by Gwen Florio
Tyson moved farther into the alley, forcing Lola to follow him into the sun. Margaret stayed in the shade. Lola thought of Bub in the truck. She’d rolled down the windows as far as she’d dared and parked it beneath one of the spindly oaks lining Main Street. The trees were another effort at civic improvement, one that had yet to realize its potential. She felt sorry for the dog, panting in the front seat. Moisture trickled from her hairline down the back of her neck, dampening her shirt. Tyson grinned again.
“Hot enough for you?”
“It’s nothing compared to Paktika.” She named the province on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border where Mike had lost his life.
That was the end of the grin. “What do you know about that?”
“That Mohammed Gul is one rude sonofabitch.” Gul was one of the region’s minor warlords. The day Lola had interviewed him, Gul had motioned to a servant, who brought the inevitable cups of tea. But instead of serving her one, Gul drank from one cup, then the next, tossing the dregs of each into the dust at her feet, an insult so stunning that even his battle-hardened men had exchanged fearful glances.
“You’re not military.” Tyson stated the obvious.
“Hardly.”
“Then what?”
Lola ignored the question. “Sounds like you all have had a tough time. First Mike getting killed, then Cody Dillon shooting himself in front of all those people. And now your own … issues.”
Tyson’s nostrils flared. His freckles ran together across the bridge of his nose, a brown blotch suggesting a mask across his face. “Fucker asked for it.”
Lola thought of the account she’d read, and imagined the victim in his hospital bed in Seattle, tubes snaking from every orifice, the machine beeping slowly beside him, the relatives sitting braced against the possibility of any change in that ominous rhythm. “I didn’t come here to talk about that,” she said. Even though she hoped to get around to it later. “Pal’s cousin thinks—”
“I heard you the first time,” he said. “Here’s what you can tell her cousin.”
Lola leaned in, close enough to see the coppery stubble forcing its way through the skin of his chin and jaw. He’d have a five o’clock shadow by two in the afternoon. “What should I tell her?”
“That any problems Palomino Jones has are very much of her own making. Karma’s a bitch. Know what I mean?”
Lola moved out of the alley’s incandescence into the steadier, ovenlike heat of the shade. “No,” she said. “I have absolutely no idea what you mean. Maybe you can tell me.”
She spoke to a closed door. The interview—even if it wasn’t one, not really—was clearly over.
Lola crossed Tyson Graff’s name off her list. Next up, Tommy McSpadden. She was grateful for his unusual last name. There’d been no reference in the newspaper to a hardware store job, or any sort of job or other connections, about McSpadden. She’d meant to ask Tyson how to find him, but he’d ended their conversation before she got the chance. Lola clicked through sites on her phone, finding references to only a single McSpadden family in Thirty. The address, she saw with relief, was in town. She didn’t even want to think how much time she could have wasted negotiating one after another of the gravel roads that ran like strands of a comb-over across the bald hills surrounding the town.
The house stood a few blocks off the main street, across from an elementary school. The playground’s monkey bars and metal swingsets sat in full sunlight. Lola thought it could have used a sign warning parents that their children risked third-degree burns if they used the equipment. Not that any of Thirty’s young mothers were foolish enough to bring their children to the playground during the day’s baking heat. The McSpaddens’ house stood in cool contrast, its square of grass well-watered and green, shielded by cottonwoods whose girth and deeply ridged bark indicated stately old age. Cheerful geraniums planted in coffee cans marched up the front steps. Lola parked in the pool of shade beneath one of the trees and rolled down the windows, fighting an urge to simply stay in the truck and enjoy the brief respite from the heat. In just the short ride from the hardware store to the house, Margaret had fallen asleep, her lips puckered around a chubby thumb, wisps of hair stuck to her high damp forehead. Her features were a streamlined version of Charlie’s blunt visage, the nose tamed to mere assertiveness, chin like a small smooth stone. She’d be a string bean like Lola, her visits to the pediatrician since birth showing her at the top of the growth charts for height and near the bottom for weight. Lola’s heart lurched as she gazed upon her sleeping child. Until she’d had Margaret, she’d never understood the stories about mothers who rushed headlong into flames, dove into churning seas despite their inability to swim, offered themselves to would-be killers, all in the name of saving their children. Comprehension came the moment the nurse had placed newborn Margaret in her arms. “Stay with her,” Lola told Bub now. As though he’d do anything else. He curled beside Margaret’s booster seat, well aware of his job.
A slight woman answered the front door, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, squaring her shoulders with a visible effort. Exhaustion scribbled the delicate skin beneath her eyes and around the corners of her mouth. She wore a starched pink camp shirt and pink-and-white flowered shorts. Toenails a shade deeper than her shirt winked from her sandals. Lola made a mental note of the effort it cost the woman to maintain the appearance that Everything Was Fine. She wondered what wasn’t.
The woman held the door wide, wordlessly inviting Lola in before even ascertaining her name. Lola glanced over her shoulder at the truck, assuring herself she’d have a clear view from the doorway, and stepped inside. The assumption of goodwill that seemed to be first nature in the West, as opposed to the deep suspicion of East Coast residents, still surprised her. “I could have been an ax murderer,” she always wanted to say to all the people who, like Tommy McSpadden’s mother, ushered her into their homes without an apparent second thought. “A thief. A scam artist.”
She might as well have said it, because Mrs. McSpadden found her voice as soon as Lola asked to see her son. “He’s asleep,” she said, backing deeper into a living room that owed its refreshing cool to closed windows and heavy, drawn drapes rather than air conditioning. The towel slipped from her hands and lay ignored on the floor. Her face flushed red. “Are you from the VA?” She folded her arms, and took a few steps sideways, blocking a hallway that Lola guessed led to the bedrooms, exactly the sort of protective maternal instinct that had tugged at Lola moments earlier. Lola guessed that if a stranger had knocked at her own door, asking about Margaret, she’d have done the same thing.
“No.” Lola hovered—reassuringly, she hoped—by the door. “I’m, well, I guess I’m a friend of a friend.”
Mrs. McSpadden wasn’t buying it, not yet. Her round, wire-framed glasses caught a shaft of sunlight sneaking between the drapes and shot it back at Lola. “What friend?”
Something moved in the hallway. Lola tried to look out of the corner of her eyes, not wanting to draw Mrs. McSpadden’s attention to the young man who’d emerged from a bedroom in nothing but his briefs. He was short, like his mother, ribs showing prominent beneath slumped shoulders.
“The friend?” The mother again.
“Palomino Jones. She goes by Pal. I guess they’ve known each other since school—” She got no further. Mrs. McSpadden moved fast to Lola’s side, grasped her elbow, steered her onto the stoop and gave her a shove. Lola caught her balance just before she fell. A shout followed her. Tommy, not his mother.
“That little slut,” he yelled. “She’s just lucky she didn’t get us all killed.”
“Tommy, get back to bed.” His mother’s voice was full of concern. It changed when she spoke to Lola, her words like a slap. “Whoever you are, wherever you came from, you go right on back there. Leave my son alone.”
The door closed. A lock clicked. Lola wondered when it last had been locked. She turned to the t
ruck, only to be confronted with two sets of wide-awake eyes. Margaret bounced in her booster seat and pronounced judgment as Lola climbed back into the truck.
“Scary lady.”
Lola started the truck and looked back at the house. The drapes twitched. She pictured mother and son peering through the opening, watching to make sure she left. “Not scary,” she said. “Scared. People who get mad and yell are usually scared of something.”
She steered the truck around a corner, imagining the relief in her wake as she disappeared from Mrs. McSpadden’s sight. She wondered what in the world about the very mention of Pal’s name could have triggered such a reaction. One thing for sure, she wasn’t going to bring up Pal with whomever she interviewed next.
TEN
Lola’s Wyoming map had been unfolded and refolded incorrectly so often that it had begun to separate along the seams. She located the pieces that comprised central Wyoming and held them together, seeking anything that resembled a tourist attraction. It had been a morning of rejection, and more awaited in the form of Pal’s inevitable surliness when she returned to the ranch. Margaret had been patient with her for most of the day. They were both ready for some time off.
The map was unwieldy, but she preferred it to the phone app that seemed unable to encompass the region’s immensity and emptiness in any way that made sense, urging routes through high country that lay beneath snow until well into summer, or suggesting shortcuts over gravel roads so rough as to make the paved route, although fifty miles longer, the faster option.
Lola brought a square of map close to her face and peered at the tiny print within the shaded area that marked the Wind River Reservation. A familiar name caught her eye. Sacajawea Cemetery. “It has to be the same one,” she said to Margaret. “The woman who led Lewis and Clark.” Margaret turned a blank look upon her. She didn’t know about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark yet, but she would the minute she started school. Montana was lousy with Lewis and Clark this and Lewis and Clark that, the famous—infamous, if you were tribal—explorers who’d led the way to white development. Or, again depending upon your point of view, to the destruction of the West.
“We’re going to a cemetery,” she said. Margaret knew about cemeteries, already having visited the Blackfeet burial ground several times in her young life to pay homage to various elders. Lola had objected at first, falling back on her own memories of chilly Catholic ceremonies populated by stone-faced adults in black standing among regimented rows of granite. But she’d quickly learned that Indian cemeteries were far more intimate places, graves as likely to be defined by wooden markers as imposing stones, and decorated with personal mementoes. Lola’s heart broke at the sight of toys on children’s graves, and warmed again at the realization of the comfort it must have given those bereaved parents to know their children were surrounded by familiar, well-loved things.
She told Margaret a simplified version of the story of Sacajawea on the way to the cemetery, pointing out that Delbert, the man who visited Pal every day, was Shoshone, just like Sacajawea. “The same way you’re Blackfeet,” she said.
“Pikanii,” Margaret reminded her, using the tribe’s own name for itself.
“Right.” Lola experienced the familiar sensation of being on the other side of a door, looking into a room that Margaret and Charlie shared, but unable to enter. A sign caught her attention. “Here we are,” she said, a bit too brightly. With her first glance, she forgot about her status as a perennial outsider.
Scarlet paper flowers carpeted the hillside, making shushing noises as the wind moved across them. Lola eyeballed Bub so severely that he abandoned his raised-leg stance beside the cemetery gate and instead did his business by the truck. “You stay here,” she told him. She didn’t mind him burning off energy in the deserted parking lot, but it seemed disrespectful to allow him to cavort among the graves.
Lola led Margaret through the gate and stooped to examine the first site. It was, like the others, covered in flowers made of red tissue paper with green wire stems. The flowers were going pink beneath the punishing sun, their petals tattered by the wind’s daily assault. Lola and Margaret wandered among the graves that but for their crimson blankets, were much like those of the Blackfeet, simple wooden crosses or low, narrow stone markers adorned with carved feathers or horses. A single granite monument loomed above the others, announcing Someone of Significance. Lola wondered if white people had been responsible for Sacajewea’s marker, and whether she lay unquiet beneath it, oppressed by its weight, longing for the airiness and simplicity of her tribespeople’s resting places.
Tobacco, a gift denoting respect, speckled the ground beneath the headstone, along with coins and a few notes on pieces of scrap paper. Lola resisted the temptation to read them. Her phone buzzed. Lola checked on Margaret, who wandered among the rows, stopping to examine the offerings at various graves, and answered it. “Jan?”
“You texted me.”
“Right.” Lola had tried to call Jan after leaving Tommy McSpadden’s house, but Jan hadn’t answered. So Lola simply texted 9-1-1, their signal for important calls.
“What’s so urgent?”
“Your cousin—”
“Oh, God. What’s wrong? Do I need to come down there?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Lola held up her hand, a calming gesture that Jan couldn’t see. “Take it easy. First of all, you can’t leave until I get back. You’ll get fired. And anyway, nothing’s wrong. I just had a few questions for you.”
Jan’s sigh was audible. “You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”
Lola was not sure; in fact, was certain something was very wrong. But she didn’t want to alarm Jan until she knew what it was.
“She’s fine. Just a little closed off. I thought if I could get a better sense of who she is, it’d help me talk to her.”
“Shoot.” Jan’s voice was thick. Lola could picture her talking past the end of the long braid that she usually wore, chewing on it when she was upset or merely thinking hard.
“Well—” Lola wondered how many innocuous questions she’d have to ask before she could get around to the ones for which she really wanted answers. “Was she a good student? Into sports?”
“Yes to both. She pulled down A’s without breaking a sweat. And if by sports you mean rodeo, we all did that growing up.”
“Why’d she go into the military instead of college?”
Jan’s voice regained the sure footing of superiority. “You’ve been in this part of the world long enough now to know the answer to that one. No way that two-bit ranch ever brought in enough money for her parents to be able to afford a college fund. The military was a great way to make some money fast and still give her the option of college later. Half the kids graduating from any of these schools enlist. Afghanistan and Iraq are the best things to happen for them. Otherwise, they’d be juggling three shit jobs, trying to stay afloat.”
Lola bit back her knee-jerk response. Jan was right, she knew. But she couldn’t help but think of the kids who came back in boxes. The wars hadn’t been good for them at all. “What about her personal life? Did she have a boyfriend?”
“No. Why?”
Lola had veered more quickly toward the key question than she’d planned. From the sudden caution in Jan’s voice, she knew Jan had realized it.
“Just wondering.” Tommy McSpadden’s voice echoed in her head. That little slut.
“I’ll bet you were. Why were you wondering?”
Lola sidestepped. “It seems like the whole bunch of them who went over there from Thirty were under some kind of strain. One guy, the friend you told me about, got killed there. Another killed himself at the airport—well. You know about that, too. And two more got arrested a day or two after coming home for beating the ever-loving shit out of somebody in a bar. That’s a lot of trauma for just a few people.”
“Yeah.” Jan’s voice rang clear. Sh
e’d spat out the braid, maybe was on her feet, pacing back and forth across the newsroom, voice rising as she spoke. “You know what it sounds like to me?”
Lola waited.
“Sounds like somebody sees a story for herself.”
Lola tried to summon up some righteous indignation. “That’s ridiculous. You said it yourself. It’s not my state. Not my story. Besides, I’m on vacation.”
“Bullshit.”
Lola glanced again toward Margaret, as though Jan’s voice could have ridden the wind toward the far end of the cemetery. Margaret assessed quarters from whomever she could. Jan spoke even louder. “You’ve said it yourself, more than once: A reporter is never on vacation.”
Jan’s end of the call went to garble. Lola heard the squawk of a police scanner in the background, followed by their editor’s raised voice. Jan returned to the phone. “I gotta go. You’re off the hook. For now. But fair warning, Wicks. This conversation will be continued.”
Lola blew out a breath and called to Margaret. The wind carried her own words back to her. She leaned into it, narrowing her eyes against the swirling dust it raised, and trekked to the cemetery’s far corner.
“What are you doing all the way back here?”
The face Margaret lifted to her was somber. “This one’s lonely, Mommy.”
Compared to the floral extravagance atop the other graves, the site seemed forlorn, its plain white marker free of mementoes or other adornment. Lola bent to read the name. Knew before she even saw it.
“Michael St. Clair.”
ELEVEN
Pal jabbed at a hamburger with her fork. It scooted across her plate, coming to a halt against a mound of rice. This time, Lola had flattened the burgers and fried them to a crisp, rendering their interiors a uniform gray, even though their exteriors posed a danger to Margaret’s young teeth.
“Guess you decided against chicken,” said Pal.
“At least the burgers are cooked through,” Lola retorted.