by Peter Bowen
“Dunno,” said Pidgeon, “but I can call and find out. I’ve talked to the cop handled the case here.”
Du Pré drove back out to the stem road and found a telephone booth.
Pidgeon was on the, phone for ten minutes.
Du Pré had a smoke and some more whiskey.
“OK,” said Pidgeon. “I got to get to the airport but I want you to find where the hell this place is, Spurgin Road.”
“We are on it,” said Du Pré.
“Oh,” said Pidgeon.
“What is the number?”
“One seven five four five,” said Pidgeon.
“It is about a half mile toward the airport,” said Du Pré.
When they got to the place, Du Pré pointed it out. A dirt parking lot in front of a long metal building.
WELDING SUPPLIES.
OK.
So she was coming home, he thought, and she pulled off there when she ran out of gas.
Du Pré went on, up to the rimrocks above the city, to the airport.
He helped Pidgeon carry her luggage in and check it.
“Thanks, Du Pré,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek.
“You come back,” he said.
“You find those pricks,” said Pidgeon. “You know how to get ahold of me. Or Harvey.”
“You tell Harvey hello,” said Du Pré. “Maybe he come out, we go hunt or something.”
“Harvey hates the great outdoors,” said Pidgeon. “He’ll go out in it, but not for fun.”
Du Pré laughed.
“But I will,” said Pidgeon. “You give my love to Madelaine.”
Du Pré nodded. Pidgeon went on up to the departure lounge.
He drove back down to where the car had been found. It was dark now. He got out of his cruiser and he switched on a powerful flashlight. He scanned the ground where a car might have rolled to a stop with no power.
It had rained here, three, four days before. Old mud puddles, dried now. Du Pré saw a piece of paper stuck in pale clay.
Folded many times.
Du Pré tugged it free.
FREE WILL EVANGELICAL CHURCH
A printed service.
Du Pré opened the pamphlet and he looked at the second page. He walked over toward his car and held the program in the headlights.
“solo … Susannah Granger …”
So she was a singer. In the church.
Wouldn’t sing for God no more.
CHAPTER 24
DU PRÉ SAT ON the hood of his car. It was four in the morning. He was up on the Hi-Line at Raster Creek, waiting for Rolly Challis. Who said he would be there at four-fifteen. Du Pré rolled a smoke.
Guy drives this road so much he knows to the minute where he will be anywhere along it, Du Pré thought. Looking for whoever killed little Shelly Challis. Du Pré had some coffee from a steel thermos. He glanced at his watch.
He heard the thrummm of Rolly’s big black eighteen-wheeler. Du Pré was looking at the second hand on his watch when Rolly came to a stop and hit the air brakes to hold the rig. A minute early.
Damn.
Rolly stepped down from the cab. He walked on the balls of his feet, stretching his arms and back.
“Lo, Du Pré,” he said. He held out his hand.
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, I don’t see the papers much. Your guy he doing any good work out there, eh?”
“Maybe,” said Rolly, “but nothing’s turned up. Guy dumps the bodies in places where they are found by accident. I guess that there are some more. Real hell for the families, was for ours.”
Du Pré waved the steel thermos.
Rolly shook his head.
“We had another down, Sheridan,” said Du Pré.
Rolly nodded.
“You know about it,” said Du Pré.
“Yeah,” said Rolly. “Schoolteacher, young. Saw a picture, not an attractive young woman. Christer.”
“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Fundamentalist. But she is maybe older than most this guy kills on the old Great North Trail.”
“We got two. Well, I want ’em both,” said Rolly. “Hard to find, though. Thought I might be getting close, case in eastern Washington, but it turned out the girl was raped and murdered by her uncle.”
Jesus, Du Pré thought.
Well, there is that damn Bucky Dassault, now that Benjamin Medicine Eagle. Never murdered anybody, though. I hate him anyway.
They smoked.
“I call him the Gatherer,” said Rolly. “He … it seems that he picks a place and then in a matter of a month or so he’ll kill four, five, maybe more, and leave them hidden there, and then move on. Prostitutes. Runaway kids trying to survive. Woman’s always got her Universal Credit Card … sometimes end up dead.”
Du Pré nodded. Poor Lourdes. She was always such a sad kid. She always was unhappy. Madelaine tried what she knew, make Lourdes happy.
Nobody can make anybody happy.
Who refuses to be happy.
Me, I sound like them bullshit therapists, TV.
I quit watching TV
There.
“I’ll be along, then,” said Rolly. “Thing I guess we’d better do is not quit.”
They shook hands.
Du Pré drank coffee and smoked. The dawn was blood pink in the east.
Traffic started to move. A few big trucks, then the huge wallowing motor homes and the cars of people headed east or west.
Du Pré got into his old cruiser and he started it and he wheeled around the rest-stop parking lot and he headed back down south toward Toussaint.
The air was dry and cool.
Mule deer moved from their watering holes to where they would he up in the day’s head. The bucks had horns covered in velvet. Antelope flashed their white butts and sped away from the road at fifty miles an hour. The hawks cruised low, looking for rodents out too late in the light. A badger waddled across the road, steely muscles bunched and close to the ground.
Du Pré cruised at ninety.
There was no one at all on the road.
Soon he could see the Wolf Mountains whitecapped and dark-flanked in the rising light. The snow on the peaks blazed pale pink and gold.
Du Pré shot past a marsh and ducks exploded skyward.
The road rose before him, climbing a long slope.
He smelled something hot.
A steamy billow of scent came through the vents.
Du Pré glanced in the rearview mirror. He was trailing white steam.
He put the transmission in neutral and he turned off the ignition.
Now that damn engine heat up and seize, if it is gonna do that.
Only got two hundred thousand miles on it.
Piece of Detroit shit, anyway.
Du Pré waited for the bass clunk that would mean the engine was eating itself.
It didn’t come.
He rolled to a stop, pulling off on a field access road, barely fifteen feet across.
An eighteen-wheeler roared past, close enough to rock the old cruiser on its springs.
Shit, Du Pré thought.
I hate these damn cars. I like horses. Things get tough, you can always eat your horse.
Maybe I eat this fucker. Pound of chopped steel a day, wash it down with whiskey. Maybe pound three times a day. Eat it, a year maybe.
Fucker.
A motor home sailed past. A dachshund was sticking its head out a window. The nasty little dog yapped.
Du Pré dragged the fifth of whiskey out from under the seat.
Go find a telephone, call that Bart. He can borrow Morris’s tow truck, come get me.
I hate this.
Du Pré drank savagely.
Several vans with Minnesota plates shot past. They were driving close together. Take a vacation in a mob.
Du Pré had another slug. He tucked the bottle back under the seat and he rolled a smoke and got out and looked down the road.
Nothing.
Hang out my damn thumb. Me, I always look l
ike some train robber or cattle thief. Me, I wouldn’t pick up me.
Shit.
Du Pré got out and he waited to lift his thumb.
He heard a car behind him slow down.
A dark green longbed van with deeply tinted windows came to a stop across the road, on another access path.
The driver’s door opened and a man got out. He was wearing mechanic’s overalls. He was weathered red. Sandy, curly hair, going bald on top.
“Little trouble, there?” he said, walking across the road. “Name’s Simpson.”
“Me, Du Pré. I blew out a hose,” said Du Pré. They shook hands.
“Let me take a look,” the man said. “I work on cars a lot. Old cop cruiser. Plymouth. Good engine.”
Du Pré shrugged. He popped the hood latch and he lifted the hood and stuck the jackleg in the socket.
Soaking steam rose up for a moment. The air reeked of antifreeze.
The man bent over and looked. He took out a pocketknife and he cut the blown hose away near the engine and he reached in the end of the hose and jiggled his forefinger.
“OK,” he said. “Just a minute. …”
He grimaced a little, then pulled.
“Got a little piece of gasket, jammed your thermostat,” he said. “You probably are OK. Didn’t seize?”
“Didn’t hear anything,” said Du Pré.
“I got a hose’ll fit that,” said the man. “Got some coolant, too.”
In five minutes the cruiser was purring. The man was fiddling with the adjustment on the carburetor.
“I pay you?” said Du Pré.
The man shrugged.
“Don’t have to,” he said. “The Lord tells us to succor the traveler.”
Du Pré handed him forty dollars.
“I want to, give you this,” said Du Pré. “Them hose, antifreeze cost some money, you have to replace them. You in Toussaint, I buy you a drink.”
“I am near there,” the man said. “I work on the combines and the trucks. Got to keep everything running. If the combines aren’t working, the threshers lose money.”
“You got a garage?” said Du Pré.
“Oh, no,” said the man. “I have what I need in the van. I repair them right in the fields. Oh, once in a great while a whole engine will blow and that’s more than I can manage, but not often. Last time was six years ago.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Well,” said the man, “I better go. Got a call up a ways here.” He walked across the road and got in the van and he pulled out and went down the road to the north.
Du Pré drove south, at ninety. The engine was running very well.
Pretty lucky, there, Du Pré thought.
Didn’t have to call that Bart.
Bart, he would have made fun of me.
CHAPTER 25
“I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOU, Gabriel,” said Bart. They were sitting at the bar in Toussaint. Susan Klein was in the cooler, making up an order. There was no one else in the place. The day outside was beautiful. The old drunks had come and gone, with their morning skinful, and the lunch crowd had yet to arrive.
“Unh?” said Du Pré. He was looking in the mirror, at the smoky and rippled images of the moldering big-game heads on the walls and the neon bleeding in the beer signs.
“You get this look,” said Bart. “You can’t just kill these people. Harvey’s worried. He tells me he’ll have to bust you, and since you were warned, he won’t be feeling any too bad about it.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, I am not worried.”
Bart looked away. He shook his head.
“Interesting requests,” he said. He was looking at a short piece of white paper, words in Du Pré’s meticulous penmanship.
“Them FBI can’t do this anyway,” said Du Pré. “Me, I would just like to know where they go, maybe, I find a car I like to know that about.”
“OK,” said Bart. “I’ll have them FedExed here.”
Du Pré peeled five hundred dollars off the roll he carried and he handed it to Bart.
Bart started to open his mouth and then he took it.
“Good thing that you do for little Lourdes,” said Du Pré.
Bart shrugged.
“I have money, Du Pré,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of wisdom.”
Lourdes was spending the rest of the summer with a maiden aunt of Bart’s, in Chicago. She was taking some classes at the Art Institute.
“Well,” Bart had said to Lourdes, “I think you’d like to see a big city. Chicago’s a big city. It ain’t Seattle, but it’ll have to do.”
Lourdes had cried, packed a little bag, and flown out the next day.
“She want to do art?” said Madelaine. “How come she don’t say so to me?”
“You’re her mother,” said Bart.
“OK,” said Madelaine. “Maybe you try it for a while.”
“Poor Lourdes,” said Bart. “Aunt Marella is very old-country.”
“That mean that Lourdes is very safe,” said Madelaine. “Me, I like that.”
Du Pré cleared his throat.
“Um,” said Du Pré. “How old are you, you have your first …”
“I am fifteen,” said Madelaine.
“OK,” said Du Pré. “I shut up now.”
“Very smart man,” said Madelaine.
“Harvey’ll be here the day after tomorrow,” said Bart. “He said he did want to come but he couldn’t really justify it since he is just supervising Pidgeon. So I sent a plane for him.”
“Unh,” said Du Pré. “We go to the bar now.”
Madelaine was building up a good head of steam. She would sometime in the next hour make Du Pré pay dearly for his impertinence, if Du Pré was stupid enough to wait for the explosion.
I wonder she is OK now, thought Du Pré. He diddled his drink. It was watery and the ice was about gone, but men, it was early in the day.
“I think I go on out to Benetsee’s,” said Du Pré. “That old man, he got to come back sometime.”
“Oh,” said Bart, “I don’t know, he could just stay away and send you notes by coyote.”
Du Pré laughed. He finished his drink and he got up and he went out to his old cruiser and he got in and started it and drove slowly out toward Benetsee’s cabin.
He turned up the rutted, grassed-over drive and he thumped along over some sticks of firewood fallen off the truck that brought the last load in. The weeds dunned out when he got to the cabin. A half dozen fat Merino sheep guarded by a small sheepdog were cropping the growth.
Du Pré parked and he got out and he walked around the ramshackle cabin to the backyard where the sweat lodge stood. The doorflap was up and the fires cold.
Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name was standing by the little brook, arms wrapped around, hands on his shoulders. He was praying. Du Pré sat on a big round of ponderosa that was a splitting block for the firewood, and he waited until the young man moved.
“You got a name yet?” said Du Pré.
The young man shook his head and he smiled.
“I don’t miss it,” he said. “You can be named for what is not there as well as for what is.”
Du Pré walked over to where the young man stood. He looked at the brook. It was boiling with little trout. The fish were clotted together and dashing around a tiny pool.
A kingfisher’s blue feather floated in the air.
OK, Du Pré thought, I don’t even want to know.
“You hear from that Benetsee?” said Du Pré.
The young man nodded.
“He be back in the fall,” he said. “Early fall maybe. Anyway he come he say before the first snow.”
First fucking snow here maybe tomorrow, thought Du Pré, I been snowed on Fourth of July, end of July, first part of August. I been stuck up in the Wolfs a week once. Blizzard on the twentieth of August. First snow. Why he don’t say when the sun shines sometimes?
“Your Madelaine send me some good food,” said the young man. “She is a ver’
good woman.”
Du Pré nodded. Madelaine, she feed all the earth, wipe all of its tears, she could. But she fix about half of this county one way and another.
“Good you are here,” said the young man. “That Jacqueline, she say I come to supper, maybe you come, too?”
Du Pré nodded. His daughter Jacqueline and her Raymond and their … fourteen children. Well, anyway the doctor say, no more, damn it. I tied your tubes. Next set of twins, you die, for sure.
Madelaine had talked with Jacqueline a long time when Jacqueline was in the hospital, last pair of babies almost kill her. At last, she nod and cry.
My son-in-law Raymond, he is looking very relieved these days. Feed all them kids, not too bad. Remember all the names of the kids these kids have, that is pret’ bad. Me, I can’t remember but about half my grandchildren. Names.
I only have the two before my wife, she dies.
Du Pré felt a tight feeling in this throat. He remembered his wife dying, her eyes burning bright, her dark hair sweaty, on the pillow.
Two little girls, my Jacqueline, my Maria, standing with me, I got hold of each little hand.
My wife she smile at us and she sigh long time and she is gone.
My girls they turn out pret’ good. They take good care of me.
“I want to talk, that old bastard,” said Du Pré, suddenly angry.
The young man stood smiling. He had very deep, gentle eyes. The world amused him, or he pitied it.
“Well,” said Du Pré, “I don’t guess I go and find him.”
“Benetsee,” laughed the young man, “he don’t want to be found, he does not be found. Try to catch a coyote, a bucket?”
Du Pré laughed.
“He say to tell you that he thinks of you,” said the young man. “How stupid you are. He wishes he could help that, but there is no cure.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Tell him,” said Du Pré, “I say, listen, old bastard, you go fuck a lame three-legged coyote, got clap.”
The young man laughed. It was a laugh that rippled like water. A deep merriment.
“How you meet him?” said Du Pré.
The young man looked off at a magpie flying past.
“I am working, Calgary, and he … he come … tell me, quit what you are doing, wrong blood for it, so I do, and I am here.”
“What work you doing?” said Du Pré.
The young man pursed his lips. He looked pained.