High Plains Tango (14 page)

As she moved, she bent gracefully to the small pouches on the floor and tossed powder of some kind into the fire, transforming the flames to green, then blue, then intense ocher. The Indian kept chanting, and she began to answer his words with chants of her own, until the drum and two voices merged into a wild but unified composition.

Her body was shining from the fire and her exertion, and Carlisle could feel his own sweat starting to run down his back and chest. She danced with more thrust and power now, her bare feet slapping the planks, earrings catching the firelight. Carlisle alternated between wanting to have her and being caught up in the magic she and the Indian were creating.

It went on and on, and Carlisle began to feel himself changing. Something had moved through the room and sought him out. The sounds and images were working on him: woman dancing, firelight, woman, old hands on old drum, firelight, woman. She began clapping her hands in syncopated time to the Indian’s drum, almost in the way of a flamenco dancer. Her eyes locked on Carlisle’s, stayed there. She became a figure of faded, limpid amber, and he could see the breath in her lungs and the wine moving in her blood. He could see all of this, could see for a moment all the way out to a transparent forever that disappeared in the moment he found it.

A crescendo was reached, the drum stopped, and Susanna walked gracefully behind the fireplace. Silence. Carlisle looked at the Indian. His head was bowed, his hands still. The only sound was from the crackle of burning wood.

After a few minutes, Susanna Benteen came around the fireplace, her clothing in place. The Indian rose: “The hearth has been blessed, and this place is now a sacred place. We did not pray only to the wood and brick, but also to you, Builder. We prayed that your hands will be guided by the six powers as you work and that your tribute to your Cody Marx will be completed as he would want. Walk here and let the house be glad.”

So saying, he swung the drum over his shoulder and opened the door. Carlisle recovered enough to thank them and offer them a ride in his pickup, but they declined. He watched them walk under the yard light and down the lane, light snow beginning to fall. The Indian, the woman, her long shawl around her, one end of it cowled over her head. They disappeared into the snow, eight miles from Salamander, into some other stretch of consciousness they understood but which Carlisle McMillan knew he did not.

As he unrolled his sleeping bag and placed it near the fire, he noticed a small sculpture of carved basswood on the mantel. It was a naked woman with flames coming from her hair. The Indian later would tell him it was a representation of Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth. The white medicine woman had asked the Indian to carve it.

Carlisle lay in his sleeping bag, thinking of the woman’s body and how it shone in the firelight while she danced to sounds from wrinkled hands playing on tightly stretched goatskin, the perspiration from her breasts falling like sweet rain onto the hearth when she turned. Regretting his lack of sensitivity about blessings and ceremonies, he found himself simply wanting her.

Chapter Nine

T
HANKSGIVING. CARLISLE’S FIRST IN THE HIGH PLAINS.
Thelma Englestrom was back from the hospital and running Danny’s again. Gally helped her serve a free Thanksgiving dinner to all the older folks having nowhere to go and to those of any age who could not afford one. She left when Thelma was closing up for the day and drove up the lane to Carlisle’s place shortly after two o’clock. It was bright cold and the Chicago Bears were losing in the third quarter.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Carlisle. It’s nice to be invited out.” She was smiling. Gally had been spending long hours cleaning up the affairs surrounding Jack’s death and working on getting the ranch sold. Except for a few words in Danny’s and at the funeral, she and Carlisle had not talked since the night her husband was killed. Two days ago, he had asked her if she would like to have Thanksgiving dinner with him.

Carlisle fastened a small turkey on a spit he had rigged in the fireplace. She watched him. “Think it’ll work? Looks a little wobbly.”

“Some things work, some don’t,” he replied. “This contraption lies about in the middle of that continuum, I’d say .  .  . sort of like life itself. If it doesn’t work, I’ll crucify the bird on a cross of two-by-fours, then we’ll burn him at the stake and have peanut-butter sandwiches.”

“In that case I’m praying it works,” Gally said, laughing. “Peanut butter’s okay, but I’m not real fond of crucifixions, marriage to former bull riders included. Sorry, that’s an awful thing to say. I’m supposed to be in mourning, but somehow I can’t seem to get in the mood. Jack was a good man at one time but ended up being something a lot less than that.”

Carlisle looked up at her from where he squatted near the hearth. “Well, I understand the new etiquette books have considerably shortened the formal mourning period, so I believe you’re absolved in this case.”

He plugged in the motor, and the turkey spun slowly, balanced perfectly on the spit. He looked up at Gally Deveraux and shrugged, then wiggled his eyebrows and grinned. “What do you think?”

“I think you can delay the cross building for now.”

The turkey went around while he basted it with a mixture of red wine, butter, and a little garlic. Gally wrapped baking potatoes in aluminum foil for later placement in the coals, then worked on a tossed salad. Carlisle fiddled with the radio, couldn’t find a station that suited him, and slipped a Vivaldi tape into the deck. He set two nail kegs by the wood stove and opened bottles of the imported beer he had bought for the occasion. They sat there while the rotisserie motor groaned under the turkey’s weight.

Gally looked good, real good. Everybody had been saying how she looked better after Jack’s death, sad and tragic as it was (mostly for Jack and not for Gally, some of them added quietly). Gally looked as if she had been relieved of a heavy load. She had put on a little weight, just enough, and her face seemed to be losing the drawn, sad look she had carried for a long time.

Carlisle had never seen her in anything except ranch clothes, but today she had on black wool slacks that did good things for her body and a soft yellow turtleneck sweater, her hair held up by three small combs fastened in the back. Carlisle was wearing his old construction boots, but the green plaid flannel shirt he had bought for the occasion worked pretty well with his faded tan corduroys.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked. “I heard you put the ranch up for sale.”

“Well, first off, I’m going to try and get the place sold. There won’t be anything left, even if I can sell it, since there are two mortgages on it. Jack inherited the ranch debt-free from his father, but we had hard times four years running. That’s when the first mortgage was taken out. Then Jack got it in his head he was a brilliant gambler. He took out a second mortgage and went to Las Vegas with the idea he could win enough to get rid of all the debt. He stayed a month, went back again, and finally came home broke. High-stakes poker did it.

“I don’t know for sure what I’ll do once the ranch is gone. Maybe move to Casper or Bismarck, look for work of some kind. Maybe go back to college, I’ve always felt bad about not finishing my degree. I was going to be a high school history teacher.”

Carlisle said nothing. The moment didn’t call for anything from him.

“I shouldn’t be quite so negative about Jack. When I first met him he was some combination of pirate and cowboy, a real romantic figure. He did pretty well at rodeoing in his younger years till he got busted up bad and had to quit. He was never the same after that. He pretended to like ranching and tried to make a go of it, but what he really liked was riding bulls, and he was good at it. When I first met him I loved to watch him do it, and I married him because I loved him and tried to keep on loving him for a long time, but he just pulled away from me and everything else, except his drinking buddies.”

And when it came to drinking buddies, she remembered that Harv Guthridge had called her two weeks after Jack’s death and asked her out. She’d said no and told him not to call anymore. He’d laughed and slammed the phone down.

She looked at Carlisle, kind of a sideways look. “You ever been married, Carlisle? Or if that’s a sore spot at all, forget I asked.”

“No sore spot. I’ve never been married, to my mother’s dismay. I came close to it once, six or seven years ago. She was an elementary school teacher, from southern Illinois. She married young and got divorced, moved to the Bay Area from the Midwest. We waltzed around for a couple of years, but I was in a blue funk in those days and pretty hard to get along with. She went east one summer with a group of other teachers and got swept away by a naturalist at the Smithsonian.”

He paused, smiled, looked at Gally. “Janie is better off with her naturalist than with an itinerant carpenter. I’ve never doubted that. I still think about her, though, off and on, now and then. She was a good person.”

Carlisle took a drink of St. Pauli Girl, read the label, moved on. “You from out here? I mean, is this where you grew up?”

“No, I’m an Iowa girl. A small town in the northern part of the state. My dad ran a hardware store there till he died a few years ago. My mother moved to Austin, Minnesota, and lives in one of those retirement communities. She seems happy about it, but the thought of winding up in one of those places kind of makes me want to set a deadline on my life—say about fifty. Which, come to think of it, isn’t all that far off.”

“Well, as a friend of mine, Buddy Reems, and I used to say when talking about death and retirement, ‘Don’t die dumb.’”

“Sounds good. What’s it mean, not dying dumb?”

“We made a list of ways we didn’t want to die. Number one was don’t die in a hospital, don’t let that happen. Number two was being tail-ended by a ’71 Cadillac in front of Kmart because a blue-light special on men’s underwear was commencing. It went on from there.”

Gally began to laugh.

“The third fits right in with what you were just saying: being hit by flying debris from a rotary lawn mower operated by an overweight sixty-seven-year-old Rotarian in a planned retirement community. I’m noticing all of this doesn’t sound as good as it did when we made it up one night in an Oakland bar. Beer talk tends to run that way.”

“What would be some good ways to die, then?” she asked, still giggling about his list.

“Well, we had a little more trouble with that part of it. Falling off a roof after nailing down the last shingle on the best house you’ve ever built, a spear in the chest on the African veldt, that sort of thing. This definitely has the ring of boys and beer to it now that I’m saying it, slightly embarrassing, in fact. Besides, I figure all this arrogance about living and dying will shift a bit as I get a little older. Let’s change the subject.”

“Well, I don’t see as there’s anything wrong with a man being a boy once in a while, long as you get over it. Strikes me that a lot of the boys don’t take that next step.”

“Yeah, it’s not much fun growing up, so we beat it back long as possible, forever if we can pull it off.”

“Women understand that. We see it all the time, living with the boys.” She grinned.

“I’ll bet you do. And as I’ve always said, to understand boy-men, you’ve got to understand gear.”

“Gear?” Gally smiled. “Tell me about gear.”

Carlisle was squatted down, putting more wood on the fire, talking over his shoulder. “Men like gear, all kinds of stuff. We like bags, too, since we’ve got to have someplace to put the gear. Then we like to sort the gear and pack it in the bags and go off somewhere.”

“Now you’re really making sense. I understand that, having lived with Jack for over twenty years.”

“When I was little—four or five—back in Mendocino, I wanted a doll buggy. That worried my mother, I think, but she found one for me at a rummage sale. One of the wheels wobbled, but I didn’t care. It was a vehicle to cart my gear around. I carried rocks, screwdrivers, and a hammer in it. Other stuff, too.

“My mother stopped worrying when she saw that. When I got older she used to kid me about it, saying, ‘Carlisle, your truck is just a grown-up version of your doll buggy, a way to haul all your stuff around.’ I’d say she was right.”

“Your general theory of gear explains a lot of male behavior.” The fire crackled and splashed light across the smile on Gally’s face. “Jack had bags and gear. Except he liked to take the gear from one bag and put it in a different bag, kind of a domino effect. After that he’d go off somewhere, hunting or fishing.”

“Yeah, repacking gear is an important part of it. You get to handle it a lot more often that way.” He opened his cooler and set two more beers on the floor beside them. “In that small town where you grew up, I’ll bet you were homecoming queen, right?”

Gally smiled again. “I was first runner-up. My dad claimed it was a scam job, that the girl who was picked got it because she was going with the quarterback on the football team. What I never told him was that
I
was going out with the quarterback, secretly. My dad was something of a local football legend himself, enough said. Lord, that all seems like a long time ago, trivial and childish.”

Though, she reflected privately, it hadn’t seemed all that trivial or childish when she and the quarterback took a six-pack and, even though it was chilly, went skinny-dipping in the Shell Rock River after the homecoming game, down by where Elk Creek flowed into the river. But it seemed that way now. The quarterback was clumsy, so was she. It was inelegant, overall. But you get by those things even though they hurt a little when you call them up.

Late in the afternoon, Carlisle positioned two sawhorses in the middle of the room and laid one-by-twelves over them. Instant table. Sunlight was coming through the south windows, and the turkey turned out pretty well. Dumptruck had his own plate in the kitchen while the radio played. The talk between Gally and Carlisle ran mostly to local things, and he happened to mention the old dance hall on the edge of Livermore.

Gally looked out at the slanting light. “Oh, Carlisle, that place is so special. Let’s go over there. It won’t be dark for a little while. We can be there in half an hour. I want you to see it up close. We can do dishes when we get back.”

“Sounds good to me. Let’s fire up the truck.”

Twenty-five minutes later, they pulled up next to the Flagstone Ballroom, sitting on the shore of a small lake. The old place was in bad repair, shuttered and peeling in a raw, windy sundown. Not all that big as those things ran, maybe twenty thousand square feet including service areas.

“Kind of looks like one of Mrs. Macklin’s pies on the second day, doesn’t it?” Gally laughed.

Carlisle nodded, peering through a crack in the rear door. All he could see was old sinks, big ones. Must have been the kitchen. He went around the building and found another opening. Enough light was coming through holes in the roof and other places that he could make out the floor and the dark contours of booths surrounding it.

“Jack used to bring me dancing here when we were first married.”

He turned and looked at her standing in gray light, looking slim and fine in her slacks and sweater with a light mackinaw over them, a few strands of black hair with a little gray mixed in blowing across her face, trying to see her as she might have looked on a summer evening in the Flagstone Ballroom twenty or so years ago. The lake behind her was developing thin ice along the edges, and her face was turning pink from the stiff, cold wind coming in over the water.

“You probably have trouble seeing me as a young girl in a pretty dress dancing the night away in this place.”

It was a declarative sentence, but she meant it as a question. “I don’t have any trouble at all seeing that, Gally Deveraux. Tell me about it, anyway.”

“By the time I moved out here, the Flagstone was on its last legs. But Jack and I came here a lot. Mostly on Friday nights, that’s when the country bands played. Sometimes I’d talk him into bringing me on Saturdays when the big bands took over. My dad had a huge record collection of all the old bands—the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw—so I was raised around that kind of music. Jack never much cared for it, said it was hard to dance to, but what he really didn’t like was that a completely different kind of person from him came on the big band nights. Jack never wore ties, except those little string numbers once in a while, and most of the people who came to big band nights here dressed up. But sometimes he’d bring me. Then he’d spend the night complaining that you couldn’t do the Texas two-step to what he called gringo music.”