Badlands (14 page)

The man in the white robes looked heavenward.

“There is our salvation,” said a distorted and mechanical voice. “In the heavens they are watching …”

The man in the white robes watched the heavens.

“I have been honored,” said the weird voice, “with three visitations.”

The starry sky, black and twinkling with lights. A red light moved across the heavens.

It went right to left and then left to right.

“Three times,” said the mechanical voice.

The man in the white robes stood on his rock by the roaring ocean.

Shot of waves crashing into rocks.

“My heart was hard, though,” said the mechanical voice.

The man in the white robes stood defiantly.

“But they loved me,” said the mechanical voice.

Shot of the starry heavens.

“They came for me,” said the mechanical voice.

Shot of the pounding sea.

Shot of the starry heavens.

“In their spaceship,” said the man in the white robes.

“They loved me and did not rebuke me …”

“I flew high above the world …”

“I received their wisdom …”

“It is yours for the asking …”

Swelling chorus.

“Bless you all,” said the mechanical voice, “from the Wise …”

Swelling chorus of Host of Yahweh singers.

“And their humble servant …”

The man in white stood by the sea.

The film ended.

“My, my,” said Ripper. “My, my, my.”

D
U
P
RÉ PEERED AND
rubbed his eyes.

Maps of the badlands lay on the big table in Bart’s house. The maps were probably wrong. The Forest Service maps of the Wolf Mountains were known locally as “the funny papers.”

Squiggles. Elevations.

The land was a wind-carved jumble. A surveying crew would have revolted. Like the one that was surveying the border between Montana and Idaho, along the crests of the ridges in the mountains. It began to rain. The surveying crew got drunk, pointed their instruments due north, and did not stop until they came to the Canadian border.

That part of the boundary was still a straight line, silly in a land of folded, faulted mountains and big rivers that were older than the mountains were.

Rivers are almost always older than the mountains they flow through, Du Pré thought. I could not believe it when I was told that. Later I believed it. Them scientists are wrong a lot but Benetsee never is.

“Rock is hard,” said Benetsee once, “water soft, time is very long. Rock never win.”

They had been standing in the bed of the old Missouri River, which a long time gone had flowed to Hudson’s Bay, after joining the Red River of the North.

Benetsee pointed to the old shoreline. It had snowed the night before, and the old shores stood out like dusted fingerprints do.

Long time gone.

Where the fuck’s the other mine? Du Pré thought.

He stared at the maps.

He rubbed his eyes.

Bullshit this is.

The telephone rang.

Du Pré looked at the machine.

He got up and went to it and he hesitated.

Might be for Bart.

Du Pré lifted up the phone.

“I am trying to reach Mr. Gabriel Du Pré,” said a voice, young and tense.

“It is me,” said Du Pré.

“I believe I have some information for you. I am not going to identify myself. You were interested in features in the landscape at roughly the southeast corner of the Wolf Mountains of Montana. I was told you wished any evidences of old mining activity. Specifically, circular tracks …”

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

“There are two sets,” said the voice. “One at …”

The voice recited latitude and longitude. Du Pré scribbled down numbers.

“Got those coordinates?” said the voice.

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

The line went dead.

Du Pré put the phone back in its cradle and he went to the maps spread out on the table. He set them together and found the place in the badlands he had gone to with Billy Hulme.

The other numbers weren’t on the maps.

The degrees were the same but the minutes and seconds were less for both latitude and longitude.

“Son of a bitch!” said Du Pré.

He rolled up the maps and tucked them in a big mailing tube and put them in the closet in his room. He went out to his old cruiser and drove to Toussaint.

Madelaine was tending the bar tonight. Susan Klein had had to go to Billings to get a wisdom tooth pulled. The dentist she went to nearby wouldn’t touch it.

There were ten or so people in the bar, drinking ditches and beers and chaffing each other.

Nobody looked twice at Du Pré when he came in.

Madelaine pulled a couple of beers. She set them in front of the customers and she had change from the cash on the bartop. Then she came down the bar to Du Pré.

Madelaine studied his face.

“OK,” she said, “Du Pré is worried.”

He glanced back at the room. No one was looking at them.

“That mine,” he said, “it is on the Eide place. There were two of them.”

Madelaine nodded.

She looked at him again.

“Them Eide,” she said, “they join that bunch. When?”

Du Pré nodded.

“Ripper,” said Du Pré, “he is in the back?”

Madelaine nodded.

“Left here, twenty minutes ago,” she said.

“I be back,” said Du Pré.

He went out the back door of the saloon and stopped for a moment and looked up at the sky. A meteor streaked brilliant green across the deep blue and the line of strange light went down over the horizon.

He knocked on the door of the room Ripper had rented.

Ripper opened it before Du Pré’s knuckles struck a second time.

Du Pré stepped inside.

Ripper said nothing. He looked carefully at Du Pré’s face.

“There are two old Spanish mines,” said Du Pré. “One, that Hulme kid found. Other one, it is on the Eide ranch someplace. That is the one the guns are in.”

Ripper sighed.

“They were moved here before the sale,” he said, “before the Eides left. Very nice.”

“Benetsee, he see them,” said Du Pré. “He just don’t know which mine, don’t know, there are two of them, which one has the guns.”

Ripper nodded.

He laughed.

“There is magic in the world,” he said. “We have got that at least.”

“Eides, they don’t sell to Bart, now we know why,” said Du Pré.

Ripper waved to a chair. He pointed to a bottle of Scotch.

Du Pré shook his head.

“Harvey will be back about noon tomorrow,” said Ripper. “He’s been after all the Eides who didn’t join the Host. Bud and Millie owned the place. The others were family, but only that.”

Du Pré nodded.

Two other smaller places near the Wolf Mountains had been owned by Eides, but they were too small to live on, so they had sold out and gone to the main ranch owned by more prosperous members of the family.

Du Pré sighed.

“Happens,” said Ripper. “People, they lose things they love, the world changes and makes no sense, so they find explanations. Too bad the Eides found this one. But they did. You know more’n three million Americans think they were abducted by aliens? That scares me more’n dope and Ross Perot.”

Du Pré laughed.

“You like that videotape?” said Ripper. “The masked man on the rock? The Guy Who Knows. Terrifying.”

“You don’t got nothing, them guns?” said Du Pré.

Ripper shook his head.

“Nothing direct,” he said, “though there was one theft, a break-in at a National Guard armory, that we’ve never been able to solve. The thieves got away with two hundred assault rifles, some antitank stuff—those plastic bazookas, use ’em and toss, grenades, light machine guns, and some plastic explosives. Good haul. Usually somebody rats out on something like that, when they get busted for something and they want the judge to have an attack of the kindlies. But other’n the usual lies everybody tells when they land in the can, nothing.”

“Where?” said Du Pré.

“Los Angeles,” said Ripper. “We were worried enough so we took tea with the local bad guys. They apologized. As loyal Americans, they feared terrorists, which they do, being your basic Republican businessmen. They had made inquiries, and got nothing.”

Du Pré nodded.

“That Host did it,” he said.

“Sure,” said Ripper. “Did a good job, too. Nothing to go to a judge with and say, my man, I would like a search warrant.”

“I find it,” said Du Pré.

“I didn’t hear that,” said Ripper. “Like I’m not asking you if you might know anything about demolitions.”

Du Pré shook his head.

Yes.

D
U
P
RÉ STARED DOWN
from the window of the little plane. He fixed his eyes on a barely perceptible broad line on the land below.

He looked at his map.

He stared at the line.

Then he looked out of the other window. The badlands lay there, their washed-out dead colors even paler in the haze. By afternoon the winds had lifted tons of dust into the air.

“OK,” said Du Pré.

“You see what you need to?” said Bart.

Du Pré nodded.

The pilot flew back to the small airstrip in the field across the road from the Toussaint saloon. He set the fat-tired plane down. When he came to a stop, Du Pré and Bart got out and the pilot nodded to them. As soon as they were fifty feet away, he gunned the engine and turned the plane around and went down the dirt runway and was airborne in seconds.

“The gold and silver is in that reef,” said Du Pré, “comes up in the badlands, almost comes up on the Eide ranch. Them Spanish, they are pret’ good miners, find that out on the prairie.”

“Didn’t do them a lot of good,” said Bart.

Du Pré nodded. No way of knowing which Indians had been here then, in the early 1600s, late 1500s, but they had killed the Spanish miners. The Spanish had good armor but not good enough.

“Amazing that they made it this far north,” said Bart.

Du Pré nodded.

They walk a long way for that gold. There is much more gold over in Alder Gulch but they never find that.

“I couldn’t see anything,” said Bart.

Du Pré rolled a smoke.

“It is there,” he said. “You see that reef, a line in the grass, the land a little higher there?”

Bart looked at Du Pré.

“I’d go with you,” he said.

Du Pré shook his head.

“I go alone,” said Du Pré. “I got to be quiet.”

Bart nodded.

“If you change your mind,” he said.

Du Pré nodded. He smoked. He looked away.

Bart went off to his truck, whistling.

Du Pré laughed.

Bart was very brave, but very noisy. Once he had gone hunting with Du Pré, and he made so much noise all the game left for the other side of the Wolf Mountains.

Bart, him don’t like to hunt. Good thing, too.

Harvey Wallace sauntered around the corner of the saloon, his big hands thrust deep in his pockets. He was shaking his head very slowly, thinking careful thoughts.

When he got close to Du Pré, he looked up and he nodded.

“Afternoon,” he said. He looked off toward the Wolf Mountains.

“What?” said Du Pré.

Harvey looked at him.

“I talked to several of the Eides,” said Harvey. “Seems that when beef fell and the weather got good and dry, which it does in Montana more often than not, Bud and Millie got very religious. They went to that Bible Fellowship church over in Cooper. Watched Christian television. Then a couple of years ago they went for a short vacation, drove off and were gone about three weeks. When they came back, they didn’t go to the Bible Fellowship any more. They clammed up. Went about their business like before, but they’d changed.”

Du Pré rolled a smoke.

“From time to time visitors would show up. They wouldn’t stay long, and other’n being polite, they didn’t have much to say.”

Du Pré lit his cigarette.

“Last summer,” said Harvey, “they had a sort of conference here, and everybody camped out in the back forty there on the ranch. Lots of traffic in and out. But again, the people who showed up were polite and opaque.”

Du Pré nodded.

“All seven of the victims were here,” said Harvey.

Du Pré looked at him.

“Something happen then,” said Du Pré.

Harvey nodded.

“Thought you should know,” he said.

Harvey sauntered on, still staring at the ground.

He turned.

“Every time,” he said, “you’re gonna do something, you talk Indian more.”

Du Pré laughed.

Harvey grinned.

“The Host was most helpful to the agents from the Butte office,” said Harvey, “who of course found nothing whatever. But I wonder just what it was that seven men saw out there that changed their minds and made them leave.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Well,” said Harvey, “back to my computers. Wonderful things, computers. Tell me things I never wanted to know at all.”

Du Pré finished his cigarette and stomped it out and went into the saloon.

Madelaine was reading a magazine.

She looked up at Du Pré.

“You watch out,” she said.

Du Pré sat on a stool.

“I got to,” he said, “I am around you, my grandkids.”

“Non,”
said Madelaine, “that Harvey, that Ripper. They are pissed off, can’t do nothing. So they think, well, Du Pré, he will do it for us, we sit back, watch. So, me, I do not know what you are thinking of, but you are not doing it.”

“I go on the ranch,” said Du Pré. “I look and see about that mine maybe.”

Madelaine looked at him, eyes flashing.

“
Non,”
she said, “they will be waiting for you. That goddamned Harvey, the son of a bitch he will have to think, something else.”

“You want me, sit on my ass?” said Du Pré.

“How ’bout I knock you on it then?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré sighed. He rolled a smoke and lit it and Madelaine took it for her one long drag.

“You never tell me like this before,” said Du Pré.

“I don’t feel like this before,” said Madelaine.

“OK,” said Du Pré, “so you tell me some better.”