by Gwen Florio
Betty’s body jerked in her arms. Lola could have sworn she heard Betty’s trademark skeptical “Hmph.”
Well deserved, she thought. Because the other emotion she’d read in Betty’s eyes was terror, so overwhelming that the woman now saw death as preferable to life. And without knowing what had so frightened her, Lola had no idea how to protect her.
THIRTY-THREE
I had to talk to someone. Someone else. Because this has to stop.
So I went to Shimá. Brought tobacco and water and some of those Fig Newtons she likes. Sat with her under the shade house for a long time, talking about sheep and the weather and all of the usual things as the sky went from white to pale blue and then purple, the buttes standing up like sentries against it. She lit a fire and rolled a new cigarette, long and slender, her fingers nimble from the weaving. I pulled a stick from the fire and held it out. She put the cigarette to her lips and bent her head to it, the flame briefly illuminating her face, her eyes sharp and knowing upon me. The cigarette’s tip flared. I looked away and shivered, hoping she’d attribute my shudder to the cold. Temperatures drop fast in the desert when the sun goes down. “Can I bring you a blanket, Shimá? Maybe some tea? Or would you like to go inside?”
“No blanket. Tea is good. We’ll stay out here and watch So’ Dine’é,” she said of the Star People. She pointed with her chin to the sky. “Few months yet until Áltse Álts’oosi comes.” The constellation heralded winter, striding across the sky, bow at the ready, an arrow nocked in its string. I hadn’t found out until junior high, reading some whiteman science textbook, that he had another name, Orion. He carries a bow, too. But where Orion is a hunter, stalking prey across the sky, Áltse Álts’oosi, the Slender Man, is a protector, going before the children, making sure no harm awaits them. I thought of the implications of Shimá speaking of him rather than the other, more benign, stars and constellations. Was there any way to think of my actions as helping to protect our people? Because that’s what I’ve been told. Maybe Shimá would tell me the same thing.
I heated water on the stove and brewed the tea a long time, the way she likes, adding plenty of sugar, and wondered yet again at the way her teeth shine white and strong in her mouth even though she’s drunk her tea that way for as long as I’ve known her. I brought it to her and she took a sip and nodded, letting me know I’d fixed it just right, stirring in sugar until the liquid was the consistency of syrup. She slurped in satisfaction.
“Young man like you,” she said. “You should be down in the valley, finding some girl and breaking her heart. Or maybe she breaks yours. Hah!” Her shoulders shook. She was pleased with herself. “But instead, you’re up here, with this old lady.”
I didn’t say anything. It was dark, but I could feel her gaze jabbing at me like a pissed-off rattlesnake, striking again and again. Her next words ran like cold poison through my veins. “Maybe you’re here about the mine. I think so.”
“I—” I couldn’t imagine how to start.
She waited. So I told her.
No. She didn’t think of me as a protector.
What had I been thinking? That Shimá would raise her hand in absolution like Father O’Callahan used to do, back when my family still went to church? Tell me it wasn’t my fault? Or give me the backbone to return and say “No more?”
Here’s what hadn’t occurred to me: that she would wither before me as the words poured from my mouth, nearly disappearing beneath the flood of the unthinkable. That by the time I finally stopped, too late, her own breath came in rasps.
“Shimá,” I said. I bent over her. “Oh, Shimá.”
She reached a shaking hand toward me, her fear more frightening than anger, than tears. She’d never needed help from anyone. She was the one people went to for help, who then turned and marched upon the coal company on their behalf, who spoke truth at council meetings before a crowd riven by the competing needs of honoring the land and feeding their children. She could handle anything until I handed her this. I folded my hands around hers, pulled her to her feet. She nearly fell. I lifted her like a child, a near-weightless bundle of flesh and bone within the sack of her clothing. I carried her to the pallet in the hogan and laid her gently upon the soft sheepskins and pulled the woolen blankets over her.
“I’m so sorry, Shimá,” I said again and again. “I’m so sorry.”
The enormity of what I’d done hadn’t occurred to me, not until the words left my body and lodged in hers. Now she knew. And knowing left her with a choice: tell someone, and see some of the people she loved most dearly sent to jail. Not just jail, but hard time in a federal prison. But to stay silent was to see more people dead.
Before, that choice had been mine. I had cringed from it, and turned to Shimá instead. Dumped that sack-of-cement burden right on her bent shoulders. Now she lay panting and shaking on her pallet, overwhelmed, suffocating beneath the weight of this new knowledge.
Which left only one thing to do—the thing I should have done on my own, without this cowardly attempt to find someone to share the responsibility with me. I bent over Shimá and touched my lips to her ear. “No one else is going to die,” I said. “I promise.”
I sat back and waited for her breathing to ease, the shuddering to stop. If anything, it intensified. I understood. Shizhé’é and the truck driver had her in their grip and would not loosen their lethal hold until I made good on my words.
THIRTY-FOUR
Betty’s condition left Lola so unsettled that she forgot about the likely consequences of her visit to Kerns. Those consequences awaited in the form of Edgar on the front step, arms folded upon his chest, legs spread wide. Classic testosterone stance, Lola thought.
She slid Conrad Coal’s annual report and a sheaf of other papers beneath the front seat as the girls scampered past him into the house, then climbed the steps to confront him. She mirrored his own body language and rejected the courtesy of a smile.
“Edgar.”
“Lola. Busy day?”
“Good day. Productive.” Let him chew on that one awhile, she thought. She wondered what Kerns had told him about their conversation.
“I don’t appreciate you using my name to go someplace you had no business being.”
“I had every business being there.”
“Then why not make an appointment, like a normal person? Why just barge in?”
Rather than concede the point, Lola waited. It didn’t take long.
“Because you’re doing a story. A story! How dare you take advantage of our hospitality that way. Charlie told me you were a workaholic. I didn’t realize that extended to your honeymoon.”
Lola made her voice silky. “Not a story. Just a freelance proposal. You know how it is, trying to make it on the crap salaries in this part of the world. Oh, that’s right. You don’t.” She let her eyes drift to the shade house with its stone fireplace and fountain, the late-model truck that in Lola’s part of the world would have been called a Cowboy Cadillac. She shifted a little so that she stood in the stream of chilled air leaking from the half-open door and gave an exaggerated, appreciative shiver.
Bitch, said Edgar’s eyes.
You have no idea, said Lola’s.
“What are you two doing out here in the heat?” Naomi materialized in the doorway, perfection in another hand-tailored silk shirt. Her impeccable cool stopped at her eyes, where suspicion and worry did battle.
Lola played her trump card, laying down the ultimate distraction. “Oh, good. I’m glad you’re out here where the girls can’t hear. I was just about to tell, um, Gar about Betty Begay. I’m really concerned about her.”
“What about her?” Edgar and Naomi spoke in unison.
Lola brushed past them into the house. Thomas sat at the counter, bent over his books. He didn’t look up.
“We saw her today.”
A textbook crashed to the floor. Lol
a jumped. Thomas’s muttered “sorry” was barely audible.
“What were you doing there?”
Lola decided she was better off ignoring Edgar’s question. “There’s something wrong. She’s pretty sick. At first, I thought she was—” Mindful of the fact that just because the girls were out of sight didn’t mean they weren’t listening somewhere, she switched course. “I thought she’d fainted.”
Naomi crossed to the pantry and retrieved two empty milk jugs. She stuck one beneath the faucet and turned on the water. “I’ll go up there. If she needs help, I can bring her to a doctor.”
“I don’t think she’ll go. She chased me out of there pretty assertively.”
“Because it was you.” Lola read Edgar loud and clear: Not one of us.
“Wait.” Thomas rose from the floor with textbook in hand. He spoke so rarely that Lola looked at Edgar before she realized where the command had come from. Even Naomi turned to stare. The water filled the jug and gurgled over the top.
“I was up there just yesterday. She seemed, uh, she seemed okay.” Thomas reached past Naomi and turned off the water.
“Okay, how? Did she seem dizzy? Sick in any way? What did you two do? Describe her condition for me.”
Lola pictured Naomi in a courtroom, firing questions at a witness. They seemed innocuous enough, but Thomas flinched as though she’d asked whether he’d committed a crime.
“We drank tea. Looked at the stars. Shared a smoke.” He capped the jug and hoisted it onto the counter without looking at her.
“She was smoking? She seemed short of breath,” Lola offered. “Maybe that’s why.”
“She’s been smoking since before I was born. The woman has titanium lungs. Gar, have you seen my keys?” Naomi grabbed her purse and a light jacket. “Thomas, could you please fill that other bottle? Thanks.”
“I can do you one better.” Thomas took the keys from Gar. “I’ll drive up and check on her. You two are so busy with everything else. Mind if I take the Prius? It’ll get me there quicker than that beater of mine.”
Naomi nodded. “Of course. But I should go with you.”
“Look. I just saw her. Who better to judge any change between then and now?” He turned away again, filling the second jug. “It would probably just be a waste of your time, anyway. Lola here doesn’t know her the way we do, can’t read her the way we can. She’s probably mistaken.”
Naomi sagged onto a stool. “Maybe. I hope you’re right.”
“No. She really was sick—” Lola began.
She stopped. Her eyes narrowed. Thomas’s skepticism about her was all it had took to change Naomi’s mind about going to the mesa. She got that. What she didn’t understand was why Thomas didn’t want Naomi going up there.
Lola waited until past midnight before she retrieved the headlamp she’d stashed under her pillow. She positioned it on her forehead, adjusted the band for comfort, and cast an apprehensive glance at Charlie’s sleeping form. Not that she needed to bother. She could probably bend over him and shine the thing directly upon his face without waking him. Just once, she thought, she’d like him to suffer a night of insomnia, if for no other reason than to get some sympathy on the too-frequent mornings when she stumbled groggy into the kitchen after hours of tossing and turning.
This would not be that night. Charlie’s breath came deep and regular. Lola slipped from bed and tiptoed through the house, stopping every few steps to listen for sounds of wakefulness—a restless turning, a muffled voice, the whir of Naomi’s sewing machine. But the quiet was absolute. Once outside, she moved quickly, wary of lurking tarantulas.
On the way home from Betty Begay’s hogan, she’d stopped at a library and used the public computer to print the photos she’d snapped of the documents on Jeffrey Kerns’s desk, stashing the printouts under the truck’s seat along with Conrad Coal’s annual reports. The opening and closing of the truck’s door echoed like shots in the darkness. She stood beside the truck awhile, waiting for the front door to be flung open, for the wash of light across the yard that would illuminate the damning papers in her arms, for a flood of the accusatory questions. But the house lay calm amid the velvety darkness. Maybe they thought it was Thomas, returning in the silent Prius. Which he might do at any minute, she reminded herself. Still, she stood a moment, acknowledging the sequined sky, unabashed in its showiness. A coyote wailed. Lola hastened back indoors.
She spread the papers across the bedroom floor and switched on her headlamp, hoping that the rows of numbers she’d glimpsed would magically have transformed themselves into the reassuring familiarity of text. She shuffled through the papers. No such conversion had occurred. The numbers sat smug in their rows, as comprehensible to Lola as the Navajo words that rattled from the truck’s radio whenever she turned it on. In college, she had majored in English, and, with the fervor of a phobic, avoided any courses requiring math. She’d done her share of municipal budget stories over the years, each one a cause for heartburn during the writing, with strong drink afterward. She sighed, pulled off a highlighter’s cap with her teeth, and chewed on it as she ran her eyes down the lines of numbers.
She looked again, and read more slowly. Fifteen minutes in, her absorption was complete. An hour later, yellow lines striped the pages. Lola felt around for the annual report she’d taken from the office. She could have found the same information online. But the hard copy was so much easier on the eyes and—Hallelujah!—comprised more words than numbers. Lola flipped the pages and wielded her marker with the same alacrity with which she’d attacked the charts.
The next time she checked the clock, another hour had passed. She switched off the headlamp. Gray light oozed through the blinds. Lola slid headlamp, papers, and highlighter beneath the bed. Charlie would be awake soon. Maybe she could sneak in a little sleep before he arose.
But even as she squeezed her eyes shut, the numbers swam before them, telling the same story no matter how many different ways she looked at them. Conrad Coal may have been one of the world’s richest companies, a fact repeated ad nauseam in the rosy language of the annual report, but the Arizona mine appeared to be hemorrhaging cash. The report gave no inkling of that, but the papers on Kerns’s desk had told a story that even Lola could understand. Those numbers would surely show up in the next year’s report, and even if Conrad Coal’s shareholders weren’t yet aware of them, workers at the mine almost surely were. Things like that had a way of getting around. The big bosses might try to keep it to themselves, but inevitably a secretary would copy some charts for one of them, or collate some papers, and then she’d say something to her brother, who drove a truck for the mine, and he’d talk to his uncle, who was a supervisor, and the next thing you knew, the invisible lines of gossip that wrapped the reservation like a spiderweb would be humming, practically lighting up the night with their intensity.
All of which made Lola wonder why anyone would try, to the point of murder, to shut down a mine that was probably going to close anyway?
THIRTY-FIVE
Her plan was to impress Charlie with this new information, to woo the cop in him with a tidbit he’d heretofore lacked.
He rose first, tiptoeing from the room without the usual moth’s wing of a kiss to her cheek. She feigned sleep until he returned to the bedroom with an insulated go-cup of coffee that he meant to put on her nightstand, a tradition that she publicly ascribed to true love but, in private, acknowledged was more likely proof of a strong survival instinct on Charlie’s part. Lola Before Coffee, he’d often said, was the equivalent of a primed nuke, set for destruction. His job was to deactivate the threat with the pre-emptive morning ritual, which she usually accepted with mumbled thanks. Today, she startled him by leaping from bed and snatching the cup from his hands, putting her mouth to its lid and swallowing half the contents in a single gulp.
“Careful—” he began.
“Gahhhh.” She fanned her
mouth. “That’s hot.”
“Fresh,” he said. “Not like usual.” Some days, the go-cup sat there for as long as an hour before Lola stirred.
“I want you to look at something.”
“Good morning to you, too.” His clipped tone let her know that he hadn’t forgotten her suspicions of his family, and that the resentment lingered.
“Knock it off. This is important.” She thrust the sheaf of papers at him, pointing to one highlighted line after another, outlining her conclusions. “The place is going broke. The way it’s bleeding money, they’re going to have to shut it down before this shows up in next year’s annual report. So why don’t they just say so? If whoever is doing these bombings knew that, they’d probably stop and nobody else would get killed. Edgar has to know about this. Find out what he has to say about it.”
Charlie opened his hand. The papers fluttered to the floor. “Find out.” He mimicked her voice. “Whatever happened to ‘please’?”
“Please find out.” Next he’d be comparing her to Margaret. Which he’d done before, more often than she’d have liked. “Look. Your brother has worked with these people a long time. Either he knows what the deal is, or he can get them to tell him. Maybe they can make an announcement. Stop this craziness. And whomever has Bub can let him go and we can go home.”
Charlie kicked at the mess of papers on the floor. “Christ, Lola. My brother already has his issues with you. Now you want me to go to him with your crackpot theory and, oh by the way, presto change-o, you’ve solved the bombings! White girl swoops in to save the great Navajo Nation.” His mouth twisted around the last sentence as though he’d bitten into something sour.
Lola stepped back. Never in all their years together, and in their few but intense fights, had Charlie referenced the color of her skin. Something drained from her, some small bit of trust. “I can’t believe you said that.” Her voice was an alien thing, riding a quiet, cold emotion welling up from the place where it had been stored away since her days overseas, when the only person she could rely upon was herself.