Badlands (5 page)

People dancing around a fire, waving bloody pieces of meat.

Buffalo meat.

We live, they sing, through another winter.

I dream I am riding a grulla and I am very small, I am standing on the horse’s back, holding a few strands of hair.

Riding into the badlands.

Benetsee singing.

Horse running hard.

I see a woman on a butte, dressed in white deerskins.

The woman jumps over the edge of the butte and she falls like a willow leaf, turning, turning, over and over.

I am on the horse and we go into a narrow place in the trail.

When I come out the woman is gone and I cannot see her.

I look up and there she is standing on top again, and I turn my head and she falls again.

Like a willow leaf.

Over and over.

“V
ER’ NICE GLASSES,” SAID
Pallas. “Them wings make you like a birdhead. Grandpère make them for you?”

“Yes,” said Madelaine.

“I bust his chops,” said Pallas, “for being smart-ass.”

“I will,” said Madelaine. She looked at Du Pré sleepily.

They were having dinner with Raymond and Jacqueline and their herd of children.

“You got more you are not telling me about?” said Du Pré to his daughter.

“No, Papa,” said Jacqueline. “I don’t hide them from you. You are a strong grandpère. You know all of their names, too, but it is all right you want to make us think that you don’t.”

“How is your boyfriend?” said Madelaine, looking at Pallas.

“Ripper?” said Pallas. “Oh, he thinks I am a kid, so he don’t call so much. He will get over it.” Ripper was an FBI agent back in Washington D.C., and had fled Montana in terror of Pallas.

Du Pré roared with laughter.

Pallas grinned at him.

“You wait,” she said. “That Ripper he is a stupid son of a bitch but I love him, save him from himself.”

More laughter.

“Just wait,” said Pallas. “You got money, you put it down, there.”

“When you marrying him?” said Madelaine.

“I am sixteen,” said Pallas, “then I marry him.”

“You got to have my permission,” said Raymond.

Pallas looked at him with true pity in her eyes.

“I will get,” she said, “your goddamn permission.”

Madelaine smiled at Pallas.

“Come here,” she said. Pallas got up and went to Madelaine and got in Madelaine’s lap.

“What?” said Pallas.

“You really want that Ripper?” said Madelaine.

Pallas nodded.

“OK,” said Madelaine. “I help you get him.”

Oh, good, thought Du Pré, I get a really crazy bastard, grandson-in-law.

“Good,” said Pallas.

“Now,” said Madelaine, leaning over so she could whisper in Pallas’s ear, and she did.

The little girl listened and she grinned.

“He ain’t got a chance,” said Raymond. “None of us ever had a chance.”

“You had plenty chances,” said Jacqueline. “Good thing for you you don’t take them.”

Du Pré looked at Madelaine and she looked back at him.

“I go now,” he said.

Du Pré nodded and Madelaine made her mouth into a kiss and then she turned back to Pallas, who was whispering away a mile a minute.

Du Pré got into his cruiser and started it, rolled a smoke and lit it.

It was coming on dark and would be a moonless night.

He turned out on to the street and drove off toward the Eide place. He stopped on the last high hill before the turnoff on the county road that led to the huge log gate. The new settlement glowed with lights. There were high poles with mercury lamps in them casting their pale green glow.

Du Pré went down a side road and opened a gate and closed it and went on, with no headlights. The road was a gray ribbon in darker earth. It was a bad one, potholed and with stones weathered out of the center. A couple of times he had to put one set of tires on the grass and ride the other on the stones so he would not tear out his oil pan and transmission.

The road snaked back through some old waterways and outwash plains to the very eastern edge of the Wolf Mountain rise. The foothills came down and flattened. Du Pré was just below them, out of sight.

He found a shadowed place in the trees and left the cruiser. He tucked the 9mm in its holster and put it on its rigging and slid it on, the heavy pistol under his left arm. He went to the trunk and took out his old Winchester .270. He looked through the light-gathering telescopic sight. He could make out quite a lot at four-power magnification.

Du Pré stopped and looked up at the stars for a moment and then he began to trot up the trail that wound to the benchlands that the Wolf Mountains sat on.

Du Pré came round a scarp of rock and he could see the little butte that the man had gone up on in the morning three-quarters of a mile away.

Du Pré kept on trotting. He moved from shadow to shadow. His old rifle had not a speck of gleam on it and the lenses of the telescopic sight were capped. He looked down at the path, watching for rock slides and other noisemakers.

A little wind kicked up and soughed in the sagebrush.

Off in the badlands it screamed.

Du Pré got to the edge of the benchlands. The little butte was only a quarter mile away.

Du Pré found some rocks he liked and he sat. He rolled a smoke and lit it with his back turned to the butte and then he cupped the cigarette in his hand so that the glow would be invisible more than twenty feet away.

Du Pré relaxed and finished his smoke, then he put it out and took out his little flask and had some whiskey and then he took the lens caps off the telescopic sight on his rifle.

He sighted on the line that led to the place that the man had been in the morning.

He was still there, a shadow, but one that moved. He stood up and he stretched. Du Pré could see him fairly clearly. He reached for the dial and he moved the magnification up.

NineX was as high as the sight went, but Du Pré lost detail when the magnification was that powerful. He backed it down to four. He could see the man pretty clearly.

Du Pré bedded the rifle on two pieces of dead juniper and then he sat back and looked up at the stars. The Gourd had moved to eleven o’clock.

The horses would be coming soon. Coming down the trail for grass and for water, out of the badlands.

A light flashed on the top of the butte and Du Pré put the sight to his eye.

The man had a flashlight on, a small one, and he was looking for something. The light stopped and Du Pré could see the rifle, a black nylon stock and a stainless steel barrel, propped against a rock.

Du Pré breathed in and let out his breath and squeezed the trigger and closed his eyes the instant the gun fired.

The recoil pushed the rifle and sight up, and it took a moment for Du Pré to find the man on the butte again. The flashlight was out, but there was so little cover there that the man, flat down on the ground, stood out because he was darker than the rocks and a little below Du Pré.

Du Pré heard the stallion scream and the sound of hooves drumming on hard earth.

The horses broke out of the shadow of the butte, well past the man who had been waiting with his rifle.

Du Pré stood up.

He looked once again through the sight. The man was gone.

Du Pré began to walk back to his cruiser. He hadn’t gone very far when he heard the scream of the little engine on the four-wheeler.

Du Pré picked up his speed. He stopped and listened.

He couldn’t tell where the thing was.

Du Pré trotted on.

He paused in a shadow beneath a big rock.

The engine screamed below.

The man was brave. He was coming to look for whoever had shot at him.

Du Pré cursed and he took some parachute cord out of his pocket. He went to the wash that led from the bench down to the land below. He tied one end to a live juniper, a thick healthy one, and he scrambled across the wash to the other side.

This was the only way up. I think.

In a moment Du Pré could see the little headlights of the four-wheeler. It was screaming up the wash.

Du Pré belayed the cord around another juniper, and then he let it down slowly, till it was about three feet off the ground.

The man on the four-wheeler turned off the little headlights. He had to slow down, because the scree and shale were slippery and the machine did not do well at a higher speed.

The man hit the parachute cord, not very hard, but it went under his chin and jerked him back. He tumbled off the four-wheeler and the machine came to a stop.

Du Pré scrambled down the side of the wash.

The man was trying to sit up, and then he rolled a couple of times downhill.

Du Pré put the 9mm against the engine of the offroad vehicle and he pulled the trigger three times. The bullets broke the aluminum engine.

The man was still trying to sit up.

Du Pré clubbed him once with the butt of the 9mm.

D
U
P
RÉ STOPPED A
mile or so before he came to the main road. He got out and opened the trunk. He took out the .270 and put the 9mm in the case with it and then he slid the case into a cleft in a rock that faced away from the road. He cut a juniper branch and he wedged it in the cleft.

From ten feet away you could never see the case, even with the flashlight Du Pré was pointing right at it.

He took his other 9mm from its case and he put it in the holster. He took off the light gloves he had been wearing and he rolled a smoke and lit it and he stood on top of the rock and looked south.

Lights set on dim moved up the main road and they stopped by the fork where the back road Du Pré was on went off. The lights went out.

Du Pré laughed. He finished his smoke and got back in his cruiser and drove on slowly, lights out, until he got to the fork in the road. The cruiser lumbered out into the main county road.

Benny Klein switched on his lights.

Du Pré switched on his.

The cars glared at each other.

Benny got out. He had a deputy with him, Bakula, a young rancher who needed a paycheck to keep his little spread going.

Du Pré put his cruiser in neutral and set the emergency brake and got out.

“Evenin’, Gabriel,” said Benny. He looked uncomfortable.

“Benny,” said Du Pré.

“Uh,” said Benny, “you mind tellin’ me where you been?”

Du Pré jerked his head west. There was another road that went toward the headwaters of Cooper’s Creek’s east fork.

“There was some trouble out to the Eide place,” said Benny.

“It’s not the Eide place anymore,” said Bakula.

“You got your gun?” said Benny, looking unhappily at Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Du Pré. He took out his 9mm and he held it out. Bakula took it and he smelled the bore.

“Ain’t been fired a while,” said Bakula. He handed it back to Benny.

Benny relaxed.

“What the hell you doin’ out in the country now?” said Benny.

“Birdwatching,” said Du Pré. “It is hard to do at night. That is what cuts the experts from the amateurs.”

Benny sighed.

“OK,” he said, “ain’t any of my bidness. You hear any gunfire.”

“Yah,” Du Pré said. “Some, an hour ago maybe. East. Pretty far off, you know.”

Benny nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I expect Bakula and me better go on, see what those yahoos want out at the ranch there.”

“What happened?” said Du Pré.

“Somebody took some shots, beat the shit out of a watchman they say. Busted his nose bad.”

Ah, them noses, Du Pré thought. Crack someone across the good part of the nose, break the bones, they can’t see and it hurts bad, they don’t think so good.

“Where?” said Du Pré. “He is watching the buildings there?”

“I dunno,” said Benny. “Just some woman called. Said a watchman had called in, said he had been shot at and was gonna go take a look. They didn’t hear nothing more.”

Du Pré nodded.

“You need help?” he said.

Benny looked at him.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “If we find some tracks.”

Du Pré nodded.

Benny and Bakula got in Benny’s cruiser and they drove off toward the Host of Yahweh’s ranch.

Du Pré drove back to Bart’s, and he went in the house and to the room he had off the main living area. Bart had designed the house himself and Du Pré and Booger Tom had built most of it. Bart didn’t like walls. The bedrooms and the bath were enclosed, but nothing else was. Du Pré stopped in front of a deliriously jumbled sculpture hanging on an outside wall. He wondered who the hell David Hockney was, again.

It was about four in the morning. Du Pré took a shower and he went to bed and tossed and turned and finally fell into a sort of sleep.

He dreamed of the badlands, of a man in armor with a crested helmet wandering thirsty, lost, sinking down upon his knees, crawling into a cave.

Du Pré woke up cranky. He smelled coffee.

He grabbed a towel and padded off to the shower and stood in it a long time, letting the hot water loosen the knots in his muscles.

He dried off and went back to his room and put on clean clothes. He took the ones he had been wearing and went to the laundry room behind the bath and put them in the washer. Then he went out to find Bart sitting at the long counter drinking the thick black coffee he began each day with.

Du Pré poured himself a generous mugful and he slid up on a stool.

“Mornin’,” said Bart. “If you hold your mouth right, that old bastard may join us for coffee. He’s been feeling benevolent toward the peasants lately.”

Du Pré nodded and then he sipped the hot black double-roast coffee.

All my life I drink coffee but I never drink coffee till I drink this.

Them Italians, they know some good things.

The door banged open and Booger Tom stomped in, rubbing his gnarled old hands, far too large for the man, grown to a life of hard work.

They look like tree roots, Du Pré thought.

“Any coffee for an old bastard?” said Booger Tom.

“Surely,” said Bart, “you needn’t address yourself so unkindly.”

“Listen, pissant,” said Booger Tom, “I know ya went to all kinda tony schools but you sound like ya got a poker up your ass. You gonna talk like that, hang your pinky out farther away from the cup, there.”