That Old Ace in the Hole

  “She never snapped back from those burns. When her gas stove blowed up? Just melted the nylons right onto her poor legs.”

  “Why I’d never wear them pantyhose.” She handed her chosen needle to LaVon for threading, saying her eyes were too old to find the needle’s eye.

  The women arranged the sections of the Cain and Abel quilt on the table. The ground was a great tawny pasture dotted with mesquite and Spanish bayonet. In the distance there was a corral and a figure bending over a branding fire. In the foreground, a burly farmer, his face contorted with rage, stood over a recumbent shepherd, preparing to smash his face (which resembled that of James Dean) with a huge rock. Three blue-eyed sheep looked on. Blows had already been struck and copious blood stained the ground. The killer’s blue overalls were spattered with red satin gore.

  LaVon explained to Bob. “We had quite a discussion about whether a put Cain and Abel in those stripy robes and sandals you always see in Bible pictures, but in the end we voted a go with the way people around here dress. To make it more real-like.”

  “Drive the message home,” said Rella Nooncaster, a sallow woman as thin as a chopstick, her white hair in a spiky butch cut. She spoke in a whiny slur without moving her upper lip. The bottom lip twisted and curled prodigiously.

  Another woman, middle-aged, with crimped brown hair like auto upholstery stuffing, came in.

  “Here is Mrs. Lengthy Boles. Mrs. Boles is our artist, Bob,” said LaVon. “She draws out the quilt designs. She went to art school. And she makes gorgeous whitework quilts and art. That picture a Jesus in the kitchen made out a corn and seeds? That’s one a hers.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Boles to Bob. “Crop art. It’s called crop art. Mostly religious pictures or family scenes or local landmarks—I done the bank, the school with the schoolbuses all corn, but instead a paint I use seeds, all kind a seeds, the bounty a God’s hand. I got over three hunderd kinds a seeds that I use. Some are wild. I like the plum pits for belt buckles.” She unrolled a quilt section that showed a half-finished cactus in bloom, quickly threaded a needle she plucked from her dress collar and, after a fuss to find the right color silk, began working on the fleshy leaves.

  On the main panel the fallen sheep man, Abel, wore jeans and a plaid shirt with pearl buttons. His dented cowboy hat lay on the stained ground near several broken teeth. Nearby a Border collie snarled at Cain.

  “Abel looks something like James Dean,” said Bob.

  “Didn’t you see East of Eden?” said Dawn Crouch. “I embroidered that face and I wanted it to look like James Dean. East of Eden was based on the Abel and Cain story. We studied it in English class. When I was in school.” She smiled at Bob in a way that made him uneasy, then turned back to working up a sheep, the effect of curly wool achieved through French knots.

  “I didn’t see it,” said Bob, thinking suddenly of Rat Women and the films he had seen with Orlando—Mudhoney, It’s Alive!, Psych-Out, The Tingler and Sin in the Suburbs.

  The women worked at separate pieces to be added to the scene.

  “These mesquite leaves are the worst things to sew,” said the sallow woman. “Would have been easier to embroider them.”

  “Oh Rella, remember the deer antlers when we did Noah’s Ark? Now those were terrible.” Mrs. Stinchcomb, grey and self-effacing, spoke as though pleading.

  “Yes, they were. I’ll say it, they were worse than mesquite leaves. But there’s so many a these I might go blind before I get done.”

  “Well, I wonder if it’s goin a storm, it’s so hot out there,” said Jane Ratt, a hefty woman with yellow hair scooped by side combs into a froth atop her head. “Rella, let me borrow your little scissors. I left mine at Hattie’s last week.” She cut a trailing thread.

  “I think it might. It’s got that feeling. I can feel that old ache in my pelvis.”

  “Tornado weather.”

  “Knock on wood.”

  Jane Ratt glanced out the window, saw her grandson Billy tear open a package of potato chips and pour them into his mouth. It was his twenty-second birthday and she was still smarting from his rejection of her little gift.

  She had asked around to discover where to get one of the metal fish she saw fastened to so many fishermen’s cars; that would make a nice present. At the garage they told her the only place that carried them was over in Woodward at the Christian Superstore. It seemed an odd place for fishing supplies, but she had driven over, found the store, found the fish, purchased it and had it gift wrapped. The store wrapping paper was printed with tiny crosses. She had given it to him that morning.

  “What’s this, then?” he said, feeling the hard metal through the paper.

  “Open it. Go on.”

  He tore the paper away and the chrome fish lay flat in his hand. He looked at her.

  “What’s this for, then? What the hell is this for?”

  “It’s because you like fishin, honey. It’s so you can put it on your truck and the other fishermen will know you like fishin. A friendly kind a thing. It means, ‘Hey, I rather be fishin than drivin this hot old truck around.’”

  “Grandma, that ain’t what it means. Where’d you git it?”

  “Over in Woodard.”

  “Where over in Woodward?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some store. I seen it and I thought you’d like it.”

  “I would like it if it meant what you think it means.”

  “All right, you’re so clever, what do you think it means?”

  “I know what it means.” And he would say no more.

  Outside the men continued to lean against the corral rail, although there were no animals in it. Many of them were young, and Bob guessed them to be the sons or grandsons of the sewing circle women. Now they had paper cups and an older man was pouring something from a thermos. Bob doubted it was coffee.

  Freda Beautyrooms looked directly at Bob Dollar.

  “Young man, we’re not used to having a visitor of the opposite sex when we sew, and I hope you don’t get the wrong impression of us. Don’t expect us to talk about poetry and philosophy and politics, though there’s plenty could. We are just good friends and Christian women who enjoy making quilts for a good cause.”

  “LaVon explained that to me,” he said, feeling his face go crimson with embarrassment at being noticed. Then he caught his breath, for pinned to the old woman’s navy polka-dot dress was the most striking brooch he’d ever seen. And it was some kind of plastic. Uncle Tam would kill for that brooch.

  “Don’t get him flustered, Freda. He’ll leave us and go out with those fool men to smoke and chew and act the fool. I see him lookin out there,” said LaVon.

  “Young man, I’m ninety-three years of age and I have seen more than you can imagine. I was born in Roughbug in 1907. And I have no interest in learning the computer. I had seven years of piano lessons as a girl and that was enough.”

  “Actually, I don’t have much interest in computers, either,” said Bob, shifting his chair to get a better look at her brooch.

  LaVon said, “Roughbug is no more, Bob. It used a be quite a place. It was about sixteen or eighteen miles from Woolybucket, once upon a time full a cattle people and cowboys, then fell on hard days when the rayroad passed it by and was a ghost town. Then this big old Dutchman, used a work for the Cutaway as a windmiller, bought the town up for a ranch and he was drillin for water and struck awl. In the old days there was cowhands, then come farmers, and when the Dutchman made his lucky strike here come the awl workers, gamblers and bank robbers and murderers and bootleggers, all mixed together, a regular Sin City. Worse than Wink or Borger. I remember how greasy everything was. You’d pick up a plate—greasy; doorknobs—greasy; the car windshield—greasy. And that smell a sulfur and awl and garbage and likker just everwhere. It was all shinnery and sand, jammed with cars and horses and men afoot in ankle-deep mud when it rained, dust when it was dry. Just turned into a rag town. There was women a the night there too. Prostitutes, bold as brass. They’d go
to the beauty parlor, get their hair done, and after, when a good Christian woman come in, the beautician would have to fold a newspaper and lay it on the chair where the other one had sat or the Christian woman would not stay. Woody Guthrie lived there for a while—where they say he wrote that song ‘Throwed the Old Man’s Shoes in the Broomcorn.’ One day a tornado just pulverized the place. The mornin after it hit you couldn’t tell there’d ever been a town there. Gone. People said it was the wrath of God.”

  “That Woody Guthrie was a Communist,” someone muttered.

  Freda Beautyrooms looked at LaVon. “Wiped Roughbug out. By then the Dutchman had got most of the awl and wasn’t he livin high on the hog. Had a big ranch over by Amarilla and a house in Dallas. Yes, Roughbug was one of the livelier places in its time. The cowboys from the old Box Three used to come in Saturday afternoons and how the dust would fly! Wally Snow was the foreman.”

  “Was not he the one who used a shave with an axe? My mother remembered that.” Babe Vanderslice looked around for someone who recalled. She, too, was working on cactus, delicate single-thread spines.

  “Bob,” said LaVon. “Babe here is The Banner’s crack reporter. She keeps an eye on everthing.”

  “He was. Vain as a peacock. Wrote poetry too. Horse poetry and stuff about sunsets. Made your skin crawl to listen to him recite. He had a voice like a woman. They say a horse kicked him in the Adam’s apple when he was a boy. Some say the kick was lower down.”

  “Wasn’t it the Box Three cowboys all decided a get married in a bunch? They ordered brides from one a them matrimonial magazines they had in them days and got a cut-rate delivery charge from P. G. Reynolds, ran the stage line. My mother used a tell about it. Fourteen or fifteen women come in on three stages, and a Methodist minister to do the marryin and some a them was pretty awful, no better than they should be. But those cowboys, all except one, kept their courage up and went through with it. I won’t mention names because some a the women turned out a be a strength to the community,” said Freda Beautyrooms, looking around the room, no doubt tallying the offspring of those mail-order marriages between rachitic cowboys and poxy whores.

  “One time they had them a so-called dance over there at big fat Pa Murphy’s dance hall, and the girls was goin a wear fig leaves and nothin else. But the panhandle is not fig leaf country. Some dumb bunny went down by the river and picked a basket a poison oak leaves and that’s what some a those poor girls put on.”

  Bob Dollar stared at Freda Beautyrooms’ brooch. It was a large Art Deco rectangle of pearlized celluloid with a black border. Two rhinestone chevrons were flanked by varicolored pennant shapes, handpainted and incised with fine black lines.

  “The tornado that wrecked Roughbug was not as bad as the one that come through in 1947, the one started in White Deer and went all the way to Woodward. Wiped out Glazier, almost wiped out Higgins and Woodward. There was another bad one in Amarilla in 1949. People get them mixed up. And then years later some Texas airline made the offer that if anybody could prove they was in that forty-nine tornado they could buy a one-way ticket to Las Vegas for forty-nine cents. Wally Ooly, used to have the drugstore, he’d gone to Amarilla for the day when it happened, took them up on it, flew to Las Vegas and never come back until a year ago. He can’t seem to adjust back to the panhandle and he’s talkin about leavin again. Good riddance to him, I say.”

  “I thought it was 1947 that tornado came through.”

  “It was.”

  “And that one that hit Pampa a few years ago, the one with the pickup trucks flyin around in the air like mosquitoes. The worst one though, they say, was in Wichita Falls in the seventies. Killed fifty people.”

  “If we was to write down ever terrible thing that happened in Roughbug we’d be writin for days,” said Phyllis Crouch, mother of the pregnant girl.

  “Isn’t that the truth. And Woolybucket. And Cowboy Rose. You girls are too young to remember this, but back in the twenties Joy Spide opened a beauty parlor to give permanents in Woolybucket. Everbody went, ever female had a have her hair marcelled. It was a rage. And in those days Joy was usin celluloid curlers. What happened was when this lady customer, her husband owned a big spread over in Roberts County, was under the heat lamp—that’s how they made the hair set, chemicals and heat lamp—one a the curlers touched the heat element and it caught on fire. Well, those a you who remember celluloid know how fast it could burn. Just a terrible flash. And this poor woman, her whole head was afire. It was her first permanent wave, and her last. I believe she suffered brain damage afterwards. Certainly had a wear a wig. It was just tragic. She became a recluse. Her husband came into town and he wrecked Joy’s beauty parlor. To this day there’s never been another one in Woolybucket. Why we have to drive a hunderd miles, get our hair done,” said Rella Nooncaster.

  Bob noticed that she, too, was wearing a handsome piece of early plastic, a necklace of cream and lime-green pendants.

  “Well, I’d say the best thing about Roughbug was Steddy’s store,” said Jane Ratt.

  There was a murmur of agreement from the older women.

  “Mugg’s Emporium in Woolybucket was right good too,” murmured Mrs. Pecan Flagg, a plump woman with dyed coal-black hair and rouge circles the size of biscuits on her cheeks.

  “Bob,” said LaVon, jumping between the poles of conversation like an arcing electric current, “my husband’s graindaddy bought Mugg’s store from the old doctor started it. Though they never used the name Fronk on it. It always stayed Mugg’s. And Mrs. Flagg is very interested in the prairie chicken. Part a their ranch is a prairie chicken refuge. They got a award over it last year.”

  The woman looked at Bob. “They respond very well to good grass cover, and we enjoy seeing them do their funny mating dances in the spring.”

  “Mugg’s Emporium was orderly. Jed Steddy’s store was messy but how we all loved it.” A rod of sunlight struck through the window and the needles glinted.

  “I remember them metal cowhide stretchers hangin down from the rafters and my dad swapped him a used saddle for six a them. And a big box a that greasy yellow soap.” The sunlight dimmed as clouds moved in, the needles dulled.

  “Yes, that’s right. And they say he never got the worst of a bargain. What all didn’t he have in that place. I remember shell cases that Mr. Steddy said was from the Indian wars, some old picket pins stamped U.S. Cavalry and a great big cone a twine. We’d get one or two of those when my deddy was raisin broomcorn. Remember that big old dusty dinosaur tooth they found on the Double Z? There was a glass case on the counter with all sorts a things for cowboys. My brother Ivon would get his bottle a Glacier Rub Scalp Stimulant and work that stuff into his hair before he went to a dance. It sort a smelled like almonds. He loved that store, all the cowboys loved it. Steddy called them ‘cattleboys.’ Never called them ‘cowboys.’ It had everything for them, tobacco, used saddles and riggin, varmint traps and slickers, liniment and vetnary cures, feedbags and saddlebags.”

  “One thing about those old days that’s gone and good riddance is fire. There was always smoke and fire, grass fires. The smell of smoke would just scare the thunder out of you.” As though the word had conjured the event a rumble shook the air. Out in the yard all the men looked up.

  “I’ll say another thing about those fires. There was nothin on earth so beautiful as the Texas prairie the season after a burn.”

  “Amen.”

  “But it wasn’t all good times and going to the store. There was heartbreak and meanness. Remember that poor girl died of the infected leg? She got a goathead sticker in her foot and it got bad infected? And those fires, you know, had some good in them. They burned out the weeds and helped the grass. Nobody ever burned up in one. It wasn’t that hard a get away. You just stepped over into the part that was already burned. It was the houses and buildins that suffered.”

  “I think that was Helen Leeton had the bad leg. Her father raised broomcorn and they were awful poor. I remember she had a brother
, Nutsy Leeton. Swear terrible like a mule skinner or awl driller, smoked cigarettes from the time he was seven or eight, drank. Old Mr. Leeton threw him out when he was around thirteen and he lived in a grove a trees by the river. Helen always said he wasn’t her real brother, that they found him in the bushes, but he was the spit and image of the Snises—the mother was a Snise—skinny and tall and with coal black hair and Indian eyes. Looked like Lyndon Johnson.”

  “The grass come back real good after a fire but Steddy’s store burned out years before the boom days and that was that.” There were ticks of rain like insect wings against a lampshade.

  “My father always said Jed Steddy set the fire for the insurance.”

  “Doubt he had any insurance. Few did in them days. Maybe money troubles is what caused him to end up in the asylum. The Insanity Board declared him unfit. It seems so strange now that they had such things as Insanity Boards.”

  “I believe they did just as good a job as all these expensive shrinks that people go to.”

  “What I think turned his mind was that awful accident with his boy Duffy and the baby.”

  “Oh Lord. Just tragic.”

  Janine Huske, who had only lived in Woolybucket County for sixteen years and was still regarded as a newcomer, said, “What happened?”

  “Oh, well,” said Freda Beautyrooms, and with a glance at Bob she lowered her voice to a whisper. He could not hear what she said until her voice rose again. “And later poor Duffy went bad when he got up in size. He got to be a bank robber in the nineteen and thirties and robbed banks in the panhandle and up in Oklahoma. Him and his gang went into the Antelope Hills and took to the willers.”

  “Chirdren did used a die bad in those old days,” said Rella Nooncaster.

  “Indeed they did. I lost my little Mina to the catarrhal fever, she just coughed herself into the angels’ arms.”