Badlands

by Peter Bowen

  Du Pré nodded. Another TV helicopter went over.

  “Them buffalo,” said Madelaine, “what they do with them?”

  Du Pré looked at her. He shrugged.

  “Poor things,” said Madelaine. “I hope they got enough water. Grass.”

  Du Pré hadn’t thought about them. They had been let out to the huge back pasture.

  “I don’t know how much water there is,” he said.

  Madelaine nodded.

  “They pump any, got no electricity,” she said. “It is maybe not enough. Who is maybe taking care of that?” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “I go see that Harvey.”

  Madelaine beamed at him.

  “Come down here for them buffalo, our people,” she said. “We maybe should see they are all right.”

  Du Pré got up.

  “You maybe tell that Ripper he can get laid, Pallas she give him her gracious permission,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré nodded. He yawned and he stretched.

  “Horses,” said Madelaine. “See about them, too.”

  The wild horses.

  “Me,” said Du Pré, “I will go, conserve all that nature.”

  He walked out to his cruiser. He got in. There was a little box wrapped in white tissue paper on the front seat.

  For Ripper, said the card, from Pallas.

  Du Pré smelled it.

  Chocolate chip cookies.

  “He is that dead meat,” said Du Pré. He turned the key and started the engine and he drove off east and then north.

  The armed camp that surrounded the Host of Yahweh compound largely lived in trailers that had been trucked in and hooked up to electricity and water, that last brought in huge tanker trucks. The trailers were out of sight if one looked out from the compound. Men in body armor carrying automatic weapons patrolled a perimeter, some on foot and some in armored personnel carriers.

  Du Pré parked where the newsmen did and he walked to the sentry at the gate in the worn fence.

  “Me,” said Du Pré, “I need to see that Harvey Wallace.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Du Pré,” said the sentry. “Go on in. Fourth trailer on the right.”

  Du Pré walked on.

  He found the trailer and knocked on the door.

  A young man opened it. He looked at Du Pré, startled, and his hand reached for the gun in his waistband.

  “It’s OK, Melton,” said Harvey.

  The young man relaxed.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Du Pré shrugged and he went on in. The room stank of sweat, bad coffee, and electrical currents.

  Harvey yawned. He looked exhausted.

  “They’re good,” he said. “They have generators and wells and a lot of food. We demand they surrender. They don’t reply.”

  “What about the stock?” said Du Pré.

  Harvey looked at him dully.

  “Them buffalo,” said Du Pré, “they are all right?”

  Harvey shook himself.

  “I assume,” he said, “that they are out there eating grass and humping each other like buffalo.”

  “Anybody go look?” said Du Pré.

  Harvey shook his head.

  “Sometimes they come in near the sentries at night,” said the young agent. “But there’s been no trouble.”

  “What,” said Harvey, “am I supposed to do with the goddamned buffalo?”

  Du Pré stood and he waited.

  “Gabriel,” said Harvey, “will you please go and see how those monstrous hairballs are?”

  “Sure,” said Du Pré.

  “Get him a pass,” said Harvey, “and then we need to compose a memo.”

  The young agent took Du Pré’s picture, pulled it out of the camera, waited, and then pulled the print apart.

  “Driver’s license?” said the agent. Du Pré handed it to him.

  “Where is Ripper?” said Du Pré.

  Harvey yawned.

  “I dunno,” said Harvey.

  Du Pré handed him the box of chocolate chip cookies.

  “From his fiancé,” said Du Pré.

  “I’ll see he gets them,” said Harvey.

  “Here’s your pass,” said the young agent. “Clip it to your shirt.”

  Du Pré stuck it on his pocket.

  Ripper came in.

  “Ripper me boy,” said Harvey, waving the box, “come speak with your Dutch uncle.”

  CHAPTER 34

  DU PRÉ CLUCKED TO the big bay and the horse muscled up the cutbank. As soon as the footing was flat, the bay began to trot.

  They are around here someplace, Du Pré thought. Strange how a big animal can disappear. Cattle hide but they are not that good at it. Buffalo are very good at it.

  He found a water hole, trampled and ruined, the earth and mud churned up and the spring strangled beneath the blackened ground. A few hoofprints had water in the bottom, but not many. The pipe surround that kept the cattle from wrecking the spring was a twisted and trampled mess of bent iron.

  My grandpère tell me the time he goes to round up buffalo, over in the Flathead Valley, they got this bison range. They are going to ship buffalo to Canada. They got a hundred cowboys, they got a train with cattle cars on it.

  Buffalo don’t think much of this. One bull he hooks a horse, horn goes right through the cinch ring, buffalo picks up the horse and rider, carries them half a mile, throws them over a bank. Horse is gutted, intestines dragging on the ground. Cowboys, they try to rope them buffalo. Buffalo, they charge the cowboys. I stuff your rope up your ass, dumb shit.

  They haze some buffalo into the cars, the train. The buffalo tear the cars apart.

  “Knock them planks to kindling,” said grandpère, “kick out the sides, then they jump straight up, land legs all stiff. Chips fly everywhere. Planks are oak. They don’t last long.”

  Foreman has to wire the Canadians.

  You want your damn buffalo, you come get them here.

  Canadians they wire back, oh, it is all right, we think of something else maybe, you keep your buffalo.

  Me, I don’t know much about them but old stories.

  My people, they eat all of the buffalo Manitoba, Saskatchewan. They come down here to hunt, make meat and pemmican sell to that Hudson’s Bay Company. Many many tons. We got guns, we kill them, we run them into traps. Hunt leader is called the Poundmaker, he makes those log corrals, pounds, run them buffalo in, shut the gate and kill them all.

  Best meat is the unborn calves.

  Du Pré stopped and he looked at the ground. Fresh tracks and shit still damp in the middle. Dry wind, maybe an hour old.

  “Where are them sons of bitches, eh?” said Du Pré to his horse.

  The horse stood, his ears pointing one place and then another. The land stretched away. Broken and looking very empty. But there were coulees cut by vanished rivers and gullies cut by thunderstorms that dumped a million tons of water on a small patch of the earth, the lottery of rain in this country.

  Du Pré cantered over to a low butte and he let the horse pick its way up a narrow trail to the top. He stopped and he looked around. The land looked soft, gray and green and lavender. There was grass eaten down to the ground.

  Not a buffalo in sight

  Du Pré laughed.

  Flying over the place he had looked down and seen them black and rounded, like raisins in an oatmeal earth. There were thousands in here, over three, and they had disappeared.

  Du Pré rode to the edge of the butte and looked down.

  A buffalo bull stood in the coulee below him. The huge animal was barely forty feet away.

  The bull was motionless.

  Nothing moved but a jay picking bugs from the black-brown cape of thick and twisted hair covering the buffalo’s huge shoulders.

  Du Pré looked at the massive beast.

  The buffalo did not twitch. The bird hopped on its back, pecking. The buffalo’s short skinny tail flicked once.

/>   “You see me, eh?” said Du Pré.

  The tail whirled around. The clump of hair at the end flapped. The buffalo snorted. Du Pré’s horse had started to tremble.

  “Ho ho ho,” said Du Pré, rubbing the bay’s neck.

  The tail hung motionless. Then it began to whirl again.

  The buffalo’s round black eye stared. A cloud of little flies danced around it but the eye did not blink. The horse danced a little and he snorted.

  “Easy, easy,” said Du Pré. The edge of the low butte fell away almost sheer, a good twenty feet.

  Du Pré rolled a smoke and he lit it and he looked up.

  A helicopter was circling the Host of Yahweh compound.

  “Them TV,” said Du Pré to the horse.

  The buffalo was motionless again. The jay hopped to a new spot and it pecked.

  Long damn way from a tree that jay is, Du Pré thought.

  The horse whinnied. The bay was nervous and trembling. The helicopter rose up and it hung in the air for a moment and then it turned toward Du Pré and it began to come on.

  Son of a bitch. What they are doing this for, thought Du Pré.

  He stared at the helicopter, getting a little larger as it came on. The horse backed a little and it snorted and shook its head.

  “Easy,” said Du Pré.

  The buffalo’s trail whirled. It stopped, sticking up and out. The buffalo lifted its right front leg and it pawed the ground. It bellowed once and it spun on its front legs and it charged the rock wall.

  The horse reared and Du Pré dropped his cigarette and he grabbed the reins.

  “Whoa, you son of a bitch,” yelled Du Pré.

  Du Pré clamped his legs tight. The horse turned and bolted for the trail they had come up on. Du Pré pulled back on the reins.

  The horse ignored him. They sailed off the lip of the butte and landed on the pan. The horse took the shock and then it bounded ahead. The trail was fairly open and Du Pré stood in the stirrups, trying to turn the horse.

  He heard the buffalo bull below and behind him.

  Du Pré turned, eyes wide.

  The bull sailed off the lip of the butte. Du Pré turned and put his head near the horse’s neck and dug his heels into the bay’s flanks.

  “You,” said Du Pré to the horse, “run all you want to.”

  The horse was going flat out, galloping across the water-carved pan and then leaping a low bank to shortgrass prairie.

  Du Pré looked back.

  The huge bull was thundering along behind them, and it was closer.

  Jesus, Du Pré thought, that bastard wants to kill us.

  He could not come up that rock wall.

  Son of a bitch did, though.

  The ground rolled away and the bay stretched out. They ran a good mile, and when Du Pré glanced back the bull buffalo was well behind, and had lost a hundred yards on the horse.

  Du Pré looked ahead.

  This horse it will be blown here another couple miles.

  OK.

  He looked back again. The huge bull was closer. They came over a rise and Du Pré looked ahead in horror.

  Hundreds of buffalo were scattered over the ground, some grazing, some lying down. Reddish calves capered.

  The horse plunged on. The buffalo stirred and the lying ones stood up. Du Pré and his bay got to them and the bay shot between two groups. Then the buffalo ran. One instant they were still and the next they were running full speed.

  Hail Mary and God damn it, Du Pré thought.

  The horse dropped down into a hidden cleft in the land. Buffalo stood thick in it. They threw up their tails and they ran.

  Du Pré and the bay were galloping in the middle of the herd. The huge animals pounded the ground, which drummed.

  Du Pré looked ahead.

  The heavy fence the Host had spent millions of dollars on was a half mile away. The buffalo pounded on.

  Du Pré tried to rein in his horse. The big bay stumbled and Du Pré fell and he rolled twenty feet.

  He looked up. The buffalo were coming at him. They passed by him, going to the sides. He closed his eyes.

  He heard the wires break, a sound like one of the strings on his violin failing, but deeper and louder.

  The dust was thick. The buffalo were gone.

  Du Pré stood up. The helicopter thwacked overhead. Du Pré looked at the TV camera poking out the side door.

  He gave it the finger.

  CHAPTER 35

  “WELL,” SAID MADELAINE, “YOU got them buffalo all organized.”

  They were watching the evening news. The footage of the buffalo stampede with Du Pré bouncing along in the middle of it had run for a good minute. Then there was the shot of the buffalo running into the fence. One animal hit the wires, which all parted, and that bull did not flinch or break stride.

  Du Pré felt his ribs. He had landed on a rock with some of them and they hurt. His elbow was raw. He had cactus spines in his right thigh.

  He took a good swallow of bourbon.

  “A sight few today may see,” said the announcer.

  More footage of the buffalo racing through the badlands. They broke into streams when the land cut close and they became a brown river when it opened up.

  “The Old West still lives,” said the announcer.

  “God dang,” said Booger Tom, “musta been downright excitin’. Now you are tellin’ me this bull just bounded up a twenty-foot cliff and took off after you?”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Whaddya do to piss him off?” said Booger Tom.

  “Tell him one of your jokes,” said Du Pré.

  “Which one?” said the old cowboy.

  Du Pré nodded.

  The door to the saloon opened and Bart came in. He was grinning evilly.

  “HOME, HOME ON THE RAAAAAAAAAAAAANGE …” he bellowed.

  Du Pré held his glass out to Madelaine. She put whiskey in it. She patted his hand.

  “They wear out soon,” she said.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Pretty good fall you did there,” said Booger Tom. “When I was in the moving picture business I recall a fall like that’d get ya a ten-dollar bonus … Course, we made a point of knowin’ where the cactus was.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Well,” said Bart, “thank God you’re all right.”

  Du Pré looked at him.

  “Me, I am not all right.”

  “What?” said Bart.

  “His friends,” said Madelaine. “Du Pré survives a buffalo stampede, that is the easy part, then he has got to live past his friends.”

  “HOME, HOME ON THE RAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGE,” bellowed Bart and Booger Tom.

  “Old man,” said Madelaine, “your voice it sounds like goat farts in a tin shed.”

  “Give me a beer,” said Booger Tom, “without the music criticism.”

  Du Pré dug at a mess of cactus spines in his elbow with the point of his knife.

  “They’ll fester out,” said Booger Tom.

  “So will his friends,” said Madelaine.

  Booger Tom sipped his beer.

  Bart sipped his soda.

  The front door banged open. Du Pré turned to look.

  It was Jacqueline. She was angry, flamingly furious.

  She looked around the room.

  “You see that Pallas?” said Jacqueline.

  Everybody shook their head.

  Jacqueline went back out, slamming the door.

  “Uh-oh,” said Bart.

  Du Pré shrugged.

  You have them kids, they drive you nuts, Du Pré thought, thing that they got to do, like eat.

  “Me,” said Madelaine, “I never see that Jacqueline so mad. Maybe you better go and see about it.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Need help?” said Booger Tom, eyes wide and innocent.

  Du Pré looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head.

  Du Pré went back out.

  Jacqueline was
stomping up the street, peering in yards. She went up to a house and banged on the door. It opened and she said something to Mrs. La Barge and then Jacqueline left and headed on.

  The van was parked there. Some kids were sitting in it. Du Pré went to the van. He slid open the door.

  The children were sitting very quietly, looking at the hands in their laps.

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “me, I never see your mother so angry. What is it? She is mad at Pallas.”

  Looks.

  “We don’t know,” said Berne.

  “Yeah,” said Marisa. “We are at the grocery store there, Mama is at the checkout, she blows up, drags us out, the groceries they are still there.”

  “Cooper?” said Du Pré.

  Nods.

  “She don’t get a phone call, nothing?” he said.

  Shakes of little heads.

  “You don’t know nothin’?”

  Looks of wide-eyed innocence.

  “Somebody pissin’ on my boots telling me it is rainin’,” said Du Pré.

  Looks of wide-eyed injured virtue.

  “Pallas kill you, you tell,” said Du Pré.

  “It’s a pret’ bad spot be in,” said Berne. “That Pallas she is in ver’ big trouble.”

  “She is usually,” said Du Pré. “She is that sort of kid.”

  “Not like this,” said Marisa.

  “You ain’t going, tell me anything?” said Du Pré.

  Little palms turned up.

  Du Pré looked up the street. Jacqueline was crossing it, striding straight, her arms stiff and swinging.

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “me, I cannot beat it out of you.”

  Jacqueline stopped and she glared at Du Pré.

  “OK,” said Du Pré, “maybe one of you talk I don’t tell on you.”

  “Yeah,” said Berne, “but all these guys squeal, soon as Pallas she start in on them. Sorry, Grandpère, it is not worth it.”

  Du Pré looked up the street again.

  Jacqueline was stalking back across the dirt road, on her way to another house.

  “She is pissed,” said Du Pré.

  “We maybe stay at Madelaine’s?” said Berne.

  “Till this blows over,” said Marisa.

  Chorus of hopeful yesses!

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Go ask her,” he said.

  The kids shot out of the van and raced into the saloon.

  I go run with the buffalo, polish the rocks up, my ribs, come home there is something mysterious it is going on, Du Pré thought, I never see my Jacqueline this pissed off.