DU PRÉ AND BART HAD been home about a week, still chuckling over their journey. Madelaine had taken to yawning wide when they would begin to speak of it. Little boys, her eyes said, exchanging code words in a tree fort.
Jacqueline’s husband, Raymond, had got a bid job on plumbing two homes over at the county seat of Cooper, so Du Pré got to go look at cow asses a couple of times. They hadn’t changed. He checked the brands and signed off on the loaded cattle.
One evening, Benetsee appeared, looking ragged and, because it was late summer, dustier than usual. He smiled widely and grabbed Du Pré’s hand in his old claw. The old man’s grip was hard; his tendons pushed up against his weathered skin like wires pulled very tightly.
“So,” said Benetsee, “I have been up through the Cypress Hills and some other places.”
Du Pré nodded. The Cypress Hills were way the hell up in Canada. He wondered just where old Benetsee had gone, where he’d come from. How far? No use in asking the old man directly, anyway; Du Pré would never get a straight answer. He had yet to get one, anyway.
Might as well bet on the curls of rising smoke.
“You ever learn that sling rock thrower?” said Benetsee. “Takes some brains to use it. I will help you; you need it.”
Du Pré had forgotten about the slingshot. He fetched it from his fiddle case. They wandered down to a little gravel bar in the stream. Benetsee peered for a moment and then plucked six rounded stones the size of small plums from beneath the clear water.
“You got to wrap this thong on your palm first,” he said. “You see, it is cut longer, and then you hold the end of the short one so it is balanced.”
He whirled the shot around his head and sent a stone eighty yards to knock a bottle off a fence post. Du Pré had found the empty pint bottle near the fence post just this morning and set it up. Stock stepped on that and it broke wrong, they could hurt themselves.
The bottle shattered into little shards.
They spent an hour, Benetsee sighing wearily each time Du Pré let a rock go. Du Pré could pretty well hit one of the four directions and not much better.
“Since these whites came, nobody can do nothing anymore,” Benetsee grumbled. “Listen, you practice with this. I try you again. Maybe I go and pray for you now.”
Benetsee left, muttering.
Like always, he would get up to some bushes and stoop and be gone. The bushes wouldn’t wave. The most Du Pré ever knew of his passage was a bird or animal complaining. If they were complaining about Benetsee. Who knew?
Du Pré tried the slingshot a few more times. It was one of those things you had to do a lot and then it would make sense. Seemed simple. Like tying knots, it wouldn’t work right until he didn’t have to think about it anymore.
Du Pré wandered back to his house. He sat on the stump of a box elder he’d been meaning to grub out for the last ten years. Big black ants had chewed holes in the gray wood. Du Pré looked at them and decided he would let them win this race. He hated digging holes, gardening, and the like.
Madelaine came out with some lemonade. The summer had gone on hot right into the first part of September. Her children were in school, and after school they would wander back on their own time. The boys played softball and the girls visited friends.
Du Pré got off the stump and offered it to her. She sat down and handed him his lemonade.
“Some nice weather,” she said, looking up at the snow-capped Wolf Mountains. Up there, it could snow anytime and always did in mid-August. The peaks were clear only from the middle of July to the middle of August, and in the winter the snows could pile forty feet deep above ten thousand feet.
Du Pré heard the telephone ring. Maria was off somewhere. He got up and trotted to the open back door of the house.
He picked up the phone, heard the long-distance hum.
“Uh, Gabriel Du Pré,” said a woman’s voice he couldn’t place.
“This is me,” said Du Pré.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “My name is Samantha Ford. I was the reporter who talked to you at York Factory?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré, “when that Paul Chase slipped in like he’d been on the trip all along. “
“Yes. He kept denying that he hadn’t and called you all ‘disgruntled employees.’ The TV people had jumped the gun and didn’t want to eat crow. But they finally had to.”
“Well, he is a strange man,” said Du Pré.
“Uh-huh. What I’m calling about is this. I moved from the Toronto paper down here.”
“Uh,” said Du Pré.
“I’m in Washington, D.C., not the state.”
“Okay,” said Du Pré. So what.
“The Cree woman, Annie McRae, who was murdered last June at the festival?”
“Uh,” said Du Pré.
“Well, one of the Indians on your expedition had been there, and she said Chase had been dating Annie.”
Du Pré straightened up.
“So I asked the cops here, and they didn’t know anything about it. You know cops. They nod and chew and look bored.”
“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Now, which one of those Quebec Indians tell you this?”
“Lucky.”
“He say anything else?”
“He said Annie was a simple girl from the bush and she didn’t know what to do about Chase. But she was…Lucky thought she was afraid of him. He’s white; he’s powerful; he’s rich. Anyway, Chase brought her down to D.C. before the festival to tape some songs, even though Annie wasn’t a solo performer, wasn’t, in fact, very good. Then when Lucky and some others got there, she wouldn’t ever leave them. Even insisted on sleeping on the floor of the room with the most men in it. When Chase tried to get her alone, she’d almost tie herself to Lucky.”
“You tell the cops this?” said Du Pré.
“Some of it,” said Samantha Ford.
“So why you call me?”
“I called Chase,” she went on, “called him late at night; sometimes you can get someone off balance. He had been drinking or whatever. He was foggy. It seemed to take him a moment to understand my question. Then he blew up.”
Du Pré waited.
“He said Annie had been sleeping with you, Mr. Du Pré.”
“Christ,” said Du Pré, “I don’t even know what she looked like.”
“So you weren’t?”
“No,” said Du Pré. That son of a bitch.
“Thank you,” said Samantha Ford. She hung up.
Du Pré walked back outside. He leaned over and kissed Madelaine.
“Who was that?” she said.
“Woman reporter I talked to in York Factory,” said Du Pré. “She call to ask me about that murdered girl I told you about at the festival.”
Madelaine looked up at him.
“Well,” said Du Pré, “this Paul Chase, what a weasel. She calls him because one of the Quebec Indians says Chase was after this murdered girl. He says the girl was sleeping with me.”
Madelaine laughed. She laughed very hard.
“That’s funny, Du Pré,” she said. “Were you?” And she laughed again.
“No, I wasn’t,” said Du Pré.
“My Gabriel screwing teenyboppers,” said Madelaine, “I don’t think so.”
“You ever talk to one of them?” said Du Pré.
“I have to,” said Madelaine, “I’m their mother.”
She sighed.