High Plains Tango (25 page)

“Merle Bagby, Salamander street commissioner, cut the hawk down only three hours before Carlisle stopped for groceries at Webster’s Jack and Jill. Carlisle was carrying two sacks out the front door when Bobby Eakins and a few others came out of Leroy’s and started calling him names. They said he should take his ass out of here and go back to where all the other stinking hippies lived. Carlisle ignored him until Bobby pushed him up against the plate-glass windows of Webster’s. Carlisle dropped his sacks of groceries and told Bobby to knock it off, at which point Bobby took a swing at him. He missed, and Carlisle cold-cocked him right onto the hood of Mrs. Macklin’s Dodge.

“Whether that was a mistake or not is still a matter for debate. But the result was that Hack Kenbule proceeded to beat the crap out of Carlisle right there on Main Street. Carlisle was strong in his own way but not all that big in the frame. Even though Hack was running to fat, he was bigger and stronger and a lot meaner than Carlisle. He’d also had several Grain Belts before the ruckus started, and with the crowd egging him on, he might have killed Carlisle if Thelma Englestrom hadn’t run screaming out of Danny’s and got the fight stopped with the assistance of Jim Webster.

“Jim helped Carlisle pick up the groceries and provided new grocery sacks for him and got him into his pickup. All the while, the crowd that had poured out from Leroy’s and Danny’s was jeering Carlisle, except for Huey Sverson, who just looked real sad. Some also noticed Arlo Gregorian was standing off to one side, not saying anything. While this was going on, Bobby Eakins was still lying across the Macklins’ car hood and, for once, was quiet.

“Carlisle, pretty battered in the face and looking like he hadn’t slept for months, came to the public hearing when it was continued the following week. This time the experts had computer printouts that were longer than the proposed highway and held them up for everybody to see. Then the engineers took over and explained all the technical details one more time.

“Carlisle stood his ground and, as some privately said afterward, seemed like he beat the bunch of them on the basis of logic and numbers. He kept hammering away at how the route selected was not the best one according to their own standards and how their discount rates and benefit-cost ratios were dead wrong. The engineers fiddled with all the pens in their plastic shirt-pocket protectors, shuffled their feet under the table, and looked at one another with tight lips, as if they knew Carlisle was right. But the main suits just absorbed the blows as they’d been taught by all their years in politics. The problem was, you see, Carlisle was arguing with those in control of the microphone, and that’s always a losing battle.

“Besides, when people want something, intellectual fine points, including proof, don’t count for much in the end. Two days later, the State Highway Commission and the secretary of transportation voted in favor of the original route involving the great curve of concrete coming by Falls City and Livermore. At the same time, they announced construction had already begun in the southern states and would begin in Yerkes County as soon as weather permitted, news that was greeted with overwhelming cheers throughout the county.

“The locals all agreed the choice was well considered and that democracy had been served. After all, democracy is based on majority rule, isn’t it? And the majority favored the proposed route, didn’t they? Some of a zoological bent kindly observed that it was too bad about the T-hawks, but they also pointed out that extinction was just nature’s way of saying good night. I heard that in Danny’s.

“On the same day the highway decision was announced, the
Inquirer
ran a back-page article saying that sinkholes were forming in various parts of the local countryside due to fast-emptying aquifers underneath the ground, according to a study by state geologists. Meanwhile, the cheerleaders got out their blazers and sent them to the cleaners for a little sheep dip, preparing themselves for the numerous ceremonies in which our forthcoming prosperity would be celebrated and praised.”

Chapter Eighteen

A
WEEK AFTER THE HIGHWAY DECISION, CARLISLE WAS SITTING
by his woodstove, thinking about his next move, not that he had any moves left. Maybe just pack up and leave.

Gally Deveraux had called a few days earlier from Casper, where she had spent Christmas with her daughter. She had heard about the highway decision and said how bad she felt for Carlisle. Her voice was soft and caring, but things had subtly altered between them. He had been completely wrapped up in work and the highway fight, and she had been immersed in her classes. And though she hadn’t said as much, Carlisle sensed she might have found someone else.

They had met a few weeks before at a motel halfway between Spearfish and Salamander, but something was different. Gally was different; changing fast. Carlisle was different; his anger over the highway had made him grim and uninterested in all the great ideas Gally was picking up from her studies, ideas she wanted to talk about with the intensity of a woman finding herself. And because of the planned Antelope National Park, which would include her land, it seemed as if Gally’s financial worries might disappear.

She especially wanted to talk about the professor she had for a course in colonial history, how brilliant he was, how much time he was willing to spend talking with her outside of class. It was ending, what she and Carlisle had together. Both of them knew that. Nobody’s fault, just the way things work out sometimes. When they parted at the motel, they held each other for longer than necessary, but neither of them mentioned getting together again.

There was not much keeping Carlisle in Yerkes County. The highway would take his house and the birds. He closed the woodstove doors after putting a couple of splits of oak on the fire and sat there with Dumptruck on his lap, feeling a little sorry for himself, trying to figure out his next move. Become a gypsy again, maybe do that. Find another place. Flight as a possibility.

He was thinking about finishing the dining room table. The table was supposed to swing down from its vertical position against the wall to horizontal on heavy brass hinges from an old church door. But he had never figured out an aesthetic and yet functional way of locking it up on the wall when it wasn’t in use. What was the point? It would be gone when the highway came through. No, he thought, do it anyway, finish things, do it right. After that, fix the atrium glass. Get the body in good shape for its burial.

He was standing there looking at the table, confronting the old classic trade-off between form and function. The simple hook he had been using was inelegant. Something just as simple was needed but with a little more style. Dumptruck kept jumping on the table and going to sleep and had to be moved each time Carlisle wanted to swing the table up and eyeball the problem.

Somewhere around four in the afternoon, sun going down, Dumptruck shifted from sleep to a state of alertness, ears pricked. A moment later, Carlisle heard the crunch of snowy footsteps. He walked quickly and quietly to a window and looked out: Susanna Benteen, alone. As she stepped onto the porch, Carlisle opened the door. Light snow was falling.

She was smiling, her face reddened from wind and cold. “Hello, Carlisle. I guess a belated Happy New Year is the greeting for today. Is it all right if I come in?”

“Of course, and late Happy New Year to you, Susanna. Can I take your cloak?”

“I think I’ll leave it on for a while. The walk was fun, but I’m a little chilled at the moment. A hot cup of tea would be nice, though.” She looked around the house. “What are you doing to the dining table?”

“Trying to figure out a way of latching it to the wall properly.”

Carlisle was talking from the kitchen area, getting the tea ready, thinking. Susanna didn’t seem as formidable to him as she once had. In the process of building his monument to Cody Marx and suffering through the highway wars, he had become completely his own man. That made Susanna’s strong sense of herself less threatening to him.

And their talk by the river over a year ago had somehow cleared the air between them, for Carlisle, at least. He had said his words plain and true, she had understood. Plus she had been coming by regularly with Gally or the Indian over the past year, and the tension Carlisle had felt in her presence was mostly gone. Mostly. There was still the matter of a desirable woman, and that tension never goes away. He recollected this was the first time she had ever come to his place alone.

“What’s the problem with the table? Oh, I see. You’re trying to figure out a different way to hang it on the wall.” She was bent over, examining the hinges.

Carlisle carried two cups of steaming tea from the stove and handed one to Susanna. “I’ll figure it out, just a matter of time.”

“I saw something like this in Iraq once. I’m trying to remember how they did it. Can we sit by the stove until I warm up?”

Susanna sipped her tea, green eyes looking over the rim of her cup at Carlisle McMillan, auburn hair spilling out from under the hood of her cloak.

He looked back, but it was still difficult for him to sustain any sort of prolonged eye contact with Susanna Benteen. “What are you doing way out here on a cold January day?”

“I stayed all night with Marcie and Claude English. They’re real nice people and have me over once in a while. You know them, don’t you?”

“Yes. I met Claude originally when I bought my subflooring lumber from him. They had me over for dinner a few times during the highway mess. Good folks, smart folks.”

“Marcie and I are interested in intensive gardening. We met at the Salamander Library one day while we were both looking at the same section of books. They wanted me to stay on through tonight, but they have small children, and I always feel like I’m putting them out a bit when I stay for long, even though Marcie says that’s not so. Besides, I felt like walking. I started off for Salamander, then got the idea of coming by to see if you were home, see how you’re doing after the highway battles.”

“I’m glad you came. I’d invite you to stay for dinner, but I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of anything to eat. Been sitting around here feeling sorry for myself and didn’t get into Webster’s Jack and Jill this week.”

“Carlisle McMillan, carpentry may be your game, but cooking when there’s nothing to cook is one of mine. I learned those skills during the years I spent on the road with my father.”

“You once said he was an anthropologist, correct?”

“Yes. Sometimes we were three hundred miles from the nearest main food supplies, in the Australian outback or in some mountain pass in Bolivia. I remember my father’s long face that Christmas morning in Bolivia, looking at our food stocks. I was only fourteen, but I put on my coat and went hiking around until I found a farmer who sold me a pretty rough-looking chicken. I made it work, though, with some canned vegetables and potatoes. Mind if I look through your larder? You can always make soup, no matter how thin the pantry seems.”

“I’d be grateful if you did. I can promise a decent bottle of red wine if you can cobble up anything at all from what’s in there. Worst case, we can have the wine and skip the food if it comes to that.”

Susanna smiled and removed her cloak. “It won’t. That’s something I can almost promise you.”

She was right. A half hour later, good smells were coming from the kitchen area while Carlisle stared at the dining table, still thinking about how to fasten it to the wall. Concentration was difficult with Susanna twenty feet away in front of his stove. The images of her dancing across the floor upon which he was standing kept rolling through his head.

She hummed, her hair hanging long with a slight curl to it, silver hoop earrings dangling, and looked over her shoulder at him. “How’s it coming, the table? Any great ideas yet?”

“A few ideas, none of them great. Something smells good over there.”

“It came down to soup. Were you aware you had all the makings for homemade bread mixed in among jars of jam and cans of old roofing nails?”

“No .  .  . I did?”

“You did, and I’ll have it under way in a while. There is something basic about the smell of baking bread. Something from a long way back.” Dumptruck was rubbing against her legs, purring.

“You’ve got that right. And I just figured out how to hang the table. A one-by-four piece of carved redwood hinged on the wall that locks into a cradle built for it on the underside of the table when the table swings up. I think it was the prospect of baking bread that did it.”

He walked over to a window and looked out. Then cracked the door and looked again. Women and big storms seemed to arrive at his place at the same time. He pondered that coincidence for a moment, then let it go. “Susanna, the snow’s really building up out there,” he called. “Want me to run you into Salamander before it gets worse?”

“No, I’m making soup and baking bread. The storm will take care of itself. It doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”

By eight o’clock supper was ready, and Carlisle had roughed out the assembly for hanging the table on the wall. It hung there now, precariously, and he swung it down. He set the table with plates, silverware, and two stubby candles hot waxed onto small scraps of pine. A tape went into the radio’s deck, and he turned off the lights. “Not bad, huh? The place looks pretty good.”

“It looks very elegant. Just right. And somehow it’s sort of comforting having a table saw within reach.”

Astor Piazzolla went to work in the tape deck of the radio: tangos. Carlisle had ordered the tape after listening to Gabe O’Rourke play the tangos in Leroy’s. Susanna held up her wineglass: “Here’s to Bolivia.”

“Bolivia it is, may she thrive and prosper and supply tourists with colorful blankets.”

Susanna laughed. “I learned to tango once, got pretty good at it, too, if I do say so.”

“Where was that?”

“Argentina. I was on the road by myself, and stopped there for a while. After my father died, I took off to see what I’d missed in my earlier days of traveling with him. That’s all I thought about back then, the next railroad station, the next bus to a place I had never heard of. The road gets in your blood.”

She looked away for a moment, toward the radio, and remembered the Argentine who had taught her the tango.

Carlisle watched her when she turned, the auburn hair shifting and then coming to rest softly in a slightly different way on her neck and shoulders. She touched her mouth with a napkin and looked at him again. He sat there in a blue workshirt and old black sweater, sawdust on his jeans, looking back at her.

On the third finger of her right hand was an opal-set ring. Another, plain and thin and gold, circled her index finger, and a jangly silver bracelet hung from her wrist. A silver falcon dangled from the chain around her neck; he had seen it before and remembered it. Her dress was wool, cream colored, and the patterned yellow-and-brown scarf lay with studied informality on one shoulder.

She reached across the table and put her hand on his. The opal ring was cool on his skin. “I’ve been thinking about your predicament with the highway, Carlisle. May I suggest that in your anger and sadness you’re missing something.”

“What am I missing?”

“Your tribute to Cody Marx is not wood and nails, windows and doors, the material objects surrounding us here. The real tribute is that you built it for him in the way he would have wanted it built. And in the process you rebuilt yourself. He would understand that instantly, but I think you’ve somehow missed it. Based on what I have heard you say about Cody Marx, he would appreciate a tribute but not a monument. There is a difference.”

Carlisle grinned. “Good point. You’re right, Cody doesn’t need a monument. I’ve been concentrating on the output, what the house represents and what the highway will do to it. Cody always focused on journeys rather than destinations, on craftsmanship rather than objects, knowing that good process eventually leads to good product, if you’re not in a hurry. I understood that once, got it back when I was building the house, and then forgot it again. And Gally Deveraux once said something to the effect that, if I want to, I can strike camp and be gone with the morning. Build another tribute if I have to. But I somehow don’t feel like I have to do it again.”

Susanna Benteen smiled then. “I like that .  .  . be gone with the morning. Stay light, portable. I try never to accumulate more of lasting value than what I can carry onto a bus or train in one suitcase and a bag over my shoulder. I still remember the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They could do that, strike camp and be gone in less than an hour with everything they owned.”

“Were you there in the Kalahari with your father?” Carlisle’s face was almost incredulous. Distant places, places he had only heard about.

“Yes.” She began laughing. “They admired his portable radio. On the day we were leaving, he offered it as a gift. The Bushmen shuffled their feet and politely declined. It was too heavy to pack and not necessary for getting through the day and the night following, which was the time frame on which they based their lives. They took only what they could carry easily, stayed light. The radio was only portable to us because we had a Land Rover, not to the Bushmen, though.”