That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx
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film began with dozens of rats scurrying along a filthy waterfront street in an unidentified city. There were close-ups of rats eating garbage, rats crouching, groups of rats sleeping together in rat nests, close-ups of rats eating gristle and one lapping at a viscous substance that looked like decayed banana pudding. Then the rats scuttled around a corner and disappeared. The camera followed rather slowly. There were no rats around the corner, but eight or ten blond women leaning against a warehouse wall, voluptuous, heavily lipsticked, dressed in tight long dresses that sparkled with sequins. The women smoked and stared through dark glasses into the night. They wore shoes with sharp-pointed toes and unbelievably high heels. The camera moved closer and closer, gliding over satin haunches, shadowed cleavage, catching the wet shine of eyes and greased lips. It moved slowly down the back of the most buxom blond, her dress cut low enough to hint at the shadowy cleft of buttocks, down over the swelling rump, down the shining fabric tight over the thigh, down the full leg to the lower calf and, for a split second, there it was, hanging just below the satin hem of the dress, a muscular rat’s tail that twitched suddenly like a lewd wink.
“Gross!” said Bob Dollar, but he hadn’t seen anything yet. He hadn’t seen the rat women on the beach in their bikinis, enticing a lifeguard under their striped umbrella where they strangled him with their tails (until then coiled in the bikinis) and devoured him, tossing the bones into the surf He hadn’t seen the nameless city’s chief of police turn into a vampire and try to force the rat women to become his sex slaves. Nor had he yet seen Orlando, who had eaten the popcorn and swallowed the cola, matter-of-factly and noisily piss on the plywood floor without leaving his seat.
At the end of the film Orlando insisted they stay for the trailers of coming attractions, Blood Feast and Scum of the Earth. On the way out he pointed at a lurid poster for The Corpse Grinders (“In Blood-Curdling Color”) and said, “That’s a fucking great film,” and told him about the theatre in Kansas City where he had seen it. As the audience had entered, the ticket taker had handed everyone a barf bag imprinted with THE CORPSE GRINDERS and some people had used theirs.
“I tried to, but I couldn’t make anything come up. I still got the bag. It’s like a collectible now. Maybe your uncle can tell me what it’s worth.” The Kansas City theatre, he said, had had buzzers rigged under the seats. The buzzers went off at the moment the nurse’s mad cat sprang on Dr. Glass and everyone in the audience screamed.
Bob Dollar had slept deeply that night, sated by low entertainment and drugged by the two stolen pills.
Before he left the Badger Hole the woman with crimped hair told him Boise City had been accidentally bombed by the U.S. Air Force during World War II. It was a hot, overcast day. Eating breakfast at a diner downtown he was startled when the television set over the microwave oven emitted a raucous alarm and red flashes 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 Boise City and moving away. Back in the Saturn he drove very slowly, in no hurry to overtake a tornado, and wondered if, in this job, he would be reaped in the whirlwind.
The 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, MIXED HEIFERS. WING ANCHOR BRAND.
NOTIFY SHERIFF H. DOUGH, WOOLYBUCKET COUNTY.
He ordered the special, chicken-fried steak with milk gravy. The waiter/dishwasher, a stout man wearing rubber gloves, brought the gravy-swimming plate and Bob asked casually if he knew of anybody who rented rooms.
“Well, there’s Beryl. Beryl and Harvey Schwarm. They got a room they rent out sometimes. But usually to a lady. I don’t know, they might. They got the yellow house with the big porch on Wild Turkey Street. Worth a try, I guess. You a salesman?”
“No. Just visiting the area – a tourist, I guess. Like the looks of your town. Pretty nice.”
“That’d be Beryl’s sister, Joni, she’s the one got the flower beds going, got them to build the bandstand. Got a band started up. They play every Friday night in the summer. Light classics, they say, but ask me it’s mostly old Frank Sinatra tunes. Nobody around here knows what classic means. There’s more and more people comes to visit. It would be handy to have a motel or a resort hotel here, but don’t look like it will happen tomorrow. Best we’ve got is the Schwarms unless you want to drive over to Dumas or up to Perryton. There’d be motels there.”
“I’ll try the Schwarms. Thanks for the tip.”
“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?