That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx

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