High Plains Tango (31 page)

“Everybody thought this was pretty funny, except Bobby Eakins, who for some reason never liked Benny. He said, and I’m quoting him: ‘I come in here to drink, not to get analyzed by a bird. I get enough of that shit from Leroy.’

“Leroy claimed parrots are sensitive and that Benny knew Bobby didn’t like him. One evening, Bobby was into his third Grain Belt when Benny came walking down the bar, stopped about three feet from Bobby, and stared at him, head kind of twisted funny, eyes blinking, and says, ‘Aarrk,
hi!
’”

Gally was imitating the way Benny must have looked, and Carlisle started roaring again, seeing in his mind the face-off between Benny the parrot and Bobby Eakins in his fertilizer cap.

“Bobby says, ‘Get the fuck outta here, ya asshole bird,’ dips his fingers in his beer, and starts spritzing Benny. Those in attendance said it was something to watch. Before Bobby could even flinch, Benny had Bobby by the ear with his beak and was tearing it right in half. Leroy grabbed Benny, Benny chomped down on Bobby, Bobby’s screaming and crying and bleeding. It was a real mess. He got his ear sewn back on okay, but there’s a big ugly red scar there, and his earlobe hangs kind of funny. Leroy finally got rid of Benny, sent him somewhere to a pet store, and Bobby refused to drink at Leroy’s anymore, mostly because of the grief he received from the other local heroes, who took to calling the parrot ‘Bobby’s Bird’ and saying things like ‘You and the parrot can work it out, Bobby. Aarrk, good thing it wasn’t an eagle.’”

Carlisle was still shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “How’s Leroy doing now?”

“I guess you haven’t heard. After Gabe, bullhorns, dwarf tossing, and parrots, Leroy decided it was time to forget the whole thing. He retired about a month ago and closed the place. Threw one final party, however, on the last Saturday night he was open. I went to it, and it was fun, though I have to admit, I kept thinking of all the good times you and I had there. I’m not trying to bring up what we talked about before, just telling the truth.

“By the way, at Leroy’s closing, a lot of people asked about you. They never cared much for your position on the highway, but they do respect you for standing up for what you believed in. A number of them said that. Even big ol’ Hack Kenbule said he had second thoughts about the pounding he did on you when you were just trying to save the house you built. He didn’t mention the T-hawks, of course, since that’s not something that Hack can get hold of. In any case, it was a good time, Leroy’s farewell party. Even Beanie Wickers came slinking in. I hadn’t seen him since the night you saved him from losing his manhood to Huey’s knife. Before it was over, he and Huey shook hands and had a beer together, but Huey said that’s as far as it went and that Beanie was not allowed to dance with Fran, who in the meantime, I noticed, was dancing real close with the co-op manager and blinking her eyes at him.”

As she prepared to go back to the restaurant, Gally turned serious. “Carlisle, do you remember the old man with the bad leg who used to live above Lester’s? The one who came into Danny’s for lunch every day and read the paper?”

Carlisle knew whom she meant. The old guy watching the decline and fall of a high plains village from his second-floor window.

“About six months ago, he fell down those steep stairs to his apartment and broke his good leg. They hauled him out to the Yerkes County Care Facility since he had nowhere else to go. That craphead Birney got him evicted from the apartment and convinced the social services people they ought to keep him out at the home. After that, they tried to turn the building into a boutique, but you were right, Salamander is not Lourdes, and nobody’s driving six miles off the interstate to buy machine-made quilts and cornhusk dolls. It lasted about six months. Word is that Cecil Macklin lost his financial tail on the enterprise.

“Anyway, I go visit the old man every couple of weeks or so. I feel just awful bad for him. He’s very smart in his own way, and they’re using drugs and television to make him into a vegetable. He’s never talked much about himself all the years I’ve known him, but he’s real depressed now and spends his time looking through some old shoeboxes where he keeps his memories. He showed me the silver star he got for fighting at the Arnhem Bridge in Holland during World War Two. Said he killed three Germans that day and took a small piece of shrapnel in the leg. Now this great land thanks him by shoveling him off to the county farm and treating him like shoddy from the packing plant. I guess the Veterans Home has a waiting list a mile long, so he can’t get in there, and it’s not much better. Maybe if you get a chance, you might stop in and say hello. He’s desperate, I can see in his eyes.”

As Carlisle drove back to Livermore, his old anger ginned up again. What the hell kind of place was this country becoming? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Money all over the place for $150 basketball sneakers demanded by whining worshippers of people with decent jump shots and not much else. But apparently nothing for old people, dying babies, T-hawks, and everything else that needed tending.

He talked with Susanna about it. A few days later, he drove over to the depressing mess generously labeled a care facility. Out of sight, out of mind, old folks drizzling and babbling. Some of them because they were genuinely ill, some of them because of the way they were being treated.

Carlisle found the old man. He was standing, supporting himself with a cane, and looking out the window of the room he shared with two other men, both of them bedridden. The room smelled of bodily functions, and the window had heavy institutional wire fronting the screen.

“I’m Carlisle McMillan. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I used to see you in Danny’s now and then.”

The old man nodded and brightened a little. “Oh, yessir, I know who you are, Mr. McMillan.”

He looked tired, run-down, sinking. Bedroom slippers, dirty trousers, soiled long-sleeved shirt cut off at the elbows and never hemmed.

“How’s your broken leg?”

“It’s comin’ along real good. Don’t make much difference, though, since I don’t have anywhere to go anyhow. Birney and his redcoats took my apartment away. That’s about all I could afford. Got myself in a pickle, a small one by modern standards, big to me.”

They walked outdoors and sat in the sunlight. Carlisle noticed as they talked about the weather and things in general how the old man’s mind seemed to crank slowly upward, his diction becoming better, and he made reference to world events, talking about them in kind of a rough, humorous, semiphilosophical way. He was raw-smart, as Gally had said. Carlisle mentioned the reconstruction job he and Susanna were doing on the old Flagstone. The old man’s face lightened, and he said he’d spent a lot of his evenings at the Flagstone, met his wife at one of the Saturday night dances.

Carlisle asked him, “Know anything about billiards? The real stuff, table with no pockets, three balls, run the cue ball off three cushions to make a carom and go to heaven?” Gally had once told Carlisle the old man was the best three-cushion billiards player in the state years ago and regularly cleaned out the hustlers who occasionally stopped in Salamander, looking for a little traveling money.

Crooked grin on the old face. “I banked a few cue balls around the green felt in days past. Got my first car that way, took it off a drummer selling ladies’ undergarments back in ’38 who didn’t know when to lay down his cue and give up. Hard to find a true billiards table now, since the game’s too difficult for the Pepsi generation. They want to play pool and call it billiards, which it ain’t.”

“Tell you what,” Carlisle said, smiling. “During one of my salvage expeditions, I found this great old billiards table at a tavern over in Leadville. The slate’s perfect, the cushions seem fine, new felt required, beautiful hand-carved mahogany for the structure. It’d been covered with canvas for years. Thing must weigh a thousand pounds, but I took it apart and hauled it back to the Flagstone. Thought I’d set it up at one end of the dance floor, which should allow for plenty of cue space.

“Right beside the Flagstone,” he continued, “is a small house, a bungalow, really, where the ballroom manager lived. I bought it as part of the property. I hear Gabe the tango player is getting pretty wobbly and needs a place to live, you need a place to live. How about the two of you sharing the old place? Gabe can work off his rent by playing a little music, you take care of yours by teaching me to play billiards. If you want, you can help me refurbish the Flagstone. I’ll have lots of sanding and finishing work, but that’d be up to you. I checked with the social services people, and it’s okay with them. They need the space out here, and besides, you have a reputation for not taking your quiet-medicine and being uncooperative in general. What do you think?”

The old man looked at Carlisle, real hard. Got tears in his eyes. Carlisle got some in his, too. “First thing you’ve got to learn is how to hold the cue properly. Most people never do learn that. It’s a game of physics and geometry, skill and treachery. That’d be right up your alley, wouldn’t it, Mr. McMillan?”

Carlisle nodded, chuckling. “It’ll take me a few days to get the old house in livable condition. How about I pick you up a week from today, first thing in the morning? That’ll give you a chance to pack and say good-bye.”

The old man whacked his cane against the bench they were sitting on. “Both of those things’ll take exactly twenty-three seconds combined. I’ll be ready.”

Then he started to sob. “Mr. McMillan, I don’t know what to say. I’m dyin’ out here, and I’m not ready to die yet, and now you’re comin’ along with this good deal and ploppin’ it right in my lap when I’d given up seein’ anything but bad custard and white-coated bullies.”

He really cut loose, crying hard, his despair flowing down and away from him. Carlisle reached over and took hold of the old man’s arm while the man pulled out a wrinkled blue handkerchief from his right hip pocket and held it over his eyes.

He tried to talk again, still choking. “Been thinking, in fact, about how I could squirrel up enough of this dope they hand out here to get it over with once and for all, if I didn’t reach a state of complete senility before then.” Pointing with his cane, he said, “I’ll be ready, Mr. McMillan, on the front porch over there, belongings in hand. Can’t stop thinking now about the Flagstone and how I can help you rebuild her. Probably find my footprints at various places on the dance floor. I can help you put the billiards table together, too. Done it before.”

Carlisle smiled, started to say more, then left it where it lay. “See you in a few days.”

When Carlisle went for him the following week, the old man looked entirely different. He was standing on the porch when Carlisle pulled up at the care facility, shaved, clean shirt and trousers. At his feet was a small, tan cardboard suitcase with brown stripes and a bad crunch on one side. Four battered Sears shoeboxes were tied together with twine and stacked beside the suitcase. On top of the boxes was an army helmet. Carlisle helped him into the truck and put his belongings on the seat between them.

“This is Dumptruck.” Carlisle grinned, gesturing with his head to the tomcat lying along the top of the seat back.

“I met Dumptruck once before, during the open house at your place several years back. He sat on the grass with me by your pond. We talked a bit and watched the little hawks flyin’ around. Liked him then, like him now.”

He held out his hand. Dumptruck sniffed it and slid off the seat to sit on the old man’s suitcase, purring.

Carlisle shifted gears and drove away from the Yerkes County Care Facility. The old man was talking about billiards tables while he petted Dumptruck. “Hardest thing is to get the slate level. Gotta get it real level. Without that, you can’t play a precision game of billiards, can’t truly engage in geometry, physics, skill, and treachery. And that’s what it’s all about, Mr. McMillan, leveling the slate and playing with precision. Yessir, I guess that’s what it’s all about in everything.”

Chapter Twenty-three

T
HERE IS AN EVENING HIGHWAY COMING OUT OF NEW
Orleans and bending northwest all the way to Calgary. Long stretches of it run through the high plains, over short grass and thin soil, past the buttes and a scattering of little towns lying along or a few miles either side of the road. Travelers often comment on the oxbow shape of the highway in Yerkes County, how it swings east and runs north past Falls City and Livermore, then abruptly heads forty miles west before resuming its northerly direction, as if desultory minds had drawn the route.

Fifteen miles or so up the highway from Livermore and west of a town called Salamander, a town that’s nearly gone now, is an exit onto Route 42. If you take that exit, turn off 42, and drive north along a red dirt road, you’ll pass a small forest where little hawks are lifting off for their twilight voyages. They made it through the Yerkes County War, barely. Now there is talk they’ll be netted and put into a captive breeding program in the San Diego Zoo, far from their evening forest, since only four other adults of their species can be found in the continental United States. Across the road and back in a field from the hawks’ forest are the ruins of what might have been a house at one time.

Farther up that same dirt road, which turns to a sticky red gumbo in the rain, is a monolith called Wolf Butte sitting a mile back from the road, its rumpled white face partially obscured when low clouds are draped across it. Stop and get out of your car, miles from the nearest little town. Stand there for a moment. Silence. Easy wind comes, goes, comes again.

Notice the hawk sitting thirty fence posts south of you. This is sacred ground, so claimed Sweet Medicine. You believe it. Anyone who comes alone to this place believes it. There is nothing out here that cares about you, about whether you live or die or pay your bills or dance on warm Mexican beaches and make love afterward. There is nothing except silence and wind. And they do not care, for they will be here long after your passing. That much they know.

Just as the cloud moves off Wolf Butte, and before another one comes, you might think you glimpse a figure moving along the crest of the butte. If you carry good binoculars, first-rate equipment with multicoated glass and all the rest, you’ll be able to see the figure is a woman. She is indistinct—the distance, the mist. But you can see her dancing, turning slowly, arms raised. Long auburn hair hangs down and touches the bare skin of her shoulders, touches the slow arch of her naked back, swinging with her as she moves. But your glasses won’t be good enough to see the detail of the opal ring on her left hand or the silver bracelet around her wrist or the silver falcon hanging from the chain around her neck. Another cloud will come onto the butte, and she will disappear. A pair of dark eyes twenty feet behind her and out of your vision can still see her, though.

Better you move on now, keep going. You probably shouldn’t say anything about what you’ve just seen. It could have been a trick of the mind, anyway. Even if it wasn’t, one does not meddle in such matters. That was known long before the horse soldiers rode through here on their way to the Little Big Horn. That was known a long time ago.

If you drive along the road another quarter mile, you’ll see a sign set back twenty yards in the grass:
PROPERTY OF THE LAKOTA SIOUX, NO TRESPASSING.

You turn to the person traveling with you. “It’s getting dark, maybe we should go back to that Best Western we passed near .  .  . what’s that town called? .  .  . Livermore? The guidebook says there’s a restaurant attached to the motel. The book also mentions there are all kinds of strange legends about this place. Supposedly late at night you can see a fire burning up on that butte over there.”

The person next to you replies, “Yes, let’s do go back. There’s something kind of creepy out here.”

You nod, saying nothing about what you saw or thought you saw through the binoculars.

Near where the interstate highway passes Livermore, an old dance hall sits on the edge of a lake. If summer has come and the wooden shutters are swung open, it’s possible to stand on the dance floor, look out across the lake, and see lights from traffic moving north and south on the highway.

The shutters are open tonight, and music is playing. An old man sits in the second tier of booths up from the dance floor, back in the darkness, a glass of Wild Turkey on the table in front of him and a fine baby boy named Cody Robert McMillan on his lap. A tomcat known as Dumptruck sits by the old man’s glass, licks his right front paw, and purrs as the old man pets him. The cat stays just beyond the grasping fist of the little boy, who reaches out and burbles, “Kiddy.”

The old man is smiling, thinking about the hand grenade he had hidden in a shoebox and was preparing to use on a lawyer named Birney and Birney’s associates. When Carlisle McMillan bailed him out of the care facility, he left it with a fellow inmate there, just in case things got too bad. That other resident of the place was also a veteran and grinned when the old man gave him the grenade, saying he would know what to do with it if the time came.

Carlisle McMillan is three years into his rebuilding job on the old Flagstone Ballroom. He estimates it will take another two years, maybe more, before he’s finished, with all the other outside work he has to do. Tonight, however, he is resting, at the request of Susanna Benteen. She has organized a celebration, something to do with nothing at all except moonlight across the water outside.

At the east end of the dance floor is one of the best billiards tables anywhere, rebuilt and recovered, with a playing surface five feet wide and twelve feet long. The old man is convinced it must be the same table on which he won his first automobile in 1938. Carlisle is coming along on the game pretty well. It’s not a game you learn quickly; still, he’s coming along. He understands the skill and physics and geometry parts all right, but, as the old man says, Carlisle is a little light on the treachery end of things.

Understand, however, Carlisle has been busy with other projects, not leaving him as much practice time as he needs. Along with his regular carpentry work and refurbishing the Flagstone, he has a little furniture manufacturing operation under way. Fixed it up with the county so the able-bodied folks at the care facility could help with the finishing work. Nothing heavy, just the details requiring a lot of care.

Some of the old people can even do the work sitting up in bed. They love the challenge of accomplishing something. Carlisle’s a stickler for quality, says it has to be done right, and they’re learning. Pays them a fair wage, too, part of which goes into a fund that has dramatically improved the quality of food served out there. He puts the small profits from the enterprise in a special account and says he’s going to build a better place for Yerkes County old folks someday, just in case he needs it himself.

Then there’s the book he’s writing. He is titling it
Scrounging—Old Things for New Lives
and has signed a contract with a regional publisher. Carlisle needs photographs for the book, so he bought a used camera, a 35-millimeter Nikon, to take the pictures himself. He seems to have a natural eye for it, even Susanna says that, and she knows about such things. Now he’s started roaming the countryside, taking photos of just about everything that is old but can be made to live again, and is building a darkroom over in one corner of the Flagstone where the coat-check area used to be.

The other matter that required some of Carlisle’s time was cleaning up the last bit of wickedness surrounding the highway construction. He didn’t give up on that, kept pushing hard until the state attorney general’s office investigated questionable land purchases along the right-of-way. Three convictions for fraud and conspiracy came out of it. All parties received probation, but the fines and bad public relations bankrupted two of them. Ray Dargen suffered a stroke shortly after his conviction and moved to Arizona. Carlisle let it go after that.

When Carlisle’s mother, Wynn, comes to visit, and she visits regularly now that she has a grandchild, the two of them carry their glasses of wine out by the lake and make a quiet toast.

“To ancient evenings and distant music,” Wynn always says, raising her glass and reciting words she had heard a long time ago from the father of Carlisle McMillan.

Things are working out for Gally and the motel manager. She wears a diamond on her left hand, and the wedding is coming up in a month or two. Sometimes Carlisle drives over to the restaurant, oscillating slowly back and forth on a stool, half listening to the traffic on the new interstate outside.

And Gally Deveraux smiles at Carlisle McMillan. If it’s a quiet time in the restaurant, they sit together over coffee and talk in the way they used to talk when they sat on stacks of lumber in a house Carlisle was building. Those were other times, when they stared into Mr. Williston’s fireplace while snow blew in and around them, talking about their lives, trying to halt the flow of liquid into the crust .  .  . and doing that, eventually.

Tonight, however, there is music in the Flagstone Ballroom. Lying around the ballroom are lumber and light fixtures and a better furnace than the old one that came with the Flagstone. Carlisle and the young fellow from Livermore he’s taken on as an apprentice are going to install the furnace before next winter. But it’s summer now, and a nice breeze is blowing in from the lake.

Hanging high on the wall at the lake end of the dance floor is a piece of wood with the symbol of Vesta on it and the words
For Cody
right below the symbol. Carlisle had sawed it out from over the door to his place before they brought in the bulldozer.

Gabe O’Rourke is pretty elderly now, but he and the other old man have a lot of fun talking about their Paris days and arguing over what color the walls ought to be in their bungalow beside the Flagstone. While the others are working on refurbishing the ballroom, Gabe practices his accordion off to one side, providing background music for the hammering and occasional soft cussing. Some days Carlisle carries a lawn chair down to the lake for Gabe so he can fish for crappies near a partially submerged brush pile. Gabe likes to watch the little bobber dance along just below the surface when a fish takes the bait. When the other old man limps down to fetch him in late afternoon, they clean his catch and have the fish for supper along with their fried potatoes.

And, Lord, Gabe still loves to play the tangos. Sometimes the other old man will ask him to get out his accordion late at night, when the two of them are sitting around in the bungalow. He plays the Paris songs. Plays them real sweet and watches his friend walk to the window and look out across the lake, wiping at his eyes when he thinks Gabe isn’t looking.

Neither of them say anything to Carlisle when Susanna goes off by herself for a time without mentioning just where it is she’s headed. They think it’s a little odd, but both have chalked it up to modern times and male-female relationships being different from what they remember. But when she’s here, which is most of the time, they like to watch her face when Carlisle comes home in the evening after a long day and climbs out of an old green truck with
KINCAID PHOTOGRAPHY, BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON
printed in faded red letters on the doors. She goes out to the truck to meet him, puts her arms around him, and leans her head on his chest. He’s sweaty and slumping a little from the hard work, an old and well-mended tool belt lying over his shoulder.

Tonight, Susanna helped Gabe onto the old bandstand on the north side of the dance floor and provided him with a chair and a small table for his beer and ashtray. The old accordion has never sounded better than it does right now, with twilight moving over the high plains. She and Carlisle are dancing twenty feet off to one side of Gabe, near the windows overlooking the lake. While a new sun moves westward over the longitudes, across Ocean India and Sudan, a huge and distant camera following the light, Carlisle turns to Gabe and says, “A slow tango, my good man, if you please.”

Gabe nods, takes a shot of beer, puts down his Lucky Strike, and starts into the song—real haunting, real spare, firm, having a certain amount of both commodity and delight. Susanna taught Carlisle the basic tango steps a while ago, and everybody had a good time watching him stumble around while he was learning. He’s not much of a dancer, but he gets by. Now Susanna, she’s altogether different. As Gabe likes to say, “I don’t know where she learned it, but Susanna dances a real sweet tango.”

Susanna is wearing a full-length gown she made, spaghetti straps and pale lavender in color, fitting her real snug. She’s five months pregnant with her and Carlisle’s second baby, and the roundness of her belly shows clearly from beneath the dress. She has her auburn hair piled way up on top of her head, with lots of silver draped all over her, including large hoop earrings. The place is lit softly by sixty-year-old overhead lights, creating changing patterns on the dance floor and reflecting from her earrings when she moves her head just right.