Coyote Wind (16 page)

The chinook wind had come, warm from the north and west, most of the snow had melted off, there were pools of water on the frozen ground. Du Pré’s soaked cows were pulling hay out of the feedrack, grimly chewing. No place to lie down, chew their cud. Soon it would get very cold again, and the world would be glazed hard and very difficult to stand on.

“Where do we need this big shovel, anyway,” said Bart.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette. He lit it.

“Oh,” he said, “ ’bout ten or twelve miles from here, old mining claim of my father’s.”

“Your father had a mine?” said Bart. That, too.

“Gold claim,” said Du Pré. Probably an emerald necklace down there, few other things, like an old car. Under the gravels, in the old riverbed. The Red River.

Go all the way down to bedrock, men there is no more story. Just the old earth, keeping the rest of its secrets.

“You go to big diesel shovel school?” said Du Pré. He looked at Bart’s cast hand.

“Correspondence course,” said Bart. “Lotsa pictures.”

Mail-order course. Shit shit shit.

“Yeah,” said Bart, “I was reading this stupid magazine, found an ad, said make big money, learn to operate heavy equipment. So I sent off for the stuff.”

“Oh,” said Du Pré, looking at his cigarette.

“When I was a kid, I had a couple toys, one of them was a big diesel shovel. I loved it the most. I have a deep and heartfelt, spiritual understanding of big diesel shovels. Trust me.”

“OK,” said Du Pré. He started to laugh. Bart, here, he is learning a lot from old Booger Tom. Laugh at snakebite, broken bones and let’s do something even if it’s wrong. Horse throw you, get back on till one of you is dead or you are moving down the trail.

Du Pré hobbled over to the stove, poured more tea for the two of them. Set the cups back down on the table.

Bart also had a bandage over his eye. He’s learning; he is learning…

“Tell you a secret?” said Bart, raising a conspiratorial eyebrow.

“Sure,” said Du Pré.

“I just up and bought a big diesel shovel. I always wanted one but I never knew how bad. So I called the big shovel dealer, said tell me about big shovels. He had an especially nice one, not too big, since I am not too big a man. Big enough, though. Pretty, too, kinda pale green. Got a stereo in the cab. Lots of levers and fun buttons. Make a new man of me.”

You are doin’ fine there, Bart.

“Now, I was thinking on having it racing striped but I decided that that would be in poor taste. Didn’t get the fake polar bear fur upholstery, either.”

Hee, thought Du Pré. “Now where is this big shovel you got?”

“Well,” said Bart, scratching at his cast, “I think it might be here within the hour, maybe two, they have to move an extra power line or something.”

“What?” said Du Pré.

“It was just an impulse,” said Bart, “but I suddenly just had to have that pretty pale green big diesel shovel. Here. Start it up, dig a lake or something for practice.”

Du Pré looked out the window.

“The ground is pretty frozen,” said Du Pré.

“The salesman assured me that this here big shovel would not notice whether the ground is frozen or not.”

“How big is this sucker, anyway?” said Du Pré.

“Oh, that,” said Bart. “Well, they do make bigger ones, or anyway one bigger one. What I wanted, see, was those real delicate controls. You could fill a dump truck with one bite, whirl around and crack open a poached egg that was sitting on someone’s head.”

Du Pré considered that.

“Whose head?” he said finally.

“Uh,” said Bart, pausing tastefully, “it is after all, my pretty pale green big diesel shovel. It would not do to lend it out, any more than it does to lend out one’s toothbrush. Very personal item, this here big diesel shovel.”

“Tell you what,” said Du Pré. “When this shovel comes, I am going to put an egg on a rock, and when you crack it just so nice … ”

“Guaranteed,” said Bart.

The telephone rang. Du Pré answered it. For Bart.

Yes. Yes? Yes. Yes! Be right there.

Bart put the phone down.

“Well,” he said, “it is here and we need to lead them to wherever that big shovel needs to be.”

“Oh, boy,” said Du Pré. He liked toys.

“W
ELL,” SAID
D
U
P
RÉ
, looking up at the pale fluorescent green monster shovel, “how much you pay for this thing?”

“I got it on time,” said Bart. “I paid them just the one time.”

Well, all right.

Du Pré looked around at Catfoot’s old claim, remembering. His father had worked here on and off for fifteen years. There was the little dragline, looked like a damn kid’s toy next to Bart’s big kid’s toy. Little D2 cat, blade resting on the ground, a couple of hydraulic lines broken off. Rusting drums that Catfoot had filled with what he hoped was paydirt to wash down and never got to. A homemade grizzly rocker. The gold got caught in an old piece of carpet, and when all the paydirt was run, Catfoot burned the carpet and little globs of gold were left in the big old frying pan. Some smelter. Not a lot of gold, ever, but it kept Catfoot busy, and when the price of gold was left float he made out pretty good.

Du Pré remembered his days here. The old equipment was broken more often than not, his father would be cursing it in Coyote French while he banged the offending parts with wrenches.

What the West was built with, blasphemy.

Booger Tom, there, when he lost his temper and cussed with a serious heart he revealed himself to be a poet.

“Wanna come up and look in the cab of Popsicle, here?” said Bart.

“Popsicle?” said Du Pré.

“Sure,” said Bart. “Don’t she look like the color of those awful popsicles you used to eat when you were a kid?”

Du Pré nodded. Yes, it did.

Over time, Catfoot had moved a lot of gravels. Down thirty feet to bedrock, old pumps straining, sometimes the old man had to pawn his guns to buy diesel to keep everything going. Du Pré looked down into the deep wide hole, water in it. The dragline bucket was down there, out of sight.

When Catfoot had got down to the bedrock, he would climb down in the hole and shovel the blue-gray paydirt into fifty-five-gallon drums, haul them up with the bucket.

Red River.

Maybe a quarter-mile of dredge spoil here, years and years of work for Catfoot. Du Pré tried to remember where things were what year. He couldn’t. Had the old man started at the other end and just worked steady over here? Or had he jumped around? Being Catfoot, he would have jumped around. Shit.

“Du Pré, damn it,” said Bart, “this is the only time you get to set foot in my pretty cab. Got a virgin on the dash. Hairy dice on the rearview mirror. Cassette recorder and player with monster ju-ju and bunga-bunga. This thing is pretty noisy. The speakers are three feet across.”

Du Pré scrambled up into the cab. He felt some stitches in his belly tear. Well, god damn them, I got work to do.

Bart turned the key, let the headring heat till the light went off. Pressed the starter. The huge engine caught and rumbled, the cab shook. Sounded very businesslike.

Bart shoved a tape in the tape machine. Tammy Wynette.

 Bart fiddled with a couple levers. The huge arm extended itself, and he fiddled with some others and the bucket waggled.

Bart pivoted the cab, the arm, the bucket. The controls were light and easy. He waggled the bucket in time to the music.

“I’m gonna pick up a couple of those old drums there,” he yelled, pointing with the bucket at a few rusting fifty-fives.

Something went wrong. He smashed them flat. The bucket went three feet into the frozen gravels.

“Popsicle, you whore!” yelled Bart.

“That egg, now,” said Du Pré.

“What fucking egg?” yelled Bart.

“This egg,” said Du Pré, removing one from his coat pocket.

They were yelling. Bart motioned for him to pay attention, he scrabbled around in the jockey box, came up with a little radio had an earplug hanging out of it and a slender microphone with a headset. The microphone was a long thin tube of clear plastic with a thin wire in it.

Du Pré put it on. He adjusted the headset. Switched on the little radio.

“Earth to Du Pré,” said Bart, softly.

Damn easy to hear, this, through the earplug.

“OK,” said Du Pré. “You practice with old Popsicle here and I go out and walk around, see what I can remember.”

“Do my best,” said Bart. “Put that egg over there on top of that post, will you?”

“Oh, hell,” said Du Pré. “You can’t see a damn thing for that bucket, it is half the size of my house.”

“Not true, my friend,” said Bart, “I went first class. This sucker has a TV camera out there.” He pointed to a little screen, pressed a button. The screen came on.

“Jesus,” said Du Pré, “it is not even in color. How you going to enjoy watching my blood spurt all over it if it isn’t a color camera?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” said Bart.

“Oh, me of no fucking faith at all,” said Du Pré. “I go put that egg on the post now.”

Bart nodded.

“Du Pré,” said Bart, “we are looking for a Mercury, Colorado plates, been down there a long time, right.”

Du Pré nodded.

“When we find it,” Bart went on, “we got a couple Masses to pay for, go to.”

Du Pré nodded.

“We both go to both of them,” said Bart.

“Oh, yes,” said Du Pré.

D
U
P
RÉ AND
B
ART
Fascelli stood by the bucket, looking at the torn metal. Some pale green paint on it. A bumper. A smashed Colorado license plate on it, all the enamel gone. The numbers were in stamped red rust, the plate was bent in half.

They looked down into the water rising in the blackish gravels.

“Well,” said Bart. “There it is. You were right.”

Du Pré nodded. It gave him no pleasure.

“I’ll get a chain around the car,” said Du Pré. “The chassis should hold, I think.”

 He scrambled down the pit walls, gravels loosening under his feet, water percolating everywhere. The heavy chain on his shoulder fouled his balance and he fell and came up wet and freezing. Little determined snowflakes fell from a black sky. Maybe rain, then ice. The time of the bad cold was coming. It was up there north, crouched, dark, merciless.

The time of white owls, boiling hooves for soup, leaving the frozen winter dead in the trees.

Du Pré shivered.

He ran the chain around the frame of the car, bent from the years spent under the tons of shifting gravels. These stones were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. They flowed very slowly, but they did.

The mountains stand up to their waists in their own flesh, thought Du Pré, spalled off by ice and time.

Bart moved the bucket down slowly, to where Du Pré could put the chain through one of the eyes on the lip.

Du Pré fought his way back up. He raised his hand, palm up.

Lift lift lift he motioned.

The chain lost its slack. A couple of pebbles stirred near the buried car. The frame bent a little. And then the car came up, sheet metal tearing, stones clattering down. Smashed to a dented tangled mass a fourth the size it once was.

Bart lifted it up and swung it round, set it down on the spoil drift. Water ran out of the wreck.

He killed the engine of the big diesel shovel, opened the cab door and dropped down the ladder.

Four weeks we been doing this, thought Du Pré. He looked back at the gravels they had so carefully moved, knowing what was down there, wanting to find it and not wanting to find it but having to find it all the same.

 And, well, boys, there you have it.

“Not much of a Grail,” said Bart.

“Have to do for the likes of us,” said Du Pré. Now we can let the sad past sleep, and be maimed by it forever.

Muddy water dripped out of the wreck. A few shreds of upholstery gone mud-colored, gobs of muck stuck out of the car. The glass was all long ground to powder.

They took a spud bar and tried to pry the wreck apart. No good. Bart went back up into the cab of the shovel and fired it up again, lifted the wreck and lumbered back to the old dragline. The weight of the dead machine was enough. Du Pré chained the old Mercury to the old dragline and Bart pulled the wreck apart.

They sorted through the wreck, ran hoses on the parts. No emeralds and gold, no money, nothing.

“And no fucking map to the Lost Bullfrog Mine,” said Du Pré.

Not that it mattered.

A car horn sounded. Madelaine and Maria, worried, had come out to see if Du Pré and Bart had killed themselves yet.

They brought sandwiches and hot coffee. It was mostly dark now and soon to be dark all the rest of the way.

“We have to report this,” said Du Pré. “Just as soon as we god damned well feel like it.”

Bart was eating a sandwich. “Sometimes after I have busted hump all day I feel like I have never tasted food before,” he said. “Good sandwich.”

“Come to supper tomorrow,” said Maria to Bart.

Bart nodded. “Guy could do worse than be a shovel man,” he said. “I have.”

Du Pré, Madelaine, and Maria left then, leaving Bart to his Popsicle, thoughts, and prayers.

 At the house, Du Pré drank some whiskey, didn’t say much.

“You find everything that you are looking for maybe you can go back to being Du Pré now,” said Madelaine, going out the door to her children. “You maybe want I leave my address with you, describe the house?”

Du Pré laughed. Madelaine, she wasn’t laughing.

“See you tomorrow,” said Du Pré to Maria.

He drove behind Madelaine to her home.

D
U
P
RÉ DROVE THROUGH
a strong May blizzard out to his house, wondered if this heavy snow would crush the old shed he had been meaning to shore up for the last ten years or so. He only remembered it when he couldn’t do it, like the leak in the roof.

Maria was in the kitchen, baking bread. The table was piled with books and there was a new computer, too, one Bart said he could not possibly use because he was just a simple shovel operator. The computer still had the warranty card on it.