High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  Leroy nodded. Not friendly, not unfriendly, not in the middle or at the extremes. Flat, in the way of no concern for anything or anyone.

  “I’ll have a Miller’s,” Carlisle said.

  Leroy slid open the metal cooler below the bar, inspected the contents, and twisted his head upward. “Outta Miller’s. Got Bud and Grain Belt.”

  “Bud’s okay.” Leroy’s smelled like every beer joint Carlisle had ever been in, only worse. Sour, acrid, a quintessential place where men came to die, a burial ground for all the old, besotted elephants of Salamander.

  Leroy opened the bottle and set it on the bar along with a little beer glass, narrow at the bottom and curving vaselike to a wider opening at the top. “That’ll be seventy-five.”

  Carlisle laid out a dollar. Leroy rang the cash register, slid a quarter along the bar toward him, and walked back to his conversation with the cowboy. “Seen the witch lately?” he asked the cowboy.

  “Screw the witch.”

  Leroy laughed. “Well, lot of us would like to give it a shot sometime.”

  “Yeah, fat chance,” he said, looking down at his whiskey and water, stirring it with his right index finger, high-heeled boot on the bar rail.

  “Ever notice that Injun she hangs around with?”

  “No . . . what Injun?” He raised his eyes without moving his head, staring at Leroy.

  “Old Injun. Lives somewhere out in the buttes.”

  The cowboy coughed hard and shoved his glass toward Leroy. “Screw old Injuns, too. And speaking of gettin’ old and gettin’ screwed, put a little more ol’ Jim Beam in this.”

  Leroy laughed again and reached for the bottle. “Jack, I could put nothing but two hundred proof in your glass and you’d still think I watered it down.”

  The cowboy tilted his head toward Carlisle and mumbled something only half under his breath about “hair longer’n a woman’s,” not caring whether Carlisle heard him or not. Leroy glanced down the bar while the cowboy shook his head and stirred his drink. Carlisle drank his Bud, wondering just where in the big peculiar he had landed. Silence and wind, witches and old Injuns.

  The beer was cold and tasted good in spite of the dismal ambience, even though Bud ranked about sixty-fourth in his beer hierarchy, with Grain Belt further down than last. Six feet away, Frank snored or choked; Carlisle couldn’t make out which, decided on both. One of the pool players screamed, “You lucky bastard!” while the other crowed, “Rack ’em up, Arlo.” Outside, someone revved up a car engine, the rolling boom from a hole in the muffler ricocheting off buildings along Main Street.

  “How’s Gally doing, Jack?” Leroy asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while except to catch sight of her going through town in the Bronco.”

  “She’s okay. You know women, always goddamn complaining about this or that, never happy with the way things are. Thinks we ought to sell the place and try something else. Christ, by the time we’d pay off the first and second mortgages, there’d be nothin’ left.”

  Leroy had heard it all before. He lined up empty glasses on a towel behind the bar, wishing his lower back pain would go away. Poured himself a shot of bar whiskey to ease the pain, which worked for a while but seemed only to make it worse later on.

  Carlisle thought about a second beer, but the company didn’t warrant it, and he didn’t feel like troubling Leroy again. Leroy stood with one foot on a keg, laughing with the cowboy, not bothering to turn when Carlisle finished his beer and walked out. As he closed the door behind him, pool balls cracked into one another while old Frank snored and choked his way toward oblivion.

  “NOW JUST what did we have sitting down there?” Jack Deveraux asked, canting his head and looking toward the door where Carlisle had exited.

  “No idea.” Leroy turned to wash more glasses. “Some longhair from somewhere. They come in once in a while. No problem, ’long as they keep quiet and keep moving.”

  As he put his Red Wing lace-ups on the sidewalk outside Leroy’s, Carlisle’s first observation was that an elderly man was watching him from a second-floor window across the street, above what used to be Lester’s TV & Appliance. His second was that Salamander and the sun pretty much closed up shop at the same time.

  In the past few months, Carlisle had seen hundreds of small towns, and Salamander was not unique. Other places, lots of them, looked the same with their empty storefronts, boarded-up schools, few young people on the streets. A general sense of malaise, of lifelessness, of things gone wrong.

  It was a pretty sunset, though, his first evening in Salamander. The kind you get out in the big spaces, with the western sky turning pink magenta laid up against a dome of azure to the north.

  Hungry now, choices limited. Leroy’s had advertised Tombstone pizza, which, looking around the main street of Salamander, Carlisle decided was prophetic. Leroy’s other specials were beef jerky in a glass jar and packages of beer nuts, all of it amounting to a shade less than the five basic food groups.

  Twilight came with a descending chill typical of late summer nights in those parts. Carlisle pulled his old leather jacket from the truck, slipped into it, and walked along Main Street. In the window of E. M. Holley’s furniture store–cum–undertaker’s parlor was an overstuffed love seat upholstered in blood-red flowers against a white background. He guessed by the looks of things in Salamander that the second half of Holley’s empire was outrunning the first.

  The windows of Charlene’s Variety were plastered with GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs stating that thread and notions and gifts could be had at rock-bottom prices. Two of the three gas stations were gone, weeds growing where pumps had been. The remaining one was trying to peddle unleaded at three cents a gallon higher than Harv’s Get & Go convenience store. Swale’s Ranch Supply looked as though it might sell a little wire or maybe some feed now and then, but not much else. There were no fresh tire tracks in the mud by Swale’s loading dock. Orly’s Meats and Locker Service was hanging in there, Webster’s Jack & Jill grocery was doing the same.

  On the door of what used to be Schold’s Badlands Lounge was a sign reading, “I have moved to Livermore.” Just below that sign was another, one that had been fastened there a long time, the bottom corners of it curling back. Carlisle squatted down to read it.

  Small Towns

  Crime is scarcely heard of, breaches of order rare, and our societies, if not refined, are rational, moral, and affectionate at least.

  — Thomas Jefferson

  Salamander’s commercial district was two blocks long. In the middle of the second block, across from where Carlisle walked, was a small and faltering neon sign, yellow with black lettering, signaling “DAN Y’s.” As he crossed the street, Carlisle could see the burned-out N, which cleared up the dominant question in his life at that particular moment.

  The door to Danny’s was flaking white wood on the bottom half with a frame of glass at the top. A faded Kools cigarette advertisement was pasted to the glass just below a Pepsi sticker. Above those was a sign advising that, indeed, Danny’s was open and would be until eight o’clock.

  Seven chromed metal stools with red seat coverings fronted the counter. Three Formica-topped tables ran down the middle, and six scarred booths wobbled along the side of the room next to the sidewalk. In one of the booths, four teenagers were reeling through that horrendous period of life when it seems death will never come and zits will never leave.

  Buddy Reems, Carlisle’s former partner in Reems & McMillan Construction, had come up with lots of good ideas. One of his best was that all teenagers should be sent to some desolate place, maybe North Dakota. Buddy had it figured out: Pave the entire state and stock it with nothing but fast-food restaurants and skateboard parks and drive-in movies.

  Buddy would then sit at a small table on the state line, and those interned would have to pass an adult certification interview with him before leaving. Some, many, most, would never make it. Those who did would have an “A” for “Adult” branded into the flesh of their fo
reheads so the world could identify and treat them as rational people. All Buddy asked in return for the brilliance of his idea and his work at the interview table was the Clearasil concession for the entire state, into perpetuity, and the right to operate a trashy amusement park he’d call Buddyland.

  Listening to Buddy talk about it, Carlisle had thought the proposal contained a lot of merit once you got by its front-end weirdness. Automobile insurance rates would dive, and so would crime rates. Bad music, gone. There were more benefits. Buddy had a long list he’d worked out, but just now Carlisle couldn’t remember all of them. Dammit, sometimes he missed Buddy Reems, missed his company and his good ideas. In addition to being a decent carpenter and drinking companion, he was a first-chop social theorist—well, maybe a cut or two below that—and operated pretty much as Carlisle’s opposite, saying and doing certain things Carlisle wouldn’t.

  Waylon and Willie were roaring out of the caf’s jukebox, bragging about honky-tonkin’ men and the good-hearted, masochistic women loving them in spite of their errant ways. The plastic, two-foot-high tubular pie case on the counter had room for ten slices. Six were gone. Apple and some sort of cream wonders were left, kind of mournful looking at the end of the day, their morning zip just a memory and replaced by an early evening sag. Carlisle decided the pies were not a bad metaphor for himself, or for the woman who came out of the kitchen and saw him sitting at the counter, oscillating slowly on a stool.

  “Oh, hi. Didn’t know anyone was out here. Can I help you with something?”

  Gally Deveraux was tired, felt that way, looked it. Nice midrange voice. A little windburned in the face, a little sad in the face. A little thin in the body, maybe, or maybe not. Long black hair with a few silver strands and rubber-banded into a ponytail. Eyes kind of a haunting color, gray or close to it. She might have been pretty a long time ago, but now she had the same spare, run-down look as the country around them.

  “Well, I’m trying to locate some dinner, and this seems to be the last hope in Salamander.”

  Gally Deveraux smiled, good smile, genuine smile. “We eat dinner around noon out here. Suppertime comes about six in the evening, breakfast twelve hours after that. So you’re kind of in a cranny, your last hope fading with every clock tick. Here, take a look at the menu and maybe we can work something out.”

  The menu was handwritten and shoved into a cracked plastic sleeve. The same list Carlisle had found in small-town cafs everywhere in that sector of America: hamburger, cheeseburger, vegetable burger, hamburger steak, pork tenderloin, grilled cheese sandwich, tuna salad sandwich, egg salad sandwich, French fries . . . The fish sandwich had been priced at $2.45 (with fries) but was crossed out now.

  Carlisle closed the menu and gave her an easy grin. “What does the chef suggest? The free-range almond chicken with an infusion of rosemary, accompanied by an unassuming white wine, or the veal in cream sauce?”

  She smiled again. “If it were me, I’d go for the hot turkey sandwich and a tossed salad on the side, ’specially since I just cleaned the grill and I’m not anxious to mess it up again. That’s easy for me to fix and won’t jump up and bite you too bad later on. I’m mostly concerned about the former.”

  “Okay, that’s it.” Carlisle grinned back. “Black coffee and a glass of water will take care of the liquids. Leave off the house dressing on the salad and bring me a wedge of lemon to squeeze on it.”

  She poured him a cup of coffee, good coffee, and went into the kitchen. He could hear her opening and closing a refrigerator door, while he tapped one foot to the jukebox and tried to ignore the greasy-haired boy thumping the pinball machine with the palms of his hands. The other teenagers, overcoming their miasma of self-absorption for a moment, were looking at him and giggling nervously. If Buddy had been there, he might have mooned them; he had done that one time in Fresno.

  He heard the microwave humming, and the woman had the sandwich ready in a few minutes. Two mounds of mashed potatoes, chunks of turkey suffocating between slices of white bread, and a Thanksgiving kind of gravy ladled over the whole business.

  The salad was iceberg lettuce with grated carrots sprinkled on top. And there was his lemon, looking at him coyly as if to say “You could’ve had Thousand Island, yet you chose me.”

  The salad dish was one of those plastic jobs designed to resemble a wooden bowl. Carlisle had seen them before and guessed that somewhere around 1955, a smooth talker had drifted along the Middle Border with a truckload of those beauties and sold them, thousands of them, to all the little cafs in all the little towns. “They never crack or stain, and they look just like those nice wooden ones. You’ll be real happy with them, I guarantee it.” And so they sailed on, the little bowls, with their cargoes of iceberg lettuce, confident of their ability to outlast everything but an exploding sun.

  Carlisle buckled down and got serious about eating. The woman poured herself a cup of coffee, leaned against the soft-drink cooler. “You’re not from around here, are you.”

  Mouth full of mashed potatoes and gravy, he shook his head. After he got the food down, he replied, “No, I’m not. How’d you guess?”

  “Well, first of all, you talk in complete sentences and use silverware. That tipped me off right away.”

  Good line. She was quick and smart. And he laughed, while probing the gravy’s surface. “I used to be from California. Now I’m from my pickup truck.”

  Bite of turkey, wash of coffee to put it down. For no reason he could remember later on, he asked her if a man wanted to buy a little place around here, who would be the person to see.

  “Cecil Macklin has an office in his home, just back of the caf and across the alley. There’s a Better Homes and Gardens real estate outfit in Livermore. That’s about ten miles southeast of here, and they cover Salamander. Cecil works for them.”

  “Well, I’d just as soon not do the Realtor bit. Any other way of scouting around?”

  She gave him a quizzical look. “Everybody else’s leaving or trying to, and you’re thinking about moving here?”

  “Just thinking about it. Trying to fight off the encroachment of what passes for civilization, as long as possible. Salamander seems about as good a place as any to throw up the barricades.”

  “You’ve got that right. Just go out in the street and wave a sign that says ‘Lookin’ for a Place.’ You’ll be trampled by people shoving deeds at you.”

  She refilled his coffee and leaned against the cooler, watching the man while he ate. A different sort all right, in his leather jacket, old jeans, and denim shirt. Brown shoulder-length hair, almost as long as hers, tied back with a yellow bandanna around his head. Dark eyes and slim body with good shoulders. Proper manners. Apparently civilized. Mid-thirties, maybe a little older, olive skin with the first creases from age and sun around his eyes and mouth, hands that had done a lot of manual labor by the look of them.

  For a moment, a flickering one, Gally Deveraux wondered about possibilities, then let it go. She had tried that two years ago with Harv Guthridge, who owned the quarry outside of town. Harv knew how to flatter a woman, and Gally had ended up in his bed over in Livermore one night after closing up Danny’s. That happened twice more. It wasn’t much in the way of good sex, but her husband, Jack, had stopped paying attention to her a long time back, and at least Harv kept telling her she was just about the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.

  Then Harv had started bragging about his conquest, and Gally didn’t need those knowing looks when she dropped plates of meat loaf in front of Danny’s regulars, so she’d called it off. If Jack knew about it, he had never said anything, and Harv still came by the house now and then to drink with him. Harv hadn’t liked being set aside by a woman, so he grinned at her now the way a trapper grins on his way home with pelts over his shoulder. He’d had her, and he didn’t mind telling anyone who cared to listen that she was pretty hot stuff when you got her clothes off and got her cranked up.

  Watching Carlisle McMillan, she knew there wasn
’t much point to thinking about possibilities. Shut up, shut down. Put the food on the counter and feel the slow dissolution of anything connected with being a woman. She was becoming one of the boys. Danny’s regulars treated her that way. So did Jack, when he had anything to do with her at all. Recognize deadfall when you see it. Make a slow left turn just this side of oblivion, that’s the best you can do for now. Still, she wished she were dressed a little better tonight, maybe in the new shirt and jeans she had bought a couple of weeks ago at Charlene’s sale, and wished, too, that she had brushed her hair an hour or so back when she’d thought about it. No particular reason, she just wished she had done those things.

  But she was tired, and that was probably why she was having these thoughts. Eight hours earlier, before coming into work, she had watched a lone eagle ride one of the last winds of summer. Standing there in a long field that ran all the way to the beginning of afternoon and watching the eagle, she could hear Jack coughing in the kitchen thirty feet behind her. His cough was worse than yesterday, and yesterday it had been worse than the day before. The cigarettes and Jim Beam had him by the throat, physically, figuratively. He was dying. But then he’d been dying for the last ten years. Gally Deveraux had been dying, too, in her own way and for a long time. Maybe ever since she had married him twenty years ago and had come out to the high plains.

  Not much resemblance between the man in her kitchen and the one she had married. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she could still see the early Jack leaning against a fence at the North Star Stampede, a rodeo in Effie, Minnesota, fiddling with a lariat. A hard, thin swashbuckler in his boots and Stetson and western shirt with pearl snaps, starched jeans fastened up by a wide leather belt that had “Devil Jack” stamped on the brass buckle. Back then, Jack Deveraux had been a wild rider of broncs and bulls and young women having the temerity to smile at him. Gally and two of her friends from Bemidji State had smiled at him.