High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  Susanna’s father had climbed to the top of a cliff attempting to get a better view of the site in preparation for the final mapping of the area. He knew that spot well, he had been there before. In fact, one of the photographs accompanying the article showed him standing on the cliff’s edge, the very spot from which he fell a few weeks later. The photograph was razor sharp, and clearly the anthropologist had been standing on rock, not dirt.

  The rent in Salamander was low, the town was quiet, and the great spaces of the high plains suited her. When her small investigations provided nothing new, she settled in, concentrating on her own existence and treating her father’s demise as a mystery yet to be solved. Most of the modest death benefits from his university retirement fund had been spent in her travels. But she made her own clothes, ate simple foods, and started a small mail-order business that sold herbs and unusual jewelry she fashioned from scraps of whatever she could find, shells along the river, stones along the roads.

  The result was a subsistence-level income, plus a little more. The locals were troubled, of course, by her ways and by the letters she occasionally wrote to the Salamander Sentinel petitioning for the kinder treatment of all things, including humans, animals, and the earth itself. None of this went down well in a place of men who talked cattle prices, who still believed the land was theirs to use as they saw fit and anyone believing otherwise could go screw themselves.

  Susanna Benteen’s bearing and speech transmitted a sense of herself that was disconcerting to some, to most. Call it equanimity, a quiet self-reliance that enabled her to live evenly and centered in whatever landscape she chose. The range and intensity of her experiences compressed into only thirty-odd years of living had given her the appearance of someone who has been there before. She had come to understand the value of small universes—the limitless worth of well-defined moments, of small tasks with infinite paths to their accomplishment—and cherished them more than larger ones. Those latter characteristics alone were enough to set her off from the people who were beating their way through ordinary lives.

  That would be the outside view, and mostly accurate. Yet, as Tanner once said to her, “Some people’s lives, most, maybe, are like a flaw on a phonograph record. They never seem to get with anything, repeating as they do the opening measure of a mindless, four-note song. You, Susanna, are different in a way I cannot explain, as if the womb just had been a brief transition from a different world in which you lived a long time before coming to this life. You’ll stagger, I think, but eventually you’ll get to a special place. The price of that will be aloneness, for people will fear not only you, but the journey it takes to become what you are.”

  And, as Tanner had predicted, she had come to be by herself in this far place, passing through the long winter nights of high plains America, wanting true friends, wanting the hands of a man upon her, hands moving across her breasts and along her legs, words in her ear, the paradoxical, two-edged feel of complaisance and power that a certain kind of man can stir in a woman.

  The Indian was a separate case. Neither man nor boy, but something else. A bird perhaps, maybe a hawk, a shadow figure with whom she could quiet herself temporarily and practice her mystical ways without restraint. Like the others she had truly cared for, he had a sense of impermanence about him, as if he were always looking out beyond wherever he currently stood.

  She was thinking of the Seattle jazz musician as she walked along the main street of Salamander on an August night. Heading south toward her house, she prepared to cross the street and waited for a pickup truck with California license plates to pass, the same one that had been parked in front of Leroy’s and had startled her when its engine turned over. The window on the driver’s side was open, and the driver looked at her when he went by only a few feet away. His face was partially shadowed from the streetlamps, but she could see the fall of long hair tied back with a yellow bandanna. The music from his radio faded as he rolled down the street.

  Chapter Six

  CARLISLE MCMILLAN JERKED TO HAZY WAKEFULNESS AT four a.m. when a truck backfired on Route 91. He was cold and scratchy and stumbled from the chair in which he’d been sleeping onto the nearest of the twin motel beds, still dressed. After wrapping himself in the spread, he slept again, dreaming restlessly about a rider on an old motorcycle. In the dream, a woman with a yellow feather in her hair reached out for the rider through the wake of his passing.

  Three hours later, showered and drinking instant coffee heated by the small electrical coil he carried with him, Carlisle sat at a desk marred by deep cigarette burns along its edges. He wrote to his mother in Mendocino.

  Dear Wynn,

  I’m still drifting around in a place called America, looking things over. You can reach me, at least for a few weeks, at general delivery, Salamander, South Dakota. I just got in here last night, but this area looks pretty good to me. If things work out, I might be settling down here for a while, get some space between me and the craziness out on the coasts.

  Love,

  Carlisle

  Carlisle pulled back the curtains to check the weather. First light was indecisive, ragged stripes of reds and grays. But sunlight finally powered its way forward, and the sky was clear when he drove away from the motel. Coffee cup squinched between his legs, napkin map beside him on the seat, he headed north along 91 past an old dance pavilion set back from the road and on the edge of a small lake, turned west on 42, and ten minutes later stopped in front of the Salamander Post Office.

  He bought stamps, mailed the letter to his mother, and reached for the door. It opened, and the face in front of him was the same face as the night before in his headlights. Her auburn hair was fashioned into a long braid winding around her neck and coming to lie softly on her right breast. Green eyes pointed at him, straight and even.

  She said, “Excuse me,” smiled pleasantly, and moved by.

  Carlisle sat in the truck, waiting for the woman to leave the post office. He wanted to see her again, to look at her in the way one returns to stare at a Matisse print or the way one puts on the Brandenburgs even after a hundred listenings.

  Sitting there like a stone. Too obvious, yet not forward enough. Introduce yourself, tell her she is the most incredible woman you have ever seen, ask who she is and where she’s going. Hell, say you want her right now, in the truck, in the post office, on the pavement outside, middle of the street. Hard to do, not good at that direct approach. Feeling clumsy and immature around that level of beauty and the sense of a controlled burn seeming to lie beneath it.

  He started the truck and moved down Main Street, looking in the rearview mirror. She came out of the post office, her eyes focused on the truck for a moment. The bounce of the truck and sun reflecting in his mirrors made her into a figure dancing through a prairie grass fire. Then she was gone, turning right at the post office corner. He made a promise to do better the next time he saw her, knowing he wouldn’t.

  Carlisle drove through Salamander and then, six miles west of town, turned north off the secondary highway and onto a dirt road the color of iron oxide. Same road he had traveled yesterday. About two and a half miles farther was a grove on the left. He checked the map again: Turn right at the intersection, go about two miles or a little more, grove on left side of the road, look for old house sitting fifty yards or more up from the road on the right. He found it.

  The land had not been farmed or grazed for a while. High weeds everywhere, sunflowers scattered around, cattails bending long and yellow and brown in the ditches. In the grass, meadowlarks carried on, a red-winged blackbird stared at him from a fence wire, and a gopher headed for cover when Carlisle got out of his pickup. He shut the truck door quietly.

  A rutted lane of sorts led up to the house, but he parked just where the lane began and walked along it, feeling like the trespasser he was. He liked the softness of old dirt under his shoes and the August sun on his face, liked the scent of open country in his nose, dense smells from a mixture of heavy dew and sun
and wild things growing and a light breeze from the western mountains. High clouds formed random shadows on the ground when they passed before the sun.

  As the woman at Danny’s had said, the house was in rough shape. But Carlisle was good at seeing what could be. Hammer enough nails, saw enough boards, consider possibilities, and you get to that place where you can see. He walked around the building, looking in through broken windows, banging his hand against the siding, then backed off fifty feet and circled it again. Unlike the big two- or three-story farmhouses built out there to shelter large families, this was a little fellow. About a thousand square feet on the first and only floor, covered by a roof with a forty-five-degree pitch.

  A sink with faucets, which meant a well of some kind outside. No toilet, but that didn’t surprise him, since he had noticed the privy behind and off to one side of the house when he walked up the lane. That could be remedied. The porch floor was rotten, its roof sagging where supports had fallen away. He stepped inside carefully, watching through shadowy light for holes and snakes that prefer to hang around old places such as this. Some holes, no snakes.

  And no basement, which was unusual for this part of the country. Since footings had to be sunk more than forty inches to get under the frost line, the conventional strategy was to just keep going and build a basement. But this structure sat on its footings about two feet above the ground, weeds poking up through cracks in the floor. Nobody had lived there for a long time.

  About then he started thinking log cabin and pried back a piece of moldy wallboard to see if chinked logs were underneath. No. Only the normal two-by-four fir studs, but with no insulation in the cavity. Must have been cold in here during the winter and hot in the summer. Whoever put this up had been in a hurry or simply unskilled. Yet the basic structure looked all right, no tilt from a distance. And inside was a huge stone fireplace, a handsome one, with a gunky flue for certain.

  After that he examined the two large bur oaks in the yard, one on the south side, the other near the front of the house on the west. Along with their aesthetic value, they’d help keep things cool in the summer. Both trees seemed to be healthy and were inhabited by squirrels that opened up with a broadside of chattering, resenting his intrusion into their lives.

  Walking around the property, Carlisle discovered a small creek hidden in high weeds north of the house. Minnows flashed in the deeper pools, and a small turtle dropped off a log when he appeared. Above him, a hawk drifted along on the morning convections, a little hawk of a kind he had never seen before. The raptors had always interested Carlisle, though he didn’t know much about them, just liked to watch them ride the shifting air currents. In the high plains, the hawks were only a notch below the top spot in their particular food chain. Their only real worries were the great owls and idiots with shotguns. Or that’s what he was naively thinking.

  The lane sloped upward from the road at a pretty fair angle, giving the place good drainage, and he could see the Little Salamander River southwest of him, flashing in the sunlight. Wolf Butte was northwest about three miles, its face white and flat in morning sun. The grove across the road was a nice one, covering twenty acres or so, mostly mature cottonwoods in the low ground, with oaks and smaller trees of other varieties where the land sloped upward again away from the road.

  Back to town, back to Danny’s. Hungry again. A dozen cars along Main Street. Salamander trying to do business, trying to hang on, rooted there in the shadow of unwelcome changes.

  Gally Deveraux was clearing dirty dishes from the counter while an older woman worked the booths and tables. He was in the trough separating coffee and doughnuts from noon dinner, so Danny’s was quiet except for the four elderly men playing pinochle at a table in the back and another old fellow three stools down from him. He noticed Gally had on new jeans and a freshly pressed western shirt. Her hair was hanging straight down this morning, parted in the middle. She looked better that way. Her eyes looked better, too, brighter somehow.

  “Back for more punishment, huh?”

  “Yes. And I’ve been out to the Williston place, looking around.”

  “See anything interesting?”

  “Maybe. Did you happen to uncover the attorney handling the estate?”

  “No, but I can do that in less than twenty seconds right now.”

  She walked to the other end of the counter where the old fellow in a gray workshirt and suspenders was reading the caf’s communal paper that whistled up from the state capital every morning. A wooden cane rested against his leg. Carlisle had seen him last night. He had been sitting in a window above Lester’s TV & Appliance when Carlisle came out of Leroy’s. Gally bent over and spoke quietly to the man, for which Carlisle was thankful. The man looked toward him through wire-rimmed spectacles, turned to the woman, and said something.

  She walked back to where Carlisle was sitting. “It’s part of an estate, just as I thought. Heirs to the place are scattered all over the country. The lawyer’s name is Birney. Has an office over in Livermore.”

  She nodded toward the old man. “He says there’s only two lawyers in Livermore, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding him. Now, what can I get you? The special today is meat loaf, and it’s just coming out of the oven.”

  When Carlisle paid his bill, Gally gave him a nice smile and said, “Well, good luck on your dream house. I hope it works out for you. This town certainly needs some fresh blood.”

  “Thanks. And thanks also for your help. Not only are you a decent cartographer, but a helpful broker as well. I’ll report back later on.”

  She looked puzzled. “What’s a cartographer? My ears aren’t used to dealing with more than two syllables at once. I think I knew that word once, but I can’t remember.”

  “Mapmaker.”

  “Oh, the napkin. Glad it helped.”

  “See you later. Thanks again.”

  Carlisle liked the fact that she asked the meaning of cartographer. Cody Marx had taught him that one of the first indicators of authentic intelligence was not being embarrassed by ignorance, as long as there was an attendant desire to learn. Without the second, Cody said, ignorance devolved into stupidity.

  He drove over to Livermore and asked a gas station attendant about the attorney’s office. “Yep, just down the block on this side of the street. Birney is the lie-yer’s name. Getting rich on probating the devil out of all these farm and ranch properties.”

  Lawyer Birney was in, but busy. If Carlisle wanted to wait, Birney would be free in about twenty minutes. While a secretary clicked her way along the keys of an IBM Selectric, he read a copy of Agriculture Today.

  Birney, round and prosperous looking. Meaty handshake, examining Carlisle, possible new fodder for the cut and chop of his probate machine in a couple of decades.

  Yes, the Williston place was for sale. Thirty acres and the house. Birney was cagey, but he was no California Realtor. “Kinda strange, you know. The Williston place has been sitting there for some time. Now you’re the second person asking about it this week. That property’d be worth a hundred and twenty-five thousand over in Falls City.”

  That was his opening gambit. Clumsy. The Marin County boys would own his butt in twelve minutes, maybe less.

  “Let me get this straight,” Carlisle said. “I thought the property was northwest of Salamander, not in Falls City. Or are you thinking of moving it?”

  Birney turned slightly pink and fiddled with an expensive pen set on the desk in front of him. “Well, no. But I was just trying to say that it’s a nice little piece of ground.”

  “That’s all it is. The house is garbage. I took the liberty of walking the property this morning. No bath, no insulation, structurally it’s a disaster. More trouble to deal with than the entire acreage is worth, probably. I’ll give you six thousand, assuming the title is as clean and tidy as the back of a baby’s neck.”

  “Whoa now, Mr. . . . ah, McMillan, was it?”—Carlisle nodded—“I have a responsibility to my clients.”

>   “Look, Mr. Birney. Let’s stop screwing around. Six thousand. A thousand now, the rest in monthly payments over the next three years at six percent simple interest on the balance, no prepayment fee for early retirement of the note. Of course, I’ll want to look over the abstract first.”

  Birney said nothing, studied Carlisle. Then, with well-practiced hesitation, he swiveled slightly in his chair and stared out through translucent orange curtains covering the office window.

  Carlisle stood up. “Thanks for your time.”

  The lawyer sighed and looked at Carlisle. “All right. My clients were hoping for quite a bit more. But it’s been sitting around for years, and they want something out of it. I keep trying to explain to them that they could get some cash flow through one government program or another, if they’d enroll it. But they’re city folks, and the thought of government paperwork drives ’em crazy, even though it’s not all that hard.”

  Sometimes you luck out. Carlisle hadn’t thought about government programs. That was something foreign to him, but he didn’t let Birney catch any hint of his ignorance. If Carlisle had known there was income to be generated merely by letting the land sit idle, he might have offered more for it.

  Carlisle’s old partner, Buddy Reems, once said, “Carlisle, I’ve decided to abandon carpentry, get out of this rat race, and go into farming.” He was talking serious, looking down at his beer in a San Francisco bar.

  As usual, Carlisle bit. “Jeez, Buddy, that takes real money. Land, equipment, seed, all that stuff.”

  “Nope.” Buddy grinned. “Given the largesse of the U.S. taxpayer in funding farm programs, all you need are land and a mailbox.”