by Peter Bowen
“I found one,” said Du Pré. “Bringing her back, tell her be quiet. She fall down, she scream. Avalanche.”
“You get killed I hate you for it, these fools,” said Madelaine.
Du Pré nodded.
I had to go. I don’t argue, me, now.
But not again.
When they got no chance.
The Alberta Clipper slammed against the house suddenly. The place shook, the wind screamed overhead.
Madelaine was praying. For all the lost souls.
Du Pré didn’t have to ask her.
Chapter 15
“DU PRÉ,” SAID MADELAINE, “we are just going to run out of food here, you know, I hope they get that damn road open.”
“It is open,” said Du Pré. “Bart just got the word. Plowed. No more snow. So they go now.”
The pilgrims had been stuck in the Cooper High School gym all week. The local people had done what they could to feed them and make them comfortable. One end of the basketball court was a big soup kitchen, and they had rolled out the wrestling mats. The place stank.
“That damn Bucky Dassault,” said Du Pré. “I find him…”
“It is not him,” said Madelaine. “You have not been in the gym. It is four, five people live in that Jackson Hole come here, sent out all these flyers, do this. I don’t know what is the big deal. Plenty wolves up in Alaska, Canada.”
Du Pré shook his head.
Who these people? Some reason, them politician say yes, here we are. Got fourteen dead people. They more or less murder themselves. Like me, come home, find some tourist in my house, feet up, drinking my whiskey, saying I beat my dog, starve my horses.
Du Pré was hollow-eyed and ready to fall over. No one had slept much, searching the roadsides for buried vehicles. One six-year-old kid he decide, my appendix needs to infect, Benny has to cut it out while a doctor in Billings talks to him. Worked out pretty good.
“I will go see about my horses,” said Du Pré. “Glad I sold all them cows, I would have a couple ten ton of dead ones to bury, March.”
And Benetsee. He will be all right.
The telephone rang. Madelaine picked it up, motioned to Du Pré.
“That Bart,” she said. She was mad at Bart for some reason.
“Yo,” said Du Pré.
“They’re going,” said Bart, “moving out pretty fast. Course us folk who live here want ’em gone, couple of the plow drivers got pretty good at scraping just enough off the cars parked by the road to total ’em and leave ’em drivable.
“Which is not why I called,” he went on. “I arrested four of these little assholes for public endangerment and threw their little butts in jail. Guy I know in Billings called, said the TV people and the journalists are ten deep waiting to leave and come here. I told him to tell them we are wholly swamped and we can’t provide lodging or food for ’em. So some of them are chartering helicopters to fly ’em back and forth. Big story, murders, now this. They’re going to be after you because of the lost dumb bastards up Cooper Creek.”
“Foote is here, yes?”
“Foote is here in two hours or so, yes,” said Bart.
“Well,” said Du Pré, “I will just send them to him, not talk to them. Pretty pushy people, them.”
“I knew that,” said Bart. “What I want you to do is come here pretty quick and chew these little assholes up real good. They’re sitting in the cells singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ for Chrissakes. The prisoners’ lockers are full of designer expedition gear.”
“OK,” said Du Pré. “I want to see about Benetsee, my horses.”
“Booger Tom went over and your horses are fine,” said Bart, “but I don’t know about Benetsee.”
“East, how the storm?” said Du Pré.
“Terrible,” said Bart. “Worst one in history, if you think history is what people write down. Finally went out to sea after pasting the South. Funny thing is, they don’t know where it came from. No warning, no blip on the spy satellites. Out of the Arctic and away we go.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, I will go see about that old fart, then I come see those people. They sure are funny people down there on the flat. Think no one lives here or if we do we don’t know how. How many people out there under the snow, huh, Bart? Missing persons? Calls they come in when?”
“Already coming in,” said Bart. “Parents. Break your heart. My kid hasn’t come back, my environmentalist kid. Earth First! Stone tools and raw hides. Course, they got no idea how tough it is to live off what you can shoot, let alone run down with a club.”
“Well,” said Du Pré, “that mob, gets to Miles City, Billings, they call home some.”
“Not all of them,” said Bart, softly. He hung up.
“Here,” said Madelaine. She held out a big wad of blankets. “Got a hot meal in there. Jug of that wine he like is by the door.”
Du Pré shrugged into his coat, pulled on his packs, went out, and started the Rover. He came back in and smoked while the car warmed up. Madelaine’s kids were watching television. The oldest boy was in the army, and the next one down would go to the navy in June.
This time, it go faster and faster, Du Pré thought, I wonder how fast it go for old Benetsee? Faster till you are dead? Run so fast you are in the dark before you know it?
Madelaine bent over to kiss him.
“I get anything for you?” said Du Pré.
“Well,” said Madelaine, “we need groceries but it will be some time we can go buy them.”
“I got some, my place,” said Du Pré.
“No, you don’t,” said Madelaine. “You don’t got a can, creamed corn, I go out there while you poking in snowdrifts.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Maybe I bring Benetsee, few days,” he said.
“Benetsee is welcome all the time,” said Madelaine, “you know that. I am some worried, old man like that, out there.”
“I go by yesterday he got smoke coming out his chimney,” said Du Pré.
Madelaine kissed him again. Du Pré went out to his Rover and got in and drove off. It was very cold and the snow gave good traction.
The road up to Benetsee’s had been plowed but the wind had drifted the snow back in many places and Du Pré got up to fifty and bashed through the drifts.
Hope that there is not a car in one of these, he thought. Well, the plows made it through OK, hope someone’s gas line did not freeze, car sitting here after the plows come through.
How many hundreds of people this storm kill? Still digging out, Alberta, Saskatchewan, east of here. Snow fall where it never did fall before.
Du Pré saw the trees that huddled close around Benetsee’s cabin. Smoke rose straight up to the white-blue sky.
There was a place big enough to park in, chewed out of the drifts by the plows. Du Pré crunched over to the path between the trees. He stopped, startled.
The path was clean and so was the ground around Benetsee’s little shack. It looked like a tornado had set down, swirled the snow up into drifts, and moved on. A very gentle tornado.
Du Pré walked up to the porch and Benetsee opened the door and grinned at him.
“You are alive,” said Du Pré.
Benetsee nodded.
“OK,” said Du Pré, “I get your things Madelaine send for you.”
The old man’s old dogs looked out on either side of Benetsee’s knees.
Du Pré sat next to the stove while the old man drank some wine and smoked. He ate hungrily all the good food that Madelaine had sent.
Like a coyote, thought Du Pré, he eat a whole lot and then he don’t need to eat a long time.
“You worried me, going to look for those fools,” said Benetsee. “They thought that they could do something very smart but them mountain eat them. Hee.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, I had to try there, you know. It is my job, now.”
Benetsee nodded.
Du Pré started to ask about the snow and the wind around his cabin but
he stopped himself. The old man would just tease him with some damn riddle. Oh, I dance, he would say. Know how, dance.
“What you going to do, them reporter come here, ask you questions?” said Du Pré. “Turn into a raven, fly away?”
“Oh, they will not bother me,” said Benetsee. “I disappear.”
Du Pré had seen the old man disappear many times. In rooms, people in them, no quick way out, poof, he was gone.
“I got to go, talk to those assholes set this thing up,” said Du Pré. “Killed a bunch of people. That fucking Bucky Dassault I think have something to do with it.”
Benetsee nodded. He drank another big glass of wine.
“He is not smart enough, be bad,” said Benetsee. “Pretty dangerous. Well, I go talk to those fools, the jail.”
Du Pré nodded.
Benetsee belched.
“One glass wine,” the old man said, “and we go.”
Chapter 16
“AH,” SAID DEPUTY LAWYER Foote, “I just finished chewing their asses off—my, how I talk in the sagebrush—and now I suspect Benetsee will do the same.”
“Hee,” said Benetsee.
“The old man gets done with them I’ll let ’em go,” said Bart. “I was appalled to find out that you cannot arrest people on suspicion of being stupid assholes. Lucky for Congress, ain’t it?”
Booger Tom was sitting in Bart’s chair, drinking coffee. The smell of whiskey got stronger the closer you got to Booger Tom’s cup.
Du Pré and Benetsee followed Bart back to the cells. They were old and primitive and cold. The five people in the holding cell were all shivering in orange jail jumpsuits. Two men, three women.
Benetsee dragged a chair over to the cell and he sat down. He held his hand up for a smoke. Du Pré rolled him one, lit it, and stuck it in Benetsee’s old brown fingers.
Benetsee smoked and he stared unblinking at the people in the cell. They began to stir and shift like a bunch of horses when the wrangler comes to cut one out.
Benetsee stared.
They could not look him in the eye.
“Why you come here?” said Benetsee, suddenly.
No answer.
“You maybe ask Bart for a red bag?” said Benetsee, turning to Du Pré. “Not a big one, maybe some flat, about this big.” He gestured with his hands.
Du Pré shrugged and went on out.
Bart listened and he dug around in the locker and found the red bag, about the size of a long briefcase, very thin, made of nylon cloth. Du Pré carried it back to Benetsee.
Benetsee held it on his lap. He unzipped it. The people in the cell stirred uncomfortably. Benetsee pulled out an eagle’s wing, bald eagle. He held it up, looking at the feathers.
“I keep this,” said Benetsee, “it only cause you trouble. You think you can make magic? Hah. You, you maybe make coffee, boiled eggs.”
Du Pré laughed.
“You come here with bad hearts,” said Benetsee, “and you get a lot of people killed, one way, another. Very foolish. You don’t kill them with your hands, you kill them with your foolish talk.”
The people in the cell looked at each other.
“You go home maybe,” said Benetsee. “You don’t come back here. Not ever. This place eat you if you do.”
The old man stood. He looked levelly at the people cowering in the cell. Benetsee tucked the eagle wing under his arm and he walked back out into the room.
“Fools,” he said to Bart. Bart nodded.
“I go, Toussaint now.” Du Pré put his coat on.
They drove out of Cooper, down the white road. There were still some cars shoved off to the side, their engines frozen. Du Pré parked in front of the Toussaint Bar and they went in.
Susan Klein was serving several couples lunch, rushing about. Du Pré and Benetsee sat and waited on stools at the bar.
“You need lunch?” said Susan, when she got back behind the bar. “I’m serving mooseburgers. All we had left. Illegal as hell, but hungry is hungry.”
“Sure,” said Du Pré.
Susan poured Du Pré some whiskey, pale yellow, a local product.
She gave Benetsee a big glass of wine.
“You can drink all the damn wine you want,” said Susan to Benetsee. “But you’re going to have to eat. All free.”
Benetsee grinned, his few old worn brown teeth like chips of walnut.
Bill Stemple got up from his table and came over to Du Pré. He was picking his teeth. He fished in his pocket and took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Ain’t this some shit,” he said. “We lost some more cows, they had their damn mouths freeze shut while me and my hands were going up and down the road to find the little fuckers. Found six. Had to keep ’em in my house and feed ’em.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré, “well, it was plenty quiet here, long time, now we got all this fuss. But maybe it teach somebody something, I don’t know.”
Stemple shrugged.
“That damn FBI woman, Banning,” he said, “hell, she’s all over everybody, asking the same damn questions over and over. I understand that she’s got to, but, Jesus, no one’s gonna walk forward and say ‘I did it’ and nobody else knows anything. We wasn’t even here.”
Du Pré shrugged. “Soon, we going to have another bunch of newspeople,” he said. “They are coming, see the disaster. Probably say, did someone take those people, kill them, bury them under the snow?”
“I got work to do,” said Stemple.
“We all got work to do,” said Du Pré. “You keep your gates closed and don’t shoot any of them. I do not like to arrest you.”
Corey Banning slid in the door and shoved it to. She had a dark red muffler wrapped around her head. A sheepskin coat. She unwrapped the muffler. She wore a pissed-off expression.
“Christ,” she said, “it ain’t one thing it’s another.”
She stalked up to the bar and Susan poured her a double brandy.
“They’re sending me some more agents,” she said, “in the middle of the fucking winter. They’ll freeze and get lost and die and such.”
“Um,” said Du Pré. “Do you care, them?”
“As much mother instinct as I got,” she said, “I hate to see it. You know, frostbite. Crippled for life. They’ll all be from Florida, I just know it. Christ.”
She sipped her brandy.
“We got a big bunch, press coming,” said Du Pré.
“Hah,” she said. “That guy Foote is a plenty smart guy, there. He’s got this one-page press release which says not one fucking thing in the most elegant English. Me, I just got no comment. We’ll starve ’em out.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, one more bad storm like this, it will not melt till June, you know. Maybe people be out there, frozen, till then.”
“The bottom canyons in the Wolfs’ll be eighty feet deep in snow,” she said. “It may not melt down before the summer after.”
Banning shrugged out of her coat. She was wearing simple ranch clothes and a stainless-steel nine-millimeter and cop holsters on her belt, handcuffs, pepper spray. She walked over to Benetsee and she put her arms around him and hugged him. She put her head down on his back.
“You know,” she said softly. “You don’t want to tell me and you won’t and I can’t make you. But you know it all, don’t you. And there’s not really anything that you want, so you can’t be bought, and you’re too old to care about anything much except praying.”
Benetsee reached back and he patted her hair. He patted the stool beside him.
“You come sit here, my daughter,” he said. “I will tell you what I know to tell you.”
She got up on the stool and put one elbow on the bar top and she leaned her ear close to his old lips.
Benetsee whispered.
She nodded.
She listened and listened.
The other people in the bar paid and left. Du Pré went to the poker machine and lost money in it. Dumb machine, electronic.
He had a pock
etful of quarters and it took him some time.
When he turned around Benetsee was gone, and Corey Banning had turned round and was looking off into the distance.
Du Pré walked over to the bar. He got another whiskey and he sat beside the FBI agent.
“Old Benetsee he just see the riddles most times,” said Du Pré. “I would not get mad with him.”
“Even the fucking riddles would help,” said Banning.
“Sometime,” said Du Pré, “you get one of them things, you know, it seems like you can untie it but you can’t. You know, my father Catfoot he kill Bart’s brother and we take a long time to figure it out, many years later. We never could have, but for a coyote Benetsee sent me.”
Banning nodded.
“Fourteen people dead is a lot of people dead, and whoever killed ’em is very smart,” said Banning, “and there’s more’n one of ’em.”
Du Pré nodded.
“I know,” he said, “that is a bad thing, they should not have done that.”
“Lot of pressure on us,” said Banning. “I may get shoved out, you know.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Yah,” he said, “then they send someone in who make evidence up, convict anybody, guilty, not, they don’t care.”
“Yeah, well, shit happens,” said Corey Banning.
She sipped her brandy.
“I don’t give a shit about the eight suicides under the avalanche,” said Corey Banning. “I got my plateful.”
Chapter 17
THE TV CREWS CAME in big motor homes with satellite dishes on the roofs. The print journalists came in rented cars and they looked for motel rooms.
Finally someone rented them a run-down house on a back street in Cooper. The place leaked water through the roof every time the heat came on and melted the snow above. The attic was full of raccoons. Raccoon shit. Nests. And they liked it there.
They shoved cameras in Du Pré’s face, and they asked him questions about the dead under the avalanche. Du Pré shrugged. And he walked past them.
He was getting into his Rover outside the Toussaint Bar when a fat sleazy woman offered him several packets of hundred-dollar bills for an “exclusive” story for one of the cheap magazines sold in checkout lines at grocery stores.