Buffalo Jump Blues (28 page)

S
ean found Kenneth Winston standing outside the bar, sharp in his Levi's Slim Fit Boot Cuts, working a toothpick. One lizardskin Tony Lama rested on the bottom rung of the porch rail. He tipped the brim of his black Stetson in Sean's direction.

“Hey, Ken, are Pat or any of the other guys inside?” Sean asked.

“No, just me loitering, practicing my mid-distance stare. Nothing put a Montana bar out of business faster than a black man on the stoop. I figure if I loiter in front of every bar between West Yellowstone and Ennis, I can put the whole valley out of business in a month. Then we can have all the good fishing to ourselves.”

“Come on in. I'll buy you a French 75.”

“Can't. I got a date with Lois Lane. That reporter for the
Star
wants to do a story, ‘Hot Hands Winston, world-famous fly tier, graces Madison Valley.' Won't say I don't deserve it. She's going to meet me here and caravan back to the clubhouse for dinner with the gang. You're invited. Robin's defrosting some of those eland steaks he brought from Africa.”

“Maybe I'll be by later,” Sean said.

Ken's nod was a fraction of an inch. “Partner,” he said, and tipped his hat, his eyes reassuming their mid-distance stare.

—

The parrot clock on the wall read seven p.m., bar time. Fishermen coming off the water were just beginning to trickle in.

Sean took an end stool and ordered a Moose Drool. The bartender
with the sleeve tattoos asked after Ida, if she was still up on the rez. Sean was surprised that he knew. The names associated with Brady Karlson's death hadn't been released by the tribal police, at least to his knowledge.

“Oh, this time of summer there are a lot of birds in the valley,” he said. “You tell her Uncle Vic says hi, that everybody here's thinking about her.”

It was only a big valley in a geographical sense. Sean should have known the news would get around.

A splash followed by a fizz of bubbles, a vision in crimson and white spinning like a barber pole, changed the subject. The Parmachene Belle knew how to make an entrance, and Sean's eyes swirled with the colors.

Behind him, he heard fingers pressing on piano keys. He didn't turn around, even with the first glissade when he thought it might be her, even after the first stanza when he knew that it wasn't, when relief was tinged with a measure of regret. He'd always suspected that she would sing her way back into his life someday, Vareda Beaudreux with her scent like oranges and lips the color of old blood. But this was someone else, a woman with chestnut hair and a voice that was as lush and as warm as the Montana evening. A frayed alto that took you back, singing songs written for whiskey and dark bars. “Sweet Love,” “Unbreak My Heart,” “Simple Twist of Fate.”

He lifted a finger and told the bartender to take a Johnnie Walker Black to the piano player, his compliments. He looked at his reflection in the bar mirror as she sang about a couple in a park, the evening growing dark, a one-night stand that would haunt a man forever. Sean emptied his glass and thought about unlit porch lights and empty stairwells, about skin that couldn't be kissed and phones that rang without answer. All the emptiness of a life lived alone coming to bear, even as the Parmachene Belle beckoned him with her expressive fingers. Only later, when he swam out of the depths of his own dark water, would he realize that this was where the story had started,
with a woman behind glass seeing a vision from her past. A twist of fate to be sure, but far from simple.

When the set ended Sean walked out the door and stood under the early stars. He caught the scent of caramel and spice as the steps came up behind him.

“What are you, some kind of no-hat cowboy? My mother told me they were the worst kind.” A smile in the voice, a hint of mischief in the eyes as Sean turned to face her.

He smiled. People up here were never who you thought they were, even if they were from somewhere else.

“I'm not going to have to do all the talking, am I? You're not that kind of a cowboy.”

“I'm not a cowboy at all.”

“No? So if you aren't a cowboy, then who am I thanking for the drink?”

“I'm a private detective,” Sean said.

“Really?”

“Sort of,” he said.

T
he ranger manning the entrance booth didn't return Harold's hello when he handed over his season pass. It was ten-thirty at night, no time for pleasantries.

“Do you need a map?” she asked.

“I didn't think you kept the booths open this late,” Harold said.

“You do when you have tourists coming in who are driving rental Winnebagos for the first time.”

“Well, I just need a campsite,” Harold said. “Are there still sites open at Madison Junction?”

She said there were. After the Fourth, the campground rarely filled up during weekdays. He thanked her and had put the truck camper in gear when she asked if he could answer a couple questions. The park was conducting a survey about congestion at the entrance gates and wanted visitor input.

“Sure,” said Harold, pressing down the clutch. He felt the hot ice of sweat bead at his temples under the band of his hat.

His right hand came up to his cheek. It had been two weeks since Lucien Drake had served him with the warrant at his sister's place, and, whistling to Calvin Barr to start the truck, not having found the baby bison on the property, had swung on Harold, a sucker punch that sent him sprawling. The eggplant bruising had finally faded, but the scabbing where Drake ground his cheek into the gravel was still scabbed over and he was glad the driver's side window was on the left, so he could offer the attendant the acceptable half of his smile.

“Shoot,” Harold said.

A couple of questions turned into five. How often did Harold visit the park? When was the last time he was caught in a queue that caused delay? Had the inconvenience ever caused him to change his travel plans? What did he think about the addition of an automated machine that could scan park passes and facilitate faster entry? Would he be willing to pay a surcharge for the use of such a lane?

“Anything to move along,” Harold said. He found that he was swallowing and that his mouth was dry.

“Thank you,” the ranger said, but Harold was already rolling the camper forward. He let out a long breath, cursing himself for not doing his homework. Had he known that the booths were attended so late, he'd have waited another hour. All it would take was a little bit of noise from the camper and she'd have asked what cargo he was hauling. Then what would he have said?

Harold's fingers itched at the scabbing as he thought back.

Lucien Drake.
He should have been ready. Instead, he'd got lucky. If Drake had connected solidly, Harold would have been out cold. As it was, he'd seen the world swim away before a vision flashed through the pain, a vision of the boy a father had made fun of by giving him a girl's name. That boy had been knocked down, too, and had always got up. Harold had got up, seen Drake, his tombstone teeth milky in the moonlight, beckoning with a hand, the worms under the skin of his chin crawling. “You want some more, Chief?” Drake said.

Harold had beat him senseless and was straddling him, trading hands, digging at the liver with the left, when Barr pulled him off. “Jesus, Harold, you'll have a lawsuit on your hands.”

“He's an asshole. How the hell can you work for that son of a bitch?”

Barr, wiry and bowlegged, his breath smelling of chewing tobacco, circled Harold's chest with his orangutan arms and dragged him away from the man curled on the ground.

Barr's voice was a raspy whisper. “Do you know Jackson McKenzie, the one they call Tatanka?”

“What does that have—”

“Answer me. Do you or don't you?”

“I've met him. It's been awhile.”

“Do you know where the camp is? Keep your voice down.”

“Not exactly. What are you getting at?”

Harold turned to look at Drake, who was whimpering, making dog noises. He broke away from Barr and walked over. Harold put the heel of his boot on Drake's right hand, the one that had beckoned to him when he thought he was the better man. “You stay until I tell you you can get up,” Harold said. “Not until, you got it?”

He ground the heel. Drake pulled his hand under his body and groaned.

The truck with the horse-and-cattle emblem was parked up the drive. Barr found a pad and a pencil in the glove compartment and drew Harold a map. “You come day after tomorrow, couple hours before dark, make sure you got the passenger. No horse trailer, something else, something enclosed.”

Barr looked at him, his face, all cracks and crannies, illuminated by the dome light. “You understand what I'm telling you?”

Harold nodded. He was looking at the Sharps on the truck's gun rack, the two bandoliers of paper-patched cartridges, each the size of a small cigar.

Something tugged at his brain.

He looked back at Drake, a lump on the ground thirty yards away.

Said to Barr, “You're the highwayman. The way I heard it, that was Theodore Thackery.”

“They called both of us highwaymen, 'cause of the cartridge belts. We gave them the idea for the jump, and I'll go to the grave regretting it. But I wasn't there that night. I never met those Indians, never knew they existed. I give no thought a'tall to those fellas carrying through.”

“Those fellas, the Karlson brothers?”

“I didn't even catch their names.”

“How did you meet them?”

“That doesn't matter.”

“Tell me.”

Barr shrugged. “They came to see the mermaids. Everybody saw them girls; it was the talk of the valley. Even a couple old pokes like me and Thack. I recognized the boys 'cause they worked for the crusade a few weeks. They bought a bottle of scotch and we took it outside the bar. I don't care what they say, that stuff all tastes like soap to me. Buffalo came up, it was what we had in common, guys on either side of the issue, finding out you aren't enemies after all.”

“Just who the fuck are you, Calvin? You part of the bison crusade? You pass on information about what the state's up to, where the buffalo are so they can haze them away from the guns? Are you like a spy for them?”

“More like tell them where to put the cameras. We share a vision of the future, we're just getting there different ways.”

“Why the hell didn't you go to the sheriff?”

“And say what? That I met a couple college boys and we talked about Indian hunting customs? State didn't have a damned bit of evidence, there was nothing a DA could do. And I never saw what happened. I wasn't no party to it.”

“Somebody told those kids when the buffalo were coming, where they could find them.”

“Why do you s'pose Thack killed himself?”

“Did he kill himself? Personally, I don't think that he did. I think those boys made it look that way.”

The man looked hard at Harold. “It ain't here nor there who pulled the trigger. I told you what I told you. You want to foller through, make something right that the man yonder says is wrong, you be there when I said.”

“Okay,” Harold said.

“Now hit me.” Barr tapped his eye. “You don't have to kill me, but hit me. All this talking's going to make him suspicious.”

—

Harold rubbed his knuckles, still sore, as he drove his sister's truck camper past the turnoff to Madison Junction Campground. He turned south, the road dipping to cross the Gibbon River near its junction with the Firehole, where the two currents bled together to form the Madison, and then he was following the gunmetal thread of the Firehole River upstream. A glare on the water where the headlights dipped as he crossed the bridge over Nez Perce Creek, following the road that dead-ended at the trail to Ojo Caliente Hot Spring. He idled along, big broad meanders of the Firehole to the south, looking for the pullout marked on the handwritten map. The openings in the flared forests trembled with a breeze, the long grasses flowing in waves like bear hair. He found the pullout. Across the river was where Tatanka had told him the herd would be, when he'd visited the camp of the American Bison Crusade a couple hours earlier.

Tatanka—buffalo bull. An old man, a white man, but a chief all the same. Plain enough to see. He told Harold that the bison that had survived the buffalo jump, that had veered from the cliff edge just in time, must have stayed in cover, moving only at night, before finally returning to the national park, where one of his field workers had recognized the cow with the broken horn. Because the cow had had twins, a very rare occurrence for bison, and campaign volunteers had seen her often with two calves, and because she was accompanied by only one now, he thought there was a better than even chance that the bull calf Harold had rescued was her offspring. The cow was still in milk, that was the crucial consideration. The calf was only forty days old and it wouldn't be weaned until six months.

“It's just one buffalo,” Tatanka said. “But he's got his mother's blood. Buffalo will need leaders when the time comes that their hooves aren't hobbled. It will warm the cockles of this old man's heart to see it, God provide I'm around.” He'd nodded toward the
truck camper. “How are you going to keep him quiet when you go through the gate?”

“Got a plan,” Harold said.

“Then I won't ask.”

He'd shaken Harold's hand. “I'm not going to give you any of this ‘brother of the buffalo' crap,” he said. “But I will say a prayer to the gods we share and hope that you fare well.”

The old man had gone back to the fire. Harold heard him say, “What's on the spit?” to the ragtag group of followers who stood to welcome him.

—

Harold turned into the pullout and stepped out of the truck. He lifted the ten-power marine binoculars. Twilight's curtain had drawn, but the sky was clear with a half moon that cast more than enough light, even to recognize a bison with a broken horn. Sweeping the openings on the far side of the river, he didn't see any bison, but that didn't mean they weren't there, back in the trees. Bison often grazed at dusk and in the hour or two after dark, and Harold felt sure that sooner or later they would come out into the open to feed on the lush grasses. That is, if they were still in the vicinty.

He unbolted the spare tire and found the coil of orange hose designed to bleed air from one tire into another. Set them by the right front. A cover story if he needed one, a curious park ranger driving up and asking what he was still doing there after dark.

He didn't have long to wait. The first bison, a cow, moved along the dark wall of the pines, then broke free from shadow to stand in the moonlight. More followed, cows with calves, a couple younger bulls, spreading out as they came onto an apron of grass in the bend of the river. And the cow with the broken horn was with them, her calf close, moving in and out of her silhouette.

Harold walked to the back of the camper and opened the door with a key. “It's time,” he said.

She smiled, her head sticking above the little humped shoulder. Straw covered the floor of the camper and her hair was matted, with bits of it sticking out.

“You did a great job back there, Dorry.”

“Are the buffalo here?” She hugged the bison's neck, which came up past her waist, the calf having grown a half foot taller in the weeks since Harold had found it.

“They're across the river.”

“I was afraid he was going to bawl when that lady was asking you the questions. He doesn't like it when anything changes, like when the truck stopped.”

“How did you keep him quiet?”

“I fed him with the bottle and talked to him. He likes it when I whisper.”

She moved past the calf in the narrow corridor and stepped outside. Harold put up the ramp he'd made from two-by-tens and the girl led the bison down it, coaxing him along.

“See them?” Harold pointed.

“I see them.”

They could hear them, the low rumblings of a contented herd.

He took her hand and they walked toward the riverbank, the calf trailing. With only the span of the current separating them from the bison, one of the bulls turned to face them, then the other bull, followed by the cows, the calves indifferent. The herd began to move away and had gone a few yards when the bull calf bleated. Immediately the cow with the broken horn stopped, the rest continuing to move, not alarmed, just creating space. The cow called to the calf. Dorry whispered, her mouth close to the calf's ear. Harold didn't hear what she said and would never ask her. He took her hand and they backed slowly away, the calf staying behind on the bank, bleating. A few short steps and he was in the river, his legs plunging as he was swept downstream. The cow followed him, keeping pace on the far bank. The calf's head bobbed, a moving dot in the middle of the river.

“We've got to help him,” Dorry said. Harold could hear the catch in her voice.

“No, he'll make it. River's not fast here.”

Even as he tried to assure her, the calf rose out of the current, formed a silhouette. He had gained the shallow water on the far side and stepped up onto the shore. He fell, his hooves slipping as he tried to climb the bank where the earth had sloughed off into the river. The cow bison stood farther up the bank, calling. The calf tried half a dozen more times, struggling, wobbling, falling back.

Harold could feel the girl's hand tighten.

“He's got a big heart, Dorry, he'll make it.”

Finally the calf made it to the top, where he was engulfed by the larger bison's shadow.

“Where did he go?”

“He's there.”

Harold handed her the binoculars. “Do you see him?”

She nodded, the heavy binoculars wavering. “He's up under her. I think he's nursing.”

“Good.”

The other calf had been edging along the river and it now joined the cow, the cow walking up the bank to rejoin the herd, trailed by the calves trotting to keep up.

“I don't know which one he is now,” the girl said.

“That's okay,” Harold said. “That's what we wanted.”