High Plains Tango (11 page)

Carlisle slid out of the booth with the empties in his hand. As Leroy dug out two more beers, the duck-man watched Carlisle sideways, tugged his blue stocking cap lower, and pulled his coat lapels together until they overlapped.

When Gally and Carlisle came out of Leroy’s, the streets of Salamander were quiet, and Carlisle noted the old man was gone from his window above Lester’s. He said good night to Gally and opened the door of his truck while she walked toward her Bronco across the street, humming an old tune, the name of which Carlisle couldn’t quite remember. But a few of the words came back to him, something to do with dance pavilions in the rain.

Chapter Seven

“N
EED ANOTHER ONE?”

“Nope, I’m okay for now.” The old man sat with his back against the wall of a Livermore tavern, his better leg stretched out on the seat of a booth, bad leg underneath the table. He grinned and looked at the ceiling, rapping his cane quietly on the edge of the seat.

“When Carlisle McMillan bought the old Williston place northwest of Salamander, the locals thought he was around the bend. After buying it, he embarked on one of the great scrounging expeditions of all time. No place in the county was safe. He rummaged old barns and ransacked the dark corners of the discount lumberyard in Falls City. Axel Looker brought in daily reports on the increasing amount of material Carlisle had lying around, and in three weeks, people were driving by just to see the stuff. Some took along binoculars since the house sat back a bit from the road. The more emboldened of the locals shifted into four-wheel drive, went right up the lane, got out of their vehicles, and asked, ‘How’s she coming?’

“Carlisle was always polite to the visitors, even though he was frantically trying to get the place closed up tight before winter. Given the late start he’d gotten, that was a real horse race. He’d keep right on working, trying to answer their questions while he sawed and hammered and tongued and grooved and mitered and shingled.

“Talk on the street, over at Danny’s, in Leroy’s, and down at the elevator was all about Carlisle and his project. It started out pretty uncomplimentary, the talk, that is. ‘Not enough acres to graze cattle or grow winter wheat.’ Or: ‘That house never was nothing more than a glorified line shack and a bad one at that.’ Or: ‘Seen the little house on the prairie lately? Darn, I hate to stand around witnessing stupidity in motion.’

“After a while, though, the tone kind of altered. Folks had taken Carlisle for some sort of hippie deviant right at first, but those who’d been out to the Williston place said he seemed to know what he was doing. Said he used a Skil circular saw, which involves guiding by hand a blade turning faster than eight zillion times per quarter second, better than most people could cut with a table saw. Said he could drive a roofing nail with two shots of his hammer and never miss. Said he wore a leather tool belt that looked like it’d seen considerable wear before he came to Salamander. Some of the women said they understood he looked real good with his shirt off and hair tied back with a leather shoestring into a ponytail. That’s what Alma Hickman passed on after talking to her customers at the Swirl’n Curl.

“Some nights he’d drag into town just before Danny’s closed and eat whatever Gally had available, two or three helpings of it. Most of the time, however, he camped out, cooking for himself on a little butane stove he’d bought at the Falls City Wal-Mart.

“People also noticed Carlisle’s appearance changed some once he got to working on his house. In spite of it being early autumn when he started, he acquired a real deep suntan, though his skin was kind of dark to start with anyway. He also straightened up some, and his jeans seemed to fit him somewhat looser around the middle. Even his walk took on a different character, the way that happens when a man finds purpose in life and something to live for. Carlisle apparently was getting himself in shape, physically and mentally.”

AS THE
old man said, when Carlisle McMillan bought the Williston place northwest of Salamander, the locals thought he was around the bend. But then they didn’t have his outlook on life, which is not surprising, since even he wasn’t quite sure of what his outlook was at that time. And, more important, they had never studied under Cody Marx, an artist of his own kind in a town full of artists and literati.

In Mendocino, the place of Carlisle’s growing, Wynn McMillan offered cello lessons and worked part-time in an art gallery. Gradually, their little rented house turned into Mendocino’s version of a salon, a modest copy of the one Gertrude Stein had engineered in Paris thirty years earlier when she provided a place for Hemingway and Pound and their cronies to hang out after they finished working for the day. So Carlisle grew up around people who used big words and analyzed what they were doing to the point that what they were doing ceased to exist as anything intelligible to an ordinary observer. At least that’s how it seemed to him.

He had seen books of Monet’s paintings by the time he was four. The music of Mozart and Haydn and Schubert was played by local musicians in the living room while he lay in bed reading about Tarzan and following the adventures of Zane Grey’s heroes. Schopenhauer, Shaw, and Spengler were discussed by people leaning against the refrigerator or banging around the stove while he fixed peanut-butter sandwiches for himself on Friday nights.

“Hello, Carlisle. My, you’re growing up fast.”

“Hi, Carlisle. How’s school going?”

“Carlisle, I’m cooking Thai for this unruly mob. Where does your mother keep the turmeric?”

The one great strength of these people, and Carlisle was always grateful to them for it, was how they treated the circumstances of his birth. The fact that he was misbegotten simply made no difference to them. Schopenhauer was important, but the fact that Wynn McMillan had rolled naked upon the sands of a California beach with a man whose last name she could not recall and produced a boy-child afterward was not important in its moral implications.

Cody Marx did not frequent Wynn’s salon. If he had been invited, he wouldn’t have come. Cody didn’t use big words. In fact, he didn’t use many words at all. He just happened to be one of the world’s great carpenters and let his skills do his talking for him. Even though he was not asked to participate in long evenings of chamber music and literary criticism, he was the first to be summoned when anything to do with building was required. If you couldn’t get Cody because he was tied up with other work, you simply waited until he could get to your project. That is, if you were one of those people insisting on perfection.

Cody Marx was far more than just a good technician. He looked at things with an artist’s eye and a philosopher’s mind, understanding that Zen and precision are not at odds, though Cody likely never had heard of anything called Zen. And his work demonstrated it. If you showed him a picture of something—a house, a room, cabinetry—that someone had already built and said, “That’s what I want,” he would politely turn down the project and amble off. Cody didn’t build copies of other people’s work. Cody built Cody’s work, period.

The way you dealt with Cody was to put up with his pipe smoking, describe in general terms what contribution to your life the finished product was supposed to make, and then stand back and leave matters to his creativity and skill. The other thing you never, ever, did was to put a deadline on a project or try to hurry him along in his work.

Word got around about that latter idiosyncrasy of his after he walked away from a kitchen job he was doing for a local banker. The banker’s wife complained to Cody in a rather unsubtle fashion about his slow, methodical ways, saying she couldn’t cook or entertain or anything else with her kitchen torn up the way it was.

Without looking at her or speaking, he gathered his tools, left, and refused to finish the job until the banker agreed to take his family on an extended trip, a journey that would not terminate until Cody sent them a postcard declaring the kitchen was finished. Of course, their new kitchen with its custom cabinets, fancy built-ins, and subdued exactness of fine craftsmanship was admired by everyone. The most lavish praise came from a British department store executive and his wife who visited the banker’s home in Mendocino after they had all met on a winter cruise, the one taken while Cody was remodeling the banker’s kitchen.

So Carlisle was there on the north coast, mowing lawns and scraping paint from expensive boats owned by summer people, unhappy with odd jobbing. He had never much liked repetition, never liked doing things where he didn’t grow in some way while doing them. It had always seemed to him that after living another twenty-four hours, you ought to be a better person than you were when the day began. Like an anchored gull, that’s how he felt, flopping around on the surface of things, tugging at his anchor chain, and trying to beat his way upward into full flight.

He heard Cody’s name mentioned by his mother and her friends and picked up on the considerable reverence that always surrounded any discussion of Cody’s work. His mother’s friends, while able in their own intellectual and artistic trades, did not possess manual skills of the kind producing immediately practical outcomes. That being so, they were given to displays of respectful awe when it came to people such as Cody who could produce those outcomes. Great auto mechanics fell into the same category, though at a somewhat lower level than Cody.

Having technical skills and using them to make things of utilitarian value, things that lasted, was an idea that appealed to Carlisle. The Mendocino houses Cody built in his younger days were models of good construction, standing strong and quiet through the years. That’s what everybody said. Everything in plumb, no tilts, no leaks that were his fault. Banisters that never loosened, tiles that never worked free, ceiling joists that hung for decades and never drooped.

The Cody anecdotes were told and told again in his mother’s living room. They were known as “Cody stories” and “Cody’s Way.” One of them in particular impressed Carlisle and ultimately changed his life. The man who related it was a local poet, a man who knew something about things hidden and meanings submerged and who once remarked, “Cody Marx knows where the bones of shoddy work are buried in the walls of Mendocino County.” Cody had been building an addition onto the man’s house, and the poet had watched him sand pine support studs that would be concealed in the walls. Nobody would ever see them, sanding didn’t make them any stronger or cause them to function any better, so the man asked Cody why he did it.

Since Cody was doing the work for a price agreed upon in advance, it didn’t matter financially to the client just why the studs had to be sanded, but he was curious. Cody chewed on his pipe, looked at a two-by-four he had just smoothed down, and told the poet he simply felt better about doing things that way. Said it felt more finished to him. That’s all he said, nothing more. Cody’s Way.

The day after he heard that story, Carlisle went off to find Cody Marx. His wife said he was working on a new house northeast of town in the hills up toward Russian Gulch. Carlisle pedaled his bicycle out there, saw Cody’s old pickup truck parked outside, and could hear the tapping of his hammer inside. He was working alone. That was his custom, unless he needed some dumb muscle for a day or two to help him with heavy work.

Carlisle stood off to one side, watching the old man work, shaky in the presence of a legend, trying to gather himself. The pipe was going, and Cody was humming softly as he trimmed a door. After a minute or two, he turned to use his miter box, saw the boy, and staggered backward a step.

Right off, I’m already in the hole, Carlisle said to himself. Cody was in his late sixties, and Carlisle was thinking that he could have caused the old man to have a heart attack.

Cody recovered, though, and said, “Yup, whaddya need?”

Carlisle was a nervous supplicant, but he got some words out. “I’d like to work with you and learn to be a carpenter.”

“Don’t need any help, can’t afford it anyways.” Cody leaned over the miter box and cut a piece of molding for the door he was working on. That done, he held up the wood to test how well it joined with the horizontal piece already in place across the top of the door. The joint looked perfect to Carlisle, but Cody took a half sheet of fine-grade sandpaper from his hip pocket and sanded down the cut. Satisfied with the fit, he nailed the molding into place, countersinking the nails in preparation for filling in the holes later on, behaving all the while as if Carlisle were merely a can of wood preservative off in the corner.

The carpenter sorted through a pile of molding and said without looking up, “You’re Wynn McMillan’s boy, ain’cha?”

“Yes.”

“How old you be?”

“Twelve.”

“Thought you mowed lawns and such.”

Carlisle steadied his pubescent voice, which tended to bolt upward just short of an octave right in the middle of words, and said the lines he had rehearsed: “I want to learn to work with my hands, making things that last. I want to learn a trade and become a craftsman.”

He worried that what he had said sounded a little too elevated, too formal, especially in the way he’d squeaked it out. But it was the best he could do. In mentioning “craftsman,” however, he had picked the right word.

“Ya know that word
craftsman
has nearly dropped out of the English language, don’t you?”

Carlisle said nothing. The old man sorted molding.

There are moments in a life when the future pivots on the slim and critical fulcrums of gut-level decisions by those possessing the power to give or withhold the things you want. That morning, as it turned out, was one of those moments for Carlisle McMillan. Cody was sorting, Cody was humming, and Cody was thinking.