That Old Ace in the Hole

Bob Dollar put the pills in his jacket pocket. “O.K.,” he said, “what’s the movie?”

“Rat Women. It’s great. It’s like this weird black-and-white flick, all grainy. It’ll scare the shit out of you. It’s an old horror movie from the sixties. That’s all the Cliff Edge shows is horror and kinky stuff. Hey, don’t we get off here? To change buses?”

Up Colfax they went, sliding past the Satire Lounge, PS Greek Pizza, past John Elway’s Parts and Tammy’s Nails, Air Afrik, Dragon Express and The Bomb. There was a fistfight going on in front of the Space-Age Atomic Washeteria, and Bob told Orlando that Uncle Tam’s budgie had come from Jersey John’s Pet Shop and that they had a charge account at the Mad Dog and Pilgrim bookstore where Bob was allowed to charge two books a month. (Bob had gone often to the branch library until Uncle Tam forbade him, for he had trouble returning the books on time and the library fines mounted up.) Orlando did not seem impressed. Finally they were past Food 99 and the Brigadier Army Surplus and there was Uncle Tam’s shop, Used but Not Abused, and Bob felt a rush of embarrassment that it all looked so shabby and poor.

Uncle Tam was lying on the ratty sofa, drinking beer and watching television. He took the brown plastic container and shook out two large capsules, swallowed them with a mouthful of beer.

“So, you want to go to a movie?” he said. “Is it a good one? Maybe I’d come with you if my back wasn’t killing me.”

“You might not like it, sir,” said Orlando. “It’s an old horror film. Rat Women.”

“Well, no, that’s not my cup of tea. So I guess I’m not sorry.” (He had watched Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle thirty-seven times for the sake of the scene in the plastic factory, the red hose emerging with swollen bladders or pinching down into a string of shining plastic sausages.) He dug a dollar bill out of his pocket.

“Here, Bob, some money for popcorn. And a paper. Bring me a Post when you come back.”

Deducting fifty cents for the paper left fifty cents for popcorn and there was, Bob knew, no popcorn on earth for such a minuscule sum. But outside, Orlando, who had been watching, said, “I’ll treat. I asked you. Anyways, I can get all the money I want. My dad drinks and when he comes home soused after he’s asleep I get in his wallet and take a twenty or whatever and I got a kind of job thing.” (Later Bob learned that Orlando’s job thing was begging tourists for money on the Sixteenth Street Mall, a skill he had learned from a ragged man who lived comfortably in an expensive LoDo loft and who only plied the begging trade in evil weather, for it was then that pity moved passersby to dig deep. The best times were stormy afternoons before Christmas.)

The Cliff Edge was awful and the movie was awful and Bob Dollar enjoyed them both. In addition to the tickets, Orlando bought popcorn and quart containers of no-brand cola. The “theatre” was a converted storeroom behind the liquor store, the ramped floor made of bare, cheap plywood that boomed with each footstep. The wooden seats were not upholstered. The place smelled of urine and scorched vegetable oil. There were only fourteen people in the audience.

The 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.

5 NO ROOM IN COWBOY ROSE (#ulink_b11409c9-7183-5749-9794-879e0ef08048)

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? Who told you that?” She sounded extremely annoyed.

“Ah. The waiter at the café. A heavyset man …”

“Big Head Haley. That fool. So dumb that just tyin his shoelaces gives him the headache. I can’t even have myself a facial without somebody poundin on the door and wantin a rent the room. He don’t know nothin about nothin and he don’t know I stopped rentin that room a year ago. If people come to Cowboy Rose they can stay with kin or bring a tent. I had trouble with a woman stayed in that room and I swore I’d never rent it out again. Come here from Minnesota and her ways was not our ways. Stay up late at night, sleep until noon and then want orange juice. She must a thought she was in Florida. I asked her to take her shoes off when she come in – I got white carpet on the stairs – but she never did and like to ruined the carpet.”

“Mrs. Schwarm, I swear I’d take my shoes off You would have no problem – ”

“No. I’m not havin no problem because I’m not fixin to rent it out. It don’t even have a bed in it now. My husband uses it for a hobby room. He makes wood ducks.” And she closed the door.

He drove north to Perryton near the Oklahoma border, decorated with blowing food wrappers and old election signs. The traffic lights swung in the wind. Every vehicle was a pickup, his the only sedan, and heads turned to stare at his Colorado plates as he drove along the main street. All the motels were booked full. On the outskirts of town he found a sad, two-story building, the Hoss Barn. A large banner hung over the door reading HOSS BARN WELCOMES MARBLE FALLS BAPTISTS.

“Are you with the church group?” asked the clerk, a young man with a skewed face and scarred nose. Bob Dollar guessed him to be an ex-convict.

“No, I’m traveling on business.”

“It’ll cost you the full rate, then – seventeen a night.”

“That’s O.K.” In Oklahoma he had paid thirty-seven.

The Hoss Barn sported a thin, filthy carpet on concrete stairs. Dixie cups and peanut wrappers lay in corridor corners. His room was small and shabby, with a powerful smell of perfumed disinfectant; a painted concrete floor, the television set chained to the wall, only one working lightbulb, several Bibles, including one in the roachy bathroom. Over the bed hung an enlarged photograph of Palo Duro Canyon. He could hear singing and cries of “Hallelujah!” coming from the room next door and, when he went out in the corridor on his way to find a restaurant for dinner, noticed a hand-lettered sign, PRAYER MEETING 5 P.M., stuck to the cinder-block wall with reused duct tape.

Every restaurant in town was packed full, people standing in long lines outside the doors except for the Mexicali Rose, which had only a small knot of hungry would-be diners. He waited with them and in time was shown to a tiny table next to the kitchen doors, which swung open furiously every half minute. The restaurant was crowded with Baptists and their children, who either sat passively without moving under the parents’ stern eyes or raced wildly up and down dodging waitresses. He ordered enchiladas and studied the crowd. There was a booth next to his table where two very quiet children sat with their hands folded. The father and mother conversed in near-whispers, shooting narrow-eyed glances at the rowdy kids running and jumping. Bob heard the father say that if he had them in his care for five minutes he would learn them what-for, he would dust their seat covers, they would get a rump-whacking to last them a lifetime. The family’s food arrived, cheeseburgers and fries for each, iced tea for the parents, enormous glasses of milk for the children.

The same waitress, wearing asbestos gloves, brought Bob a metal platter, the entire surface a lake of boiling yellow cheese. He put his fork to it and a gout of steam shot up. He expected to see the fork tines droop. Before the molten lava cooled enough for him to eat, the waitress brought the family in the booth a special dessert, ice-cream sundaes with five sauces and masses of ersatz whipped cream. Instead of a cherry there was a tiny cross atop each. The wan children could only eat a little of these concoctions.

“Give them here, then,” said the mother, digging in her spoon. “We paid for them.”

Very suddenly he thought of Fever, Orlando’s girlfriend, of how the Baptists would shrink from her if she strode in now in her unlaced Doc Martens.

Orlando had called one day and told Bob to meet him at Arapaho and Sixteenth.

“There’s like a place where everybody hangs out. At night people in wheelchairs race there. In the daytime it’s a hangout. A lot of cool kids show. Fever’s going to be there.”

“Who’s Fever?”

“My girlfriend. Sort of my girlfriend,” said Orlando, stunning Bob, for the fat boy had struck him as a loner, a singular youth who would grow up to have the classic berserk fit, shooting diners in some fast-food emporium or taking a tax collector hostage.