Read Online That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Annie Proulx
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Dollar had slept deeply that night, sated by low entertainment and drugged by the two stolen pills.
Now in Boise City, which the woman with crimped hair told him had been accidentally bombed by the U.S. Air Force during World War II, he fell asleep with the television set blabbering, awakened a little after midnight by a raucous alarm and red flashes on the television screen warning residents of May and Rosston and Slapout to seek shelter as a spotter had reported a funnel cloud moving northeast from Darouzett, just over the Texas line. The screen flashed a map and he saw the tornado was seventy miles east of him and moving away, went back to uneasy sleep, wondering if in this job he would be reaped in the whirlwind.
5
NO ROOM IN COWBOY ROSE
T he next morning was fiercely windy and as he crossed into Texas passing some purple beehives and a sign that read SEE THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG , 3 MI WEST , the wind increased, banged at the car with irregular bursts and slams. Tumbleweeds, worn small by a winter’s thrashing, rolled across the road in the hundreds. Sheets of plastic, food wrappers, sacks, papers, boxes, rags flew, catching on barbwire fences where they flapped until a fresh gust tore them loose. The landscape churned with detritus. A big tumbleweed hit the Saturn’s windshield stem first and with force. A crack arched across the glass. In the distance ahead he saw a hazy brown cloud and guessed something was on fire. But the smell and an immediate choking sensation in his throat as he drove past an enormous feedlot, the cows obscured by the manure dust that loaded the wind and was clearly the source of the cloud, introduced him to the infamous brown days of the Texas panhandle, wind-borne dust he later heard called “Oklahoma rain.” He passed a tannery and a meatpacking plant, saw the faces of Chicano men in the windows of old trucks. A large metal sign, pulsing in and out as though breathing, read BULL WASH OUT . The sky was dead grey, a match for the withered grass around the railroad tracks where a chemical spill years before had killed off all the soil organisms.
He turned east, snorting and blowing his nose. At least hogs, he thought, were kept in a building (for, still innocent of direct experience with hog production, he had looked through the glossy Global Pork Rind annual report and admired the clean, low-slung hog bunkers). He passed several playa lakes crowded with thousands of ducks and geese struggling in the white-capped waves, and these bodies of water seemed incongruous under the throstling brown wind. But mostly he passed flat fields with V-8 engines pumping water, pump jacks pulling up oil, and, in the pastures, windmills lifting water into stock tanks, each tank surrounded by a circle of dirt from which radiated dozens of narrow cow paths.
By bright midmorning he was in the clear on Highway 15, looking for a town to establish his base of operations. The wind was dying down. Somewhere between Stratford and Miami he turned off Route 15 onto a narrower road, past a fence hung with dead coyotes and posted with signs that read TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT SURVIVORS WILL BE PERSECUTED , bumped across a set of railroad tracks and, a dozen miles on, entered Cowboy Rose, once a cattle town, then a ghost town, now slowly reviving, half-restored and idyllic, richly shaded by trees. Silver Spoon Creek ran through it, and through the center of the town, a large square of lawn edged with some drooping trees he associated with cemeteries. There were two cafés, two gas stations, and a cream-painted brick building, the front wall painted in huge red letters: TORNADO & BALL POINT PEN MUSEUM. Across the way he saw a shady park with a grand lawn edged by flower gardens. He noticed a Victorian-style bandstand. There were no grain elevators nor cylinders of anhydrous ammonia, nor giant storage tanks in sight.
He went into the Cactus Spike Café, past a hand-lettered poster that read:
18 CATTLE MISSING,
Now in Boise City, which the woman with crimped hair told him had been accidentally bombed by the U.S. Air Force during World War II, he fell asleep with the television set blabbering, awakened a little after midnight by a raucous alarm and red flashes on the television screen warning residents of May and Rosston and Slapout to seek shelter as a spotter had reported a funnel cloud moving northeast from Darouzett, just over the Texas line. The screen flashed a map and he saw the tornado was seventy miles east of him and moving away, went back to uneasy sleep, wondering if in this job he would be reaped in the whirlwind.
5
NO ROOM IN COWBOY ROSE
T he next morning was fiercely windy and as he crossed into Texas passing some purple beehives and a sign that read SEE THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG , 3 MI WEST , the wind increased, banged at the car with irregular bursts and slams. Tumbleweeds, worn small by a winter’s thrashing, rolled across the road in the hundreds. Sheets of plastic, food wrappers, sacks, papers, boxes, rags flew, catching on barbwire fences where they flapped until a fresh gust tore them loose. The landscape churned with detritus. A big tumbleweed hit the Saturn’s windshield stem first and with force. A crack arched across the glass. In the distance ahead he saw a hazy brown cloud and guessed something was on fire. But the smell and an immediate choking sensation in his throat as he drove past an enormous feedlot, the cows obscured by the manure dust that loaded the wind and was clearly the source of the cloud, introduced him to the infamous brown days of the Texas panhandle, wind-borne dust he later heard called “Oklahoma rain.” He passed a tannery and a meatpacking plant, saw the faces of Chicano men in the windows of old trucks. A large metal sign, pulsing in and out as though breathing, read BULL WASH OUT . The sky was dead grey, a match for the withered grass around the railroad tracks where a chemical spill years before had killed off all the soil organisms.
He turned east, snorting and blowing his nose. At least hogs, he thought, were kept in a building (for, still innocent of direct experience with hog production, he had looked through the glossy Global Pork Rind annual report and admired the clean, low-slung hog bunkers). He passed several playa lakes crowded with thousands of ducks and geese struggling in the white-capped waves, and these bodies of water seemed incongruous under the throstling brown wind. But mostly he passed flat fields with V-8 engines pumping water, pump jacks pulling up oil, and, in the pastures, windmills lifting water into stock tanks, each tank surrounded by a circle of dirt from which radiated dozens of narrow cow paths.
By bright midmorning he was in the clear on Highway 15, looking for a town to establish his base of operations. The wind was dying down. Somewhere between Stratford and Miami he turned off Route 15 onto a narrower road, past a fence hung with dead coyotes and posted with signs that read TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT SURVIVORS WILL BE PERSECUTED , bumped across a set of railroad tracks and, a dozen miles on, entered Cowboy Rose, once a cattle town, then a ghost town, now slowly reviving, half-restored and idyllic, richly shaded by trees. Silver Spoon Creek ran through it, and through the center of the town, a large square of lawn edged with some drooping trees he associated with cemeteries. There were two cafés, two gas stations, and a cream-painted brick building, the front wall painted in huge red letters: TORNADO & BALL POINT PEN MUSEUM. Across the way he saw a shady park with a grand lawn edged by flower gardens. He noticed a Victorian-style bandstand. There were no grain elevators nor cylinders of anhydrous ammonia, nor giant storage tanks in sight.
He went into the Cactus Spike Café, past a hand-lettered poster that read:
18 CATTLE MISSING,
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