Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  “Yes, Papa,” said Maria.

  Du Pré hung up. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, Bart’s hand was in front of them with the keys to the Rover dangling from his fingers.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Bart, “but I just want you to know that I am extremely glad you have an adult along with you. I would worry otherwise, but now I will not. I can’t afford to have heard anything, because I would have to tell Michelle, who would go completely batshit. Now, would you please get out of my sight, and do you have enough money?”

  “Yes and I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

  Bart went to the kitchen and came back with a wad of hundreds.

  “Have you thought of family counseling?” he said, eyes wide.

  Du Pré took the money, the keys, his fiddle, then he walked out the door. He got in the Rover and headed north.

  He didn’t get to Massachusetts till dawn, and it took him a while to find where in Northampton it was that Maria lived.

  He pulled over to the curb and got out.

  Maria came striding out the front door of the huge old house. She had a backpack and a carryall. She kissed Du Pré on the cheek. He put her luggage in the back.

  “You know where them Mohawks live?” said Du Pré.

  Maria pointed north and Du Pré started the Rover.

  CHAPTER 47

  THEY WENT ROUND THE southern end of Lake Champlain and then turned north on a freeway. Du Pré was drinking lousy thin coffee from a Styrofoam cup and steering, and what he most wanted to do was pull off and rip the bandage away and scratch his itching forehead.

  I got the good healing flesh, Du Pré thought. I can take these damn stitches out pretty soon.

  “You maybe ought to change that bandage, Papa,” said Maria. “We get you one, fluorescent green like that dragline of Bart’s.”

  Goddamn kid.

  “So you will tell me maybe where we are going?”

  “Up next to Canada, ” said Du Pré. “I am thinking this Lucky isn’t Chippewa; I think about how he does things. So then I think maybe he is Mohawk.”

  “Mohawk?” said Maria. “Why them?”

  “Lot of them are ironworkers,” said Du Pré. “They run around long way off the ground on steel beams, no safety lines, move like cats.”

  All the other Quebec Indians had moved like woods people, careful not to make noise. But Lucky moved for balance. Lucky grabbed the ground with his feet. Lucky pulled it up to him.

  Or maybe I am full of shit, too.

  “How you gonna look for him, that flag on your head?” said Maria.

  Good question.

  “You got a picture of him?” she said.

  “In the glove box,” said Du Pré. The photos Bart had taken of the crew were there, taken right after they had pulled the canoes out at the bay.

  Maria riffled through them.

  “It’s this guy standing next to you and then here’s another of him speaking into a microphone. He’s kind of cute,” said Maria.

  “Christ,” said Du Pré.

  “You aren’t laughing enough, Papa,” said Maria.

  Du Pré didn’t feel like laughing. His head itched.

  “So I will be a real pain in the ass till you laugh.”

  Du Pré laughed at that.

  “I don’t really know,” said Du Pré, “I think he would have left D.C. right away. I am thinking the Mohawks because they are right next to Canada there and it is so easy to go across the border.”

  “Okay, Papa,” said Maria.

  “If we got to go across the border, you leave them damn guns somewhere,” said Du Pré. “Them Canadians don’t like people have pistols.”

  “I know, Papa,” said Maria. “They don’t shoot each other much. We got more murders each year in Omaha than they do in all their whole country. I wonder why Americans shoot each other so much.”

  “Television,” said Du Pré.

  “Television?”

  “Every time I watch television, it is so damn dumb, I want to go out and shoot somebody,” said Du Pré.

  “Okay,” said Maria, “you are better now.”

  They drove for a couple of hours, then pulled off to have lunch. Du Pré studied the map while waiting for his cheeseburger.

  “Little dinky states back here,” he said. “We got ranches bigger than Vermont.”

  “It’s so pretty there, Papa,” said Maria. “People have been there a long time, pretty little churches and towns. Makes me think Montana is so new.”

  Also very old, Du Pré drought. People hunting buffalo there a long time before them pyramids were built, I wonder when Benetsee was born? Long time gone.

  They drove on. They had left the interstate and wound along a good two-lane blacktop road, coming to little towns every fifteen miles or so. There were orchards in heavy leaf; the land was rich from rain.

  Du Pré found a motel about forty miles from the Mohawk reservation. He rented two rooms for two days. The woman behind the desk gave him the keys and a packet of tourist information. She recommended a little inn just up the road, very good food, though somewhat pricey.

  Du Pré had left all of his spare clothing at Bart’s. He gave some money to Maria and sent her off to buy some spare things, took a shower, and went to sleep. When he woke up it was getting on dark. There was a big paper sack on the suitcase stand.

  The clothes had been washed and carefully folded. Du Pré got dressed, pulled on his boots, threaded his belt through the loops on the tan jeans. He put his wallet and keys in his pocket. He knocked on the door connecting the two rooms.

  “You up, Papa?” said Maria. “Everything fit?”

  “Yes,” said Du Pré. He opened the door.

  Maria was at the little desk in her room, studying. With a 9mm pistol holding down her notes.

  “Where did you get that gun?” asked Du Pré, curious.

  “Bought it,” said Maria, “if it make you feel better.”

  “You are not old enough to buy a gun.”

  “Jacqueline is.” She smiled sunnily.

  “Okay,” said Du Pré. Well, he didn’t have to worry about Maria if she was on guard. The girl would consider carefully before shooting, but she would shoot. Probably hit what she shot at, too. Maria didn’t like to do anything poorly.

  “How many that hold?” asked Du Pré.

  “Fourteen,” said Maria.

  “Four-inch group?” said Du Pré.

  “Yeah,” said Maria. “Nine, ten seconds. If I rush, I don’t hit so good.”

  If I rush, I don’t hit so good. Well, well, well.

  “Now we are here, I don’t quite know how to do this,” said Du Pré.

  “He will not be expecting you,” said Maria. “Just find him and that will scare him.”

  “I think I try to call Bart,” said Du Pré, “Michelle too, find out anything.”

  He went outside and looked at the sun. Maybe eight o’clock.

  He got Michelle on the first try, at her desk in D.C.

  “Where the fuck are you?” she said. “Bart’s up in Quebec. He called earlier, but I was out. Now I can’t raise him. Some sort of atmospheric problem. I’ll try in a while.”

  “Upstate New York, I guess they call it,” said Du Pré. “I wanted to see if you had any suggestions.”

  Michelle was silent. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t. We don’t have any evidence against Lucky good enough to get a warrant.”

  “How ’bout assaulting me?”

  “Sure,” said Michelle, “but if we pop him for that, maybe he just goes to ground. Any attorney will bargain it down to where all he’ll have to do is send in a check or forfeit bail. This is D.C., murder capital of the country. The courts are choked.”

  “Michelle,” said Du Pré, “you call Madelaine, see if she can get old Benetsee to call and talk with you maybe.”

  “Why?” said Detective Leuci.

  “Make you feel better,” said Du Pré.

  He hung up and went back out to
look at the sunset.

  The food at the old inn was very good and very expensive. Du Pré had some bourbon.

  He slept well that night.

  CHAPTER 48

  A BRIGHT MORNING WITH a lot of dew on it. A Friday.

  Du Pré rolled a smoke and stood in the cool. He wondered how far north the Saint Lawrence was.

  Maria came out of her room, dressed in ragged jeans and a blouse that seemed to be mostly knots. She had a scarf over her forehead and under her hair in the back and big dark glasses and her shoulder bag, the kind photographers carry.

  “Yo,” said Du Pré. “Morning. You want to go get some breakfast maybe?”

  They went back to the inn, but it wasn’t open. They found a little working-class restaurant in the town and had big breakfasts of eggs and ham and hash browns. The coffee was good. There was a plate of homemade biscuits.

  They stood on the sidewalk out front and watched the little town gearing up. Tourism was its lifeblood. There were galleries and T-shirt shops and “antique” stores. But not too bad.

  “You think maybe Lucky is over on the reservation?” said Maria.

  “Not yet,” said Du Pré. “I think he comes in late tonight, with maybe a carload of high-iron workers from the city. Maybe New York, I don’t know. I think he thinks that there are warrants out for him, he will make it back here without using anything he has to buy a ticket for or go to some special place to leave at.”

  “Are there any warrants?”

  “Chickenshit one for assaulting me in D.C.,” said Du Pré.

  “We got to get you a new bandage,” said Maria. “That one looks kind of grubby, you know.”

  She went off to a drugstore and came back with some tape and gauze and a big, cheap bandanna, white, with blue roses all the hell over it.

  “Wish your hair was long enough to braid,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Du Pré, “I look plenty Indian, plenty Frenchy.”

  They sat in the Rover. Maria tugged Du Pré’s bandage off and looked at his wound. She cleaned his forehead with a couple foil-wrapped wet paper towels that smelled like lilacs.

  “I think you can take the stitches out, couple days,” she said. “It isn’t even oozing anywhere.”

  “I am not oozing, I am happy,” said Du Pré.

  “I am going to put some aloe vera cream on that,” said Maria. “It will make it heal faster.”

  The ointment felt cool on Du Pré’s forehead.

  Here I am hunting somebody with my daughter the gunslinger, Du Pré thought, and I am glad to have her here. My women, they all have had some common sense. I don’t know I do or not.

  “You drive me to the reservation and I will ask around,” said Maria. “Say I love this man’s music and have they seen him. They will think I am a groupie.”

  Du Pré didn’t have a better suggestion.

  The car telephone chirred.

  Du Pré picked it up.

  “Finally,” said Bart. “I’ve been trying for hours.”

  “Sorry,” said Du Pré.

  “Okay,” said Bart. “You were right. Sulin kept after Eloise until she got so pissed, she screamed that Lucky had come to help them. And then Sulin kept hammering on the murders, especially those little girls, till Eloise went off to talk to Hervé and Guillaume and found out, yeah, he was gone a lot and at those times.”

  “You find out what tribe he is?” asked Du Pré.

  “They say they know nothing at all about where he came from. Just that he was around for a while and talking about the dams and canoes and how to fight it. Sounded good. Well, fighting it is good. But for all they know, he dropped from the fucking moon.”

  “He won’t come back there,” said Du Pré.

  “Um,” said Bart. “Michelle is plenty pissed off.”

  “Okay,” said Du Pré. “She can’t do nothing, you know. Pisses me off when I can’t do nothing. So maybe you go back and help her out.”

  “I stay out of her way when she’s working,” said Bart.

  “Good,” said Du Pré. “go back and take her to dinner, buy her maybe some flowers.”

  “So,” said Bart, “where are you exactly?”

  “Upstate New York, they call it,” said Du Pré.

  “Alone?”

  “I got Maria.”

  “Well,” said Bart, “I won’t worry about you then.”

  “She is one tough lady,” said Du Pré. “Got guns enough for a platoon.”

  “I will never understand you people,” said Bart. “Okay. We are on our way back shortly. I am going to tell Michelle everything.”

  “Of course,” said Du Pré.

  “You need me there?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Du Pré.

  Just me. Just Lucky.

  Just the one dream.

  I need to talk to Benetsee.

  I have already talked to Benetsee.

  “Okay,” said Bart. “Ain’t this a pisser?”

  “It is that,” said Du Pré.

  He put the phone back in its cradle.

  “Let’s go to that reservation,” said Maria. “You drop me off somewhere, give me maybe two hours.”

  “I want to keep an eye on you there,” said Du Pré.

  “I will be all right,” said Maria. “I am researching this paper and looking for these musicians, you know.”

  “What if he’s here already? He will not like questions about him.”

  “I am not going to ask him, Papa.”

  Du Pré didn’t have a better idea. He wished, for one thing, that the Rover didn’t have D.C. license plates.

  “We will go and rent a car,” said Du Pré.

  “Why?” said Maria.

  “D.C. license plates on this thing.”

  Maria sighed and reached into her shoulder bag. She took out two Massachusetts plates and handed them to Du Pré.

  Christ, Du Pré thought, I will just go back to the motel so I don’t slow her down so much. Me, I am old, need a nap.

  “Good you think of that, “ he said.

  “Yeah,” said Maria. “That garage will be pissed off, but we will take them back, you know.”

  Illegal weapons and stolen license plates, Du Pré thought, and my lovely daughter there. Four-inch group. I don’t think she will have any trouble in college. Jesus.

  They drove down the road and found a rest area. Du Pré switched the license plates. The screws went into plastic sets. No rust. It took him five minutes.

  “Okay,” said Du Pré. “Where you want me to drop you off?”

  “They got a high school or a public library?” said Maria.

  They drove to the reservation. All such places are sad and in disarray.

  Du Pré asked the man at a gas station where the library was and he dropped Maria there.

  He drove on, found a place to park off the road, and walked among the wildflowers. He sat on a log and smoked.

  The time dragged on.

  But then it was time to go back.

  When he pulled up by the library, Maria was waiting.

  She got in the Rover.

  “You were right,” she said. “He is expected back late tonight maybe. She didn’t know anything about the festival, you know. Funny.”

  “Why funny?” said Du Pré.

  “The librarian,” said Maria, “is Lucky’s sister.”

  CHAPTER 49

  REMEMBER YOUR FATHERS,” said Benetsee. The phone was so clear, it sounded as if the old man was lisping wet advice in his ear. So Madelaine had given him wine.

  She takes everybody for what they are if they are not mean, Du Pré thought, and so I am very lucky.

  “I don’t know what I am doing,” said Du Pré.

  “Nobody knows what they are doing,” said Benetsee, “not even the gods. Just remember your fathers.”

  Du Pré hung up.

  “So?” said Maria.

  Du Pré shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “If you feel you are rig
ht, Papa, then it will be okay,” said Maria.

  Du Pré tried to think, but there wasn’t much to think about. His forehead itched and so did his thoughts.

  “What if he doesn’t come?” said Maria.

  “Benetsee says he will come,” said Du Pré.

  “When?”

  “The last hour before dawn.”

  Owl time.

  “Some pretty country around here, Papa,” said Maria. “Let’s drive some and then get a good dinner, maybe you get a little sleep.”

  “You got to just stay in that room till I come back,” said Du Pré.

  “Okay,” said Maria. She sounded cheerful.

  “Balls,” said Du Pré. “Now where are those fucking guns?”

  “Papa,” said Maria, “they are mine. I will stay in the room and only shoot anyone who breaks in, okay?”

  “Maria…”

  But she was looking straight ahead and Du Pré caught himself. Maria was her own and always had been. She would not do what she would not own to, and she would not take orders—from anyone. And no hard feelings, it just happened to be that way.

  Du Pré started the Rover. They drove off to the west, found a narrow two-lane blacktop road, and wandered down it past orchards and occasional white frame farmhouses.

  “Pretty fat country, this,” said Du Pré.

  “You aren’t happy, can’t see prickly pear cactus and sagebrush,” said Maria. “Sure are a lot of people here you know.”

  They found another inn nestled by a clear lake and had supper, good fish and some white wine. The lake was ringed by vacation houses. There were no motorboats on it, just canoes.

  After they had finished, they went out on the dock.

  “Play me some music, Papa,” said Maria. Her lower lip was quivering. She was very tough and awfully young—back and form.

  Du Pré went to the Rover and got his fiddle. He took it and the bow out of the case and carried them back down and they sat on the end of the dock and Du Pré played, not loudly. Jigs and reels and portage ballads, songs of work, songs of longing.

  “You girls at home, pull the rope and help us with this big canoe.”

  Bragging songs, how many packs of furs a voyageur can carry uphill on a bad portage.

  Du Pré sang some of them. He had a clear tenor voice.

  They waited for the night.