Notches (24 page)

“Critical care may not let you see him,” the clerk said. “I can call for you.”

Du Pré nodded. He walked Madelaine around in a circle while they waited.

“You can go up,” said the clerk, “but they may ask you to leave if they feel the patient is tiring or getting agitated.”

Du Pré and Madelaine went to the elevator and up to the floor. The doors opened and the smell of illness and disinfectants surrounded them.

Du Pré winced. Madelaine gripped his arm a little harder.

A nurse led them down to Rolly’s room. She opened the door very gently, putting out a hand to make Du Pré and Madelaine wait. She went in very quietly.

They heard her voice, then Rolly’s, strong and deep.

She came back out and motioned them to go on in.

Rolly was propped up on pillows, the bed cranked high. His head was a turban of bandages and a weight hung off a frame at the foot of the bed, a cable running to the end of a cast.

His left arm was gone.

But his blue eyes twinkled out of his swollen face. Purple, green, and black bruises lay across all his skin. The bridge of his nose had a metal form taped to it.

“Mr. Du Pré and Miss Madelaine,” said Rolly, laughing. “Ain’t this some shit? I need a jukebox and a barstool and a beer. Pool table ain’t so much of a concern anymore, I guess.”

“You like pool?” said Du Pré.

“Can’t remember,” said Rolly. “It was a long damn time ago.”

Rolly handed a note to Du Pré. His right hand had a patch of adhesive across the back of it. Du Pré unfolded the note.

“Be careful, the cops have been here some and the flowers ain’t mine.”

Du Pré nudged Madelaine and she glanced at the note and then at Rolly and she nodded.

“How long you be here?” said Du Pré.

“Couple weeks,” said Rolly. “Got to come back, get fitted for an arm. You know, they got ones now that are part electronic. What they call ’em, bionic?”

Du Pré shrugged. He watched very little television.

“What else they cut off?” said Madelaine.

“Just the arm,” said Rolly. “They thought about cutting off the leg but I told ’em I’d have to kill ’em.”

“Hmm,” said Madelaine. “After you get out of here where you go? You be a while, getting better, you know.”

“Uh,” said Rolly, “Well, your pal Bart called and he give me a choice, go someplace or come up to Toussaint and get to know Booger Tom and him better. So I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

“Ah,” said Madelaine.

“Good,” said Du Pré. “She have someone, put that good soup down. Fuss over. Me, I am scared to death I get sick.”

“What is wrong, my soup?” said Madelaine.

“Not enough salt,” said Du Pré.

“Salt’s bad, your heart,” said Madelaine.

“These days,” Rolly laughed, “If it tastes good at all, it’s downright toxic.”

Du Pré nodded and laughed.

“You need us, do anything?” said Madelaine.

Rolly grinned. “Know any hookers wear nurse’s uniforms?” he said.

Du Pré laughed.

“OK,” said Madelaine. “Anything else?”

“All I got to do is wait and sleep,” said Rolly. “I rode a long ways on a big horse.”

Madelaine tugged a flat pint of whiskey out of her purse and she showed it to Rolly. He held out his hand. She gave it to him and he slipped it under the bedclothes.

The nurse who had shown them in opened the door.

“Five minutes,” she said. “He has a doctor coming.”

She shut the door.

Madelaine got a small oblong plastic pill container from her purse, the sort that has seven compartments. She went to the sink and she ran a thin stream of water and she grabbed several paper towels from the dispenser as she moved the box back and form under the stream. She dumped out the excess.

She went and sat on the bed and she put her forefinger into the paint and she lifted it up and put a crimson slash on each side of his mouth. She put black and yellow in zigzags on his cheeks. A stripe of blue from his lower lip down under his chin.

Madelaine nodded. She took out a mirror and she held it up to Rolly, and he looked at himself and he nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

“OK,” said Du Pré. “We see you, Toussaint.”

Rolly stuck his thumb up.

They all laughed.

Madelaine and Du Pré made good time to the elevator, getting in just as the doors closed. They were walking across the parking lot in a matter of two or three minutes.

“That damn nurse she shit rusty pickles she see him,” said Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Madelaine. “Me, I want a. beer.”

Du Pré looked at her. She didn’t drink beer very often. Very hot days and this was a cool one.

They got into the old cruiser and Madelaine pointed downtown and Du Pré nodded and he drove down to the poor part of Billings, where the Indians on drunks and the hobos and the mentally ill pushed their homes in shopping carts down the pitted sidewalks.

“There,” said Madelaine, pointing at a shabby sign above a little bar. The windows were glazed with dirt. A wino was sleeping curled up in the stairwell next to the front door.

Du Pré laughed.

So did Madelaine.

“Maybe I ask you a better place, start looking for Rolly’s hooker,” said Madelaine. “You, know them probably, yes?”

“Oh, yes.” said Du Pré. “Me, I spend much time here, you bet.”

They got out and they went into the bar. A very tired-looking middle-aged woman was slumped on a stool behind the bar, a cigarette hanging from her lip. She was watching a soap opera on the little television on a shelf behind her.

Du Pré ordered bottle beers for both of them. He went off to the john to take a leak. The floor was swimming in water from a broken seal at the base of the toilet. Du Pré used the toilet anyway.

By the time he came back out Madelaine was talking into the telephone on the bar. The woman behind the bar looked cheerful.

Spread a little money around, Du Pré thought, it is like the sun.

Madelaine turned away from Du Pré when he slid back up on the barstool. She listened for another moment.

“Yah, well,” she said. “You do this, hundred up front, another you come back with a note from him, uh?”

Madelaine put the phone back in the cradle.

They drank beer for a half hour.

A good-looking hooker came in and she walked right up to Madelaine.

Madelaine nodded. The hooker was wearing a crisp nurse’s uniform.

“Four forty-two,” said Madelaine, handing her a hundred-dollar bill.

The hooker went out.

“This soap all right with you?” said the woman behind the bar. She smiled. Her false teeth had clots of dental fixative on them.

“Yah,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré laughed.

They got some fives and they went to the video poker machines. The machines were shut off.

They went back to the bar and sat and a man in a workman’s uniform came in and he carted the machines out the door.

The woman behind the bar never looked away from the television as the four machines went out the door.

Du Pré looked at Madelaine. He grinned. They both laughed.

An actress on the television was suffering from amnesia.

A commercial sold soap. Another, feminine hygiene.

Madelaine reached down and took Du Pré’s hand and she squeezed his fingers.

They had another bottle of beer each.

The hooker in the nurse’s uniform came in.

She handed Madelaine a slip of paper.

Madelaine glanced at it and she laughed and she handed over another hundred-dollar bill.

She gave the note to Du Pré.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Paint a great hit. Raster Creek,” Du Pré read.

“We go home now,” said Madelaine.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS FIDDLING
and Bassman and Père Godin were backing him up. Père Godin was famous for having been thrown out of a seminary in Quebec when three very pregnant young women accused him of fathering their impending children. He was in his late seventies now and he had fathered more than forty children. He played the accordion and he sang in a high falsetto, a tenor, a baritone, a bass. Double-voiced. Du Pré had never heard anyone else like him.

The Toussaint Bar was packed. There were local people and then many from Turtle Mountain and from Canada. The women wore bright dresses with headings and bells, the men ribbon shirts.

Godin quavered to the end of the ballad and Bassman and Du Pré quickly finished. It was time for a break.

Du Pré was sweating in the heavy silk shirt that Madelaine had made for him.

He made his way over to her and he put an arm around her. She grinned and looked merrily up at him. Her face was a little flushed. She had been drinking her sweet pink wine.

“I never see so many Métis, one place, here,” said Du Pré. There were about thirty in the room. One couple had come from Manitoba, a drive of nearly a thousand miles from their home.

“Why they here?” said Du Pré.

“Listen to my Du Pré fiddle,” said Madelaine. “You are a very famous man, you know, them records you made, people listen to them.”

Du Pré nodded.

Bullshit, he thought. They got plenty good fiddlers, Turtle Mountain, Manitoba, Alberta. Me, I am OK, not the best. Me, I do not want ever to be the best, anything I do. Does bad things to you, that best.

“That Père Godin, he have what, fifty children?” said Du Pré. “I hear he just had twins, latest wife.”

“Ah, yes,” said Madelaine. “He is very charming man I hear. One, my cousins, Canada, she have one of his.”

Bassman was leaned up on one hand against the wall, talking to a pretty woman in a turquoise velvet dress, who was not his wife. His wife was home, swelling with child. Bassman and the woman went out.

Some of that grass, thought Du Pré, these musicians are some playboys. Good hearts, lots of damage, them good hearts.

Somebody handed Du Pré a glass of whiskey and water and ice. He drank thirstily. Playing made him burn. Tomorrow he would be exhausted.

Susan Klein bustled past. “What’s the occasion?” she said. “I’m damn near out of some of my booze.”

Du Pré put one palm up and he shrugged.

“Ver’ charming man,” said Madelaine. “Père Godin, he is some guy. There are some guys, Du Pré, that women just cannot get mad at. They are born, that. He is one of them.”

Du Pré looked at the silver-haired old fart. He was fairly tall and rail-thin and he had big hands with very long tapered fingers.

“We go maybe outside,” said Madelaine. “It is plenty hot in here.”

They struggled to the door and went out into the cool night. There was no cloud or moon and the stars burned in the velvet black sky.

“Wheh!” said Madelaine. “This is some better!”

Du Pré felt the silk cold on his back where the little wind from the west was touching lightly. His neck itched. He took off the silk bandanna wound around it.

Ahh, he thought, I don’t put it back on neither.

“I don’t see Bart,” said Du Pré.

“He come later,” said Madelaine, “I talk to him, he will be along, probably a few minutes.”

Du Pré nodded. Bart was so shy, really, that Du Pré couldn’t remember him in any crowd.

Booger Tom was pissing in the shadow of a cottonwood in the little park across the road.

Du Pré looked down the street. One of Bart’s Rovers was coming on, the big SUV pulled up and the rear window rolled down.

“Evenin’,” said Rolly Challis. Bart got out and he went to the back of the rig and he opened it and he took down a wheelchair and he unfolded it and snapped the pressure rings together.

Bart wheeled the chair up to the door and it opened and Rolly swung his leg out and Du Pré went to help Bart lower him into the chair. Bart pushed the wheelchair over to the steps that led up to the front door of the bar and Du Pré got on one side and Bart the other and they lifted the chair up to the boardwalk and then Du Pré pushed Rolly on in while Bart went to park his rig.

Père Godin came and he cleared the way for Rolly s chair and Du Pré wheeled him up right next to the tiny stage. Susan Klein brought Rolly a big glass of whiskey. Rolly took tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and he rolled a smoke expertly and he licked the paper and tucked it in his mouth.

Madelaine lit the cigarette for him.

Oh, Du Pré thought, now I am knowing why all of this.

Père Godin got up on the stage and he lifted the heavy accordion up and he shrugged into the harness and he checked it for tune. Bassman stepped up on the stage and he picked up his fretless electric bass and he put the strap on and he turned toward his amplifier and he ran a quick scale and then he bent and fiddled with the knobs.

Du Pré kissed Madelaine and he stepped up and he picked up his fiddle and he plucked the strings with his left forefinger and listened close to the harmonics. He twisted the peg for a string that had gone a little flat.

A Métis that Du Pré didn’t know stepped up and he lifted a flat Celtic drum over his head and he began to beat on it with the stick, a fast rhythm with backbeats. Père Godin chuffed the accordion in time. Bassman did stops on his bass.

Du Pré nodded and he ripped off some icy little notes.

“Salteux!” screamed Père Godin.

One of the Métis war songs. The victory song.

Salteux, the Métis warriors, and this for the Salteur Du Pré and the Salteur Challis.

The Métis roared.

The ranch folk backed away and the Métis women went to the space in the center of the floor and they began to dance. They ululated, hands to mouths, while they bobbed, legs pumping. The floor shook. The many voices warbling the ululations blended, rose and fell.

Père Godin broke into riffs of reedy chords and notes not on the European scales.

Du Pré fiddled. He played notes from his blood. Smoke. Buffalo on the shortgrass prairie.

The Salteux had run the Sioux out of the Great Lakes country and the Cheyennes out of Wisconsin.

Du Pré fiddled between his two worlds of the blood.

He looked down at Madelaine.

Her eyes flashed crimson fire, so did her hair when the light struck just right.

Your babies are safe, Du Pré thought.