by Gwen Florio
Lola’s vantage point on the ladder allowed her to gaze across the miles at the mine without looking down. The mountain of coal, awaiting transport to belching power plants, was a miniature version of the sacred mesa atop which it sat. She reminded herself, as she always did when confronted with man’s despoiling of natural beauty, that she liked her electricity just fine. And that the mine, according to what Edgar and Naomi had told them the night before, provided hundreds of jobs in an otherwise-remote area. As she watched, one of the trucks detached itself from the swarm around the coal and lumbered along the access road.
Lola lifted a reluctant foot from the security of the rung and lowered herself inch by inch until she felt the next rung beneath her foot. She eased her other foot down and let her hands slide along the ladder. She took a shuddering breath and paused before the next step. The truck turned out of the mine entrance onto the main road that led past the turnoff to the ruins, growing larger as it approached.
Margaret’s voice wafted her way, chased by Charlie’s. “Almost done, Mom.”
“No hurry, Lola. We’ve got nothing to do for the next hour or so.”
Lola blew another breath. When the truck passes, she told herself, I’ll take another step down. The truck moved closer, and then, with a blast that shook the ladder in its fastenings, petaled into an orange bloom of flame.
Lola was on the ladder and then she was on the ground, the last several steps accomplished with a speed she’d not have believed possible. The guide had already taken off, dust churning in his wake as his tribal-issue pickup barreled down the road. Charlie and the girls were in Edgar’s truck, which barely slowed to pick up Lola.
“Holy shit.” Lola struggled to fasten her seat belt as Charlie swung the truck in a quick turn that flung her against the door. “What was that?”
“You know what it was.” He spat the words as if cursing.
“Where are we going?” As if she didn’t know.
Charlie’s grip on the wheel was fierce, his eyes narrowed, lips pressed together. “To see if we can help that poor trucker.”
That poor trucker was beyond help, Lola knew. She’d seen the aftermath of too many bombings in Afghanistan to hold out hope. “The girls,” she said. They didn’t need to be exposed to that sort of thing.
“You’re going to stay with them,” said Charlie. The pickup leapt forward. Charlie muttered something about the benefits of a V8 engine.
“Like hell I am.” The strands of breaking-news DNA, tamped into a deep place more than a year earlier, began to move about, stretching and uncoiling, crowding the walls of their confinement, in a sensation that was nearly physical. Lola pushed her hands against her gut and spoke as much to herself as Charlie. “You can’t go there. It’s like the guide said. We’re outsiders. You are.”
“Uncle Charlie.” Juliana’s voice trembled. “I don’t want to go. I’m scared. We should go home.”
Charlie didn’t reply. The truck rocketed along another half-mile before he lifted his foot from the accelerator and touched it to the brake pedal. His U-turn was unnecessarily exaggerated, accompanied by great plumes of red dust. Lola looked in the rearview mirror, caught Margaret’s eye, and shook her head. Not the time for conversation, she tried to convey. Margaret turned to Juliana and laid her finger across her lips. Charlie’s temper, rarely exhibited, was of the silent variety and usually quick to pass. Lola knew he would be more angry at himself for wanting to do something so clearly ill-advised, given the girls’ presence. Usually that sort of impulse was Lola’s territory. Lola promised herself she wouldn’t bring it up the next time they fought, even though she knew very well it was a promise she’d likely break, just as she knew Charlie would probably forgive her for bringing it up.
They rode in silence for a half-hour, until Charlie turned off the main road onto the long track that led back to his brother’s house. Lola took a moment to appreciate the fact that their relationship was at the point where they’d made their peace with one another’s imperfections, and wondered if Edgar and Naomi, sprinting down the driveway toward the pickup, had reached that same stage.
“We knew you’d gone to the cliff houses.” Naomi’s voice was muffled, her face buried in her daughter’s hair. “We tried to call. But there’s no cell service there.”
“We were afraid you might have been on the road when—” Edgar added, wrapping his arms around wife and daughter.
Just like that, Lola was back in Wyoming, fearing for Margaret’s life. Fear being wholly inadequate to encompass the certainty that if anything had happened to Margaret, her own life would cease to matter. The feeling rushed back now, the cessation of breath before she’d realized that day that Margaret was safe, the need to touch her child everywhere, to inhale her scent, to press her lips again and again to Margaret’s soft skin. Now, before she could turn to her daughter, Margaret’s hand was in hers, the child sensing the mother’s need. Deep within Lola, the breaking-news DNA that had responded to the bombing spiraled tight and quieted.
“Coffee, I think, is in order,” she said, trying for normalcy. She thought back to the previous night, to the way Naomi had dosed her lemonade. “Or maybe lemonade.” From the grateful look Naomi threw her, she knew she’d divined the woman’s need. She wondered how deep it went.
“Girls,” Edgar said, “why don’t you go inside where it’s cooler? Stay close. No riding Valentine.”
“We don’t want to, anyway,” Juliana said. Lola surmised they were more rattled than they wanted to let on. They twined their arms and bent their heads toward one another, dark hair flowing together, and slipped from the room silent as water.
The adults settled themselves in the shade house and sipped at the beverages of their choice. It was midday, an hour that defeated even the shade house. But the chill of violent death lay over them all. Despite acknowledging Naomi’s need for her doctored lemonade, Lola opted for coffee, her own drug of choice, wrapping her hands around her mug, absorbing its warmth.
Edgar waited until the door had closed behind the girls. “No solid information yet,” he said in answer to Charlie’s unspoken query. “The truck driver is dead, of course,” he added before anyone could ask the next likely question. “Which is the scary thing. The elder, that was probably an accident. Nobody expected him to be there when the sign blew. But there was no way anyone could have expected the truck driver to survive today. Only two incidents, but the guy who did this—if it is a guy, and if it’s the same guy—is already upping the ante.”
“Here’s what I don’t get,” said Charlie. “With the billboard, there was still some room for doubt that this was a protest against the mine. After today, I think we can safely presume that the mine is the target.”
The line between assume and presume was so thin as to be nearly invisible, but Lola knew Charlie was right. Once again, she reminded herself that when it came to crime, the most likely theories usually proved correct.
“Possibly,” said Edgar.
Maybe lawyers were more skeptical, Lola thought.
“When people do something like this as a protest, they usually want the world to know,” Charlie continued, pushing past Edgar’s hesitance. Lola wondered if anyone else caught the annoyance in his tone.
“Go on.”
“Nobody’s claimed responsibility. No communiqués, no manifestos, no blathering on the Internet, right?”
“Oh, there’s plenty of Internet chatter,” Edgar said.
“I’ll bet,” said Charlie, and Edgar looked pleased. “But chatter about the bombings, right? Nobody saying, ‘Look what we did. And guess what else we’re going to do if—what?’ The mine isn’t shut down? Or, at least, the expansion halted?”
“Nothing like that,” said Naomi when Edgar remained silent. “I’ve been watching.” Her tall glass was half empty. With a manicured nail, she etched patterns in the rime of frost on its side.
&n
bsp; “It’s too soon for anything about the truck,” Edgar protested.
“Not necessarily,” said Lola. “The Taliban gabbed online within minutes of some of their attacks. I always thought it was funny how fast they took to the Internet, given the whole anti-technology thing they started with.”
“How long since you’ve been in Afghanistan?”
Edgar had mastered the lawyer’s art of tone-as-dismissal, Lola thought. “Almost ten years.”
“Well, then.” Advantage, Edgar.
“Is it possible that these were done by different people?” Naomi ventured. “Not just by different people, but different groups?
“Wrong question.” Charlie spoke to Naomi, but Lola guessed his response was directed at Edgar. “Of course it’s possible. But is it probable? It just isn’t. How’s that research coming?”
Edgar slumped and ran his hand over his face. “Along with our own digging, we’re getting regular updates from both the tribal police and the FBI. It’s like you said, the MO doesn’t fit the usual suspects. On the other hand, they’re the ones with the skill to pull this sort of thing off. Not giving them credit. Just being realistic.”
“Whoever did it had some serious chops,” Lola said. “Two different kinds of bombs—that doesn’t seem easy.”
Edgar snapped to attention. “What do you mean, two different kinds?”
“I’m guessing the one that took out the billboard—and the elder—was your basic timer device. Your guy probably set it up at night when nobody was around to see him, and timed it to go off in the morning before things got too busy. The billboard was far enough off the road that even if a car had been driving past, it might have been damaged but not destroyed.”
“Unlike the elder, who had the misfortune to be sitting right next to it,” Edgar said. “What about the other one?”
“You wouldn’t want to use a timer on that one,” Lola said. “Not if you were trying to take out a truck or some other vehicle from the mine. You’d have no way of knowing when it would pass. So you’d want some sort of trigger device, like a cellphone.”
“I don’t get how that rules out the same person for both,” Edgar said.
Charlie came to Lola’s defense. “It doesn’t. But again, people who do these sorts of things tend to learn one method and stick with it. Maybe we’ve got a copycat here—somebody who saw the billboard blow up and decided he could make an even bigger splash.”
Lola switched sides, playing devil’s advocate. “Or we could have a lone wolf on our hands.” That wriggle within was back, uncoiling faster, more insistently. She twisted in her seat and ignored the arch of Charlie’s eyebrow at the word our. “Someone like a McVeigh. Or that guy who attacked abortion clinics down South and then hid out for years in the woods? Wasn’t he a bomber, too?”
“He was,” said Charlie. “And now he’s in SuperMax in Colorado, cooling his jets there with McVeigh’s partner and the men who planned the first World Trade Center bombing. Anyway, his thing was abortionists and gays, not environmental stuff. And McVeigh hated the government.”
“But their methods,” said Lola. “The bombings, the business of working alone. It throws people off the scent. Remember how everybody thought Islamic terrorists were behind Oklahoma City? And how they blamed the Olympics bombing in Atlanta on some poor security guard? Neither of the guys who actually did it went around bragging about what they’d done. In fact, each did their damnedest to get away with it. What if the same thing is at work here?”
At which point, given the looks on everyone else’s faces, Lola wished she’d just kept her mouth shut. They’d all been thinking the same thing. It was, as Charlie so devoutly espoused, the most likely scenario.
But it was also the scenario that would prove the toughest case to crack. Meaning, Lola knew, that more people were probably going to die.
THIRTEEN
I didn’t do anything this time. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. “I’m out,” I said a couple of days ago. “This killing—”
The reply came cool and quiet as spring water. That was an accident. The same words I’d told Shizhé’é when he came to me, after.
But at least I got a promise: Never again. Not for you.
Which didn’t mean I was done. There was another job for me, a strange one this time, so strange I should have known. I was to go to the road outside the mine between ten in the morning and ten fifteen and leave a large gym bag in the westbound lane, just to one side of the center line. The idea was, it would look like the bag had fallen off a car. The tourists are always tying all of their shit on top of their cars. The bag was already scuffed up pretty bad, just like it had bounced along the road a ways. It even had some clothes inside, men’s jeans and T-shirts and underwear and socks. An old disposable razor, a ratty toothbrush, a half-squeezed tube of off-brand toothpaste. The clothes were worn, like someone had had them for a long time. I figure maybe they came from a secondhand store. There’s a few on the reservation, people giving us their castoffs—even their underwear, for Chrissakes—rather than letting us develop businesses where we could work jobs that would let us buy our own damn clothes. Businesses other than the mine, I mean.
“What’s this for?” I asked, hefting the bag. I just got a look, one that said Don’t ask. My chest seized up. A Dopp kit was added to the bag. I didn’t look in it. I guess you could say I knew after all.
Between ten a.m. and ten fifteen. Westbound lane. A little off the center line. Then get out of there.
So I did it. Spent the night in my hiding spot, high up the cliff, in one of the houses of the ancients. I crept down at first light, sat in brush a few yards back from the road for four hours, shifting a pebble from one side of my mouth to the other to fight thirst, fretting over a mistake I’d made. I’d left my bookbag behind. By the time I realized I’d forgotten it, it was too late. The cliff dwelling tours would have started. All I could hope was that nobody would find it. I went over all the things that could go wrong and ended up feeling as good as I could under the circumstances. Nothing in the bookbag would identify me. I’d taken out my books the night before so as not to have any extra weight. Just a water bottle and a sandwich. Even when my brain went all CSI and I started worrying about fingerprints and DNA, I calmed myself down by remembering that mine weren’t on record anywhere. Besides, I’d worn gloves against the night’s chill, and their fabric had probably wiped the bottle clean of my fingerprints. The plastic wrap around the sandwich, thank God, I’d crumpled up and stuffed into my pocket so as not to leave trash.
The key chain bothered me a little. I don’t use it for keys, just carry it because I like it. Half the people on the reservation, and even more tourists, have those key chains. Betty Begay makes them. Once she realized how much money she could make stocking trading posts around the reservation with those little trinkets she could turn out in no time at all, compared to the months it took to weave a good-sized rug, she turned mostly to them—which had the effect, of course, of making her true rugs all the more rare and therefore worth even more than they’d been before. Betty Begay could have taught the supply and demand segment of my Econ 101 course in about five minutes flat.
I sat under that brush, alternately worrying and reassuring myself, until ten. Each time I started out from under my shelter, I’d hear a car approach. By ten after, I was sweating. At twelve after, the road was bare. I dashed out and positioned the bag just so, laying it on its side so it would look even more like it had just fallen, and sprinted back to the brush. I waited a few minutes, then began a retreat, dodging from one clump of brush to the next. I could hear tires screeching as cars approached the bag and swerved around it. They had to be careful. The shoulder there was soft. I was almost to the side road where I’d parked my car when I heard a deeper rumble. One of the trucks from the mine, I figured. I didn’t look back.
Until I did.
The bla
st was bigger this time, or maybe I was just closer. The air did that thing again, pushing against me, sucking back. Long time ago, my parents took me to California, to the ocean. I stood in water up to my thighs, feeling it tug at me. That’s what the air was like. Again the cloud of smoke and dirt, bits and pieces of truck kicked into the sky by the blast, the red dirt swirling counterclockwise across the desert floor. I fell to my knees and wrapped my arms around my head.
“I didn’t do it,” I whispered. “I didn’t.” Even though I knew that, in some crucial way, I had.
FOURTEEN
The sense of something wrong jolted Lola from sleep.
She lay in the woolly dead-of-night stillness, letting herself come fully awake. The room was quiet. Too quiet. That was it. Charlie was the soundest of sleepers, falling off within seconds of his head touching the pillow, his deep breaths just short of a snore. Now he lay tense and alert beside her. She rolled onto her side and ran her fingers over his chest, feeling the muscles tighten with the motion. “You’re awake. What’s up?”
“Thought I heard a car.”
Lola listened. Nothing. “Probably out on the main road.”
“That road’s a long way away. Besides, it wasn’t the engine. A door.”
“Maybe somebody stopped on the road. Sound travels at night.” She faked a yawn, hoping he’d take the hint. If he stopped talking, there was a chance she’d sink back into sleep. Then she heard it too, a faint whirring.