Centennial (4 page)

The door opened and the black man I had seen on the street entered and came to our table. Miss Endermann kissed him, then said, “This is my friend and counselor, Nate Person. Not only a good barber but a sagacious one. He knows where the bodies are buried.”

Person, a gray-templed man in his fifties, asked where I was from, and when I said Georgia he laughed. “That’s a state not high on my list.”

“It’s getting better,” I assured him.

“High time,” he said evenly.

“You must tell him everything you told me,” Miss Endermann said, and Nate nodded.

I suppose it was a good dinner, but the items that faced me were so unlike what I was accustomed to in Georgia that it all tasted like a hot jumble. “The toasted thing is a taco,” Miss Endermann explained. To me it was more like French-fried cardboard, and the enchilada and tamale seemed so nearly identical that I never did discover which was which. The stuffed pepper, called a chili relleno, was mostly fried cheese, but the salad was great. So was the small glass of pomegranate juice. And the Coors beer was, as she had predicted, “as light as a cupful of mountain water.”

After we had finished the dinner, which Miss Endermann and Person gulped as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks, I began to experience the most pleasing sensation. It was as if my stomach were in harmony with the world. “That must have been pretty good food,” I said. “Tastes better now than it did going down.”

“Join the club,” Miss Endermann said. “Nate, remember that first time you made me try it? Thought I’d die.”

There was a commotion at the door and Marquez hurried over to greet a tall, gangling westerner who had slouched in. He wore a cowboy hat, a bandanna and crooked-heel boots with fancy spurs. He was what western writers call a “lean, mean hombre,” but he moved with an easy grace and made himself at home wherever he was.

He came directly to our table, where he grabbed Miss Endermann, pulled her to her feet and kissed her.

“Cisco!” she cried. “This is too much. I thought you were in Chicago.”

“I was. Got back Monday. Heard you were in town. Knew I’d find you here.”

She introduced him to me as Cisco Calendar, and he let me know at once that he didn’t think much of me. He turned a chair around and straddled it, resting his chin on the back. “Good to see you,” he said to Carol. He spoke elliptically and kept his half-savage face close to hers.

It was obvious that he intended getting Miss Endermann off by himself, and it was just as obvious that she wished it that way, so after a few uneasy moments he said, “Got the car out here. Wanta take a spin?” She did, and that was the last I saw of this angular, aggressive cowboy.

In the morning Miss Endermann said, “If you’re up to it after the Mexican food, let’s reconnoiter.” She drove me up and down the two main streets until my bearings were set. She then took me to the plush northwest segment: “The Skimmerhorns, the Wendells, the Garretts. Those are the names that count.” In the northeast sector, where the homes were noticeably poorer, she said, “Zendt’s Farm, which started it all, and down here, the original Wendell place. There was a great scandal about it, and you’ll want to look into that.”

As we passed the Flor de Méjico in the southeast, she said, ‘That’s where we ate last night. Down here by the tracks is where Manolo Marquez lives, and along here is Nate Person’s barbershop, where we came into town yesterday.” In the remaining sector, the southwest, there was not much: along the tracks the ramshackle home of Cisco Calendar. “He could afford much better, of course, but that’s where his family has always lived.”

That was Centennial, at least the part I would be concerned with. “Not quite,” Miss Endermann said. “Two more localities, and they loom large.” And she drove me north on Prairie and well up toward the Wyoming line, where I saw something which astonished me: a massive castle complete with spires and donjon.

“It’s Venneford,” she said. “All the land we’ll be on today, and millions of acres more, once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Greatest cattle ranch in the west.”

“Does the noble earl figure in my story?”

“Not unless you want him to,” she said. “But what we see next is the heart of your story.”

And she drove me east onto dry land such as I had never before seen, bleak and desolate, and at the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, “This is how they found it. A vast emptiness. Nothing has changed in a million years.”

In no direction could I see any sign that man had ever tried to occupy this enormous land—no house, no trail, not even a fence post. It was empty and majestic, the great prairie of the west.

Miss Endermann interrupted my reflections with a promise: “When we reach the top of that next hill you’ll see something memorable.”

She was right. As we climbed upward through the desolate waste, we reached an elevation from which I looked down upon a compelling sight, one that would preoccupy me for the next half year. It was a village, line Camp, she said, and once it had flourished, for a tall grain silo remained, but now it was deserted, its shutters banging, its windows knocked in.

We drove slowly, as if in a funeral procession, through the once busy streets marked only by gaping foundation holes where stores and a church had stood. We found only devastation, gray boards falling loose, school desks ripped from their moorings. Somehow I must make the boards divulge their story, but now only hawks visited Line Camp and the stories were forgotten.

Two buildings survived, a substantial stone barn and across from it a low stone edifice to whose door came a very old man to stare at us.

“The only survivor,” Miss Endermann said, and as we watched, even he disappeared.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We want you to tell us,” she said.

It must have been obvious that I was captivated by Centennial and its environs, because at lunch we began to pinpoint my commission, and I said, “By the way, nobody has told me who wrote the story I’m supposed to fortify.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Obviously not.”

“I did.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I researched this story on the scene for five months.”

“I knew ...” I was confused. “Of course, I realized that the people here knew you. But I thought you’d been ...”

“Helping someone else? Helping someone important?”

She asked these questions with such a cutting edge that I thought we’d better get down to cases. “Miss Endermann,” I said, “you’ll forgive me, but your magazine is asking me to spend a lot of time on this project. May I ask what your credentials are? Do you mind a few questions?”

“Not at all,” she said frankly. “I’d expect them. I know this is important to you.”

“What do you think of Frank Gilbert Roe?”

Without batting an eye, she said, “On horses, terrific. On bison, I prefer McHugh.”

This was a sophisticated response, so I proceeded: “What’s your reaction to the Lamanite theory?”

“A despicable aberration of Mormonism.” She stopped and asked apologetically, “You’re not Mormon, are you?” And before I could answer, she said, “Even if you are, I’m sure you agree with me.”

“I respect the Mormons,” I said, “but I think their Lamanite theory asinine.”

“I’m so glad,” she said. “I don’t think I could work with. someone who took that sort of bull seriously.”

“What was your reaction to the Treaty of 1851?”

“Ah,” she said reflectively. “Its heart was in the right place. But the government in Washington had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of Missouri that there was no chance—none ever—that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given. If it hadn’t been gold, it would have been something else. Stupidity. Stupidity.”

This young woman knew something. I asked her, “What is your judgment on the Skimmerhorn massacre?”

“Oh, no!” she protested.. “It’s your job to tell us what you think about that. But I will confess this. I’ve studied the Skimmerhorn papers at Boulder and the court-martial records in Washington, and I’ve interviewed the Skimmerhorns in Minnesota and Illinois. I know what I think. Six months from now I want to know what you think.”

I had one final question, and this would prove the depth of her investigation. “Have you done any work on the reports of Maxwell Mercy?”

She burst into laughter and astonished me by rising and kissing me on the cheek. “You’re a real dear,” she said. “I did my master’s thesis under Allan Nevins at Columbia on some unpublished letters I’d found of Captain Mercy. On my bedroom wall at home I have an old photograph of him taken by Jackson at Fort Laramie, and for your personal information I got damned near straight A’s at Illinois and honors at the University of Chicago, where I took my doctorate.”

“Then what in hell are you doing knocking around with Cisco Calendar till four o’clock this morning?”

“Because he sends me, you old prude. He sends me.”

Next morning I drove her to Denver, where she caught the plane back to New York. At the ramp she told me, “Stay the rest of the week. You’ll fall in love with this place. I did.” When I wished her luck at the office, she said, “I’ll be working on maps.” Then, impulsively, she grabbed my hands. “We really need you ... to make the thing hum. Call us Friday night, saying you’re signing on.”

I drove back by way of the university at Boulder because I wanted to consult my old friend, Gerald Lambrook of their history department, and he said, “I can’t see any pitfalls in the arrangement, Lewis. Granted, you’re not writing the article and you lose some control, but they’re a good outfit and if they say they’re going to give it first-class presentation, they will. What it amounts to, they’re paying you to do your own basic research.”

Lambrook was an old-style professor, with a book-lined study, sheaves of term papers, which he still insisted on, and even a tweed jacket and a pipe. I worked in a turtleneck and it was sort of nice to know that the old Columbia-Minnesota-Stanford types were around. I had known him at Minnesota and it was easy to renew our old friendship.

“But I’m interested, historically speaking,” he said, “in the fact that you haven’t mentioned the thing for which Centennial is most famous. The area; I mean.”

I asked him what that was, and he said, “The old Zendt place.”

“I know about it. Saw it yesterday. The fellow from Pennsylvania who wouldn’t build a fort but did build a farm.”

“I don’t mean the farm. I mean Chalk Cliff, on his first place.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That’s where the first American dinosaur was found.”

“The hell it was!”

“That great big one. Went to Berlin and how we wish we had it back. And then, not far from there, but still on the original farm, the Clovis-point dig. Say, if you’re free, I think I could get one of the young fellows from geology to run us up there.” He started making phone calls, between which he told me, “The university’s doing some work up there, I think.” Finally he located an instructor who was taking his students on a field trip to the Zendt dig during the coming week, and he said he’d enjoy refreshing his memory, so off we went, Lambrook and I in my car and young Dr. Elmo Kennedy in his.

We drove north along the foothills of the Rockies, past Estes Park on the west and Fort Collins on the east, till we came to what might have been called badlands. Dr. Kennedy pulled up to inform me, “We’re now entering the historic Venneford spread, and Chalk Cliff lies just ahead. I’ll open the gates, you close them.”

We proceeded through three barbed-wire fences behind which white-faced Herefords grazed, and came at last to an imposing cliff, running north and south, forty feet high and chalky white. “Part of an old fault,” Kennedy explained. “Pennsylvanian period, if you’re interested. At the foot of the cliff, in 1875, down here in the Morrisonian Formation, Professor Wright of Harvard dug out the great dinosaur that can be seen in Berlin.”

“I never knew that,” I confessed. “I knew the dinosaur but not its provenance.”

“And two miles up, at the other end of the cliff, is where they found—1935, I think it was—that excellent site with the Clovis points.”

“I have heard about that,” I said, “but not that it was located near Chalk Cliff.”

We spent the rest of the morning there, inspecting this historic site, after which Lambrook and Kennedy drove back to Boulder. “Be sure to close the gates,” they warned. That left me some time to inspect the brooding cliff, and as I kicked at the chalky limestone I came upon a fossilized sea shell, a frail, delicate thing now transformed into stone, indubitable proof that this cliff and the land around it had once lain at the bottom of some sea and now stood over five thousand feet above sea level. I tried to visualize the titanic force that must have been involved in such a rearrangement of the earth’s surface, and I think it was then I began to see my little object-town Centennial in a rather larger dimension than the editors back in New York saw it.

By back roads I drove east to Line Camp, seeing that desolate spot from a new angle, and was even more fascinated by the compression of history one observed there: Indian campground, cattle station, sheep ranch, dry-land farming, dust bowl, and then abandonment as a site no longer fit for human concern. The place attracted me like a magnet and I wished that I were writing of it and not Centennial, which at this point seemed pretty ordinary to me, but as I drove south, it occurred to me that I must be following the old Skimmerhorn Trail, and when I came to the low bluffs that marked the delineation between the river bottom and the prairie and I was able to look down into Centennial and its paltry railroad, with cottonwoods outlining the south side of the Platte, I had a suspicion that perhaps it too had had its moments of historic significance. What they were, I could not anticipate, but if I took the job I would soon find out.