Specimen Song (8 page)

Rollie shrugged.

Foote stood up. “We came to assist,” he said.

Du Pré was looking at the beauty with the foul mouth. She had thick dark red hair, bright sapphire eyes, and a stainless steel 9mm automatic pistol in a holster in the small of her back, so her suit coat would cover it.

“This guy Chase has some connections,” she said, “but they won’t help if we can build a case. But what’s he like? You said he cut in on you at the end of the expedition. Why’d he leave in the first place?”

Du Pré told them about the bear, Chase climbing the tree in a panic, the canoe capsizing the next day, and Chase’s hysterics. How one of the assistants had said he wasn’t taking his medication.

“So, what was he like?” Detective Leuci repeated. She sat down, lit up, and gave the bird to the thank-you sign.

“A little spoiled kid,” said Du Pré. “Seemed like he
couldn’t
think of anyone but himself. I began to have this bad feeling about him at the festival…”

“Bad feeling?”

“I don’t like him, you know. Hard at first to put a finger on it, but he smiles too quickly, says too many right things. I don’t trust him. I wasn’t going to come at all, because I didn’t really want to …”

“Why did you?”

Benetsee, Du Pré thought. He looked at Foote, who smiled.

“This old man I respect told me to,” said Du Pré. “It’s hard to explain.”

Detective Sergeant Leuci leaned forward, eager to be explained to.

“He’s an old man I know since I am a child,” said Du Pré. “He sees farther than the rest of us can.”

“A medicine man?”

Du Pré didn’t know what to say. He thought.

“He just seems to know a lot of things there doesn’t seem to be a way for him to know,” Du Pré said finally. “When he tells me I ought to do something, he has always been right.”

“A psychic?”

“He has visions, I think,” said Du Pré lamely.

“Indian?”

“Some,” said Du Pré.

“You have visions?”

Du Pré sighed. “Only when I am fucking drunk.”

Detective Michelle Leuci roared with laughter. She had a big, honest, booming laugh.

“So,” she said, still shaking. “My partner here finds you holding on to a horse, belonging to the rider who spotted Annie McRae’s body. Where were you when you saw the horse?”

“I am onstage, playing with a Cajun band,” said Du Pré.

“Before that?”

“I am onstage, playing my Métis music.”

“What’s a Métis?”

“Red River breeds,” said Du Pré. “We are mostly Canadian. Voyageurs were Métis. Cree, Chippewa, Ojibwa, French, some little English. We come down to Montana after the second rebellion, in 1886.”

“Fascinating.”

She stood up.

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll look hard at this Chase character. Get hold of Samantha Ford.” She glanced at Rollie, who went out of the room.

“We’re going to get some dinner,” said Bart, standing up. He bowed to Detective Sergeant Leuci. “Would you care to join us?”

“Who’re you?” said Leuci.

“Bart Fascelli,” said Bart, “and please go get your fucking coat.”

Leuci stared at him for a minute, she shrugged.

She nodded. She went out into the hall, in the next door, and came back.

“No place too fancy,” she said, “or folks might think I’m corrupt.”

Bart offered her his arm gallantly. She took it and they went out the door.

“We have been abandoned and forgotten,” said Lawyer Foote. “They will go to some nice place. It’s McDonald’s for the help.”

“We could catch them,” said Du Pré.

Foote shook his head. Then he shook his finger.

They both laughed.

When they got out of the building, the limousine was gone. Foote waved down a cab.

They had barely enough money between them to pay the cabbie off when they got to the hotel.

Midway through dinner, the hotel manager sidled up to Foote and gave him a plain white envelope. Foote thanked the man, getting up to do so. He sat back down, peered into the envelope, and counted out three thousand dollars in hundreds. He handed them to Du Pré.

“Well,” said Foote, “I think we should go. The plane can always come back for Bart when Bart surfaces.”

“Why all this money?” said Du Pré.

“The rude prick pays,” said Foote, taking a bite of his fish.

T
HAT WOULD BE THE
best thing for Bart,” said Madelaine when Du Pré described his disappearance. “Kinda rude for him to go off like that, though.”

“He’s handicapped,” said Du Pré.

“Huh?” said Madelaine.

“He’s a rich kid,” said Du Pré. “They are handicapped. People always do for them, you know. Some of their wires never get hooked up.”

“I think I chew his ass hard he get back here,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré grinned. Poor Bart. Madelaine’s ass-chewings were artful. As a mother, she got lots of practice. She was fond of Bart, so she would do a good job, too.

It had frosted hard and the trees and bushes had started to turn. The wind smelled of fall, late in coming this year.

Du Pré heard the distant boom of a shotgun. The grouse season was open. Couple weeks, the season would open for pheasants and ducks. The wild turkeys in the river bottoms. Du Pré thought maybe he’d hunt for a turkey this year. He’d written off and gotten a turkey call from some fellow in New Hampshire. Beautiful thing, in an oiled leather case, Du Pré had played with it. You scraped a dingus on the side of the call and the thing scrawked and gobbled.

I hope Benetsee don’t see this, Du Pré had thought. He put the call away.

Something nagged at the back of Du Pré’s mind, nibbled in the shadow—on that long trip through the dark green forest, over the clear water, on the route of Du Pré’s blood, one stream of which ran all the way to France. Something. Once when he was young, he had shot a bear. He’d been too excited and he’d wounded the animal, not killed it. When his father, Catfoot, shot something, it dropped, and he had told Du Pré to wound an animal was not to respect it.

Du Pré had been alone. He waited for the animal’s wound to stiffen and then he tracked the bear, a good-sized black one. He came to a small glade. The glade was quiet, too quiet. He walked softly out on the path, past a big old ponderosa pine. Too quiet. He felt sudden fear and he turned, pointing the gun back the way he had come.

There was nothing there.

Du Pré stood there frozen for some time—he never knew how long.

A single drop of something fell on his hand.

He looked up. The wounded bear was directly above him, perhaps twenty feet up, clinging to the tree.

Spend a lot of time looking in the wrong place because I am thinking I am looking in the right one, Du Pré thought. I got to learn to look everywhere, see everything. Like Benetsee.

That man don’t have visions, Du Pré thought. He just pays real close attention.

Or maybe he does have visions.

He remembered the coyote pawing for the lumps of fat in the snow directly over the brass box that held the story complete of the murder of Bart’s brother by Du Pré’s father, Catfoot. Someone had hung that piece of fat up there. Indeed, had known the story all along, it seemed. But, like any good storyteller, hadn’t told it too rapidly. Benetsee hang that fat, yes.

Du Pré went into the house. He got his shotgun from the closet, put a few shells in the pocket of his jacket. There was always jerky, fruit leather, a plastic space blanket, and fatwood splinters to make a fire with in the game pouch in back.

“I drop you off and go shoot a grouse maybe,” said Du Pré to Madelaine. It was getting close to time to take her home, anyway.

Du Pré barely saw his daughter Maria, a senior in high school. Since Bart had offered to send her to any college she could get in, she had washed the dye out of her hair, quit wearing clothes that looked like they had been taken from the bodies of car-bombing victims, and spent her time studying with the same ferocity she had once devoted to driving her father up the wall.

Du Pré walked Madelaine to her front door—he always did—and then he got in his old cruiser and drove off toward the Wolf Mountains. The grouse would begin to come down to the logging roads to pick up gravel for their crops in an hour or so, and Du Pré, without a gundog, would pretty well have to stick to beating the bushes near the roads. Not that he cared if he shot a grouse or not, he liked being out in the bright fall air, liked the smell of the forest.

When Du Pré turned off the county road and entered the trees, he drove slowly on the left side of the road, glancing down at the verge for the tracks he might see—elk, mule deer, a mountain lion.

Must be that lion lives up by Belker Ridge, he thought. See a few more tracks, we had better trim them on back.

Mountain lions were simple killing machines. If their numbers grew, their solitary ways would bring them down near people, where they would feed on dogs and, eventually, small children.

The Montana newcomers would scream about killing such nice big puddy-tats.

We have always had dudes out here, Du Pré thought, but this last bunch think they know things.

Du Pré saw a couple ruffed grouse up ahead taking dust baths and scratching in the fine gravel at the road’s edge. He pulled the car off as far as he could go and stopped it, pulled the shotgun out of the case, got out, racked a couple shells in, and began to walk casually toward the grouse;

They looked at him and took less time to dust and peck.

Du Pré got closer.

The grouse became nervous and dashed off into the woods. Du Pré ran after them. They were fast runners. Du Pré was a little faster. He pounded over the thick needles. The grouse took flight, their wings booming. Du Pré threw the shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

The grouse kept right on going.

I ought to shoot the bastards on the ground, Du Pré thought. It pissed him off to miss a shot.

He walked back to the car, stuffing another shell in the shotgun.

Just as he stepped out of the woods, four grouse boomed up from across the road, wings whirring, heading straight up. Du Pré shot twice and two birds folded up and fell.

I am some hot shit, Du Pré thought. He walked into the trees and picked the birds up, crumpled on the ground, the little wind ruffling their soft feathers.

He drove on to the end of the road and saw no more birds. He backed and filled at the Kelly hump that blocked the road and then headed back down, in no particular hurry. He got back home with an hour of sunlight to spare. He cleaned the birds, shucked their skins, and put the carcasses in salty water. He would bake them in aspic and then chill them overnight and they would be tender then, make wonderful sandwiches.

Shadows.

He went to the violin case and got out the slingshot.

He went down to the creek.

What about this, now? he thought, sending a stone in flight.

What about this?

Blood dropping from the sky? Long time ago.

B
ART SHOWED UP, LOOKING
chastened. Du Pré drove him home from the airstrip in Cooper, and Bart stared out the window. Once, Du Pré looked over, to see him wiping his eyes.

Du Pré was a good friend; he kept his mouth shut and waited.

“She didn’t tell me to go,” he said. “I suddenly realized I was acting like Gianni. So I told her about that. She just smiled at me and said she was a simple girl, really. So I took back most of the stuff. Said I’d go home for a while and think, I hadn’t had a lot of practice in being human.”

Du Pré laughed. After a while, Bart did, too.

“She has a week of vacation the second week of October and she’s going to come out here. At least I can send a plane for her.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Anytime you can avoid the Denver airport is better than a time you can’t.”

“I love her.”

This was not news to Du Pré. Under the embarrassment, Bart was very happy. He would go on being very happy till Madelaine lit into him ever so sweetly. But Madelaine was very smart about people. She’d fry Bart good but not burn him.

He is trying very hard, Du Pré thought. I am proud of my friend here.

Bart was building a modest log home with the help of Booger Tom and such ranch hands as were between tasks. The ranch had been running as a tax write-off for years; there were more hands than the place needed, but Bart refused to fire or lay anyone off. He had said time would shrink the crew.

But if a cowboy broke down within a hundred miles, they knew they could come here and work up a stake to go on.

Bart was well thought of among the cowboys.

“I will be glad when I can get that trailer out of here,” said Bart.

Most of the logs were stacked for the house’s sides. Then the rafters and rooftree had to be set and the place sealed off before the winter. Bart’s big dragline had been pressed into service to lift the logs, the bucket replaced with a ball, hook, and choker chain.

Booger Tom was sitting on the log pile, whittling and spitting tobacco. The old goat was out of another time, still wore the checked pants and custom high-topped boots and gigantic pure silk scarf—so dirty, it was hard to discern the pattern in it, true, but pure silk nonetheless.

“Shit,” said Bart, “I thought it’d all be done by now.”

“We wuz all too ignorant,” said Booger Tom. “We need a leader.”

Bart grinned and so did Booger Tom.

“The hands is all off working,” said Booger Tom, “but I expect a couple could come help tomorrow.”

“She is lookin’ good,” said Du Pré. He suddenly thought of the money of Bart’s he had. He fumbled for his wallet.

“Bart,” he said, “that lawyer, Foote there, he give me all this cash—I don’t know what for.”

Bart looked at the thick green wad.

“Oh, that,” he said finally, as though it took him a few moments to think up what it was.

“Yeah, this,” said Du Pré. He got annoyed when Bart did this, and then annoyed with himself for getting petty with Bart when the big man was just generously trying to help.

“I need some help here,” Bart said, groping. “You know I got to get this closed off before winter. So say thirty dollars an hour?”