Specimen Song (16 page)

He carefully got the car back up on the road. The outer tires had begun to knock the lightly packed sand down. Over another foot and he’d have to hitchhike.

Another truck came thundering out of the lightening mist. This driver got as far over on his side as he could. There was plenty of room.

Du Pré wondered if the first guy had eaten too many pocket rockets. Maybe he was just an asshole.

Du Pré was starting up a longish, smooth grade when the top of his fuel pump blew off. The gasoline in the engine compartment flamed up and rubber burned. Du Pré stopped the engine and the car, then grabbed his fire extinguisher and popped the hood open. He had to use a stick to lift the hood. The fire burned low by then, and a shot from the extinguisher put it out.

There, Du Pré thought. Ass fucking end of nowhere in Quebec, where the Indians hate me, the English hate me, and the French think I am a mix of both of the ones
they
hate.

The fire was out. Du Pré stood in the stink, wondering how he’d get to Lucky’s village.

He heard a big truck coming from behind him, the orange one. Du Pré cursed and ran for cover.

The truck slowed.

It stopped.

The driver climbed down from the cab.

“Bad,” said the man, a stocky French-Canadian with a pockmarked face and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip

“Could I hitch a ride?” said Du Pré. “Take me just a minute to get what I need.”

“We just take the whole thing,” said the driver. He clambered up on the trailer and switched on the hydraulic self-loader. He twiddled some levers and the huge steel jaws spread and the boom swung and he grabbed Du Pré’s car around the middle, diddled a moment till the tops of the jaws found the frame, and lifted the cruiser up and set it on the trailer.

“Nice paint job there,” said the driver. “I was afraid I would maybe scratch it.”

Du Pré helped set the chains and boomers.

“How far are you going?” said Du Pré. “End of the fucking road,” said the driver. “If you had looked some English, I would have left you there.” They smoked and didn’t talk.

Y
EAH,” SAID LUCKY,
“I tried to call you, but your Madelaine, she said that you had already gone. Good that you are here. I need some help to finish this last canoe.”

He was helping Du Pré set up a tent. The village was poor and the shacks were crowded.

Far off in the woods, someone was playing a flute.

Grave children watched them put up the tent.

Du Pré felt at home.

It was like this around the fur posts, he thought. God, people must have been poor back then. We can’t imagine.

Eloise, Lucky’s wife, brought them coffee, hot and thick with sugar. She laughed.

Lucky looked at her.

“I am just happy,” she said.

“She’s like that,” said Lucky.

Du Pré pounded in a stake.

He ate with them that night, some good white fish and vegetables, homemade bread and preserves. He rolled a smoke.

Lucky took Du Pré’s pouch and made himself a cigarette.

“We got the same people we had last time ’cept for Françoise, who is going to have this baby.”

Du Pré nodded. Women did that.

“Also this Bart,” said Lucky, “he called and said he would be here in a week or ten days.”

“Good,” said Du Pré.

“It’s such a bad thing Hydro-Quebec wants to do,” said Lucky. “The young people have worked hard to set up their little communities, ban drugs and alcohol, go back to the old ways that were good and use the new ones that are good. Now these dams could destroy that all.”

“The mercury will kill off Hudson Bay,” said Eloise. She had lost the hesitant bad grammar of the poor Indian. Du Pré could hear much education in her voice. Poor little Indian girl, indeed.

“There’s too much brush where the water backs up,” said Lucky, “too expensive to grub out. So they flood it, and the brush chemically will fix mercury into methylmercury compounds. Very lethal, and they concentrate in the food chain. In us. You know about the stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. He remembered he’d read something. Heavy metals. Mercury was very poisonous.

“New York City needs electrical power,” said Lucky. “So they are happy to take our land and lives for it.”

“How did you meet Chase?” said Du Pré suddenly.

“Him.” Lucky laughed. “Oh, you know us Chippewa don’t allow any publication of our religious beliefs, sue you right now, but we get these people want to find out things. So we tell them a lot of shit, but they can’t get any two Chippewa to tell them the same stuff, and if they say anything, we say, That’s right, and we sue.”

“Anthropologists,” said Lucky. Same tone of voice a housewife uses with the word
cockroaches
. “When I was a kid, they came to dig up an old burial ground, so old, we didn’t know who was in it. What kind of Indians, you know. We think we have been here forever, but our history is brief, if not short. Not much to write in it, you know. My committee at Brown was even half-hoping I’d tell them true Chippewa religious tales.”

Okay, Du Pré thought, Brown is one of the places Maria is thinking of going. Backwoods canoe builder. Sure.

“These anthros dug it up. End of the season, they had a party. All of them wore a human vertebra on a ribbon in their lapel or pinned to their dresses. Disgusting. So they left. So we dug up all the bones and moved them. Buried them simply out of sight.”

“They came back and had a fit,” said Eloise, “but no one knew anything. We didn’t know if they were Mishtawayawiniwak or not, but they deserved to sleep.”

“What’s Mishtawa …um?” said Du Pré.

“Canadian Chippewa, Cree, Ojibwa,” said Lucky. “Our American cousins get pissed off, think we look at them as second-class.”

“So we are going down the Rivière de la Baleine,” said Lucky. “Brave Indians going up against powerful interests. Actually, Hydro-Quebec is so scared, they have tried to buy us off. They don’t want us asking why screw up the River of the Whale? Very bad publicity.”

“Asking it sadly from bark canoes,” said Eloise. “In good sound bites.”

Du Pré howled with laughter.

“You remember when Chase rejoined the expedition for the last mile?” said Lucky. “And we didn’t do anything?”

“Not much, anyway,” said Eloise.

“We got a couple of reporters really curious,” said Lucky.

“We talk to them once in a while.”

“They smell a story,” said Lucky.

“We only waved it under their noses a little,” said Eloise.

“And Bart has helped a lot,” said Lucky.

Oh, Du Pré thought, so he is not sitting half-dead with love all of the time. Good.

“He owns some TV stations,” said Eloise.

No fucking doubt, thought Du Pré. He has been sober now for a few years and I bet he is just finding out what all he owns. Michelle says, yes, he will own heaven, too.

Which he deserves.

“That Bart, he is something,” said Du Pré.

“Come on,” said Lucky, “I will show you these canoes. They got left out by mistake and the porcupines chewed them so bad I had to build new ones.”

Lucky led Du Pré to a huge wall tent set on a puncheon floor, up on pilings. He fiddled with the tent ties and went inside. Du Pré waited until a gasoline lantern flared. He stepped in. The two big freighters were up on forms, struts and braces pinned and partly lashed. Long coils of braided spruce roots hung from the side poles. Birch bark was stacked cup-down at the far end.

Toolboxes filled with carefully organized shaves and chisels and drawknives. Expensive tools, all with beechwood handles and precise bright grindings on the cutting edges—well-used and well-kept.

“We got about three weeks, and this lacing and steaming the bark takes time,” said Lucky. “I could sure use some help.”

“You know these murders?” said Du Pré.

Lucky nodded.

“The police think it is Chase. I don’t think so. I think that it is someone uses Chase, only strikes when Chase is around.”

Lucky looked at Du Pré. He seemed very sad.

“He may come after me,” said Du Pré.

I hope he does anyway.

“Well,” said Lucky, “don’t worry about here. We know everything. Who said he would come after you?”

“Old man I know sees things,” said Du Pré. “He’s never been wrong.”

“I would like to meet him,” said Lucky.

Du Pré nodded. Me, I would just like to know where the old bastard is.

Lucky turned down the lantern and they left as the light died.

Du Pré slept deep.

He dreamed of owls and fire, black waters and endless ice, great bears and white wolves, piles of soft furs.

Some fiddle music.

A mountain with a hole in it, like the eyesocket of a skull, something moving back in the mountain, a flash of black eyes in black.

D
U
P
RÉ SPENT HIS DAYS
in the pale light and cedar smoke, helping Lucky pitch and fit and lace the canoe skins together. The village pulsed around them. Children stuck their heads under the tent wall to stare solemnly, flitting away like chipmunks at any glance from Du Pré. Lucky could look at them directly, but Du Pré was alien and alarming.

They worked well together, so well that they could ask questions of one another merely by holding up a piece. The other would look at it and nod, or perhaps walk over and point at some confusion.

They ate fish and drank clear water tart with cedar. No alcohol was allowed in the village, but sometimes a drunk would come back from his sad journey to a roadhouse, reeking and eventually ashamed. The people said nothing to the offender. They didn’t have to.

Lucky showed Du Pré how to carve the breaker rolls from birch logs, to fit under the scalloped stern. He wouldn’t say where he had come upon this design. Du Pré thought it might lessen drag. It might not, too. He didn’t know. The freighters were big and clumsy and it was likely enough the breaker rolls were merely cosmetic, but if Lucky’s ancestors used them, well, that was a pretty good reason.

Me, I bake my own rosin from spruce pitch from a tree on the south slope. That tree is smart enough to find a spring or it couldn’t live. Same way to look for music.

Du Pré liked the fish. The Chippewa were a fishing and trapping culture. They needed vast lands and good waters. He liked the people. They walked pigeon-toed. Some unfortunates were crippled by hip dysplasia. They lived in another time.

Rain. It began as a patter of sleet and little pellets of ice, then rain. Du Pré lay curled in his sleeping bag, the hypnotic sound of the drops on the cloth lulling and gentle.

He woke. He had heard something.

Light danced through the wall of the tent.

The canoe shop was on fire.

Du Pré struggled into his pants and pulled on his pants and he ran out, shirtless. The cold rain stung his skin.

Flames boiled twenty feet in the air for just a moment, then fell, and the tent cloth was gone. The canoes burned brightly for a while, shed slabs of burning bark, the struts weakened and the canoes fell flaming into the burning floor.

Nothing to do.

Du Pré tried to remember the sound, a whoosh or a whump.

Someone had poured gasoline in there. The fire went up too fast for anything else.

He went back to his tent and got dressed, put on his jacket and hat. He took a good flashlight and started casting about beyond the circle of footprints made by the people who had come to watch helplessly.

“The bastards,” said Lucky, “those rotten sons of bitches.” He sounded plenty Anglo-Saxon when he was mad.

Du Pré didn’t wait to find out who Lucky thought had done it. He moved off into the trees on a trail, stabbing the beam at the bushes to see if anyone had moved through them. He found where a man had come through the brush to the trail and moved off toward the big lake to the east. Du Pré followed the footprints. The man wasn’t running, just striding purposefully down to the water. The rain had masked the boat’s engine. There would have to have been a plane over there somewhere out of sight, and now it was above these leaking clouds, heading back.

Somebody with a lot of money didn’t want this trip to happen. Du Pré wondered if the Hydro-Quebec people could be such fools. Or had their dealings with the quiet and seemingly despairing Indians given them blinders of contempt?

Lucky and Eloise would go down that damn river on logs and Du Pré on an inner tube if they had to.

Nothing to be done right now, Du Pré thought. I don’t got a plane in my backpack, and anyway, I hate to fly.

Lucky and Eloise were smiling, happy, whistling when Du Pré got back. They couldn’t have been more joyful.

“We are getting to them,” said Lucky. “We are getting to them real good, you bet.”

Du Pré squatted on his wet heels. He felt the cold on his ass. He wiped his hands on his shirt, got out his makings, and rolled a cigarette.

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “So I guess you had made these canoes to be burned, yes? And you got others?”

Lucky grinned.

“You sure it was them?” said Du Pré.

Lucky’s face got hard and then bewildered.

“Who the fuck else would it be?” he said.

“Chase,” said Du Pré, “maybe. Maybe someone you haven’t thought of.”

Lucky looked down, lost.

“You got people, you got politics,” said Du Pré. “What are your Chippewa politics?”

“We got some traitors want to sell this place, all of our land,” said Lucky, “but they don’t live here. They are apples—red out, white in—but I don’t think they would do it now. Wait till later. This maybe jacks up the price, you know.”

Du Pré nodded.

“The canoes are hidden a few miles downriver from where we take off,” said Lucky, “hidden well. Hervé and Guillaume are there and they are armed and very good in the woods. They seem to be fishing, drying fish, anybody sees them. All winter, they were there trapping. We fly to where the canoes are, you see. We won’t be stopped.”

Du Pré sighed. He thought he should have been told, then he thought it didn’t matter. Or was he here because of Bart and Bart’s power?

Hmm, Du Pré thought, am I being used or being spared?