Centennial

by James A. Michener

  She had referred to her marriage only once: “How can a girl tell that a guy is a total creep?”

  She was in the restaurant when Garrett arrived. “Let’s go see if Cisco will sing tonight,” he suggested, and she was eager for an excuse to leave the restaurant. They walked west on Mountain, then down Prairie and along the railroad tracks to where Cisco lived in an old clapboard house. He was sitting on the porch, as he usually did in the afternoon, just watching things go past. Like his older brother, he was tall and lean, with the face of a man long accustomed to outdoor work.

  “Hiya, folks,” he said amiably, without getting up.

  “Came by to tell you I’m sorry about the run-in with Floyd ... in court, that is.”

  “He’s a mean one. Anything you said was probably true.”

  “I only testified about the turkeys.”

  “How they doin’?”

  “Checked them this morning. There they were, fat and sassy.”

  “Come on over tonight,” Flor said. “Give us some songs.”

  “I just may do that,” Cisco said.

  They knew it was unnecessary to say anything more. If he felt like it, he would stop by Flor de Méjico around ten and entertain his neighbors. Flor knew that in places like Cleveland and Birmingham he could command thousands of dollars for a night’s performance, but when at home he liked to associate with the people from whom he had learned his songs, the Chicanos and the cowboys.

  Garrett and Flor walked back to the Railway Arms, where they stopped for a couple of beers. They were aware that townspeople were watching them, and that there had been a good deal of talk. Gossips claimed that Flor was his mistress, but a waitress who knew her said, “That hot tamale ain’t gonna let no man in her bed without a license.”

  She was wrong. In various rooms in various towns Flor Marquez and Paul Garrett had been lovers for some time now, each wary of the other, each uncertain of what the future could be. On this afternoon, when each was feeling desolate with loneliness, they separated at the hotel, then found their way by back paths to a motel, where they stayed through the early evening.

  About nine they slipped away, at different times and by different paths, to join me at the restaurant. Flor arrived first and made a desultory effort at helping her father serve the dinner crowd, and after a while Garrett drifted in, as he often did, to play the juke box.

  At ten there was a commotion. “Cisco’s coming!” a boy at the door shouted, and in came the lanky singer with his guitar. Nodding to various friends, he made his way to where Garrett and I were sitting, then invited Flor to join us. He drank beer for about an hour, answering the questions of well-wishers who wanted to know about Nashville and Hollywood, and finally he took up his guitar, plucking a few notes.

  Without warning he struck a series of swift chords, then placed the guitar on the table. “What would you like to hear, Paul?”

  It really didn’t matter, for whatever Cisco Calendar sang evoked the west. If he sang of buffalo skinners, he called forth images of his own grandfather during the big kill of 1873, with his Sharps .50 firing until it was too hot to handle. If he sang of the dust bowl, he reminded listeners of his own father, Jake, who had gone broke in 1936 after watching his farm blow away; when his wife wouldn’t stop nagging him, he blazed away at her with a shotgun and spent a year in jail.

  And if Cisco sang of cowboys, people could hear in his high, nasal complaint the rush of the tumbleweed or the harsh dissonance of a rattler coiled in a sandy path. He could sing of the hawk and the eagle and the Indian’s pinto and make the listener see these creatures, for he had in his manner a terrible reality, the art of a man who had absorbed a culture and found its essence.

  “I’d like to hear ‘Malagueña Salerosa,’ ” Garrett said, and Cisco looked at him.

  “That’s a tough one to start with.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy.”

  Cisco lifted the guitar and played the unique chords which framed this love song, perhaps the finest written in North America in the past fifty years. It was difficult to sing, requiring a command of Spanish-type falsetto, but Cisco respected it as the best of his Chicano repertoire:

  “What beautiful eyes she has

  Beneath those dark brows ...

  Beneath those dark brows ...

  What lovely eyes ...”

  The Chicanos in the restaurant applauded as he sang a passage in high falsetto. After finishing the song, he placed the guitar on the table and bowed to the applauders. “I am singing this song for my good friend Paul Garrett and my better friend Flor Marquez, who are in love.” Recovering the guitar, he played a long passage based on the theme of the song, then sang tenderly the exquisite conclusion:

  “I offer you only my heart ...

  I offer you my heart

  In exchange for my poverty ...

  She is pretty and bewitching

  Like the innocence of a rose ...”

  With the last word he strummed the guitar softly and bowed again. He avoided the popular pitfalls like “Cool Water” or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” or “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” apologizing, “Those songs are for the boys with strong voices. I’m after somethin’ different, altogether different.”

  As he unraveled bits and pieces of the songs he really loved, he built a portrait of a west that no longer existed but which men wanted to remember. Single phrases often evoked a whole era: “Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly.” Or “On a ten-dollar horse and forty-dollar saddle, I’m off to punch them Texas cattle.” Or “His wife, she died in a poolroom fight.” Or “Clouds in the west, it looks like rain. Derned old slicker’s in the wagon again.”

  He sang for several hours—the last of the real cowboys, the last of the buffalo men. He had enjoyed great popularity in Europe as well as in the eastern cities, but he felt most at ease in the restaurant of Manolo Marquez, who had fed him free during the bad years. Here he had learned most of the good Chicano songs he sang, like his very popular translation of “The Ballad of Pancho Villa,” which American audiences appreciated for its outrageous nationalism.

  But the highlight of any Cisco Calendar performance always came late at night, as it did now. Nodding to Garrett and Flor, he played the famous opening chords of the song they waited for. The words were as taut as Homer’s and strove for the same effect: the beginning of a memorable saga:

  “ ’Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the year of ’73, ©

  A man by the name of Crego comes steppin’ up to me,

  Says, ‘How d’you do, young feller, and how’d you like to go

  And spend one summer pleasantly on the range of the buffalo?’ ”

  The song had excellent touches-the smell of the west, the Indians, the tense narrative, the petulant cowboys:

  “It’s now we’ve crossed Pease River, boys, our troubles have begun.

  First damned buffalo that I skinned, Christ, how I cut my thumb!”

  Now Cisco became something larger than life, an epic figure chanting in the darkness of the wild, free days that were no more. Sitting very straight, and moving his hands as little as possible, he approached the end of his song with the inevitability found in Greek tragedy:

  “The season was near over, boys, Old Crego he did say

  The crowd had been extravagant, we were in debt to him that day.

  We coaxed him and we begged him, but still it was, ‘No go!’

  So we left his damned old bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo.”

  “The Buffalo Skinners” was the name of this splendid song. Its composer? No one knew, but the music hammered with the beat of buffalo hoofs on the prairie. Its lyricist? Some nameless Texas cowboy, down on his luck, who had tried his hand at buffalo-skinning during the year of the last great hunt.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said as he finished. “If I was you two,” he said quietly to Flor and Garrett, “I’d get married and to hell with them.”

  I did not see Garrett on Sund
ay, for he spent the day with Flor, talking seriously about the problems that would arise if they did marry. He was Episcopalian and she Catholic, but that was of no consequence to either of them. He had two children, and they were at a difficult age ... well, all ages were difficult when a widower sought to remarry, because the children rarely approved, no matter whom he chose. The young Garretts had already stated that they would not like the idea of a Chicano stepmother. The principal objection, of course, had been removed by the death in February of Paul’s mother, Ruth Mercy Garrett. She had been a tense, unlikable woman who had always known of her husband’s protracted love affair with Flor’s great-aunt, Soledad, and because of it she despised Chicanos. When she heard that Paul was seeing Flor Marquez, a divorcee to boot, she put on a terrible scene, accusing her son of trying to hasten her death. She was so irrational that Paul could not discuss the matter with her, but he honestly believed that his mother might indeed have a heart attack if he married Flor, especially after she bellowed at him, “You’re just like your father! You’re carrying on with that Mexican hussy merely to spite me, the way he did.” Now she was gone and no one deplored her passing, not even her grandchildren, whom she had tried to pamper but who saw her for what she was—a miserable, self-pitying, self-destroying woman.

  One of the real obstacles was Manolo Marquez, for he saw little chance that an Anglo-Chicano marriage might succeed. The few he had witnessed had turned out disastrously, and he doubted that Flor and Paul would do much better. Flor respected what he had to say, because while she was preparing for her first marriage he had predicted that it couldn’t last two months, and it had crashed after only eleven days.

  “He’s a flashy macho,” Manolo had warned his daughter. “But you wouldn’t recognize the type because you don’t hang around poolrooms.” No description could better fit her unfortunate husband, a strutting would-be hero with ideas about the rights of the male in marriage so bizarre that one couldn’t even be amused by them. Flor was humiliated that she had been such a miserable judge of human behavior and felt little confidence in her belief that Garrett might be different.

  But all doubts withered in face of the fact that she and Paul loved each other, wanted each other and felt like better people when in each other’s company. Sex with her first husband had been an appalling affair, without feeling or fulfillment, but to share a bed with Paul Garrett was totally satisfying. He was not afraid of letting her know that he needed her.

  On this Sunday, for example, when they had made their way to the motel again, he told her, “I’m so lonely I can hardly bear it. I stay up there in the castle surrounded by acres of empty land, and they insulate me from everything. If I couldn’t see you in the restaurant, I’d go batty.”

  It became obvious to each that they ought to get married. What held them back? It simply was not the custom in Colorado for Anglos to marry Chicanos. To marry an Indian was acceptable, but a Chicano? No!

  Paul spent Monday away from Flor, trying to sort out his convictions. He applied himself to the job of getting the centennial commission functioning, and since one of his plans called for widespread use of radio, he needed to know what that medium was doing, and the more he heard, the more disgusted he became. On this day he wanted a tape of the major noon broadcast from the local station, and here is the complete transcription:

  FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Well, folks, it’s high noon and the train is chuggin’ in from Poison Snake and Sheriff Gary Cooper is a-waitin’ at the station.

  SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: It’s time for news, all the news, the straight news, delivered without fear or favor, the news you want when you want it.

  FEMALE QUARTET (singing in close harmony):

  “From north from south,

  From east and west,

  We bring it first,

  We bring it best.”

  FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Yessiree, like the girls just said, we bring it best. Remember you heard it first on Western Burst.

  MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending)”

  “The news, the news, the news!

  Here comes the news.”

  SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: But first a brief message which is sure to be of interest. (Here followed two minutes of singing commercials.)

  FIRST ANNOUNCER (breathlessly) : West Berlin, Germany. This morning Chancellor Willy Brandt announced a radical shift in his cabinet.

  SECOND ANNOUNCER (gravely) : Oakland, California. At a special press conference called hurriedly this morning the management of the Oakland Raiders announced that Choo-Choo Chamberlain would—I repeat would—be able to play Sunday against the Denver Broncos.

  MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending)”

  “No matter when the stories burst,

  You hear it here, you hear it first.”

  FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for all the news, the news in depth, the news behind the news.

  MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending):

  “All the news, the news you need.

  Yes indeed. Yes indeed.”

  FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Next complete news coverage one hour from now.

  SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: Unless, of course, there is some fast-breaking news development anywhere in the world. If there is, you know we break in right away, regardless of the program. Because Western Burst is always first. All the news, the news in depth.

  Resignedly, Garrett leaned forward and clicked off the set. Radio and television could have been profound educative devices; instead, most of them were so shockingly bad that a reasonable man could barely tolerate them. In one spell last winter television had offered him an automobile that talked, a housewife who was a genie, a village idiot who could move forward and backward in history, and eighteen detectives involved in forty-seven murders. When one station did run the B.B.C. series Six Wives of Henry VIII, the newspaper announced the first episode as a western, Catherine of Oregon.

  There was the same-illiterate cheapening in every aspect of life. One local restaurant had a big sign advertising its specialty, “Veal Parma John.” Another proclaimed, “Broken Drum Café. You Can’t Beat It. Our Chicken Has That Real Fowl Taste.” A refreshment booth featured “Custard’s Last Stand,” while a motel sign flashed “Just a Little Bedder.”

  One gap in Colorado’s cultural life perplexed him. The state had no major publishing program, and whereas its history was perhaps the most varied and vital in the west, there were few local books to celebrate it. This was the more remarkable in that two neighboring states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, each had a university press which produced really fine volumes on western themes; Garrett was pleased that they kept him supplied with the books he needed but thought it deplorable that Colorado, a richer state with a better subject matter, published almost nothing, as if it were ashamed of its history.

  He did not propose any radical moves in this area, because some years ago he had burnt his fingers badly trying to modify western taste. Denver had a City-and-County Building which faced the gold-domed capitol across a lovely plaza; together they formed one of the most attractive state centers in America. It had become traditional each Christmas to decorate the former building with an appalling collection of green, red, orange and sickly purple lights, and to leave them in position for the January stock show. One French architect, when asked his opinion of the decorations, exclaimed, “The ultimate flowering of early Shanghai Whorehouse.” After unrelieved ridicule had been heaped on the display, Garrett spearheaded a movement to replace it with something more appropriate, and a high-salaried decorator was flown in from New York to take charge. With an international taste he threw out the garish lights and substituted muted colors which blended with the dark Rockies towering beyond, but when cattlemen from various parts of the state descended on the city and found the lights to which they had been accustomed missing, they raised hell, disrupted a session of the legislature and informed the city that “if Denver don’t think enough of us to decorate the building properly, we’ll move our show to Omaha.” In panic the city fa
thers tore down the new lights and reinstalled the awful old ones, so that now Denver had one of the few unique Christmas displays in America. Flamboyant beyond description, it evoked no sense of Christmas, but it did exemplify a cattle show, and every Colorado rancher knew which of those two celebrations was the more important.

  Wherever he looked Garrett saw this same lack of art, this failure of taste. He wondered what the state had to celebrate, except superhighways. Even the mountains were being abused. Brooding over Denver each night was a gigantic neon-lit cross occupying the whole face of a mountain. It had been placed there as an advertisement, and the majority of people in the city liked it, because, they said, “it puts the mountain to some practical use. Also, it reminds us that we are one nation under God.”