Authors: Peter Bowen
Couple lumps of something there.
“Benny!” said Du Pré. “You hand me that boathook again, maybe?”
Benny did.
Du Pré pulled and scraped the lumps out.
Looked like old hide, all balled up.
One lump had some brown hair on it, fairly long.
An ear.
Christ, Du Pré thought, this is the skin of her face.
Du Pré dropped it over the side. And another brown gob.
He looked in. The rock floor of the cleft was clean. There were stains, dark ones, where the bundle had sat.
I wonder how that foot got out there.
Skunk shit there, a foot from my nose, all dried and black.
Coyotes could make it in here, too.
They chew and drag. Wonder they did not drag the whole thing off.
Du Pré went down the ladder. Benny was zipping up the black body bag. He carried it to his truck. Du Pré followed with the ladder and the boathook.
“Where,” said Pidgeon, “in the name of God did you find a boathook in this fucking desert?”
“Navy recruiter,” said Benny, solemnly. “Busted him for speeding. He didn’t have any money, so the judge took this.”
He is some better, now, thought Du Pré!
“Thanks,” said Benny.
“You send that to Helena?” said Du Pré.
“I drive it to Helena,” said Benny.
Du Pré nodded.
“The north–south guy,” said Pidgeon.
Du Pré nodded.
D
U
P
RÉ DROVE INTO
Toussaint past combine crews harvesting the hard red wheat. The giant machines marched slowly across the golden fields, trucks grinding along beside them, receiving thick streams of hulled grain. One combine, two trucks. When one truck was full it would pull ahead, the second would move up under the spout, and the first would head for the metal storage bins standing at the ranch houses.
Lotta damn noodles, Du Pré thought, wish I liked noodles better.
He drove into the little town and to the bar. He parked and walked inside. There were a lot of strangers in the bar, drinking beers and eating and playing the video poker machines.
The combines ran twenty-four hours when the weather was good. All night, with giant spotlights hung on the cabs focused on the wheat. The whole year’s work on the fields brought in, the bank’s notes paid off. Everyone hoped. Maybe something left over. Wheat was up.
The off-duty crews were using part of their twelve-hour break to let off a little steam. They talked in soft Texas accents. They had started down in Texas three months before, working their way north with the ripening grain.
The pool table was busy. Quarters piled beside the coin slot. The players waited. Money was bet on these games, and on the poker games that went on round the clock, too.
Boomers. Make it, spend it right away.
Du Pré grinned. He liked these people.
They never caused much trouble, and anyway they would never fight in a bar. They needed that bar, and being 86’d from it would make life very hard indeed. They fought across the street in the parking lot.
Susan Klein was scurrying fast behind the bar, drawing beers, mixing drinks, and somehow getting hamburgers and french fries done right and on plates.
She got a good timer in her head, Du Pré thought. He went round the bar and he made himself a whiskey ditch and he dropped a twenty on the ledge of the cash register.
The owners of the equipment sat at corner tables, writing checks, lending money to crew members till payday, and then they’d leave a day or two ahead of the crews, on to the next place of work, and see to all arrangements. The owners were weathered men in their sixties, in light straw cowboy hats and custom boots with lone stars on the front of them.
Susan caught up for a moment. She ran a couple of bar napkins across her forehead. The place was hot. The day was hot and there were a lot of people there and the grill was going.
“Looks good,” said Susan. “If the weather lasts another week, the wheat will be in. No problems.”
Other years, it had rained, and the grain had to wait for the sun. Put up damp, it would mold. Running grain dryers was expensive. There weren’t enough of them. Not needed until they were needed, and then too much grain for the ones at hand.
The big parking lot across the street was filled with the motor homes that the crews lived in. In past years, the ranchers put the crews up in bunkhouses, but since farm and ranch hands had been replaced pretty much by machinery, the bunkhouses had rotted or burned down.
Combine gypsies.
Voyageurs.
Du Pré sipped his drink.
“Could you maybe do some music tonight?” said Susan. “Crews switch at nine or ten, so if you started at seven or so then both shifts could hear you.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Thanks,” said Susan.
Du Pré thought about who he could get to back him up.
Couple kids. Ranch kids, one played pretty good rhythm guitar and the other pretty good bass.
Wish my cousins were here, they got some music in them.
The kids are OK, just too young.
And they like the old songs. Guitar player he wants to fiddle, I give him one lesson, a tape of simple stuff, say, when you can do all this perfectly then I give you another. Me, I don’t listen to you practice at all. I listen to myself practice is bad enough.
Du Pré called the boys, who weren’t in but their mothers said they thought they would, which meant that they would.
These ranch women pret’ tough.
Du Pré laughed.
A young man in faded denims and worn boots and a battered hat yee-hawed. Du Pré glanced at the point register at the top of the video poker machine’s screen. Past five hundred and climbing, so the kid had hit a Royal Flush, Ordered. Ten to ace, left to right. That was eight hundred bucks.
Susan laughed and she went in the back to get the money. The young man brought the slip of paper to the bar and he waited, grinning.
Susan glanced at the little slip of paper. She handed over the eight hundred-dollar bills.
“Drinks for the house!” the young man yelled.
Everybody whooped, even Du Pré.
“Buy me a few new clothes and get my truck some new tires,” said the young cowboy. “Then I’ll put ten times this back into them damn machines figuring I am going to win big again. You don’t, I know, but it is some way to pass the time.”
Du Pré glanced at his hand. Wedding band. He was a long way from his wife. Probably missed her a lot.
Du Pré went out and he drove up to Madelaine’s. She was in the kitchen, kneading bread dough. Wednesday. Baking day. Madelaine had a baking day, two cleaning days, two sewing days, a day to relax, and one day she prayed more or less all day. Unless she went to bed with Du Pré, or he offered to buy her pink wine and dance to the music on the jukebox with her.
She liked that two-step.
No Métis music, that. She danced the reels and clogs, too, but she really liked the two-step. Liked Nashville music. Cheating hearts, drunks, trucks, prison, railroad trains.
Her father had worked all of his life on the Great Northern Railroad, even though it wasn’t called that any more after Burlington bought it.
Line that Jim Hill built, Du Pré thought, then the Catholics, they buy railroad cars that are chapels, run them on to a siding, say to the Métis, hey, François and Helene, you come get married by a priest, you bring your twelve children to watch.
Métis who come down here after Red River Rebellion, they don’t talk to priests much. Priests betray Louis Riel, so the English hang him. Little Gabriel Dumont, Louis Riel’s little general, brother to my great-great-grandfather, he come down here and he the fifty years later he still had not once talked to a priest. Wouldn’t be buried in Catholic earth, either.
Red River.
“I play some music tonight,” said Du Pré.
“Good,” said Madelaine. “I be your … what … gropey?”
“Huh?” said Du Pré.
“Gropey,” said Madelaine. “One them women follow musicians around, you know, want to fuck them.”
“Oh,” said Du Pré. “I got ten, twelve, more of them. You just be my Madelaine.”
Madelaine looked at Du Pré. She smiled. She pegged a big lump of sticky dough at him. Missed. Hit St. Francis on the wall behind Du Pré.
“Damn,” said Madelaine. “What kind of man are you, not save that poor saint? Damn. Poor St. Francis.”
Du Pré laughed.
That evening it was still hot at six-thirty. Du Pré got into his cruiser and he drove down to the bar and he went in. Benny was setting up the little stage.
The two kids showed up, all scrubbed and eager. They were so young that they really couldn’t legally play in the bar, if anyone cared to think about it.
Good kids, Du Pré thought, they never make much musicians, but they want to a lot.
News that Du Pré was playing his fiddle always brought some people down to the bar. Not so many this night, because everyone was working so hard. But there were fifty people in the room when Du Pré and his sidemen started. The harvest crews listened respectfully.
Susan Klein shut down the pool table when Du Pré played. No arguments.
Madelaine came in after nine.
The night crews went out and the day crews straggled in, dusty and hot and tired and covered in bits of wheat hulls. They perked up after a lot of beer and some food.
Du Pré played some reels and some jigs.
People danced, some of them pretty well.
A couple of the Texans were really good.
Du Pré took a break after a long hour.
He bought Madelaine some pink wine.
“Everbody they think they make out pret’ good this year,” said Madelaine.
Du Pré nodded. Everybody always hoped that it would be a good year, wheat’s up, no rain at harvesttime.
After Du Pré quit he and Madelaine danced to the jukebox. Late, till the bar closed.
“C
HRIST,” YELLED
P
IDGEON.
“D
O
you have to drive like this?” Du Pré laughed. The countryside was shooting by very rapidly. They were north of the Yellowstone River and south of the Missouri. The Big Dry. Where the last wild buffalo in America were slaughtered by a Smithsonian expedition.
Du Pré’s great-grandfather had watched from a nearby butte.
The expedition moved on and Du Pré’s grandpère had butchered out the three cows and he had smoked the meat and taken it back to his family. It was the last of the buffalo for the Métis.
Beef is pret’ good, though, Du Pré thought.
“You fucker,” yelled Pidgeon.
Du Pré looked over and he grinned.
“Drive that fifty-five you never get anywhere,” said Du Pré, at the top of his lungs. “Big place, this Montana.”
Pidgeon tried to light a cigarette but she couldn’t get the flame on her butane lighter to keep going long enough to do it. Du Pré took the cigarette from her and he lit it with his old Zippo and handed it back.
Pidgeon smoked and looked out the window.
Du Pré slowed down to eighty-five to humor her.
“How fast were we going?” she said.
“About right,” said Du Pré. From the bench he could see the Interstate along the south bank of the Yellowstone River. It was heavy with traffic and it looked very busy in the calm and empty landscape.
They crossed over the river and went up an on-ramp and headed west.
South at Hardin, on the Crow Reservation, headed for Sheridan.
Du Pré drove at sixty-five. You could drive like hell on the two-lane but the superhighways were heavily patrolled.
This schoolteacher, she was from Billings.
Dumped near Sheridan.
Missing for two days.
First one we got that’s fairly fresh, Du Pré thought.
He’s around.
I find him.
“I think we’ll get some cooperation,” said Pidgeon, “but you never know. The Bureau didn’t try to spare anyone’s feelings till recently.”
No shit, thought Du Pré.
“So I talked to the Sheriff and he’s meeting us at the Denny’s at the north exit into the town.”
Du Pré nodded.
Find your way around America by hamburger.
Bad hamburgers, too.
They came to the exit for the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Eleven Métis, they die there. That Mitch Bouyer, he is leading the scouts, he try to send his friends away. He knows how many Sioux, Cheyenne, all them Plains people are down there.
Custer sends his favorite Crow scout, Half Yellow Face, away.
Mitch, he die there. Lonesome Charley Reynolds, the old trapper, he die there, too.
That Custer, he is a bastard.
Them Indian, they have their Day of Greasy Grass.
“My heart has quit pounding,” said Pidgeon. “You can speed up now. I know it hurts you to obey the law.”
“Me,” said Du Pré, “I obey all them good laws.”
“Right,” said Pidgeon.
She was dressed in jeans and hiking boots and a cotton shirt and a photographer’s vest. Her gun, ID, handcuffs, and such were in the pockets. She carried a camera and many rolls of film. Little tape recorder.
“There have been three other bodies left near Sheridan in the last ten years,” said Pidgeon, “all young women, all mutilated, none identified. All of them treated as isolated cases. Since they were dumped years apart, I suppose.”
“Me,” said Du Pré, “I never know that so much of this happens.”
Pidgeon nodded.
“I got into this,” she said, “because of a term paper. How many women were killed and dumped and no one ever charged in their murders. Over the last twenty years, there have been thousands. Thousands. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Pret’ hard to find, people who do it,” said Du Pré. “They are not part of any place. Come in, kidnap someone, kill them, leave them somewhere else. Don’t go back. Or kill them poor whores. They got to get in cars with men. Can’t attract too much attention, cops bust them.”
“These are young girls mostly,” said Pidgeon, “of lower-class origin. I have heard them called trailer trash. Money’s pretty damned important in this country.”
Du Pré nodded. Pretty important everywhere.
“Was Bart pissed when you said you didn’t want to take the offer of a plane from him?” said Pidgeon.