High Plains Tango (26 page)

Susanna tore a small piece of bread from the hot loaf. Piazzolla moved into “Nuevo Tango,” weaving the song around a January wind, which probed for cracks in Cody’s tribute and found none.

“How about coffee by the stove?” she asked. “I’ll fix it if you’ll clear the table. Seems a fair trade.”

“Deal.”

Carlisle tossed pillows on the floor next to the woodstove. Susanna concocted something from regular coffee, bitter chocolate, cinnamon, and a small splash of whiskey. After the coffee, they poured more of Carlisle’s red wine. Susanna was quiet, staring into her glass. Carlisle had difficulty keeping quiet around her, as if he needed words as a nervous reaction to her presence. There was some old force made of equal parts darkness and light within him, and he could feel it moving. A woman, her presence, what to do next. He wondered if women ever had the same feelings.

“Susanna, do you know anything about Wolf Butte? All sorts of legends float around about that place. Since I’ve been on this land I’ve noticed what looks like a fire up on the crest, usually very late in the night, just before dawn.”

She slowly brought her eyes up to his, looking at him with the directness of an arrow. “Yes, I know about the legends of Wolf Butte.
‘Stories’
is a better word, I think. ‘Legend’ carries the sense of being not true or overly romanticized. In the case of Wolf Butte, however, what you have heard is mostly true. It is a place of great power, the Early Ones knew that. If you’re asking about the people who have died out there, they died because they came to alter what the Keeper believed should not be tampered with.”

She took a deep breath, reached into her bag, and brought out a curved, dark green comb. She held it between her teeth and pushed her thick hair up high on top of her head and fastened it there with the comb. Carlisle watched her, she smiled at him.

“Have you heard about the professor who died near Wolf Butte while preparing for an archaeological dig?” she asked, settling herself against a cushion.

Carlisle nodded. “Yes.”

“That was my father.” She said it evenly.

“Jesus,” Carlisle whispered.

“That’s how I came to Yerkes County in the first place, to do a little private investigating of his death. The explanations all seemed a little too pat, too tidy, to explain a careful man walking where he had walked many times before and falling. My father was used to rough country, knew how to take care of himself, and I was suspicious. He had told me that academic reputations were threatened, that the dig at Salamander Crossing, as the place was called, might disprove widely accepted hypotheses of the overland migrations by early peoples. Quite a bit was at stake. And the dig was shut down immediately after his death.”

“How did your investigation turn out? Find anything?”

“No, nothing. Then I met the man you call Flute Player. Since then I have been to Wolf Butte many times with him. He knows every rock and tree and crevice there. And he has convinced me that my father died because they were going to excavate the burial mounds. He says many people have died out there over the years, that the Keeper of the butte has a way of watching over things. And you know what is strange? My father would understand that kind of power and would believe in it. In that light, his death makes sense to me because it would make sense to him.”

“Why did you stay on in Salamander?”

“Inexpensive living, a big peaceful countryside. I settled in, focused on living my life rather than worrying about my father’s death all the time. To be honest, I didn’t have much money. Because my father bounced around so much, he didn’t leave a lot in the way of a death benefit from his retirement program. What little there was I spent on my travels. I get by.”

“Where were you before you came to Yerkes County?”

Susanna Benteen gave him the direct gaze she seemed to have invented. “Traveling, on the road for most of seven years, stopping here and there for a while. Before that I lived for three years with a man named Andrew Tanner on the Spanish seacoast .  .  . San Sebastian. He was a freelance journalist, a war correspondent.”

“Hell of a life, Susanna.” Carlisle was shaking his head slowly and feeling a brief surge of unexamined envy toward a man named Tanner. “Let me ask you something else, if you don’t mind. It’s a little impertinent, I suppose, so don’t feel compelled to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Susanna Benteen smiled. “I don’t feel compelled about much of anything. What is the question?”

“Do you know who the Keeper is?”

“No. And that’s the truth. But I believe something is out there.”

“Do you think it’s the Flute Player? Is he the Keeper?”

“I truly don’t know. But there is a powerful force in and around Wolf Butte, I know that much.”

“And you’re aware that the highway route goes within three hundred yards of the butte and through part of the burial mounds on the other side of it.”

“Yes, I know that. The Flute Player is worried. He says the Keeper has big medicine but that it may not be powerful enough to stop what is coming this time.”

“What about the Indians in general? You seem to think like an Indian. Can’t they do something?”

“Carlisle, I must gently disabuse you of some notions you—and others—may have about Indians and about me. It’s not really your fault. Neither our media nor our educational institutions know or teach much of anything accurate about Indians. The Indians have a lot of problems, including unemployment, extreme poverty, crime, broken families, alcoholism. And diabetes is rampant, apparently something to do with genetics and diet combined. I don’t know if they care one way or the other about the highway. From what I understand, the laws are complicated when it comes to artifacts, and in this state the owner of the land can do pretty much what he or she wants to do with it, including the disposition of archaeological finds.

“Also, my father taught me to beware the ‘noble savage’ view of traditional peoples. Whites tend to have a mythic view of Indians. We like them just fine in our romanticized and somewhat imagined past, that idyllic time before the white man came, living a life supposedly full of freedom and harmony with nature. If I told you that some Indians kill bald eagles, which are an endangered species, for their tail feathers, you might begin to shift your views, even though the tail feathers are used in religious rituals. And if I told you that many of the eagles are killed to get feathers for the manufacture of curios that are sold to tourists, and that occurs all the time, you probably would vehemently disapprove. It’s all a good deal more complicated than most people understand.

“Beyond that, there are many aspects of Indian culture and belief that are close to my own view of things. That’s why the Flute Player accepts me in the way he does. But I am not some New Age mystic driving to sweat lodge ceremonies in a BMW and trying to be a weekend Indian. I am not an Indian, and I can never be an Indian. The Indian way is a separate view of life and nature that is difficult for whites to understand. And, in the same fashion, Indians cannot become like me. I have my own beliefs and my own ways of behaving that have come down to me from an unusual childhood. I lived for years in tribal cultures over much of Africa, Asia, South America, and, to a lesser extent, the American Southwest. My ways are not the ways of the Indian. They are
my
ways, but there are some similarities.”

Carlisle was slightly chagrined. “Well, the lecture was deserved.”

“I didn’t mean to lecture. I just wanted to get a few things straightened out.” She smiled warmly, sipped her wine.

“In any case, all of this is hard for me to get my hands around, Susanna. Your father, the Keeper, people dying over there at Wolf Butte, the highway, the birds, an outfit called the AuRA Corporation.”

She looked at the ceiling. “What does the word
aura
mean, in the dictionary sense? It’s something surrounding a person or a thing, something that has a quality all its own.”

“Yes, I’d say that’s pretty close.”

She canted her head slightly, thinking. “It reminds me of Aurora, Roman goddess of the dawn and the rising of the sun.”

Carlisle fetched his old college dictionary, thumbed it, mumbling, “A .  .  . a-r, a-t, a-u .  .  . here it is, ‘aura.’”

Susanna reached over and tapped the page. “Look at the beginning of the ‘Au’s.’ What’s there?”

He ran his finger along the columns, then smacked the book with his hand. “Au is the chemical symbol for gold!”

She smiled. “I thought so. My high school chemistry is a little dusty, but I remember reading somewhere that the symbol for gold was taken from the Roman goddess’s name. Now, doesn’t the corporation that owns the land spell its name with a capital A followed by a lowercase u?”

“You’re right again. That’s how it’s spelled.”

She smiled, looked at him. “So what do we have now? Is AuRA just a clever spelling of the word
aura,
with a play on the symbol for gold? Or does it have some other meaning?”

“I don’t know. But I think you might be on to something.”

“I don’t know, either,” replied Susanna.

Carlisle was silent for a moment. “Maybe we ought to talk with Flute Player.”

“And maybe we ought to talk with some of the more militant Indians at the reservation or with the American Indian Movement people down at the capital. I met Lamont Crow Wing once. He’s a fist beater with AIM. There might be more that can be done yet. At the moment, though, I’m too tired to think about it. Do you have something I can sleep in?”

“Clothing or a bed?”

“Both, please.”

Susanna was about six inches over five feet, seven less than Carlisle. His worn gray sweatsuit might do it, he decided. He handed it to her, and she went into the bathroom, coming out a few minutes later looking just fine, sleeves rolled up, pants ballooning and draping to the floor. Susanna knew how to wear clothing, gave it her own twist, and appeared ready for a lunar fashion show when she had put it together.

“You can have the bed, Susanna, I’ll toss my sleeping bag up in the loft.”

“No, I prefer the sleeping bag. I practically grew up in sleeping bags.”

She carried the bag up the curving stairs, stopped halfway along, and looked down at Carlisle, her free hand on the rail. “Good night, Carlisle. I admire the things you construct, but I admire you and your craftsmanship a great deal more.”

Carlisle lay in bed a long time before sleep came, thinking of Susanna, of what she had said, listening to the storm and to Dumptruck talking softly as he moved from under the stove and padded up the loft stairs. The stove needed serious help by four in the morning. He pulled on a sweater and jeans and padded toward it, trying not to disturb Susanna. Approaching seven on the Beaufort scale, the wind pounded like a great flat hand smacking his redwood siding as he opened the stove door and laid pieces of cured white oak onto the coals. The heat began to rise again, and he squatted there, letting the warmth come into him.

“Good morning, Carlisle.” Susanna was leaning over the loft railing, whispering.

“Good morning, Susanna. Sorry if I woke you.”

“You didn’t. I awakened some time ago. I’ve been lying here listening to the wind. Would you like coffee?”

“Yes, but I’ll fix it. You can sit by the stove while I do it. Or maybe you prefer tea?”

“Thank you, I do prefer tea,” she said, wrapping the sleeping bag around her and stepping barefoot down the loft stairs.

Carlisle flipped the radio on at low volume, interested in the weather report. It came in the form of bulletins every few minutes, a droning recitation of school closings and Big Medicine. Twelve inches of snow had fallen already, with another twelve to eighteen inches on the way. Winds would reach forty miles per hour by evening. Back over to music, Merle Haggard singing about the road. Too early for Merle, bad day for the road, so he punched in an old tape that had Paul Winter playing his soprano saxophone in the Grand Canyon.

Susanna sat on a pillow with the sleeping bag wrapped around her, sipping tea, looking at Carlisle McMillan resting on one elbow, drinking coffee. “What are you thinking about, Carlisle? You’re thinking about something.”

He was thinking about firelight and goatskin drums and a woman dancing. On a blizzardy February morning, he was thinking about sweet rain.

He didn’t answer.

“Carlisle, would you like to make love?” She said it straight and unadorned, but she spoke quietly and smiled.

He smiled. “Yes. I’ve wanted to make love with you since I saw you moving through my headlights on my first night in Salamander.”

“I sensed as much. And I have felt the same about you. First, I must bathe. Then I’ll use the remainder of the wine to fix us something nice to drink.”

Carlisle tried to cover a slight shaking of his hands when he handed towels to her, while she carefully and precisely took various items from her shoulder bag. The witch of Salamander, green eyes and old ways. She walked toward the bathroom, smiling at him, stopped, and took his hand, looking up at him for a moment.

The shower came on, and Carlisle leaned against the kitchen wall, listening to it, imagining her standing under the water. Ten minutes later, Susanna came out of the bathroom wearing her cloak for a robe, the hood down, hair loose and falling to the small of her back, the silver rings dangling from her ears.

“A shower is in order for me, too.” She had left a small bar of sandalwood-scented soap in the bathroom. Her hairbrush and green comb lay near the sink. A small bottle of perfume with no label was next to the comb. Her toothbrush and a container of baking soda next to that. Womanly artifacts and the high scent of female from a long ways back somewhere. He took the stopper from the perfume bottle and smelled flowers and sand and wind along the Tigris.

He let the water beat on him. The water hot, the fierce wind outside .  .  . Susanna Benteen. When he was finished, he pulled on his jeans and sweater and went into the living room.

“I’m up here, Carlisle.” Her voice came down from the loft.

She had arranged pillows, blankets, and the sleeping bag into a warm cradle occupying most of the small loft. She was naked, sitting on and among the pillows, legs curled underneath her. A single candle was set in the empty wine bottle, incense was burning somewhere. Cradled lightly in her hands was a yellow feather. If Syawla came to earth, she would look like this, Carlisle thought.