Wolf, No Wolf

by Peter Bowen

“Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré. “It is like a tattoo.”

  Benny nodded.

  Du Pré was doing a hundred and ten down a two-lane blacktop.

  “We are breaking a bunch of laws.”

  “Four,” said Du Pré. “I am drunk more than the limit, we are on duty more or less, car is full of guns, all loaded, and I am driving fifty-five miles over the speed limit.”

  “Oh,” said Benny, “is that all.”

  They shot past a Highway Patrolman. The patrol car roared after them, lights flashing.

  Du Pré switched on his light bar and radio.

  “Officer Du Pré,” said Du Pré into the microphone, “taking a heart for transplant to the airport.”

  Crackle crackle.

  The patrol car dropped behind.

  “Dirty, dirty,” said Benny.

  “Pret’ good whiskey,” said Du Pré. “Have some.”

  Benny did.

  “So what do we do now?” said Benny. “You know those feds are going batshit but they can’t get anywhere. They got nothing and no one to frame even.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “You talk to Angela Green?” said Benny.

  “Oh, yes,” said Du Pré.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré, “dumb kid, you know, how they fight their parents. She will get knocked up next, I guess maybe.”

  Benny nodded.

  “Pretty rich family.”

  “If they release the wolves again this’ll happen again,” said Benny.

  “Yah.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “We got to stop them,” said Du Pré. “How?”

  “Well,” said Du Pré, “I will have to think about that.”

  Chapter 36

  “DICKED,” SAID HARVEY WALLACE, aka Weasel Fat, “dicked, dicked, and dicked. I told ’em, we go there, we get dicked. No other way. Won’t help my career.”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré, “well, you don’t know how to do nothing else, maybe?”

  “I don’t like doing nothing else,” said Harvey. “I like chasing bad guys and running them down and throwing them in the slammer. I like to hunt ducks even more, come to think on it. I could be a duck cop.”

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “now, you can come long as you behave, there, it is very important, you know, you do this, I don’t want no more people killed here. Maybe this is not the best idea anybody ever had but I cannot, you know, think of any better one, I am too old and dumb.”

  “OK,” said Harvey.

  “I ask you to please do this,” said Du Pré. “You don’t dick me.”

  “OK,” said Harvey Weasel Fat. “Sure as my name ain’t really Wallace I will not dick you. I drive you there and sit outside and I wait.”

  “Well,” said Du Pré, “they will not, you know, come apart. We got no bullet. Gun it was fired from, guns, they are cut apart and melted down. Nobody knows nothing more than they got to. Smaller number of people in it than we thought. So there we are.”

  “Dicked,” said Harvey.

  “Dicked dicked dicked,” said Madelaine. She stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips, looking at Du Pré and Harvey, eyes narrowed. “You guys so dumb all you do is talk dirty, my house. I don’t care you talk dirty, you be funny, though.”

  “OK,” said Harvey.

  “OK,” said Du Pré. They were waiting on dinner. Being good boys.

  “And you Harvey,” said Madelaine, “you say dicked dicked dicked you know what you are sounding like?”

  “No,” said Harvey.

  “You are whining,” said Madelaine. “And you don’t stop I call you Weasel Dick for couple weeks, see how you like that.”

  Harvey nodded. He looked sheepish.

  Madelaine brought in the rest of the bowls and they sat down to supper. Her children wouldn’t eat for an hour, but Du Pré and Harvey had other business.

  Pot roast, potatoes, home-canned green beans, home-baked bread, and blackberry pie.

  “Wonderful,” said Harvey. “You let me wash dishes?”

  “No,” said Madelaine, “I don’t want you guys around, you go do what you are going to do, come back, tell me, we go have some nice drinks. I listen better, your whining, I am about drunk.”

  “Me, Du Pré,” said Harvey, “we give up our badges, we send you.”

  “Me,” said Madelaine, “I am a woman. Dumb jobs like that, we send you guys. No way. Eat your pot roast.”

  “You speak pret’ good Coyote French there, Harvey,” said Du Pré.

  “You damn Métis everywhere,” said Harvey, “like ass pains and bad debts.”

  They finished and got up.

  Madelaine kissed Du Pré. After a moment, she kissed Harvey on the cheek.

  “You be back here, ten o’clock,” said Madelaine.

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

  “I know,” said Madelaine. “I know what you are goin’ do, too. Fine. Good idea. Be back by ten. I will want some pink wine then.”

  Du Pré and Harvey walked out to Harvey’s government car and they got in and they drove off toward the Grange Hall fifty miles away. The building sat in the middle of the plains, miles from anything, and the Stockgrowers’ Association was meeting there.

  “What you got, the medicine bundle?” said Harvey.

  Du Pré looked at the case in the back seat, a case made more than a century before for a double-recurve bone and Osage Orange bow. Du Pré wasn’t sure where it had come from. Benetsee had given him the soft leather case, quilled and beaded and faded and cracked.

  “Sacred shit,” said Du Pré. “Don’t think so very much, Harvey.”

  “OK,” said Harvey.

  Du Pré pulled a pint of whiskey out of his pocket and he had a drink and offered it to Harvey. Harvey shook his head.

  “Afterward,” said Harvey, “fine. I dunno what you got in mind, none of my business, but afterward.”

  Du Pré nodded. They turned onto the highway and shot hard for the east. The tires whined and birds burst up from crushed gopher carcasses mashed to the asphalt.

  The sun was hot. They drove with the windows down. The blackbirds in the barrow pits chirred liquidly.

  Du Pré looked to his left. He couldn’t see the Wolfs, only the hayfields just past the fence. A red fox flamed in the green grass.

  Du Pré rolled a smoke and lit it and he looked down to the south toward the far Missouri and the breaks, out over the buffalo country, where the cattle grazed so far from plates and tables. People back in there, too, in their Sears, Roebuck ranch houses, with the Siberian elms screening the wind, the windmills screaking overhead.

  You can take this land but it makes you its own, he thought, got to be here some, it gets into your blood and bone and marrow and the dust colors your bones gold.

  My country, this.

  They made good time. Du Pré pointed off to the right, at the old Grange Hall red in the leafing cottonwoods. The ground around it was thick with cars and trucks, people moving slowly to the hall.

  Harvey drove to the last row nearest the road and he switched off the engine and he sighed.

  “I’ll just wait here, like you asked,” he said, “but don’t kill anyone.”

  “Too much of that,” said Du Pré.

  Harvey nodded.

  The last few of the ranchers were filing inside.

  Du Pré got out. He opened the back door and took out the medicine bundle and he tucked it under his arm and he walked up to the door and he waited just a moment and then he walked inside.

  People were talking and joshing and standing and sitting.

  The Martins and some of their kin looked at Du Pré for a moment and then they went back to their conversations.

  Clark Martin left his knot of family and he walked to the podium and he rapped on it with a stick of kindling. Everyone sat down but Du Pré. He leaned against the back wall.

  “I call this meeting to order,” Clark Martin said, loudly.

&nb
sp; Du Pré slipped the MP-40 out of the bow case. He lifted it and pressed the trigger and the machine pistol jumped in his hands. He stitched a line of holes in the ceiling. The brass went on rattling and then tinkling on the worn wooden floor.

  People dived for the floor or stayed rooted in the chairs, hands to ears. Someone sobbed. Morgan Taliaferro Martin turned and looked at Du Pré flatly, her eyes as old as Egypt.

  Du Pré looked over at Angela Green; she sat with her mouth open and one hand to her face.

  “Count them holes, the ceiling,” said Du Pré. “Sixteen of ’em, that’s how many dead we got here. Fool kids, plain fools, Packy, and Banning. Lot of holes there. You who did this, you are so big, you go to those holes, call those kids out of them. Call Packy. Call the four people killed up in the mountains, just doing their job. Call Corey Banning. Call them out now, I see them, then I go away.”

  Clark Martin stared at Du Pré, eyes sleepy.

  “I have pretty well figured this all out,” said Du Pré. “But if I have not, I throw my badge in the ditch, I don’t throw my gun, and I come for you. I don’t care no more. I don’t care, me.”

  “Mr. Du Pré,” said Morgan Martin, “this is appalling. Simply awful. I’ll see you prosecuted for this.”

  Du Pré slid the machine pistol back in the bow case.

  “Night that those four were killed, up in the mountains, with the wolves, someone flew up there, in a helicopter,” said Du Pré. “But there was this. There were one, maybe two people been flown up there before. Early, before them wolves and biologists were. Waited, in the snow, and then when the helicopter came back, make a lot of noise, them four people all walk toward the helicopter, wondering what it was doing there, and not looking behind them. Probably had maybe a television station’s letters stuck on the side.”

  Du Pré picked up the bow case and he walked to the door and he turned.

  “We are ver’ close now,” he said, “and we come to you, who did this, soon. Until then, though, you remember, there is no more of this. It is enough. Now, you have your damn meeting.”

  Du Pré walked out, leaving the door open. He stepped across the puddle at the foot of the steps and he opened the back door of Harvey’s government car and he slid the bow case on the seat and then he shut the door and opened the front door and he got in.

  He slammed the door hard.

  “Sometime,” said Du Pré, “you lose on that poker, you got to make lucky with them dice.”

  “Did I hear automatic-weapon fire in there?” said Harvey. “Of course not. Firecrackers. Somebody was celebrating. Firecrackers are illegal, too. Especially as big as those sounded. Terrible, but out of my jurisdiction. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me just what the fuck is going on.”

  “Kids these days,” said Du Pré, “they don’t respect nothin’.”

  Harvey turned the car around and headed back toward Toussaint.

  “We can’t be late to take Madelaine out for pink wine,” said Harvey.

  Du Pré rolled a cigarette and he lit it and rolled his window down.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré, “that is important for sure.”

  “You think that did any good?” said Harvey.

  “Maybe,” said Du Pré. “Depends how many people were in on this. I don’t think many. We’ll see.”

  They rode in silence for a while.

  “Your Madelaine, think she’ll dance again with a Blackfeet?” said Harvey.

  “Oh, I am sure that she will,” said Du Pré.

  Chapter 37

  “YOU SURE SHE’LL COME?” said Harvey. He sipped his coffee. They were sitting in the Toussaint Bar. It was about ten in the morning. The place stank of bleach and stale beer and old cigarettes.

  Du Pré shrugged.

  Shit, I am tired, he thought. I am very tired of this. Also it makes me very sad.

  The front door was open and thick shafts of light stabbed through it. Du Pré heard a magpie scrawk.

  A truck pulled up outside and stopped. There was a diesel throb for a few minutes, then the engine died and a door slammed.

  Angela Green came through the door, the light behind her. She wore a light fringed jacket and a new Stetson. She stood a moment, her eyes adjusting to the dimness. She saw Du Pré and Harvey Wallace sitting at the bar and she walked over. She dragged a stool away from the bar and put it in front of them and she sat down.

  “You set them up,” said Harvey.

  Angela looked at him, her face blank.

  “They set themselves up,” she said. “All they had to do was stay home and mind their own damn business. Taylor…nobody knew he was going to go to war. And that’s the story.”

  “Taylor was a mighty man,” said Harvey, “but he was just the one. Took more than that, more than him.”

  “Taylor was plenty,” said Angela. “Now, if you want to talk to me anymore, maybe you should arrest me.”

  “In time,” said Harvey, “though I doubt it. You probably knew what would happen. Probably. But Taylor wouldn’t have let you know anything for sure.”

  “He was always a gentleman,” said Angela.

  “Yeah,” said Harvey, “well, you be a lady and quit spying on those idiot flatlander environmentalists. Leave them to hugging their bunnies in peace. Poor little things’ll find some new cause soon anyway. When I do find anything out, though, I will happily arrest you.”

  Angela lit a cigarette. She looked at Harvey.

  “You like this?” she said.

  Harvey shrugged.

  Susan Klein came out of the kitchen.

  “Need something?” she said.

  “Ditch,” said Angela.

  Susan nodded and mixed the drink and pushed it across the bar.

  “How’re your folks?” she said.

  “Thriving,” said Angela.

  A plastic bag sailed through the door and plopped on the floor. Du Pré and Harvey tensed.

  “Look at it,” said Clark Martin. He was standing where they couldn’t see him. Du Pré got up and he walked over and scooped up the bag, his gun in his right hand. The sun shone on the rutted parking lot, the blacktop, the field beyond the little park.

  Du Pré carried the package back to the bar and he set it down and put his gun by it and he pulled it open. Wallets. Four wallets. He opened them. Two had Fish and Wildlife Service badges in them.

  “Shit,” said Harvey. He had his gun out, too.

  Angela sipped her drink.

  Du Pré looked at Harvey. He nodded.

  They went to the doorway. Harvey ducked out in a crouch, pointing his gun.

  No one there. Du Pré followed him, walking loose. They went down the steps, squinting in the sun.

  Clark Martin was across the road, leaning against one of the box elder trees at the far side of the park, a hundred yards away. He had his arms folded on his chest.

  Harvey padded across the road, Du Pré close behind.

  “You’re under arrest, Clark Martin,” said Harvey.

  “Stop there,” said Clark. Harvey kept on walking.

  “It’s all there is,” said Clark, “me and Taylor. Du Pré was right, Taylor dropped me up there the day before, and when he flew the chopper back they all bunched up. I came in from the trees behind. It was all over in five seconds.”

  Harvey stopped.

  “Get your hands way, way up,” he said. He swung up his nine-millimeter. Du Pré came up beside him, gun in hand, not pointing it.

  “Show time,” said Clark. He jerked his hand into his jacket and pulled out an automatic and he dropped into a crouch and fired.

  Du Pré felt something whack him in the chest.

  Harvey fired three bursts of two each. Clark Martin shuddered as bullets struck him. He fell back against the tree and tumbled around to the side and fell boneless, like a bundle of rags.

  Du Pré felt his chest. It stung where he had been hit. His fingertips felt wax.

  Harvey walked on the balls of his feet over to Clark Martin. He kept the gun po
inted at him. He kicked Martin’s pistol away with his foot and then he knelt and pulled on Martin’s shoulder to roll him over. He put his knuckles to Martin’s neck. He stood up.

  Du Pré came up. He looked down at Clark Martin, his chest red and his eyes glazing.

  Harvey scratched at his shirt. He looked at his fingernails.

  “Wax,” he said.

  “Me, too,” said Du Pré. “He was pret’ quick there.”

  “Real slugs, I dunno we’d made it,” said Harvey. “You didn’t fire, did you, Du Pré ?”

  “No,” said Du Pré.

  Harvey sighed. He put his gun back in the holster.

  “Let’s smoke,” he said.

  Du Pré nodded. He rolled a couple of cigarettes. They stood there, looking down at Clark Martin.

  “You figured he’d do this?” said Harvey.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré. “Them Martins got a lot of Indian in them.”

  “Could have fooled me,” said Harvey. “Makes sense, though.”

  None of this makes much sense, Du Pré thought. Except that people thought that it did. Little bastards insult this place, everybody who lives here, now they’ll be a little scared, maybe. Damn Martins, they took a chance. Didn’t work out. Taylor’s dead. Clark’s dead. When he knew we’d find it out, he come in, make us kill him. Pretty Indian, that.

  Bart’s Rover roared up, light bar flashing, but no siren.

  He drove right into the park, across the scrubby grass. He stopped the car and got out.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Well,” said Harvey Weasel Fat, “it’s over.”

  “Oh?” said Bart.

  “I checked the phone records,” said Harvey, “and there’s nothing there. Angela Green called Montana frequently, but she never called the Martin ranch, not once. Her folks. A couple girlfriends. Taylor gave us a confession. Clark gave us the evidence. End of story.”

  “What evidence?” said Bart.

  “Four wallets,” said Harvey, “two of them from Fish and Wildlife officers.”

  “Why the hell did he keep those?” said Bart.

  “Proof,” said Harvey. “We got proof and we got a lot of suppositions. Hardly anyone else in on it, directly, anyway. Other people knew. Sort of. Maybe. When the snow finally melts up there we might find a few things, but only Clark and Taylor were actually there. ’Less someone wants to confess just for the fun of a long prison sentence, this is it, folks, this is all there is.”