Читать книгу That Old Ace in the Hole - Annie Proulx, Энни Пру - Страница 10

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.

“How come she’s called Fever. Did her parents name her that?”

“Not them! Shirley is what they picked out. But she had her tongue and lip pierced with these little barbells in and they got infected. Her ears, too. But they didn’t get infected. She had a fever and she went around asking everybody to put their hand on her forehead and see if she had a fever so we started to call her that. Anyway, we can just hang for a while and then go to the movies,” said Orlando. “There’s a five-dollar special triple feature – Deranged … the Confessions of a Necrophile and I Drink Your Blood. The other one is some kind of atomic monster thing and if it’s boring we can leave.”

When he got to Arapaho he saw Orlando at once. The evil fat boy was wearing a red cowboy hat and an aircraft mechanics jumpsuit with United Airlines stitched on the breast. He was in a crowd of ten or twelve teens. They looked more like sci-fi movie set creatures than human beings, with spiked, shaved, dyed heads, Magic Marker tattoos, pierced lips, nostrils, eyebrows, lips and tongues, huge swaddled trouser legs and assortments of metal – neck chains of fine gold and waist chains of heavy tow-truck linkage. Bob was struck by the appearance of a rachitic youth wearing black lipstick, which went well with his ginger mustache and gilded ears.

“Orlando,” he called and the fat boy spun around, waved coolly, pulled a girl from the crowd and brought her over.

“This is Fever.”

He had to admit Fever suited Orlando. She was rather fat, her sleek flesh looking springy and resilient. The sides and back of her head were shaved, the top hair left long and dyed prison orange and federal yellow. Her mouth was coated with alternating vertical bands of purple and blue lipstick and a small ring hung from her lower lip. Her ears glinted with a dozen niobium rings. She wore a pair of men’s white corduroy trousers. The backs of her hands were inked with skulls. Each finger showed several rings and chipped green nail polish, and her elbows were scaly gray. She wore a man’s sleeveless purple satin jacket, the back embroidered Insanity Posse. When she turned around Bob saw a biscuit-size hole in the rear of her pants disclosing the fat swell of a peach buttock. When she sat on the concrete abutment her bare ankles showed, scabby and ringed with grimy circles.

She looked at Bob Dollar and said, “How the fuck are ya?” When she smiled he could see the barbell in her tongue.