That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx Read Free Book Online

Tam and Bromo Redpoll to Santa Fe for the Art Plastic Society’s annual convention, and while the two men slavered over cracked polymer, he’d wandered around the town with one of the free guidebooks supplied by the hotel. So, thinking of the Santa Fe Trail from Independence, Missouri, to Council Grove in Kansas, to Pawnee Rock where the route split in two, the “wet trail” going south along the Cimarron River, the safer “dry trail” from Bent’s Fort westward to Raton Pass through the Sangre de Cristo range and on to Santa Fe, and thinking how he would soon be crossing that ghostly track, he took a wrong turn.
    He did not notice at first, for a road runner dashed in front of him. The road was paved, but soon it narrowed, and after fifteen miles plunged down a short hill to a bridgeless water crossing, then up and around a tight corner and onto level ground where it split away into three rutted dirt trails without signs. The mesas were out of sight, the rock formations had disappeared. He fumbled for his map but the one he had, a gas station cheapo stamped Central and Western States, did not show Teemu on it. He guessed that by turning right, which he took to be east, he would parallel the state line and, after a while, find a good road cutting south again.
    And so he maneuvered onto a set of dusty ruts dotted with manure, a primitive road wandering through uninhabited grazing land. There were no towns, no gas stations, no houses, no corrals, no traffic. He was the only person on an endless track without turnoff nor intersection. The fine dust got into the car and choked him and he wished he had bought gallons of water from the talkative store man. It was sultry for a day in March, even in Oklahoma, and gross clouds crowded the sky. After an hour of dry swallowing he came on a weather-beaten sign, the first he had seen. It read COMANCHE NATIONAL GRASSLAND . He looked at his map. There was a green square on the map bearing the same name. He was somehow back in Colorado and heading north.
    He could not bear to retrace his path to the fetal boomtown, so he drove doggedly on, believing that sooner or later there would be intersecting roads east and then south that would take him down to Oklahoma and Texas. Eight miles later he hit a right-hand turnoff without a sign but it surely headed east and gave him a view to the south of a massive wall of blue-black cloud slashed by lightning.
    With an abrupt twitch the dusty road butted onto blacktop and in the distance he could see semis racing along a busy highway. He had found the road but lost the day. A northwest slot in the clouds let a narrow ray of sunlight through. There was a heaviness to it as though its rich color truly bore the weight of gold.
    In another hour he was back in Oklahoma, a few miles outside Boise City, looking for a place to sleep. He found a bed-and-breakfast, the Badger Hole, where, on the front lawn, an enormous fiberglass badger stood with Christmas lights around its neck. In the tiny parking lot there was an unwashed white van with Arizona plates. A finger had written in the dust on the back door ON THE MOTHER-FUCKING ROAD AGAIN . It didn’t sound like the sentiment of an escaped convict, so he took the room.
    He was shown up the stairs by a heavy woman, young but fleshy, with yellow crimped hair and a beautiful face. When she spoke her mouth went up on one side as though she talked around a cigar. The room was hot and airless, the walls painted forget-me-not blue. The single bed was dainty and white, the bathroom obviously made over from a narrow closet. There was no air conditioner, but an electric fan took up most of the top of the painted chest. He pried a window open and with the cool evening air came a loose knot of mosquitoes. He turned on the fan, which roared hugely, the stream of air twitching the curtains, stirring the pages of a magazine on the bedside table— Decorating Your Mobile Home .
    Bob Dollar opened the smallest of the packages