Specimen Song (12 page)

The howls fell off.

The telephone rang.

Madelaine got up.

Du Pré grabbed her hand.

“That is for me,” he said.

“You expecting a call this late?” said Madelaine, smiling.

“Yes,” said Du Pré, his stomach clenching, “I guess I am.”

“Du Pré,” he said as soon as he had the telephone up to his mouth.

“Another,” said Michelle. “This time, a secretary who had been working late. She talked a moment with the security guard in the parking structure. He went to the John. He came back. Her car didn’t come out, so he went to look. She was lying beside it, with her keys in her hand.”

Christ, thought Du Pré. If it was here, I would just shoot this Paul Chase and see if the murders stopped. Even if the murders kept on, we can spare Paul Chase.

“Massive skull fracture, literally popped her eyes out of her head. Left the weapon—a war club, I guess you’d call it.”

“You see it?”

“Yeah. ME’s got it. It was a round rock like you’d find in a riverbed. Had a handle of something wrapped in rawhide, with a loop at the butt for your wrist. Not your wrist, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “I think that’s called a
watunk
.”

“You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

“We still have a full tail on Chase, but not only can he slip out of his office, he lives over in Virginia on an estate, complete with wrought-iron fence and rottweilers and electronic security. So I think that’s a waste of time and a lot of manpower.”

“This secretary wasn’t Indian?”

“No,” said Michelle. There was a pause. “Right,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Listen,” said Du Pré, “I think maybe I will go and look for Benetsee and talk with him. Last murder, he was here and made me drive him to a medicine place,” and he was waving a bullroarer just before the last woman was killed.”

“What’s a bullroarer?” said Michelle.

“A piece of wood shaped like a narrow shingle, on a thong. You whirl it around and it makes a big noise.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Maybe Benetsee saw something in his dreams,” said Du Pré.

“I wish he would just tell us,” said Michelle. “People are getting killed here, you know.”

“I don’t think he can,” said Du Pré. “I think maybe he sees the riddle but not the answer. The answer’s always there when you look back. But I don’t think he is not telling us. I think he is telling us all he knows.”

“I’m sorry,” said Michelle, “I’m just frustrated.”

“Me, too,” said Du Pré. “How is Bart?”

“Fine,” said Bart.

He’s with Michelle, he’s fine, Du Pré thought.

“I will go try to find Benetsee,” said Du Pré.

“Bring him here,” said Michelle.

“He wouldn’t go,” said Du Pré.

“I thought not,” said Michelle.

Du Pré hung up. Madelaine had come in. She was yawning and looking at Du Pré with her eyes half-closed.

“I got to go find Benetsee,” he said.

“You got to find
me
right now,” she said, taking his hand. “You can go look for that old goat later.”

D
U
P
RÉ DROVE TOWARD
B
ENETSEE’S
shack. The moon washed things white or black. The landscape was ghostly and unmoving.

The old man wasn’t there. Du Pré went in, moving gently through the four old dogs, who wheezed in his way. They got his scent and went back to bed. Du Pré felt the stove. It was cold.

That damn old man, Du Pré thought, he always knows when I am coming and plays these games with me.

There is always a point to the games.

So. Where is the old bastard?

The moon is washing him.

The coyotes. Du Pré went to his old cruiser and dug his fiddle out of the trunk and tuned up. The sudden cold skew-jawed the strings. He tuned three times before the strings quit warping off.

Du Pré played his coyote song. He played howls on his fiddle and then he would stop-time and howl. It was a song from the Red River cart days, when the Métis came down from Canada to hunt the buffalo, driving the carts with their big wheels. Drive them buffalo into long, blind corrals and kill them with spears to save the gunpowder for them Sioux. Flesh out the buffalo, hang the sheets of meat on racks made of willow, dry them with fires made of red alder. Fold up the dried meat in rawhide parfleches, go north again, ready for winter…

Du Pré finished and waited.

The coyotes burst into chorus, crescendoed, stopped.

One howl kept going. It came from a cliff a mile or so away, a low one, perhaps fifty feet high. It wavered and sank.

The coyotes sang again, softer this time.

The lone coyote on the cliff howled.

Du Pré walked toward the cliff where Benetsee was. He stopped. Shit. He had forgotten to bring wine. Well, the old man would have to make do with water. Then Du Pré remembered he had a bottle of bourbon in the trunk. He went back and got it. Fiddle in one hand and whiskey in the other. Tobacco. Questions.

The land was stark, the trail a ribbon of pale gold across the white. Sagebrush stood gray, bark white and silver. The grass was dead and it waited for the winter.

Coyotes.

A jackrabbit, coat already going patchy white, dashed in front of Du Pré, a coyote twenty feet behind.

Another coyote be waiting ahead, spell the first one, and that damn rabbit run in a circle till he drop and get eaten, Du Pré thought. He remembered the first time he had seen that story in tracks in the snow.

The trail went to the right of the cliff, up through jumbled slabs of stone. The rattlesnakes would be chilled and sleeping, in huge balls of hundreds in the caves.

Du Pré’s head rose above the cliff top. He looked over and saw a bush near the edge of the cliff. The bush stood up.

Du Pré walked toward the old man.

“Ho,” said Benetsee. “Long way for a polite young man to come bring an old man some whiskey,” he said.

Du Pré shook his head.

“The bottle is too small to be wine,” said Benetsee. “So since you are a polite young man and not a cheap one, it must be whiskey, no?”

He took the bottle, cracked the seal, and drank deeply. Du Pré took out his tobacco pouch and rolled them cigarettes.

“This evil man, he don’t like the Cree,” said Benetsee.

“He only kill the one Cree,” said Du Pré.

“Three,” said Benetsee. “The woman from the Canada school was half-blood, a Métis. The last one was Métis, too. Red River Breed woman from North Dakota.”

No telephone out here in the sagebrush. Du Pré thought. No telephone in his house. I am the second person in Montana to know about this last killing.

Du Pré waited. Benetsee would tell him what he wished to when he wished to. Du Pré went over to the edge of the cliff and slid to the earth in the cross-legged set of the Indian.

They looked out at the sere landscape. A coyote trotted across the field, up to Du Pré’s parked car, pissed on a tire, ambled on.

A vee of geese crossed the moon, high up and headed for the Gulf of Mexico.

“I cannot see his face,” said Benetsee. “But these women, they pass by me on the way to the Star Trail, and they are weeping. Most of the dead are happy, but they are not.”

But the Star Trail isn’t Cree, Du Pré thought. I don’t know what the Cree think about that. Us Métis, the Jesuits got to us so long ago, we’ve lost some of our poetry forever.

“
Babiche, bakihonnik, watunk
,” said Benetsee. Choked, stabbed, and crushed.

“Could you maybe tell me how to find him?” asked Du Pré.

Benetsee sat silently. He lifted chaff between forefinger and thumb and let it dribble, to see what way the imperceptible wind was blowing.

“Used to be an ocean here,” said Benetsee, “long time ago.”

Du Pré nodded. Yes. Eighty million years ago.

“Métis used to camp over there,” he said, pointing to a big stand of willows around a spring that ran clear, sweet water. “You go there and stand sometimes, you can see where the corrals were for the horses. You go in the early spring, you can see where they drove the buffalo. Grass comes up greener where the posts were.”

“I can’t see him,” said Benetsee. “He is in the dark there, hole in the mountain. I can’t see him, just I maybe see him when he starts to move, see his eyes gleam. See him rising up, stirring, little bits of shadow. Then the women pass me when they are dead.”

Du Pré waited.

“He hates Indians,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré nodded. He took the bourbon from Benetsee and had a swig. The burn felt good. It was flat cold out.

“I try to scare him back,” Benetsee went on. “Maybe there’s another way out of the mountain.”

Du Pré waited.

“Maybe that’s just where he sleeps,” said Benetsee.

Okay.

“How big is the mountain?” said Du Pré.

“Can’t tell,” said Benetsee.

Okay.

They sat silently.

“You come over to Madelaine’s with me, huh?” said Du Pré.

Benetsee didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

Du Pré got up, a little stiff.

“I am very tired,” he said. “I will go to sleep now, grandfather.”

“You going to go there?” said Benetsee.

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

“He just quit till you leave,” said Benetsee.

Shit shit shit, Du Pré thought. Now I got to worry I don’t go there the bastard be killing Indians because I stay here where I’d rather. Shit shit shit.

“Maybe he don’t quit,” said Benetsee. “I can’t see.”

Whew, Du Pré thought. Fucking Washington, D.C. Thank you, you old prick.

“When he’s ready again, I’ll know,” said Benetsee.

“You let me know?” asked Du Pré.

Benetsee shrugged.

Du Pré started to walk away.

“Gabriel!” Benetsee said loudly, his voice young and crisp. If it was
his
voice.

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

“He will come looking for you when he’s ready,” said Benetsee.

Okay, thought Du Pré.

Benetsee tossed something to Du Pré. A smooth round black stone the size of a small plum. Du Pré wrapped his hand around it. He opened his fingers and looked at it for a moment. He put the stone in his pocket.

Christ, I am tired, he thought.

D
U
P
RÉ TURNED THE PAINTED
feather in his fingers. Canoes, Indians, a bearded white man, a dog, a bird with a notched beak and talons. He slipped the black steatite carving of the rising wolf from his pocket. The stone was warm from his body and slick as soap.

The jet flew east swiftly. He would land in D.C. in a couple of hours.

Du Pré thought he would rather have come on a horse, but things did not move reasonably this late in the century he had been wrongly born in. Zoom. Flash. TV, movies, computers. Zoom. Shit.

Well, Du Pré had thought, if he is going to come after me, then I will go and spit in his face, maybe he come after me before he kills anybody else—which is fine. I am a good hunter, too. Maybe write a little ballad about it, “The Indian Killer and Catfoot’s Son.” The asshole wants to play, we’ll play.

At least I stir the shit.

Du Pré was unused to such cold anger in himself. He hadn’t had a reason to know it was in him till now. D.C. had very tough gun laws, which didn’t work except to keep the good people unarmed, so the bad ones had an easier time of it. So Du Pré had no gun, no knife.

I got moccasins and shadows, though.

Benetsee had brought him a pair, plain, all soft leather, unlike the stiff-soled Plains moccasins. The pair Benetsee had given him would wear out walking to the outhouse in Montana. Die of the rocks and cactus. But they were very quiet.

Benetsee had also given Du Pré a little obsidian knife, a ceremonial one, a hole drilled through the handle. It was on a thong around Du Pré’s neck.

I am going to a strange land to hunt someone dangerous and all I got is what little I know and some magic an old drunk gave me.

Fair enough.

The plane suddenly lost a lot of altitude and Du Pré’s stomach rose up right between his ears. The plane quit plummeting and Du Pré’s stomach sank slowly back home.

Horses are mostly nice people and a good way to travel, doesn’t put your fucking stomach up between your ears.

Du Pré was going to the capital of the twentieth century and he didn’t like either of ’em.

Du Pré sipped a little bourbon. He rolled a cigarette. He looked down at the clouds.

The plane made its approach and Du Pré watched the ground rush up, the runway flash by. The engines screamed in reverse. He was there. Stopped. He promised himself he would go home on the train. He was never getting on one of these goddamned things again. His mind was plumb fixed on the subject.

The limousine rolled across the runway to the door. Du Pré came down the stairs, determined never to go up them again. He got in the door the black driver opened for him, feeling embarrassed. He was not comfortable with servants, with being cosseted.

Bart was in the back. He looked great. Du Pré shook his hand as the car pulled away. Bart stared steadily at Du Pré. Du Pré couldn’t see that black pain flitting in the back of Bart’s eyes.

“You sure this is a good idea?” said Bart.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “you ever round up cattle? Foreman always says the same thing in the dark when you got to get up. Let’s do something even if it’s wrong.”

“Michelle’s worried,” said Bart.

“Worst thing happens, the world will go on fine without a dumb-ass Red River Breed plays the fiddle some,” said Du Pré. “World always goes on fine; it’s the only thing it knows how to do. Tears dry up, people forget. So.”

“Well,” said Bart, “she is at work, wanted to see you as soon as you came in. Officially, she doesn’t know about you, understand.”

“I walk in her office, she knows,” said Du Pré.

“We’re having dinner in Norfolk,” said Bart. “You ever eat oysters?”

“Plenty times,” said Du Pré. He loved oysters.

Du Pré showered at the hotel while Bart spoke softly into the telephone. They got into the limousine and took off, picking up Michelle Leuci in the parking lot of a shopping center several miles away.