High Plains Tango (2 page)

Chapter Two

A
XEL LOOKER WASN’T STUPID. HE JUST BEHAVED THAT WAY.
In his bones he knew the scientist fellow was right, even though he didn’t like scientist fellows in general. Didn’t like them because they clearly were a bunch of radicals feeding at the public trough, funded by Axel Looker’s own taxes. Didn’t like them because they held you to logic and asked for proof, wouldn’t let you get away with the comforting restaurant talk where myths born of self-interest were passed around like ketchup. Passed around and eventually agreed upon with murmurs of assent and nodding of heads, until an enduring fiction was created with which all were comfortable. One departed from this common point of view only at the risk of censure, not to mention expulsion from the back table in Danny’s caf.

The ecologist had said their days out here were closing down unless they dramatically changed their ways. Told them they were draining the big Ogallala aquifer and overgrazing the grasslands. Said they were letting the soil, which was thin at the outset, blow away in the wind.

They had listened to him, first at a speech he gave in the Livermore gym, where he had nearly been hooted off the stage. Afterward, walking out to their cars, someone said they ought to at least whip up a barrel of hot tar and send his feathered butt back east where he belonged. Things didn’t go any better when the ecologist showed up at Clyde Archer Legion Post 227 in Salamander and spoke again. Somehow, though, it was harder to dismiss him when the audience was small and they could see his eyes and he could see theirs. He was thin and earnest, talking quietly. He had charts and numbers, and he had level, steel-hard answers for their questions. It seemed as though he knew their criticisms flowed from the myths they were determined to preserve, and he would have none of it. They kept looking for gaps in his arguments, but they couldn’t find any. That made them dislike him even more.

As with most people, no matter how intelligent, Axel Looker had his own way of putting aside unpleasant evidence that didn’t fit with what he wanted to happen. So even though Axel knew the scientist fellow was right, deep down he knew that, he couldn’t admit it to anyone, including himself. Over morning coffee at Danny’s, the boys tilted back their caps and talked about outside interference in their lives while they absently fingered the crop subsidy checks tucked in their shirt pockets.

On his way home and six miles west of Salamander, Axel turned off Route 42 and headed north along the red dirt road toward the place he and Earlene had farmed and ranched for thirty-four years. The red dirt had turned to a sticky gumbo in late summer rain, and he slowed down, nearly stopping, when he met a tan pickup with California plates.

“Now who the hell is that?” he wondered out loud. Tomorrow he would ask around at Danny’s or the grain elevator, see if anybody knew. Looked like an Indian behind the wheel, maybe another one of those agitators forever demanding the land out there be returned to them, filing lawsuits, and claiming it was their land and that it had been stolen from them a hundred and some more years ago. What a pile of cowshit that was. Axel may have disliked scientists, but he absolutely hated Indians, particularly those who argued he was farming stolen land.

When he arrived home, he mentioned to Earlene that it might be time to think about retiring and moving to Florida. He didn’t say anything to her about the pickup truck he met on the way back from Salamander. Didn’t want to worry her.

LOOKING BACK
on it, if Carlisle McMillan had known what lay ahead of him, he might not have stopped in Salamander that first night, might have kept right on going through and out the other side of Yerkes County.

“Too damn much grief, as it turned out, for a man doing nothing except trying to find some peace and quiet.” That’s what he once said.

Easy to understand why he might say that. His recollections were still clear and hard formed: birds lifting off with a predator’s scream and warriors lashed to the trees of April. Boom of shotguns and the hard crack of a long-range rifle. Sirens, men shouting, dust climbing high and fast into morning skies, fires on the crest of Wolf Butte. And the slow, downward slide of anything resembling justice and plain dealing.

Carlisle’s jaw tightened when he talked about that part of it. Then he would shift over to a half smile. “But there were compensations. On balance, I’d do it over again.”

Of course he would. How many women could you find like Susanna Benteen? Or Gally Deveraux, for that matter. Pretty close to none. Susanna and Gally and what came to be known as the Yerkes County War feathered out the boy. Made him stand upright and lurch forward into manhood. Carlisle admitted it.

He came into Yerkes County from the north late on that August day, stopped and looked at the country around him. The roll of short grass, Wolf Butte to his right. Mist, easy wind, silence. Heading south again on the red dirt road, he hit pavement after a few miles, Route 42. He looked at his map, leaned on the steering wheel and thought about his options. Full dark coming in an hour or so. A little town east about six miles. In the other direction, the next place of any size was Casper, Wyoming, three hundred miles southwest and not much between here and Casper. Turn east.

Fifteen driving minutes later, Carlisle squinted past the slap of his windshield wipers and saw the four cylindrical towers of a grain elevator ahead. Sign on the edge of town:
WELCOME TO SALAMANDER
, Pop. 942, Elev. 2263.

The sign was battered, needed a new paint job. Three bullet holes were grouped within the
O
in
WELCOME
. Problematical greeting.

More signs: church schedules, and the Lions Club met every Tuesday at noon. He moved slowly along the highway doubling as Main Street, the town spreading out a block or two on either side of the commercial district and five blocks beyond it at the ends. Past Duane’s Pickup Palace & Lawn Mower Repair, past the Blue Square Drive-In (
CLOSED LABOR DAY
) and the Jackrabbit Lanes (
CLOSED,
windows covered with plywood). He shifted down into second with the truck engine whining a little, wipers beginning to drag as the rain let up and late sunlight splayed through the overcast farther west.

Merchants along Main Street were shutting their front doors at the end of the day. The buildings they locked were mostly white frame, some of them well built originally, but in need of scraping and paint now, and part of the roof had collapsed on what used to be the Salamander Hotel. Mixed in with the wooden structures were several fine old brick buildings in late Victorian style, the former home of Melik’s Drug as an example. In the spaces between some of the buildings, Carlisle could see houses on side streets and beyond them open country. Not many trees, and small ones at that, water being scant and the soil too thin in most places for deep, heavy roots. Those that had grown to any size had been cut for buildings and firewood years ago.

Carlisle McMillan put his tires against a curb with chunks missing from the concrete, in front of a tavern called Leroy’s. Got out, flexed his knees, swung his arms. Long day, thirsty day, 397 miles since dawn. He walked into Leroy’s and slid onto the first stool just at sundown, feeling grimy. Leroy was at the other end of the wooden bar, talking to a tall cowboy wearing a Stetson. The cowboy, rakish having been his middle name a long time ago but bilious now more appropriate, smoked a thin cigar and looked as if he were four days past the end of everything. Two men in caps with fertilizer logos on the crowns were bending over the shabbiest excuse for a pool table Carlisle had ever seen. It sloped, it leaned, and the cushions had deep cigarette burns in them.

But it wasn’t the worst-looking article in the place. That prize belonged to the old duffer sitting two stools down from Carlisle, left arm crooked on the bar. And lying on the arm was a face with a week of gray stubble. Up came the head, or what passed for one. He stared at Carlisle through crosshatched red eyes. “Who’errr
youvff
?” When Carlisle ignored him, his curiosity escalated, and he shouted the same question, nearly falling off his bar stool in the effort.

Leroy came along behind the bar, cigarette dangling from his mouth, wiping his hands on a dirty white apron wrapped around his waist and hanging two inches below his knees, a rip in the hem causing part of it to hang even a little farther. As he passed the old man, Leroy slapped the bar and said, “Shut up, Frank.”

“Fugyouleer-oy.” Frank flung the slur in the general direction of Leroy’s retreating back before his head smacked onto the bar and he was quiet.

Leroy nodded. Not friendly, not unfriendly, not in the middle or at the extremes. Flat, in the way of no concern for anything or anyone.

“I’ll have a Miller’s,” Carlisle said.

Leroy slid open the metal cooler below the bar, inspected the contents, and twisted his head upward. “Outta Miller’s. Got Bud and Grain Belt.”

“Bud’s okay.” Leroy’s smelled like every beer joint Carlisle had ever been in, only worse. Sour, acrid, a quintessential place where men came to die, a burial ground for all the old, besotted elephants of Salamander.

Leroy opened the bottle and set it on the bar along with a little beer glass, narrow at the bottom and curving vaselike to a wider opening at the top. “That’ll be seventy-five.”

Carlisle laid out a dollar. Leroy rang the cash register, slid a quarter along the bar toward him, and walked back to his conversation with the cowboy. “Seen the witch lately?” he asked the cowboy.

“Screw the witch.”

Leroy laughed. “Well, lot of us would like to give it a shot sometime.”

“Yeah, fat chance,” he said, looking down at his whiskey and water, stirring it with his right index finger, high-heeled boot on the bar rail.

“Ever notice that Injun she hangs around with?”

“No .  .  . what Injun?” He raised his eyes without moving his head, staring at Leroy.

“Old Injun. Lives somewhere out in the buttes.”

The cowboy coughed hard and shoved his glass toward Leroy. “Screw old Injuns, too. And speaking of gettin’ old and gettin’ screwed, put a little more ol’ Jim Beam in this.”

Leroy laughed again and reached for the bottle. “Jack, I could put nothing but two hundred proof in your glass and you’d still think I watered it down.”

The cowboy tilted his head toward Carlisle and mumbled something only half under his breath about “hair longer’n a woman’s,” not caring whether Carlisle heard him or not. Leroy glanced down the bar while the cowboy shook his head and stirred his drink. Carlisle drank his Bud, wondering just where in the big peculiar he had landed. Silence and wind, witches and old Injuns.

The beer was cold and tasted good in spite of the dismal ambience, even though Bud ranked about sixty-fourth in his beer hierarchy, with Grain Belt further down than last. Six feet away, Frank snored or choked; Carlisle couldn’t make out which, decided on both. One of the pool players screamed, “You lucky bastard!” while the other crowed, “Rack ’em up, Arlo.” Outside, someone revved up a car engine, the rolling boom from a hole in the muffler ricocheting off buildings along Main Street.

“How’s Gally doing, Jack?” Leroy asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while except to catch sight of her going through town in the Bronco.”

“She’s okay. You know women, always goddamn complaining about this or that, never happy with the way things are. Thinks we ought to sell the place and try something else. Christ, by the time we’d pay off the first and second mortgages, there’d be nothin’ left.”

Leroy had heard it all before. He lined up empty glasses on a towel behind the bar, wishing his lower back pain would go away. Poured himself a shot of bar whiskey to ease the pain, which worked for a while but seemed only to make it worse later on.

Carlisle thought about a second beer, but the company didn’t warrant it, and he didn’t feel like troubling Leroy again. Leroy stood with one foot on a keg, laughing with the cowboy, not bothering to turn when Carlisle finished his beer and walked out. As he closed the door behind him, pool balls cracked into one another while old Frank snored and choked his way toward oblivion.

“NOW JUST
what did we have sitting down there?” Jack Deveraux asked, canting his head and looking toward the door where Carlisle had exited.

“No idea.” Leroy turned to wash more glasses. “Some longhair from somewhere. They come in once in a while. No problem, ’long as they keep quiet and keep moving.”

As he put his Red Wing lace-ups on the sidewalk outside Leroy’s, Carlisle’s first observation was that an elderly man was watching him from a second-floor window across the street, above what used to be Lester’s TV & Appliance. His second was that Salamander and the sun pretty much closed up shop at the same time.

In the past few months, Carlisle had seen hundreds of small towns, and Salamander was not unique. Other places, lots of them, looked the same with their empty storefronts, boarded-up schools, few young people on the streets. A general sense of malaise, of lifelessness, of things gone wrong.