Free High Plains Tango by Robert James Waller Page A

for directions. This was a guy who still thought a dovetail joint had something to do with dope and whom Carlisle had to roust from bed three mornings out of six. The contractor was shouting obscenities and telling Carlisle to get back on the job, the young man was holding the window, the people in the vacant lot next door were staring. Carlisle McMillan climbed into his truck and started the engine.
    He went back to his furnished apartment, packed his clothes and radio into a couple of duffel bags, and settled up with the building manager. He made the bank just before closing time and withdrew everything he had: $11,212.47. A thousand in cash, three thousand in traveler’s checks, two thousand in a check to his mother to help her get by, the rest in a bank draft.
    His smaller tools went into the metal box fastened to the bed of the six-year-old Chevy pickup. His books, table saw, and other bulky things were stashed in a you-store-it-you-keep-the-key cubicle, and he pulled out in early evening, with no idea of where he was headed.
    He started with the Oakland Bay Bridge, swung north through Sacramento, and eventually picked up a little two-laner across the Sierra Nevada, up into Idaho. Nice country there, but too close to California, too close to the roar of a future he didn’t care much about seeing.
    The truck seemed to have its own mind at crossroads, so Carlisle had let it go, running east, all the way to the North Carolina coast. At Cedar Island, he took the ferry over to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks and settled down in a B&B to watch the trawlers and catch the wind. But the developers had been there, too, not at Ocracoke, but north and south a little ways, pinching in toward him. He could smell them, feel them. Screwing up Nags Head with their condos and theme restaurants, building on land the sea would never stop trying to reclaim, asking for government help when their houses washed away after they had been advised not to build on the mercurial dunes.
    It was worse farther down. On the sea islands, off the mainland from Charleston, the white boys were sweating only lightly in their tan summer suits while slickering everybody, mostly the descendants of ex-slaves who had owned the islands. Carlisle sat on a sea wall next to an old black man and talked with him about it.
    The man told him the island people were originally into family and poetry, music and Christian mysticism. Still were to some extent. The world they had fixed up in this sweltry place was one of Brer Rabbit and Brer Gator and fine sea island cotton. Now the white boys, they were into something else altogether. Hard-nosed stuff, that’s what they were up to.
    “They’s ridin’ ’round in those little golf carts, just a-figgerin’. All the time they’s a-figgerin.’”
    The old man wore brown striped pants from a suit that had been new thirty years ago but was now shiny with wear, a blue-striped white shirt with a frayed collar, and a gray fedora. As he talked, he looked out toward the sea islands, his voice taking on a distance that seemed farther away than the islands themselves. Carlisle listened, sometimes looking down at the patterns they both were making in the sand with the toes of their shoes, sometimes looking out to where the old man looked, out to the islands.
    What those white boys had done was brilliant, Carlisle admitted that to himself. Ruthless, but brilliant. It worked like this, according to the old man. Offer big money for land, get the avarice sluicing around in the heads of some poor folks, and put an expensive hotel on the site. That jacked up property taxes beyond what the remaining landholders could afford. To pay the taxes, they had to sell the land given to them by General William Tecumseh Sherman after the Civil War. The developers bought the land and put up more hotels and condos and beach clubs. Property taxes rose even more, the cycle continued.
    Eventually, an island would reach what the fast guys called