That Old Ace in the Hole

“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.