That Old Ace in the Hole

  As they started to ford the stream Orlando opened his bag to rummage in it. “I think I got a extra CD here, just want you to—AAAAAAHHH!”

  Bob slammed on the brakes midstream and looked at Orlando, who was straining back against the seat so hard Bob heard the metal frame crack. A grey object emerged from the interior of Orlando’s bag, leaped on his chest and ran up his neck and onto his shoulder, across his back and down the other arm and into the dark crevice between the seat and the door. Tonya had been found.

  Bob drove across the stream nervously, glancing down between his feet to see if Tonya was crouched there.

  “Are you bit?” he asked Orlando.

  “Christ, I don’t know! I need to get out a here. What the hell was that thing, a tarantula?”

  “Yes,” said Bob. “It’s one of LaVon’s pets. Missing for a couple a weeks. Check yourself over, make sure you didn’t get bit.”

  “I’m afraid to move.”

  But Bob was pulling up in front of the hitching post and both of them leaped from the car and rolled in the dirt like stunt men, leaving the doors wide open. LaVon came out on the porch and stared curiously at them.

  “Check yourself over,” said Bob to Orlando, who was gingerly plucking at his shirt and looking at his bare arms. “It’s Tonya,” he called to LaVon. “Somehow she was hiding in Orlando’s overnight bag. Don’t know how she got on that side of the creek.”

  “She’s arboreal,” said LaVon. “Where is she now?”

  Bob started to say that the animal was in the Saturn under the seat but they all saw Tonya climb up onto the passenger seat (recently vacated by Orlando), as though waiting for her chauffeur.

  “I’ll get her box,” said LaVon, disappearing inside. Immediately Orlando picked up a rock and threw it at the spider on the seat. It missed, but dented the Saturn’s door frame.

  “Don’t hurt it, Orlando. She’s going to get it in a minute. It’s quite a valuable spider.”

  “Nothin I hate more,” said Orlando with passion, shuddering at the thought of his narrow escape, looking once more at his arms to be sure he wasn’t bitten.

  “You’d feel it by now,” said Bob. “LaVon says it’s a dangerous spider with a fast-acting poison.”

  “Why in the name of God would anyone want to have a poison spider for a pet?”

  “They’re interestin,” snapped LaVon, descending now from the porch with the tarantula’s old home.

  The tarantula greeted LaVon with upraised and threatening front legs, the other six slightly tensed as though to spring. “Poor thing,” said LaVon. “She’s dehydrated, I can tell,” and she worked the atomizer, letting the soothing moisture fall on the tarantula. Suddenly, as though recognizing a haven, Tonya rushed into the box and LaVon clapped on the lid. She looked at Orlando. “Whyn’t you get in your Porch and beat it off my property?” she suggested.

  “Nothing could give me greater pleasure, you old bitch,” said Orlando, suiting the action to the words. Bob was not sorry to see his old friend go. Prison had shaped him, as so many others, for the worse.

  Down at the jail Sheriff Hugh Dough was taunting Coolbroth Fronk, who sat fuming in one of the two cells.

  “So how come they named you Coolbroth? Why not Hotstew?”

  “It’s Irish. It was my great-granduncle’s name.”

  “Hell it is. Sounds Lithuanian to me. Or Chinese. Tagalog or Fuegian.”

  “Dammit, I told you it’s Irish.”

  “Don’t swear at me, boy, or you’re likely a be feelin depressed in a little while. And there’s another thing I want a know. There’s a kind a story goin around about you and why you got tossed out a Texas Tech.”

  “I didn’t get tossed out.”

  “The way we heard it you was doin somethin pretty unusual to a bull they keep there on the experimental farm. They say you was pokin him up the ass with a piece a pipe. And the college wouldn’t stand for such a perversion thing. Now, just between us, what was you tryin a do to that bull? Are you queer or what?”

  “You are a dirty-minded old goat. Anybody in this place is queer it’s you. I’ll tell you but I know damn well you ain’t got the brain a understand it. O.K. I am not tossed out a school. I’m on a break, workin on a project. And it wasn’t a bull. It was a hog. Not that anything to do with art will mean much to you, but I’m a artist. A sculptor. Workin on a project—Clichés of Disbelief. You ever hear the expression ‘In a pig’s ass’?”

  The sheriff nodded. “My sister collects stamps,” he said, that being the only connection between the Dough family and art that he could conjure.

  “Well, then, I am workin on a sculpture a the inside of a pig’s ass. And I got a blue moon lined up, a tintype with nothin on it—Not on Your Tintype—and a lot more. It’s a kind a conceptual art. Now, what about my phone calls? Don’t I get a couple phone calls?”

  “You get one and you already had it when you called your mama a hour ago. Guess she’s not in no hurry to get you out.” The sheriff gave Coolbroth one of his hard stares. “I heard a few things about your other misdeeds too.”

  “What other misdeeds? And I don’t think parking a bicycle on the sidewalk is a ‘misdeed.’”

  “Well, it is. In Woolybucket. No, the misdeed I’m thinkin about is what you done with Dawn Crouch.” He put his face near Coolbroth’s and hissed, “It was you knocked her up, wasn’t it? It’s you goin a be the unnamed daddy.”

  “I want a see a lawyer,” said Coolbroth, whose face was red with anger.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so right off,” said the sheriff. “I would a made a call immediately.” He went out to his office and Coolbroth could hear his voice rising and falling as he spoke on the telephone. After a long time the front door opened and Coolbroth heard the sheriff laughing with someone. Footsteps came down the corridor and an elderly man with a fleshy nose shambled past without looking at him, turned, walked past again and went up front. Again he heard the sheriff laugh, the front door open and close. The sheriff came to Coolbroth’s cell.

  “You notice that fella?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Well, that was a lawyer and you seen him. Lights out. You just ooze off to sleep now and have some sweet dreams a big-assed hogs and nameless little babies starvin a death because their daddies don’t give a shit and let’s not hear any more out a you.”

  Sheriff Hugh Dough flicked the light switch and twilight descended, though outside in the free blue air it was still two hours before sunset.

  26

  BROTHER MESQUITE

  The day before he left for Denver Bob went to the Old Dog for a blowout steak and potato dinner, for he feared Uncle Tam’s vegetarian leanings, imagining a platter of shredded cabbage ringed with boiled parsnips. He opened the café door at 1:30, when most of the regulars had already eaten and left, threw his cap on the corner table at the front tucked behind a jog in the wall but where he’d still have a good view of the traffic (the local habit of watching trucks and cars had overtaken him), speared a steak from the big bowl, now nearly empty, and Cy already beginning to cut up the leftover meat for the next day’s beef hash. The potatoes were gone, chopped into tiny squares for the hash.

  “I’ll throw a new one in the microwave for you,” said Cy. “About all that damn thing is good for, heatin coffee and cookin taters. I already put the sour cream and butter in the icebox, so you’ll have to haul it out. You want a salad, there’s about a cup’s worth a coleslaw. That enough? Got plenty a parsnips. Plenty a onion pie, what they used a call ‘quiche,’ which the guys here would not eat if I called it that, but if I say ‘onion pie’ they like it. It’s the word ‘pie.’ If I said ‘shit pie,’ they’d eat it. And, matter a fact, I put in double the onions the regular recipe, so it ain’t the same thing anyhow. There’s some cherry cobbler left. The butterball dumplins is all gone. Here comes Brother Mesquite, suppose he’ll want some too. Why can’t you fellers get in here at noon when it’s all hot and good?”

  As Bob w
as loading his plate Brother Mesquite, cassock hitched up, boots muddy, came in rubbing his hands and looking around the empty room.

  “Looks like we beat the rush,” he said to Bob. Cy snorted and muttered something under his breath.

  “I hope I didn’t hear that,” said Brother Mesquite, spearing the ultimate steak and going in heavily for the onion pie.

  “I got a joke I been savin up for you, Brother Mesquite,” said Cy. “I’ll have a coffee with you in a little bit.”

  “Mind if I sit with you?” Brother Mesquite asked Bob. “Just say, you want some privacy.”

  “No, sit down, sit down,” said Bob, moving into the corner and waving at the chair across from him.

  “Oh dear Lord, it feels good a sit down on somethin that don’t move,” said Brother Mesquite, from whose person emanated a powerful smell of horse. A briar hung from his hat brim. “I been a-horseback since daylight checkin fence. Plus I got the toothache again. We got some fence line we never put in long enough posts and those old buffs get to leanin and scratchin on them and they’ll work right up out a the ground, the wire starts to sag and pretty soon she’s on the ground and your stock is headin over the waterfall.” He began to clean his fingernails with a handsome knife.

  “Is that a rosewood handle?” asked Bob.

  “Lignum vitae. Lee Reeves over in Shattuck made it. ‘Made for the hand, not the eye,’ he says, but what he comes up with is mighty easy to look at. You ought a get one.”

  “You use different fencing than for cows?”

  “Oh yes. Bigger, longer posts, not so many cross fences since buffs don’t graze like cows—cows are selective. They’ll eat all the creampuff grasses and plants so you have to keep moving them after a few days to another pasture unless you like to see bare dirt. Now the buffs, they evolved on the plains with the plants—the two grew up together, they belong together in this place, this landscape. The bison and the native plant species have a relationship. Your cow is out a place here and that’s why they are so much work. You’ve got a keep them fed with food they like, you’ve got a give them water—those thousands a windmills, this and that. The buff rustles for hisself. He’ll walk a long way for water, or find little seeps and springs you didn’t even know was there and, if he has to, he’ll dig a seep out with his hoof. Or if it’s winter he’ll eat snow. For all I know, maybe he licks the frost off fence wire. The bison is self-reliant and belongs in this country. The cow, bred to be placid and sluggish and easy to handle, is a interloper. For instance, you know how cows in a blizzard move with their rumps to the wind?”

  Bob nodded, for he too had moved with his rump to the wind. But his mind was on the self-reliant buffalo. He imagined himself dying of thirst, clawing into the earth with his fingernails, going for the water below.

  “Well, your buff don’t do that. They head into the storm, so they get out a the bad weather quicker. Poor old cow moves with it, stays in the bad weather movin along with the storm until she drops dead or comes up against a fence and there she freezes. Another thing is there was some old wallers on the ranch, just little hollers, not used for a hunderd twenty years. We put our buffs out and in two weeks they’d found all those old wallers their ancestors made and took them over for theirselves. Anyway, we took out most a the cross fences that was on the old ranch and now we got three thousand-acre pastures and a couple five hunderds. Tell you what, you want to get a idea of what this country looked like a hunderd fifty years ago, come pay us a visit at the Triple Cross. You can see a long way and never get a fence in your eye.”

  “I’d like to but I’ve got to go up to Denver in the morning for a couple days. Maybe when I come back. If I come back.”

  “Your return in doubt?”

  “Yeah. I think I’m in trouble with my boss. See, I’m not what I said I was at first. They told me to lie about what I was doing here and I guess I picked the wrong lie because I just got in deeper and deeper and it’s my fault some people got the wrong idea.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it,” said Brother Mesquite, in a quiet voice, the first indication Bob had seen that he was anything but a bison-crazed rancher. “I’ll get the dessert. You want coffee a go with your cherry cobbler? I’m goin a call the dentist. This tooth is murder.”

  He made the call, was back in a few minutes, slid a plate of cream-covered cherry cobbler across the table.

  “Well, thanks,” said Bob, gazing out the window at a pickup truck he thought he recognized. It must have just been through the car wash, for it was dotted with water drops. The driver, Francis Scott Keister, jumped out, jammed his hat on tighter against the wind and ran around the truck to the passenger door.

  “Oh no,” said Bob. “That guy hates my guts.”

  “What, old Francis? What did you do to him?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just suspicious of me being here.”

  “With just cause?”

  “Yeah. I prevaricated about what I was doing here and he smelled a rat.”

  A second person got out of Francis Scott Keister’s truck, came with him toward the café, her long blond hair tangling in the wind.

  “My God,” said Bob, “that’s Evelyn Chine.”

  “I don’t believe I know her,” said Brother Mesquite.

  But when Francis Scott Keister and Evelyn Chine came in they did not glance at the corner table, walked straight to the back booth. Bob could not see them, and could only catch a few floating phrases and single words.

  Cy said, “…that’s left is this onion pie and some coleslaw. I can quick cook you up a steak—the grill’s still hot. Or make a cold—”

  “Ham sandwich good enough for me,” said Keister. “That good enough for you, Evvie? You got coffee, Cy?”

  “I’d love a ham sandwich,” said Global Pork Rind’s top site scout.

  “Plenty coffee.”

  Their voices dropped to a murmur.

  “Well,” said Brother Mesquite, “how did it happen that things got so complicated for you?”

  “It started,” said Bob, “when Mr. Cluke told me I had to make up a cover story because people down here are hostile to hog farms. ‘Not In My Back Yard,’ and all that. And then LaVon Fronk just pinned me up against the wall about what I was doing here before I could think up something good and I said the first things that came into my head. And I could see she didn’t believe me, so I thought up the luxury retirement place thing. And I still think it’s not a bad idea. There’s some beautiful country here. I been thinking I’d ask Mr. Cluke if Global Pork wouldn’t set up a real estate development branch. When I am in Denver next week I’m going to ask him about the chance of that.”

  “You know, Bob, maybe you should not have taken a job that asks you to lie about what you are doin. There sure must be jobs out there that would let you be honest about the work. It sounds to me as if this Cluke bird must feel in his heart that his company is doing something morally wrong if he asks you to invent a ‘cover story.’ Is this job, this work, something you feel valuable and worthy?”

  “God, no! I hate all this skulking around. I just took it because it was a job. I don’t actually know what I want to do. My uncle, who raised me, runs a kind of secondhand shop and I don’t want to do that. About the only thing that really interests me is like—history? History of the Santa Fe Trail.” And he told him about his pleasant hours with Lieutenant Abert’s account and his desire to retrace that 1845 path to see what the lieutenant had seen. “And books. I really like books.”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted a do either,” said Brother Mesquite, “at your age. I knew I liked animals—grew up on a panhandle ranch, youngest a six boys. Pretty religious family. I liked math and photography and I thought I would be happy workin as a missionary or teachin somewhere. So I tried teachin. I was terrible at it—didn’t have what they call ‘people skills.’ And the missionary thing faded pretty quickly—that takes advanced people skills. I always seemed to end up in cities—I was in New York City, can you believe i
t, for six months—helpin with shelters and soup kitchens and findin a place for the homeless to sleep, honorable work, but I couldn’t quit thinkin about the panhandle. Finally, when I was thirty, thirty-one, I figured that the contemplative life with its daily rituals and habits—no pun intended—was right for me. Simplicity, moderation, stability, prayer, work, responsibility and study. And when I found the Triple Cross right here in my home country, I was deeply moved and grateful. You want more coffee?”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, half rising, but Brother Mesquite was out of his chair and off with the cups. When he came back he had two raised doughnuts as well. No wonder his teeth ached, Bob thought.

  “Cy had these extra. Anyway, after a few years the abbot and the brothers listened a my arguments for a bison operation on the monastic lands. There’s monasteries raise cattle but this is the only bison ranch. It took a couple years a research and discussion before we got it worked out. We started small with four heifers and a young bull and now we run almost three hundred bison. It’s helped the monastery define itself. Before the bison we had a organic vegetable seed operation, mostly plants suited to the southern plains, and we still do that, but the physical work a the bison ranch is good for us. We’ve learned from these animals—about their ways, about ourselves, about what suits this region a the earth. The monastery is a happy and productive place. And I am happy. Couldn’t ask for much more from life.”

  “But don’t you feel bad when the truck comes to haul your animals to the slaughterhouse?”

  “No truck comes for that purpose. We raise breedin stock.”

  “Goddammit, Cy, this coffee’s got a fly in it!” came an angry voice from the back.

  “I can make you another pot, Francis.”

  “Forget it, we’ll go down the old ladies’ tearoom and get some. They make damn good coffee and you could learn something from them about desserts—get off your pineapple kick.”

  There was a clatter of dishes and the ring of coin and Francis Scott Keister, his right hand in the small of Evelyn Chine’s back, walked to the front door without looking at Bob and Brother Mesquite. As the two got in Keister’s truck Bob was astonished to see them go into a kissing clinch.