Annie Proulx - That Old Ace in the Hole

Ad Slauter, in contrast, lived in a dwelling constructed around an old bunkhouse dating back to the 1890s, part of a massive ranch that had belonged to a disappointed Scottish consortium. He had added slapdash additions and wings to accommodate his large family of ten girls. He was an advocate of arcane home remedies. When five-year-old Mazie, playing hide-and-seek, chose a bull nettle patch in which to hide and emerged shrieking and clutching at her calves, he urinated on the burning welts, telling her it would take the sting out, until his wife came at him with a broom. Turpentine and cold coffee was, he said, good for a fever, and drunks could be made sober if they ate sweet potatoes.

The Slauter ranch was shabby and run-down, with sagging fences and potholed roads. He ranched as his father had, letting his mixed-breed cows, mostly picked up at the cattle auctions in Beaver, Oklahoma, take care of their own sex lives. Cows preferred to nurse their calves for six or seven months, not become pregnant as rapidly as possible, and Slauter thought they knew what they were doing. They wandered where they would and were half-wild by the time of fall roundup. He bought small, young bulls every five or six years for a few hundred dollars. Only fifty-five percent of his cows produced a calf each year. Because they ate only pasture grass supplemented by baled hay in winter, they took a long time to put on enough weight for market, twenty-eight to thirty months. Curiously enough the two men’s ledgers balanced out at almost the same figures, for Keister’s operation was costly and his heifer mortality rate high as the champion bull semen made painfully large calves.

Hugh Dough dreaded to see either of the combatants pull up in front of the courthouse, but especially disliked Francis Scott Keister, whom he regarded as a rigid straight arrow who made too much of things that didn’t concern him.

The sheriff’s office had five dispatchers. They were all big, placid, middle-aged women, and not one of them understood how to separate the inconsequential from the urgent. Myrna Greiner did not hesitate to call at three A.M.

“Sheriff, I thought you ought a know we got a report that a black panther is tryin to break into Minnie Dubbs’s kitchen. She can hear it a-growlin and a-scratchin at the door.”

“How does she know it’s a black panther? Did she see it?”

“She says she can tell by the noise it’s makin. Plus she looked out that little side window in her pantry and she could see it in the moonlight standin up on its hind legs and scratchin away.”

“Call her back and tell her that if it’s still on the prod at daylight I’ll come out there and arrest it. Tell her to put some cotton in her ears and go to sleep. Tell her to take a bath first. My granny used to say that if you don’t take a bath the panthers will get you in the night.”

But to the dispatchers all calls were of equal weight, for if you read the papers it was as logical to believe that a panther would slink out of New Mexico and make its way to Minnie Dubbs’s house in Woolybucket as it was to fear that the creaking noise down below was an escaped convict bent on robbery, car theft and murder. Just such a terrifying fate had overwhelmed deaf old Mr. Gridiron, a retired rancher kidnapped from his bed in 1973, driven away in his own truck and murdered beside the road across the Oklahoma line.

The sheriff’s great victory against Tully Nelson, his onetime political opponent, had occurred a few years earlier at 8:30 on a moonless June night as he was cruising the back roads. A call for backup help came from Texas Fish and Game.

“Sheriff Hugh, we got a tip-off that a gang of poachers is working the Stink Creek area tonight. Can you meet us there ten o’clock?”

He was a mile from the bridge when the call came, pulled over and doused his lights, glassed the fields with his powerful night binoculars and immediately picked up parking lights at the side of the road near the bridge. He counted four lights – two vehicles. He turned around, circled south, east, north and west on farm roads, making a four-mile loop in order to come up behind the vehicles, drove the last half mile slowly with his lights out (for he had good night vision and knew every inch of this road), stopped a quarter mile from the bridge and crept up to the parked vehicles on foot. Just off the road at the bridge stood two empty sheriff’s cruisers, parking lights on. On the doors he saw a star and the words SLICKFORK COUNTY SHERIFF. The trunk of one vehicle gaped wide.

“Well, I’ll be a Methodist,” he murmured. It was the break he’d been waiting for. The Slickfork Sheriff’s Department Annual Barbecue and Volleyball Tournament was coming up, and here, he thought, they were, fixing to get the main entrée by foul means. Out in the field he could hear grunts and panting and cursing and adjurations to keep it down, he could see the dancing flicker of a small flashlight. He used his cell phone to call the dispatcher (Janice Mango) and whispered that she should get Fish and Game out to the Stink Creek bridge immediately, call the newspapers in Amarillo, get three deputies out there with shotguns – the miscreants he was about to arrest were heavily armed. He had a newsworthy collar about to go down.

As the hunters approached the gap in the barbwire (their fence cutters had been at work) he turned on his own light, a marine searchlight that lit up what seemed to be the entire panhandle in a blast of 200,000 candlepower – Tully Nelson and his four deputies, dragging and lugging two dead deer and one Rocking Y steer, put their hands over their pained eyes.

“O.K., you’re under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind your backs. I know who you are and you’re already reported so don’t try no goddamn fool stuff” He saw with disgust that Tully was in uniform. He used their own handcuffs on them, collected weapons and tossed them into the open trunk.

“Come on, Hugh, let’s talk about this.” The speaker was Deputy Waldemar, a heavily muscled workout freak with a Hollywood profile and capped teeth.

“Nothin a say. Might as well sit down, boys. You goddamn arrogant idiots are caught red-handed fixin to pull the dumbest trick I seen in many years. I suppose this was for your goddamn barbecue?”

“Come on, Hugh. It’s for the public good. Everbody comes to that barbecue,” pleaded Harry Howdiboy, Sheriff Dough’s idea of a garden slug reincarnated as a human. Well, he’d sprinkle salt on him.

“It was not for the public good. It was for personal gain and advantage and it is illegal sideways, up and down and through the middle. What you done is mortally wrong and it will stay done until the trumpet blows. Advise you to set and keep still. I’m in a stinkin bad mood and the least little move or talk might make me think you are resistin arrest and tryin to escape. Time I got done with you they mightn’t recognize anything except the frickin handcuffs.”

In December of that year he received the Texas Peace Prize awarded annually at the Hotel Stockholm in Dallas. On the flight from Amarillo to Dallas he had had a window seat and spent the time counting the rivets in the wing. In addition to the rivets there were five small L-shapes as though someone had traced the corner of a toolbox with white paint. Then he noticed many droplets of white on the wing – clusters as though someone had struck a loaded paintbrush a smart slap. There were too many to count. During the ceremony he had counted the fringed threads on the cloth covering the award table. The large photograph of himself holding the trophy and the fifty-dollar prize check hung in his office next to the portrait of his grandmother in her Roman gladiator headgear.

Bob stayed three days in the Hoss Barn reading the local classifieds, returning to the Mexicali Rose to eat chicken-fried steak (the never-changing special), asking waitresses and store clerks about places to rent, driving around reading bumper stickers: