Specimen Song (7 page)

Yeah, Du Pré thought, I hear that joke once, Frenchman going to kill you, he explains it logically; the German weeps a lot; and the Englishman just does it and says, “What knife?”

A crowded world growing more hungry and cold.

Du Pré was beginning to like this long, dark wood, though, the loon cries, the water everywhere. Montana was a tough desert till you got to the mountains. It was the winter that made things bloom.

“How far is York Factory?” Du Pré asked Nappy.

“Two days,” said Nappy. “We make good time without those others. “

They stopped the next evening at an Indian camp, a dreary place. The people were living in tents; several bearskins ripe and unscraped hung in stretchers. The men were off fishing or cutting pulp. The traplines had yielded poorly these last few years.

That night, the expedition was startled to see two brusque Scotswomen at the head of a procession of everyone else in camp, bringing gifts of berries and smoked fish. There was so much food left in the dry bags that they didn’t need Nappy and Du Pré, and Françoise handed out hundreds of pounds of tinned goods and dried fruit.

They sang some songs around the fire. The Scotswomen were on a tour, taking notes and making, sketches, for some book.

They went on in the morning. In the afternoon, a light plane flew high overhead, banked, turned, and came over the expedition, then went on east, toward where York Factory must be.

The plane came over the next morning, too, and then the party saw the signs of the town, trees cut, a road along the river. The water in the river deepened and slowed, here and there a plastic bottle drifted on the water, pushed about by the winds and chop.

They rounded a short headland and saw the little village spilling down to the water. Du Pré idly looked behind him. Something wasn’t right.

He looked again. There was an extra canoe, and it was moving as fast as the paddlers could make it go.

In ten minutes, it passed Du Pré and Nappy.

Paul Chase was in it, of course.

Du Pré looked up toward the town, and he whistled to Nappy.

“So that Chase, he talk to those newspeople up there, you bet,” said Du Pré, laughing. “That guy, he should be a politician.”

The people in the freighters were pointing and laughing.

When Du Pré and Nappy pulled their canoes out, Chase was rattling away into a tape recorder while some TV cameraman sprawled out on the ground. Chase hadn’t shaved in a few days and he was daubed here and there with soot.

“Excuse me,” said a young woman with a notebook, “were you with the expedition?”

“Yes.” Du Pré nodded.

She asked some questions about the trip, then one about the leadership of Dr. Chase.

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “he was not there, you know. He left the expedition a few days out from Lac La Ronge.”

“What?” she said.

“You see that man over there?” said Du Pré, pointing to Bart. “He came to see me in a chartered plane and he flew Chase and his people out.”

Chase was looking over at Du Pré, his eyes narrow. He pushed his way through the reporters and toward the dock area. A little floatplane was tethered there.

The reporters gave up on him and scattered for the telephones or ran toward another plane farther down toward the bay.

The woman with the notebook was talking to Bart and taking notes furiously.

Du Pré laughed.

Chase’s floatplane racketed to life and taxied away from the dock.

Some of these people, they take your breath away, Du Pré thought.

D
U
P
RÉ AND
B
ART HAD
been home about a week, still chuckling over their journey. Madelaine had taken to yawning wide when they would begin to speak of it. Little boys, her eyes said, exchanging code words in a tree fort.

Jacqueline’s husband, Raymond, had got a bid job on plumbing two homes over at the county seat of Cooper, so Du Pré got to go look at cow asses a couple of times. They hadn’t changed. He checked the brands and signed off on the loaded cattle.

One evening, Benetsee appeared, looking ragged and, because it was late summer, dustier than usual. He smiled widely and grabbed Du Pré’s hand in his old claw. The old man’s grip was hard; his tendons pushed up against his weathered skin like wires pulled very tightly.

“So,” said Benetsee, “I have been up through the Cypress Hills and some other places.”

Du Pré nodded. The Cypress Hills were way the hell up in Canada. He wondered just where old Benetsee had gone, where he’d come from. How far? No use in asking the old man directly, anyway; Du Pré would never get a straight answer. He had yet to get one, anyway.

Might as well bet on the curls of rising smoke.

“You ever learn that sling rock thrower?” said Benetsee. “Takes some brains to use it. I will help you; you need it.”

Du Pré had forgotten about the slingshot. He fetched it from his fiddle case. They wandered down to a little gravel bar in the stream. Benetsee peered for a moment and then plucked six rounded stones the size of small plums from beneath the clear water.

“You got to wrap this thong on your palm first,” he said. “You see, it is cut longer, and then you hold the end of the short one so it is balanced.”

He whirled the shot around his head and sent a stone eighty yards to knock a bottle off a fence post. Du Pré had found the empty pint bottle near the fence post just this morning and set it up. Stock stepped on that and it broke wrong, they could hurt themselves.

The bottle shattered into little shards.

They spent an hour, Benetsee sighing wearily each time Du Pré let a rock go. Du Pré could pretty well hit one of the four directions and not much better.

“Since these whites came, nobody can do nothing anymore,” Benetsee grumbled. “Listen, you practice with this. I try you again. Maybe I go and pray for you now.”

Benetsee left, muttering.

Like always, he would get up to some bushes and stoop and be gone. The bushes wouldn’t wave. The most Du Pré ever knew of his passage was a bird or animal complaining. If they were complaining about Benetsee. Who knew?

Du Pré tried the slingshot a few more times. It was one of those things you had to do a lot and then it would make sense. Seemed simple. Like tying knots, it wouldn’t work right until he didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Du Pré wandered back to his house. He sat on the stump of a box elder he’d been meaning to grub out for the last ten years. Big black ants had chewed holes in the gray wood. Du Pré looked at them and decided he would let them win this race. He hated digging holes, gardening, and the like.

Madelaine came out with some lemonade. The summer had gone on hot right into the first part of September. Her children were in school, and after school they would wander back on their own time. The boys played softball and the girls visited friends.

Du Pré got off the stump and offered it to her. She sat down and handed him his lemonade.

“Some nice weather,” she said, looking up at the snow-capped Wolf Mountains. Up there, it could snow anytime and always did in mid-August. The peaks were clear only from the middle of July to the middle of August, and in the winter the snows could pile forty feet deep above ten thousand feet.

Du Pré heard the telephone ring. Maria was off somewhere. He got up and trotted to the open back door of the house.

He picked up the phone, heard the long-distance hum.

“Uh, Gabriel Du Pré,” said a woman’s voice he couldn’t place.

“This is me,” said Du Pré.

“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “My name is Samantha Ford. I was the reporter who talked to you at York Factory?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré, “when that Paul Chase slipped in like he’d been on the trip all along. “

“Yes. He kept denying that he hadn’t and called you all ‘disgruntled employees.’ The TV people had jumped the gun and didn’t want to eat crow. But they finally had to.”

“Well, he is a strange man,” said Du Pré.

“Uh-huh. What I’m calling about is this. I moved from the Toronto paper down here.”

“Uh,” said Du Pré.

“I’m in Washington, D.C., not the state.”

“Okay,” said Du Pré. So what.

“The Cree woman, Annie McRae, who was murdered last June at the festival?”

“Uh,” said Du Pré.

“Well, one of the Indians on your expedition had been there, and she said Chase had been dating Annie.”

Du Pré straightened up.

“So I asked the cops here, and they didn’t know anything about it. You know cops. They nod and chew and look bored.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Now, which one of those Quebec Indians tell you this?”

“Lucky.”

“He say anything else?”

“He said Annie was a simple girl from the bush and she didn’t know what to do about Chase. But she was…Lucky thought she was afraid of him. He’s white; he’s powerful; he’s rich. Anyway, Chase brought her down to D.C. before the festival to tape some songs, even though Annie wasn’t a solo performer, wasn’t, in fact, very good. Then when Lucky and some others got there, she wouldn’t ever leave them. Even insisted on sleeping on the floor of the room with the most men in it. When Chase tried to get her alone, she’d almost tie herself to Lucky.”

“You tell the cops this?” said Du Pré.

“Some of it,” said Samantha Ford.

“So why you call me?”

“I called Chase,” she went on, “called him late at night; sometimes you can get someone off balance. He had been drinking or whatever. He was foggy. It seemed to take him a moment to understand my question. Then he blew up.”

Du Pré waited.

“He said Annie had been sleeping with you, Mr. Du Pré.”

“Christ,” said Du Pré, “I don’t even know what she looked like.”

“So you weren’t?”

“No,” said Du Pré. That son of a bitch.

“Thank you,” said Samantha Ford. She hung up.

Du Pré walked back outside. He leaned over and kissed Madelaine.

“Who was that?” she said.

“Woman reporter I talked to in York Factory,” said Du Pré. “She call to ask me about that murdered girl I told you about at the festival.”

Madelaine looked up at him.

“Well,” said Du Pré, “this Paul Chase, what a weasel. She calls him because one of the Quebec Indians says Chase was after this murdered girl. He says the girl was sleeping with me.”

Madelaine laughed. She laughed very hard.

“That’s funny, Du Pré,” she said. “Were you?” And she laughed again.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Du Pré.

“My Gabriel screwing teenyboppers,” said Madelaine, “I don’t think so.”

“You ever talk to one of them?” said Du Pré.

“I have to,” said Madelaine, “I’m their mother.”

She sighed.

T
HE LITTLE PRIVATE JET SHOT
across the sky. Du Pré watched the Midwest’s patchwork of fields move beneath the wings. He toyed with a glass of bourbon.

Lawyer Foote sat in one of the other chairs, Bart in the third.

Bart was enraged.

Du Pré was both angry and bewildered.

Foote, the elegant attorney from Chicago’s Gold Coast, looked bored.

“You two calm down,” Foote said finally. “This is a farce. I don’t even think it is necessary for us to
go
there. A deposition would have sufficed. It is up to them to find some evidence, for Chrissakes. I would bet things are closing in on Chase.”

“I am just sick of that lying little prick,” said Bart.

Foote sighed, picked up a book, and went back to reading.

“Do I have to cage the pair of you?” he said, offhandedly.

Bart and Du Pré sank back in their chairs for a minute. Then they tensed up and began to lean forward again.

“You are to keep your tempers, gentlemen,” said Foote. “An attack on Chase would not be worth it, to put it mildly.” He did not look up from his book.

The plane got to Washington and circled just once before shrieking in to land. A limousine moved slowly out to the plane. The ramp went down. Foote got off first, carrying a slim attaché case and glancing grimly at his watch. Du Pré and Bart had no luggage. The black driver got in and drove off. He was separated from them by a glass panel.

The police station was new, in the late seventies architecture best called inhumane.

Foote spoke briefly to the desk officer. The man picked up a telephone. He talked for a moment and then pointed down the hall to the right. They began to walk toward it.

The big, rumpled detective whom Du Pré had spoken to in June, while he held the frightened horse, came out of a doorway and stood there waiting for them, hands in pockets.

They got closer. The detective stared at Foote with distaste.

“Just a few questions,” said the cop.

“If I think the questions reasonable, I shall instruct my client to answer,” said Foote. His disdain chilled the hall.

They all took seats at the conference table. There was a voice-activated miniature tape recorder sitting on it. No ashtrays. A sign on the wall thanked them for not smoking.

The detective rattled the case number into the recorder. Foote had scribbled a short note. He pushed it over to the detective, who looked sourly at it and then spoke the names of Bart, Du Pré, and the lawyer.

“You ever date this Annie McCrae?” said the detective.

“No,” said Du Pré. “I don’t even know what she looked like.”

The detective rattled off questions; Du Pré looked at Foote before answering each one. Foote nodded; Du Pré spoke.

“But Paul Chase says you did,” the detective said finally.

“Paul Chase is a liar,” said Du Pré. He recounted the story of the expedition and Chase’s grandstanding at the end of it. Told him to contact Samantha Ford at the Post.

“Thanks,” said the detective suddenly. He waved to someone behind the mirrored wall. A door opened in the hallway. Heels clicked on the tiles. A tall, pretty woman came in the door.

“This is my partner,” said the detective, “Detective Sgt. Michelle Leuci.”

Bart was staring at her, and not just because she was Italian.

“You dragged their asses all the way here from fucking Montana?” said the lovely woman. “Rollie, you are an asshole. He could have been deposed there. For Christ sweet sakes.”