by Gwen Florio
Marriage came accompanied by the specter of a wedding, and an obligatory marshmallow dress that resided in a different universe than Lola’s daily outfits of cargo pants and turtlenecks or T-shirts, depending on the season. Just thinking about a dress made her feel itchy and constricted. She’d probably have to wear makeup, too. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth as though to wipe away nonexistent lipstick.
“I’d just met up with Jan’s cousin,” she told Charlie, returning to her narrative with relief. “It was pandemonium. People crying, hugging, kissing babies. Then a guy shouted something and shot himself.”
“How did you know he’s the one who shouted? And did you see him shoot himself?” Always the cop, Lola thought.
“Negative.” Charlie already knew the answer to both questions. “But it was obvious, when I saw him, that he’d shot himself. And I asked people if he’d been the one shouting ahead of time,” she said with a bit of pride. It might not have been her story, but she’d taken pains to verify the facts anyway.
“What’d they say? And what did he say?”
“Nothing that made sense. Or at least, not what people thought they heard. Nobody was really sure. He said, ‘It’s alive. It’s alive.’”
The phone went silent as Charlie digested that piece of information. “Like in Young Frankenstein?” he said finally. The Mel Brooks horror movie spoof was a shared guilty pleasure.
“Except nobody laughed.”
“Right.”
He got around to the question Lola had hoped he wouldn’t ask. “Where was Margaret during all of this?”
“Outside,” Lola said.
A longer silence. “Alone?”
“With Pal.”
“Lola—”
She turned into the wind and held the phone high as his voice rose, saying something else about Margaret. But not so high that she couldn’t hear what he said next. “Have you thought about my question yet?”
The gusts swept past with the sound of tearing fabric. “Can’t hear you, Charlie!” she shouted toward the phone. “Losing reception out here. Sorry. Talk tomorrow. Love you.” Lola thumbed the phone off. She wished that in exchange for his ultimatum, she’d extracted a promise that he wouldn’t bring up the topic of marriage again until she was back in Magpie. She hunched against the wind in preparation for her next obligatory call. Jan would want to know about her cousin, but Lola didn’t have much to tell her. The two-hour ride from Casper to the ranch had passed in near-total silence but for Margaret’s chattering, an ongoing conversation with Bub in a language that only girl and dog understood. Lola had asked Pal about the suicidal soldier, only to be silenced with a bitten-off, “Didn’t know the guy.”
She tried a few other questions, about Pal herself, about Jan, about suggestions on what to see in Yellowstone, eliciting only monosyllabic answers and, finally, the flat statement, “I’m tired.” Pal leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. In the jump seats behind them, Margaret and Bub had already succumbed to sleep. But for air shrieking past the open windows, cooling only by virtue of motion, Lola drove in silence through a landscape that increased in desolation as the miles passed. Montana, with its overlay of postcard mountains and trout streams and movie-mogul ranches, was a gift to tourism marketers. Central Wyoming was the same landscape stripped to bleached skeleton, barely enough dirt clinging to hardrock to anchor sagebrush, and wholly inadequate for trees, which all but disappeared along with any hint of human habitation the farther west Lola drove from Casper. Towering rocks banded with red angled abruptly out of the ground, as though shoved by an unseen fist below. Alkali patches stretched across the flats between them, bouncing back the glare of the heat-whitened sky.
Lola wished the truck had air-conditioning. Pal had already shrugged out of her fatigue jacket, her Army-issue brown T-shirt revealing arms braided by slender ropes of muscle. Her hands were large and capable-looking. Lola guessed Pal was stronger than she appeared at first glance. Of course she was, Lola admonished herself. Carrying one of those big rifles, humping that bulky pack and body armor through the vengeful heat of an Afghan summer. Lola had hoped to compare notes with Pal, maybe get an update on how things had changed—or not—in Kabul, but their conversation had been too brief for Lola to mention her own years there.
Pal stirred and muttered in her sleep. Her hands, which had been clasped in her lap, fell apart, the tension in her body easing. One arm fell to her side. Lola glanced and gasped. She forced her gaze back to the empty road ahead. But she couldn’t keep it from straying to Pal’s forearm, to the four faint scars there, a row of slashes, the skin tough and whitened.
The scars were old, she reminded herself now as she punched Jan’s number into her phone. No need to mention them. Jan spoke without preamble, as was her habit. “How’s my cousin? Is she all right? What’s the deal with the shooting?”
“You probably know more about the shooting than I do. There’s got to be a story online about it somewhere,” Lola told her. As to Pal—she looked toward the ranch house crouched at the bottom of the hill, edges dissolving into the gloaming. Lola was sure she’d snapped on the porch light when she’d set out up the hill, but now the house lay in darkness, nothing to suggest life within. Earlier that afternoon, they’d stopped at a town about twenty miles from the ranch so that Lola and Margaret could get dinner—Pal declined—while Pal stocked up on groceries. As far as Lola could tell from the bags Pal toted back to the truck, Pal was going to subsist on canned goods. While Lola and Margaret waited in the truck, Pal ducked into a package store and returned with a clinking bag, at which point, Lola set her internal alarm for the earliest departure possible the next morning. She and Margaret could drive back to the town and have breakfast there before heading to Yellowstone. They wouldn’t even have to see Pal at all. Jan would surely call her cousin, and figure out on her own what was going on with Pal. Lola mouthed some noncommittal phrases into the phone and rang off.
She shoved the phone into her pocket and jogged back to the house. She ran her hands over the wall just inside the door, seeking the light switch. She wished she hadn’t found it; that she’d simply felt her way through the darkness to the back bedroom where Margaret slept, Bub plastered to her side. Then she wouldn’t have seen Pal, passed out at the kitchen table beneath the glare of the naked overhead bulb, one of the just-purchased pint bottles of bad bourbon nearly empty beside her. One arm cradled her head. The other, the one with the scars, stretched across the table. Lola tiptoed close. Sometime during the late afternoon or evening, Pal had added a new scar, a slash across one of the earlier ones, turning it into an X. The line had already started to scab over, but the skin around it remained red and angry.
Guilt washed through Lola as she remembered how she’d ended her conversation with Jan. “She’s not the most talkative person,” Lola had told her. “But I remember those flights home from Kabul. I could barely stand up when I got home, and I was flying coach, not rattling around inside a cargo plane. She’s exhausted. Aside from that, I think your cousin is just fine.”
THREE
Lola’s pickup crept along in a line of traffic, exhaust fouling Yellowstone’s crystalline air. In Montana, she lived within an hour of Glacier National Park, and she knew the best way to negotiate its roads with the minimum amount of aggravation during tourist season. But in Yellowstone, she was the tourist, stuck on the main roads along with what appeared to be about one million other people. Behind her, Margaret slumped in her booster seat, no longer excited by herds of bison and the occasional far-away grizzly that caused the entire crawling procession of vehicles to come to an interminable stop.
Bub sprawled on the passenger seat beside Lola, every so often lifting his head and regarding her with his bifurcated gaze, one brown eye, one blue, reassuring himself that nothing had changed since the last time he’d checked. “Go to sleep, buddy,” Lola told him. “You might as well slee
p, too, Margaret. We’re in this for the long haul.” She checked her map, reminding herself that the distance to the park entrance had barely changed since the last time she’d looked. Forty-eight miles. What on earth had possessed her to make the long loop through the park at the height of tourist season? “Right,” she reminded herself. “I didn’t have a choice about when I got furloughed.” She and Margaret only had been on the road a few days. She had another two and a half weeks to kill. Charlie and Jan and her editor, too, all had urged her to stay out of town for as long as possible.
“You won’t be able to help yourself,” Charlie said. “Something will happen and you’ll want to cover it. They’ll fire you if you do any reporting while you’re on furlough.”
The plan had been to spend a few days in Yellowstone and then go on to the Tetons. Lola thought they might cut the former short in favor of the latter. The Tetons, at least in the photos she’d seen, looked more like Glacier, with heavily forested mountains, their peaks foreboding with mist. Yellowstone’s vast sunlit savannahs lacked the swirling sense of mystery that Glacier always evoked. Visitors complained about the latter. The park in northwestern Montana was scary, they said. All those trees pressing in close, roots grabbing at the unwary ankle, while from above skeins of black moss brushed scalp, shoulders, an unwisely exposed neck. And the fog, descending without notice, rendering a clearly marked trail tunnel-like, obscure. You never knew when a grizzly would charge out of the gloom. Or so Lola enjoyed telling the tourists.
Ahead of her, lights flashed red. Lola hit the brakes. Bub stood up. He saw the distraction before Lola did. His hackles raised, then smoothed. He lay back down with a yawn more outrage than exhaustion. “Good lord,” said Lola. “It’s only some stupid mulies.” Back in Magpie, mule deer were nearly as common as dogs, making short work of newcomers’ flowerbeds and finding clever ways to destroy the wire fences of the old-timers at constant war with them. Lola looked at the map again. Forty-six miles. She reached for the newspaper she’d picked up from a bench outside a ranger station and propped it against the steering wheel, alternately scanning its pages and the road ahead of her. A story about the soldier’s suicide dominated the front page. He was, the story noted, one of a tight-knit group of companions from Thirty who’d enlisted upon graduating from high school. Lola recognized the name of the town where they’d stopped for dinner before they’d delivered Pal.
“Wait a minute,” Lola said aloud. Bub opened an eye. “Tight-knit,” the story said. But Pal had told her she didn’t know the man. Lola had assumed he’d been from a different part of Wyoming. She cracked a rueful smile and repeated the mantra of every editor for whom she’d worked: “Assume makes an ass out of u and me.” When would she ever learn? Apparently Pal and the suicidal soldier had gone to high school together. From what Lola had seen of Thirty, the high school couldn’t have been that big. They must have known each other well in school, and even better after enlisting and serving together overseas in the same unit. Pal probably had just been trying to deflect conversation, Lola told herself. She read on. The soldier was, it turned out, the second casualty among the group from Thirty. Another had been killed in Afghanistan only a few months earlier.
“Maybe that’s why he did it,” someone speculated in the newspaper story. “Survivor guilt. Isn’t that what it’s called?”
Lola flipped through the pages to the jump, checking out other stories along the way. Wyoming, she read, was in the midst of a drought. Ranchers were already importing hay from neighboring states. Oil prices were up, good news for the folks working in the on-again, off-again boomtown of Gillette. Seemingly every town of any size in the state was making preparations for its Fourth of July rodeo, a phenomenon that caused the holiday to be known throughout the West as Cowboy Christmas for its multitude of purses. But for the names of the towns, Lola thought, she could have been reading the Daily Express back in Magpie, rural news the same around the region. She came to the jump of the Page One story. A companion headline caught her attention.
“Pair Charged in Bar Ruckus.”
Again, standard fare, albeit with more than the usual amount of ink devoted to such a recurring story. Only the bar fights whose circumstances were so ridiculous as to make for amusing reading rated a newspaper story. Lola checked the road ahead, assuring herself of the twin streams of brake lights, and bent over the story, searching for the quirky detail that she could text to Jan. Within two paragraphs, she knew it was a different kind of story. The two pugilists were veterans, fresh off the plane from Afghanistan. They appeared to have gone straight to a local watering hole and picked a fight that ended with their victim being airlifted to an intensive care unit in Seattle with head injuries so severe as to make permanent brain damage a possibility. The perpetrators’—the alleged perps, Lola reminded herself—names were unfamiliar. But the name of their unit was entirely too familiar. As was their hometown: Thirty.
Lola paged back to the front and re-read the story about the soldier who’d killed himself. A half-dozen soldiers from Thirty had gone to Afghanistan. Now, two were dead and two more in jail within days, hours maybe, of arriving home. She looked at the byline on the lead story, and turned back to the one about the bar fight. They were the same—Dave Sparks.
“Congratulations, Dave Sparks,” she said aloud. “You missed the forest for the trees.”
Because it was clear to Lola, as obvious as the pulse that thrummed with quickened interest at her wrists and temples, that the story was bigger than the recitation of events tragic in two cases, criminal in the other. She looked to Bub. He stood at full alert, as always divining any change in mood before she felt it herself. “What do you think, buddy?” she asked him. “What the hell happened to those folks over there?”
Twinges of empathy, for the people of Thirty, and of jealousy for the stories that lay ahead for Dave Sparks, sparred within her. In a town the size of Thirty, the death of any veteran would send ripples of shock and sorrow throughout the community. In Magpie, such funerals were elaborate affairs, beyond the capacity of the small churches, filling the high school gymnasium. Afterward, people lined the streets as the hearse rolled slowly past, motorists flashing their headlights in tribute. At least those other funerals had been years apart. She’d never seen a single community hit so hard in such a short time. The fact of two dead, one of them by his own hand, and two more in trouble of their own making, would increase the effect exponentially. People questioned themselves in such circumstances. Wondered what they could have done differently. And, inevitably, some turned on one another. A thin bright line of anger nearly always underscored grief. Stories about such situations were complicated, tangled affairs, the best of them reflecting larger truths about individuals in particular and humanity in general.
Steak, Lola labeled such stories, in comparison to her usual diet of the hamburger that comprised police briefs and weather reports. One or two such stories a year was the best she ever hoped for, but those one or two sustained her through the routine of the other months. She caught herself compiling imaginary headlines, her way of focusing her thoughts. “War’s Trauma Writ Large in Small Town. Something like that,” she suggested to Bub. His head bob almost certainly had more to do with avoiding a particularly blistering gust through the window, but Lola decided to take it for assent.
The cars began to move again, crawling up a hill. Lola supposed there’d be another delay when people stopped to take in the view from the top. She banged her head against the steering wheel and groaned. Bub bestowed a quick, anxious swipe of his tongue upon her cheek. Her phone buzzed, a welcome distraction. Cell service in the park was spotty. Apparently the truck had just rolled into a hotspot.
She held the phone before her. A text—no, several texts—from Jan. “Call me.” “Call me.” “Call me.” “Goddammit, call me.”
Lola called. Jan’s voice filled the cab.
Lola glanced in the rearview mirror. “Hush,” s
he hissed. “Margaret’s asleep.”
Jan lowered the volume, if not the intensity.
Lola thrilled to the possibility that Jan offered. Knew better than to show it. “No way,” she hissed into the eventual pause. “I am not going back there.”
“You have to,” Jan said. “I’ve been trying to call her ever since she got back. She won’t answer. I even called her neighbor to make sure she was still alive.”
“Why can’t he look after her?”
“He’s got his own issues.”
Lola wondered what those were. Was he an alcoholic, as Pal apparently was, or at least was on her way to becoming? Did he, too, cut up his arm? Refuse to speak? Because, as far as Lola was concerned, that would make him the perfect person to look after Pal. Birds of a feather and all that—thoughts that Lola deemed best kept to herself. A moment later, she was glad she had.
“His grandson got killed over there. Pal emailed me something about it, back when she was still in touch. But that was months ago.”
Another surge of blood warmed Lola’s face. If she were writing a story—which she wasn’t, not yet, anyway—the neighbor would go at the top of the list of people to interview.
“We’re right in the middle of our vacation,” she protested, to herself as much as to Jan.
“You? Vacation? Bored out of your skull yet? How do you like Yellowstone? Making friends with all of the tourists?”