Specimen Song (23 page)

“The Mounties are checking up on his movements,” said Michelle.

“Big shit,” said Du Pré. “They are going to run into a lot of Indian time, what they run into. They ask their questions and no one remembers. When he came back here, I bet he drove, he come across the border with some other folks. He…”

They were passing a new building going up. The steel girders were partly assembled. The building wasn’t too tall yet. A couple of men lounged far up enough to kill them if they fell, casually as people lean against walls.

“Shit,” said Du Pré.

“What?” said Michelle.

“Nothing,” said Du Pré.

“Look,” said Michelle, “just sign the complaint, please. Humor me. At least if we find him, we can hold him on that.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré.

“Have Bart bring you downtown,” she said.

“I go and sign the complaint, I guess.” said Du Pré.

“Now what?” asked Bart.

“I changed my mind,” said Du Pré.

“Bullshit,” said Bart. “Something changed it for you.”

Du Pré sat silent.

“Okay,” said Bart, “we go down and play scritchy-scritch on the little piece of paper. While my bullshit detector melts down.
Why did you go and change your mind?
”

They parked by the big building that held Michelle’s office and went in. They found her talking quickly into her phone.

“Well,” she said, to the phone, “I don’t know where he might cross or if he will…I know that…I know that, too. Just hold him. We want to talk to him.”

She hung up.

“You asshole,” she said pleasantly, smiling at Du Pré.

“I will sign your form,” he said.

“Shit.” Michelle sighed. She took Du Pré by the arm and down a couple long halls and into a courtroom. A judge was waiting. Du Pré signed a complaint.

“Will he be available to testify, Detective Leuci?” the judge said offhandedly.

“If I have to bring him in a sack,” said Michelle sweetly.

They walked back out.

“What have you got on your tiny little mind?” she said, hurrying Du Pré back down the hall to her office.

“Couple hundred stitches,” said Du Pré.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” said Detective Leuci.

“You aren’t going to catch him,” said Du Pré. “You going to try to get the Canadians give him back, when I can’t even say for sure it was him who cut me?”

“Motherfucker,” said Michelle.

“I can’t say,” said Du Pré.

“Shit,” said Detective Leuci.

Bart was waiting out in the hallway.

They walked up to him.

“Gabriel,” said Michelle tiredly, “what are you going to do now?”

“Go see my daughter maybe,” said Du Pré. “Get my fiddle first.”

“I picked up your fiddle at the hospital,” said Bart. “They brought it in the ambulance.”

“Then I will go and see my daughter,” said Du Pré.

“Don’t do this,” said Michelle.

“What?” said Du Pré.

“Just don’t,” said Detective Leuci. She bit her lip and went into her office.

Y
OU WERE RIGHT ABOUT
Gianni and Catfoot.” said Bart, looking at the card in his hand. It was the card the woman reporter had given Du Pré in the little Inuit village on Hudson Bay after he and Bart and the Quebec Indians had come down the Rivière de la Baleine.

“I think you find out that Lucky isn’t Chippewa and that he came and went from the village,” said Du Pré. “They will cover for him, but they are not very good at it. I don’t drink that they talk to the Mounties, though.”

Two percent of Canadians are Indian, one-quarter of prison inmates are, too. So the Indians don’t like the Mounties much.

“How’s Maria doing?” said Bart. He looked a little shamefaced. He had been so besotted by Michelle Leuci that he had been thinking of little else.

And I don’t blame him one bit, Du Pré thought. He has had very little love in his life and is trying to do right by it. He remembered Bart’s bloated, sick face, and Bart three-quarters dead from booze. But Bart was struggling and he had faith in the possibility of love in the world. Which took a great deal of courage, come to think of it.

“She is fine,” said Du Pré. “Little Métis girl from Montana, where the schools are not much good, trying to go to a tough eastern university. But she will just work till she gets it. She is tougher than either you or me, I think.”

“That would not take very much,” said Bart, “as we are nothing but a couple of middle-aged marshmallows.”

Du Pré nodded. Fair enough.

“But you are really going to go and hunt Lucky,” said Bart. “You know Michelle will bust you if you kill him. She’ll bust you if you
threaten
him.”

“It will be out of her jurisdiction,” said Du Pré, “but I have to find him first.”

“You won’t tell me where you are going to look?”

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

Bart let it drop. Du Pré was lying, sort of. He didn’t know where he was going yet, but he’d decide soon enough—as soon as Bart was off to find that woman reporter and go back to the village and hound Eloise and Françoise and Hervé and Guillaume. Bart would not be good at it, but that woman, Sulin Bickhoff, would be very good at it. Strange name. So, for that matter, was Gabriel. Du Pré wondered if Bart’s family owned her newspaper. Probably. They seemed to own just about everything.

If Bart and this Sulin Bickhoff found out what Du Pré thought they would, then Michelle would have something better to work with than she had now.

Du Pré’s forehead itched. He would not be blending into any crowds for a while. Probably have a narrow white scar across his browned forehead.

I can’t even kill the fucker, Du Pré thought angrily. I got to goose him till he screws up, and he is plenty smart for sure.

Du Pré called Maria. She was in her room at the boardinghouse near the school, working hard.

“You be ready in the fall,” said Du Pré. “You worry too much.”

“I know,” said Maria. “I know I worry too much and that I will be ready in the fall. But…this is some different place, Papa.”

“I got to ask you a favor,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Maria. She would hear him out at least.

“I need for you to go someplace safe where no one knows you are except Madelaine until I call her to call you. This guy, killing these Indians down here in D.C.? I have found him and he ran. I don’t know he even knows about you, but you do me this favor, huh? Just go hide till Madelaine calls you?”

Maria didn’t say anything for a while.

“Okay,” she said. “I will tell you what, I will take some books that I have to read and my computer, I will go someplace—I am not even going to tell you where— and then I will wait. But you got to call Madelaine to call me so I know that you are all right.”

“Sure,” said Du Pré, not knowing where he was going or if there were telephones there. Or if Lucky would get him, too.

“Where are you going, Papa?” said Maria. “You got to tell me so I can worry about some
place
.”

Shit, Du Pré thought, now she will come after me. Maria, she don’t have any fear bones.

“Maria,” said Du Pré, “I know how this song ends. Now you going to go and come with me, I guess.”

“Papa,” said Maria, “you are so smart, I am more proud of you every day.”

Why, Du Pré wondered for the ten thousandth time, don’t I keep my big fucking mouth shut and not think for my daughter, who will not have it? She would not have it when she was two and she will not have it now.

“I will drive up and get you,” said Du Pré.

“I will be ready,” said Maria. “Do I need a gun?”

“Christ, no!” said Du Pré. “They are illegal everywhere here, you know.”

“What,” said Maria, “has that got to do with anything?”

“Where you get a gun, anyway?” asked Du Pré.

“I brought two with me. There are these drug people and burglars and rapists here, you know. I don’t like that shit.”

Du Pré was speechless. I send my little girl off to get ready for college, she is ready to kill. Where did she learn this? Me. Montana. Your Honor, that asshole needed killing. Case dismissed.

“What kind of fucking guns do you have, anyway?” asked Du Pré.

“I got a nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer and a Colt Python,” said Maria.

“You ever shoot them?”

“Sure,” said Maria. “I can do a four-inch group at fifty feet with the nine-millimeter. The Python is a little sloppier, but it fits in my backpack, on the side pocket there where it is easy to hand.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré, “I will come and get you.”

“Yes, Papa,” said Maria.

Du Pré hung up. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, Bart’s hand was in front of them with the keys to the Rover dangling from his fingers.

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Bart, “but I just want you to know that I am extremely glad you have an adult along with you. I would worry otherwise, but now I will not. I can’t afford to have heard anything, because I would have to tell Michelle, who would go completely batshit. Now, would you please get out of my sight, and do you have enough money?”

“Yes and I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

Bart went to the kitchen and came back with a wad of hundreds.

“Have you thought of family counseling?” he said, eyes wide.

Du Pré took the money, the keys, his fiddle, then he walked out the door. He got in the Rover and headed north.

He didn’t get to Massachusetts till dawn, and it took him a while to find where in Northampton it was that Maria lived.

He pulled over to the curb and got out.

Maria came striding out the front door of the huge old house. She had a backpack and a carryall. She kissed Du Pré on the cheek. He put her luggage in the back.

“You know where them Mohawks live?” said Du Pré.

Maria pointed north and Du Pré started the Rover.

T
HEY WENT ROUND THE
southern end of Lake Champlain and then turned north on a freeway. Du Pré was drinking lousy thin coffee from a Styrofoam cup and steering, and what he most wanted to do was pull off and rip the bandage away and scratch his itching forehead.

I got the good healing flesh, Du Pré thought. I can take these damn stitches out pretty soon.

“You maybe ought to change that bandage, Papa,” said Maria. “We get you one, fluorescent green like that dragline of Bart’s.”

Goddamn kid.

“So you will tell me maybe where we are going?”

“Up next to Canada, ” said Du Pré. “I am thinking this Lucky isn’t Chippewa; I think about how he does things. So then I think maybe he is Mohawk.”

“Mohawk?” said Maria. “Why them?”

“Lot of them are ironworkers,” said Du Pré. “They run around long way off the ground on steel beams, no safety lines, move like cats.”

All the other Quebec Indians had moved like woods people, careful not to make noise. But Lucky moved for balance. Lucky grabbed the ground with his feet. Lucky pulled it up to him.

Or maybe I am full of shit, too.

“How you gonna look for him, that flag on your head?” said Maria.

Good question.

“You got a picture of him?” she said.

“In the glove box,” said Du Pré. The photos Bart had taken of the crew were there, taken right after they had pulled the canoes out at the bay.

Maria riffled through them.

“It’s this guy standing next to you and then here’s another of him speaking into a microphone. He’s kind of cute,” said Maria.

“Christ,” said Du Pré.

“You aren’t laughing enough, Papa,” said Maria.

Du Pré didn’t feel like laughing. His head itched.

“So I will be a real pain in the ass till you laugh.”

Du Pré laughed at that.

“I don’t really know,” said Du Pré, “I think he would have left D.C. right away. I am thinking the Mohawks because they are right next to Canada there and it is so easy to go across the border.”

“Okay, Papa,” said Maria.

“If we got to go across the border, you leave them damn guns somewhere,” said Du Pré. “Them Canadians don’t like people have pistols.”

“I know, Papa,” said Maria. “They don’t shoot each other much. We got more murders each year in Omaha than they do in all their whole country. I wonder why Americans shoot each other so much.”

“Television,” said Du Pré.

“Television?”

“Every time I watch television, it is so damn dumb, I want to go out and shoot somebody,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Maria, “you are better now.”

They drove for a couple of hours, then pulled off to have lunch. Du Pré studied the map while waiting for his cheeseburger.

“Little dinky states back here,” he said. “We got ranches bigger than Vermont.”

“It’s so pretty there, Papa,” said Maria. “People have been there a long time, pretty little churches and towns. Makes me think Montana is so new.”

Also very old, Du Pré drought. People hunting buffalo there a long time before them pyramids were built, I wonder when Benetsee was born? Long time gone.

They drove on. They had left the interstate and wound along a good two-lane blacktop road, coming to little towns every fifteen miles or so. There were orchards in heavy leaf; the land was rich from rain.

Du Pré found a motel about forty miles from the Mohawk reservation. He rented two rooms for two days. The woman behind the desk gave him the keys and a packet of tourist information. She recommended a little inn just up the road, very good food, though somewhat pricey.

Du Pré had left all of his spare clothing at Bart’s. He gave some money to Maria and sent her off to buy some spare things, took a shower, and went to sleep. When he woke up it was getting on dark. There was a big paper sack on the suitcase stand.

The clothes had been washed and carefully folded. Du Pré got dressed, pulled on his boots, threaded his belt through the loops on the tan jeans. He put his wallet and keys in his pocket. He knocked on the door connecting the two rooms.

“You up, Papa?” said Maria. “Everything fit?”

“Yes,” said Du Pré. He opened the door.

Maria was at the little desk in her room, studying. With a 9mm pistol holding down her notes.

“Where did you get that gun?” asked Du Pré, curious.

“Bought it,” said Maria, “if it make you feel better.”