Coyote Wind (17 page)

“Papa,” said Maria, “there is something funny hanging in the tree back there.” She leaned over the sink and pointed out the window to the willow by the little creek.

Du Pré squinted. Something white, had a couple birds on it.

“Looks like a piece of suet,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” said Maria, “I didn’t hang it up there, pretty high.”

A good eight feet off the ground. There was a path through the snow to it, from the yard, the trail went out across the white field beyond the creek.

“That’s funny,” said Du Pré.

The suet was hung over the stobs of the lilac Catfoot Du Pré and his young bride had planted so long ago. The lilac had died, the leaves had turned yellow a couple of years ago. Du Pré had cut the dead trunks away and he had meant to grub up the roots but he had forgotten to do that.

Like hell, I hate digging up roots.

Du Pré looked down at the tracks in the snow. Coyote. The animal had stood beneath the suet, tried to leap up and get it and couldn’t. When the birds pecked the slab of fat some chunks broke off and fell down into the snow. The coyote had scratched around a lot, for the good fat after this hard winter.

“OK,” said Du Pré, “you old fucker.”

He went to the shed, got a spud bar and a shovel. The ground was thawed, it always did under the snow. He slammed the spud into the earth, grabbed the shovel, and down about a foot and a half he hit something hard but not like a rock is hard.

Little brass box, size of a Bible.

All green, been here a while, thought Du Pré.

He took it to the house, put it in the sink and washed the dirt off. A little box, well-brazed seams all around. Du Pré looked at the bead.

Catfoot’s bead, that, as much his as his handwriting.

“What you got there?” said Maria.

“Something I think belongs to Bart,” said Du Pré.

He went back out to the shed, got a cold chisel and a hammer. Cut the top off the box on the kitchen floor.

Nice and dry in the box. Catfoot lay up good tight bead, there.

A suede envelope, black. A flat packet wrapped in foil. Du Pré pulled them both out. Nothing else.

“See this, now,” said Du Pré to Maria. He opened the suede envelope. He lifted out the necklace, green gems and gold, all brilliant in the light.

“Oooohhhh,” said Maria. She reached for the necklace. Du Pré let her have it.

Du Pré peeled back the foil. Thick packet of hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s this?” said Maria. “What is all this?”

Du Pré told her all of it.

She sat at the table, looking out the window, at the failing light.

Du Pré reached across the table, took her hand, squeezed it.

“I got to go up to Bart’s a minute,” he said. “Talk to him about a couple Masses.”

B
ART LOOKED AT THE
money and the brilliant necklace. His whole face twitched. “What a bunch of shit,” he said. “My family. A bunch of money and a bunch of shit. We hated each other. I loved Gianni. You know why? He was gone before I was old enough to know him. He must have been a prize asshole. Oh, God. I spent all my time waiting for Gianni to come back. At least he was my goddamned brother.” Du Pré rubbed his eyes.

 Bart sipped his tea. He wanted a drink, bad.

“I didn’t want to know, either,” said Du Pré.

Bart poked the necklace like it was a prize snake that had died just to be rude.

Bart took a pouch of cheap tobacco out of his bathrobe and rolled a cigarette. He lit it. He sucked the smoke in hard and blew it out. He shook his head again.

“You people,” he said.

Du Pré looked up. What?

Bart began to cry, softly.

“Us?” said Du Pré. He didn’t know what us Bart meant.

“I spent all of my time whining,” said Bart. “Well, boys, there you have it.”

Du Pré didn’t know what the fuck Bart was talking about.

Bart wailed. It was the cry of some creature wounded to death and the killers closing.

“I can’t stand this,” said Bart.

I can’t either, thought Du Pré. So get drunk.

Bart went to the cupboard and took out the whiskey and had a lake of it.

“You people,” he said again.

“What goddamned people?” said Du Pré. “You tell me that. My father killed Gianni. Well, you stupid asshole, I would have too.”

Bart nodded.

“He needed killing,” said Du Pré.

Bart sat back down, calm. He poked the necklace again.

“What did Gianni do to make Catfoot so mad?” said Bart.

Du Pré lit a cigarette.

“Pauline asked him to kill Gianni,” said Du Pré, “and Gianni was some asshole, so Catfoot just killed him. Catfoot was a careful guy, you know, it’s hard to find a body you take care. So I think he just did it.”

“You people,” said Bart.

“I don’t know what
you people
means,” said Du Pré.

“You’re killers.”

“Oh,” said Du Pré. That.

Bart sat back hard in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

“Festerfuck,” he said.

Du Pré sat and rubbed his mustache.

“Hey,” he said, “what about these Masses.”

“We need ’em for our souls,” said Bart.

Du Pré waited. He yawned.

“How the hell could Catfoot just kill my brother and bury him and go on with his life?” said Bart.

“I got to go home,” said Du Pré.

“Answer me, goddamnit,” said Bart. He was starting to cry again.

“Your brother was a piece of shit,” said Du Pré, “and your brother was a bad man to one of Catfoot’s women. Catfoot didn’t even know you lived, but he would have killed you too, he was so tired of Pauline’s goddamned bitching. You don’t push people so far, you know.”

“You people,” said Bart, again. He started another cigarette.

“My father a murderer and your brother needed killing and I am very tired of this,” said Du Pré.

“I want to give this necklace to Maria,” said Bart.

“She’s down at the church,” said Du Pré, “so we can go now.”

He walked out. He whistled “Baptiste’s Lament.”

Many stars above.

Turn the page to continue reading from The Gabriel Du Pré Montana Mysteries

D
U
P
RÉ HAD NEVER
sweated like he was sweating in all his life. The air flowed in and out of his lungs like honey. The strings of his fiddle were greasy.

This Washington, D.C., he thought, now I know why everything comes out of it is so fucked up. People live here too long, say a month, it poaches their brains. I feel sorry for them, where I just used to hate them. Thank you, Jesus.

He put his fiddle in the old rawhide case his grandfather had made and he walked down through the crowds flowing slowly from one stage to another of the Folk Life Festival.

Least all these pretty girls hardly wearing anything, Du Pré thought. Thank you, Jesus.

Du Pré stood at the back of a crowd watching an old black man play a battered guitar, had a neck of a wine bottle on his finger. Du Pré nodded at the rhythms, the lonesome heartbreak of the glass sliding on the high strings. Some good music this. But the man’s accent was thick and Du Pré couldn’t make out very many of the words. He didn’t have to. Bad luck and hard women.

Du Pré sucked in another lungful of honey flavored with car exhaust and city smells. He thought of how he had come to be here.

Three months ago, in a bitter Montana March, winter hanging on late and the mud yet to come, he and Madelaine had gone over to a fiddling contest in the college town of Bozeman. Du Pré hadn’t won anything at the contest, all the prizes went to youngsters, who, Du Pré had to admit, played lots more notes than he did, even if they weren’t the right or even reasonable ones. And afterward, some bearded man in a down jacket had come up to him and introduced himself as one of the directors of the Folk Life Festival at the Smithsonian, and said how he would like Du Pré to come in late June and play at it. The festival would pay his travel, put him up, and pay him five hundred dollars.

Du Pré had looked at the guy.

“Why you want me?” he said finally. “I didn’t even win a ribbon. You sure you don’t want that guy over there won the first place?”

“Hardly,” said the man in the down jacket. His name was Paul Chase.

“Washington, D.C.,” said Du Pré, “I have never been there. So I guess I would go.”

Paul Chase offered Du Pré a notebook and felt-tip pen. Du Pré scribbled his address in it.

“You’ll get a letter in a couple of weeks,” said Paul Chase.

They shook hands.

Madelaine had gone to the bar to get some of the sweet, bubbly pink wine she liked and a soda for Du Pré. The place was crowded with young people. They were forming little knots here and there and fiddling while some other young folks played guitars or banjos. One guy had a dobro strapped on, and he slid the steel expertly up and down. Du Pré took his soda and Madeline’s arm and pulled her over closer to the dobro player.

Du Pré had never been close to anyone playing one of the strange-looking guitars with the perforated tin pie plate in the top. He liked the sound. The dobro player glanced up at Du Pré briefly and then looked down to his work again. Another wailing shimmer sliding.

In the car, headed out of town, Du Pré told Madelaine about his invitation to Washington, D. C.

“All people do in Washington, D.C., is shoot each other,” said Madelaine. “I saw that on the TV.”

They stopped at an old hotel in Lewistown and then drove on home the next day.

The letter came a couple weeks later, and the days went by, and then Madelaine drove Du Pré down to Billings to take his first long air ride since he was in the army.

Du Pré looked out at the runway and the whooshing jets.

“The hell with it,” he said, “I think I won’t go.”

Madelaine laughed.

Du Pré got on the plane. He hated every minute of the trip, and now here he was in Washington, DC, sweating.

I don’t do this again, thought Du Pré. I am too old to be a rock-and-roll star.

Du Pré heard an eerie, trilling ululation. He walked toward the soundstage it came from. There were six Indians onstage, singing. Their voices were weaving in and out of one another like smoky flutes. The hair on the back of Du Pré’s neck stood up. The music spoke to his soul. It was music of ice and seal hunting, nights a month long, deserts of ice broken and twisted, and the endless, screaming polar wind.

Du Pré picked up a program from the trampled grass, looked through it. Inuit throat singers from Canada. Whew.

The Inuit trailed off. They were followed by a Cajun band. Du Pré found his foot tapping to the music, accordion, washboard, some little guitar, fiddle, and a man playing bones.

The band finished the number and the bones player talked a moment about how you had to get just these sections of two ribs on the cow. Those sections rang best, he said. He started to play a solo on them, and Du Pré took out his fiddle and played it damped at the back of the crowd.

The crowd parted, some people looking back at Du Pré.

Du Pré stopped. He felt bad, like he’d stolen the bones player’s audience. Hadn’t meant to, but there it was.

“Hey!” the bones player called. “You come on up here, play something.”

I got to, thought Du Pré. He was running sweat.

I make a fool of myself maybe.

Du Pré made his way to the stage. He clomped up the folding steps and out to a microphone. The rest of the band smiled and nodded.

The bones player laid down a rhythm and Du Pré fiddled off it, some notes here and there, little riffs, longer passages. He’d been playing the fiddle long enough, he could sometimes reach for lungs and his fingers would get them almost before his mind thought of them.

Du Pré heard a couple women scream off to his left. He looked over and saw a horse dancing with a pancake saddle off on its left side. The crowd was afraid of the horse and the horse was afraid of the crowd. They were trying to pull away from each other, but the crowd was thick and everywhere the horse turned, he saw people and it frightened him more.

Du Pré went off the stage on one hand, leaving his fiddle lying by the microphone. He threaded his way through the crowd, and when he popped out into the space the horse had made around itself, he began to talk to the horse in Coyote French, making soothing sounds.

The horse stood still, grateful that here was a human who seemed to know him. Du Pré got hold of the bridle.

Du Pré led the horse away from the crowds. He saw some ambulance lights off by a jumble of portable outhouses, and a couple of police cars there, too.

“Well,” said Du Pré to the horse, “now what about this? Huh?”

The horse whiffled. Du Pré rubbed the gelding’s soft nose.

T
HE BIG COP HAD SWEATED
his linen sport coat dark under the arms and down his spine. He sweated so much that he messed up the notes he was trying to take.

“Fuckin’ heat,” said the cop. “So you caught this horse. You’re one a the performers here?”

“Uh-huh,” said Du Pré.

“Why you catch the horse?”

“I know horses pretty good,” said Du Pré. “This horse, he was some scared, and all he wanted was someone around who seemed to know horses. So I just walked up to him and grabbed his bridle.”