THE TOUSSAINT BAR WAS jammed with people mostly smoking. A blue cloud hung down from the ceiling to the top of the bar. It rasped the lungs and throat and gave the light shape and changings.
Du Pré fiddled. The place grew quiet save for heads nodding in time, feet tapping, and the coughs of the college kids who had made the long journey, only to have their unpolluted lungs and tender little throats seared. Du Pré could see them standing in back as near the open door as they could get. He couldn’t laugh; it would make him drop the beat.
One of the Norwegian ranchers from up on the bench played the spoons, clacking and rippling. Du Pré wished for a Cajun with those good ringing rib bones.
He finished. He was sweating from the hard playing and the close, wet air. He went to Madelaine, sitting at a little shelf table built into the wall. He put his fiddle in the case and tried to close it. Something was jammed in the seal where the two halves met. The slingshot. He pulled it out and recoiled it, placed it under the fiddle’s neck.
He’d been practicing some, and he was good now some of the time. Then he’d do whatever he thought he’d been doing with it and the stone would fly off forty-five degrees away from whatever he was aiming at. He was trying now to forget the thing in his hand and just look at what he was trying to hit, like a good shot with a rifle. The brain knows more than the mind does.
“You fiddle good, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. She turned and looked behind her toward the door. It had opened and a shaft of bright light stabbed through the fug until the door swung to again.
Bart and Michelle were standing there. Michelle had on a simple rough-out leather jacket, jeans, and blue rubber-bottomed boots. She looked stunning. The men in the place gaped just long enough to piss off their women.
Bart and Michelle just stood for a few minutes. They couldn’t see. When their eyes adjusted, they looked over and saw Du Pré and Madelaine and moved toward them. Du Pré got up and motioned Michelle to his seat. He and Bart stood.
The college boys were playing some lousy version of “The Red-haired Boy,” the beat scotched up by their periodic coughing fits. The crowd went from quietly respectful to telling very loud jokes in two minutes. The kids slunk off, cased their instruments, and left. Du Pré watched in sympathy. They didn’t live, the poor things; they only studied on it.
“We have to go in an hour or two,” said Bart, “but Michelle wanted to listen to you play.”
“I will be playing in maybe ten minutes,” said Du Pré.
Bart went off through the crowd and came back with four drinks in his huge hands—bourbon, vodka, sweet pink wine, and club soda for himself.
He looks like he is getting younger, Du Pré thought, maybe growing back through the time that he missed. He is a good man.
Du Pré sipped slowly, and by the time that he finished his drink, the crowd was calling for him. The old Norwegian rancher got out his spoons. Du Pré took out his fiddle and checked the tuning. It was fine. He put rosin ort the horsehairs of his bow. He tucked the fiddle under his chin.
Du Pré thought of his blood, the voyageurs, in the dark green wilderness, in canoes. Dark waters, dark songs. Long hard days and bitter weather. One’s wages were all too often death. Dark waters flowing past deep green-black stands of trees, packs of furs. He played. He thought of the voyageurs and he let his fingers and bow describe them.
He let the music fade, one long, lonesome note, in the distance of the past.
The crowd did not move or clap. They sat transfixed. Du Pré looked over at Madelaine. Michelle was staring at him wide-eyed, her hand to her mouth.
Entertaining is simple. One up tune, one medium, one down, one up, and so forth. Du Pré played a reel, a dance tune, the happy music that was played at the weddings where the couple jumped over a broom. The priest would be along someday to bless it. No reason to hurt the feelings of God.
The crowd cheered and clapped. Du Pré bowed. He launched into a lament, a song of men homesick for their houses, lovesick for their women, tormented by not knowing if they were still remembered and still loved. When the wind was against the canoes on the homeward voyage, the men said that their girls weren’t pulling on the rope to bring them home, they were playing around with the loafers at the home post. Men away from home are all Ulysses hoping for a Penelope.
The rancher with the spoons sat quietly through the sad song. Du Pré held a note and then began to shiver the bow and spark the tempo and he then shot into a fast-tempoed question song, where the fiddle was two people asking sassy questions and giving sassy answers. People began to beat out the time on glasses.
Du Pré looked around the room at his friends and neighbors—young and old, weathered and pale, few teeth or gleaming rows, well-off and poor, faithful or weak. He felt fondness for them all.
I live in a place where you can have personal enemies, Du Pré thought. Sometimes they are more use than your friends.
The door of the bar opened, but Du Pré’s eyes were too used to the dark to see who it was. He kept playing. The door closed. He looked down at the floor, bobbing with the rhythm. He closed his eyes and pushed the music hard. He glanced over toward the little table where Madelaine and Bart and Michelle were sitting.
Maria was leaning over, talking to Michelle, who was stuffing her cigarettes into her pocket and looking up at Bart. She looked stricken and angry. Maria stood back.
Michelle practically ran out the door of the saloon. Bart was right behind her.
Du Pré broke off in midstride. He put the fiddle on top of the rickety old piano and rushed toward the door, shoving people out of the way.
Someone else was dead. But who and where?
Du Pré caught up with them at Bart’s Rover. Michelle had the cellular telephone in her hand and she was punching frantically at the buttons. She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth and her lighter lit in her moving hand.
“Rollie!” she screamed. “What the fuck…”
She listened. Her face crawled and twisted. She put the lighter down on the seat. She bit her lip.
“Shit, Rollie,” she said. “Shit.”
She listened some more.
“Right now,” she said. She turned off the phone.
“Two more,” she said. She sounded as if she were speaking underwater.
Du Pré looked down at the mud between his boots.
“Little girls,” she said. “Little Indian girls. One eight and one nine.”
“I come with you,” said Du Pré.
“The fuck you do, Du Pré,” said Detective Leuci. “I know how you think. I like it. But you stay right here. You come to D.C. and I will arrest you.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” said Du Pré, angry.
“You didn’t have to,” said Michelle softly. She got out of the Rover and went to Du Pré and put a hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers. “I know you, Gabriel. No. No. You stay here. Find Benetsee. Stay here. No.”
Du Pré looked at her, his black eyes burning.
“Bart,” said Michelle. “Let’s go.”
They drove away.
She’s right, Du Pré thought as they pulled away.
We both are.