High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  Eleven years later and thinking about the woman, he hit the city limits of Chimney Rock once again. Sunday afternoon, middle part of August. Tourists shambled through stores advertising corncob pipes and “Genuine Cherokee Indian Moccasins” made in Taiwan.

  In a motel parking lot, an outfit called the Buccaneers and their assorted mamas were draped over bikes, wearing their boots and leathers, drinking beer, and posturing, working on their nominally lethal appearance and unsettling the Chamber of Commerce sorts peering through window blinds in their real estate offices. Crabby Dick’s Oyster Bar was jammed, and fun seekers were writing graffiti on river rocks, telling an indifferent world they had been there, telling it that “Al loves Becky,” at least for a little while. Sunday in the Carolinas.

  Carlisle figured the visitors would fire up all 37,648 cylinders that had brought them to the mountains for a weekend and would get out before sundown, back to Asheville, back to Charlotte, back to wherever. He was right. By eight o’clock, the main street was dark and almost empty.

  He ate ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy at John’s pretty fair restaurant and walked along the river afterward, looking up through darkness at the two-thousand-foot cliff giving the town its name. Suddenly he felt lonesome. It was a good place and a good time to be with a woman, but he didn’t have one.

  He wished Sharon were here on this Sunday night. The images came up in his mind like a quick slide show evolving into a filmstrip. Years before, they had rolled around on a rug in front of the fire. Women always look good in firelight, and Sharon looked even better than that. She wore flannel pajamas and a perfume whose name he couldn’t remember, but he could still taste it on her skin.

  After her divorce, Sharon had pulled herself together and worked her way through an English degree at Duke, then hired on with a book publisher in New York. He knew all of this because she had always sent him a Christmas card until a few years back.

  There was a phone by the park entrance. New York information provided a number, and he dialed it as light rain started coming down. A man answered. Carlisle almost hung up but stayed with it and asked for Sharon.

  She picked up, paused after Carlisle gave his name, and said, “Please hold while I take this on another phone.”

  The flat sound of her voice made it seem as though he had called to order a gallon of paint thinner. He could hear music playing in the background after she laid down the receiver and her voice saying, “Ronnie, sweetheart, please hang up the receiver when you hear me pick up the other one in the bedroom.”

  She came on again, different this time, bright and warm and glad to hear from him. “Where are you, Carlisle?”

  He told her. Told her all the right things and meant them. Told her he was in Chimney Rock in the rain and thinking of her and missing her.

  “Oh, Carlisle, right this minute I wish I were there with you. I sold my land out there years ago, but I still love that place. Tell me exactly where you’re standing.”

  He told her.

  “I can just picture it. The mountain up behind you. And the river. Hold the phone so I can hear the river going over the rocks.”

  He did that, looking up at the dark sky.

  “Come to New York, Carlisle. I’d love to see you again.”

  He explained he had reached the point where places containing more than a thousand people and requiring rush-hour traffic reports from Sky Ranger gave him the twitches. She said she understood. They talked a little more and said a warm good-bye.

  Afterward, he wished he hadn’t called her. He walked back to his room and read for a little while, then slept. At dawn, he made a thermos of coffee and pulled out, rolling west again in a state of lassitude.

  Through Asheville, along the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway, the truck pointed west. Days on the road, one indistinct as the next. Wheels rolling, mind rolling, thinking about Cody Marx.

  Out of the southern high country, climbing north into a place of soybeans and hogs and cornfields that stretched beyond sundown. Near a bridge in Ohio, a boy of about eight sat ten feet from the highway, watching the traffic. Two hundred yards back in a field, Carlisle could see farm buildings; probably the boy had come from there. Sixty years ago, a farmer’s son would have been watching trains and wondering about the rails and where they went. On that day, wearing a ball cap and old jeans, the boy watched trucks and cars, following the asphalt with his eyes, looking in all directions at once, dreams beginning to form, plans yet to be made.

  Farther west he traveled. August hot on most days, unforgiving white sun, hammering sun, lights from ball fields soft focused in a mix of dust and evening haze, heat lightning in the distance. Rain sometimes, windshield wipers scraping the water aside, hiss of rubber tires on rainy backcountry highways running as flumes through late summer cornfields. Village signs proclaiming past glories, small victories, old but not forgotten and shown to the world as if that particular kind of history mattered in the future: 1972 STATE 2-A TRACK CHAMPIONS. The sign was weathered, barely readable.

  And the smells, thick and summery: pork chops on grills, fresh-cut grass in small towns, greasy steel in the old manufacturing cities, oily diesel smoke from tractor-trailers, one with TRUCKIN’ FOR JESUS on the rear doors.

  And the sounds. In Bettendorf, Iowa, the banners screamed BIX LIVES! and old-time jazz floated out and over the brown Mississippi, over the barge traffic and tugboats: Shufflin’, shufflin’, shufflin’ down to the land of dreamy dreams, where she moans the whole night long and drags me around by her apron strings just when they’re closing Storyville. In Sioux City, on a Saturday, cathedral bells of the Angelus rang at sundown while Carlisle pumped his own gas.

  Every other county seemed to have a bluegrass music festival under way or on its way. Jim & Jesse and their backup crew headlined a Sunday night concert at a middle-of-somewhere fairgrounds. Hair slicked back and Jesse cross-picking his mandolin over Jim’s flattop guitar, fiddle and five-string banjo noodling around behind them. Carlisle stood far back in trees near the concession stands, drinking lemonade, listening.

  An overweight man carrying a fiddle case asked him, “You a picker, boy?” Carlisle shook his head, and the man walked away, looking for pickers.

  Somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, a little town came up, one of those places with dust in its teeth and a dry rattle in its throat: Salamander.

  Chapter Five

  THE WOMAN PASSING THROUGH CARLISLE MCMILLAN’S headlights his first night in Salamander was called Susanna Benteen. As with other men who had stared at Susanna and wondered about the exotic frontiers that might lie beneath her cloak and dress, it was the look of her that first caught Carlisle’s attention. On the initial glance, it would have been easy to dismiss her as a relic from the wild Berkeley days. Easy to dismiss her as an older version of those idealistic young people who had fairly crackled with intensity, handing out pamphlets on obscure causes and urging others to sign petitions on behalf of the Secaucus Seven or human rights in countries most people couldn’t even locate on a map.

  Such an appraisal would have been wrong. Susanna’s mother, a Hungarian national, died when she was four, sending her into the keeping of her father, a scholar whose work in applying Jung’s theories of symbolism to the puzzles of ancient cultures took him to wherever humans dig for whatever it was they were before. She had traveled with him, a girlhood of sandals and T-shirts and baggy shorts with elastic waistbands, shuffling off to schools in Cairo or Khartoum, playing with tribal children along dusty excavation trenches near the Nile’s second cataract or the great dig at Olduvai. In the heat of aboriginal villages, she sat beside her father while his tape recorder turned, and they listened to tales of dreamtimes past, the swirl of allegory and image rich in her ears. In short, Susanna Benteen was a child of desert nights and desert drums.

  When he took a professorship at Yale, she kept his house and cooked his meals, already old in her ways, already a veteran of life on the road. The phone in h
er New Haven kitchen rang on a bright April morning. The archaeologist in muddy boots and field clothes had spoken to her in level tones, coming down the long lines of Mother Bell from Yerkes County, South Dakota. Her father was dead.

  “Fell from a cliff about three hours ago, none of us saw it happen. What can I say. . . . I’m really sorry. He was a good man. We’ll take care of things on this end for you.”

  After stumbling through a boring and incoherent year at Bryn Mawr, she pulled out to discover what was possible and what was not. Communes and compulsions, old cities and third world buses, on her own and moving. Moving.

  She lived for a time on the Spanish seacoast, in San Sebastian. The house belonged to a man named Andrew Tanner. She was twenty-three and searching, Tanner was fifty-six, a journalist and magisterial, following his trade to places where men fought one another for reasons not altogether clear. Wherever conflict existed, there went Andrew Tanner with his notebooks, and he went alone.

  Susanna remained behind in San Sebastian, waiting for him to return from Entebbe or Beirut or Vientiane. He would sometimes cable her, and she would ride the train to Paris, meeting him there for a day or two while his laundry was done and his ease was taken. She stayed with Tanner nearly three years, growing restless and already thinking of leaving when a cable arrived from Beirut: A mortar round had hit the truck in which he was riding and Tanner was dead. The fathers all seemed to die.

  Tanner. She remembers the long talks over wine in the cafs of Paris, over cognac and coffee on the porch of his house in San Sebastian. He was sun-worn and quiet in his ways, living somewhere in another time. Modern warfare, he used to say, was too fast, too machine-driven, lacking what he called the majesty of conflict. He longed for the shouts of centurions, for Napoleon’s cavalry moving through early morning snowfall on the plains of Europe, for riders in black robes sweeping down the sands of Arabia.

  Tanner had watched Susanna and sensed her restlessness. He had traveled widely and well, and he had seen such women before. The African in the airport at Mombasa, mocha skinned and regal and offering not so much as a look in his direction, the curve of her bare shoulder melding into a slender arm encased in gold bracelets. Another one, the glint of her crossing from one building to the next in the byzantine paths of a Calcutta market. He remembered the green sari and the long, brown neck and the eyes that came his way for only a moment. One other, perhaps, thirty years back, an Arab carrying a young child and stepping down from a second-class coach in the station at Marrakech. But he had been a boy then and still wondering what it was like to be a man.

  “Men will be a problem for you,” he had said to her one night. “Finding the right one.” Tanner had a cryptic way of speaking, as if he were reading from his notebooks.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He paused. “There will be few men who will suit you. Most of us remain boys for as long as possible, beating back responsibilities that ought to come with adulthood, substituting whatever specious things we can conjure up as a way of staving off the quite reasonable demands of full-blown women.”

  In the darkness, the rasp of match against striking pad as he lighted another cigarette. She turned toward him, listening and understanding. He was silhouetted against the dark water of the Mediterranean. Some of the waves glowed with a green phosphorescence as she watched them roll toward her.

  Tanner continued. “The reason is simple: Our boyhood pastimes ask considerably less of us than a woman eventually does. The kind of woman you are becoming, or already are, has expectations when she looks at a man. Those expectations go wanting when only a boy looks back.”

  He hesitated and let his voice circle down until it was scratchy and almost inaudible. “And there is pain and sadness in all of that. The boy feels it, I know that for certain, and I suspect . . . I suspect there is pain and sadness for the woman, too. I think you may find it lonely out there.”

  Susanna was wearing an off white caftan that lay soft across her body, cognac glass in her lap, rocking slowly in a wicker chair and staring out over Spanish waters. A light wind from the Azores had come up and ruffled the caftan, and she was aware of the soft cotton moving against her skin. Tanner leaned toward her and put his lips on her hair, then went into the house. When she followed an hour later, he was asleep in his leather desk chair, an unfinished manuscript stacked on the typewriter.

  The next morning he was gone, leaving a sheet of paper on the pillow beside her. He had written this:

  In middle age

  I was content,

  Striking my bargains

  With swift-running light

  And telling myself

  That I had done

  What could be done.

  Then, you . . . you again,

  After all the years.

  I have seen you before

  Out on the deserts,

  Out on the trains,

  Near castle walls

  Where jugglers swallow fire,

  And

  Dancing like a fallen nun

  In the streets of Pretoria—

  The arch of your neck,

  The toss of your head,

  A casual show

  Of yellow stocking

  When the music turned.

  And suddenly . . .

  . . . Again

  I am fighting

  For the hours.

  But I can do no more

  Than play sweet lamentations

  For the death of blue autumns.

  That’s all I can do now.

  And none take notice

  Of my winter longing . . .

  . . . Or know your secret fancies

  Except

  The Dancing Master

  And

  me.

  Three weeks later, Tanner was dead. Susanna Benteen pushed on. An Argentine taught her the tango and loved her to insensibility on the candlelit balcony of a Buenos Aires mansion. He had removed her clothing while they danced and continued to dance with her after she was naked while he remained fully dressed in evening clothes, then bent her over the balcony rail, her long hair hanging toward the street below while she screamed into the night with pleasure. There were many nights like this. He wanted to marry her, offered her money and a position in society, but it wasn’t right for her and she knew it and pushed on.

  Then came the aging jazz musician in Seattle. She sat in a bar called Shorty’s and listened to his tenor saxophone, and she found his blackness against the light peach of her own skin to be part of an intense, quiet eroticism she shared with him. The sound of his saxophone would sometimes reach inside her as if he were there himself.

  So her future became the road, and she spent a long time on the road. Her father had taught her about symbols, Andrew Tanner had taught her about the world and its capacity for malice, and an Asian man had given her part of the map for tranquillity. Still, the Indian who came later, after she had moved to Yerkes County, was closer to her in many ways than any other man she had ever known. It was as if the two of them shared a common mind, or nearly so.

  All of the men she had cared for, every one of them, shared a common trait: While they did their work, whatever it was at the moment, they were also looking for something else, looking toward some other place. They were always thinking about that other place, the paste of their relationship with whomever and wherever eventually beginning to crack and release. Each of them was skilled in what he did, yet each of them felt as if he belonged to another time.

  And throughout these years, she remained troubled by her father’s death, the way it happened, as much as the fact of it. And so the last Greyhound to stop in Salamander brought her down a long, straight highway through April rain and let her off in front of Danny’s.

  She rented a small house south of the Salamander elevator and began discreet inquiries into the circumstances of her father’s death. The coroner’s verdict had been quick and sanitizing: The earth gave way where the anthropologist stood; death was a
ccidental.

  An editorial in the High Plains Inquirer stated her father’s death was “an unfortunate casualty in our yearning to better understand ourselves by wresting knowledge from the layers of our past.” In a way, that was both a little too quick and a little too tidy, or so it seemed to her; the lid on the incident had been slammed shut. The entire package had been neatly tied, and nothing could be found to indicate anything other than a scholar concentrating on his work rather than where he placed his foot. None of that made sense, for her father was a careful and experienced man who had walked many cliffs in his lifetime.

  Beyond all of those circumstances, there was the curious matter of the dig being closed immediately after his death. Funding for the project had appeared certain, then evaporated. The dig at Salamander Crossing was aborted and forgotten in spite of its original promise.

  The Crossing was nothing more than a junction thirteen miles northwest of Salamander, near Wolf Butte, where the Chicago & Milwaukee switches sent trains in directions ruled by schedules and cargo. Aerial maps disclosed the presence of several promising moundlike structures, and ground observations indicated vegetation was unusually lush in certain of these areas, a characteristic of subsurface burial plots and middens produced by refuse disposal. Interest in the site was increased by pottery shards found nearby in the cuts made by railroad construction. In addition, several test pits indicated the possibility of archaeological deposits below.

  Her father and others had begun mapping the area in preparation for a full-scale dig, a research design was prepared, and requests for funding were submitted to federal agencies. A breathless article in a prominent natural history magazine stated: “The dig at Salamander Crossing contains bright prospects of shedding new light on the cultures of Palaeo-Indian Man and may severely challenge widely accepted theories concerning overland migrations from Asia via the Bering Sea land bridges and down through North America.” Academic reputations were at stake, and those enjoying the perquisites of fame based on a widely accepted hypothesis, which now might be proven wrong, became uneasy over the possibilities at Salamander Crossing.