That Old Ace in the Hole (40 page)

T
he telephone rang at sunup and Bob staggered out of bed, stepped on something extremely sharp and painful, hopped to the phone and picked up to hear Jaelene Shattle saying sleepily, “Who? Oh, Bob, he’s still asleep. Can I take—”

“I’m here, Jaelene,” he broke in.

A hearty male Texas voice boomed back. “Well, Bob, good mornin! It’s a beauty. Look out your window and rejoice.”

“Brother Mesquite?” He examined the sole of his foot, removed a goathead that had struck deep. How had it got into the house?

“Right. A beautiful day. Cool now, but she’ll warm up. Sorry I missed you last night. Wonderin if you were takin in the Barbwire Festival today?”

“Yes. I promised LaVon I would sell raffle tickets in the quilt booth for an hour this afternoon.”

“Good. I’ll just look for you. What time will you be holdin down the raffle fort?”

“Two to three. But I’ll probably go over there this morning and look around. I’ve never been to a Barbwire Festival before.”

“It’s quite the big affair. Woolybucket’s day in the sun. Don’t miss the rodeo. Yours truly is ropin. With Brother Hesychast.”

“I would not want to miss that,” said Bob. “When does it start?”

“Rodeo starts at noon. Look forward to seein you, Bob. I need a talk to you about something. Connected with Ace Crouch’s project. You heard about that, right?”

“Yeah,” said Bob, letting a little bitterness creep into his voice, looking out the window at the brilliant sky streaked with crimson and gold.

He showered (still a luxury after the sponge baths of the Busted Star bunkhouse days) and dressed first in shorts and sleeveless shirt, for he thought it would be hot, but when he looked in the mirror it struck him as an un-Texas costume. And there was the rodeo and the blazing sun—no doubt people would dress western. He put on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, tugged on the never-yet-worn cowboy boots Mr. Cluke had told him were vital to success in the panhandle. Maybe that had been his problem, the wrong footgear. He looked in the mirror and was not displeased until he thought about Uncle Tam’s account of the Global Pork Rind shooting. He would call LaVon and let her know. For once
he
would have the news. But when he tried her line it was busy.

Downstairs Jaelene, prodding a pot of grits, told him to sit down and have breakfast. She poured a mug of coffee, cracked two eggs into a buttered pan and shook pepper over them.

“You want orange juice, Bob?”

“I’d like a little. Can I help?” For some reason he held back from telling Jaelene about the shooting.

“Sure enough. You can butter the toast when it pops up. Most people don’t have grits
and
toast, but Mr. Shattle insisted when we got married and it’s kind of a habit now. There’s jam in the refrigerator. Butter’s right here.”

There was jam and more jam. The Shattles had sweet teeth for sure, he thought as he plucked out jellies, jams, fruit curds and something called Blueberry Tiger.

Jaelene Shattle refilled their coffee cups, slid the eggs, flanked with sideburns of buttered grits, onto plates and sat down opposite him. He must be in Mr. Shattle’s chair, he thought, spreading the Blueberry Tiger on his toast. He was surprised by the odd combination of chile, bourbon and blueberry.

“How is Mr. Shattle doing this week?” He wondered who at Global Pork Rind had died.

“Good. You know, I told him about Ace’s plan and that they moved the hogs out and was goin a drain the lagoon and fill it up with dirt next week and that poor man, he just broke down and wept. It’s been awful hard on him. He said, ‘You tell Ace I’ll buy all the buffalo I can afford.’ I doubt he knows how much they cost. Not like cows! He’ll be home soon as they pump that old lagoon out and it starts a sweeten up.”

The air outside was lukewarm, the sky as unmarked with weather trouble as a sheet of blue paper. As he drove toward Woolybucket over a road the color of crushed almonds he realized he felt extremely well, free of the press of hog farm site finagling, ready for a day of pleasure. The temperature heated up as he drove. By the time he got to Woolybucket the bank thermometer read 94 degrees. In Woolybucket it seemed everyone felt as he did, for people were jovial and laughing, nearly everyone dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and cowboy boots except for a few tourists in shorts, their legs already red. He did not have a hat and set out to find one in the dozens of kiosks and booths standing along Main Street. The town was transformed. Crews must have worked all night to get the stands and platforms and booths ready. The stage, with a sign wreathed in barbwire nailed across the front, was at the end of the street:

STREET DANCE 8 PM

PANHANDLE PINTOS

with

FRANKIE McWHORTER

Already crowds were moving along the street, clustering around the booths, breathing in the delicious smell of roasting meat and mesquite smoke. The thermometer climbed to 104 degrees, a heat almost as pleasurable in its intensity as a mouthful of cognac.

The barbwire kiosks drew heavy crowds, rashy and sweat-spangled, fanning themselves with rodeo programs and souvenir fans that read
WOOLYBUCKET BARBWIRE FESTIVAL
. The town was packed with collectors of barbwire, crowding the dealer kiosks that offered eighteen-inch strands of antique Crandel’s Twist Link, Miles’ Open Diamond Point and the like. A slight breeze from the northeast came up and someone said, “She’s drawin moisture,” pointing to the west, where Bob saw a dryline of thunderheads. The lawn around the courthouse seemed intensely tan.

Beyond the barbwire booths stood the sign booth, which featured designs and trinkets made of rusted wire. Bob, sweating heavily, bought a windmill for himself, and for Uncle Tam a barbwire owl as a curiosity. Behind the counter a rough-skinned man with narrow and slanting blue eyes under bushy brows, in jeans and a leather vest, armpit hair shooting out in pale bunches, told Bob he could make any name or design he wanted, even obscenities and rudeness, and send it in two weeks. Bob ordered a sign for LaVon’s kitchen that would spell out
VIVE LA FRANCE
! He ordered another for the Shattles:
WE
CLEAN AIR
.

He passed a heap of hide rugs and a display of huge curved longhorns ready for mounting on a Cadillac hood or the living room wall. There were booths for candy floss, snake cakes, bratwurst, Australian rain slickers and kitchen gadgets, pony-hide briefcases, bolo ties, leather and wool chaps. One boot shop carried hats and boots and Bob tried on summer straws until he settled on a Resistol polyhemp with a hand-rolled brim, a Calgary crease and a black cord band. In the mirror he looked like a real Texan.

He continued his wander down the street in the shade of the hat, wondering why he had not bought one before now, passed bad cowboy art featuring lurid sunsets and rearing horses. People kept looking at the sky which had begun to cloud over. The bank thermometer had inched up to 107 degrees. The kitchen-gadget barkers shouted and waved multibladed implements. A few customers stood around the weather station and tornado warning systems booth.

“Keep that thing turned on,” said Hen Page to the salesman, gesturing at the sky. Beyond it was the bison burger barbecue grill manned by Cy Frease, with Coolbroth Fronk putting the meat and fixings in buns and making change. Bob bought two with onions and salsa, ate them as he strolled.

He came to a gap in the booths, and in this open space sat Rope Butt in a saddle resting on an oversize sawhorse. From this perch he recited cowboy poetry on request for $2.50 a poem. Bob purchased a long comic recitation of Rope’s own composition, “How to Make a Bridle,” at a cost of five dollars, for it was, said Rope Butt, twice the length of a regular poem and had some bawdy lines for which there was usually an extra charge. When the recitation began to draw a small crowd Rope waved them away, declaring it was a private performance for a paying customer.

After the poem Bob paused to watch two arm wrestlers, both dripping sweat, the champion a huge cowhand from Goodwell, Oklahoma, who had so far defeated all challengers. Their fleshy arms made sucking sounds where their skins touched. There was a burst of applause from the stage as Buckskin Bill, chairman of the Barbwire Queen judges, announced the winner—Moxie Slauter, the oldest girl of Advance Slauter, a peaches-and-cream beauty with humidity-straggled maroon hair. Bob noted that she had double dimples and deserved to win.

At 11:45, in the liquid heat, he walked out to the rodeo arena at the north end of the main street, a place of steel and wood corrals he had seen fifty times deserted and forlorn, the air pale yellow with suspended dust. Now the place thrummed with diesel pickups and stock trucks, early comers already filling the spectator bleachers, horses and bulls and calves in the stock pens. The thunderheads loomed, the darkling plain flat beneath its indigo bulk. The entranceway flew a banner announcing the 68th Woolybucket Ranch Rodeo. Barkers hawked cotton candy and cold drinks. He bought a ticket and went to the stands, picking out an aisle seat. The front row was taken up by eight assorted men, whom Bob guessed to be the monks from the Triple Cross, for they were dressed in chinos and short-sleeved shirts while the lay Woolybucket audience wore jeans and cowboy boots. Tourists wore shorts and T-shirts. The smell of food was everywhere. A turkey leg vendor roamed the aisles selling the hot meat, followed by the taco man, the barbecue rib man and the popcorn lady, then the stringy youth with a pierced cardboard tray holding towering cones of cotton candy, to Bob’s mind the second vilest confection on the planet, first place going to the candy apple. In the crowd Bob thought he saw the nurse with the flapper hair and dimpled cheeks, but when she turned he saw it was another woman. Perhaps he could see the nurse again when he met with the Chines at the hospital. Behind him someone said, “Fixin a have us a storm.”

The inner wall of the arena and the fronts of the chutes were plastered with advertisements for local businesses. Many of the contestants were riding their shy ranch horses up and down in the arena to get them used to the crowd and the space. Brother Mesquite was with them, on his paint horse, Tic-Tac, a name the abbot had protested as unspiritual, but Brother Mesquite had grown up with horses named Tic-Tac and planned never to let the name fade.

Bob had been to many rodeos, but never a ranch rodeo. He knew some events were different. His program told him that the competitors were restricted to cowboys who worked local ranches, no professionals allowed. Three of the traditional events had been dropped—bull riding, which Bob regretted, and barrel racing, cause for rejoicing. The unfamiliar events were four-man penning, oldtimer’s bronc riding, double mugging, a feed sack race, a cutting horse contest and, as the last event, wild cow milking.

At noon on the dot the rodeo commenced, and Bob, surrounded by turkey leg munchers and squalling babies, stood with the rest of the crowd and took off his hat to the words of “The Cowboy’s Prayer” intoned by Rope Butt. The line of thunderheads flickered with lightning but seemed no closer. The northeast breeze freshened and people sighed with pleasure. As the crowd sat down the Grand Parade began, composed of scout troops and the children of local business owners in gaudy costumes and waving advertising flags on horses groomed to spectacular showiness, their polished hooves gleaming, brushed haunches a-shine, manes plaited in intricate designs that would excite envy in an Afro-American beauty shop. The announcer, up in his high booth, was Warnell Pue, an Old Dog regular, and he was drunk, cracking jokes about the clowns (clothed in women’s dresses chopped short at midthigh), mixing up names and even events. The contestants clustered with others from their ranches, stood leaning on the arena rails, alternately watching the action and the sky.

“Start with bronc ridin, ride as ride can, reglar saddle, first man out is Dalton Booklung of the Dirty Socks outfit over in Clayton, New Mexico, come all this way for the event. What? What?” He leaned down to someone shouting at him from the ground.

“O.K., little mistake there, not Dalton Booklung but his brother Raine Booklung, still the Dirty Socks, Raine Booklung ridin Cap’n Crunch. This here is a mean bronc. He has put a man in the hospital already this year—he’s in rooms 101 and 102.”

Bob recognized Raine Booklung as the shirtless man from the barbwire sign booth. His long hair hung to the middle of his back. His wet arms gleamed. He stood on a rail of the chute pen while his brother and friends held a weasel-headed horse, suddenly dropped into the saddle like a sack of cement, the gate flew open, the horse twisted and reared, put his head down and his heels high and threw Raine Booklung into the dirt.