Coyote Wind

by Peter Bowen

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 Maybe he thought Bodie had been replaced by Du Pré, now the opportunities for goldbricking would be greater and the new rider wouldn’t rip his mouth up with a bad hand on the reins.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.

  CHAPTER 5

  “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.

  CHAPTER 6

  DU PRÉ 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.

  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.

  CHAPTER 7

  “HOW 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.”

&nb
sp; “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.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE 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.