High Plains Tango by Robert James Waller

Author:Robert James Waller [Waller, Robert James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307238306
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2005-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

EARLY SUMMER, AND CARLISLE HAD THE HOUSE FINISHED except for some minor plumbing and electrical work he wanted to complete before his open house. That allowed him more time for Gally and other things he had been thinking about. In the spring, he’d come across plans for a five-string banjo in a copy of Mother Earth News. He laid up a prototype, studied it, and figured out some improvements. A vintage Gibson four-string was lying in its case at a Salamander garage sale. He cannibalized it for the tone ring and fitted the ring to a laminated maple rim he built up and finished on a lathe he rented for a day. The neck was hand carved out of a scrap of mahogany he’d picked up at a construction site in Falls City, and he laid the frets with micrometer accuracy.

It sounded pretty good, real good, in fact, even though he didn’t play all that well, learning as he did from some books and tapes he’d ordered. Good enough for Dumptruck, apparently, since the tomcat didn’t complain too much. And Gally liked to hear Carlisle play and sing “Way Out There” or “Buffalo Skinners” on Saturday nights after they’d had a few beers.

As the old man said, Carlisle was taken with the music of Gabe O’Rourke. Most Saturday nights, Gabe would bring a guitar player with him, a fellow who got around real well on the ebony fretboard of a forty-year-old Martin New Yorker. Both of them were sophisticated musicians, and that surprised and pleased Carlisle, who decided he had underestimated what was possible out there on the high plains.

They played a fair amount of stuff familiar to the locals, but now and then they’d get lean and tight and play—Carlisle couldn’t believe it at first—a tango. The real street stuff, direct from the cafs of Argentina and Paris all the way to Leroy’s in Salamander.

In Carlisle’s early years, a fellow named Luis occasionally dropped by Wynn McMillan’s house in Mendocino. Luis was a tango dancer, right down to his slicked-back dark hair and insolent ways. One evening, Carlisle chewed on a stick of red licorice and listened while Luis explained to the assembled members of Wynn’s salon how the tango was the one dance having universal meaning attached to it.

According to Luis, the movements of the tango represented the male’s domination of the female. He argued furthermore that this dominion extended to the male’s brutal attitude toward nature, as contrasted with the nurturing instincts of females. Before he had finished, Luis had constructed a semicoherent theory of how the entire history and behavior of celestial space could be found in the movements unique to tango dancing.

Carlisle was eleven when he heard Luis’s lecture, after which Luis had supported his notions by giving an exhibition in the living room. His partner was a voluptuous watercolorist, who was all too willing to be dominated, or so it seemed to Carlisle’s inexperienced eyes. When Carlisle looked back on it, however, what fascinated him most was that Luis had his own theory of the macrocosm.

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