by Gwen Florio
Lola stood with Margaret outside The Mint, the sidewalk radiating fire through her running shoes, glad that in deference to the unrelenting heat she’d worn shorts instead of jeans. What the hell, Lola thought. Chances are Tyson wouldn’t be there, and that nobody else there would know where he was. Or, more likely, they’d know but wouldn’t tell her. She’d be in and out of there in three minutes flat. Less. She’d convinced herself. Now she needed to persuade Margaret, who’d turned on her the narrow-eyed gaze she employed when she suspected her mother was about to do something that would not in any way be to her benefit. “We’re going into this restaurant,” Lola said. “It’ll be nice and cool in there.”
“But we just had lunch,” Margaret said.
“This is a kind of restaurant that mostly serves things to drink. If we decide to stay, maybe you can have a nice cold pop,” said Lola, choking out the last word. Pop was most emphatically on the forbidden list.
“It’s a bar,” Margaret said.
Lola picked her up and balanced her on her hip. “You’re five years old. How do you know about bars?” She pushed open the windowless door and went in. The hardware store had been dim, but the Mint was frankly dark, its only illumination coming from a couple of weak lamps along the back bar. The back bar itself was a thing of beauty, ornately carved and inset with high mirrors, brassy with age. Lola had seen such back bars in the smallest of towns, each accompanied by its own story of being toted across the prairie in sections packed carefully into Conestoga wagons. She didn’t much care whether the stories were true. The bars’ exotic beauty deserved such fanciful tales. She stood to one side of the door, letting her eyes adjust.
A bartender in a white shirt and black bowtie—fancy duds for midday in a town like Thirty, Lola thought—polished the taps with a soft towel, politely ignoring her until she was ready. The usual old-timers took up the seats closest to the door. Even though it meant a farther walk to the restroom to empty their aging bladders, it gave them first peep at whoever walked in and thus a chance to comment on anything, or anyone, new in Thirty. They swiveled in their seats and fixed rheumy eyes upon Lola, and she knew that if she were to perch upon one of the barstools, one or the other of them would find a way to approach her and quiz her as to her identity, her business in Thirty, and any other questions triggered by their slow-firing synapses. And she might let them, might plant Margaret on a stool next to her and signal the bartender for—gawd—some pop, and gently prod the men toward talk of their own days coming home from war, and what it was like for them as compared to the recent run of misfortune among the returning Afghanistan veterans. She would have done exactly that, had she not spied at the far end of the bar two men, younger by decades than the others, with a nearly empty pitcher of beer between them.
“Thank you,” she breathed to the journalism gods. She stepped to the bar. The bartender materialized before her.
“A new pitcher for those gentlemen,” she said. Had she imagined the twitch in the corner of the bartender’s mouth at the word “gentlemen?” “And a glass for me, along with a Coke with extra cherries for this young lady. We’ll take it down there.”
Nobody, thought Lola as she sauntered the length of the bar with Margaret squirming on her hip, tattooing her heels against Lola’s thighs, would dare be rude in public to a woman with a child. Especially not someone who’d just bought them beer. Not even Tommy McSpadden and Tyson Graff.
The men’s faces brightened when they saw the beer. Then they saw Lola. From the way it took them awhile to recognize her, she surmised the pitcher was not their first.
“You’re that girl came by the hardware store,” Tyson said.
“You know her?” McSpadden chimed in. “She came by my house, too. Made my mom all crazy.”
“Your mom’s crazy anyway.”
“Ain’t that a fact?”
“Woman,” Lola said.
They gaped.
“Not girl. Woman. I’m the woman who just stood you a new pitcher of beer.” Which arrived on cue, an inch of foam precisely even with the lip, sides beaded with moisture. The bartender came back with two fresh glasses for the men and one for Lola, all of them frosted from the freezer, and returned one last time with Margaret’s Coke. Lola positioned Margaret on a stool and gave her a look. I’ve bribed you and you know it, it said. Don’t even think about any funny stuff. Margaret plucked the first of a handful of cherries from the glass and popped it into her mouth and smiled her sweetest at the men before turning her attention to the paper straw striped like a barbershop pole.
Lola tilted the pitcher over each of the three glasses, filling the men’s to the brim and hers about halfway. “Cheers,” she said. They clinked, frowning.
“What are we drinking to?” As before, Tyson took the lead.
“That guy’s recovery,” Lola said. “What’s his name again?”
“Oh,” Tyson said. “Him.” Which was as far as Lola got in her attempt to determine their victim’s name.
“Nice break for you guys. Sounds like everything’s going to work out okay,” she said. She took a sip of her beer.
“Everything was gonna work out okay, anyway,” Tyson said. Each time he spoke, he thrust his head forward. The cords in his neck leapt to prominence. His shoulder muscles bunched. Lola forced herself not to pull back.
“How’s that?”
“Fucker started it. His fault, not ours.”
That old story, Lola thought. Always somebody else’s fault. Except that sometimes, it actually was. “What happened?”
Tommy McSpadden had already drained his glass. He reached for the pitcher but missed it.
“I’ll pour,” Lola said.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked her.
Dammit. She’d hoped to get to that part later. “I’m writing a story about it. About you. Not just you two,” she added at the wariness rising fast in their faces.
“What are you, some kind of reporter? Are you new here?”
“I’m not from here,” she said. “I write for a publication based … out East,” she said, thinking fast. In these parts, New York could be an interview-killer. She hurried on. “Sounds like you all went through hell over there, what with Mike getting killed and everything.”
Tyson’s head jutted forward again. “Mike got himself killed. But Pal. She helped.”
Lola poured beer so fast that some splashed onto the bar. The bartender approached with his rag. Her glance warned him away. Tyson called him back. “Let’s get some shots over here. Schnapps.”
Let’s not, Lola thought. Beer was one thing. She needed at least some semblance of clear thinking on their part while she asked her questions. “Why don’t you hold off on those shots a minute?” she said. The bartender nodded his approval.
She pulled out her notebook and pen. “Just to make sure I keep everything straight,” she said. “You said Pal helped get Mike killed. How’s that?”
Tyson hitched his stool forward. Tommy followed suit. They exchanged glances.
“You want a story?” Tyson said. Tommy grinned, lips wet with beer. “’Cause we got one will knock your socks off. Put that goddamn notebook down.”
It should have been an easy, even boring, patrol, they told her. The hairs on the back of Lola’s neck stood up. Expecting anything to be easy, let alone boring, was a recipe for disaster in Afghanistan.
The village near the forward operating base had never posed a threat. Their task was to keep it that way, an example for other villages to follow. To that end, a small group of soldiers was assigned to observe a meeting between the elders of this particular village and another somewhat farther away. The Wyomingites drew the short straw. The meeting would take hours. Tea would flow freely. “Everybody take a piss before you leave,” Tommy recalled Skiff saying. “Especially you, TB.”
Lola wracked her brain for someone with those initials
. She didn’t want to interrupt, but had to. “Who’s that?”
Tyson barked a laugh. “Pal. We all called her Thimble Bladder because she had to pee more than the rest of us.”
“Not more,” Tommy said. “But it was a bigger production when she did.”
Lola felt a stab of sympathy for Pal, remembering her own days of desperately holding her water among groups of men in a barren country that offered precious little in the way of roadside shelter. And even if there had been a friendly boulder or shrub, it would have been too dangerous to step off the roads, which at least were swept intermittently for mines. Away from the roads, all bets were off. As her male companions lined up in front of the aging Russian jeeps in which the journalists traveled, turned their backs and unzipped, she crouched behind the vehicle—only, more than once, to spy an Afghan driver flattened on the ground, peering beneath the jeep, hoping for a glimpse of foreign female ass.
“So, you went to the village,” she urged. “Any problems along the way?”
“None. But the meeting went even longer than we expected. All afternoon, until almost dark.”
Lola could imagine. Village councils were tribal affairs, marked by elaborate and time-consuming courtesies. To leave early would give unimaginable offense. She could see the soldiers, sitting cross-legged on the inevitable rug inside the simple mud hut, unable to hold the seemingly effortless knee-crouch of the Afghanis around them, stirring restlessly as the light outside dimmed.
“By the time we left, the stars were out.”
Another memory kicked in, a rare good one. In a country where only the cities had widespread electricity, and even that unreliable, the night skies above Afghanistan were starlit in a way Lola only vaguely remembered from her small-town childhood. The Milky Way unfurled in a great shimmering ribbon across the heavens, the billion or so other stars in the sky mere accessories to its magnificence.
“Skiff had radioed back, letting them know we were on our way, and that everything was okay. They offered to send out someone to escort us, but he said we were fine. And we were. At least until the vehicle broke down. We knew they’d come for us soon. So we set out to meet them.”
The stars lit the dirt track so brightly there was no need for headlamps. The temperature plummeted at night, meaning that for once their heavy body armor was almost bearable. After the long day in the hut, the interpreter’s steady drone broken only by pauses for another round of tea or a shared plate of greasy mutton, it felt good to be
moving, and back among their own, free of the constant tension of the need to avoid inadvertent insults. They joshed among themselves, horsing around, pretending they were playing that old nursery school game, Lion Hunt. Except they made it a Taliban Hunt.
“I’m going Talib hunting!” Pal hissed, eyes shining in the dark. “I’m not afraid.”
She led the way in a half crouch, rifle at the ready in one hand, the other shielding her eyes from the starlight as she scanned the surrounding rocks. “Talib? Are you there?” They all waited, chuckling during the long pause. “Nope!”
She and Mike jogged ahead, the others hurrying to catch up. “I’m going Talib hunting…” They disappeared around a bend in the path.
“Hey,” Skiff called, his voice low. “Wait up.”
Something rustled off to the side. Guns came up in unison, the men turning in a tight circle. Nothing. “Jesus Christ,” Skiff said. “Those two fuckers better not be messing with us.”
Lola glanced toward Margaret. She seemed engrossed in standing up her cherry stems in a sort of tipi shape, one that kept collapsing and required even more intense concentration. She gave no sign of having heard Tyson’s language as he recounted Skiff’s words.
They heard scrambling. A shout. A burst of gunfire.
“Motherfuck!” Skiff screamed. In deference to Margaret, Tyson whispered it, but the expression on his face gave no doubt as to the intensity of the moment. The soldiers, he said, rounded the corner at a sprint, nearly falling over the cloaked man who lay across the path before them, making slow swimming movements as his life leaked away into the dust.
“Got him!” Pal stood a little away from the man, breathless, doing a sort of jig. “Got our Talib.”
“You got him, you mean,” Mike said, his grin very white in his dark face. They bumped fists.
“What the fuck? What the fuck?” Skiff was the only one among the others who appeared capable of speech. Something baa’ed in the brush, an old familiar sound. The group bunched together, Pal and Mike joining the others. Sheep trotted into the clearing, stopping when they saw the soldiers, blowing and snorting, hooves shifting uneasily in the dust.
“Talib, my ass. You assholes shot a motherfucking shepherd. People get court-martialed for this shit.”
The man moved again in the dirt. It seemed impossible. One side of his head was gone. Mike knelt over him. “Pretty sure this is a Talib.”
The man’s arm came up. Something flashed. Mike fell beside him.
Pal screamed.
Skiff moaned. “Motherfuck. We are so fucking fucked.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Now you know,” Tyson said, “why we had to cook up that bullshit story about Mike falling asleep while he was on watch.”
Tommy bobbed his head. “Had to.”
With some effort, Lola lifted her hand to signal the bartender. “Whiskey,” she said. “Jameson’s, if you’ve got it. A double.”
“All around?”
“Hell, yeah,” Tommy and Tyson said in unison.
The Jameson’s burned, doing exactly what it needed to do, focusing her thoughts on something other than the horror that had just been laid out before her. “Better to think Mike died falling asleep—”
“Yeah. As a, you know, mercy,” Tommy said.
“To his family,” Tyson added. The words had the air of rehearsal. They held the shot glasses over their beer mugs and released them with a splash, lifting mugs to their lips and canting their heads back, Adam’s apples jerking until the shot glasses clinked against their teeth.
Lola was tempted to follow suit with her own whiskey, but sipped instead. “A mercy to you, too. That court-martial business. That’s some scary shi—. Some scary stuff.”
“It would have been on Pal.” Tyson called for more shots and fresh mugs.
Lola decided that the wiser course was to go along. Even though she knew, and they clearly did, too, that the shooting of an unarmed civilian would have fallen on the whole group, and fallen harder still for their not reporting the true circumstances. She glanced at her blank notebook.
Tyson followed her gaze. “All of that was—what do you guys say? Off the record. That’s it, right? Off the record.”
Lola slapped some money on the bar. “That’s exactly how you say it. It means I can’t quote you on anything you just told me. So your asses are covered.”
Let them think they had their secret, she thought. Now that she knew what had really happened, all she had to do was verify it elsewhere. She gathered up Margaret and bade them a distracted goodbye, already thinking of the new request for information she was going to file with the Department of Defense.
Pal was sitting on the porch steps when they pulled up to the house, lacing up her running shoes.
“Anybody want to come on a run with me? Lola?” It was the first time she’d made anything resembling a gesture of friendship. Earlier, Lola would have jumped at the chance. Even if it meant running, a direct contradiction of her opposition to all forms of exercise. Now, the idea of running with someone who’d killed an innocent man, and not only killed him but for fun, nauseated her. Lola had been in the villages, and she knew that widowhood could bring slow starvation for the man’s wife and children.
“God, no,” she said. Then, to soften it, added, “I can’t leave Margaret alone.”
“We can just run back and forth,
so that we can see her on the porch. Besides, Bub and Jemalina are with her. Neither of them would let anyone get within three feet of that child. Come on.” She looked Lola up and down, taking in her T-shirt and shorts and the running shoes Lola wore in place of her wintertime hiking boots. “You’ve got the right shoes.”
“But I don’t run in them,” Lola protested. “I just wear them because they’re comfortable. To walk in. Slowly.”
Pal grabbed Lola’s arm and pulled her away from the truck. “Just a little ways. It’ll be good for you.” She broke into a jog, still holding Lola’s arm. Lola pulled back. Pal’s grip loosened not at all. Lola stumbled, then found herself moving beside Pal in the slowest of shuffles. Her fists clenched. Who was this murderer, dragging her away from her child?
Pal let go just in time. “Let’s pick it up.”
Lola glanced back. As Pal had promised, she could still see Margaret, flanked by Jemalina and Bub, neither of them looking particularly happy with the situation. That makes three of us, Lola thought. They ran up a slight rise. Lola’s breath came harder. Sweat ran into her eyes. It stung. Right about the time she thought her lungs would burst, they came to the top of the rise.
“We’ll run along the ridgeline,” Pal said. “Otherwise we won’t be able to see Margaret.”
Back on level ground, she picked up the pace yet again. Lola lengthened her own stride. If she was going to be this miserable, she thought, she might as well make the most of it. She pulled alongside Pal. “I don’t know if your cousin told you,” she gasped, “but I spent some time in Afghanistan, too. Years, actually. I’d love to compare notes.” If her oxygen deprivation hadn’t approached dangerous levels, Lola would have held her breath awaiting Pal’s response. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Pal turned her head and gave her a long look, then sprinted away, down the other side of the ridge, out of sight of Margaret, where she knew Lola wouldn’t follow, kicking up her speed so that Lola couldn’t catch her even if she’d tried.