That Old Ace in the Hole

  “Just a big, fresh-faced boy, and he sure looked good. Broad shoulders, good muscle on him, kind a lean and rangy. See how his mouth’s hangin open a little like he was gettin ready to say somethin or laugh? Ever picture a him I seen it’s the same. Even his kid pictures showed that. His mouth still hangs open but there hasn’t been a tooth a his own in there since he was thirty and now he don’t wear the dentures. But see how neat he parted his hair on the left, straight as a stick and slung over his forehead white above the hat line. Big ears but flat from his mother taping them down when he was a baby. They used a do that, tape baby’s ears flat so they wouldn’t stick out. Done it with my own boy. He looks good in his white shirt and fresh-ironed jeans and his best boots greased up, don’t he? Too bad them jeans was high-waters and tight. Twenty years old and I believe he was still growin. Tight enough so’s you can see everthing he had over on the left. They say a man will generally keep his goods on the side he parts his hair, balance out his handedness, I guess. Tater is right-handed but I bet you could wrap him in see-through plastic now and not see a thing. It shrivels up pretty good when they get old. He’s the one you want to ask about the freight team.”

  “What freight team?”

  “That photograph I showed you. You wanted a know how the feller managed a drive it.”

  “Oh yeah. LaVon, on the way over this morning there was a grey horse on the ranch road. I couldn’t see the brand. Suppose it’s one of yours, but I don’t think I saw it before. Maybe you bought some new horses and this is one?”

  “Grey? Certain not one a ours. My graindad, like most a the old cowboys, said that light-colored horses attract lightning, wouldn’t have one on the place. Kind of a tradition. I half believe it myself. There was a family down at the crossroads about six years ago, come up from Houston, he was in awl in some way, three kids, bought each kid a horse and one of them horses was a real light grey, one a sorrel and the other a bay. Wouldn’t you know it, a storm rolled in, lightnin like flies on sugar, and sure enough, one of them horses was hit and it was the grey one. So I don’t know, maybe there’s somethin to the old sayin. I wonder if birds is ever hit by lightnin. There’s some will fly around in a storm like they don’t care. That horse could be from Sanderson’s place down the road. I’ll call them up and see. Anyway, I bet you know Tater’s graindaughter, Donna Crouch—she works in the office at the grain elevator.”

  “Big tall lady with a blond ponytail?”

  “No, that one’s Lou Ann Bemis. Her and her husband run the Java Jive Café in Waka on weekends. Donna is real short, red hair parted in the middle, wears big round glasses, never says a word.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, LaVon.”

  “Have a good day now, Bob.”

  The next morning began with gritty, stinking wind that increased in velocity and abrasiveness. Bob came into the kitchen banging his water jug against his leg. LaVon was rummaging through the photographs.

  “Pour us out some coffee, Bob, will you? Thanks.” She held up a studio portrait of a young curly-headed blond boy who could not have been more than fifteen. He was togged out in cowboy rig that fit too comfortably to have been studio props.

  “No idea who this boy is. Looks a little bit like you, curly hair, big baby blues. Tater said he’d writ down who everbody was on the backs of the pictures, but I find he missed quite a few. And I can’t hardly read his writin. Done my best to work through these but some a them are complete mysteries. So. I’m goin over there to the Bar Owl tomorrow and set down with him and talk him through the ones I don’t know. If I can get him loose of the telvision. You can come along, you want. He was the real thing, you know, a good solid rancher who knew cows and men. And still does. He’s got stories and stories if we can get him goin.” She held up another photograph showing a group of men and horses standing around a fresh grave mound. White ink letters spelled out “A Cowboy Funral.” She looked at the back.

  “Not a clue who was gettin buried. Oh! Here’s one you’ll like. It’s the main street a Cowboy Rose around 1911.”

  She handed Bob a brown photograph showing a few false-front mercantile buildings, a blacksmith shop under a shady tree with the smith bent over a horse’s hoof, a grassy track that was the main street extending east into the distant plain. He recognized two of the buildings; they still stood, the blacksmith’s shop and the tiny bank.

  He spent the evening with Lieutenant Abert, using his Texas road map to puzzle out the locations of the Bents’ panhandle trading posts, for the notes told him the trader brothers had built something called “the Adobe Fort” on the Canadian around 1840, and, in the spring of 1844 put up another trading post a few miles distant. Even with the big gazetteer, The Roads of Texas, he could not locate the marker streams, Bosque Grande Creek and Red Deer Creek. He supposed the map was not detailed enough or that the streams had been renamed. Later, from LaVon, he learned what he suspected, that this “adobe fort,” after the Bents abandoned it, was the famous Adobe Walls, the scene of a battle in 1874 between a war party of several hundred Comanches, Kiowas and Cheyennes (including the young Quanah Parker), led by the Comanche warrior Coyote Droppings (who claimed his medicine made him and those with him immune to bullets), and twenty-eight sharpshooter buffalo-hide hunters. The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 forbade white men the right to hunt south of the Arkansas River, but white men did as they pleased. The same treaty forbade the Indians from raiding panhandle settlements, but the Indians continued to swoop down on homesteads. On this fine spring morning the Indians made a classic dawn attack. But the buffalo hunters had been awakened at two in the morning by the snap of the breaking ridgepole. They had repaired the pole and, sparked with coffee, decided to stay up and get an early start on the day. When the cry of “Indians!” came, they were awake and alert. They held off the Indians for three days. After a number of the attacking men fell, the main Indian body retreated to the ridges above Adobe Walls where they rode back and forth out of rifle range. On the third day the plainsman Billy Dixon snapped off a shot at one of the distant riders with his .50 Sharps rifle. The Indian fell dead from his horse and soon after the demoralized attackers, who had believed their strong medicine protected them from bullets, left. It was the beginning of the end, and a year later the panhandle had been ethnically cleansed of its native people. Billy Dixon’s long shot became a pillar of western myth.

  They drove to the Bar Owl over miles of pale caliche road, LaVon’s scarred Chevy pickup raising milky dust that hung in the air, a translucent scrim that dimmed the road behind. It was a blinko day, clouds skipping across the sky. A windmill in the distance flashed a new blade with every revolution. When Bob remarked on it she said owls broke the blades by flying into them, and that the panhandle was thick with owls, and that Pee-Wee Fischer, who raised falcons, shot them whenever he could. Bob saw again what beautiful country it was when he looked past the clutter of tanks and pumps, colored by yellow light so thin and clear it slipped off the sky in huge slabs and in narrow straw-colored pipes glancing off flying birds, windshields and plate glass, throwing winks from cars and trucks. And it was crazy country too, some of the flattest terrain on earth, tractor-chewed and rectangled, rugged breaks and plunging canyons, sinister clouds too big to see in one look, rusty rivers, bone white roads and red grass—the oddly named bluestem. The wind had died down and LaVon gestured at an unmoving windmill in a heavily grazed pasture. Against the sky it looked like a combination of tripod and meat grinder. Half a dozen small birds sat slant-legged on the edges of the blades, and as a little breeze came up again the blades began to turn, the birds slid a few inches down the blade edges and flew.

  “In the days when the big ranches started sellin off land,” she said, “it was dry, dry country. The XIT had hundreds a windmills and full-time hands to tend to them. And when the nesters come in, without windmills they couldn’t of made it. Not a one. Of course they didn’t make it anyway. They didn’t have a blessed clue to what was under them. I mean the Ogallala. All
that water they didn’t even know was there. In those days if you wanted a be a rancher you had a have live runnin water or a hand-dug well, somehow pump it out a the ground. If you had stock and kids you had a have hundreds a gallons a day. It was all shallow wells and windmills until pretty much in the 1960s. Well do I remember. I grew up in the windmill days. They was the only thing made the west possible to live in.”

  Bob said, “What did your husband do? Was he a rancher?”

  “Not at first. He got into land sales. He was panhandle born and raised and heard the stories how Mr. Borger done the job back in the 1920s—soon as they found awl Mr. Borger bought up a couple hundred acres a land and laid it out in lots, fifteen hundred dollars a piece, called it a town site. Named the streets. When Mr. Fronk got in the land sales I did quite a bit a that. That’s a job I liked. No Main Street or them First, Second and Thirds for me—I’d go for colorful names like Red Hot Poker and Bramble Lane and Messican Hat. In one day Mr. Borger took in over a hundred thousand dollars. So Mr. Fronk was inspired and he got into that kind a thing. Course there’s nothin new in that. It’s how all these towns was laid out—somebody, usually the railroad headquarters, decided where they was goin a have a town and then they sent in their surveyors to plat the lots or they used a land agent and then they sold them. There was good money in it. Mr. Fronk wasn’t a railroad man but he was friends with many an awl man and when somebody brought in a well he was right there, buyin land. He platted it himself. There’s a few towns in the panhandle he started—Auger, Gusherton, Rich and Seaview.”

  “Seaview?” asked Bob.

  “He thought it sounded good, and if somebody said somethin, he’d turn it on them and say it was a sea of grass or enough oil underground to make a sea. To make it sweeter he sold lumber, too. Two years after we was married there was plenty to buy this ranch. In a way, Bob, you remind me of Mr. Fronk.”

  “How so?” asked Bob.

  “Because you both believe in what you are doin. Mr. Fronk would get real excited about the new towns. He wanted them to do good. It’s like you and these luxury home sites.”

  Bob held the box of photographs on his lap and looked at them again on the way over. The photograph of Tater Crouch as a young man seemed familiar and somehow comic, though he did not know why. Then it came to him that Tater’s too-small jeans, ending well above the ankles, were the same high-water length as those worn by Jacques Tati in the Mr. Hulot films, Uncle Tam’s favorites.

  The entrance to the Bar Owl was a loose plank bridge over Two Year Creek. LaVon pointed out the old bunkhouse, a small, pitched-roof, board-and-batten building with a lean-to on the east side. The doors were gone, the shingle roof holed, chimney attenuated, window glass shot out. The gaping doorway showed bales of hay, darkened by weather and mold, stacked to the ceiling. A tilted cross, all that remained of a clothesline support, stood in the mesquite. On the ground in front of the building in a little patch of grass, the head and blades of a windmill lay facedown. In the brown distance another stood, but the blades did not turn and the stock tank at its foot sparkled with bullet holes. The land rose and fell, not flat enough for irrigated agriculture, the thin grass heavily punctuated with mesquite, showing lenses of bare sandy ground like rents in cat-clawed fabric.

  A hawk sat on an electric pole and LaVon told him that one had started a grass fire when its wings touched two wires and it fell dead and blazing into the dry grass below.

  “Tater tried to sue the electric company but he didn’t get very far.”

  They passed a tractor dragging a bush hog through the mesquite, a spray of twigs and dust flaring behind it. The driver raised one hand as they drew abreast. In another mile LaVon pointed out the original ranch headquarters, a matched pair of narrow sandstone houses facing one another and joined by a high stone wall that enclosed a kind of patio with two or three shade trees. LaVon said that a hundred years ago old man Crouch, Tater’s grandfather, had taken the plan from the design stamped on the bags of Arbuckle coffee beans. The twin houses had been abandoned in 1974, the Crouches shifting into a characterless prefab ranchburger with contemporary plumbing and heat, an attached three-car garage.

  As they pulled up in the yard LaVon said, “Now don’t say a word about Mrs. Crouch. She passed last year in terrible pain. She needed to go on but Tater could hardly bear it. And before that he lost his only boy. He was a bull rider and a big Braymer named Grannyknot got him down and mashed him.”

  A heavily made-up woman of late middle age opened the door.

  “Hello, Louise,” said LaVon, and from the way the woman answered, “Come on in, Miz Fronk,” Bob guessed she was the housekeeper. The interior of this house, which might have been lifted from any sunbelt suburb, was as dull as its exterior, seven-foot ceilings coated with an off-scale rough finish embedded with sparkling plastic chips, in the hall a brown carpet with a pressed-down track to the kitchen. The living room walls were ranged around with tables, each stacked with tottering cliffs of account books, tally books, ledgers and maps, newspapers, for, LaVon had said on the ride over, Tater Crouch was roughing out a history of the Bar Owl which some grandniece, enrolled in a creative writing course at Southwest Texas U, would smooth into prose during the summer.

  He thought it was the ugliest room he had ever seen. The walls were papered with a design of giant red hummingbirds. Against the wallpaper hung small sets of antlers, hardly more than spikehorns. The curtains clashed with the print upholstery, the plaid table runner, the patterned rug, as though every surface had had a digitized pattern applied to it. There were two benches upholstered in white plastic. Enormous lamps with frilled orange shades stood on side tables.

  Tater Crouch sat in a wheelchair near the south window where he could watch the driveway.

  “Tater! Here’s LaVon! LaVon’s here! Tater!” the housekeeper shouted.

  “Well, I know it. I seen her drive in, didn’t I?”

  The old man turned his deflated-football face toward them, the nose almost flat, the white hair cropped, the short white face whiskers like the fur of a laboratory rat. The eyes were standard, red-rimmed Texas blue. He began to cough and spit into a handkerchief.

  Bob was shocked. He had carried the image of the twenty-year-old man in his too-small jeans to this house and was now confronted with sixty years of change. He could see nothing of the young, clear-eyed man in this old wreck. He would not let old age happen to him.

  “Well, Tater,” said LaVon. “I hope you don’t got the flu. You sound bad.”

  “Hell, it ain’t the flu. It’s that damn pig farm over on Coppedge Road. They turn them fans on, sucks out the ammonia and sulfide and if the wind is right, like it was this mornin, we almost die of it. It just plays smash with us. They say it gives you pneumonia and artharitis. They say it’ll turn your eyes yeller.”

  The housekeeper, nodding agreement, wheeled his chair to one of the tables, moved the papers on it and cleared a space for LaVon to spread out the photographs.

  “Tater, those hog farms are a crime. But I don’t know what we can do about them. Anyway, I’ve brought Bob Dollar with me. He’s visitin Woolybucket and stayin in the Star bunkhouse. Thought he’d like to meet you. And, like I said on the telephone, I got these mystery photographs. Appears you missed puttin the names on one or two. Do you recollect who is this boy?” LaVon held out the studio portrait of the young blond boy in the black hat. “There is not a name on the back.”

  “Why, that’s young Fanny. ‘Muddy Fan’ we called him after he got bucked off and landed in a waller and come up mud hat to boot heel. He was the best-liked boy there ever was on our place. Five hard men, dirty and rough, at the funeral and ever one of them made tears for that boy. We won’t see his likes again, not theirs neither. It was a sad thing.”

  “Is this it?” said LaVon, pulling out the cowboy funeral photograph.

  “Yes, it is. Oh, how we hated to bury that boy. That’s me over there on the left. I had my head down so’s the photographer wouldn’t
catch me bawlin like a calf. I weren’t much older’n Fanny. Could a been me dead.” He gave a crackling laugh like a dead bush in a drag, twigs snapping. “Cowboyin was hard in them days. The young guys today don’t know nothin about it. Take your brandin crew, twenty, twenty-five men—the wagon boss, cook, couple a ropers, wrangler, eight or ten flankers a throw them down and hold, couple men to work the irons, a knife man, a vaccinator, a dehorner, a guy to paint the stumps and cuts, and your guys holdin the herd. You’d get at it before light and keep at it until dark and then sleep on the ground until you started again. It would be dark when you got up and the wrangler had to lay down on the ground and skylight the horses. We’d always brand after Fourth a July. Forty-five dollars a month for that.”

  “And who was this Fanny that everbody thought so high of?”

  “He was just a kid, drifted in from somewhere, I don’t recollect where, but he was a pure-dee wonder with horses, just the finest kind a rider. Fanny the Wrangler. Wasn’t nobody better. Limber as a piece a raw bacon. Good enough he could a been a contest hand. Cheerful, good-natured, give you the shirt off his back. And smart. He thought hisself out from a problem, didn’t just bull through. Worked for my deddy two year before the Reaper cut him down.”

  “So he wasn’t kin to folks hereabouts?”

  “Naw. Missouri or Montana or someplace with the letter M on the front, could a been Maine or Minnesota. I think it was Minnesota, him bein so white-headed and pale-complexioned. He’d be a old man now like me if he’d lived, but I remember him like I seen him ten minute ago. I can see him noddin his head to one side and twistin his tongue around his teeth like he did. He had bad teeth and we had to pull a few for him.”