Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  “Du Pré!” said Madelaine, “You forget what your Madelaine look like. I see you on the TV! Your clothes need a wash.”

  “So do I,” said Du Pré.

  “I can’t find Benetsee and no one else can, either,” she said.

  Maybe the old bastard was dead and the coyotes had dragged him to a den and he was just a few stumps of bones. Could be.

  But he could have said good-bye somehow. He die, his own time.

  What am I doing here?

  “Damn,” said Du Pré. “I miss you.”

  “Yeah,” said Madelaine. “Since I see you so long ago, my hair gone all white, my tits down to my knees, and I got no teeth.”

  “My dick fell off,” said Du Pré. “I got this fungus.”

  “You come right home, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. “Them Quebec girls can’t last.”

  She hung up.

  Du Pré had a tight feeling in his chest.

  “Mr. Du Pré,” said a woman’s voice behind him, “I need to talk to you. We met in York Factory, remember?”

  The woman reporter who’d stayed to get the story on Chase.

  “Why did you come on this trip?” she asked.

  See if I can kill some bastard killed some people, Du Pré thought.

  “I wanted to see this country,” said Du Pré. “Pretty fine country to drown, you know.”

  The reporter looked at him.

  “What do you think of Hydro-Quebec’s plan?” she said.

  “I think we have destroyed enough of the world,” said Du Pré. “We maybe ought to take better care of it.”

  “Are you part Indian, Mr. Du Pré?” she asked.

  “I am Métis,” said Du Pré, “Red River Breed. Twice we rebel against them English. My people came down to Montana from Canada after the second one. Lots of distant relatives up there.”

  “Is the Métis a tribe?”

  Du Pré thought.

  “I guess so,” he said. “We fight them Sioux and Assiniboine and Gros Ventre pretty good.”

  “Where is Paul Chase?” she said. “I thought he’d be here at least by now.”

  So did I.

  “I have not seen him,” said Du Pré.

  “You sitting out here with a rifle because of Chase?” she said. “Guy’s got no more guts than a Junebug.”

  “Lots of people don’t want us to be doing this,” said Du Pré. “There is a lot of money here.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  Du Pré rolled a smoke. He felt like a fucking fool.

  “I am going back, get some whiskey,” said Du Pré.

  They walked back toward his tent. The light was bright and the evening cool hadn’t started, but it felt like it would frost good tonight.

  The reporter took a tin cup of whiskey, nodding at Du Pré.

  “What about the murders?” she said.

  “Police are working on them,” said Du Pré. “

  “So are you,” said the reporter.

  “I am just here paddling.”

  “I come from California,” she said. “On the back side of Shasta. Cattle and sheep country. Isn’t like California at all. Not many people. My daddy once killed somebody. For trying to molest me when I was a kid.”

  Du Pré waited.

  “He didn’t say anything about it and no one pinned it on him and he died without telling me he’d done it. But he had this look in his eyes, Mr. Du Pré. He was out of another time and he had killed someone and he would again and ask no one’s leave if he felt it right. You have that same look, Mr. Du Pré.”

  “I am tired,” said Du Pré.

  “My card,” said the reporter.

  Anybody turned up dead, I’d best call, I guess, Du Pré thought.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said the reporter. She was a very pretty woman with very hard green eyes. Laugh lines.

  She walked off.

  Du Pré stared at the card in his hand.

  Helicopters. Lights.

  Bullshit.

  Frost.

  CHAPTER 37

  LUCKY HAD THOUGHT ONLY as far as descending the river. When Du Pré asked him what arrangements there were for getting back out, Lucky smiled sunnily and shrugged.

  Du Pré was enraged. He went down to the shingle and walked along, kicking stones. Bart came up behind him, laughing.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I called, they’ll be here for us tomorrow. Calm down. Lucky put all his thoughts into the trip and nothing more.”

  “His goddamn antenna fell down,” said Du Pré. He was out of bourbon, too, and there was nothing available in the settlement. The Inuit forbade alcohol.

  All the newspeople were gone. There wasn’t anything to do.

  There is something not right about all of this, Du Pré thought. I am tired and disgusted and I just wish that I was moving somewhere. Just moving.

  What’s not right? I need Benetsee.

  He thought of the mangled, tortured bird. Some sick bastard did that.

  That woman reporter, she was right—it is not Chase. He is sick and treacherous, but he is weak.

  Du Pré and Bart stood there, smoking. After a while, Bart left Du Pré alone.

  Du Pré stared out over the bay; the sun was beginning to set. A flock of ducks in the light, white wing patches flashing. A lone blue heron flapping, long legs dangling behind.

  There was some weather coming, low dark cloud on the far horizon.

  Du Pré reached in his jacket pocket and found the slingshot. He bent to the shingle and picked up a rounded stone and slung it out over the water. The stone was not balanced, and it curved off to the left before sending up a little tower of water.

  His mind was full. He kept slinging stones, kept looking down. Kept thinking but could make no sense of it.

  As he began to put the sling away, his hand touched a stone in his pocket. It was almost perfectly spherical, he had found it upriver, drawn to its perfection for the slingshot.

  He got off the shingle and began to move through the low shrubs, toward the trees.

  A Canada jay sat on the top of a willow.

  Du Pré whirled the slingshot.

  The bird flew. Du Pré put some arm into the last whirl and popped the thong.

  The bird flew and the stone flew, drawn to the same point. A puff of gray and white feathers.

  Du Pré’s belly sank. The last thing he had thought possible was that he would hit the jay. Now he’d killed something for not one good reason. He poked around in the tree line till he found the crushed bird, blood running from its beak, eyes glazed, skeleton crushed from the rock.

  He put the bird up in the fork of a tree so something would find and eat it.

  You practice this till you snap like a bow made of bois d’arc, old Benetsee had said. Osage orange, the finest bow wood in North America. Old times, a Sioux would trade a horse and a blanket for a bow of Osage orange. They could drive a killing arrow into the chest of a buffalo or a bear up to the feathers, the nock, sometimes clear on through.

  He’d just done that. He remembered the spring, how a ripple of force seemed to have begun at the soles of his feet and flashed to the pocket of the shot fast as an arc of light.

  So it was like that. Du Pré had begun to hunt when he was seven, with his father, Catfoot, who started him with a BB gun and worked him up to a .25-20. To this day, Du Pré did not sight a rifle. He just looked with both eyes open at what he was trying to hit and swung and squeezed the trigger. He’d shot antelope at four hundred yards, the good shot which clips the spine from the skull. Running antelope.

  What had foxed him was that he was the force behind the stone, his muscles, not the tamped charge of guncotton that pushed a bullet. But it was in a way the same.

  I just step back in time ten thousand years, Du Pré thought. This white time, it is very new and not much good for anything but pissing you off. Here I worry about I got to wait a day for a ride out of here. I don’t think a thousand years ago I would have been so upset.


  He headed back toward the little village and the piles of duffel. He still had some tobacco somewhere in one of his bags.

  Bart was sitting on a stump near the pile of duffel, talking and laughing. Must be Michelle. He waved Du Pré over. He handed the phone to him.

  “Hello, Gabriel,” said Michelle. She sounded clear and crisp. These phones were some sort of magic.

  “ ’Lo,” said Du Pré.

  “So you guys made it down all right.”

  “Yes,” said Du Pré. He didn’t tell her his thoughts.

  “Everything has been mercifully quiet around here,” she said. “Oh, the usual ruck of drive-by shootings and all, but I guess that’s just a part of American life now.”

  Yours maybe, Du Pré thought. You drive by and shoot in Montana, you have people shoot back. They got better aim, too, since they aren’t moving.

  “Will you come here with Bart?” said Michelle.

  “I need to get home,” said Du Pré. “I got a car parked over at the end of a road. So maybe they drop me off, I don’t know.”

  See my Madelaine. See my home.

  He gave the telephone back to Bart and walked away to give Bart some privacy. Though you could hear the big man laughing and talking a long ways off. Well, he was happier than Du Pré had ever seen him.

  Du Pré dug around in the duffel till he found the bag with his tobacco in it. He was shoving his hand around the bottom when he hit a flannel shirt with something hand-sized and long in it…a bottle of whiskey he had missed.

  “There is a God,” said Du Pré aloud. I get home, I go to Mass a few times; it will make Madelaine feel better.

  Nappy and Felix were putting up a tent. Du Pré went to help them and shared his find with them. They were laughing and tired. It had been a tense trip, wondering about who was off in those dark trees with a scoped rifle maybe.

  “This time, each time, I feel like my own shadow,” said Nappy. “Wonder why I came on this trip. It does not seem real to me now. I will not remember it until later.”

  “Uh,” Felix added, “Ever’ time I go out in that forest, I am some scare, you know, and I go out there all my life.”

  Du Pré sipped his whiskey, they ate some cold beans and turned in. The trip was over arid they were tired because of it.

  Just before Du Pré dropped off, he wondered where Lucky and the others were.

  Talking with the Inuit, he decided.

  CHAPTER 38

  DU PRÉ LOOKED AROUND Madelaine’s kitchen, not quite believing that he was in it.

  She stood by the stove in her robe, her hair undone. They’d damn near broken the door to the house down in their haste to get to bed.

  She was frying some bacon and eggs for Gabriel.

  She turned and smiled at him.

  Du Pré couldn’t quite believe she was standing right there, either.

  My eyes are here in Toussaint, Montana, he thought, and my ass isn’t even across the Canadian line.

  He looked outside. It was high Montana spring, when the snow turns to mud and the wildflowers erupt.

  Benetsee’s head went past the window over the kitchen sink.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Du Pré. He ran to the back door in his bare feet.

  “You old bastard!” Du Pré yelled. “You come in here now. I got to talk with you some now!”

  Benetsee stood by a stone planter filled with prickly pear cactus all in blooms of primary colors. He was rocking on his heels and looking at the flowers.

  He turned. His eyes looked very sad and old and deep in his head.

  “Du Pré,” he said. He rocked on his heels. “Du Pré,” he said again.

  Benetsee followed Du Pré into the kitchen. Madelaine had already poured him a big glass of pink wine. She dished up Du Pré’s eggs and then she began to cook some for the old man.

  “I need to talk to you and no one can find you,” said Du Pré.

  Benetsee nodded. He seemed quite unconcerned that no one had been able to find him. He looked off out the window, thinking of something else.

  “Pretty bad thing that was done to that raven,” said Benetsee.

  Du Pré nodded and ate his eggs. He was past wondering how Benetsee knew things he couldn’t possibly know. He just did.

  And when he didn’t, he wouldn’t say anything, nothing at all. Not being coy, just not saying anything.

  “I saw that man,” said Benetsee, “but I couldn’t see who it was, it was so dark.”

  Du Pré ate his eggs. The bird had been mutilated in broad daylight, damn near high noon. But what kind of darkness was he talking about?

  Madelaine poured Benetsee some more wine and set the eggs in front of him. Benetsee ate hungrily. He drank the second glass of wine. Madelaine poured him another.

  Benetsee looked at Du Pré, unblinking. Du Pré fetched his tobacco pouch and watched the old man roll a smoke.

  “I thank you, Madelaine,” said Benetsee. She smiled at him.

  “I am lost in this,” said Du Pré. “I was pretty sure I knew who does these things, but it isn’t him, so I don’t know. I’m pretty mad.”

  Benetsee nodded. He stood up.

  “He wears funny moccasins,” said Benetsee, “they have a soft sole like coat leather maybe.”

  Du Pré thought on that, but it didn’t mean anything to him. Catfoot had worn moccasins a lot. He got them from some relations in Canada. Du Pré tried to remember what they were like and couldn’t. So maybe there was a pair or part of one at his house, maybe in the attic or the workshop. Old pieces of leather had uses, if you could get to them before the pack rats did.

  Benetsee went outside. Du Pré kissed Madelaine, pulled on his socks and boots, and went after him. The sun was good and warm. He saw a male mountain bluebird flash past, brighter than a clear sky after a rain.

  Benetsee was standing by the house, looking at the new leaves on the lilacs. The flower cases would open in a week or so and then the place would be perfumed and the bees would come in numbers.

  “You going to play at that music party they have out east?” said Benetsee.

  “Guy who runs it don’t like me,” said Du Pré.

  Benetsee nodded.

  “This man who kills Indians will be there,” said Benetsee.

  Christ, Du Pré thought. And fifty thousand other people.

  Benetsee put out a gnarled, dirty hand and felt the bark of the lilac. He ran his thumbnail on it and squinted at the spot he’d rubbed.

  “I be home now,” he said to Du Pré.

  “You want a ride?” asked Du Pré.

  But Benetsee was walking away, off toward his house maybe, or maybe he would detour a thousand miles, talk to the coyotes.

  Du Pré went back inside, feeling tired.

  “Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “you are a long ways from your Madelaine. Now, you want to find this evil person, I think that you had better, Du Pré. It seems he is owning you some. That is what hate does, Du Pré.”

  Du Pré started to apologize, but shut up when he realized she wasn’t complaining, just stating simple truths.

  I want that bastard dead, Du Pré thought.

  Rage burned up in him.

  We walk under the same sun and share the same night and it’s too close.

  “I am going to go to that music thing,” said Du Pré.

  Madelaine nodded.

  She had her arms crossed and she was looking down at the floor.

  Du Pré went to her and hugged her.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “So I pray some more for you, Du Pré,” she said. “I do that a lot, since you don’t pray so much.”

  Du Pré nodded, holding her.

  “I want to go for a drive and see the wildflowers,” said Madelaine, “I will leave a note for my kids.” Her children, even the younger ones just started in high school, could come home and fix themselves something to eat and do their little chores. Madelaine wouldn’t be back very late anyway, but if she was, they’d be fine. Th
e neighbors watched, too. One of the good things about a tiny town. The only unforgivable sin was making too much money.

  They drove off toward the Wolf Mountains. The flowers were coming up, not too many blooms yet. The great fields of clover that would splash yellow and red and lavender across the foothills were a couple of weeks from blooming. But the prickly pear had their waxy flowers popped, sometimes five different bright colors in a single patch.

  This was the only time of year when there was a lot of water.

  Ducks paddled in ponds near the road. Teal, mallards, wood ducks, and the coots ran over the dead mats of vegetation from last year. Geese honked and flew high overhead.

  They saw a peregrine drop on a pair of mallards and clobber the male, who fell down a couple hundred feet and was dead long before he hit the earth. The falcon swept in and landed on its prey.

  The wind came up and the dead grass danced.

  They drove back to Madelaine’s.

  When Du Pré came in after Madelaine, he took one look at little Suzanne’s face and knew.

  “This lady called for you,” said Suzanne, handing Du Pré a scrap of paper.

  Du Pré looked down at Michelle’s number.

  CHAPTER 39

  YOU LOOK FUNNY IN this rich man’s car,” said Madelaine. “Too bad about the old police car.”

  “Yah,” said Du Pré, “well, it was gone when I checked and Bart got me home, you know. Then he buys me this thing, I don’t want it but maybe I will not hurt his feelings.”

  “How much this cost?” asked Maria.

  “I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “I think maybe I buy some penny loafers, drive with them on.”

  “You better be gone now,” said Madelaine. “The train is on time you bet.”

  Maria was off to her summer tutorial before entering college. She had told Bart that she wanted to take the train because she had never been out of Montana and she wanted to see the Midwest. Ride the train through New York and on to Massachusetts.

  “Bye, Madelaine,” said Maria, leaning over and looking across Du Pré, who was giving Madelaine’s hand a squeeze.

  “Oh, yah,” said Madelaine. “I forgot, I got to talk to you a minute, Du Pré, won’t take long. Leave this silly thing running and you come here a minute.”