High Plains Tango (28 page)

Today, Carlisle decided, he’d try to find the Indian, see what he had to say, see if the Sioux could be roused to do something. He looked at the sky, grinning upward, remembering the millennial filmmaker of his dream, and leaving it with one final enigmatic image, which might give the creature pause as it edited and discarded a thousand years from now. And he was quiet inside, the heart of Carlisle McMillan was quiet once again, and he hummed to himself as he walked toward the house, watching the T-hawks lifting off at sunrise from their little forest across the road, feeling distant signals from a place deeper than his bones. He looked toward Wolf Butte and could see what looked like the faint waver of a fire on the crest.

Susanna was still sleeping. He took off his clothes and slid in beside her. She turned and snuggled her face in his neck, running her hand along his back. “You’re cold,” she whispered drowsily and rubbed against him, putting one of her thighs between his. He ran his hand slowly over her legs, her breasts, her hair.

Chapter Twenty

M
ORNING TEA NEAR THE WOODSTOVE, AND SUSANNA’S GREEN
eyes were looking at Carlisle McMillan.

Carlisle said, “I think you’re right. It’s not over yet. Let’s find the Indian and talk with him. Do you know where he might be?” His energy was back, and Susanna could feel it in him, the intensity.

But there were things you would tell your lover and things you would not. Some things belonged to you, not to him. Susanna knew exactly where to find the Indian, but she was reluctant to say anything. The Indian had treated her in a special way, let her see and feel things she was sure he did not generally share with others.

Finally, Susanna replied, “Carlisle, this is going to sound a little like one of those bad western movies, but let’s go outside and build a fire. If the Indian sees it, wherever he is, I think he’ll come.”

She knew the Indian would indeed see the fire. From the crest of Wolf Butte, you could see whatever you wanted to see.

Twenty minutes later, Carlisle grinned at her as he heaped scrap lumber on a fire he had built near the pond. “Do we dance around it or just let it burn?”

“Sometimes, Carlisle, you sound just like the locals.” Susanna shook her head slowly, but she was smiling. “Just let it burn for a while.” Two hours later, there was a knock on the door.

“Ho, Builder.”

“Ho, Flute Player.”

Carlisle asked the Indian about the burial mounds and what laws might be available to protect them. The Indian knew nothing about law and said so.

“I do not live on the reservation, and I am somewhat apart from the tribe. But I will ask, though the People are discouraged about being able to do anything about anything anymore.” The Indian stood on the porch and talked with Susanna a few minutes, then left.

Three days earlier, an official-looking car had come up Carlisle’s lane. Important legal notices usually arrived by registered mail, but the formal notice that his property was being taken for the highway was delivered in person via the county attorney, who was flanked by two state troopers. Those on the side of economic nirvana were taking no chances, Carlisle thought, smiling to himself.

Dumptruck, sitting on a windowsill, had caught on right away and hissed when they got out of the car. But Carlisle had nothing against these guys. They were simply doing an unpleasant job, acting as the big dog’s tail. They seemed a little surprised he was polite and offered them a cup of coffee.

They hesitated, then accepted and came inside. Susanna had been painting near the woodstove, standing in front of her easel and wearing an old shirt of Carlisle’s as a smock. He introduced her, and she provided the visitors with a nice smile. That was the only way Susanna Benteen knew how to smile.

Carlisle had watched them take it all in. The wood on which he had expended more than a year of his life, sun coming in through the skylights, Susanna, Dumptruck, the five-string banjo hanging on the wall. Now and then, he caught them glancing in Susanna’s direction while they talked. She was, after all, a kind of quiet legend in Yerkes County, and none of them had ever spoken to her before. Later, Carlisle and the men had stood on the front porch for a few minutes, looking west to the T-hawks’ forest.

“It’s a damn shame, them taking your place,” one of the troopers had said with true sincerity in his voice. Then he added, “Don’t quote me, though.”

Carlisle smiled. “Thanks. I won’t quote you, don’t worry.”

The county attorney asked, “Do you think this road’s really going to do anything for Salamander?”

“No.” Carlisle said only that, and the county attorney let it go.

The same trooper who had spoken earlier looked at Carlisle as they stepped off the porch. “Like I said, I’m sorry. It’s a shame.” He held out his hand.

Carlisle nodded and shook the trooper’s hand, then did the same when the other two men offered theirs.

After they’d gone, he looked over the official notice stating he had until April 30 to clear out of the house he’d built for Cody. That gave him a little over two months to pack and move. He could do it in one day. As he laid the notice on the mantel next to the statue of Vesta and stood there thinking, Susanna put her arms around his waist from behind and rested her cheek against his back. A week ago, she had sent a letter to a man named Riddick living in the Wilson Mountains of Arizona. She said nothing to Carlisle about the letter.

A FEW DAYS
before Carlisle’s eviction date, the Indian stopped by. He argued that one final symbolic gesture concerning the highway was in order. At first Carlisle objected, not being inclined toward what he saw as token behavior.

But, listening, he decided the Indian was not talking about tokenism. Symbolism, yes, but not tokenism. The Indian spoke of Crazy Horse, the great Sioux warrior; and Sweet Medicine, the Cheyenne medicine man; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. He talked about long, forced marches through the snow and the smell of burning villages. To the Indian’s way of thinking, the highway was not an isolated occurrence, but rather a plain and obvious continuation of what had gone before. Now, however, as he pointed out, the whites had turned on their own, distrusting anyone making a try for freedom or asking for consideration of ideas beyond the white man’s customary way of doing things.

“Builder, we must proclaim again that some of us stand for another way. If we want to be certain our deathbed memories cause us to smile, we must stand for that other way, just as Crazy Horse and Sweet Medicine and Joseph did. As in your culture’s tale of the man Odysseus, someone has chosen to open the bag and release all the contrary winds against people such as you and me, or so it seems. But if we cannot have the winds with us, then we must let it be known that we will at least not bend, no matter how hard they have chosen to blow, no matter if they are winds from the graveyard. We must, in our own way, shout into those winds, even if our words are blown back into our faces and are heard only by ourselves. If you find that idea uncomfortable, then I have misjudged you.”

Carlisle had talked to the Flute Player several times about the Lakota Sioux somehow blocking the highway to protect the sacred ground. Maybe they could save that much, if nothing else. But the Indian would say only that the People were considering it. Carlisle and Susanna drove down to the capital and met with Lamont Crow Wing of AIM, a tough veteran of the Indian struggles. He had been at Wounded Knee with Frank Black Horse, Loreli Decora, and the rest when the federal government laid siege to it in 1973. He’d been part of the protest in 1972 after Raymond Yellow Thunder was beaten, stripped from the waist down, and paraded around an American Legion dance in Gordon, Nebraska, where the celebrants were invited to kick Raymond Yellow Thunder, after which he was stuffed in a car trunk and died there.

Lamont Crow Wing was no soft reservation Indian. That was obvious. In an old workshirt, jeans, and surplus army boots, he sat behind a gray metal desk and looked at Carlisle, then at Susanna.

“Of course, I have heard about what’s going on up in Yerkes County. I respect you for your struggles, Mr. McMillan. But let’s talk straight. I do not care about your house. It is unfortunate the highway will destroy your home, but from our point of view, that’s all it is, unfortunate.

“The highway is a complex matter for us. Even within a given Indian tribe there is much controversy over the best path to the future for us. Some traditionalists hold out for the old life ways, others see an acceptance of white attitudes toward economics and development as our only hope for survival. In other words, if you go down to the reservation, you might be surprised to find support for the highway in some quarters. Unemployment is a serious problem for us, and some believe the highway will bring new jobs. Also, some of the tribal leaders can be bought off easily. That’s already happened in the past, and it will happen again.

“The T-hawks—that’s sad, and pardon me if I’m overly blunt, but you people worry about the extinction of a few birds while we worry about the extinction of entire cultures. We are being obliterated, just as surely as if the horse soldiers were still slaughtering us with their guns. It’s a little slower now, but no less painful.”

He listened when Carlisle argued that saving the T-hawks would save the burial mounds and vice versa, then Crow Wing repeated much of what Susanna had already said about the Indians’ problems. He finished by saying, “A lot of the People have just given up and don’t think it will do any good to try to stop the highway by legal means, in spite of the burial grounds near Wolf Butte. We have no faith in white man’s law, and there’s no reason why we should, given our past experience with it. However, just to make you aware of it, AIM has filed a request for an injunction to halt the road while the disposition of artifacts is discussed. Because of the speed with which the highway project has proceeded, we were late in the filing and have little hope our request will be granted. Concern for the past is no match for the promises of economic development.”

Lamont Crow Wing grinned sardonically, looking straight and firm at the man and woman across the desk from him. “You know what we used to sing as part of our ghost-dance ritual? ‘The whites are crazy / The whites are crazy.’”

He promised, however, to talk with some other members of AIM and certain of the reservation Indians about the highway, the birds, and the burial grounds. He was mostly concerned about the burial grounds and said so. Carlisle had not heard from him after that.

ON A COOL
April morning, under heavy clouds and threat of rain, Carlisle and the Flute Player formed a two-man picket line just north of where Route 42 intersected the red dirt of Wolf Butte Road leading to Carlisle’s house. Construction workers and machines had reached the intersection and were preparing to move up the road, doing initial site work for the heavy construction to follow and taking dead aim at Carlisle’s place and the T-hawks. Word had flashed via the Yerkes County telegraph that he and the Indian were out there obstructing progress, and inside of forty minutes around two hundred people had gathered, creating a traffic jam nearly blocking 42.

Huge yellow machines were moving back and forth in what seemed to be almost random patterns to a casual watcher. If the earth could have talked, it would have been screaming as tons of it were dug and pushed and loaded and hauled. The scene resembled a military battle: red dust rising into the air, the roar of trucks and earthmovers and bulldozers, people shouting, men operating jackhammers tearing up Route 42 where it would be rebuilt to accommodate an exit from the new interstate highway, allowing tourists to visit Antelope National Park and Ray Dargen’s Indian Mysteryland.

As Carlisle would later say, “In spite of how you feel about road construction, you have to admit there’s something awful virile about it, all those big machines, all that power. In terms of dominating nature, it doesn’t match nuclear weapons, but it’s next best.”

Carlisle was dressed in faded jeans, his old leather jacket, and work boots, his hair reaching to his shoulders, yellow bandanna tied around his head. The Indian wore his standard uniform of jeans and denim jacket, black hat and cowboy boots, western shirt. Each of them carried a small wooden flute, and they stood side by side, directly in front of a bulldozer that had crossed Route 42 and was beginning to move up the dirt road.

Carloads of people were still arriving. Most left their autos on the highway, turning it into a parking lot, and walked up to within fifty yards or so of where Carlisle and the Indian had positioned themselves. People were talking to one another, nodding, pointing at the two, shaking their heads. A few were smiling and laughing, most were not. Somehow, what was occurring moved Carlisle’s earlier arguments from the level of easily dismissed abstractions to a hard, obvious reality.

More red dust rose into the air, drifting over the spectators, and far back, locked in the traffic jam, were the sirens and revolving blue lights of state patrol cars. Ralph Pluimer, on-site manager for F. J. Remkin & Sons, contractors for the portion of the road within the state, moved forward and spoke to Carlisle and the Indian, thinking he could frighten them into giving up their foolish stand. “I’m asking the two of you to please get out of the way. But I’m only asking once. After that, it’s your asses, not mine.” Carlisle said nothing, the Indian said nothing.

Pluimer turned and walked away, motioning for the lead bulldozer to move forward. The driver, wearing a blue baseball cap and mirrored sunglasses, shifted gears and the machine jerked toward Carlisle and the Indian.

A woman from the crowd, Marcie English, ran to Carlisle and the Indian, crying, pulling on Carlisle’s jacket. “Carlisle, this is insane, you’re going to get hurt. Please stop. It’s over, can’t you see that?” Though she was screaming, the noise of the approaching machinery almost overpowered her words.

“Go back, Marcie. Dammit, go back! I don’t know what’s going to happen here.”

Carlisle tore her hand from his jacket and she retreated, wiping her eyes on the cuff of her rain slicker. He could see Susanna Benteen off to one side, about thirty yards away, a look of concern on her face. Susanna had serious reservations about the wisdom of this demonstration and had said so. But Carlisle and the Indian had already decided they were going to do it.