Specimen Song (20 page)

Du Pré nodded.

“That Potato Dick best on the second day, it is having some give to it a little, second day is the best, third day it is not smelling so good and out it goes, I got to carve another one.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “I find this bastard I stay here in Montana for a long time. “

“You don’t
belong
any other place,” said Madelaine. “I worry about you, you come back you got a bad look in your eye.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Madelaine. “I love you but you are an asshole.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré.

“Go on now,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré got back in the Rover. The rear of it was stacked with Maria’s luggage. A lot of her other stuff had already been shipped by parcel carrier.

He turned the Rover around and drove off toward the county road, which would take them north and west so Maria could catch the train in Malta. The southern train through Billings had been shoved off the tracks, long time ago, real stupid thing to do.

“I will miss you, Jacqueline, everybody a lot,” said Maria, “I will miss this. I will get very homesick. Real different place, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré.

“It is very nice of that Bart do this for me,” said Maria. “I won’t let him down.”

“He wanted to do too much for you,” said Du Pré. “But this is good. Now when you get there, you please remember who you are, who your people are now.”

“Yes, Papa,” said Maria.

“Us Métis we here before anybody,” said Du Pré, “long time before that Champlain. We come here a long time gone,” said Du Pré, “to be free. We are here before that Champlain, before them Vikings, too, probably, long time before that Columbus.”

“Why?” asked Maria.

“Get away them tax people, them priests,” said Du Pré. “They always come along, though.”

They rounded the western edge of the Wolf Mountains and looked out on the high rolling plains, big and tough and open. The highway went on straight to the west, miles ahead, they would crest a long grade and see another rising and the horizon twenty miles away.

Red cedars in the draws and clinging to the rocks, cattle grazing, the quick flash of white from the rumps of antelope headed for safety. Buzzards circled over north, lowering down on a dead animal out of sight in the folded land.

“I got to go,” said Maria, “but I know I will sometimes be on my bed back there crying. It is different, huh? Everything close together and a lot of people.”

“Oh, yes,” said Du Pré. “Every breath of air been used five, six times before you get it.”

“Oh, Papa.”

“Pretty dangerous, too, you be careful where you go. It is not like here, someone watching you all the time.”

“I
like
that,” said Maria. “You know here I get in trouble because I am standing next to a guy drinking beer, I got to go talk to that puke Bucky Dassault, there.”

“Well,” said Du Pré, “not any fun but you don’t do it again.”

“I don’t get
caught
again?” said Maria.

I cannot ask no more, Du Pré thought, my beautiful young daughter here is going off to that fancy school and she will come back to visit sure enough but I won’t see her again. This is pretty bad, I got a lump in my throat like the one the day I drop her off at her first kindergarten school.

She run home from that. I ask her, you scared, she say, no, I am some
bored
. She already knew how to read. I take her back she bite that little Gary Klein so they have to send her home. I give up, send her to the first grade. The next year.

I am all my life being a father cutting deals with my daughters. They always win. I am glad they like me all right, they didn’t I would be long
dead
.

My wife died such a long time ago, but I can see her in their faces and I had my great luck, Madelaine.

I don’t understand any of my women.

They passed several cattle herds being moved down the verge of the road, to new pastures. The cowboys waved and the heeler dogs scuttled round, nipping at the hooves of the laggards, barking and jumping.

One of them gave Du Pré and Maria the finger.

“Why he do that, Papa?” asked Maria.

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “it is this dumb silly Rover that Bart bought for me, it looks like a car those flatlanders with a lot of money buy, move here, screw everything up. We lucky he don’t shoot at us.”

“All changing,” said Maria.

“Always does,” said Du Pré.

“I wonder what will be left when I come back,” said Maria.

“Land, it always stays the same,” said Du Pré. “Not much that we can do about it, bad as we get. But the people on it and their hearts, they change a lot, this is a bad time, now.”

They drove a while, silent. Magpies lifted up from the carcasses of squashed rabbits and then settled when the Rover passed. Once a huge porcupine stopped them dead in the road, the ancient animal waddling across the asphalt. He was headed for the trees down by a little pond below the road grade.

They passed through a cut in the yellow-gray limestone, the bed of the sea which had run from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean so long ago, and now was mountains, some rising even beneath the plains.

There was a flat pan of sagebrush and scrubgrass ahead. The road ran straight as a taut string.

There were four animals on the right side of the road, each about a hundred yards apart from the others. One two three four.

Coyotes.

“Damn,” said Maria, “I have never seen that in the daylight for sure!”

Du Pré slowed. They passed the first coyote and as soon as they did the animal turned and trotted out of sight. So did the next three.

“Benetsee, “said Du Pré, “I think he say so long to you.”

“Ah,” said Maria. “But I will be back.”

He knows more than you, my child, thought Du Pré, you will visit but you will never return.

They got to the train station a couple hours later. The train was on time and Du Pré loaded Maria up and he kissed her and it pulled away, Maria waving till Du Pré couldn’t see her any more.

He drove back home.

He stopped in Cooper and bought Madelaine three big very long potatoes.

T
HE PHONE RANG AT
Bart’s house. Du Pré knew. He swore and picked it up.

“He was strangled,” said Michelle. “Guy named David Ross, a linguist. Specialized in the dialects of Cree and Chippewa, and he was working on some rare dialect when this happened.”

“Where did it happen?” asked Du Pré. He remembered the smell of the halls in the Smithsonian.

“In the parking garage under Ross’s apartment,” said Michelle. “At about two
A.M
. We think that the killer was waiting for him. He was found about six by another tenant. Lying right by his car. The keys were on the floor nearby.”

“Why do you think he was waiting?”

“There’s a good place nearby,” said Michelle. “The door is electronic and quick. Good lighting. No place outside to hide near enough to dash in in time.”

“I am coining to that music festival,” said Du Pré.

“I thought you would,” said Detective Leuci. “Remember how strict our gun laws are. Also remember that D.C. isn’t fucking Tombstone.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré.

“If you can find him, I’ll take care of the rest,” said Michelle.

“I am very confused,” said Du Pré, “which is a good sign.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh,” said Du Pré. “It means maybe Benetsee will help me out.” He didn’t mention anything that Benetsee had already told him.

“Well,” said Du Pré, “how is that Bart?”

“He,” said Detective Leuci, “is a sweet man.”

“You let me know anything else?” said Du Pré.

“If you will do the same,” said Michelle. She was reading him.

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “Benetsee said he saw the man who mangled that bird. He wore moccasins.”

Detective Leuci was very silent.

“I have been thinking it is not Chase,” said Du Pré. “He is too weak.”

More silence.

“So you are not telling me everything, either,” said Du Pré.

“I can’t,” said Michelle.

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “But if you don’t tell me and it puts my people here in danger, I will be very angry.”

“Call me at home after eleven my time,” said Detective Leuci.

She hung up.

Du Pré walked out to the kitchen.

“I got to go to my place a little while, look for something,” he said, “You feed your kids and I take you out, big fun, a cheeseburger and some pink wine, maybe french fries.”

“It is Friday, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. “Tonight they have some fish and the prime rib, you know.”

Du Pré had forgotten what day of the week it was.

“Okay,” he said. “You can be Catholic and have the fish and I will have the prime rib.”

“I am not that kind of Catholic,” said Madelaine. “My God don’t worry about what you eat, just what’s in your heart.” She was chopping cabbage for coleslaw.

Du Pré went out to his old car and started it and drove out to his place. He hadn’t been there in over six weeks, but it was spruce and well tended, his daughter Jacqueline and her man, Raymond, watched it. There was a light burning inside.

Jesus, Du Pré thought, even the windows have been washed.

And I need to talk to my Maria, too, I have forgot her off at that fancy college.

On Friday night, Maria would be off having some good time, Du Pré thought. I tell myself that, anyway.

He walked round back and opened up the long shed where the tools and workbench were. The doors slid open easily—that Raymond had oiled the tracks, too. The workbench was covered in dust marked with pack rat tracks.

The joists overhead were holding a bunch of slowly rotting wood crates. Du Pré couldn’t remember if they’d ever been moved since his parents had been killed by the train thirty years ago almost.

He dug round under the bench for a moment, but all he found were boxes full of little scraps of wood and cans of nails.

He went outside to the overhang and lifted a stepladder down and dragged it back in and unfolded it. The ladder was so old and the joints so weak, it was like trying to climb a staggering drunk. Du Pré caught hold of a joist and pulled himself up. He reached up and felt for the top of the box. There wasn’t one.

He hauled himself up farther and then he swung up on the joists. It was cramped against the shed roof. He started digging around in the boxes, which were dusty, an inch of dust, and crosshatched with old cobwebs.

The last box held what he was looking for. Well, it’s always the last box, yes?

Du Pré was sneezing from the dust. But he’d spotted Catfoot’s old leather-working kit, a sheet-metal box with a leather handle now completely gnawed away. He tried to haul the box back to the ladder, thought about it, and then just jimmied it till it fell through and crashed on the floor.

Dust blew up like the thing had a powder charge in it.

Du Pré swung down, held onto the joist till he leveled, and dropped the two feet to the floor. He went outside, sneezing, then back in and dragged the box out onto the ground. The air in the shed was half earth.

The fall had shaken things loose. Du Pré saw some rat-gnawed coils of old dried
babiche
, a folded half hide of reddish brown leather cracked with age, and the metal kit. He poked around in the withered scraps and couldn’t find anything like what he was looking for. The old shoes and boots and moccasins…had he given them to the church for the poor? It was so damn long ago.

I must have, he thought. I gave all the clothes to the church.

He remembered Catfoot making moccasin soles from the neck hide of bulls. Thick stuff, he cured it some way, not the
babiche
way, some other way.

There is something here.

Nothing.

Du Pré fiddled with the trunk latches Catfoot had brazed onto the sheet-metal box. He lifted the lid.

There was a pair of moccasin soles, grayish white and half an inch thick, already buck-punched off at an angle all the way around, ready to lace the uppers to.

The bottom of the box was a welter of leather-working tools, hole punches and needles and little knives and awls.

Du Pré piled all the old learner back in the box and took out the leather-working kit and then put the box in the shed and took the kit to his house. He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

He was all-over gunmetal and ocher from the dust.

He stripped and showered and found some clean clothes in his bedroom. Everything smelled a little musty and unused.

“I will drive fast and blow off the stink,” he said aloud as he got into his car, after putting the leather kit in the trunk. Madelaine was waiting, all pretty, wearing her red silk dress. They went down to the Toussaint bar and had supper. Madelaine drank some pink wine and Du Pré sipped bourbon. He was beginning to feel maybe halfway home.

W
ELL, THE LIBRARIES AROUND
here are not too good,” said Du Pré to Maria. She sounded as if she was in the next room—miracles of modern electronics.

“Okay Papa,” she said happily, “now what exactly do you need to know?”

“The moccasins your grandpapa made, they are a Plains moccasin,” said Du Pré, “and I think maybe the moccasins that the Woodland peoples make are different. I seem to remember something, but I don’t know how and why they are different.”

“Which Woodland peoples?” said Maria.

“Cree, Chippewa, Ojibwa,” said Du Pré.

“I could send these by computer,” said Maria.

“Just tell me over the telephone,” said Du Pré, “and quit your messing with your old father. I don’t like those computers. It is so no one can even use a summer name anymore.”

“What’s a summer name?” said Maria.

“It is the name a cowboy uses when he doesn’t want folks to find him,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Maria, “I will go find out. I’ll call you at Madelaine’s if you are not at home. How is Jacqueline, my nieces and nephews?”

“There are two more of each since you left,” said Du Pré.

“Papa!”

“Okay.” He hung up.

Computers. Christ.

He went outside and stared at his four horses in the pasture.