by Gwen Florio
“Gar.” Charlie’s mouth twisted around the single syllable. The two men touched fingers the Indian way.
“You must be exhausted.” Naomi took things in hand. “Let’s relax in the shade house. We’ll have some lemonade.”
Lola hung back, scanning the broken land around her. Rocky ridges and buttes and arroyos. Hoodoos, their skinny sandstone bodies topped by flat pancakes of hardrock. But not a mountain in sight.
SEVEN
Lola was used to plastic pitchers full of faux-lemonade, a standard at events both on and off the reservation, the gritty flavored powder turned sludgy in the bottoms of paper cups. Naomi appeared on the patio bearing a tray with four glasses and a graceful rounded pitcher of heavy blue Mexican glass, ice cubes tinkling within, lemon slices sailing like vivid ships amid the transparent floes. Lola took an astringent sip and touched her tongue to her teeth, bursting capsules of pulp. The real thing.
Sunlight filtered through the willow branches roofing the shade house. The narrow dried leaves rustled pleasingly in the breeze. “We wanted it to be as traditional as possible, as well as being functional.” Naomi ran a hand over the polished uprights. “You’ll see shade houses like this all over the reservation.”
Not exactly like this, Lola thought. One side of the shade house was taken up by a stone fireplace with a grill built into an extension. Water chuckled in a corner fountain, spilling over rounded river rocks into a shallow pool. Plants burst in cool green profusion from outsize ceramic pots with geometric designs; Lola, whose thumb was brown verging on black, had no idea what they were. The long picnic table where they sat could accommodate a dozen people. Lola thought the whole setup belonged in one of those fat, years-old magazines she perused in the dentist’s office, turning pages worn to the consistency of soft cloth. First in Kabul and then in Montana, she’d lived so long apart from the good life portrayed in those photo spreads that they appeared to her as exotic as a National Geographic feature.
In Magpie, when people no longer felt like doing their outdoor entertaining among rattlesnake-concealing sagebrush, they spent a weekend tacking on a redwood deck, topping it with a one-piece picnic-table-and-bench combo Howard Gulbranson had banged together and sold outside his gas station, and called it good. People knew to tote their own bubba chairs to barbecues for the overflow.
Naomi’s glance told Lola she’d registered her inventory, along with its attendant judgment. “We do a lot of entertaining. Lawyers, and, especially with Gar’s job, corporate types. This helps. You understand.”
Lola wished she didn’t. Some of the lawyers and probably most of the corporate types would be white and affluent, raised and educated far from the reservation, barely able to mask their shock at its casual and pervasive poverty, the junked cars beside the rusting house trailers, the outhouses that signaled the lack of indoor plumbing, electrical lines nowhere in sight. They must have writhed within at the invitation to dinner at Edgar and Naomi’s, fearing dirt floors, sheep shit in the driveway, unchained rez dogs. Then, this. Relief would gust like a summer squall, the ominous clouds of preconception shredding and wafting away. The conversation in the rental car on their drive back to the familiar confines of a chain motel: “Delightful people.” “Yes. We can do business with them.” “Ivy League–educated, you know.”
Lola searched for a topic less fraught. “That’s a beautiful shirt,” she said. Idiot, she thought. She stiffened in preparation for Naomi’s reaction. The woman was an attorney, for God’s sake, and here she was, falling back on the inane woman-speak of clothes. Bad enough she’d already mentioned the perfume.
But Naomi preened. “I made it.”
Lola’s eyes widened, again taking in the top-stitching adorning the delicate fabric, the piping that outlined the yoke and placket, the pearly snaps. How did one attach snaps to a blouse, anyway? She imagined some sort of glue but figured that wasn’t the case.
Naomi’s shoulder lifted prettily, a modest shrug. “I never took to weaving. Sewing was always my thing.”
Lola had wrestled with an apron—an apron! Who wore aprons anymore?—for weeks in a high school home ec class. A blouse like Naomi’s looked like months of work. “How do you find the time?”
“I make the time. It helps me unwind. When I can’t sleep at night, I’ll go in and whip something up.”
Lola revised her estimate of the time involved. Maybe a few days.
“You should see her sewing room,” Edgar said. “Take the finest department store. Anything you see there, she can make herself, only better. At Dartmouth, nobody could figure out how this poor little Indian dressed better than all the white girls.”
Lola noted the way he beamed upon his wife, as well as the barely suppressed grimace that crossed Naomi’s face at his words. She took another stab at changing the subject, holding her glass against her cheek, absorbing the cool. “This is just what I needed. Our truck doesn’t have air-conditioning.”
Edgar cocked an eyebrow. “That’s going to be a problem here. And that color isn’t going to help.” Even faded, the red paint would absorb the heat. He reached into his pocket. “Here.”
A set of keys flew across the table. Charlie caught them one-handed. “What’s this?”
Edgar pointed with his chin to the brawny white double-cab pickup in the driveway. “Use mine while you’re here. Air-conditioning and more room besides. We’ve set up a tour for you at some nearby cliff houses tomorrow morning. A local guide will take you through them once you get there. I hope you don’t mind bringing Juliana along with you. We had a whole raft of things planned to do with you, but it looks like you’re going to be mostly on your own now. Both of us got sucked into this bombing case. Naomi even had to take some time off from her hours at the law school in Tempe.”
“Do you teach there?” Lola asked. Good lord, she thought to herself. Was there nothing this woman couldn’t do?
“Just once a week,” Naomi said. “It’s about a five-hour drive each way, so I have to spend the night. I usually keep the same hours in the summertime, to prep for the fall semester. It looks like I’ll have to double up on them once this case is over.”
Charlie shifted in his chair. “The bombing—have they caught the guy who did it?”
Edgar’s head wagged back and forth. “Nobody yet.”
A panting Bub appeared at Lola’s side, Margaret and Juliana behind him. “Mom, can we ride Valentine? Margaret says she knows how.”
“I do know how,” Margaret chimed in. Both girls were breathless, their faces red, as though they’d run the whole way from wherever Valentine lived.
Naomi looked a question at Lola.
“She does,” Lola said. Margaret had only been a few months old when Charlie had first boosted her in front of him on Spot. The upshot was that Margaret bossed Spot around even more decisively than Spot bossed around Lola, who’d never attained complete confidence in her riding ability.
“All right,” Naomi said. “But stay close to home.”
Lola jerked in her seat. “You’re letting them head out on their own with a suspect on the loose?”
Charlie shot Lola a look that she had no trouble deciphering: Fine, my ass. Another lecture about counseling no doubt awaited.
“The bombing was miles from here,” Edgar said. “They’ll be okay.” The girls dashed away, dust puffing like smoke at their heels, before Lola could raise any more objections.
“What’s your part in this?” Charlie returned to the subject at hand. “Seems to me it’s the cops’ show at this point. And the FBI’s.”
All four people at the table fell silent. Bombing was a federal crime no matter where it occurred, the FBI’s involvement routine. But on Indian reservations the FBI was called in for any suspected felonies, creating a layer of resentment among local law enforcement who felt bigfooted on their own turf.
“Something like this, it’s all han
ds on deck,” Edgar said. “Besides, our—the mine’s—billboard was destroyed. We don’t know if the billboard was the target or the elder was. It’s probably the billboard, though, so I’m doing some research into attacks on corporate sites, trying to identify likely suspects.”
“If they catch the guy, the tribe will be ready to do its own prosecution,” Naomi added. “That’s where I come in.”
“When they catch him,” Edgar said.
“Of course.” Naomi spoke into her glass.
“Seems like the FBI would have all that information on hand,” Charlie said. “They’ve been investigating these kinds of cases for years.”
“Well, we’re looking into it anyway,” Edgar said. “Think the FBI’s going to share everything with the tribe? Let alone with the mine.”
Charlie raised his glass in wry acknowledgment. “Any likely suspects?” He leaned forward in his chair. Hah, thought Lola. Charlie was always giving her a hard time about being unable to turn off her reporter instincts. But put a crime in front of him, even one far from his jurisdiction, and he shifted into cop overdrive.
“Too many,” Edgar said. He ticked them off on his fingers. “The protesters. It’s early yet, but last summer we had a whole army of elders out there every week, holding signs protesting the mine’s expansion, trying to get the tourists’ attention. Drove the Chamber of Commerce types crazy.”
“Would elders know how to make a bomb?”
“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Naomi interjected. “A lot of them don’t even have electricity. But we’ve also got the greenies, the white activists attaching themselves to the issue. Not that there aren’t environmental concerns. There are, and they’re huge. People living near the mine have lost their drinking water. But this has been a problem for years. These folks just started showing up recently.”
Lola took another sip of lemonade and watched Charlie’s face as he processed the information. He didn’t change expression, didn’t shift in his chair. But something, a tightening of the muscles around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, a deeper stillness, evidenced quickened interest.
“The usual hippie-dippies? Or … ?”
Edgar nodded understanding. “ELF,” he said, meaning the radical Earth Liberation Front. “That was my thought, too. They did a number on Vail way back when, burning down that lodge. Along with a ranger station someplace, Oregon or Washington, I think. And didn’t they set fire to a bunch of SUVs somewhere?”
“Right. But that’s the thing. They’re burners, not bombers.”
Lola suppressed a smile. Charlie’s knowledge of crime went well beyond the borders of his own isolated rural county. “You never know when they’re going to show up here,” he’d said once, when she twitted him about studying up on some obscure troublemaking group or other. When she’d first moved to the speck on the map that was Magpie, she found the notion laughable. Then she’d learned about the weeks-long standoff in the 1990s in remote eastern Montana between the FBI and an anti-government group calling themselves the Freemen. Another group, in the mountains of western Montana, created a hit list of local government officials so extensive as to include the dogcatcher. It had sounded like a joke to Lola until Charlie told her how agents had unearthed house trailers packed with dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammo, along with pipe bombs and booby traps. And, of course, the Unabomber had operated for years from a hard-luck Montana logging town, where his reclusive, off-the-grid lifestyle and unkempt appearance had attracted not a moment’s notice.
“Could be a freelancer,” Edgar said. “Some wannabe monkey-wrencher.”
“Could be,” Charlie agreed.
But it’s probably not, Lola saw him thinking. Charlie’s mantra, buttressed by years of experience, was that nearly always the perp was the most obvious suspect: the husband of the woman who “accidentally” drowned in the bathtub, the mother of the missing child, the disgruntled employee, the wronged spouse.
“The places with public computers, the library and such, already offered their hard drives to the FBI so they can check to see if anybody’s been searching bomb-making instructions. And, of course, the mine is cooperating fully,” Edgar said.
Lola had forgotten about Naomi until she felt slender fingers lace through her own. She fought an urge to pull her own unlovely hand away, to hide its freckled white skin, its blunt fingers with their bitten nails.
“What if it’s a provocateur?” Naomi spoke almost in a whisper. “Someone from the mine, maybe, looking to paint the opponents as crazies.” She stared at her husband as she spoke, her face still and straight, a line of tension twanging between them.
Edgar’s hand twitched. Lemonade sloshed from his glass. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
Naomi’s hand tightened on Lola’s. Lola bit the inside of her lip to keep from wincing. “It was just a thought,” Naomi said.
Charlie nodded. “One that should be considered.”
Naomi loosened her grip on Lola and threw Charlie a grateful smile.
A bee buzzed beneath the willow branches and landed in the puddle of spilled lemonade. A second joined it. Edgar set his glass down with a thump. The bees rose almost to the willow leaves and then drifted back to the table, lifting legs individually and placing them back down in the sticky moisture.
“We’d better show you two to your room so you can settle in,” Edgar said. He reached out with thumb and forefinger, crushing first one bee and then the other with a small tight smile of satisfaction.
“Mommy, look.” Twinned voices snagged the adults’ attention. A piebald pony, all stubby legs and round stomach, jogged toward them, the two girls riding bareback, Margaret’s arms wrapped Juliana’s waist. Her heels tattooed Valentine’s distended flanks, urging the pony into a rocking canter. Behind them, Bub quickened his lopsided gait.
Four pairs of hands broke into applause. Four parental voices called their approval. Four heads jerked as one at the deafening bang.
The pony disappeared in a whirl of dust. When it cleared, two girls lay motionless on the ground.
EIGHT
Charlie had strength, but Lola a mother’s desperation. She reached the girls first, flinging herself to the ground beside them, her face to Margaret’s, her hand on her daughter’s chest. Charlie fell to his knees beside her.
Margaret opened her eyes. “Ow.”
Juliana sat up. “Double ow.”
“Stay down,” said Lola. “I don’t know what that was. It was too loud for a gun. And that bomber’s out there somewhere.”
A new sound rang out. Laughter. Naomi and Edgar bent double, whooping, slapping their thighs. Edgar straightened first. “Bomber? You mean this miscreant?” He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes.
A young man walked around the corner of the house. He touched fingertips with Edgar, accepted a kiss on the cheek from Naomi. “What’s so funny?” He continued on toward Lola and Charlie without waiting for an answer, stopping a few feet away. A hesitant smile vanished at the sight of the girls on the ground. “Juliana, are you all right? Who’s this? What happened?”
Juliana hopped to her feet and dusted off her rear end. She reached a hand to Margaret and pulled her up. “This is my cousin, Margaret, the one I told you about. We were riding Valentine until your stupid car scared him. He bucked us off.”
Charlie shook his head at Lola, trying not to smile. Lola’s glance in return promised retribution.
The pony stood some feet away, reins dragging in the dirt. He stamped a hoof. “Come back here, Valentine,” Juliana called. The pony gazed at a distant butte.
“Get him, Bub,” Margaret said. Bub, who knew about horses’ hind legs from long experience with Spot, nipped at Valentine’s fetlock and then danced away before a sharp hoof could land. Valentine pinned his ears back. A second nip drew another ineffectual kick. When Bub darted in for a third, the pony turned and t
rudged toward them, ears still signaling extreme discontent.
“I’d keep that dog if I were you,” the young man said. A thread of scar tissue along his cheekbone lifted with his slow smile. “I’m Thomas Benally. Owner of the stupid car.” He shifted a bookbag from one shoulder to the other.
“Which Lola here thought was a stupid bomb.” Edgar couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself.
“You can’t blame me,” Lola said. “Given what happened here just a few days ago.”
Naomi stepped between them. “Let’s all go back into the house. It’s cooler there. Girls, put Valentine away and feed him.” She didn’t invite Thomas to dinner. It was, in the Indian way, assumed.
Lola reached for Valentine’s reins, smacking the pony’s nose when he tried to take a bite out of her arm, and led him step by reluctant step to Juliana. The vacation had already begun to feel too long.
Thomas was a sort of ward, Naomi explained to Lola, putting it in white terms first, then narrating the clan kinships that Lola had never been able to sort out among the Blackfeet, let alone an unfamiliar tribe like the Navajo. Bottom line, he was a relative, even if not in the strict blood relationship understood in the white world.
What it came down to, in the end, was that Thomas had needed a place to live for some years and Naomi and Edgar provided. It was a practice—without the complicating and clueless machinations of government supervision—that Lola knew to be so commonplace among Indian families as to go unremarked. Now, Naomi said, he spent most of his time at the tribal college in Tsaile, about an hour and a half away, but still stayed with them during holidays and summer breaks. “He’s pre-law. Not officially, of course. But that’s the goal.” Striving for casual, failing to keep the pride from creeping in. Diné College, like all thirty-four tribal colleges around the country, was a two-year program. “He’ll go to the University of Arizona from here, and then their law school, or better yet, one of the Ivies. After that he’ll come back and work for the tribe.”
