High Plains Tango

  “No kidding, Senator, that’s what he said. And you know what? Ray Dargen’s been pretty quiet since that happened, according to Flanigan. Apparently McMillan has suspicions about what’s going on with the juggling of the highway route and Dargen using inside information to make land purchases along the route that benefit him and his partners, and he’s going to push it hard, maybe right up all our asses.”

  “For God’s sake, Cal.” The senator turned quiet for a moment, thinking. “You know, in any other circumstances, I think I could grow to like this McMillan. As it stands right now, we’ve got to nail him good or shut him down. And the best way to do that is simply to get the highway built as fast as possible, then everybody’ll forget about birds and Dargen and McMillan and go back to work.”

  When Jack Wheems finished talking to Cal Akers, he glanced at the calendar—six days to the end of January—and walked over to his window in the Senate Office Building, staring at the traffic below. Rush hour was almost over. He wondered what a carpenter named Carlisle McMillan was doing out in the high plains at that time of day.

  WHAT CARLISLE was doing was reading a letter from Governor Jerry Gravatt.

  Dear Mr. McMillan:

  Let me begin by assuring you that I share your concern for a healthy environment where all of us can live in harmony with nature and build a prosperous high plains economy at the same time. I should very much like to discuss our mutual concerns. Therefore, at the suggestion of Mr. Ray Dargen, State Highway Commissioner, I’ve asked my secretary to contact you to set up an appointment where we can all sit down and reach a happy compromise on an issue that needs to be resolved. If we can just get together, I’m hopeful there is cause for optimism.

  Yours truly,

  Jerry

  Hon. Jerry Gravatt, Governor

  Dumptruck turned his head and watched with considerable interest as the crumpled letter flew toward Carlisle McMillan’s kitchen wastebasket. Earlier that day, a group of men had disturbed the big tomcat when they rapped on the door. Carlisle had stepped out on the porch and looked at the four-member delegation from the Livermore Civic Boosters Club.

  They shuffled their feet and got around to introducing themselves, one of them acting as spokesman.

  “Mr. McMillan, you’re a businessman, just like we are, and this highway will mean a lot of carpentry work because of economic growth. Don’t you think you’re being just a little unreasonable?”

  Carlisle stared at them, couldn’t believe their navet. Were they really this dumb about what he was doing, about what was going on with the T-hawks? Obviously, they were, and Carlisle felt sorry for them, in a way. He breathed twice, looked at the sky, then back at the overcoats and said, “No.” After that, he nodded politely and closed the door.

  As Governor Gravett’s letter hit the wastebasket rim and balanced there for an instant before dropping in, Carlisle heard the sound of breaking glass in his greenhouse. At first he thought a squirrel had nose-dived through it. Then he heard a rifle shot and went to the floor, crawling rapidly and dragging a frightened and confused Dumptruck from the windowsill. He held the squirming cat and stayed low as a third shot hit the greenhouse. After that it was silent, but Carlisle stayed on the floor for another few minutes before lifting himself up to look out a corner of the window. Nothing.

  The professor at Stanford had said it would get rough, maybe an R rating. He had been right. After looking at the damage and carrying in plants, Carlisle shut the greenhouse door and sat by his woodstove, wondering whether or not it was worth his effort to repair the greenhouse. Dumptruck jumped onto his lap and settled down, purring.

  The following day, a Yerkes County sheriff’s deputy examined Carlisle’s greenhouse. “Looks like someone fired rifle shots from the road. The shell casings in the ditch are from a .30-06, fairly potent weapon. I’d say they hit what they were aiming for. The boys around here are pretty fair country marksmen, and if they’d been shooting at you, we probably wouldn’t be talking right now. We’ll look into it, but at the moment, you’re more than a little unpopular in these parts, Mr. McMillan, and I’d watch my step if I were you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  ONE OF THOSE REACHING FOR SUSANNA BENTEEN, AND THERE had been many who tried and nearly as many who failed, was George Riddick. That was some years before the Avenue of the High Plains was announced.

  The nomadic life has its own codes, and those who have traveled loose and free sometime in their lives, with no purpose except looking for one, come to know the signs and symbols. A certain evidence of fatigue brought on by the miles and erratic sleep, the scuffed shoes and the old knapsack beside your chair in a desert caf where the afternoon sunlight angles in through dusty windows. The way you drink your coffee—slowly—and count your cigarettes and count your change—carefully—making sure there is enough, what you need for the bus that will swing open its door with a sigh and take you on to the next place, and the next after that.

  In Topock, Arizona, on the California line, Susanna Benteen had waited for a bus that never came. Gracie’s Cafe, where the bus stopped, would close at five, and it was already four. The place was empty except for Gracie and Susanna and the big man with a black beard, who drank coffee and twice looked in Susanna’s direction, noticing the signs and symbols of the road.

  A wall phone rang behind the cash register. Gracie answered, then walked over to where Susanna was sitting. “Missy, I’m sorry, but the bus broke down in Kingman and won’t be coming until tomorrow. There’s no place to stay in Topock, but if you can make it over to Needles, you might find a room.”

  The road was like that, and Susanna Benteen had learned to roll with it and was trying to think this through. She had been in similar predicaments many times in her life. The overbooked Pan Am flight out of Delhi on a Friday night, with the next available flight not until Tuesday. The train that had stopped at a country station fifty miles south of Brussels, the passengers forced off because the Brussels terminal was already filled with stranded trains during a winter storm. The time her father’s truck had broken down a hundred miles from Olduvai.

  The teapot before her was almost empty. Susanna poured the last of the hot water into her cup and considered her options, which were close to zero. Outside, three men sat on an old car, laughing, spitting into the dirt, looking in at her now and then. A winter sundown was only thirty minutes away, the Mojave light dropping fast. Traveling alone had its benefits, but for a woman this kind of situation was not one of them. A man could walk outside, kick a few tires, and offer to pay one of the boys for a ride over to Needles. A woman found risk in that, and with good reason. Unfair, but the way things were. Susanna didn’t like it, but she understood it.

  The big man at the counter walked over to her. “Look, I’m headed for Flagstaff, but I’ll be glad to run you over to Needles if you’re stuck.”

  She looked up at him. He’d been polite to Gracie when he had ordered coffee. Some risk. She measured it, looked at him again, and said, “Thank you. I’d very much appreciate that. . . . I could pay you something for your trouble.”

  “No need for that. It’s not far. My name is George Riddick.”

  He picked up her knapsack and held the door for her, and they walked to his van. The boys outside kicked their tires, spat, and winked at one another, malignant and knowing. As Susanna and the man walked past, one of them said, in a voice intentionally made loud enough for Susanna to hear, “Good thing you made your move on that cute little piece when you did, beard. We were just one step away from it.”

  Riddick put down Susanna’s knapsack, turned to the man, and slapped him hard across the face, hard enough to make him stumble and nearly fall. The other two straightened from where they’d been leaning against the car, the hormones beginning to chug upward: a fallen companion, honor in the desert, all of that. Riddick looked at them, grinned, and waited. When they didn’t move, he picked up the knapsack, opened the van door for Susanna, and put the knapsack by her feet. She was sha
king a little. The man had acted with a raw, instant violence that unnerved her.

  The van smelled of cigar smoke. Tools were scattered about, old coffee cups tossed on the backseat. He turned the ignition key and looked over at her. “Sorry about that garbage with the yahoos, but I’ve got a short fuse when it comes to smart-asses.”

  The tightness in her stomach eased a little, but not much. She clutched her hands in her lap and decided talk might help. “Do you live in Flagstaff?”

  “No, south of there in the mountains, near a place called Sedona. Ever hear of it?”

  “Yes. I was there once, just passing through. It was quite beautiful.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “New Haven . . . Connecticut. I lived there before my father died, and I have a few estate matters yet to settle.”

  “I can take you as far as Flagstaff if you want. You’ll be able to get a bus out of there with no problem.”

  Three hours later, they made the turn south outside of Flagstaff, and Susanna went on with George Riddick to his place in the mountains. In the two months she spent there, he did not touch her or even try. George Riddick lived an ascetic’s life born of an anger that never left him, and sex was no longer part of that life.

  But through the years, she knew he was out there taking care of the business that mattered to him. She was always aware of a dark presence roaming around behind the occasional newspaper article reporting some horrific violence done to the people and organizations Riddick hated. Neither the rumors nor the articles ever mentioned his name, yet she knew it was him, an avenging wrath from the galaxies in an old Dodge van with balding tires and rust dripping from the fenders. Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun with a shortened barrel and a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol, both wrapped in oilskin and riding behind his driver’s seat where he could reach them easily. Riddick in stained khaki pants and a worn flannel shirt, paratrooper boots, and his black ball cap with “Earth Warrior” hand stitched on the crown. Old army field jacket with a strip of electrician’s tape above the right breast pocket covering the space where his name was stenciled. And the cold cigar in his mouth and the heavy, gray-flecked black beard that grazed his chest when he nodded his head ever so slightly.

  Along the thread of environmental radicalism, from quiet protest to civil disobedience to hard violence, George Riddick had no comparison. He was off the scale. Susanna had come to that understanding in the time she knew him, and the savage, relentless intensity with which he pursued his ends had frightened and yet fascinated her in a way that was almost sexual.

  The Sierra Club? He called them politicians, Kens and Barbies in $300 Patagonia jackets. How about PlanetFire and their summer rallies, their botched attempts to blow up transmission lines running from power plants in the Southwest? Riddick scorned them as dilettantes, monkey wrenchers who read Edward Abbey and played games in the shadows, assaulting technological manifestations rather than the destroyers themselves.

  He once said to Susanna, “I am what comes along when everything else has failed. There’s nothing very admirable about what I do, it just has to be done. If prevention is not possible, then retribution is next best, and if the retribution is certain enough and hard enough when it comes, then eventually it may become a kind of prevention based on fear.”

  Riddick had been out there before, putting his life on the line. Two purple hearts and other medals, all of which he had thrown into the garbage years ago. He had been there all right, leeches and snakes and malaria and little men in black who carried their weapons and rice down trails worn smooth beneath the Cambodian jungle canopy. In the early days, the M-16s hadn’t worked right, jamming at critical moments, so Riddick arranged to have a 12-gauge Remington pump shotgun smuggled to him. He sawed the barrel short and used that, crawled through the jungle and became a killing machine, making the world safe for economic development and biotechnology.

  George Riddick had no plans beyond the afternoon before him or the night or the day following. Nothing more to do than spend his life running symbolic hoses from the outlet pipes and smokestacks of the defilers of nature back to the executive offices.

  He had ways of doing that, George Riddick did. Ever drink a large glass of influenza-green number two from your outlet pipe? Ever breathe plastic bags full of dog-hockey brown taken from the top of your factory’s smokestack, the one you stuck a short way across the border in Matamoros to avoid the tougher U. S. environmental laws?

  Ever eat a slice of yellow, maggoty dolphin your tuna-fishing fleet suffocated in its nets a week before? If you had run into George Riddick in the right circumstances, you would have, for certain you would have done that. The executive world of good hotels and neat annual reports would not have prepared you to deal with the malevolent, elemental force that was George Riddick. And you would have been well motivated to drink sincerely, breathe deeply, and chew intently. Motivated by the Beretta poked in your crotch, by the sound of your twelve-cylinder Jaguar being bludgeoned to its original molecules, and by the sight of your wife gagging as she tried to swallow pieces of her mink coat while her head was being shaved.

  George Riddick had left behind him a ragged and random trail of traumatized corporate executives and government administrators, many of whom had retired after their only encounter with him. In good resorts of the Caribbean, word about Riddick passed from beach chair to beach chair. The villa at Jumby Bay cost $1,400 a night and kept the native islanders repulsed, but nothing could save you from Riddick if he decided to come. That’s what they said, rum punch in hand, shuddering a little in the warm sunlight.

  George Riddick understood that rich people seldom were affected by the problems they created. Others were, people and animals alike, but lawyers fought it out in abstract terms far from the everyday reality of designer executive offices. George Riddick made sure you suffered the consequences of your decisions, physically and emotionally. They said he was an unanticipated echo of the things you had done and that you would think hard before doing them again after his violation of your spirit and your manhood.

  As Riddick said to Susanna Benteen, “I simply provide an additional outcome to the bad choices certain people make.”

  Yes, George Riddick had been out there, and he was still out there with a sticker pasted across his dashboard that read PUNISH THE BASTARDS! If you breached the standards he had raised single-handedly, he would be coming. Not for a while, but he would be coming your way . . . eventually. And as he passed through the Mojave from time to time, he remembered Susanna Benteen and wished his mind had been in a place where he could have had such a woman for his own.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE OLD MAN:

  “As I came to find out, Carlisle McMillan and I shared at least one other conviction in addition to liking Gally Deveraux, which was neither of us cared much for flocks of men in matching blazers, calling themselves community representatives or something like that. You know ’em, easy to spot. They’re the guys with shit-eatin’ grins in grainy black-and-white newspaper photographs, always standing behind a mayor or governor or some other suit at ribbon cuttings in honor of recently constructed shrines to human ingenuity, Mammon, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

  “I dislike ’em mostly because they’re always so goddamned cheerful. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a severe shortage of happiness in the world, and I’m all for good cheer. But if you look real close at those pictures, you can see l-u-c-r-e printed right across their carefully flossed teeth. It comes through even in bad photographs. Their abundant cheer flows not from seeing a good sunrise over the Little Sal or simply by being given another day of life, but from the sweet dreams of money with which they’ll do something to make even more money. Just what they’re going to do with all this money is not clear to me and maybe even not to them.

  “The other thing I notice is that these ribbon cuttings almost always have something to do with the destruction of nature. The little matching-blazer army is ’specially fond of projects such as h
ighways, dams, nuclear waste dumps, and gigantic bridges, real big schemes of any kind that are being paid for by taxpayers other than themselves and seem to do great amounts of damage to nature. They use the word progress a lot in talking about these matters, though that’s recently been replaced somewhat by economic development.

  “They only wear their precious blazer outfits when the bag’s outta the cat. That is, when the project has been completed or is too far along to stop. In the early stages, they’re involved in espionage and plotting, so they keep a low profile. That way they’re able to surprise the general population with the wonder of these ventures when the projects emerge full-blown and ready for construction. Moreover, surprise has the value of cannonballing the projects right through the guts and out the other side of anyone having the impertinence to raise questions about the merits of a particular majestic enterprise relative to its cost.”

  I smiled at the old man’s words and checked the small tape recorder I had laid next to his breakfast plate. I had seen the blazers. Everyone had.

  The old man chewed his over-easy eggs, took a sip of coffee, and continued. “Their main forum for handling opposition of any kind is an exercise in phony democracy called the public hearing. I went to one of these meetings once when they was thinking about putting a big dam across the Little Sal. See, plans are made by bureaucrats, engineers, and selected movers and shakers. After everything’s already been decided, a public hearing is called for the purpose of what’s gracefully labeled ‘soliciting citizen input.’

  “But the big thinkers don’t really want input from citizens. If common folks had too much input and asked hard questions about who really stands to benefit from dams and highways, the things might never get built. The hearing is just a slick way of getting people to think they’ve had some say, which they have, except their input has nothing to do with the final output and therefore is of no value, not to mention being useless.