That Old Ace in the Hole Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 BEAR-SKIN 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