High Plains Tango (29 page)

The Indian began to play his flute, its timbre cutting through the roar of machinery, his melody counterpointed by the wail of state patrol sirens back along the highway. The lead bulldozer was thirty yards in front of them and moving forward. Carlisle brought up his own flute and began to play, the two of them harmonizing on a short, repetitive melody.

Rain began, turning the raw earth to a slimy red gumbo. WFC Television had arrived from Falls City, a cameraman and a reporter positioning themselves behind Carlisle and the Indian. A photographer and a reporter sent by the
High Plains
Inquirer
to cover the destruction of the T-hawk forest joined the television crew.

Rain coming harder  .  .  .

Clank of machinery  .  .  .

Sheriff’s department strobe lights off to one side, coming across open ground from the east  .  .  .

Bulldozer treads turning bright red, earth color  .  .  .

Sirens  .  .  .

Men yelling  .  .  .

Ralph Pluimer shouting at the bulldozer operator: “We’ve put up with these sonsabitches for too long  .  .  .”

Bulldozer coming on  .  .  .

Carlisle and the Indian playing their flutes  .  .  .

Cameras filming the Indian and Carlisle and a person known as the duck-man standing beside them who was wearing a large overcoat with a bulge that seemed to move around beneath the gathered lapels  .  .  .

Reporter excited, gabbling into her microphone  .  .  .

State trooper forcing his way through the crowd and attempting to drive a patrol car across the increasingly muddy terrain. Other troopers running, slipping, sliding, toward Carlisle and the Indian  .  .  .

Ten feet from the Indian, Carlisle, and the duck-man, the bulldozer stopped, distorted images of the three men reflected in the rain-washed blade, elongating their faces and bodies into otherworldly shapes—a little tin-pot army from another time. Still the Indian and Carlisle played their simple melody, and the duck-man clutched his coat lapels, pulling down his knit cap with his other hand. The bulldozer beginning to inch forward again. The operator dropped the blade and began to push a growing mound of earth toward the three men.

Simultaneously, four state troopers reached the Indian, Carlisle, and the duck-man, and a fifth began shouting angrily to the bulldozer operator, who stopped his machine and shut off the engine. The rain began to fall with more intensity. Suddenly, the entire construction site was quiet. All machines were shut down, everyone simply was watching. It was absolutely silent, except for the rain and the voices of state troopers talking to the three protesters. One of those watching from back in the crowd was a big man with a black beard, who wore an old green army jacket and a cap with
EARTH WARRIOR
on the crown. People stood apart from the stranger but glanced at him and whispered to one another when he walked over to the witch and talked to her.

A patrol car worked its way across the mud and halted twenty feet from where the conversation between the troopers and protesters was taking place. Carlisle was shaking his head in response to the words directed at him. The Indian continued playing and was ordered to stop by one of the troopers.

He continued anyway, and the trooper yanked the flute from his hands, shouting at him, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The Indian replied, “I am watching the buffalo.”

The duck-man was silent, still clutching the lapels of his overcoat with both hands and his eyes flicking rapidly in all directions. There was agitated movement beneath the coat.

Carlisle, the Indian, and the duck-man were handcuffed, taken to the patrol car, and put in the backseat, while a trooper held the mallard duck and wondered what to do with it. Susanna Benteen offered to take the duck, and Marcie English, in turn, took it from her, saying they would keep it safe on their ranch.

The doors on the patrol car were slammed shut, and with red lights flashing and siren howling, the car fishtailed across red mud, back wheels spinning. Through the mud-splattered rear window, three blurred heads could be seen as the patrol car maneuvered through the crowd and onto Route 42, heading toward Livermore. The same thought was on everyone’s mind: This surely must be the end of the Yerkes County highway war, and it had come down finally to the mud-and-rain-blurred images of two handcuffed, long-haired men and another one regarded as the town crazy riding east in a state patrol car on a wet April morning.

When the reporters asked for comment from the bystanders, most refused. Some were clearly pleased that Carlisle and the Indian had been arrested, others just shook their heads and turned away when attempts were made to interview them. Marcie and Claude English refused to talk. Susanna Benteen had disappeared.

One Mr. Gabe O’Rourke, however, did respond tersely to a reporter’s question. When asked what he thought of the drama that had just occurred, the accordion player offered only the following enigmatic statement: “It was a first-class tango. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”

SO THE BUILDER
and the Flute Player and the duck-man made their stand, a symbolic stand, but not a futile one. Carlisle understood that when he saw their reflections in the bulldozer’s blade. They had lost but not succumbed. They had shouted into the wind.

Public records show a man named Carlisle McMillan and another identified as Arthur Sweet Grass, who gave his age as “old” when asked by the booking sergeant. Told that was unacceptable, Mr. Sweet Grass changed it to 105. They were charged with a misdemeanor and jailed for a few hours, then released when Carlisle paid their nominal fines for creating a public disturbance. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Sweet Grass indicated he was perfectly willing to work off his fine in jail time. After attempting to interview the duck-man, the magistrate recommended he be released with no charges filed against him.

Afterward, sitting in Carlisle’s living room area, Susanna said, “Arthur was right, it
was
worth doing. At least you stood for something besides concrete. He once said that if you cannot fasten your message on the horns of a buffalo, then send it on the wings of a butterfly. At least you sent a message, even if it rode only on a butterfly’s wings.”

And the people of Yerkes County would remember the stand and talk about it for years to come. How a white man and an Indian and a man dismissed as loony had challenged the bulldozers, flutes playing, refusing to be moved by the arguments of progress, even when it was clear to almost everyone else that the white man and the Indian and, of course, the duck-man were wrong. On top of that, the
Inquirer
’s photographer eventually won a Pulitzer for his shot of Arthur Sweet Grass, Carlisle McMillan, and a man in a long overcoat reflected in a bulldozer blade.

HEAVY RAIN
halted construction on the highway for six days after the Indian and Carlisle were arrested. When work resumed, Susanna and Carlisle drove west of Salamander, parked the truck, and walked across the fields of early May to a hill overlooking the T-hawk forest and the place Carlisle had built for Cody.

They found a spot where the warming sun hit the earth nice and soft, sitting there and watching the first of the Caterpillars crawling north along the gravel road. The driver wore a blue ball cap and mirrored sunglasses. Behind him was a truck carrying men with chain saws.

When the Cat turned into Carlisle’s lane, Susanna wrapped both her arms around one of his, tears running down her cheeks. He gritted his teeth, listening to the Cat-skinner shift his machine into successively lower gears. The driver never paused, just kept shifting down and moving up the lane, a grinding, surreal, unremitting symbol of something called progress. Susanna was digging her fingernails into Carlisle’s arm without even realizing it.

The bulldozer crushed into the atrium first and hit the south wall of Cody’s tribute thirty seconds later. Carlisle could hear the splintering redwood shriek as nails he had hammered one by one wrenched free, the house first leaning, then twisting into a grotesque shape. And he thought about Cody and about all the long days in the sun and nights he’d slept in the truck with a yellow tomcat while snow blew around them, working by the light of a gasoline lantern, sanding and smoothing, preparing the surfaces and finishing, and doing everything else in between in the right way. He could see the piles of lumber he had scrounged and Gally coming up a twilight lane and Susanna naked in the loft with a yellow feather in her hair. He could see it all, and all of it was disintegrating as he stared down at what had been his thirty acres.

In less than ten minutes, the place was leveled. After that, the workshop went down in one push, and the bulldozer moved toward the pond. The dam was earthen, so it was no problem, and pond water flooded into the creek channel. Down the lenses of his binoculars, Carlisle could see bluegills washing through the cut. While the bulldozer took care of the pond, a workman started a chain saw and began cutting the two oaks standing near where the house had been. They came down easily, crushing the bat houses as they hit the ground.

Across the road, T-hawks were rising into morning air as men moved into the forest with chain saws. At the entrance to Carlisle’s lane, two men in yellow hard hats were leaning over a car hood, looking at a large map they’d unrolled.

“Carlisle, I can’t watch this anymore. Let’s go.” Susanna got to her feet as she said it.

He nodded, kicked a clod of dirt, and walked off with her. Looking back once, he could see the bulldozer scraping soil into the pond. It would be filled and leveled in a few hours. Workmen were randomly tossing the remains of Cody’s house and the workshop onto trucks, and T-hawks were circling high above the whine of yellow chain saws held steady by men in orange hard hats. Carlisle wondered if the T-hawks wondered. Maybe, maybe not.

By day’s end, there would be no remaining signs of Williston or Carlisle or the T-hawks, and Carlisle decided without even thinking about it that one small token gesture was in order. He picked up a rock and threw it as far as he could toward the bulldozer. The rock fell an eighth of a mile short, bounced twice, and was still. At the same moment the rock came to rest, the water tower in Salamander exploded in a roar of orange flame and crashed onto the county maintenance shed next to it.

The mature hawks were in a frenzy, trying to coax the young ones, not yet ready to fly, into the air away from the toppling trees and whine of the saws. Susanna Benteen tugged at Carlisle’s jacket. “Carlisle,
please
let’s go.”

Carlisle refused to move, frozen there, breathing hard with emotion and nailed to where he stood. At that moment, the blast from a shotgun brought quiet with it, and everyone looked down the road. None of them had seen the old rusted-down Buick turn off Route 42 and begin moving up Wolf Butte Road. It came slowly up the red dirt, toward the T-hawk forest. On it came, straight toward where the engineers studied site plans. The chain saws had shut down, workmen wondering what role the Buick and a shotgun protruding from its driver’s-side window played in their morning’s work. They stared at George Riddick as he dismounted from the car. The gun was pointed upward, the butt of it resting on his hip.

Riddick wiggled a cold cigar in his mouth and looked at the men. “Good morning, gentlemen. Now we’re going to have a discussion about options. And your set of choices is pretty thin. In fact, there is only one: Get the hell out of here.”

He brought the shotgun down from his hip and chambered a shell, the hard
shick-shick
of the forestock’s slide underlining his words. George Riddick pointed the Remington toward Route 42 and spoke with quiet firmness. “All of you get moving. Now.” With those words, a ragged band of hard hats began running down the road toward Route 42.

There is a thin and tenuous line between outrage and radicalism. Carlisle had teetered on that border, stepping tentatively across it when he and the Indian and the duck-man had made their stand. But George Riddick had walked across that line a long time ago and kept on walking into territory where few had ever walked and kept on going to a place where his mind no longer functioned in normal ways. And what happened to him personally was of no concern to George Riddick.

Over the years, two things had protected Riddick. The first was the sheer boldness of his ways. People simply didn’t expect other people to behave as he did, such as the time he walked into the headquarters of Continental Cyanide, tore up the telephone switchboard at the main reception desk, and instructed the receptionist to open the locked glass doors to the executive offices, which she did with Riddick’s hand on her throat.

The CEO had screamed at him, “This is terrorism!”

Riddick gave him a cold grin. “You’re goddamned right it is. Get ready to be terrified.”

Beyond his audacity, George Riddick was a random variable. No pattern, no predictability, hard to trace, impossible to anticipate. He would lie up for months in his mountain cabin near Sedona, walking the rocky trails, rage building. Then some primeval swell would mount within him, and he would move again. Yet for all his anger and brutal methods, he had never killed anyone since his long-ago jungle days.

The previous afternoon, the local boys had sicced Hack Kenbule on Riddick, just as they had done earlier with Carlisle. Riddick was walking down the main street of Salamander when Hack came after him. Didn’t work out the same as with Carlisle. Hack lasted exactly fourteen seconds, staggering around and gasping for air after half a dozen karate chops to the neck and other critical regions, after which Riddick put him through the dusty window of what had once been Charlene’s variety store, with a kick in the face. Marv Umthon tried to intervene on Hack’s behalf, and Riddick simply broke big Marv’s ankle with one stomp of his boot, looked at Marv hopping around on one foot screaming, and decided to break the other one while he was at it. Fred Mumford, being the sole member of Salamander’s police force and having self-preservation foremost in his mind, declined to arrest Riddick on the grounds that Hack Kenbule had started it all.