High Plains Tango

by Robert James Waller

  Gally began to laugh.

  “The third fits right in with what you were just saying: being hit by flying debris from a rotary lawn mower operated by an overweight sixty-seven-year-old Rotarian in a planned retirement community. I’m noticing all of this doesn’t sound as good as it did when we made it up one night in an Oakland bar. Beer talk tends to run that way.”

  “What would be some good ways to die, then?” she asked, still giggling about his list.

  “Well, we had a little more trouble with that part of it. Falling off a roof after nailing down the last shingle on the best house you’ve ever built, a spear in the chest on the African veldt, that sort of thing. This definitely has the ring of boys and beer to it now that I’m saying it, slightly embarrassing, in fact. Besides, I figure all this arrogance about living and dying will shift a bit as I get a little older. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Well, I don’t see as there’s anything wrong with a man being a boy once in a while, long as you get over it. Strikes me that a lot of the boys don’t take that next step.”

  “Yeah, it’s not much fun growing up, so we beat it back long as possible, forever if we can pull it off.”

  “Women understand that. We see it all the time, living with the boys.” She grinned.

  “I’ll bet you do. And as I’ve always said, to understand boy-men, you’ve got to understand gear.”

  “Gear?” Gally smiled. “Tell me about gear.”

  Carlisle was squatted down, putting more wood on the fire, talking over his shoulder. “Men like gear, all kinds of stuff. We like bags, too, since we’ve got to have someplace to put the gear. Then we like to sort the gear and pack it in the bags and go off somewhere.”

  “Now you’re really making sense. I understand that, having lived with Jack for over twenty years.”

  “When I was little—four or five—back in Mendocino, I wanted a doll buggy. That worried my mother, I think, but she found one for me at a rummage sale. One of the wheels wobbled, but I didn’t care. It was a vehicle to cart my gear around. I carried rocks, screwdrivers, and a hammer in it. Other stuff, too.

  “My mother stopped worrying when she saw that. When I got older she used to kid me about it, saying, ‘Carlisle, your truck is just a grown-up version of your doll buggy, a way to haul all your stuff around.’ I’d say she was right.”

  “Your general theory of gear explains a lot of male behavior.” The fire crackled and splashed light across the smile on Gally’s face. “Jack had bags and gear. Except he liked to take the gear from one bag and put it in a different bag, kind of a domino effect. After that he’d go off somewhere, hunting or fishing.”

  “Yeah, repacking gear is an important part of it. You get to handle it a lot more often that way.” He opened his cooler and set two more beers on the floor beside them. “In that small town where you grew up, I’ll bet you were homecoming queen, right?”

  Gally smiled again. “I was first runner-up. My dad claimed it was a scam job, that the girl who was picked got it because she was going with the quarterback on the football team. What I never told him was that I was going out with the quarterback, secretly. My dad was something of a local football legend himself, enough said. Lord, that all seems like a long time ago, trivial and childish.”

  Though, she reflected privately, it hadn’t seemed all that trivial or childish when she and the quarterback took a six-pack and, even though it was chilly, went skinny-dipping in the Shell Rock River after the homecoming game, down by where Elk Creek flowed into the river. But it seemed that way now. The quarterback was clumsy, so was she. It was inelegant, overall. But you get by those things even though they hurt a little when you call them up.

  Late in the afternoon, Carlisle positioned two sawhorses in the middle of the room and laid one-by-twelves over them. Instant table. Sunlight was coming through the south windows, and the turkey turned out pretty well. Dumptruck had his own plate in the kitchen while the radio played. The talk between Gally and Carlisle ran mostly to local things, and he happened to mention the old dance hall on the edge of Livermore.

  Gally looked out at the slanting light. “Oh, Carlisle, that place is so special. Let’s go over there. It won’t be dark for a little while. We can be there in half an hour. I want you to see it up close. We can do dishes when we get back.”

  “Sounds good to me. Let’s fire up the truck.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, they pulled up next to the Flagstone Ballroom, sitting on the shore of a small lake. The old place was in bad repair, shuttered and peeling in a raw, windy sundown. Not all that big as those things ran, maybe twenty thousand square feet including service areas.

  “Kind of looks like one of Mrs. Macklin’s pies on the second day, doesn’t it?” Gally laughed.

  Carlisle nodded, peering through a crack in the rear door. All he could see was old sinks, big ones. Must have been the kitchen. He went around the building and found another opening. Enough light was coming through holes in the roof and other places that he could make out the floor and the dark contours of booths surrounding it.

  “Jack used to bring me dancing here when we were first married.”

  He turned and looked at her standing in gray light, looking slim and fine in her slacks and sweater with a light mackinaw over them, a few strands of black hair with a little gray mixed in blowing across her face, trying to see her as she might have looked on a summer evening in the Flagstone Ballroom twenty or so years ago. The lake behind her was developing thin ice along the edges, and her face was turning pink from the stiff, cold wind coming in over the water.

  “You probably have trouble seeing me as a young girl in a pretty dress dancing the night away in this place.”

  It was a declarative sentence, but she meant it as a question. “I don’t have any trouble at all seeing that, Gally Deveraux. Tell me about it, anyway.”

  “By the time I moved out here, the Flagstone was on its last legs. But Jack and I came here a lot. Mostly on Friday nights, that’s when the country bands played. Sometimes I’d talk him into bringing me on Saturdays when the big bands took over. My dad had a huge record collection of all the old bands—the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw—so I was raised around that kind of music. Jack never much cared for it, said it was hard to dance to, but what he really didn’t like was that a completely different kind of person from him came on the big band nights. Jack never wore ties, except those little string numbers once in a while, and most of the people who came to big band nights here dressed up. But sometimes he’d bring me. Then he’d spend the night complaining that you couldn’t do the Texas two-step to what he called gringo music.”

  Carlisle leaned against the Flagstone and laughed, thinking about Jack and the look he must have had on his face when a band rolled into “Stardust.”

  Gally was under way, talking fast, talking to the wind as much as to Carlisle, and he let her run. “I remember how these big shutters would be swung up and how the lake looked with moonlight across it. There were moving lights in the ceiling that flickered on the floor and on the dancers, and on Saturday nights the bands played all the old songs: ‘Sunrise Serenade,’ ‘A Foggy Day,’ ‘Stella by Starlight.’ Things like that.

  “The Saturday night bands had names you wouldn’t believe, names like Glenn Boyer’s Honey Dreamers. Icky, huh?” She was grinning and looked almost beautiful standing there, reeling in the memories, moving through old doorways she needed to walk through again.

  “By the mid-sixties, things were changing fast. To keep going, the place booked rock ’n’ roll bands, mostly. For some reason, though, it just kind of died out, all of it. The Flagstone closed in 1966. They had a big farewell party, and lots of the musicians who played here over the years came and played one more time. People drove all the way from Florida and California just for that one night. I was only twenty-five and wasn’t from around here, but I’d spent a lot of nights in this old place by that time.

  “I remember they played ‘Auld L
ang Syne’ at the end, and we all cried, except for Jack, who was hoping they’d finish up with ‘San Antonio Rose.’ He was drunk and kept on hollering for that: ‘“SannnAnnnntonnnniooooRosie,” one more time.’ The musicians playing that night probably had never played ‘San Antonio Rose’ in their entire lives, but Jack kept on hollering for it even after the band left the stage.”

  She stopped for a moment, thinking how she’d taken off her clothes in the truck that night when she and Jack left the Flagstone, sitting on his lap and steering the truck while his hands moved over her, the two of them wobbling back and forth along the roads of Yerkes County, headed toward a place called home.

  She looked serious for a moment. “I loved him then, Carlisle, I truly did. He was a young girl’s dream, I guess.”

  “I’m sure you did. From everything you’ve told me, I can see why.”

  “But I came to hate him, and that’s not right.”

  Gally had tears in her eyes, maybe from the wind, maybe from her memories. She was leaning back into them, hearing a big band play “Early Autumn” again, seeing the lights on the floor, feeling what it was like to be a young woman when the big sky was like the curve of a cowboy’s shoulder—no, some combination of cowboy and pirate—looking out through open windows when he turned you, looking out at moonlight over warm water lapping on the lake shore, thinking none of this will ever change.

  Carlisle smiled at her. “I’ll take you dancing sometime. Would you like that?”

  She walked over and put a mittened hand on his face. “I’d like that very much.” That’s all she said, and they walked slowly back to the idling truck and the warmth of its heater.

  They cleaned up the supper leavings, and Carlisle made a pot of coffee. Talking for a while longer, smiling at each other across Carlisle’s jury-rigged table. He was thinking that Gally Deveraux was a damn fine woman. He fixed her a plate of turkey to take home with her, and they stood on his front porch for a minute or two, looking out across the great spaces where they lived. Gally had stopped thinking of Carlisle as a possibility, thought of him now as a man, a good man. Whatever his weaknesses were, he was strong in all the right ways, far as she could tell. There was a part of her that wanted to stay with him tonight, more out of companionship than anything else, but somehow that didn’t seem right, yet. Besides, she wasn’t ready to be turned down, and she wasn’t sure how Carlisle felt about her in that way.

  She stood on her tiptoes, put her hand on his face, and kissed him softly. “Good night, Carlisle. Thanks for Thanksgiving, it was real sweet. And thanks for going over to the Flagstone with me. I feel good about having done that, remembering those better days with Jack and feeling better about him and our life together because of it. I want to go home tonight and reflect on that some more. I think I’ll just concentrate on remembering the old Jack and try to forget about that other person I lived with all these years.”

  Carlisle touched her hair, bent over, and kissed her, then leaned back and said, “Good night, Gally. Drive carefully.”

  She started to step off the porch but turned instead and took hold of his shirt lapel with her thumb and finger. “Carlisle McMillan, I like being around you, and I like the way you kissed me. Sometime, when I get myself sorted out a little more, I may suggest we get to know each other a bit better. I hope you won’t be offended if I do.”

  “Gally, I don’t think there’s anything you could say that would offend me. Now take your turkey and run before I suggest what I think you’re talking about.”

  She started the Bronco and rolled down the lane. Carlisle watched her make the turn onto the dark road, watched the Bronco’s taillights move off to the north past where Syawla and the Keeper were supposed to live. When she was gone he looked northwest, then looked again. He went back inside and fetched his binoculars and focused them. There was a small fire burning on the crest of Wolf Butte.

  Chapter Ten

  THE SATURDAY FOLLOWING THANKSGIVING WAS SO UNUSUALLY warm for the season that it lulled people into thoughts of an easy winter, just before the storms regrouped and slammed them upside the head. Carlisle had something in mind for the house and went to the Little Sal, poking along its sandbars, looking for driftwood. He smelled the smoke from Susanna Benteen’s fire before he saw her.

  The river narrowed there, with twenty-foot bluffs rising on either side. She was sitting beneath a rock overhang, a small fire before her, looking at the water. He almost backed off but instead stood quietly. She seemed to be concentrating on something, and he didn’t want to disturb her. And, to be perfectly honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone with her. Carlisle was comfortable around women, but there was something about this woman that unsettled him, and, of course, just as unsettling were the images he still had of her dancing across the wooden floors of his house.

  In convincing her to perform her special blessing, the Indian had attributed to Carlisle more cosmic awareness than he deserved. That’s how Carlisle saw it. A fully mature consciousness, he supposed, would dwell on the goodness she and the Indian bestowed upon this place and upon him, Builder. But he had coveted her and was stalked by his recollections of her naked body as she danced, images that were reinforced and sharpened by echoes he still could hear in the shadowy, resonant corners of the house he was building. The Indian’s drum and the slap of her bare feet on raw lumber possessed infinite half-lives of their own.

  Susanna Benteen, however, was not the kind of woman you telephoned and casually invited out. She seemed neither approachable nor unapproachable. That scale didn’t work in her case.

  Also, he suspected she and the Indian were locked into each other in some powerful way, operating on a level of understanding that probably was beyond him. Whether she was the Indian’s woman or not, he wasn’t sure. But he liked and respected both of them and was not about to interfere, even if he had known how.

  While he was thinking about moving upriver again and leaving her alone, she turned her head. For a moment she merely looked at him, then she smiled and called out, “Hello, Carlisle,” almost as if she had been expecting him.

  He walked toward her. “Sorry if I bothered you, didn’t mean to.”

  “You’re not bothering me. Come join me. We don’t have many nice days like this one left.”

  It was the first time he had seen her wear anything but long dresses. That day she was in old, snug jeans and a beige sweater, dark green mountain parka, and well-traveled hiking boots. The auburn hair was braided, and the braid hung straight down her back, almost to her waist.

  “How is the house coming along?” she asked.

  “Fine, real good. I’m out here looking for a special piece of driftwood to make into a stair railing.”

  “The river makes a bend about a mile upstream. A lot of wood piles up there in high water, then stays when the water recedes. Have you gone by there yet?”

  “No, but I’ll take a look. Thanks.”

  “Where are you from, Carlisle? I noticed your license plates are from California.”

  “I grew up in Mendocino, but I lived in the Bay Area for the last fifteen years.”

  “I was there once, in Mendocino.” She was watching the last leaves of autumn float by, curled and brown.

  “When?”

  Susanna Benteen pursed her lips and looked upward, thinking. “Six years ago. I had heard it was a nice place, so I stopped on my way down from Seattle.”

  “You from Seattle?”

  She turned her head and looked at him. “No, I’m from all over, I guess.”

  The river gurgled where it tried to push back the bluffs. A hawk drifted far in the west, high and lonesome looking. A light breeze ruffled the water’s surface.

  “You’ve traveled a lot, then?”

  “Yes, a lot,” Susanna replied. “My mother died when I was four. My father was one of those itinerant scholars, an anthropologist, who roamed the world living off grants and contracts. I went with him.” She held the tip of a stick in the water and wa
tched the small eddy it created, thinking back to her girlhood for a moment.

  A rock was jabbing into Carlisle’s hip, and he shifted over a little. She tossed the stick in the water and watched the current take it downstream. “It was a strange, remarkable childhood. How did you come to live in Yerkes County, Carlisle?”

  “Drifted in here, on the run from all the craziness. It seemed quiet and open, so I decided to stay and build something worthwhile for a change.”

  “It looks like a fine house. The man you call Flute Player told me about your work even before I saw it.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate you and him coming by to give it your blessing.”

  She smiled at him. “How did you feel about the blessing? It was loosely copied from an ancient rite I once saw a shaman perform in East Africa. The statue of Vesta was my idea.”

  How could he answer that? Tell her the truth about what he really felt, about the drumming and how her body looked? End run, coward’s way: “Well, it was pretty different from anything I’d seen before.”

  Susanna Benteen smiled sideways at him. “Yes, I’m sure of that. But how did you feel about it?”

  Moment of truth. His stomach was jumping. He let out a breath, staring across the river, avoiding her eyes. “Honestly, it was the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen or heard or read about. That’s as straight as I can put it.” He felt better having said it and turned to look at her.

  The green eyes looked at him calmly. “It wasn’t intended to be, but I think I understand.” She blinked once. “To be honest, I had some of those same feelings midway through the ritual, though I didn’t when it started. The years traveling with my father, the time spent in old cultures, made me comfortable with nakedness, mine and others’. Sometimes I forget that and take it for granted. But I admit, I saw the way you were looking at me and saw things beyond the ritual, just as you did. Men and women can’t escape that, I guess. Some push of the genes, something from a long way back.”