High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  He had smiled back in that slow, roguish way of his. “Evenin’, ladies.” Good eyes, blue and direct.

  When Gally had left for college, her mother recited a litany of bad things young women should avoid in the interest of preserving all the good things young women are supposed to preserve. The list was a long one and included star quarterbacks but inadvertently omitted cowboys. After watching Jack ride the bulls that night in Effie, and after three beers from the cooler in his truck, Gally willingly shucked her jeans and smelled the dust on his skin while she straddled him in his truck cab. Jack pulled out for Bozeman the next morning, and Gally went with him.

  “Easy,” that’s what he called her back then. She hadn’t minded because it was a pretty good description of her in those days. Besides, early on in their marriage she liked the way Jack said it, kind of soft and loving, as in “Hey, Easy, wanna go dancin’ tonight?” He called her that for years after they were married. He didn’t call her that anymore. He didn’t say much of anything to her anymore.

  The eagle had disappeared somewhere in the north behind a rain cloud. When she couldn’t see it anymore, Gally walked across dusty, short grass toward the house. She opened the fridge, stared into it for a moment, then looked at the distant, contemptuous man sitting at the kitchen table, coughing.

  “Want me to fix you something to eat, Jack? I could heat up the vegetables and roast left over from Sunday.”

  He was still thin in the legs and shoulders, but now he carried a potbelly that sagged in concert with his splotched, puffy face. He was drinking whiskey straight from the bottle this morning and tilted back his head, took another shot. He swallowed it and said nothing.

  “You really do need something in your stomach. Seems like you never eat anymore.”

  “If I don’t feel like eating, I’m not gonna eat. Stop pushing at me about it, for chrissake.”

  The table was covered with empty beer bottles and two ashtrays full of cigarette butts. Jack and his cronies had spent another night sitting there bitching about hard times, about what the government and shit-faced environmentalists and bankers and European farm policies were doing to their lives.

  “Maybe if you’d clean up the goddamn kitchen table once in a while, I might feel more like eating.”

  “Clean it up yourself, Jack. You and your buddies made the mess.”

  The old Jack was pretty much gone, but the temper was still there. He swept a stand of beer bottles to the floor with his forearm and went into the living room. One of the bottles continued to spin on its side for a long time, then clinked against a table leg and stopped.

  Arms folded, Gally leaned against the door frame of the house Jack’s grandfather built in 1915. The house was peeling white and needed care, but there wasn’t any energy for that. Energy for whiskey—the procuring of it, the drinking of it—but not for the house. Or for her. No money, either. She had bought her last new dress two years earlier when they were going out to celebrate Jack’s birthday, but he had gotten drunk in midafternoon and passed out. She leaned against the door frame this afternoon and looked down at herself in an old denim shirt, faded jeans, boot heels run over, and felt six times bad and worse than that, feeling a whole lot older than thirty-nine.

  She wondered how Jack Jr. was doing. He was nineteen and following the second-tier rodeo circuit, firing off a postcard now and then from Las Cruces, Ardmore, and other places where the bulls had straps pinching their genitals and tried to buck off cowboys who had never really been cowboys, just rodeo riders. Sharon was also gone, to a husband who drove for a truck line out of Casper. At first, she would ride with him when he hauled loads up to Fargo and stay with Gally and Jack for a few days before her husband picked her up on the way back, but not anymore. Two babies of her own kept her tied down in Casper now. Even without the babies she wouldn’t have come now, because of Jack’s drinking and all.

  Around noon, Gally walked across the porch and out to the Ford Bronco, started it, and drove along the lane. Rain took up just as she turned onto Wolf Butte Road. Four hours later, Jack followed her into town and went into Leroy’s.

  In Danny’s, another country tune counterpointed by the pinball machine was expiring on the jukebox: “I’m [bing!] short on words, but [bong!] long on [bing!bong! . . . bong!bong!bing!] love . . .”

  Carlisle was thinking a contemporary composer, maybe John Cage, could cut through all of that and do something with it. Or maybe Cage would consider it a masterwork and just leave it alone.

  “Do you own this place?” He looked at the woman in faded jeans, denim shirt, and old cowboy boots with the heels run over.

  “No, and I’m glad I don’t, the way things are going around here. Older woman named Thelma Englestrom owns it, took it over from her husband when he died. She’s been in the Falls City hospital for the last couple weeks, so I’m working a little more than usual. Me and Mrs. Macklin, Cecil’s wife, are sort of keeping things going till Thelma gets back on her feet. Ordinarily I just work here a few days a week, mostly in the mornings, sometimes afternoons and evenings.”

  Carlisle stared at the pie case.

  “Those fellows look a little tired, don’t they,” Gally Deveraux observed, following his eyes. “Mrs. Macklin bakes ’em fresh every other day. But the liquid runs into the crust and eventually collapses it, kind of like Salamander.”

  There was something in what she said that was straight and true. Something. He had thought about it before. “Yeah, it does kind of look like that. But I’ll take a shot at the apple.”

  “Want it straight or with some ice cream?”

  “Strap on the vanilla. The end is near anyway, right?”

  Big piece of apple pie. Big scoops of ice cream. She rested her stomach against the ice-cream freezer, her jeans pulling up tight over a nice-looking rear, and dug out the good stuff, serving it along with a clean fork. She took his gravy plate into the kitchen, rattling around in there. He missed her company. He was in the middle of Salamander in the middle of America in the middle of the world, someplace in a universe still expanding. It had been good talking with her.

  Outside, squeal of tires. The teenagers were leaving.

  When he paid his bill, Gally glanced up at him and smiled. “You know, I’ve been thinking about your question . . . about finding a place. An old fellow named Williston used to live on an acreage about eight miles northwest of here. Pretty bare, but there’s a nice grove across the road from it and a little house of some kind. Probably in rough shape by now. In fact, it was in rough shape to start with. I remember, though, someone said a lawyer over in Livermore or Falls City was trying to sell it as part of an estate. I can find out for you, if you’re serious.”

  “I’m halfway serious. I’d appreciate any information you can give me.”

  She sketched lines on a paper napkin with BUY AMERICAN printed in the upper right corner and handed it to him. “No charge for the map. You’ll be able to find it okay. It’s off in the direction of Wolf Butte, which has a reputation for being haunted and promoting things that go bumpity in the dark. That legend got some additional help when a college professor fell off a nearby cliff some years back and got himself killed. You don’t strike me as someone who’s too bothered by that sort of stuff, however.”

  She grinned and went on. “The house sits a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty yards from the road, and it’s got a couple of nice big trees right near it. I think there’s a little shed or something off to the side. I pass right by there coming into town, but you know how it goes, see something a million times and you forget what it looks like.”

  Carlisle looked at the map. “I appreciate it. This all seems a little familiar. I think I may have come into town that way.”

  Gally Deveraux was turning off the caf lights as Carlisle stepped outside. The air had a bite to it, and he flipped up the collar on his jacket. He stood there for a moment. Four cars in addition to his truck were parked on Main Street, all of them resting under the mercury vapor streetla
mp in front of Leroy’s, like horses angled into a water trough. A tumbleweed blew in from the west on a tentative wind and rolled down the pavement. Carlisle watched it pass Charlene’s Variety, then stop in front of Orly’s Meats and Locker as the wind died.

  An out-of-tune Dodge pickup driven by a man in a cowboy hat moved slowly by in a direction opposite that of the tumbleweed, its lights reflecting in empty storefronts. Face dark and indistinguishable under the hat, the man looked at Carlisle for a moment, then stared straight ahead, holding a cigarette against the steering wheel. A rifle was racked across the window behind him. Custom license plates seemed to be the habit around Yerkes County, and this one read DEVLJK.

  The wind came again, and the tumbleweed began to move east, bouncing silently along the street in the dust of this place called Salamander. Laughter reverberated softly from somewhere inside Leroy’s. Carlisle heard the laughter and listened to the wind, listened to the crunch of his boots on gritty asphalt as he crossed the street. You could smell winter getting to its feet, and Carlisle was still a long way from anything called home.

  He started the engine and turned on the headlights just as a figure in a long cloak passed in front of his truck. The woman was startled by the sound and the lights, glancing for a moment toward where Carlisle sat in the cab. Auburn hair flowed from beneath her hood, and the face, what he could see of it, was strange, an uncommon kind of beauty that started in a man’s eyes, then dropped into his belly. She turned her head again and continued along the street, cloak billowing softly in the wind and dust of a late summer heading quickly into early autumn.

  He made a U-turn and drove back down the street. The woman stepped off the curb and waited for him to pass. He looked at her again. A lot of people looked more than once at Susanna Benteen. Some even called her a witch.

  Chapter Three

  SLEEPY’S STAGGER INN, LIVERMORE. THE OLD MAN GRIPPED his right leg with both hands and shifted it into a better position underneath the table, grunting a little from both the effort and some obvious pain.

  His face twitched momentarily before he went on with what he’d been saying.

  “Never been anything like it, not out here, at least.”

  He fingered his shot glass, angled it up, and looked straight down into the whiskey, what he called the “amber truth” when he ordered it. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You name it, we had it: war, magic, 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.”

  The old man liked to talk, so I switched on my tape recorder and let him.

  “When Carlisle McMillan first rolled into Salamander that first evening, I somehow knew the level of excitement was going to pick up around here. Somehow I just knew that.

  “Now, if you’re sixty-four, as I was then, living in two rooms plus bath above what used to be Lester’s TV and Appliance, there wasn’t much to do. Especially if you couldn’t get around too well because of the leg you mangled out at the Guthridge Brothers quarry in ’75, when you got caught between the blade of a front-end loader and a chunk of limestone. I’d hobble down to the post office in the morning for the junk mail and keep track of Main Street from the window in my parlor. That was about it.

  “Since almost nothing happened down there, your mind kind of rotted from concentrating on piffle running to emptiness. But it was that or television, and the street won hands down.

  “Anyway, Carlisle went into Leroy’s and came out twenty minutes later. He stood around on the pavement a bit, then took a jacket out of his truck. He walked along, looking into windows, cutting cattywampus across the street in the general direction of Danny’s. I lost my angle of view on him when he got to my side of the street, but Danny’s was the only thing open, so I guessed he must have gone in there.

  “I also took my meals at Danny’s. Some of them, anyways. Right after I went by the post office in the morning. That way, I only had to negotiate the stairs to my place once a day, which was plenty with this damn leg. Gally Deveraux, who worked in the caf, was real nice and gave me secret discounts on the noon specials. She’d send me home with day-old rolls and those little unused jam cartons left over from breakfast, free of charge. Sometimes she told me to go ahead and take extra packets of sugar or salt or pepper.

  “So if I ate a lot at noon, I could get by in the evening on oatmeal and rolls with cheese or a little peanut butter and jam. Well, that and a shot of the Old Charter my daughter always sent me at Christmas from Orlando. Of course, by late March I’d worked my way through her gift, and December started looking like a long way off.

  “But I baby-sat Mert’s Texaco when he’d take his wife to the clinic in Livermore, and he’d pick up a fifth of cheap stuff for me at the big Piggly Wiggly store over there. That’s how he paid me for sitting on my butt and telling people to pump their own damn gas at a nickel a gallon more than Harv’s Get and Go inconvenience store charged. The IRS held I ought to report the whiskey as barter income, but I always said piss on ’em. I wish they’d audited me anyhow, just so I would have had someone halfway intelligent to talk to, even if it was an accountant. You know, if those folks weren’t so boring, they’d be interesting.

  “So, how’d I know Carlisle was going to notch up the energy level in Salamander? Not sure. Maybe it had to do with the yellow bandanna tied around his head and the long brown hair coming out from underneath it, hanging to just above his shoulders. In the twilight, in his leather jacket, old boots, and faded jeans, he looked like one of the younger bucks from the reservation who was trying to forget Wounded Knee, avoid a beer gut, and rediscover his heritage.

  “Something about his walk, too. Kind of easy, kind of sure. A walk like that covered a lot of ground in a day without exerting too much effort. There was something about Carlisle that told me the years were pulling at him pretty hard, but I could still tell he was upper shelf, that he wouldn’t bend without some real pushing. ’Course, we don’t bend none too easy around here, either.

  “For all those reasons, I decided to keep an eye on Carlisle McMillan and see if he hung around. As I said, we’d been pretty hard up for excitement. Before all hell broke loose in the form of the Yerkes County War, there’d been only two things worth noting around here, aside from Salamander needing some kind of municipal CPR. One of ’em didn’t involve Carlisle directly. The other one did.

  “The first had to do with Susanna Benteen. You had to get your mind kind of calm and straight to understand Susanna. Otherwise you’d take her for something she wasn’t, like maybe a relic from the old student uproar days of the sixties. We used to watch it all on TV in the evenings back then, and I kind of miss seeing that now. Of course, the bobos over at Leroy’s weren’t all that sympathetic toward those students marching around and burning flags. But they were more or less fascinated with the ‘free love’ ideas we heard about, which apparently was a nice part of the marching and burning.

  “Once you got by that notion and started looking real close at Susanna, your reaction would depend on whether you were a man or a woman, I suppose. A lot of us still remember the first time we saw her. It’s easy to recall ’cause Susanna Benteen came riding in on the last Greyhound ever to stop in Salamander. Had a battered suitcase in one hand, macram bag over her shoulder. The boys at the back table in Danny’s looked up from their cards and out the front window. Somebody said, ‘Jesus Keyrist! Do you see what’s coming off the bus out there?’ We all turned as one, like we’d been rehearsing it for a long time.

  “And Susanna Benteen came stepping off the bus and onto the sidewalk, light as you please. Wore a dress about the color of ripe wheat with a dark green shawl over it, high black boots, and that long auburn hair of hers done up in a fancy braid. She came into the restaurant and asked for a cup of herbal tea. Spoke real quiet and poli
te. There wasn’t much call for herbal tea in Salamander, and Gally apologized for not having any. That was perfectly all right, the regular stuff would do, we all heard Susanna Benteen say. We all heard it ’cause we were all paying close attention.

  “Gally served her a cup of hot water and a Lipton’s bag with a spoon, trying not to stare at this creature who had wafted in off the Greyhound. But the boys in the back stared. You bet they did. The older you get, the more bad manners are permitted, if not forgiven. That’s one of the few advantages of age and its various declines. I was sitting at the counter a few stools down from Susanna and pretending to read a newspaper, but I was staring, too. At the risk of sounding poetic, which I ain’t and never have been, a swallow had landed where only crows had flown.

  “After she’d been here a while, quite a few of the folks in Salamander started calling Susanna a witch. Some still do. That’s one way of dealing with things you don’t understand. Partly it’s the look of her. The feeling you might be staring at something you haven’t seen before. Something beyond the boundaries of ordinary ways of doing things, and do we ever hate anything deviating from the ordinary. She represented something the other side of where most of us cared to go, fearing we might never get back to a place that was familiar. And when it comes to Susanna, I suspect there’s some truth in all of that, the idea that you might not get back from wherever she might take you. Carlisle McMillan eventually found that out.

  “Even though the locals were suspicious of Susanna from the beginning, a lot of that witch business got its start when Arlo Gregorian’s wife, Kathy, got pregnant. The fact that she was pregnant would have been enough, simply because babies are a real oddity in a town where the majority of residents are old women living on government transfer payments or sucking up interest from CDs, courtesy of Verle and Floyd and Morris and Harold and all the rest of those buggers who worked their asses off to pay for their land and then died at about the same time they burned the mortgage. After which, of course, the wife sold the property that was too much for her to take care of and moved to town.