American Heritage

 

by Dennis Vannatta

The Sioux, or maybe they were Blackfoot, would have been wrapped in blankets against the chill as they came over the crest of the ridge to the north, the wind slicing from the west between gray sky and tawny plains, no place here for them to hunker down out of the wind, no shelter until, farther south, they would find themselves in the Badlands. If you could call that shelter.

“I see them all on horses, riding bareback,” Kath said.

“Well, maybe if it was a raiding party,” Lawrence said in his professorial voice. (He was, in fact, a marketing professor.) “But I imagine a horse would have been a rare and valuable possession, and only the warriors would have had one of their own.”

“So, are we warriors?”

Lawrence frowned but didn’t turn his head to look at her. It would have been dangerous at that speed.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we have a Mustang, don’t we?”

Lawrence laughed and slapped the wheel but then remembered that he was doing almost eighty, with that wicked tailwind, and clutched the wheel with both hands again.

“You know, you don’t have to drive eighty just because it’s the speed limit,” Kath said. “You’re not used to it.”

“Us pioneers can’t live in fear, ma’am,” he said, trying to do a John Wayne but sounding more like Walter Brennan.

They’d been “seeing Indians coming over the hill” ever since they left Rapid City, driving east toward the Badlands. Because of mechanical problems, their flight was three hours late arriving at the airport last night, and the only vehicles left at their car rental agency were a Toyota minivan and the yellow Mustang. “Come on, let’s do something fun,” Kath had said, sensing that Lawrence was about to opt for the minivan. So the Mustang it was. Lawrence held on for dear life and was going seventy-two when they got to Wall.

*

“So we’re stopping to visit a drugstore?” Kath said although Lawrence had already explained to her about Wall Drugs, which his dad told him about seeing on a trip to the Black Hills when he was a boy. “You’d see the See Wall Drug signs on fence posts all the way across South Dakota,” he said, damn near the only thing you did see, and hundreds of miles later, when you finally pulled into the Wall Drugs parking lot, it’d seemed like the most wonderful place in the world. They were still there, the Wall Drugs signs. Lawrence and Kath had starting seeing them as soon as they left Rapid City.

Lawrence didn’t know what it’d been like in his dad’s time, but now Wall Drugs was basically one enormous souvenir store, or series of souvenir stores, occupying most of a city block.

“Kitschy,” Lawrence said, looking over Kath’s shoulder as, giggling like a schoolgirl, she lifted one wooden plaque after another with cornball sayings burned onto them.

“Hey, you’re from Tennessee, and you’re turning up your nose at kitsch in South Dakota?”

“I don’t like kitsch in Tennessee, either.”

They came out of a souvenir store into an open area, and there stood an enormous fiberglass rabbit, steps on one side leading up to a saddle.

“Photo op!” Kath said.

“I’m not getting up there,” Lawrence said.

“Oh, go on. You don’t have to worry about the rabbit doing eighty.”

Lawrence climbed up into the saddle and threw his elbows out like Peter O’toole on his camel in Lawrence of Arabia while Kath took his picture with her cellphone.

“There’s my hero!” she said.

He climbed down, and they went over to another photo op, a Conestoga wagon, genuine wood, Lawrence thought, drawn by two fiberglass horses.

“Get up there, you two wild and crazy guys,” came a voice from behind them. “We’ll take your picture.”

They climbed up and sat on the bench-seat of the wagon as the man took the photo with Kath’s cellphone. Then the man and his wife changed places with them, and Kath took their photo. They all laughed like it was great fun. You have to get in the spirit of things.

Introductions all around. They were the Wheelwrights, Barry and Annie, from Cincinnati. At first Lawrence thought they were younger than he and Kath but later decided they were probably a little older, mid-forties, he guessed, although the kind of forty-year-olds who tried to dress and act like twenty-somethings and could pull it off if you didn’t look too close.

After the introductions, there was that awkward moment when nobody knew what to say next, until finally Barry said, “Well, enjoy the rest of your visit,” and they went their separate ways.

*

Halfway between Wall and the Badlands, Lawrence and Kath stopped at an old-time plains homestead, the house built into the side of a hill. Even though it was called a sod house, the exposed portion was made of wood.

“They had to haul the wood from twenty miles away,” Kath said, reading a sign.

“No trees around here for sure.”

“These were real pioneers.”

“Imagine. No Grubhub. No 911 when the Injuns come calling.” “No, I mean it, Lawrence. It really took something to come out here, build a life out of nothing. They were some kind of people.”

She walked around the inside of the house touching anything that didn’t say Do Not Touch. They walked back outside. The wind almost blew off Lawrence’s Tennessee Vols ball cap.

“Look,” Lawrence pointed. “The prairie dogs. They’re real.”

They’d seen them on the short walk from the visitors’ center to the sod house, the prairie dog holes here and there on both sides of the path, the white, furry things popping up out of the holes as if on springs and disappearing instantly, looking too cute to be real.

“Of course they’re real. What did you think?”

“Who knew prairie dogs could be white? I swear to God, I thought it was all mechanical. It looked like a giant Whack-a-Mole game to me.”

“Whack-a-Mole. Boy, you can be a real mood killer, you know that?”

“We were in a mood?”

*

The Badlands, wow, the Badlands were quite literally otherworldly. They looked like a giant CGI backdrop for a Star Wars movie, Lawrence thought. He didn’t say that to Kath, though. After the Whack-a-Mole comment, he didn’t think another pop culture comparison welcome.

They parked and followed a paved walkway into that lunar landscape. At the end of the pavement, a sign warned that one should proceed only with extreme care.

They stepped out onto a reasonably flat area. Then Kath made her way down a steep, rocky path into a crevasse some dozen feet deep.

At the bottom she looked up and grinned.

“Come up out of there,” he said, waving her back toward him.

They returned to the Mustang, drove to the next parking area, then stopped and followed that path.

They’d gotten fairly into it, gawking left and right, when a woman standing off to the side of the path said, “We’re going to have to quit meeting like this.”

It was Annie Wheelwright.

“Hey, there,” Lawrence said, unable to think of her or her husband’s names.

Kath saved him. “Hi, Annie. Where’s Barry?”

Annie pointed to the top of a rocky slope. There Barry stood with a camera taking photos of something the three at the bottom couldn’t see.

He must have heard them because he turned and called down, “Hi, you Lintons. Come on up.”

“What are you looking at?” Kath asked.

“A big horn sheep. You need to see this.”

Annie said, “I’m not wearing shoes for climbing,” and pointed to her sandals with hard-leather soles.

“Come on, let’s go,” Kath said to Lawrence.

“Do I have to?”

“Come on.”

He made a histrionically long-suffering face for Annie and started up. He got about halfway when he felt his feet going, and he slid back to the bottom on his feet and palms.

“Shee-it!”

“Out of my way, tenderfoot,” Kath said, scrambling up the slope.

Kath and Barry were up there several minutes taking photos and ooing and ahhing.

When she got back down, Kath showed Lawrence the pictures she’d taken on her phone.

“Man, look at the horns on that sucker,” Lawrence said.

Barry was still up on the slope when they left.

They ate lunch at a Subway in Wall, then drove back to Rapid City.

*

That evening, they were walking through the lobby of their motel when they saw the Wheelwrights again.

“Hey, you’re stalking us.”

“No, you’re stalking us.”

They decided, since they seemed fated to always be running into each other, to have dinner together.

It was a pleasant evening. Annie, who’d been an English major in college, asked Lawrence jokingly if his branch of the Lintons was related to the Lintons in Wuthering Heights. Then Barry asked Lawrence if he knew what a wheelwright was.

“Someone who works on wheels, right?” Lawrence said.

Annie slapped the table and said, “He asks that same stupid question of everyone we meet. Why do you keep doing that, dummy? I married a dummy dummy dummy,” grabbing him by his curly blond hair and shaking his head at each “dummy.” Barry grinned like he was pleased to be abused and yanked about. Truly, they seemed more like a couple of teenagers than a couple in their forties, Lawrence thought.

Kath must have been thinking the same thing because she asked, “How long have you two been married?” When Annie said twenty-two years, Kath said that that beat her and Lawrence by two years. Then she asked if the Wheelwrights had children and when she found out that they didn’t said, “Aha, that’s the reason you seem so carefree.” (Kath and Lawrence’s daughter, Jordan, had left for her first year of college a month ago. Now they were empty-nesters, and felt it. That was the reason for the vacation to the Black Hills, in fact. “We need to do something. We’re stuck in a rut,” Kath had said, and when Lawrence replied that he didn’t feel like they were in a rut, she’d said, “That’s sad, Lawrence. You don’t even realize how sad that is.”)

It turned out that the Wheelwrights were planning to go to Mt. Rushmore and then Custer State Park the next day, just liked the Lintons, so it seemed natural for Barry to suggest that they all go together.

“Sounds like fun,” Kath said, and Lawrence said, “Sure, I’ll drive.”

“No no, I’ll drive,” Barry said.

Lawrence, who wanted to be able to cut the day short if he got bored, said, “I’m the one with the yellow Mustang, and Barry held up his hands in surrender.

“But in that case dinner’s on us tonight,” Barry said, and Lawrence said, “Damn, I should have ordered the lobster.”

Everyone laughed.

That night in bed, Kath said, “You were unusually sociable tonight.” Lawrence didn’t much care for the “unusually” but didn’t say anything because he was hoping for a little vacation sex.

*

At Mt. Rushmore, the Wheelwrights walked on ahead while Kath and Lawrence stopped off in the gift shop to look for a souvenir for Jordan.

They came back outside, Kath with the cute little furry buffalo tucked into her bag, and walked up the promenade between the state flags waving atop tall poles. The overcast of yesterday had given way to a clear, bright sky.

At the low wall at the end of the promenade, they stood looking up at Mt. Rushmore. They agreed it was spectacular. Then they looked around for Barry and Annie but didn’t see them.

“Maybe they took a walk,” Lawrence said.

“Walk where?”

They went into the snack bar, but the Wheelwrights weren’t there, either, nor in the little theater where a documentary on the building of the monument was shown. They went back outside and in a moment saw Barry and Annie coming up the promenade toward them, Barry walking like a man late for work with Annie a couple of steps behind him trying to keep up.

“Uh oh,” Kath whispered to Lawrence, “this doesn’t look good.”

They came up to Lawrence and Kath, both looking grim, and Lawrence, with greater enthusiasm than he really felt at the moment, said, “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

Annie turned to Barry with a vindictive sneer and said, “Ha! This one said you’d be better off watching North by Northwest.”

“That’s a goddamn lie. I never said that. I said you get a better sense of the size of the monument in the movie. Here, the perspective, whatever, it just doesn’t make them look as big as they really are. You can tell in the movie because you can see a person on them.”

“What this one said was, they should pick one person a day to throw off the top. That’d really draw the crowds.”

“A joke, as you very well know. Wait, I take that back. You wouldn’t know a joke if your bony ass depended on it.”

“Fortunately, my bony ass doesn’t depend on your pathetic attempts at humor.”

“OK, kids,” Lawrence broke in. “What say we go get some ice cream? They claim it’s made from Thomas Jefferson’s own recipe.”

*

Back in the car, Lawrence said, “Well, so, on to Custer State Park and those bison, or, what, just call it a day and head back to Rapid City?”

“Oh, no no, don’t let us change your plans,” Annie said, leaning forward from the back seat and putting her hand on Lawrence’s shoulder.

And Barry said, “Heck no, buddy, we’ve had our daily blood-letting. We’re fine now. Onward! Let’s hunt them bison!”

Halfway through the scenic route to the park, Lawrence pulled off the road and parked at an overlook. Exclaiming over the vista, Kath and Annie moved off along the flagstone wall bordering the parking area. Lawrence stood next to Barry, trying to think of some joke to lighten the mood. But it was Barry who spoke first.

Lawrence was trying to think of something to say when Barry spoke up.

“You can have her,” he said, gazing off into the distance.

“Pardon me?”

“You can have her.” He nodded toward the two women, still walking slowly away. “Annie. I can see the signs. You can do her any time you want to, any way you want.”

“I don’t really—”

“Go ahead. Give it a try. Enjoy yourself. I don’t mind.”

Lawrence cleared his throat. Cleared it again.

“Well, thanks, but I’ll pass on that one. That’s not really my kind of thing.”

Barry shrugged.

The women returned, and they all got back in the car. In a half hour they were at the park office with its gift shop and restaurant.

“Anybody for lunch?” Lawrence asked, pulling into the parking lot without waiting for an answer.

*

They bought sandwiches and soft drinks and ate outside on the terrace overlooking the lake. A cool breeze chased white clouds across the blue sky.

They finished lunch, and Lawrence announced that he was going to make use of the little boys’ room.

When he came back out, he bought a roll of Tums, peeled back the wrapper, and took two even though his stomach wasn’t actually bothering him. It was just a matter of time, though. He should have taken those onions off.

Back on the terrace, Annie was sitting at the table, alone.

“Our spouses gone to the restrooms?” Lawrence asked.

Annie pointed at the lake, index finger extended and thumb raised. It looked like she was aiming a pistol.

A little bridge on the far side spanned an outlet of the lake and connected the restaurant side, with its tiny man-made beach and children’s playground, to the rocky, wooded promontory beyond.

Kath and Barry were almost across the bridge. Then they were across. They were lost among the trees a moment, and then they were visible again walking up what must have been a trail through the trees and rocks.

“You can go if you want. It’s not that far. It won’t take you long to catch up to them,” Annie said. “I rubbed a blister yesterday, and it opened up, so I’m staying where I am.”

She raised her naked foot to him and held it there for his inspection. He didn’t see a blister.

He looked back across the lake. Kath and Barry had disappeared into the trees.

 

*

Instead of the scenic route, Lawrence took 79, the faster way, back to Rapid City. In the motel lobby, Barry thanked Lawrence for doing all the driving, and they all shook hands almost formally. There was no mention of getting together again.

Lawrence and Kath went to a Lonestar Steakhouse for dinner. Lawrence ordered a sirloin and was surprised when Kath, who’d cut almost all red meat from their diet, didn’t give him one of those looks. In fact, she said he deserved it after doing all the “heavy lifting” that day.

“Yeah, what a day, what a day,” he said.

“What a day indeed,” she said, laughing too loud.

He made some joke about The Battle of Mt. Rushmore, and Kath laughed again, too loud.

They talked about what they might do the next day, and then Lawrence’s steak and Kath’s salad and baked potato came.

Kath suddenly slapped her fork down and exclaimed, “My God, we never saw the buffalo! That’s the main reason we took that drive to Custer—to see the buffalo.”

“You’re right. With all that other stuff, that stuff with Barry and Annie, it just completely slipped my mind.”

Kath seemed strangely shaken.

“We can always go tomorrow if it’s important to you.”

She didn’t say anything. She peered down at her salad. Lawrence watched her.

“What happened on that hike you took with Barry?” he asked her after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“When you got back, you seemed, I don’t know, upset or something? Your face was all red.”

She frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, all red. I guess I was just a little flushed. I do remember being a little winded. It must have been from the altitude. Didn’t we see a sign that said it was over a mile high here?”

“You were gone a long time. Forty-five minutes. Maybe more.”

“Forty-five minutes? You’re crazy. It couldn’t have been more than thirty, if that.”

“At least forty-five. What were you two doing all that time?”

“What were we doing? We were hiking, Lawrence. It was a hike. What do you think we were doing? . . . Well, what do you think we were doing?”

Lawrence told her what Barry had said to him—what he could do with Annie.

“My God,” Kath said, almost whispering. Her eyes were huge, hands pressed down on the table.

“It’s not like a man to offer his woman to someone else unless he has a replacement lined up,” Lawrence said.

A visible tremor ran through Kath. Then another. Her eyes filled with tears.

“This world,” she said. “This crummy, dirty world. I don’t want my Jordan to have to grow up in a world like this.”

“Jordan is already grown,” Lawrence said, sounding colder than he’d meant it. He was sorry for it. He’d be better off just keeping his mouth shut. I’m out of my depth, he said to himself.

*

Back in the motel parking lot, Kath said, “I’m not going in there.”

“Oh. Of course not,” Lawrence said, thinking that Kath refused to sleep under the same roof with Barry and Annie. “We’ll check out and find a different motel. We shouldn’t have any trouble. It’s the off-season.”

“No. I’m not staying in any motel. I refuse.”

“But . . . where then . . .?”

“Out of Rapid City. Get on the interstate. Head east.”

He gaped at her. Her cheekbones, forehead, and jawline were limned by the garish lights on the parking lot.

“You don’t have to go. You can stay here. Get out and I’ll drive,” she told him.

He drove east on I-90. It wasn’t late, but there were few cars coming west into Rapid City and almost none going their direction, into the plains, empty except for the signs advertising Wall Drugs and warning of road closings in bad weather, the long gates on the tall poles, raised now, which would be lowered to prevent foolhardy travelers attempting to proceed during blizzards.

They drove in silence to Wall. Lawrence slowed at the exit, but Kath said, “No,” so he drove on.

They came to the exit for the Badlands. Kath pointed, “Here.”

The Badlands? Well, it was a little like the movie, Lawrence decided, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek heading into the plains, leaving everything behind, going wherever their will led them. He and Kath hadn’t killed anybody, of course.

“You know, in Badlands, the movie, I mean, they never do actually go into the Badlands, the two kids on the run. We never see the Badlands in the movie.”

Kath didn’t say anything. Lawrence drove on.

“Hey,” he said, “it just occurred to me, we won’t even be able to go into the Badlands. The gate at the park entrance—they’ll have closed that hours ago.”

It was as if she didn’t even hear him. He drove on another couple of miles. Then Kath suddenly barked out, “Here! Stop!”

He slammed on the brakes and came to a stop in the middle of the blacktop.

“This is it,” she said.

“What is it?”

He looked around and discovered, to their left, the plains homestead they’d toured before entering the Badlands yesterday morning.

“What are we doing here?”

“Park it. . . . Or don’t, whatever. You can go back if you want. I’m getting out here.”

“OK, OK, I’ll park it. Just don’t do anything crazy,” he said, at the same time thinking, That ship’s already sailed.

A steel cable was strung between two posts, barring the entrance to the parking lot, but the ditches on either side were shallow enough that, with care, Lawrence could drive across and park right in front of the visitors’ center.

There were no lights on anywhere. Lawrence followed Kath on around the building.

There, in the open area sloping up from the visitor’s center to the sod house, little white heads popped up out of holes in the ground. The prairie dogs. Lawrence didn’t say anything about Whack-a-Mole.

He hung back when Kath pushed open the door of the sod house and disappeared into the darkness.

Then there was a light, and Lawrence thought of a lantern being lit as in some old Western. But then the bluish-white light started flashing this way and that, and he decided it must be from Kath’s cellphone.

Lawrence started forward but stopped when he heard a sound he couldn’t quite place. Then he heard it again, and then the light was gone.

Ah. He thought he understood. Inside the house were two fairly large rooms side by side, with an alcove just big enough for a bed separated from the first room by a blanket hanging from rungs on a line. The sound must have been Kath sliding back the blanket, then entering the alcove and sliding it closed again.

He stood there.

What on earth was she doing? What did she expect him to do?

That bed. There had to be . . . vermin. Mice. Who knows what all. Insane!

The yellow Mustang was sitting in the lot not a hundred steps away. They could drive into Wall, twenty minutes, tops, and stay in a motel. Hell, at eighty miles an hour on the interstate, they could be back in Rapid City in less than an hour and stay in the best motel in town.

But there was no use thinking about that. Kath had left all that behind and had gone on to . . . something. Some new life. He was afraid to follow her. He was afraid not to.

He took one hesitant step toward the sod house, feeling like one who’d set out westward, crested a rise and, for the first time, looked out in fear and wonder on the frontier.