High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  He had seen books of Monet’s paintings by the time he was four. The music of Mozart and Haydn and Schubert was played by local musicians in the living room while he lay in bed reading about Tarzan and following the adventures of Zane Grey’s heroes. Schopenhauer, Shaw, and Spengler were discussed by people leaning against the refrigerator or banging around the stove while he fixed peanut-butter sandwiches for himself on Friday nights.

  “Hello, Carlisle. My, you’re growing up fast.”

  “Hi, Carlisle. How’s school going?”

  “Carlisle, I’m cooking Thai for this unruly mob. Where does your mother keep the turmeric?”

  The one great strength of these people, and Carlisle was always grateful to them for it, was how they treated the circumstances of his birth. The fact that he was misbegotten simply made no difference to them. Schopenhauer was important, but the fact that Wynn McMillan had rolled naked upon the sands of a California beach with a man whose last name she could not recall and produced a boy-child afterward was not important in its moral implications.

  Cody Marx did not frequent Wynn’s salon. If he had been invited, he wouldn’t have come. Cody didn’t use big words. In fact, he didn’t use many words at all. He just happened to be one of the world’s great carpenters and let his skills do his talking for him. Even though he was not asked to participate in long evenings of chamber music and literary criticism, he was the first to be summoned when anything to do with building was required. If you couldn’t get Cody because he was tied up with other work, you simply waited until he could get to your project. That is, if you were one of those people insisting on perfection.

  Cody Marx was far more than just a good technician. He looked at things with an artist’s eye and a philosopher’s mind, understanding that Zen and precision are not at odds, though Cody likely never had heard of anything called Zen. And his work demonstrated it. If you showed him a picture of something—a house, a room, cabinetry—that someone had already built and said, “That’s what I want,” he would politely turn down the project and amble off. Cody didn’t build copies of other people’s work. Cody built Cody’s work, period.

  The way you dealt with Cody was to put up with his pipe smoking, describe in general terms what contribution to your life the finished product was supposed to make, and then stand back and leave matters to his creativity and skill. The other thing you never, ever, did was to put a deadline on a project or try to hurry him along in his work.

  Word got around about that latter idiosyncrasy of his after he walked away from a kitchen job he was doing for a local banker. The banker’s wife complained to Cody in a rather unsubtle fashion about his slow, methodical ways, saying she couldn’t cook or entertain or anything else with her kitchen torn up the way it was.

  Without looking at her or speaking, he gathered his tools, left, and refused to finish the job until the banker agreed to take his family on an extended trip, a journey that would not terminate until Cody sent them a postcard declaring the kitchen was finished. Of course, their new kitchen with its custom cabinets, fancy built-ins, and subdued exactness of fine craftsmanship was admired by everyone. The most lavish praise came from a British department store executive and his wife who visited the banker’s home in Mendocino after they had all met on a winter cruise, the one taken while Cody was remodeling the banker’s kitchen.

  So Carlisle was there on the north coast, mowing lawns and scraping paint from expensive boats owned by summer people, unhappy with odd jobbing. He had never much liked repetition, never liked doing things where he didn’t grow in some way while doing them. It had always seemed to him that after living another twenty-four hours, you ought to be a better person than you were when the day began. Like an anchored gull, that’s how he felt, flopping around on the surface of things, tugging at his anchor chain, and trying to beat his way upward into full flight.

  He heard Cody’s name mentioned by his mother and her friends and picked up on the considerable reverence that always surrounded any discussion of Cody’s work. His mother’s friends, while able in their own intellectual and artistic trades, did not possess manual skills of the kind producing immediately practical outcomes. That being so, they were given to displays of respectful awe when it came to people such as Cody who could produce those outcomes. Great auto mechanics fell into the same category, though at a somewhat lower level than Cody.

  Having technical skills and using them to make things of utilitarian value, things that lasted, was an idea that appealed to Carlisle. The Mendocino houses Cody built in his younger days were models of good construction, standing strong and quiet through the years. That’s what everybody said. Everything in plumb, no tilts, no leaks that were his fault. Banisters that never loosened, tiles that never worked free, ceiling joists that hung for decades and never drooped.

  The Cody anecdotes were told and told again in his mother’s living room. They were known as “Cody stories” and “Cody’s Way.” One of them in particular impressed Carlisle and ultimately changed his life. The man who related it was a local poet, a man who knew something about things hidden and meanings submerged and who once remarked, “Cody Marx knows where the bones of shoddy work are buried in the walls of Mendocino County.” Cody had been building an addition onto the man’s house, and the poet had watched him sand pine support studs that would be concealed in the walls. Nobody would ever see them, sanding didn’t make them any stronger or cause them to function any better, so the man asked Cody why he did it.

  Since Cody was doing the work for a price agreed upon in advance, it didn’t matter financially to the client just why the studs had to be sanded, but he was curious. Cody chewed on his pipe, looked at a two-by-four he had just smoothed down, and told the poet he simply felt better about doing things that way. Said it felt more finished to him. That’s all he said, nothing more. Cody’s Way.

  The day after he heard that story, Carlisle went off to find Cody Marx. His wife said he was working on a new house northeast of town in the hills up toward Russian Gulch. Carlisle pedaled his bicycle out there, saw Cody’s old pickup truck parked outside, and could hear the tapping of his hammer inside. He was working alone. That was his custom, unless he needed some dumb muscle for a day or two to help him with heavy work.

  Carlisle stood off to one side, watching the old man work, shaky in the presence of a legend, trying to gather himself. The pipe was going, and Cody was humming softly as he trimmed a door. After a minute or two, he turned to use his miter box, saw the boy, and staggered backward a step.

  Right off, I’m already in the hole, Carlisle said to himself. Cody was in his late sixties, and Carlisle was thinking that he could have caused the old man to have a heart attack.

  Cody recovered, though, and said, “Yup, whaddya need?”

  Carlisle was a nervous supplicant, but he got some words out. “I’d like to work with you and learn to be a carpenter.”

  “Don’t need any help, can’t afford it anyways.” Cody leaned over the miter box and cut a piece of molding for the door he was working on. That done, he held up the wood to test how well it joined with the horizontal piece already in place across the top of the door. The joint looked perfect to Carlisle, but Cody took a half sheet of fine-grade sandpaper from his hip pocket and sanded down the cut. Satisfied with the fit, he nailed the molding into place, countersinking the nails in preparation for filling in the holes later on, behaving all the while as if Carlisle were merely a can of wood preservative off in the corner.

  The carpenter sorted through a pile of molding and said without looking up, “You’re Wynn McMillan’s boy, ain’cha?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old you be?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Thought you mowed lawns and such.”

  Carlisle steadied his pubescent voice, which tended to bolt upward just short of an octave right in the middle of words, and said the lines he had rehearsed: “I want to learn to work with my hands, making things that last. I want to learn
a trade and become a craftsman.”

  He worried that what he had said sounded a little too elevated, too formal, especially in the way he’d squeaked it out. But it was the best he could do. In mentioning “craftsman,” however, he had picked the right word.

  “Ya know that word craftsman has nearly dropped out of the English language, don’t you?”

  Carlisle said nothing. The old man sorted molding.

  There are moments in a life when the future pivots on the slim and critical fulcrums of gut-level decisions by those possessing the power to give or withhold the things you want. That morning, as it turned out, was one of those moments for Carlisle McMillan. Cody was sorting, Cody was humming, and Cody was thinking.

  “You play football or anything like that?”

  “No. I don’t have time, and I’m not interested anyway.”

  “Then you’d be available on Saturdays and after school during the school year?”

  Carlisle’s pulse rate escalated twenty points. “Yes, sir.”

  Cody returned to sifting through the pile of long, slender pieces of wood, speaking without looking at Carlisle. “I watched you mowing a lawn across the street from where I was working about six weeks ago. Thing that impressed me was how you finished up on your hands and knees, clipping the few blades of grass your mower couldn’t reach.”

  He looked up at Carlisle for a moment. “Finishing is what it’s all about, in carpentry . . . and in life, for that matter. At the other end is the phrase that injects cold fear into the bones of all home handymen: ‘Prepare the surface.’ Most people don’t prepare the surface correctly, and that’s another aspect of good craftsmanship and life in general. So whether you’re doing life or carpentry, if you prepare the surface, carry out the finishing, and do everything else in between in the right way, you got things covered. Craftsmanship is a matter of attitude first, technical skill after that. Follow me?”

  “Yes, sir, I follow you all right.”

  Cody straightened up and looked straight at the boy, squinting. “Dollar an hour. You start by doing cleanup work, since that’s always part of both preparing the surface and finishing. Tomorrow, right here, seven a.m., ready to work. Need a ride out here?”

  “No, sir. I have my bike.”

  The Legend carried a piece of molding over to the door, humming. Carlisle took that as a signal to leave. On his way home, pedaling fast, breathing hard, lifting off, he already felt like a craftsman. Just being around Cody Marx did that to a person. The anchor chain was parting.

  Wynn McMillan had been mildly upset with the arrangement. Not that she had anything against Cody Marx, but Carlisle was averaging more than a dollar an hour doing lawns and boats, and his earnings were important to a household where things were always lean. Yet she listened while Carlisle told her all the reasons why he wanted to work with Cody. And Wynn McMillan understood.

  She smiled then. Carlisle never forgot how she had smiled and what she had said. “Be the finest carpenter Mendocino ever produced, Carlisle, if that’s what you want. We’ll manage somehow.”

  Some of Carlisle’s best years were those he spent working alongside Cody Marx. He grew to love the old man. Loved him for his skill, for his outlook, for the fine work he did. But it ran deeper than that. Carlisle had no father, Cody and his wife had no children, so the bond was a natural one. Carlisle never even considered that in the beginning, but later on came to believe that Cody had. As was true of men in those days, Cody felt he knew some things worth passing on to someone, and that someone had turned out to be Carlisle. During the years the two of them worked together, he tried his best to teach Carlisle everything he knew. All of it.

  With his first couple of paychecks from Cody, Carlisle bought a pair of dark blue bib overalls and a tan workshirt, exactly like those Cody wore. That year at Christmas, his mother gave him a black lunch bucket and a red metal thermos that were almost identical to Cody’s. In the years after, to this day, in fact, his lunch and his coffee have ridden in that battered bucket and battered thermos, the artifacts of his learning days, a way of reaching back to the strong hands of Cody Marx and the understanding ways of his mother.

  During the first two years Carlisle worked for Cody, he called him nothing but “sir” or “Mr. Marx.” It was like apprenticing yourself to a Zen master, and the master was to be given the respect due him.

  On Carlisle’s fourteenth birthday, they were remodeling the inside of a lovely old drugstore downtown. Carlisle reported for work at six-thirty in the morning. He learned early on that when Cody said “seven,” he really meant a half hour before that.

  He said, “Good morning, Mr. Marx,” as always, his voice mercifully beginning its decline into a steady pitch at the upper end of the baritone range.

  Cody had been tamping down his first pipeful of tobacco for the day, cocked his head toward Carlisle as he lighted it and between efforts at getting it to draw properly asked, “This your birthday, is it?” He knew that, somehow.

  “Yes, sir.” Carlisle was grinning, proud of being fourteen and working for Cody Marx, proud of his burgeoning skill.

  Cody bent over and reached into a brown paper sack on the floor. Out of it he pulled a new leather tool belt, stiff and light brown. When he held it out, Carlisle could see old but still serviceable hand tools protruding from various pockets.

  “Happy birthday, Carlisle. I just want you to know it’s good working with you. And, by the way, I think you’re due a raise to a dollar fifty. One other matter: I’d prefer it if you’d call me ‘Cody’ from here on out. Now let’s put these ceiling joists up correctly so we can get on to greater things.”

  Carlisle had tears in his eyes as he strapped on the belt. Partly because, as Cody intended, he took the present to be a symbol of progress in his long climb to skill and understanding and partly because Cody had said Carlisle worked with him, not for him. That was important.

  Over the years, through windows not yet closed and doors not yet hung, Carlisle could hear the high school marching band practicing late on autumn afternoons. If Cody and he were working in the evenings to get a job completed, he sometimes could hear the crowd and the public address announcer over at the football field. From the gabled ends of Mendocino, he watched other kids go to the beach on summer afternoons and sail their parents’ boats in the mornings.

  None of that bothered him. In fact, he would not have changed places with them, not for anything. He was creating things of permanence with his hands. For that’s what Carlisle loved helping Cody Marx do all over Mendocino County, California. They prepared surfaces, finished, and did everything else in between. More than that, and most of all, they did it right, working to close tolerances, following Cody’s Way. People smiled when Cody’s truck went through town, Cody driving along in his blue bibs and tan workshirt, talking with the boy who was dressed just like him.

  Carlisle worked steadily with the old carpenter until he graduated from high school, and he still worked with him part-time during his first two years at Stanford. When Cody had a job requiring more than two hands, Carlisle would catch a bus up from Palo Alto. During the ride he would study his textbooks, thinking what a poor substitute they were for the taction of fine woods moving through your fingers and the pleasure of standing back and looking over good work when it was finished.

  Cody had started mumbling about retirement, but Carlisle didn’t believe it. Then on a Thursday afternoon, Carlisle’s mother telephoned. In a soft, halting voice, she told him Cody had died. “They found him out at the old Merkle place where he was putting in some closets.”

  A day in a man’s twentieth year coming down, spring day, low sun running groundward. Carlisle sat in his room and cried for two hours without stopping, quietly beating his fist against a desk piled high with books whose combined knowledge was no more than fleeting twaddle compared with what Cody Marx knew and tried to pass on to him. At that moment, Carlisle decided he would finish at Stanford—he would do that for his mother—but afterwar
d he would follow Cody’s Way.

  Cody’s tools and old truck were bequeathed to Carlisle. Anna Marx turned them over to him with tears in her eyes.

  As he finally prepared to drive away, she took his hand in both of hers and said, “Carlisle, you were the main topic of conversation at our house for the last eight years. Every evening Cody would have something to tell me about you, about how much you were learning, about what a good boy you are and how much it pleased him to watch you growing into a fine man. When you showed up for work in your shirt and overalls that were just like his, he came home, sat at the kitchen table, and said, ‘Anna, I think I’ve got a son.’ And then ever after he always thought of you that way. He was so proud of you. My God, how he loved you, Carlisle. He truly loved you.”

  Carlisle nodded. She had told him something he already knew, but it was good to hear her say it. “I loved him, too, Mrs. Marx, every bit as much as he loved me. He gave me a place in life, a purpose, and I’ll try to live up to Cody’s Way.”

  In the old truck, which still ran like new, since Cody had done the tune-ups and repairs on it, Carlisle drove slowly around Mendocino for hours, looking at all the places where they had worked together. He remembered, it seemed, every mortise, every tenon, every dovetail, every bevel and compound angle they had ever created.

  He would stop the truck and wipe his eyes when he heard Cody’s voice saying, “I think we can get it a little better than that, Carlisle,” which was Cody’s gentle way of telling Carlisle he hadn’t done something right. He leaned his head on the steering wheel, thinking of the old man who had tried his best to make a decent craftsman out of him. The smell in the truck of ash and cedar and East Indian satinwood and Honduras mahogany mixed with the smoke from Cody’s pipe. The memories . . . God, all the memories.