That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx
side and out of it tumbled people and beds and china; tiny figures struggled in the water. An iceberg shaped like a bundle of chef’s knives threatened to stab the ship again. Tears came to Bob’s pale eyes. He had heard his uncle say many times that the tie was his dearest possession. The other package felt like a book. Bromo always had given him books, great books, for he had an uncanny sense of what Bob would like. Inside was a slender paperback, Expedition to the Southwest, An 1845 Reconnaissance of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma by Lieutenant James William Abert. There was a note from Bromo:
Dear Bob.
I thought the adventures of Lt. Abert might interest you as he was the first to systematically explore the region you are now in and at approximately your age. I hope you will take as much interest in what you see as he did. The broadly engaged mind is the source of a happy life. Good luck.
P.S. Keep away from Oklahoma.
He went down the street for supper, ate two scorched corn dogs and aged coleslaw at the Bandwagon diner and then called home collect from a pay phone.
“Hi, Uncle Tam, it’s me.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Haven’t heard from you in twenty-four hours. How do you like it down there?”
“I’m not there yet. I got mixed up on some back roads. I’m in Oklahoma. It got too late to keep going. Anyway, I want to look over the country in daylight. Thought I’d call up and tell you I’m really happy about the tie. I know it meant a lot to you.”
“Well, seemed right you should have something from your mother. I was going to give it to you when you graduated from Horace Greeley, but something told me to wait. What did Wayne send you?”
“A book by some guy named Abert. A lieutenant. I think he went through this country a hundred years ago. Looks pretty interesting. Bromo wrote I should stay out of Oklahoma but that’s where I am. What’s new with you?”
“Not much the time you been gone. I cut my thumb opening mail – a paper cut. Hurt like hell. And my feet are pretty bad today. I’m thinking of going to the doctor. And I entered the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes contest. First prize is two million dollars.”
“How’s the vegetarian program going?”
“Good. I got me some tofu and vegetables and fruit, about a ton of dried beans. Mrs. Mendoza down the block showed me how to cook them Mexican-style. Gave me some dried epazote. She told me where to get good chorizo but I left that out – not a vegetable. I feel a little better already – except my feet. And your old friend stopped by.”
“What old friend?”
“The big jailbird. Orlando.”
“Orlando’s out?”
“Well, he must be if he came by. I don’t know if he escaped or got released and I didn’t care to ask. Didn’t recognize him at first. You can tell he’s been working out. Wanted to know how to get hold of you. Said I didn’t know.”
“I’ll send you an address soon as I find a place to stay and get a mailbox. If Orlando comes by again get a phone number or something. I’ll call you again in a couple of days.”
“I hope you’re not going to take up with him again. He’s an ex-con now. Or worse, a prison escapee.”
There was a television set in the room but he read a few pages from Lieutenant James William Abert’s Expedition, learning, before sleep descended, that the lieutenant was the son of Colonel John James Abert, who headed the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, the agency charged with exploring and mapping the west. At West Point the son collected an astonishing number of demerits and stood near the bottom of his class in all but drawing, where he ranked first. His fellow West Pointers included Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry W. Halleck and others who became Civil War luminaries. Bob Dollar’s heart went out to Lieutenant Abert, surrounded by military bullies, sissy drawing his only skill. The lieutenant was Bob Dollar’s age when he and his friend and second-in-command, the mathematically inclined Lieutenant William Guy Peck, and a small company were ordered by the idiosyncratic and haughty John Charles Frémont to separate from the larger expedition and form the “South Expedition” to explore the territory of the Comanche, and chart the course of the Canadian River while Frémont himself pushed on to sunny California. Bob found the journal interesting, for Abert had an inquiring eye, a good nature, and he was early in the country.
The bed was heaped with puffy quilts and featherbeds, so infernally hot that he ended by kicking them all on the floor and directing the fan’s stream of air at the bed. When he woke at dawn the sheets were twisted into frightful points and kinked spirals like aging telephone cords. He showered, pulled on his jeans and T-shirt. He couldn’t get away from the place fast enough. The white van was gone.
In every installment of life’s book, Bob Dollar knew, even when he was fourteen, there was a fat boy; someone’s brother or school pal, the son of a deli owner, a youth aiming his life at building a low-rider, a discontent slagged out on some sofa with a can of Yoo-Hoo in hand, the one member of the gang the police catch, the fountain of knowledge at the porno video shop, the champion pizza maker at Benny’s Underground Pie Parlor. He encountered his fat boy in Walgreens while waiting in line for one of his uncle’s pain prescriptions. In front of him stood a suety person of sixteen, his round head bound in a black cloth imprinted with skulls and crossbones, his chin decorated with seventy or eighty pale blond whiskers and an assortment of pimples. He was wearing overalls with enormous legs – each large enough to contain a burly man – standing sidewise in line and addressing a pregnant woman waiting on a plastic chair. His sweatshirt sleeves were so long he had torn little holes at the cuff seams and from these holes his thumbs protruded, the cuffs themselves like fingerless mitts over his warty hands. He was not like other fat boys. He was not jolly, he did not smile appeasingly his eyes were not naïve and innocent. Bob Dollar knew instinctively that this was an evil fat boy. At once he took an ardent liking to him. He liked the fat boy because he was unlikable.
The fat boy spoke to the woman on the chair. “They had me in a wrestle hold in Kansas City. It was one of the most dangerous holds. They almost killed me. I don’t know how I escaped, but I’m standing here, ain’t I, waiting in line like anybody else? And that was last year. They couldn’t do it now, because I’d kill them. I’d break their backs. And one of them was my best friend. But he is not my best friend now. He’s my ex-best friend. We did some things together. One time when we were little we borrowed his mother’s crème brûlée torch and melted the gumball machine, and the gumballs all came out on the floor, and they were rolling around and we picked them up and man, they were hot. Worse than hot, they were boiling, they stuck to our hands and burned them. See, I got gumball scars right here.” He held out his palm for inspection, displaying puckered circles.
“That was my ex-best friend Mark who built a rocket launcher when he was thirteen. He was into wrecking things, me too, and that’s probably why we were best friends. His aunt had all these old vinyl records, weird jazz stuff, and we threw them in the air and then bashed them with baseball bats. Mark had three baseball bats but he never played baseball, just bashed things. If I saw him now I would bash him. But he’s safe, he’s safe because he’s in Kansas City and I’m here. And he plays the guitar but he’s not very good. He doesn’t want to be good. He wants to be loud. And he’s got like these weird metal gloves that his grandfather gave him. His grandfather went to England to see the Tower of London and he brought back these metal gloves and Mark put them on and got his hand stuck in one. They had to take him to the emergency room in Kansas City and he was on television getting it taken off. The reason his grandfather gave him the gloves was to keep him from playing the guitar. That was the deal, ‘I give you these English metal gloves and you not play that fucking guitar.’ Excuse me, miss, that was Mark’s grandfather talking,