by Peter Bowen
Du Pré shut the telephone off.
I do not like this, I had thought she was more honest than that. But maybe she is right. There is more good weather coming. More tourists and fools and the way that this goes now maybe more dead people. Me, I don’t got no answers.
Hell. Shit. Damn.
Du Pré walked down to his Rover and started it and sat in it smoking until the engine warmed.
I am a brand inspector, little rancher, grandfather, and a bit part, some cheap television movie.
But I did not make it like that, it was those foolish little bastards from the flat with all their silly notions, feel like they are better for this place than we are.
Du Pré reached under the seat and pulled out a fifth of whiskey and he had a slug and sat there watching the mountains and the sun spilling down them.
Can’t find Benetsee, he is not around or not around when I come to find him, old fart. Leave him meat, tobacco, wine, he still won’t come.
Here I am, cold morning, looking for a guy up there who was looking for something that he left behind that frightens him now. Or maybe just wanted to see…oh, I am a very stupid man. Not proud, scared, and two of them to do it.
Du Pré saw a car coming up the sloppy road behind him, a rental car pasted half over with mud.
Journalists.
Du Pré had another slug of whiskey. He rolled a cigarette.
Good headline. “Officers drink and smoke while so many lie dead.”
They bother me, I will piss on their shoes.
Du Pré punched some numbers into his portable telephone and he waited a moment.
“Special Agent Banning,” said Corey.
“More you are awake, longer your name gets,” said Du Pré. “Now I am some mad with you. You don’t lie exactly, you just don’t maybe tell me all the truth you know. Well, I know something now which I am not going to tell you yet. Lead me someplace. I arrest somebody, I don’t let you know and see how you like it.”
“I’m trying to save some lives,” said Corey.
“You still aren’t telling me, you know, what,” said Du Pré.
“Shit,” said Corey.
“There are, you know, couple newspeople driving up toward me now, so I think maybe I tell them I spend time out here, freezing my ass, while them FBI don’t tell me what they know, things are now interesting.”
“You bastard.”
“Oh, no,” said Du Pré. “My parents, they are married three, four days before I come, my mother she hold her missal out on her belly, I pound on her stomach while she said she marry Catfoot. Me, I get there just in time always.”
“Shit.”
“Now, now,” said Du Pré, “you maybe got this nice big thick file, the Martins, you let me see it.”
“Goddamn you,” said Corey Banning.
“Maybe we, how you say, do lunch,” said Du Pré. “Now I got to go a minute here, soon as these newspeople get stuck.”
Du Pré got out and looked down the muddy road and waited till the rental car got to a steep rise. It slowed and stopped while a spray of mud flared out behind. The rear end slid slowly to the edge of the road and off; the wheels settled and dug in.
Two people got out and looked helplessly at the car. They were dressed in funny clothes with pockets all over the arms.
Du Pré had another slug of whiskey and he rolled another cigarette and he got in his Rover and turned around and drove down the hill. The two reporters stood beside the car.
He drove past them, waving.
One of them screamed something.
Du Pré stopped the Rover, got out, walked to the back where they could see him, gave them the finger, and drove on.
This whole thing is now to come together, all them strings in knots and the ends followed into the shadows.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and the mountains flamed in the sun, up high where the snow lay deep and would till July. The orange and red-pink of an abalone shell.
Du Pré stopped at the edge of the bench, where there was a turnout for the snowplows. He looked down at Stemple’s ranch, the cattle in the pastures, Bill Stemple driving a tractor, unspooling a big roll of hay for his stock.
He could see all the way south to where the Missouri ran between its bluffs and gravel hills.
He looked off toward a shelf of rock in the high grass and sage. There was a pile of rocks on it, the slabs of limestone spalled off the mountains over time and time again. Piled about ten feet long and three feet high, littler slabs on top.
Plenty of holes to look through.
Two scouts could hide there and watch and there would be nothing visible if you looked up from below.
Du Pré got out and he walked to the fence and stepped through and he followed a game trail through the sage to the ledge and the pile some Indians had made so long ago.
The rock behind the pile was still wet.
Du Pré squatted down on his haunches.
He saw a cigarette filter tip.
Another.
A scrap of foil.
He got up and moved back and forth, looking at the ground.
Someone had crapped near a sagebrush.
Du Pré pulled a bag from his pocket and poked the turd into it with a stick.
He looked at a little left on the ground.
Raspberry seeds.
Somebody from right here, Du Pré thought. But me, I knew that.
Chapter 24
“I WAS DAMN CLOSE,” said Corey Banning, “and you got me and here it is.”
She handed Du Pré a folder filled with sheets of computer type. Ugly stuff, Du Pré hated it. Always smelled like fluorescent lights, cheap floor polish, that paper.
“How much more they find up Cooper Canyon?” said Du Pré.
“Oh, scraps,” said Corey. “That goddamn Governor swears to have the bear killed, right, and now the animal-rights idiots are picketing the statehouse. Anyway, folks want to die of pure dumbness and have a bear eat ’em, I don’t care.”
“Lot of medals, these two guys,” said Du Pré. Taylor Martin and his brother Clark. South-downs, probably, the Missouri people who came here to get away from the Civil War.
I meet these guys once, twice. Soft-voiced. Cattle, sheep, pretty big ranch. Both of them fly helicopters, both of them crash behind enemy lines, Vietnam, and both of them make it back. Volunteer a lot. Some trouble, get drunk in Saigon, beat the shit out of some MPs, lose rank, end up on the ground. Then they sign up, second tour for Clark, third for Taylor, they like it.
“Pretty good,” said Du Pré. “Guys looking for the murderers are the murderers, they fly in and out. Nobody saw that some.”
“I’m going out to reef on them” said Corey. “You want to come along?”
Du Pré nodded. He called Madelaine, told her where he was going.
Du Pré drove. He smoked. He reached under the seat and had some whiskey. He offered the bottle to Corey, but she shook her head.
“Not this time,” she said.
“What you going to do you can’t arrest them?” said Du Pré. “They don’t talk to you, what?”
“Piss ’em off.”
She will do that. Hope we all live through it, woman got a mouth on her like my great-uncle Hercule.
Du Pré shot down the lonely two-lane highway, swerving to miss the worst frost boils. A cock pheasant ran in front and into the sere weeds.
They drove for half an hour. Corey pointed to a pole covered in signs, each pointing to a ranch somewhere the hell and gone back in the rolling High Plains country.
Martin.
Du Pré turned and roared up a wide county road. A flock of ravens flew away from a dead deer by the side of the road. Antelope stood in the low swales in the folds of the hills, staring at the Rover as it shot past. Flights of ducks rose from marsh ponds that would be dry by July.
A fork in the road, another sign pole. Du Pré bore off to the right. Another ten miles and they found a mailbox atop a long welded chain, links th
e size of boot soles, “Martin” on the top. They turned off and drove up the rutted road and when they topped the second hill they saw the ranch, down in a stand of cottonwoods. Barns and sheds and three simple two-story ranch houses, railroad houses, bought as kits from Chicago factories, shipped by rail and then ox team to this place between the earth and sky, where there were no trees but cottonwoods, the lumber from them weak and useless.
Du Pré drove into the big yard. Tractors and machinery, seed bins, some chickens fluttering across the mud. A pair of blue heelers came out barking and circled behind the Rover, ready to bite the rear tires as soon as it stopped.
Du Pré sat for a moment. Corey opened her door and got out and she stood by the Rover, looking around.
A man came out of one of the machine sheds. He was wearing rubber irrigation boots and a red mackinaw and a yellow plaid hat. He walked slowly over toward Corey Banning.
“Special Agent Banning, FBI,” said Corey. She held up her ID and the man came close and he looked for a long moment at the cards in the black leather case and he nodded and she put the wallet in her pocket.
Du Pré got out and he walked round to them.
“Du Pré,” he said.
“The fiddler?” said the man. “You play right nice.”
“I have some questions for you,” said Corey. “Is there a place we can go sit?”
“How ’bout the truck here,” said the man.
They got in.
Du Pré and the man sat in the front, Corey in back.
“I’m investigating the murders,” said Corey, “of two Fish and Wildlife agents, two other men with them, on or about the evening of the sixteenth of November, and of two other people shot in October. Now, what is your name again?”
“Taylor Martin, ma’am,” said the man, “like I told you before.”
“You have a helicopter.”
“Three of ’em,” said Martin. “We run twelve thousand head here.”
Jesus, thought Du Pré, that is one big damn bunch of cattle.
“You flew Du Pré here and Sheriff Fascelli over the Wolf Mountains yesterday?”
Martin nodded.
He wear that helmet and mask I don’t know him, thought Du Pré. His hands are pretty steady there, though.
“Mind if I have a cigarette?” said Martin.
“Fine,” said Corey.
Du Pré rolled one and lit it; so did Taylor Martin.
“It seems that someone was up in the Wolf Mountains, and that they could only have got in and out flying in a helicopter. You were with Du Pré and Fascelli part of that day. Where were you before and after?”
Taylor Martin blew out a long stream of blue smoke.
“Agent Banning,” said Martin softly, “I shot two people who were cutting my fences and shooting my stock on the night of the twelfth of October, and then I burned them with a thermite unit I made.”
“FUCKING FREEZE!” yelled Corey. She had her nine-millimeter jammed against Martin’s head. “CUFF HIM!”
Du Pré took out his handcuffs and snapped them on Martin’s wrists. Martin had turned slowly, so Du Pré could clip them behind his back.
“And then,” he went on, “I flew up into the Wolf Mountains and I shot four men and six wolves. I chopped the slugs out of the bodies. Heads, actually, all of them, and then I flew back here.”
“Christ,” said Corey Banning. She was digging for her tape recorder.
“And I’ll be perfectly happy to tell you everything you wish to know,” said Martin.
“Call Bart and have him get a cell ready,” said Corey. “I’ll have to get transport for this guy, out to Billings.”
“Let me out of this whatever-it-is for a minute,” said Taylor Martin. “My kid brother is in the shed there and he’s got a rifle on you and I’d just as soon this all ended now.”
Du Pré nodded and he got out and walked around the front of the Rover and he opened the door and helped Taylor Martin out.
“Clark!” yelled Martin. “I told them. I’m going now, it’s over, go and finish feeding the calves in the third lot. I’ll call you when I can.”
Clark Martin came out of the building. He was carrying an assault rifle in one hand.
“OK, Taylor,” he said. “Good luck.”
The Martin brothers laughed.
Du Pré drove back down to the county road and then he cranked up to speed and when he hit the highway he drove at ninety, light bar flashing.
When they got to the jail in Cooper Bart and Benny were there, and they hustled Martin back to a cell after taking his clothes and giving him an orange jumpsuit.
Taylor Martin rubbed his wrists and he looked amused.
Corey Banning pulled a chair up to his cell and began to fire questions at him.
Martin answered all of them which did not mention anyone else. He maintained that it was only he who had shot six people.
“That’s a lot of goddamned people,” said Corey.
“I killed over three hundred in Vietnam,” said Martin. “I have a true talent.”
“Your brother helped you.”
“Nope,” said Martin.
“I’m going to keep asking questions till I know everything,” said Corey.
Martin shrugged. “Could I have a soda? Flavor don’t matter, a smoke, too.”
Du Pré walked down to the fridge and got him one.
He lit a cigarette and passed it through the bars. Taylor Martin took the smoke and nodded at Du Pré.
Martin had a slug of pop.
“Bring me a pad of paper and a pen,” he said. “I’ll just write down what I have to say now and sign it. Or go away.”
Du Pré fetched him a pad and pen and a clipboard.
Martin began to write.
“Agent Banning,” said Martin, “I will write this, and it’s pretty simple, really. And while I do I’m going to say a few things to Mr. Du Pré. He will, I think, understand them rather better than you.”
“You don’t talk like a ranch guy,” said Corey Banning.
Martin laughed. “We have a uniform speech? My, my. No, we do not. I went to Yale, ma’am. Classics. With honors. So did my youngest brother. Clark went to West Point. So did one of our brothers-in-law. Other one went to Princeton, but every family has ’em, yes?”
“Vietnam?”
“I wanted to see what being a warrior meant,” said Taylor Martin. “I did and I liked it.”
“Do you like killing?”
Martin shrugged.
“I’m indifferent,” he said. “It’s either necessary or not, you know.”
“You’re lying about your brother.”
“Nope.”
He scratched on the pad.
“Mr. Du Pré,” said Martin, “your people have been round here since when? 1870? 1886?”
“Eighty-six,” said Du Pré.
“The second rebellion,” said Martin. “We have been where the ranch is since 1879. Now it seems that our leases for summer grazing are to be terminated, on the whim of people who have never been here at all. A purely political decision, of course. It’s the property of the United States government and therefore the people of our country, of course. But it was handled very badly and when those idiots came to cut fences and shoot cattle I thought I’d make an example of them.”
Scratch scratch.
“Here,” said Martin, handing the confession through the bars. “You need to sign as witnesses where I marked the two X’s.”
“Christ,” said Corey Banning. “I don’t believe any of this.”
“Oh, but you must,” said Taylor Martin. He took a drink from his can of pop.
“Bullshit,” said Corey.
“The soda washed down a cyanide capsule,” said Taylor Martin. “I suppose that you’ll get in trouble for not checking the inside of my mouth. Too late now.”
Corey Banning looked at him, stunned.
Taylor Martin smiled and then put his hand to his eyes and fell to the cell floor and died in a matt
er of seconds.
Du Pré pounded on his chest for a while, but it didn’t do any good.
Chapter 25
“I DIDN’T KNOW HE was so short,” said Madelaine. She was looking at the Governor, who was squelching through the mud toward a portable podium. TV crews and reporters stood in deep ranks, waiting.
“Well, I have heard steers fart,” said Du Pré, “and I do not need to listen to this one sing, too. I think I will go to the bar now and have a nice drink. See there is a pretty woman there, buy her some pink wine.”
“Poor guy,” said Madelaine. “He can’t be very happy, want a job like that.”
They got into Du Pré’s Rover and drove off to Toussaint in the gray spring rain.
“That Taylor Martin, why he do a thing like that?” said Madelaine.
“He was sick,” said Du Pré, “some kind of cancer, maybe from that Agent Orange, they used it in Vietnam. Anyway, he confesses and then he kills himself. Now we got a confession and a dead end. Pretty smart guy, pretty tough, too.”
“I wish all these people would go away,” said Madelaine. “So angry, everyone, I never seen our friends and neighbors so mad.”
Du Pré nodded. He shifted in the seat, scratched his neck.
“Only reason it is not much, much worse is that Bart and that Lawyer Foote they are very, very powerful people, they have kept too many of them FBI out of here. About twenty of those fools kicking in doors we have a real war. And now the Fish and Wildlife, they will let more wolves loose up there, and more wolves will get shot, and I suppose more people, too, you know. None of this, it would have happened, those people cared enough about what was here, find out a little what it is before they come.”
“You are plenty mad, too, Du Pré,” said Madelaine.
“Yah, well, I got to go fish dead people out of places here and there get buried alive, avalanche, I am a deputy which I swore I would never do, poor Bart is the Sheriff, we got to have a Sheriff, a rich man, otherwise we just get smashed. Lucky for us, he is here, a good guy.”
“You didn’t have time, make meat this fall,” said Madelaine. “First time I know that happen.”
Jesus, Du Pré thought, I shoot my elk, my deer, every year I am here since I was fourteen and I shoot deer before that. I shoot deer sometimes in the summer when Benetsee wants summer hides for his women relatives up in Canada, against the law but we got more deer here than we got jackrabbits. Deer carcasses, they keep the coyotes off the lambs. I don’t make meat this fall, I ride herd on a bunch of mostly dead assholes should have stayed to home.