Notches

by Peter Bowen

  “That Sonny, he better not get tangled up with that La Fant woman,” said Madelaine. “She is some twister. She take guys, make them crazy. She likes to watch them fight about her.”

  Du Pré shrugged. My cousin, he is forty, I never hardly know him he is not fighting over some crazy woman. He like it, help get his dick up, I guess.

  “That Bassman,” Madelaine went on. “He is talking sweet to Alyse. She is nice, have a bad time, men. She picks bad men.”

  Bassman, he collect women all over the place. Someday they all have nice lunch, together, there, get up a posse, go cut off Bassman’s balls and then hang him from a tree, sit down, drink beer while he bleeds to death dangling.

  My cousins want to play that way, I am not their mother, thought Du Pré, I am just a cousin. Fools.

  Sonny and Bassman got back up on the little stage, grinning like dogs in a field of fresh cow shit.

  Heat.

  “I go now,” said Du Pré. “Do some songs then we go.”

  “Poor Du Pré,” laughed Madelaine. “You get no sleep tonight. I do while you are gone. You get back, you get no sleep then either.”

  “I stand it somehow,” said Du Pré. He picked his fiddle up off the top of the bar and he walked to the stage and he got up and stood and listened to the rhythms Bassman was pulling out of his fretless electric bass. Some backbeat, there.

  Play across the creek, Du Pré thought, sail my hat over.

  He shot little icy notes into the smoky air.

  People got up and they began to dance.

  Madelaine came to the stage and she danced in front of Du Pré, running her tongue tip around her lips.

  I hope I don’t drop the beat, fucked up by my hard-on, thought Du Pré, my woman is messing with me. Some fun.

  They played and people danced and they left in couples. The bar was emptied by the last song, except for a few people.

  Du Pré cased up his fiddle. He shook hands with his cousins and he nodded and smiled at their women and he took Madelaine home.

  After, they lay pearled with sweat, the window open and the cool night air flowing over their hot bodies.

  “I got to go,” said Du Pré.

  “I got plans, you, you get back,” murmured Madelaine.

  Du Pré got up and he pulled on his clothes and boots and he went out to his old cruiser. The glass was thick with dew. Bullbats flew overhead, catching insects in the single pole light by the street. The little brown bats would be down by the water, eating mosquitoes.

  Du Pré started the cruiser and he let it warm while he took an old towel and wiped the thick stippled water from the windshield. He got in and he rolled three cigarettes and laid them on the dashboard, and then a fourth he stuck in his mouth and he lit. He pulled a bottle of Canadian whiskey from under the seat and he had a stiff drink.

  Keep me awake. Run on whiskey, pussy, and music. Not a bad life that I got. I say that, my Madelaine belt me in the mouth.

  Du Pré turned around and he headed for the little two-lane blacktop that snaked around the foothills of the Wolf Mountains to the west of the range. It led up to the Hi-Line and came into the main stem at Raster Creek.

  I did not know what Raster meant, Du Pré thought, so I ask Booger Tom. The old man snorted and said it was a corruption of “arrastra,” the Spanish millwheel of heavy stone drawn round and round by burros to crush ore for roasting. ‘

  Du Pré had seen a couple of the huge stones up in the Wolfs. The Spanish had got this far north?

  Why not?

  The road was wet, black and snaking north into the night. Du Pré put the car up to ninety and he shot along under the blurry moon. High cloud, lot of water in the air.

  The country changed. Du Pré could smell a different soil, some sour thing in the water. Several times deer froze in the headlights. Du Pré braked hard and got down to a crawl till he was past them. They might move off the road, but they might run back if the headlights blinded them.

  He got to Raster Creek at a quarter to five. He got out and he sat on the warm hood of his car, smoking and drinking whiskey.

  At five minutes to five he heard a big rig to the west. The truck was moving damned fast. The headlights rose ahead of the big diesel and then they blazed into view and the drive began to ring down the gears and slow the huge, heavy machine.

  Big black eighteen-wheeler.

  Rolly Challis brought the truck into the parking lot of the rest stop at a crawl. He stopped and the lights went out and Du Pré heard the air brakes hiss and lock and then the cab opened and Rolly dropped down, freehanded, his foot touched lightly on the rubber plate on the running board and then he was on the ground and walking quickly toward Du Pré,

  Du Pré slid off the hood of his car and he walked toward Rolly.

  They stopped two feet from each other.

  Rolly grinned and he held out his hand.

  Du Pré grinned and he shook it.

  “How is Lourdes?” said Rolly.

  “Oh,” said Du Pré, “she is all right. She scared herself pret’ good. She really ask you you want a piece of ass, Spokane?”

  “Uh,” said Rolly. “No, not exactly. She asked me if I would like to have her suck my penis. She had trouble pronouncing ‘penis.’ Sort of choked on it, you know. So I said, ‘Little girl, you are a long damn way from home and in a lot of trouble. How bout’ you tell me what’s up over breakfast.’ I didn’t think she had a lot of time in giving blow jobs to truckers. Poor kid.”

  Little Lourdes, Du Pré thought. Kids, these days. I will not tell Madelaine, who would shit bobcats.

  This Rolly, he is a funny man. Probably, he rob a bank, leave them all laughing.

  Du Pré put the bottle of whiskey forward. Rolly shook his head. . “Thank you, though,” he said.

  They stood there. The sun was rising in the east, the sky was a pink curtain halfway up to heaven.

  “I don’t have much,” said Rolly. “But I thought I’d best talk to you about it. I been driving back and forth for seven years on this route and down on the Interstate. One thing I never did, though, is look at where the bodies of the girls were dumped.”

  Rolly pulled a map from his back pocket. He stuck a small flashlight in his teeth. He went to Du Pré’s cruiser and he unfolded the map. It was the western half of the United States.

  There were many black X’s on the map.

  From Seattle to Minnesota.

  From Amarillo to Calgary, Alberta.

  Du Pré squinted.

  The big picture.

  One wide band across America, up high, the Pacific to the Great Lakes.

  One wide band running north and south, along the front of the Rockies and east to the hundredth meridian.

  Du Pré blinked.

  “Jesus,” he said. “There are maybe two of them.”

  “I believe so,” said Rolly. He folded the map and he started to walk back to his truck.

  “You go now?” said Du Pré, surprised.

  “Yup,” said Rolly. “When you talk to ol’ Harvey Wallace, there, give him my best. Ask him about time. We need to know when the bodies were dumped.”

  “Yah,” said Du Pré.

  Rolly swung up into the cab and he moved out toward the rising sun.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I NEED TO LEARN how to say ‘No’ better,” said Bart. He looked tired. The huge lowboy trailer that had tires running nearly the entire length of it, on both sides, triple tires, sat in its spot. The giant diesel shovel, boom tucked, sat on it.

  “Big job, eh?” said Du Pré.

  “Biggest I have done,” said Bart “I should have another operator for Popsicle, there, but I kinda hate to hand her off to anyone.”

  Du Pré snorted. Bart loved his diesel shovel. Bart had, Du Pré had heard, hundreds of millions of dollars. He would have been much happier if he had been born poor. But he wasn’t. It almost killed him. Du Pré remembered Bart’s drunken, bloated red face the first time he had seen him. Sticking out the window of t
he too-big house. Booger Tom had burned the house down on Bart’s orders.

  Long time ago.

  Bart, he had gotten drunk a few times, gotten sick, but the times got farther apart and there hadn’t been one in over three years.

  Du Pré nodded.

  Bart, he is doing good. Wish he could find him a woman, but when he does he spends too much money on them and they feel bought and go away.

  The day was already bright and hot. The eagle was high on the updraft from the fields of wheat that reached from the foothills of the Wolf Mountains behind the ranch house clear out south to where the rain fell so scantily the soil held water enough only for sagebrush.

  “Wheat’s up,” said Booger Tom. The old man had come round the side of the house. He moved slowly now, his many injuries from a life of hard riding were coming due. Arthritis. Bones broken many times. Hands gnarled and twisted like the roots of willows.

  Old cowboy, tough enough.

  “I can see it’s up,” said Bart. “I keep telling you I want to lose money. I get half of the crop, if it’s five-dollar wheat this year then I lose … oh, fuck it. Numbers, all it is.”

  “I keep tryin’,” said Booger Tom. “Tryin’ hard.”

  “I think,” said Bart, “that the old bastard is pulling my dick.”

  “Give the damn wheat to charity,” said Booger Tom. “Give it to them damn Rooshians.”

  “Yah, yah,” said Bart. He went inside.

  “It don’t rain, then maybe harvest in a couple weeks,” said Booger Tom. “Them combine crews are about a week behind.”

  Du Pré thought about the contract harvesters. Started down in Texas and worked north, on the road five or six months out of the year. Chaff and dust and itch and long hours. But damn good money. Good people, worked very hard.

  Then, a hailstorm could come up and knock all the kernels off the heads and you got nothin’. Don’t pay to comb the field.

  Farming.

  Ranching, you got your cows, looking for a place to hide, or your sheep, looking for a place to die.

  People here, they got to be tough some.

  Bart appeared at the screen door.

  “Du Pré,” he said, “phone. Harvey Wallace.”

  Du Pré flicked his butt out on the yard and he went inside and he picked up the portable phone and went back out. It crackled a little, not too bad.

  “Mornin’” said Harvey.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré. “Nice out here. How is that Washington, D.C?”

  “Foul,” said Harvey. “Sticky, full of slimy politicians and government titsuckers like me. The founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They stuck it out in a swamp and waited for the mosquitoes to give everybody yellow fever and kill it off. I take it my man Rolly put you up to this?”

  “Yah,” said Du Pré.

  “Well,” said Harvey. “We are all low-rent riverboa? gamblers here, you know, and you want to peek at our hand.”

  “How is that Pidgeon?” said Du Pré.

  “Her of the gorgeous knockers and mean mouth?” said Harvey. “Thriving. I relayed your request to her and you know what she did?”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré.

  “Pulled out a computer printout and said she knew you were bright and would get around to this.”

  “Christ,” said Du Pré. “There are what, one hundred fifty of them crosses on that map? One hundred fifty?”

  “A lot,” said Harvey. “I doubt that all of them can be credited to one or two accounts.”

  “How long you know there are two of them?” said Du Pré.

  “Gabriel,” said Harvey, “quit spitting at me. I don’t know there are two. I know there are a lot of dead bodies. I thought I would let you just run and see what you came up with. If I had told you everything we think we know, that’s what you would have looked for.”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré. “Yah, well, I do not know either. It makes me sick, all those girls, this guy, these guys, years they do this. No one sees them.”

  “The Green River Killer out in Washington?” said Harvey. “Killed as many as ninety. Then stopped. He died or moved away. We doubt we will ever know. I have a collage of the faces of the murdered women. It is on the wall of my office. To remind me that there is evil in the world.”

  “These girls,” said Du Pré. “Not many of them, you know, we find out who they are.”

  “There are a hundred thousand runaway teenagers at least out there at any given moment,” said Harvey. “Some parents are just glad that they are gone. Some parents don’t have one single photograph of their child. Not one. Nothing. Some of them never report anything. They don’t care. Kids are gone, not eating, taking money for booze or drugs. There are some real pieces of shit in the world. Lots of them.”

  “That Pidgeon,” said Du Pré. “How come she has not called me?”

  “She’s in Europe,” said Harvey, “helping out Scotland Yard. They have some bastard dismembering prostitutes around Edinburgh. Jock the Ripper, of course.”

  Du Pré snorted.

  “We have some information,” said Harvey. “But in so many cases the bodies weren’t discovered until they were nothing but bones. Can’t get a real good fix on that.”

  “How many skinned?” said Du Pré.

  “Nineteen,” said Harvey, “or maybe more, we just haven’t found the skins.”

  “This guy is pretty smart,” said Du Pré.

  “Very smart,” said Harvey. “We may never catch him.”

  Du Pré snorted.

  “We’re gonna try good, though,” said Harvey. “Where is that god damned Benetsee?”

  “Dunno,” said Du Pré.

  “He ever gone this long before?” said Harvey.

  “No,” said Du Pré.

  “You know how to get hold of him in Canada?”

  “No,” said Du Pré, “I ask people, who are from there, but, one thing, I don’t even know what tribe he is. I guess maybe Cree but them Cree they don’t talk, each other’s business at all. Very close. Anybody publish anything about their religion, they sue them. They don’t want them fool New Age people bothering them.”

  “Like Bear Butte,” said Harvey.

  “Yah,” said Du Pré.

  Bear Butte was sacred, a vision place to many Plains tribes. So now men’s movement groups and New Age idiots went there, did what they thought were Indian ceremonies. How they like it, we have a Sun Dance in the cathedral, there in Washington? We don’t do that. Leave Bear Butte alone. Leave us alone.

  Du Pré snorted. Here I am, bad Catholic, worse Indian. I guess I am more religious than I know.

  “Shit,” said Harvey. “We even tried some psychics. Not helpful. Or maybe we just can’t unravel their babble. I dunno. I’d try reading animal guts like the Romans I thought’d help.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré, “I am forgetting, Rolly, he say to tell you hello.”

  Harvey laughed long.

  “That son of a bitch,” he said. “I can’t help but like the guy. Though I’d never admit it, like every other American, when Banker Bob takes it in the shorts but good I can’t help but feel a little better.”

  “Him got something else,” said Du Pré.

  “What?” said Harvey, suddenly collected.

  “I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “I have just this hunch, you know, that he was going to tell me something else and then he changed his mind.”

  “Damn,” said Harvey.

  “One other thing,” said Du Pré. “That Rolly he is a killer.”

  “Killed who?” said Harvey.

  “Dunno he did,” said Du Pré, “yet.”

  “You’re right there,” said Harvey.

  “So maybe he think he get close he just do that, see if this stops,” said Du Pré.

  “That has worried me,” said Harvey.

  “Uh,” said Du Pré. “He got them eyes, you know.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Harvey.

  “Maybe I am wrong,” said Du Pré.

  “Nope,
” said Harvey. “Another thing worries me.”

  “Uh,” said Du Pré.

  “You got those eyes, too, Gabriel. Remember, I’ll bust your ass.”

  “Thanks,” said Du Pré.

  Harvey hung up.’

  CHAPTER 15

  DU PRÉ STOOD BY the silvered pile of boards still marked with the yellow tape that the investigators had used to cordon the area off. The dirt under where the single body had been found was turned and mounded. There were bootprints on the loose soil and the marks of the feet of horses and cattle.

  A coyote had scratched at the earth, perhaps scenting the meat that had rotted here. But not much. Then the coyote trotted on toward the slash of pale green where a tiny plume of water ran through the soil, coming out as a small spring miles away.

  Du Pré looked up. The eagle was a speck so high in the sky that he never could have seen it had he not known exactly where to look.

  That eagle, Du Pré thought, he must like it up there some. Nothing to eat, and by the time he dive the thing he is after would be ten feet under the ground.

  Du Pré remembered nearly forty years before, when he was hunting with his father, Catfoot, that they had come to the edge of a meadow covered three feet deep in snow, hoping for elk on the far side. But what they saw was a deer with an eagle on its back. The big golden bird had its talons sunk in the deer’s back near the neck and the eagle was flapping its wings and the deer, tongue lolling from exhaustion, was trying to run to safety but there was none.

  The eagle let go and lifted and the deer stood quivering, and then the eagle’s mate stooped and grasped and the deer leaped forward again.

  Du Pré and his father went on. When they came back hours later, pulling the gutted carcass of a dry cow elk, the eagles were feasting on the deer.

  “Them do that,” said Catfoot. “Eagle, him smart bird, the gold ones. Them balds not so smart. They just steal from smaller birds.”

  Du Pré looked down at his feet. They seemed far away. There was a sprig of sagebrush caught in the cracked sole of his boot.

  Du Pré tried to fly up with the bird, to think what this land looked like from high in the air. He could have got someone to fly him but he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.