Free That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx Page B

mustache and gilded ears.
    “Orlando,” he called and the fat boy spun around, waved coolly, pulled a girl from the crowd and brought her over.
    “This is Fever.”
    He had to admit Fever suited Orlando. She was rather fat, her sleek flesh looking springy and resilient. The sides and back of her head were shaved, the top hair left long and dyed prison orange and federal yellow. Her mouth was coated with alternating vertical bands of purple and blue lipstick and a small ring hung from her lower lip. Her ears glinted with a dozen niobium rings. She wore a pair of men’s white corduroy trousers. The backs of her hands were inked with skulls. Each finger showed several rings and chipped green nail polish, and her elbows were scaly gray. She wore a man’s sleeveless purple satin jacket, the back embroidered Insanity Posse . When she turned around Bob saw a biscuit-size hole in the rear of her pants disclosing the fat swell of a peach buttock. When she sat on the concrete abutment her bare ankles showed, scabby and ringed with grimy circles.
    She looked at Bob Dollar and said, “How the fuck are ya?” When she smiled he could see the barbell in her tongue.

6
SHERIFF HUGH DOUGH
    S heriff Hugh Dough was forty years old, a small man, five feet five, 130 pounds, riddled with tics and bad habits, but nonetheless a true boss-hog sheriff. He had a sharp Aztec nose, fluffy black hair and black eyes like those in a taxidermist’s drawer. A line of rough pimples ran from the corner of his funnel mouth to his ear. His uniform was a leather jacket and a black string tie. He had been a bed wetter all his life and no longer cared that he couldn’t stop. There was a rubber sheet on the bed and a washing machine in the adjacent bathroom. He had never married because the thought of explaining the situation was unbearable. He was an obsessive nail biter. He counted everything, courthouse steps, telephone poles, buttons on felons’ shirts, the specks of pepper on his morning eggs, the number of seconds it took to empty his bladder (when awake).
    Other members of the Dough family had gone into law enforcement and public safety, creating a kind of public service dynasty. Hugh Dough’s half brother Doug was a paralegal, and their maternal grandmother had been a member of the Panhandle Ladies Fire Brigade in Amarillo at the turn of the century, with a wonderful costume of black tights, short serge dress with enormous brass buttons and a crested metal helmet modeled after those of the Roman gladiators. His father’s mother’s sister, Dolly Cleat, took pride of place. She had gone off to the University of Chicago early in the century where she specialized in political economy and sociology, and, after the Great War, worked her way up from superintendent of the Ohio Women’s Workhouse to assistant warden at the State Home for Girls in West Virginia. His father’s unmarried sister, Ponola Dough (“Iron Ponola”), was the commander of the Women’s Police Auxiliary in Pine Cone, south of Waco. Before her ascension to the top position, the auxiliary had been little more than cops’ wives holding bake sales to raise money for a barracks pool table or to help some trooper’s family left destitute by his injury or death. Ponola changed all that and made the auxiliary a quasi-military organization with uniforms and black leather belts and boots, rigid hats in Smokey the Bear style, shirts with neckties and the like. The cookie-baking wives were forced out and in their place came Ponola’s friends, muscular Baptist-Republican-antiabortion amazons who patrolled the street outside Pine Cone’s only bar, looking to break up fights and twist cowboys’ arms, arts in which they excelled.
    But the one he was close to above all others was his younger sister, Opal, with whom he’d enjoyed a particular relationship throughout adolescence, begun on a sultry Sunday afternoon when he was fourteen and Opal twelve. They had been playing hide-and-seek with