Badlands (3 page)

“I don’t like this,” said Raymond.

Du Pré drove to the Toussaint Saloon. There were several cars parked out in front, and the usual ruck of old pickups. Some of the cars had Oregon and California plates on them.

“They have landed,” said Raymond. He got out stiffly. He would be stiff for the rest of his life after his hard fall, eighty feet.

Damn near died, Du Pré thought, the father of my grandchildren. I got fourteen, I think. Jacqueline maybe hide a few, so she don’t upset me.

He hit the steering wheel once with his open hand. It stung. He got out of the cruiser.

Inside it was still. The regulars were lined up on stools at the bar.

The newcomers sat stiffly at tables, the men all in the odd shirts, the women in long gray dresses and scarves. They were eating hamburgers and fries and drinking sodas.

Du Pré and Raymond went to the bar and took the last two stools. The local people looked down the bar at them and then went back to staring off into the distance.

The newcomers rose as one and all of them filed out but a man in his forties, who brought the tabs to the bar. He had a purse on a chain in his hip pocket, and he took bills from it, and left the tip on the bartop. He left without a word.

The door closed.

“Why in the hell did you serve the sons of bitches?” said a rancher, looking angrily at Susan Klein.

“Well, Bill,” said Susan, “they were polite and orderly and I had no reason not to. Top of that, it would be against the
law
not to.”

“Hell with the law,” said Bill.

“Easy for you to say,” said Susan, “but I have more difficulties with breaking it.”

Bill gulped his drink and he spun off the barstool and stomped out the door. He slammed it.

“There goes his digestion,” said Booger Tom. Du Pré looked up, surprised. He hadn’t noticed the old cowboy sitting there.

“I think,” said Susan Klein, “that we oughta wait and see what they do.”

Du Pré heard a big truck gear down and slow. He got up and went out. Two big trailers with earthmoving equipment and a backhoe had stopped. Then the lead truck started and they headed off toward the Eide place.

Day after tomorrow, concrete trucks, Du Pré thought. These people they plan this ver’ carefully.

He looked down the road. Madelaine was walking up the street from her house. She was wearing a brilliantly white blouse and her dark skin and black hair shot with silver shone in the late sun. She waved. Her walk was soft and graceful.

Fine-lookin’ woman, thought Du Pré, glad that she likes me.

Me, I don’t get mad about this.

Bullshit.

Madelaine got close.

“Not bullshit,” she said. “You be careful, Du Pré. Don’t you get mad about this.”

Du Pré laughed.

Madelaine frequently knew exactly what Du Pré was thinking, as though he had spoken aloud.

So did Jacqueline and Maria, Du Pré’s daughters.

My women they understand me too good, Du Pré thought.

Madelaine stood on her toes and kissed him.

“They are here eating hamburgers,” said Madelaine. “Nobody throw them through the window, that is good.”

Not yet they don’t, thought Du Pré.

“This Host of Yahweh,” said Madelaine, “Father Van Den Heuvel says they got a lot of money. They sue plenty.”

Du Pré nodded.

“They are ver’ careful about the law,” said Madelaine. “Get a lot of messed-up rich kids. They got a leader but he is pret’ invisible. Call him the White Priest. Always wears white robes.”

“That Father Van Den Heuvel,” said Du Pré, “he is keeping track, the competition.”

“That is what he said, too,” said Madelaine.

“I don’t like this,” said Du Pré.

“Nobody like this,” said Madelaine, “have a bunch strange people take over.”

“They are taking over?” said Du Pré.

“They will try,” said Madelaine. “Father Van Den Heuvel he say they have some trouble, California, the White Priest says he will talk, God, find a place they can call their own.”

“Christ,” said Du Pré.

Madelaine swung her hand through the air, brushing across the Wolf Mountains and the plains and the sky.

“It is yours, Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “but it isn’t either. You don’t own nothing finally but enough earth, bury you in.”

“This earth,” said Du Pré.

“Somebody else got to do that for you,” said Madelaine, “so you don’t own much you see.”

Du Pré laughed.

Some more vans with dark-tinted windows went past. Du Pré counted eight. All white with blue patterns, like china, painted on them.

“Why they come here?” said Du Pré.

“Why we come here?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré laughed. The Métis came down to Montana from Canada. They had eaten all the buffalo, Manitoba, Saskatchewan. Fight the Sioux for buffalo here. The Métis had more guns and better guns.

“Maybe they don’t bother nobody,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré sighed and rolled a smoke.

He lit it and Madelaine took it for her one long drag. She handed it back to him.

“OK,” said Du Pré.

“Bullshit,” said Madelaine. “Me, I don’t want them here either but they are. There will be trouble, you know, Du Pré. Maybe bad trouble.”

Du Pré nodded.

That rancher Bill, for one, had a bad temper and fast fists.

“It is bad,” said Du Pré. “Them things they are always bad.”

“They always go bad,” said Madelaine, “but this one is not yet. Lots of sick people, people on drugs, living on the streets, they come to the Host of Yahweh, get cleaned up.”

Du Pré nodded. It is like that yes.

“I want, talk to Benetsee,” said Du Pré.

“That would be good,” said Madelaine.

“U
NBELIEVABLE,” SAID
B
ART.
H
E
was looking down at the Host of Yahweh compound ten thousand feet below. There were neat rows of prefabbed houses laid out in a grid, six large metal barns, and a pair of poured foundations for what would be large buildings.

“A church and a palace for the White Priest,” said Bart. “Montana Power ran a quad of 880’s in there to service them all. There will be over six hundred people living there.”

The pilot looked back over his shoulder.

“Fly the boundaries,” said Bart. “It’s the map I gave you.”

The pilot turned back, nodding.

Du Pré looked down on the old Eide spread from his seat. The land rolled yellow and green with old grass and new grass, cut through with stone outcrops and weathered buttes. The badlands stretched to the east, fantastic pastels of purple and gray and ochre.

“Fencing crews,” said Bart. “They plan to run a herd of buffalo. So they need stouter fencing than the Eides had. Pricey. Twenty thousand dollars a mile. Number nine wire and twelve-foot mains sunk in concrete.”

Du Pré shook his head.

“Buffalo are the coming thing,” said Bart. “The yuppies worry about fat in their diets and buffalo meat has less than beef does.”

“They are going to herd buffalo?” said Du Pré.

“I doubt they thought that far,” said Bart.

Buffalo, they go where they want. I have seen them run up sheer banks, jump high fences, go where they want, them buffalo. Also they are dangerous. Me, I do not want, inspect loads of buffalo. I don’t want Raymond do it, either.

God damn this bullshit.

Du Pré started to roll a smoke and then he remembered he couldn’t smoke in the plane, which was a charter out of Billings.

Yuppies.

What is a yuppie exactly?

“Bart,” said Du Pré, “what is a yuppie?”

Bart thought about it a moment.

“Remember those clowns who were here back when the wolves were released in the Wolf Mountains?” said Bart.

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

“Them,” said Bart.

Du Pré nodded. Some of them die in the avalanche, Old Black Claws the big grizzly he eat them under the snow. So they are bear shit, we strain what is left out of the meltwater. It is not much, them.

“One of those barns is the commissary,” said Bart. “They truck in food and clothing and all and sell it there.”

“You been there?” said Du Pré.

“Nope,” said Bart, “they let in the state inspectors because they have to. But no one else. There’s a couple of journalists camped out by the gate there. Won’t talk to them, won’t let them in.”

“We can go on down now” said Bart.

Du Pré looked out and down and saw a herd of wild horses running toward the badlands where they hid most of the day. They had been grazing longer now because the grass was fresh and hadn’t much food in it.

“Them,” said Du Pré, pointing.

The wild horses were running flat out, about twenty of them, with the stallion at the rear and the lead mare out in front guiding the bunch.

“I see ’em,” said the pilot. “You want me to go closer.”

“Not too close,” said Bart.

“Right,” said the pilot.

Du Pré waited while the plane banked and then it turned and he could see the horses again. Six of them were grullas, backbred to gray with faint stripes like zebras on their withers. Gray on gray, not black on white.

“What are those?” said Bart, pointing.

“Spanish horses,” said Du Pré. “Grullas they are called. They are close to wild horses.”

“Are there any wild horses left?” said Bart.

Du Pré shook his head.

“One,” said Du Pré. It has a strange name, Przewalski’s horse. Or something like that. In middle Asia.

“The Eides never bothered to fence much near the badlands,” said Bart.

“No water, no grass,” said Du Pré, “no reason a cow go there.”

“Some cows would go there,” said Bart.

“Want me to fly the badlands?” said the pilot.

Bart looked at Du Pré.

Du Pré nodded.

The pilot dived down a couple of thousand feet and he leveled the plane. Du Pré could see the horses running flat out, and they dashed into the badlands and down a trail that wound through the small strange buttes and odd formations. The horses never slowed.

“Over there,” said Bart.

Du Pré looked out Bart’s window when the pilot banked the plane.

Four all-terrain vehicles were shooting down the tracks of the horses. The men on them had rifles slung across their backs.

“Those bastards,” said Bart. “Look at that.”

The horses were safe and long out of range.

The pilot circled.

Two of the all-terrain vehicles were close together and they slowed and stopped. The men on them got out to talk. Then one drove off. The other got back on his four-wheeler and he drove up toward a butte that commanded a view of the trail the wild horses had taken.

The man took a sleeping bag and a sack from the four-wheeler. He carried them up a trail that wound to the top of the butte.

“Let’s go back,” said Bart.

The pilot nodded and banked the plane.

Du Pré had one last look at the man on the butte, who was looking up at the plane.

“Those sons of bitches,” said Bart. “There have been wild horses out there since the days of the buffalo. They don’t bother anything that much.”

Du Pré shook his head.

“What?” said Bart.

“They fence that off,” said Du Pré, “them horses have to go somewhere.”

“Why shoot them?” said Bart.

“Maybe they want to,” said Du Pré.

Buffalo. There were buffalo here once, and buffalo wolves, and big white grizzlies along the river bottoms.

That William Clark, he say he rather fight two Indians than fight one grizzly.

But they are all gone now.

Benetsee, he will know how long they been there.

Long time gone.

Wonder if them Red Ochre People, them boat people, they were here.

Not in the badlands.

Badlands, they don’t even got lizards. Too cold, too dry.

Got horses though.

Grullas. Tough little bastards.

The plane dipped sharply as the pilot approached the dirt strip behind the Toussaint Saloon. He made one low pass. The sheep grazing on the runway fled to a corner of the fenced field.

The pilot made one more turn and then set the plane down, very smoothly, and he cut the props and braked. Du Pré was pushed against his shoulder straps.

The pilot turned the plane around and Bart and Du Pré clambered out. The pilot gunned the engines and was airborne again in thirty seconds.

“There has to be something I can do,” said Bart. He slammed his fist into his palm repeatedly.

Du Pré rolled a smoke and lit it and he sucked in a thick stream.

He blew it out.

“Maybe not,” said Du Pré. “I don’t think them horses, protected.”

“I don’t like this,” said Bart

“Nobody like it,” said Du Pré. “So far they done nothing.”

Bart screwed up his big red face.

“They will,” he said.

Du Pré nodded.

He began to walk toward the saloon and Bart fell in behind.

Madelaine was behind the bar, stringing beads on her threaded needle. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth.

Du Pré slid up on a barstool.

“Don’t do this you are older’n Saint Jean’s shit,” said Madelaine. She half-closed one eye.

“They are going, shoot the wild horses,” said Du Pré.

Madelaine got the bead on the needle and she put it on to the little purse she was making beautiful.

She put down the purse and she got a drink for Du Pré.

“Go, see Benetsee,” she said.

D
U
P
RÉ DROVE THE
old cruiser up the rutted track that led to Benetsee’s cabin. The house stood dark and empty, dead. The old man’s old dogs had died years before.

Du Pré parked the cruiser and he opened the trunk and took out a jug of screwtop wine and a sack of food, cooked meat and potatoes and bread and jars of preserves, that Madelaine had sent along.

Du Pré walked back past the cabin and down the little dip that led to the meadow where Benetsee’s sweat lodge stood. The flap was up and the sweat lodge empty.

Du Pré saw a movement at the corner of his eye. A skunk, bold black and white, secure in its stinks. The little animal wandered past the sweat lodge, nose to the ground. It flipped up a cowpie and snapped at something, and then it went on toward the creek and was lost in the willows. The faint smell of its perfume wafted to Du Pré.