High Plains Tango (27 page)

She delicately pointed the feather to a thin, almost invisible scar starting between her breasts and curving down for six inches over her right rib cage. “A mama baboon did that when I was twelve. I was playing with her baby, and she became nervous, wanted the baby back.”

The wine, warmed and spiced. Breasts full and lifting when she reached up and inserted the feather in her hair, smiled, and then removed it and laid it to one side. “I found it along the road during my walk out here.”

The evolution of night into day was smooth and nearly indiscernible, the storm disallowing anything other than a deep gray to form outside. Susanna was taking him along corridors of the senses he had never walked or even contemplated walking. There was a ritualistic quality to her lovemaking, a sense of progression trellising him upward toward something he could not see or even imagine.

Her face in his neck, lips in his ear, she whispered words of her own over and over until it became a mantra of sorts, and he stopped thinking about the body against which he moved. Making love with Susanna Benteen was to have her become a presence in your mind as well as a physical entity touching you.

She raised her body to meet his, both of them glistening with sweat, her face losing its composure and going slack from the rise of her sexuality, her hands sliding along the moisture on his back. He bent her like the wind bends sienna wheat in a high plains summer and eventually came to know that loving Susanna Benteen took you as near to Truth as you can get without dying.

And the woman lay there as the callused hands of a craftsman moved over her, hands upon her in all the places she wanted them to be. She touched the neck of Carlisle McMillan as he moved over her, ran her hands along the veins and arteries there, the beat of his blood in her fingertips, her words coming in small bits of Swahili and Arabic, in Navaho and Sioux, as she looked up at him.

The hours of the day compressed and expanded. Sometimes the two of them lay silent for a long while, side by side, her hands moving across his face and chest and shoulders while he did the same to her. And they whispered to each other in an old sweet language that seems profound in those moments but is difficult to recall later on.

The storm continued for another thirty-six hours. Susanna and Carlisle talked and cooked and made love, and sometimes they slept. Susanna mentioned she used to paint in watercolors but had to leave her easel behind in one of her moves.

“That can be remedied,” Carlisle said. He put on his parka and boots, tied a rope to the back door so he could find his way home through the blizzard, and waded to his workshop, staggering and thrashing about in deep snow. He stomped in through the back door while Susanna held it open, snow on his eyebrows, carrying pieces of ash and an array of Cody’s hand tools.

Chapter Nineteen

T
HE ONLY SOUND, ASIDE FROM FIRST WIND RISING, WAS THE
occasional brush of Carlisle McMillan’s leather jacket against the boards of his workshop when he shifted his weight. Two weeks after he and Susanna Benteen had first made love, he was hunkered down there, his back against the exterior north wall, covered by the quiet darkness of a high plains winter. He looked out across his pond. Every day, sometimes several times a day, he broke a hole in the pond ice so the animals could find water in hard weather. The hole would freeze over, and he would do it again. Somewhere under the snow was a new summer cactus blooming and the sweet smell of western rains. Somewhere under the ice were bluegills suspended in the cold and waiting for a warmer sun.

A young doe came out of the T-hawk forest across the road. She moved quietly through starlight and over open ground north of Carlisle’s house, circling in toward the pond. He could hear the faint crunch of her hooves across white silence. The doe paused, knowing he was there watching her, in his boots and old jacket and navy watch cap, long hair blowing only slightly. He breathed slowly, quietly.

An owl rode in on night wings and landed in one of the bare oaks near the house, head swiveling. The owl knew the field mice had tunnels under the snow. The owl also knew they left the tunnels sometimes.

Just short of the pond the doe stopped, her breath turning to foggy, transient puffs in the cold. She stamped a foot quietly, in the way whitetails demonstrate uncertainty, then came to the small piece of open water after a minute or two. She drank a little, lifted her head to look in Carlisle’s direction, drank some more. He did not move. She needed water, not alarm. She would have enough of that when the bulldozers and chain saws came in two months.

Forty thousand feet above the doe, above Carlisle McMillan, were the blinking lights of an overnight jet heading west through the northern sky. Seattle? San Francisco? Over the curve of his thoughts came the sound of a morning train, distant, almost not there. A week ago, the final decision to push the highway through had been made. In the years to come, only temporary silence would be here, silence until the next pair of headlights flashed in the darkness and the next set of truck tires rolled along the Avenue of the High Plains. The owl would be gone, the mice would be gone. All of it, the doe, the house, the pond, all of it would be gone.

Seventy feet away, in the house, Susanna slept. She would stay with him for a while, leave, then return a few days later. There was more than a trace of impermanence about her, as if she might come into high plumage and take flight at any time.

Carlisle understood. You didn’t hold Susanna Benteen, you simply moved parallel with her for a while. When it came to relationships, Carlisle guessed that forever was not part of her vocabulary and tried to accept that. Still, when she left him he was empty, and he never truly had felt that way before. He had cared for Gally, a rich feeling of warmth and friendship. But he and Susanna made something beyond what he had ever known. To touch Susanna Benteen was to move your hand across space and hear your voice ask the old questions. There were no answers, but the asking of them was enough.

Love was not a word Susanna used. She was capable of love and, in fact, could love profoundly. Carlisle sensed that and could find it sometimes in how she touched him or looked at him.

The doe finished drinking, looked again toward Carlisle, and began walking back toward the T-hawk forest. First sign of red in the east.

A few nights before, snuggled against the curve of Susanna’s back, he had dreamed: It was midafternoon in Africa, in Sudan. A child was dying there, belly swollen in the last stages of hunger, flies clustered on its open mouth. A mother, holding the child, would brush away the flies, hoping only that death would come soon to the child, and to her. But the child first. God, in Your mercy, please let it first be the child, then me; the child suffers more.

In the dream, Carlisle was engaged in strange travels. He imagined a cosmic filmmaker, six thousand trillion miles out, the distance light could travel in a thousand years Earth time. Androgynous, skilled beyond human comprehension, and with a penetrating intelligence lodged in a brain three feet in diameter, the creature of Carlisle’s fancy was sitting on a massive throne suspended on whatever passed for atmosphere in its lonely place. The terrain was flat, so perfectly flat that from its throne the creature could see for a hundred miles in all directions, and nothing moved out there.

Attached to the creature’s throne was a machine humans would call a camera and lens, but of such power and proportion that to call it that would do the instrument injustice. Two hundred meters high and forty meters in diameter was the camera, with the lens affixed at the top and reaching out sixty meters at a right angle to the camera mechanism. The creature manipulated its machine by thought alone, wherever or whatever the creature thought about, so to that place or thing the throne, the creature, and its digital image machine turned, swinging easily, silently.

Years before, the creature had filmed Cleopatra moving slowly across an Egyptian courtyard, gold bracelets flashing in sunlight, her lips parted as Antony came toward her. The photograph was cropped, Antony taken out, the likeness of Cleopatra retained and enlarged and hung on the infrastructure of the machine next to a long-range portrait of Eve that the creature had been studying for years beyond the counting.

A thousand years out, a millennium following the death of Carlisle McMillan, the powerful lens might probe a turning Earth lit in longitudinal sequence as the day raked westward over it. Over the Ganges Fan and the Java Trench, over men and women hauling in empty nets on a beach of Ocean India, over a child and its mother in Sudan. A man leaning against a shed at first light, half a world away, would come later. The camera would find the doe and the owl and the man, focus and magnification controlled by the creature’s thought, zooming in on the man as the creature willed it, down to the level of the man’s eyes and face in exquisite detail. The filmmaker would study the images later, editing, keeping some, eliminating others, its judgment hard-pure and implacable.

The man would be discarded. Self-pity unmistakable in the eyes of the man, and the creature would match that against those pulling empty nets onto a tropical coast, match it against a woman and child dying in the Sudan. Struggle would be paramount in the creature’s value scheme; self-pity would be of no interest and, more than that, a matter for condemnation. The creature would have been watching for a long time and might recall that one hundred million years ago there were no flowers in the place where this man crouched by a small building. Now the man had geese beating their way north when Earth tilted in the spring and flowers after that, and the creature would have seen them on earlier film and wished flowers would grow around its camera throne. It longed for the sight of geese moving through end-of-winter skies. But the creature’s place was cold and dark and arid, colored only in black shadow where the thin yellow from its own distant sun fell upon it and the equipment. Self-pity had no place when the stomach was full and there would be flowers again, and geese again. The creature rumbled those words in its mind, as it sorted, tossing images of the man aside. Carlisle jerked to wakefulness, breathless and overwhelmed.

Not a pretty picture of me. That’s what Carlisle thought, and remembered then the diamondback rattlesnake in what the old travelers called
mauvaises terres,
“evil lands,” the Badlands today. He had come through there once. It had been cool, and the diamondback had crawled onto the road, stretching out on the pavement’s warmth in the late afternoon. At first, Carlisle had thought it was a crack in the pavement. Then he saw the patterned back and swerved, letting his truck pass safely over the snake. There was traffic, tourists spending an hour in a place that never counted hours, counted in years by the millions if it counted at all.

Carlisle had stopped his truck, pulled a long-handled broom from his truck box, and walked back to herd the snake across the road to safety. Cars, vans, motor homes running past him, Carlisle frantically waving and pointing at the snake. Drivers adjusted, missing the snake, waving back at Carlisle. The snake would have none of it, wrapped itself into a coil in the midmost of the road, and began striking at vehicles as they passed over or around it, driven by the preservation instinct, self-defense, not anger. Humans would have called it courage if the snake had been one of them.

Blind stabbing instinct or not, Carlisle had admired the snake, six pounds of flesh rearing up and fighting back against tons of indifferent metal and rubber. He had approached to within ten feet of the diamondback when a Winnebago motor home ground the animal into a stew of red and yellow, disembodied tail flicking. A man’s arm had come out of the driver’s side as the vehicle moved on down the road, fist closed, middle finger extended, hand pumping up and down. Darwin is Darwin, screw you and your snake, Jack, whoever you are. Lunch at Wall Drug, Doris, just up ahead?

Carlisle watched the doe leaving him, thinking: Nothing’s going to be left when we get finished, not diamondbacks or old lions or men ill designed for the times of which they are a part. I, at least, can move camp, dodging the machines for a while.

At first he had thought his strategy didn’t work. Then he decided it was working pretty well until the highway project came along. As Susanna said, maybe just call that part bad luck, the highway.

Try again, she had said. “Like the Stoics, you must try to assume a posture of noble indifference toward chance. Try to slough off the road as just plain bad luck.”

He knew what he needed to become was cryptozoic.
Crypto
as in “secret” or “hidden,”
zoic
as in the way certain kinds of animals live, such as raccoons and coyotes and deer. These animals have learned to exist alongside civilization, while remaining apart from it.

Carlisle wondered if it was still possible for him to live alongside civilization and yet be somewhat apart from it. Find a slice of quiet in the layers of noise, conduct a raid into the noise now and then for some work, take the gold, and run like hell back to the quiet place. The Indians had a name for it. They called it “shapeshifting.” Carlisle had tried it once on the high plains, and it seemed to be working. He would make another run at a cryptoreality. Stay in the tunnels of a separate world as much as possible, watch for the owls when going out in the open, hope for some better luck next time. Flight was no good. You couldn’t escape it, whatever “it” was. He remembered words by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley: “In the days of the frost seek a minor sun.”

Carlisle had done it once, found his own small sun; he could do it again. It was not a perfect strategy, but it was next best to simple and didn’t involve self-pity.

The doe reached the end of the lane and crossed the road, moving into the T-hawk forest. Sunrise, smoke from the woodstove lying almost flat in the wind and streaming toward Salamander eight miles away.

Carlisle, still resting against his toolshed, looked down at his hands. With their prehensile virtues, they swung one of the best hammers anywhere. Man, the tool user. He reached down to feel the old tool belt Cody had given him, a talisman of sorts, and remembered he was not wearing it.

The smart-money boys thought they had neutralized him once and for all, counting coup while galloping across their legal documents like a little cavalry in business suits, armed with deceit and visions of a New Jerusalem out there on the prairie. Susanna had convinced him there was more to do. He wasn’t finished yet. He didn’t have much hope that anything could save his house or the birds now, but whatever it took, he wasn’t finished. He was getting ready to ratchet upward again, turning like a river.

It had taken a little digging, but thanks to Susanna figuring out that AuRA was related to gold, Carlisle’s further research had turned up the interesting fact that Williston had filed a mining claim decades ago for Wolf Butte and the land surrounding it. Mr. Ray Dargen had subsequently purchased that claim. Two years later, the land itself had been bought from the federal government by the AuRA Corporation. Susanna added the clincher: “Au” plus the first two letters of Ray Dargen’s Christian name, and the result was “AuRA.”

Carlisle had already uncovered some of that information earlier but had trouble sorting through the records. AuRA was the key. It was easy when there was a name to hook things together. The Three Buttes Land Corporation owned AuRA, and Three Buttes was a subsidiary of the RAYDAR Corporation, Dargen’s holding company that served as an umbrella for his operations. Moving on from there, Carlisle found what he earlier suspected: Some of the locals and their friends had not only machinated for a route passing near Livermore and Falls City, which it didn’t need to do if the shortest route was a concern, but they also had advance word of the project and bought land in key locations along the right-of-way. Land they bought for a hundred bucks an acre would be worth twenty or more times that when the interstate came by. The Three Buttes Land Corporation had made a sizable chunk of these purchases.