by Peter Bowen
Du Pré thought of his blood, the voyageurs, in the dark green wilderness, in canoes. Dark waters, dark songs. Long hard days and bitter weather. One’s wages were all too often death. Dark waters flowing past deep green-black stands of trees, packs of furs. He played. He thought of the voyageurs and he let his fingers and bow describe them.
He let the music fade, one long, lonesome note, in the distance of the past.
The crowd did not move or clap. They sat transfixed. Du Pré looked over at Madelaine. Michelle was staring at him wide-eyed, her hand to her mouth.
Entertaining is simple. One up tune, one medium, one down, one up, and so forth. Du Pré played a reel, a dance tune, the happy music that was played at the weddings where the couple jumped over a broom. The priest would be along someday to bless it. No reason to hurt the feelings of God.
The crowd cheered and clapped. Du Pré bowed. He launched into a lament, a song of men homesick for their houses, lovesick for their women, tormented by not knowing if they were still remembered and still loved. When the wind was against the canoes on the homeward voyage, the men said that their girls weren’t pulling on the rope to bring them home, they were playing around with the loafers at the home post. Men away from home are all Ulysses hoping for a Penelope.
The rancher with the spoons sat quietly through the sad song. Du Pré held a note and then began to shiver the bow and spark the tempo and he then shot into a fast-tempoed question song, where the fiddle was two people asking sassy questions and giving sassy answers. People began to beat out the time on glasses.
Du Pré looked around the room at his friends and neighbors—young and old, weathered and pale, few teeth or gleaming rows, well-off and poor, faithful or weak. He felt fondness for them all.
I live in a place where you can have personal enemies, Du Pré thought. Sometimes they are more use than your friends.
The door of the bar opened, but Du Pré’s eyes were too used to the dark to see who it was. He kept playing. The door closed. He looked down at the floor, bobbing with the rhythm. He closed his eyes and pushed the music hard. He glanced over toward the little table where Madelaine and Bart and Michelle were sitting.
Maria was leaning over, talking to Michelle, who was stuffing her cigarettes into her pocket and looking up at Bart. She looked stricken and angry. Maria stood back.
Michelle practically ran out the door of the saloon. Bart was right behind her.
Du Pré broke off in midstride. He put the fiddle on top of the rickety old piano and rushed toward the door, shoving people out of the way.
Someone else was dead. But who and where?
Du Pré caught up with them at Bart’s Rover. Michelle had the cellular telephone in her hand and she was punching frantically at the buttons. She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth and her lighter lit in her moving hand.
“Rollie!” she screamed. “What the fuck…”
She listened. Her face crawled and twisted. She put the lighter down on the seat. She bit her lip.
“Shit, Rollie,” she said. “Shit.”
She listened some more.
“Right now,” she said. She turned off the phone.
“Two more,” she said. She sounded as if she were speaking underwater.
Du Pré looked down at the mud between his boots.
“Little girls,” she said. “Little Indian girls. One eight and one nine.”
“I come with you,” said Du Pré.
“The fuck you do, Du Pré,” said Detective Leuci. “I know how you think. I like it. But you stay right here. You come to D.C. and I will arrest you.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” said Du Pré, angry.
“You didn’t have to,” said Michelle softly. She got out of the Rover and went to Du Pré and put a hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers. “I know you, Gabriel. No. No. You stay here. Find Benetsee. Stay here. No.”
Du Pré looked at her, his black eyes burning.
“Bart,” said Michelle. “Let’s go.”
They drove away.
She’s right, Du Pré thought as they pulled away.
We both are.
CHAPTER 29
BENETSEE AND HIS DOGS were gone. The spring weather was terrible. Every year, it killed flatlanders dressed too lightly. Hypothermia set in, they got disoriented, and they died trying to make fires after they had forgotten how to strike a match.
Only thing to be afraid of here is a cold wind, thought Du Pré.
And other people—some of the time.
He opened the door of Benetsee’s stove and thrust a finger down in the ashes. Cold. Settled. So he’d been gone at least three days. Maybe five. It didn’t matter. The old man would be fine, wherever he was. He’d come round when he wished to.
I wonder if the Prophets were as much of a pain in the ass, Du Pré thought. Must have been. People killed them for a little peace and quiet.
Du Pré left the jug of wine on the table. He unscrewed the top so that if it froze pink ice would ooze out and the jug wouldn’t burst. He rolled a cigarette out of the wind and smoked. He went back out to his tired old cruiser and got in and sat, looking up at the surging sky. The weather was high up. A few mackerel clouds.
He looked at the side of the road. The little pasque flowers were up. Boil the bulbs down, you got a thick green gum that made a good arrow poison. The first flowers of spring are death. This country is a person.
He drove on toward Bart’s new house. The weather had been dry and windy and the mud didn’t cling so much. Few more days of wind and sun, it would be dust. Snow, mud, and dust, the three seasons of Montana.
The front door was standing ajar. Du Pré looked at it a moment and wondered if Bart and Michelle had left it so. He took his 9mm from the glove box and racked a round into the chamber. He circled the house, looking for tracks, but all he found were old ones.
He still pushed the door open and went in gun-first. He checked the place out.
All I know about this is from watching cop movies, Du Pré thought. Hope the guy I’m looking for only watches cop movies, too. Even odds.
This is silly, he thought, straightening up.
The air inside the log house was cold and smelled of pitch. Du Pré fired up the rocket heater to take the chill off. He looked at the muddy footprints on the floor. Mine. Bart’s big feet. Michelle’s. It seemed a long time ago.
The place heated up rapidly. The rocket heater, designed to dry topping compound on sheetrock, threw out a vast amount of heat in very short order. By the time that Du Pré had gotten his tool belt on, the dull was gone, and by the time he had swept the place out, it was getting too warm.
A ton of work—build cabinets, case things out, trim. Won’t be able to finish before I got to go with Lucky and them down the River of the Whales.
But I think that it will take a long time for Bart to talk Michelle into leaving her pavement and muggers for sagebrush and coyotes. So I wonder now if Bart will ever live in this house. Play with his dragline again. Maybe he doesn’t really like it here, just needed a far place to get well in.
Du Pré switched on the planer and started to feed the pine through, taking it down so he could fair off the window casings. He stared at the blades intently. They could take off the tips of fingers faster than the eye could follow.
The planer screamed.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Du Pré whirled, and the piece of wood he let go shot through the planer and slammed through the lower glass of a window before sailing out into the mud. Du Pré was scrabbling for his 9mm.
“Yer phone’s ringin’!” yelled Booger Tom. He was looking at Du Pré like Du Pré had three noses. Du Pré remembered he’d laid the 9mm down over by the toolboxes.
Du Pré shut off the planer.
Booger Tom walked out the door, shaking his head and muttering.
Du Pré lifted the phone. He pressed the button.
“Du Pré!” said Michelle. “Christ, I must have let it ring forty times.”
“Chase has split. We can’t find him,” said Michelle. “We are going henshit here.”
“Oh,” said Du Pré.
“Just oh?” said Michelle.
“I don’t think it is him,” said Du Pré. “The killer, he just uses Chase for cover. Maybe he follows Chase, though. I don’t know.”
“The little girls were visiting with a school group, both of them were Ojibwa. The teachers and parents who came kept a close eye on them. We still don’t know how they got separated, or if one was snatched and then the other.”
Du Pré didn’t say anything.
“Knife,” said Michelle. “The bodies were shoved in a cabinet, a guard noticed blood seeping out the door.”
“I can’t find Benetsee,” said Du Pré. “His dogs are gone, too. He travels, I don’t know how. Maybe the trains.”
“Is he Métis?” asked Michelle.
“I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “Sometimes I think he was here before God. He’s …I don’t know.”
“Chase wouldn’t go out there, would he?”
“I don’t think so,” said Du Pré. “I don’t think that he likes me very much. Also, he is a coward, you know. He may be crazy, but he is still a coward. So, no…”
“When do you go to Canada?” asked Michelle.
“I go maybe three weeks,” said Du Pré. “Whenever I am going, I think I go earlier than I say.”
“Good,” said Michelle. “Wait a minute.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone.
“Sorry,” she said. “Well, let me know when you do go.”
“Sure,” said Du Pré.
Du Pré turned the telephone back off. He rolled a cigarette and smoked. He nodded.
He unplugged all the extension cords and dropped his tools in the box. He shrugged into his jacket and tucked the 9mm in the waistband of his pants.
He went out, shutting the door and slipping the wooden block into the hole in the doorframe to block it shut.
He walked over to the bunkhouse and banged on the door. Booger Tom came finally, yawning.
“I have to go away for a while,” said Du Pré.
Booger Tom nodded and shut the door.
Du Pré went home and packed. He didn’t need a lot. He put the duffel in the trunk of his car. He locked the 9mm in his little gun room off the bedroom.
He drove over to Madelaine’s.
The next morning before daylight he drove off. She stood in the doorway in her white nightdress, one hand upraised.
CHAPTER 30
DU PRÉ SMELLED THE cedars in the bog. A little stream cut through pale gold sands. He watched a blue jay bright as silks peck at something in the duff.
He reached in his pocket for a rock, put it in the slingshot, whirled it round and let it fly at the ripple of water in the stream, the only disturbance on its surface. The stone sent up a column of water a few inches high. But it had gone where he wished it to.
He was tired. He had been driving for twenty-six hours. He had stopped to practice with the sling. He was too tired to think. A good time to practice, since thinking was unhelpful. He took a few more shots and missed just one, when he began to think about letting go.
He got back in the car and drove on. The road was gravel. He had a case of liquid-rubber repair tubes in the back and four other tires mounted on rims. The snowplows kept the road open year around, but the blades of the plows left steel splinters. He’d had five flat tires since he’d begun.
All this trouble to slip away and travel in shadows, Du Pré thought. But all anyone has to do is wait at the end, for they know where I am going and who with.
But they don’t know where I am now. I want them to think I am in D.C. I want whoever it is just not to know where I am. I want them to worry.
He came to an Indian village, a reservation. It was the same. The ramshackle shacks and broken cars, the packs of starving dogs, the little children wild as lynxes, running for cover and looking back with their beautiful ancient black eyes. Fish drying on smoke racks. A huge bearskin on a stretching frame, the rounded-end cordwood tossed onto the stretched skin to stretch it further. Whites paid for big. They were very strange.
Du Pré parked, then got out and stretched, rolled a cigarette. An old person—he couldn’t tell man or woman—looked out from the tumbled folds of a filthy blanket with eyes of such deep contempt, Du Pré cast his down.
I am somewhere in Quebec and I don’t really know where, Du Pré thought. I know what kind of Quebec I am in, though. The forgotten part and the forgotten people. A quarter of the inmates in Canadian prisons were Indian. Two percent of Canadians were Indian.
And this old person despises breeds, too, Du Pré thought, turning away. I cannot blame them.
He drove on to a roadhouse, where he had a hamburger and fries, malt vinegar to cut the grease. The white owner looked at him, indifferent. Du Pré paid and left.
Lucky’s village was another hundred and fifty miles, at the uttermost end of the road—if there was a road. Some of the potholes on this one could swallow a car. The highway funds obviously went to roads the whites had more use for.
Maybe those wrecked cars, they bought them south and drove home once.
Du Pré slept by the road, in a turnout. He woke before dawn with his bladder full. He pissed and steam rose. There were no insects yet. The car was covered in a thick frost. Fogs boiled out of the cedar bogs. This country had been two miles under the ice not so long ago. Lakes and bogs, the leavings of glaciers.
Du Pré liked it. It was thicker with life than his country, but just as tough. The sky hung down here. Out there, it vaulted and one could get crushed under the weight of heaven.
He heard geese overhead, above the mist. Big flights passed, the honking calls swelled and faded. He looked at the shadowed woods. Easy to lie awake at night afraid here, to think of the loup-garou, fell creatures in their inhuman strength, hungry for blood fresh from the throat.
He lit the little gasoline stove, made coffee, heated a can of pork and beans. By the time he was through, the sun was stabbing through the mist. Golden slanting columns. He heard a woodpecker hammering on a dead tree. The eerie rasp of a deadfall stirred by the wind, rubbing on another tree, the noise sharpened by the rosin in the live one. Like the fiddle’s bow. Screeeee.
Du Pré started the old cruiser and went. He drove slowly, there could well be logging trucks coming.
He came to a crossroads, or rather three-fourths of one. The road he was on dead-ended in it. He turned to the north. Lucky was up there maybe a hundred miles—if the map was okay. He had twenty gallons of gas in jerricans in the trunk. Spare fan belts. A lot of hope.
A huge orange logging truck burst out of a foggy tunnel of trees. The monster was square in the center of the road. The driver made no move to get over. Du Pré looked off to his right. The verge was almost nonexistent. He got as far over as he could and stopped. He slid over and opened the far door and scrambled out and moved down the side of the road toward the implacable barreling truck so that if it did hit his car, it wouldn’t push it onto him.
The truck missed Du Pré’s old cruiser by inches. The draft of its passing made the old car dance on its springs.
Du Pré ripped off a string of names of no pleasure and gave the trucker the finger. The truck went on and vanished into mist.
The last part of the journey is always the worst, thought Du Pré. And maybe I am going to find this guy who kills Indians at the end of it, and he will maybe try to kill me. I am afraid now, but when I see him before me, I will be angry. Cold and angry. Rage is a binding net.
He carefully got the car back up on the road. The outer tires had begun to knock the lightly packed sand down. Over another foot and he’d have to hitchhike.
Another truck came thundering o
ut of the lightening mist. This driver got as far over on his side as he could. There was plenty of room.
Du Pré wondered if the first guy had eaten too many pocket rockets. Maybe he was just an asshole.
Du Pré was starting up a longish, smooth grade when the top of his fuel pump blew off. The gasoline in the engine compartment flamed up and rubber burned. Du Pré stopped the engine and the car, then grabbed his fire extinguisher and popped the hood open. He had to use a stick to lift the hood. The fire burned low by then, and a shot from the extinguisher put it out.
There, Du Pré thought. Ass fucking end of nowhere in Quebec, where the Indians hate me, the English hate me, and the French think I am a mix of both of the ones they hate.
The fire was out. Du Pré stood in the stink, wondering how he’d get to Lucky’s village.
He heard a big truck coming from behind him, the orange one. Du Pré cursed and ran for cover.
The truck slowed.
It stopped.
The driver climbed down from the cab.
“Bad,” said the man, a stocky French-Canadian with a pockmarked face and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip
“Could I hitch a ride?” said Du Pré. “Take me just a minute to get what I need.”
“We just take the whole thing,” said the driver. He clambered up on the trailer and switched on the hydraulic self-loader. He twiddled some levers and the huge steel jaws spread and the boom swung and he grabbed Du Pré’s car around the middle, diddled a moment till the tops of the jaws found the frame, and lifted the cruiser up and set it on the trailer.
“Nice paint job there,” said the driver. “I was afraid I would maybe scratch it.”
Du Pré helped set the chains and boomers.
“How far are you going?” said Du Pré. “End of the fucking road,” said the driver. “If you had looked some English, I would have left you there.” They smoked and didn’t talk.
CHAPTER 31
YEAH,” SAID LUCKY, “I tried to call you, but your Madelaine, she said that you had already gone. Good that you are here. I need some help to finish this last canoe.”
