Annie Proulx

THAT OLD ACE IN THE HOLE

A Novel

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Dead Line Ltd, 2002

The right of Annie Proulx to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN 9780007383894

Version 2016-06-13

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it arc the work of the author’s imagination Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

DEDICATION

Alle molens vangen wind

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. Global Pork Rind

2. Art Plastic

3. On the Road Again

4. The Evil Fat Boy

5. No Room in Cowboy Rose

6. Sheriff Hugh Dough

7. The Rural Compendium

8. Pioneer Fronk

9. The Busted Star

10. Old Dog

11. Tater Crouch

12. Rope Butt

13. Habakuk’s Luck

14. The Young Couple

15. Abel and Cain

16. Curiosity Killed the Cat

17. The Devil’s Hatband

18. Just a Few Questions

19. The Sheriff’s Office

20. Everything’s O.K. So Far

21. Triple Cross

22. Ribeye Writes

23. Rich Orlando

24. Violet’s Night on the Town

25. Top Sales

26. Brother Mesquite

27. Trip to Denver

28. Used but Not Abused

29. Ribeye Cluke’s Office

30. Quick Change

31. Mrs. Betty Doak

32. Ace in the Hole

33. Failure

34. Barbwire

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Also by Annie Proulx

About the Publisher

1 GLOBAL PORK RIND

In late March Bob Dollar, a young, curly-headed man of twenty-five with the broad face of a cat, pale innocent eyes fringed with sooty lashes, drove east along Texas State Highway 15 in the panhandle, down from Denver the day before, over the Raton Pass and through the dead volcano country of northeast New Mexico to the Oklahoma pistol barrel, then a wrong turn north and wasted hours before he regained the way. It was a roaring spring morning with green in the sky, the air spiced with sand sagebrush and aromatic sumac. NPR faded from the radio in a string of announcements of corporate supporters, replaced by a Christian station that alternated pabulum preaching and punchy music. He switched to shit-kicker airwaves and listened to songs about staying home, going home, being home and the errors of leaving home.

The road ran along a railroad track. He thought the bend of the rails unutterably sad, those cold and gleaming strips of metal turning away into the distance made him think of the morning he was left on Uncle Tam’s doorstep listening for the inside clatter of coffee pot and cups although there had been no train nor tracks there. He did not know how the rails had gotten into his head as symbols of sadness.

Gradually the ancient thrill of moving against the horizon into the great yellow distance heated him, for even fenced and cut with roads the overwhelming presence of grassland persisted, though nothing of the original prairie remained. It was all flat expanse and wide sky. Two coyotes looking for afterbirths trotted through a pasture to the east, moving through fluid grass, the sun backlighting their fur in such a way that they appeared to have silver linings. Irrigated circles of winter wheat, dotted with stocker calves, grew on land as level as a runway. In other fields tractors lashed tails of dust. He noticed the habit of slower drivers to pull into the breakdown lane – here called the “courtesy lane” – and wave him on.

Ahead cities loomed, but as he came close the skyscrapers, mosques and spires metamorphosed into grain elevators, water towers and storage bins. The elevators were the tallest buildings on the plains, symmetrical, their thrusting shapes seeming to entrap kinetic energy. After a while Bob noticed their vertical rhythm, for they rose up regularly every five or ten miles in trackside towns. Most were concrete cylinders, some brick or tile, but at many sidings the old wood elevators, peeling and shabby, still stood, some surfaced with asbestos shingles, a few with rusted metal loosened by the wind. Rectilinear streets joined at ninety-degree angles. Every town had a motto: “The Town Where No One Wears a Frown”; “The Richest Land and the Finest People”; “10,000 Friendly People and One or Two Old Grumps.” He passed the Kar-Vu Drive-In, a midtown plywood Jesus, dead cows by the side of the road, legs stiff as two-by-fours, waiting for the renderer’s truck. There were nodding pump jacks and pivot irrigation rigs (one still decked out in Christmas lights) to the left and right, condensation tanks and complex assemblies of pipes and gauges, though such was the size of the landscape and their random placement that they seemed metal trinkets strewn by a vast and careless hand. Orange-and-yellow signs marked the existence of underground pipelines, for beneath the fields and pastures lay an invisible world of pipes, cables, boreholes, pumps and extraction devices, forming, with the surface fences and roads, a monstrous three-dimensional grid. This grid extended into the sky through contrails and invisible satellite transmissions. At the edge of fields he noticed brightly painted V-8 diesel engines (most converted to natural gas), pumping up water from the Ogallala aquifer below. And he passed scores of anonymous, low, grey buildings with enormous fans at their ends set back from the road and surrounded by chain-link fence. From the air these guarded hog farms resembled strange grand pianos with six or ten white keys, the trapezoid shape of the body the effluent lagoon in the rear.

Still, all of these machines and wire and metal buildings seemed ephemeral. He knew he was on prairie, what had once been part of the enormous North American grassland extending from Canada to Mexico, showing its thousand faces to successions of travelers who described it in contradictory ways: under gritty spring wind the grass blew sidewise, figured with bluets and anemones, pussytoes and Johnny-jump-ups, alive with birds and antelope; in midsummer, away from the overgrazed trail margins, they traveled through groin-high grass rolling in waves; those on the trail in late summer saw dry, useless desert studded with horse-crippling cactus. Few, except working cowboys, ventured onto the plains in winter when stinging northers swept snow across it. Where once the howling of wolves was heard, now sounded the howl of tires.

Bob Dollar had no idea he was driving into a region of immeasurable natural complexity that some believed abused beyond saving. He saw only what others had seen – the bigness, pump jacks nodding pterodactyl heads, road alligators cast off from the big semi tires. Every few miles a red-tailed hawk marked its hunting boundary. The edges of the road were misty with purple-flowered wild mustard whose rank scent embittered the air. He said to the rearview mirror, “some flat-ass place.” Though it seemed he was not so much in a place as confronting the raw material of human use.

A white van turned out of a side road in front of him and he narrowed his eyes; he knew white vans were favored by the criminally insane and escaped convicts, that the bad drivers of the world gravitated to them. The van sped away, exceeding the speed limit, and faded out of sight. There appeared, far ahead, on the other side of the road, a wambling black dot that resolved into a bicyclist. A trick of the heated air magnified the bicycle, which appeared thirty feet high and shivered as though constructed of aspic. He passed another hawk on a telephone pole.

The great prairie dog cities of the short-grass plains which once covered hundreds of square miles were gone, but some old-fashioned red-tails continued to hunt as their ancestors, in flat-shouldered soar, turning methodically in the air above the prairie, yellow eyes watching for the shiver of grass. Many more had taken up modern ways and sat atop convenient poles and posts waiting for vehicles to clip rabbits and prairie dogs. They retrieved the carrion with the insolent matter-of-factness of a housewife carelessly slinging a package of chops into her shopping cart. Such a hawk, a bit of fur stuck to the side of its beak, watched the bicyclist pumping along west. As the machine moved slowly through the focus of those amber eyes the bird lost interest; the bicycle had no future in the hawk world; more rewarding were trucks on the paved highways, grilles spattered with blood, weaving pickups that aimed for jacks and snakes as though directed by the superior will on a telephone pole.

The bicyclist, reduced to human size, and Bob Dollar, in his sedan, drew abreast; the bicyclist saw a red-flushed face, Bob had a glimpse of a stringy leg and a gold chain, then the bicycle descended a dip in the road. Alone on the highway again Bob squinted at a wadded quilt of cloud crawling over the sky. There unrolled beside the Saturn the level land, every inch put to use for crops, oil, gas, cattle, service towns. The ranches were set far back from the main road, and now and then he passed an abandoned house, weather-burned, surrounded by broken cottonwoods. In the fallen windmills and collapsed outbuildings he saw the country’s fractured past scattered about like the pencils on the desk of a draughtsman who has gone to lunch. The ancestors of the place hovered over the bits and pieces of their finished lives. He did not notice the prairie dog that raced out of the roadside weeds into his path and the tires bumped slightly as he hit it. A female red-tail lifted into the air. It was the break she had been waiting for.

Bob Dollar was a stranger in the double-panhandle country north of the Canadian River. He had held two jobs in the five years since he had graduated from Horace Greeley Junior University, a hybrid institution housed in a cinder-block building at the edge of an onion field off Interstate 70 east of Denver. He had expected enlightenment at Horace Greeley, hoped to find an interest that would lead to an absorbing career, but that did not happen and his old doubts about what he should do for a career persisted. He thought a wider educational scope would help and so applied to the state university, but even with a modest scholarship offer (he had a large vocabulary, good reading habits and exemplary grades), there wasn’t enough money for him to go.

Armed with his computer printout diploma from Horace Greeley he found it difficult to land what he thought of as “a good position,” and, finally, rather than work in Uncle Tam’s shop, took a minimum-wage job as inventory clerk for Platte River Lightbulb Supply.

After thirty months of toil with boxes and broken glass and miniscule annual raises he had had an unfortunate experience with the company’s president, Mrs. Eudora Giddins, widow of Millrace Giddins who had founded the company. He was fired. And he was glad, for he did not want life to be a kind of fidgety waiting among lightbulbs, as for a report card. He wanted to aim at a high mark on a distant wall. If time had to pass, let it pass with meaning. He wanted direction and reward.

There followed five months of job hunting before he was hired on as a location man for Global Pork Rind, headquarters in Tokyo and Chicago, with a field office in Denver. He was assigned to the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle territory and sent out on his first trip for the company.

The day before he left, Mr. Cluke’s secretary, Lucille, had flashed him a red smile and waved him into the office. Mr. Ribeye Cluke, the regional operations manager, got up from behind his glass-topped desk, the gleaming surface like a small lake, said “Bob, we don’t have many friends down there in the panhandles except for one or two of the smarter politicians, and because of this situation we have to go about our business pretty quietly. I want you to be as circumspect as possible – do you know what that word ‘circumspect’ means?” His watery eyes washed over Bob. His large hand rose and smoothed the coarse mustache that Bob thought resembled a strip of porcupine. His shoulders sloped so steeply that from behind it looked as though his head was balanced on an arch.

“Yes sir. Keep a low profile.”

Mr. Cluke picked up a can of shaving cream from the top of the filing cabinet and shook it. From a drawer in his desk he removed an arrangement of braces, straps and fittings and put it over his head so that part rested on his shoulders, and another part that was a large disk against his breast. He tugged at the disk and it opened out on a telescoping arm, becoming a mirror. He applied the shaving cream to his heavy cheeks and, with a straight razor which he took from his pencil jar, unfolded it and began to shave, skirting the borders of the mustache.

“Well, that’s good, Bob. Last fellow we thought could scout for us believed it meant something that happened to him in the hospital when he was a baby. So he was no use. But you’re smart, Bob, smart as a dollar, ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha,” laughed Bob, who had increased his word power since the age of nine with The Child’s Illustrated Dictionary given him by his uncle Tam. But his laughter was subdued, for he knew nothing of hogs beyond the fact that they were, mysteriously, the source of bacon.

“In other words, Bob, don’t let the folks down there know that you are looking for sites for hog facilities or they will prevaricate and try to take us to the cleaners, they will carry on with letters to various editors, every kind of meanness and so forth, as they have been brainwashed by the Sierra Club to think that hog facilities are bad, even the folks who love baby back ribs, even the ones hunting jobs. But I will tell you something. The panhandle region is perfect for hog operations – plenty of room, low population, nice long dry seasons, good water. There is no reason why the Texas panhandle can’t produce seventy-five percent of the world’s pork. That’s our aim. Bob, I notice you are wearing brown oxford shoes.”

“Yes sir.” He turned one foot a little, pleased with the waxy glint from the Cole Haan shoe which retailed at $300 plus, but which his uncle Tambourine Bapp had fished from a donation box left at the loading dock of his thrift shop on the outer banks of Colfax Avenue.

Uncle Tarn had raised him. He was a slender, short man with vivid, water-blue eyes, the same eyes as Bob and his mother and the rest of the Bapp clan. Thick greying hair swept back from a square brow. His quick chicken steps and darting hand movements irritated some people. Bob had been a little afraid of him the first week or two because his left ear rode half an inch higher than the right, giving him a crazy, tilted look, but slowly he yielded to Tam’s kindness and sincere interest in him. His uncle’s cropped ear was the result of a childhood injury when his sister Harp cut off the fleshy top with a pair of scissors as punishment for playing with her precious Barbie doll.

“He wasn’t playing! He was hanging her,” she had sobbed.

When he was eight, Bob’s parents had brought him to the thrift shop doorstep very early in the morning, told him to sit there next to a box of dog-eared romance novels.

“Now when Uncle Tam gets up and starts slamming things around inside, you knock on the door. You’re going to stay with him. We’ve got to run now or we’ll miss the plane. Quick hug goodbye,” said his mother. His father, waiting in the sedan, raised his hand briskly and saluted. Years later Bob thought it might have been the break the old man was waiting for.

At first his uncle claimed it wasn’t abandonment. They were in the kitchen at the table, Uncle Tam having his Saturday coffee break.

“I told Viola and Adam to bring you over. The plan was for you to stay with me until they got back from Alaska. After they got their cabin built they were coming back to get you and you were all going to live in Alaska. You staying here was a temporary thing. We just don’t know what happened. Viola called only one time to say they had found some land, but she never said exactly where and there’s no record of it. The pilot that flew them to wherever they went left Alaska and went to Mississippi where he got into dusting crops. By the time we traced him it was useless. He’d crashed in a cotton field and suffered brain damage. Couldn’t even remember his own name. Anything could have happened to your mother and father – grizzly bear, amnesia. Alaska’s a big place. I don’t for one minute think they abandoned you.” He tapped his fingers on the table, impatient with his own words which sounded stupid and inadequate to him. It was not possible for two grown people to disappear as had Adam and Viola.

“Well, what did they do to make a living,” Bob asked, hoping for a clue to his own direction. All he was sure about was that he hadn’t been important enough to take along. He taught himself not to care that he was so uninteresting that his parents dropped him on a doorstep and never bothered to write or call. “I mean, what was my dad, an engineer, or a computer guy or what?”

“Well, your mother painted neckties. You know the one I’ve got of the Titanic sinking? That’s one of hers. I would say that’s my dearest possession. It’ll be yours someday, Bob. As for your dad, that’s a little hard to say. He was always taking tests to see what he should do with his life – aptitude tests. Don’t get me wrong. He was a nice guy, a really nice guy, but a little unfocused. He never could settle on anything. He had about a hundred jobs before they went to Alaska. And there something happened to them that I’m sure they couldn’t help. We don’t know what. I spent a fortune in phone calls. Your uncle Xylo went out there for two months and turned up absolutely nothing except the name of that pilot. Put ads in the papers. Nobody knew anything, not the police, not our family, not a single person in Alaska ever heard of them. So I’d say you had bad luck with your folks disappearing, losing the chance to get raised in Alaska – instead getting brought up by a crazy unrich uncle with a junk shop.” He arched his back and twisted his head, fidgeted with a loose thread on the cuff of his knit shirt. “I suppose the only thing I’d like to impress on you, Bob, is a sense of responsibility. Viola never had it, and for sure Adam didn’t. If you take on a project then, dammit, see it through to the end. Let your word mean something. It just about broke my heart to see the way you’d run to the mailbox every day expecting to find a letter from Alaska. Adam and Viola were not what I’d call responsible.”

“It was lucky in a way,” said Bob. The lucky part was Uncle Tam. He read stories to Bob every night, asked his opinion on the weather, on the doneness of boiled corn, foraged through the junk shop detritus for things that might interest. Bob Dollar couldn’t imagine what his life would have been like in the household of Uncle Xylo whose wife, Siobhan, was an impassioned clog dancer and who ran an astrology business out of their front living room in Pickens, Nebraska. She had a neon sign over the front door with a beckoning hand under the words “Psychic Readings.”

“I guess it wasn’t easy bringing up somebody else’s kid,” he mumbled. The bedtime reading had welded him to Uncle Tarn and to stories. From the first night in the little apartment when Uncle Tam had turned a page and said the words “Part One: The Old Buccaneer,” Bob had become a sucker for stories told. He slid into imaginary worlds, passive, listening, his mouth agape, a hard listener for whatever tale unfolded.

“Ah, you were an easy kid. Except for the library fines. You were always a nice kid, you always pitched in and helped. I never had to worry about phone calls from the cops, drugs, stolen cars, minimart holdups. The only headache you gave me was when you started hanging around with that heavy guy, Orlando the Freak. He was a wrong one. I’m not surprised he ended up in the pen. I’m thankful you’re not there with him.”

“It’s not like he committed armed robbery or something. It was only computer hacking.”

“Yeah? If you think diverting all the operating funds of the Colorado U.S. Forest Service to a Nevada bordello was ‘just computer hacking,’ I have news for you.” He stretched and fiddled with his cuff, looked at his watch. “It’s almost eleven. I’ve got to get back to the shop.”

In the early years Bob often felt he was in fragments, in many small parts that did not join, an internal sack of wood chips. One chip was that old life with his parents, another the years with Uncle Tam and Wayne “Bromo” Redpoll, then just Uncle Tam. Another part was Orlando and Fever and weird movies, then the lightbulb time and Mrs. Giddins asking him to massage her feet and her fury when he drew back, gagging, from the stink of clammy nylon. It was true that Bob had always pitched in and helped with dishes and cooking and house chores, largely because he was so ashamed of Uncle Tam’s withering poverty which somehow seemed less if everything was clean and squared up. He would rearrange the books in the bookcases by size and color and Bromo Redpoll, his uncle’s business partner, would say, “Don’t be such an old lady.”

Uncle Tam doted on Bob Dollar but had little to offer as proof of affection beyond solicitous attention and gifts of relatively choice treasures from the thrift shop, including the recent brown oxfords.

“Bob! These look like your size, ten double E. Try em on. In a bag of stuff from some Cherry Creek fat cat. Probably the maid dropped them off.”

“They’re great. Now all I need is a sports coat.” In fact the shoes looked odd with Bob’s jeans and T-shirt.

“We got no sports coats you’d be caught dead in, but there is a real nice car coat, suede with shearling lining. Like new, and almost your size. Car coats are kind of old-fashioned now, but it could be useful. You never know. The thing is, it’s a kind of – kind of a tan. Come back in the shop and have a look-see.”

The car coat was tight across the shoulders and the sleeves somewhat short, but there was no denying, despite the lemony color of a bad dye lot, that it was a well-made garment. He lived in dread that on the street someday the previous owner would recognize the coat and make scathing remarks. It had happened twice in school, once when he wore an argyle sweater, once with a knitted cap, the name CHARLES spelled out on the cuff. He had tried to ink the letters out with a marker but they showed plainly enough. Eventually a large black beret with cigarette burn holes turned up and he wore it for years, telling himself some Frenchman had visited Denver and abandoned it there.

“Now, Bob,” said Mr. Cluke, slapping his cheeks with a manly heather aftershave lotion, “you cannot go down to Texas wearing brown oxfords. Take my word for it. I’ve spent enough time down there to know a pair of brown oxfords can set you back with those people. Despite oilmen trigged out in suits, and wealthy wheat growers with diamond rings, the figure of respect in Texas is still the cattleman and the cattleman wants to look like a cowboy. It wouldn’t hurt for you to get a pair of dress slacks and some long-sleeved shirts. But for sure you have got to get yourself a decent pair of cowboy boots and wear them. You don’t need to wear the hat or western shirts, but you got to wear the boots.”

“Yes sir,” said Bob, seeing the logic of it.

“And Bob, here’s a list of the qualities that I want you to look for – on the q.t. – in that country. Look for your smaller cow outfits and farms, not the great big ones or the ranches with four hundred oil wells. Look for areas where everybody is grey-headed. Older. People that age just want to live quiet and not get involved in a cause or fight city hall. That’s the kind of population we want. Find out the names of local people who run things – bankers, church folks – get on their good side. Keep your eyes and ears open for farmers whose kids went off to school and those kids are not coming back unless somebody puts a gun to their heads. Read the obits for rural property owners who just died and their offspring are thinking ‘show me the money’ so they can get back to Kansas City or Key West or other fleshpots of their choice.

“And here’s another thing. You will have to have a cover story because you can’t go down there and say you’re scouting for Global Pork Rind. Some people would be openly hostile. You will be there off and on for several months at a time, so you will have to think up a story to explain your presence. The fellow we had before told people he was a reporter for a national magazine working on a panhandle story – that was supposed to let him get into every kind of corner and let him ask pertinent questions. You know what ‘pertinent’ means, don’t you?”

‘Yes sir. Pertaining to, or related in some way to a topic.”

“Very good, I imagine you did well in school. That fellow I mentioned thought it had something to do with hair implants. Anyway, he thought that was a good cover story and expected doors to open to him like butter.”

“What magazine did that fellow say he was working for, sir? Doing the profile for?”

“Well, he did not pick Texas Monthly, thinking the local populace might have heard of it. And of course it would have been folly to name Cockfight Weekly or Ranch News. I believe he said Vogue. He thought he would be safe with that one in the panhandle.”

“And it didn’t work for him?”

“No, no. It didn’t.” Ribeye Cluke’s little finger swept a speck of shaving cream from his earlobe. “You will have to think of something else. I would stay away from the magazine idea, myself But you’ll think of something. Now, Bob, it’s perfectly fine to stay in a motel for a few days until you get your bearings, but your best bet is to rent a room with someone in the area. Find some old lady or elderly couple with plenty of relatives. That way you’ll get a beeline on what’s happening. You’ll get the lowdown. Now you just scour the properties north of the” – he consulted the map on the wall – ”the Canadian River. Scour them good! Whenever you find a property that looks right and the owner is willing, you let me know and I’ll send our Money Offer Person down. We’ve set up a subsidiary company to buy the parcels and then deed them over to Global. The residents do not know a hog farm is coming in until the bulldozers start constructing the waste lagoon. Later, when you’ve gained experience, when you’ve proved your value to Global Pork Rind, you can act as your own Money Offer Person, though generally we like to send a woman, mention a sum to the oldsters right on the spot. There’s an advantage to that. Another thing, don’t stay in one place, after a month or so switch to another town. And so forth. That fellow I mentioned? He picked Mobeetie, so if I were you that’s not where I’d go. He made people suspicious. He got into trouble.

“Lucille here has made up a packet of maps and brochures, county profiles for you, and there’s your corporate credit card – and you bet there’s a limit on it, Bob. We need your signature on this card. Here you go then and I’ll just wish you good luck. Report back to me by mail every week. And I don’t mean that damn e-mail. I won’t touch that. Get a post office box. Write to me at home and I’ll respond from same so your postmaster down there doesn’t see Global Pork Rind on the envelope and start putting five and five together. I’ll see that the company newsletters are sent to you in a plain brown wrapper. Can’t be too careful. Use a pay phone if there is an emergency.”

“Yes sir.”

“And remember, the thing that’s really important is that – that we – that we do what we do.”

Bob left with the feeling that Ribeye Cluke was somehow deceiving him.

That night he took his uncle Tam to a celebratory dinner at a famous Inuit-Japanese-Irish steak house where they poured melted Jersey butter from quart pitchers, where the baked potatoes, decorated with tiny umbrellas, were the size of footballs and the steaks so thick they could only be cut with samurai swords. His uncle winced at the menu prices, then overpraised the food, a sure sign he was homesick for Chickee’s place down the block from his shop where he could enjoy a plate of fried gizzards or catfish hot pot. But it seemed his thoughts had gone in a different direction, for out on the sidewalk he belched and said, “I’ve been thinking of getting into vegetables. Becoming a vegetarian. Meat’s too damn expensive. Oh. Wait a minute. Before I forget. Wayne sent you something. And there’s a little thing from me.” His uncle thrust two flat parcels at Bob. “Don’t open them until you get there,” he said.

“Bromo! I didn’t even know you were in touch with him anymore.”

“Yeah. I am. We are. Whatever.”

2 ART PLASTIC

At the time Bob’s parents had dropped him off on the doorstep, Uncle Tam had had a roommate, Wayne Redpoll, with glary eyes and a rubbery mug, his features arranged around a nose so beaked that it made his eyes unmemorable. His brown hair was crinkled and violent, springing with energy. In the mornings before ten o’clock when the shop opened, he lounged around without a shirt doing crossword puzzles, tapping the pencil against his discolored teeth. His chest was strange, the nipples almost under his armpits. He was not good at the puzzles, too impatient for them, and after a few minutes would go his own way, filling in the blanks with any old word, right or wrong. Bob disliked him mildly and it was partly to vanquish him at crosswords that he began to study The Child’s Illustrated Dictionary which Uncle Tam had fished out of a box and handed to him, saying, “Happy congratulations on this great Wednesday morning.” By the time he was twelve he could do the Tuesday New York Times puzzle with a pen in less than twenty minutes, but Thursday and Friday took many hours with pencil as the clues were sly and presumed knowledge of cultural events in the dim past. All kinds of words streamed through his mind – ocelot, strabismus, plat du jour, archipelago, bemusement, vapor, mesa, sitar, boutique. Wayne tried to counter Bob’s skill by dredging up odd crossword information and explaining it to him as though that were the point of the puzzles: that crosswords had been invented in 1913 by a Liverpool newspaperman, that in 1924 they became a national craze. He generally pooh-poohed the New York Times puzzles, which, he said, were child’s play – a meaningful look at Bob – compared to the evil puzzles of the British, particularly those with cryptic clues constructed by the old masters, Torquemada, Ximenes and Azed. But this persiflage did him no good. He did not have the knack and Bob did.

Wayne Redpoll had come by the nickname “Bromo” after a night of heavy drinking not long after Bob Dollar arrived on the doorstep. He moaned with a hangover, drank black coffee to restore balance, said, “Goddamn, I’m going for a walk to clear my head,” ended at Chickee’s place down the street where he ordered a Bromo-Seltzer to settle his queasy gut. He swallowed the gassy mixture and within seconds puked on the counter.

He had a habit of holding his words behind his teeth, only letting them escape through the narrowest possible opening of his jaws, which gave his conversation a constricted sibilance. He had many dislikes. He hated the “drink milk” campaign that showed celebrities holding empty glasses of milk, their upper lips white with the stuff as though they drank like tapirs. Hijackers aside, he loathed flying, especially the attendants’ merry commands to pull down the window shades so other passengers could watch grade-Z American movies. He refused to lower his shade, saying that the only pleasure in flying was the chance to look at the landscape from thirty-five thousand feet. Once he had been put off the plane in Kansas City for daring to argue about it. Tam had driven hundreds of miles to pick him up and listened all the way back to Bromo’s rant about the horrible streets he had walked through while waiting. Phrases offered to the grief-stricken, such as “time heals all wounds” and “the day will come when you reach closure” irritated him, and there were times when he sat silent, seeming half-buried in some sediment of sorrow.

“Closure? When someone beloved dies there is no ‘closure.’”

He disliked television programs featuring tornado chasers squealing “Big one! Big one!” and despised the rat-infested warrens of the Internet, riddled with misinformation and chicanery. He did not like old foreign movies where, when people parted, one stood in the middle of the road and waved. He thought people with cell phones should be immolated along with those who overcooked pasta. Calendars, especially the scenic types with their glowing views of a world without telephone lines, rusting cars or burger stands, enraged him, but he despised the kittens, motorcycles, famous women and jazz musicians of the special-interest calendars as well.

“Why not photographs of feral cats? Why not diseases?” he said furiously. Wal-Mart trucks on the highway received his curses and perfumed women in elevators invited his acid comment that they smelled of animal musk glands. For years he had been writing an essay entitled “This Land Is NOT Your Land.”

Even though they did not get along, Bromo had opened a charge account for Bob at the local bookshop where he was allowed to buy one book every two weeks. Bob’s longing for the books had overcome his dislike of any obligation to Bromo.

When donation boxes came to the shop’s doorstep he offered scathing criticism of the contents. Once a strange garment arrived in a box stamped OUTDOOR GRILL DELUXE. It was an enormous vest made of an unidentified fur, coarse, long and brownish grey. It smelled of old smoke and mothballs.

“A beast!” cried Bromo in mock horror, backing away from it. “Good God, that’s something from the sixties, some mountain commune garment. Feel in the pockets, Tam, see if there’s any drugs.”

The pockets were empty. Bromo disliked the vest, which reminded him of paisley skirts, peace signs, girls doctoring their children with coltsfoot and yarrow; he was particularly irked at being unable to identify the fur. At last he could stand it no longer, wrapped the vest up, took it to the Denver Natural History Museum.

“Pass the macaroni, Bob,” said Uncle Tam that evening. Then, to Bromo, “Aren’t you going to tell us what they said at the museum?”

“You really want to know?”

“Of course I want to know. It’s a very unusual fur.”

Bromo snorted. “You can say that again. It’s also highly illegal. It is grizzly bear fur.”

“Oh no,” said Uncle Tam who was an ardent environmentalist with lifetime subscriptions to Audubon, High Country News, Mother Nature, Wildlife of the Rockies and Colorado Wildlife.

There followed a long discussion – argument – about what to do with “the Beast,” as Bromo persisted in calling it. In the end it got a spotlighted solo place on a table with a sign reading UNIQUE BEARSKIN VEST and a price tag of $200.

The two men were housemates and business partners and, Bob wondered a few years later, if perhaps not something more, for there was in their relationship an odd intimacy that went beyond household or business matters. Yet he had never seen any affectionate glances or touching between them. Each man had his own bedroom at opposite ends of the upstairs hall. But neither did they ever bring women to the house. It was a poor bachelor establishment (though tidy and well-dusted), for the partners made very little money. In the end Bob decided that the sexual gears of both men (and perhaps his own) were engaged in neutral, except for one peculiar and inexplicable memory of Bromo Redpoll in Santa Fe sitting on the hotel shoeshine throne for the third time in one day, an expression on his face that nine-year-old Bob could only characterize as “adult,” while a Mexican boy snapped his rag over a glossy wingtip. When Bob was older he grasped the sexual content of that expression and he had a word for it – concupiscence – for he had seen it on his own face, though not in longing for a shoeshine boy, but for the sluts of Front Range High, as distant to him as calendar photographs. He imagined himself with a sultry, curly-headed, dimpled girl, but it had not worked out that way. Bob was not tall but by some stroke of genetic luck he was well-proportioned with smooth musculature, a hard little ass and boxy shoulders. As Bob matured, the unbidden thought had come to Tam that the boy was, as Wayne might say, “a casserole.”

There were no dimpled girls with curly hair at Front Range High and in his junior year he had been picked out by a big, unclean girl with a muddy complexion, Marisa Berdstraw, who wore lipstick of a dark red color that made her teeth glow beaver yellow. She had quickly inveigled him into a sexual servitude with all the declarations and trappings of professed love but none of the reality. This meant going steady, studying together, a Friday or Saturday night movie, a sex grapple on Sunday mornings when her parents, both with mottled, rough faces, were at church. He did what she said and she had a pattern of events and behavior worked out in her mind. She would call up in the evening.

“What ya doin?”

“Studying for a social studies test.”

“I got a test too. In Diagonals. But I’m not studyin for it. It’s more like a quiz.”

Diagonals was an experimental course that darted tangentially from subject to subject as classroom discussion ranged. It had started off as a geology unit, veered to Esperanto, slid to the court of Louis XVI, on to the Whiskey Rebellion, the Oklahoma land rush, then to fractals, to oil tanker construction and, most recently, to mathematical calculation with an abacus.

“Only three more days till Sunday,” she said archly.

“Yeah.”

“Are you glad?”

“Glad about what? That there’s three more days?”

“That it’s only three more days.”

“Sure.”

But he wasn’t that glad. The encounters in her gritty sheets, awash in her strong body odors, left him restless and disappointed. He wanted a few things to be different. But Marisa did have a hearty laugh and a certain sense of humor, though based on pain and accident. He had only once brought her to the apartment. She made it clear that she thought the apartment a cramped hole and Uncle Tam something of an idiot, nice but quite dumb.

“He’s vague, you know? Not with it, is he?”

It was neither sorrow nor relief that he felt when she told him they had to break up.

“I’m not going with you anymore,” she said. “There’s another guy.”

Soon enough he learned the other guy was Kevin Alk, a nearsighted math freak with an acned face and greasy hair that held the tracks of his comb.

“Good luck,” he said politely, but privately his thought was that Marisa and Kevin Alk deserved each other. As for himself, Marisa’s interest in him and then her lack of interest pointed up how unimportant he was to her. Only Uncle Tam counted some value in him, but what that value was Bob didn’t know. Nothing more than kinship he supposed and maybe a sense of obligation to his lost sister.

The apartment had a particular smell, an effluvium that came up from the shop below – dust-choked carving, musty upholstery, the bitter out-gas of celluloid and Bakelite, the maritime odor of ancient fish glue. The stairway up from the shop was narrow and crooked, the walls papered with some odd 1940s pattern of yellow trellis hung with red teapots. Upstairs, at the midpoint of the hall’s length, hung engravings and pictures that had come in with loads of junk and taken Uncle Tarn’s fancy. One showed fifty great rivers of the earth arranged as dangling strings and graded as to length, and the opposing corner illustrated a crush of mountain peaks, lined up from the smallest to the greatest, giving the impression of a fabulous and terrific range that existed nowhere in reality. Yet for years Bob believed that in some distant land hundreds of inverted ice-cream cone mountains gave way to an immeasurable plain cut by fifty rivers running parallel to each other.

“It’s not a real place,” said Bromo Redpoll. “You dunce. It’s only for the sake of comparison.”

The shop dealt in a wide variety of American junk but its specialty was plastic, and their mutual interest in resin and polymer objects joined the two men as twinned cherries on the stem. Uncle Tam could talk plastic manufacturing for hours, and had signed up for a course in chemistry the better to understand the complex processes.

There was a room in the shop – the best room – where nothing was for sale to the ordinary customer. A sign on the door said

ART PLASTIC

By Appointment Only

“One day,” Uncle Tam said, “probably not in our lifetime, but maybe in yours, Bob, people will collect plastic objects from the twentieth century as art, like now they are going after wooden grain cradles and windmill weights. This will be worth a fortune,” he said, waving grandly at the shelves and cases of Lucite bracelets, acrylic vases, Bakelite radios, polyethylene water pitchers. On floor pedestals, as if sculptures, stood plastic washing-machine agitators, black and white. The partners’ scavenging hunts ranged from outlying yard sales to periodic rakes through the shops of Antique Row on Broadway where they foraged for baby rattles, ancient billiard balls, even celluloid bibs from nuns’ old-style habits.

Within specialties there are often subsets of rarer specialties, and so it was with Bromo Redpoll and Tam Bapp. Bromo had collected a dozen phenol parasol handles with fancy metal bands. Tam sought out the British urea resin from the 1920s known as Beetleware – the forerunner of melamine. Silicone, polyurethane, epoxy were what they wanted but never would they buy anything for more than a few dollars. A side specialty was Bakelite jewelry from the 1920s. When Uncle Tam discovered, in the bottom of an old box of magazines, a Bakelite catalog from early in the century, both considered it a great find.

There were dozens of dolls and toys in the Art Plastic room but Bob preferred the Cleopatra Manicure Box to any of them, a striking red-and-black Art Deco box packed inside with plastic-handled files and emery boards and a few bottles of nail varnish dried to black powder. He pretended Cleopatra had actually owned it and the vials of dark dust were poisons.

The highlight of the week came on Sunday evenings when the Antiques Roadshow aired. Uncle Tam locked the shop at 4:30, even when customers stood beseechingly at the door as he hung up the Closed sign. The partners’ devotion to the program was extreme and they had evolved certain rituals. The coffee table was cleared of magazines and bills that had accumulated during the week. Their notebooks and pens were set out. The drinks, according to season and affordable ingredients, were to be made in the jazz-age silver penguin shaker – drinks containing coconut milk were esteemed, but coconut milk was expensive and it usually came down to a six-pack of Bud split between them. The food was peanut butter sandwiches, or carrot sticks and cheap cheese, or, if they were flush, buffalo wings or cardboard containers of tripe stew from Chickee’s place.

Plastics rarely made it onto the Antiques Roadshow but when they did both men were beside themselves and scribbled in their notebooks. When a podgy Baltimore man displayed his pristine, bright red ABS Olivetti typewriter and red slip-on case from the 1960s they stamped their feet in jealousy and shouted angrily when the “expert” put a paltry value of a hundred dollars on it. Uncle Tam said that if he had the money, he would fly to Baltimore and make the man an offer, though the airfare, of course, would bump the cost into the stratosphere. In the end he resigned himself to a fruitless Denver search for a match of the beautiful instrument.

The Antiques Roadshow could have gone on for hours; they would have remained leaning forward in happy anticipation, assigning values before the experts could speak, eating the carrot sticks which curved as they dried. At the end of the program they were both restless and Bromo went into the Art Plastic room to dust and wipe. They talked about making the big discovery that would put them over the top, and, very often, filled with enthusiasm, they headed out for the evening flea markets, coming home at midnight with boxes of worthless oddities. The closest they came to the big time was a yellowed journal kept by one A. Jackson which Tam thought might be Andrew Jackson. But in the pages the loving references (which gradually cooled) to “Mr. Jackson” dulled their expectations as they puzzled out that “A.” was Amelia Jackson of Poultney, Vermont, one in the grand parade of emigrants from New England to the gold fields of California in 1850. The diary – simple observations of weather and dust and miles traversed – ended abruptly at the Independence Rock stopover. Amelia Jackson wrote:

Mr. Jackson has concluded to break from this wagon train in company with several other men who cannot agree with our guide, Mr. Murk. I am to stay with the wagon and we will meet in San Francisco if Our Savior wills it. The men will undertake a short cut to the gold fields. I cannot think this the best plan. I would give a very great deal to be at home with mother and father and my dear sisters, in peace and harmony and with PLENTY of water in the cistern.

They managed to sell the journal for a few hundred dollars to the Pioneer Historical Library in Independence, Missouri, and Bromo said sourly that if it had been an Andrew Jackson journal they could have retired.

As the years went on Bob noticed that Bromo Redpoll was less keen on the antiques program than his uncle. He was increasingly derisive about Tiffany lamp shades and old journals. He would get up halfway through the hour, say “Call me if the Kenos come on” and go into the kitchen to poke through the refrigerator, for the only part of the show-that seemed to interest him now was the appearance of the Keno twins from New York, experts on American furniture. Bob thought the Kenos looked like animated waxworks but their clothes were fascinating. The word “natty” came to him. They were natty dressers as no one in Denver was nor could be.

Finally, the year Bob graduated from high school, the partnership ended on a Sunday night following the program. Bromo had spent most of the hour in the kitchen making Peanut Butter Dreams, but with one ear turned toward the living room in case Tam called “Keno alert!” At the very end it had come and he rushed in to see an exquisite highboy that had set the television twins’ hands trembling. Bromo watched, utterly rapt, the wooden spoon with its gob of batter in his hand. As the carousel music surged up and the credits rolled he sat on the sofa beside Tam and said, “We’ve got to talk.” He put the spoon on the coffee table, heedless of the batter sliding onto the table. Then he looked up and saw Bob watching them both.

“Here, Bob, will you finish making the cookies? I’ve got to talk to Tam.”

Bob, shooting a glance at his uncle who nodded, went into the kitchen, ostentatiously closing the swing door. He could hear Bromo’s voice growling on and on in some kind of low-key manifesto. He was curious but could not make out what they were saying, even when he stood with his ear on the door. Once in a while Uncle Tam would ask a question and off Bromo would go again, long, rolling breakers of speech, saying more than Bob had heard him say in eight years. When the cookies were done he put some on a plate and brought them in but the moment he pushed the door open they both shut up, watched him put the plate down, said thank you and waited until he left before starting to talk again. He took a handful of warm cookies for himself and went up to his room. At ten, yawning, he brushed his teeth for bed and heard them still at it downstairs, still talking.

At some time in the early morning he half woke, got out of bed and opened his door. The murmur of voices continued from downstairs. Now it was Uncle Tam talking, and the only words he could make out were “… fair market value.” They must be talking plastics, he thought.

Eight o’clock Bob galloped down the stairs, the first one down, and no wonder if they’d stayed up half the night talking about combs and bracelets. There was an empty scotch bottle in the trash. He started the coffee and went outside, ran down to the Continuum newsstand for the papers and, on the way back, stopped at the Sweet Mountain Bakery for the strawberry-pistachio Danish they all liked. Back in the kitchen he set the table, put out the milk and sugar, took three eggs from the refrigerator, looked for the nitrate-free bacon Uncle Tam insisted on buying, heard shuffling steps behind him. It was Uncle Tam in his ratty checkered bathrobe, looking bleary and hungover.

“Oh boy, I need some of that coffee.”

“How late did you guys stay up?”

“Until it got light. I just went to bed two hours ago.” He looked at the table, at the three places set. He picked up one of the plates, the silverware, put them away.

“Hey, what’d you do that for? Bromo likes breakfast too.”

“Not this morning. He’s gone. Left at five A.M. He persuaded me to buy his share of the business out. From now on it’s you and me, kid.”

“But where’d he go? Why? How could you buy him out if we don’t have any money?”

“He went to Iowa City where his sister lives, and from there he is going to New York. He says he wants to learn period furniture like the Keno brothers. He doesn’t care about Art Plastic anymore. And you’re right, I don’t have any money, so I had to promise to pay him a certain amount in case I can ever unload this dump. And now, if you don’t mind, let’s drop the subject permanently. I’ve just about got brain fever from it all.”

Bob had the sense to be quiet. And after a few weeks he got his first job – grocery packer at Sandman’s. In addition to his wage check he got meat and vegetables, eggs and fruit past their prime. So they lived on almost-spoiled produce and high meat, with frequent bouts of diarrhea.

3 ON THE ROAD AGAIN

The morning after the celebratory steak dinner Bob was heading south down I-25 in a Global Pork Rind company car, a blue, late-model Saturn, watching out for escaped prisoners in white vans. He stopped for gas in Trinidad, got a dripping chile dog to eat while he drove, pulled over at a roadside spring below Raton Pass to clean his hands and wipe off the steering wheel.

On the passenger seat were the packages his uncle had handed him outside the restaurant.

He took twisting, climbing roads through northeast New Mexico, high dry ranchland empty of everything but cinder cones and cows and an occasional distant building surrounded by corrals. An elderly horseman herded forty cows down the middle of the road, not deigning to hurry them or turn them out of the right-of-way.

He climbed a switchback road lined with tough-looking shinnery oak. He guessed he was about an hour’s drive from the Picket Wire canyonlands along the Purgatoire River, south of La Junta. When he was thirteen, he, Uncle Tam and Bromo Redpoll had rented a car and driven down to the Withers Canyon Gate, planning to hike in to the fabled dinosaur track bed.

It was a hot day, over a hundred degrees by late morning. Bob and Uncle Tam each had a canteen of water. Bromo carried a daypack of cold beers, Bob and Uncle Tam clutched plastic bottles of water. Bromo and Bob wore hiking boots, Uncle Tam his old black and stinking sneakers. The road in to the gate where the trail began was a gauntlet of washouts and boulders. At the gate a posted sign said the round-trip hike was 10.6 miles.

“Damn,” said Uncle Tam, “that’s almost an eleven-mile hike.”

“Two hours in, two hours out,” said Bromo, draining the first of his beers and tossing the can behind a rock. “Leave it alone,” he said when Bob ran to pick it up. “We’ll get it on the way out. You’re too damn picky. Don’t be such an old lady.”

They set off slowly, climbing the rocky trail. The sun beat against Bob’s face and within twenty minutes he knew he was burning. He’d forgotten his cap. He said, “Uncle Tam, did you bring any sunblock?” He thought they were in a terrible place, bristling with cholla, yucca and purple prickly pear. Scraggy junipers clung to frying rock. The canyon walls rose around them, shooting out heat as from ray guns.

“Shit. No. Would have been a good idea. You got any, Bromo?”

“Back in the car. Want to run back and get it, Bob? We’ll wait for you.”

“No.” The idea of running anywhere was repulsive.

They walked on, Bromo in the lead as if he were heading up a safari. Every step raised a puff of yellow dust from the trail and their boots and Uncle Tam’s sneakers, their stocking tops and lower legs were soon coated with the stuff setting off an itchy sensation like hay chaff At first Bob tried to make the water in his twelve-ounce bottle last but he was parched and his throat clicked painfully when he swallowed. It felt as though his throat were bleeding inside. Bromo finished his fourth beer, carefully standing the can beside the trail.

“Get it when we come out,” he said as he had every time he finished one. He straightened up and a thin, arid rustle shivered the heat. Bob thought it was a cicada or a grasshopper and walked up, intending to pass Bromo, but Uncle Tam thrust out his arm with hard suddenness, hitting Bob in the face.

“Ow. What’d you do that for?”

“Shut up. That’s a rattlesnake.” The landscape lurched.

They couldn’t see it. They stood very still. The buzzing surged until it seemed the loudest sound Bob had ever heard. Still they couldn’t see it until Bromo shifted position.

“There it is,” said Bromo. “Right next to the beer can. Christ, I was two inches from it.”

“I want to get out of here,” Bob whispered.

They backed up slowly and when they were fifteen feet away Bromo picked up a rock and threw it at the rattler. He missed.

“Well, what do you want to do, Tam, try and find a way past? The damn snake’s right on the trail.”

“Hell, let’s go back. I got blisters, Bob’s sunburned and who knows how many snakes we’ll run into? Could be hundreds in here. Not all of them rattle. People have killed so many of the ones who rattle that it’s the silent guys who reproduce. One of these days they’ll all be nonrattlers. Plus it’s too hot. This is the kind of place you tackle in November, not June.”

They left and did not come back in November or ever. But Bob had thought many times that someday he was going to make it in to the dinosaur tracks, maybe on a mountain bike, and certainly in cold weather when the rattlesnakes were hibernating. Now, remembering the aborted trip, he thought maybe he would try again on one of his trips between Denver and the panhandle. On a cool day.

North of Clayton he found a yellow-dirt road that carried him around hairpin bends, over humpback bridges and through mud ruts deep enough to scrape the bottom of the car. It was midafternoon when he came out at Teemu, not far from Black Mesa, in the Oklahoma panhandle, piñon-juniper-mesa country with cholla, hackberry, scrub oak all through the rocks. He stopped at a general store for a bottle of water and a ham sandwich, got pinned by the garrulous proprietor, a baggy man whiskered with white bristles recently arrived from California, who explained his ambitious retirement plan to make the place into another Santa Fe.

“See, my grandparents left here in the thirties. Dust bowl days. I thought I’d come back and see what they left behind. It’s a beautiful place. Great potential. Got electricity too, more than you can say for California. We got craft people here, carvers and painters, we got Indians, we got people with sheds full a antiques, we got a small tourist trade that just needs working up. It’s mostly a Christian tourist trade, there’s the Cowboy Bible Camp that packs them in all summer. Over in Kenton they got the Easter Pageant, brings in the thousands. We even got a vineyard now, Butch Podzemny’s ranch out east has went over to vines. With a little luck Oklahoma panhandle could put Napa Valley in the dumpster. Pretty good climate for vines, high, dry, plenty sun, clean air, light stony soil. The new county agent thinks we got a chance to make a real nice regional varietal. The old agent couldn’t see past cows.”

Bob thought the man was trying to puff the place up to himself, to smother his regret at leaving California for the bull’s-eye of the dust bowl.

“I figure if we can interest Oklahoma Today, get them to come out and do an article on us, we’d improve business about fifty percent. But we’re kind of forgotten out here. Right now I try to keep everything loose, keep a little of everything on hand so I can see what people want. I got calendars, a few groceries, lunch counter. I got the gas pump, only gas pump for thirty miles either direction. Next year is the big year. I got a friend talked into remodeling the old hotel, open a nice restaurant. Butch’ll have the first wine ready to sell then. If he makes a go of it there would be a hundred others love to get out of the damn cow business and into something nice like vines. The boom is coming. Teemu will be the next Santa Fe.”

It took Bob twelve seconds to drive through the bedraggled boomtown of the future, past three storefront churches, seven collapsed or empty buildings, the old school boarded up and wreathed in two-strand Wave Spread wire, past a decayed rock building with no roof and a dangling sign that read KELLY’S HOTEL – which he guessed was the home of the future “nice restaurant.” Bemused by curious rock formations that resembled dinosaur excreta standing on end, he thought of the storekeeper’s apparent ignorance that it had taken Santa Fe centuries to build up from its start as a trading town for Mexican hides and Indian silverwork. Several times he had gone with Uncle Tam and Bromo Redpoll to Santa Fe for the Art Plastic Society’s annual convention, and while the two men slavered over cracked polymer, he’d wandered around the town with one of the free guidebooks supplied by the hotel. So, thinking of the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, Missouri, to Council Grove in Kansas, to Pawnee Rock where the route split in two, the “wet trail” going south along the Cimarron River, the safer “dry trail” from Bent’s Fort westward to Raton Pass through the Sangre de Cristo range and on to Santa Fe, and thinking how he would soon be crossing that ghostly track, he took a wrong turn.

He did not notice at first, for a road runner dashed in front of him. The road was paved, but soon it narrowed, and after fifteen miles plunged down a short hill to a bridgeless water crossing, then up and around a tight corner and onto level ground where it split away into three rutted dirt trails without signs. The mesas were out of sight, the rock formations had disappeared. He fumbled for his map but the one he had, a gas station cheapo stamped Central and Western States, did not show Teemu on it. He guessed that by turning right, which he took to be east, he would parallel the state line and, after a while, find a good road cutting south again.

And so he maneuvered onto a set of dusty ruts dotted with manure, a primitive road wandering through uninhabited grazing land. There were no towns, no gas stations, no houses, no corrals, no traffic. He was the only person on an endless track without turnoff nor intersection. The fine dust got into the car and choked him and he wished he had bought gallons of water from the talkative store man. It was sultry for a day in March, even in Oklahoma, and gross clouds crowded the sky. After an hour of dry swallowing he came on a weather-beaten sign, the first he had seen. It read COMANCHE NATIONAL GRASSLAND. He looked at his map. There was a green square on the map bearing the same name. He was somehow back in Colorado and heading north.

He could not bear to retrace his path to the fetal boomtown, so he drove doggedly on, believing that sooner or later there would be intersecting roads east and then south that would take him down to Oklahoma and Texas. Eight miles later he hit a right-hand turnoff without a sign but it surely headed east and gave him a view to the south of a massive wall of blue-black cloud slashed by lightning.

With an abrupt twitch the dusty road butted onto blacktop and in the distance he could see semis racing along a busy highway. He had found the road but lost the day. A northwest slot in the clouds let a narrow ray of sunlight through. There was a heaviness to it as though its rich color truly bore the weight of gold.

In another hour he was back in Oklahoma, a few miles outside Boise City, looking for a place to sleep. He found a bed-and-breakfast, the Badger Hole, where, on the front lawn, an enormous fiberglass badger stood with Christmas lights around its neck. In the tiny parking lot there was an unwashed white van with Arizona plates. A finger had written in the dust on the back door ON THE MOTHER-FUCKING ROAD AGAIN. It didn’t sound like the sentiment of an escaped convict, so he took the room.

He was shown up the stairs by a heavy woman, young but fleshy, with yellow crimped hair and a beautiful face. When she spoke her mouth went up on one side as though she talked around a cigar. The room was hot and airless, the walls painted forget-me-not blue. The single bed was dainty and white, the bathroom obviously made over from a narrow closet. There was no air conditioner, but an electric fan took up most of the top of the painted chest. He pried a window open and with the cool evening air came a loose knot of mosquitoes. He turned on the fan, which roared hugely, the stream of air twitching the curtains, stirring the pages of a magazine on the bedside table – Decorating Your Mobile Home.

Bob Dollar opened the smallest of the packages his uncle had handed him and inside found the tie his mother had painted showing the Titanic going down. There was an immense gash in the ship’s side and out of it tumbled people and beds and china; tiny figures struggled in the water. An iceberg shaped like a bundle of chef’s knives threatened to stab the ship again. Tears came to Bob’s pale eyes. He had heard his uncle say many times that the tie was his dearest possession. The other package felt like a book. Bromo always had given him books, great books, for he had an uncanny sense of what Bob would like. Inside was a slender paperback, Expedition to the Southwest, An 1845 Reconnaissance of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma by Lieutenant James William Abert. There was a note from Bromo:

Dear Bob.

I thought the adventures of Lt. Abert might interest you as he was the first to systematically explore the region you are now in and at approximately your age. I hope you will take as much interest in what you see as he did. The broadly engaged mind is the source of a happy life. Good luck.

P.S. Keep away from Oklahoma.

He went down the street for supper, ate two scorched corn dogs and aged coleslaw at the Bandwagon diner and then called home collect from a pay phone.

“Hi, Uncle Tam, it’s me.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Haven’t heard from you in twenty-four hours. How do you like it down there?”

“I’m not there yet. I got mixed up on some back roads. I’m in Oklahoma. It got too late to keep going. Anyway, I want to look over the country in daylight. Thought I’d call up and tell you I’m really happy about the tie. I know it meant a lot to you.”

“Well, seemed right you should have something from your mother. I was going to give it to you when you graduated from Horace Greeley, but something told me to wait. What did Wayne send you?”

“A book by some guy named Abert. A lieutenant. I think he went through this country a hundred years ago. Looks pretty interesting. Bromo wrote I should stay out of Oklahoma but that’s where I am. What’s new with you?”

“Not much the time you been gone. I cut my thumb opening mail – a paper cut. Hurt like hell. And my feet are pretty bad today. I’m thinking of going to the doctor. And I entered the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes contest. First prize is two million dollars.”

“How’s the vegetarian program going?”

“Good. I got me some tofu and vegetables and fruit, about a ton of dried beans. Mrs. Mendoza down the block showed me how to cook them Mexican-style. Gave me some dried epazote. She told me where to get good chorizo but I left that out – not a vegetable. I feel a little better already – except my feet. And your old friend stopped by.”

“What old friend?”

“The big jailbird. Orlando.”

“Orlando’s out?”

“Well, he must be if he came by. I don’t know if he escaped or got released and I didn’t care to ask. Didn’t recognize him at first. You can tell he’s been working out. Wanted to know how to get hold of you. Said I didn’t know.”

“I’ll send you an address soon as I find a place to stay and get a mailbox. If Orlando comes by again get a phone number or something. I’ll call you again in a couple of days.”

“I hope you’re not going to take up with him again. He’s an ex-con now. Or worse, a prison escapee.”

There was a television set in the room but he read a few pages from Lieutenant James William Abert’s Expedition, learning, before sleep descended, that the lieutenant was the son of Colonel John James Abert, who headed the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, the agency charged with exploring and mapping the west. At West Point the son collected an astonishing number of demerits and stood near the bottom of his class in all but drawing, where he ranked first. His fellow West Pointers included Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry W. Halleck and others who became Civil War luminaries. Bob Dollar’s heart went out to Lieutenant Abert, surrounded by military bullies, sissy drawing his only skill. The lieutenant was Bob Dollar’s age when he and his friend and second-in-command, the mathematically inclined Lieutenant William Guy Peck, and a small company were ordered by the idiosyncratic and haughty John Charles Frémont to separate from the larger expedition and form the “South Expedition” to explore the territory of the Comanche, and chart the course of the Canadian River while Frémont himself pushed on to sunny California. Bob found the journal interesting, for Abert had an inquiring eye, a good nature, and he was early in the country.

The bed was heaped with puffy quilts and featherbeds, so infernally hot that he ended by kicking them all on the floor and directing the fan’s stream of air at the bed. When he woke at dawn the sheets were twisted into frightful points and kinked spirals like aging telephone cords. He showered, pulled on his jeans and T-shirt. He couldn’t get away from the place fast enough. The white van was gone.

4 THE EVIL FAT BOY

In every installment of life’s book, Bob Dollar knew, even when he was fourteen, there was a fat boy; someone’s brother or school pal, the son of a deli owner, a youth aiming his life at building a low-rider, a discontent slagged out on some sofa with a can of Yoo-Hoo in hand, the one member of the gang the police catch, the fountain of knowledge at the porno video shop, the champion pizza maker at Benny’s Underground Pie Parlor. He encountered his fat boy in Walgreens while waiting in line for one of his uncle’s pain prescriptions. In front of him stood a suety person of sixteen, his round head bound in a black cloth imprinted with skulls and crossbones, his chin decorated with seventy or eighty pale blond whiskers and an assortment of pimples. He was wearing overalls with enormous legs – each large enough to contain a burly man – standing sidewise in line and addressing a pregnant woman waiting on a plastic chair. His sweatshirt sleeves were so long he had torn little holes at the cuff seams and from these holes his thumbs protruded, the cuffs themselves like fingerless mitts over his warty hands. He was not like other fat boys. He was not jolly, he did not smile appeasingly his eyes were not naïve and innocent. Bob Dollar knew instinctively that this was an evil fat boy. At once he took an ardent liking to him. He liked the fat boy because he was unlikable.

The fat boy spoke to the woman on the chair. “They had me in a wrestle hold in Kansas City. It was one of the most dangerous holds. They almost killed me. I don’t know how I escaped, but I’m standing here, ain’t I, waiting in line like anybody else? And that was last year. They couldn’t do it now, because I’d kill them. I’d break their backs. And one of them was my best friend. But he is not my best friend now. He’s my ex-best friend. We did some things together. One time when we were little we borrowed his mother’s crème brûlée torch and melted the gumball machine, and the gumballs all came out on the floor, and they were rolling around and we picked them up and man, they were hot. Worse than hot, they were boiling, they stuck to our hands and burned them. See, I got gumball scars right here.” He held out his palm for inspection, displaying puckered circles.

“That was my ex-best friend Mark who built a rocket launcher when he was thirteen. He was into wrecking things, me too, and that’s probably why we were best friends. His aunt had all these old vinyl records, weird jazz stuff, and we threw them in the air and then bashed them with baseball bats. Mark had three baseball bats but he never played baseball, just bashed things. If I saw him now I would bash him. But he’s safe, he’s safe because he’s in Kansas City and I’m here. And he plays the guitar but he’s not very good. He doesn’t want to be good. He wants to be loud. And he’s got like these weird metal gloves that his grandfather gave him. His grandfather went to England to see the Tower of London and he brought back these metal gloves and Mark put them on and got his hand stuck in one. They had to take him to the emergency room in Kansas City and he was on television getting it taken off. The reason his grandfather gave him the gloves was to keep him from playing the guitar. That was the deal, ‘I give you these English metal gloves and you not play that fucking guitar.’ Excuse me, miss, that was Mark’s grandfather talking, not me.”

The woman on the chair stared at him with an expression of distaste but said nothing. Bob wanted to say that his uncle’s roommate had been put off a plane in Kansas City but as he opened his mouth the druggist, with great heavy eyes which Bob thought sensual, came to the counter and spoke to the fat boy.

“Orlando, did Dr. Tungsten give you some samples? I can’t fill your prescription. The doctor didn’t sign it.”

“What? No, he didn’t give me samples! Just the prescription and he said, ‘Get it filled right away.’ He didn’t sign it? What a jerk.”

“Do you want me to call him?”

“Hell no, I’m going back over there,” said Orlando, taking the prescription from her hand and heading briskly for the door.

When he was out of sight the clerk dialed the telephone and spoke to someone. “This is Ruby Voltaire, the pharmacist down at Young’s? I had an Orlando Bunnel, claims to be a patient of Dr. Tungsten’s, in here just now with a prescription for Viacomdex but it wasn’t signed. So I’m not sure what the story is. Oh? Uh-huh. O.K. O.K.”

The other clerk looked at Bob Dollar and said, “Your uncle’s prescription is ready.”

“He wants you to put it on his bill.” He took the container and sprinted for the door.

In grade school he had had friends, but his freshman year in high school was one of oppression, loneliness and a sense of being an outcast, in part, he was sure, because he wore cast-off garments from Uncle Tam’s shop. A month into his sophomore year he tried to explain the situation to his uncle.

“I didn’t make many friends last year,” he said, “but I thought it was because I was a freshman. And I thought it would be different this year. But I am still out of it. I try to be nice to everybody but nobody is nice to me. I just don’t know how to make people like me. And they make fun of my clothes.”

But Uncle Tam was not helpful. “Aw, what do you care? They’re just punks.”

After Orlando’s advent Bob did not care.

He could see the fat boy at the bus stop two blocks west. He looked up the street and in the distance saw the flat face of the bus, no larger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. He began to run toward the bus stop, made it with the bus still blocks away.

“Hi,” he said to the fat boy, who looked at him hard.

“You were in the drugstore,” he said.

“Yeah.”

They said nothing more until they were on the bus.

“Where do you go to school?” asked Bob Dollar.

“School! I don’t honor them with my presence. I fucking quit school.”

“Wow. Your parents let you quit?”

“Of course they let me quit. The alternative was handcuffs and forcible transport. I had a problem with the teachers. My parents don’t care as long as I read a lot of books.”

Bob Dollar could believe that the fat boy had problems with his teachers. He could see the potential for arousing teacher fury. “So what happened? You just didn’t go in one day? You just said to your family, ‘I have quit’?”

“O.K., here’s what happened.” Orlando spoke in a weary voice as though harried beyond bearing. “In this school I was in a class. The teacher’s name was Miss Termino. We called her ‘the Terminator.’ And ‘the Termite.’ She assigned this dumb-ass paper, ‘What I Plan to Do with My Life.’ Everybody had to read his little masterpiece in class. It was the usual dumb shit, kids who wanted to be computer programmers, software entrepreneurs, doctors and nurses, motorcycle racers, deejays.”

He had touched on a subject that greatly interested Bob.

“How do they know?” he said. “How do they know what they want to be?”

But Orlando avoided philosophical discussion and continued his story.

“So, everybody reads their little paper except me and then the Terminator says, ‘That was excellent, class.’ She didn’t mention that nobody said they wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician, which everybody knows is what’s wrong with the country. One of the things wrong with the country. So I said, ‘Miss Termino, I didn’t read mine. You skipped me.’ And she said, ‘I didn’t skip you, Orlando, I assumed you would not have done the assignment, as usual.’ So I go, ‘I did this one,’ and I got up and walked to the front. Kind of stamping. And I read my paper. I knew it by heart. I go: ‘Orlando’s Ice City. I do not want to be a brain surgeon or president, I wouldn’t mind being a champion wrestler or a guy who raises pit bulls or the captain of an ocean liner but first I am going to build an ice city at the South Pole and I’ll get money from big corporations and hire a bunch of guys with no jobs – clean up the bums in Kansas City – to build the ice city. The buildings will all be clear ice and I’ll have a big furnace to melt snow and squirt the water into molds – rectangles cubes cones and cylinders – and the bums will put them together into big ice skyscrapers and domes and I’ll have all these lights inside so the ice buildings at night will shine in colors and the best and biggest buildings will be huge tetragons, and if people want to tour the city I’d charge fifty dollars each and that would include penguin steaks for dinner.’ So then a girl goes, ‘Penguin steaks! Agk! Gross!’ and I gave her a shove because it was proof of a closed mind and penguin steaks are probably pretty good, but the girl fell on her desk and broke her teeth off just like a hockey player and the Terminator said go to the office. I said not a word but picked up my books and walked. Quit. My father – he’s a jerk but so what – sided with me. Then two weeks later we moved here.”

“I guess you got a good imagination or you’re a big liar,” said Bob Dollar.

“Well, that’s for you to find out.” Orlando hung from the strap so his body swayed with the bus’s motion.

Bob said, “I don’t get how people know what they want to be before they’re old, like twenty or something.”

“You don’t have a clue?”

“No. Do you? I mean, after building the ice city.”

“Sure. I want to be rich and rule the world. I want to be a computer geek. And I don’t want to build the fucking ice city no more. That was kid stuff Why you want to know about quitting school? You planning on doing that?”

“No. My uncle wouldn’t let me.”

“What does he have to do with it? What about your parents?”

“They disappeared when I was seven.”

“Holy shit! What do you mean, disappeared? Ran off in the night? Abducted by aliens? Exploded? Killed by gangsters or venomous reptiles? Man, I am impressed. I wish my parents would disappear. My mother – know what she does?”

“What?”

“She cooks stuff with the labels on. Those dumb stickers they put on the tomatoes saying ‘tomato’ or the avocados saying ‘avocado’? She forgets to take them off so you find these little labels in the salad. Or the chicken’s got this metal tag on its wing and she cooks it with the tag on and there’s lead and all kinds of poison comes out of the metal. So I’m half-poisoned. My father suffers the worst. He’s all bent over and coughing. Poisoned by metal chicken labels.”

The bus was filling up and Bob stood closer to Orlando. He could smell dirty hair and spearmint chewing gum.

“My mother and father went to Alaska to build a cabin for us to live in and I got to stay with my uncle until they came back. Except they never did. Never called up, never wrote. My uncle called the Alaska police and they put out a missing-persons report but they never found them. My uncle Xylo went to Alaska to look for them. Somehow they just disappeared. Couldn’t ever find out what part of Alaska they went to. So I got to stay with my uncle forever. He runs a junk shop on Colfax and we live in the back and upstairs. At first my uncle thought something had happened to them. But later he changed his mind. I think he figured out that they dumped me.”

“Man, that is weird! So are you going to go to Alaska and search for your parents when you turn eighteen?”

“I thought about it.” He had never told his uncle this deep fantasy that had started a few months after they disappeared: he imagined himself flying to Fairbanks, looking in the phone book and finding Adam and Viola Dollar with an address and telephone number. Later, after he found out that Fairbanks was just another ordinary city, he had amended the scenario: now he (metamorphosed into a hirsute and muscular adult) paddled a red canoe up a raging Alaskan river, and then hiked into the wilderness as winter was coming on. Just when he was on the verge of freezing in a terrific blizzard he came upon a cabin in the wilderness. Inside was an old couple, feeble and emaciated. Their fire was out and they huddled under ragged blankets. He found the axe and the woodshed and chopped great armfuls of wood, made a fire, cooked hot dogs and mashed potatoes, fed the old couple, who sobbed with gratitude, and then he washed the dishes. There was a dog – a husky – and he fed the dog. Later he enlarged the husky to a whole pack of starving sled dogs and he fed them all and they licked his hands. The old couple exclaimed over him and when they were strong again they begged him to stay. The old man said, “We had a boy who would have been about your age but we were never able to go back to Denver and get him.” And he imagined himself gently asking why and being told of a desperado – Rick Moomaw, with bushy hair and a face like a whiskered hot water bottle – on the neighboring claim, who was waiting for them to leave, even for a weekend, when he would manage to steal their entire property, even the cabin, even the deed. Finally Bob told them who he was, their long-lost son, and they fell on his neck and told him they had found gold but Rick Moomaw was after their claim. In the fantasy he laughed and flexed his arms, said he could and would break Moomaw into pieces.

Later this fantasy faded, replaced by dreams of sluttish blonds with enameled toenails, but when he met the fat boy it was still blazing. He had never told anyone about his hope to find his parents, yet within a few minutes of their meeting Orlando had guessed it.

A few months after his parents’ fateful departure Bob had started thinking of his slippery self as a reindeer, and he carried his head carefully to avoid hitting his antlers against cupboards or wall projections. It became an intensely vivid fantasy. He had no idea who he was, as his parents had taken his identity with them to Alaska. The world was on casters, rolling away as he was about to step into it. He knew he had a solitary heart for he had no sense of belonging anywhere. Uncle Tam’s house and shop were way stations where he waited for the meaningful connection, the event or person who would show him who he was. At some point he would metamorphose from a secret reindeer to human being, somehow reconnected with his family.

At Christmas he went with Uncle Tam, but not Bromo, who stayed behind to feed the cat and look after the shop, to Knuckle, Kansas, the family farm where his mother, Uncle Tam and the rest of the Bapp siblings had grown up. He had stayed with his grandmother many times when he was still with his parents, and saw now that even when he was very young his mother and father had not wanted him. At the holiday gatherings his aunts Lutie and Banjie made much of him and his uncles squeezed out false promises to take him fishing or hunting or to a Rockies game. At some time during the dinner his grandmother would look around the table, wipe at her eyes and say, “If Viola knew what she was missing.”

“I’m sure she took it into consideration and regrets her decision, Mother,” said Uncle Ket, for the extended family had theories that Viola and Adam Dollar were living somewhere in Homer or Nome, or even raising foxes in the Aleutians. Over the years the family had advanced explanations for the long silence, all built on the supposition that the runaways were not dead: leprosy, amnesia, madness, kidnapping or retreat to a very remote place could explain why they had not been in touch. Bob clung to these scenarios. Only Bromo Redpoll said they were dead, and what did he know? He was not blood kin.

On the bus Orlando suddenly said, “Hey, you want to go to the movies?”

“Yeah, but I got to get my uncle’s prescription back to him. He’s waiting for these pills. He said he was in agony. He hurt his back lifting a box of plastic dolls. Plus his feet really hurt.”

“Bad! Where do you live?”

“Colfax. Way out on Colfax, out near Chambers Road. It’s like almost to Kansas.”

“Man, that’s way, way, way out there. Can we get there on the bus? Cool. We take the pills to your uncle and then we go. The theatre is on Colfax too. The Cliff Edge, Colfax and Xerxes. It’s behind a liquor store.”

“I thought you had to go back to your doctor.”

“Doctor? What do you mean?”

“What you told the drugstore lady. That you were going back to get your prescription signed.”

“Oh, that was just bullshit. I was just trying it on. That was straight from the Book of Never Happen. I found that prescription on the sidewalk. Let me see your uncle’s pills. Heh. Hydrocodone. No rush there, that’s just codeine and Tylenol. But we might as well take a couple. He’ll never miss them.” He shook out six pills, gave two to Bob, swallowed the others.

Bob Dollar put the pills in his jacket pocket. “O.K.,” he said, “what’s the movie?”

“Rat Women. It’s great. It’s like this weird black-and-white flick, all grainy. It’ll scare the shit out of you. It’s an old horror movie from the sixties. That’s all the Cliff Edge shows is horror and kinky stuff. Hey, don’t we get off here? To change buses?”

Up Colfax they went, sliding past the Satire Lounge, PS Greek Pizza, past John Elway’s Parts and Tammy’s Nails, Air Afrik, Dragon Express and The Bomb. There was a fistfight going on in front of the Space-Age Atomic Washeteria, and Bob told Orlando that Uncle Tam’s budgie had come from Jersey John’s Pet Shop and that they had a charge account at the Mad Dog and Pilgrim bookstore where Bob was allowed to charge two books a month. (Bob had gone often to the branch library until Uncle Tam forbade him, for he had trouble returning the books on time and the library fines mounted up.) Orlando did not seem impressed. Finally they were past Food 99 and the Brigadier Army Surplus and there was Uncle Tam’s shop, Used but Not Abused, and Bob felt a rush of embarrassment that it all looked so shabby and poor.

Uncle Tam was lying on the ratty sofa, drinking beer and watching television. He took the brown plastic container and shook out two large capsules, swallowed them with a mouthful of beer.

“So, you want to go to a movie?” he said. “Is it a good one? Maybe I’d come with you if my back wasn’t killing me.”

“You might not like it, sir,” said Orlando. “It’s an old horror film. Rat Women.”

“Well, no, that’s not my cup of tea. So I guess I’m not sorry.” (He had watched Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle thirty-seven times for the sake of the scene in the plastic factory, the red hose emerging with swollen bladders or pinching down into a string of shining plastic sausages.) He dug a dollar bill out of his pocket.

“Here, Bob, some money for popcorn. And a paper. Bring me a Post when you come back.”

Deducting fifty cents for the paper left fifty cents for popcorn and there was, Bob knew, no popcorn on earth for such a minuscule sum. But outside, Orlando, who had been watching, said, “I’ll treat. I asked you. Anyways, I can get all the money I want. My dad drinks and when he comes home soused after he’s asleep I get in his wallet and take a twenty or whatever and I got a kind of job thing.” (Later Bob learned that Orlando’s job thing was begging tourists for money on the Sixteenth Street Mall, a skill he had learned from a ragged man who lived comfortably in an expensive LoDo loft and who only plied the begging trade in evil weather, for it was then that pity moved passersby to dig deep. The best times were stormy afternoons before Christmas.)

The Cliff Edge was awful and the movie was awful and Bob Dollar enjoyed them both. In addition to the tickets, Orlando bought popcorn and quart containers of no-brand cola. The “theatre” was a converted storeroom behind the liquor store, the ramped floor made of bare, cheap plywood that boomed with each footstep. The wooden seats were not upholstered. The place smelled of urine and scorched vegetable oil. There were only fourteen people in the audience.

The film began with dozens of rats scurrying along a filthy waterfront street in an unidentified city. There were close-ups of rats eating garbage, rats crouching, groups of rats sleeping together in rat nests, close-ups of rats eating gristle and one lapping at a viscous substance that looked like decayed banana pudding. Then the rats scuttled around a corner and disappeared. The camera followed rather slowly. There were no rats around the corner, but eight or ten blond women leaning against a warehouse wall, voluptuous, heavily lipsticked, dressed in tight long dresses that sparkled with sequins. The women smoked and stared through dark glasses into the night. They wore shoes with sharp-pointed toes and unbelievably high heels. The camera moved closer and closer, gliding over satin haunches, shadowed cleavage, catching the wet shine of eyes and greased lips. It moved slowly down the back of the most buxom blond, her dress cut low enough to hint at the shadowy cleft of buttocks, down over the swelling rump, down the shining fabric tight over the thigh, down the full leg to the lower calf and, for a split second, there it was, hanging just below the satin hem of the dress, a muscular rat’s tail that twitched suddenly like a lewd wink.

“Gross!” said Bob Dollar, but he hadn’t seen anything yet. He hadn’t seen the rat women on the beach in their bikinis, enticing a lifeguard under their striped umbrella where they strangled him with their tails (until then coiled in the bikinis) and devoured him, tossing the bones into the surf He hadn’t seen the nameless city’s chief of police turn into a vampire and try to force the rat women to become his sex slaves. Nor had he yet seen Orlando, who had eaten the popcorn and swallowed the cola, matter-of-factly and noisily piss on the plywood floor without leaving his seat.

At the end of the film Orlando insisted they stay for the trailers of coming attractions, Blood Feast and Scum of the Earth. On the way out he pointed at a lurid poster for The Corpse Grinders (“In Blood-Curdling Color”) and said, “That’s a fucking great film,” and told him about the theatre in Kansas City where he had seen it. As the audience had entered, the ticket taker had handed everyone a barf bag imprinted with THE CORPSE GRINDERS and some people had used theirs.

“I tried to, but I couldn’t make anything come up. I still got the bag. It’s like a collectible now. Maybe your uncle can tell me what it’s worth.” The Kansas City theatre, he said, had had buzzers rigged under the seats. The buzzers went off at the moment the nurse’s mad cat sprang on Dr. Glass and everyone in the audience screamed.

Bob Dollar had slept deeply that night, sated by low entertainment and drugged by the two stolen pills.

Before he left the Badger Hole the woman with crimped hair told him Boise City had been accidentally bombed by the U.S. Air Force during World War II. It was a hot, overcast day. Eating breakfast at a diner downtown he was startled when the television set over the microwave oven emitted a raucous alarm and red flashes warning residents of May and Rosston and Slapout to seek shelter as a spotter had reported a funnel cloud moving northeast from Darouzett, just over the Texas line. The screen flashed a map and he saw the tornado was seventy miles east of Boise City and moving away. Back in the Saturn he drove very slowly, in no hurry to overtake a tornado, and wondered if, in this job, he would be reaped in the whirlwind.

5 NO ROOM IN COWBOY ROSE

The next morning was fiercely windy and as he crossed into Texas passing some purple beehives and a sign that read SEE THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG, 3 MI WEST, the wind increased, banged at the car with irregular bursts and slams. Tumbleweeds, worn small by a winter’s thrashing, rolled across the road in the hundreds. Sheets of plastic, food wrappers, sacks, papers, boxes, rags flew, catching on barbwire fences where they flapped until a fresh gust tore them loose. The landscape churned with detritus. A big tumbleweed hit the Saturn’s windshield stem first and with force. A crack arched across the glass. In the distance ahead he saw a hazy brown cloud and guessed something was on fire. But the smell and an immediate choking sensation in his throat as he drove past an enormous feedlot, the cows obscured by the manure dust that loaded the wind and was clearly the source of the cloud, introduced him to the infamous brown days of the Texas panhandle, wind-borne dust he later heard called “Oklahoma rain.” He passed a tannery and a meatpacking plant, saw the faces of Chicano men in the windows of old trucks. A large metal sign, pulsing in and out as though breathing, read BULL WASH OUT. The sky was dead grey, a match for the withered grass around the railroad tracks where a chemical spill years before had killed off all the soil organisms.

He turned east, snorting and blowing his nose. At least hogs, he thought, were kept in a building (for, still innocent of direct experience with hog production, he had looked through the glossy Global Pork Rind annual report and admired the clean, low-slung hog bunkers). He passed several playa lakes crowded with thousands of ducks and geese struggling in the white-capped waves, and these bodies of water seemed incongruous under the throstling brown wind. But mostly he passed flat fields with V-8 engines pumping water, pump jacks pulling up oil, and, in the pastures, windmills lifting water into stock tanks, each tank surrounded by a circle of dirt from which radiated dozens of narrow cow paths.

By bright midmorning he was in the clear on Highway 15, looking for a town to establish his base of operations. The wind was dying down. Somewhere between Stratford and Miami he turned off Route 15 onto a narrower road, past a fence hung with dead coyotes and posted with signs that read TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT SURVIVORS WILL BE PERSECUTED, bumped across a set of railroad tracks and, a dozen miles on, entered Cowboy Rose, once a cattle town, then a ghost town, now slowly reviving, half-restored and idyllic, richly shaded by trees. Silver Spoon Creek ran through it, and through the center of the town, a large square of lawn edged with some drooping trees he associated with cemeteries. There were two cafés, two gas stations, and a cream-painted brick building, the front wall painted in huge red letters: TORNADO & BALL POINT PEN MUSEUM. Across the way he saw a shady park with a grand lawn edged by flower gardens. He noticed a Victorian-style bandstand. There were no grain elevators nor cylinders of anhydrous ammonia, nor giant storage tanks in sight.

He went into the Cactus Spike Café, past a hand-lettered poster that read:

18 CATTLE MISSING, MIXED HEIFERS. WING ANCHOR BRAND.

NOTIFY SHERIFF H. DOUGH, WOOLYBUCKET COUNTY.

He ordered the special, chicken-fried steak with milk gravy. The waiter/dishwasher, a stout man wearing rubber gloves, brought the gravy-swimming plate and Bob asked casually if he knew of anybody who rented rooms.

“Well, there’s Beryl. Beryl and Harvey Schwarm. They got a room they rent out sometimes. But usually to a lady. I don’t know, they might. They got the yellow house with the big porch on Wild Turkey Street. Worth a try, I guess. You a salesman?”

“No. Just visiting the area – a tourist, I guess. Like the looks of your town. Pretty nice.”

“That’d be Beryl’s sister, Joni, she’s the one got the flower beds going, got them to build the bandstand. Got a band started up. They play every Friday night in the summer. Light classics, they say, but ask me it’s mostly old Frank Sinatra tunes. Nobody around here knows what classic means. There’s more and more people comes to visit. It would be handy to have a motel or a resort hotel here, but don’t look like it will happen tomorrow. Best we’ve got is the Schwarms unless you want to drive over to Dumas or up to Perryton. There’d be motels there.”

“I’ll try the Schwarms. Thanks for the tip.”

“I’m the one supposed to get the tip,” said the man.

Mrs. Schwarm, wearing a blue chenille housecoat, answered the door, her nose swollen, face red and sprinkled with small yellow grains. Her hands were encased in rubber gloves and she held a wet facecloth from which water dripped.

“I’m hoping to rent a room,” he said. “Someone told me you rent rooms?”

“Who? Who told you that?” She sounded extremely annoyed.

“Ah. The waiter at the café. A heavyset man …”

“Big Head Haley. That fool. So dumb that just tyin his shoelaces gives him the headache. I can’t even have myself a facial without somebody poundin on the door and wantin a rent the room. He don’t know nothin about nothin and he don’t know I stopped rentin that room a year ago. If people come to Cowboy Rose they can stay with kin or bring a tent. I had trouble with a woman stayed in that room and I swore I’d never rent it out again. Come here from Minnesota and her ways was not our ways. Stay up late at night, sleep until noon and then want orange juice. She must a thought she was in Florida. I asked her to take her shoes off when she come in – I got white carpet on the stairs – but she never did and like to ruined the carpet.”

“Mrs. Schwarm, I swear I’d take my shoes off You would have no problem – ”

“No. I’m not havin no problem because I’m not fixin to rent it out. It don’t even have a bed in it now. My husband uses it for a hobby room. He makes wood ducks.” And she closed the door.

He drove north to Perryton near the Oklahoma border, decorated with blowing food wrappers and old election signs. The traffic lights swung in the wind. Every vehicle was a pickup, his the only sedan, and heads turned to stare at his Colorado plates as he drove along the main street. All the motels were booked full. On the outskirts of town he found a sad, two-story building, the Hoss Barn. A large banner hung over the door reading HOSS BARN WELCOMES MARBLE FALLS BAPTISTS.

“Are you with the church group?” asked the clerk, a young man with a skewed face and scarred nose. Bob Dollar guessed him to be an ex-convict.

“No, I’m traveling on business.”

“It’ll cost you the full rate, then – seventeen a night.”

“That’s O.K.” In Oklahoma he had paid thirty-seven.

The Hoss Barn sported a thin, filthy carpet on concrete stairs. Dixie cups and peanut wrappers lay in corridor corners. His room was small and shabby, with a powerful smell of perfumed disinfectant; a painted concrete floor, the television set chained to the wall, only one working lightbulb, several Bibles, including one in the roachy bathroom. Over the bed hung an enlarged photograph of Palo Duro Canyon. He could hear singing and cries of “Hallelujah!” coming from the room next door and, when he went out in the corridor on his way to find a restaurant for dinner, noticed a hand-lettered sign, PRAYER MEETING 5 P.M., stuck to the cinder-block wall with reused duct tape.

Every restaurant in town was packed full, people standing in long lines outside the doors except for the Mexicali Rose, which had only a small knot of hungry would-be diners. He waited with them and in time was shown to a tiny table next to the kitchen doors, which swung open furiously every half minute. The restaurant was crowded with Baptists and their children, who either sat passively without moving under the parents’ stern eyes or raced wildly up and down dodging waitresses. He ordered enchiladas and studied the crowd. There was a booth next to his table where two very quiet children sat with their hands folded. The father and mother conversed in near-whispers, shooting narrow-eyed glances at the rowdy kids running and jumping. Bob heard the father say that if he had them in his care for five minutes he would learn them what-for, he would dust their seat covers, they would get a rump-whacking to last them a lifetime. The family’s food arrived, cheeseburgers and fries for each, iced tea for the parents, enormous glasses of milk for the children.

The same waitress, wearing asbestos gloves, brought Bob a metal platter, the entire surface a lake of boiling yellow cheese. He put his fork to it and a gout of steam shot up. He expected to see the fork tines droop. Before the molten lava cooled enough for him to eat, the waitress brought the family in the booth a special dessert, ice-cream sundaes with five sauces and masses of ersatz whipped cream. Instead of a cherry there was a tiny cross atop each. The wan children could only eat a little of these concoctions.

“Give them here, then,” said the mother, digging in her spoon. “We paid for them.”

Very suddenly he thought of Fever, Orlando’s girlfriend, of how the Baptists would shrink from her if she strode in now in her unlaced Doc Martens.

Orlando had called one day and told Bob to meet him at Arapaho and Sixteenth.

“There’s like a place where everybody hangs out. At night people in wheelchairs race there. In the daytime it’s a hangout. A lot of cool kids show. Fever’s going to be there.”

“Who’s Fever?”

“My girlfriend. Sort of my girlfriend,” said Orlando, stunning Bob, for the fat boy had struck him as a loner, a singular youth who would grow up to have the classic berserk fit, shooting diners in some fast-food emporium or taking a tax collector hostage.

“How come she’s called Fever. Did her parents name her that?”

“Not them! Shirley is what they picked out. But she had her tongue and lip pierced with these little barbells in and they got infected. Her ears, too. But they didn’t get infected. She had a fever and she went around asking everybody to put their hand on her forehead and see if she had a fever so we started to call her that. Anyway, we can just hang for a while and then go to the movies,” said Orlando. “There’s a five-dollar special triple feature – Deranged … the Confessions of a Necrophile and I Drink Your Blood. The other one is some kind of atomic monster thing and if it’s boring we can leave.”

When he got to Arapaho he saw Orlando at once. The evil fat boy was wearing a red cowboy hat and an aircraft mechanics jumpsuit with United Airlines stitched on the breast. He was in a crowd of ten or twelve teens. They looked more like sci-fi movie set creatures than human beings, with spiked, shaved, dyed heads, Magic Marker tattoos, pierced lips, nostrils, eyebrows, lips and tongues, huge swaddled trouser legs and assortments of metal – neck chains of fine gold and waist chains of heavy tow-truck linkage. Bob was struck by the appearance of a rachitic youth wearing black lipstick, which went well with his ginger mustache and gilded ears.

“Orlando,” he called and the fat boy spun around, waved coolly, pulled a girl from the crowd and brought her over.

“This is Fever.”

He had to admit Fever suited Orlando. She was rather fat, her sleek flesh looking springy and resilient. The sides and back of her head were shaved, the top hair left long and dyed prison orange and federal yellow. Her mouth was coated with alternating vertical bands of purple and blue lipstick and a small ring hung from her lower lip. Her ears glinted with a dozen niobium rings. She wore a pair of men’s white corduroy trousers. The backs of her hands were inked with skulls. Each finger showed several rings and chipped green nail polish, and her elbows were scaly gray. She wore a man’s sleeveless purple satin jacket, the back embroidered Insanity Posse. When she turned around Bob saw a biscuit-size hole in the rear of her pants disclosing the fat swell of a peach buttock. When she sat on the concrete abutment her bare ankles showed, scabby and ringed with grimy circles.

She looked at Bob Dollar and said, “How the fuck are ya?” When she smiled he could see the barbell in her tongue.

6 SHERIFF HUGH DOUGH

Sheriff Hugh Dough was forty years old, a small man, five feet five, 130 pounds, riddled with tics and bad habits, but nonetheless a true boss-hog sheriff He had a sharp Aztec nose, fluffy black hair and black eyes like those in a taxidermist’s drawer. A line of rough pimples ran from the corner of his funnel mouth to his ear. His uniform was a leather jacket and a black string tie. He had been a bed wetter all his life and no longer cared that he couldn’t stop. There was a rubber sheet on the bed and a washing machine in the adjacent bathroom. He had never married because the thought of explaining the situation was unbearable. He was an obsessive nail biter. He counted everything, courthouse steps, telephone poles, buttons on felons’ shirts, the specks of pepper on his morning eggs, the number of seconds it took to empty his bladder (when awake).

Other members of the Dough family had gone into law enforcement and public safety, creating a kind of public service dynasty. Hugh Dough’s half brother Doug was a paralegal, and their maternal grandmother had been a member of the Panhandle Ladies Fire Brigade in Amarillo at the turn of the century, with a wonderful costume of black tights, short serge dress with enormous brass buttons and a crested metal helmet modeled after those of the Roman gladiators. His father’s mother’s sister, Dolly Cleat, took pride of place. She had gone off to the University of Chicago early in the century where she specialized in political economy and sociology, and, after the Great War, worked her way up from superintendent of the Ohio Women’s Workhouse to assistant warden at the State Home for Girls in West Virginia. His father’s unmarried sister, Ponola Dough (“Iron Ponola”), was the commander of the Women’s Police Auxiliary in Pine Cone, south of Waco. Before her ascension to the top position, the auxiliary had been little more than cops’ wives holding bake sales to raise money for a barracks pool table or to help some trooper’s family left destitute by his injury or death. Ponola changed all that and made the auxiliary a quasi-military organization with uniforms and black leather belts and boots, rigid hats in Smokey the Bear style, shirts with neckties and the like. The cookie-baking wives were forced out and in their place came Ponola’s friends, muscular Baptist-Republican-antiabortion amazons who patrolled the street outside Pine Cone’s only bar, looking to break up fights and twist cowboys’ arms, arts in which they excelled.

But the one he was close to above all others was his younger sister, Opal, with whom he’d enjoyed a particular relationship throughout adolescence, begun on a sultry Sunday afternoon when he was fourteen and Opal twelve. They had been playing hide-and-seek with visiting cousins, big shock-headed bullies neither of them liked. They had burrowed into the hay in the barn loft. The need for silence and secrecy, the closeness of each other’s body, the gloom of the loft shot through with sparkles of light from roof holes, were conducive to half-playful physical exploration which continued in many places over the next year, from the front room coat closet to the family sedan which Hugh was allowed to drive in certain circumstances. One of those circumstances was as his sister’s escort to dances, for Opal was not allowed to go on dates. Instead, the Dough paterfamilias decreed, Hugh would drive his sister to and from the dance. Once there she could meet her partner for the evening while Hugh could team up with his girlfriend.

One warm September evening when Opal was thirteen and Hugh fifteen, he had driven them to the dance. He was enamored of a tall girl with long red hair, Ruhama Bustard, recently arrived in the panhandle from Click County, Missouri. He danced six times running with Ruhama, who allowed him to rub against her, then, as he begged her to come out into the parking lot, twirled away with Archie Ipworth. Aching and abandoned he sought out Opal, who was dancing with a classmate whose face was so pustulated it appeared iridescent from a distance.

“Hey, you want a go? Get the hell out a here? I’m havin a hell of a lousy time.”

“O.K.,” she said and turned to the boy. “See you in school Monday.” He nodded and slouched away.

In the sedan he told her what the problem was, how the red-haired girl had excited him to a frenzy and left him with an ache that ran from his knees to his shoulders.

“I mean, it’s terrible,” he said. “She give me bad Cupid’s cramps.” He groaned theatrically. “Whyn’t you just let me put it in? I mean, it’s not much more than we already done.”

“O.K.,” she said and he pulled into the cemetery where they got in the backseat and began an activity that finished up nearly every dance they attended for the next five years, including the dance that followed Opal’s wedding, the bridegroom an elderly rancher named Richard Head, too drunk on cheap champagne to notice his bride’s absence from the festivities. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the Dough family gathered en masse at the old homestead, it was Hugh and Opal who volunteered to go to the store and get the ice cream or ginger ale or extension cord that was needed.

The sheriff’s father, T. Scott Dough, had been a cook at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville for many years, back in the days when it was called Uncle Bud’s Place, his job to prepare the final dinners for men on death row. When he died at sixty-six it was the sheriff who had to sort through the clothes in the closet, the Sunday trousers with bagged knees as though keeping a place for the dead legs. In a box of brittle papers he found four or five old German postcards, hand-tinted, showing women leaning into or against motorcars of the 1930s, their seamed and clocked stockings wrinkled sadly at the back of the knee and ankle, their feet in T-strap shoes of dull leather. Their skirts were rucked up to disclose utilitarian garters and sweaty, bunched cotton panties. From the gaping leg openings buttocks swelled, muscular and hard. One in particular he disliked. It showed a bare-bottomed woman, left foot up on a running board, the right on the ground in a patch of grass. The woman’s posture and the angle of the camera made the left buttock alarmingly huge while the right, pulled flat by the extended leg, seemed atrophied. How anyone could take pleasure in asymmetry was beyond him, yet the repellent image fixed itself in his mind and rose unbidden at awkward times.

People had always asked the sheriff’s father about the condemned men, what were the nature of their crimes, what they said and did. The old man would say, “Don’t know damn thing bout any of it cept what they want for their last meal. Thought when I first come in the job it was goin a be fancy stuff, but no. Country boy don’t know a thing about food. The most a them ask for cheeseburger with double meat and fry. Sometime you get one steak and Worcestershire. But mostly it’s your hamburger. They don’t think steak. Nigger boy got better idea. They ask like fry chicken, peach cobbler and cob corn, your barbecue back rib, salmon croquette. A lot a the nigger, special your Muslin, refuse a last meal. They rather fast. Another one ask wild game – guess he thought we goin out and make a javelina hunt for him. He get cheeseburger. Had my way he would a had road kill. Lot a enchilada and taco. They ask beer and wine but they don’t get it. They ask cigarette and cigar. No. They don’t get no bubble gum neither. This one that kill his girlfriend want six scramble egg, fifteen piece bacon, grit and seven piece toast. He eat ever bite and lick the plate. What was comin don’t affect his appetite. And how about two jalapeño and raw carrot for the last meal? But I tell you what – hardly a one ask for chicken-fry steak. What you make a that?”

In the bottom of the box was a chef’s toque, stained and crushed. That’s what his father’s life had come down to, yellowed girlie pix and a flat hat. He intended to take care something of that nature did not happen to him.

For a while he collected sheriff memorabilia. He had a collar worn by one of Sheriff Andre Jackson Spradling’s hounds. He had an axe that the escaped convict Jason Shrub used to bludgeon his way out of the Comanche County jail, and a photograph of the gun that a desperate prisoner snatched from Sheriff C. F. Stubblefield and then used to shoot the sheriff’s tongue. He had one of Buck Lane’s florid neckties and a pack of greasy cards from a Borger gambling den raid. He had a windmill weight in the shape of a star. He had a set of brass knuckles used by a deputy sheriff from Bryant, Oklahoma. There was a heavy chain used to lock prisoners to trees from the days before the Woolybucket jail was built.

Hugh Dough was reelected term after term. He did not, as some sheriffs, rely on easy banter and warmth to disarm, but had developed a mean, piercing stare and a reputation for being a trigger-happy marksman. The credulous believed in vast acreages for paradise and inferno, one aloft, the other down the devil’s adit in the hot rocks, both unfenced open range. But the sheriff knew that the properties had been long ago broken up and that frayed patches of heaven and hell lay all over Texas. Most rural crimes, he believed, happened in vehicles at the Dairy Queen and at roadside rest areas, the latter having social uses that might surprise the highway landscape planners. Then there were the lowlives who stole drip gas from the pipeline, and every town had its set of wife beaters. To track the former he listened for sounds of engine knock in local cars, a side effect of drip gas use.

He was a good customer of the state crime lab and, with their help, had once solved an ugly crime in which a naked and severely bruised young ranch hand was discovered dead at the foot of a remote windmill. There were scores of circular marks on the victim’s skin, and on a wild hunch Hugh Dough asked the crime lab to compare them with the decorative conchas on the ranch owner’s handmade chaps. They matched.

There were notches on his gun handle. He had black belts and diplomas in esoteric martial arts; in his hands a stick was a lethal weapon. In Woolybucket County he presided over certain legal rites, heard confessions, arbitrated disputes, observed the community, knew when a family was in difficulties, and he guided the errant back onto the path, sometimes forcibly.

Hugh Dough disliked politics and it galled him to run for office. For many years he had run against Tully Nelson, a six-four bully who, after his last defeat, moved thirty miles to sparsely populated Slickfork County where he was handily elected, and hence a rival sheriff Hugh Dough also disliked teenage punks, and thought the best deterrent for a young hoodlum – the younger the better – was a night or two in the county clink. He had once locked up the state’s attorney’s bespectacled nine-year-old son, whom he caught throwing rocks at a dog chained to its doghouse.

“How’d you like it, then, was you chained up and some four-eyed little bastard come along and start peggin rocks at you? Believe I’ll have to educate you.” And he handcuffed the kid to a bicycle rack in front of the courthouse, snatched off the kid’s glasses and put them on his own blinking eyes, saying, “Now let’s us pretend I’m you and you’re that poor dog,” picked up a small stone and hurled it. It caught the kid on the upper arm and set off shrieks and blubbering that brought heads to the windows. A few more stones and the kid was hysterical.

“Guess I will have to lock you up until you quiet down,” he said and dragged the bellowing child into the jail, kicked him into a cell. Of course he paid for it later, as the state’s attorney was a formidable enemy.

“Ain’t that the squeeze of it?” said the sheriff on the phone to his sister Opal.

“At least you got the satisfaction,” she said, and in the panhandle satisfaction of grievances counted for something.

Perhaps the most irritating of his duties, aside from chasing down old ladies’ reports of strangers on the highway, was keeping a balance in the ongoing feud between Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister, two ranchers of opposing personalities and ranch philosophies and styles. What puzzled Sheriff Hugh Dough was their lack of kin recognition, for the Slauters and the Keisters had intermingled generations back when both clans lived in Arkansas. Old Daniel Slauter had married Zubie Keister in 1833, and although she was only the first of his five wives, she bore him five of the thirty-two children he claimed to have fathered, and a marked Keister look – long ringy neck, circled eyes, spider fingers and bad teeth – had entered the Slauter genes. Later more Slauter-Keister crossings further marred the stock.

Advance Slauter and Francis Scott Keister had loathed each other since grade school (which old-timers called “cowboy college” in their sarcastic voices) when Keister, the product of an intensely religious upbringing, a 4-H leader and a Junior Texas Ranger, overheard Advance Slauter, muscular lout extraordinaire, say that he was screwing both his younger sisters and anybody who wanted a piece of the action should show up at the family ranch at six A.M. with a quarter in hand and tap on Ad’s window for admittance. Hugh Dough had sniggered knowingly, later inspired to do his own homework, but Francis Scott Keister was outraged on behalf of pure girlhood. A terrific fight followed, broken up by the principal. Both boys refused to say what had started it. In fact, Ad Slauter was entirely puzzled by the attack. So the feud began and had persisted over thirty years, each man coming by turn into the sheriff’s office to report the latest atrocity. Sheriff Hugh Dough would hear the complainant out and take notes, file them in the two voluminous dossiers of increasingly sophisticated criminal misdemeanor. The assaults were mostly rock-throwing and name-calling until high school when both wangled broke-down old hoopys to drive. Now buckets of paint were thrown, tires shot out, windshields broken. When Francis Scott Keister went to the Wichita Falls stock show with the 4-H group he bought a custom-designed bumper sticker that read I AM A PIECE OF SHIT and pasted it on the back of Slauter’s car. Ad Slauter responded, on the family vacation trip to Padre Island, by visiting the marina store where he stole three aerosol cans of expandable flotation foam and he used them to fill the engine compartment of Keister’s vehicle. He signed Keister up for subscriptions to gay pornographic magazines (“Bill me later”). Keister released black widow spiders on Slauter’s windowsill. Slauter poured sixteen gallons of used crankcase oil on Keister’s front porch.

As grown men both Francis Scott Keister and Advance Slauter ran cow-calf cattle operations but there were few similarities beyond the fact that both men’s cows were quadrupeds. Francis Scott Keister was a scientific rancher, methodical, correct, progressive. He had been born in Woolybucket and was belligerent and aggressive about being a “panhandle native,” loathed all outsiders.

Keister lived with his wife, Tazzy, and only child, fourteen-year-old Frank, a lanky boy with wing-nut ears and broom-handle neck. He often told him to go help his mother in the kitchen as he was no help with machinery or cows. Their house was large, of the style called “rancho deluxe,” the only building on the ranch not made entirely of metal. His corrals and catch pens were of enameled steel in pleasing colors. The machine shop and calving barn were heated and well-lighted, freshly painted every year. His handsome Santa Gertrudis cattle displayed rich mahogany coats and backs as level as the ground they trod. Ninety-four percent of his cows dropped a calf every spring. He kept meticulous breeding records on complicated computer charts. The heifers were artificially inseminated with semen from champion bulls, turned out on newly sprouted winter wheat in the spring, carefully moved from pasture to pasture during the summer. Keister supplemented the grass with soy meal, beet pulp, molasses, sorghum and sweet-corn stover, corn, cottonseed hulls, beet tops, cannery waste, anhydrous ammonia, poultry packer by-products (including feathers), peanut meal, meat meal, bonemeal, lint from the family clothes dryer. To this smorgasbord he added a battery of growth stimulants including antibiotics and the pharmaceuticals Bovatec and Rumensin, as well as the implants Compudose, Finaplix, Ralgro, Steer-oid and Synovex-S. At eighteen months his big steers were ready for market and he received the highest prices for them.

Ad Slauter, in contrast, lived in a dwelling constructed around an old bunkhouse dating back to the 1890s, part of a massive ranch that had belonged to a disappointed Scottish consortium. He had added slapdash additions and wings to accommodate his large family of ten girls. He was an advocate of arcane home remedies. When five-year-old Mazie, playing hide-and-seek, chose a bull nettle patch in which to hide and emerged shrieking and clutching at her calves, he urinated on the burning welts, telling her it would take the sting out, until his wife came at him with a broom. Turpentine and cold coffee was, he said, good for a fever, and drunks could be made sober if they ate sweet potatoes.

The Slauter ranch was shabby and run-down, with sagging fences and potholed roads. He ranched as his father had, letting his mixed-breed cows, mostly picked up at the cattle auctions in Beaver, Oklahoma, take care of their own sex lives. Cows preferred to nurse their calves for six or seven months, not become pregnant as rapidly as possible, and Slauter thought they knew what they were doing. They wandered where they would and were half-wild by the time of fall roundup. He bought small, young bulls every five or six years for a few hundred dollars. Only fifty-five percent of his cows produced a calf each year. Because they ate only pasture grass supplemented by baled hay in winter, they took a long time to put on enough weight for market, twenty-eight to thirty months. Curiously enough the two men’s ledgers balanced out at almost the same figures, for Keister’s operation was costly and his heifer mortality rate high as the champion bull semen made painfully large calves.

Hugh Dough dreaded to see either of the combatants pull up in front of the courthouse, but especially disliked Francis Scott Keister, whom he regarded as a rigid straight arrow who made too much of things that didn’t concern him.

The sheriff’s office had five dispatchers. They were all big, placid, middle-aged women, and not one of them understood how to separate the inconsequential from the urgent. Myrna Greiner did not hesitate to call at three A.M.

“Sheriff, I thought you ought a know we got a report that a black panther is tryin to break into Minnie Dubbs’s kitchen. She can hear it a-growlin and a-scratchin at the door.”

“How does she know it’s a black panther? Did she see it?”

“She says she can tell by the noise it’s makin. Plus she looked out that little side window in her pantry and she could see it in the moonlight standin up on its hind legs and scratchin away.”

“Call her back and tell her that if it’s still on the prod at daylight I’ll come out there and arrest it. Tell her to put some cotton in her ears and go to sleep. Tell her to take a bath first. My granny used to say that if you don’t take a bath the panthers will get you in the night.”

But to the dispatchers all calls were of equal weight, for if you read the papers it was as logical to believe that a panther would slink out of New Mexico and make its way to Minnie Dubbs’s house in Woolybucket as it was to fear that the creaking noise down below was an escaped convict bent on robbery, car theft and murder. Just such a terrifying fate had overwhelmed deaf old Mr. Gridiron, a retired rancher kidnapped from his bed in 1973, driven away in his own truck and murdered beside the road across the Oklahoma line.

The sheriff’s great victory against Tully Nelson, his onetime political opponent, had occurred a few years earlier at 8:30 on a moonless June night as he was cruising the back roads. A call for backup help came from Texas Fish and Game.

“Sheriff Hugh, we got a tip-off that a gang of poachers is working the Stink Creek area tonight. Can you meet us there ten o’clock?”

He was a mile from the bridge when the call came, pulled over and doused his lights, glassed the fields with his powerful night binoculars and immediately picked up parking lights at the side of the road near the bridge. He counted four lights – two vehicles. He turned around, circled south, east, north and west on farm roads, making a four-mile loop in order to come up behind the vehicles, drove the last half mile slowly with his lights out (for he had good night vision and knew every inch of this road), stopped a quarter mile from the bridge and crept up to the parked vehicles on foot. Just off the road at the bridge stood two empty sheriff’s cruisers, parking lights on. On the doors he saw a star and the words SLICKFORK COUNTY SHERIFF. The trunk of one vehicle gaped wide.

“Well, I’ll be a Methodist,” he murmured. It was the break he’d been waiting for. The Slickfork Sheriff’s Department Annual Barbecue and Volleyball Tournament was coming up, and here, he thought, they were, fixing to get the main entrée by foul means. Out in the field he could hear grunts and panting and cursing and adjurations to keep it down, he could see the dancing flicker of a small flashlight. He used his cell phone to call the dispatcher (Janice Mango) and whispered that she should get Fish and Game out to the Stink Creek bridge immediately, call the newspapers in Amarillo, get three deputies out there with shotguns – the miscreants he was about to arrest were heavily armed. He had a newsworthy collar about to go down.

As the hunters approached the gap in the barbwire (their fence cutters had been at work) he turned on his own light, a marine searchlight that lit up what seemed to be the entire panhandle in a blast of 200,000 candlepower – Tully Nelson and his four deputies, dragging and lugging two dead deer and one Rocking Y steer, put their hands over their pained eyes.

“O.K., you’re under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind your backs. I know who you are and you’re already reported so don’t try no goddamn fool stuff” He saw with disgust that Tully was in uniform. He used their own handcuffs on them, collected weapons and tossed them into the open trunk.

“Come on, Hugh, let’s talk about this.” The speaker was Deputy Waldemar, a heavily muscled workout freak with a Hollywood profile and capped teeth.

“Nothin a say. Might as well sit down, boys. You goddamn arrogant idiots are caught red-handed fixin to pull the dumbest trick I seen in many years. I suppose this was for your goddamn barbecue?”

“Come on, Hugh. It’s for the public good. Everbody comes to that barbecue,” pleaded Harry Howdiboy, Sheriff Dough’s idea of a garden slug reincarnated as a human. Well, he’d sprinkle salt on him.

“It was not for the public good. It was for personal gain and advantage and it is illegal sideways, up and down and through the middle. What you done is mortally wrong and it will stay done until the trumpet blows. Advise you to set and keep still. I’m in a stinkin bad mood and the least little move or talk might make me think you are resistin arrest and tryin to escape. Time I got done with you they mightn’t recognize anything except the frickin handcuffs.”

In December of that year he received the Texas Peace Prize awarded annually at the Hotel Stockholm in Dallas. On the flight from Amarillo to Dallas he had had a window seat and spent the time counting the rivets in the wing. In addition to the rivets there were five small L-shapes as though someone had traced the corner of a toolbox with white paint. Then he noticed many droplets of white on the wing – clusters as though someone had struck a loaded paintbrush a smart slap. There were too many to count. During the ceremony he had counted the fringed threads on the cloth covering the award table. The large photograph of himself holding the trophy and the fifty-dollar prize check hung in his office next to the portrait of his grandmother in her Roman gladiator headgear.

7 THE RURAL COMPENDIUM

Bob stayed three days in the Hoss Barn reading the local classifieds, returning to the Mexicali Rose to eat chicken-fried steak (the never-changing special), asking waitresses and store clerks about places to rent, driving around reading bumper stickers:

MY SON IS AN HONOR INMATE AT MCALESTER

HONK IF YOU LOVE BRATWURST

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS

7-LETTER WORD FOR STINK – HOGFARM

He counted churches: the Primitive Baptist Church, the New Light Baptist Church, the Sunrise Baptist Church, the Sweet Loam Baptist Church, the First Baptist Church, the Bible Baptist Church, the Apostolic Faith Church, the Freewill Baptist Assembly, the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the Fellowship Baptist Church, the True Christian Church, the Straight Christian Church, the First Church of God, the People’s Church of the Plains, the Gospel of Grace Church, the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Bethlehem Lutheran Missouri Synod Church, the First Assembly of God Church, the First United Methodist Church, the Church of the Brethren, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and, on the very edge of town near some run-down hovels, the Immaculate Conception Caprock Catholic Church, a tiny building hardly bigger than the smokehouse from which it was converted. There seemed to be a church for every five residents. But of apartments and houses there was nothing for rent. Everyone had a home and was in it. The manager of the Hoss Barn, Gerald Popcorn, perhaps not an ex-con after all, thought Bob Dollar, offered him a residency rate of ten dollars a night but told him he would have to move to a smaller room. A tent seemed a better choice. And outside the wind never stopped blowing.

At night he read from Lieutenant Abert’s Expedition. There was an illustration of James William Abert at the front, but in it he seemed middle-aged. It was difficult to guess how he had looked at twenty-five: thin, a longish, straight nose, limp brown hair. Perhaps even then he was growing the mustache and beard of the sketch, even then his hair already receding. Bob imagined his friends called him “Jim,” but he thought of him as Lieutenant Abert.

The account began with a description of Bent’s Fort. Bob Dollar had gone to Bent’s Fort himself on the eighth-grade class trip. He knew the fort was a reconstruction and the guides, blacksmiths and mountain men lounging around were only actors, but the feeling was remarkably real that he was on the border of Mexico marked by the Arkansas River in the mid-nineteenth century, the world of traders and trappers and Cheyenne Indians, of Mexicans and Texians, of buffalo hides and French voyageurs. Now, looking at Lieutenant Abert’s watercolor of the fort, done from the far side of the Arkansas and showing an overly large flag flying from the fort and, in the foreground, a conical tent, perhaps a teepee, with two white men standing near, one wearing a striped shirt and, his arms folded, the other in buckskin pants and with a rifle over his left shoulder, he felt he was there again. The fort looked the same as it had on the eighth-grade trip. During the class visit Bob had been pleased to see screaming peacocks strutting along the fort’s parapet and wandering through the courtyard. Now he read that in Lieutenant Abert’s day there had been numerous cages at the fort containing birds of the region – the magpie, the mockingbird, the bald eagle. The parapet of the outer wall was planted to bristling cacti, which, when Abert saw them in the summer of 1845, were in waxy red-and-cream-colored bloom.

He delighted, with the lieutenant, in the groups of Cheyenne who came to the fort and did a scalp dance and posed for him while he painted their portraits. He enjoyed the lieutenant’s detailed description of Cheyenne hairdressing, the men’s hair long enough to trail on the ground but their eyebrows and beards plucked out with tweezers. He thought the lieutenant’s attraction to the women’s center partings and neat braids that hung to their waists a little more than that of a disinterested observer. Clearly he fancied them and Bob wondered if he had slept with any of them. He supposed so. And when the lieutenant went with “Mr. Charbonard” to visit Old Bark, an important Cheyenne (with a beautiful daughter), Bob thrilled at the contact with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804, for “Mr. Charbonard” was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacajawea and Toussaint Charbonneau, the baby whom Sacajawea had carried on her back all the way to the Great Water of the West. What the lieutenant had written in 1845 Bob held in his hand, feeling the long-dead voice speaking to him.

At the end of the week, sitting in the Mexicali Rose over a cup of weak coffee, the cook stuck his head out of the square hole where the chicken-fried platters appeared.

“Hey, Bob Dollar, want your eggs bright-eyed or dirty on both sides? And are you still lookin for a place to rent?”

“Dirty. And I sure am.”

“Well, I heard it there’s a lady down in Woolybucket got somethin. If you don’t mind stayin down there. Pretty dead town. I got the number for you.” He thrust a torn edge of newspaper through the hole. “And if you got smarts you’d take somethin to eat. There’s no place to eat in Woolybucket. There was a place about fifteen years ago, run by a old lady, well, I say old lady, but you couldn’t tell if she was a woman or a man.”

“Thanks. And I guess I’ll get an order of fried chicken to go.”

He looked on his map. Woolybucket was the next town past Cowboy Rose, down Route 444, which ran from Tyrone, Oklahoma, to Pampa, Texas. It was on the north side of the Canadian River. He called the number and a woman’s thin yet rough voice told him that the place was an old log bunkhouse on the Busted Star Ranch, without electricity or running water, but sound and sturdy and only fifty dollars a month. No drinkers, no smokers, no women, no drugs. He said he would like to look at it, thinking that maybe it was the break he had been waiting for.

The wind had died down, leaving an emptied, medium-blue sky. On the outskirts of Woolybucket a sign proclaimed THIS IS THE BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD. A smaller, almost completely faded sign beyond it was illegible except for the sinister words “… out of town before sunset.” Woolybucket was the seat of Woolybucket County. Seven gravel and caliche roads, formed in the 1890s by cattle driven from outlying ranches to the railhead, converged from every compass point. No traffic light on earth could order the complex nine-way intersection which operated first come, first served. The railroad bisected the main street. There was a white water tower on which some wag had painted the legend H₂O. Beyond it were five or six grain elevators with a dozen pickups parked in front. Bob guessed that was the major hangout place for farmers.

The center of Woolybucket featured a small tan lawn like a grass tutu around a tan brick courthouse, a tan sidewalk leading up to a portico where a sign with an arrow directed visitors to the sheriff’s office. Along the street opposite the courthouse he saw the traditional lineup of small-town businesses, a card and gift shop, an empty storefront, the Old Dog Café, a law office with a sign reading F. B. WEICKS ATTY in flaking gold letters, the Lone Star pool hall, Bludgett’s Pharmacy, the Speedwell Market, the Woolybucket Bank and the glass-fronted newspaper office, The Banner, which he soon learned the less sanguine locals called The Bummer. Through its plate-glass windows the Old Dog looked to be crowded with men wearing cowboy hats, and the street itself, especially in front of Clip’s News & Video where young men and teenaged girls leaned against the walls of stores, against the municipal trash barrel, the posts supporting the arcade roof, draped themselves across the fenders of pickups. The town seemed vital and full of life.

The newer shops that proclaimed Woolybucket a community of modernity flanked the courthouse on the side streets. Here was an Episcopal church shaped like a wedge of cake, the Motel Caribe with a bathtub-size pool in the center of the parking lot, a Thai-Mexican restaurant, Woolybucket Cellular and a fitness center named Gym Bob’s. He bought six doughnuts at Cousin Dougie’s Donut Shop. A placard in the window announced YES WE HAVE LATE, which he took to be the regional spelling of “latte.”

The post office was two streets back, a false-front building shaded by a small Cottonwood tree. On slat-backed benches sat four elderly men, leathery, wrinkled, skinny-necked and thin, all with their right legs crossed over the left. Their pants legs rode high exposing four white shanks in oblique alignment. They all smoked cigarettes showing the same length of ash, they turned their heads in unison to watch the traffic pass. Bob Dollar was pleased to see so many oldsters and imagined them all to be proprietors of big spreads.

Another elderly man standing outside the post office, wearing chinks, cowboy hat and tooled leather cuffs, gave him directions to the Busted Star, said it was owned by LaVon Grace Fronk, told him to stay on the asphalt because they’d just bush-hogged the damn roadsides, now bristling with brush stobs sharp as punji sticks. He mounted a grey horse, saluted Bob Dollar and rode off. The horse limped.

“Come on in,” yodeled the woman, beckoning him into the gloom of the house. Her voice was grainy and oleaginous at the same time, like coarse-ground peanut butter. “Will you all take a glass of water or some Pepsi?” LaVon Fronk, small and thin as a fifth-grader, was a middle-aged ranch widow who resembled one of the minor Roman emperors with her intense, nervous face, small mouth barely wider than her nose, the eyes close-set under a ledgey brow, marbled hair of faded red and white.

“I’d love some water,” he said, his throat parched with dust. She made a little production of getting the glass, rinsing it, putting in ice cubes, taking a pitcher of iced water from the refrigerator, slicing a lemon and perching it on the rim of the glass. The house seemed very hot to him.

“There! There’s nothing like cold water, is there? I was a Harshberger from Miami” – she pronounced it “Miama” – “Miami, Texas, of course. Not the Florida place. I married Jase Fronk in 1951 and he died – well, that’s enough of that.”

“Woolybucket is kind of a strange name,” said Bob. “Is it called after somebody?”

“Named after the woolybucket tree. I guess there used a be a lot a them grew here. Birds like a woolybucket. The leaves in the spring, why they are all fuzzy underneath before they roll out – that’s the wooly buckets. And Cowboy Rose is named after a flar. The wine cup. That’s the other name for the cowboy rose. You couldn’t have a town called ‘Wine Cup.’ Not in teetotal Woolybucket County.”

While he drank his water Bob noticed flamboyant knickknackery everywhere. LaVon said the kitchen was French provincial, though to him it seemed Texas provincial, a clean white linoleum floor, a white Formica table with chrome legs and matching chairs, a calendar on the wall next to a portrait of Jesus constructed of macaroni and seeds, and against the walls aged and noisy white appliances. The dishtowels, stamped Bonjour at the bottom, showed the Eiffel Tower. On the counter stood ceramic jars labeled CAFÉ, SUCRE, FARINE. A poster reproduction of Brassaï’s Steps of Montmartre hung over a wine rack, which contained not wine but bottles of whiskey; a good sign, thought Bob Dollar. She showed him dozens of items she had purchased through mail-order catalogs – a leather hot water bottle cover, a Moroccan oil lamp. Over the cat’s basket – she had a heavy paint tomcat with a bad leg, only one ear and half a tail, the victim of an encounter with the lawn mower – a blue enamel sign declared CHAT LUNATIQUE. Chat mort would have been more accurate, for the somnolent beast lay as one dead hour after hour, rousing only when the refrigerator door opened or when the gangly neighbor boy started the lawn mower.

When he finished his water she said, “Well, let’s go have a look at that bunkhouse.”

“This’s it,” she said, driving him through a bumpy pasture, over a sullen creek toward a motte of cottonwood trees. There was a second fence behind the barbwire made up of old tires on end, packed three deep in overlapping rows. Under the cottonwoods stood a small log building with a porch. A rope ran around the circumference of the porch floor and La Von explained this was to keep snakes out of the cabin. Inside were four empty bunks, on each a thin mattress folded in half, a stack of blankets, four wooden chairs at a square table. There was a tiny stove with a blackened teakettle on it and against the wall a wood box full of kindling and sticks.

“Spartan,” she said. “There’s no electric. Supply your own sheets and towels. You’ll have to haul water. Get it down the house in the kitchen.”

“I’ll take it,” he said without seriously considering a daily drive across a cow pasture, the labor of lugging water, no telephone, for already he was taking pleasure in the subtle beauty of the panhandle, noting the groves and thickets along watercourses, huge coils of grapevine weaving the trees into a coarse fabric. He thought the bold diagonal of caprock rim that divided the high plains from the southern plains, the red canyons of the Palo Duro striking and exotic.

He unloaded his suitcase, his new briefcase (new only to him, for it had come from Uncle Tam’s shop) with its freight of Global Pork Rind flyers and papers, a pair of pinch-toe cowboy boots shining with polish, and the box of fried chicken he had brought from Perryton. It took only a few minutes to unpack. He went outside and walked around the bunkhouse, starting up a plump, chickenlike bird in the tangled vines along the creek. The sound of running water was pleasant though it made him want to piss. Against the back of the bunkhouse leaned four large logs, two of them partially shaped and carved into figures – a woman’s head with flowing hair, and a roughed-out human figure that vaguely resembled Lenin. Perhaps some ranch hand had fancied himself a sculptor.

In the deepening afternoon he sat on the porch with a warm bottle of Pearl and told himself to buy a cooler and ice in Woolybucket the next day. There were several pieces of farm machinery in a large field to the west, ungrazed for some years and grown up with big bluestem and weeds. He counted five rusted wheat combines, three pickup trucks, four old tractors, various harrows and rakes, all sinking into the earth. There was a dark shape in the high grass, but what it was he could not make out – perhaps an old gas pump. In the dulling light he noticed a low rise to the south, too low to be called a hill even in this flat country, little more than a swelling as though the earth had inhaled and held the breath. But by panhandle standards it was a wave of earth that deserved the name “hill.” Beyond the rise was a great indigo cloud spread open like a pair of dark wings, monstrous and smothering, shot through with ribbands of lightning, and in the distance the stuttering flash of strobe lights at the ends of the irrigation pivot water arms. The dusk sifted down like molecules of pulverized grey silk.

He left the fried chicken skin and bones on the porch floor. Sometime in the night he woke to hoarse barking cries outside the door repeated with monotonous regularity. But even as he struggled to come fully awake the barks began to recede and, peering out the window into faint starlight, all he could see was a small shadow gliding into the black weeds, whether fox or coyote he didn’t know. Toward morning rain tapped the roof.

He went over to the ranch house in the morning, drew the water, then sat and had a cup of coffee with La Von, who had the regional taste for very weak, pale brown coffee. She told him she was compiling a county history which she called The Woolybucket Rural Compendium, hundreds of memoirs and photographs from families of the region.

“Mr. Dollar, I have been workin at it for thirteen years.”

Her mailboxes, she said, were packed full with genealogical reminiscence every noon when Doll McJunkin delivered. Elderly visitors came up the drive with their boxes of photographs and diaries, faded envelopes. The papers and photographs filled two entire rooms downstairs. As they sat at her worktable with their coffee cups LaVon gestured at the shelves of boxes.

“I suppose I’ll never get it done,” she said with something like pride. “I suppose I’ll die and my son will throw everthing out – essentially the entire history of Woolybucket County and everbody in it.”

“Couldn’t you do it in several volumes?” asked Bob. “Like, get the first volume published that deals with the earliest days and then, later, you know, follow up with the later stuff?”

“No, I could not. My material is filed by family, not by year. It’s alphabetical, not chronological. I sometimes think that was a mistake. But we live with our mistakes.”

“Then couldn’t you do like A to L? I mean, anything, just so you make room. And don’t the people want their letters and pictures back?”

“They may,” she said carelessly. “And they’ll get them back when I’m done. There’s too much new stuff that comes in that has a be added to the families at the beginning a the alphabet.”

“But – ”

“Do not worry about it, Mr. Dollar,” said LaVon. “I’m sure you have your own work that interests you. Every pie got its own piecrust.”

“Well, yeah.” He did not see the trap.

“And just what is your work? What brings you down here in the panhandle, which has so few voluntary visitors?”

“It’s kind of complicated,” he said. “It’s not really work at all.” He noticed two semitransparent plastic sweater boxes on the table near LaVon’s computer. He thought he saw something moving inside the top box.

“Oh? A vacation perhaps in sunny Woolybucket?”

“I’m looking for – ”

“Yes?” She stared.

“I’m, I’m, I’m writing a profile of the panhandle for a magazine. That’s why I’m interested in your Compendium.”

“What magazine is that?”

“Ah. I haven’t got one lined up yet. I thought I’d write the article first and then send it to a magazine. Maybe Oklahoma Today,” said Bob, thinking fast.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Dollar. Strange as it may seem, Oklahoma Today specializes in Oklahoma stories, and they are not even partial a panhandle Oklahoma. And that’s not how you get a article in a magazine. People get assignments. You must think I’m pretty dumb. For your information I was a contributing editor to Drip for seventeen years.” She relieved his puzzlement; “It’s an ag-tech magazine devoted a irrigation.”

“No. No. You’re right. I’m not writing an article. Somebody else is. Was.” He thought frantically. “In fact I’m looking for a – a girlfriend. My mother disappeared in Alaska when I was little, but she always told me to marry a girl from Texas.”

“Oh, did she. How old were you when she gave you this advice?”

“Around seven. Or eight.” He kept looking at the plastic box. There were holes punched all around the top just below the cover.

“That’s a little young for someone a be guidin a child toward marriage. Unless she was Chinese?”

“No.”

“Maybe she came from Texas herself? There are a lot of Asian people on the coast.”

“No. She wasn’t Asian. But she always admired Texas girls. And I admire them too.”

“Maybe we’d better leave it at that, your admiration for Texas girls. By the way, are you employed? I’m just wondering if you’ll be able a handle the rent, low as it is.”

“Well, I am employed. I’m scouting the region for nice pieces of land for, for a luxury home development. Global Properties Deluxe. The company is interested in branching out into the Texas panhandle. They feel there is potential here.”

“If you know how many thousands have surmised that ‘potential.’ But luxury home development is a new one to me. This part a the country is losin people. I’d think they would a sent you down to the hill country outside Austin with all those rich computer folks or around Dallas. Your panhandle millionaire prefers a live in a trailer house and put the money into land and horses. Anyway, how lucky you are, Bob Dollar, to have a good job in a world where so many strive hand to mouth. In that case you probably don’t mind givin me a month’s rent in advance? I got a be protected in case you skip.”

He smiled and said he would write the check on the spot, then added, “Is there something in that plastic container? I thought I saw something move. In the top one?”

“That’s Pinky.” She reached for the box, set it between them and pried up the cover. Bob was horrified to see a tan tarantula with baby pink feet staring up at him. He rose so abruptly his chair tipped over. The spider reared back in alarm.

“She won’t hurt you,” said La Von. “She’s very quiet. I’m surprised you noticed her move. She spends most of her time in her hideout.” She pointed at several pieces of heavy bark propped at the back of the sweater box. “It seems a little dry,” she said, putting her hand in the box and feeling the wood chips and soil. The spider ignored her. She took up a small bottle near the phone and squirted the cage interior with a fine mist, replaced the cover.

“Long as I’m misting,” she said, putting down the bottle and reached for the other box.

“You’ve got two,” said Bob without enthusiasm.

“This one is different,” she said, carefully lifting up one corner of the lid. “This is Tonya. She’s a Togo starburst, an African arboreal. They’re both arboreals, but Pinky comes from Latin America, from the rain forest.” Bob moved closer to get a better look. “Stay back, Bob, this one can jump and she is very aggressive and bites like a flash. The bite can make you feel pretty sick.” He saw the grey spider had a beautiful starburst pattern on its carapace. It was not as large as Pinky. He was relieved when LaVon put the cover back.

“I only had Tonya for a year, but Pinky almost five. She could live to be eight or nine years old. That’s a short life span for a tarantula. Now your Mexican blond can live to be forty. They are long-term pets.”

The sky was the color of cold tea when he went out.

On the bunkhouse porch that evening when it grew too dark to see the words he fetched his flashlight, for he was at the point in the narrative where the lieutenant was looking at drawings by Old Bark’s son (who had earlier danced with “extravagant contortions”), autobiographical drawings in which the son vigorously attacked Pawnees with his lance. The lieutenant was generous, praising the execution and the “considerable feeling” for proportion and general design. Bob felt that if the lieutenant had had Old Bark’s son in a drawing class he would have given him a gold star. But when the famous guide Thomas Fitzpatrick came on the scene, cautioning the lieutenant never to tie mules to bushes, for they twitched the branches, each rustle convincing them that the enemies of mules were creeping near, the flashlight began to dim and falter and after a few minutes he gave up and went early to bed. At that moment, sitting in the deep dusk, the flashlight beam weakening, the course of Bob Dollar’s life shifted, all unknown to him, for he was conscious only of his annoyance at the lack of light and swore to get a camp light or candle the next day.

8 PIONEER FRONK

In 1878 in Manhattan, Kansas, Martin Merton Fronk, twenty-three years of age, the son of a German immigrant watchmaker, sat on Doctor Jick’s leather examination table, coughing and wheezing.

“Well, young man,” said Doc Jick, “what I think is that you are suffering from a concentration of the humid nature of our local atmosphere, which, however fragrant and delightful to the majority of nostrils, affects some few in a deleterious manner. You, I fear, are among that rare number. Your constitution is somewhat weak and renders you unable to enjoy or profit from the lowland airs. I advise you to seek a higher, drier climate where crystalline breezes sweep through the atmosphere with rapidity and frequency. I would suggest to you the high plains of Texas where other sufferers have gone before you and found themselves much improved within a year. Not a few with tuberculosis.”

“Do I have tuberculosis?”

“I think not. You have a sensitivity to vapors and dampness. I have no hesitation in recommending you to the Texas high ground. There is, in fact, a very good medical man in Woolybucket – oh, these Texas town names – who has cared for and cured a number of respiratory cases far worse than yours. You can seek him out with confidence. D. F. Mugg, M.D., keenly interested in the malaises of the human body and good horse trader as well.”

“I have no idea what I might do out there to make my living.”

“I understand it is a fair country for farming, but even better for the raising of cattle. Many men, especially young men such as yourself, are flocking to the region seeking their fortunes through the rich grass and pure water. Once your lungs have healed in the healthful air, as I have every confidence they will do, I do not doubt that you will be yo-ho-hoing and riding at breakneck speed across the flower-spangled highlands. You might go farther north to Wyoming Territory or Montana, but those environs suffer deadly winter chill and blizzard snows. At least Texas has warmth.”

Later, Fronk reflected bitterly on those words. Yet while in a state of blissful ignorance he put his affairs in order and converted most of his worldly goods into cash ($432), argued with his father, who still cherished dreams that his son would come to the watchmaker’s bench. After three days of wrangling the father understood the son’s departure was inevitable, and, in late April of 1878, Martin Fronk climbed onto a huffing, west-bound train accompanied by a valise and a trunk packed with such necessaries as an axe, some good hemp rope and fourteen back issues of the Louisiana Go-Steady, an occasional illustrated paper of incendiary political views and attractive engravings of little-known foreign regions, a class in which Martin mentally placed Texas, high ground and low. As well he had put a small sack of yams in the trunk and a paper packet of coffee beans wrapped and tied by his younger sister, Lighty

When the train stopped for an hour in a town that seemed to consist of one large emporium and swarms of cattle, he got out to stretch his legs, entered the store and purchased three cans of oysters, one of which he opened and ate on the platform, the other two going into his valise. The train started with a terrific jerk, then settled into a monotonous and swaying side-to-side motion. In the issue of the Go-Steady he was perusing, a timely article on cattle raising had his rapt attention, and he barely noticed the extraordinary span of the bridge over which the train was passing, 840 feet in length, the conductor announced.

Cattle, he read, needed no care nor cosseting on the Texas plains. One turned them out and let them graze as they would, then, once or twice a year, rounded them up with the help of the children of the region (thus he interpreted “cowboys”) and drove the beasts to market in exchange for money. So plentiful were ownerless cows on the Texas plains that a poor but ambitious man could make his fortune in one or two years. Coughing lightly, he turned the page and read that a cow valued in Texas at five or ten dollars would sell for thirty dollars in Kansas City. The article described the economics of driving three thousand cows from Texas to a Kansas railhead. The eleven men needed to drive them, including a cook, each cost thirty dollars per month – that was $330. Another hundred went to the trail boss, another hundred to provisions: that made $530 a month in costs. The cows could bring $90,000. Suddenly, his future seemed clear.

The article went on to explain that the most efficient and inexpensive procedure was to arrange for the services of a contract drover rather than use one’s own cowboys, who were needed on the home ranch to care for the next cow crop. Or, in yet another scenario, the article presented the example of a rancher with six strong sons who managed the trail drive with animals from the ranch, sons who were paid little or nothing, for the ranch would come to them in the sweet by-and-by. But, Martin thought, one did not find six strong sons on alder bushes. He supposed it would take decades, even if he had a wife, to grow strong and cattle-minded sons. As he read on he understood that contract drovers themselves could make fortunes, and eventually purchase and stock their own cattle ranches. There was an example of one who made $50,000 in a single season driving other men’s cattle north. He fell into a pleasant reverie. If his health improved rapidly he might become a drover for a few years, then set up as a rancher, he and his six strong sons. One thing he understood clearly – there were fabulous profits in cattle if you were a stem-winder.

The train tracks did not extend to Woolybucket, but ended a brisk day’s ride away at a place called Twospot. There was a rough stable behind the station where he persuaded a mangy oldster to sell him a secondhand Dearborn buggy and a grey horse with ogre eyes, loaded his trunk and valise into the buggy and started west, the general direction of Woolybucket. On the train, the conductor, who had seemed to be as well-informed in the affairs of the MKT Railroad as a company director, had told him it was a sure thing the line was going to be extended to Woolybucket within a year, that Woolybucket was to become a major cattle-shipping point, that he, Martin Fronk, would be smart to look for land in the vicinity of this metropolis-to-be.

He twice crossed small streams, the Woolybucket and Rogers Creeks, both lined with willows and cottonwood, offering shade and rest to the traveler. Indeed, he saw a small party in a camp but as they looked, from a distance, like Indians, he did not care to approach. The conductor had mentioned a few peculiar habits of the Indians, especially the Comanches, who were lacking in common manners and sometimes exhibited markedly abrupt behavior.

“They got ahold of a clock salesman last year, cut open his stomach, pulled out his guts a ways, tied em to the horn of his saddle and whacked the horse. I believe they cut off different parts of him for souvenirs, too. Weren’t much left but the general idea of what he’d been. Smart if you stay away from them.”

A man in the seat across the aisle said, “Hell, that weren’t the worst. Tell him what they done to Dave Dudley at Adobe Walls. You don’t know? Well, I’ll tell him. They got Dave Dudley who was shootin buffler at the mouth a Red Deer Creek. They carved out one a his balls, put it in his hand and tied his hand to a stake set out in front a him so he would have to look at it and think about what was happenin. Then they cut the hole in his gut and driv a stake down through into the ground, pounded it in with a axe. Used one a his own buffler pegs. And they finished up with scalpin him four ways from last Tuesday, ever hair on his head tooken. That’s the kind we got here. They run out most a them now but not all.”

By late afternoon the sky was a deep khaki color in the southwest though that had little significance for him. He was tired from the hot, jolting hours in the Dearborn and wanted more than anything to sink to his chin in cold water. He was thirsty, had long ago drained the canteen of water. Yet he feared going down to the river where there might be Indians. Now and then he drew a deep breath, testing to see if the high, dry air was making a difference in his breathing. It seemed to him to be easier and perhaps more comfortable. He could not really tell. The gloomy sky ahead cracked open with lightning and he cut toward a motte of trees, Indians or not, wanting some shelter.

There were no Indians in the shady grove, but a cleared area and trampled vegetation showed it had been occupied in the last twenty-four hours by someone. He made a tiny fire and laid two yams in the coals to bake while he washed the dust from his burning face. There was a small pool, somewhat murky. He cupped his hands and drank the sulfurous water. A rumble of thunder shook the ground though the air was dead still. A soft explosion from the fire reminded him that he had forgotten to pierce the potatoes and one had burst. It was a dead loss. He stabbed his knife into the other, still whole (he thought of suffering Dave Dudley and the wretched clock salesman, for the yam resembled a yellow belly), raked more coals on top of it and filled the canteen at the pool. He unharnessed the grey, rubbed it down, fed and watered it, spread his blanket on the ground under the Dearborn. When the surviving potato was done he ate it hot and without salt, opened a second can of oysters with his knife, swallowed them, drank again from the pool, rinsed the oyster can and put it aside to use as a coffee pot in the morning, crawled under the wagon ready to sleep although it was still daylight, yanking his blanket over his head to thwart the mosquitoes. A tiny fresh breeze slid along the ground, as sweet and cool as chilled water. The sky had turned purple-black, riven with lightning that showed low-scudding clouds moving at right angles to a heavier mass above. The clouds were ragged and wild. The little breeze quickened, became a small wind, strong enough to drive off the stinging pests, lifted the corner of his blanket. It was sharply colder.

He dozed for a quarter of an hour, then woke to a terrific explosion of thunder. He thought for a moment he was back on the train, for he could hear a heavy freight not far away. How had he come to a train yard? There was a mad rattling and balls of icy hail the size of pecans bounded under the wagon. He tried to crawl out from under it but something was blocking the side, something with stiff, wet hair. It took him a few seconds to recognize the feel of his horse. The freight train was passing by just beyond the trees accompanied by a crackling of branches. The trees swayed, one fell. In the flashes of lightning he could see their writhing branches, a confetti of torn leaves, and beyond, some black and immense thing towering like a nightmare. The unseen train, running without lights, curved away into the wet night. To the west a band of colorless sky showed that the next day would be fair. Aching with fatigue and a general sense of malaise he slept again.

He woke early, before the sun was up. The vast sky freckled with small flakes of raspberry-tinted clouds. He crawled out from under the Dearborn and looked at his horse. It was dead.

In a little while he mixed a handful of cornmeal with water in his palm, laid the mass on some gathered leaves to thicken while he made a fire and heated two flat rocks in it. He baked the cornmeal cake on one of the hot rocks, roasted a few coffee beans on the other and pulverized them with the heel of the axe, boiled coffee in the oyster can. The hot can burned his hands and mouth. He strained the floating grounds through his teeth, chewed the escapees. He studied the horse again, thought it might have been struck by lightning as there was a discolored mark on its right shoulder and another near the fetlock.

He hid his trunk as well as he could beneath an overhang of dirt bank, piled torn branches in front of it, heaped rocks. He looked again at his dead horse. Finally he set off west on shank’s mare, guessing that Woolybucket could not be more than two or three miles distant.

Late in the morning a new difficulty assailed him. He could feel the cornmeal cakes and coffee and oysters whirling and sloshing in his gut. His bowels writhed. He thought of Dave Dudley and the clock salesman. For the next few hours he stumbled along with frequent responses to his mad intestines. He abandoned his valise. Soon he began to vomit as well and his head ached violently. In midafternoon he quit and lay on the ground in considerable misery. After an hour, feeling fever roast him on a spit of illness, he thought he smelled smoke. He rolled to his other side and scanned the prairie. Yes, there was smoke coming out of a mound of soil – might it be a volcano? A black rectangle suddenly showed in the face of the mound of earth and a figure moved into it and hurled something that sparkled briefly. The figure turned and disappeared into the dark rectangle that he recognized as an open doorway. He began to crawl toward it and when he was only fifty feet away, two horses in a makeshift corral began to whinny and snort. The door opened a crack and Martin Merton Fronk called out “Help,” in a feeble, choked bleat.

“What the blue burnin hell is that?” said a voice and a seven-foot gink with white hair wearing a red shirt and too-short California pants came striding out of the dugout with a Winchester in his hands. He was followed by a shorter, younger man, a bench-legged, bullet-eyed rip with a luxuriant but multicolored beard that blew sideways in the wind.

“Who the hell are you and why the blue tarnation are you creepin up on us? You one a them fellas with a sticky rope admires other folks’ horseflesh?”

“Sick. Can’t walk. Meant no harm.” It seemed funny that they saw evil design in him. The talking made him vomit again.

“Christ, you smell like you been shittin yourself as well as losin your okra.”

“Yes. Sick. Sick.” He said a few words about the cornmeal cakes and the dead horse and the sudden diarrhea.

“You get your water at Twospot? Little pond a water there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s squitter water. It’ll make you want a die, make you think your guts is bein pulled out a your asshole with your mama’s crochet hook, but you won’t die and most gets better and some even drinks that squitter water again and has no ill effects. I done it. Anyways, we got the fix-up for it. Just wait here. You ain’t comin into this camp smellin like shit and puke boiled with skunk cabbage for a week. You lay out here folded up like a empty purse and we’ll bring it to you.”

The cure, as they called it, was a tin cup of brown liquid toned up with some kind of cheap whiskey. He drank it and promptly vomited. The man with the multicolored beard fetched a second dose, which he took in tiny sips, willing it to stay down. When the cup was empty he lay in the grass and closed his eyes.

“Give her a hour or two to work,” said the giant and they disappeared into the dugout.

Near sunset they reappeared with a basin of steaming water and some folded garments. They pulled his noisome shirt and pants from him and poured the basin of hot soapy water over him, threw down a flour-sack towel and advised him to get into the fresh clothes.

“My valise …” he said, pointing back the way he’d come.

The tall man said, “Good idee. Why have him stink up our duds with his squitter shit when he can do what he wants with his own?” He saddled one of the horses and rode in the direction of the creek camp. Martin lay naked and cold on the prairie and began to shiver but at least he was no longer racked with spasms. The multicolored beard brought him a biscuit and some clean water.

Before the sun went down the tall man was back with the valise, which he opened and went through with interest. He tossed a pair of pants to Martin and a striped cotton shirt. Martin asked for his spare underdrawers but the man laughed and closed the case.

“Sonny, no man in Texas wears them. Just slows you down whatever you got in mind. I’n use them for a dishclout.”

They gave him a corner in the dugout and the tall man who said his name was Klattner, late of Arkansas, promised – as soon as he learned there were coffee beans in it – that he’d get Martin’s trunk in the morning.

“We been out a coffee a month. Tried to git a little in Woolybucket but they’re out too and no supply wagon due until June. So your coffee will be appreciated. What damn old Woolybucket needs is a good store. The one they got in Woolybucket now, it’s not no good. There’s a crazy doc half runs it when he ain’t layin on a sofa dead drunk. Couldn’t hit a elephant’s ass with a banjo. Used a have a regular storekeeper, but he lost the emporium to the doc in a game of chance. Doc don’t never order enough coffee, flour, sugar, what-have-you. All last winter no flour and no tabacca. My God, he got in a thousand pound a saleratus and not one teaspoon a flour. We horsewhipped him but it didn’t do no good. Bad as ever.”

“Would his name be Doctor Mugg?”

“It would. You know him?”

“No. I was told he was well-regarded at curing sick folks.”

“I don’t know who told you that but the informant was lyin. Doc Mugg couldn’t cure a ham if you gave it to him in front of a smokehouse. What Doc Mugg needs in the cure line is the water cure – for hisself If I was you I’d get better on my own. Fresh air and whiskey is best and plenty work.”

The multicolored beard chimed in. “If I was you I wouldn’t tie up to Doc Mugg for a minute. He’s filled up the graveyard complete and is startin on another. Why don’t you git his store away from him and run it good – run it honorable. Every man would greet you with hearty goodwill wherever you may go.”

But Martin Fronk had fixed his sights on making a fortune as a cattleman, whether drover or rancher, found the idea of running a store repugnant and said so.

“I spose you want a be a cattleboy,” drawled the multicolored beard whose name was Carrol Day, a curiously feminine name, thought Martin, not yet acquainted with the bearded Marions, Fannys and Abbys of Texas who, saddled by their unthinking mothers with dainty names, built savagely masculine frames of character.

“I believe I’m too old to be a boy again of any kind.”

“Age don’t matter. Some a the pertest cowboys is pushin seventy summers. Lookit old Whitey here,” nodding at the tall man who was wrapping rawhide around the helve and head of an axe. “He’s most eighty and he’s more cowboy than any ten ordinaries.”

“He’s a cowboy?”

“Hell yes. Been up the trail to Montana what, twenty times?”

“Twenty-two. And that was enough. It’s too cold up there. Snows all summer. You git paid there’s no place to spend your money. Just turn around and come back to Texas.”

“What about Miles City? What about Cheyenne? What about Denver? I understand you paid them towns a visit on your return journeys many a time.”

“My money was gettin too heavy. Anyway, Martin here don’t want a be no cowboy or no storekeeper. I’n see he’s got bigger ideas in mind.”

“I was thinking about the stock-driving business.”

Both men began to scream with laughter. Carrol got down on the dirt floor and rolled, moaning, “Oh my sweet cabbage patch, ‘the stock-drivin business.’”

“You idiot,” said Klattner. “Make it in the stock-drivin business, you got to know cows like you know your own tweedle-dee. You got to have cowboyed, got to know the markets and men. You have to sweet-talk crazy farmers and handle Indans. We just got burned alive, me and Whitey, in the stock-drivin business. Stampedes, Indan troubles, blueburnin Kansas farmers – ”

“Indians?”

“Hell, they’re no bother,” said Carrol. “Just give em one a your cows and they leave you alone. A course after fifty donations you’re down fifty cows.”

“They can be trouble,” said the other. “There’s Quanah Parker. And others. There was that clock salesman – ”

He didn’t want to hear about the clock salesman again.

“I could run a store,” whispered Martin Fronk, giving up his plans to become a rancher or cattle drover. The waterholes were too chancy.

The next day he felt distinctly better, packed his suitcase and asked his hosts if they could spare one of their horses so he could get to Woolybucket.

“You buyin or borrowin?”

“I’m agreeable to purchase one of your steeds. Preferably one that is docile and of gentle disposition.”

“That one died last year. But we can let you have that sorrel gelding for twenty dollars. He’s got two names: You Son of a Bitch and Grasshopper. He don’t like grass a wave in the breeze and when it does so he hops. You purchase old Grasshopper and we’ll draw your wagon in next week. See if you can’t git that store away from Doc Mugg and do right by the town.”

The other added his advice. “And, if you do, lay in plenty coffee. And keep your supply wagon outn reach a them damn red sloughs. Look like dry riverbed places along the Canadian but you break through to the mud, stickier than boiled molasses mixed with glue, and eight hunderd foot deep. It’s happened.”

You Son of a Bitch disliked waving grass, birds, distant riders, prairie dogs, clouds, saddles and, as Martin Fronk came into the outskirts of Woolybucket, black-and-white dogs. One of the last named sent him into paroxysms of bucking until Martin departed the saddle. The horse stood trembling, facing the barking dog. Martin picked up a few stones and threw them accurately and hard at the dog, which ran yipping to a ragged tent. The side of the tent was painted with letters: GEN’L STOR DF MUGG MD PROP.

He went inside the tent. There was an ungodly welter of stuff, from unfurled yard goods to bullwhips.

“Got any coffee?” he asked the shambling wreck entangled in a bolt of blue daisy cotton. Was that a banjo on the cold stove?

“June. Didn’t send it yet. Come back in June, sir.”

He left, wondering if he’d seen the fabled Dr. Mugg, thinking he could run that store with his head in a bag and hobbles on his ankles.

9 THE BUSTED STAR

Bob Dollar thought LaVon’s Busted Star Ranch, a little north of the Canadian River, a beautiful place. For the first time in his life he saw what extraordinary personal privacy a ranch family enjoyed. If he really were looking for a site to develop luxury homes this would be it. La Von told him the ranch had been mixed-grass grazing land – bluestem, buffalo grass, gramma, wheat grass and Indian grass – when the first settlers came into the country in the late nineteenth century. Moises Harshberger, her peripatetic grandfather, arrived in the panhandle as a young man in 1879, a year after her husband’s ancestor Fronk had taken over Mugg’s store.

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