Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  Du Pré tried the slingshot a few more times. It was one of those things you had to do a lot and then it would make sense. Seemed simple. Like tying knots, it wouldn’t work right until he didn’t have to think about it anymore.

  Du Pré wandered back to his house. He sat on the stump of a box elder he’d been meaning to grub out for the last ten years. Big black ants had chewed holes in the gray wood. Du Pré looked at them and decided he would let them win this race. He hated digging holes, gardening, and the like.

  Madelaine came out with some lemonade. The summer had gone on hot right into the first part of September. Her children were in school, and after school they would wander back on their own time. The boys played softball and the girls visited friends.

  Du Pré got off the stump and offered it to her. She sat down and handed him his lemonade.

  “Some nice weather,” she said, looking up at the snow-capped Wolf Mountains. Up there, it could snow anytime and always did in mid-August. The peaks were clear only from the middle of July to the middle of August, and in the winter the snows could pile forty feet deep above ten thousand feet.

  Du Pré heard the telephone ring. Maria was off somewhere. He got up and trotted to the open back door of the house.

  He picked up the phone, heard the long-distance hum.

  “Uh, Gabriel Du Pré,” said a woman’s voice he couldn’t place.

  “This is me,” said Du Pré.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “My name is Samantha Ford. I was the reporter who talked to you at York Factory?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré, “when that Paul Chase slipped in like he’d been on the trip all along. “

  “Yes. He kept denying that he hadn’t and called you all ‘disgruntled employees.’ The TV people had jumped the gun and didn’t want to eat crow. But they finally had to.”

  “Well, he is a strange man,” said Du Pré.

  “Uh-huh. What I’m calling about is this. I moved from the Toronto paper down here.”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré.

  “I’m in Washington, D.C., not the state.”

  “Okay,” said Du Pré. So what.

  “The Cree woman, Annie McRae, who was murdered last June at the festival?”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré.

  “Well, one of the Indians on your expedition had been there, and she said Chase had been dating Annie.”

  Du Pré straightened up.

  “So I asked the cops here, and they didn’t know anything about it. You know cops. They nod and chew and look bored.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Now, which one of those Quebec Indians tell you this?”

  “Lucky.”

  “He say anything else?”

  “He said Annie was a simple girl from the bush and she didn’t know what to do about Chase. But she was…Lucky thought she was afraid of him. He’s white; he’s powerful; he’s rich. Anyway, Chase brought her down to D.C. before the festival to tape some songs, even though Annie wasn’t a solo performer, wasn’t, in fact, very good. Then when Lucky and some others got there, she wouldn’t ever leave them. Even insisted on sleeping on the floor of the room with the most men in it. When Chase tried to get her alone, she’d almost tie herself to Lucky.”

  “You tell the cops this?” said Du Pré.

  “Some of it,” said Samantha Ford.

  “So why you call me?”

  “I called Chase,” she went on, “called him late at night; sometimes you can get someone off balance. He had been drinking or whatever. He was foggy. It seemed to take him a moment to understand my question. Then he blew up.”

  Du Pré waited.

  “He said Annie had been sleeping with you, Mr. Du Pré.”

  “Christ,” said Du Pré, “I don’t even know what she looked like.”

  “So you weren’t?”

  “No,” said Du Pré. That son of a bitch.

  “Thank you,” said Samantha Ford. She hung up.

  Du Pré walked back outside. He leaned over and kissed Madelaine.

  “Who was that?” she said.

  “Woman reporter I talked to in York Factory,” said Du Pré. “She call to ask me about that murdered girl I told you about at the festival.”

  Madelaine looked up at him.

  “Well,” said Du Pré, “this Paul Chase, what a weasel. She calls him because one of the Quebec Indians says Chase was after this murdered girl. He says the girl was sleeping with me.”

  Madelaine laughed. She laughed very hard.

  “That’s funny, Du Pré,” she said. “Were you?” And she laughed again.

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Du Pré.

  “My Gabriel screwing teenyboppers,” said Madelaine, “I don’t think so.”

  “You ever talk to one of them?” said Du Pré.

  “I have to,” said Madelaine, “I’m their mother.”

  She sighed.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE LITTLE PRIVATE JET SHOT across the sky. Du Pré watched the Midwest’s patchwork of fields move beneath the wings. He toyed with a glass of bourbon.

  Lawyer Foote sat in one of the other chairs, Bart in the third.

  Bart was enraged.

  Du Pré was both angry and bewildered.

  Foote, the elegant attorney from Chicago’s Gold Coast, looked bored.

  “You two calm down,” Foote said finally. “This is a farce. I don’t even think it is necessary for us to go there. A deposition would have sufficed. It is up to them to find some evidence, for Chrissakes. I would bet things are closing in on Chase.”

  “I am just sick of that lying little prick,” said Bart.

  Foote sighed, picked up a book, and went back to reading.

  “Do I have to cage the pair of you?” he said, offhandedly.

  Bart and Du Pré sank back in their chairs for a minute. Then they tensed up and began to lean forward again.

  “You are to keep your tempers, gentlemen,” said Foote. “An attack on Chase would not be worth it, to put it mildly.” He did not look up from his book.

  The plane got to Washington and circled just once before shrieking in to land. A limousine moved slowly out to the plane. The ramp went down. Foote got off first, carrying a slim attaché case and glancing grimly at his watch. Du Pré and Bart had no luggage. The black driver got in and drove off. He was separated from them by a glass panel.

  The police station was new, in the late seventies architecture best called inhumane.

  Foote spoke briefly to the desk officer. The man picked up a telephone. He talked for a moment and then pointed down the hall to the right. They began to walk toward it.

  The big, rumpled detective whom Du Pré had spoken to in June, while he held the frightened horse, came out of a doorway and stood there waiting for them, hands in pockets.

  They got closer. The detective stared at Foote with distaste.

  “Just a few questions,” said the cop.

  “If I think the questions reasonable, I shall instruct my client to answer,” said Foote. His disdain chilled the hall.

  They all took seats at the conference table. There was a voice-activated miniature tape recorder sitting on it. No ashtrays. A sign on the wall thanked them for not smoking.

  The detective rattled the case number into the recorder. Foote had scribbled a short note. He pushed it over to the detective, who looked sourly at it and then spoke the names of Bart, Du Pré, and the lawyer.

  “You ever date this Annie McCrae?” said the detective.

  “No,” said Du Pré. “I don’t even know what she looked like.”

  The detective rattled off questions; Du Pré looked at Foote before answering each one. Foote nodded; Du Pré spoke.

  “But Paul Chase says you did,” the detective said finally.

  “Paul Chase is a liar,” said Du Pré. He recounted the story of the expedition and Chase’s grandstanding at the end of it. Told him to contact Samantha Ford at the Post.

  “Thanks,” said the detective sudd
enly. He waved to someone behind the mirrored wall. A door opened in the hallway. Heels clicked on the tiles. A tall, pretty woman came in the door.

  “This is my partner,” said the detective, “Detective Sgt. Michelle Leuci.”

  Bart was staring at her, and not just because she was Italian.

  “You dragged their asses all the way here from fucking Montana?” said the lovely woman. “Rollie, you are an asshole. He could have been deposed there. For Christ sweet sakes.”

  Rollie shrugged.

  Foote stood up. “We came to assist,” he said.

  Du Pré was looking at the beauty with the foul mouth. She had thick dark red hair, bright sapphire eyes, and a stainless steel 9mm automatic pistol in a holster in the small of her back, so her suit coat would cover it.

  “This guy Chase has some connections,” she said, “but they won’t help if we can build a case. But what’s he like? You said he cut in on you at the end of the expedition. Why’d he leave in the first place?”

  Du Pré told them about the bear, Chase climbing the tree in a panic, the canoe capsizing the next day, and Chase’s hysterics. How one of the assistants had said he wasn’t taking his medication.

  “So, what was he like?” Detective Leuci repeated. She sat down, lit up, and gave the bird to the thank-you sign.

  “A little spoiled kid,” said Du Pré. “Seemed like he couldn’t think of anyone but himself. I began to have this bad feeling about him at the festival…”

  “Bad feeling?”

  “I don’t like him, you know. Hard at first to put a finger on it, but he smiles too quickly, says too many right things. I don’t trust him. I wasn’t going to come at all, because I didn’t really want to …”

  “Why did you?”

  Benetsee, Du Pré thought. He looked at Foote, who smiled.

  “This old man I respect told me to,” said Du Pré. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Detective Sergeant Leuci leaned forward, eager to be explained to.

  “He’s an old man I know since I am a child,” said Du Pré. “He sees farther than the rest of us can.”

  “A medicine man?”

  Du Pré didn’t know what to say. He thought.

  “He just seems to know a lot of things there doesn’t seem to be a way for him to know,” Du Pré said finally. “When he tells me I ought to do something, he has always been right.”

  “A psychic?”

  “He has visions, I think,” said Du Pré lamely.

  “Indian?”

  “Some,” said Du Pré.

  “You have visions?”

  Du Pré sighed. “Only when I am fucking drunk.”

  Detective Michelle Leuci roared with laughter. She had a big, honest, booming laugh.

  “So,” she said, still shaking. “My partner here finds you holding on to a horse, belonging to the rider who spotted Annie McRae’s body. Where were you when you saw the horse?”

  “I am onstage, playing with a Cajun band,” said Du Pré.

  “Before that?”

  “I am onstage, playing my Métis music.”

  “What’s a Métis?”

  “Red River breeds,” said Du Pré. “We are mostly Canadian. Voyageurs were Métis. Cree, Chippewa, Ojibwa, French, some little English. We come down to Montana after the second rebellion, in 1886.”

  “Fascinating.”

  She stood up.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We’ll look hard at this Chase character. Get hold of Samantha Ford.” She glanced at Rollie, who went out of the room.

  “We’re going to get some dinner,” said Bart, standing up. He bowed to Detective Sergeant Leuci. “Would you care to join us?”

  “Who’re you?” said Leuci.

  “Bart Fascelli,” said Bart, “and please go get your fucking coat.”

  Leuci stared at him for a minute, she shrugged.

  She nodded. She went out into the hall, in the next door, and came back.

  “No place too fancy,” she said, “or folks might think I’m corrupt.”

  Bart offered her his arm gallantly. She took it and they went out the door.

  “We have been abandoned and forgotten,” said Lawyer Foote. “They will go to some nice place. It’s McDonald’s for the help.”

  “We could catch them,” said Du Pré.

  Foote shook his head. Then he shook his finger.

  They both laughed.

  When they got out of the building, the limousine was gone. Foote waved down a cab.

  They had barely enough money between them to pay the cabbie off when they got to the hotel.

  Midway through dinner, the hotel manager sidled up to Foote and gave him a plain white envelope. Foote thanked the man, getting up to do so. He sat back down, peered into the envelope, and counted out three thousand dollars in hundreds. He handed them to Du Pré.

  “Well,” said Foote, “I think we should go. The plane can always come back for Bart when Bart surfaces.”

  “Why all this money?” said Du Pré.

  “The rude prick pays,” said Foote, taking a bite of his fish.

  CHAPTER 15

  THAT WOULD BE THE best thing for Bart,” said Madelaine when Du Pré described his disappearance. “Kinda rude for him to go off like that, though.”

  “He’s handicapped,” said Du Pré.

  “Huh?” said Madelaine.

  “He’s a rich kid,” said Du Pré. “They are handicapped. People always do for them, you know. Some of their wires never get hooked up.”

  “I think I chew his ass hard he get back here,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré grinned. Poor Bart. Madelaine’s ass-chewings were artful. As a mother, she got lots of practice. She was fond of Bart, so she would do a good job, too.

  It had frosted hard and the trees and bushes had started to turn. The wind smelled of fall, late in coming this year.

  Du Pré heard the distant boom of a shotgun. The grouse season was open. Couple weeks, the season would open for pheasants and ducks. The wild turkeys in the river bottoms. Du Pré thought maybe he’d hunt for a turkey this year. He’d written off and gotten a turkey call from some fellow in New Hampshire. Beautiful thing, in an oiled leather case, Du Pré had played with it. You scraped a dingus on the side of the call and the thing scrawked and gobbled.

  I hope Benetsee don’t see this, Du Pré had thought. He put the call away.

  Something nagged at the back of Du Pré’s mind, nibbled in the shadow—on that long trip through the dark green forest, over the clear water, on the route of Du Pré’s blood, one stream of which ran all the way to France. Something. Once when he was young, he had shot a bear. He’d been too excited and he’d wounded the animal, not killed it. When his father, Catfoot, shot something, it dropped, and he had told Du Pré to wound an animal was not to respect it.

  Du Pré had been alone. He waited for the animal’s wound to stiffen and then he tracked the bear, a good-sized black one. He came to a small glade. The glade was quiet, too quiet. He walked softly out on the path, past a big old ponderosa pine. Too quiet. He felt sudden fear and he turned, pointing the gun back the way he had come.

  There was nothing there.

  Du Pré stood there frozen for some time—he never knew how long.

  A single drop of something fell on his hand.

  He looked up. The wounded bear was directly above him, perhaps twenty feet up, clinging to the tree.

  Spend a lot of time looking in the wrong place because I am thinking I am looking in the right one, Du Pré thought. I got to learn to look everywhere, see everything. Like Benetsee.

  That man don’t have visions, Du Pré thought. He just pays real close attention.

  Or maybe he does have visions.

  He remembered the coyote pawing for the lumps of fat in the snow directly over the brass box that held the story complete of the murder of Bart’s brother by Du Pré’s father, Catfoot. Someone had hung that piece of fat up there. Indeed, had known the story all along, it seemed. Bu
t, like any good storyteller, hadn’t told it too rapidly. Benetsee hang that fat, yes.

  Du Pré went into the house. He got his shotgun from the closet, put a few shells in the pocket of his jacket. There was always jerky, fruit leather, a plastic space blanket, and fatwood splinters to make a fire with in the game pouch in back.

  “I drop you off and go shoot a grouse maybe,” said Du Pré to Madelaine. It was getting close to time to take her home, anyway.

  Du Pré barely saw his daughter Maria, a senior in high school. Since Bart had offered to send her to any college she could get in, she had washed the dye out of her hair, quit wearing clothes that looked like they had been taken from the bodies of car-bombing victims, and spent her time studying with the same ferocity she had once devoted to driving her father up the wall.

  Du Pré walked Madelaine to her front door—he always did—and then he got in his old cruiser and drove off toward the Wolf Mountains. The grouse would begin to come down to the logging roads to pick up gravel for their crops in an hour or so, and Du Pré, without a gundog, would pretty well have to stick to beating the bushes near the roads. Not that he cared if he shot a grouse or not, he liked being out in the bright fall air, liked the smell of the forest.

  When Du Pré turned off the county road and entered the trees, he drove slowly on the left side of the road, glancing down at the verge for the tracks he might see—elk, mule deer, a mountain lion.

  Must be that lion lives up by Belker Ridge, he thought. See a few more tracks, we had better trim them on back.

  Mountain lions were simple killing machines. If their numbers grew, their solitary ways would bring them down near people, where they would feed on dogs and, eventually, small children.

  The Montana newcomers would scream about killing such nice big puddy-tats.

  We have always had dudes out here, Du Pré thought, but this last bunch think they know things.

  Du Pré saw a couple ruffed grouse up ahead taking dust baths and scratching in the fine gravel at the road’s edge. He pulled the car off as far as he could go and stopped it, pulled the shotgun out of the case, got out, racked a couple shells in, and began to walk casually toward the grouse;