That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx

      “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).

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