High Plains Tango Read Free Page A

when Carlisle finished his beer and walked out. As he closed the door behind him, pool balls cracked into one another while old Frank snored and choked his way toward oblivion.
             
    “NOW JUST what did we have sitting down there?” Jack Deveraux asked, canting his head and looking toward the door where Carlisle had exited.
    “No idea.” Leroy turned to wash more glasses. “Some longhair from somewhere. They come in once in a while. No problem, ’long as they keep quiet and keep moving.”
    As he put his Red Wing lace-ups on the sidewalk outside Leroy’s, Carlisle’s first observation was that an elderly man was watching him from a second-floor window across the street, above what used to be Lester’s TV & Appliance. His second was that Salamander and the sun pretty much closed up shop at the same time.
    In the past few months, Carlisle had seen hundreds of small towns, and Salamander was not unique. Other places, lots of them, looked the same with their empty storefronts, boarded-up schools, few young people on the streets. A general sense of malaise, of lifelessness, of things gone wrong.
    It was a pretty sunset, though, his first evening in Salamander. The kind you get out in the big spaces, with the western sky turning pink magenta laid up against a dome of azure to the north.
    Hungry now, choices limited. Leroy’s had advertised Tombstone pizza, which, looking around the main street of Salamander, Carlisle decided was prophetic. Leroy’s other specials were beef jerky in a glass jar and packages of beer nuts, all of it amounting to a shade less than the five basic food groups.
    Twilight came with a descending chill typical of late summer nights in those parts. Carlisle pulled his old leather jacket from the truck, slipped into it, and walked along Main Street. In the window of E. M. Holley’s furniture store–cum–undertaker’s parlor was an overstuffed love seat upholstered in blood-red flowers against a white background. He guessed by the looks of things in Salamander that the second half of Holley’s empire was outrunning the first.
    The windows of Charlene’s Variety were plastered with GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs stating that thread and notions and gifts could be had at rock-bottom prices. Two of the three gas stations were gone, weeds growing where pumps had been. The remaining one was trying to peddle unleaded at three cents a gallon higher than Harv’s Get & Go convenience store. Swale’s Ranch Supply looked as though it might sell a little wire or maybe some feed now and then, but not much else. There were no fresh tire tracks in the mud by Swale’s loading dock. Orly’s Meats and Locker Service was hanging in there, Webster’s Jack & Jill grocery was doing the same.
    On the door of what used to be Schold’s Badlands Lounge was a sign reading, “I have moved to Livermore.” Just below that sign was another, one that had been fastened there a long time, the bottom corners of it curling back. Carlisle squatted down to read it.
    Small Towns
    Crime is scarcely heard of, breaches of order rare, and our societies, if not refined, are rational, moral, and affectionate at least.
    —         Thomas Jefferson
    Salamander’s commercial district was two blocks long. In the middle of the second block, across from where Carlisle walked, was a small and faltering neon sign, yellow with black lettering, signaling “ DAN Y ’s.” As he crossed the street, Carlisle could see the burned-out N , which cleared up the dominant question in his life at that particular moment.
    The door to Danny’s was flaking white wood on the bottom half with a frame of glass at the top. A faded Kools cigarette advertisement was pasted to the glass just below a Pepsi sticker. Above those was a sign advising that, indeed, Danny’s was open and would be until eight o’clock.
    Seven chromed metal stools with red seat coverings fronted the counter. Three Formica-topped tables ran down the middle, and