Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “When did the commercial aspect begin? Your first customer, that is?”

  “One day when we were practicin’ on dry runs we came so close to a big bird that Floyd cried, ‘Shit, a man don’t even have to aim. If he can point a gun he can get hisself a eagle this way.’ So there was this dude from Boston. Had one of everything in his game room except a eagle. Even had a Kodiak bear, and wanted a eagle so bad he could taste it.

  “He told Floyd before takeoff, ‘I don’t think you can get a eagle this way, but if you bring me onto one, I’ll give you five hundred dollars.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘And there’ll be a little somethin’ in it for you.’ So we were bound to locate a eagle.”

  “Did you?”

  “We cruised for a while west of Fort Collins and didn’t find nothin’. So we sorta drifted down over Rocky Mountain National Park, where we turned up a big, beautiful bird. The dude wanted to fire as soon as we saw it, but we didn’t want to shoot him over the park, because we might run into trouble when we landed to pick it up.

  “So I swung the plane south of him and we worked him north, out of the park, and when he was over plowed land I moved in real close.

  “Now, the eagle and the plane fly at about the same speed, so it was just like the bird was standin’ still. And that’s where we made our big mistake on our first try. I got too close. Hell, you could of killed that eagle with a broom.

  “So when the dude does fire he practically disintegrates the eagle. We spent the better part of a hour pickin’ up the various bits and pieces, and when we hauled them in to Gundeweisser, the taxidermist, he looks at the pile and asks, ‘How do you want this job made up? As a duck or a eagle? I can play it either way.’

  “He turned out a masterpiece. Spread-eagled, talons projectin’, glass eyes flashin’. The dude was delighted and sent us the picture you have over there. When we showed it to Gundeweisser, he said, ‘That eagle’s two-thirds plastic, but he’ll never know.’ So after that I kept the crate a little farther away so’s the gun blast didn’t tear the bird apart.”

  “How many did you kill from your platform in the sky?”

  “Somethin’ over four hundred, but me’n Floyd never shot a single one. Always some sportsman who wanted our national bird on his wall.”

  Taxidermist Gundeweisser confirmed these figures. “The boys brought me their eagles because I’d perfected the knack of making them look extra ferocious—talons extended. I was able to do this because I bought only first-class eyes from Germany—hard glass with a flash of yellow. I mounted over four hundred eagles, and nobody ever wanted the bird just looking natural. Always had to be in the act of killing something, talons extended.”

  One of the state naturalists was now called, and he testified that he and his associates had been watching Floyd Calendar for some time. “National publicity on the eagle thing scared him off that line, and we never saw the plane again. What he directed his attention to was bears. There was almost as good a market for bears as there was for eagles, and he devised a sure-fire way of helping an eastern hunter bag his bear.”

  “Explain it, if you will.”

  “He learned to trap bears. He probably knows more about bears than any man in America. At the beginning of each season he’d trap eight or ten beauties and hide them in cages deep in the woods. When some sportsman came along Floyd would charge him one hundred dollars for the hunt, two hundred if he bagged a bear. He would take the sportsman to one of several cabins in the woods, and about a quarter of a mile away he would have one of his bears in a cage. At five in the morning he’d sneak out and let the bear loose and at five-fifteen he and the sportsman would start trailing it, and by five-thirty the bear would be dead. I investigated three dozen cases like this, and never did the hunter suspect what Floyd had done. He handed over two hundred dollars and was delighted with the deal.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, every now and then Floyd would release a bear that would take off in some unanticipated direction, and there’d be no chance of trailing him. So he adopted the practice of not feeding the caged bears for two weeks prior to releasing them. Now there were few escapes, because the bear would stop to eat, and the sportsman could creep up and gun it down.”

  “We’d like to hear what Mr. Calendar tried next”

  “Ranger Quarry will explain that.”

  A very young man took the stand, with a collection of gadgets to which the clerk gave numbers. “Mr. Calendar was still not satisfied, for an occasional bear would still get away. We have evidence that his new plan was inspired by an article in National Geographic in which I detailed experiments I had made in Canada on the hibernating habits of bears. In the article, which now I’m sorry I wrote, I explained how we attached to the bear a very small radio device, like this. Wherever the bear went, it sent a signal, which betrayed his position at all times. Then I put one of these direction finders in my cap, and I could move about and always know where the bears were.

  “Well, Floyd Calendar discovered who manufactured the broadcasting and listening devices, and after that whenever he captured a bear to be used later, he planted one of these transmitters around his neck. Then when a sportsman came into the mountains to get himself a bear, all Floyd had to do was let the bear loose, listen to where he was going, and zero his hunter right onto the scene without any chance of failure.”

  “Didn’t the hunter realize what was happening when he got to the dead bear and saw the broadcast device?”

  “No. Because Floyd never let him shoot at the bear till he—Floyd, that is—was all set for a running start. Then, while the hunter jumped in the air with joy, Floyd ran in, bent over, and with one quick swipe, tore the little transmitter from the bear’s neck, and no one was the wiser.”

  Now came the turn of Paul Garrett, who was introduced as deputy to the commissioner. Spectators in the courtroom leaned forward as he took the stand, because feelings ran high in this case, and some citizens felt that it was unfair to confront Calendar with an official like Garrett.

  “I’ve known Floyd Calendar all my life,” Garrett said under questioning. “Knew his father, too. And my family knew his grandfather.”

  “Tell us about Mr. Calendar and turkeys.”

  “About ten years ago I lured a family of wild turkeys onto the north edge of my ranch. We fed them, protected them, and after a while we had quite a colony. The wild turkey is a very sensitive bird, almost extinct in these parts, and we watched our brood very carefully, because they’re our real national bird.

  “But apparently Floyd Calendar was watching them too, because after they reached a certain number they began to decline, and we could find no sign of coyotes. We worried about this until a friend of mine in Massachusetts sent me a copy of a form letter he’d received from Colorado. Here it is.”

  The judge instructed the clerk to read it, and the spectators were either amused or outraged when Floyd Calendar’s mimeographed letter to his clients was divulged: “I can make you a guarantee that no other guide in America can make. Come to the Rockies and I’ll show you how to bag both of our national birds, a baldheaded eagle and a wild turkey.”

  “Where did he get the turkey?” the prosecutor asked.

  “From my protected sanctuary. When I saw the letter I staked one of my men out to guard the turkeys, and sure enough, here comes Floyd Calendar with a hunter from Wisconsin, shooting my turkeys.”

  “Now, Mr. Garrett, there are rumors circulating as to what you did then. Will you tell the court.”

  “I became very angry and waited till I saw Calendar go into Flor de Méjico, that’s the restaurant run by Manolo Marquez, and I went up to him and I said something like ...”

  “We don’t want to hear ‘something like’ what you said. What did you say?”

  “As well as I can remember, I said, ‘Calendar, if you ever set foot on that turkey range again, I’ll kill you. If I’m there when you come, I’ll do it there. If I miss you when you sneak in, I’ll c
ome into this restaurant and get you while you’re eating.’ ”

  “Did you say, Mr. Garrett, that you’d get him while he was eating?”

  “I did. I was very angry.”

  This early confession of his threat took some of the sting out of the cross-examination, but the defense attorney made a good deal of the fact that a man who would be working with sportsmen in his new job had threatened to shoot one of them in a public restaurant. By the time the interrogation ended, Garrett did not look good.

  The last prosecution witness was a Centennial man who had had several run-ins with Calendar, and his testimony was devastating: “With Floyd Calendar, killing became an end in itself. He hated everything that moved—prairie dogs, rattlers, antelope and, like you heard, bears and eagles. I think if you gave Floyd a free hand, when he got through with the animal kingdom he’d start on Negroes and Mexicans and Chinese and Catholics and anyone else who wasn’t exactly like himself. He hates anything that intrudes on his part of the world, and considers it his duty to wipe it out. To call him a sportsman is obscene. He’s a one-man ecological disaster.”

  The defense attorney, of course, objected to this whole tirade, and the judge ordered it stricken from the record.

  When the first defense witnesses appeared the general tenor of the trial became clear, for they were ranchers and hunters who testified that bald eagles carried away young lambs and should be exterminated. They also testified that Floyd Calendar was one of the finest men in the west—everyone said he had been kind to his mother—and on that edifying note the court recessed over the weekend. One rancher, as he left the courtroom, told Garrett, “You have a nerve, testifyin’ against a real American,” and Paul was relieved to know that he would be required to testify no further.

  On Saturday, November 10, he worked on the ranch, riding north to inspect the wild turkeys. They were most handsome birds, big and heavy. They always looked as if Pilgrims with long guns should be chasing them for the 1621 Thanksgiving, and Paul was delighted that they shared the ranch with him.

  He also rode over to a corner of the range he had set aside for a prairie-dog town. Slowly the little creatures were making a comeback, sharing their burrows with sand owls. Their return was not an unmixed blessing, for one of Garrett’s horses broke his leg in a burrow and had to be shot. The ranch foreman wanted to bulldoze the town out of existence, but Garrett refused permission: “You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.”

  The fact that he had sought the company of turkeys and prairie dogs reminded him of how deeply he was afflicted by the permanent American illness. A deep depression attacked him, which he could identify but not explain, the awful malaise of loneliness.

  I’ve never understood why so many Americans are so committed to loneliness. I know it runs in my family. When Alexander McKeag, who could be called an ancestor because he held Pasquinel’s family together, spent the winter of 1827 alone in a cave, speaking to no one, he was succumbing to our sickness.

  And when my other ancestor, Levi Zendt, turned his back on Beaver Creek and chose the dreadful isolation of Chalk Cliff, he was behaving like a typical American.

  Sheepmen like Amos Calendar elected to live by themselves. Like their prototype Daniel Boone, they preferred living alone “rather than with all them people.”

  Only the white Americans did this. The Arapaho always combined in large communal societies. Chinese railroad workers lived in colonies, and so did Chicano beet workers. The Japanese clung to their communities and so did the Russians. It took the American to build his ranch far from everything, his farm where no one else could see him. Why?

  Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one’s own cottage.

  It had been the same with all subsequent frontiers. If a man was inwardly afraid of loneliness, he had small chance of adjusting to the terrible isolation of the Kentucky forest. A predisposition for living alone became almost a requirement for survival in America, and even now, Garrett thought, the world held few places so lonely as the average American city.

  The prairie had intensified the challenge, for there the emptiness was inescapable; even the sheltering tree was absent. A family moving west could anticipate fifty days of travel without encountering a sign of human habitation, and the wife whose husband decided to settle in Wyoming had to face an endless expanse of nothingness.

  And there had been that ultimate in isolation, the snowbound mountain men passing the winters in some forgotten spot, allowing the drifts to cover him, during the silent months, reading nothing, conversing not even with animals, who were also in hibernation. This was a form of exile difficult to comprehend, but there were always men who sought it.

  The only heroes I had as a boy were loners. The isolated defenders of the Alamo. Nathan Hale operating alone and taking his punishment solo. The pioneer mother defending the Conestoga wagon after her man was slain. The Pony Express rider pointing the nose of his horse west and going it alone. These were my symbols.

  This had an effect on every aspect of American life. One courageous man building a solitary log cabin and calling it home. Any self-respecting family must live apart ... by itself ... in its own little cabin, and any unfortunate who failed to achieve this alone-ness was either pitied or ridiculed. The unmarried elder sister became the focus of pity because she had to live with others. Any son-in-law who had to live with his wife’s parents was an object of ridicule.

  When the west was opened, people did not live in communities. One ranch was thirty miles from the next. During the period of Indian raids no one gave the remote settler hell for trying to make it alone. He was cheered for being brave enough to face the Indians on his own.

  As a consequence of all this, Americans became the loneliest people on the face of the earth. We’re even lonelier than the Eskimos, who live in close units. We’re much lonelier than the Mexicans, who occupy the same type of land to the south, for Mexicans retain the extended family in which people of all ages live together in reasonable harmony.

  There were compensations, Garrett had to admit. Living alone meant that men had to be more ingenious, which led to inventiveness. Old patterns had to be surrendered, so revolutionary new ones could be more easily accepted. Forward-seeking led to the development of the brash, resolute, outgoing man. The world needed him, but he evolved at a terrible price in loneliness.

  For Garrett was also aware of the heavy social cost. Americans were both wasteful and cruel with their old people, especially their older women. Three factors conspired to produce a plethora of elderly women. First, as in all nations, females tended to live about five years longer than males. Second, custom encouraged a man to marry a woman somewhat younger than he. Third, American tradition required the man to work himself to death to support his woman, so that many men died prematurely. Adding these data, the average wife could look forward to about fifteen years of widowhood.

  Other civilizations had grappled with this phenomenon. The American Indian who used to live at Rattlesnake Buttes solved it by depriving the widow of everything, even shelter, and encouraging her to starve to death. Asian Indians adopted a crueler solution: the widow was expected to climb the funeral pyre of her husband and burn to death. Arab nations developed the sensible device of multiple wives. In America, Garrett saw, the survivors were condemned to infirmity and loneliness.

  Men fared only slightly better. So
me of the loneliest men Garrett had ever known were the heads of corporations, trusting no one, confiding in no one, living out their lives in quiet despair, each wealthy man immured within his own castle.

  What the hell am I doing living in a castle? he asked himself as he returned to ranch headquarters. Since the death of his wife he had been terribly lonely, felt himself no better off than the widows and the tycoons he had been pitying. He had a fine ranch, a profession he loved and now a responsible job with the government, but these did not compensate for his increasing sense of isolation.

  About three o’clock that afternoon he took a shower, shaved and climbed into his car. When he left the ranch he could not have said where he was heading. Vaguely he wanted to hear Cisco Calendar sing some good western songs, for Cisco was the best in the business and was home again from his television show in Chicago. He also wanted to assure Cisco that his testimony against Floyd indicated no grudge.

  But Cisco was not the main reason for the trip to town. What he really needed was to see Flor Marquez, to make up his mind about that long-legged, dark-haired divorcee. She had first caught his eye during his visits to her father’s restaurant for some good Chicano food. It could not be said that he watched her grow up, for he was too preoccupied with other things to notice a Chicano girl, but he was aware that she had married a dashing fellow from Los Angeles, and of course it was a general scandal when she returned home after two weeks with a scar along her left cheek.