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Lots of others out there, though.

Forty of them, any given time.

Pret’ bad people.

I wish Benetsee would show up.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette. He whistled a little in between drags. This afternoon he would go to the bar in Toussaint and fiddle with a couple of cousins down from Canada.

Big family, mine, Du Pré thought. Indian family. These cousins they are from people come down here with my great-great-grandfather, then they go to North Dakota and back up to Canada. Always in the Red River country. I like that country, sings in my bones.

Goes to Hudson’s Bay.

Wonder how them whales are doing.

Wonder that Hydro-Quebec kill that River of the Whale yet. Damn it. I should ask Bart, he sends money to fight that.

The fields of winter wheat were ripening now July. They were going to red-gold and that hard red wheat was getting ready for the harvest. Ring good on the shovel, that hard red wheat.

Du Pré remembered threshing, the combine crews, everybody itching from the chaff. The streams of dark red winter wheat shooting out of the pipes and into the trucks lumbering along on the side of the combines. Sell all the hard red wheat you could grow, anybody. Make pasta, them good noodles. One-fifth protein. Come from Russia, that hard red wheat.

The Dukhobors brought it, I hear.

Du Pré liked the Dukhobors, a pacifist Russian sect. If a Dukhobor got really mad with you, they undressed. I will not fight you, I am naked before your violence, but I am mad at you.

The Mennonites, during the First World War they came and got the men and hung them from handcuffs on a pipe till their shoulders dislocated, because they wouldn’t fight.

The Hutterites. Good farmers, shrewd traders.

Good people, just don’t have much truck with the rest of the world. Who can blame them?

Du Pré flicked his smoke out into the yard. The grass was meadow grass, already drying and yellowing and going dormant.

Du Pré got his fiddle and he went to his old cruiser and he got in and turned around and went down the long drive.

That Bart he is off digging a big irrigation ditch with Popsicle, his lime green diesel shovel. One we find the answer to his brother’s death with. Find a lot of things. Find out more truth than maybe we want to know. That is the thing about truth, there is only too much or not enough.

Du Pré drove slowly, windows down, listening to the meadowlarks trill. Big yellow-breasted birds got a black wishbone on their chests. He glanced over and saw a brilliant bluebird, winged sapphire, sitting on the fence post its house was nailed to.

Got to get the hole the right size in the house or you got starlings. Yuppie birds, maybe. Lots of squawk and sharp elbows. No taste.

Du Pré was in no hurry. It took him an hour to go the twenty miles to town. He went to Madelaine’s.

He parked and went in the front door.

“Du Pré!” Madelaine called. “There is a box for you there!”

Du Pré looked at the box on the coffee table. Shirt box.

Madelaine, she make me another shirt.

“OK,” said Du Pré. “I see, shirt box.”

“Smarty,” said Madelaine from the bathroom. “You look in that, see how your woman love you.”

Du Pré lifted off the top.

Bright red shirt with black piping and fiddles over the pockets made of porcupine quills. The shirt was heavy silk. Du Pré picked it up. A red silk Métis sash was folded underneath. Fiddles on that, too, and DU PRÉ on the back in black beads. Very fine beads. Two circlets on each side with coyotes howling at yellow moons on them. Du Pré felt something crinkle in the sash’s pocket, on an end that hung down. He fished out a dollar bill.

Bad luck to give an empty purse.

Madelaine came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a heavy turquoise silk/satin shirt with yellow flowers embroidered on it in fine beads, a long yellow skirt, and yellow cowboy boots. Her rings were all turquoise and silver and coral.

Her hair was in two long braids. Beaver fur wrapped around them.

“You play that good music, eh?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded. He was shrugging into the shirt. He put his fiddle rosin in the pocket of the sash and he stuck the other end through the loops on his jeans.

He drove down to the bar. Two old cars with North Dakota plates stood outside. Cousins.

Du Pré was a little late and his cousins were picking and singing already. He tuned his fiddle and then joined them.

They played the old voyageur stuff, the longing songs of men far from their women, thinking that maybe they would not see them again.

Long time ago, on the lakes bordered by the deep black woods. The Company of Gentlemen Adventurers of Hudson’s Bay. The Métis voyageurs. Red River.

R
OUND MIDNIGHT
D
U
P
RÉ
and his cousins were playing very tight and the crowd had thinned to those who simply loved the music. The whoopers had gotten drunk and left. Madelaine was looking at Du Pré with her bright and saucy black eyes and she would smile when he looked at her.

Got plans for you, her face said.

Du Pré grinned and rosined his bow.

There is nothing left of us but songs and stories finally, Du Pré thought.

Even maybe when the earth is ice again and the Red River sleeps for a long time. Missouri, she used to flow to Hudson’s Bay, but ice come and now she goes to the Gulf of Mexico.

I am a man, but we are not very big.

“‘Baptiste’s Lament’!” said Sonny, the accordion player.

Du Pré nodded. The song was about a young voyageur who misses his love and he sees her in the moon on the water, smiling. And when he gets home she is dead, and he drowns when he sees her in the moon on the water again, swimming down after her, singing.

Sad song.

They took a break. Du Pré was leaning up against the bar kissing Madelaine when Susan Klein tapped him on the shoulder and handed him the telephone. Du Pré looked at Susan. She shrugged.

“Eh,” said Du Pré.

“Du Pré,” said a soft drawling voice.

“Who is this?” said Du Pré.

“Rolly Challis,” said the soft voice. “I’m in Browning. I’ll be at Raster Creek in four hours. Could you meet me there?”

Five in the fucking morning.

“Sure,” said Du Pré. “You got something.”

“Maybe,” said Rolly. “Some things I need to talk over with you anyway. Sorry about the time but that’s my run. I can take a couple of hours there, highball later.”

“Yah,” said Du Pré, “I be there.”

The phone clicked.

“Girlfriend?” said Madelaine.

“Yah,” said Du Pré, “She meet me at five in the morning. I got time for you before, maybe after. I am busy man, you know.”

Madelaine smiled suddenly. She reached up and took Du Pré’s right earlobe in her teeth and she bit it softly.

“You see that man brought my Lourdes back?” she hissed. Du Pré’s ear was a little wet. “You thank him for me. No, I will not go, but sometime I like to thank him, smile at him with my face.”

Du Pré nodded.

Sonny and Bassman were chatting with a couple pretty women from Cooper. Everybody looked happy. Be even happier later.

“That Sonny, he better not get tangled up with that La Fant woman,” said Madelaine. “She is some twister. She take guys, make them crazy. She likes to watch them fight about her.”

Du Pré shrugged. My cousin, he is forty, I never hardly know him he is not fighting over some crazy woman. He like it, help get his dick up, I guess.

“That Bassman,” Madelaine went on. “He is talking sweet to Alyse. She is nice, have a bad time, men. She picks bad men.”

Bassman, he collect women all over the place. Someday they all have nice lunch, together, there, get up a posse, go cut off Bassman’s balls and then hang him from a tree, sit down, drink beer while he bleeds to death dangling.

My cousins want to play that way, I am not their mother, thought Du Pré, I am just a cousin. Fools.

Sonny and Bassman got back up on the little stage, grinning like dogs in a field of fresh cow shit.

Heat.

“I go now,” said Du Pré. “Do some songs then we go.”

“Poor Du Pré,” laughed Madelaine. “You get no sleep tonight. I do while you are gone. You get back, you get no sleep then either.”

“I stand it somehow,” said Du Pré. He picked his fiddle up off the top of the bar and he walked to the stage and he got up and stood and listened to the rhythms Bassman was pulling out of his fretless electric bass. Some backbeat, there.

Play across the creek, Du Pré thought, sail my hat over.

He shot little icy notes into the smoky air.

People got up and they began to dance.

Madelaine came to the stage and she danced in front of Du Pré, running her tongue tip around her lips.

I hope I don’t drop the beat, fucked up by my hard-on, thought Du Pré, my woman is messing with me. Some fun.

They played and people danced and they left in couples. The bar was emptied by the last song, except for a few people.

Du Pré cased up his fiddle. He shook hands with his cousins and he nodded and smiled at their women and he took Madelaine home.

After, they lay pearled with sweat, the window open and the cool night air flowing over their hot bodies.

“I got to go,” said Du Pré.

“I got plans, you, you get back,” murmured Madelaine.

Du Pré got up and he pulled on his clothes and boots and he went out to his old cruiser. The glass was thick with dew. Bullbats flew overhead, catching insects in the single pole light by the street. The little brown bats would be down by the water, eating mosquitoes.

Du Pré started the cruiser and he let it warm while he took an old towel and wiped the thick stippled water from the windshield. He got in and he rolled three cigarettes and laid them on the dashboard, and then a fourth he stuck in his mouth and he lit. He pulled a bottle of Canadian whiskey from under the seat and he had a stiff drink.

Keep me awake. Run on whiskey, pussy, and music. Not a bad life that I got. I say that, my Madelaine belt me in the mouth.

Du Pré turned around and he headed for the little two-lane blacktop that snaked around the foothills of the Wolf Mountains to the west of the range. It led up to the Hi-Line and came into the main stem at Raster Creek.

I did not know what Raster meant, Du Pré thought, so I ask Booger Tom. The old man snorted and said it was a corruption of “arrastra,” the Spanish millwheel of heavy stone drawn round and round by burros to crush ore for roasting. ‘

Du Pré had seen a couple of the huge stones up in the Wolfs. The Spanish had got this far north?

Why not?

The road was wet, black and snaking north into the night. Du Pré put the car up to ninety and he shot along under the blurry moon. High cloud, lot of water in the air.

The country changed. Du Pré could smell a different soil, some sour thing in the water. Several times deer froze in the headlights. Du Pré braked hard and got down to a crawl till he was past them. They might move off the road, but they might run back if the headlights blinded them.

He got to Raster Creek at a quarter to five. He got out and he sat on the warm hood of his car, smoking and drinking whiskey.

At five minutes to five he heard a big rig to the west. The truck was moving damned fast. The headlights rose ahead of the big diesel and then they blazed into view and the drive began to ring down the gears and slow the huge, heavy machine.

Big black eighteen-wheeler.

Rolly Challis brought the truck into the parking lot of the rest stop at a crawl. He stopped and the lights went out and Du Pré heard the air brakes hiss and lock and then the cab opened and Rolly dropped down, freehanded, his foot touched lightly on the rubber plate on the running board and then he was on the ground and walking quickly toward Du Pré,

Du Pré slid off the hood of his car and he walked toward Rolly.

They stopped two feet from each other.

Rolly grinned and he held out his hand.

Du Pré grinned and he shook it.

“How is Lourdes?” said Rolly.

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “she is all right. She scared herself pret’ good. She really ask you you want a piece of ass, Spokane?”

“Uh,” said Rolly. “No, not exactly. She asked me if I would like to have her suck my penis. She had trouble pronouncing ‘penis.’ Sort of choked on it, you know. So I said, ‘Little girl, you are a long damn way from home and in a lot of trouble. How bout’ you tell me what’s up over breakfast.’ I didn’t think she had a lot of time in giving blow jobs to truckers. Poor kid.”

Little Lourdes, Du Pré thought. Kids, these days. I will not tell Madelaine, who would shit bobcats.

This Rolly, he is a funny man. Probably, he rob a bank, leave them all laughing.

Du Pré put the bottle of whiskey forward. Rolly shook his head. . “Thank you, though,” he said.

They stood there. The sun was rising in the east, the sky was a pink curtain halfway up to heaven.

“I don’t have much,” said Rolly. “But I thought I’d best talk to you about it. I been driving back and forth for seven years on this route and down on the Interstate. One thing I never did, though, is look at where the bodies of the girls were dumped.”

Rolly pulled a map from his back pocket. He stuck a small flashlight in his teeth. He went to Du Pré’s cruiser and he unfolded the map. It was the western half of the United States.

There were many black X’s on the map.

From Seattle to Minnesota.

From Amarillo to Calgary, Alberta.

Du Pré squinted.

The big picture.

One wide band across America, up high, the Pacific to the Great Lakes.

One wide band running north and south, along the front of the Rockies and east to the hundredth meridian.

Du Pré blinked.

“Jesus,” he said. “There are maybe two of them.”

“I believe so,” said Rolly. He folded the map and he started to walk back to his truck.

“You go now?” said Du Pré, surprised.

“Yup,” said Rolly. “When you talk to ol’ Harvey Wallace, there, give him my best. Ask him about time. We need to know when the bodies were dumped.”