Badlands (12 page)

Du Pré laughed.

“I’d sell this place to the Devil and buy hell with the money,” said Carter. “But not them. Never them.”

Du Pré ate his sandwich. Good beef and mustard.

“Who knows them badlands good,” said Du Pré.

“Billy,” said Carter. “Ever since he was a shaver, he’s been goin’ out there.”

Du Pré nodded.

“He spent three weeks out there once,” said Marge. “Left the day before school started. We thought he was
dead.
”

“I was fine, Ma,” said Billy. “I just hated school.”

“I am looking for something,” said Du Pré.

Billy looked at him.

“Spanish mine,” said Du Pré.

Billy shook his head, but he hesitated before he did.

“I
SEE,” SAID
F
OOTE.
”Very interesting.”

“They got satellites, take photographs,” said Du Pré.

“Arrastras,” said Foote.

“Like big stone wheels,” said Du Pré, “maybe they don’t use them, but maybe they do. If there were some, there would be circles in the earth, maybe twenty feet across. Mule, horse, they pull the shaft the wheel crushes the ore.”

“What are the coordinates again?” said Foote.

Du Pré read him the numbers from the topographical maps. The maps weren’t very accurate.

“I’ll see what I can find,” said Foote. “And may I speak to Bart for a moment?”

Du Pré handed the cell phone to Bart. He walked away from the conversation.

They were standing outside the Toussaint Saloon. There were dark lines on the western horizon.

I got to go the butte tonight and it will rain on me.

Thank you, Benetsee.

I put ipecac, your wine, next time.

Bart finished and he shut up the cell phone and put it in his shirt pocket.

“I be gone maybe two three days,” said Du Pré. “He said he would see, call back.”

Bart nodded.

“Hard news about the Eides,” said Bart. “Things get tough, people go crazy. I did.” He laughed.

Du Pré grinned.

“Well,” said Bart, “I am off to tear a new irrigation ditch for the Martins. Morgan Martin is diversifying. She’s gonna have a huge patch of
mint.”

Lots of ranchers did that, the oil was valuable, used in some odd industrial processes. The mint had to be cropped and processed almost continually, so an acre was a lot.

Du Pré looked at Bart.

“Hundred and ten acres,” said Bart. “Wear out a lot of blades mowin’ it, she will.” He laughed and went off to his eighteen-wheeler, which had twenty-six, because Popsicle, his lime-green dragline, weighed nearly fifty tons.

Du Pré went into the saloon. Madelaine was beading.

“Get your own drink, Du Pré,” she said, staring at the little purse. “Get a big one, you don’t have any next two, three days.”

Du Pré went behind the bar and he made a tall stiff ditch. He went back round and sat across from Madelaine. She pulled the thread tight and she set down the purse.

“Benetsee is good for you,” she said. “It take maybe five years for you, figure that out, but he is good for you.”

Du Pré snorted.

“You ask that Foote, the satellite maps?” she said. She lit a cigarette. Someone had left a pack of long brown filter tips on the bar.

“Yah,” said Du Pré, “that Hulme kid, he knows where this is. Don’t want anyone else to know.”

“His place,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded.

“Go and talk to him, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. “You find it on your own, maybe he go crazy, put a bullet in you.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Yah,” he said. He got up.

“They fire that Parker cop,” said Madelaine. “I didn’t think it was bad enough, do that.”

Du Pré shrugged.

“Be back, dinner,” said Madelaine. “Last dinner you get, a while.”

Du Pré leaned far over the bar and they kissed. He went out the door with his ditch in his hand.

It took forty minutes to get to the Hulmes. There was only one pickup by the house. Du Pré got out and looked around.

Somebody was grinding something in the machine shed.

Du Pré walked over and looked in. A stream of sparks fell from a whirling carborundum disc. Billy Hulme was working on a big part. The air stank of welded metal. Du Pré waited until Billy put down the grinder and flipped up his mask.

“Billy,” said Du Pré.

Billy did not start and he did not look at Du Pré.

“I need your help,” said Du Pré.

Billy looked at him then.

“I don’t want nothing from there,” said Du Pré.

“You were already there, you son of a bitch,” said Billy.

Du Pré shook his head.

“Not me,” he said.

Billy pulled off his heavy leather gloves and slammed them down on the workbench.

“No,” said Du Pré.

“Somebody was,” said Billy. “They came on a dirt bike.”

“Eides maybe,” said Du Pré. “Bud and Millie, I saw them, they are part of that Host of Yahweh.”

“No shit,” said Billy.

“You take me there,” said Du Pré. “I find it anyway someday, but it is yours, you found it first.”

Billy looked at Du Pré.

“OK,” he said. “It’s hard. It was mine and no one else knew about it.”

Your mother know about it, thought Du Pré. Them women they know everything.

“Come on,” said Billy. He walked out of the machine shed, tossing his long leather welder’s apron on a barrel.

He got in the pickup. Du Pré got in, too, and Billy started the truck and drove down toward the back pasture to the gate where the badlands began.

Billy picked his way expertly through the maze, through places Du Pré wasn’t sure that the truck would fit. He worked the truck south and east. A couple of times Du Pré could see the lands of the host ranch in the distance.

“This was their old cart trail,” said Billy. “They made charcoal up in the mountains and brought it down here to roast the ore.”

Long time gone, Du Pré thought. Early 1600s?

Billy parked the truck and they got out. They were in a hidden hole, a place where the earth seemed to have sunk in a circle as though it had been cut by a knife. The walls around the circle were only ten to fifteen feet high.

Water belled nearby.

“Spring over there,” said Billy, “so they had water. The water runs about forty feet and goes back into the earth. Mine’s over there.”

Du Pré looked at the far side of the hole. There was some scrubby sagebrush and a single juniper writhing up out of rock.

Billy began to walk.

Du Pré smiled.

A door. Weathered the same pale gray as the rock it was set against.

So dry here the door had lasted for centuries.

Billy went to it and lifted it and set it aside. It was so dessicated that it was light as Styrofoam.

The mine shaft was only the size of a door on a house. Billy turned on a flashlight and he went in.

There was a room twenty feet back, perhaps thirty feet across.

Billy put the light on some rusty metal.

Du Pré squinted.

Rusty armor.

“Four of ’em,” said Billy. “Most of the bones are gone. Coyotes took ’em maybe. That bastard was here at least didn’t take anything.”

Billy put the light on a flat slab of rock. Four swords lay there, the leather fittings on the scabbards dried to dark twists.

“That’s the vein,” said Billy. “The raster wheels are outside, but they were cracked, so frost busted them up.”

Du Pré nodded.

He took a spool of yellow plastic tape from his pocket.

“I put this over the entrance,” said Du Pré.

Du Pré pulled off a few feet of the tape.
DO NOT ENTER POLICE INVESTIGATION
said the tape, over and over.

“I liked it better when it was just me,” said Billy.

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

I
T BEGAN TO RAIN
as Du Pré walked up the path to the top of the butte back of Benetsee’s cabin. He could drive to the base of the formation on an old logging road and then scramble up the steep path. The rocks and soil got slick and his bootsoles slipped and he cursed and grabbed for handholds.

The rain fell in sheets and Du Pré was soaked through. Runnels of water ran down his back and his ass and slid down his legs. His feet squelched in his boots.

“Good cold wind now I die up here, you old prick,” said Du Pré to the water, air, and earth.

He sat on a rock and watched the silver rain fall from all the low points on his clothes. Rain ran off the end of his nose. It itched.

He felt in his shirt pocket for the little pill bottle. He took it out and smelled the bitter contents.

Fuck, he thought, and he drank it.

It smelled bitter but tasted sweet, like balsam.

He tried to roll a cigarette but the rain was too much and the papers shredded in his fingers.

“Man here in this, pret’ stupid man,” said Benetsee. He had come and he sat not six inches from Du Pré on the rock. He was soaked, too, but he grinned happily.

Du Pré glared at him.

“Come,” said Benetsee. He walked to the edge of the butte and stepped down a path that Du Pré had never seen before. It was easy to walk on even in the rain, and soon they were on level ground and near Du Pré’s cruiser.

They got in.

Du Pré burped. The sweetish taste was pleasant, woody and thick.

“Old man,” said Du Pré, “one day I just shoot you. I do that.”

Benetsee laughed for a long time.

“You be lost then,” he said.

Du Pré nodded grimly, started the car and drove off to Benetsee’s cabin. He had to go out to the county road on one track and back to the cabin on another. The rain sluiced down very hard and Du Pré could barely see out the windshield even with the wipers set at their fastest.

He stopped the car and shut it off and then ran toward the cabin. There was a warm yellow light inside. The stove was hot and the air warm and dry.

Pelon was sitting at the little table.

Water was running in a small stream down from the board ceiling into a bucket on the floor.

“No good,” said Benetsee. “You miss something.”

Pelon nodded glumly.

“Our good friend brings us wine, tobacco, meat,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré clenched his teeth. It was all in the trunk of the car, out in the driving rain. His clothes had already begun to steam.

He went back out and stomped angrily to the cruiser. He got the trunk open and fished out the plastic bags with the wine and food and tobacco in them. He got his whiskey from under the front seat, and a change of dry clothes in another plastic bag.

He squelched back to the house in his sodden clothes and boots. Benetsee was sitting on the chair that Pelon had been on. He looked perfectly dry and comfortable.

Du Pré set down the bags. He reached for the big jug of screwtop wine, opened it, and poured Benetsee a quart jar full. The old man grinned and took the jar and drank it all in one long swallow.

Du Pré looked around the tiny cabin.

“Where is Pelon?” he said.

“Up on the roof fixing the leak,” said Benetsee.

“In this shit?” said Du Pré.

“He do it first time up there he not be there now,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré looked at the silver thread of water running from the ceiling to the bucket.

“Pret’ hard to tell where that is, this,” he said.

“Pelon got to learn,” said Benetsee, “see things that are hard to see.”

Du Pré had some whiskey. He stripped off his soggy clothes and hung them on a cord that stretched across the room near the stove. He stood naked with his back to the heat until he was dry. The fire in the stove crackled and popped and the air whistled through the little cracks where the pieces of cast iron joined.

Du Pré put on his dry clothes. He put his boots on some long pegs near the chimney. They began to steam.

He sat at the table and got a package of tobacco and rolled a smoke for each of them. His shepherd’s lighter was so wet it would not work. He took a match from a saucer on the table and struck it and lit his smoke, then held the flame out to Benetsee. The old man bent his head to the light.

They smoked.

“Good tobacco,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré looked at the package. Holland.

“Dutch,” said Du Pré.

“Good people,” said Benetsee.

“I am supposed, have a vision,” said Du Pré. “I go like you say, the butte.”

“Pret’ lousy weather,” said Benetsee. “Me, I would have it here.”

The silver thread of water slowed and stopped.

Pelon had found the leak.

“Him,” said Benetsee, “got to learn things.”

“Him, manage to stay alive around you,” said Du Pré, “he learn plenty.”

Benetsee laughed and laughed.

“Dumb shits,” he said, “both, you.”

“What is that stuff I drank?” said Du Pré.

“Peru balsam,” said Benetsee.

Balsam of Peru, Du Pré thought. My people are a long way from Peru.

“Spanish mine,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré nodded.

“I go there this afternoon,” said Du Pré.

“What you need a vision for then?” said Benetsee.

Du Pré rubbed his eyes.

This old man is always telling me something, won’t tell me anything.

Pelon came in, water streaming from his clothes. He looked at the place in the ceiling where the leak had been.

“There,” said Pelon.

“Get dry,” said Benetsee.

Pelon stripped and put his wet clothes on nails and the cord and he fished some dry clothes out of a box under the bed. He was shivering. He went to the stove and stood next to it.

Du Pré started to offer him the whiskey but remembered that Pelon didn’t drink alcohol. Pelon made himself some tea. He stood close to the stove sipping the hot liquid.

Benetsee drank more wine.

Du Pré rolled them two more smokes. He lit both and he handed one to Benetsee.

“What am I not seeing, old man,” said Du Pré.

Benetsee grinned.

His brown stumps of teeth showed just above his lower lip.

“What is the blue jay?” said Du Pré.

Benetsee grinned.

“What I do about this Host of Yahweh?” said Du Pré.

“Bad people,” said Benetsee. “Lots of guns, explosives.”