High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  Even these years later, particularly when he was working on something intricate, Carlisle would catch himself humming. When that happened, he would stop for a moment, finger the old tool belt he was wearing, which had been mended a dozen times and darkened by the oil from his hands and the wood he worked, and think about Cody Marx. He would think about how the old man prepared the surface on a lonely, quiet boy named Carlisle McMillan.

  The decrepit house on the property near Salamander was the unchiseled stone for the monument he would build to the memory of Cody Marx. He was bent on making ol’ man Williston’s place into something that represented the finest of all that Cody Marx had taught him. In the best tradition of craftsmanship, he would reclaim a derelict and make it live forever.

  Out of habit, the bad habit he had picked up building for developers and other people caring little about work being truly finished, Carlisle found himself cutting corners and doing things just to get them done. When he realized that, he slowed down, sometimes tearing apart a piece of work that wasn’t up to Cody’s standards, and started over. If he had to sleep in the cab of his truck through the roar of high plains blizzards, this job would be done right.

  The roof was first. In autumn, cedar shakes could be bought at a decent price. The lumberyard in Falls City had twenty-five squares ordered for a project that was canceled, and Carlisle got his shakes for even less than he anticipated. They let him sort through them, picking out the very best. By California standards, he stole them.

  Standing inside Williston’s place and looking up, he saw rafters and roof sheathing, with no cavity for insulation. So raising the entire roof system to create the space he needed was essential. Carlisle knew that was going to be the worst part of the entire project. It was also the most critical.

  He started by ripping off the old shingles and rotted sheathing underneath. Most of the rafters were in bad shape. These were replaced with kiln-dried two-by-twelves. He built up and repaired others, nailed down one-by-threes across the rafters, and started laying the shakes, using hot-dipped sixpenny galvanized nails. And he sanded the rafters and one-by-threes, though he was tempted not to. Nobody would know, except him and Cody. But that was quite enough.

  Putting in a big skylight over what would be the main living quarters and a smaller one that would let moonlight come easily into the bedroom area slowed him down. But he did it right and fashioned them so they could be cranked open from the inside when the days warmed.

  That done, Carlisle worked on the interior floors, laying down well-cured, double-tongue-and-groove car siding he found stacked on a nearby farm. The farmer charged him almost nothing for it. Later on, he would put down fine wood over the planks. For now, it was a matter of getting in a subfloor he could live with in rough weather.

  The siding was in bad repair, a result of cheap material from the outset and little maintenance afterward. As Cody would have said, “Looks like someone decided to kinda let this place weather in.” Carlisle tore it off, all of it, along with the inside plaster, leaving the old house standing there like somebody with a new hat and shoes but naked otherwise.

  Early fall rains, cold rains, hit him twenty days into the work. Still, he continued tearing and pounding, wearing his slicker and sometimes using the truck headlights and a gas lantern as he worked into the night.

  As the old man said, folks from Salamander began driving out to see what Carlisle was up to. He tried to be polite and answer their questions, but he kept working while they talked.

  If the roof is an umbrella, the siding is a slicker. He wanted to make the house as lasting and maintenance-free as possible, so his choice was planking, either western red cedar or redwood. Both were expensive, and as a matter of principle, he refused to use either of those in their virgin state. He simply couldn’t countenance the felling of the big trees to supply planking. Of course, the lumberyard offered the standard four-by-eight sections of pressed wood with a cedar veneer. But, as he told one visitor who suggested he ought to make his life simple and use the veneer, “I worked with enough of that in my California days to last me a lifetime, not my kind of material. Besides, ever see what a woodpecker can do to cedar veneer?”

  A local retired carpenter came by to kibitz and offer unneeded advice, of which Carlisle was already acquiring a surplus. But he listened when the man talked about a hunting lodge up in Three Forks that was being torn down. The old fellow had helped build it fifty years back and still remembered the nice redwood they used to cover the inside. Carlisle drove up to Three Forks, shuffled his feet, haggled with the demolition crew supervisor, and got what he needed. In fact, there would be enough left over for a redwood shower and hot tub later on. Maybe enough for the atrium-greenhouse he was thinking about hooking on to the south wall, once he had sanded off the glossy clubhouse finish and returned the wood to its natural state.

  By mid-October, most of the siding was in place, and rolls of batted fiberglass insulation were on their way from the lumberyard in Livermore. Just in time, too, since the first snowfall had come three days before, forcing him to sleep in the truck at night.

  He had also acquired a partner. A big yellow tomcat with a chewed right ear had drifted by a week earlier, stayed for lunch and then for supper, and soon became a permanent resident. The cat slept with Carlisle in the truck cab and followed him around during the day. Carlisle studied the cat. The cat studied Carlisle.

  “Well, big guy, I think the name Dumptruck suits you. So if you don’t mind, we’ll leave it at that.” Dumptruck blinked his yellow eyes. Carlisle grinned.

  Near sundown on a Saturday, he walked around the house, admiring his work and feeling better about himself than he had for a long while. Cody had been fond of quoting somebody named Sir Henry Wotton, who said, 350 years back: “Well building hath three conditions: commodity, firmness, and delight.” Carlisle was succeeding in the first two and had the third pretty well mapped out in his head. In addition, he was getting back to somewhere he’d been before, somewhere with Cody, somewhere quieter, somewhere that made sense.

  Carlisle was hungry but too tired to fire up the butane stove and heat another can of beans or whatever was left under the tarp where he kept his food cache. Without hurrying things, it was too late to make Danny’s in Salamander, so it looked like peanut-butter sandwiches and fruit with a Milky Way at the end.

  While he and Dumptruck considered their dismal set of choices, he glanced down the lane and saw Gally Deveraux walking toward him through the twilight. She was carrying a large picnic hamper in one hand and a thermos jug in the other, stumbling over the ruts. He had been eating some of his meals at Danny’s over the last few weeks and had come to know Gally better, but this surprised him.

  She stopped and adjusted the Stetson that had fallen over her eyes. He walked down to meet her. “Hello, Gally. What a surprise.”

  Her face was red and she was panting a little from the stumbling and carrying. She was wearing jeans and a shirt she had bought at Charlene’s going-out-of-business sale and her winter denim jacket. In the twilight, with strands of hair trailing out from under the hat, she looked just fine, like a slightly aging sweetheart of the rodeo.

  “Hi, carpenter. I didn’t know if I should drive up your lane or not. Jack took off for the weekend with some of his hook-and-bullet buddies to shoot dangerous game, deer or pheasants, I guess, maybe hummingbirds for all I know. Whatever it is, if it runs or flaps, they’ll shoot it. Got to keep the range free of predators and cull the wildlife for ecological purposes, as they’re fond of saying. Actually, what they do is drink and drive around, trying to scare up something they can shoot from the truck window.

  “He left it to me to go out and round up some of the yearlings. I was out there on the sorrel gelding, working my tail off, when I said to myself, ‘Well, to hell with you, Jack.’ That’s when I got it in my head to come over for a neighborly visit. Thought with all the work you’re doing, you might require something in the way of food with the punch of rocket fu
el.” The explanation for being there came pouring out fast and up front.

  “Gally, what a kind thought. I was just mulling over the virtues of beans versus peanut butter, and here you come out of the falling darkness on an errand of mercy.” He took the hamper from her.

  Gally laughed and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. She was sweating lightly, even though the evening was cooling fast. “There’s a steady flow of reports coming in from everyone that’s been visiting you. You’re surprising them. The early betting leaned toward you falling off the roof and pulling out for California when the first snow flew.”

  The hamper held thick slices of ham, potato salad, coleslaw, apple pie, homemade bread, the works, including a six-pack of Miller’s. Gally’s famously good coffee was in the thermos.

  They walked around Carlisle’s emerging vision while he pointed out subtleties of the carpenter’s trade far beyond anything Gally cared to know. But women in general have a nice way of putting up with boyish dreams, and she asked intelligent questions, nodding and smiling as he ran his fingers over redwood and fir while he talked.

  Inside, they stood on the decking, looking up through the larger skylight at red bands of sundown cut diagonally by the contrails of a jet. After a long week at Danny’s and a day of rounding up yearlings to boot, Gally had to be as tired as he was, Carlisle knew, but she covered it, and at that moment he began to feel differently about her, started to care about her in the way you care about a friend who is maybe a little something more than just a casual friend.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  He took her over to the fireplace and pointed at a word carved into the stone on the left-hand side: Syawla. “I found it when I cleaned the gunk off. Williston must have tooled it in there. I remember you telling me about the legends out here, about a priestess called Syawla.”

  “Carlisle, that makes the enamel peel right off my teeth. Why do you suppose he put it there?”

  “Don’t know. Adds a little something to the place, though. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t want to think about it, period.”

  The nights were getting cold, but Carlisle had the fireplace working. While Dumptruck slept on the hearth, he and Gally sat on stacks of lumber, laughing and talking and eating the food she had brought in her Bronco, down the red dirt road past Wolf Butte, past a lot of things. She had traveled that road with muddled thoughts about women growing older who had more or less given up on possibilities. And she looked at the man from California wearing a navy-issue watch cap, whose hair was almost as long as hers and was tied back into a ponytail with a leather shoestring; it felt good to laugh again.

  After supper, Carlisle tossed more pieces of scrap lumber into the fireplace, and for a while they sat there without talking. Both of them stared at the flames, drinking coffee out of tin cups, light snow blowing through places where he hadn’t finished the siding. Gally was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, cup balanced in both hands, wondering about a lot of things. When she left about midnight, there was the glow of a small fire on the crest of Wolf Butte three miles northwest, but Carlisle didn’t see it.

  The next morning, an unusual amount of traffic was moving on the red dirt road, including several county sheriff vehicles and an ambulance. Carlisle wondered about it but didn’t want to take the time to investigate. A little before noon, Axel Looker drove up the lane and got out. “Hear what happened?”

  “No. I figured something was going on by the number of cars and trucks going by out front.”

  “Jack Deveraux and some of his drinking pals were road hunting on the other side of Wolf Butte yesterday. Somehow one of the guns went off in their truck and blew half of Jack’s face away. Killed him on the spot.”

  “My God! When was that?”

  “About five-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t know Jack, except to see him around, but I know Gally. That’s just awful.”

  “Well, yes and no. That’d be the going opinion around here. Jack was a serious drinker and headed further in that direction. These dumb bastards around here are always mixing alcohol and guns. I won’t let ’em hunt my land anymore after they shot a steer a few years ago. We used to have bullets whizzing around the house during deer season.”

  Carlisle was thinking that Gally had been walking up his lane with her hamper and thermos at about the time her husband had been dying. In some indefinable way, he felt guilty about what had happened, as if he’d had a hand in it.

  “Nobody could locate Gally,” Axel continued. “She was off somewhere until pretty late.” Axel was looking at Carlisle, remembering he’d seen what looked like Gally’s Bronco parked at the foot of Carlisle’s lane when he and Earlene had driven home the night before after doing their weekly grocery shopping in Livermore.

  Carlisle said nothing, so Axel went on. “I guess Gally’s taking it pretty well. But I’ll tell you what the old-timers at Danny’s are saying. They’re saying it wasn’t no accident, even though apparently that’s just what it was. But one of the old guys who’s an expert on the Wolf Butte legends said, ‘There ain’t no accidents out there. It just looks that way. Always.’”

  Chapter Eight

  THE FIRST BIG SNOW HELD OFF UNTIL LATE OCTOBER, coming softly then in the middle of the night and settling on Carlisle McMillan’s new cedar shakes while he slept. Around dawn the wind kicked up, and he awakened to the rattle of plastic sheets fastened over unfinished windows and doors. He got the fireplace going, ate some bread and jam, and waited for the coffee to brew in its pot hanging over the flames.

  He had planned to install the first of the double-paned windows today, but clearly it was time for the high-efficiency woodstove that had arrived from Vermont two weeks ago. The Indian had drifted by the day after it was delivered. He came late in the morning while Carlisle was thinking about how to get 275 pounds of cast iron off the bed of the pickup and into the house without cracking it or permanently destroying his capacity to function as a male animal, or both. The stove had Defiant stamped on its door and looked just that way resting on the truck bed.

  Carlisle had never seen the Indian before, didn’t hear him coming. He stood on the other side of the pickup as if he were part of the landscape. Face like hammered copper, thin as a stipe of wild yellow clover, dressed in denim jacket and jeans and beat-up cowboy boots, white shirt with a smudge on the collar. Straight black hair about the same length as Carlisle’s and a wide-brimmed hat with some kind of juju-bead hatband wrapped around the crown.

  He said nothing, looking at the stove, then at Carlisle. Old dark eyes taking in the problem, taking in Carlisle, taking in the universe for all Carlisle knew.

  “It’s a heavy son of a whore,” Carlisle said, looking at the stove.

  The Indian nodded. “We could rig up a travois out of these long two-by-fours and a couple of crosspieces.”

  That’s all he said. That’s all he had to say. Carlisle knew the problem had been solved.

  The Indian might have been fifty, he might have been seventy. Carlisle couldn’t tell. But he was tough and strong for his size. They wrestled the stove off the truck and onto the drag, then moved it to the steps, where Carlisle walked it gingerly across the rotten porch floor he hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet.

  Carlisle offered the Indian a beer. They sat on the tailgate of the pickup, legs swinging back and forth, sipping and talking a little. The Indian was intensely curious about the house and what Carlisle was doing. Said he sensed some kind of positive magic in all of this.

  “I have these strong feelings of ancestral worship when I look at your work. Why is that?”

  Carlisle felt a little shiver and swung his head toward the Indian. He had not spoken of Cody Marx to anyone for years. But he decided the Indian would understand the story. He told him, and while he was talking, the Indian would slowly move his head up and down from time to time.

  After Carlisle finished, the Indian said, “When you have closed up your h
ouse, I will come by to chant good words over this sacred place. I will bring Susanna with me. Do you know her?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She is the white woman who lives in a little house by the elevator in Salamander. She may be white, but in her own way she thinks more Indian than many Indians do. She has her own vision—not an Indian vision, since that is impossible to achieve without being an Indian, but her way has much in common with the Indian way. She has strong medicine within her, and I will ask her to also say words over the tribute you build to your Cody Marx.”

  “I think I know who you mean, though I’ve never met her.” Carlisle knew exactly whom he meant.

  After that, the Indian started coming by every few days to check on Carlisle’s progress. Always on foot, always by himself. Sometimes he brought fresh bass or catfish from the Little Sal and cooked lunch for them over an open fire. Sometimes he sat on the floor cross-legged and played a small wooden flute while Carlisle worked. Carlisle liked the sound. Somehow it fit this country, so he asked the Indian if he would teach him to play.

  When the Indian came again, he brought an extra flute, saying it was Carlisle’s to keep. “Begin by holding it like this, then blow across the opening here very gently. At the beginning, do not try to play any song, do not even try to put your fingers on the holes made for them. You should concentrate on getting a sound from the open position so pure that it alone makes your heart ache. It will take you months to do that, but I will help you. When you see the image of a lone coyote coming from the sounds, then you will know you have it right. So long, Builder. I will come again.”

  In the years Carlisle knew him, the Indian never referred to Carlisle as anything but “Builder.” Carlisle, in turn, called him “Flute Player,” since the Indian had never offered a name. The Indian didn’t seem to mind.

  Masonry was not Carlisle’s strongest skill, but in the northwest corner of the main room, he’d mortared together a nice brick heat shield that ran halfway up the wall. The brick, coming from a historic street the Livermore City Council had decided to pave, would both protect the wall and absorb heat that would be released long after the stove had died out. He had enough materials left over to build a hearth two bricks high for the stove to sit on, leaving plenty of clearance all around it.