That Old Ace in the Hole - Annie Proulx

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about it.” He had never told his uncle this deep fantasy that had started a few months after they disappeared: he imagined himself flying to Fairbanks, looking in the phone book and finding Adam and Viola Dollar with an address and telephone number. Later, after he found out that Fairbanks was just another ordinary city, he had amended the scenario: now he (metamorphosed into a hirsute and muscular adult) paddled a red canoe up a raging Alaskan river, and then hiked into the wilderness as winter was coming on. Just when he was on the verge of freezing in a terrific blizzard he came upon a cabin in the wilderness. Inside was an old couple, feeble and emaciated. Their fire was out and they huddled under ragged blankets. He found the axe and the woodshed and chopped great armfuls of wood, made a fire, cooked hot dogs and mashed potatoes, fed the old couple, who sobbed with gratitude, and then he washed the dishes. There was a dog – a husky – and he fed the dog. Later he enlarged the husky to a whole pack of starving sled dogs and he fed them all and they licked his hands. The old couple exclaimed over him and when they were strong again they begged him to stay. The old man said, “We had a boy who would have been about your age but we were never able to go back to Denver and get him.” And he imagined himself gently asking why and being told of a desperado – Rick Moomaw, with bushy hair and a face like a whiskered hot water bottle – on the neighboring claim, who was waiting for them to leave, even for a weekend, when he would manage to steal their entire property, even the cabin, even the deed. Finally Bob told them who he was, their long-lost son, and they fell on his neck and told him they had found gold but Rick Moomaw was after their claim. In the fantasy he laughed and flexed his arms, said he could and would break Moomaw into pieces.

      Later this fantasy faded, replaced by dreams of sluttish blonds with enameled toenails, but when he met the fat boy it was still blazing. He had never told anyone about his hope to find his parents, yet within a few minutes of their meeting Orlando had guessed it.

      

      A few months after his parents’ fateful departure Bob had started thinking of his slippery self as a reindeer, and he carried his head carefully to avoid hitting his antlers against cupboards or wall projections. It became an intensely vivid fantasy. He had no idea who he was, as his parents had taken his identity with them to Alaska. The world was on casters, rolling away as he was about to step into it. He knew he had a solitary heart for he had no sense of belonging anywhere. Uncle Tam’s house and shop were way stations where he waited for the meaningful connection, the event or person who would show him who he was. At some point he would metamorphose from a secret reindeer to human being, somehow reconnected with his family.

      At Christmas he went with Uncle Tam, but not Bromo, who stayed behind to feed the cat and look after the shop, to Knuckle, Kansas, the family farm where his mother, Uncle Tam and the rest of the Bapp siblings had grown up. He had stayed with his grandmother many times when he was still with his parents, and saw now that even when he was very young his mother and father had not wanted him. At the holiday gatherings his aunts Lutie and Banjie made much of him and his uncles squeezed out false promises to take him fishing or hunting or to a Rockies game. At some time during the dinner his grandmother would look around the table, wipe at her eyes and say, “If Viola knew what she was missing.”

      “I’m sure she took it into consideration and regrets her decision, Mother,” said Uncle Ket, for the extended family had theories that Viola and Adam Dollar were living somewhere in Homer or Nome, or even raising foxes in the Aleutians. Over the years the family had advanced explanations for the long silence, all built on the supposition that the runaways were not dead: leprosy, amnesia, madness, kidnapping or retreat to a very remote place could explain why they had not been in touch. Bob clung to these scenarios. Only Bromo Redpoll said they were dead, and what did he know? He was not blood kin.

      

      On the bus Orlando suddenly said, “Hey, you want to go to the movies?”

      “Yeah, but I got to get my uncle’s prescription back to him. He’s waiting for these pills. He said he was in agony. He hurt his back lifting a box of plastic dolls. Plus his feet really hurt.”

      “Bad! Where do you live?”

      “Colfax. Way out on Colfax, out near Chambers Road. It’s like almost to Kansas.”

      “Man, that’s way, way, way out there. Can we get there on the bus? Cool. We take the pills to your uncle and then we go. The theatre is on Colfax too. The Cliff Edge, Colfax and Xerxes. It’s behind a liquor store.”

      “I thought you had to go back to your doctor.”

      “Doctor? What do you mean?”

      “What you told the drugstore lady. That you were going back to get your prescription signed.”

      “Oh, that was just bullshit. I was just trying it on. That was straight from the Book of Never Happen. I found that prescription on the sidewalk. Let me see your uncle’s pills. Heh. Hydrocodone. No rush there, that’s just codeine and Tylenol. But we might as well take a couple. He’ll never miss them.” He shook out six pills, gave two to Bob, swallowed the others.

      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

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