Lola on Fire

by Rio Youers

  “Missed you at pinochle last night,” he said as he climbed back into his truck, and she told him that she’d be there next week, even though she knew that her days of playing pinochle were well and truly behind her.

  She spent some time with her cattle, looking for signs of disease: scours, coughing, nasal discharge. Maybe it was pointless, given what she was about to do, but doing something normal—even checking a calf for diarrhea—helped her cope with the many things that were not normal.

  Brody was awake when she returned to the house, but not exactly alert. He sat on the floor in the living room, huddled in a blanket, rocking back and forth.

  “I’ll make us something to eat,” Lola said.

  “Not hungry.”

  “The worst thing we can do right now is deteriorate. We need to stay strong.”

  She went to the kitchen and started pulling eggs, meats, and vegetables out of the fridge. Brody joined her after a moment. He sat at the table, stared at the closed laptop for a second or two, then pushed it away from him.

  “Is there any point,” he said, “in going to the police?”

  “No,” Lola said.

  “But if you show them that . . . that video”—he sneered when he said it, his hateful eyes directed at the laptop—“they’ll have to do something. They’ll at least investigate.”

  “You’re right.” Lola lifted a skillet out of the cupboard and dropped it on the stove with a bang. “But there’s no way to prove it’s Jimmy in the video. Investigators might question him, on suspicion, probably at his home while sipping cognac—he has friends on the force—but no arrest will be made without evidence.”

  “There has to be something in that video,” Brody said. “Some small clue that—”

  “Involving the authorities is a dangerous move, with little chance of success. It will only frustrate Jimmy, and then he’ll do something worse to Molly.”

  “Kill her?”

  “Not right away. She’s his bargaining chip, but there’s still lots he can do.” Lola sprayed oil into the skillet and cranked the heat. “Eventually he’ll tire of hurting her. Then he’ll kill her. And then he’ll come at me the old-fashioned way.”

  Brody stared at her, dark pouches beneath his eyes, his mouth slightly open. He had the hollow, dead look of a prisoner of war: a boy whose world has been upended, the few good things he had known tipped out.

  Lola went to him, one hand on his face—which was cold, so cold—her forehead touching his.

  “I’m going to take care of this,” she promised him.

  “Okay.” A weak, cracked word.

  “I told you,” she said, “that when Jimmy played his hand, I would respond. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.” Brody started to cry and she lifted him into her arms and held on tight. She felt a fluttering in her own chest but pushed it away.

  “Listen to me, Brody—”

  “Kill him.”

  “Listen: I have a plan, and it has to go off without a hitch.” She held him at arm’s length and drove her gaze deep into his. “I need you to do exactly what I say, when I say. Do you understand?”

  A vague response.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Lola lowered him onto his seat and returned to the skillet. “We leave in a few hours.”

  * * *

  They drove into Lone Arrow proper. Population 5,100. Main Street was narrow, three stoplights, lined with the usual crop of small-town stores and eateries. There were no McDonald’s or Starbucks. Savior came by way of the First United Methodist Church and the Bald Eagle Shooting Range.

  Lola pulled her pickup into one of the spaces in the range’s lot. It was a low-key establishment, with neat white lettering across the brickwork and two signs in the glass door. One read: no minors unless accompanied by an adult, and the other: no alcoholic beverages or drugs permitted on this property.

  She said, “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you from pulling a trigger. You might have to, though. It’s a good idea for you to know how.”

  Brody nodded, staring straight ahead.

  “This place is better equipped than it looks. Fourteen lanes, good ventilation. Best of all, it has a tactical area, with cover and moving targets. The local police use it for training.”

  “Okay,” he mumbled.

  “I can’t teach you much in the time we have.” Lola shook her head. “You’ll be as green when you come out as when you go in. Just a different shade of green. That’s about the best I can do.”

  They got out of the truck. Lola lifted a carryall of firearms from the backseat: the MMR, her Baby Eagle, the Glock 42. She glanced across the street and saw a silver Nissan Maxima pull up outside Bricker’s Hardware, a single male occupant, red goatee and a ball cap.

  “Just put Jimmy in front of me,” Brody mumbled. “I only need one shot.”

  “If only it were that simple,” Lola said. “Come on.”

  * * *

  They started on the lanes. A crash course in pistol shooting. Lola showed him arm and hand position. “Push out with your shooting hand, pull back with your support hand. Same mechanic as with the rifle; think of your right arm as the buttstock . . .” She helped with his trigger control. “Don’t jerk the trigger. That will upset your aim. You want a nice, smooth motion. That gun should surprise you a little every time it goes off . . .” She explained the importance of sight alignment. “See the target, but focus on the front sight. I mean really focus. There’s a magic point where everything on the periphery melts away, then you’ll keyhole every shot . . .” Brody put round after round down the range, and Lola helped him make adjustments until his groups came back tight.

  “Good,” she said, showing him a target where every hit but one was within the inner ring. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  This earned a thin, wavering smile.

  They proceeded to the tactical area, where Lola showed Brody cover techniques, how to shoot from prone and kneeling positions, and how to quickly transition from pistol to rifle and back again. Man-shaped targets swooped and popped up. “Same basics as stationary shooting,” Lola instructed. “Focus on that front sight post. Smooth trigger pulls. But track the target through the shot, even after you pull the trigger.” Brody missed and missed again. “You need to adjust your lead,” Lola said. “Your shots are late. Think about angle, distance, and speed. That’s a calculation you need to make instantly, and no two shots are the same.”

  Brody missed.

  “Sight alignment. Smooth tracking.”

  He missed.

  “You’re jerking the trigger.”

  Brody clipped targets. He hit shoulders and thighs.

  “Better. Try again, starting from cover. And think about your lead.”

  Six hits to center mass. Two to the head.

  “Attaboy.”

  The hours ticked by. Two and then three. They took a short break, then headed back to the lanes.

  “I don’t know,” Brody said, flexing his right hand, rolling his shoulder. “My fingers are killing me. And my arm . . .”

  “What are you going to do if you take a bullet to the shoulder?” Lola asked. “Give up? Curl into a ball and hope the enemy doesn’t see you?”

  “No, I . . .”

  Lola popped the top two buttons of her shirt and pulled it open enough to expose a knot of scar tissue on her left shoulder.

  “Little present from Marco Cabrini,” she said. “Joey’s old man.”

  “You told me you got that scar falling out of a tree.”

  “Something else I lied about.” She shrugged and buttoned up. “Let’s keep going.”

  * * *

  They shot side by side for fifteen minutes, then Lola handed Brody the MMR and two boxes of ammo.

  “Switch it up,” she said, removin
g her ear protectors. “Apply everything I’ve shown you. I want to see some tight groups when I get back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a little business to take care of.”

  She left the Bald Eagle via the back door and cut across the Dollar Tree lot to Station Road, which she followed north for two blocks, then took Main west, then Vincent Street south, approaching Bricker’s Hardware from the other direction. The silver Nissan was still parked outside. Lola crept up on the passenger side, opened the door, and jumped in.

  “Hello, Eddie.”

  Within one second she had the muzzle of her Baby Eagle tucked beneath his rib cage and she pressed hard.

  “Oh fuck,” he gasped, and then, thinking clearly, “I call Jimmy every hour. If he doesn’t hear from me, he’ll hurt the girl.”

  “Hurt her, yes. But he’s not going to kill her. Not yet.” She pressed even harder with the gun and he winced and shrank against the driver’s door. “I think a little more pain is an acceptable trade for running a bullet through your internals.”

  “Fuck.”

  “I don’t want to shoot you, though. Because you’re a goddamn chickenshit asshole, and I derive no pleasure from shooting goddamn chickenshit assholes.” She started to twist the pistol. He groaned and dribbled. “But, you know, if I have to . . .”

  “Chrissakes,” Eddie snorted. “What’s this about?”

  Lola smiled. “It’s about you giving me what I want.”

  He breathed hard and a section of his false goatee came unglued. Sweat ran from beneath his ball cap.

  “What do you want?” he hissed. “Just fucking tell me.”

  She told him.

  * * *

  Lola returned to the range to find Brody stripping the MMR and returning it to the carryall.

  “Ran out of ammo,” he said.

  “Good.” She nodded. “Any kills?”

  “Just the same one,” he said. “Over and over.”

  * * *

  It was almost six p.m. by the time they got back to the farm. Brody took Advil for his shoulder and for everything else that ached.

  “Grab whatever you need,” Lola said.

  They loaded up the truck and headed east.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They drove more than two hundred miles that evening, listening to the drone of the engine and nothing else. They were trapped with their imaginations. And maybe they deserved that, Brody mused. They had each played a part in putting Molly where she was. They should each conceptualize what she might be going through.

  Brody distilled every harrowing thought into gasoline and dripped it into a bottle inside him. By the time they reached the Omaha city limits, that bottle was three-quarters full. He didn’t know if he had the ability to do what needed to be done, but he for damn sure had the fuel.

  * * *

  An imperfect moon watched them over the Missouri River, into Iowa, then shut its eye behind a lid of soft cloud. Soon after, Lola exited the interstate and pulled up outside a hotel. It wasn’t much, but it was multiple stars better than anything Brody had stayed in with Molly.

  “I’m not tired,” he said. “We should keep going. I’ll drive.”

  “We’ve got nine hundred miles of interstate ahead of us,” Lola said. “We need to rest.”

  She got out of the truck, stretched, grabbed her bags from the backseat—including the carryall filled with weapons. They were all in there: the pistols, the rifles, even the shotgun from the barn. Along with the sawed-off strapped beneath the dash, they were considerably armed.

  Brody grabbed his own bag—he’d ditched the replica; the time for nonlethal had passed—and walked with his mom toward the hotel entrance.

  “What do you need me to do?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Lola rubbed her eyes.

  “You said you had a plan, and that you need me to do exactly what you say, when you say.” Brody winced as he heaved his bag onto his right shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Right.” She lowered her gaze and stepped ahead of him. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  * * *

  Despite the world and all its cruelty, and the bleak industry of his imagination, Brody fell asleep within seconds of his head touching the pillow. His dreams were as deep and quiet as the ocean floor.

  They were on the road by six, after removing a skin of ice from the truck’s windshield. One quick stop for gas, another for breakfast—McDonald’s drive-through, convenience over nutrition. Brody’s appetite was surprisingly lively. He wolfed all of his and finished what his mom couldn’t.

  “Still hungry?” she asked. “We can hit another drive-through.”

  “I’m good for now,” Brody said. “Let’s keep going.”

  They rolled east, into the new day, watching the red seam ahead of them first crack, then bleed, then spread into a dramatic apricot sunrise. Lola flicked the radio on, skipping through stations until she found something that rocked.

  “That’s some sunrise,” she said.

  With no delays, they would roll into Pennsylvania, and onto Jimmy’s turf, sometime around eight p.m. If his mom’s mysterious plan didn’t work, he might be sleeping with the fishes by eight-thirty, making this the last sunrise he’d ever see.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I watch the sun come up most mornings,” Lola said. “I always take a moment, you know, just to breathe it in. And I still can’t look at a sunrise without thinking about your dad. It was his favorite time of the day.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true.” Lola nodded and cracked a faint smile. “Every two or three weeks we’d wake early, drive to the High Bridge in St. Paul, and watch the sun come up over the city. My memory is that it was always spectacular—the way it reflected off the high-rises downtown and shimmered on the Mississippi—but that might just be the way I choose to remember it. We sometimes skew our memories to suit us, right?”

  “I guess so,” Brody said.

  “It was probably cloudy and cold, and I was probably cranky, pregnant, and desperate to pee. But in my mind”—Lola tapped her right temple—“it was always perfect.”

  Brody settled back in his seat, momentarily at peace. Maybe it was the sunrise coupled with the music, or the knowledge that they were on their way to ending this, whatever “the end” might mean. But he thought it had more to do with Lola—this new glimpse of her spirit and tenderheartedness. For the first time in years, he was beginning to feel like he had a mom.

  “I have a lot of good memories,” he said. “I don’t think any of them are skewed.”

  “Like?”

  “Like our camping vacation at Crow Wing Lake—”

  “When your dad went fishing and capsized the kayak.”

  “Oh God, and that storm.” Brody puffed out his cheeks. “That shit was biblical. Then there was the Christmas we all went carol-singing dressed as snowmen—”

  “And snowwomen.”

  “Right, and nobody knew who we were. I don’t think we got through one carol without laughing our asses off.”

  “Yeah, that was a good time.”

  “And remember when our TV broke, and we put on our own production of The Simpsons?”

  “You stole the show,” Lola said. “You were a great Bart.”

  “We were all great.”

  Lola smiled, tapping her thumbs on the wheel as the radio played. Brody looked out the window and lost himself to the past—to good memories and bad. He indulged them all, though; he wasn’t running from anything today. The scenery flashed by. Flat farmland. A river. A water tower. More and more farmland. Brody finally snapped back to the present when a fleet of hot-air balloons drifted over the interstate, low enough to hear the roar of their burners.

  Lola must have snapped out of her memories, too.

  “That was the happiest I’ve ever been,” she said.

  Brody turned to her, expecting to see her usual noncommittal expression
, but there was more now: a depth to her eyes, a trembling in her jaw, a crimping of her brow. It was as if her tough exterior layers were peeling away, revealing the hesitant, more tender person beneath.

  “If I could go back to any time in my life,” she continued, “it would be then, with you, Molly, and your dad.”

  “Really?”

  “No doubt about it.” She gripped the wheel firmly. Maybe her hands were trembling, too. “I had a difficult childhood. It was better with Grandpa Bear, but it wasn’t normal. And Vince . . . I was happy with him, but we were working for Jimmy, and that was not a good scene. The last twelve years have been lonely, sometimes fulfilling, but rarely happy. And then there was Natalie Ellis, the opposite of Lola Bear, with her reusable grocery bags and rusty minivan, the years of changing diapers, baking muffins, the PTA meetings, the Little League baseball games and swimming lessons. Of all the lives I’ve lived, that was by far the happiest.”

  Brody said, “If this ends well, maybe we can start again. The three of us.”

  Lola nodded, but flinched at the same time. Perhaps it was the sunlight in her eyes.

  “I’ve endured some terrible things,” she said. “I’ve encountered very bad people, lived through years of isolation, been pushed beyond my endurance. But leaving my family was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. That night, when I kissed you and Molly goodbye, thinking I would never see you again . . . I can’t even put into words how much that broke me inside. And I’ve never been unbroken since.”

  Another layer lifted away and now Brody thought she might cry (a phenomenon he’d never seen, not even when she was Natalie Ellis). She held the tears back, though. Her eyes were fixed dead ahead, unblinking.

  “I thought about you all the time. Not just big stuff like school and relationships, but the little things, too: what time you got up in the morning, which superheroes were your favorites, if Molly still liked chocolate milk on her Cheerios.” She pressed her lips together and drifted into the past again, but only for a moment. “I contemplated going home to you—three, four times a day I’d think about it. I even packed a bag on one occasion. I couldn’t do it, though. I just couldn’t put you into that kind of danger. If I’d known, of course, that Jimmy would find you anyhow . . .”