Free High Plains Tango by Robert James Waller Page B

“buildout,” which meant there wasn’t any more room for construction. And the really delicious part? The great-grandson of former slaves, a fellow who used to own a little land on one of the islands, wound up working as a pool boy at the Hilton. He vacuumed the bottom of chlorinated ponds while his mother stared through an iron fence at the graves of her ancestors. She needed a pass from the white folks at the hotel to visit the grave sites. Brilliant—elegant, in fact—you had to allow them that much.
    He said good-bye to the old man and drove to what he hoped might be a quiet beach. That didn’t work out. The college troops were on spring break, even though most of them, in Carlisle’s way of looking at things, hadn’t studied hard enough to deserve any break at all, and those studying hard were back at school in the library. He had spent four years at Stanford and knew the real scholars were not on the beaches, even though they were the ones needing a rest, along with construction workers, machinists, and the Mohawks working high steel, none of whom had spring breaks written into their union contracts.
    A wet T-shirt contest was in full blossom on a stage near the water, the present contestant being a good-looking girl wearing bikini bottoms and a doused cutoff T-shirt, which had CLOSED MONDAYS printed on the front. In spite of the nonsense, Carlisle couldn’t help but admire her breasts. Her nipples were practically tearing apart the thin cotton in an effort to be seen. He supposed swinging your fine tits in front of four hundred howling men did that to some women.
    The Sigma Chi and their affiliates were drunk and sunburned and falling back toward the darkness civilization was rumored to have overcome. “Let-us-see-them .  .  . Let-us-see-them,” they chanted with what they took to be clownish understatement, more tongue-in-cheek refined than “Show us your tits!” while a Van Halen tape hammered the afternoon through a sound system designed to communicate with other worlds.
    And, eventually, she did let them see. Stripped off her shirt and dignity at the same time, setting free those big, lovely breasts with a suntan line across them, while civilization fell to its knees weeping, along with the Sigma Chi. That done, the crowd started working on her bikini pants, the gentle roar of hundreds of drunks urging her to get rid of those, too. Responding, she moved into a self-conscious bump and grind with strong Protestant overtones, hesitant thrusts of her pelvis—not too much—movements confined by years of parental admonitions concerning moderation in all things.
    Somewhere, Carlisle imagined, her parents were sipping cocktails and telling their friends, “Yes, Christina is a sophomore at William and Mary, but she hasn’t decided on a major yet. She’s mentioned sociology, or maybe art, but we’re worried about her lack of direction. And what do you do with a degree in art?” With that body, Carlisle grinned to himself, Christina needn’t worry about direction, because a long line of expert advisers would be happy to provide guidance.
             
    HE DROVE south again, walking the beaches where he could get to them via the few public accesses left. Hunkering down for days at a time, reading, thinking, letting his hair grow longer, looking for salvage. In late summer, he caromed off the East Coast and headed inland again. He remembered a place called Chimney Rock wedged in Hickory Nut Gorge, not far from Asheville. He had spent a week there with a woman in .  .  . he tried to remember .  .  . long time ago, in autumn. She wanted to take a look at a small piece of land she owned in the southern Blue Ridge. Carlisle had just been discharged from the army and was headed from Fort Bragg to California, so he decided to go with her.
    It had been real nice. A fast mountain stream with a pretty lake at the end of it slashed through the village. They rented a chalet with a big stone