Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  Du Pré could hear her screaming, even up this high.

  “Michelle said you were planning on going back,” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “I’ll go, too,” said Bart.

  “I was going to take the train,” said Du Pré.

  “Oh bullshit,” said Bart. “We can be home in a few hours.”

  “That’s your home, isn’t it, now?” said Du Pré. He had a sip of bourbon.

  Bart scratched his chin.

  “Okay,” said Du Pré.

  “Let’s go,” said Bart. He picked up the telephone, dialed.

  They were over Kentucky by dark.

  When the plane landed in Billings, Bart turned his sad face to Du Pré.

  “I’ve got to go back,” he said. “She’s there, you know.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  CHAPTER 26

  WINTER.

  Every twenty-five years or so, we get one of these, Du Pré thought. He was standing outside at high noon, in minus-forty cold, the sun pale, watching the column of smoke from his woodstove go straight up for many hundreds of feet.

  Second time in my life I have seen sun dogs, Du Pré thought. The sun with its two outriders. The name is nice, sundogs, but they mean weather that kills.

  Three of his cattle had died. Frozen, legs locked. They had been seeming just fine, but the black night took them. There was room with the other cattle in the loafing shed, but these chose to wander out to the farthest corner of the field and die on their feet.

  Maybe by late March, they’d be thawed enough to skin.

  Or maybe just get them into a truck and take them to the landfill.

  The coyotes were feeding on the dead cattle a little. But the meat was frozen so hard, even they had trouble with it. Well, if this weather gives the coyotes trouble, it is bad, Du Pré thought, and I have to see if that old fart Benetsee is all right. I am sure that he is, but I have to go see.

  He opened the door of his old cruiser. The metal scrawked and the hinges made a sound like fingernails on a blackboard.

  Winter is always tough here, but then every once in a while you get one like this and it is an evil god.

  One morning Du Pré had gone outdoors, and when he looked at a fencepost, a huge white owl had spread its wings in the pale sun. An Arctic owl, round of head, wings nearly six feet from tip to tip. Du Pré had seen them before, but not very often.

  He turned the ignition key and the engine caught at once. He, like everyone else here, had a head-bolt heater plugged into the engine to keep it warm and some heat tape wrapped around the battery.

  He set the heater on high and got back out; the exhaust was a needling icy stink in his nostrils. He unplugged the heater and hung the stiff extension cord on a post. He went back inside. No use in even trying to drive the car until it was good and warm. The tires would be frozen hard to the ground.

  Du Pré listened to the radio. The schools were all closed. A family over by Harlowton had died when their trailer caught fire. Too many electric heaters on old wiring.

  The telephone rang. Du Pré hesitated. Maybe I have already left, he thought.

  He picked it up. Goddamned altar boy.

  “Christ,” said Bart, sounding like he was in the other room, “it is tit cold out there.”

  “It is that,” said Du Pré. “How is that D.C.?”

  “Well, about zero,” said Bart. “But it’s that wet cold goes right through you.”

  Du Pré thought about the ragged people sleeping outside in their little houses of cheap wine. Jesus.

  “I will be out when this breaks,” said Bart. “I’m afraid the jet would swoop in for a landing and the wings would break off.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré.

  “Michelle wanted me to call you and tell you that Chase is still in that hospital. Looks like hell, lost a lot of weight. She doesn’t want to call herself. Some sort of political bullshit in the department. So she can say, no, she isn’t talking to that asshole out in Montana. And the investigation of the three murders is stalled. But at least we are not asking for help from outsiders. We can fuck this up and do nothing right here in the DCPD.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Du Pré, “like I said I don’t think the guy will move till he has Chase to screen him.”

  “Cold bastard.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. Well, stab, club, strangle are not hobbies for your warmhearted people.

  “How’s …” said Bart, launching into a list of inquiries on the health and well-being of everyone he knew in Montana. He was obviously very lonely. What life he had ever had was here and he was in love with a city girl.

  Du Pré hoped it wouldn’t tear him up too much.

  “Look,” said Du Pré, “I am going to check out old Benetsee, so why don’t I maybe call you tonight, after I see him. Also, Maria, she asks after you.”

  “Is she there?” said Bart.

  “Sort of,” said Du Pré. “She is in front of that computer you gave her. Maybe she has been dead for weeks, all I know. Just a minute.”

  “Hey,” Du Pré yelled at his daughter, who was staring hard at the computer screen, “Maria.”

  She stirred a little. Du Pré stuck the back of his hand under her nose.

  “Remember my smell?” said Du Pré. “I am your friend.

  “Christ,” said Maria, looking up, eyes narrowing but mouth smiling.

  “That Bart, he wants to talk to you. He is lonely and living in a madhouse, so you be nice to him.”

  When Du Pré shut the door on his way out, she was laughing hard, so Bart must be laughing, too. Good.

  The car lurched free, lumps of ice annealed to the tires. Du Pré thumped down the driveway and up the road at a crawl. Until the tires shed their shacklings, he couldn’t go more than a few miles an hour for fear of shattering the cold, fragile steel of his tie-rods and steering gears.

  A song ran through Du Pré’s mind, a song about the cold, clear black nights that came just before the arctic air mass bellied down over the land. The Métis knew what that meant; the song was a prayer, a begging to be spared.

  Do not linger too long, oh cruel white queen.

  The car jumped. The ice had fallen off the tires. Du Pré sped up. The traction was excellent. It was too cold for a film of water to form between tread and snow. The car held better on this than it did on the rolling gravel of summer.

  But this was no time to go in the ditch.

  Benetsee’s shack sat back in undisturbed snow—no tire tracks or beaten paths, just the little meanderings of winter creatures. Du Pré left his old cruiser running, pulled as far off the road as he could get, and swung his booted feet through the light, crisp snow, rolling like a sailor unused to shore.

  The old man opened the door before Du Pré got there. He had a big glass of wine in his hand.

  Since he hadn’t gone out in three weeks and the whole shack would not hold enough wine to last him for three weeks, Du Pré wondered if the owls were fetching it for him.

  Benetsee’s four ancient dogs crowded in the door to woof at Du Pré.

  The ancient fug in the cabin was chthonic.

  Du Pré cleared a pile of old clothes and newspapers yellow with age off a rickety chair and sat down.

  “Old man,” said Du Pré, “I was worried about you.”

  Benetsee grinned. He had a few teeth left, randomly protruding from his old bluish gums.

  “You know I see my own death, and you aren’t in it,” said Benetsee. “But it is good to see you. You ought to practice walking.”

  Riddles again.

  “Can you hit a flying bat with a stone from the sling?” asked Benetsee.

  Du Pré had forgotten the sling. It was still in his violin case.

  Benetsee dug around in a rubbled pile of unrelated junk. He found a deerskin bag. He grunted with pleasure or relief.

  “You save these,” he said, “for that day.”

  Du Pré opened the string tie at the top of the bag. He tipped
it and six black stone balls a bit more than an inch across rolled out into his palm. The balls had simple incised patterns, no images.

  After awhile, Du Pré left.

  On the drive to Madelaine’s, he wondered if he were falling back in time, like someone going over backward off a steep ladder.

  CHAPTER 27

  BART STUMPED THROUGH THE slop. The Black Wind, the Chinook, had come, warm with the Pacific Ocean’s heat, and it had hammered down the snow to a thick, wet crust and swelled the streams till they jammed with ice and pooled and flooded the pastures. The cattle were soaked. If another hard arctic cold air mass descended, they’d die, glazed, standing, with grass in their mouths.

  He stopped by one of the big picture windows. A dead magpie lay in the mud. It had flown into the window in a high wind and the smash had left a patch of blood and feathers on the unyielding glass.

  “If I landscape now,” Bart grumbled, “I’ll have to use a spoon.”

  Du Pré nodded. In some places, the county roads were washed out. Over by Miles City, the freeway was closed because an ice dam on the Yellowstone had backed water over it.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Michelle Leuci, lifting one foot as she leaned against a door frame. She was looking, in some awe, at six inches of gumbo that had attached itself tenaciously to the sole of her boot. The mud was the consistency of peanut butter. It looked like peanut butter made from bleached peanuts.

  “We’d best take our boots off inside,” said Bart.

  “Splinters,” said Du Pré.

  “You finished the fucking floor,” said Bart. “So not a splinter in sight.”

  They took their boots off and stepped in. Bart picked up a long, sharp splinter immediately. He yelped and sat and peeled off his sock and pulled it out, wincing.

  “Good help is hard to find,” said Du Pré.

  “You’re fired,” said Bart.

  “Poor darling,” said Michelle. “You dumb shit.”

  True love, Du Pré thought. He remembered Bart’s swollen, alcohol-bloated face the first time that he saw him. Good going, Bart.

  “I still can’t get over how right you were,” said Michelle, looking at Du Pré. “Chase has been in that loony bin for four months going on five; nothing happens at all. I gather they raked him off the ceiling finally. Drugs. Fried mind. The killer must hate him a lot.”

  “His money protected him,” said Bart. “I know quite a bit about that.”

  Michelle went to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “This Lucky says while we have been frozen so bad, they have had the mildest winter anyone ever heard of,” said Du Pré. “So I will go when he says, I guess. Runoff in April maybe, instead of June.”

  “The weather’s changing,” said Bart.

  “Yeah,” said Michelle. “You got ten months of it here, and two more of real bad sledding.”

  “City girl,” said Bart.

  “I remember the perfume of bus exhaust on summer mornings,” said Michelle, “and the muggers hatching in the twilight.”

  They had come just for the weekend. Michelle was to be on duty first thing Monday morning, two thousand miles away.

  “What about your brand work?” said Bart.

  “My son-in-law, Raymond, will do that,” said Du Pré. “If it is someplace I know funny things happen, I will go with him.”

  “So you want to do this?” said Bart.

  “Sure,” said Du Pré. Lot of finish carpentry on this log house. I like the smell of the wood and the way it comes up in your eye when you rub the oil of tung on the finished piece. Catfoot liked making things with his hands—knives, guns, strange machines, fiddles, headless corpses. Oh, fuck it, that shit brother of Bart’s needed killing. Had me pretty lost there for a while, Bart, too.

  “I want some arrows in the roof,” said Michelle.

  “Huh?” said Bart. Du Pré looked at her.

  “I want some fucking arrows in the roof,” she said, “or the cops I work with won’t believe it is still Montana. They won’t believe I ever came here. They think the Little Bighorn was last week and you folks beat off Indian attacks every few nights.”

  “I got drunk in Fort Belknap and got attacked by Indians,” said Bart.

  “Can’t blame them,” said Michelle. “I have heard some stories of you drunk.” The telephone rang in the empty house.

  Bart went and got it. He pointed to Michelle and held the receiver out to her.

  “Leuci,” she said. She listened, frowning, her teeth holding her lower lip.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, “a whole fucking week.”

  She listened some more, looking worried.

  “Rollie,” she said, “unless we have a lot more folks and luck, there’s no way we can keep track of him. His estate has too many ways out of it. Look, I’ll…” She listened again, interrupted.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Okay.” She hung up.

  “Chase was released a week ago,” she said, “been at home. We just found out that he was out. You know how? An announcement in the Smithsonian’s newsletter. After an extended illness, Dr. Paul Chase will resume his duties. On Monday.”

  Du Pré sighed.

  “What time does that thing start?” said Bart.

  “Four,” said Du Pré. He was fiddling in a contest at the Toussaint bar, the long contest ended at the summer all-Montana fiddler’s contest in Poison. Du Pré didn’t go to Poison anymore, since he’d won twice. It seemed unfair.

  Bart pulled a check out of his shirt pocket and gave it to Du Pré. Thirty thousand dollars. Well, he’d have to pay some other subcontractors out of it and who knew what else.

  “I am going to set up an account with this,” said Du Pré.

  “Set up an account, set up three mistresses,” said Bart, “I don’t give a shit.”

  “Big talk,” said Michelle, “Biiig talk. Madelaine would stop that. Most interestingly.”

  “I see you there,” said Du Pré, turning and walking to his boots. He sat on the doorsill and pulled them on. When he stood up and tried to walk, the heavy mud off-balanced him and he fell back into the door.

  “Drunk again,” said Bart. “Dock him.”

  Du Pré made the universal sign for eat shit and die.

  He picked up a shingle scrap and scraped. The mud hung on. Finally, it tore free, making a gross sucking sound. The other was easier. He stood up and walked toward his car, platforms rapidly building.

  He slumped into the seat and pulled the clabbered boots off. He started the car and drove. Mud stuck to the tires slammed hard against the wheel wells.

  This goddamned country, Du Pré thought. It is a person.

  He got to Madelaine’s and parked so he could step out on the grass in his stocking feet.

  She met him at the door.

  “You have to leap out a window, Du Pré,” she said. “Some jealous husband, eh?”

  “Gumbo,” said Du Pré.

  “His name was Gumbo?”

  “I am wet and tired,” said Du Pré. “I want to take a nap and then I got to go fiddle.”

  “No nap,” said Madelaine, taking his hand. “I’ll think about maybe you fiddle.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE TOUSSAINT BAR WAS jammed with people mostly smoking. A blue cloud hung down from the ceiling to the top of the bar. It rasped the lungs and throat and gave the light shape and changings.

  Du Pré fiddled. The place grew quiet save for heads nodding in time, feet tapping, and the coughs of the college kids who had made the long journey, only to have their unpolluted lungs and tender little throats seared. Du Pré could see them standing in back as near the open door as they could get. He couldn’t laugh; it would make him drop the beat.

  One of the Norwegian ranchers from up on the bench played the spoons, clacking and rippling. Du Pré wished for a Cajun with those good ringing rib bones.

  He finished. He was sweating from the hard playing and the close, wet air. He went to Madelaine, sitting at a little she
lf table built into the wall. He put his fiddle in the case and tried to close it. Something was jammed in the seal where the two halves met. The slingshot. He pulled it out and recoiled it, placed it under the fiddle’s neck.

  He’d been practicing some, and he was good now some of the time. Then he’d do whatever he thought he’d been doing with it and the stone would fly off forty-five degrees away from whatever he was aiming at. He was trying now to forget the thing in his hand and just look at what he was trying to hit, like a good shot with a rifle. The brain knows more than the mind does.

  “You fiddle good, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. She turned and looked behind her toward the door. It had opened and a shaft of bright light stabbed through the fug until the door swung to again.

  Bart and Michelle were standing there. Michelle had on a simple rough-out leather jacket, jeans, and blue rubber-bottomed boots. She looked stunning. The men in the place gaped just long enough to piss off their women.

  Bart and Michelle just stood for a few minutes. They couldn’t see. When their eyes adjusted, they looked over and saw Du Pré and Madelaine and moved toward them. Du Pré got up and motioned Michelle to his seat. He and Bart stood.

  The college boys were playing some lousy version of “The Red-haired Boy,” the beat scotched up by their periodic coughing fits. The crowd went from quietly respectful to telling very loud jokes in two minutes. The kids slunk off, cased their instruments, and left. Du Pré watched in sympathy. They didn’t live, the poor things; they only studied on it.

  “We have to go in an hour or two,” said Bart, “but Michelle wanted to listen to you play.”

  “I will be playing in maybe ten minutes,” said Du Pré.

  Bart went off through the crowd and came back with four drinks in his huge hands—bourbon, vodka, sweet pink wine, and club soda for himself.

  He looks like he is getting younger, Du Pré thought, maybe growing back through the time that he missed. He is a good man.

  Du Pré sipped slowly, and by the time that he finished his drink, the crowd was calling for him. The old Norwegian rancher got out his spoons. Du Pré took out his fiddle and checked the tuning. It was fine. He put rosin ort the horsehairs of his bow. He tucked the fiddle under his chin.