to the dispatchers all calls were of equal weight, for if you read the papers it was as logical to believe that a panther would slink out of New Mexico and make its way to Minnie Dubbs’s house in Woolybucket as it was to fear that the creaking noise down below was an escaped convict bent on robbery, car theft and murder. Just such a terrifying fate had overwhelmed deaf old Mr. Gridiron, a retired rancher kidnapped from his bed in 1973, driven away in his own truck and murdered beside the road across the Oklahoma line.
The sheriff’s great victory against Tully Nelson, his onetime political opponent, had occurred a few years earlier at 8:30 on a moonless June night as he was cruising the back roads. A call for backup help came from Texas Fish and Game.
“Sheriff Hugh, we got a tip-off that a gang of poachers is working the Stink Creek area tonight. Can you meet us there ten o’clock?”
He was a mile from the bridge when the call came, pulled over and doused his lights, glassed the fields with his powerful night binoculars and immediately picked up parking lights at the side of the road near the bridge. He counted four lights – two vehicles. He turned around, circled south, east, north and west on farm roads, making a four-mile loop in order to come up behind the vehicles, drove the last half mile slowly with his lights out (for he had good night vision and knew every inch of this road), stopped a quarter mile from the bridge and crept up to the parked vehicles on foot. Just off the road at the bridge stood two empty sheriff’s cruisers, parking lights on. On the doors he saw a star and the words SLICKFORK COUNTY SHERIFF. The trunk of one vehicle gaped wide.
“Well, I’ll be a Methodist,” he murmured. It was the break he’d been waiting for. The Slickfork Sheriff’s Department Annual Barbecue and Volleyball Tournament was coming up, and here, he thought, they were, fixing to get the main entrée by foul means. Out in the field he could hear grunts and panting and cursing and adjurations to keep it down, he could see the dancing flicker of a small flashlight. He used his cell phone to call the dispatcher (Janice Mango) and whispered that she should get Fish and Game out to the Stink Creek bridge immediately, call the newspapers in Amarillo, get three deputies out there with shotguns – the miscreants he was about to arrest were heavily armed. He had a newsworthy collar about to go down.
As the hunters approached the gap in the barbwire (their fence cutters had been at work) he turned on his own light, a marine searchlight that lit up what seemed to be the entire panhandle in a blast of 200,000 candlepower – Tully Nelson and his four deputies, dragging and lugging two dead deer and one Rocking Y steer, put their hands over their pained eyes.
“O.K., you’re under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind your backs. I know who you are and you’re already reported so don’t try no goddamn fool stuff” He saw with disgust that Tully was in uniform. He used their own handcuffs on them, collected weapons and tossed them into the open trunk.
“Come on, Hugh, let’s talk about this.” The speaker was Deputy Waldemar, a heavily muscled workout freak with a Hollywood profile and capped teeth.
“Nothin a say. Might as well sit down, boys. You goddamn arrogant idiots are caught red-handed fixin to pull the dumbest trick I seen in many years. I suppose this was for your goddamn barbecue?”
“Come on, Hugh. It’s for the public good. Everbody comes to that barbecue,” pleaded Harry Howdiboy, Sheriff Dough’s idea of a garden slug reincarnated as a human. Well, he’d sprinkle salt on him.
“It was not for the public good. It was for personal gain and advantage and it is illegal sideways, up and down and through the middle. What you done is mortally wrong and it will stay done until the trumpet blows. Advise you to set and keep still. I’m in a stinkin bad mood and the least little move or talk might make me think you are resistin arrest and tryin to escape. Time I got done with you they mightn’t recognize anything except the frickin handcuffs.”
In December of that year he received the Texas Peace Prize awarded annually at the Hotel Stockholm in Dallas. On the flight from Amarillo to Dallas he had had a window seat and spent the time counting the rivets in the wing. In addition to the rivets there were five small L-shapes as though someone had traced the corner of a toolbox with white paint. Then he noticed many droplets of white on the wing – clusters as though someone had struck a loaded paintbrush a smart slap. There were too many to count. During the ceremony he had counted the fringed threads on the cloth covering the award table. The large photograph of himself holding the trophy and the fifty-dollar prize check hung in his office next to the portrait of his grandmother in her Roman gladiator headgear.
Bob stayed three days in the Hoss Barn reading the local classifieds, returning to the Mexicali Rose to eat chicken-fried steak (the never-changing special), asking waitresses and store clerks about places to rent, driving around reading bumper stickers:
MY SON IS AN HONOR INMATE AT MCALESTER
HONK IF YOU LOVE BRATWURST
WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS
7-LETTER WORD FOR STINK – HOGFARM
He counted churches: the Primitive Baptist Church, the New Light Baptist Church, the Sunrise Baptist Church, the Sweet Loam Baptist Church, the First Baptist Church, the Bible Baptist Church, the Apostolic Faith Church, the Freewill Baptist Assembly, the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the Fellowship Baptist Church, the True Christian Church, the Straight Christian Church, the First Church of God, the People’s Church of the Plains, the Gospel of Grace Church, the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Bethlehem Lutheran Missouri Synod Church, the First Assembly of God Church, the First United Methodist Church, the Church of the Brethren, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and, on the very edge of town near some run-down hovels, the Immaculate Conception Caprock Catholic Church, a tiny building hardly bigger than the smokehouse from which it was converted. There seemed to be a church for every five residents. But of apartments and houses there was nothing for rent. Everyone had a home and was in it. The manager of the Hoss Barn, Gerald Popcorn, perhaps not an ex-con after all, thought Bob Dollar, offered him a residency rate of ten dollars a night but told him he would have to move to a smaller room. A tent seemed a better choice. And outside the wind never stopped blowing.
At night he read from Lieutenant Abert’s Expedition. There was an illustration of James William Abert at the front, but in it he seemed middle-aged. It was difficult to guess how he had looked at twenty-five: thin, a longish, straight nose, limp brown hair. Perhaps even then he was growing the mustache and beard of the sketch, even then his hair already receding. Bob imagined his friends called him “Jim,” but he thought of him as Lieutenant Abert.
The account began with a description of Bent’s Fort. Bob Dollar had gone to Bent’s Fort himself on the eighth-grade class trip. He knew the fort was a reconstruction and the guides, blacksmiths and mountain men lounging around were only actors, but the feeling was remarkably real that he was on the border of Mexico marked by the Arkansas River in the mid-nineteenth century, the world of traders and trappers and Cheyenne Indians, of Mexicans and Texians, of buffalo hides and French voyageurs. Now, looking at Lieutenant Abert’s watercolor of the fort, done from the far side of the Arkansas and showing an overly large flag flying from the fort and, in the foreground, a conical tent, perhaps a teepee, with two white men standing near, one wearing a striped shirt and, his arms folded, the other in buckskin pants and with a rifle over his left
