Badlands (20 page)

Du Pré grinned at him.

“She stir it up good,” he said, “ten years old. Me, I maybe live long enough, see her at twenty.”

“The mind reels,” said Harvey.

Toussaint was visible in the near distance.

A TV helicopter was landing across the road from the saloon.

Du Pré drove on.

He pulled around in back of the saloon.

“I think I’ll wait here,” said Harvey. “If you happen to see Ripper, tell him I stand ready to be his best man.”

Du Pré nodded. He went in the back door of the saloon.

Madelaine was still sitting on her stool behind the bar. Jacqueline and Ripper were down at one end, glowering. A few reporters were off at the tables, drinking and laughing.

Madelaine looked up at Du Pré. She nodded.

“You gutless fuck,” she said. She smiled.

Du Pré shrugged.

“These …” he said, jerking his head at the reporters.

“Non,” said Madelaine. “Just bored, fly around, look at the buildings, there is nothing to see there. Crazy people. Those poor kids.”

A cell phone chirred. One of the reporters flipped open the little black dingus. He put it to his ear.

“Let’s go,” the reporter yelled.

All the people at the tables ran out the door.

Ripper got up and came to Du Pré.

“Where’s Harvey?” he said. Du Pré jerked his head toward the back door. Ripper ran out.

Tires squealing. The car roared off very fast.

“Now something,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded.

Jacqueline came down to join them. She looked tired.

“Find her?” said Du Pré.

“Non,” said Jacqueline, “she is layin’ real low. Smart kid.”

“Others are all at my house,” said Madelaine, “filling sandbags.”

“Ver’ funny,” said Jacqueline. “You know what that little shit did? She call that cheap newspaper tell them the story. They don’t believe her. She got this tape, Ripper, him talking our house where he is. She mess with the tape, having him say things. You know, take a few words here, some there. She play it over the phone, those shits at that paper. Now they are curious. They come here, we don’t know it, get the story, everybody knows Pallas, she has decided she is marrying Ripper, a few years she is old enough. So people they say yes, of course, they think it is a big joke …”

Du Pré nodded.

Me, I give her that tape recorder she says she wants one, small and good, tape bird calls. I think she means rap music.

Don’t bring it up now.

Madelaine laughed.

“Ripper, he is not so happy,” she said.

“Me, either,” said Jacqueline. “Goddamned kid.”

Benny Klein came in. He looked into the gloom and saw Du Pré.

“They’re comin’ out,” said Benny.

Du Pré whirled on his stool.

“Yeah,” said Benny. “They’re comin’ out now, hands over their heads, and all.”

Du Pré got up and went out to his cruiser. He started the engine.

“Grandpère,” Pallas yelled. “I am in the trunk, you let me out!”

Du Pré ignored her. He drove off fast.

D
U
P
RÉ PARKED BACK
away from the police cars and the National Guard carriers.

“Grandpère!” said Pallas.

“You!” said Du Pré, “you be quiet You stay there I maybe be an hour, more. You are in deep
shit.”

“OK, Grandpère,” said Pallas, in a very small voice.

Du Pré got out. It was cloudy, so Pallas wouldn’t bake too badly in the trunk. He walked up toward the searchlights banked on either side of the gate. Harvey and Ripper were there. The armed and armored men around the perimeter were all standing and looking on.

The Host of Yahweh was filing out of the big metal buildings. They blinked in the light. Small children were wailing. The men wore the odd billowy shirts, the women long gray dresses and bonnets. They marched four abreast toward the gate.

Du Pré watched as they walked past, led by cops. The people were directed to an open meadow and asked to sit.

Du Pré walked up to Harvey and Ripper. Another agent was filming the Host marching out of their compound. Du Pré stared hard at the faces of the men, but he didn’t see any he knew.

Some were older, some younger, some of the women had white hair and glasses, some of the men were bald, well into their sixties. Some of them were quite young. All of them were silent.

They filed past in fours, or in families, fathers and mothers carrying little ones or keeping older children in line. The TV cameras were rolling. There was a bank of thirty of them, all with their technicians glued to the eyepieces and sound gauges.

“It would help,” said Harvey, in a low voice, “if we had any idea just who we were looking for.”

The crowd walked fairly swiftly. The last few people passed, and then the cops began to rush the metal buildings.

“I don’t see that guy,” said Ripper, “that smoothie who was cutting us up so bad on the tube.”

Harvey nodded.

The cops got to the buildings. They had drawn weapons. One opened the door and the others rushed in.

A few minutes passed.

The big sliding doors on the side of one of the buildings were pushed open.

“Search every box bigger’n one for shoes,” said Harvey, “for people. After that, search ’em all. Tapes, discs, what-have-you.”

A small black dog ran out through the open sliding doors.

Harvey looked at a computer in his hand. He walked over to Du Pré. Faces appeared on the screen. The doctor who had been so eloquent after the woman had killed herself.

Tate.

The avuncular man with the long brown hair who had said that the Host of Yahweh had nothing to hide.

“None of them, at least that I saw,” said Harvey.

“Parker?” said Du Pré.

Harvey shook his head.

Du Pré hadn’t seen her, either.

Harvey sighed.

“This,” he said, “is a fucking mess. We have to bus all these people somewhere and interview all of them.”

Du Pré nodded.

“We look like your friendly jackbooted persecutors,” said Harvey.

Du Pré nodded.

“This isn’t right. Something isn’t right,” said Harvey.

Du Pré looked at all of the modular homes and trailers. They seemed lifeless. The Host of Yahweh had stayed out of sight in the big metal buildings. Search teams began to go through the homes and the long white double-wides.

Harvey slapped his thigh with his hand.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Here I sit, waiting for one of them to tell me they’ve found a dead cop.”

Du Pré nodded.

An ambulance started up its sirens and it came roaring up the road and shot down to the compound. The attendants jumped out and grabbed a wheeled stretcher and then went in the sliding doors.

Harvey listened to his radio, the earpiece in.

He frowned.

“Found Parker,” he said, “unconscious. Otherwise all right. Jesus Christ.”

A medevac helicopter came over low and landed near the metal building. The ambulance attendants wheeled the stretcher out and lifted it into the helicopter. The blades began to swirl faster and the machine lifted up. When it was five hundred feet up, the pilot kicked in the jet engines and soon it was a speck on the horizon.

Du Pré looked over at the houses. Men were dashing in and out of them, bursting in a door and then appearing on the far side headed for another.

“Maybe they got out,” said Du Pré.

Harvey nodded.

“Thing about electronic gear,” he said, “is that electronic gear can make it do things it ought not to.”

“I will be at Madelaine’s,” said Du Pré, “or the saloon,”

Harvey nodded.

Du Pré walked back down to his cruiser. He opened the trunk.

Pallas blinked at the light.

“You,” said Du Pré, “maybe I just shoot you, dump you in a coyote den, let them eat you. Your mama, she get hold of you, she skin you.”

Pallas sat up.

“Maybe,” she said, “I hide out a while, Madelaine’s.”

“Madelaine mad at you, too,” said Du Pré.

Pallas thought about that.

“I am thirsty,” she said.

Du Pré lifted her out.

“OK,” he said, “I got some water. Maybe we take you, Benetsee’s. You be safe there.”

Pallas stumbled a little. Her leg had gone to sleep.

“Hot in there,” she said.

Du Pré lifted her up and put her in the front seat. He got the water jug from behind the driver’s seat and gave it to her. He got in and started the cruiser and turned it around and drove on back toward the road, the blacktop.

“You are some trouble,” said Du Pré. “You make trouble for Ripper, you make trouble, your mother.”

Pallas drank water and stayed silent.

She put the cap back on the jug and set it on the floor.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, I did not think they would buy it.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Me,” he said, “I never see your mother so mad.”

“She get plenty mad,” said Pallas. “You are not around her then.”

“I am around her
now,”
said Du Pré. “She bite your head off, piss down your throat she is mad.”

Pallas began to cry. She blubbered.

“You,” said Du Pré, “quit that shit. I know you. You are not sorry one bit. You got Ripper half crazy, you set him up good.”

Pallas quit snuffling. Du Pré turned off on the bench road that led to Benetsee’s. Pallas stayed quiet.

“Maybe,” said Du Pré, “you leave Montana, maybe you grow a mustache, wear glasses, get a job.”

“Where?” said Pallas, weakly.

“Bolivia,” said Du Pré. “It is a good place you are Butch Cassidy the Sundance Kid.”

Pallas laughed.

“Pret’ good movie,” she said.

“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Remember they get shot to shit the end.”

“Yah,” said Pallas, “so what I do.”

“Hide out, Benetsee’s,” said Du Pré. “I come get you when Jacqueline she is more worried than she is mad.”

“OK,” said Pallas.

Du Pré got the cruiser up to speed.

“You!” he yelled.

Pallas looked up at him.

“I am a ver’ proud grandpère!” yelled Du Pré.

They laughed and rolled along the dirt road.

“Y
OU TAKE THAT LITTLE
shit to Benetsee?” said Madelaine. She was sitting in her kitchen, drinking chamomile tea.

Du Pré looked at the ceiling.

“I don’t rat her out,” said Madelaine. “Jacqueline get a good grip on your nuts you will sing like a capon you don’t talk fast.”

Du Pré nodded.

“I think,” said Madelaine, “maybe I got this idea.”

Du Pré looked at her.

“She is like them other kids some, but she got something else, too,” said Madelaine. “I talk, her teacher, the school. They got the computers there. Other kids they are doing kid stuff, ten, you know. Learning about science, a little …”

Du Pré rolled a smoke.

“Pallas, she is liking math,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded.

“You don’t got a checking account, Du Pré,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré shook his head.

“Now,” said Madelaine, “here is this thing, you tell me what it is.”

She pushed a sheet of paper over to Du Pré. Du Pré looked at it.

“Them two bars there,” he said, nodding, “they are that equal sign.”

“Yah,” said Madelaine, “so what is the rest of it there?”

Du Pré looked at it.

“Alphabet,” said Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Madelaine, “what alphabet?”

Du Pré shrugged.

“How many languages you got?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré laughed.

“English, Coyote French,” said Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Madelaine, “me, too. This is another language, though, Du Pré. What is it?”

Du Pré raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

“Greek,” said Madelaine.

“Pallas, she is learning Greek?” said Du Pré.

“Non!” said Madelaine. “I tell you math. Math she is doing has these Greek letters in it.”

“Why?” said Du Pré.

Madelaine sipped her tea while Du Pré smoked.

“So I ask the teacher what kind of math is this. She says she don’t know. She goes, the computer, asks somebody someplace, they say, it is sort of math, graduate students studying math do, but not very many. Also pretty tough problem you have solved there, so what is this person got maybe a doctorate in math is doing in Toussaint, Montana?”

“Shit,” said Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Madelaine, “so we shit, us, and we maybe talk to that Bart. Pallas is so smart, we maybe ought to let her do something here.”

“Jacqueline, she will not like this,” said Du Pré. Jacqueline was a good mother and she loved her children fiercely.

“She be fine,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré sighed.

“Maybe Pallas don’t want do much anyway,” said Du Pré.

Madelaine nodded.

“We ask her,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré looked at his watch. He went to the telephone.

Bart answered on the first ring.

“It is me,” said Du Pré, “That Pallas is, some math genius. So what the fuck I do.”

“What does Pallas want to do?” said Bart.

“I don’t ask her yet,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” said Bart, “ask her, and if she wants to go to some school for it, of course I will pay for it. No problem, any of those kids, they all can go to school on me if they want. You know that.”

“I got to ask,” said Du Pré.

“So ask her,” said Bart, “and then if she wants to do something we can go from there.”

“OK,” said Du Pré. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” said Bart. “I got to go, there’s somebody at the door.”

Du Pré hung up.

“OK,” said Madelaine, “so you got to ask Pallas, then Jacqueline.”

Du Pré yawned.

Madelaine rapped the table with her knuckles.

“Du Pré,” she said. “You go ask Pallas.”

“Why?” said Du Pré. “She is there in the morning. Maybe she will forget that Ripper, marry Benetsee. Them, perfect match.”

Madelaine snorted.

“God damn it,” she said, “you go and do that now.”

“Why?” said Du Pré.

“I got this feeling,” said Madelaine. “You go to sleep you want to, I go maybe.”

Du Pré shrugged, stood up, went to the front hall, took his old leather jacket down from the peg in the wall. He yawned.