Specimen Song (24 page)

“You are not old enough to buy a gun.”

“Jacqueline is.” She smiled sunnily.

“Okay,” said Du Pré. Well, he didn’t have to worry about Maria if she was on guard. The girl would consider carefully before shooting, but she
would
shoot. Probably hit what she shot at, too. Maria didn’t like to do anything poorly.

“How many that hold?” asked Du Pré.

“Fourteen,” said Maria.

“Four-inch group?” said Du Pré.

“Yeah,” said Maria. “Nine, ten seconds. If I rush, I don’t hit so good.”

If I rush, I don’t hit so good. Well, well, well.

“Now we are here, I don’t quite know how to do this,” said Du Pré.

“He will not be expecting you,” said Maria. “Just find him and that will scare him.”

“I think I try to call Bart,” said Du Pré, “Michelle too, find out anything.”

He went outside and looked at the sun. Maybe eight o’clock.

He got Michelle on the first try, at her desk in D.C.

“Where the fuck are you?” she said. “Bart’s up in Quebec. He called earlier, but I was out. Now I can’t raise him. Some sort of atmospheric problem. I’ll try in a while.”

“Upstate New York, I guess they call it,” said Du Pré. “I wanted to see if you had any suggestions.”

Michelle was silent. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t. We don’t have any evidence against Lucky good enough to get a warrant.”

“How ’bout assaulting me?”

“Sure,” said Michelle, “but if we pop him for that, maybe he just goes to ground. Any attorney will bargain it down to where all he’ll have to do is send in a check or forfeit bail. This is D.C., murder capital of the country. The courts are choked.”

“Michelle,” said Du Pré, “you call Madelaine, see if she can get old Benetsee to call and talk with you maybe.”

“Why?” said Detective Leuci.

“Make you feel better,” said Du Pré.

He hung up and went back out to look at the sunset.

The food at the old inn was very good and very expensive. Du Pré had some bourbon.

He slept well that night.

A
BRIGHT MORNING WITH
a lot of dew on it. A Friday.

Du Pré rolled a smoke and stood in the cool. He wondered how far north the Saint Lawrence was.

Maria came out of her room, dressed in ragged jeans and a blouse that seemed to be mostly knots. She had a scarf over her forehead and under her hair in the back and big dark glasses and her shoulder bag, the kind photographers carry.

“Yo,” said Du Pré. “Morning. You want to go get some breakfast maybe?”

They went back to the inn, but it wasn’t open. They found a little working-class restaurant in the town and had big breakfasts of eggs and ham and hash browns. The coffee was good. There was a plate of homemade biscuits.

They stood on the sidewalk out front and watched the little town gearing up. Tourism was its lifeblood. There were galleries and T-shirt shops and “antique” stores. But not too bad.

“You think maybe Lucky is over on the reservation?” said Maria.

“Not yet,” said Du Pré. “I think he comes in late tonight, with maybe a carload of high-iron workers from the city. Maybe New York, I don’t know. I think he thinks that there are warrants out for him, he will make it back here without using anything he has to buy a ticket for or go to some special place to leave at.”

“Are there any warrants?”

“Chickenshit one for assaulting me in D.C.,” said Du Pré.

“We got to get you a new bandage,” said Maria. “That one looks kind of grubby, you know.”

She went off to a drugstore and came back with some tape and gauze and a big, cheap bandanna, white, with blue roses all the hell over it.

“Wish your hair was long enough to braid,” she said.

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “I look plenty Indian, plenty Frenchy.”

They sat in the Rover. Maria tugged Du Pré’s bandage off and looked at his wound. She cleaned his forehead with a couple foil-wrapped wet paper towels that smelled like lilacs.

“I think you can take the stitches out, couple days,” she said. “It isn’t even oozing anywhere.”

“I am not oozing, I am happy,” said Du Pré.

“I am going to put some aloe vera cream on that,” said Maria. “It will make it heal faster.”

The ointment felt cool on Du Pré’s forehead.

Here I am hunting somebody with my daughter the gunslinger, Du Pré thought, and I am
glad
to have her here. My women, they all have had some common sense. I don’t know I do or not.

“You drive me to the reservation and I will ask around,” said Maria. “Say I love this man’s music and have they seen him. They will think I am a groupie.”

Du Pré didn’t have a better suggestion.

The car telephone chirred.

Du Pré picked it up.

“Finally,” said Bart. “I’ve been trying for hours.”

“Sorry,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Bart. “You were right. Sulin kept after Eloise until she got so pissed, she screamed that Lucky had come to help them. And then Sulin kept hammering on the murders, especially those little girls, till Eloise went off to talk to Hervé and Guillaume and found out, yeah, he was gone a lot and at those times.”

“You find out what tribe he is?” asked Du Pré.

“They say they know nothing at all about where he came from. Just that he was around for a while and talking about the dams and canoes and how to fight it. Sounded good. Well, fighting it is good. But for all they know, he dropped from the fucking moon.”

“He won’t come back there,” said Du Pré.

“Um,” said Bart. “Michelle is plenty pissed off.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “She can’t do nothing, you know. Pisses me off when I can’t do nothing. So maybe you go back and help her out.”

“I stay out of her way when she’s working,” said Bart.

“Good,” said Du Pré. “go back and take her to dinner, buy her maybe some flowers.”

“So,” said Bart, “where are you exactly?”

“Upstate New York, they call it,” said Du Pré.

“Alone?”

“I got Maria.”

“Well,” said Bart, “I won’t worry about you then.”

“She is one tough lady,” said Du Pré. “Got guns enough for a platoon.”

“I will never understand you people,” said Bart. “Okay. We are on our way back shortly. I am going to tell Michelle everything.”

“Of course,” said Du Pré.

“You need me there?”

“I don’t think so,” said Du Pré.

Just me. Just Lucky.

Just the one dream.

I need to talk to Benetsee.

I have already talked to Benetsee.

“Okay,” said Bart. “Ain’t this a pisser?”

“It is that,” said Du Pré.

He put the phone back in its cradle.

“Let’s go to that reservation,” said Maria. “You drop me off somewhere, give me maybe two hours.”

“I want to keep an eye on you there,” said Du Pré.

“I will be all right,” said Maria. “I am researching this paper and looking for these musicians, you know.”

“What if he’s here already? He will not like questions about him.”

“I am not going to ask
him
, Papa.”

Du Pré didn’t have a better idea. He wished, for one thing, that the Rover didn’t have D.C. license plates.

“We will go and rent a car,” said Du Pré.

“Why?” said Maria.

“D.C. license plates on this thing.”

Maria sighed and reached into her shoulder bag. She took out two Massachusetts plates and handed them to Du Pré.

Christ, Du Pré thought, I will just go back to the motel so I don’t slow her down so much. Me, I am old, need a nap.

“Good you think of that, “ he said.

“Yeah,” said Maria. “That garage will be pissed off, but we will take them back, you know.”

Illegal weapons and stolen license plates, Du Pré thought, and my lovely daughter there. Four-inch group. I don’t think she will have any trouble in college. Jesus.

They drove down the road and found a rest area. Du Pré switched the license plates. The screws went into plastic sets. No rust. It took him five minutes.

“Okay,” said Du Pré. “Where you want me to drop you off?”

“They got a high school or a public library?” said Maria.

They drove to the reservation. All such places are sad and in disarray.

Du Pré asked the man at a gas station where the library was and he dropped Maria there.

He drove on, found a place to park off the road, and walked among the wildflowers. He sat on a log and smoked.

The time dragged on.

But then it was time to go back.

When he pulled up by the library, Maria was waiting.

She got in the Rover.

“You were right,” she said. “He is expected back late tonight maybe. She didn’t know anything about the festival, you know. Funny.”

“Why funny?” said Du Pré.

“The librarian,” said Maria, “is Lucky’s sister.”

R
EMEMBER YOUR FATHERS,”
said Benetsee. The phone was so clear, it sounded as if the old man was lisping wet advice in his ear. So Madelaine had given him wine.

She takes everybody for what they are if they are not mean, Du Pré thought, and so I am very lucky.

“I don’t know what I am doing,” said Du Pré.

“Nobody knows what they are doing,” said Benetsee, “not even the gods. Just remember your fathers.”

Du Pré hung up.

“So?” said Maria.

Du Pré shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“If you feel you are right, Papa, then it will be okay,” said Maria.

Du Pré tried to think, but there wasn’t much to think about. His forehead itched and so did his thoughts.

“What if he doesn’t come?” said Maria.

“Benetsee says he will come,” said Du Pré.

“When?”

“The last hour before dawn.”

Owl time.

“Some pretty country around here, Papa,” said Maria. “Let’s drive some and then get a good dinner, maybe you get a little sleep.”

“You got to just stay in that room till I come back,” said Du Pré.

“Okay,” said Maria. She sounded cheerful.

“Balls,” said Du Pré. “Now where are those fucking guns?”

“Papa,” said Maria, “they are mine. I will stay in the room and only shoot anyone who breaks in, okay?”

“Maria…”

But she was looking straight ahead and Du Pré caught himself. Maria was her own and always had been. She would not do what she would not own to, and she would not take orders—from anyone. And no hard feelings, it just happened to
be
that way.

Du Pré started the Rover. They drove off to the west, found a narrow two-lane blacktop road, and wandered down it past orchards and occasional white frame farmhouses.

“Pretty fat country, this,” said Du Pré.

“You aren’t happy, can’t see prickly pear cactus and sagebrush,” said Maria. “Sure are a lot of people here you know.”

They found another inn nestled by a clear lake and had supper, good fish and some white wine. The lake was ringed by vacation houses. There were no motorboats on it, just canoes.

After they had finished, they went out on the dock.

“Play me some music, Papa,” said Maria. Her lower lip was quivering. She was very tough and awfully young—back and form.

Du Pré went to the Rover and got his fiddle. He took it and the bow out of the case and carried them back down and they sat on the end of the dock and Du Pré played, not loudly. Jigs and reels and portage ballads, songs of work, songs of longing.

“You girls at home, pull the rope and help us with this big canoe.”

Bragging songs, how many packs of furs a voyageur can carry uphill on a bad portage.

Du Pré sang some of them. He had a clear tenor voice.

They waited for the night.

Du Pré sent one last soft, low note across the water. They got up and walked to the Rover and drove back to the inn. Du Pré took a shower.

He left his wallet. He put the slingshot in his hip pocket and the carved stone balls in his left front pocket and thought of drinking some bourbon but knew that he couldn’t. He put on the moccasins Benetsee had given him.

He kissed Maria and ruffled her hair, then went out and got in the Rover and drove off.

He parked by the highway leading to the reservation, shut off the engine and the lights.

The hours dripped by like falling water.

Traffic dwindled away.

Du Pré sank into a hunter’s half sleep.

And all the hunted had to do was act the innocent, ask why was Du Pré hounding him, and there would be nothing Gabriel could do by law.

The mosquitoes whined through the open windows. They landed on Du Pré and fed. He didn’t move.

His eyes flicked back and forth.

A car appeared. It was full of people. The car pulled off right across the road and six men got out to piss.

Lucky was one of them.

Du Pré opened his door, slid out, and walked through the shadows.

They were all standing with their backs to him, watering the barrow pit.

Du Pré crossed the road. He walked to their car.

A couple of the men finished. They zipped up and stretched. Lucky was still pissing.

Du Pré waited.

A man turned round and gave a start when he saw Du Pré.

“Lucky!” Du Pré shouted. “I am here! We dance, huh?”

Lucky whirled, hands at his crotch.

Everybody froze.

“Ho, Du Pré,” said Lucky. “You are a fool. This is this guy I told you about.” He was looking left and right.

A couple of men came round the car, toward Du Pré. He saw a knife flash.

And then a gun started firing behind Du Pré, in the trees. Fast fire. The slugs were going just overhead but not much.

People scattered. Some dove into the barrow pit they had just pissed in.

Lucky ran. He was there, and then he was moving into the woods, very fast. He sank in the shadow of the trees.

Du Pré waited and then he ran up the road before cutting in.

The gun was still firing behind him.

Wonder how many dips she got for that thing? Du Pré thought. I bet ten; she always was a thorough little girl.

Du Pré slowed down. He stopped and listened. He could hear Lucky moving slowly and softly somewhere in front of him.

He would probably try to make it to the town.