Coyote Wind

by Peter Bowen

  “Guy hit a car,” said the Sheriff. “Bounced up on my sidewalk, through my hedge, stopped with the hood all folded around a tree in my yard, fer Chrissakes. Three o’clock in the morning.”

  The Sheriff had made his own arrest. Call “60 Minutes.”

  “What are you here for?” he said, looking at Du Pré.

  “My daughter was partying with some kids, had some beer, got caught, now they want to make her go listen to Bucky Dassault. Attend AA. She already goes to Mass. I am damn mad.”

  “The Judge is a pussy,” said the Sheriff. “Don’t scare him.”

  So Du Pré kept his mouth shut. Good thing, too. The Pussy Judge did all his talking for him anyway.

  “Ssssince you are in … Lawn Forcement … waive … to your custody … don’t want to see her here again … serious matter,” said the Pussy Judge.

  This so fucking serious, why that damn Bucky Dassault, thought Du Pré, while he looked respectful.

  Du Pré said he took the whole matter very seriously.

  The Pussy Judge went on to other matters, just before Du Pré would have lost his temper he had to stand and listen to any more of this bullshit. Which would have been tragic for everybody.

  Du Pré asked God Who the Fuck was Minding the Store outside on the sidewalk. What the hell ever happened to kids will be kids, and kids do this sort of thing, practicing to be screwed-up adults like everybody else? Huh?

  Du Pré drove back to Toussaint, sat in the bar which was empty except for the lady with the beehive hairdo who was washing everything. Du Pré drank whiskey, wished someone would come in he could kill—a Texan would be nice, can’t get convicted of killing a Texan in Montana. Maybe I go find a dog with a calloused butt and kick him.

  The telephone rang, the lady at the bar looked at Du Pré. She pointed at the pay phone on the wall by the front door. Du Pré walked over to it, picked it up.

  “Papa,” said Maria, “are you all right?”

  “I just pissed off,” said Du Pré. “All these people butting in business isn’t any of theirs. Anyway, you don’t have to go and talk to that damn Bucky Dassault or any of the rest of that crap. But you not to get caught again, you hear? I don’t think it a bad thing that kids drink beer, long as they don’t drive around. But now you got a bunch of bad people paid by the government to mess with you, call it help, and that is a lot of trouble.”

  “I know,” said Maria. “I get caught with beer again my papa gets sent to prison.” She laughed. So did Du Pré.

  “I love you, Papa,” she said.

  “Love you too,” said Du Pré. “Hey, I come and get you, we get Madelaine, we eat dinner here maybe.”

  “I pick up Madelaine,” said Maria. Du Pré considered the fact that his daughter now had a car and a driver’s license, or anyway a car. Du Pré, shut up, he told himself.

  “OK,” said Du Pré.

  I know I don’t do this father job so good, so I wish you luck, Maria.

  “When you get this car?” said Du Pré.

  “I love you, Papa,” said Maria, hanging up.

  Maria came to the bar alone. Madelaine was feeding her kids, she would come when they were cared for.

  “Where’d you get the car?” said Du Pré, trying.

  “Let’s dance,” said Maria. She put money in the jukebox.

  CHAPTER 19

  “IT HAS TO BE THE Headless Man,” said the Sheriff, “the report says the teeth have fillings in them and appear weathered.”

  “Very interesting,” said Du Pré. “I got back to inspecting cattle right now. I got five shipments here, four there, I am a very busy brand inspector.” All yours, Jack.

  “Where’d they bury the Headless Man, anyway?” asked the Sheriff.

  “I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “Potter’s field, maybe.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the Sheriff.

  “It’s back of the old Mission church in Toussaint,” said Du Pré. “Where all the drunks freeze to death their families too poor to bury buried.”

  “Why there?”

  “What?”

  “Why behind the Catholic church?”

  “The poor people around here are mostly Catholic,” said Du Pré.

  “Are you Metisse?”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Well, what are they? Indians?”

  This son of a bitch here since ’75 and he don’t know what Métis are, Du Pré thought. “Red River breeds, they come down here after the Rebellion in 1886, some come before, this was the old buffalo hunting grounds. Come down in their Red River carts, get winter meat. The Métis were Cree and French, little English maybe. You know all them stories about the voyageurs? Métis.”

  “What rebellion?” said the Sheriff. “I thought the Red River was in Texas or something. John Wayne did a movie, yeah.”

  Du Pré had seen it, pretty good movie.

  “Red River of the North,” said Du Pré, “flows to Hudson Bay. See, I think the Missouri only flow like it does now since the last glaciers, ten thousand years or so. It used to flow into the Red River of the North.”

  “Red River Rebellion?”

  So Du Pré told him about poor crazy Louis Riel, the saint, who led the rebellion and the English hung him. About little Gabriel Dumont, Riel’s general, who would have destroyed the British troops but Jesus told Riel not to let Gabriel do it. The priests betrayed Riel to the English, Dumont tried to rescue Riel, bring him down to Montana. So for all his days thereafter Gabriel Dumont never once again spoke to priests.

  So the Métis come here. Big families, couple horses, little blankets, a kettle, a wooden plow, a hoe, an ax.

  “We still here,” said Du Pré. “Still poor, still Catholic.”

  He left the Sheriff, drove off to his first inspection, small one, but he wanted to take his time. He didn’t exactly think that the rancher was a thief, but he didn’t exactly think that he wasn’t, either.

  He found them ready, a couple of stock haulers waiting. They ran the cattle by him, the brands looked OK, except for two might have been worked over a little.

  “My youngest sort of screwed them up,” said the rancher. “Had to touch up these two later … ”

  The story sounded OK, didn’t sound OK, maybe, maybe not, was it worth skinning the steers, seeing what the original brand was. Du Pré subtracted the added scars, couldn’t come up with a brand he knew.

  Du Pré nodded. Not enough right now, but if someone came up missing a few head he’d be on this guy. He was half on him now. But you can’t say “Judge, I have this feeling … ”

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “everything’s in order.”

  Or maybe the kid did screw them up, I’m just out of order.

  The rancher tucked a chew in his lip.

  “Du Pré,” said the rancher, “seen in the Tribune about you finding that plane wreck and the rest of the Headless Man. Said you thought that the killer would be found pretty soon.”

  Du Pré nodded. That asshole reporter, don’t get the quotes right that he likes, he makes them up.

  “How’s the investigation going? Any suspects?”

  Television. What did those new shows call bad guys? Perps?

  Jesus.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Du Pré. “I don’t know what the Sheriff is doing.” Neither does the Sheriff.

  “Oh.”

  “I look at cow asses,” said Du Pré. “They just didn’t have anybody to send so I went. I don’t know much.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well,” said Du Pré, “I got to go.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “No, I got another shipment, I got to run.”

  Du Pré drove away.

  Perps.

  Shit.

  The next three shipments were all out of the same corrals, small lots of fifty or a hundred head. And a banker waiting to take the checks from the cattle buyer. Guy in lizardskin boots. Some banker.

  The ranchers were going under, for sure, all working as long-haul
truckers, just raising a few cows because that’s what they’d always done. The brands were all good, Du Pré had known these people all his life.

  He drove off to the last loading, some ten miles away. One of the bigger outfits, out-of-state money, probably a tax dodge.

  Du Pré nodded at the foreman. He’d busted the man once. Before the man lost the ranch he tried one year to slip forty head of someone else’s cattle past Du Pré. Well, it is pretty easy to spot bright new scar tissue, hardly had the scabs off, hard to sketch in a forged brand with a running iron and get the size right.

  The man did a little time without complaint, and was always courteous to Du Pré.

  Du Pré hadn’t liked busting the guy. Now some assholes the government paid to lose money on cattle had the man’s place. Including the little graveyard where his folks were buried.

  The foreman lost the place, lost his money, worked for someone else on his family’s land. Made that one try, he’d have done better to rob a bank, maybe.

  The cattle marched past. Du Pré had to look hard at only one brand, had a bad tear across it, probably the animal fell onto a sharp rock or something. Just a rip across the brand, I know that’s OK.

  “Thanks, Du Pré,” said the foreman, when Du Pré signed off.

  “You bet, Jim,” said Du Pré.

  I still feel bad about busting him, thought Du Pré as he drove off. I always will.

  CHAPTER 20

  DU PRÉ PULLED HIS car over to a turnout on the dirt road, high up on the Bench, to look down the high plains toward Toussaint and Cooper and the blue haze beyond. He could see fifty miles south and east from the shoulders of the Wolf Mountains.

  He rolled a cigarette, lit it, walked to the edge of the scraped dirt where the fireweed rattled. Late fall, soon on winter. Hadn’t had a winter in a long time, but the summer had been cool and wet.

  The winter right after the poor Métis fled south to escape the wrath of the English was the worst anyone remembered, 1886-87. That year there was no summer, two springs, the lilacs bloomed twice, some said because of the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the East Indies.

  In December the winds howled high overhead, the air unstirred on the ground. The sky was pale gray and glittered. Snow began to fall, snow so fine that the cattle and horses inhaled it and froze their lungs and died of pneumonia. The temperature dropped to forty, fifty, sixty degrees below zero.

  Then the Blizzard came.

  The winds came.

  Coulees a hundred feet deep filled with snow. Cattle wandered out into the flat white, sank into fluff. In the spring, the tops of the cottonwood trees had dead cattle in the forks of the branches.

  Ninety percent of the range cattle in Montana died. The Texas herds had overgrazed the plains, too, so the cattle went into the winter lean and weak.

  The Métis huddled in their tiny cabins, boiled moccasins for thin, stinking soup.

  Corpses were stacked in the woodsheds, the ground was frozen many feet down.

  Hard winter. There would be another someday.

  Du Pré spat. He pissed, looking down at a couple of pickups racketing along the low road, one had a horse in back. Drivers were going too fast but everybody did here, you’d never get anywhere if you didn’t.

  I drive too fast. Now where the hell is Benetsee? The old man came and went, dropped his riddles. The old fart knows something. If the Headless Man is Gianni Fascelli, is who killed him down there right now? Could I see him if I had my binoculars?

  Play my fiddle at midnight in the graveyard, summon up the Headless Man, have him tell me who? And this Headless Man, what would he speak with?

  A rifle sounded, far away. Up in the mountains. All the hunters from the Flat States come here, think the game feeds on the snow up top of the peaks or something. Very little game up there in the deep green trees. Nothing for them to eat. Down here, there is a lot for them to eat. The haystacks of ranchers, for one.

  I ought to go hunt this weekend, make winter meat.

  When Gabriel Dumont led the buffalo hunt, he wore his red sash. I’ll wear my red sash.

  Benetsee. The prophets must have been a lot like him. No damn wonder folks killed them. Irritating sonsofbitches.

  Where had Benetsee gone? Some city, sleeping in doorways in his old clothes, begging quarters?

  I could find the old bastard, lock him in a room or something. Say, Benetsee, I got this wine out here, you tell me stories that I like, you get some. But not till I really like them damn stories.

  I got no talent for being a bastard, torture a harmless old man. Leave that to Bucky Dassault, other helpful bastards. The Sheriff’s such a fool, he think Benetsee’s one too.

  I got to find that old man, ask him, please, here, take this wine but tell me what you know. I won’t tell anyone else, I tell you before God (who is deaf, or was when my wife died) but I need to know.

  Coyotes sing now, they make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, there. Real straight.

  Du Pré looked down on some fine big country. He thought about the skreeking Red River carts, the people, the buffalo driven into stout log pens to be killed at leisure, the meat sliced off their bones in sheets a quarter-inch thick, hung on willow racks over fires, baled up and tied with sinew, bundles stacked in the carts arid then everybody turned around and went back north.

  At night the fiddles came out, the people danced, the men smoked and played cards on a blanket.

  They smoked that meat right down there, went round the mountains to the east, played the fiddle right down there, made babies, longed for home, the priest.

  The Black Robes, they come, have incense, golden kingdoms up above. But what good are priests, anyway, won’t make medicine help you to steal more horses? Send smallpox to them damn Blackfeet and Sioux. Protestants even sorrier, not even incense, they get called Short Robes.

  So I find that old man, see if maybe he tell me something.

  ’Sides I miss him, he comes from another time, like them buffalo hunters, like my grandfathers.

  Red River.

  CHAPTER 21

  OLD BENETSEE WAS AT his shack, carving pipes from the red, close-grained stone quarried for five thousand years over near Pipestone Pass. He would fit them with a willow stem, hang a few chicken feathers on them, spread them on a blanket and wait for shoals of tourists.

  Benetsee’s hands shook quite a bit, but when he bent to dig another bit of red stone out of the deepening bowl they didn’t.

  “Ho Benetsee,” said Du Pré. He had a jug of cheap white wine in a paper sack. He felt like a turd.

  The old man looked up and nodded.

  “I been expecting you,” he said. “How are all your beautiful women: Jacqueline, Maria, that nice Madelaine?”

  “Fine,” said Gabriel. “They ask about you some. Wonder if you all right, hope things go well for you.”

  “I got no pretty women,” said Benetsee. He seemed relieved about it. “If I had one now I’d be doing too well. Better this way, I don’t have to wash so much.”

  Scritch scritch on the pipe.

  Fifty centuries of that sound. Make that a couple million years. Some old fart going scritch scritch on the whatever, punctuate his teasings of a younger fool. Lot of men, stand where I am now. This dust is full of them.

  “You hear about I find these three skulls where there should be only two?”

  Scritch scritch nod.

  “Well,” said Du Pré, “what about that, you know?”

  Benetsee looked up, head cocked, eye bright as a bird’s.

  “Coyote tell me much,” said Benetsee, “but it very hard pick out just what he is saying, how much he is playing with me.”

  Tell me about it, thought Du Pré.

  Benetsee dug at the pipe bowl. He seemed to have forgotten that Du Pré was standing there.

  “You want some wine?” said Du Pré. Now maybe you remember me.

  “Good morning to drink wine,” said Benetsee, putting down his pipe, the little black
awl with the deerskin wrapping the end held in the palm.

  Du Pré handed Benetsee the jug.

  The old man took a long pull of the gassy cheap wine. He belched and handed the jug back to Du Pré. A whiff of the wine hit Du Pré’s nose, his mouth ran water, he felt like throwing up.

  I am drinking too much whiskey these days, Du Pré thought, I know better but when I drink a lot of it I don’t grind my teeth in my sleep so much.

  “Have some wine, good morning for it,” said Benetsee. He looked far away, up to the Wolf Mountains. Little sharp face, Du Pré thought of the shrew’s skull in the coyote scat. In his pocket.

  Du Pré choked down some. Jesus, like drinking bubble gum.

  “Whew,” said Du Pré “you much man, drink that.”

  “Poor man drink that,” said Benetsee. He looked at his fingernails, rimmed in black, clawed old hands, the veins and tendons seen easily through the transparent skin.

  “So what you want to know?” said Benetsee. “I don’t know too much. Coyote knows a lot, but me, not too much.”

  Du Pré felt the warm bloom of the wine in his stomach. A nice warm peaceful feeling, he sat down next to the old man, put his elbows on his knees, rolled a cigarette. Gave it to him, rolled another for himself, lit both.

  “Brings me wine, brings me tobacco,” said Benetsee. “Hard to find a respectful young man these days.”

  “The Headless Man,” said Du Pré, “how did his head get up in the mountains, in a place a goat wouldn’t have, next to a wrecked plane fell down so long ago they think maybe it just flew to heaven.”

  Benetsee reached for the jug. Glug glug glug.

  “Well,” said Benetsee, “somebody very angry, of course. So you kill someone, you put the head and hands with some other bones, let the magpies and coyotes and skunks stir them. So maybe no one will know, what happened.”

  “I got that,” said Du Pré.

  “How long your parents been dead now, Gabriel,” said Benetsee. “A bad day, that one.”

  Very bad day. Papa drunk and Mama deaf, car stall on a railroad crossing, didn’t find a piece of either of them big enough to call Mama, Papa. Closed coffins at the funeral, coffins very light to carry, too.