High Plains Tango

  Across the road, T-hawks were rising into morning air as men moved into the forest with chain saws. At the entrance to Carlisle’s lane, two men in yellow hard hats were leaning over a car hood, looking at a large map they’d unrolled.

  “Carlisle, I can’t watch this anymore. Let’s go.” Susanna got to her feet as she said it.

  He nodded, kicked a clod of dirt, and walked off with her. Looking back once, he could see the bulldozer scraping soil into the pond. It would be filled and leveled in a few hours. Workmen were randomly tossing the remains of Cody’s house and the workshop onto trucks, and T-hawks were circling high above the whine of yellow chain saws held steady by men in orange hard hats. Carlisle wondered if the T-hawks wondered. Maybe, maybe not.

  By day’s end, there would be no remaining signs of Williston or Carlisle or the T-hawks, and Carlisle decided without even thinking about it that one small token gesture was in order. He picked up a rock and threw it as far as he could toward the bulldozer. The rock fell an eighth of a mile short, bounced twice, and was still. At the same moment the rock came to rest, the water tower in Salamander exploded in a roar of orange flame and crashed onto the county maintenance shed next to it.

  The mature hawks were in a frenzy, trying to coax the young ones, not yet ready to fly, into the air away from the toppling trees and whine of the saws. Susanna Benteen tugged at Carlisle’s jacket. “Carlisle, please let’s go.”

  Carlisle refused to move, frozen there, breathing hard with emotion and nailed to where he stood. At that moment, the blast from a shotgun brought quiet with it, and everyone looked down the road. None of them had seen the old rusted-down Buick turn off Route 42 and begin moving up Wolf Butte Road. It came slowly up the red dirt, toward the T-hawk forest. On it came, straight toward where the engineers studied site plans. The chain saws had shut down, workmen wondering what role the Buick and a shotgun protruding from its driver’s-side window played in their morning’s work. They stared at George Riddick as he dismounted from the car. The gun was pointed upward, the butt of it resting on his hip.

  Riddick wiggled a cold cigar in his mouth and looked at the men. “Good morning, gentlemen. Now we’re going to have a discussion about options. And your set of choices is pretty thin. In fact, there is only one: Get the hell out of here.”

  He brought the shotgun down from his hip and chambered a shell, the hard shick-shick of the forestock’s slide underlining his words. George Riddick pointed the Remington toward Route 42 and spoke with quiet firmness. “All of you get moving. Now.” With those words, a ragged band of hard hats began running down the road toward Route 42.

  There is a thin and tenuous line between outrage and radicalism. Carlisle had teetered on that border, stepping tentatively across it when he and the Indian and the duck-man had made their stand. But George Riddick had walked across that line a long time ago and kept on walking into territory where few had ever walked and kept on going to a place where his mind no longer functioned in normal ways. And what happened to him personally was of no concern to George Riddick.

  Over the years, two things had protected Riddick. The first was the sheer boldness of his ways. People simply didn’t expect other people to behave as he did, such as the time he walked into the headquarters of Continental Cyanide, tore up the telephone switchboard at the main reception desk, and instructed the receptionist to open the locked glass doors to the executive offices, which she did with Riddick’s hand on her throat.

  The CEO had screamed at him, “This is terrorism!”

  Riddick gave him a cold grin. “You’re goddamned right it is. Get ready to be terrified.”

  Beyond his audacity, George Riddick was a random variable. No pattern, no predictability, hard to trace, impossible to anticipate. He would lie up for months in his mountain cabin near Sedona, walking the rocky trails, rage building. Then some primeval swell would mount within him, and he would move again. Yet for all his anger and brutal methods, he had never killed anyone since his long-ago jungle days.

  The previous afternoon, the local boys had sicced Hack Kenbule on Riddick, just as they had done earlier with Carlisle. Riddick was walking down the main street of Salamander when Hack came after him. Didn’t work out the same as with Carlisle. Hack lasted exactly fourteen seconds, staggering around and gasping for air after half a dozen karate chops to the neck and other critical regions, after which Riddick put him through the dusty window of what had once been Charlene’s variety store, with a kick in the face. Marv Umthon tried to intervene on Hack’s behalf, and Riddick simply broke big Marv’s ankle with one stomp of his boot, looked at Marv hopping around on one foot screaming, and decided to break the other one while he was at it. Fred Mumford, being the sole member of Salamander’s police force and having self-preservation foremost in his mind, declined to arrest Riddick on the grounds that Hack Kenbule had started it all.

  Two hours before Riddick appeared at the T-hawk forest, three members of EWU wheeled a barrel of chicken blood into Ray Dargen’s office. Damages to the office and to Dargen’s Lincoln Continental parked in back were subsequently estimated at $70,000. Dargen heard the ruckus before it got to his inner office and locked the door. George Riddick kicked in the door with his paratrooper boot, pasted Ray Dargen against the wall and poured six ounces of chicken blood down his throat, then left him vomiting on the $200-a-yard beige office carpet.

  Thirty minutes after the damage to Dargen’s operation, another barrel of blood was trundled into the offices of the High Plains Development Corporation. Margaret Andrews ran out the back door and used the pay phone down the block to call Mr. Flanigan, who was in Washington, D.C., expressing his concerns to a Senate committee about the Rio Grande Initiative and its potential impact on the economic future of his area.

  After that, Riddick removed the license plates from the old Buick, filed off all identification numbers on the vehicle, and put the other members of EWU on the road to the mountains, telling them, “This one might end badly. I’m going to do the rest myself.”

  Riddick maneuvered the Buick until it was angled across the road just short of the T-hawk forest. He filled his jacket pockets with ammunition. Right pocket: double-aught shotgun shells. Left pocket: clips for the Beretta. He laid a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 on the hood of the car and put a box of cartridges beside it. Drinking water from his canteen, he waited. He had no plans. Whatever was going to happen would happen. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this, something about the end of things, something about the state of “no more” he carried in his mind.

  State troopers arrived, looked over the situation, and called for help. Three hours later, George Riddick faced the standard array of bullhorns and SWAT teams. Fifty or sixty armed men confronted him, the bullhorns talking to him, trying to talk him down. He seemed unaware of it all.

  News teams arrived by midafternoon. Five miles to the northwest, a fire burned on Wolf Butte, sending a barely discernible column of smoke rising. Riddick saw it.

  Flanking movements were tried. Riddick expertly used the Winchester to hold them off, firing over their heads. He had nothing against the cops but knew they would come for him after dark. Didn’t matter, nothing mattered anymore except struggle and retribution.

  An hour before sundown, a line of old cars and pickups turned onto the red dirt road and moved up it toward the T-hawk forest. When the phalanx of police halted the caravan, seventy-five Lakota Sioux and representatives from other tribes, mostly members of the American Indian Movement led by Lamont Crow Wing, got out and walked across the fields to the T-hawk forest, disregarding the bullhorned orders to stop. They chained themselves to the larger trees while two EWU members with chicken blood on their clothing, ignoring Riddick’s orders to leave, began hammering spikes into tree trunks as a deterrent to chain saws. After word reached the AIM office about the stand Riddick was making, Lamont Crow Wing had said, “Piss on it. Let’s go do something and stop hanging out here like a bunch of res Indians waiting around for the hand
outs.”

  Darkness came. Negotiations continued with Lamont Crow Wing while spikes went into trees. A SWAT team moved forward toward Riddick’s position. Men running, crouching, falling to their bellies, and talking to one another over small radios. They were within thirty yards of the junked car and with their night-vision glasses could see the Winchester lying across the hood. More quiet chatter on the radios, sweating hard and getting ready. Final assault. They checked their weapons and begin zigzagging runs toward George Riddick’s barricade. When they arrived, there was nothing except the Winchester lying on the hood of the sedan.

  A little way to the north of where the final assault had been made, two men sat on the crest of Wolf Butte by the remains of an extinguished fire. They talked quietly. One of them was old and wore a wide-brimmed hat with juju beads on the crown. The other wore a cap with the logo EARTH WARRIOR. They greeted the woman who had climbed the butte and sat beside them.

  While they talked, a somewhat ambivalent federal judge in Falls City, worried about political ramifications, had been prodded into action by an attorney for AIM, who had continued flashing news to the judge from the front lines near the T-Hawk forest while insisting he would be held responsible for any carnage that occurred. The petition by the Sioux was granted, and the judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing highway construction through the burial mounds northwest of the T-hawk forest until questions surrounding the content and true ownership of the mounds could be settled. The judge wrote the following in issuing the order:

  Traditionally, Fifth Amendment rights regarding private property have held sway in such matters. Recent claims, however, by Native Americans and other original inhabitants of lands throughout the world, particularly the Australian Aborigines, have given the courts some pause in allowing destruction of a people’s heritage, even though the relics that are part of this heritage may be located on land held in private ownership. Therefore, the purpose of this restraining order is to allow time for litigation concerning the limits of constitutional rights concerning the disposition of such artifacts.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  RAY DARGEN WAS SCREAMING INTO HIS CAR PHONE, HIS words machine-gunning all the way to Washington, D.C. The Lincoln was out of commission while the dealership struggled with removing dried chicken blood, but he still had the Cadillac, which he also treated as a depreciable asset for the RAYMAX Corporation, even though it was his wife’s vehicle and never used for business.

  Senator Harlan Sterk was talking quietly on the other end. “Ray, shut up and listen to me. The FBI and the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation are looking into the violence out there. We’ll take care of that. But I’m telling you, Senator Wheems has had it. You overplayed it, my friend. You’ve done it before and gotten away with it. This time it’s not going to work. I know you’ve been a good supporter of mine, but there are limits as to what I can do, and frankly, I’m pretty steamed up myself about those land purchases of yours along the right-of-way. To quote Jack Wheems, ‘I don’t give a good goddamn about what some clown named Ray Dargen thinks. This highway is a lot bigger than him or Yerkes County.’ Wheems said that two hours ago.”

  Sterk continued. “What happened out there has been all over the national news. The networks keep rerunning that tape of McMillan and his friends standing in front of the bulldozer, and somehow that crazy man, we think it was this George Riddick, and his Indian cohort have captured the fancy of people everywhere, the last stand against the white man’s stupidity, all that stuff. Christ, people are calling in from all over the world on behalf of those birds. The transportation committee is saying bad things about this project, and if we don’t watch out, we’re going to end up with a strip of concrete that ends somewhere near Falls City in a wheat field.”

  Ray Dargen began to whine, but Senator Sterk interrupted him. “Ray, I said shut up and listen. It looks like the Indians can hold up the project for at least six months with the restraining order. You own the land, and, whether it’s morally right or not, the law is pretty clear according to a lawyer I spoke with. The land is yours, and the artifacts in the burial mounds are yours, and that’s how things probably will eventually work out through the courts. But that’s not the problem. The problem is this: The transportation committee is buckling under the bad public relations that have been generated out there and may recommend that the highway end at Wichita, especially with Florida crying about their population boom and the need for more road money down there. Even if that doesn’t happen, Wheems says a delay of six months is unacceptable to him, since that will put us into winter and effectively amounts to a construction delay of nearly a year. At the moment he has the engineers working around the clock, looking for a way to change the route and still include the Falls City–Livermore strip. It’ll be a pretty strange-looking road, but I think he’s going to get it done.

  “If I were you, I’d stop worrying about the highway and start worrying about my own ass. George Riddick, or whoever, is still roaming around somewhere, and your old pal Carlisle McMillan is talking to the state attorney general about those little land acquisitions along the right-of-way carried out by you and your buddies. To be honest with you, Ray, I think you’re in some trouble, possibly bad trouble, and I can’t help you. More than that, I can’t even appear to have had anything to do with your mischief. We warned you about this. I went too far in getting Wheems to change the route to include Falls City and Livermore, given what you were trying to pull off. Now listen to this and listen carefully: I appreciate your past support, but this is where we part company. Don’t call me anymore, Ray, I don’t want to hear from you. My advice is to get yourself a first-class criminal lawyer and hang on. And by the way, if you run into Axel Looker out there, tell him to stop calling me, too. It’s not our job to help him retire to Florida or Arizona or wherever. Good-bye.”

  The last three sentences of an editorial in the Inquirer one week later read as follows:

  Businessman-developer Ray Dargen’s decision to deed Wolf Butte and surrounding property to the Lakota Sioux is commendable; however, just what this means for the planned route of the Avenue of the High Plains is uncertain. In fact, the entire Avenue is uncertain at this time, which is a sad state of affairs for those of us concerned about the economic future of this state. It’s unfortunate that a few radicals with misplaced concerns about the environment can thwart the progress so necessary to our collective well-being.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  IN THE WEEKS BEFORE HIS EVICTION DATE, WHEN THE SETTLEMENT over the house came to a head, Carlisle retained a lawyer from Falls City, a counselor who had fought all the land wars ever fought in the high plains. He was old and mean, the only true son of a gully rattler. And he didn’t much like anybody, jamming the law and logic right up the nozzle of the state and anyone else daring to offer an opinion, making them pay Carlisle $180,000 flat for the Williston place.

  Their protestations reached the level of shrieks, but the lawyer quoted Plato—“Render to each his due”—then rolled into biblical metaphor, loosely, citing Jacob’s dream, saying Carlisle had lain upon the rocks of Mr. Williston’s place and turned them into the gate of heaven for himself. The lawyer paraded a copy of the Observer article that had called Carlisle one of the great craftsmen of the high plains, pointing out that 257 people had come to Carlisle’s open house, and generally made the opposition feel as if they were destroying St. Peter’s Basilica.

  The state countered by offering to pay that sum if Carlisle would agree to let them convert the place into a tourist information center, saying what a nice impression it would make on visitors. That gave Carlisle visions of “Rick + Tammy” hacked into the wood he had sanded and smoothed and of people going tinkle in the pond or throwing stones at the bluegills. His lawyer took care of that, too, calling for what he labeled “the complete purification of a man’s monument to his teacher,” by which he meant absolute and total destruction.

  The bulldozers were already working in Lou
isiana and Arkansas, and the schedule was tight. After all, New Orleans and Yerkes County both needed saving. The money was paid with no tourist information center attached to it, after which the lawyer swept up his documents, shook Carlisle’s hand, and said, “Screw ’em.” His wife wanted a wall moved in their house, and he would take that as his fee, if Carlisle was agreeable.

  Two days before he was required to vacate Cody’s place, Susanna helped Carlisle box and haul his things to her house. Carlisle went into negotiations with the owner of the Flagstone Ballroom over in Livermore and managed to buy the old dump and a little bungalow beside it for $20,000. That was his next project. He had figured out that with the right design, a fair amount of scrounging, and some careful work, he could turn it into a real palace for Susanna and him. Living quarters, plenty of room for workshops and art studios and Susanna’s mail-order business, while leaving the dance floor intact. After he had the plumbing working and some wiring done, he patched the roof and framed up temporary quarters that could be heated in winter. When Susanna’s lease expired six months later, they moved themselves over to the ballroom.

  After two years, and some perspective to look back on it all, Carlisle still believed he was right, right in his general opinions about the demise of Salamander and right to try to stomp the corrupt bastards who cooked up the highway in the first place. He would do it again under similar circumstances. But maybe he had made it all a little too pat, too one-sided and sanctimonious. That’s what he concluded in his more honest moments.

  As Susanna said to him, “Carlisle, it’s hard to find true evil, but there are fools everywhere. Salamander has only its share and no more.”

  Carlisle knew he had positioned himself as some kind of pious champion fighting a dark empire, when all he was really fighting mostly was a bunch of people who had forgotten how to survive and had been suckered by what pyemic marketeers defined as the good life. Salamander, and Yerkes County in general, had counted on a future that never happened, panicked when it didn’t.