by Gwen Florio
Every year people died in those mountains, shoved off narrow ledges by gleefully screaming winds, drenched into hypothermia by icy gray rains, or on the rarest of occasions, masticated into unrecognizability by irritable grizzlies. Lola, years removed from her job as a foreign correspondent, ended up writing about all of those things in her present job as a reporter for the local Magpie Daily Express. Still, the sight of the mountains, with their unwavering demand for respect, always steadied her.
“I’ll miss it here.” Too late, Lola bit her lip. The words were already out. She had spent much of her life rejecting attachments to people or places; now she had a husband and child who brought with them an extended family of aunties and uncles and elders on the reservation.
“You’ll like it even more after a break.” Charlie dug the heels of his palms between her shoulder blades. “You’re stiff as a two-by-four.” He knuckled a stubborn knot of muscle. “A two-by-four layered with marbles. Sure you don’t want to rethink counseling? Maybe when we get back.”
Lola shrugged his hands away and took one in her own, twining her fingers in his, a basket weave of brown and white. “It’s been a year. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.”
It was as much as they ever talked about it. Lola had always been on the high-strung end of the spectrum, fresh from Afghanistan when they’d first met, still sizzling with adrenaline, a horse with a bit in its teeth and eyes rolling toward every possible escape. Charlie had been smart enough to know that only a very long rein sustained their relationship, although Lola periodically rebelled against it, even after Margaret had come along. Charlie accepted the danger inherent in his own job as county sheriff, but often fretted about Lola’s penchant for putting herself in harm’s path.
A year earlier, though, while reporting a story in Wyoming, that tendency had ended up getting not just herself but also Margaret nearly killed. At which point Lola had fled back to Magpie. There, she contented herself with covering her beat, the Blackfeet Reservation, but of necessity whatever else was happening around the region—the usual small-town-newspaper fare of weather stories, farm reports, and the occasional tourist-related disaster on the Front. She acquired, as the saying went, a “mile-wide, inch-deep” knowledge of commodities prices, snowpack levels, wildfire movements, fracking, land-use disputes, local centenarians’ birthdays, and, always and forever, weather. Some days, she even relaxed into a shimmering sort of stillness that another person might have identified as happiness.
Overall, though, her new passivity disturbed her husband as much, if not more, than the old recklessness. He hadn’t even been able to drag her away from Magpie’s endless howling winter for a long weekend in the warmth and brightness and people-on-the-streets cheer of Great Falls or Missoula. “No,” she’d said, her eyes straying toward the window, the black wall of mountains barely visible beyond the billowing curtains of snow. “I don’t think so.” Followed, again, by “I’m fine.”
The honeymoon to Arizona, then. “Dammit, you’re not fine,” Charlie had said when he proposed it. That was all it took. The old Lola raised her head. Curled her lip. Margaret stood by her father, both of them holding their breath. A look passed between them: she’s faking it. Margaret owed the lankiness that was chasing baby fat from her bones to her mother, along with an unyielding jaw and gray eyes hard with skepticism. The obsidian hair, the brown skin, the unnerving calm, that was Charlie.
“A honeymoon,” Lola had said. “Why not?” Fists clenched behind her back, nails clawing her palms, breaking the skin in stripes. “Arizona sounds nice.”
Oxygen had flowed back into the room, and Lola gave thanks for a husband kind enough to pretend he believed her lie.
FOUR
Now, weeks after Charlie had called her bluff, oxygen seemed in short supply.
Lola’s breath juddered in her chest as Charlie went to her dresser and pulled underwear, shirts, and shorts from the tangled mess within. “I’ll need my running clothes,” she managed. “And shoes.” Pretending to go along.
Running was the one good thing she’d brought back from Wyoming, urged into it against her will by a friend there, her first attempts almost as painful as they were resentful, calves screaming, lungs afire. Improbably, she’d persisted upon her return to Montana, describing wide circles around the house at first, dodging sagebrush, rocks, and the occasional rattler too startled to strike, but always keeping the frame bungalow, with Margaret inside, in view. It had taken a blowup on Charlie’s part, full of invective about her presumptions of his incompetence as a father, to send her out on the gravel roads surrounding the ranch, and eventually farther up into the foothills, under the cool dimness of the lodgepole pines, their needles providing a springy cushion underfoot.
“Where will I run there?” she asked, even as Charlie double-bagged her beat-up running shoes and added them to the duffel filling with alarming rapidity. Lola gripped the edges of the bed.
“You probably won’t,” he said. “It’ll be ninety degrees by seven in the morning, past a hundred by noon.”
Lola imagined a vast fiery cauldron, an unwelcome change from a Montana summer that reliably offered see-your-breath mornings and sweatshirt-demanding evenings as a respite from the daytime heat. “Couldn’t we wait until winter?” Her distaste for Montana’s defining season lay in inverse proportion to her love of its summer.
“Margaret has school,” Charlie reminded her. “Besides, Eddie—I mean, Gar—said summer was the best time for a visit, with the girls being out of school and all.” Edgar had taken to calling himself Gar, a moniker Charlie had been slow to adopt. “How ’bout you call me Char?” Charlie had said to him in one telephone conversation. “Then we can rhyme. Gar and Char.” Lola couldn’t make out Edgar’s words, but his laugh had rung loud through the phone. Charlie’s face darkened and he’d changed the subject.
Gar probably figured that nobody in his right mind would come to Arizona in the summer, Lola thought now, but she kept silent about her suspicion. She consoled herself with the reminder that Charlie had promised to be back home by Indian Days, the Blackfeet Nation’s annual Fourth of July powwow, so she’d still spend most of her summer in Montana.
Margaret appeared in the bedroom doorway, followed by Bub, a three-legged Border collie listing farther off balance than usual, his jaws locked around the handles of Margaret’s small duffel, his tail tucked as far between his legs as it would go. “Mom, Dad, look. I taught Bub to carry my suitcase. Aren’t you ready yet? I thought we were supposed to leave right after breakfast. I want to meet Juliana.” Edgar and Naomi’s daughter was two years older than Margaret, who’d been talking for weeks about all the things she expected to learn from her big-girl cousin.
Charlie pointed to his own bag, zipped shut, beside the bedroom door. “I’m ready. Your mom’s the one holding us up. And give that poor dog a break. He has better things to do than tote your bags. Drop it, Bub.” Bub’s jaws parted. His feathery tail resumed its usual lofty posture. His eyes, one blue, one brown, radiated gratitude. He padded to Charlie’s side, standing proud with his savior.
“I’m almost ready.” Lola ignored Margaret’s pointed gaze at the open bag. “Five more minutes. Go say goodbye to the chickens and Spot.” Margaret was responsible for the care and feeding of their Appaloosa, Spot, as well as a flock of recently acquired Buff Orpington chickens, extravagantly feathered against Montana’s cold.
“You mean twenty-five minutes. Come on, Bub.” Margaret swept from the room in wounded righteousness. The dog gave Charlie a final worshipful glance and trailed Margaret at a distance designed to discourage further assignments. Lola went into the bathroom and threw her toothbrush, deodorant, and a sample-size bottle of the hand lotion she used as face cream, her version of makeup, into her Dopp kit. They rattled against the small plastic bottles containing the fossilized antibiotics, industrial-strength painkillers, and sleeping pills from her foreign corr
espondent days, when medications were her only weapons against interminable flights and all-too-possible injury from accident or, more likely, attack. She tried to remember the woman she’d been then, jolting in a Soviet jeep over the red-painted rocks that bordered known minefields, or lying flat on a hotel balcony to transmit stories on a satellite phone while firefights rattled the streets below. That woman hadn’t had a child, hadn’t known what it was like to face losing that child.
Lola sorted through the bottles. The container for sleeping pills was empty, the prescription long outdated. She tossed it. She lifted the bottle of painkillers, twisted off the top, and held it over the toilet. Then she relented, capping it and replacing it in the kit. You never know, she told herself.
In the bedroom, Charlie’s cellphone chimed. Lola’s heart lifted. Maybe it was a last-minute emergency. Even though Charlie had recently acquired a deputy, a big case would require the attention of two people. They’d have to cancel their trip. She hovered in the doorway, waiting.
“Wait,” Charlie said into the phone. “Slow down.” He sat down hard on the bed. The tone in his voice bespoke bad news. Lola turned her back so he wouldn’t see the hope lighting her face.
“God,” he said. “No. An elder?”
So the reservation had lost another of its elders, Lola thought. She mentally subtracted four days, the time for the necessary funeral ceremonies, from their vacation. She eased onto the bed beside Charlie and pasted an expression of sympathy across her face. She wondered who’d died. All the elders she knew were in robust good health. She racked her brain for a name, and abandoned the effort with Charlie’s next words.
“A bomb?”
Lola bounded to her feet. She scrabbled through the mess atop the dresser for her truck keys and phone and pens and notebook. If a bomb had killed an elder, it was a story, a big one. Too big for just Jan, her fellow reporter at the Express. Lola might have stopped chasing the big national stories, but the ones on her turf still sparked the old frisson, focus narrowing to a pinpoint, nerves zinging in anticipation, her senses on this day heightened further still by the welcome knowledge that she could kiss her vacation goodbye. She pursed her lips to whistle a happy tune, sucking her breath back in just in time.
Charlie clicked off his call. “Where are you going?”
“You just said there was a bomb. One that killed somebody. Not just any somebody, but an elder. I’m going to go cover it. I’ll drop Margaret at Auntie Alice’s on the way.”
Charlie’s smile contained not a hint of mirth. The hair on Lola’s arms stood up.
“Better gas up the truck. You’ve got a long ride ahead.”
Lola shifted from one foot to another, impatient to hit the road. If he talked much longer, Jan would make it to the bombing long before she got there. Jan had probably already heard it on the scanner and would be on her way, leaving Lola with mop-up, the secondary interviews with experts, none of the drama from the scene. On the other hand, Charlie knew the bomb’s location. “Why? Where is it? Babb? Heart Butte?” She named communities in the reservation’s far reaches. Even though Charlie worked off-reservation, he got called in, along with the FBI, when the Blackfeet reported possible felonies.
“Gaitero.”
In all her years of covering the rez, Lola had never heard of Gaitero. “Where’s that?”
Charlie’s smile stretched wider, some actual humor infiltrating it. “That was my brother on the phone. This bombing you’re so hot to cover? It’s in Arizona.”
FIVE
Lola watched in the pickup’s side mirror as the house grew smaller behind them.
Charlie swung the truck onto the main road. Once a shade of scarlet that made it a magnet for speeding tickets, the truck was the legacy of Lola’s friend Mary Alice, who’d splurged on it with her buyout money from the Baltimore newspaper where she and Lola had worked together as young reporters, before Mary Alice had headed off to Montana and Lola to Afghanistan. Lola had ended up in Montana as a result of Mary Alice’s murder, acquiring both Charlie and the truck in the process. After years of clocking more miles on gravel roads than paved, the truck’s candy-apple exterior was dull and pitted as scrap metal, and it no longer so readily caught the Highway Patrol’s eyes, not even when Charlie, a legendary leadfoot, was behind the wheel.
The prairie whipped past, tawny grasses rippling wavelike, washing around the legs of glossy Angus cattle. Horses roamed among them, paints and buckskins and blue-tick roans, so different from the monotone Thoroughbreds that had populated the paddocks of Lola’s wealthier childhood acquaintances. Unlike the stolid cattle, the horses tossed their heads and frisked, chasing one another head-high to presumably better pasture. Beyond, the mountains stood unmoving. The house disappeared from view. At Lola’s request, they made a long looping detour so that she could say goodbye to Ninahstako, named Chief Mountain by whitemen. The lone butte hard by the Canadian border was sacred to the Blackfeet. Early in their relationship, Charlie had told Lola he wanted to be buried within sight of it. “Me, too,” Lola had said. Even without the cultural heritage, Ninahstako had a way of getting under one’s skin.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Magpie was the first place that had felt like home after leaving her parents’ house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at the age of eighteen. Until she’d arrived in Montana in her early thirties, she’d spent the intervening years in a series of dorm rooms, then a Baltimore apartment before and (briefly) after a years-long stint in Kabul, where she’d shared with other journalists a rented villa that came with its own exorbitantly paid contingent of Kalashnikov-toting security guards.
In Afghanistan, such weaponry was on constant and casual display, toted by boys barely into their teens and elders with chest-length beards. She’d gotten used to the possibility of violence there. Even after her return to the United States, her reporting had brought the occasional death threat. But not until she’d worked briefly in Wyoming had the threats involved Margaret. Lola’s stomach lurched at the memory. “I think I might be getting carsick.”
Charlie turned toward her. The wind rushed through the open window with a noise like tearing cloth. It caught his hair and flung it about his face. Early in his stint as sheriff, sensitive to his status as the first Indian cop—back then, the only cop—in a white county, he’d adopted a buzz cut. He’d since relaxed and now his hair was longer than Lola’s, hanging past his shoulders on the days he decided to forego braids. “About the bombing,” he said. He’d long ago learned that news was the best way to distract her.
Lola let herself be played. “Who would want to kill an elder?”
Charlie’s mouth twisted. On anyone else, that mouth would have been too wide, lips too full, but it provided a necessary balance between the assertiveness of chin and nose that dominated his square face. “Actually, Eddie”—Lola guessed he wouldn’t resort to “Gar” until they crossed the Arizona line—“thinks they were trying to kill the sign.”
“A sign?”
“Billboard, actually. For a coal mine.”
Lola tried to figure out how a billboard could prompt a bomb. “Does somebody want to build a coal mine?” After years of sporadic, low-level resistance to coal, the fast-moving reality of climate change had finally prompted real, widespread opposition around much of the country. Even in the regulation-hating, job-hungry West, a billboard promoting a new mine probably wouldn’t go over well.
“Nah, the mine’s been there for years. Decades. They want to expand it, I guess.”
“Where does the elder come in?”
“That’s the problem,” said Charlie. “He came in.”
The truck blew past a small metal oblong that informed them they’d passed into the next county. There were plenty of counties to go. They’d be in Montana for nearly a third of their thousand-mile trip, assuming the bombing had distracted Charlie from his plan to stop at every kitschy attraction within twe
nty miles of the highway.
“The elder is sort of a local attraction,” he explained. “He guides people to dinosaur tracks.”
“Dinosaurs?” Margaret sat up in the jump seat behind them. Bub, who’d draped himself across her lap, shook himself off with a grumble, not taking kindly to being disturbed.
“Just their tracks,” Charlie said. “We’ll see them when we’re there. Anyhow,” he said to Lola, “he does this all summer long. But nobody expected him to be out there that early in the morning. Just a wrong place, wrong time sort of thing. Whoever set that bomb was probably trying to demolish the billboard. Unfortunately, the elder was sitting right next to it. Not much left of either of them, from what Eddie said.”
Lola worked her phone, trying to find a site for an Arizona newspaper that could give her more information. No signal, the phone taunted her. She looked at the map accordioned on the console between her and Charlie. From the looks of their route, largely free of the dots that signaled towns of any size, they’d be in no-signal territory for a good part of their trip.
Charlie enfolded her phone hand in his own, effortlessly steering one-handed around serpentine curves that traced their way down the side of a long ridge. The truck barely slowed at all. Beyond the driver’s side, the road yawned away into emptiness.
“Withdrawal setting in already?” he asked. Lola always checked her phone incessantly, even on her days off, fearful of missing a story. “When does the twitching start? And what do I need to do about it?”
Take me home, Lola thought. The road unkinked. For what would be the last time in two weeks, she fixed her gaze upon the peaks of the Front, the defining feature of her home. How would she feel in a place without its reliable boundary, the visual touchstone by which she oriented herself daily?
Seven and a half hours, two warnings, and one actual ticket later—Charlie had never adjusted to Montana’s belated imposition of a speed limit and believed the old no-limit rule should apply everywhere—saw them in Salt Lake City, where Charlie tried, to no avail, to lure Lola into a mall. “They’ve got a Macy’s and a Nordstrom and everything. I don’t think there’s a Nordstrom in all of Montana.”