Notches (19 page)

Du Pré nodded.

He went to a motel and he rented a room and he slept for five hours.

The green light on the tracking unit hadn’t moved.

He went to the revival meeting at seven.

There were a hundred people there.

Simpson sat in the front row of folding chairs. He was well dressed, in a dark suit and shoes, a white shirt and a dark tie. His hair was pomaded.

The congregation sang loud hymns.

There was a choir. One of the singers was a pretty blond girl, blooming with what beauty she would have before going to fat and bad makeup in five years time.

Du Pré looked at Simpson.

Simpson stared at the girl.

He was wearing tinted glasses.

But his head never moved.

D
U
P
RÉ SAT IN
the sweat lodge. It was pitch-dark. The steam was so hot and close his lungs cleared of the tobacco he smoked. He coughed once. He inhaled deeply. The paint on his face clogged his pores. Sweat ran from his skin in streams.

He was alone. He dipped a little water from the bowl with a piece of curved birch bark and he sprinkled it on the red-hot stones. They glowed very dimly, and gave no light. They floated in his eyes. He could not really say where up and down were. He was sitting, but he felt so light he could have been sitting on the tight canvas of the ceiling.

Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name sat outside. He was drumming. The strokes and rhythms multiplied.

No one man could do all that, Du Pré thought, I am a musician. He is drumming in straight time, nine-five time, thirteen-five time, backbeats. I have listened to drumming my whole life, I never heard this.

Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name began to sing. The wailing ululations, prayers and offerings.

Du Pré’s blood sang.

He bowed his head and he wept. His tears fell with his sweat.

I ask for many things. I ask for strength and cunning. I ask for courage. I ask for a warrior’s heart. The heart of a warrior is his humility, the strength of the tribe is the warrior’s humility. We are very small on this earth but we have our place.

Du Pré breathed.

He cleared his mind and he let the drumming and singing flow into his breath and blood.

He dreamed.

He woke slowly. His back was cold. He was lying on his back. He could feel the rough stems of grass against his skin. He looked up. The stars were out, a fingernail moon.

“Uh, Du Pré,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré’s eyes shot wide-open.

“You don’t move or I don’t talk to you,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré froze.

That old shit, he thought, here he is. Play his damn games with me.

Fucker.

“You doin’ ver’ good,” said Benetsee.

Du Pré waited.

“You keep doin’ that.”

A wind came up. The willows sighed.

Du Pré waited.

He heard an owl call softly.

Felt wings brush his face.

Hush Wings. Owl’s a good hunter. At night. Blind in the sun, the sport of starlings, then.

Du Pré heard the coyotes start to howl, the hunting chorus. The yips died away.

He sat up and he looked around.

Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name was sitting with his legs tucked under him, head bowed. He held a bundle wrapped in marten skins.

Du Pré stood up. He went to the plank table he had piled his domes on before he went into the sweat lodge. He toweled off and he dressed. His socks were damp and his boots were hard to get on. He rolled a smoke and he lit it and he looked up at the stars.

Far away, he thought, they don’t need to bother with us. We can find our way around the world with them, though.

Du Pré glanced at Benetsee’s praying apprentice.

Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name hadn’t moved.

Du Pré walked round the cabin to his cruiser and he reached in and got his whiskey and he had a little. He went back.

The young man was sitting on the table. He was smiling.

“OK,” said Du Pré. “Where is that Benetsee?”

“I am in Canada, you fool,” said the young man.

But it was Benetsee’s old cracked voice.

Du Pré looked at him.

“Shit,” he said.

He went to his car and got in and he drove. He didn’t care where to. He drove west, out on dirt roads that wound through the rolling giant High Plains. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care.

He came to a side road that cut across a hayfield set beneath a sheer scarp. Old pishkun. Buffalo Jump.

Du Pré took the road right up to the place where the boulders that had been spilled off the front lip were piled.

He got out and looked up at the rim.

There was just enough starlight to see faint dapples of lighter color. The grass that tongued up the watercourses.

Water and rock, water always wins in the end.

Du Pré stared hard.

He saw shadows, giant ones, tumbling through the air. The ghosts of buffalo bellowing as they fell. The hunters danced in triumph on the lip. The shaman lay broken on the rocks below. This was done once a generation, one time, use the pishkun. Plenty of meat. The shaman led them over the edge. He was singing.

The women butchered and dried meat and they danced.

The ground was black with blood.

The wolves and bears smelled the meat and they came.

Ravens, magpies, badgers, skunks, the vultures and the insects.

The eagles.

Up top there were some pits where eagle-catchers had lain hidden, a prairie chicken tethered close against the crisscrossed sticks
above them. The eagle swooped and grasped the grouse in its talons and the eagle-catcher reached up and grabbed the eagle’s legs and pulled down so that the eagle couldn’t reach the hands with its beak.

It did not work that well, I bet, thought Du Pré.

Them shamans they are missing some fingers them eagles cut right off.

Shaman’s bones right here, down in the rocks, under the grass.

Du Pré had hundreds of arrowheads and spearpoints and scrapers. He had been finding them since he was a child.

Gopher mounds were good places, new cuts where a stream was changing course, any place where a bulldozer churned the earth.

Du Pré sat and he smoked and he looked up at the scarp.

That is that kind of hunting. Me, I cannot stampede them Christers over a cliff. They do that for themselves.

What am I hunting?

A bad man.

What does he hunt.

Stupid young women.

Where does he go to feed.

To church.

Where does he go to drink?

No bars, they are sinful.

Where does he sleep?

Du Pré blew up. He got out of his car and he yelled and his voice boomed against the cliffs and rang back. Birds chirred, wakened. He kicked the door of his cruiser and he dented it. He grabbed his 9mm and he fired a whole clip at a boulder and the last round whanged off in a banshee scream, flattened to a disc of lead and copper.

“I find you bastards and I cut your fucking hearts out and I eat them. I eat them! You can wander in the damn dark with no hearts.”

He sat on the hood of his cruiser.

He rolled a smoke and lit it and inhaled and he coughed and coughed.

My throat is raw from that yelling, Du Pré thought. I have some whiskey. I am drinking too much. Too much is when you like it too much. Better not do it so much, it don’t damp no fires. Make them hotter.

Madelaine is half-crazy with fear, her babies get killed, this man.

Du Pré had some whiskey.

He looked up at the rim three hundred feet above.

He dropped the bottle on the ground.

He got a canteen from the trunk and he put it on, the strap over his shoulder, diagonal to his body.

He began to walk up the trail he could see, a white snake moving among the sagebrush.

He scrambled and cursed up the steep places. Put his hands where he shouldn’t, rattlesnakes might lie up there on the warm rocks.

Fucking snake bite me I am so mad it die.

Hunt these guys.

Can’t kill them, that Harvey is not kidding.

Neither am I.

Du Pré tore his hand open on a sharp rock. He sucked blood from the deep gash. He looked down. Obsidian spearpoint sticking out of the yellow earth, thin and settled between two rocks. Du Pré tugged at it. It would not come. He pulled his folding tool from his belt and got the screwdriver blade out and he dug away.

Stuck through a bone. Clear through it.

Buffalo rib bone. Bull die all the way up here.

Why they bother to kill it?

Du Pré looked up at the rim. He was centered under it.

Shaman was under it, that’s why.

Du Pré got hold of the rib bone and he heaved. It came free. The rib suddenly split open and the spearpoint fell. Du Pré caught it in the air.

Du Pré held the black volcanic glass up to his eyes.

The stars glittered in the conchoidal fractures.

Knapper, he move around the edge with an elk tine.

Du Pré sat a moment.

He looked down at his cruiser. A coyote was walking past the front of it, and the coyote stopped and pissed.

“Yes, my friend,” laughed Du Pré.

Benetsee.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS EATING
breakfast with his left hand. His right palm had thirty stitches in it and it hurt like hell. He mashed a piece of ham apart with his fork and he put it in his mouth.

Madelaine sat across the table. She had eaten a bite of an egg. She was smoking one of the tailor-made cigarettes Du Pré had bought in Miles City. She was drinking coffee. Her eyes had dark circles under them and she was edgy.

“You are not talking to your Madelaine these days, Du Pré,” she said. “You go off someplace, come back with them funny clothes, go off again, come back with your hand cut open bad. You don’t say nothin’. You know who this guy is. I know it. You don’t talk to me.”

Damn right, Du Pré thought, you go on the warpath and cut off that Simpson’s balls I let you know who I think it is, he is. Then Harvey he get to arrest you. I don’t think so.

“What you find where you went?” She was looking at him very hard.

“Not much,” said Du Pré. He bent his head and he strained to crush another piece of ham away from the steak.

“You are not talking to me, Du Pré,” said Madelaine.

Christ, thought Du Pré, I had better lie some, I guess. But she will know I am lying.

Du Pré shrugged.

Madelaine dashed her coffee in his face.

“You know this guy is!” she yelled. Then she threw a plate of corn muffins at him and she jumped up and began to fire all of the dishes in the drainer.

Du Pré dropped down below the table.

She pegged crockery at him between the legs.

“Jesus, Mama!” said Cyrill, her youngest. “You are crazy!”

“Fucking bastard Métis son of a bitch cocksucker,” screamed Madelaine.

Du Pré hunkered. If he ran she’d chase him. Might as well confine the damage to the one room.

Cyrill ran off.

Du Pré wished him a long life in a dark hole.

Madelaine nailed Du Pré on the left knee with a big crockery bowl.

“Ah!” said Du Pré. “I am dead. You have killed me!”

“My fucking cousin’s baby she is dead with her head cut off and you won’t talk to me!” yelled Madelaine. She was down to silverware.

Du Pré tried to remember if there were any big sharp knives in the drainer. He couldn’t.

A big sharp knife stuck in the floor in front of his leg. It thunked when it hit and it quivered.

“Jesus!” said Du Pré. “I am finding this guy, you know, you want to kill me before I do?”

“Bastard!” yelled Madelaine.

“People, people,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, rushing in the front door. “Please! Madelaine! Gabriel!”

The big priest slipped on the hall runner and he crashed into the glass-fronted cabinet that held Madelaine’s collection of porcelain. The sound of the collision was awful.

“Oh,” said Madelaine.

“Oh,” said Du Pré.

“SHIT!” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

Madelaine was still.

Then she began to laugh, low and throaty. She went on.

Du Pré peeked over the top of the table at her. She was looking at him and laughing and shaking her head.

Father Van Den Heuvel crunched to his feet. He began to brush little white shards of porcelain from his cassock.

“Men,” said Madelaine. Her voice was thick with amused contempt.

Du Pré stood up and he looked around the kitchen at all the damage. Couple holes in the plaster walls he would now get to patch. Have to drive Madelaine all the damn way to Billings, get new crockery. He measured the distance between where the knife hit and where his nuts had been sitting. Less than a foot.

Du Pré was a very smart man. He kept his mouth shut.

“I’m … very … sorry,” stammered the priest. He had little bits of glass and porcelain on his black robe.

“Shit … heads,” said Madelaine, laughing.

Du Pré nodded vigorously and kept quiet:

“I’ll buy you some new …” said the priest lamely.

“Oh, no,” said Madelaine. “You do not. You were trying to help. Me, I lose my temper, God punish me. He also forgive me right away, you guys are such assholes. I watch you, years, you do these things, mostly us women we just smile and shrug. You can’t help it, them two heads, always thinkin’ with the little one. Priests, too. Father crap you talk. Me, I pray to Mother of God. He needs one. Fucking fools. You men. Bah.”

When Madelaine got mad her eyes flashed crimson on the black irises. Lots of Assiniboine blood in her. Women famous for their beauty, famous for their tempers, famous for being very warlike.

Wonder them damn Assiniboines don’t run about everybody up a tree, Du Pré thought, women like these in the camp. Jesus.

“Well,” said Father Van Den Heuvel, “now that we are all calm …”

“Me, I am not calm,” said Madelaine. “I am not calm. You are just so sorry I cannot help but laugh. My niece she is lying dead, head cut off and stuck in her belly. No, I am not calm a little. Fucking Du Pré he go off looking, that guy, some guy, he don’t find nothing, dumb shit he still come home. You know what we do, days of the carts?”