Besides, he reflected there were good things out there. When he was considering whether to leave or stay after the highway route had been decided, he thought about that, the good things. Where else could you hear first-class tangos those days? And the county still respected him for his skills, if not his opinions. Salamander, what was left of it, remained cool toward him, but the people in Falls City and elsewhere continued to pay well for his services. You could buy gas without first paying an attendant in a bulletproof kiosk, and in Susanna, the Indian, Marcie and Claude English, and Gally, not to mention a gutsy little guy called the duck-man, he had met some of the best people he’d ever known, people possessing wisdom and courage far beyond the flashy cleverness of Buddy Reems or the ephemeral culture of the San Francisco streets. That’s why he purchased the Flagstone Ballroom and decided to make another run at his particular brand of camouflage.
When the Avenue of the High Plains was jogged west to avoid the T-hawk forest and Indian burial mounds around Wolf Butte, the idea for Antelope National Park was scrapped. So, of course, was the federal government’s intent to purchase the properties owned by Axel Looker and Gally Deveraux, where the park would have been located. Facing bankruptcy and foreclosure on her ranch, Gally had dropped out of school.
Susanna, while awarding Carlisle the Recusant of the Decade Award, encouraged him to go see Gally, believing he should renew the friendship that had been important to both him and Gally. Danny’s had closed six months after the highway was completed, and Gally was managing the restaurant portion of a new Best Western motel near Falls City.
Carlisle hadn’t seen her for more than two years. It seemed longer than that. Lots of things seemed far back to him, farther than they really were. The Yerkes County highway war and Susanna had driven a wedge into time, splitting it and fouling up his internal abacus, making events that occurred before the wars and before Susanna seem more distant than the calendar’s measure, and he hardly recognized Gally when he sat down at the Best Western restaurant counter.
They tried getting together a couple of times during the early stages of the highway battle, but, as he pointed out, there was something between them, concrete. Regardless of where their conversations and glances at each other had seemed to lead, the concrete divided them. The highway had covered their relationship with a layer of hard feelings that suffocated it for him.
Gally was facing slightly away from him, talking to a waitress, crisp, and well dressed, her hair pulled back fancylike. Just as she finished her conversation and was about to walk into the kitchen, Carlisle said, “I’ll have a hot turkey sandwich with extra mashed potatoes.”
She turned, surprised at first, then smiling. “Hello, Carlisle.”
He was a little uneasy, asking if she had a few minutes free. They sat in his truck, and he told her that he missed her as a friend. He was sorry for both of them that things had ended a little too quickly, too hard. Gally had a nice way of touching his cheek with her hand. He remembered that when she reached over and did it, saying she understood, tears in her eyes. He was glad he’d come.
Still touching his cheek, she said, “Carlisle, we had a fine year together, and if it can’t be me, then I’m glad it’s Susanna.”
She said her life was going well, and he believed her. The motel manager had come up from Dallas, escaping the memories of a messy divorce back down the road, and he and Gally were thinking of getting engaged. She promised to send Susanna and Carlisle a wedding invitation if things got that far. He said they would be pleased to attend.
She looked at him, serious face. “Carlisle, the highway hasn’t helped Salamander at all. In fact, it’s done quite a lot of harm. Just made it easier for people to drive over to Falls City for shopping and eating out, like you predicted. Can you imagine? People actually drive forty miles to Falls City to buy bananas because they’re ten cents a bunch cheaper there. Don’t they think about wear and tear on their cars or the value of their own time or the gas it takes to get there?”
Carlisle was silent, while Gally continued, starting to giggle. “Did you hear about Leroy’s parrot?”
Carlisle shook his head.
“Well, let me back up a minute. Leroy, as you know, watched his business going to pot for years and was always trying to think of something to perk it up. That’s why he hired Gabe for a while on Saturday nights.
“After he decided Gabe cost too much, he got the idea of using a bullhorn to entertain the crowd. Said he’d seen some comedian on television using one. Every so often he’d pick up this stupid bullhorn and announce to one and all that so-and-so’s pizza was ready. He even tried to tell jokes through it. The problem is, of course, Leroy’s no comedian, as we all know.
“After a while, the boys starting grabbing the bullhorn when Leroy wasn’t looking. It got pretty bizarre, not to mention tasteless. By nine on Saturday nights, they’d start trying to sing along with the jukebox through it. By eleven, things would degenerate, the drunks wrestling for control of the bullhorn so they could make announcements such as ‘Hey, Alma, how about comin’ over here and sittin’ on you-know-what for a while?’ For heaven’s sake, you could hear them clear out on the street, so Leroy doused that idea. Next thing he tried was dwarf tossing. Ever hear of that?”
Carlisle had an incredulous grin on his face. “What tossing?”
“Dwarf tossing. Leroy didn’t invent it. Seems it was all the rage for a while in some spots around the country, though it’s unlikely it’ll be an Olympic event anytime soon. At one end of his place, Leroy piled up three or four old mattresses. The idea, from what I gather, was to see how far you could throw this dwarf from Falls City who hired himself out for the occasion. Hack Kenbule, of course, eventually held the all-time record for the event, at least at Leroy’s. Marv Umthon was rankled by that, but he was still hobbling a bit from what that wild man Riddick did to his ankles, so he couldn’t match Hack’s great achievement. Anyway, that silly stuff lasted until people started complaining about the insensitivity of the pastime, even though the dwarf didn’t seem to mind too much.
“Then while Leroy was downstate at the hospital he got to talking with some psychiatrist who owned this parrot named Benny. Seems these birds have a life span of just about forever, decades, at least, and taking one on is a major commitment. Not only that, they’re really tough hombres. Leroy claimed they can break a broomstick with their feet. Apparently, the parrot had attacked the psychiatrist’s wife in a fit of jealousy, chewed her up real bad, and the psychiatrist had brought her down to the hospital so the doctors there could take a look at her wounds.
“Leroy bought the parrot for two hundred dollars, a steal, he maintained, figuring it would be a real draw at the tavern. It was for a while. The first day he had Benny, he took him into the bar and set him on a chair. Benny the parrot promptly hopped down on the floor and started walking around, mumbling to himself, so Leroy said.”
In the telling of this, Gally began laughing so hard that tears ran down her cheeks. It was contagious, and Carlisle was laughing, too, even before she had the whole story out. Just imagining a parrot named Benny walking around the tavern floor and grumbling like Leroy was funny enough in itself.
“Now, Carlisle, remember that big, mean, ugly tomcat Leroy had? The one that used to sit on the jukebox and hiss at customers? Remember him? Leroy called him Bar Rag.”
Carlisle nodded.
“Well, Bar Rag comes strolling into the room that first day Benny was walking around on the floor inspecting the place. The cat sees the bird, goes into one of those belly-to-the-ground-little-short-steps routines that cats are famous for, and begins sneaking up on Benny. About the time Bar Rag is only a few feet from Benny and is picking up speed as he moves in for the kill, the parrot turns, sees the cat, and yells, ‘Hi!’”
Gally was shaking with laughter. So was Carlisle, lying across the steering wheel of his truck and choking on the mental pictures he was forming while Gally talked.
“Leroy said Bar Ra
g was in the middle of his charge but stopped on a dime and actually flipped over backwards when the bird yelled ‘Hi!’ at him. According to Leroy, Bar Rag started running for the back door, accelerating all the while like a space rocket, and busted right through the screen. That was three months ago, and Leroy hasn’t seen him since.”
By this time, Carlisle was slumped against the truck door, hands over his face, roaring with laughter. “What—”
“Wait!” Gally gurgled through her laughter, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m not finished. Leroy’s traffic improved, just as he’d hoped. Everyone wanted to see the bird that had run off Bar Rag. Pretty soon there were all kinds of people standing around with Grain Belts in their hands, just watching Benny to see what he’d do or say next. If nobody was paying any attention to him, Benny would swoop through the tavern screeching, ‘Watch the bird! Watch the bird!’
“Also, it turned out that Benny had picked up quite a bit living with the psychiatrist. People’d be at the bar talking, and Benny’d be sitting up on the Budweiser sign hanging from the ceiling, listening. After a while he’d start talking right into the conversation nearest him, saying things such as ‘It’s because of your mother, you’ll just have to work through it,’ and all that therapeutic stuff.
“Everybody thought this was pretty funny, except Bobby Eakins, who for some reason never liked Benny. He said, and I’m quoting him: ‘I come in here to drink, not to get analyzed by a bird. I get enough of that shit from Leroy.’
“Leroy claimed parrots are sensitive and that Benny knew Bobby didn’t like him. One evening, Bobby was into his third Grain Belt when Benny came walking down the bar, stopped about three feet from Bobby, and stared at him, head kind of twisted funny, eyes blinking, and says, ‘Aarrk, hi!’”
Gally was imitating the way Benny must have looked, and Carlisle started roaring again, seeing in his mind the face-off between Benny the parrot and Bobby Eakins in his fertilizer cap.
“Bobby says, ‘Get the fuck outta here, ya asshole bird,’ dips his fingers in his beer, and starts spritzing Benny. Those in attendance said it was something to watch. Before Bobby could even flinch, Benny had Bobby by the ear with his beak and was tearing it right in half. Leroy grabbed Benny, Benny chomped down on Bobby, Bobby’s screaming and crying and bleeding. It was a real mess. He got his ear sewn back on okay, but there’s a big ugly red scar there, and his earlobe hangs kind of funny. Leroy finally got rid of Benny, sent him somewhere to a pet store, and Bobby refused to drink at Leroy’s anymore, mostly because of the grief he received from the other local heroes, who took to calling the parrot ‘Bobby’s Bird’ and saying things like ‘You and the parrot can work it out, Bobby. Aarrk, good thing it wasn’t an eagle.’”
Carlisle was still shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “How’s Leroy doing now?”
“I guess you haven’t heard. After Gabe, bullhorns, dwarf tossing, and parrots, Leroy decided it was time to forget the whole thing. He retired about a month ago and closed the place. Threw one final party, however, on the last Saturday night he was open. I went to it, and it was fun, though I have to admit, I kept thinking of all the good times you and I had there. I’m not trying to bring up what we talked about before, just telling the truth.
“By the way, at Leroy’s closing, a lot of people asked about you. They never cared much for your position on the highway, but they do respect you for standing up for what you believed in. A number of them said that. Even big ol’ Hack Kenbule said he had second thoughts about the pounding he did on you when you were just trying to save the house you built. He didn’t mention the T-hawks, of course, since that’s not something that Hack can get hold of. In any case, it was a good time, Leroy’s farewell party. Even Beanie Wickers came slinking in. I hadn’t seen him since the night you saved him from losing his manhood to Huey’s knife. Before it was over, he and Huey shook hands and had a beer together, but Huey said that’s as far as it went and that Beanie was not allowed to dance with Fran, who in the meantime, I noticed, was dancing real close with the co-op manager and blinking her eyes at him.”
As she prepared to go back to the restaurant, Gally turned serious. “Carlisle, do you remember the old man with the bad leg who used to live above Lester’s? The one who came into Danny’s for lunch every day and read the paper?”
Carlisle knew whom she meant. The old guy watching the decline and fall of a high plains village from his second-floor window.
“About six months ago, he fell down those steep stairs to his apartment and broke his good leg. They hauled him out to the Yerkes County Care Facility since he had nowhere else to go. That craphead Birney got him evicted from the apartment and convinced the social services people they ought to keep him out at the home. After that, they tried to turn the building into a boutique, but you were right, Salamander is not Lourdes, and nobody’s driving six miles off the interstate to buy machine-made quilts and cornhusk dolls. It lasted about six months. Word is that Cecil Macklin lost his financial tail on the enterprise.
“Anyway, I go visit the old man every couple of weeks or so. I feel just awful bad for him. He’s very smart in his own way, and they’re using drugs and television to make him into a vegetable. He’s never talked much about himself all the years I’ve known him, but he’s real depressed now and spends his time looking through some old shoeboxes where he keeps his memories. He showed me the silver star he got for fighting at the Arnhem Bridge in Holland during World War Two. Said he killed three Germans that day and took a small piece of shrapnel in the leg. Now this great land thanks him by shoveling him off to the county farm and treating him like shoddy from the packing plant. I guess the Veterans Home has a waiting list a mile long, so he can’t get in there, and it’s not much better. Maybe if you get a chance, you might stop in and say hello. He’s desperate, I can see in his eyes.”
As Carlisle drove back to Livermore, his old anger ginned up again. What the hell kind of place was this country becoming? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Money all over the place for $150 basketball sneakers demanded by whining worshippers of people with decent jump shots and not much else. But apparently nothing for old people, dying babies, T-hawks, and everything else that needed tending.
He talked with Susanna about it. A few days later, he drove over to the depressing mess generously labeled a care facility. Out of sight, out of mind, old folks drizzling and babbling. Some of them because they were genuinely ill, some of them because of the way they were being treated.
Carlisle found the old man. He was standing, supporting himself with a cane, and looking out the window of the room he shared with two other men, both of them bedridden. The room smelled of bodily functions, and the window had heavy institutional wire fronting the screen.
“I’m Carlisle McMillan. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I used to see you in Danny’s now and then.”
The old man nodded and brightened a little. “Oh, yessir, I know who you are, Mr. McMillan.”
He looked tired, run-down, sinking. Bedroom slippers, dirty trousers, soiled long-sleeved shirt cut off at the elbows and never hemmed.
“How’s your broken leg?”
“It’s comin’ along real good. Don’t make much difference, though, since I don’t have anywhere to go anyhow. Birney and his redcoats took my apartment away. That’s about all I could afford. Got myself in a pickle, a small one by modern standards, big to me.”
They walked outdoors and sat in the sunlight. Carlisle noticed as they talked about the weather and things in general how the old man’s mind seemed to crank slowly upward, his diction becoming better, and he made reference to world events, talking about them in kind of a rough, humorous, semiphilosophical way. He was raw-smart, as Gally had said. Carlisle mentioned the reconstruction job he and Susanna were doing on the old Flagstone. The old man’s face lightened, and he said he’d spent a lot of his evenings at the Flagstone, met his wife at one of the Saturday night dances.
Carlisle a
sked him, “Know anything about billiards? The real stuff, table with no pockets, three balls, run the cue ball off three cushions to make a carom and go to heaven?” Gally had once told Carlisle the old man was the best three-cushion billiards player in the state years ago and regularly cleaned out the hustlers who occasionally stopped in Salamander, looking for a little traveling money.
Crooked grin on the old face. “I banked a few cue balls around the green felt in days past. Got my first car that way, took it off a drummer selling ladies’ undergarments back in ’38 who didn’t know when to lay down his cue and give up. Hard to find a true billiards table now, since the game’s too difficult for the Pepsi generation. They want to play pool and call it billiards, which it ain’t.”
“Tell you what,” Carlisle said, smiling. “During one of my salvage expeditions, I found this great old billiards table at a tavern over in Leadville. The slate’s perfect, the cushions seem fine, new felt required, beautiful hand-carved mahogany for the structure. It’d been covered with canvas for years. Thing must weigh a thousand pounds, but I took it apart and hauled it back to the Flagstone. Thought I’d set it up at one end of the dance floor, which should allow for plenty of cue space.
“Right beside the Flagstone,” he continued, “is a small house, a bungalow, really, where the ballroom manager lived. I bought it as part of the property. I hear Gabe the tango player is getting pretty wobbly and needs a place to live, you need a place to live. How about the two of you sharing the old place? Gabe can work off his rent by playing a little music, you take care of yours by teaching me to play billiards. If you want, you can help me refurbish the Flagstone. I’ll have lots of sanding and finishing work, but that’d be up to you. I checked with the social services people, and it’s okay with them. They need the space out here, and besides, you have a reputation for not taking your quiet-medicine and being uncooperative in general. What do you think?”