by Gwen Florio
“Won’t having cops hanging around make me even more of a target?” Naomi’s voice faltered as she posed the question.
“She has a point,” Edgar said. “If there’s a cop with her, whoever sent this will know she told.”
Charlie rubbed a hand over his face and looked toward the hallway. The girls would be up soon. They’d need to have this resolved before then. All of them were entirely too aware of the unerring antennae of the young for anything out of the ordinary.
“Wait a minute,” said Lola. “She’s already got protection. A cop hanging around.” She jutted her chin toward Charlie. “You. For all the rest of the world knows, you’re just the visiting brother-in-law. It’s perfect.”
Too late, she bit her tongue. Reached out a hand as if to capture the words, crush them in her fist. Because, even as Charlie and Naomi and Edgar all nodded eager assent, she realized she’d just put her husband squarely in the sights of the bomber.
NINETEEN
Charlie’s service weapon always traveled with him. But once they’d arrived in Arizona, he’d stashed it on a high shelf in the bedroom closet. Now he retrieved it, tucked it into a waistband holster, and changed into a loose, dark shirt that hung over it.
“So much for spending more time with Eddie. But this is a good idea. I’ll go with Naomi to her office. At least I’ll get to drive the Prius. I’ve always wondered what those things are like. Anybody asks—and I can’t imagine anyone will—I’m shadowing her to see how Navajo prosecutors coordinate with the off-rez authorities. Wish I could go with you and the girls today.”
“I wish you could, too.” Lola moved behind him and put her arms around him. The gun pressed against her. He’d shown her how to shoot one, even offered to buy her one of her own, but she’d always demurred. “I’d do something stupid. My luck, I’d shoot my foot off before I ever got a bad guy. Or you.”
She’d done too many stories over the years on fatal gun accidents, and not a single one about a gun successfully used in self-defense, to feel comfortable carrying one herself. Instead she contented herself with the bear spray that everyone back in their part of Montana carried as routine protection against the grizzlies that favored the same hiking trails, campgrounds, and huckleberry patches as their human counterparts.
She was glad Charlie had a gun, though, and especially glad he’d have one under these circumstances. She didn’t say what she was thinking: that the kind of guy who could brazenly walk up to Edgar and Naomi’s house to deposit a threatening note wasn’t the type to give Charlie an opportunity to shoot first. Be careful out there, she wanted to say. Stay safe. Watch your back. All the clichés.
She didn’t say anything, though—especially not the words her brain screamed at him: that he should be most alert around those closest to him.
Lola may have been worried about Charlie, but everyone else seemed worried about her. By the time she and the girls set out for their excursion, she felt as though she’d reassured the universe that she would be fine on her own.
“Really, it’ll be fun,” she told Charlie. “No, not as much fun,” she added with a wicked grin, trying to lighten the mood with a reference to the previous night. Were those circles under his eyes?
When Edgar asked, she said, “I just want to drive around, get a sense of the place. All I’ve seen is the road to your house, and then to Window Rock and Gallup. I want to see where people live.”
“I swear I won’t get lost,” she told Naomi.
She started to say something pre-emptive to Thomas, but he ducked his head and turned toward the door. Something had come over him since they’d first met. He seemed angry—or maybe exhausted from a night of typing threats and depositing them on the front step. “Bye,” he said, and left without saying where he was going. No one asked. Minutes later, he departed in a series of blasts from his car’s dragging tailpipe.
“I thought he got his car fixed,” Lola said. “When he drove in the other night, I didn’t hear all that noise.”
“Maybe whatever got fixed broke again.” Naomi handed her an insulated bag. “I packed sandwiches for you. You can have a picnic.”
Lola had promised the girls lunch, although she’d imagined something in an air-conditioned restaurant after she finished visiting with Mrs. Begay. From what she’d seen so far, their surroundings did not lend themselves to outdoor dining, unless one enjoyed being baked crispy by a sun only too happy to oblige. But things might be different off the beaten path. Maybe Mrs. Begay could point them to some shady, secluded spot, one that once sheltered a spring of clear, cold water reduced to a bitter trickle.
“Take this, too.” Naomi handed her a jug of water. “Don’t drink it. Keep it in the car in case you break down.”
“Thanks. You saved me a stop at Bashas’,” Lola said. Even though she’d still stop at the reservation’s main grocery store to ask directions to Betty Begay’s place.
At the store, the checkout clerk’s response jolted her. “Are you some kind of reporter?”
“Excuse me?” Lola wondered if she gave off some sort of invisible vibe. She’d emailed a couple of contacts at Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel before she’d left the house that morning; both had already written stories on the bombings, but Lola offered to keep tabs on the situation to save them the expense of keeping their own correspondents—who were supremely skilled, in the way of foreign correspondents the world over, of running expense accounts sky-high—in Window Rock.
“Reporters are always looking for her,” the clerk said. “Like him.” She pointed with her chin.
A rawboned white guy examining a rack of snack food turned at the clerk’s words. Lola recognized him from the meeting. “And I found her,” he said. He shifted a bag of trail mix to his left hand and held his right out to Lola. “Jim Andersen.”
“You’re a reporter?” Lola tried to keep the incredulousness from her voice. Even by the admittedly loose standards of a newsroom, up close Jim Andersen proved a scruffy specimen, clothes in need of a wash and hair in need of a comb. If she hadn’t seen him at the meeting, she’d have taken him for a backpacker. “You weren’t sitting with the other reporters at the meeting.”
“I’m not mainstream media.” He gave the words a derisive twist. “I write for the Green Coalition newsletter.” He dug in a pocket. “Here’s my card.”
Everything fell into place. The Green Coalition was a loose affiliation of environmental groups that fell beyond the establishment boundaries of organizations like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, but still on the right side of the line crossed by ELF. Or at least it purported to be. Lola knew them as one of the groups on Charlie’s radar. If Jim Andersen looked like a backpacker, it’s probably because he was, traveling on a shoestring, staying as close to the land as possible out of a combined concern over his carbon footprint and lack of finances. Lola wouldn’t have put it past him to have hitchhiked to the reservation from wherever he was based. Which was where, she asked him now.
“Wherever I need to be. I came down here from the tar sands in Alberta. I was up there for most of the winter. Now I’m in Arizona in the summer, writing about the mine. I froze there, I’m cooking here. I need a better system.”
You need a bath, Lola thought. He wafted scents of woodsmoke and sweat, common to campers everywhere. But there was something about him, a tense wariness, a shoulders-back, light-on-the-feet stance, ready for quick action. The hair falling to his shoulders was just for show, she decided. “You’re military.”
“Ex,” he agreed.
“How long out?”
“Few years.” He bounced once on the balls of his feet.
“Where?”
“Iraq. We done here?”
Lola wasn’t, but knew she needed to be. She hazarded a single question more. “You’ve already talked to Mrs. Begay?”
“Yeah.” He smacked the trail mix down
on the counter and lay a bill beside them. He might not have been a traditional reporter, but he had the same sort of proprietary gleam in his eye that told Lola she wasn’t going to get anything else out of him. “What’s your interest in her?”
Lola pointed through the window toward the girls in the truck that, local-style, she’d left running so as to keep the air-conditioning going and gave him the shorthand version of another of the complex clan relationships Naomi had described. “She’s my niece’s grandmother.” She saw the question in his eyes and offered what she hoped was a plausible explanation as to why, given her family’s close connections to Mrs. Begay, she needed help finding the place. “She told me how to get there, but I wasn’t quite clear. I thought I’d better double-check here.” Hell would freeze over before she asked Jim Andersen for directions. She blew a sigh of relief when he nodded apparent acceptance, scooped up his trail mix, and left.
The clerk rang up her sixteen-ounce bottle of water. “Mrs. Begay is the only person standing up to the mine. Well, not the only one. But the main one. The leader, I suppose.” She paused with her hands over the keys. “You want me to ring up a couple gallons of water? People usually bring her some when they go to see her. What she’s got up there isn’t fit to drink.”
“Make it five,” said Lola.
It took two trips to tote the heavy plastic jugs to the truck, but when she left the store, she had directions to Betty Begay’s hogan in hand.
TWENTY
Lola had told the truth when she said she wanted to see what the reservation looked like off the beaten path, especially considering that the beaten path itself consisted of nothing more than a handful of two-lane roads.
But first, she saw the mine. The clerk hadn’t mentioned it in her directions, but towering wire fences, topped with razor wire, presaged its presence. Small signs sported the company logo of stacked C ’s. Lola wondered if she could drive directly onto the mine’s property, maybe even ask for a tour. Industrial sites usually were locked up tighter than CIA safe houses, but things in the West tended to be more relaxed and open.
A large warning near the mine’s entrance exploded Lola’s hopes of a friendly western howdy. EMPLOYEES ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED, it shouted.
“Prosecuted, huh?” Lola glanced back at the girls. If she’d been alone, she might have risked it. Sometimes, stupid—“What sign? I didn’t see a sign”—actually worked. A handful of protesters lounged in bubba chairs about a hundred yards from the gate. As the pickup approached, they rose and brandished signs.
Coal Kills.
Say No to Mine Expansion.
And, in a play on the company’s Conrad Coal Keeps Them On motto, Turn Off the Lights.
Lola noted a couple of elders in traditional clothing. The others were young, white, and in shorts and T-shirts, the hippie-dippies that Charlie and Edgar had discussed. Lola gave them a nod of acknowledgment. As soon as she’d passed, they sank back into their chairs.
A truck, just like the one destroyed by the bomb, rumbled through gates manned by security guards. It turned toward Lola, who fought an urge to swing the pickup entirely off the road in an effort to give the truck as wide a berth as possible. What if someone detonated another bomb? She hit the accelerator, ignoring the girls’ cries of protest and Bub’s muttering, and turned onto a dirt track, only the smallest of signs indicating the road the store clerk had told her to take. The pickup’s hotshot suspension failed the challenge of the higher speed she demanded in her effort to put as much distance between them and the mining truck as possible.
The track kinked. The main road with its other vehicles and occasional buildings vanished behind them. Just like that, Lola was beyond civilization.
She thought she’d seen desolation in North Dakota, where the plains rolled on forever, or Wyoming, with its treeless stretches of sagebrush. But at least the tight-packed sagebrush had represented signs of an abundant, if toughened, life. Here, even the sagebrush appeared cowed, only a few lonely clumps dotting expanses of bare rock. An occasional butte reared from the desert floor. Hawks soared on the downdrafts, specks against the painful glare of sky. Lola wondered what they possibly could be hunting. It seemed as though nothing could survive the frying pan of desert floor. She caught Juliana’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Do sheep really graze here?”
“Of course.”
“Whatever in the world do they eat?”
Juliana looked as though she didn’t understand the question. Her mother had described the land as bountiful and generous to the Navajo and Hopi people. Once again, Lola realized—as she had when she’d been assigned to Afghanistan, and then again when she’d ended up in Montana—that she was going to have to learn a new way of looking at things. Arizona must have hidden charms, or at least benefits, which her untrained eye had yet to detect. Maybe Betty Begay could explain them to her. In fact, Lola thought, that would be a good way to start their conversation. Assuming Betty was home. From what Naomi and Edgar had said, Lola knew it was entirely possible that Betty might be miles from her home, trailing a band of skinny sheep across the redrock.
“Auntie Lola! Auntie Lola!”
At Juliana’s unexpected and welcome use of auntie, Lola eased her foot from the accelerator.
“There’s Shimá’s house.”
Lola had nearly missed the turnoff. She steered the truck toward the bump on the horizon that eventually resolved itself into a hogan and worked on persuading Juliana about coincidence.
“Do you visit Mrs. Begay a lot?”
Juliana nodded. “With my mom,” she added.
“Then we should stop and see her, too,” Lola said. Let Juliana think everything had happened by chance while they were out exploring.
A familiar small figure emerged from the hogan as Lola parked the truck. Juliana wriggled out first. “I brought my new friends,” she announced.
“Ya’at’eeh,” Betty said.
Lola mumbled the greeting back, uncertain of her ability to get the breaks in the right places, to pronounce the final syllable as eh instead of ay.
Betty Begay directed a shrewd smile at her. “You’re from the meeting. Now you’re here to see me.”
Lola rubbed her foot in the dirt and offered a vague semblance of truth. “We were just driving. Sightseeing. And then when we took this road, Juliana told me you lived here.”
“Hmph.” Betty Begay’s skepticism could not have been more obvious.
“We brought you some water. Girls, help me out, please.” She handed each of the girls a gallon jug and balanced the other three in her arms.
“You bring water even though you don’t plan to see me? You must be a mind reader, know that somewhere on the mesa, an old lady needs more water.”
For just a moment, Lola felt sorry for the mine managers or anyone else who tried to bullshit Betty Begay.
“I had it in the truck in case we got stuck somewhere—” Lola began, but Betty cut her off with another “Hmph.”
“You come on,” she added, and led the way into the hogan. “You girls want some lemonade?”
Lola motioned Bub to stay outside. She thought the hogan might be stifling, given the small space and the day’s heat. But the thick mud walls pushed back against the sun, and the interior was cool and dim and soothing. An oil-drum stove stood beneath the smokehole. A pallet of sheepskins lay against one wall. A photo dangled from a nail. The oval frame surrounded the image of a middle-aged woman with softly permed hair and a severe expression lightened by a crinkle at the corners of her eyes.
Betty saw her looking. “She was my daughter.”
“Oh, no. When did she … ?”
“No. Not that. She was taken from me. By those people. To convert her, civilize her.”
“A boarding school?” That story, at least, Lola knew. Religious warriors of various denominations had long waged battle on the tribes
’ so-called heathen ways. The Blackfeet had endured the Jesuits; the Salish and Kootenai, the Sisters of Mercy. In California, Father Junipero Serra—a Franciscan elevated to sainthood—persuaded people to Catholicism with the help of a lash. And everywhere, the forced removal of Indian children from their homes to the boarding schools, where nuns and priests cut their hair and forbade them from speaking their own language or following their own spiritual practices.
“Worse than boarding school. Worse than the Jesus people.”
Lola couldn’t imagine what might be worse, and said as much.
“The Mormons. They took our children, adopted them outright. Legally, my Loretta is their daughter.”
Lola’s head jerked involuntarily to look for Margaret. She could hear the girls chattering in the shade house. She tried to imagine what it would be like if people took Margaret from her and claimed her as their own, a vision that included a strong probability of herself ending up in prison for murder. She dusted her hands together, as if to rid herself of the unthinkable. Compared to the removal of a people’s lifeblood, the problems posed by the mine suddenly seemed manageable.
Lola looked again at the photo. Betty’s daughter was not a young woman. “It seems as though you’ve been in touch over the years.”
“Oh, yes. She says she has two families. Me. And those people.”
Betty appeared to have forgiven her daughter, Lola thought, but not the family who’d taken her. She couldn’t blame her. “Does she live here now?
“Salt Lake.” A quick, sly smile added another crease to Betty’s features. “She’s an adoption lawyer.”
Lola returned the smile. No matter that other people had raised her; Betty’s daughter appeared to have inherited her mother’s subversive tendencies.
Betty took three metal cups from a shelf, poured water from one of the jugs into them, and mixed in the off-brand powdered lemonade so familiar to Lola. The cups were small. Lola glanced around the hogan. Empty water jugs sat in stacks against one wall. It appeared that the five gallons she’d brought represented the whole of Betty’s water supply, making the offer of a drink even more precious. Betty herself, Lola noted, drank nothing. As Lola watched, she furtively touched her tongue to her lips. Lola set her own cup down.