by Gwen Florio
But Margaret’s eyes, gray like her own and in this moment hard as polished granite, held Lola’s. She gave a decisive nod that would have done credit to a general sending troops into battle. Her little chin came up and she brandished a book that Lola had handed to her on the way out of the car. “I’m sorry, Mommy.” She cut her eyes toward the receptionist to make sure the woman was listening. “Juliana and I can read this book while we’re waiting for you. I’m excited to see what it says!”
She infused her voice with a cheeriness that sent waves of both pride and fear through Lola. If a seven-year-old could dissemble so readily, what challenges would a teenage Margaret present? A few minutes later, she got an idea.
THIRTY-ONE
Kerns’s office came as a shock after the hallway’s sterility. Their guide’s improbable high heels clicked a farewell down the tiles. Lola and the girls found themselves standing on carpet—industrial-strength indoor-outdoor, but a carpet nonetheless—in an anteroom with faux-leather chairs in each corner. Magazines with titles like Coal Age and Coal International littered a coffee table.
Kerns himself stood before them, extending a hand to Lola, who remembered just before taking it to switch to a whiteman-style handshake, returning his boss-man squeeze with her own take-that crunch. He acknowledged it with a flash of teeth that could have been a smile. Or not. “They can wait out here,” he said, gesturing toward the girls.
“I want to stay with my mommy.” Margaret’s voice, so confident moments before, had gone all little-girl whiney.
Lola stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “Come along, you two,” she said, striding through the door to the inner office before Kerns had time to object. A blast of arctic air stopped her. The hallway they’d just left seemed tropical in retrospect. Lola clasped her hands behind her back to hide the goose bumps rising along her arms and pretended to study the large photos of scarred earth that took up most of the wall space in the office.
“Some of our mines,” Kerns said, pointing from one to the next. “Chile … Venezuela … the Philippines … and, of course, here. Would you like my jacket?” He was already shrugging out of a blazer of summer-weight wool. Lola thought he could have worn houndstooth in comfort.
“No, thank you.” She settled herself in front of his desk, a mahogany number whose size and strength recalled a helipad. The rest of the office was a model of squared-off corners and bare surfaces, but a mess of paperwork buried Kerns’s desk, the stacks so high in some places that they blocked Lola’s view of a couple of framed photos. Over the years, she had honed the reporter’s skill of reading upside down, something she’d often demonstrated to Margaret, who’d then tried it herself on her grade-school readers. Lola scanned the sheets on the desk but saw mostly graphs and numbers, the sorts of things she’d have to study at length to make sense of. She blew out her breath in annoyance, then smoothed her expression when Margaret caught her gaze.
“Do you have a couple of pieces of scrap paper? The girls like to draw. That’ll keep them busy while we talk.”
Kerns walked to a printer across the room. Lola craned her neck for a closer look at the papers on his desk. All carried the company’s logo. He returned with two sheets of printer paper. Lola extracted two pens from her shirt pocket; she tried not to carry a purse. “Maybe some magazines to put under the paper,” she said. “This carpet is so thick, it’ll be hard to draw on.”
The muscles in Kerns’s face tightened briefly. “Here.” He handed her some copies of Conrad Coal’s annual report, its cover as glossy and professional as any magazine, the contents quite a bit thicker than most. Margaret and Juliana crouched at Lola’s feet and put pen to paper. Rather than sitting behind the desk, Kerns took the chair next to hers. “What brings you here, Ms. Wicks? Surely your brother-in-law didn’t send you.”
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” Lola said. There. Let him think he had something to hold over her. Especially because it was true.
“Which brings me back to my original question.” His fingers drummed at the chair’s arms, their well-tended cuticles bespeaking a manicurist. His scalp showed pink through his stylish stubble. A man like Kerns, Lola thought, didn’t go at his hair with fingernail scissors, the way she maintained hers. He used a barber, or more likely a stylist. She wondered where on the reservation he found a stylist, and how often he had to go to maintain the just-short-of-shaved look. She’d read somewhere that men with shaved heads—the white-collar version, maybe, of the security guards’ wraparound shades and Uzis—projected more masculinity than baldies or even men with luxuriant Kennedyesque pompadours. Like Gar.
“You probably know I’m a reporter,” she said. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But even if he didn’t, he’d find out soon enough. It might as well be from her. “I’m putting together a proposal for a story on your situation here. It’s no secret Conrad Coal has a lot of enemies. But”—she laid on the standard blandishment—“you’ve got lots of friends, too. You said it yourself at the community meeting. You’re a huge employer hereabouts. From what people tell me”—and by people, Lola meant Google—“Conrad Coal pays even better than government jobs. That’s saying something.”
She paused again, to give Kerns time to preen.
He took the bait. “If Conrad Coal shut down, the Navajo Reservation would go from being one of the country’s richest to the poorest. Like that one up in South Dakota everybody likes to use as an example? What’s it called?”
“Pine Ridge,” Lola said. The reservation in South Dakota’s southwest corner was routinely trotted out as embodying all the ills of Indian Country, the poverty, the alcoholism, the tribal infighting. But every so often, its people flexed their muscle, say, voting in a unified Democratic bloc that swung a crucial U.S. Senate race away from a sure Republican win. Which, unfortunately for the reservation’s Oglala Lakota residents, did not reap the usual pork that might have gone to a white voting district that delivered such a treasured prize.
“So whoever’s doing this is hurting his own people as much as he’s hurting us,” Kerns finished.
“You’re sure, then, that the bomber is tribal?”
He’d spoken with a level of certainty that eluded everyone else with whom Lola had discussed the bombing. She made a mental note.
“Who else would it be?” When Kerns went for sincerity, his eyebrows pushed wrinkles into the pink expanse of skin above them.
“ELF, for starters.”
Kerns’s forehead smoothed. “Those idiots. Not a chance. We’ve had somebody inside them for years. Other than everybody being afraid the feds will hang these bombings on them, I haven’t heard any chatter about this, and believe me, we would.”
Lola took a moment to appreciate the casual revelation that Conrad Coal could afford to pay people for the years-long undertaking of undercover infiltration, a luxury affordable by the government only in the direst circumstances. A shame, she found herself thinking, that McVeigh hadn’t directed his wrath at a coal mine. Maybe he’d have been stopped before he blew 168 people into oblivion. “No ELF, then,” she said. “But you still haven’t told me why you think the bomber is tribal.”
“Stands to reason,” he said. Condescension crept into his tone. “All those demonstrators, yammering about how we’re exploiting them. You’d think we were evil incarnate.”
“You said it yourself.” Lola troweled it on thicker still. “People would starve if they lost their jobs at the mine.” They wouldn’t, of course. They’d lived for centuries in one of the world’s harshest climates and no doubt would manage just fine decades hence, when the Conrad Coal finally exhausted the earth beneath it.
“Tell that to those people from the mesa. You can’t talk reason to them. God knows, your brother-in-law has tried. No better friend to Conrad Coal—and by extension, to his people—than Edgar Laurendeau. Look here.” He took one of the photos from the desk and handed it to Lola. It was a cl
assic grip-and-grin, Edgar and Kerns shaking hands, smiling for the camera. “That’s from last year. He’s accepting a check for one hundred thousand dollars in engineering scholarships for tribal members, so the Navajo can send kids to school to learn how to run mines, not just work in them. Now you tell me. Does that sound like exploitation?”
Margaret leaned harder against Lola’s leg. “It’s very generous,” Lola murmured. “You know these aren’t his people, don’t you?”
Kerns layered superiority with disbelief. “What do you mean? He’s a lawyer for the tribe. And his wife—half her family is in tribal government.”
Lola leaned back and prepared to enjoy herself. “He’s tribal, all right. But not Navajo. He’s Blackfeet. From Montana.”
An entirely predictable array of expressions crossed Kerns’s face, starting and ending with what the hell? She imagined the years of careful cultivation, the bowing and scraping, the scholarships awarded and ballfields paid for, the dinners and drinks and junkets, all to ensure the good faith of “their” Indian who now turned out to be somebody else’s Indian. Maybe. “Looks like he’s thrown his lot in with the Navajo,” Kerns blustered.
“You’d better hope so.” Lola kept reminding herself not to smile. Few things were more enjoyable than watching someone find out that money didn’t buy everything, or, as in this case, might have bought the wrong thing. Of course, there’s no saying Edgar had been bought. He’d probably say, if confronted, that every legal path he’d smoothed for Conrad Coal had benefited the reservations. See: jobs, scholarships, ballfields. Still, such coziness always made Lola squirm. It was nice to watch someone else be the squirmee.
“Mommy.” Margaret rapped Lola on the knee with her pen. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
The relief on Kerns’s face was unseemly. “It’s down the hall and around the corner. I’ll show you out. We’re about done here, aren’t we?”
“No.” Margaret was already on her feet. She took Kerns’s hand and pulled him from his chair. “She doesn’t know where it is. You show me. Juliana will come, too. Mommy, you stay here.”
Kerns’s dazed expression showed he wasn’t used to taking orders from a seven-year-old. He didn’t realize that, given the chance, Margaret could probably twist the Queen of England to do her bidding. He dutifully followed Margaret to the door. She cast a glance over her shoulder to Lola, and then at the desk. If she’d known how to wink, Lola thought, she probably would have. Lola waited until she heard the outer door shut before holding her phone over the papers on Kerns’s desk and clicking the camera like crazy.
THIRTY-TWO
Any lingering elation from the small victory in Kerns’s office vanished as the truck climbed the mesa to Betty Begay’s hogan. Lola wrestled it around switchbacks, appreciative of the V8 engine that responded with a roar and surge of power whenever she touched toe to gas pedal.
Something was off about Kerns, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. He was so insistent upon pinning the bombings on someone from the tribe. But if the tribe—or even just an individual—was turning on the company, that could only hurt the mine’s business. Shareholders tended to get the vapors about matters that affected the bottom line. In Lola’s experience, companies took pains to avoid anything that might bring that reaction. Yet Kerns appeared to have done just that. Lola had scooped up the annual reports along with the girls’ drawings when she’d left the office, and she resolved to study them when she got home that night.
She reached down and touched a hand to the gallon jugs of water crowding the passenger seat. They’d been icy when she’d retrieved them from the refrigerated case at Bashas’. In her time with Kerns, they’d gone lukewarm. Lola shrugged. They’d be just short of hot after sitting for days in Betty’s little hogan. But they’d provide the elder’s morning tea—Lola had also picked up some Lipton, after seeing a box beside the tabletop camp stove in the shade hut outside the hogan—and even a precious wash-up. The truck rounded the final curve with a growl, and Lola let it drift to a stop. The hogan stood silent, no wisps curling from the smoke hole. No Betty at work in the shade house.
Juliana scrambled to extricate herself from the seat belt. “Maybe she’s somewhere with the sheep, waiting in the shade until it’s cooler before they come home.” Just then, a sheep wandered around the corner of the hogan, followed by another.
“Oh, hell.” Lola flung herself from the truck and raced Juliana to the blanket covering the hogan’s doorway. If something had happened to Betty, she didn’t want the girls to see. She veered left, as proper, upon entering and stopped, waiting for her eyes to adjust. “Mrs. Begay?” The hogan seemed empty, its few objects in their place, the chair empty, blankets drawn across the sleeping pallet of sheepskins. Lola took another step. Something beneath the blankets. A body, unmoving. Lola forced herself forward and held her hand in front of Betty Begay’s inert lips. She sighed at the puff of air upon her fingers, and fell back at the words that issued loud and clear from Betty’s mouth.
“I’m not dead.”
Lola responded with some words that demanded an apology. Then she choked out a “Sorry” and crouched beside the pallet. “Are you all right?”
Betty’s eyes opened, startling Lola almost as much as her words. “I’m fine. You go away now.”
Huh, thought Lola. Although she knew there were vast differences among tribes, members of each one she’d encountered so far reflexively offered food and drink to visitors. “I’ll just bring the water in,” she said, moving fast toward the doorway before Betty could object. The girls stood just outside in full sunlight, arms wrapped around one another.
“She’s here,” Lola reassured them. “I think she might be a little bit sick, though. Why don’t you girls look after the sheep?” Even though she had no idea how one looked after sheep. But maybe Juliana did. The ache for Bub gnawed at her afresh. As far as she knew, he’d never herded a single sheep in his life. But the skill was bred into him. He’d have found a way to help.
Lola staggered twice between truck and hogan with a gallon jug of water in each hand and another under each arm. Back inside, she poured some water into a cup and knelt beside Betty again. She slid her arm under Betty’s shoulders and eased her into a sitting position. Betty lay limp as an old cloth, and nearly as light, against her. Lola held the cup to her lips. Betty turned her head away. “You go away,” she said again, the strength in her voice startling Lola anew.
“If I leave, I’m only going to call a doctor.”
“I’m not sick.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
Betty stiffened at the rudeness. “I’m not sick. I’m dying.”
“Please.” Lola offered the cup again. “Just a sip.” She tilted the cup so that it wet Betty’s lips. She could have sworn she saw a quick flicker of tongue against the moisture, but in the daylong twilight inside the hogan, it was impossible to tell. “Are you … do you have …?” Lola fished for a way to ask if Betty had some sort of bad disease. Cancer, probably. But she’d said she wasn’t sick. Lola had known elderly people, and not just Indians, who’d set their minds against their stubborn bodies and achieved death. Her own grandmother, after her grandfather died, had announced she was done with the business of life. “What’s the point? They’re all gone. Him, my sisters, my friends.”
“I’m still here,” a teenage Lola had protested, twining her fingers with her grandmother’s, feeling the bird-fragile bones, the papery skin. Her grandmother’s eyelids slid closed and she lay back against her pillow. She and Lola had the same long jaw, and it quivered as she spoke. “You’ll be fine. You’re strong, like me. You put your strength into living. I’m using mine for this now.” Her hand tightened around Lola’s. Her chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly, a little more slowly each time Lola went to see her. “Not much longer,” a nurse said on one of Lola’s final visits. “A few days now.”
“How is s
he doing this?”
The nurse had the quick gestures and overly bright voice of the perpetually overworked, keeping herself revved up for the next crisis. She went still a moment. When she spoke, the words came slowly. “Damned if I know. I’ve seen it before, every few years. They’re barely breathing by the end. It’s like they slow everything down, maybe starve their organs of oxygen, until everything just stops. You ask me, they’re the lucky ones. They get to call the shots.”
Lola wondered if Betty had reached a similar decision and, if so, why. The woman had seemed in almost embarrassingly good health for her age, sturdy and energetic. “Mrs. Begay,” she said. “Look at me.” She sat down the cup and put a finger beneath Betty’s chin and forced her head around. Betty’s eyes briefly met hers before she jerked her head from Lola’s hand.
No, thought Lola. Something else was going on. When her grandmother had set about dying, she’d become almost preternaturally calm, her eyes trained unblinking on something in the distance, maybe whatever her view of the hereafter happened to be. With a quick stab of regret, Lola realized she’d never asked what that was.
But in that quick communion with Betty, the woman’s eyes had radiated anguish, along with something else. Lola wrapped her other arm around Betty and cradled her as she would a child, rocking gently and whispering, “It’ll be all right. We’ll help you. Whatever it is, we’ll protect you.”
