High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  He frowned momentarily, found his place in the story he’d been telling, and continued. “As you might recall, I started out to talk about the only two pieces of excitement in Salamander over a period of a decade or so, aside from the Yerkes County War, of course. All this previous rambling was somewhat necessary as background for major events that cropped up later on.

  “The second thrill occurred about two years after the Gregorians’ success at adding to the great human tide devouring this lonely planet. I was looking out my window one night, as usual, preferring that to watching some dude on ABC dance around in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. Up to around nine o’clock, the only thing of interest I’d seen was Carlisle McMillan, who’d been around the area for about seven or eight months at that time, park his truck and go into Leroy’s.

  “A few minutes later, I saw Huey Sverson’s old green Buick screech to a stop right in front of Leroy’s. He double-parked it, he did. Out jumps Huey without bothering to close the door, and I saw he was carrying a butcher knife big enough for use at the rendering plant over in Falls City. He walked past Jack Deveraux’s truck where Devil Jack, as he liked to be known, was sleeping one off, slammed open the front door of Leroy’s, and disappeared inside.

  “The rest of what happened I got from Gally and a few other generally reliable sources. Their version was subsequently confirmed by each and every customer stopping at Mert’s while I was plunked down there a few days later. It seems that Beanie Wickers, who at one time drove a soybean truck, as you might guess, had been diddling Huey’s wife on the side while Huey was off with the National Guard on selected weekends. Huey found out, tossed back three or four shots of Jim Beam, and made a cool and well-considered decision to punch Beanie’s ticket.

  “Beanie saw Huey coming and had a pretty fair idea of what was going on, since Huey was shouting, ‘I’m going to carve your ass into sixteen parts, you wife stealer!’ or something to that effect. Beanie ran over the top of the pool table and locked himself in the women’s toilet. That resulted in a situation having temporary stability, since none of the boys, least of all Leroy, had any intention of disarming Huey, who was swinging that knife around like John Rambo.

  “Huey kept banging on the metal door of the ladies’ powder room and shouting—in some detail, according to bystanders—exactly what he was going to do with the butcher knife, focusing especially on certain operations he intended to perform on Beanie’s private members. While that was occurring, Leroy summoned our local security force consisting of one Fearless Fred Mumblypeg, which is what the town called Fred Mumford. Fred was sixty-nine, wore a silver badge, and drove around in his Olds seeking out such habitual violators as Ernie ‘the Gurney’ Penrose, a retarded kid with a habit of peeking in bedroom windows.

  “Fred got to Leroy’s and told the assembled observers that he might be old, but he wasn’t stupid. Moreover, as far as he was concerned, Beanie was about to get everything he deserved. That attitude didn’t surprise anyone, since Fred was a lay preacher at the Baptist church.

  “Now I’d observed that Carlisle McMillan was kind of a quiet guy who didn’t much cotton to violence. Said he’d seen enough of that out in California and in the bars around Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he’d been in the service. But, as we all found out that night, Carlisle had some barb to him when events called for it.

  “He watched the Mexican standoff in progress and overheard Leroy say he was going to call the county sheriff. Along with violence, Carlisle had an acute dislike for formal organizations of any kind, and on top of that, he knew what serious law would mean for Huey. So he asked Leroy to hold off a few minutes. Carlisle walked calmly within talking distance of Huey and started saying things in a real level, quiet way, trying to convince him to put down the knife and go home, mend things with Fran, and forget about assholes like Beanie.

  “But Huey, in his heightened state, and suffering besides from the memories of his U.S. Ranger days in Vietnam, which wouldn’t let him sleep at night, started calling Carlisle a ‘long-haired hippie bastard,’ two-thirds of which was true, as we later found out, and turned the knife on him. With Gally screaming at him to be careful, Carlisle retreated, reached behind himself, and grabbed a twenty-weight pool cue someone had left lying on the table after Beanie’s sprint across the top of it.

  “Huey was so wrought up he didn’t notice Carlisle had hold of the cue, and when Huey came within range, Carlisle swung that sonuvabitch in a nice firm arc and clubbed Huey on the outside of the left knee. Hit ’im with the butt end of the cue, real hard.

  “Huey went into a stagger, dragging his injured leg like he’d been taught in the Rangers, and kept coming directly at Carlisle, at which point Carlisle did the same thing to Huey’s right knee, only harder. Huey kissed the floor of Leroy’s at about thirty miles an hour, landing facedown in miscellaneous cigarette butts, one of them still smoking, plus the remains from a spilled pitcher of Grain Belt and a slice of Tombstone pizza featuring extra cheese and pepperoni. Carlisle stepped on Huey’s knife hand with one of his work shoes and kicked the knife away with the other. That done, he told Leroy to get Beanie out of the women’s can and out of town.

  “Well, the evening ended with Carlisle and Huey and Gally all sitting in a booth together, sharing a pitcher, and talking. Gally had a nice, motherly way about her when she felt like it, and she was trying to calm and console Huey, all the while cleaning up his face with a bar rag. After a while, Huey started crying, which was a little embarrassing, but given the circumstances and the fact that he was a veteran, nobody held it against him later on. At closing time, Leroy presented Carlisle with the pool cue he’d used to swat Huey, saying that Carlisle had saved him a lot of trouble with the law.

  “The next day, thinking they needed to reinvigorate their marriage, Fran and Huey left on a trip to the Five Flags amusement park, which she’d been trying to get him to do for years. Apparently Beanie stayed out of Huey’s marital bed from then on and did his drinking over here at Sleepy’s.

  “So it all ended pretty well, thanks to Carlisle. And in Huey’s eyes, Carlisle McMillan could do no wrong after that, saving him, he figured, from prison and losing Fran and never getting to see Five Flags, where he rode the rolly coaster six times.”

  Chapter Four

  BY THE SCORES WE KEEP, WHAT HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS the Yerkes County War was a small war. Small and primitive. You probably saw a brief mention of it somewhere in your newspaper or maybe in a film clip on the evening news, then dismissed it as one of those nasty little quarrels in some distant place having no relevance to your life. Just why the nastiness occurred is complex. A lot of tangled reasons, some of them reaching back a century or more. Would it have taken place if Carlisle McMillan had never come to Yerkes County? Hard to say. The fact is he did come.

  On his first night in Salamander, Carlisle McMillan stopped at the convenience store on the edge of town, still thinking about the woman who had moved through his headlights, then waited for him to pass after he made a U-turn and headed east down the main street of Salamander. He carried words in his head, words that came and came again, something about flowers and wind and bittersweet recollections. He couldn’t get it straight: Did the words come from his mind or the truck radio, or was the woman whispering them as he drove by? Damn, he thought, this country is playing with my head.

  He gassed the truck and went inside. A six-pack of Old Style plus the gas came to $17.87. The store was empty except for a frowsy woman in her late forties behind the cash register and a suit talking on the pay phone near the door. The man was business wrinkled after a long day and sagged against the wall while he talked. Right foot crossed over his left at the ankles, brown tassel loafers, expensive ones, dulled by the day’s rain. He sagged a little more when he got an answering machine on the other end and talked back to it.

  Hi, Cal. This is Bill Flanigan from the High Plains Development Corporation. I checked in with my office, and my secretary said I should call you as
soon as possible. Sorry we keep missing each other. It’s [looks at his watch] . . . nine-fifteen at night, Tuesday the twenty-seventh. I’m in Salamander, about ten miles northeast of Livermore. Been up here with Ray Dargen looking over the layout we talked about. I’ll be in my office first thing in the morning. Give me a call. I’m anxious to hear about how things are progressing on your end, and we’re real excited out here about what the senator’s got in mind.

  Back in the truck, Carlisle moved along Route 42 toward its intersection with U.S. 91, following a car with a state insignia on the side. The car had pulled away from the convenience store just ahead of him, its accelerator pressed by a brown tassel loafer.

  Carlisle turned south on 91, guessing there might be a motel in Livermore, the next town over. There was. The Chief Motel, one of those mom-and-pop places where you ring a bell on the desk and a woman in a green cotton dress with orange flowers on it comes through a door serving as the entrance to the family’s living quarters. Carlisle had noticed that at about 80 percent of these stayovers, you could look past the woman’s shoulder as she dug out your key and see some guy in his undershirt and slippers, watching television. The significance of that recurring tableau was unclear to him.

  The woman looked up at him. “Number twenty-two. Out the door and left, second from the end.”

  Carlisle was tired, slumping a little, dark brown eyes catching the woman’s for a moment. She lowered hers quickly, then brought them up again, watching his back when he left, the little bell attached to the door jingling as he closed it.

  She sighed and returned to her living room, where she flumped into a chair beside the man in undershirt and slippers, unwrapped a Butterfinger, and said, “Did you see that man? Something about him kind of gave me the willies. Kind of half hippie, half Injun, half somethin’ else, coyote, maybe. Didn’t have an address, but he paid in cash. How can you not have an address these days?”

  The undershirt said nothing.

  The television said, “We’ll be back in a moment after these messages from your local station.”

  The Butterfinger stuck to the woman’s teeth as she chewed it.

  Carlisle tossed his duffel bags on one of two single beds spread with frayed chenille, wilted into a chair covered with black, cracked vinyl, and opened a beer. Trucks were rolling down 91 outside as he reached over his shoulder and flipped off the overhead light. The only light in the room came from the quiver of a dying fluorescent bulb over the bathroom sink. He was somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, north of Nebraska and south of Canada. The picture on the opposite wall was that of an Indian brave in loincloth, bay pony mounted, eyes shielded with his right hand held parallel to his brow. The Indian was looking toward a setting sun, and no buffalo were on the plain below him.

  Sliding lower in the chair, Carlisle put his boots on the bed nearest him, the woman of the Salamander street in his thoughts again. The face, the auburn hair, the green eyes watching him pass. A woman like that, in Salamander, Middle of Nowhere? He’d seen her before, or a woman like her, somewhere. Not in the flesh, exactly, he knew that. Maybe in some old dream he should have written down but didn’t. Can of beer between his legs, the woman disappeared from his thoughts as his head lopped slowly onto his shoulder.

  LIKE MOST people, Carlisle McMillan had been shaped through chance as much as intent, by incident as much as cunning. A decision here, another one there. In restrospect, some of them good, others bad. The outcomes of his choices determined by rational effort mixed with unforeseen events arching in over his shoulder on days when he least expected them. The roll and toss of ordinary existence, in other words. Uncertainty, in another word.

  And from the start, Carlisle McMillan had lived with more uncertainty than most. A little short of forty years back, he had been born the misbegotten son of a woman named Wynn McMillan and a man whose last name she either never knew or could not remember. From what little his mother told him, he had no more than a vague and shifting image of the man who was his father.

  So in his boyhood wonderings, and even the same in his later years, he saw the man only as a dark silhouette on a road bike, one of the big ones designed for long hauls. The man rode the coastal highway south of Carmel, backlighted by a falling sun, crossing a high bridge where the Pacific gouged deep into the cliffs. And the woman behind the rider? Her arms around his waist, her hair riffling back in the wind? That would have been the mother of Carlisle McMillan, a long time ago.

  She and the man were together only two days, but two days were enough. Enough to have created a boy-child named Carlisle.

  She remembers the sand was warm against her back where she lay with him. She’s never forgotten that, how warm the sand was in late September. And she remembers his strange, quiet ways, some of the same characteristics she later recognized in her son. She sensed he knew secret things and heard faint music from a distant past that was his alone. Yet his last name escaped her. She thinks he told her once, but they were sitting by an evening fire, high on the rim of their lives, drinking homemade beer. And she doesn’t remember it.

  As she once said, “Somehow names seemed unimportant in those days. I know it must be hard for you to understand, Carlisle, but that’s how we felt. I suffer that now, the loss of his name, more for you than for me.”

  So ran the edge of the tale. She had told him everything when he was twelve. They were sitting on the front steps of their rented house in Mendocino. She put her arms around the thin, quiet boy and leaned her head against his while she talked, her freshly washed hair conspicuous in her blend of mother scents. He listened and loved her for the unrelenting honesty with which she spoke, for the happiness she found in having brought him to be, even for the tingling overtones of mystical, sexual abandon she conveyed in talking about the man. Though at Carlisle’s age it was hard for him to imagine anything of that sort, especially involving his mother.

  All of this was good, her honesty and her caring, but it was not enough. In his secret places, Carlisle McMillan wished for a father who could give him the reassurance that all the random and powerful feelings thrashing around inside him could eventually be synthesized into a coherent and useful manhood.

  And for a long time he was angry. Angry about the ambiguity, about Wynn McMillan mating casually with a stranger who had then ridden north through the coloring trees of a long-since autumn and simply disappeared. It took some living, some thinking, but he finally made a slender peace with it all. Well, most of it.

  Still, there was the ambiguity, the sense of being incomplete, and the curiosity about the particular ripple in the gene pool from which he had come. There were those who said he looked part Indian, the cheekbones and the prominent nose, and the long brown hair he sometimes tied with a red bandanna, Apache style. He kind of liked that idea, even though he had no way of knowing whether or not it was true. When people asked, “Do you have Indian blood?” he was silent, shrugging his shoulders, letting them draw their own conclusions.

  And there was the tapping. That’s what he called it. It had started when he was a child and had stayed with him over the years. Something way back and far down, source unknown. Signals, faint and distant, maybe from the spirals of his DNA, coming when he was quiet inside, sensing them more than hearing them. As if a feral cat were playing with a dusty telegraph key in a ghost-town railway station: tap . . . pause . . . tap . . . pause . . . tap, tap . . . repeat sequence. That was one pattern, there were others.

  It seemed implausible to him at first, chimerical, perhaps, but he imagined his father was sending some kind of message down the bloodlines to him. He thought of it this way: My father as a person does not consciously know I exist, but his genetic codes know, for they are part of me. The codes know I exist, the species knows I exist. I am of his species and carry his genetic blueprints. Therefore, in a way, he knows. The logic was fuzzy, but it made some kind of sense if he didn’t pursue it too far.

  So Carlisle came to believe his father was
connected to those signals, that he was back there someplace. He listened hard and talked back to them. “Who are you, man? Dammit, crank up the volume, stay on the air. Tell me something about you so I can know more about me. What is it I know that I don’t know I know?” But the signals were tenuous, fading almost as soon as they started, and he always felt slightly abandoned and a little sorry for himself after that.

  He noticed the signals mostly when he was at ease with himself. A year ago, maybe two, the signals had stopped. Carlisle McMillan had come to a place where he had no quiet moments and was no longer at ease. He was losing himself.

  When he was a boy in Mendocino, an old master carpenter named Cody Marx had taught him to swing a hammer and saw a board better than almost anyone. Two decades later, he knew he was violating the old man’s trust and it was eating holes in his heart. He constantly thought how far he had drifted from what Cody Marx had tried to make of him. How far? A long way. A long way from the builder of things beautiful and lasting he had started out to become.

  Looking back, he wasn’t clear on how it had happened. Along the turns of his life, small choices had mounted into large consequences. Focusing on the immediate had led him astray into a corrupt and unpleasant future, one in which he had never intended to live. Somewhere in all of that, the dream of living as a craftsman was lost, Cody’s way discarded.

  Bills came due. What the hell, take a garbage job just for the money. More bills, another piece of quick work, mediocre work. Get it done, get paid, get out, get on to the next job to pay the next bill. The way of things.