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That Old
Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Annie Got Her Gun In some of Annie Proulx’ earlier writing,
I admit that after reading some sentences full of images, and words that I
understood, I found myself saying, “Huh?” Finally, in her latest novel, That Old
Ace in the Hole, Annie was able to shoot out every sentence and paragraph
without a single “Huh?” from me. Her names for people, places and organizations
caused me to laugh out loud on occasion. For example, Bob Dollar, the
protagonist, searches out hog farm sites for Global Pork Rind. There are
plenty more where those came from. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 7 (pp. 61-67): THE
RURAL COMPENDIUM 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: MY SON IS AN HONOR INMATE AT MCALESTER HONK IF YOU LOVE BRATWURST WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE INJESUS 7-LETTER WORD FOR STINK—HOGFARM He
counted churches: the Primitive Baptist Church, the New Light Baptist Church,
the Sunrise Baptist Church, the Sweet Loam Baptist Church, the First Baptist
Church, the Bible Baptist Church, the Apostolic Faith Church, the Freewill
Baptist Assembly, the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the Fellowship Baptist
Church, the True Christian Church, the Straight Christian Church, the First
Church of God, the People's Church of the Plains, the Gospel of Grace Church,
the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the
Bethlehem Lutheran Missouri Synod Church, the First Assembly of God Church,
the First United Methodist Church, the Church of the Brethren, the
Seventh-DayAdventist Church and, on the very edge of town near some run-down
hovels, the Immaculate Conception Caprock Catholic Church, a tiny building hardly
bigger than the smokehouse from which it was converted. There seemed to be a
church for every five residents. But of apartments and houses there was
nothing for rent. Everyone had a home and was in it. The manager of the Hoss
Barn, Gerald Popcorn, perhaps not an ex-con after all, thought Bob Dollar,
offered him a residency rate of ten dollars a night but told him he would
have to move to a smaller room. A tent seemed a better choice. And outside
the wind never stopped blowing. At
night he read from Lieutenant Abert's Expedition. There was an
illustration of James William Abert at the front, but in it he seemed
middle-aged. It was difficult to guess how he had looked at twenty-five:
thin, a longish, straight nose, limp brown hair. Perhaps even then he was
growing the mustache and beard of the sketch, even then his hair already
receding. Bob imagined his friends called him "Jim," but he thought
of him as Lieutenant Abert. The
account begun with a description of Bent's Fort. Bob Dollar had gone
to Bent's Fort himself on the eighth-grade class trip. He knew the fort was a
reconstruction and the guides, blacksmiths and mountain men lounging around
were only actors, but the feeling was remarkably real that he was on the
border of Mexico marked by the Arkansas River in the mid-nineteenth century,
the world of traders and trappers and Cheyenne Indians, of Mexicans and
Texians, of buffalo hides and French voyageurs. Now, looking at Lieutenant
Abert's watercolor of the fort, done from the far side of the Arkansas and
showing an overly large flag flying from the fort and, in the foreground, a
conical tent, perhaps a teepee, with two white men standing near, one wearing
a striped shirt and, his arms folded, the other in buckskin pants and with a
rifle over his left shoulder, he felt he was there again. The fort looked the
same as it had on the eighth-grade trip. During the class visit Bob had been
pleased to see screaming peacocks strutting along the fort's parapet and
wandering through the courtyard. Now he read that in Lieutenant Abert's day
there had been numerous cages at the fort containing birds of the region—the
magpie, the mockingbird, the bald eagle. The parapet of the outer wall was
planted to bristling cacti, which, when Abert saw them in the summer of 1845,
were in waxy red-and-cream-colored bloom. He
delighted, with the lieutenant, in the groups of Cheyenne who came to the
fort and did a scalp dance and posed for him while he painted their
portraits. He enjoyed the lieutenant's detailed description of Cheyenne
hairdressing, the men's hair long enough to trail on the ground but their
eyebrows and beards plucked out with tweezers. He thought the lieutenant's
attraction to the women's center partings and neat braids that hung to their
waists a little more than that of a disinterested observer. Clearly he
fancied them and Bob wondered if he had slept with any of them. He supposed
so. And when the lieutenant went with "Mr. Charbonard" to visit Old
Bark, an important Cheyenne (with a beautiful daughter), Bob thrilled at the
contact with the Lewis and dark expedition of 1804, for "Mr.
Charbonard" was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacajawea and
Toussaint Charbonneau, the baby whom Sacajawea had carried on her back all
the way to the Great Water of the West. What the lieutenant had written in
1845 Bob held in his hand, feeling the long-dead voice speaking to him. At
the end of the week, sitting in the Mexicali Rose over a cup of weak coffee,
the cook stuck his head out of the square hole where the chicken-fried platters
appeared. "Hey,
Bob Dollar, want your eggs bright-eyed or dirty on both sides? And are you
still lookin for a place to rent?" "Dirty.
And I sure am." "Well,
I heard it there's a lady down in Woolybucket got somethin. If you don't mind
stayin down there. Pretty dead town. I got the number for you." He
thrust a torn edgp of newspaper through the hole. "And if you got smarts
you'd take somethin to eat. There's no place to eat in Woolybucket. There was
a place about fifteen years ago, run by a old lady, well, I say old lady, but
you couldn't tell if she was a woman or a man." "Thanks.
And I guess I'll get an order of fried chicken to go." He
looked on his map. Woolybucket was the next town past Cowboy Rose, down Route
444, which ran from Tyrone, Oklahoma, to Pampa, Texas. It was on the north
side of the Canadian River. He called the number and a woman's thin yet rough
voice told him that the place was an old log bunkhouse on the Busted Star
Ranch, without electricity or running water, but sound and sturdy and only
fifty dollars a month. No drinkers, no smokers, no women, no drugs. He said
he would like to look at it, thinking that maybe it was the break he had been
waiting for. The
wind had died down, leaving an emptied, medium-blue sky. On the outskirts of
Woolybucket a sign proclaimed THIS IS THE BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD. A smaller,
almost completely faded sign beyond it was illegible except for the sinister
words ". . . out of town before sunset." Woolybucket was the seat
ofWoolybucket County. Seven gravel and caliche roads, formed in the 1890s by
cattle driven from outlying ranches to the railhead, converged from every
compass point. No traffic light on earth could order the complex nine-way
intersection which operated first come, first served. The railroad bisected
the main street. There was a white water tower on which some wag had painted
the legend H20. Beyond it were five or six grain elevators with a
dozen pickups parked in front. Bob guessed that was the major hangout place
for farmers. The
center ofWoolybucket featured a small tan lawn like a grass tutu around a tan
brick courthouse, a tan sidewalk leading up to a portico where a sign with an
arrow directed visitors to the sheriff's office. Along the street opposite
the courthouse he saw the traditional lineup of small-town businesses, a card
and gift shop, an empty storefront, the Old Dog Cafe, a law office with a
sign reading F. B. WEICKS ATTY in flaking gold letters, the Lone Star pool
hall, Bludgett's Pharmacy, the Speedwell Market, the Woolybucket Bank and the
glass-fronted newspaper office, The Banner, which he soon
learned the less sanguine locals called The Bummer. Through its
plate-glass windows the Old Dog looked to be crowded with men wearing cowboy
hats, and the street itself, especially in front of Clip's News & Video
where young men and teenaged girls leaned against the walls of stores,
against the municipal trash barrel, the posts supporting the arcade roof,
draped themselves across the fenders of pickups. The town seemed vital and
full of life. The
newer shops that proclaimed Woolybucket a community of modernity flanked the
courthouse on the side streets. Here was an Episcopal church shaped like a
wedge of cake, the Motel Caribe with a bathtub-size pool in the center of the
parking lot, a Thai-Mexican restaurant, Woolybucket Cellular and a fitness
center named Gym Bob's. He bought six doughnuts at Cousin Dougie's Donut
Shop. A placard in the window announced YES WE HAVE LATE, which he took to be
the regional spelling of'latte." The
post office was two streets back, a false-front building shaded by a small
cottonwood tree. On slat-backed benches sat four elderly men, leathery,
wrinkled, skinny-necked and thin, all with their right legs crossed over the
left. Their pants legs rode high exposing four white shanks in oblique
alignment. They all smoked cigarettes showing the same length of ash, they
turned their heads in unison to watch the traffic pass. Bob Dollar was
pleased to see so many oldsters and imagined them all to be proprietors of
big spreads. Another
elderly man standing outside the post office, wearing chinks, cowboy hat and
tooled leather cuffs, gave him directions to the Busted Star, said it was
owned by LaVon Grace Fronk, told him to stay on the asphalt because they'd
just bush-hogged the damn roadsides, now bristling with brush stobs sharp as
punji sticks. He mounted a grey horse, saluted Bob Dollar and rode off. The
horse limped. "Come on in," yodeled the woman, beckoning him into
the gloom of the house. Her voice was grainy and oleaginous at the same time,
like coarse-ground peanut butter. "Will you all take a glass of water or
some Pepsi?" LaVon Fronk, small and thin as a fifth-grader, was a
middle-aged ranch widow who resembled one of the minor Roman emperors with
her intense, nervous face, small mouth barely wider than her nose, the eyes
close-set under a ledgey brow, marbled hair of faded red and white. "I'd
love some water," he said, his throat parched with dust. She made a
little production of getting the glass, rinsing it, putting in ice cubes,
taking a pitcher of iced water from the refrigerator, slicing a lemon and
perching it on the rim of the glass. The house seemed very hot to him. "There!
There's nothing like cold water, is there? I was a Harshberger from
Miami"—she pronounced it "Miama"—"Miami, Texas, of
course. Not the Florida place. I married Jase Fronk in 1951 and he died—well,
that's enough of that." "Woolybucket
is kind of a strange name," said Bob. "Is it called after
somebody?" "Named
after the woolybucket tree. I guess there used a be a lot a them grew here.
Birds like a woolybucket. The leaves in the spring, why they are all fuzzy
underneath before they roll out—that's the wooly buckets. And Cowboy Rose is
named after a flar. The wine cup. That's the other name for the cowboy rose. You
couldn't have a town called 'Wine Cup.' Not in teetotal Woolybucket
County." While
he drank his water Bob noticed flamboyant knickknackery everywhere. LaVon
said the kitchen was French provincial, though to him it seemed Texas provincial,
a clean white linoleum floor, a white Formica table with chrome legs and
matching chairs, a calendar on the wall next to a portrait of Jesus
constructed of macaroni and seeds, and against the walls aged and noisy white
appliances. The dishtowels, stamped Bonjour at the bottom, showed the
Eiffel Tower. On the counter stood ceramic jars labeled CArf, SUCRE, FARINE.
A poster reproduction of Brassai's Steps ofMontmartre hung over
a wine rack, which contained not wine but bottles ofwhiskey; a good sign, thought
Bob Dollar. She showed him dozens of items she had purchased through
mail-order catalogs—a leather hot water bottle cover, a Moroccan oil lamp.
Over the cat's basket—she had a heavy paint torncat with a bad leg, only one
ear and half a tail, the victim of an encounter with the lawn mower—a blue
enamel sign declared CHAT LUNATIQUE. Chat mort would have been
more accurate, for the somnolent beast lay as one dead hour after hour,
rousing only when the refrigerator door opened or when the gangly neighbor boy
started the lawn mower. When
he finished his water she said, "Well, let's go have a look at that
bunkhouse." "This's
it," she said, driving him through a bumpy pasture, over a sullen creek
toward a motte of cottonwood trees. There was a second fence behind the
barbwire made up of old tires on end, packed three deep in overlapping rows.
Under the cottonwoods stood a small log building with a porch. A rope ran
around the circumference of the porch floor and LaVon explained this was to
keep snakes out of the cabin. Inside were four empty bunks, on each a thin
mattress folded in half, a stack of blankets, four wooden chairs at a square
table. There was a tiny stove with a blackened teakettle on it and against
the wall a wood box full of kindling and sticks. "Spartan,"
she said. "There's no electric. Supply your own sheets and towels.
You'll have to haul water. Get it down the house in the kitchen.” "I'll
take it," he said without seriously considering 'a daily drive across a
cow pasture, the labor of lugging water, no telephone for already he was
taking pleasure in the subtle beauty of the panhandle, noting
the groves and thickets along watercourses, huge coils of grapevine weaving
the trees into a coarse fabric. He thought the bold diagonal of caprock rim
that divided the high plains from the southern plains, the red canyons of the
Palo Duro striking and exotic. He
unloaded his suitcase, his new briefcase (new only to him, for it had come
from Uncle Tarn's shop) with its freight of Global Pork Rind flyers and papers,
a pair of pinch-toe cowboy boots shining with polish, and the box of fried
chicken he had brought from Perryton. It took only a few minutes to unpack.
He went outside and walked around the bunkhouse, starting up a plump,
chickenlike bird in the tangled vines along the creek. The sound of running
water was pleasant though it made him want to piss. Against the back of the
bunkhouse leaned four large logs, two of them partially shaped and carved
into figures—a woman's head with flowing hair, and a roughed-out human figure
that vaguely resembled Lenin. Perhaps some ranch hand had fancied himself a
sculptor. If you’ve given
up on Proulx for being obtuse, you can return to That Old
Ace in the Hole. Steve Hopkins, May 27, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the June 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/That
Old Ace in the Hole.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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