Coyote Wind (2 page)

The trail went straight up through a big fenced pasture, overgrazed, though the fences were so new and well done they could only belong to an owner who needed more to lose money than to make money in the cow business. Bodie rode ahead, fighting a little with the movements of his horse. One of those lousy riders who will never get any better. The horse kept swinging his head side to side, obviously pissed off.

Du Pré looked up at the island mountain range, the nine peaks, robed round with bluffs and foothills. They rose up strangely from the high dry plains, catching enough water from the eastering clouds to make them green with trees and shrubs. The sight of them against the northern sky was as familiar to Du Pré as the house he was raised in and lived in still. Strangers to the country remarked on their beauty. Du Pré was uncomfortable in lands that didn’t look like this. It simply was meant to look like this. Home.

Bodie’s horse shied, a rattlesnake had sunned upon a flat warm spot on the trail. The bad young cowboy flew hot in rage, beat on the horse until the animal reared and fell over on its side. Du Pré thought he heard Bodie’s leg snap. He hoped he had.

“Goddamn it to fucking hell,” the boy screamed, hands clasped to thigh.

Du Pré swung down, dropped the reins. His horse stood there, knew Du Pré’s hand, knew him. Bodie’s horse trotted away, once stepping on a rein and jerking his head. Du Pré knelt by the cowboy, felt the leg. Not broken, but the muscles torn and swelling.

“I’ll shoot that fucking horse!” Bodie snarled through his pain.

“No you won’t,” said Du Pré. “You’re not bad hurt. Now, I go catch him for you and you ride on back and you be good to that damn horse. I get back and see his mouth’s torn or you hurt him, then I kick your stupid teeth down your throat.”

The cowboy gaped at Du Pré.

“It ain’t broken?” he said.

Du Pré spat, walked back to his horse. He swung up, went off after Bodie’s rangy gelding. Idiot. Shoveling life’s shit with a broken handle.

The pony stood waiting, looking back at Du Pré. He grabbed the reins and led him back.

“He’ll take you,” said Du Pré. “Now where you find this wreck?”

“Little dry draw third shoulder over,” said Bodie.

“You just let that horse carry you back,” said Du Pré. “I hope he dumps you and kicks you to death. He does, I buy him, feed him oats and carrots every day, molasses. You’re too stupid to live.”

“My leg … ” Bodie whimpered.

“Fuck your leg,” said Du Pré. He rode on. Before the trail turned he looked back. The cowboy was struggling to mount, the horse’s ears were back.

More in the world like him than not, Du Pré thought. God damn it, be like that. Shit.

H
E FOUND IT RIGHT
where Bodie had said it was. A mess, yes, but a very old one. A juniper had grown up through the metal frame of a seat. Rusted engine half-buried in the yellow earth of the draw. Bones were scattered around, the coyotes and skunks and badgers would have come along and supped. When this had happened the draw had burned, maybe it had been a rainy night, but it had been a long time ago. The plane had been a light, flimsy one, the marks it would have made when it hit so long ago had been erased.

Du Pré stamped his feet. It was cold, maybe ten above. He had spent the night crouched over a little fire, a saddle blanket on his shoulders.

Candy bars and stale water for breakfast. Madelaine was in bed. Missing him. He hoped.

The light rose. Du Pré cast around, quartered back and forth. He looked down at the place where the sagebrush trunk went into the ground. A jawbone, human. The skull then rolls downhill. So he walked straight down, like water would run. The draw was pretty steep, not much water had moved through it.

The skull was nestled under a flat rock which crossed the little streambed. The spring melts were running through the gravels underneath the slab. Lucky the skull was still whole.

Du Pré knelt, looked, crossed himself. Some days he didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in crossing himself.

“Maybe this let you sleep now,” said Du Pré. He picked up the white skull, the color of the giant puffball mushrooms that came up in pastures in the wet years. The mushrooms were bigger, and startling in the green.

“Now I got someone’s head in my hands, I thinking on frying mushrooms,” Du Pré said aloud. “Dumb bastard.”

Du Pré turned the skull in his hands. A neat hole in the forehead of it. Something rattled inside. A thin bone at the back, near where the spine joined, had been chewed through by a coyote, so the brains could be licked out. A slug fell out of the hole, landed on a bed of broken lime between stones. Dull gray, dull green. Copper jacket then. Du Pré stared at it.

He looked again at the hole in the skull, punched when the bone was living, dished, like an awl hole through tin.

Du Pré put the slug in his pocket, snapped the flap shut. He looked up toward the place where the rusting engine stained the earth. The sun was up enough now to begin making clouds, little misty wisps, from the flanks of the mountains where the frost had bloomed the night before. They would gather above the peaks, be thick by afternoon.

He put the skull and jawbone in a saddlebag, picked again over the ground, found another jawbone. Older, drier, the teeth had slipped from the sockets. If there had been teeth in them. Well.

Du Pré stood up, arched his back, still cramped from the night’s cold.

“Enough,” he said. More than. Now the FAA cops would come and sift carefully for all the remnants. Haul the engine down the mountains. Ask tough questions of the hawks and coyotes? A lot of years ago.

The case would get filed and jawed over in the saloons, but nothing more, no plane supposed to be here at all. File and forget. A bullet hole in the skull.

Du Pré picked his way back down the draw, leading the horse. The pony was gentle as a puppy, unwilling to give trouble where none was offered, like most creatures. Damn that fool Bodie anyway, he give a bad name to men.

I just don’t think they ever find out on this one, not ever. Du Pré whispered a novena, looked back at the place of death. Well, every place was that for something. Du Pré stepped on a spider.

The horse knew the way home, snuffled a little. The sounds of his hooves picked up tempo as the grade flattened. Maybe he thought Bodie had been replaced by Du Pré, now the opportunities for goldbricking would be greater and the new rider wouldn’t rip his mouth up with a bad hand on the reins.

Du Pré stopped for water at a little spring purling out of a red band of stone, wreathed in watercress shiny with little black beetles. He plucked a few leaves, shook off most of the bugs. Chewed. The bitter crispness freshened his mouth, the sour taste of old candy bars left.

By sunset he was at the Sheriff’s office, the Sheriff chewing mints to mask the Saturday whiskey he allowed himself in adult portions. Let others arrest the amateur drunks, I run this outfit. Nobody should be Sheriff who wants the job.

“Fuck,” said the Sheriff, looking at the skull, the hole in it, the jawbones, the slug Du Pré dropped on the counter for punctuation. “Now them FAA’s got to come.” He turned the slug around in his fingers. “How come you didn’t put this in an evidence bag?”

“Didn’t have any,” said Du Pré. “Remember, I inspect brands. They don’t make evidence bags big enough put a cow in.”

 The Sheriff looked at him hard, fuzzed up, trying to come back but too much Canadian hooch on his tongue, just sitting there.

“What about that cowboy found this?”

“Oh, no,” said Du Pré. “That dummy, he wasn’t even born this happened. No. Anyway, he’s too stupid to do any killing, ’cept maybe his mother or girl when he’s drunk. He’ll end up in Deer Lodge, he’s dumber than a box of rocks.”

“What do you think of this?” said the Sheriff. He was staring up at the ceiling, trying to get sober.

“I don’t,” said Du Pré. “I don’t understand it. I’m glad I don’t have to.”

Du Pré dusted his hands, picked up his hat.

“Where you goin’?”

“Confession,” said Du Pré. “I go to Mass in the morning.”

“Well, good luck.”

Du Pré’s eyes crinkled. He laughed.

“I
’M STILL LIVING IN
sin with Madelaine Placquemines,” said Du Pré, to the dim shadow behind the confessional screen.

“Good,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “Also I wanted to kill somebody.” Du Pré thought of shooting Bodie. It made him happy. Bodie bled in the dust and the horses smiled at Du Pré.

“Did you?”

“No,” said Du Pré. Good idea, though.

“Two sins. Good week. Got any more, I’m running a special.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Couple Hail Marys. The words are pretty, you’ll like them.”

The priest absolved him.

Du Pré struggled out of the booth, looked at the few others who were waiting. His daughter Jacqueline, pregnant again, flowing.

Du Pré the grandfather, at forty. Five times over. She started young with her man. Fifteen, him seventeen. She wanted twelve. Du Pré didn’t want to remember that many names, but he supposed he could.

He stopped and bent over to kiss her. She smelled beautiful, no perfume, just her.

“You come by, eat?” Jacqueline murmured.

“Sure,” said Du Pré, “what we bring?”

“Wine and your fiddle.”

Du Pré walked out of the church, smiling. His wife died so suddenly, cancer of the blood, seemed like a bad cold till she died just like that, less than two weeks. The two girls, four and nine then, very bad time. Jacqueline got very mad personally with Death, take one of hers she send back twelve till Death give up. Just you wait and see, for sure.

And my other daughter, child of the times, Du Pré thought, grimacing. Horrible, loud, mean music, forty lipsticks all at once, the only roached hair in the town.

Poor Du Pré, the mothers of the families said, while their children got drunk and knocked each other up or finally got through school and went off to the service or college or, often enough, to Deer Lodge Prison when the judge’s patience ran clean out.

He wondered for a moment if Maria was still a virgin. Probably not. All things taken into account, probably none of Du Pré’s business. She was a young woman of fourteen, going on twenty-five. When she got to twenty-five, she’d look back and wince. Like everybody.

I don’t know the proper noises to make, Du Pré thought. I could threaten her with convent boarding school. She’d laugh. She keeps trying to piss me off. I think. If I get mad, she cries. I do not understand any of my women.

He drove out of the town toward his house. Maria’s boyfriend’s old pickup truck was in the driveway and loud horrible noises came from the house. Some people might think it was music, but Du Pré knew better.

Du Pré parked his car, went on in. The two had been necking on the couch or whatever. Du Pré had enough sense to flick his headlights coming up the drive and smoke a cigarette before coming in. When you just walk on in like a dumbass you deserve what you get, anyway.

The living room smelled of beer. Lust. People.

Maria and her boyfriend—what was his name, Raymond? Dark and surly kid with high-top running shoes, embarrassed at not knowing what the fuck was going on anywhere, like any other boy his age.

“
TURN THAT SHIT OFF!
” Du Pré roared. His head hurt. Maria, pouting a bit for appearance’s sake, punched the button on the record player, and it died.

For this, no resurrection, Du Pré thought. Hah.

“Good evening, Raymond,” said Du Pré to the boy.

“He’s Billy,” said Maria, eyes narrowing, “and he’s been Billy for some time.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Sorry,” he said. I’m not, either.

 Billy looked at the floor and his untied shoelaces.

“You got a report card?” said Du Pré. I play father, maybe she be nice and not laugh at me in front of Billy, here.

Maria brought it. She got very good grades, though Du Pré had never seen a textbook in the house. Just magazines.

“Very good, daughter,” said Du Pré. “All A’s, one B, who was this prick anyway? She didn’t get this from me.

Maria smiled, they would hug later.

If she needs me to take care of her some way I’ll do it, thought Du Pré, but I am afraid to try it on my own. He looked at Billy. Was I as dumb, clumsy, and loutish as this boy? Undoubtedly. It’s a wonder there are any people at all, something didn’t eat us all a million years ago. I see Billy, I cannot believe in evolution. It is not a religious matter.

Don’t make fun of the boy, it hurts forever.

“We go to dinner at your sister’s tomorrow?” said Du Pré.

“No, I got something else,” said Maria. She didn’t like her sister these days, having beautiful babies, being a real woman, damn age anyway.

Du Pré thought Maria would shoot out of this place like a missile, get an education, and what Du Pré thought of that no matter. He thought it was wonderful, but didn’t want to screw anything up by approving at the wrong time.

I don’t know how to do this, Du Pré thought, Jackie and Maria do. I think. I hope.

“I’ll be at Madelaine’s,” said Du Pré.

Like I always am, and all the kids will be drinking beer here and maybe smoking a little grass, but I have never come back at a reasonable hour of the morning to find the place not cleaned up, so I suppose she is not trying to tell me anything.

I don’t understand any of my women and I am not going to, it is beyond me and that’s that.

He walked down the gravel walk, looked out at the horse pasture and his six head, standing there in a circle, plotting something.

“Just keep quiet, Daddy Du Pré,” he said to himself, “An’ let your daughters take care of you, or if you don’t, make noises, they will really take care of you.”

Know that for sure, yes I do.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS PREPARED
for complete assholes, these FAA’s. But they turned out to be pleasant weary professionals who sorted out death and destruction, maybe save someone’s life down the road. Unlike the FBI and BATF agents, who were jerks to begin with and then exiled to Montana to boot. Made them vicious. Take Leonard Peltier, for instance, take Wounded Knee. The second one.