High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  High Plains Tango

  a novel

  Robert James Waller

  Shaye Areheart Books

  NEW YORK

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other books by Robert James Waller

  Copyright Page

  For my mother, Ruthie, who for years has lived in a quiet fog of Alzheimer’s disease, but who still smiles in recognition when she sees me and likes it when I hold her hand on winter afternoons.

  “In some respects, George Armstrong Custer had a pleasant stroll by the river compared to what Carlisle McMillan went through, and afterward nobody placed any white markers in the thin, red soil of Yerkes County. Never been anything like it, not out here, at least . . . not anywhere else, probably. You name it, we had it: magic, war, Indians . . . so-called witches, for chrissake.”

  “Mind if I quote you here and there, on the local stuff?” I asked.

  “Keep buying the Wild Turkey, quote me all you want. Talk to Carlisle McMillan, too, get it straight from the hombre who went through it all.”

  —CONVERSATION,

  back booth in SLEEPY’S STAGGER INN

  * * *

  Hell, we’re all just a bunch of dervishes, dancin’ around and chantin’ till the music ends. But you got to accept the tango runs forever. Susanna Benteen understood that. Not sure if anyone else did. She ain’t no witch, like people said. ’Least I don’t think so. She dances a sweet little tango, though, I’ll say that.

  —Gabe O’Rourke,

  ACCORDION PLAYER

  Chapter One

  NOT EXACTLY A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT, BUT NONETHELESS: a strange, far place in a strange, far time, distant buttes with low, wet clouds hanging across their rumpled white faces and long, straight highways running somewhere close to forever. In a settled land, the truly wild places are where nobody is looking anymore. This was a wild place.

  Enigmatic sign pointing west.

  Why did the eagle die? Did anyone remember? Some did, but they weren’t talking.

  Red dirt road perpendicular to the highway, heading into the short grass and disappearing over a low rise a half mile out.

  Other signs, every thirty miles or so, pointing to other roads hinting travel through invisible walls and into other times. If you had a vehicle with enough stamina, maybe turn off on one of them, just for the hell of it. We’ve all had a fleeting urge to do that.

  That’s what Carlisle McMillan did. He was in no hurry, a traveler without design, a temporary drifter by his own choice. After turning his tan Chevy pickup off westbound pavement onto what the locals called Wolf Butte Road, he headed south past the Dead Eagle Canyon sign. After a while, he stopped his truck and got out, miles from the nearest little town.

  Late August cool. Mist. Carlisle McMillan stood there for a few moments, boots becoming grass wet, sky water on his face and hands.

  Easy wind came, went, came again. Silence. Cattails bending, yellow clover riffling as the wind chose. Like a film without a sound track—the silence—only deeper. More like a stone coffin at nightfall when the mourners have left and dirt has been shoveled over you.

  The Cheyenne believed this was sacred ground. Sweet Medicine said it was so. The hawk sitting thirty fence posts south of Carlisle McMillan believed it. Anyone who happened on this place believed it. The smart money would come with food and water, perhaps a sleeping bag, in case an engine failed or a tire relented and the spare was empty. For nothing out here cared about you, that much was clear. Nothing cared whether you lived or died or paid your bills or danced on warm Pacific beaches and made love afterward. There was nothing except silence and wind, and they would be here long after your passing.

  The Early Ones were buried here in mounds, giving the appearance of sea roll to the prairie. They shuffled across the old land bridges from Asia when the continents were connected in the high north. A century ago, others were buried in this place. Buried where they fell in the wars of Manifest Destiny, the great westward push. You could still find metal buttons from cavalry tunics if you scuffled around in the gravel and looked close. Other things, too, old knife handles, human shoulder bones splintered by lance and bullet, pipe stems. If you dug, you would find more, a lot more.

  Six inches behind Carlisle McMillan’s left rear tire was a tunic button half buried in the mud. The winds of a hundred springs uncovered the button, rain washed it into a creek. The creek carried it onto a sandbar. A bird picked it up and flew toward a nest, dropping it when it turned out to be hard and tasteless. That particular button once fastened the coat of Trooper Jimmy C. Knowles, Seventh Cavalry, who rode behind a man they called Son of the Morning Star. Trooper Knowles thought well of his yellow-haired general and aspired to be a cut-and-paste copy of him. He would have ridden into hell with Son of the Morning Star. And he eventually did.

  If you can get past the wind, listen beyond the silence, there are old sounds reverberating here. Distant bugles, squeak of cavalry leather, maybe the low thrum of time itself. And faint images of old riders from a long time ago, mounted on fine Appaloosas, breaking from the shadows of Dead Eagle Canyon, running hard across the roll of green prairie, and turning their ponies for autumn, steam coming from muzzles and mouths.

  Sometimes you can even smell things farther out when the wind is just right. That’s what they said and still say. You have to lean back and flare your nostrils. Work at it. Then it will come to you. First the ordinary smells of big, open country and after that the faint whiff of old deceptions.

  Not far from where Carlisle McMillan stood in light rain and looked out across the rise of nothing, the anthropologist fell to his death from one of the smaller buttes. There had been the sound of rushing air followed by the thump of something high in the middle of his back, causing him to stagger forward from where he was standing and launching him into downward flight. The first eighty feet or so, his fall had a certain purity in its form and velocity, almost graceful. Until he hit an outcropping. After that, it was a Raggedy-Ann tumble for the next six hundred feet. The only sound was his scream, and his only perception was that of the cliff face going by him in a blur of white sandstone. He smashed into rock and gravel at the bottom, neck twisted rearward in such a way that his chin could touch the bottom of his right shoulder blade. None of his colleagues on the plain below had seen it happen or heard his cry.

  A pair of dark eyes had seen it, though—the man falling through cool sunlight, the thin and yellow sunlight that sweeps this land in middle spring—but nothing would be said. Nothing, not ever. It was the way of things. 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.

  Carlisle McMillan leaned on a fence post, looked west, stared at the distance. Great run of empty space, broken only by an occasional butte. The one a half mile to his right, 3,237 feet high, was called Wolf Butte. A woman wa
s dancing there on the crest, but Carlisle couldn’t see her.

  Bare feet on short grass, she moved. Far off, far down, she could just make out a figure standing beside a pickup truck. Twenty feet behind her, the Indian played a flute, his back resting against the gnarled trunk of a long-dead scrub pine.

  A low-slung cloud moved onto the butte, the cold wetness of it touching the graceful arch of the woman’s back, touching the curve of her legs. It touched her face and the opal ring on her left middle finger and the silver bracelet around her right wrist, touched the silver falcon hanging from the chain around her neck. The Indian could not see her clearly anymore, only transient sightings through the cloud, a momentary view of leg or breast or the swing of long auburn hair as she turned. But still he played, knowing the cloud would pass, knowing she would come to him.

  Far off and far down, Carlisle McMillan shifted his truck into reverse and backed onto the road, grinding into the mud a tunic button that once fastened the blue coat of Trooper Jimmy C. Knowles, Seventh Cavalry. When the cloud drifted away from the butte and the woman again could see what lay on the plain below her, the figure was gone, only the vague image of a pickup truck moving south.

  The flute angled down to silence. She raised her arms through the mist to the sky, lowered them, and walked toward the Indian. He was old, but his body was hard like fence wire, and she settled onto him. The wind was light and cool and wet. Close to her, he could smell the sandalwood with which she had bathed that morning. The rain lifted for a moment, and over the Indian’s shoulder she watched the hawk flying toward a cliff, the same one from which her father had glimpsed the earth rising toward him.

  Chapter Two

  AXEL LOOKER WASN’T STUPID. HE JUST BEHAVED THAT WAY. In his bones he knew the scientist fellow was right, even though he didn’t like scientist fellows in general. Didn’t like them because they clearly were a bunch of radicals feeding at the public trough, funded by Axel Looker’s own taxes. Didn’t like them because they held you to logic and asked for proof, wouldn’t let you get away with the comforting restaurant talk where myths born of self-interest were passed around like ketchup. Passed around and eventually agreed upon with murmurs of assent and nodding of heads, until an enduring fiction was created with which all were comfortable. One departed from this common point of view only at the risk of censure, not to mention expulsion from the back table in Danny’s caf.

  The ecologist had said their days out here were closing down unless they dramatically changed their ways. Told them they were draining the big Ogallala aquifer and overgrazing the grasslands. Said they were letting the soil, which was thin at the outset, blow away in the wind.

  They had listened to him, first at a speech he gave in the Livermore gym, where he had nearly been hooted off the stage. Afterward, walking out to their cars, someone said they ought to at least whip up a barrel of hot tar and send his feathered butt back east where he belonged. Things didn’t go any better when the ecologist showed up at Clyde Archer Legion Post 227 in Salamander and spoke again. Somehow, though, it was harder to dismiss him when the audience was small and they could see his eyes and he could see theirs. He was thin and earnest, talking quietly. He had charts and numbers, and he had level, steel-hard answers for their questions. It seemed as though he knew their criticisms flowed from the myths they were determined to preserve, and he would have none of it. They kept looking for gaps in his arguments, but they couldn’t find any. That made them dislike him even more.

  As with most people, no matter how intelligent, Axel Looker had his own way of putting aside unpleasant evidence that didn’t fit with what he wanted to happen. So even though Axel knew the scientist fellow was right, deep down he knew that, he couldn’t admit it to anyone, including himself. Over morning coffee at Danny’s, the boys tilted back their caps and talked about outside interference in their lives while they absently fingered the crop subsidy checks tucked in their shirt pockets.

  On his way home and six miles west of Salamander, Axel turned off Route 42 and headed north along the red dirt road toward the place he and Earlene had farmed and ranched for thirty-four years. The red dirt had turned to a sticky gumbo in late summer rain, and he slowed down, nearly stopping, when he met a tan pickup with California plates.

  “Now who the hell is that?” he wondered out loud. Tomorrow he would ask around at Danny’s or the grain elevator, see if anybody knew. Looked like an Indian behind the wheel, maybe another one of those agitators forever demanding the land out there be returned to them, filing lawsuits, and claiming it was their land and that it had been stolen from them a hundred and some more years ago. What a pile of cowshit that was. Axel may have disliked scientists, but he absolutely hated Indians, particularly those who argued he was farming stolen land.

  When he arrived home, he mentioned to Earlene that it might be time to think about retiring and moving to Florida. He didn’t say anything to her about the pickup truck he met on the way back from Salamander. Didn’t want to worry her.

  LOOKING BACK on it, if Carlisle McMillan had known what lay ahead of him, he might not have stopped in Salamander that first night, might have kept right on going through and out the other side of Yerkes County.

  “Too damn much grief, as it turned out, for a man doing nothing except trying to find some peace and quiet.” That’s what he once said.

  Easy to understand why he might say that. His recollections were still clear and hard formed: birds lifting off with a predator’s scream and warriors lashed to the trees of April. Boom of shotguns and the hard crack of a long-range rifle. Sirens, men shouting, dust climbing high and fast into morning skies, fires on the crest of Wolf Butte. And the slow, downward slide of anything resembling justice and plain dealing.

  Carlisle’s jaw tightened when he talked about that part of it. Then he would shift over to a half smile. “But there were compensations. On balance, I’d do it over again.”

  Of course he would. How many women could you find like Susanna Benteen? Or Gally Deveraux, for that matter. Pretty close to none. Susanna and Gally and what came to be known as the Yerkes County War feathered out the boy. Made him stand upright and lurch forward into manhood. Carlisle admitted it.

  He came into Yerkes County from the north late on that August day, stopped and looked at the country around him. The roll of short grass, Wolf Butte to his right. Mist, easy wind, silence. Heading south again on the red dirt road, he hit pavement after a few miles, Route 42. He looked at his map, leaned on the steering wheel and thought about his options. Full dark coming in an hour or so. A little town east about six miles. In the other direction, the next place of any size was Casper, Wyoming, three hundred miles southwest and not much between here and Casper. Turn east.

  Fifteen driving minutes later, Carlisle squinted past the slap of his windshield wipers and saw the four cylindrical towers of a grain elevator ahead. Sign on the edge of town: WELCOME TO SALAMANDER, Pop. 942, Elev. 2263.

  The sign was battered, needed a new paint job. Three bullet holes were grouped within the O in WELCOME. Problematical greeting.

  More signs: church schedules, and the Lions Club met every Tuesday at noon. He moved slowly along the highway doubling as Main Street, the town spreading out a block or two on either side of the commercial district and five blocks beyond it at the ends. Past Duane’s Pickup Palace & Lawn Mower Repair, past the Blue Square Drive-In (CLOSED LABOR DAY) and the Jackrabbit Lanes (CLOSED, windows covered with plywood). He shifted down into second with the truck engine whining a little, wipers beginning to drag as the rain let up and late sunlight splayed through the overcast farther west.

  Merchants along Main Street were shutting their front doors at the end of the day. The buildings they locked were mostly white frame, some of them well built originally, but in need of scraping and paint now, and part of the roof had collapsed on what used to be the Salamander Hotel. Mixed in with the wooden structures were several fine old brick buildings in late Victorian style, the former home of
Melik’s Drug as an example. In the spaces between some of the buildings, Carlisle could see houses on side streets and beyond them open country. Not many trees, and small ones at that, water being scant and the soil too thin in most places for deep, heavy roots. Those that had grown to any size had been cut for buildings and firewood years ago.

  Carlisle McMillan put his tires against a curb with chunks missing from the concrete, in front of a tavern called Leroy’s. Got out, flexed his knees, swung his arms. Long day, thirsty day, 397 miles since dawn. He walked into Leroy’s and slid onto the first stool just at sundown, feeling grimy. Leroy was at the other end of the wooden bar, talking to a tall cowboy wearing a Stetson. The cowboy, rakish having been his middle name a long time ago but bilious now more appropriate, smoked a thin cigar and looked as if he were four days past the end of everything. Two men in caps with fertilizer logos on the crowns were bending over the shabbiest excuse for a pool table Carlisle had ever seen. It sloped, it leaned, and the cushions had deep cigarette burns in them.

  But it wasn’t the worst-looking article in the place. That prize belonged to the old duffer sitting two stools down from Carlisle, left arm crooked on the bar. And lying on the arm was a face with a week of gray stubble. Up came the head, or what passed for one. He stared at Carlisle through crosshatched red eyes. “Who’errr youvff?” When Carlisle ignored him, his curiosity escalated, and he shouted the same question, nearly falling off his bar stool in the effort.

  Leroy came along behind the bar, cigarette dangling from his mouth, wiping his hands on a dirty white apron wrapped around his waist and hanging two inches below his knees, a rip in the hem causing part of it to hang even a little farther. As he passed the old man, Leroy slapped the bar and said, “Shut up, Frank.”

  “Fugyouleer-oy.” Frank flung the slur in the general direction of Leroy’s retreating back before his head smacked onto the bar and he was quiet.