Badlands (18 page)

“Parker, she is in there?” said Du Pré.

Harvey nodded.

“She gets in trouble,” said Harvey, “we go in shootin’.”

Du Pré sighed.

“Pidgeon’s talking with her probably,” said Harvey.

Du Pré looked at him.

“Parker got in, hell, we didn’t even know it. That woman at the massacre, one was still alive, she still is, but she isn’t talking much. How Parker got back here so quick from California we don’t know, but she did.”

Du Pré sighed.

“Those women shot themselves and each other,” said Harvey. “They were the assassins. Had a few trophies, show the White Priest, I suppose, I dunno how that bastard gets people to do this shit, but he does.”

“So,” said Du Pré. “You wait, why?”

“Waco,” said Harvey, “is why. There’ll be three hundred agents here by daylight.
Searchlights. We were gonna shut the power off then. Then we wait ’em out.”

Du Pré nodded.

“This worries me,” said Harvey. “Those fools at Waco weren’t all that smart. It was one of those things, happens. These people are a good deal more competent. Very little false front.”

“Them women,” said Du Pré, “you are sure?”

Harvey nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it was real clear. We don’t know much, but it just looks like when the guys wanted to leave, the White Priest said OK, fine, go, no hard feelings. Then he sends the girls, kill ’em all at the same time.”

Du Pré shook his head.

“Yeah,” said Harvey, “things folks will do when they really believe.”

Pidgeon opened the van door and she motioned for Harvey to come. He walked over. Pidgeon and Harvey stood together, heads down, listening. Harvey waved to Du Pré.

Du Pré walked to the van.

The technician fiddled with something.

A voice, weird and distorted.

“Electronic voice cover,” said Pidgeon.

“It is not the Last Days,” said the voice.

A chorus of Praise Yahwehs.

“Here we must stand,” said the voice.

Praise Yahweh.

“The Legions of Arcturus and Betelgeuse are flaming through the stars and they shall succor us.”

Praise Yahweh.

“The Assyrians draw nigh our gates.”

Praise Yahweh.

“They shall not enter to destroy our Temple.”

Praise Yahweh.

“I will go now,” said Du Pré.

He walked toward his cruiser.

D
U
P
RÉ SAT AT
Madelaine’s kitchen table. They had just eaten venison saddle with plum sauce and wild rice with little strong onions Madelaine raised in the garden boxes Du Pré had built for her. She had more than seventy herbs and spices in the boxes. One, fifteen feet long, was all chives.

They finished and Du Pré washed the dishes. He dried the silver and put it away in the velvet-lined box.

Catfoot had found the silver, in its chest, in an abandoned wagon he stumbled across in the Wolf Mountains. The wagon had furniture and cast-iron cookware in it, too. There was no sign of who had left it, decades before.

The silverware was heavy and had a crest on it and the initials GP in raised scrolled script.

“Du Pré,” Madelaine had said when she had first looked at it, “it is a sign from God. You change your name, Placquemines, it is yours.”

“Too many letters,” Du Pré had said.

Madelaine made coffee and they took it out back and sat near the double-bloom Persian lilacs. There was a faint scent yet, though the blossoms had long fallen.

“So,” said Madelaine, “what is Du Pré going to do?”

Du Pré shrugged.

“Me,” he said, “I think I play my fiddle, let them fix that one.”

A TV news helicopter whacked over, and it set down in the meadow across from the Toussaint Saloon, a third of a mile away.

“Those children in there,” said Madelaine, “they better be thinkin’ of them, all the time. Poor kids.”

Du Pré nodded.

There was a good three hours of light left.

Horse hooves. A little horse.

Pallas came round the house on her little blue roan. She stepped down and dropped the reins. The horse stood.

“Hi,” said Pallas. “I got to talk, you.”

Du Pré narrowed his eyes.

This Pallas, he thought, thinks so fast, me I get whiplash tryin’ to keep up.

“’Bout me marryin’ Ripper,” said Pallas. “It’s a while you know.”

Du Pré nodded.

“It’s OK he marries somebody else long as he divorces her then,” said Pallas.

“You tell him this?” said Madelaine.

Pallas shook her head.

“I thought Grandpère could,” she said.

“Me,” said Madelaine, “I need more coffee, be right back.”

“Ver’ generous of you,” said Du Pré.

“Don’t want Ripper to think I am mean,” said Pallas. “Sides, he is prolly pret’ horny.”

“What happens,” said Du Pré, “Ripper don’t want to get married, you or anybody?”

“I take care of that,” said Pallas.

Madelaine stayed in the house. Du Pré saw her once, looking quickly out the kitchen window and laughing like hell.

“OK,” said Du Pré, “I tell him.”

“Thanks, Grandpère,” said Pallas. She got back on her little blue roan and she turned him and they went.

Madelaine came back out.

“That kid,” said Du Pré, “she is scaring me some.”

“Good,” said Madelaine, “she about scare anybody. Poor Ripper, he think he got a life, he don’t, he don’t do what she say.”

Du Pré nodded. Another TV helicopter went over.

“Them buffalo,” said Madelaine, “what they do with them?”

Du Pré looked at her. He shrugged.

“Poor things,” said Madelaine. “I hope they got enough water. Grass.”

Du Pré hadn’t thought about them. They had been let out to the huge back pasture.

“I don’t know how much water there is,” he said.

Madelaine nodded.

“They pump any, got no electricity,” she said. “It is maybe not enough. Who is maybe taking care of that?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré sighed.

“All right,” he said. “I go see that Harvey.”

Madelaine beamed at him.

“Come down here for them buffalo, our people,” she said. “We maybe should see they are all right.”

Du Pré got up.

“You maybe tell that Ripper he can get laid, Pallas she give him her gracious permission,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded. He yawned and he stretched.

“Horses,” said Madelaine. “See about them, too.”

The wild horses.

“Me,” said Du Pré, “I will go, conserve all that nature.”

He walked out to his cruiser. He got in. There was a little box wrapped in white tissue paper on the front seat.

For Ripper,
said the card,
from Pallas.

Du Pré smelled it.

Chocolate chip cookies.

“He is that dead meat,” said Du Pré. He turned the key and started the engine and he drove off east and then north.

The armed camp that surrounded the Host of Yahweh compound largely lived in trailers that had been trucked in and hooked up to electricity and water, that last brought in huge tanker trucks. The trailers were out of sight if one looked out from the compound. Men in body armor carrying automatic weapons patrolled a perimeter, some on foot and some in armored personnel carriers.

Du Pré parked where the newsmen did and he walked to the sentry at the gate in the worn fence.

“Me,” said Du Pré, “I need to see that Harvey Wallace.”

“Certainly, Mr. Du Pré,” said the sentry. “Go on in. Fourth trailer on the right.”

Du Pré walked on.

He found the trailer and knocked on the door.

A young man opened it. He looked at Du Pré, startled, and his hand reached for the gun in his waistband.

“It’s OK, Melton,” said Harvey.

The young man relaxed.

“Sorry,” he said.

Du Pré shrugged and he went on in. The room stank of sweat, bad coffee, and electrical currents.

Harvey yawned. He looked exhausted.

“They’re good,” he said. “They have generators and wells and a lot of food. We demand they surrender. They don’t reply.”

“What about the stock?” said Du Pré.

Harvey looked at him dully.

“Them buffalo,” said Du Pré, “they are all right?”

Harvey shook himself.

“I assume,” he said, “that they are out there eating grass and humping each other like buffalo.”

“Anybody go look?” said Du Pré.

Harvey shook his head.

“Sometimes they come in near the sentries at night,” said the young agent. “But there’s been no trouble.”

“What,” said Harvey, “am I supposed to do with the
goddamned buffalo?”

Du Pré stood and he waited.

“Gabriel,” said Harvey, “will you please go and see how those monstrous hairballs are?”

“Sure,” said Du Pré.

“Get him a pass,” said Harvey, “and then we need to compose a memo.”

The young agent took Du Pré’s picture, pulled it out of the camera, waited, and then pulled the print apart.

“Driver’s license?” said the agent. Du Pré handed it to him.

“Where is Ripper?” said Du Pré.

Harvey yawned.

“I dunno,” said Harvey.

Du Pré handed him the box of chocolate chip cookies.

“From his fiancé,” said Du Pré.

“I’ll see he gets them,” said Harvey.

“Here’s your pass,” said the young agent. “Clip it to your shirt.”

Du Pré stuck it on his pocket.

Ripper came in.

“Ripper me boy,” said Harvey, waving the box, “come speak with your Dutch uncle.”

D
U
P
RÉ CLUCKED TO
the big bay and the horse muscled up the cutbank. As soon as the footing was flat, the bay began to trot.

They are around here someplace, Du Pré thought. Strange how a big animal can disappear. Cattle hide but they are not that good at it. Buffalo are very good at it.

He found a water hole, trampled and ruined, the earth and mud churned up and the spring strangled beneath the blackened ground. A few hoofprints had water in the bottom, but not many. The pipe surround that kept the cattle from wrecking the spring was a twisted and trampled mess of bent iron.

My grandpère tell me the time he goes to round up buffalo, over in the Flathead Valley, they got this bison range. They are going to ship buffalo to Canada. They got a hundred cowboys, they got a train with cattle cars on it.

Buffalo don’t think much of this. One bull he hooks a horse, horn goes right through the cinch ring, buffalo picks up the horse and rider, carries them half a mile, throws them over a bank. Horse is gutted, intestines dragging on the ground. Cowboys, they try to rope them buffalo. Buffalo, they charge the cowboys. I stuff your rope up your ass, dumb shit.

They haze some buffalo into the cars, the train. The buffalo tear the cars apart.

“Knock them planks to kindling,” said grandpère, “kick out the sides, then they jump straight up, land legs all stiff. Chips fly everywhere. Planks are oak. They don’t last long.”

Foreman has to wire the Canadians.

You want your damn buffalo, you come get them here.

Canadians they wire back, oh, it is all right, we think of something else maybe, you keep your buffalo.

Me, I don’t know much about them but old stories.

My people, they eat all of the buffalo Manitoba, Saskatchewan. They come down here to hunt, make meat and pemmican sell to that Hudson’s Bay Company. Many many tons. We got guns, we kill them, we run them into traps. Hunt leader is called the Poundmaker, he makes those log corrals, pounds, run them buffalo in, shut the gate and kill them all.

Best meat is the unborn calves.

Du Pré stopped and he looked at the ground. Fresh tracks and shit still damp in the middle. Dry wind, maybe an hour old.

“Where are them sons of bitches, eh?” said Du Pré to his horse.

The horse stood, his ears pointing one place and then another. The land stretched away. Broken and looking very empty. But there were coulees cut by vanished rivers and gullies cut by thunderstorms that dumped a million tons of water on a small patch of the earth, the lottery of rain in this country.

Du Pré cantered over to a low butte and he let the horse pick its way up a narrow trail to the top. He stopped and he looked around. The land looked soft, gray and green and lavender. There was grass eaten down to the ground.

Not a buffalo in sight

Du Pré laughed.

Flying over the place he had looked down and seen them black and rounded, like raisins in an oatmeal earth. There were thousands in here, over three, and they had disappeared.

Du Pré rode to the edge of the butte and looked down.

A buffalo bull stood in the coulee below him. The huge animal was barely forty feet away.

The bull was motionless.

Nothing moved but a jay picking bugs from the black-brown cape of thick and twisted hair covering the buffalo’s huge shoulders.

Du Pré looked at the massive beast.

The buffalo did not twitch. The bird hopped on its back, pecking. The buffalo’s short skinny tail flicked once.

“You see me, eh?” said Du Pré.

The tail whirled around. The clump of hair at the end flapped. The buffalo snorted. Du Pré’s horse had started to tremble.

“Ho ho ho,” said Du Pré, rubbing the bay’s neck.

The tail hung motionless. Then it began to whirl again.

The buffalo’s round black eye stared. A cloud of little flies danced around it but the eye did not blink. The horse danced a little and he snorted.

“Easy, easy,” said Du Pré. The edge of the low butte fell away almost sheer, a good twenty feet.

Du Pré rolled a smoke and he lit it and he looked up.

A helicopter was circling the Host of Yahweh compound.

“Them TV,” said Du Pré to the horse.

The buffalo was motionless again. The jay hopped to a new spot and it pecked.

Long damn way from a tree that jay is, Du Pré thought.

The horse whinnied. The bay was nervous and trembling. The helicopter rose up and it hung in the air for a moment and then it turned toward Du Pré and it began to come on.

Son of a bitch. What they are doing this for, thought Du Pré.

He stared at the helicopter, getting a little larger as it came on. The horse backed a little and it snorted and shook its head.