Coyote Wind

by Peter Bowen

  “Sure,” said Du Pré.

  “I just up and bought a big diesel shovel. I always wanted one but I never knew how bad. So I called the big shovel dealer, said tell me about big shovels. He had an especially nice one, not too big, since I am not too big a man. Big enough, though. Pretty, too, kinda pale green. Got a stereo in the cab. Lots of levers and fun buttons. Make a new man of me.”

  You are doin’ fine there, Bart.

  “Now, I was thinking on having it racing striped but I decided that that would be in poor taste. Didn’t get the fake polar bear fur upholstery, either.”

  Hee, thought Du Pré. “Now where is this big shovel you got?”

  “Well,” said Bart, scratching at his cast, “I think it might be here within the hour, maybe two, they have to move an extra power line or something.”

  “What?” said Du Pré.

  “It was just an impulse,” said Bart, “but I suddenly just had to have that pretty pale green big diesel shovel. Here. Start it up, dig a lake or something for practice.”

  Du Pré looked out the window.

  “The ground is pretty frozen,” said Du Pré.

  “The salesman assured me that this here big shovel would not notice whether the ground is frozen or not.”

  “How big is this sucker, anyway?” said Du Pré.

  “Oh, that,” said Bart. “Well, they do make bigger ones, or anyway one bigger one. What I wanted, see, was those real delicate controls. You could fill a dump truck with one bite, whirl around and crack open a poached egg that was sitting on someone’s head.”

  Du Pré considered that.

  “Whose head?” he said finally.

  “Uh,” said Bart, pausing tastefully, “it is after all, my pretty pale green big diesel shovel. It would not do to lend it out, any more than it does to lend out one’s toothbrush. Very personal item, this here big diesel shovel.”

  “Tell you what,” said Du Pré. “When this shovel comes, I am going to put an egg on a rock, and when you crack it just so nice … ”

  “Guaranteed,” said Bart.

  The telephone rang. Du Pré answered it. For Bart.

  Yes. Yes? Yes. Yes! Be right there.

  Bart put the phone down.

  “Well,” he said, “it is here and we need to lead them to wherever that big shovel needs to be.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Du Pré. He liked toys.

  CHAPTER 43

  “WELL,” SAID DU PRÉ, looking up at the pale fluorescent green monster shovel, “how much you pay for this thing?”

  “I got it on time,” said Bart. “I paid them just the one time.”

  Well, all right.

  Du Pré looked around at Catfoot’s old claim, remembering. His father had worked here on and off for fifteen years. There was the little dragline, looked like a damn kid’s toy next to Bart’s big kid’s toy. Little D2 cat, blade resting on the ground, a couple of hydraulic lines broken off. Rusting drums that Catfoot had filled with what he hoped was paydirt to wash down and never got to. A homemade grizzly rocker. The gold got caught in an old piece of carpet, and when all the paydirt was run, Catfoot burned the carpet and little globs of gold were left in the big old frying pan. Some smelter. Not a lot of gold, ever, but it kept Catfoot busy, and when the price of gold was left float he made out pretty good.

  Du Pré remembered his days here. The old equipment was broken more often than not, his father would be cursing it in Coyote French while he banged the offending parts with wrenches.

  What the West was built with, blasphemy.

  Booger Tom, there, when he lost his temper and cussed with a serious heart he revealed himself to be a poet.

  “Wanna come up and look in the cab of Popsicle, here?” said Bart.

  “Popsicle?” said Du Pré.

  “Sure,” said Bart. “Don’t she look like the color of those awful popsicles you used to eat when you were a kid?”

  Du Pré nodded. Yes, it did.

  Over time, Catfoot had moved a lot of gravels. Down thirty feet to bedrock, old pumps straining, sometimes the old man had to pawn his guns to buy diesel to keep everything going. Du Pré looked down into the deep wide hole, water in it. The dragline bucket was down there, out of sight.

  When Catfoot had got down to the bedrock, he would climb down in the hole and shovel the blue-gray paydirt into fifty-five-gallon drums, haul them up with the bucket.

  Red River.

  Maybe a quarter-mile of dredge spoil here, years and years of work for Catfoot. Du Pré tried to remember where things were what year. He couldn’t. Had the old man started at the other end and just worked steady over here? Or had he jumped around? Being Catfoot, he would have jumped around. Shit.

  “Du Pré, damn it,” said Bart, “this is the only time you get to set foot in my pretty cab. Got a virgin on the dash. Hairy dice on the rearview mirror. Cassette recorder and player with monster ju-ju and bunga-bunga. This thing is pretty noisy. The speakers are three feet across.”

  Du Pré scrambled up into the cab. He felt some stitches in his belly tear. Well, god damn them, I got work to do.

  Bart turned the key, let the headring heat till the light went off. Pressed the starter. The huge engine caught and rumbled, the cab shook. Sounded very businesslike.

  Bart shoved a tape in the tape machine. Tammy Wynette.

  Bart fiddled with a couple levers. The huge arm extended itself, and he fiddled with some others and the bucket waggled.

  Bart pivoted the cab, the arm, the bucket. The controls were light and easy. He waggled the bucket in time to the music.

  “I’m gonna pick up a couple of those old drums there,” he yelled, pointing with the bucket at a few rusting fifty-fives.

  Something went wrong. He smashed them flat. The bucket went three feet into the frozen gravels.

  “Popsicle, you whore!” yelled Bart.

  “That egg, now,” said Du Pré.

  “What fucking egg?” yelled Bart.

  “This egg,” said Du Pré, removing one from his coat pocket.

  They were yelling. Bart motioned for him to pay attention, he scrabbled around in the jockey box, came up with a little radio had an earplug hanging out of it and a slender microphone with a headset. The microphone was a long thin tube of clear plastic with a thin wire in it.

  Du Pré put it on. He adjusted the headset. Switched on the little radio.

  “Earth to Du Pré,” said Bart, softly.

  Damn easy to hear, this, through the earplug.

  “OK,” said Du Pré. “You practice with old Popsicle here and I go out and walk around, see what I can remember.”

  “Do my best,” said Bart. “Put that egg over there on top of that post, will you?”

  “Oh, hell,” said Du Pré. “You can’t see a damn thing for that bucket, it is half the size of my house.”

  “Not true, my friend,” said Bart, “I went first class. This sucker has a TV camera out there.” He pointed to a little screen, pressed a button. The screen came on.

  “Jesus,” said Du Pré, “it is not even in color. How you going to enjoy watching my blood spurt all over it if it isn’t a color camera?”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” said Bart.

  “Oh, me of no fucking faith at all,” said Du Pré. “I go put that egg on the post now.”

  Bart nodded.

  “Du Pré,” said Bart, “we are looking for a Mercury, Colorado plates, been down there a long time, right.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “When we find it,” Bart went on, “we got a couple Masses to pay for, go to.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “We both go to both of them,” said Bart.

  “Oh, yes,” said Du Pré.

  CHAPTER 44

  DU PRÉ AND BART Fascelli stood by the bucket, looking at the torn metal. Some pale green paint on it. A bumper. A smashed Colorado license plate on it, all the enamel gone. The numbers were in stamped red rust, the plate was bent in half.

  They looked down in
to the water rising in the blackish gravels.

  “Well,” said Bart. “There it is. You were right.”

  Du Pré nodded. It gave him no pleasure.

  “I’ll get a chain around the car,” said Du Pré. “The chassis should hold, I think.”

  He scrambled down the pit walls, gravels loosening under his feet, water percolating everywhere. The heavy chain on his shoulder fouled his balance and he fell and came up wet and freezing. Little determined snowflakes fell from a black sky. Maybe rain, then ice. The time of the bad cold was coming. It was up there north, crouched, dark, merciless.

  The time of white owls, boiling hooves for soup, leaving the frozen winter dead in the trees.

  Du Pré shivered.

  He ran the chain around the frame of the car, bent from the years spent under the tons of shifting gravels. These stones were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. They flowed very slowly, but they did.

  The mountains stand up to their waists in their own flesh, thought Du Pré, spalled off by ice and time.

  Bart moved the bucket down slowly, to where Du Pré could put the chain through one of the eyes on the lip.

  Du Pré fought his way back up. He raised his hand, palm up.

  Lift lift lift he motioned.

  The chain lost its slack. A couple of pebbles stirred near the buried car. The frame bent a little. And then the car came up, sheet metal tearing, stones clattering down. Smashed to a dented tangled mass a fourth the size it once was.

  Bart lifted it up and swung it round, set it down on the spoil drift. Water ran out of the wreck.

  He killed the engine of the big diesel shovel, opened the cab door and dropped down the ladder.

  Four weeks we been doing this, thought Du Pré. He looked back at the gravels they had so carefully moved, knowing what was down there, wanting to find it and not wanting to find it but having to find it all the same.

  And, well, boys, there you have it.

  “Not much of a Grail,” said Bart.

  “Have to do for the likes of us,” said Du Pré. Now we can let the sad past sleep, and be maimed by it forever.

  Muddy water dripped out of the wreck. A few shreds of upholstery gone mud-colored, gobs of muck stuck out of the car. The glass was all long ground to powder.

  They took a spud bar and tried to pry the wreck apart. No good. Bart went back up into the cab of the shovel and fired it up again, lifted the wreck and lumbered back to the old dragline. The weight of the dead machine was enough. Du Pré chained the old Mercury to the old dragline and Bart pulled the wreck apart.

  They sorted through the wreck, ran hoses on the parts. No emeralds and gold, no money, nothing.

  “And no fucking map to the Lost Bullfrog Mine,” said Du Pré.

  Not that it mattered.

  A car horn sounded. Madelaine and Maria, worried, had come out to see if Du Pré and Bart had killed themselves yet.

  They brought sandwiches and hot coffee. It was mostly dark now and soon to be dark all the rest of the way.

  “We have to report this,” said Du Pré. “Just as soon as we god damned well feel like it.”

  Bart was eating a sandwich. “Sometimes after I have busted hump all day I feel like I have never tasted food before,” he said. “Good sandwich.”

  “Come to supper tomorrow,” said Maria to Bart.

  Bart nodded. “Guy could do worse than be a shovel man,” he said. “I have.”

  Du Pré, Madelaine, and Maria left then, leaving Bart to his Popsicle, thoughts, and prayers.

  At the house, Du Pré drank some whiskey, didn’t say much.

  “You find everything that you are looking for maybe you can go back to being Du Pré now,” said Madelaine, going out the door to her children. “You maybe want I leave my address with you, describe the house?”

  Du Pré laughed. Madelaine, she wasn’t laughing.

  “See you tomorrow,” said Du Pré to Maria.

  He drove behind Madelaine to her home.

  CHAPTER 45

  DU PRÉ DROVE THROUGH a strong May blizzard out to his house, wondered if this heavy snow would crush the old shed he had been meaning to shore up for the last ten years or so. He only remembered it when he couldn’t do it, like the leak in the roof.

  Maria was in the kitchen, baking bread. The table was piled with books and there was a new computer, too, one Bart said he could not possibly use because he was just a simple shovel operator. The computer still had the warranty card on it.

  “Papa,” said Maria, “there is something funny hanging in the tree back there.” She leaned over the sink and pointed out the window to the willow by the little creek.

  Du Pré squinted. Something white, had a couple birds on it.

  “Looks like a piece of suet,” said Du Pré.

  “Well,” said Maria, “I didn’t hang it up there, pretty high.”

  A good eight feet off the ground. There was a path through the snow to it, from the yard, the trail went out across the white field beyond the creek.

  “That’s funny,” said Du Pré.

  The suet was hung over the stobs of the lilac Catfoot Du Pré and his young bride had planted so long ago. The lilac had died, the leaves had turned yellow a couple of years ago. Du Pré had cut the dead trunks away and he had meant to grub up the roots but he had forgotten to do that.

  Like hell, I hate digging up roots.

  Du Pré looked down at the tracks in the snow. Coyote. The animal had stood beneath the suet, tried to leap up and get it and couldn’t. When the birds pecked the slab of fat some chunks broke off and fell down into the snow. The coyote had scratched around a lot, for the good fat after this hard winter.

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “you old fucker.”

  He went to the shed, got a spud bar and a shovel. The ground was thawed, it always did under the snow. He slammed the spud into the earth, grabbed the shovel, and down about a foot and a half he hit something hard but not like a rock is hard.

  Little brass box, size of a Bible.

  All green, been here a while, thought Du Pré.

  He took it to the house, put it in the sink and washed the dirt off. A little box, well-brazed seams all around. Du Pré looked at the bead.

  Catfoot’s bead, that, as much his as his handwriting.

  “What you got there?” said Maria.

  “Something I think belongs to Bart,” said Du Pré.

  He went back out to the shed, got a cold chisel and a hammer. Cut the top off the box on the kitchen floor.

  Nice and dry in the box. Catfoot lay up good tight bead, there.

  A suede envelope, black. A flat packet wrapped in foil. Du Pré pulled them both out. Nothing else.

  “See this, now,” said Du Pré to Maria. He opened the suede envelope. He lifted out the necklace, green gems and gold, all brilliant in the light.

  “Oooohhhh,” said Maria. She reached for the necklace. Du Pré let her have it.

  Du Pré peeled back the foil. Thick packet of hundred-dollar bills.

  “What’s this?” said Maria. “What is all this?”

  Du Pré told her all of it.

  She sat at the table, looking out the window, at the failing light.

  Du Pré reached across the table, took her hand, squeezed it.

  “I got to go up to Bart’s a minute,” he said. “Talk to him about a couple Masses.”

  CHAPTER 46

  BART LOOKED AT THE money and the brilliant necklace. His whole face twitched. “What a bunch of shit,” he said. “My family. A bunch of money and a bunch of shit. We hated each other. I loved Gianni. You know why? He was gone before I was old enough to know him. He must have been a prize asshole. Oh, God. I spent all my time waiting for Gianni to come back. At least he was my goddamned brother.” Du Pré rubbed his eyes.

  Bart sipped his tea. He wanted a drink, bad.

  “I didn’t want to know, either,” said Du Pré.

  Bart poked the necklace like it was a prize snake that had died just to be rude.


  Bart took a pouch of cheap tobacco out of his bathrobe and rolled a cigarette. He lit it. He sucked the smoke in hard and blew it out. He shook his head again.

  “You people,” he said.

  Du Pré looked up. What?

  Bart began to cry, softly.

  “Us?” said Du Pré. He didn’t know what us Bart meant.

  “I spent all of my time whining,” said Bart. “Well, boys, there you have it.”

  Du Pré didn’t know what the fuck Bart was talking about.

  Bart wailed. It was the cry of some creature wounded to death and the killers closing.

  “I can’t stand this,” said Bart.

  I can’t either, thought Du Pré. So get drunk.

  Bart went to the cupboard and took out the whiskey and had a lake of it.

  “You people,” he said again.

  “What goddamned people?” said Du Pré. “You tell me that. My father killed Gianni. Well, you stupid asshole, I would have too.”

  Bart nodded.

  “He needed killing,” said Du Pré.

  Bart sat back down, calm. He poked the necklace again.

  “What did Gianni do to make Catfoot so mad?” said Bart.

  Du Pré lit a cigarette.

  “Pauline asked him to kill Gianni,” said Du Pré, “and Gianni was some asshole, so Catfoot just killed him. Catfoot was a careful guy, you know, it’s hard to find a body you take care. So I think he just did it.”

  “You people,” said Bart.

  “I don’t know what you people means,” said Du Pré.

  “You’re killers.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré. That.

  Bart sat back hard in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

  “Festerfuck,” he said.

  Du Pré sat and rubbed his mustache.

  “Hey,” he said, “what about these Masses.”

  “We need ’em for our souls,” said Bart.

  Du Pré waited. He yawned.

  “How the hell could Catfoot just kill my brother and bury him and go on with his life?” said Bart.

  “I got to go home,” said Du Pré.

  “Answer me, goddamnit,” said Bart. He was starting to cry again.

  “Your brother was a piece of shit,” said Du Pré, “and your brother was a bad man to one of Catfoot’s women. Catfoot didn’t even know you lived, but he would have killed you too, he was so tired of Pauline’s goddamned bitching. You don’t push people so far, you know.”