That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx

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СКАЧАТЬ pockets were empty. Bromo disliked the vest, which reminded him of paisley skirts, peace signs, girls doctoring their children with coltsfoot and yarrow; he was particularly irked at being unable to identify the fur. At last he could stand it no longer, wrapped the vest up, took it to the Denver Natural History Museum.

      “Pass the macaroni, Bob,” said Uncle Tam that evening. Then, to Bromo, “Aren’t you going to tell us what they said at the museum?”

      “You really want to know?”

      “Of course I want to know. It’s a very unusual fur.”

      Bromo snorted. “You can say that again. It’s also highly illegal. It is grizzly bear fur.”

      “Oh no,” said Uncle Tam who was an ardent environmentalist with lifetime subscriptions to Audubon, High Country News, Mother Nature, Wildlife of the Rockies and Colorado Wildlife.

      There followed a long discussion – argument – about what to do with “the Beast,” as Bromo persisted in calling it. In the end it got a spotlighted solo place on a table with a sign reading UNIQUE BEARSKIN VEST and a price tag of $200.

      The two men were housemates and business partners and, Bob wondered a few years later, if perhaps not something more, for there was in their relationship an odd intimacy that went beyond household or business matters. Yet he had never seen any affectionate glances or touching between them. Each man had his own bedroom at opposite ends of the upstairs hall. But neither did they ever bring women to the house. It was a poor bachelor establishment (though tidy and well-dusted), for the partners made very little money. In the end Bob decided that the sexual gears of both men (and perhaps his own) were engaged in neutral, except for one peculiar and inexplicable memory of Bromo Redpoll in Santa Fe sitting on the hotel shoeshine throne for the third time in one day, an expression on his face that nine-year-old Bob could only characterize as “adult,” while a Mexican boy snapped his rag over a glossy wingtip. When Bob was older he grasped the sexual content of that expression and he had a word for it – concupiscence – for he had seen it on his own face, though not in longing for a shoeshine boy, but for the sluts of Front Range High, as distant to him as calendar photographs. He imagined himself with a sultry, curly-headed, dimpled girl, but it had not worked out that way. Bob was not tall but by some stroke of genetic luck he was well-proportioned with smooth musculature, a hard little ass and boxy shoulders. As Bob matured, the unbidden thought had come to Tam that the boy was, as Wayne might say, “a casserole.”

      There were no dimpled girls with curly hair at Front Range High and in his junior year he had been picked out by a big, unclean girl with a muddy complexion, Marisa Berdstraw, who wore lipstick of a dark red color that made her teeth glow beaver yellow. She had quickly inveigled him into a sexual servitude with all the declarations and trappings of professed love but none of the reality. This meant going steady, studying together, a Friday or Saturday night movie, a sex grapple on Sunday mornings when her parents, both with mottled, rough faces, were at church. He did what she said and she had a pattern of events and behavior worked out in her mind. She would call up in the evening.

      “What ya doin?”

      “Studying for a social studies test.”

      “I got a test too. In Diagonals. But I’m not studyin for it. It’s more like a quiz.”

      Diagonals was an experimental course that darted tangentially from subject to subject as classroom discussion ranged. It had started off as a geology unit, veered to Esperanto, slid to the court of Louis XVI, on to the Whiskey Rebellion, the Oklahoma land rush, then to fractals, to oil tanker construction and, most recently, to mathematical calculation with an abacus.

      “Only three more days till Sunday,” she said archly.

      “Yeah.”

      “Are you glad?”

      “Glad about what? That there’s three more days?”

      “That it’s only three more days.”

      “Sure.”

      But he wasn’t that glad. The encounters in her gritty sheets, awash in her strong body odors, left him restless and disappointed. He wanted a few things to be different. But Marisa did have a hearty laugh and a certain sense of humor, though based on pain and accident. He had only once brought her to the apartment. She made it clear that she thought the apartment a cramped hole and Uncle Tam something of an idiot, nice but quite dumb.

      “He’s vague, you know? Not with it, is he?”

      It was neither sorrow nor relief that he felt when she told him they had to break up.

      “I’m not going with you anymore,” she said. “There’s another guy.”

      Soon enough he learned the other guy was Kevin Alk, a nearsighted math freak with an acned face and greasy hair that held the tracks of his comb.

      “Good luck,” he said politely, but privately his thought was that Marisa and Kevin Alk deserved each other. As for himself, Marisa’s interest in him and then her lack of interest pointed up how unimportant he was to her. Only Uncle Tam counted some value in him, but what that value was Bob didn’t know. Nothing more than kinship he supposed and maybe a sense of obligation to his lost sister.

      The apartment had a particular smell, an effluvium that came up from the shop below – dust-choked carving, musty upholstery, the bitter out-gas of celluloid and Bakelite, the maritime odor of ancient fish glue. The stairway up from the shop was narrow and crooked, the walls papered with some odd 1940s pattern of yellow trellis hung with red teapots. Upstairs, at the midpoint of the hall’s length, hung engravings and pictures that had come in with loads of junk and taken Uncle Tarn’s fancy. One showed fifty great rivers of the earth arranged as dangling strings and graded as to length, and the opposing corner illustrated a crush of mountain peaks, lined up from the smallest to the greatest, giving the impression of a fabulous and terrific range that existed nowhere in reality. Yet for years Bob believed that in some distant land hundreds of inverted ice-cream cone mountains gave way to an immeasurable plain cut by fifty rivers running parallel to each other.

      “It’s not a real place,” said Bromo Redpoll. “You dunce. It’s only for the sake of comparison.”

      

      The shop dealt in a wide variety of American junk but its specialty was plastic, and their mutual interest in resin and polymer objects joined the two men as twinned cherries on the stem. Uncle Tam could talk plastic manufacturing for hours, and had signed up for a course in chemistry the better to understand the complex processes.

      There was a room in the shop – the best room – where nothing was for sale to the ordinary customer. A sign on the door said

      

      ART PLASTIC

       By Appointment Only

      “One day,” Uncle Tam said, “probably not in our lifetime, but maybe in yours, Bob, people will collect plastic objects from the twentieth century as art, like now they are going after wooden grain cradles and windmill weights. This will be worth a fortune,” he said, waving grandly at the shelves and cases of Lucite bracelets, acrylic vases, Bakelite radios, polyethylene water pitchers. On floor pedestals, as if sculptures, stood plastic washing-machine agitators, black and white. The partners’ scavenging hunts ranged from outlying yard sales to periodic rakes through the shops of Antique Row on Broadway СКАЧАТЬ