Letter from rural Nevada: Cowboy Bob Ups and Hightails it
Rural Nevada is chockfull of abandoned old mines and ghost towns. But those places that remain peopled are full of eccentric characters like Cowboy Bob. In this episode, Bob blanches at my newfound scrutiny, and makes himself scarce.
Second of three parts.
At some point during my days in McDermitt, I had a professional reckoning: Cowboy Bob was no longer just my irritating next-door neighbor, the strange man across the fence.
He was a chapter in my project.
He had to be.
If I wanted to understand how this small town ticked, I had to learn more about Bob.
I called my friend Ed, a newspaper editor who plays alter-ego to my reporter’s persona.
“I’ve got to write about Bob,” I began.
Ed had heard all about Bob, mostly at the start, about how he’d given me the creeps.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to report him out. You gotta go deep, as deep as you can. You can’t just make fun of him."
He was right, of course. I’d already started asking questions about Bob, mostly out of a perverse curiosity, but now I realized I had a lot more reporting to do.
Beginning with interviewing Bob.
One afternoon, I spotted Bob in his yard, like he always was, with rake and shovel in hand. But instead of offering a shout and a wave, I headed directly over to the fence.
“Bob,” I began, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you exactly what I’m doing in McDermitt (Of course, he’d never asked). I’m a writer, and I’m doing a book about the town.”
He stared at me warily.
“And, Bob, I think you’re a chapter.”
He didn’t say anything. Finally, he pointed over my head, at a jet and its entrails. He said he appreciated the previous night’s rain, because the moisture made the lines in his dirt yard stand out all the better.
I was late and didn’t press him that day, but something had changed that afternoon at the fence: Somehow, Bob didn’t seem so happy-go-lucky. He didn’t pop up every time I turned around. He no longer knocked at my door.
In fact, I soon came to realize, Bob had begun ghosting me.
Suddenly, the cowboy boot was on the other foot. I was now the pest, keeping a constant lookout for Bob, so that I might ask him a few questions, get his views on his neighbors and on life in McDermitt. About the job of being Bob.
For days, he was a no show. He wasn’t in his yard. I didn’t even see his truck. It’s like Bob had suddenly vanished. Then I spotted him out by the tanks at one of McDermitt’s two gas stations, up to his old performance routine.
I walked up to see a traveller cleaning his windshield, Bob right there next to him, close in, like a sidekick.
“Is this man bothering you, sir?” I joked. I don’t know why I said it, but I did. Maybe I just wanted to let Bob know I’d found my quarry, that I’d tracked him down.
“Nah, he’s OK,” the motorist said. “He’s just showing me some of this tricks.”
And what might those be?
Of course, I seen his repertoire many times before. Tricks like flexing his right bicep and making the muscle twerk. Tricks like producing his driver’s license, unbidden, to show that that he is indeed 81 years of age.
The man drove off. I followed Bob into the market. He ducked behind the tall shelf in the snack aisle.
“Hey, Bob, got a moment?” I asked.
I had come to realize that I actually missed him. I missed the days when he turned up just about everywhere. Farmer’s hat pulled over over his ruddy face, he’d come driving past in that brown Dodge Ram truck with a white toolbox in the back, an old thing with a muddy Nevada license plate, rakes and shovels and tools stored in the back.
But Bob didn’t feel like talking. He walked outside the shop and hopped into his truck.
“I’ve got things to do,” he said.
I stood there in that gas station parking, feeling rejected.
I didn’t know much more about Bob than I did when I’d arrived weeks ago.
One day, old Bob Grubaugh and his pickup showed up outside Lorraine’s front door.
“I need a haircut,” he said.
“Well, it’s gonna cost you,” she joked.
“How much?
“A hundred dollars.”
“OK.”
“Bob, you know I won’t charge you for a haircut. Now, come on in here.”
The best way to reach Bob, she knows, is with his own brand of corny humor.
“I’m not a professional,” she said, “so you’re going to be my guinea pig.”
Bob liked that line. And he got the last laugh.
A few days later, he came back to tell Lorraine that he’d pinned up notices on the community board at both the library and the post office.
They advertised free haircuts and gave Lorraine’s home telephone number.
“Bob,” she ordered. “You march back over there and take those down this instant.”
It turns out, Bob has developed a loosely-coordinated support network around town, residents who view him as an innocent — if sometimes annoying —neighbor in need.
Bruce Easterday keeps his shovels sharpened and the couple makes regular checks on the old buckeroo. Lorraine cuts his hair and helps him decipher his bills and letters. Another woman in town does Bob’s weekly laundry, but doesn’t want much else more to do with him and never invites him into the house.
She tells him to leave the laundry on her front stoop, saying it’ll be there the next day. But McDermitt is rife with Bob-haters. The woman’s mother lives in the next house and whenever he shows up for his clothes, she’ll walk out into the yard and shake her fist at the told man, telling him to leave her daughter alone or she’ll come after him herself.
Junior has less patience for Bob. Once, he went a year without even talking to him which, in tiny McDermitt, is quite of feat of social ghosting.
“I got a hammer,” Junior told his wife. “I’ll go over and fix his TV, alright.”
“Oh, Junior.”
Bob doesn’t have all that many people he can call on for favors.
Many people in town have made it plain they want no communication whatsoever, because he gives them the creeps. Junior doesn’t buy it.
“He’s been around here long enough for people to know that he’s just Bob,” he said. “This world takes all kinds. There are plenty of Bobs out there. And I’ll tell you this, he doesn’t have a vicious bone in his body. A few times, I’ve irritated the hell out of him, just to see if I can get a rise. Nothing bothers the man.”
“That’s because he’s afraid of you half the time,” Lorraine said.
“Well, he should be,” Junior said.
One day, Junior was driving his four-wheeler ATV around town and Bob jumped out in front of him, like he wanted to talk. Then he pulled the oldest gag in his repertoire.
“He puts one hand up high and when he’s got your attention, he uses another to grab something of yours, like a tool,” Junior says. “He thought that was fun. I told him that I was going to stab him with my screwdriver, so he put the wrench back.”
While Junior can’t always stomach Bob’s antics, he understands them.
One day, he said, as he was walking into the local market, Bob and encountered a woman walking out. In a way that to him seemed playful, he stepped in front of her. When she moved to the side to let him pass, he moved with her.
“In my mind, it was harmless, Bob’s idea of a joke,” Junior said. “He’d do it to anybody.”
The woman’s husband didn’t think so.
“I’m gonna hit him,” he told Junior.
“Nah,” Junior said. “There’s no harm to what he did. Your wife just took offense, is all.”
But Lorraine scolded Bob for that escapade.
“Bob, you can’t just face off with people at the grocery store. You’ll scare them. You’re irritating people. Before you approach anyone, you should know them first.”
Lorraine is Bob’s biggest defender in town. He’ll stop by her house to pet one of her cats and talk about the weather, until Lorraine has had enough small talk.
One day, she finally said, “I’m going into the house now.”
“Well, I’m not done talking to you,” Bob told her.
“Well,” Lorraine shot back, “I’m done listening, Bob.”
When Lorraine ran the local post office, Bob stopped in every morning to collect the mail for an elderly neighbor. He knew which one was the woman’s postal box and could reach around the window and feel around with his hands to tell if the box was empty.
As you can imagine, that got on Lorraine’s nerves.
Lorraine told him to behave himself. And he did, that first day, but tried the stunt again the following morning and the one after that. Finally, Lorraine had enough.
She was sorting mail nearby and instinctively reached out to swat Bob in the head with a handful of magazines.
“You hit me,” he said, with a sense of mock alarm.
“That’s right, and I’m gonna hit you again if you do that.”
Then her soft spot returned.
“Did it hurt?”
“No,” Bob said.
“Well, OK then. You learned your lesson.”
She added, “We get along, Bob and me. He’s like a kid. He’s irritating like a little boy.”
The word spread quickly around a town not used to breaking news.
In the early-morning hours, Bob Grubaugh had been the victim of a robbery break-in.
Most folks, even supporters like Lorraine and Junior, said he probably brought it on himself. He’d befriended two drifters who had taken up residence in a rundown trailer parked just down the back alley from Bob’s house.
For weeks, he’d given the couple money, which they presumably spent to buy drugs. Then one night, the man broke into Bob’s house through a bedroom window and stuck a handgun to his ribs, demanding all the money Bob had.
They figured the old man was an easy mark. And everybody in town knew they were right. Bob is careless. After he cashed his monthly $1,000 social security check, there weren’t many monetary demands to tend to. His house and truck were paid for, after all, and other than filling his gas tank or running into the market for another box of Little Debbie donuts, he didn’t have many ways to spend his cash.
So, instead, he hoarded it. He’d carry around $100 dollar bills in his wallet, walk into the store every morning to cash another C-note.
Not long go, Lorraine said, Bob walked into the post office while she was working as postmistress. He set down a vintage Roytan cigar box on the counter.
“Wow, that’s a real keepsake,” Lorraine said. “I remember those things.”
“I found it,” Bob said.
Then he opened up the container and Lorraine saw bunches of $100 bills rolled up tight, painstakingly arranged. It was like he’d just robbed a bank
“Bob, you didn’t find that,” she said. “That’s your money. Don’t show that around to people or you’re going to get knocked on the head.”
Once a month, a neighbor drove Bob down to Winnemucca so he could cash his government checks and replenish his supply of coveted greenbacks.
Well, Bob walked out of that bank and began handing out $20 bills to children he’d encounter. He’d approach total strangers and open up his wallet so they could see how much money he had.
“In his own mind, he does it to buy friends,” Lorraine said. “But it gets him into trouble.”
So Bob’s friends have become protective against his own gullible habits.
On his drives around town, often before dawn, Bob has picked up stranded hitchhikers and invited them back to his house. One day, Junior asked him about one older woman hitchhiker he’d taken in. “He said it was wintertime and she was cold and had not place to say, so I took her home to my house,” Junior recalled. “He probably gave her a wad of cash before sending her off on her way.”
Then Bob met a drifter named Debbie, and everyone feared the worst.
She’d taken up residence in the Diamond A motel. People reported that Bob had been hanging around the room and a friend soon called Lorraine to report, with no small amount of distaste and even horror, that she’d seen the couple making out.
Lorraine later saw Debbie scrounging around Bob’s truck. Bob said he’d given her the keys. “Bob, you be careful around that woman,” she advised.
As it turned out, Debbie had a gambling problem and Bob had given all his money from his $1,000 a month social security checks. Suddenly, he was walking around without even a single dollar bill in his wallet.
The break-in at Bob’s house was the final misadventure.
Bob’s sister, Charlotte, and her niece, Michelle run an Oregon ranch about 20 miles north of town. For years, they’ve been his caretakers from afar. Bob doesn’t like people in his business and gives the two women wide berth. But now they had to take action.
Charlotte filed for power of attorney. Now she gets the checks delivered to her, and dispenses Bob an allowance. No longer flush with cash, he’ll drop by the homes of people he knows to ask for a loan, including Lorraine’s.
“Don’t loan him any money,” Charlotte will say.
But Lorraine can’t help herself. She has a soft spot for this man who has been ostracized by so many people in town, for just being himself.
Before the holdup, she’d given him $40 and then another $30 more, for a total of $70, which he had promptly handed over to the couple.
As Lorraine told the story, Junior shot her a glare from across the living room. “So, now it’s all coming out,” he said. “You told me it was a lot less than that.”
“Oh, Junior,” Lorraine waved him off. “You’re only told what you need to know.”
Lorraine just has a big heart. She’s has taken in stray dogs and cats. What’s one more needy neighbor? “Bob just needs a friend,” she said. “Somebody he can talk to. And he’s done a lot more for me than I’ve done for him. If I counted all the weeds he’s killed and branches he’s raked up and the water lines he’d turned off, I’d owe him money.”
One day in late September, Bob rolled by Lorraine’s house, saying he needed a new registration for his truck. “Bob, they always send you a notice when your registration payment is due,” Lorraine said. “Have you been checking your mail?”
Bob went home and returned with a wrinkled, oversized manila envelope.
He dumped out its contents.
Lorraine leafed through letters and notices of all kinds and finally found it. She filled out what she could but finally had to call Charlotte for the information she didn’t know.
“I don’t know if he can even read,” she said.
“Oh, he can read — a little bit,” Junior said. “But who knows how good his eyes are. Maybe he can’t see the letters, or comprehend what they mean.”
So, why doesn’t Bob seek help from his own sister and niece, who live such a short distance away? In another puzzle to Bob’s life, friends say, the old man has convinced himself that the pair are embezzling his money, in the end demonizing his own relatives.
“He can’t keep track of himself. And he’s mad at the two people who are best prepared to help him,” Lorraine said. “It’s sad.”
I decided that I needed to speak to Bob’s family to get answers. But would they even talk to me, a big-city stranger asking personal questions, poking into family wounds?
I had a problem, and once again Lorraine and Junior came to my rescue. Junior called up to the ranch and told Charlotte there was a writer in his living room who wanted to talk about Bob. Could he come up and visit?
Charlotte gave her hesitant consent. Lorraine said she’d tag along as my emissary.
FINAL CHAPTER: Bob's Cowboy past.