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

bouts of diarrhea.

3
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
    T he morning after the celebratory steak dinner Bob was heading south down I-25 in a Global Pork Rind company car, a blue, late-model Saturn, watching out for escaped prisoners in white vans. He stopped for gas in Trinidad, got a dripping chile dog to eat while he drove, pulled over at a roadside spring below Raton Pass to clean his hands and wipe off the steering wheel.
    On the passenger seat were the packages his uncle had handed him outside the restaurant.
    He took twisting, climbing roads through northeast New Mexico, high dry ranchland empty of everything but cinder cones and cows and an occasional distant building surrounded by corrals. An elderly horseman herded forty cows down the middle of the road, not deigning to hurry them or turn them out of the right-of-way.
    He climbed a switchback road lined with tough-looking shinnery oak. He guessed he was about an hour’s drive from the Picket Wire canyonlands along the Purgatoire River, south of La Junta. When he was thirteen, he, Uncle Tam and Bromo Redpoll had rented a car and driven down to the Withers Canyon Gate, planning to hike in to the fabled dinosaur track bed.
    It was a hot day, over a hundred degrees by late morning. Bob and Uncle Tam each had a canteen of water. Bromo carried a daypack of cold beers, Bob and Uncle Tam clutched plastic bottles of water. Bromo and Bob wore hiking boots, Uncle Tam his old black and stinking sneakers. The road in to the gate where the trail began was a gauntlet of washouts and boulders. At the gate a posted sign said the round-trip hike was 10.6 miles.
    “Damn,” said Uncle Tam, “that’s almost an eleven-mile hike.”
    “Two hours in, two hours out,” said Bromo, draining the first of his beers and tossing the can behind a rock. “Leave it alone,” he said when Bob ran to pick it up. “We’ll get it on the way out. You’re too damn picky. Don’t be such an old lady.”
    They set off slowly, climbing the rocky trail. The sun beat against Bob’s face and within twenty minutes he knew he was burning. He’d forgotten his cap. He said, “Uncle Tam, did you bring any sunblock?” He thought they were in a terrible place, bristling with cholla, yucca and purple prickly pear. Scraggy junipers clung to frying rock. The canyon walls rose around them, shooting out heat as from ray guns.
    “Shit. No. Would have been a good idea. You got any, Bromo?”
    “Back in the car. Want to run back and get it, Bob? We’ll wait for you.”
    “No.” The idea of running anywhere was repulsive.
    They walked on, Bromo in the lead as if he were heading up a safari. Every step raised a puff of yellow dust from the trail and their boots and Uncle Tam’s sneakers, their stocking tops and lower legs were soon coated with the stuff, setting off an itchy sensation like hay chaff. At first Bob tried to make the water in his twelve-ounce bottle last but he was parched and his throat clicked painfully when he swallowed. It felt as though his throat were bleeding inside. Bromo finished his fourth beer, carefully standing the can beside the trail.
    “Get it when we come out,” he said as he had every time he finished one. He straightened up and a thin, arid rustle shivered the heat. Bob thought it was a cicada or a grasshopper and walked up, intending to pass Bromo, but Uncle Tam thrust out his arm with hard suddenness, hitting Bob in the face.
    “Ow. What’d you do that for?”
    “Shut up. That’s a rattlesnake.” The landscape lurched.
    They couldn’t see it. They stood very still. The buzzing surged until it seemed the loudest sound Bob had ever heard. Still they couldn’t see it until Bromo shifted position.
    “There it is,” said Bromo. “Right next to the beer can. Christ, I was two inches from it.”
    “I want to get out of here,” Bob whispered.
    They backed up slowly and when they were fifteen feet away Bromo picked up a rock and threw it at the rattler. He missed.
    “Well, what do