High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  With the snow piling up outside, he set seventeen brown paper sacks in a line along one wall. In each sack were the parts for one step in the installation of the wood stove. Cody had taught him to operate this way when doing something that involved a lot of pieces.

  As Cody said, “People dump all the parts out and rummage through them as the need arises. That’s not only inefficient, but also small parts have a tendency to run when you’re not looking. There’s a whole creation separate from ours that’s full of random parts that have escaped that way. Partition the job into stages, put the right parts for each stage into its own bag, and everything works out as it should.”

  Seventeen steps, seventeen sacks. Two days of wrestling uncooperative metal and cutting his hands, and it was done. Just in time, too, since a high-pressure front followed the storm, as things tend to occur in the high plains, with hard, bright sunlight and a sharp drop in temperature. Carlisle heated the stove to a low burn and let it cool. He did that again and again, curing the cast iron so it wouldn’t crack when he built the first big fire in it. Then he put down the first real fire, and the stove cooked away, double burning the gases as it was designed to do, filling the entire house with good radiant heat, and Carlisle began installing the last of the windows.

  Autumn was volatile. Four days after the snow fell, it had melted. The house was closed in except for hanging the front door, a solid-core mahogany prize that had been tossed on the junk pile up at the hunting lodge where Carlisle acquired his redwood siding. He had the job under control and rested for a moment, sitting on the doorsill and looking out across the prairie, coffee cup beside him.

  A black hat was coming up the lane. Under it was the Indian carrying a small drum over his shoulder, and the woman was with him.

  A black shawl over a dress of lavender-colored wool. High boots and a flaxen sash knotted on her left hip, the ends of it hanging to her knees. She was wearing a headband that matched the sash. The bounce of sunlight off her silver necklace raced ahead of them as they came on, walking easily, talking to each other.

  “Ho, Builder.”

  “Ho, Flute Player.”

  “Builder, I have brought Susanna Benteen with me.”

  Carlisle took the hand she held toward him and looked at her. She was like nothing he’d ever seen. Beauty all right, not American beauty perfect, not the starlet or the magazine cover, but a calm, slow, haunting kind of beauty.

  Her lips were full and well-defined, high cheekbones and a softly pointed chin, all of it edged and set off by the thick auburn hair. In some way he could not yet grasp, she was whole and was aware of her wholeness. You could call it quiet beauty or you could call it a hesitant nobility. You could say all of that about her and many other things and still chafe at your inexactness. There was no adequate description for a state of affairs where someone simply was.

  Carlisle could not fit her into any category. Hanging around California for most of his life, he thought he’d seen about every possible variation of woman, but Susanna was her own tribe numbering one and no more. She looked at him straight, evenly, smiling a little.

  The Indian examined the door Carlisle was working on, running a hand along the vertical edge of it, looking it up and down, speaking while he did so. “Susanna and I talked yesterday. We decided that today seemed favorable for your efforts at closing up the house, and it appears we were right. Is that not so?”

  “You’re right on schedule,” Carlisle said. “Once I get this door hung, the place will be full tight against all weather.”

  “Very good, Builder. Then Susanna will prepare for her blessing, and I will carry out mine while you continue your work. I have convinced her to perform the special ceremony she did when I asked her to bless my house last year. She was reluctant, but I have told her much about you, and she now has agreed to do this as a favor to me.”

  “I am honored.” Carlisle wanted to say more, but he felt rattled by the very presence of Susanna Benteen.

  Susanna and the Indian went inside while Carlisle retrieved one of Cody’s old planes and shaved the door perimeters a little more in several places. Testing, shaving, sanding, testing, until it swung perfectly into place with a soft, sure click. He wanted to look at Susanna Benteen every five seconds or so but forced himself to concentrate on the work.

  “May we use the fireplace for this occasion, Carlisle?” She had a smooth, confident voice in the alto range.

  “Yes, of course. Want me to get it going?”

  “I prefer to do that myself, if it’s all right.”

  “That’s fine. The two of you do what you need to do.”

  She got the fire under way while Carlisle gathered up tools and swept the floor. The house was all wood but was beginning to feel as though it had the strength and mass of concrete. Tight, solid, with a force of its own. Anyone could feel that, just standing inside and looking around. Two and a half solid months of work, and Carlisle was pleased. Proud, in fact. This place would go on forever, or just about. Outside, he could hear the Indian sing-chanting and moving around the perimeter of the house. “Hey-ah-ah-hey! Hey-ah-ah-hey!”

  His blessing complete, the Indian accepted a beer. But Susanna chose the red wine Carlisle offered her and thanked him politely as she took it.

  With a low sun slanting through the front windows and catching dust motes in the air, he opened a beer for himself and sat on a nail keg. The small lumberyard in Livermore had had three of these kegs sitting in a back corner and had given them to Carlisle for the asking. In Marin County, such kegs sold for $80 in stores catering to rustic home decorating.

  Darkness came, and Carlisle drank his second beer, half watching the woman take small pouches from her macram bag and arrange them in a semicircle near the fire. The house originally had been built as a post-and-beam structure in the same fashion as an Amish barn. Carlisle had always liked this system, since all of the roof weight rested on the posts and beams, and walls bearing no load could be moved reasonable distances without the complications of headers and crossbeams. He had torn out all the inside partitions, leaving the interior completely open, with Williston’s fireplace standing free about a third of the way in from the rear wall.

  The only light came from the fire, a large warm fire, and the Indian moved to where he could rest his back against the south wall, sitting cross-legged with the drum in his lap. He started to play. Soft, easy strokes, tapping the drumhead with his fingers. This continued for maybe five minutes, sound reverberating in the empty spaces.

  The Indian was chanting now. The woman had gone behind the fireplace, out of view. Carlisle was enjoying it, sitting in a wash of pride within the house he was creating, listening to the Indian. A year ago he would have been impatient, wanting the ceremony to move on, but his careful work here had quieted him. He noticed that even his pulse rate had slowed over the last few months.

  Carlisle wondered for a moment what Cody would think about all this hoodoo and decided he would be pleased. His concern was building to suit the purposes people had in mind.

  Gradually the volume of the drum increased as the Indian played with more intensity, using his palms, his voice rising at the same time. Carlisle nearly dropped the can of beer he was holding when Susanna Benteen came from behind the fireplace. Except for a necklace with a silver falcon hanging from it and large hoop earrings that matched the necklace, she was naked.

  And she was not a bit self-conscious about her nakedness. That much was clear. She walked slowly to a position in front of the fireplace, brought her legs together, and raised her arms toward rafters that were still bare and had insulation stapled into place between them.

  To Carlisle McMillan, her body looked as if it had been turned on the lathe of a master craftsman. She was all of the women who had ever appeared in his heated boyhood fantasies wrapped into one live, obviously healthy woman who began to dance in front of Williston’s fireplace. She executed slow pirouettes at first, her long hair swinging in the firelight, her feet mak
ing no sound on the raw flooring.

  As she moved, she bent gracefully to the small pouches on the floor and tossed powder of some kind into the fire, transforming the flames to green, then blue, then intense ocher. The Indian kept chanting, and she began to answer his words with chants of her own, until the drum and two voices merged into a wild but unified composition.

  Her body was shining from the fire and her exertion, and Carlisle could feel his own sweat starting to run down his back and chest. She danced with more thrust and power now, her bare feet slapping the planks, earrings catching the firelight. Carlisle alternated between wanting to have her and being caught up in the magic she and the Indian were creating.

  It went on and on, and Carlisle began to feel himself changing. Something had moved through the room and sought him out. The sounds and images were working on him: woman dancing, firelight, woman, old hands on old drum, firelight, woman. She began clapping her hands in syncopated time to the Indian’s drum, almost in the way of a flamenco dancer. Her eyes locked on Carlisle’s, stayed there. She became a figure of faded, limpid amber, and he could see the breath in her lungs and the wine moving in her blood. He could see all of this, could see for a moment all the way out to a transparent forever that disappeared in the moment he found it.

  A crescendo was reached, the drum stopped, and Susanna walked gracefully behind the fireplace. Silence. Carlisle looked at the Indian. His head was bowed, his hands still. The only sound was from the crackle of burning wood.

  After a few minutes, Susanna Benteen came around the fireplace, her clothing in place. The Indian rose: “The hearth has been blessed, and this place is now a sacred place. We did not pray only to the wood and brick, but also to you, Builder. We prayed that your hands will be guided by the six powers as you work and that your tribute to your Cody Marx will be completed as he would want. Walk here and let the house be glad.”

  So saying, he swung the drum over his shoulder and opened the door. Carlisle recovered enough to thank them and offer them a ride in his pickup, but they declined. He watched them walk under the yard light and down the lane, light snow beginning to fall. The Indian, the woman, her long shawl around her, one end of it cowled over her head. They disappeared into the snow, eight miles from Salamander, into some other stretch of consciousness they understood but which Carlisle McMillan knew he did not.

  As he unrolled his sleeping bag and placed it near the fire, he noticed a small sculpture of carved basswood on the mantel. It was a naked woman with flames coming from her hair. The Indian later would tell him it was a representation of Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth. The white medicine woman had asked the Indian to carve it.

  Carlisle lay in his sleeping bag, thinking of the woman’s body and how it shone in the firelight while she danced to sounds from wrinkled hands playing on tightly stretched goatskin, the perspiration from her breasts falling like sweet rain onto the hearth when she turned. Regretting his lack of sensitivity about blessings and ceremonies, he found himself simply wanting her.

  Chapter Nine

  THANKSGIVING. CARLISLE’S FIRST IN THE HIGH PLAINS. Thelma Englestrom was back from the hospital and running Danny’s again. Gally helped her serve a free Thanksgiving dinner to all the older folks having nowhere to go and to those of any age who could not afford one. She left when Thelma was closing up for the day and drove up the lane to Carlisle’s place shortly after two o’clock. It was bright cold and the Chicago Bears were losing in the third quarter.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, Carlisle. It’s nice to be invited out.” She was smiling. Gally had been spending long hours cleaning up the affairs surrounding Jack’s death and working on getting the ranch sold. Except for a few words in Danny’s and at the funeral, she and Carlisle had not talked since the night her husband was killed. Two days ago, he had asked her if she would like to have Thanksgiving dinner with him.

  Carlisle fastened a small turkey on a spit he had rigged in the fireplace. She watched him. “Think it’ll work? Looks a little wobbly.”

  “Some things work, some don’t,” he replied. “This contraption lies about in the middle of that continuum, I’d say . . . sort of like life itself. If it doesn’t work, I’ll crucify the bird on a cross of two-by-fours, then we’ll burn him at the stake and have peanut-butter sandwiches.”

  “In that case I’m praying it works,” Gally said, laughing. “Peanut butter’s okay, but I’m not real fond of crucifixions, marriage to former bull riders included. Sorry, that’s an awful thing to say. I’m supposed to be in mourning, but somehow I can’t seem to get in the mood. Jack was a good man at one time but ended up being something a lot less than that.”

  Carlisle looked up at her from where he squatted near the hearth. “Well, I understand the new etiquette books have considerably shortened the formal mourning period, so I believe you’re absolved in this case.”

  He plugged in the motor, and the turkey spun slowly, balanced perfectly on the spit. He looked up at Gally Deveraux and shrugged, then wiggled his eyebrows and grinned. “What do you think?”

  “I think you can delay the cross building for now.”

  The turkey went around while he basted it with a mixture of red wine, butter, and a little garlic. Gally wrapped baking potatoes in aluminum foil for later placement in the coals, then worked on a tossed salad. Carlisle fiddled with the radio, couldn’t find a station that suited him, and slipped a Vivaldi tape into the deck. He set two nail kegs by the wood stove and opened bottles of the imported beer he had bought for the occasion. They sat there while the rotisserie motor groaned under the turkey’s weight.

  Gally looked good, real good. Everybody had been saying how she looked better after Jack’s death, sad and tragic as it was (mostly for Jack and not for Gally, some of them added quietly). Gally looked as if she had been relieved of a heavy load. She had put on a little weight, just enough, and her face seemed to be losing the drawn, sad look she had carried for a long time.

  Carlisle had never seen her in anything except ranch clothes, but today she had on black wool slacks that did good things for her body and a soft yellow turtleneck sweater, her hair held up by three small combs fastened in the back. Carlisle was wearing his old construction boots, but the green plaid flannel shirt he had bought for the occasion worked pretty well with his faded tan corduroys.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “I heard you put the ranch up for sale.”

  “Well, first off, I’m going to try and get the place sold. There won’t be anything left, even if I can sell it, since there are two mortgages on it. Jack inherited the ranch debt-free from his father, but we had hard times four years running. That’s when the first mortgage was taken out. Then Jack got it in his head he was a brilliant gambler. He took out a second mortgage and went to Las Vegas with the idea he could win enough to get rid of all the debt. He stayed a month, went back again, and finally came home broke. High-stakes poker did it.

  “I don’t know for sure what I’ll do once the ranch is gone. Maybe move to Casper or Bismarck, look for work of some kind. Maybe go back to college, I’ve always felt bad about not finishing my degree. I was going to be a high school history teacher.”

  Carlisle said nothing. The moment didn’t call for anything from him.

  “I shouldn’t be quite so negative about Jack. When I first met him he was some combination of pirate and cowboy, a real romantic figure. He did pretty well at rodeoing in his younger years till he got busted up bad and had to quit. He was never the same after that. He pretended to like ranching and tried to make a go of it, but what he really liked was riding bulls, and he was good at it. When I first met him I loved to watch him do it, and I married him because I loved him and tried to keep on loving him for a long time, but he just pulled away from me and everything else, except his drinking buddies.”

  And when it came to drinking buddies, she remembered that Harv Guthridge had called her two weeks after Jack’s death and asked her out. She’d said no and told him n
ot to call anymore. He’d laughed and slammed the phone down.

  She looked at Carlisle, kind of a sideways look. “You ever been married, Carlisle? Or if that’s a sore spot at all, forget I asked.”

  “No sore spot. I’ve never been married, to my mother’s dismay. I came close to it once, six or seven years ago. She was an elementary school teacher, from southern Illinois. She married young and got divorced, moved to the Bay Area from the Midwest. We waltzed around for a couple of years, but I was in a blue funk in those days and pretty hard to get along with. She went east one summer with a group of other teachers and got swept away by a naturalist at the Smithsonian.”

  He paused, smiled, looked at Gally. “Janie is better off with her naturalist than with an itinerant carpenter. I’ve never doubted that. I still think about her, though, off and on, now and then. She was a good person.”

  Carlisle took a drink of St. Pauli Girl, read the label, moved on. “You from out here? I mean, is this where you grew up?”

  “No, I’m an Iowa girl. A small town in the northern part of the state. My dad ran a hardware store there till he died a few years ago. My mother moved to Austin, Minnesota, and lives in one of those retirement communities. She seems happy about it, but the thought of winding up in one of those places kind of makes me want to set a deadline on my life—say about fifty. Which, come to think of it, isn’t all that far off.”

  “Well, as a friend of mine, Buddy Reems, and I used to say when talking about death and retirement, ‘Don’t die dumb.’”

  “Sounds good. What’s it mean, not dying dumb?”

  “We made a list of ways we didn’t want to die. Number one was don’t die in a hospital, don’t let that happen. Number two was being tail-ended by a ’71 Cadillac in front of Kmart because a blue-light special on men’s underwear was commencing. It went on from there.”