High Plains Tango (30 page)

Two hours before Riddick appeared at the T-hawk forest, three members of EWU wheeled a barrel of chicken blood into Ray Dargen’s office. Damages to the office and to Dargen’s Lincoln Continental parked in back were subsequently estimated at $70,000. Dargen heard the ruckus before it got to his inner office and locked the door. George Riddick kicked in the door with his paratrooper boot, pasted Ray Dargen against the wall and poured six ounces of chicken blood down his throat, then left him vomiting on the $200-a-yard beige office carpet.

Thirty minutes after the damage to Dargen’s operation, another barrel of blood was trundled into the offices of the High Plains Development Corporation. Margaret Andrews ran out the back door and used the pay phone down the block to call Mr. Flanigan, who was in Washington, D.C., expressing his concerns to a Senate committee about the Rio Grande Initiative and its potential impact on the economic future of his area.

After that, Riddick removed the license plates from the old Buick, filed off all identification numbers on the vehicle, and put the other members of EWU on the road to the mountains, telling them, “This one might end badly. I’m going to do the rest myself.”

Riddick maneuvered the Buick until it was angled across the road just short of the T-hawk forest. He filled his jacket pockets with ammunition. Right pocket: double-aught shotgun shells. Left pocket: clips for the Beretta. He laid a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 on the hood of the car and put a box of cartridges beside it. Drinking water from his canteen, he waited. He had no plans. Whatever was going to happen would happen. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this, something about the end of things, something about the state of
“no more”
he carried in his mind.

State troopers arrived, looked over the situation, and called for help. Three hours later, George Riddick faced the standard array of bullhorns and SWAT teams. Fifty or sixty armed men confronted him, the bullhorns talking to him, trying to talk him down. He seemed unaware of it all.

News teams arrived by midafternoon. Five miles to the northwest, a fire burned on Wolf Butte, sending a barely discernible column of smoke rising. Riddick saw it.

Flanking movements were tried. Riddick expertly used the Winchester to hold them off, firing over their heads. He had nothing against the cops but knew they would come for him after dark. Didn’t matter, nothing mattered anymore except struggle and retribution.

An hour before sundown, a line of old cars and pickups turned onto the red dirt road and moved up it toward the T-hawk forest. When the phalanx of police halted the caravan, seventy-five Lakota Sioux and representatives from other tribes, mostly members of the American Indian Movement led by Lamont Crow Wing, got out and walked across the fields to the T-hawk forest, disregarding the bullhorned orders to stop. They chained themselves to the larger trees while two EWU members with chicken blood on their clothing, ignoring Riddick’s orders to leave, began hammering spikes into tree trunks as a deterrent to chain saws. After word reached the AIM office about the stand Riddick was making, Lamont Crow Wing had said, “Piss on it. Let’s go do something and stop hanging out here like a bunch of res Indians waiting around for the handouts.”

Darkness came. Negotiations continued with Lamont Crow Wing while spikes went into trees. A SWAT team moved forward toward Riddick’s position. Men running, crouching, falling to their bellies, and talking to one another over small radios. They were within thirty yards of the junked car and with their night-vision glasses could see the Winchester lying across the hood. More quiet chatter on the radios, sweating hard and getting ready. Final assault. They checked their weapons and begin zigzagging runs toward George Riddick’s barricade. When they arrived, there was nothing except the Winchester lying on the hood of the sedan.

A little way to the north of where the final assault had been made, two men sat on the crest of Wolf Butte by the remains of an extinguished fire. They talked quietly. One of them was old and wore a wide-brimmed hat with juju beads on the crown. The other wore a cap with the logo
EARTH WARRIOR.
They greeted the woman who had climbed the butte and sat beside them.

While they talked, a somewhat ambivalent federal judge in Falls City, worried about political ramifications, had been prodded into action by an attorney for AIM, who had continued flashing news to the judge from the front lines near the T-Hawk forest while insisting he would be held responsible for any carnage that occurred. The petition by the Sioux was granted, and the judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing highway construction through the burial mounds northwest of the T-hawk forest until questions surrounding the content and true ownership of the mounds could be settled. The judge wrote the following in issuing the order:

Traditionally, Fifth Amendment rights regarding private property have held sway in such matters. Recent claims, however, by Native Americans and other original inhabitants of lands throughout the world, particularly the Australian Aborigines, have given the courts some pause in allowing destruction of a people’s heritage, even though the relics that are part of this heritage may be located on land held in private ownership. Therefore, the purpose of this restraining order is to allow time for litigation concerning the limits of constitutional rights concerning the disposition of such artifacts.

Chapter Twenty-one

R
AY DARGEN WAS SCREAMING INTO HIS CAR PHONE, HIS
words machine-gunning all the way to Washington, D.C. The Lincoln was out of commission while the dealership struggled with removing dried chicken blood, but he still had the Cadillac, which he also treated as a depreciable asset for the RAYMAX Corporation, even though it was his wife’s vehicle and never used for business.

Senator Harlan Sterk was talking quietly on the other end. “Ray, shut up and listen to me. The FBI and the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation are looking into the violence out there. We’ll take care of that. But I’m telling you, Senator Wheems has had it. You overplayed it, my friend. You’ve done it before and gotten away with it. This time it’s not going to work. I know you’ve been a good supporter of mine, but there are limits as to what I can do, and frankly, I’m pretty steamed up myself about those land purchases of yours along the right-of-way. To quote Jack Wheems, ‘I don’t give a good goddamn about what some clown named Ray Dargen thinks. This highway is a lot bigger than him
or
Yerkes County.’ Wheems said that two hours ago.”

Sterk continued. “What happened out there has been all over the national news. The networks keep rerunning that tape of McMillan and his friends standing in front of the bulldozer, and somehow that crazy man, we think it was this George Riddick, and his Indian cohort have captured the fancy of people everywhere, the last stand against the white man’s stupidity, all that stuff. Christ, people are calling in from all over the world on behalf of those birds. The transportation committee is saying bad things about this project, and if we don’t watch out, we’re going to end up with a strip of concrete that ends somewhere near Falls City in a wheat field.”

Ray Dargen began to whine, but Senator Sterk interrupted him. “Ray, I said shut up and listen. It looks like the Indians can hold up the project for at least six months with the restraining order. You own the land, and, whether it’s morally right or not, the law is pretty clear according to a lawyer I spoke with. The land is yours, and the artifacts in the burial mounds are yours, and that’s how things probably will eventually work out through the courts. But that’s not the problem. The problem is this: The transportation committee is buckling under the bad public relations that have been generated out there and may recommend that the highway end at Wichita, especially with Florida crying about their population boom and the need for more road money down there. Even if that doesn’t happen, Wheems says a delay of six months is unacceptable to him, since that will put us into winter and effectively amounts to a construction delay of nearly a year. At the moment he has the engineers working around the clock, looking for a way to change the route and still include the Falls City–Livermore strip. It’ll be a pretty strange-looking road, but I think he’s going to get it done.

“If I were you, I’d stop worrying about the highway and start worrying about my own ass. George Riddick, or whoever, is still roaming around somewhere, and your old pal Carlisle McMillan is talking to the state attorney general about those little land acquisitions along the right-of-way carried out by you and your buddies. To be honest with you, Ray, I think you’re in some trouble, possibly bad trouble, and I can’t help you. More than that, I can’t even appear to have had anything to do with your mischief. We warned you about this. I went too far in getting Wheems to change the route to include Falls City and Livermore, given what you were trying to pull off. Now listen to this and listen carefully: I appreciate your past support, but this is where we part company. Don’t call me anymore, Ray, I don’t want to hear from you. My advice is to get yourself a first-class criminal lawyer and hang on. And by the way, if you run into Axel Looker out there, tell him to stop calling me, too. It’s not our job to help him retire to Florida or Arizona or wherever. Good-bye.”

The last three sentences of an editorial in the
Inquirer
one week later read as follows:

Businessman-developer Ray Dargen’s decision to deed Wolf Butte and surrounding property to the Lakota Sioux is commendable; however, just what this means for the planned route of the Avenue of the High Plains is uncertain. In fact, the entire Avenue is uncertain at this time, which is a sad state of affairs for those of us concerned about the economic future of this state. It’s unfortunate that a few radicals with misplaced concerns about the environment can thwart the progress so necessary to our collective well-being.

Chapter Twenty-two

I
N THE WEEKS BEFORE HIS EVICTION DATE, WHEN THE SETTLEMENT
over the house came to a head, Carlisle retained a lawyer from Falls City, a counselor who had fought all the land wars ever fought in the high plains. He was old and mean, the only true son of a gully rattler. And he didn’t much like anybody, jamming the law and logic right up the nozzle of the state and anyone else daring to offer an opinion, making them pay Carlisle $180,000 flat for the Williston place.

Their protestations reached the level of shrieks, but the lawyer quoted Plato—“Render to each his due”—then rolled into biblical metaphor, loosely, citing Jacob’s dream, saying Carlisle had lain upon the rocks of Mr. Williston’s place and turned them into the gate of heaven for himself. The lawyer paraded a copy of the
Observer
article that had called Carlisle one of the great craftsmen of the high plains, pointing out that 257 people had come to Carlisle’s open house, and generally made the opposition feel as if they were destroying St. Peter’s Basilica.

The state countered by offering to pay that sum if Carlisle would agree to let them convert the place into a tourist information center, saying what a nice impression it would make on visitors. That gave Carlisle visions of “Rick + Tammy” hacked into the wood he had sanded and smoothed and of people going tinkle in the pond or throwing stones at the bluegills. His lawyer took care of that, too, calling for what he labeled “the complete purification of a man’s monument to his teacher,” by which he meant absolute and total destruction.

The bulldozers were already working in Louisiana and Arkansas, and the schedule was tight. After all, New Orleans and Yerkes County both needed saving. The money was paid with no tourist information center attached to it, after which the lawyer swept up his documents, shook Carlisle’s hand, and said, “Screw ’em.” His wife wanted a wall moved in their house, and he would take that as his fee, if Carlisle was agreeable.

Two days before he was required to vacate Cody’s place, Susanna helped Carlisle box and haul his things to her house. Carlisle went into negotiations with the owner of the Flagstone Ballroom over in Livermore and managed to buy the old dump and a little bungalow beside it for $20,000. That was his next project. He had figured out that with the right design, a fair amount of scrounging, and some careful work, he could turn it into a real palace for Susanna and him. Living quarters, plenty of room for workshops and art studios and Susanna’s mail-order business, while leaving the dance floor intact. After he had the plumbing working and some wiring done, he patched the roof and framed up temporary quarters that could be heated in winter. When Susanna’s lease expired six months later, they moved themselves over to the ballroom.

After two years, and some perspective to look back on it all, Carlisle still believed he was right, right in his general opinions about the demise of Salamander and right to try to stomp the corrupt bastards who cooked up the highway in the first place. He would do it again under similar circumstances. But maybe he had made it all a little too pat, too one-sided and sanctimonious. That’s what he concluded in his more honest moments.

As Susanna said to him, “Carlisle, it’s hard to find true evil, but there are fools everywhere. Salamander has only its share and no more.”

Carlisle knew he had positioned himself as some kind of pious champion fighting a dark empire, when all he was really fighting mostly was a bunch of people who had forgotten how to survive and had been suckered by what pyemic marketeers defined as the good life. Salamander, and Yerkes County in general, had counted on a future that never happened, panicked when it didn’t.

Besides, he reflected there were good things out there. When he was considering whether to leave or stay after the highway route had been decided, he thought about that, the good things. Where else could you hear first-class tangos those days? And the county still respected him for his skills, if not his opinions. Salamander, what was left of it, remained cool toward him, but the people in Falls City and elsewhere continued to pay well for his services. You could buy gas without first paying an attendant in a bulletproof kiosk, and in Susanna, the Indian, Marcie and Claude English, and Gally, not to mention a gutsy little guy called the duck-man, he had met some of the best people he’d ever known, people possessing wisdom and courage far beyond the flashy cleverness of Buddy Reems or the ephemeral culture of the San Francisco streets. That’s why he purchased the Flagstone Ballroom and decided to make another run at his particular brand of camouflage.

When the Avenue of the High Plains was jogged west to avoid the T-hawk forest and Indian burial mounds around Wolf Butte, the idea for Antelope National Park was scrapped. So, of course, was the federal government’s intent to purchase the properties owned by Axel Looker and Gally Deveraux, where the park would have been located. Facing bankruptcy and foreclosure on her ranch, Gally had dropped out of school.

Susanna, while awarding Carlisle the Recusant of the Decade Award, encouraged him to go see Gally, believing he should renew the friendship that had been important to both him and Gally. Danny’s had closed six months after the highway was completed, and Gally was managing the restaurant portion of a new Best Western motel near Falls City.

Carlisle hadn’t seen her for more than two years. It seemed longer than that. Lots of things seemed far back to him, farther than they really were. The Yerkes County highway war and Susanna had driven a wedge into time, splitting it and fouling up his internal abacus, making events that occurred before the wars and before Susanna seem more distant than the calendar’s measure, and he hardly recognized Gally when he sat down at the Best Western restaurant counter.

They tried getting together a couple of times during the early stages of the highway battle, but, as he pointed out, there was something between them, concrete. Regardless of where their conversations and glances at each other had seemed to lead, the concrete divided them. The highway had covered their relationship with a layer of hard feelings that suffocated it for him.

Gally was facing slightly away from him, talking to a waitress, crisp, and well dressed, her hair pulled back fancylike. Just as she finished her conversation and was about to walk into the kitchen, Carlisle said, “I’ll have a hot turkey sandwich with extra mashed potatoes.”

She turned, surprised at first, then smiling. “Hello, Carlisle.”

He was a little uneasy, asking if she had a few minutes free. They sat in his truck, and he told her that he missed her as a friend. He was sorry for both of them that things had ended a little too quickly, too hard. Gally had a nice way of touching his cheek with her hand. He remembered that when she reached over and did it, saying she understood, tears in her eyes. He was glad he’d come.

Still touching his cheek, she said, “Carlisle, we had a fine year together, and if it can’t be me, then I’m glad it’s Susanna.”

She said her life was going well, and he believed her. The motel manager had come up from Dallas, escaping the memories of a messy divorce back down the road, and he and Gally were thinking of getting engaged. She promised to send Susanna and Carlisle a wedding invitation if things got that far. He said they would be pleased to attend.

She looked at him, serious face. “Carlisle, the highway hasn’t helped Salamander at all. In fact, it’s done quite a lot of harm. Just made it easier for people to drive over to Falls City for shopping and eating out, like you predicted. Can you imagine? People actually drive forty miles to Falls City to buy bananas because they’re ten cents a bunch cheaper there. Don’t they think about wear and tear on their cars or the value of their own time or the gas it takes to get there?”

Carlisle was silent, while Gally continued, starting to giggle. “Did you hear about Leroy’s parrot?”

Carlisle shook his head.

“Well, let me back up a minute. Leroy, as you know, watched his business going to pot for years and was always trying to think of something to perk it up. That’s why he hired Gabe for a while on Saturday nights.

“After he decided Gabe cost too much, he got the idea of using a bullhorn to entertain the crowd. Said he’d seen some comedian on television using one. Every so often he’d pick up this stupid bullhorn and announce to one and all that so-and-so’s pizza was ready. He even tried to tell jokes through it. The problem is, of course, Leroy’s no comedian, as we all know.

“After a while, the boys starting grabbing the bullhorn when Leroy wasn’t looking. It got pretty bizarre, not to mention tasteless. By nine on Saturday nights, they’d start trying to sing along with the jukebox through it. By eleven, things would degenerate, the drunks wrestling for control of the bullhorn so they could make announcements such as ‘Hey, Alma, how about comin’ over here and sittin’ on you-know-what for a while?’ For heaven’s sake, you could hear them clear out on the street, so Leroy doused that idea. Next thing he tried was dwarf tossing. Ever hear of that?”

Carlisle had an incredulous grin on his face. “What tossing?”

“Dwarf tossing. Leroy didn’t invent it. Seems it was all the rage for a while in some spots around the country, though it’s unlikely it’ll be an Olympic event anytime soon. At one end of his place, Leroy piled up three or four old mattresses. The idea, from what I gather, was to see how far you could throw this dwarf from Falls City who hired himself out for the occasion. Hack Kenbule, of course, eventually held the all-time record for the event, at least at Leroy’s. Marv Umthon was rankled by that, but he was still hobbling a bit from what that wild man Riddick did to his ankles, so he couldn’t match Hack’s great achievement. Anyway, that silly stuff lasted until people started complaining about the insensitivity of the pastime, even though the dwarf didn’t seem to mind too much.

“Then while Leroy was downstate at the hospital he got to talking with some psychiatrist who owned this parrot named Benny. Seems these birds have a life span of just about forever, decades, at least, and taking one on is a major commitment. Not only that, they’re really tough
hombres.
Leroy claimed they can break a broomstick with their feet. Apparently, the parrot had attacked the psychiatrist’s wife in a fit of jealousy, chewed her up real bad, and the psychiatrist had brought her down to the hospital so the doctors there could take a look at her wounds.

“Leroy bought the parrot for two hundred dollars, a steal, he maintained, figuring it would be a real draw at the tavern. It was for a while. The first day he had Benny, he took him into the bar and set him on a chair. Benny the parrot promptly hopped down on the floor and started walking around, mumbling to himself, so Leroy said.”

In the telling of this, Gally began laughing so hard that tears ran down her cheeks. It was contagious, and Carlisle was laughing, too, even before she had the whole story out. Just imagining a parrot named Benny walking around the tavern floor and grumbling like Leroy was funny enough in itself.

“Now, Carlisle, remember that big, mean, ugly tomcat Leroy had? The one that used to sit on the jukebox and hiss at customers? Remember him? Leroy called him Bar Rag.”

Carlisle nodded.

“Well, Bar Rag comes strolling into the room that first day Benny was walking around on the floor inspecting the place. The cat sees the bird, goes into one of those belly-to-the-ground-little-short-steps routines that cats are famous for, and begins sneaking up on Benny. About the time Bar Rag is only a few feet from Benny and is picking up speed as he moves in for the kill, the parrot turns, sees the cat, and yells, ‘
Hi!
’”

Gally was shaking with laughter. So was Carlisle, lying across the steering wheel of his truck and choking on the mental pictures he was forming while Gally talked.

“Leroy said Bar Rag was in the middle of his charge but stopped on a dime and actually flipped over backwards when the bird yelled
‘Hi!’
at him. According to Leroy, Bar Rag started running for the back door, accelerating all the while like a space rocket, and busted right through the screen. That was three months ago, and Leroy hasn’t seen him since.”

By this time, Carlisle was slumped against the truck door, hands over his face, roaring with laughter. “What—”

“Wait!” Gally gurgled through her laughter, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m not finished. Leroy’s traffic improved, just as he’d hoped. Everyone wanted to see the bird that had run off Bar Rag. Pretty soon there were all kinds of people standing around with Grain Belts in their hands, just watching Benny to see what he’d do or say next. If nobody was paying any attention to him, Benny would swoop through the tavern screeching, ‘Watch the bird! Watch the bird!’

“Also, it turned out that Benny had picked up quite a bit living with the psychiatrist. People’d be at the bar talking, and Benny’d be sitting up on the Budweiser sign hanging from the ceiling, listening. After a while he’d start talking right into the conversation nearest him, saying things such as ‘It’s because of your mother, you’ll just have to work through it,’ and all that therapeutic stuff.