High Plains Tango (13 page)

By mid-October, most of the siding was in place, and rolls of batted fiberglass insulation were on their way from the lumberyard in Livermore. Just in time, too, since the first snowfall had come three days before, forcing him to sleep in the truck at night.

He had also acquired a partner. A big yellow tomcat with a chewed right ear had drifted by a week earlier, stayed for lunch and then for supper, and soon became a permanent resident. The cat slept with Carlisle in the truck cab and followed him around during the day. Carlisle studied the cat. The cat studied Carlisle.

“Well, big guy, I think the name Dumptruck suits you. So if you don’t mind, we’ll leave it at that.” Dumptruck blinked his yellow eyes. Carlisle grinned.

Near sundown on a Saturday, he walked around the house, admiring his work and feeling better about himself than he had for a long while. Cody had been fond of quoting somebody named Sir Henry Wotton, who said, 350 years back: “Well building hath three conditions: commodity, firmness, and delight.” Carlisle was succeeding in the first two and had the third pretty well mapped out in his head. In addition, he was getting back to somewhere he’d been before, somewhere with Cody, somewhere quieter, somewhere that made sense.

Carlisle was hungry but too tired to fire up the butane stove and heat another can of beans or whatever was left under the tarp where he kept his food cache. Without hurrying things, it was too late to make Danny’s in Salamander, so it looked like peanut-butter sandwiches and fruit with a Milky Way at the end.

While he and Dumptruck considered their dismal set of choices, he glanced down the lane and saw Gally Deveraux walking toward him through the twilight. She was carrying a large picnic hamper in one hand and a thermos jug in the other, stumbling over the ruts. He had been eating some of his meals at Danny’s over the last few weeks and had come to know Gally better, but this surprised him.

She stopped and adjusted the Stetson that had fallen over her eyes. He walked down to meet her. “Hello, Gally. What a surprise.”

Her face was red and she was panting a little from the stumbling and carrying. She was wearing jeans and a shirt she had bought at Charlene’s going-out-of-business sale and her winter denim jacket. In the twilight, with strands of hair trailing out from under the hat, she looked just fine, like a slightly aging sweetheart of the rodeo.

“Hi, carpenter. I didn’t know if I should drive up your lane or not. Jack took off for the weekend with some of his hook-and-bullet buddies to shoot dangerous game, deer or pheasants, I guess, maybe hummingbirds for all I know. Whatever it is, if it runs or flaps, they’ll shoot it. Got to keep the range free of predators and cull the wildlife for ecological purposes, as they’re fond of saying. Actually, what they do is drink and drive around, trying to scare up something they can shoot from the truck window.

“He left it to me to go out and round up some of the yearlings. I was out there on the sorrel gelding, working my tail off, when I said to myself, ‘Well, to hell with you, Jack.’ That’s when I got it in my head to come over for a neighborly visit. Thought with all the work you’re doing, you might require something in the way of food with the punch of rocket fuel.” The explanation for being there came pouring out fast and up front.

“Gally, what a kind thought. I was just mulling over the virtues of beans versus peanut butter, and here you come out of the falling darkness on an errand of mercy.” He took the hamper from her.

Gally laughed and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. She was sweating lightly, even though the evening was cooling fast. “There’s a steady flow of reports coming in from everyone that’s been visiting you. You’re surprising them. The early betting leaned toward you falling off the roof and pulling out for California when the first snow flew.”

The hamper held thick slices of ham, potato salad, coleslaw, apple pie, homemade bread, the works, including a six-pack of Miller’s. Gally’s famously good coffee was in the thermos.

They walked around Carlisle’s emerging vision while he pointed out subtleties of the carpenter’s trade far beyond anything Gally cared to know. But women in general have a nice way of putting up with boyish dreams, and she asked intelligent questions, nodding and smiling as he ran his fingers over redwood and fir while he talked.

Inside, they stood on the decking, looking up through the larger skylight at red bands of sundown cut diagonally by the contrails of a jet. After a long week at Danny’s and a day of rounding up yearlings to boot, Gally had to be as tired as he was, Carlisle knew, but she covered it, and at that moment he began to feel differently about her, started to care about her in the way you care about a friend who is maybe a little something more than just a casual friend.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

He took her over to the fireplace and pointed at a word carved into the stone on the left-hand side:
Syawla
. “I found it when I cleaned the gunk off. Williston must have tooled it in there. I remember you telling me about the legends out here, about a priestess called Syawla.”

“Carlisle, that makes the enamel peel right off my teeth. Why do you suppose he put it there?”

“Don’t know. Adds a little something to the place, though. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t want to think about it, period.”

The nights were getting cold, but Carlisle had the fireplace working. While Dumptruck slept on the hearth, he and Gally sat on stacks of lumber, laughing and talking and eating the food she had brought in her Bronco, down the red dirt road past Wolf Butte, past a lot of things. She had traveled that road with muddled thoughts about women growing older who had more or less given up on possibilities. And she looked at the man from California wearing a navy-issue watch cap, whose hair was almost as long as hers and was tied back into a ponytail with a leather shoestring; it felt good to laugh again.

After supper, Carlisle tossed more pieces of scrap lumber into the fireplace, and for a while they sat there without talking. Both of them stared at the flames, drinking coffee out of tin cups, light snow blowing through places where he hadn’t finished the siding. Gally was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, cup balanced in both hands, wondering about a lot of things. When she left about midnight, there was the glow of a small fire on the crest of Wolf Butte three miles northwest, but Carlisle didn’t see it.

The next morning, an unusual amount of traffic was moving on the red dirt road, including several county sheriff vehicles and an ambulance. Carlisle wondered about it but didn’t want to take the time to investigate. A little before noon, Axel Looker drove up the lane and got out. “Hear what happened?”

“No. I figured something was going on by the number of cars and trucks going by out front.”

“Jack Deveraux and some of his drinking pals were road hunting on the other side of Wolf Butte yesterday. Somehow one of the guns went off in their truck and blew half of Jack’s face away. Killed him on the spot.”

“My God! When was that?”

“About five-thirty in the afternoon.”

“I didn’t know Jack, except to see him around, but I know Gally. That’s just awful.”

“Well, yes and no. That’d be the going opinion around here. Jack was a serious drinker and headed further in that direction. These dumb bastards around here are always mixing alcohol and guns. I won’t let ’em hunt my land anymore after they shot a steer a few years ago. We used to have bullets whizzing around the house during deer season.”

Carlisle was thinking that Gally had been walking up his lane with her hamper and thermos at about the time her husband had been dying. In some indefinable way, he felt guilty about what had happened, as if he’d had a hand in it.

“Nobody could locate Gally,” Axel continued. “She was off somewhere until pretty late.” Axel was looking at Carlisle, remembering he’d seen what looked like Gally’s Bronco parked at the foot of Carlisle’s lane when he and Earlene had driven home the night before after doing their weekly grocery shopping in Livermore.

Carlisle said nothing, so Axel went on. “I guess Gally’s taking it pretty well. But I’ll tell you what the old-timers at Danny’s are saying. They’re saying it wasn’t no accident, even though apparently that’s just what it was. But one of the old guys who’s an expert on the Wolf Butte legends said, ‘There ain’t no accidents out there. It just looks that way. Always.’”

Chapter Eight

T
HE FIRST BIG SNOW HELD OFF UNTIL LATE OCTOBER,
coming softly then in the middle of the night and settling on Carlisle McMillan’s new cedar shakes while he slept. Around dawn the wind kicked up, and he awakened to the rattle of plastic sheets fastened over unfinished windows and doors. He got the fireplace going, ate some bread and jam, and waited for the coffee to brew in its pot hanging over the flames.

He had planned to install the first of the double-paned windows today, but clearly it was time for the high-efficiency woodstove that had arrived from Vermont two weeks ago. The Indian had drifted by the day after it was delivered. He came late in the morning while Carlisle was thinking about how to get 275 pounds of cast iron off the bed of the pickup and into the house without cracking it or permanently destroying his capacity to function as a male animal, or both. The stove had
Defiant
stamped on its door and looked just that way resting on the truck bed.

Carlisle had never seen the Indian before, didn’t hear him coming. He stood on the other side of the pickup as if he were part of the landscape. Face like hammered copper, thin as a stipe of wild yellow clover, dressed in denim jacket and jeans and beat-up cowboy boots, white shirt with a smudge on the collar. Straight black hair about the same length as Carlisle’s and a wide-brimmed hat with some kind of juju-bead hatband wrapped around the crown.

He said nothing, looking at the stove, then at Carlisle. Old dark eyes taking in the problem, taking in Carlisle, taking in the universe for all Carlisle knew.

“It’s a heavy son of a whore,” Carlisle said, looking at the stove.

The Indian nodded. “We could rig up a travois out of these long two-by-fours and a couple of crosspieces.”

That’s all he said. That’s all he had to say. Carlisle knew the problem had been solved.

The Indian might have been fifty, he might have been seventy. Carlisle couldn’t tell. But he was tough and strong for his size. They wrestled the stove off the truck and onto the drag, then moved it to the steps, where Carlisle walked it gingerly across the rotten porch floor he hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet.

Carlisle offered the Indian a beer. They sat on the tailgate of the pickup, legs swinging back and forth, sipping and talking a little. The Indian was intensely curious about the house and what Carlisle was doing. Said he sensed some kind of positive magic in all of this.

“I have these strong feelings of ancestral worship when I look at your work. Why is that?”

Carlisle felt a little shiver and swung his head toward the Indian. He had not spoken of Cody Marx to anyone for years. But he decided the Indian would understand the story. He told him, and while he was talking, the Indian would slowly move his head up and down from time to time.

After Carlisle finished, the Indian said, “When you have closed up your house, I will come by to chant good words over this sacred place. I will bring Susanna with me. Do you know her?”

“I’m not sure.”

“She is the white woman who lives in a little house by the elevator in Salamander. She may be white, but in her own way she thinks more Indian than many Indians do. She has her own vision—not an Indian vision, since that is impossible to achieve without being an Indian, but her way has much in common with the Indian way. She has strong medicine within her, and I will ask her to also say words over the tribute you build to your Cody Marx.”

“I think I know who you mean, though I’ve never met her.” Carlisle knew exactly whom he meant.

After that, the Indian started coming by every few days to check on Carlisle’s progress. Always on foot, always by himself. Sometimes he brought fresh bass or catfish from the Little Sal and cooked lunch for them over an open fire. Sometimes he sat on the floor cross-legged and played a small wooden flute while Carlisle worked. Carlisle liked the sound. Somehow it fit this country, so he asked the Indian if he would teach him to play.

When the Indian came again, he brought an extra flute, saying it was Carlisle’s to keep. “Begin by holding it like this, then blow across the opening here very gently. At the beginning, do not try to play any song, do not even try to put your fingers on the holes made for them. You should concentrate on getting a sound from the open position so pure that it alone makes your heart ache. It will take you months to do that, but I will help you. When you see the image of a lone coyote coming from the sounds, then you will know you have it right. So long, Builder. I will come again.”

In the years Carlisle knew him, the Indian never referred to Carlisle as anything but “Builder.” Carlisle, in turn, called him “Flute Player,” since the Indian had never offered a name. The Indian didn’t seem to mind.

Masonry was not Carlisle’s strongest skill, but in the northwest corner of the main room, he’d mortared together a nice brick heat shield that ran halfway up the wall. The brick, coming from a historic street the Livermore City Council had decided to pave, would both protect the wall and absorb heat that would be released long after the stove had died out. He had enough materials left over to build a hearth two bricks high for the stove to sit on, leaving plenty of clearance all around it.

With the snow piling up outside, he set seventeen brown paper sacks in a line along one wall. In each sack were the parts for one step in the installation of the wood stove. Cody had taught him to operate this way when doing something that involved a lot of pieces.

As Cody said, “People dump all the parts out and rummage through them as the need arises. That’s not only inefficient, but also small parts have a tendency to run when you’re not looking. There’s a whole creation separate from ours that’s full of random parts that have escaped that way. Partition the job into stages, put the right parts for each stage into its own bag, and everything works out as it should.”

Seventeen steps, seventeen sacks. Two days of wrestling uncooperative metal and cutting his hands, and it was done. Just in time, too, since a high-pressure front followed the storm, as things tend to occur in the high plains, with hard, bright sunlight and a sharp drop in temperature. Carlisle heated the stove to a low burn and let it cool. He did that again and again, curing the cast iron so it wouldn’t crack when he built the first big fire in it. Then he put down the first real fire, and the stove cooked away, double burning the gases as it was designed to do, filling the entire house with good radiant heat, and Carlisle began installing the last of the windows.

Autumn was volatile. Four days after the snow fell, it had melted. The house was closed in except for hanging the front door, a solid-core mahogany prize that had been tossed on the junk pile up at the hunting lodge where Carlisle acquired his redwood siding. He had the job under control and rested for a moment, sitting on the doorsill and looking out across the prairie, coffee cup beside him.

A black hat was coming up the lane. Under it was the Indian carrying a small drum over his shoulder, and the woman was with him.

A black shawl over a dress of lavender-colored wool. High boots and a flaxen sash knotted on her left hip, the ends of it hanging to her knees. She was wearing a headband that matched the sash. The bounce of sunlight off her silver necklace raced ahead of them as they came on, walking easily, talking to each other.

“Ho, Builder.”

“Ho, Flute Player.”

“Builder, I have brought Susanna Benteen with me.”

Carlisle took the hand she held toward him and looked at her. She was like nothing he’d ever seen. Beauty all right, not American beauty perfect, not the starlet or the magazine cover, but a calm, slow, haunting kind of beauty.

Her lips were full and well-defined, high cheekbones and a softly pointed chin, all of it edged and set off by the thick auburn hair. In some way he could not yet grasp, she was whole and was aware of her wholeness. You could call it quiet beauty or you could call it a hesitant nobility. You could say all of that about her and many other things and still chafe at your inexactness. There was no adequate description for a state of affairs where someone simply
was
.

Carlisle could not fit her into any category. Hanging around California for most of his life, he thought he’d seen about every possible variation of woman, but Susanna was her own tribe numbering one and no more. She looked at him straight, evenly, smiling a little.

The Indian examined the door Carlisle was working on, running a hand along the vertical edge of it, looking it up and down, speaking while he did so. “Susanna and I talked yesterday. We decided that today seemed favorable for your efforts at closing up the house, and it appears we were right. Is that not so?”

“You’re right on schedule,” Carlisle said. “Once I get this door hung, the place will be full tight against all weather.”

“Very good, Builder. Then Susanna will prepare for her blessing, and I will carry out mine while you continue your work. I have convinced her to perform the special ceremony she did when I asked her to bless my house last year. She was reluctant, but I have told her much about you, and she now has agreed to do this as a favor to me.”

“I am honored.” Carlisle wanted to say more, but he felt rattled by the very presence of Susanna Benteen.

Susanna and the Indian went inside while Carlisle retrieved one of Cody’s old planes and shaved the door perimeters a little more in several places. Testing, shaving, sanding, testing, until it swung perfectly into place with a soft, sure click. He wanted to look at Susanna Benteen every five seconds or so but forced himself to concentrate on the work.

“May we use the fireplace for this occasion, Carlisle?” She had a smooth, confident voice in the alto range.

“Yes, of course. Want me to get it going?”

“I prefer to do that myself, if it’s all right.”

“That’s fine. The two of you do what you need to do.”

She got the fire under way while Carlisle gathered up tools and swept the floor. The house was all wood but was beginning to feel as though it had the strength and mass of concrete. Tight, solid, with a force of its own. Anyone could feel that, just standing inside and looking around. Two and a half solid months of work, and Carlisle was pleased. Proud, in fact. This place would go on forever, or just about. Outside, he could hear the Indian sing-chanting and moving around the perimeter of the house. “Hey-ah-ah-hey! Hey-ah-ah-hey!”

His blessing complete, the Indian accepted a beer. But Susanna chose the red wine Carlisle offered her and thanked him politely as she took it.

With a low sun slanting through the front windows and catching dust motes in the air, he opened a beer for himself and sat on a nail keg. The small lumberyard in Livermore had had three of these kegs sitting in a back corner and had given them to Carlisle for the asking. In Marin County, such kegs sold for $80 in stores catering to rustic home decorating.

Darkness came, and Carlisle drank his second beer, half watching the woman take small pouches from her macram bag and arrange them in a semicircle near the fire. The house originally had been built as a post-and-beam structure in the same fashion as an Amish barn. Carlisle had always liked this system, since all of the roof weight rested on the posts and beams, and walls bearing no load could be moved reasonable distances without the complications of headers and crossbeams. He had torn out all the inside partitions, leaving the interior completely open, with Williston’s fireplace standing free about a third of the way in from the rear wall.

The only light came from the fire, a large warm fire, and the Indian moved to where he could rest his back against the south wall, sitting cross-legged with the drum in his lap. He started to play. Soft, easy strokes, tapping the drumhead with his fingers. This continued for maybe five minutes, sound reverberating in the empty spaces.

The Indian was chanting now. The woman had gone behind the fireplace, out of view. Carlisle was enjoying it, sitting in a wash of pride within the house he was creating, listening to the Indian. A year ago he would have been impatient, wanting the ceremony to move on, but his careful work here had quieted him. He noticed that even his pulse rate had slowed over the last few months.

Carlisle wondered for a moment what Cody would think about all this hoodoo and decided he would be pleased. His concern was building to suit the purposes people had in mind.

Gradually the volume of the drum increased as the Indian played with more intensity, using his palms, his voice rising at the same time. Carlisle nearly dropped the can of beer he was holding when Susanna Benteen came from behind the fireplace. Except for a necklace with a silver falcon hanging from it and large hoop earrings that matched the necklace, she was naked.

And she was not a bit self-conscious about her nakedness. That much was clear. She walked slowly to a position in front of the fireplace, brought her legs together, and raised her arms toward rafters that were still bare and had insulation stapled into place between them.

To Carlisle McMillan, her body looked as if it had been turned on the lathe of a master craftsman. She was all of the women who had ever appeared in his heated boyhood fantasies wrapped into one live, obviously healthy woman who began to dance in front of Williston’s fireplace. She executed slow pirouettes at first, her long hair swinging in the firelight, her feet making no sound on the raw flooring.