Coyote Wind (3 page)

Their work made the FAA inspectors direct.

“You Indian?” one said. Not “Native American.”

“Some,” said Du Pré. “A lot, really. But Frenchy enough so the anthropologists don’t bother us.”

“A blessing,” said the FAA man. “My sister was married to an anthropologist for a while.”

The FAA men had come in by plane and a helicopter had been chartered from a local cropduster. Du Pré hated helicopters. The fucking things could not possibly fly, or anyway not long enough. Whack whack whack. I ask you.

Du Pré sat by the pilot to point out the way.

The flight was short, a few minutes. A horse gives you time to get there, Du Pré thought. The noisy shaking machine touched down on a barren flat spot less than half a mile from the crash. The FAA agents, just two of the four, the others would come the next trip, got out with their cases of cameras and metal detectors.

Du Pré had helped sort through one other crash, but it was fresh and stinking. This was very old, here. The only smell was pine and sage.

Du Pré helped carry the equipment, his load a tripod and a heavy backpack full of something or other.

He led them up, the older agent wheezed a little.

Du Pré stopped by the rusting half-buried engine. The two FAA men looked around, whistling.

“Long time ago,” said the older man. He’d got his breath back.

“Beats intestines hanging from the trees,” said the other one with such a job black humor let you sleep at night, among other things.

“I suppose I stay out of the way?” said Du Pré.

“Oh, no,” said the older one. “Mr. Du Pré, we’re city folks. If you could look around, maybe spot something. You’d be better than us at seeing things that were out of place.”

Du Pré nodded, rolled a cigarette and smoked, watching them set up their cameras and take out tape measures and a box of plastic bags. For parts of planes. Parts of people. Long time ago.

Du Pré looked up the draw, up at a weathered cliff, the common gray stone of these mountains. There was a yellow scar of fresh rock thirty feet from the top. He wondered if the plane had hit there. Bounced back. Wait, an old Ponderosa pine rotting into the ground, laid out like a pointer from the scar on the rock to the engine buried in the yellow earth. A spray of rotted branches clustered round the little block of steel. The trunk of the tree was slumping into dust, spilling red sawdust from the jaws of the big black carpenter ants.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “I think maybe it hit up there, then land in the crown of the tree. Maybe the tree was already dead, they get hit by lightning. Then it went over, roots rotted out.”

“ … And then the engine and such landed here when the tree come down. Maybe. Maybe I’m full of shit, too.”

“I like this guy,” said the younger FAA man. “Sounds good, even the full of shit part.”

“Can we get up there?” said the older man, pointing at the scar on the cliff wall.

Du Pré looked. “Need a rope, you can’t climb this rock, it’s too rotten. But anything hit there, it should fall to that ledge below, should still be there. I can get to that, easy enough.”

“If you find Judge Crater or Nixon’s integrity or anything, you call down, we’ll bag it up.”

Du Pré climbed up slowly through the rubbled rock the ledge had shed to frost. When he finally rolled up on to the flat he sat up and saw an easier way, good game path on it, fifty feet away. Always worked out like that, life.

The grass and shrubs were sparse, spalled scree uttered the ledge. Good place for rattlesnakes. He quartered back and forth, saw a square black corner, tugged a radio from the duff, beneath it was a gauge of some kind with the glass broken out.

“I found a radio and a gauge,” Du Pré called down. “You want to come up or I just bring it to you?”

“God damn it, look again, and don’t see anything,” the younger man laughed. He picked up some plastic bags, slung his camera and bag on his shoulder. He started up the way Du Pré had gone.

“It’s easier over there,” Du Pré called down, pointing to his right.

Du Pré looked down at his boot. There was a coyote turd there, a rope of deer hair from a scavenged kill, and the gleaming tiny skull of a shrew.

Du Pré put the scat in his pocket, snapped the flap.

“H
OW NICE YOU COME
see me now and again,” said Madelaine. “I already have one husband run off, now my boyfriend is practicing, yes? Hunh?”

Du Pré grinned at her. His wife dead, her husband gone crazy, maybe even dead, gone three years, not a peep. She wanted to divorce him for desertion but the Church says wait. I want to marry this woman but God won’t let me.

Bullshit.

Father Van Den Heuvel says about the same thing. No wonder he’s here, ass end of nowhere, him a very educated man. Among the heathen I should wear my red sash more.

“I marry you today, Madelaine,” said Du Pré. “Go and roust the Judge.”

“I don’t care what the Judge think,” said Madelaine. “I care what God may think.”

A good girl, four children, not wanting to blow Paradise.

 God, He ought to get to work on time, stay later, tend to business.

All four of her kids were doing good in the schools, happy kids, poor, lots of love here and Madelaine firm on doing one’s best. And working in the huge garden out back, where the stuffs they canned for the winter grew. When you sweat to grow what you eat it fills you up better.

“So what’s this airplane’s name? Uh. Debbie?”

“Bonnie,” said Du Pré. An old and loving game they played.

“Well,” said Madelaine, letting her robe fall open, “I ’spose I love that you still have some time for me, you bastard.”

They went to bed, hot flesh, need, lay spent.

“I got to go out northwest for a while,” said Du Pré. “I got a feeling someone is maybe selling beef too quick.”

“Who?” said Madelaine.

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “I don’t know, be a brand inspector, you just got to show up a lot of places where you not supposed to be at all. You know, kill a beef and sell it out of your car to people. Or back up a small truck with a portable chute, load it quick and take the cattle to a small slaughterhouse, the owner pays in cash, good deal for everyone but the poor rancher.”

“Now I got to worry, a cow,” said Madelaine. “What’s her name?”

“Josephine.”

“I got a daughter named Josephine … ”

“She’s six, too old for me,” said Du Pré.

“Beast.”

Du Pré got up, dressed.

“Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “that daughter you got, she could come live here, you know. I make her put her hair back nice.”

“Oh,” said Du Pré.

“Oh. What. Oh? She shames you running around like that with that worthless stupid Billy.”

“I’m not shamed by her,” said Du Pré. “Thing about Maria is she’s her own. They both are.”

“That damn hair.”

“Madelaine,” said Du Pré, patiently, “I know that you want to help. Well, help me. You try to run Maria, she’ll buck. She’s a good girl, she just doesn’t want to be a breed girl in bunghole Montana. She’ll go away, find that there are worse things to be, try some of them. My daughters take good care of me.”

“How’s that?”

“They don’t tell me everything,” said Du Pré.

“Women don’t never tell everything,” said Madelaine. She grinned.

“Josephine, I’m coming,” Du Pré sang. He had a good tenor, good for the chansons, good for the reels. Sometimes when he sang he felt his people back there a couple centuries, little French-Cree-Chippewa voyageurs, singing while they hauled the heavy packs of furs to Sault Sainte Marie for the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers of Hudson Bay. The HBC. Here Before Christ, to some.

They sweated and starved and froze, those little voyageurs. The men who made the money off the furs died of gout and port.

“Say,” said Madelaine, “I want to hear you fiddle some this time soon—I see there is a fiddler’s jamboree on Saturday. Maybe I even let you drink too much wine.”

“Sure,” said Du Pré.

“If Josephine let you go,” said Madelaine, pouting. “I ask her,” said Du Pré. Madelaine threw a shoe at him.

T
HE BIG OLD SALOON
was crowded, it had been built back in the days when ranchers had lots of hands instead of lots of machinery. A lot of fiddlers here, even some college boys from somewhere, all trying to make authentic music. They didn’t seem to know what music was, but they were hell-bent on authentic.

Du Pré set his violin case down on a small table, helped Madelaine with her coat.

“Josephine says I can stay late, drink a lot, stop off and see her on the way home,” said Du Pré.

“Moo,” said Madelaine. “I want some wine.”

Pink wine. Sweet. Kind she liked was made out of bubble gum, Du Pré thought.

Du Pré got her a big glass, himself some whiskey. The woman behind the bar had a lacquered beehive hairdo, blond and white, with dark roots. Her hands were red from washing everything.

The Oleson brothers came in, dressed alike, new denims and the railroad red cotton kerchief. Ike was carrying the mangy case his curly-maple Hardänger fiddle slept in.

Du Pré hated Hardänger music. He claimed it had been invented to scare herring into the nets.
Scree.
Scraw. But he liked Ike Oleson.

 The college boys were murdering “The Red-Haired Boy,” a tune Du Pré would like to have heard in other than a tortured state. While the boys screeked away, they stared at Du Pré and the Olesons. Jesus Christ, Justin, there’s some real ones. Right, Nigel.

“You look good there,” said Ike, coming by, taking his hat off to Madelaine. Elderly bachelor, always a gentleman to the ladies, who scared him witless.

“You lookin’ good, Dupree,” said Oleson. Du Pré wondered what chickenshit television program the old fart had been watching. Du Pré indeed. These English, even if they were Swede.

“You play that Injun fiddle, eh?” said a big half-drunk man, so drunk it seemed a reasonable question to him.

“Wahoo,” said Du Pré, turning away. The man went off.

“Play “The Steep Portage,’ Du Pré,” said Madelaine.

“I want to wait a minute,” said Du Pré, “see them tune.” There were a dozen fiddlers twisting keys, the college boys would be tuned by the century’s end.

Du Pré looked down at his feet, beaded moccasins in red and turquoise and yellow and black. Old Nez Percé woman over in Idaho did them. Du Pré had asked her if they were old Nez Percé designs. She had said no, she got them out of a book in a language she could not read.

“What language?” Du Pré asked.

“Japanese!” said the old woman, laughing.

“Hey! Du Pré!” Buster Lacroix from fifty miles east, played the rib bones.

Du Pré fiddled, Buster thocked out the rhythm hard. He made the good ringing bones from the third rib of a fat steer, aged them in the shitpile, or so he said.

The college boys looked hungrily at the two of them. Go be some professors, Du Pré thought, we got to work our lives.

Some of the Métis women began to dance, the old reels and Cree glories, leftovers from the days when the Red River carts with their huge cottonwood wheels skreeked and scrawked down from the north to hunt the buffalo. The Métis drove the buffalo into stout blind corrals or drove the herds from swift surefooted buffalo ponies. Make everybody meat for the winter. The carts sounded for many miles over the prairies. At night the men gambled. The leaders were all poor, like those of the Indians who were the lost generous and humble. Wealth was a sign of a bad heart. The more power you had, the less you owned. Nobody who ever wanted a chief’s job got it.

Take that, you white fools who want to be president.

Madelaine got up, joined the ring of dancing women. Her heavy breasts swung while she danced. She threw back her head, laughed, her white even teeth startling in her brown face. Her black hair flashed crimson, sheen of fire.

Long ago the English hanged poor mad Louis Riel, him with his visions and little talks with God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the saints Louis had heard of. Many of the Métis came down to Montana. To the old buffalo grounds, just before the buffalo were all slaughtered, just before the great cattle drives began. North to fatten scrawny Texas steers on good Montana grass, Texans came with the cattle, and Montanans hated them men and hate them still.

Gabriel danced too much and fiddled too much and drank too much. Madelaine danced too much and drank too much sweet pink wine and she flirted with the men, who laughed and nudged each other.

When they left, the fiddles were wobbling in search of the right notes.

Gabriel was too drunk to go to confession, so was Madelaine.

In the night the telephone rang. It was the Sheriff’s office. Maria and some other kids had been busted, beer, a little dope. The Sheriff would let her go if Du Pré came to get her.

“No,” said Gabriel, “I leave her there till morning.”

Madelaine was half-asleep, but she woke up for that.

“You won’t go get your own daughter out of jail?” she said.

“It would just make her mad with me if I did,” said Du Pré. “See, that girl likes taking her licks for her own doings, you know? They are both pretty tough, my girls.”

“I don’t know,” said Madelaine.

“My girls, I do,” said Du Pré.

He went and fetched Maria early in the morning. They said nothing to one another while he drove her home.

She kissed him on the cheek and said a soft “thank you.”

That be that, thought Du Pré. Whew.

9
U
P
RÉ CAME BACK
from checking out a long stretch of fence that was seldom watched. Ranchers were so pressed for time that often they did not miss stolen stock until the fall roundup, if the thieves repaired the fence. Du Pré watched for tire tracks in the barrow pits, fences a little saggy, maybe new wire bright on a splice. You could get a couple thousand dollars in a truck in a hurry. Beat wages, yes it did.

 But he hadn’t seen anything. Times like this he had his gun on the seat, in its holster. He’d arrested two men a few years before, one of them actually reaching for a rifle when Du Pré had shot and winged the bastard, shattering the man’s upper arm. Then the judge let the guy off easy, on account of the trouble of his arm.