Specimen Song (13 page)

She kissed Du Pré on the cheek and squeezed his hand.

“It will be all right,” said Gabriel. “Benetsee said so.” Not too much of a lie, since Du Pré had no idea what Benetsee thought all right was; the old man’s mind and speech were as hard to separate as strands of smoke or the words from a coyote’s howl.

“What are you going to do?” said Michelle.

Du Pré just looked at her.

“I maybe commit harassment,” said Du Pré. “I’m very ugly in the face, you know, so when I hang it in front of someone else’s, it is maybe more than just impolite.”

Bart roared with laughter.

Michelle sank back in the seat. After a while, she laughed, too.

“You aren’t carrying any gun, are you?” she said suddenly.

Du Pré shook his head. “It is against the law here,” he said. “I got a pocketknife my papa made.” Du Pré slid the little knife with the blade set in a brass fitting that you unscrewed from the handle and turned around so the blade was out and screwed it back in. The brass came off an old gasoline stove, the steel from a saw blade, and the handle was a hollow tube of Osage orange, the magnificent bow wood that the Plains Indians used. A recurved bow made of this tough wood could send an arrow through a buffalo’s chest and clear out the other side.

Michelle looked out the window.

Bart put his arm around her shoulders.

Du Pré wished to Christ they’d get wherever, because he could use a smoke. God meant me to fly, He’d have given me a rocket up my ass. I
hate
this twentieth century, bah.

The limousine stopped in front of a dimly lit restaurant in the old part of the downtown.

“Smoke now,” said Michelle. “This place has gone granola on us.”

She lit up. Du Pré rolled a smoke and hit it.

“My vices,” said Michelle, “are all that separate me from beasts.”

Du Pré laughed. They smoked, finished, stepped on the butts.

They went in. It was a place that Du Pré liked, shabby, worn decor that had once been pretty elaborate, a spanking stainless-steel kitchen smack in the middle of the room. The tables were black Formica, and the waiters spread worn, starched tablecloths over them as they seated the customers.

It smelled wonderful.

They ate oysters and crayfish, lobster and cod, peppery coleslaw, and drank lots of iced tea.

“Oh damn,” said Du Pré, leaning back, “this is the first thing I have liked about this Washington, D.C.”

“I don’t know if I could stand all the quiet out there,” said Michelle.

“It’s actually kinda noisy,” said Bart, “just different noises. Not so many bodies hitting the pavement, splat. Automatic gunfire, no.”

Bullshit, no automatic-weapons fire, Du Pré thought. I know there is a guy has a P-51 Mustang fighter plane everything works on, including the 20mm cannon. Don’t know who he is. Course, schoolkids there don’t own machine guns like here. Hmmm. Well, some of them do, but they don’t
use
them.

They left. The limousine dropped them in front of the big, expensive hotel that Bart was staying at. Du Pré had a room across the hall.

Late that night, Du Pré slipped out, walked casually through the lobby, nodded at the doorman. He had his old leather suitcase and his old denim jacket over his arm. He walked a mile before he got a cab. He let the cabbie take him to a cheap hotel. He rented a room, listened to the drunk on the crying jag through the thin wall.

The next day, he bought a cheap light blue suit and a silly fedora.

I hate to shave off my mustache, Du Pré thought.

He shaved it off and walked outside.

The wind tickled his upper lip.

D
U
P
RÉ WALKED INTO THE
big, gawky building, and he studied the directory until he found Chase’s name. The guard directed him down a long corridor.

I am a simple man, Du Pré thought, opening the door to Chase’s office, so I will just do a simple thing.

The office was opulent, refurbished with Chase’s money, no doubt. An elegant young woman sat at an antique desk. She looked up slowly and smiled.

“May I help you?” she said.

“Paul Chase,” said Du Pré.

“He is in a conference at the moment,” she said. “And you are…?”

“I am in a hurry at the moment,” said Du Pré. He went past her quickly and opened the door wide. Chase wasn’t behind his desk. Du Pré stepped inside, hearing the secretary moving behind him.

Chase was on a couch near the wall, screwing one of the women from the summer’s expedition.

“Hey, Chase,” said Du Pré, “I got something for you. Didn’t bring my fiddle, you know.”

Du Pré slid the little sculpture of the rising wolf from his pants pocket.

The woman was frantically putting on her clothes.

Chase was thunderstruck, mouth open.

“You see him here?” said Du Pré, advancing. “You see this little sculpture? Means something, yes, Chase?”

Chase slumped momentarily.

The woman ran out the door, buttoning.

The secretary was screaming into her telephone.

Chase had a seizure. His eyes rolled back in his head, his tongue wriggled wildly out of his mouth, his arms and legs jerked.

Du Pré walked out, through the anteroom, opened the door, saw a men’s room door across the hall, and went into it. Feet pounded down the hallway, a long run. As soon as they went into the office and were silenced by the thick carpeting, Du Pré stepped back out, jacket over his arm, and went swiftly out a side entrance. The fall air here was crisp and the leaves on the maples yellow and red.

At the hotel, he changed back into his Levi’s and boots and left the cheap suit and shoes on the bed.

“What the fuck happened to you?” said Bart, a little angry, when Du Pré came in the door of the hotel suite.

“I…” Du Pré said, feeling his naked upper lip, “I got drunk. I shave off my mustache. I got this nice tattoo…”

Bart shook his head.

Du Pré called room service and ordered some cheese and a double bourbon, a few crackers.

He went to a little ice cream table with filigree chairs by the bay window and sat there. The bellboy brought a tray, set it down. Bart handed the youngster a bill and the bellboy left.

Du Pré sat, nibbling and sipping.

“You know, Bart,” said Du Pré, “I didn’t need to shave off my mustache. I was too hasty there.”

I didn’t know it would be so simple. Now I got to take shit for it till it grows back out. But my beard, it grows like I use chicken shit for soap. That is my French blood there.

The telephone rang. Bart picked it up and got an earful. He was holding the receiver a good two feet from him. Once in a while, he winced.

“It’s for you,” Bart said sweetly when whoever was on the other end paused for breath.

Du Pré took it. “Hello, Michelle,” he said.

“What the fuck did you do?” she yelled. “You bastard. I had people who were supposed to be watching you!”

“Well, yeah,” said Du Pré, “but I am a shy man and I don’t like to be stared at, you know.”

“The paramedics hauled Chase off in straps,” she said. “What the fuck did you
do
?”

“I don’t think he likes me,” said Du Pré. “When he figured out who I was, his eyes rolled up in his head. He foamed.”

“Christ,” said Michelle Leuci, sounding more like a detective. “I’m sorry.”

“It is okay,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” she said, “don’t do that again. Next time, stay where we can see you.”

“I will go back to Montana now,” said Du Pré.

“What?”

“I am going home,” said Du Pré. “It isn’t Chase. He was biting his tongue and blood was shooting out of his mouth. It isn’t him.”

Detective Leuci was silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Du Pré.

“He was taken to a private hospital in Virginia,” said Michelle.

As long as he was there, nothing would happen, Du Pré thought. Poor Chase, used like a coyote uses a bush. “This guy, I wonder if I have ever seen him. I know that he has seen me.”

“What do you mean he has seen you?” said Michelle.

Du Pré had been talking to himself, the mark of people who work alone.

“I have to think some,” he said, “and I can’t think in cities.”

“Nobody can think in cities—just look at the fucking newspaper,” said Michelle.

“So I will go home. What I meant was, Benetsee said this evil man would come after me, and I was just wondering if I have ever seen him. Then I thought he must have seen me.”

“Why?”

“He was at the festival and I was playing,” said Du Pré, “so he has seen me. I don’t know him, but he knows me.”

“Okay,” said Michelle.

“I am pretty blind here,” said Du Pré, “like you don’t see what there is to see there.”

“There?” said Michelle. “There’s nothing there but a long view.”

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

She laughed. “Well,” she said, “it’s a jumble, for sure.”

Du Pré handed the phone back to Bart. He went back to his seat by the window. He looked out at the city street. Panhandlers worked the crowds, who lurched away from them like minnows shying from a turtle. A couple homeless folks, shapeless masses of layered rags, slept off their drunks in the day’s dying heat. Papers and plastic cups danced in the breeze. The air felt used.

An ambulance screeched past.

This city is not fun, thought Du Pré. Life could be very terrible here.

He sipped his bourbon. He ate some cheese.

Down below, two cops hauled a ragged, screeching woman toward a car. They held her as far away from them as they could.

Du Pré could hear her screaming, even up this high.

“Michelle said you were planning on going back,” said Bart.

Du Pré nodded.

“I’ll go, too,” said Bart.

“I was going to take the train,” said Du Pré.

“Oh bullshit,” said Bart. “We can be home in a few hours.”

“That’s your home, isn’t it, now?” said Du Pré. He had a sip of bourbon.

Bart scratched his chin.

“Okay,” said Du Pré.

“Let’s go,” said Bart. He picked up the telephone, dialed.

They were over Kentucky by dark.

When the plane landed in Billings, Bart turned his sad face to Du Pré.

“I’ve got to go back,” he said. “
She’s
there, you know.”

Du Pré nodded.

W
INTER.

Every twenty-five years or so, we get one of these, Du Pré thought. He was standing outside at high noon, in minus-forty cold, the sun pale, watching the column of smoke from his woodstove go straight up for many hundreds of feet.

Second time in my life I have seen sun dogs, Du Pré thought. The sun with its two outriders. The name is nice, sundogs, but they mean weather that kills.

Three of his cattle had died. Frozen, legs locked. They had been seeming just fine, but the black night took them. There was room with the other cattle in the loafing shed, but these chose to wander out to the farthest corner of the field and die on their feet.

Maybe by late March, they’d be thawed enough to skin.

Or maybe just get them into a truck and take them to the landfill.

The coyotes were feeding on the dead cattle a little. But the meat was frozen so hard, even they had trouble with it. Well, if this weather gives the coyotes trouble, it is bad, Du Pré thought, and I have to see if that old fart Benetsee is all right. I am sure that he is, but I have to go see.

He opened the door of his old cruiser. The metal scrawked and the hinges made a sound like fingernails on a blackboard.

Winter is always tough here, but then every once in a while you get one like this and it is an evil god.

One morning Du Pré had gone outdoors, and when he looked at a fencepost, a huge white owl had spread its wings in the pale sun. An Arctic owl, round of head, wings nearly six feet from tip to tip. Du Pré had seen them before, but not very often.

He turned the ignition key and the engine caught at once. He, like everyone else here, had a head-bolt heater plugged into the engine to keep it warm and some heat tape wrapped around the battery.

He set the heater on high and got back out; the exhaust was a needling icy stink in his nostrils. He unplugged the heater and hung the stiff extension cord on a post. He went back inside. No use in even trying to drive the car until it was good and warm. The tires would be frozen hard to the ground.

Du Pré listened to the radio. The schools were all closed. A family over by Harlowton had died when their trailer caught fire. Too many electric heaters on old wiring.

The telephone rang. Du Pré hesitated. Maybe I have already left, he thought.

He picked it up. Goddamned altar boy.

“Christ,” said Bart, sounding like he was in the other room, “it is tit
cold
out there.”

“It is that,” said Du Pré. “How is that D.C.?”

“Well, about zero,” said Bart. “But it’s that wet cold goes right through you.”

Du Pré thought about the ragged people sleeping outside in their little houses of cheap wine. Jesus.

“I will be out when this breaks,” said Bart. “I’m afraid the jet would swoop in for a landing and the wings would break off.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré.

“Michelle wanted me to call you and tell you that Chase is still in that hospital. Looks like hell, lost a lot of weight. She doesn’t want to call herself. Some sort of political bullshit in the department. So she can say, no, she isn’t talking to that asshole out in Montana. And the investigation of the three murders is stalled. But at least we are not asking for help from outsiders. We can fuck this up and do nothing right here in the DCPD.”

“Yeah, well,” said Du Pré, “like I said I don’t think the guy will move till he has Chase to screen him.”

“Cold bastard.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. Well, stab, club, strangle are not hobbies for your warmhearted people.

“How’s …” said Bart, launching into a list of inquiries on the health and well-being of everyone he knew in Montana. He was obviously very lonely. What life he had ever had was here and he was in love with a city girl.

Du Pré hoped it wouldn’t tear him up too much.

“Look,” said Du Pré, “I am going to check out old Benetsee, so why don’t I maybe call you tonight, after I see him. Also, Maria, she asks after you.”