Centennial

  “I’d rather cut off my right hand,” Garrett said, and he meant it. He was about to make a phone call to Montana when he heard footsteps on the porch, and when he went out he found to his astonishment that Morgan Wendell, the presumptive Czar, was standing there.

  “I had to vote early,” Morgan explained. His manager had told him, “Be there at seven. I’ll have photographers on hand, and we’ll make all the afternoon papers.” He had stood by the voting machine with his wife, both of them smiling.

  “I trust you’re going to vote, Paul.”

  “Never miss.”

  “I hope you’ll vote for me.”

  “Isn’t this rather late to be campaigning?”

  “I’m not campaigning. It looks as if I’ll win safely, and I don’t give a damn how you vote.”

  Garrett had made no move to invite Wendell into the castle, a place the real estate man had rarely visited, but this sharp rejoinder brought him to attention. “What’s the reason for the visit, Morgan?”

  “Something very important, Paul.” The candidate hesitated, and Garrett said, “Come on in,” and Wendell said, “Thanks.”

  As Garrett ushered him into the big room with the moose heads, Wendell said abruptly, “Paul, you and I have never gotten along well, and I suppose that when you do vote, you’ll vote for Hendrickson.” Garrett shrugged his shoulders but said nothing. “What I’m here for is to tell you that I need your help ... need it badly.”

  “You just said you didn’t give a damn.”

  “On the voting ... who cares? But on the morning after I’m elected—and I think I will be—I’m going to require some first-rate brains to help me out. No, don’t interrupt. Brains are not my long suit. But sensing what’s happening in the world is—anticipating what troubles people.”

  “How does this involve me?”

  “Most directly. The great problem in the next decade in Colorado will be to save the state. I really mean that. To save the forests, the trout, the elk—and especially things like the rivers and the air we breathe.”

  Paul Garrett leaned back and studied his visitor. “You know, Morgan, for the first time in your life you’re talking sense.”

  “I’ve learned it from men like you,” Wendell said. “The first appointment I want to give to the press is my deputy, Paul Garrett.”

  “It’s a job I’d have to accept ... if offered.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “But, Morgan, I won’t take it just to provide a façade for you. When you speak about ecology it’s the popular word, the in-thing to do politically. And I have no objections, because men have to get elected. But when I use the word it summarizes my whole life. I may not be an easy man to live with.”

  “That I understand,” Wendell said. “Let’s leave it this way. You make every decision about our natural resources just as you see it, and when you become totally intolerable, I’ll fire you with a ‘Dear Paul’ letter and replace you with someone a little more congenial. I judge we can tolerate each other for at least three years, and in that time the basic task can be started.”

  “Sounds workable,” Garrett said. Then he thought of something that might prove disqualifying. “You know, Morgan, that I’m testifying at the Calendar trial this week. It could prove sticky.”

  Wendell lowered his head, for this was unpleasant news. The Calendar trial was bound to agitate voters across the state, and to have his deputy take sides was bound to be unsettling. “Couldn’t you duck that one, Paul?”

  Garrett laughed. “You see, even before you make the appointment you’re asking me to draw back. Morgan, the Calendar trial is at the heart of all we’ve been talking about. Of course I can’t duck it. Of course I’m going to embarrass you.”

  “Maybe I could delay announcing your appointment. That would be reasonable.”

  “Anything is reasonable,” Garrett said. “Anything on God’s earth can be given a reason. But if you delay, I won’t accept the appointment. Can’t you see, Morgan, I will always be a thorn in your side, because the protection of this state will invariably irritate people whom you want to placate ... whom you must placate. It’s going to be a dogfight every inch of the way. We know that. Question is, can we live with it?”

  Wendell contemplated this forthright declaration of difference, then said, “Your job will be to protect all the natural good things of this state, and I know you’ll do it. My job is to see that industry gets a fair shake so there will be jobs and tax rolls. You conserve the water. I want every drop I can get for new cities and new factories. It will be difficult, and you want to make it worse by getting mixed up in the Calendar affair ... infuriate every hunter in the state.”

  “You wouldn’t want me, Morgan, if I weren’t committed on such issues.”

  Morgan Wendell, facing the first difficult decision of his future administration, took a deep breath and said something which took Garrett completely off guard. “Paul, do you know who my favorite American of all time was? Warren Gamaliel Harding. Because he came along at a lush period of our national life, when we had a comfortable margin for error. And he proved how horrible an elected official can be. He’s a warning for all politicians. On the day we take office we all think of President Harding and we say to ourselves, ‘Well, I won’t allow myself to be as bad as that.’ Harding keeps the ball game honest, and I judge him to be one of the most useful Americans who ever lived. I’m not going to be the Colorado Harding.”

  “I’m having lunch in town,” Garrett said. “At the Marquez place. Join me.”

  So the first public appearance the Czar made was in the Flor de Méjico, with a man who was known to be cool toward his candidacy. It did Wendell a lot of good in the district, but shrewd politician that he was, he saw something that day which would aid him even more. He had an unusual gift for sensing what was going on in his vicinity, and as he entered the restaurant with Garrett he noticed that Paul hesitated in the doorway and looked in all directions, then walked to the table, plainly showing his disappointment.

  Later in the meal Wendell was watching Garrett out of the corner of his eye and saw his future deputy’s face brighten. Looking toward the kitchen, Wendell saw Manolo Marquez’s daughter come in with an armful of dishes. Townspeople knew that she had been married in Los Angeles, but after only two weeks, she had returned home with a scar down the side of her face and grounds for divorce. Well, I’ll be damned! he said to himself. Old blueblood Garrett and a Chicano girl! That could make me very popular with the Chicano voters in the southwest. I will be damned.

  That afternoon when Paul Garrett went into the secrecy of the polling booth and looked at the two names confronting him—Charles Hendrickson, a man who lacked every qualification that Democrats sometimes had, and Morgan Wendell, a man without the basic character expected in Republicans, he felt a great nausea. I’ll be damned if I can vote for either of them, he decided, and after pulling the lever for one of the Takemoto boys who was running for school board and another lever for a German woman, he left the booth without voting for Czar on either ticket.

  On the following day he began his series of inspection tours, those brief trips during which he simply looked at the land he would be protecting. His journeys east through the drylands sometimes brought tears to his eyes as he surveyed that chronicle of lost hope. but he was even more deeply distressed by what he saw along the front range from Cheyenne down to the New Mexico border:

  When I was a boy we had an old book, Journey West by John Brent of Illinois. He came this way in 1848, and I remember his writing in his diary that one morning, while they were still one hundred and five miles east of the Rockies, they could see the mountains so clearly they could almost spot the valleys. Look at them now! We’re ten miles away and we can’t see a damned thing—only that lens of filth, that curtain of perpetual smog. What must be in the minds of men that they are satisfied to smother a whole range of mountains in their aerial garbage? This must be the saddest sight in America.

  S
outh from Cheyenne, clear across Colorado, hung a perpetual veil of suspended contamination. The lens appeared to be seven hundred feet thick, composed of industrial waste, especially from the automobile. Week after week it hung there, stagnant. Had it clung to the ground, it would have imperiled human breathing and would have been treated as the menace it was, but since it stayed aloft, it merely blotted out the sun and dropped enough acid to make the eyes smart twenty-four hours a day.

  From Centennial, Beaver Mountain was no longer visible, and whole days would pass with the cowboys at Venneford unable to see that majestic range which once had formed their western backdrop. Men who used to stand at the intersection of Mountain and Prairie, inspecting the Rockies to determine the weather, now had to get that information from the radio.

  Garrett was especially perturbed about what had happened to Denver, once America’s most spectacular capital, a mile-high city with the noblest Rockies looking down on the lively town, made prosperous by the mountains’ yield of silver and gold. Now it was a smog-bound trap with one of the worst atmospheres in the nation, and the mountains were seen no more.

  There were days, of course, when the contamination was swept aloft by some intruding breeze, making the peaks visible again for a few hours. Then people would stare lovingly at the great mountains and tell their children, “It used to be this way all the time.”

  During the past ten years Paul Garrett had often had the dismal feeling that no one in Denver gave a damn. The state had succumbed to the automobile, and any attempt to discipline it had seemed futile. Year after year, two citizens a day were killed by cars throughout the state, and no one did anything to halt the slaughter. Drunk drivers accounted for more than half these deaths, but the legislature refused to punish them. It was held that any red-blooded man in the west was entitled to his car and his gun, and what he did with either was no one else’s business.

  The west had surrendered to the automobile in a way it had once refused to surrender to the Indian, for the car in one year killed more settlers than the redman did during the entire history of the territory. The concrete ribbons ate up the landscape and penetrated to the most secret places. And if by chance some valley remained inviolate, the snowmobile whined and sputtered its way in, chasing the elk until they died of exhaustion. No place was sacred, no place was quiet, in no valley was the snow left undisturbed.

  Paul Garrett, pondering these problems in the early days of November, made a series of promises: “As Deputy Commissioner of Resources and Priorities I’m going to switch to a small car. I’m going to drive slower. Day and night I’m going to tackle the Denver smog. And I’m going to ban snowmobiles in every state forest.” Even so he feared that such measures might be too late, and he muttered sardonically, “Pretty soon, if you want to see the unspoiled grandeur of Colorado you’ll have to go to Wyoming.”

  On Friday, November 9, Paul Garrett faced up to a most disagreeable task. He shaved carefully, dressed in a conservative business suit, and with his razor, trimmed some of the gray hair about his ears. This would be his first public appearance since the announcement of his appointment to the new position, and he wanted to make a good impression.

  He drove to the Federal Court in Denver, where the trial of Floyd Calendar was to start. The judge was a small, alert man with a well-known sense of humor, and the contesting attorneys were men who typified the forces at stake in this case. The district attorney, representing the conservation forces of the nation, was a former athlete who could not in the slightest degree be termed a bleeding heart, while the defense attorney was a famous outdoors man, well known as a hunter and a rancher.

  The accused was something else again. Floyd Calendar was a mean-looking, thin, heavily bearded man in his early sixties. He wore no tie and his suit seemed several sizes too large, even though he was a tall man. He had one tooth missing in front, which made his normally surly countenance almost sinister. Even so, he represented hunters, men who loved the outdoors and ranchers who sought to protect their livestock.

  Calendar was involved in two serious crimes: shooting bald eagles, our national bird, from a plane and killing bears, an endangered species, in “a cruel and unfair manner.”

  The first prosecution witness was Harold Emig, from Centennial. The government lawyer wanted to use him to establish the kind of man Floyd Calendar was.

  “He was a guide,” Emig said. “First public job he had was putting parties together to shoot prairie dogs.”

  “Are prairie dogs edible?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Oh, no! You just shoot prairie dogs for the fun of it. Floyd knew where all the dog towns were. There aren’t many these days, you know. And for a dollar a head he would take us out there, and we’d rim the prairie-dog town. We’d be on the west, you understand, so’s the sun would be in the critters’ eyes, and Floyd had drums and whistles and he knew how to make the little fellows stick their heads up, and when one did we’d blaze away.”

  “How many dogs would you kill?”

  “Well, on a good day when Floyd’s whistles were working, each man would get maybe ten, twenty ... that’s not countin’ probables.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “Nothin’. A prairie dog ain’t good for nothin’. You couldn’t eat ’em. It was just the fun of seein’ a little head pop up from the hole and blasting it with a well-aimed shot.”

  “Does Mr. Calendar still conduct such hunts?”

  “No, sir. After a while the dogs were pretty well cleaned out, and he turned to rabbit drives. You get sixty, seventy men with clubs and you range over a pretty large area, always closin’ the circle, and in the end you have an excitin’ time, everybody clubbin’ rabbits to death.”

  “I thought that was stopped some years ago.”

  “Yeah. Life magazine slipped a photographer into one of Floyd’s hunts and took pictures of the men ... I was in the middle of one of the shots. Well, it sort of irritated a lot of women back east ... grown men you know, clubbin’ jackrabbits that way, but they never seen what damage a rabbit could do.”

  “Then what did Mr. Calendar do?”

  “Well, he came up with a real fine idea. Lot of men in pickup trucks and special huntin’ dogs, and we’d go out onto the prairie, far away from everything, and we’d turn up some coyotes, and we’d chase after ’em for mebbe ten miles and then we’d let the dogs go and they’d zero in on a coyote.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then the dogs would tear him apart.” There was a pause in court, and Emig added, “It was necessary, of course, because coyotes eat sheep.”

  “Your sheep?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Calendar’s sheep?”

  “No. We just went along for the fun.”

  The prosecution now called a new witness, Clyde Devlin, a dynamiter. “What we done, there wasn’t no more prairie dogs, and the coyotes was used up, so Floyd, he kept lookin’ for anything sportin’, and his mind fell on the rattlers up at the buttes. We bought small sticks of dynamite and threw them into the dens. Killed a lot that way, but the fun was standin’ around with shotguns and blastin’ the others as they crawled out.

  “But the reason people was willin’ to pay money for the dynamitin’ was the fun of seein’ Floyd handle rattlers. He had a way of pinnin’ ’em down with a forked stick, then pickin’ ’em up by the tail and snappin’ ’em like a whip. The rattler’s head would fly off. I seen him whip sixteen snakes in one day, and nobody else had the guts to try even one. Me? I wouldn’t get near ’em.”

  The prosecutor turned to the first serious charge. Calling to the stand Hank Garvey, pilot of a small plane stationed at Fort Collins, he asked, “When, in your opinion, Mr. Garvey, did Mr. Calendar first direct his attention to eagles?”

  “We were flyin’ one day, about five years ago, and in the distance we seen this eagle come off a dead tree, and we both watched it flyin’ for some time, and Floyd said, ‘Hell, Hank, with the right attention a man could stay on that e
agle’s tail and blast him right out of the sky.’ So we spent a whole week makin’ dry runs, seein’ if we could spot eagles and close in on them, and we found it was right easy. Eagles don’t fly half as fast as they show ’em in the cartoons.”

  “When did the idea ... I mean, whose idea was it to do this commercially?”

  “That came natural. Floyd and I knew a lot about hunters, him bein’ a guide and all, and we knew how tough it was for a hunter to bag hisself a eagle. Some very good shots tried for years without ever gettin’ close to one, let alone hittin’ it. And this bugged ’em, because on their walls they would have the head of a rhinoceros from Africa and a tiger from India, but they wouldn’t have their own national bird. There was a blank spot on their wall, and they were hungry to do somethin’ about it, because nothin’ looks better, when it’s mounted right, than a bald eagle.”