That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx
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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.