High Plains Tango

  Carlisle got to his feet, a little unsteady. “Sun’s going down. Be dark in a couple of hours.”

  “Does darkness bother you?”

  “No, but my expedition isn’t finished. The piece of driftwood . . .”

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for. I enjoyed our talk.”

  “Thanks, so did I.” He walked back up the shore. It was full night when he stepped onto his front porch, carrying a long, pale gray piece of driftwood over his left shoulder. Susanna was still sitting by her small fire, under a bluff, near the river. She was thinking about Carlisle McMillan, about the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, about the strange old feelings that came to her almost every night and urged her toward something she was trying hard to understand.

  HIS FIRST winter out on the high plains was one of Carlisle’s best. Short prairie days of compressed light, weather alternating between stone gray afternoons and mornings of luminous, brittle cold. With the house snugged down and the woodstove cooking away, he worked on the inside, the phase of construction he always liked best. Even though he was not short-changing any part of the building, somehow the opportunities for craftsmanship were most easily seen and done on interior spaces.

  After Thanksgiving, Gally pulled out to visit her daughter in Casper, leaving the ranch in the keeping of a hired man. Her daughter was pregnant with her third child and having a hard time, so Gally stayed on to help her. She sent Carlisle a Christmas card, saying she missed his company and that she would return after the baby was born, early in February.

  In November, after the crops were harvested, Axel Looker had put in an all-weather road for Carlisle. He had stopped one day while Carlisle was standing by the main road, looking at the sorry condition of his lane. The rains of autumn combined with traffic had turned it into a strip of deep, muddy ruts twelve feet wide.

  Axel leaned out his truck window. “Hi, neighbor. Looks like you could use a good path up to your house.”

  Carlisle nodded. “I’m standing here thinking about how to get it done.”

  “No problem. You order out some gravel from the Guthridge Brothers pit, and I’ll pilot my baby ’dozer down here. I can have it done in a day or two.”

  Indeed, Axel did have it finished in two days. A nice little road banked just right for moisture runoff, with gravel spread evenly over the base he’d constructed. Carlisle offered payment, but Axel Looker refused.

  “With the crops in, I’ve been drivin’ Earlene nuts just hangin’ around thinkin’ of things to do. That being so, she’s drivin’ me nuts ’cause I’m drivin’ her nuts. Puttin’ in your road was a family vacation of sorts. Sometime I’ll have some carpentry work you can rough up for me. Till then, don’t worry about it.”

  After a heavy snow, Carlisle would hear Axel’s big Steiger tractor working in the lane, scooping snow with a front-end loader and dumping it off to the sides. When Carlisle stepped out, Axel would wave, red-faced and apparently having fun, feeling the power of his iron underneath him, taking a short and separate vacation from Earlene.

  Gally returned from Casper on the fifth of February. She phoned Carlisle in late afternoon, an hour after getting home. “Hello, carpenter, how’re you doing?”

  “Gally! Good to hear your voice. I’m real good, hammering and sawing as usual. How’s your daughter?”

  “She’s fine now. Got the baby here in good shape, got Sharon organized and moving forward. Lord, I’m glad I don’t have three little ones to look after. She has her hands full and will for the next eighteen years or so. . . . Carlisle, I missed you. I picked up some things at a Custer deli on my way in, thought I might stop by if you’re up for an evening of beer and pastrami?”

  “I am indeed. Come over anytime.”

  “Okay. I have some reentry things to clean up here. Be about two hours or so. All right?”

  “Great. See you then.”

  Gally Deveraux bathed in her old clawfoot tub, lying back in warm, soapy water, hair pinned up. The countryside was somber that time of year, hunkered down and trying to outlast winter’s pounding that made the high plains seem like Siberia. From the tub, she could see the sky through her bathroom window, the color of gray mud, looking low and wet and ominous.

  It felt good to be home, and she lay there for a long time thinking about her daughter, then about her own life and what she might do with it. Then about Carlisle McMillan. She put her toes on the faucet and wiggled them happily, then reached for her razor. She shaved her legs and stepped out, feeling uncommonly feminine and slightly wicked for some reason, the way she used to feel in the early days when Jack still called her Easy, the way she had felt that night riding home from the Flagstone, naked on Jack’s lap.

  Carlisle was on his stepladder when he heard the Bronco come up his lane. When she knocked, he yelled, “Come in, but watch the stepladder when you open the door.”

  Gally tentatively moved the door inward, felt it bump against the ladder, peered in, and squeezed through the opening. She looked up at him. “What are you doing up there in the air?”

  He looked down at her and grinned. “Decided to put in a small loft. Be down in a minute, soon as I get these last few nails in the railing and countersink ’em.”

  Gally went into the kitchen, took the food out of paper bags, and put it in the fridge. She looked at Carlisle’s backside. He was stretched up, hammer positioned in his right hand, nail steadied with his left. He had a baseball cap on backward with GIANTS lettered on the crown, brown hair hanging straight and long. His flannel shirt was untucked in the back, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She watched his right forearm position the hammer, saw the muscles in it flex. Three easy shots of the hammer and the nail was driven home, solidly, perfectly. He reached in his tool belt, took out a punch, and countersunk the nail.

  He came down the ladder and walked over to her, smiling, and put his arms around her, hammer dangling from his right hand. “Hello, Gally Deveraux. Nice to see you.”

  She hugged him, smelled sawdust and perspiration, felt the muscles in his back, and, without even thinking about it, tucked his shirttail in. That, she thought, is intimacy, tucking in a man’s shirttail.

  She pulled back and grinned up at him. “I missed you, Carlisle.”

  “Same here, Gally. It’s been quiet since you left. Dumptruck’s pretty much decided to just sleep out the winter, far as I can tell.”

  “Not a bad strategy, I’d say. Animals understand how to roll with nature. We keep trying to fight it. Hungry?”

  “Nope. Thirsty, though.”

  “I can fix that. Along with pastrami and rye and coleslaw and other things, I picked up some St. Pauli Girl. Big splurge, homecoming celebration and all.”

  Taking a six-pack of Bud from the cooler at the deli, she had seen the St. Pauli Girl and remembered that’s what Carlisle had bought for Thanksgiving. She returned the Bud to the cooler and took out the St. Pauli Girl, feeling extravagant, hoping Carlisle would be home that night.

  “Carlisle, you have chairs! Three of them, folding ones.”

  “Yeah, church basement stuff till I figure out something else. When it comes to furniture, function dominates form for the moment. Plus the fact they remind me of going to catechism on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid. Wynn, my mother, had given up her father’s Presbyterian ways and joined the Catholics.”

  “How’d that go for you?”

  “The nuns used to whack our knuckles with a ruler if we couldn’t answer their questions, simple ones, such as ‘Who is God?’ Fifteen years later, I had a philosophy professor ask the same question on a final examination, and I still couldn’t answer it. Still can’t.” He was stretched out in one of the chairs, legs out in front of him, right ankle crossed over the left. He leaned forward, unfastened his leather tool belt, and laid it on the floor beside him.

  “How did you answer the philosophy professor’s question? Or did you just leave it blank?”

  “No, I thought about it for the entire exam period, t
ried several different slants, none of which worked. Finally I simply wrote, ‘God Is.’”

  “What happened?”

  “I got a B plus.”

  Gally smiled. “Smart move, Carlisle. Most people would have written sixteen pages full of blather. Your answer was like your carpentry, just enough, never too much.” She pulled off her boots and sat cross-legged in a chair, elbows on her knees and facing him. She wiggled her toes underneath white socks. “Where did you go to college?”

  “Stanford.”

  “Wow, that’s the big leagues. Expensive, too.”

  “I had a tuition scholarship. Got some government help and did carpentry part-time. It worked out.”

  “Did you graduate?”

  “Yes. I did it for my mother. I wanted to please her, so I stayed with it.”

  “What was your major?”

  “Started out in engineering. I could handle it, but I didn’t like it. Switched over to art with an emphasis in graphic design, took a minor in English lit. It was okay. But all I ever wanted to be was a carpenter, ever since I was a kid working with Cody Marx, the old fellow I told you about.”

  He grinned and took a long drink of St. Pauli Girl. “I think a shower is in order for me. I even have one of those now in the unfinished bathroom. Put some music in the tape deck if you like. There’s a stack of tapes over on the kitchen counter.”

  For an instant Gally wanted to say, “Can I watch you shave?” She liked watching Jack shave in the early days. There was something about it, something faintly erotic. But she smiled and caught herself, saying nothing. She sorted through the tapes and put one into the deck built into Carlisle’s small radio. Willie Nelson laid out a few guitar licks and sang about time slipping away, rolling into “Stardust” after that. In the background, she could hear the shower.

  Beer in hand, she walked around the house. Carlisle had an eye for spareness and restraint, for elegance. And he truly was a perfectionist when it came to building. The window trim fit so perfectly that the places where boards joined were almost indistinguishable, hairline cracks at most. The small loft was a nice idea, she thought. She marveled at the curved stair railing leading up to it, a piece of driftwood apparently, debarked and sanded and finished until it was as smooth as polished steel. The fireplace mantel was a four-by-six slab of oak five feet long. He had carved long, graceful, asymmetrical scallops on the outside edge.

  She examined the figurine on the mantel, something she hadn’t noticed before, and saw it was a naked female, flaming hair sprouting from the head. She held it in her hands, ran her fingers over it, noticed the detail on it, right down to tiny nipples and the absolutely correct curve of perfect buttocks. She put it back and looked at the word Syawla chiseled into the fireplace stone, shivering a little.

  Carlisle came out of the bathroom in jeans and a red sweater, gray wool socks, and moccasins. He walked over to the woodstove and opened the front doors, putting a screen across the opening after laying two large pieces of white oak on the fire.

  “I have the fireplace plugged with insulation for the winter, too much heat goes up the flue. But this open-door stove arrangement works pretty well as a substitute when you’re not too worried about efficiency, which I’m not at the moment.”

  Pastrami sandwiches and coleslaw by the fire. Easy talk. Laughter. Willie in the background, Jerry Jeff Walker after that. Beer and Mr. Bojangles. Firelight and land stretching somewhere close to forever outside. She asked him about the figurine on the mantel.

  “The Indian—the fellow I call Flute Player, think I mentioned him to you—and Susanna Benteen came by to bless the house. They brought the little statue as kind of a housewarming present. Said it represents Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth.”

  Something inside Gally bristled. Susanna Benteen, the witch or whatever she was. A gurgling inside, some old and basic female thing called competitiveness. She had experienced those feelings before in her life, sometimes when she watched Jack slow-dancing with a pretty young thing from Falls City. Other times, too, when she was younger and the high school quarterback was paying attention to someone else. Jealousy turning into some kind of thin, hot venom. The old instinct from far back, competition for the best males, the prime ones, the ones who seem to carry the best traits for survival of the species. Unseemly, but there it was.

  Carlisle saw something in her eyes or her face. “They didn’t stay long, just came by for an hour or so and did their blessing. It was kind of them, though I’m not sure I grasped all the hoodoo that was part of it.” Nothing was said about the sweet rain that fell from the rounded breasts of Susanna Benteen.

  Wind came up, low whoosh turning into a subdued roar that faded, then came again and stayed. But inside it was warm. A little after midnight, Gally cracked the front door and peeked outside.

  “Carlisle, look at the snow!”

  They had been talking, neither of them bothering to check on the weather. A heavy, wet snow had begun falling quietly two hours before. Three inches of new stuff on the ground already and visibility was approximately to the edge of the porch.

  “Looks like you stay the night,” Carlisle suggested, peering over her shoulder. “No way anybody would want to drive through that. Besides, I don’t think you can get your car down the lane, let alone up Wolf Butte Road to your place.”

  She closed the mahogany door and leaned against it, standing there in her jeans and white socks and yellow turtleneck sweater, smiling at Carlisle McMillan. The same sweater she had worn at Thanksgiving, the only good sweater she still owned and kept wrapped carefully in a plastic bag. Black hair with silver gray strands, hanging long, brushed, and catching wavering light from the stove.

  As with a lot of women, Gally Deveraux underestimated herself. She was no raving beauty, but she had a slim, long-legged way about her. Easy, as Jack said. Kind eyes and a nice face.

  Carlisle walked over to her, reached out, and put his right hand on her neck, underneath the sweater, his thumb touching her face just in front of her ear. He slowly massaged her skin and smiled back at her. Good skin, soft and warm. She could feel the calluses on his hand.

  Gally ran her fingers across his cheek and nose and eyelids. He leaned into her, pinning her against the door and kissing her slow and soft. She kissed back, same easy way at first, then with an intensity she hadn’t felt for a long time. Arms around the carpenter’s neck, pressing her body against him, curling one of her legs behind one of his.

  She lifted his sweater and ran her hands across the muscles of his back, then pulled up the sweater in front and kissed his chest. “Carlisle,” she whispered, “I want you so much. I’ve thought, fantasized about it, dreamed of it.” She was a little short of breath. His hand was wound tight in her long hair.

  He picked her up, her arms still around his neck, and carried her through the living room and behind the fireplace to the bedroom area. He laid her down and began kissing her breasts, her stomach. Eventually all the undressing got done, as it always does. And not long after, they were where both of them wanted to be.

  They were a little clumsy at first, but some better as time went on. He rested himself on his hands and looked down at her. He pulled her to a sitting position, put his legs around her, her legs around him. He caressed her hair, and she tilted her head, feeling his tongue move across her throat and across her ears and his teeth biting her gently on her shoulder, hand sweeping slowly down her hair and then winding it tight in his fist again.

  Gally Deveraux’s long and lonely times were ending. In this far place, they were ending with the warmth of Carlisle McMillan inside her.

  Christ, how she loved having this man inside her. Her body came up involuntarily, bellies touching then and words from his mouth she heard but didn’t hear and hearing then only her own breathing mixed with his and feeling his long hair brushing against her breasts. Gally Deveraux was becoming herself again.

  Carlisle sensed that things were meant to be as they were that night, almost sea
mless. She felt small beneath him, fragile, and smelled and tasted of the high plains and big open country. He kept his movements slow and gentle, letting her feel him, letting him feel her. Keeping it at the level of slow delight for a long while. Dancing with her, traveling the far places with her, that kind of moment when you get as close as you ever get to whoever the person is. And from the kitchen, Elton John telling them both that Daniel was gone on a plane.

  Later, lying in bed, Carlisle could see the naked backside of Gally Deveraux in the bathroom, through the open door. She was brushing her hair and quietly singing an old tune that Jerry Jeff had sung earlier, something about desperadoes waiting for a train. Dumptruck purring, walking around on the bed.

  Later on, in bed together again. Not having sex, making love. Gally Deveraux riding on top of Carlisle and smiling down at him. Carlisle smiling back and sliding his hands across her breasts. Letting go, music playing out in the kitchen, letting go . . . she arched her back, his hands across her stomach . . . far country, far places, wind and buttes and land rolling like the sea . . . the carpenter and Gally Deveraux.

  The next day, holding hands over breakfast. “Lord, Carlisle, it’s been so long, I forgot how nice it can be. All those good loving things. Maybe a little depravity mixed in, too, and that doesn’t hurt, does it?”

  Carlisle waved a piece of toast smeared with orange marmalade. “Gally, the world can never have too much true depravity, ’long as it’s combined with those other things you mentioned.”

  She smiled. “I made a decision this morning. I was lying there while you were still sleeping, and I thought about what I want out of my life. On the way in from Casper yesterday, I stopped at the college in Spearfish and asked about going back to school, about what it would take. They’ll count some of my work at Bemidji State years ago, so it turns out I can become a history teacher in two and a half years. There’s something called a Pell Grant that’ll help with the money. Maybe I can get the ranch sold, too. So I’m going to do it, start this fall. What do you think? A near forty woman going back to school, dumb or what?”