High Plains Tango Read Free Page B

six scarred booths wobbled along the side of the room next to the sidewalk. In one of the booths, four teenagers were reeling through that horrendous period of life when it seems death will never come and zits will never leave.
    Buddy Reems, Carlisle’s former partner in Reems & McMillan Construction, had come up with lots of good ideas. One of his best was that all teenagers should be sent to some desolate place, maybe North Dakota. Buddy had it figured out: Pave the entire state and stock it with nothing but fast-food restaurants and skateboard parks and drive-in movies.
    Buddy would then sit at a small table on the state line, and those interned would have to pass an adult certification interview with him before leaving. Some, many, most, would never make it. Those who did would have an “A” for “Adult” branded into the flesh of their foreheads so the world could identify and treat them as rational people. All Buddy asked in return for the brilliance of his idea and his work at the interview table was the Clearasil concession for the entire state, into perpetuity, and the right to operate a trashy amusement park he’d call Buddyland.
    Listening to Buddy talk about it, Carlisle had thought the proposal contained a lot of merit once you got by its front-end weirdness. Automobile insurance rates would dive, and so would crime rates. Bad music, gone. There were more benefits. Buddy had a long list he’d worked out, but just now Carlisle couldn’t remember all of them. Dammit, sometimes he missed Buddy Reems, missed his company and his good ideas. In addition to being a decent carpenter and drinking companion, he was a first-chop social theorist—well, maybe a cut or two below that—and operated pretty much as Carlisle’s opposite, saying and doing certain things Carlisle wouldn’t.
    Waylon and Willie were roaring out of the caf’s jukebox, bragging about honky-tonkin’ men and the good-hearted, masochistic women loving them in spite of their errant ways. The plastic, two-foot-high tubular pie case on the counter had room for ten slices. Six were gone. Apple and some sort of cream wonders were left, kind of mournful looking at the end of the day, their morning zip just a memory and replaced by an early evening sag. Carlisle decided the pies were not a bad metaphor for himself, or for the woman who came out of the kitchen and saw him sitting at the counter, oscillating slowly on a stool.
    “Oh, hi. Didn’t know anyone was out here. Can I help you with something?”
    Gally Deveraux was tired, felt that way, looked it. Nice midrange voice. A little windburned in the face, a little sad in the face. A little thin in the body, maybe, or maybe not. Long black hair with a few silver strands and rubber-banded into a ponytail. Eyes kind of a haunting color, gray or close to it. She might have been pretty a long time ago, but now she had the same spare, run-down look as the country around them.
    “Well, I’m trying to locate some dinner, and this seems to be the last hope in Salamander.”
    Gally Deveraux smiled, good smile, genuine smile. “We eat
dinner
around noon out here. Suppertime comes about six in the evening, breakfast twelve hours after that. So you’re kind of in a cranny, your last hope fading with every clock tick. Here, take a look at the menu and maybe we can work something out.”
    The menu was handwritten and shoved into a cracked plastic sleeve. The same list Carlisle had found in small-town cafs everywhere in that sector of America: hamburger, cheeseburger, vegetable burger, hamburger steak, pork tenderloin, grilled cheese sandwich, tuna salad sandwich, egg salad sandwich, French fries .  .  . The fish sandwich had been priced at $2.45 (with fries) but was crossed out now.
    Carlisle closed the menu and gave her an easy grin. “What does the chef suggest? The free-range almond chicken with an infusion of rosemary, accompanied by an unassuming white wine, or the veal in cream sauce?”
    She