Badlands

by Peter Bowen

  “They want it because it is out of the way,” said Bart.

  “I liked it better around here when it was like it was around here,” said Susan. “We got enough homegrown idiots.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Hell,” said Susan. “You know, that bunch out in Oregon, they swept up homeless folks and brought them to Antelope, I think it was, and had them all register to vote. We haven’t got that many people here in Cooper County, damn it, we don’t need this.”

  Du Pré rolled a smoke.

  “God damn those Eides,” said Susan, savagely polishing the bartop. “Selling to a bunch of weirdos.”

  “I’m trying to find out how that happened, too,” said Bart. “Perhaps there is something to be done.”

  “It’s sold, isn’t it?” said Susan.

  Bart nodded.

  “Shit,” said Susan.

  Booger Tom came in, limping a little. He’d been kicked working some fresh horses a few days before.

  “You hear the news?” said the old man. “All four thousand head of the Eides’, well, they’s for sale, cheap. Bid and truck ’em yourself.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” said Susan.

  “I got it offen that Internet,” said Booger Tom.

  “You wrangling computers now?” said Susan.

  “Enough to keep track of stock prices,” said Booger Tom, “since this fat wop pays me, run his ranch.”

  “I ain’t fat,” said Bart.

  “You ain’t ’zactly emaciated, there,” said Booger Tom. “Which I hear is all the fashion amongst rich folks.”

  “I ain’t rich either,” said Bart. “I just have too much money.”

  “So give me a raise,” said Booger Tom.

  “You ain’t worth it,” said Bart, “but talk to Foote if you like.”

  Booger Tom snorted.

  “Them as favors them Beefmasters will sure be here tomorrow,” said the old man. “I guess they’s all rounded up.”

  “How did they do that?” said Bart. “So quick.”

  “Easier’n you’d think,” said Booger Tom. “Went flying over it this morning. Them Eides lucked out way their land lays, and so you haze them cows and put up a couple of gates and each time it gets easier. They was still some hay and cake out for ’em, and so they’d hardly begun to leave for the summer pastures. I think they was all still in the lower two anyhow. Two people on them four-wheelers could prolly do it. They was when we done flew over anyway.”

  An eighteen-wheeler geared down and pulled off into the parking lot.

  In a moment the driver came in, a brown muscular man in his forties.

  “You-all tell me how to get to the Eddy place?” he said. “I got some fellers behind me, they won’t have to stop. Boss said we’d best be here to truck in the morning.”

  Susan Klein scratched a few lines on a sheet of paper and she came round the bar and stood with the man.

  “Turn there about fifteen miles,” she said. “Can’t miss it. Just don’t miss that fork there or you’ll wind up on the McQuarrie place. They aren’t selling any cattle now.”

  The trucker nodded, and stared at the map. He went out the front door.

  “That will be too much, Raymond,” said Madelaine.

  Raymond, Du Pré’s son-in-law, had taken over the brand inspections in Cooper County.

  “He should call me,” said Du Pré. Raymond hadn’t.

  “You both be busy you are signing off, four thousand head,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “That’s t’other thing,” said Booger Tom. “They’s gonna be seven more inspectors here in the mornin’, too.”

  “Get that off the Internet?” said Susan.

  “Matter of fact, I did,” said Booger Tom. “Got your psychiatric records, too. They make some interestin’ readin’.”

  Susan snorted and made the old bastard a whiskey ditch.

  Another eighteen-wheeler roared past, and another and another.

  Du Pré walked outside. He looked off toward the highway. A solid line of stock haulers was coming on. At forty head each, it would take a hundred to haul away the Eide herd. There would be more than a hundred, probably, depending on the splits.

  Du Pré waved back to a hauler, a man in a black cowboy hat. He had a double trailer. The empty rig bounced and whipped.

  “But we don’t hear nothing here,” said Madelaine. She had come up beside him in her moccasins. Silent as Du Pré’s father Catfoot, who barely ruffled the dust when he walked.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré.

  “Auction take a long time,” said Madelaine.

  “No,” said Du Pré. “It is done already.”

  Madelaine looked at him.

  “License plates,” said Du Pré. “All from Oregon, a few from Idaho. Those cows they are sold already.”

  “This is strange,” said Madelaine. “Couple guys come, burn the place down, then all these trucks. Who are these people?”

  “We find out,” said Du Pré.

  “You be careful, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. “You be damn careful.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  Madelaine dug him hard in the ribs.

  “I mean careful,” she said. “Maybe you don’t get angry, Du Pré, you watch out.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  “We go, Canada,” he said.

  “We live here,” said Madelaine. “Our people buried here. We been here a long time gone, Du Pré. These fools, they come, they will not stay. You will see.”

  Du Pré grunted.

  The cattle haulers ground past, each one following the other by radio. They all had big auxiliary diesel tanks welded on the tractors.

  Like them Eide never there, this time tomorrow, Du Pré thought. I went there once, they bury old man Eide, down in the grove. Nothing left of them but a graveyard.

  Another clot of trucks ground past.

  Du Pré sighed and he rolled a smoke and lit it and gave it to Madelaine. She had the one deep drag she liked and then she gave it back to him.

  “Come on in, sailor, I buy you a drink maybe,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré laughed.

  “I am a soldier, in Germany,” he said. “Me, out there, looking at them Russians, ready to fight you bet.”

  “Yah,” said Madelaine.

  “I get seasick bad,” said Du Pré.

  “You got them voyageurs in you,” said Madelaine. “You don’t get seasick. They don’t go on the sea.”

  They went back in the bar Bart was slumped on a stool, staring into his club soda.

  Madelaine went to him and put her arm around his broad shoulders.

  “You,” she said, “this is not your fault.”

  “If I had only known,” said Bart.

  “Some reason they don’t tell you,” said Madelaine.

  “We were always civil,” said Bart, “I just don’t understand why they would sell to that damn cult and not a word to anyone.”

  “Maybe there is something else,” said Madelaine.

  Bart sighed and he patted her hand.

  “OK,” he said, “I know what you are saying.”

  Madelaine hugged him. “It work out OK,” she said. Bart snorted.

  “It is not country, them,” said Madelaine. “I just wish I had known,” said Bart.

  “Ah,” said Booger Tom, “gives us all somethin’ to worry about.”

  CHAPTER 4

  IT TOOK ALL OF the light of the day to load the cattle into the haulers. There were nine inspectors, one from four hundred miles away, and Du Pré and Raymond were exhausted and covered with dust by the time the last huge aluminum trailer had been filled, the last inspection form signed.

  The two men Du Pré had seen the night the Eide place burned stood silently, arms crossed, in their odd clothing.

  The ranch was ashes and tracks. There were three missing head, a tiny loss out of four thousand one hundred and twenty-six beeves.

  Du Pré and Raymond stood talking with the other
inspectors for a few minutes, and then they left, for they had long drives ahead and a long day behind.

  “Damndest business,” said one, a weathered white-haired man from Madison country. “At a three hundred dollar loss a head, somebody’s out over a million bucks. Wish they’d a give it to me.”

  Du Pré and Raymond went to Du Pré’s old cruiser. They got in.

  “Look at those bastards,” said Raymond. “They might maybe have dropped from the moon.”

  The two men in the odd dried-blood-colored shirts had barely moved all day. They weren’t moving now.

  Du Pré shrugged and started the cruiser’s engine and they drove away.

  Three miles down the county road they had to pull off. There was a line of haulers pulling halves of prefabricated houses toward the ranch. Eighteen of them, nine houses worth. All identical, white with blue trim.

  “Son of a bitch!” said Raymond. “It is an invasion!”

  “They got no foundations for them,” said Du Pré. “Got to pour concrete before they can set those up.”

  Then they passed six long vans with dark windows and two heavy trucks piled with construction equipment. Generators, air compressors, gang boxes of hand tools. The haulers and the vans all had California plates on them, but the houses had been prefabbed in Billings.

  “I don’t like this,” said Raymond.

  Du Pré drove to the Toussaint Saloon. There were several cars parked out in front, and the usual ruck of old pickups. Some of the cars had Oregon and California plates on them.

  “They have landed,” said Raymond. He got out stiffly. He would be stiff for the rest of his life after his hard fall, eighty feet.

  Damn near died, Du Pré thought, the father of my grandchildren. I got fourteen, I think. Jacqueline maybe hide a few, so she don’t upset me.

  He hit the steering wheel once with his open hand. It stung. He got out of the cruiser.

  Inside it was still. The regulars were lined up on stools at the bar.

  The newcomers sat stiffly at tables, the men all in the odd shirts, the women in long gray dresses and scarves. They were eating hamburgers and fries and drinking sodas.

  Du Pré and Raymond went to the bar and took the last two stools. The local people looked down the bar at them and then went back to staring off into the distance.

  The newcomers rose as one and all of them filed out but a man in his forties, who brought the tabs to the bar. He had a purse on a chain in his hip pocket, and he took bills from it, and left the tip on the bartop. He left without a word.

  The door closed.

  “Why in the hell did you serve the sons of bitches?” said a rancher, looking angrily at Susan Klein.

  “Well, Bill,” said Susan, “they were polite and orderly and I had no reason not to. Top of that, it would be against the law not to.”

  “Hell with the law,” said Bill.

  “Easy for you to say,” said Susan, “but I have more difficulties with breaking it.”

  Bill gulped his drink and he spun off the barstool and stomped out the door. He slammed it.

  “There goes his digestion,” said Booger Tom. Du Pré looked up, surprised. He hadn’t noticed the old cowboy sitting there.

  “I think,” said Susan Klein, “that we oughta wait and see what they do.”

  Du Pré heard a big truck gear down and slow. He got up and went out. Two big trailers with earthmoving equipment and a backhoe had stopped. Then the lead truck started and they headed off toward the Eide place.

  Day after tomorrow, concrete trucks, Du Pré thought. These people they plan this ver’ carefully.

  He looked down the road. Madelaine was walking up the street from her house. She was wearing a brilliantly white blouse and her dark skin and black hair shot with silver shone in the late sun. She waved. Her walk was soft and graceful.

  Fine-lookin’ woman, thought Du Pré, glad that she likes me.

  Me, I don’t get mad about this.

  Bullshit.

  Madelaine got close.

  “Not bullshit,” she said. “You be careful, Du Pré. Don’t you get mad about this.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  Madelaine frequently knew exactly what Du Pré was thinking, as though he had spoken aloud.

  So did Jacqueline and Maria, Du Pré’s daughters.

  My women they understand me too good, Du Pré thought.

  Madelaine stood on her toes and kissed him.

  “They are here eating hamburgers,” said Madelaine. “Nobody throw them through the window, that is good.”

  Not yet they don’t, thought Du Pré.

  “This Host of Yahweh,” said Madelaine, “Father Van Den Heuvel says they got a lot of money. They sue plenty.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “They are ver’ careful about the law,” said Madelaine. “Get a lot of messed-up rich kids. They got a leader but he is pret’ invisible. Call him the White Priest. Always wears white robes.”

  “That Father Van Den Heuvel,” said Du Pré, “he is keeping track, the competition.”

  “That is what he said, too,” said Madelaine.

  “I don’t like this,” said Du Pré.

  “Nobody like this,” said Madelaine, “have a bunch strange people take over.”

  “They are taking over?” said Du Pré.

  “They will try,” said Madelaine. “Father Van Den Heuvel he say they have some trouble, California, the White Priest says he will talk, God, find a place they can call their own.”

  “Christ,” said Du Pré.

  Madelaine swung her hand through the air, brushing across the Wolf Mountains and the plains and the sky.

  “It is yours, Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “but it isn’t either. You don’t own nothing finally but enough earth, bury you in.”

  “This earth,” said Du Pré.

  “Somebody else got to do that for you,” said Madelaine, “so you don’t own much you see.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  Some more vans with dark-tinted windows went past. Du Pré counted eight. All white with blue patterns, like china, painted on them.

  “Why they come here?” said Du Pré.

  “Why we come here?” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré laughed. The Métis came down to Montana from Canada. They had eaten all the buffalo, Manitoba, Saskatchewan. Fight the Sioux for buffalo here. The Métis had more guns and better guns.

  “Maybe they don’t bother nobody,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré sighed and rolled a smoke.

  He lit it and Madelaine took it for her one long drag. She handed it back to him.

  “OK,” said Du Pré.

  “Bullshit,” said Madelaine. “Me, I don’t want them here either but they are. There will be trouble, you know, Du Pré. Maybe bad trouble.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  That rancher Bill, for one, had a bad temper and fast fists.

  “It is bad,” said Du Pré. “Them things they are always bad.”

  “They always go bad,” said Madelaine, “but this one is not yet. Lots of sick people, people on drugs, living on the streets, they come to the Host of Yahweh, get cleaned up.”

  Du Pré nodded. It is like that yes.

  “I want, talk to Benetsee,” said Du Pré.

  “That would be good,” said Madelaine.

  CHAPTER 5

  “UNBELIEVABLE,” SAID BART. HE was looking down at the Host of Yahweh compound ten thousand feet below. There were neat rows of prefabbed houses laid out in a grid, six large metal barns, and a pair of poured foundations for what would be large buildings.

  “A church and a palace for the White Priest,” said Bart. “Montana Power ran a quad of 880’s in there to service them all. There will be over six hundred people living there.”

  The pilot looked back over his shoulder.

  “Fly the boundaries,” said Bart. “It’s the map I gave you.”

  The pilot turned back, nodding.

  Du Pré looked down on the old Eide spread fro
m his seat. The land rolled yellow and green with old grass and new grass, cut through with stone outcrops and weathered buttes. The badlands stretched to the east, fantastic pastels of purple and gray and ochre.

  “Fencing crews,” said Bart. “They plan to run a herd of buffalo. So they need stouter fencing than the Eides had. Pricey. Twenty thousand dollars a mile. Number nine wire and twelve-foot mains sunk in concrete.”

  Du Pré shook his head.

  “Buffalo are the coming thing,” said Bart. “The yuppies worry about fat in their diets and buffalo meat has less than beef does.”

  “They are going to herd buffalo?” said Du Pré.

  “I doubt they thought that far,” said Bart.

  Buffalo, they go where they want. I have seen them run up sheer banks, jump high fences, go where they want, them buffalo. Also they are dangerous. Me, I do not want, inspect loads of buffalo. I don’t want Raymond do it, either.

  God damn this bullshit.

  Du Pré started to roll a smoke and then he remembered he couldn’t smoke in the plane, which was a charter out of Billings.

  Yuppies.

  What is a yuppie exactly?

  “Bart,” said Du Pré, “what is a yuppie?”

  Bart thought about it a moment.

  “Remember those clowns who were here back when the wolves were released in the Wolf Mountains?” said Bart.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré.

  “Them,” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded. Some of them die in the avalanche, Old Black Claws the big grizzly he eat them under the snow. So they are bear shit, we strain what is left out of the meltwater. It is not much, them.

  “One of those barns is the commissary,” said Bart. “They truck in food and clothing and all and sell it there.”

  “You been there?” said Du Pré.

  “Nope,” said Bart, “they let in the state inspectors because they have to. But no one else. There’s a couple of journalists camped out by the gate there. Won’t talk to them, won’t let them in.”

  “We can go on down now” said Bart.

  Du Pré looked out and down and saw a herd of wild horses running toward the badlands where they hid most of the day. They had been grazing longer now because the grass was fresh and hadn’t much food in it.