High Plains Tango Read online

  Call it the hard press of reality, Carlisle thought, call it getting by in an uncharitable world, call it anything you want. That didn’t pretty it up, the nibbling away at the dreams, the silent, creeping, almost unconscious surrender to the forces of banality. Hardly noticing, concentrating on survival, he spiraled down through the levels of pride and caring, until he finally leveled off at a place he never expected to be.

  He came to see himself as just another carnival pony plodding along in a great, trashy parade of things ephemeral, things of no value beyond what someone was willing to pay for them. The market took the measure of things, and Carlisle understood that the markets of that hard, unsmiling time seldom valued quality of the kind produced by Cody Marx. Carlisle’s language, his outlook, his posture, all reflected acquiescence to a system Cody Marx had quietly railed against.

  Even the occasional woman in Carlisle’s life had come to be handled in the same way: nothing permanent, permanence didn’t matter. Another woman, an evanescent night or week, and move on, keep up with the parade.

  He had fought back the guilt, suppressing the low and persistent mumble of protest within, telling himself and others that times had changed, that the leisurely, self-indulgent world of Cody Marx no longer existed. That worked for a while, and the rationalizations deadened him, like the too much beer he drank in the evenings, like the weekends that were lost in bar talk and bitching.

  His partner, Buddy Reems, once said, “Carlisle, it’s become a race between people with your outlook and the developers, and you’ve got concrete in your boots. You’re suffering a major friction between practice and instinct, covering up the gap between this bullshit work we do and who you really are. You’re trimming your life, Carlisle. Just like we slap molding over the place where two boards meet so you can’t see the crack.”

  Carlisle remembered Buddy’s words clearly, and he knew Buddy was right, though a part of him wanted to deny it. He was benefiting from what civic boosters called development, all the builders were.

  Buddy’s observation occurred while the two of them were sitting on top of a house they were putting up in Oakland. They had just finished nailing roof sheathing to the rafters and were taking a break before hauling up the shingles and laying them down. All around Carlisle and Buddy, new houses were under construction. From the rooftop they could see downtown San Francisco across the bay, where cranes were working thirty stories in the air, looking like big fishing rods in the summer heat waves, spooling concrete and metal up to the guys balanced on high steel. Everywhere, the grading and pouring and hammering were going on.

  He and Buddy were on a runaway freight train moving too fast for a workable dismount. How the hell could you get off and not stumble? Payments on the truck and tools. Payments to subcontractors. Rent. A few bucks for serious Saturday night drinking. They were doing a wire-walking act on top of the train, working without a net, knowing a client’s default on a lumber bill could send them tumbling.

  Buddy had swung off the train, though, and joined a commune in New Mexico. He took up with a girl from Taos who had legs longer than last week, so he said. He also said he’d share her with Carlisle in true communal spirit if Carlisle would come on down.

  They stayed in touch for a while, but eventually the commune imploded and Carlisle lost track of him. Carlisle kept on building houses he didn’t like for people he liked even less. Days going by, years going by, swinging his hammer and counting his pay, enduring the blind sweat of routine work. Making compromises to bring projects in at budget, maximizing cosmetic style at the expense of craftsmanship, benumbed and losing his way. Trying to forget Cody and failing in that effort.

  A voice from somewhere kept saying: You have to turn like a river.

  Carlisle had always been quiet, but it got to the point that he hardly ever spoke, the torment from what he considered his betrayal of Cody Marx, and himself, tearing him apart. Nights, he sat in his little apartment beneath a yellow evening lamp and thought about it. In the apartment below, an elderly woman watched reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show, and the too sweet horns and same-sweet voices sent red, red robins and sunnier sides of happy streets up through the carpet while a gay couple across the hall quarreled endlessly.

  Above him, late on Saturday nights, he endured the dull thump of a bond trader bouncing on a fashion consultant, the unimaginative four-four meter of their desire forming a cadence so measured that you could dance to it.

  The woman on the futon was given to pleas of “More!” while the man favored “Yeeesss! Ohhhh . . . Yes!”

  Sirens in the distance,

  foghorns from the waterfront,

  book in his lap,

  drink in his hand,

  fly on the lampshade,

  the Lennon Sisters in waltz time below,

  red, red robins,

  and a wavering string of MORE-OH-YESes from above.

  Carlisle McMillan sat there, remembering what Cody Marx had said about working to close tolerances in all things, numbed by the savage burlesque his life had become.

  On a spring morning, he was thinking again about how far he had toppled from where he’d begun, from the day he first strapped on the old tool belt he was wearing now. Thinking that Cody would shake his head in disbelief if he saw the work, saw the compromises, saw the capitulation to everything he had stood against. Turn like a river . . .

  Carlisle was laying down subflooring in what would eventually be the sunken living room of a fifty-eight-hundred-square-foot number. A big split-level on which he was doing the carpentry work as a subcontractor. The house was for an executive who worried about the color of logos on toothpaste packages and was paid a third of a million bucks every 365 days in monthly installments for his deliberations.

  Voices were coming from the vacant lot next door. Carlisle sat back on his haunches and looked out the open window beside him, hammer in his right hand resting on his thigh. Two men and a woman. One of the men, perspiring and cumbrous, was talking. He was either a Realtor or a developer or the manager of a big construction firm; they all kind of ran together after a while. The other man was rounding in the gut and slumped in the shoulders from deskwork and expense account lunches and a lack of exercise.

  The woman was one of those California dreams. On the Eighth Day, and rested from His previous labors, God had built a secret plant somewhere down the coast of that western land for the sole purpose of manufacturing women like her. Thirty-five, maybe, and a lovely tight body wrapped in designer jeans tucked into knee-high leather boots and a light pink sweater that showed her fine breasts swinging upward underneath it. Blond hair halfway down her back fastened with a gold clasp.

  Carlisle looked at her, then at the sorry suit standing next to her, and figured she arched her back and smacked her belly against some horse from a local exercise salon, early afternoons, probably, in a good motel. He remembered meeting a guy from Illinois who swore he was heading west to bring back one of these California beauties lashed like a hunter’s trophy to the fender of his car. Carlisle could hear the three of them talking, with the developer-Realtor giving a short, verbal tour of things to be.

  “Over there is where the golf course and clubhouse will go. Your lot will be on the edge of the fourteenth fairway. Allison, I understand you like to play tennis. There’ll be six courts by the clubhouse, just a short distance from the Olympic-size swimming pool. Of course, access to the entire area will be controlled by guards at the gate. And we’re bringing in a chef from London, who will make sure the clubhouse dining room serves only the best continental cuisine.”

  “Hey, Carlisle, how’s it going?” The contractor had arrived, making his rounds. “I promised the Muellers you’d have this in shape by the first of July. Gonna make it, I hope. I might have to pull you off this job for a few days to help out the knotheads working for me south of here. They dunno shit from shinola about building houses. Christ, Carlisle, they put the dormers on the wrong side on two units. And we’ve got sixteen more uni
ts just getting started over in Concord. I’d like you to do some framing over there. Just get this flooring down as fast as you can. We’ll run the carpet over it and nobody’ll know the difference. How the hell come you don’t use a nail gun like everyone else, anyway?”

  Carlisle, still on his knees, brown hair hanging over his collar, sweat dripping off the end of his nose and through his faded blue workshirt, squeezed the hammer in his hand and turned his dark eyes up at the contractor. A sparrow had flown in and landed on a two-by-six lying a few feet from him, tail flicking, leaving a small gratuity on the board.

  The salesman next door was rambling on.

  So was the contractor.

  So was Allison Whoever.

  So was the sorry suit.

  So was everybody in the entire world, it seemed to Carlisle, and as far as he could tell, they were all talking about the same thing: crap. That’s what they were talking about: crap, sparrow crap.

  “Dancing at the clubhouse on Saturdays, Allison . . .”

  “Carlisle, the units over in Concord are el cheapos, so don’t worry about . . .”

  “Bill, though we can’t say it openly, minorities won’t be a problem . . .”

  “Allison, you’ll just love . . .”

  “Carlisle, I want you to . . .”

  “We’ll need room for three cars . . .”

  “Get this place buttoned up, Carlisle. We need you in Concord.”

  Carlisle turned his head and stared at the floor. Turn like a river . . .

  He stood up slowly, unfastening his tool belt, and jammed the hammer into it as he walked toward his truck. The young man hired by the contractor to be Carlisle’s helper had been lugging in a crated stained-glass window, a mass-produced design Carlisle had already installed in two other houses this year.

  Walking and speaking quietly, he looked at the contractor and flipped his head toward the young man. “Let him finish it. After that he can do the framing over at Concord and move right on from there with his nail gun, all the way down the coast to Tijuana, make a big circle, and hit Bakersfield on his way back up to Vancouver.”

  The young man carrying the window looked at Carlisle, then at the contractor, his face a mixture of anxiety and confusion, waiting for directions. This was a guy who still thought a dovetail joint had something to do with dope and whom Carlisle had to roust from bed three mornings out of six. The contractor was shouting obscenities and telling Carlisle to get back on the job, the young man was holding the window, the people in the vacant lot next door were staring. Carlisle McMillan climbed into his truck and started the engine.

  He went back to his furnished apartment, packed his clothes and radio into a couple of duffel bags, and settled up with the building manager. He made the bank just before closing time and withdrew everything he had: $11,212.47. A thousand in cash, three thousand in traveler’s checks, two thousand in a check to his mother to help her get by, the rest in a bank draft.

  His smaller tools went into the metal box fastened to the bed of the six-year-old Chevy pickup. His books, table saw, and other bulky things were stashed in a you-store-it-you-keep-the-key cubicle, and he pulled out in early evening, with no idea of where he was headed.

  He started with the Oakland Bay Bridge, swung north through Sacramento, and eventually picked up a little two-laner across the Sierra Nevada, up into Idaho. Nice country there, but too close to California, too close to the roar of a future he didn’t care much about seeing.

  The truck seemed to have its own mind at crossroads, so Carlisle had let it go, running east, all the way to the North Carolina coast. At Cedar Island, he took the ferry over to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks and settled down in a B&B to watch the trawlers and catch the wind. But the developers had been there, too, not at Ocracoke, but north and south a little ways, pinching in toward him. He could smell them, feel them. Screwing up Nags Head with their condos and theme restaurants, building on land the sea would never stop trying to reclaim, asking for government help when their houses washed away after they had been advised not to build on the mercurial dunes.

  It was worse farther down. On the sea islands, off the mainland from Charleston, the white boys were sweating only lightly in their tan summer suits while slickering everybody, mostly the descendants of ex-slaves who had owned the islands. Carlisle sat on a sea wall next to an old black man and talked with him about it.

  The man told him the island people were originally into family and poetry, music and Christian mysticism. Still were to some extent. The world they had fixed up in this sweltry place was one of Brer Rabbit and Brer Gator and fine sea island cotton. Now the white boys, they were into something else altogether. Hard-nosed stuff, that’s what they were up to.

  “They’s ridin’ ’round in those little golf carts, just a-figgerin’. All the time they’s a-figgerin.’”

  The old man wore brown striped pants from a suit that had been new thirty years ago but was now shiny with wear, a blue-striped white shirt with a frayed collar, and a gray fedora. As he talked, he looked out toward the sea islands, his voice taking on a distance that seemed farther away than the islands themselves. Carlisle listened, sometimes looking down at the patterns they both were making in the sand with the toes of their shoes, sometimes looking out to where the old man looked, out to the islands.

  What those white boys had done was brilliant, Carlisle admitted that to himself. Ruthless, but brilliant. It worked like this, according to the old man. Offer big money for land, get the avarice sluicing around in the heads of some poor folks, and put an expensive hotel on the site. That jacked up property taxes beyond what the remaining landholders could afford. To pay the taxes, they had to sell the land given to them by General William Tecumseh Sherman after the Civil War. The developers bought the land and put up more hotels and condos and beach clubs. Property taxes rose even more, the cycle continued.

  Eventually, an island would reach what the fast guys called “buildout,” which meant there wasn’t any more room for construction. And the really delicious part? The great-grandson of former slaves, a fellow who used to own a little land on one of the islands, wound up working as a pool boy at the Hilton. He vacuumed the bottom of chlorinated ponds while his mother stared through an iron fence at the graves of her ancestors. She needed a pass from the white folks at the hotel to visit the grave sites. Brilliant—elegant, in fact—you had to allow them that much.

  He said good-bye to the old man and drove to what he hoped might be a quiet beach. That didn’t work out. The college troops were on spring break, even though most of them, in Carlisle’s way of looking at things, hadn’t studied hard enough to deserve any break at all, and those studying hard were back at school in the library. He had spent four years at Stanford and knew the real scholars were not on the beaches, even though they were the ones needing a rest, along with construction workers, machinists, and the Mohawks working high steel, none of whom had spring breaks written into their union contracts.

  A wet T-shirt contest was in full blossom on a stage near the water, the present contestant being a good-looking girl wearing bikini bottoms and a doused cutoff T-shirt, which had CLOSED MONDAYS printed on the front. In spite of the nonsense, Carlisle couldn’t help but admire her breasts. Her nipples were practically tearing apart the thin cotton in an effort to be seen. He supposed swinging your fine tits in front of four hundred howling men did that to some women.

  The Sigma Chi and their affiliates were drunk and sunburned and falling back toward the darkness civilization was rumored to have overcome. “Let-us-see-them . . . Let-us-see-them,” they chanted with what they took to be clownish understatement, more tongue-in-cheek refined than “Show us your tits!” while a Van Halen tape hammered the afternoon through a sound system designed to communicate with other worlds.

  And, eventually, she did let them see. Stripped off her shirt and dignity at the same time, setting free those big, lovely breasts with a suntan line across them, while civilization fell to its knees weep
ing, along with the Sigma Chi. That done, the crowd started working on her bikini pants, the gentle roar of hundreds of drunks urging her to get rid of those, too. Responding, she moved into a self-conscious bump and grind with strong Protestant overtones, hesitant thrusts of her pelvis—not too much—movements confined by years of parental admonitions concerning moderation in all things.

  Somewhere, Carlisle imagined, her parents were sipping cocktails and telling their friends, “Yes, Christina is a sophomore at William and Mary, but she hasn’t decided on a major yet. She’s mentioned sociology, or maybe art, but we’re worried about her lack of direction. And what do you do with a degree in art?” With that body, Carlisle grinned to himself, Christina needn’t worry about direction, because a long line of expert advisers would be happy to provide guidance.

  HE DROVE south again, walking the beaches where he could get to them via the few public accesses left. Hunkering down for days at a time, reading, thinking, letting his hair grow longer, looking for salvage. In late summer, he caromed off the East Coast and headed inland again. He remembered a place called Chimney Rock wedged in Hickory Nut Gorge, not far from Asheville. He had spent a week there with a woman in . . . he tried to remember . . . long time ago, in autumn. She wanted to take a look at a small piece of land she owned in the southern Blue Ridge. Carlisle had just been discharged from the army and was headed from Fort Bragg to California, so he decided to go with her.

  It had been real nice. A fast mountain stream with a pretty lake at the end of it slashed through the village. They rented a chalet with a big stone fireplace and a long front porch. She was a fine woman in her late twenties, a little older than Carlisle. Her husband had left her after finishing medical school, and she was forced to take a job in the maintenance division office at the base. That’s where Carlisle had met her.

  His carpentry saved him from Vietnam. A colonel took one look at Carlisle’s skills and assigned him to the maintenance division. He completed his two years working on the officers’ quarters at Fort Bragg, plus a few afternoons now and then at the colonel’s home, building a deck out back and a sauna in the basement. Routine hitch, no sweat.