by Annie Proulx
The nameless stream, black and deep, ran under a concrete bridge and in the water floated a wood duck and her train of ducklings aligned as though tied to her by a string. He looked down the road, unsure even if he could find his way back to Woolybucket. After a few minutes he could see a plume of dust from an approaching vehicle. He got out, ready to flag it down and ask directions.
A pickup truck came rattling over the hill and plunged toward him. It slowed as it approached and stopped abreast of Bob. The driver was young with a big round face, heavy-jowled, clean-shaven, dark eyes fringed with ink-black lashes, a snub nose, red lips, so red Bob thought the man might have been eating beets. His dark hair stood up in a crest like that of a jay and was already receding at the temples, but that defect lent him an elusive charm. He was, thought Bob, one of those rare males whom the word “cute” fitted.
“Hidy,” said the driver. “You O.K.? Or broke down?”
“Yeah, the car’s O.K., but I’m kind of lost. I’m looking for the north entrance to the Cow Bones Ranch. Not the main gate.”
“O.K. You are about seven miles off. What you do is go ahead the way you are pointin and after two miles or so you’ll come to the old schoolhouse on the right—that’s where me and my friend live. Keep goin another mile and watch for the sign for Powper Lane? Go left on Powper Lane and keep goin straight until you hit Jimmy Rim Springs. Turn right. It’s a couple a miles up the road there, a metal gate. There’s a sign on the gate, but I don’t know what it says. Never got that near. We’re not exactly pals a Dick Head and his hands.”
“What about Peeler Flats? I was told to take a turn at Peeler Flats.”
“Peeler Flats? Never heard of it. Not around here.”
“Thanks,” said Bob, wondering. There was something a little odd about the encounter. But he started the Saturn and pulled out, watching the fellow’s pickup disappear in its own dust.
He found Powper Lane and Jimmy Rim Springs Road and, finally, a metal gate with a sign on it. The sign, though the letters were small, read NO TRESPASSING THIS MEANS YOU and the gate was locked. His choices were three. He could drive back to the main gate and go to the ranch house and say he was looking for Ace Crouch and could they please let him in, or he could park the Saturn, climb over the gate and walk in, or he could give up and go back to the Shattle place, call Ribeye Cluke and tell him the bad news.
Without really thinking about it he found himself climbing over the gate, his Global Pork Rind folders in one hand, walking down the caliche ranch road with floating blooms of white prickly poppy lighting the way. How far could it be to the windmill? A mile? He walked on. And on. After an hour and twenty minutes he was streaming with sweat, his pores clogged with dust. There was no shade, just the brutal sun and its killing rays. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life and he had forgotten his sunglasses so the white dust before him danced with red and green spots. He tried to make a hat with the pages from his brochures but the sheets were too small and slick, and they fell apart within minutes. There were some weak vines at the edge of the road and he was about to gather them and twine them into a leafy hat when he remembered the old lady’s quilting bee story about the dancing girls and the poison oak. He was not sure what poison oak looked like but undoubtedly, the way his luck had been running, this must be it. He scrutinized the roadside for safer hat materials, stopped and gathered a mass of bluestem grass, which he tried to weave into something that would shade his burning face and head, but he didn’t have the knack and the stems fell apart like the jackstraws they were. At last he took his shirt off and draped it over his head, feeling the vicious heat sting and burn his arms and bare torso. Now he knew why men wore undershirts—they could save themselves from sunstroke. Inspiration struck. He might not wear an undershirt but there were his shorts. He would take them off, work a few twigs into them for a frame, and voilà!—a hat.
He had gotten as far as taking off his pants and shorts when he became aware of hammering hooves and turned to see a horseman galloping toward him on the road. There was no time to dress completely again, but he had pulled his underdrawers more or less on when the horseman pulled up. A very old man whose skull showed boldly through his meager flesh glared down at him.
“What are you doin on my ranch? Can’t you read? Big sign says no trespassers?”
“Yes sir. Are you Mr. Richard Head?” He could not bring himself to say Dick Head.
“I am. And who the hell are you? And why are you paradin your bare ass on my road? You with them fairies in the old schoolhouse?”
“No sir. My name is Bob Dollar, sir. I am looking for Ace Crouch. His wife said he was working out here today. The gate was locked so I thought I’d walk in. And I got so hot I thought I’d try to make a hat out of my underwear.”
“Well, of all the damn fool things. Why didn’t you come up to the house and ask instead a wanderin around like a crazy man? You keep on long enough you’ll find him if he don’t find you first on his way home.”
“How much farther is it—sir?”
“About eleven more mile. You keep rattlin your hocks you might make it by supper time. If you don’t suffer heatstroke,” he added, looking at Bob’s fiery face. “What kind a hat did you think you could make out a underwear, somethin like Lawrence of Arabia?”
“I don’t know. I was just getting ready to start. Making them. It.”
“Well. Here’s what I’ll do. You set down and cool off. Give me your keys and I’ll ride back to the gate and git your car, tie up my horse and drive in this far. Then you can drive me back down a my horse at the gate and make the choice a gettin the hell out a here and seein Ace at home this evenin, or you can go ahead and drive out to the well and catch him there. He’s got his own key to the gate. He can let you out again.”
“Thank you, Mr. Head. I appreciate your kindness.”
“I don’t relish a corpse on my ranch road.” And the old man turned his horse and rode off smartly, sitting as straight as a pipe.
An hour later Bob, in the Saturn with the air-conditioning cranked full on, saw the windmill in the distance and the big square truck parked beside it. The sun, now low in the sky, glinted on the mill’s turning wheel. As he drew closer he made out the figure of a man on the top platform. The man was watching him, that much he could tell.
“Mr. Crouch?” Bob squinted up at the figure on the windmill. The sun was behind him, throwing him into black silhouette.
“Call me Ace.” The voice was unexpectedly deep and the tone was one of amusement. “Well, here you are, Bob Dollar, doin your thing for Global Pork Rind.”
“Yes sir.”
“Climb on up, Bob. I got some ice tea up here and you look like you could use it.”
Bob began to climb the skinny metal ladder. He was a third of the way up when Ace spoke again. “Better hold the side rails, not clutch on the rungs. Rungs been known a let go but the rails is strong as a wet dog.”
Bob climbed on, not looking at the ground below, gripping the rough, hot metal. As he climbed higher he felt a sweet breeze. He could hear the wheel above him sighing, hear the clank of the sucker rod rising and dropping, the rhythmic spurt of water into the tank. At the top he crawled onto the platform and, not daring to stand up, crept across to where Ace Crouch sat comfortably beside a bucket, a rope for lowering and raising it tied to the handle, a jar of tea nestled in the half-melted ice. He passed the jar to Bob as soon as he eased into a sitting position on the edge of the platform.
“My God,” said Bob, taking in the view across miles and miles of prairie, white grain elevators rising in the distance. Despite the heat haze and the quivering mirage that made the main road look as if it were underwater, he could see thirty miles. For several minutes neither said anything, Bob enjoying the delicious air, the coldness of the tea, Ace thinking his own thoughts.
Finally the old man spoke.
“Why’d you come out here, Bob?” he said, a hard edge to his voice.
“O.K.,” sai
d Bob. “I’m here because I don’t understand why you keep telling people not to sell to me. That land of Jim Skin’s is worthless.” He sounded querulous and whiny to himself. “And how about your brother’s place? The smell is already so bad he can’t enjoy life and he says he would like to move into Woolybucket. He says he would like to sell. Then there’s the Shattles. They want to sell too, but because you said no, Tater said no and they said no. It’s like you have a hold over all these people and they can’t think or speak for themselves.”
The old man pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. The wind carried the acrid smell of the match and then the smoke to Bob. Ace Crouch did not speak.
“So,” said Bob. “What was I supposed to do, come to you first? Like on bended knee asking some warlord for permission to cross the country?”
Ace Crouch laughed a little but said nothing.
“Don’t you think your brother would be happier in town?”
The old man stubbed out the barely smoked cigarette, tore the butt open with his thumbnail, scattered the tobacco to the wind and rolled the paper into a tiny pellet, which he flicked away.
“What do you see out there, Bob?” His arm swept the horizon where a few small clouds cooked like dumplings in the simmering sky. “Tell me what you see.”
Bob saw he was being set up. “Barbwire fences, the road with some trucks on it and a gate. The railroad and two sets of grain elevators, suppose one is in Woolybucket. Pump jacks.”
There was a long silence that stretched out and continued. Ace Crouch pulled out and lit another cigarette.
“I see more. I see home,” he said. And when Bob craned his neck and peered in the direction of Cowboy Rose, the old man said, “Not that home. My home country, the place my people has lived in for a hunderd twenty-odd years from the canyonlands to the hills. You know, the Jones and Plummer Trail went right through here, right under the goddamn windmill we’re settin on. You can see its trace.”
“Mr. Crouch, I think of those times too. I think about Lieutenant Abert coming into this country in 1845 and exploring the Canadian River for the first time, and all that he saw.” As he said this he half sensed that what he wanted was to be Lieutenant Abert traveling through the unmarred plains, not a callow salesman exhorting old people to give up their properties.
“This is a unique part a North America. A lot a good men and women struggled a make their homes in this hard old panhandle.” Ace’s face was as creased as dried mud, the old eyes slitted, peering into the haze.
Bob fidgeted. “The ladies at LaVon’s quilting bee told me about the old days—melons and cowboys and oil booms—I could see how it was. That old panhandle homey kind of life.”
“You don’t hardly know a thing about this place. You think it’s just a place. It’s more than that. It’s people’s lives, it’s the history of the country. We lived through the droughts that come and we seen the Depression and the dust storms blowin up black as the smoke from a oil fire. We seen cowboy firin squads shootin half-starved thirsty cattle by the thousand. Yes, that’s who had a do it, the men who took care a cows all their lives was the ones had a shoot them too. And there was many a tough saddlebum turned his head away.”
“That was almost seventy years ago, sir.”
But Ace had the bit in his teeth. “Ever year a few more sell out to the corporations. Ever man for hisself. It’s mostly the younger ones wants the money as they don’t intend a live here. They got their hunderd reasons for it. I happen a feel we should stick together on this one and tell the hog farm corporations to go pound sand.”
He picked up the tea jar and drank, passed it to Bob. “All we got is the land and the Ogallala and they are ruinin both. So that would be my answer to Global Pork Rind. Go pound sand. When you come here, Bob, why everbody thought you was a shinin light when you talked about puttin the land to use for nice houses, nature estates and all. It seemed like you was bringing in a kind a value-added situation.”
“But Ace, we can’t live in the past. And you can’t bring it back. Don’t people have a right to make up their own minds where and how they want to live their lives? Probably in forty or fifty years there’ll be something else that pushes out the hog farms and somebody else will say how sad it is, how the panhandle hog heritage is being lost.”
“Somethin else like what, use the panhandle for a atomic testin ground? And you sure don’t need a tell me about change. A lifetime windmillin. It’s like Brother Mesquite says: ‘Things are as the windmill to the wind, constantly changin, makin a response.’ But what things change into is somethin else. Just one or two people can stand up and fight back.”
“I don’t agree with that, sir. Ace. Look at the Indians. They fought back and you see what happened to them. They had something other people wanted. Same thing here. You got something the hog corporations want and they will get it.”
“Not as long as I’m around. You know, your luxury home idea was pretty good. It could work if there wasn’t no hog farms around. Maybe not just places for rich folks, but somethin more moderate. Not luxury homes but decent houses and room for decent people who got some respect for the land. I think you had the germ of a good idea there. Like to talk more about that to you.”
“Frankly, sir, Ace, I think the hog farms are here for good. Maybe that’s the future of the panhandle—people will move out and turn it all over to the hog farms and feedlots. Intensive stock-raising. It could be the best thing.”
“Best thing for who? And would you be proud a be part a that? Here, have some more ice tea.”
Bob sighed. “Well, best thing for the general good.” He was getting nowhere. The man was hung up on the past. Ace passed the jug of iced tea to Bob and talked on.
“Bob, everbody here knows a few things about swine. Some still do raise them on a small scale. Phil Bule raises beeler pork, no antibiotics, no growth stimulants or hormones, and it’s the best you ever eat. His pigs live outside and they can go in the sun or the shade as they want. The skin on factory hogs is as thin as tissue paper. Try to get em in the truck, just touch em and they bleed. An some a those hogs is so weighty their legs snap like sticks. Pigs twitch their head and rub themselves raw on pen wire. Of all the creatures’ lives on God’s earth, for downright pure-dee hell the life of a hog farm pig has got a be the worst.” He crushed his cigarette butt against the tower’s steel frame. “The whole thing is ugly and unnatural and I’m against it. And you should be too.”
“I don’t know what I’m against,” mumbled Bob. “And I don’t see what’s wrong with adapting to change. There’s plenty of people here who don’t object to having corporate agriculture in their county. And they don’t mind the lagoons, either.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t call them ‘lagoons.’ A lagoon is a beautiful pool a water set off from the sea. Anyway, here’s the Canadian River valley, a small piece a the world, got its own cultural ways grew out a the place. It’s a rural ideal, you might say. But a outside force can break it up. And then you git anger and resentment because what made the place special and good to people is wrecked. And that’s where we are now, in shadowland.”
“Mr. Crouch—Ace—it seems to me that windmills did a share of breaking things up too. I mean, you could say that windmills were a kind of anticommunity technology—every man for himself instead of water co-ops. So what you’ve done all your life has been against the panhandle too. How is that different than a businessman trying to make a living in large-scale stock raising?”
“You should a been a lawyer, Bob. It takes us back around the circle. There are so many people in the world now that there is not enough elbow room. Doesn’t your rural resident born here have a right a live here? More right than a absentee corporate hog farmer to ruin the place?”
“Why should being born in a place give you more rights than anybody else? I’ve never understood that. It’s like Francis Scott Keister going around with his bumper sticker, ‘Texas Native.’ I mean, so what?”
“It’s historical and psychological rights. Hell, it’s gettin to sunset and we’re at loggerheads. Time to git down and head out.”
Nimbly Ace Crouch stood up, stretched, lowered the bucket of ice and tea to the ground, then went quickly down the ladder, half sliding. Bob followed cautiously and slowly, gripping the side rails. At the bottom the old man said only, “Follow me and I’ll unlock the gate for you.”
At the highway Ace Crouch opened the gate, drove through and parked his rig, held the gate open for Bob. Bob stopped outside the gate as well and, while Ace relocked the gate, tried to continue his argument.
“I mean, is it fair for your brother to suffer out there when he could be in town enjoying life? And what about the Shattles? Mr. Shattle is sick from the fumes. They need to sell those properties. And—”
“Son, Tater and me is movin toward death. We’re in the years when we meet our fate instead a dodgin and twistin in the long game that nobody can win. We sorted it out, Tater and me, that we got a obligation to the panhandle. I’m the oldest one. I got the responsibility. And the power. Tater and me won’t sell nothin to no hog corporation. You lose. But remember, you can’t win em all.”
“All!? I haven’t won any.”
Ace Crouch got in his truck. He nodded once and drove away.
Bob, who had never been a villain before, smarted with resentment. But he was afraid of losing the way again, so followed the old man’s taillights.
33
FAILURE
As Bob drove into Woolybucket, tired and blue, for it had been a day strewn with the sandburs of defeat, he noticed that the lights were on in the Old Dog and people moving about inside, then remembered Cy’s intention of staying open late to catch something he called “the supper trade” to combat the losses from the Christian competition. A bowl of chile would cheer him up. Maybe Brother Mesquite would be there, although he didn’t see the monk’s old pickup. He parked in front of the café and went in.