Badlands (8 page)

“I half expected a call from the cult,” said Bart, “but it seems they have their own excavators. They are utterly self-contained. Easier now with the Internet. They ship in their foodstuffs, clothing, necessaries. Other than deliveries of fuel and power they don’t spend a nickel locally. They don’t hire local craftsmen. They barely leave the ranch. And they offer a free barbecue to the neighbors.
That
should be interesting.”

Du Pré nodded.

Pidgeon came in the back door of the saloon. It was a warm day and she had on shorts and a halter. Two cowboys at a table in the corner stared at her, mouths open.

“I have some stuff,” said Pidgeon. She went back out.

The cowboys looked at each other and they shook their heads.

Du Pré slid off the stool and he went out the back door to the double room Pidgeon had in the larger of the two trailers. She had set up an office. There was a fair-sized telephone bank and some other electronic equipment Du Pré did not recognize and didn’t care to know about, either.

There were seven color photographs printed on 8½ × 11 sheets of paper tacked to a corkboard. The photographs were grainy, blowups of those taken for driver’s licenses.

All men, all in their mid-thirties, all with neat haircuts and open, level gazes, and all dead at the same instant though they were hundreds of miles apart.

“My clients there,” said Pidgeon, “pretty ordinary joes, every one. None of them were in the military. They went to middling schools and got degrees in ordinary disciplines. All having to do with the computer. Computer science, advertising, marketing, and information retrieval. That’s what librarians are today. Information retrieval specialists.”

Du Pré looked at the faces. They were meaningless.

“Other’n they all got killed the same moment,” said Pidgeon, “neither I nor my alchemies can spot any pattern. Four were married and divorced before they joined the Host, three divorced after they joined the Host, not a one of them ever got busted for anything ’cept overtime parking. Dull, honest citizens, other’n believing spaceships were coming and what-all else the Host thinks, they were all duller than network TV. Why somebody thought they all had to be killed is mysterious. These guys would be invisible in a gray room.”

Du Pré stared at the photographs.

“Maybe I have copies of these?” he said.

Pidgeon looked at him.

“Sure,” she said. “Take about five minutes.” She did something on a keyboard and noises began. A printer pushed out a sheet of paper.

“I was going to take these to Benetsee,” said Pidgeon. “We need a little magic.”

Du Pré laughed.

Pidgeon waited while the photographs came out of the slot. She put them in a manila envelope and handed it to Du Pré.

“Where is that Ripper?” said Du Pré.

“In a phone company truck,” said Pidgeon, “hanging off a pole out at the Host Ranch. Looking around. Won’t amount to shit, but at least I don’t have to listen to his godawful jokes.”

“They are pretty bad,” said Du Pré.

Ripper loved puns, the more wretched the better.

“Couple agents from out Butte office are coming to talk to the White Priest,” said Pidgeon, “ask questions about the late lamented. This is the first and only spot of trouble the Host of Yahweh has ever had. It is odd as hell. Other’n the spaceships and the White Priest, there isn’t anything even especially weird about them.”

“Give Harvey my best,” said Du Pré.

“I’d like to give Harvey a whack over the head with a chair,” said Pidgeon. “I coulda done this at home, damn it.” She punched savagely at her keyboard.

Du Pré took the envelope and went out.

The day was bright and there were only a few puffy clouds high up. The sun was very warm on his back. He wore an old shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the shoulder seams. The air felt good.

Du Pré yawned.

Funny dreams last night, but they are not funny. Make no sense. Only times my dreams make sense I go to Benetsee’s, but those are not dreams.

Du Pré shrugged and went in the back door of the Toussaint Bar. The cowboys were still at the table in the corner, still looking poleaxed. Madelaine was behind the bar. She was still wearing the ridiculous rhinestone glasses.

She was staring at her beadwork.

Du Pré leaned over the bar. He snatched the godawful glasses and threw them on the floor and stomped on them. Blue rhinestone beads crunched and plastic shattered. He twisted his bootheel.

Du Pré went and got the broom and dustpan and swept up the pieces and took them to the cold woodstove and threw them in. He put the broom and dustpan back.

He sat back down on the barstool.

Madelaine had on another pair of glasses, the spare set of plain fake tortoiseshell Du Pré had bought in Cooper.

“I win five dollars,” said Madelaine. “I know you do that, I say today. That Susan, she say, no, tomorrow. So we bet.”

“You know me pret’ good,” said Du Pré.

Madelaine looked up and she smiled.

“You know me pret’ good, too,” she said. She put down her beadwork and glasses. She came round the bar and put her arms around Du Pré and kissed him.

The cowboys at the table cheered.

Madelaine turned and bowed.

Du Pré laughed.

Madelaine went back to her stool behind the bar.

Du Pré looked at the floor. He saw a piece of blue bead he had missed.

But when he bent over to pick it up, he couldn’t see it.

D
U
P
RÉ DROVE HIS
old cruiser through the front gate of the Host ranch, and down the recently graded road to the main compound. There were perhaps forty vehicles parked on a lot marked out with lines of white powder. Some were Host of Yahweh vans and some were pickups and cars owned by local people.

One of the huge metal buildings had its front doors slid open, and lights shone inside.

“Wonder what they got?” said Madelaine.

They got out. Ripper and Pidgeon had been sitting in the backseat, silently. They got out, too.

“Jacqueline and Raymond and the kids be along,” said Madelaine.

The four of them walked toward the big metal building. There were rain clouds off to the west. A huge area down in a meadow had been made over into a softball field and a soccer field and there was an elaborate playground, with slides and jungle gyms and swings and sandboxes.

Inside the barn, tables had been set up and hundreds of folding chairs. There was a bandstand and many booths with carnival games. Tossing rings, shooting air guns at spinning targets, throwing balls at stacks of fake bottles. There were shelves of prizes, mostly stuffed animals. Some of the booths sold preserves and baked goods and clothing.

The members of the Host of Yahweh were bustling around, hanging the last of the bunting and arranging the last few things, forgotten till that moment.

“Don’t look too dangerous,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded.

The rear door of the metal barn was open, too, and scents of cooking meat and barbecue sauce blew through the barn.

There was a cotton candy machine in one corner, and some kids in line waiting to get really sticky.

Ripper and Pidgeon split up and they sauntered around the booths.

Madelaine stopped at one of the shooting galleries. She began to dig in her purse for some money.

“It’s free,” said the young man in the old-blood-colored shirt.

Madelaine shrugged and she picked up one of the little air rifles and she aimed it at a target swinging on a stand. She pulled the trigger and the pellet rang on the target. The center red circle fell out of the thing and on to a bell.

“Top shelf,” said the young man. “Anything you want.”

Madelaine regarded the large stuffed bunnies and monkeys and bears.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a big brown rabbit.

She handed her prize to Du Pré.

“Look good on you,” she said, standing back.

Du Pré looked at the big rabbit.

“I put it in the car,” he said.

I am not, me, walking around this thing.

“I look around,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré heard a mob of happy little voices coming.

“They are here,” he said, looking toward the front door.

Jacqueline’s herd of children burst out of the sunlight, laughing and shoving each other. Raymond and Jacqueline came along behind, each carrying a toddler who was too slow to keep up.

Du Pré put the rabbit up to his face, and he walked past the kids who were looking around in wonder. He went to the cruiser and opened the back door and put the huge rabbit on top of the cooler. He fished his flask from under the seat and he had some whiskey and rolled a smoke. He lit it and shut the car door.

“Mr. Du Pré?” said a woman’s voice, behind him.

Du Pré turned around.

It was the young woman who had brought the poster to the saloon a few days before.

“If you aren’t busy,” she said, “someone would like to meet you and speak to you for a moment.”

Du Pré nodded.

The woman turned and walked away, and Du Pré followed. She came to a door in the end of one of the prefab houses and opened it. Du Pré dropped his cigarette on the ground and snuffed it with his bootheel. He went in and the woman followed him, shutting the door.

There were two men in the room, both dressed in Host costume. One was the blond man Du Pré had seen here the night the ranch buildings burned.

The other man had brown hair. It was hard to make out his face, because he had a wide white bandage crossing the bridge of his nose and his eyes were bruised.

“Hello again,” said the bandaged man.

“You haven’t met Roger,” said the blond man, “at least not to shake hands. I am Tate.”

Du Pré nodded.

“We were told that the wild horses were pests and we could shoot them without anyone caring,” said Roger. “Since we are fencing off their pasture and water, and they would then have to leave, where another rancher would shoot them, and, by the bye, be angry with us for sending vermin his way, we thought to kill them. You object.”

Du Pré nodded.

Roger looked at Tate.

“This is our land,” said Tate, “and we will obey the laws. But we can hardly leave that end of the ranch unfenced. Buffalo aren’t cattle.”

Du Pré looked at Roger.

“Fence it off,” he said. “That is fair. Them horses, been there a long time. There are grullas in that bunch.”

Tate and Roger looked at him.

“Old horses,” said Du Pré. “Maybe close to what the wild horses were, people caught, thousands of years ago.”

“Very well,” said Tate.

“People hunt them for pet food,” said Roger.

Du Pré shook his head.

“Not here,” he said.

Roger stood up. He put out his hand.

“Apologies,” he said.

“Things rightly solved?” said a rich deep voice behind Du Pré.

Du Pré turned.

A man stood there, in a long white robe. The rope around his waist was white. There was a crucifix and beads on the rope, all white. He had a single ring on the middle finger of his right hand, a white stone in a white setting.

“I am the White Priest,” said the man.

Du Pré nodded.

“We assumed when we came here that we would offend,” said the White Priest. “We are odd, and keep to ourselves. We do that because we are all at risk, Mr. Du Pré, for all of us, myself included, had other lives which nearly killed us. Drugs, booze, whatever. So we stay close to one another. Now we have come to a remote place. We wish to live in peace and harmony with our neighbors. We will not proselytize. We will not attempt to take over the school board, or the County Commission. But however well-intentioned we may be, we will offend. Could we perhaps hire you as a consultant? We would pay any reasonable fee.”

Du Pré looked at the three men.

“Who said, shoot the horses?” he said.

“I did,” said Tate. “We have the damned brumbies in Nevada, and they are a pain in the ass. I am a ranch kid, Mr. Du Pré. Different country but pretty much the same.”

“You don’t got to pay me,” said Du Pré, “and it don’t matter, you call me, someone else. Call somebody. You are fencing your land off, no problem, you are not in a place it is wrong to do that. There are some. Fence off them badlands, OK, them horses go round the Wolfs, the Trapper Springs. They do that anyway.”

“My apologies,” said Tate.

“Your nose there, I am sorry,” said Du Pré, looking at Roger.

Roger shrugged.

“I ain’t that pretty to begin with,” he said.

“Great,” said the White Priest. “Now, I suppose that everyone thinks we killed the seven former members who were shot, at precisely eight
P.M.
on the same day. We did not. The FBI is welcome to look at all of our records, interview whomever they wish.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Anyone may leave here any time they wish to,” said the White Priest. “It would hardly work if we had to chain people, now would it? We are a collective. But one takes no oath when they join, and suffers no consequences when leaving. I am telling you the simple truth, Mr. Du Pré.”

Du Pré nodded.

“I go, my family,” he said. He turned and went past the White Priest and out the door into the sunlight.

The huge carcasses were turning on spits over low fires and a pair of cooks were slathering on barbecue sauce with brooms.

It smelled very good.

T
HE BAND DID A
fair imitation of Irish folk music. Guitar, fiddle, hand drum, flute, and close harmonies. The musicians were young and fresh-faced and earnest.

“Them, want to be liked,” said Madelaine. She put another piece of barbecued buffalo in her mouth and chewed.

Du Pré grunted.

“Working at it very hard,” said Madelaine. “You see, that woman there with the cold drinks?”

Du Pré looked toward where Madelaine had nodded. The woman was dressed in the long gray dress and bonnet and plain wire-rim glasses that were the uniform of Host women.

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

“She limp a little. She is the one maybe the skunk bit, Benetsee’s?”

Du Pré looked at her. She didn’t look familiar, but then she had been against the light of the sun if it was the woman that the skunk had bitten that day at the old man’s cabin.