That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx

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,