by Gwen Florio
“Ha! What purpose?” The congregation stirred as Joshua pushed himself to his feet, shoved past the others in the pew and headed for the church door. Father Eyebrows rushed through the final few phrases of the service. He made as if to follow, but Charlie intercepted him, whispering something into the old priest’s ear, leaning so close that he risked entanglement with those fearsome brows. Lola saw Charlie’s eyes scanning the crowd over the priest’s gleaming pate, tracking Joshua’s beeline toward the men who’d returned from the patch. Lola moved with the rest of the mourners as though she hadn’t seen Joshua backing one of the uncles into the stairwell that led to the church’s postage-stamp choir loft. The stairwell housed what was, to Lola, the church’s most remarkable feature, a long-neglected statue of Saint Lucy. The plaster image was a relic from the days when the church more enthusiastically celebrated the martyrdom of unfortunates like Lucy, whose eyes were said to have been gouged out before she was put to death for her refusal to marry and give up the virginity she’d dedicated to Christ. Lucy the statue cradled a saucer with a pair of blue eyes, the whites veined red, the orbs trailing scarlet stalks. Another pair, miraculously intact, gazed serenely from her face. Lola looked over her shoulder. Someone else had claimed Charlie’s attention. His back was to her. She hurried toward the stairwell, stopping just outside.
Joshua had cornered Josephine deRoche’s husband, Roy. “I told you, I never saw her there,” Roy said. “What kind of question is that for a man to ask about his sister?”
“She wanted to pay me back for rehab.” Joshua’s voice was low and miserable. “Where else do people go to make money these days? And how else do women make money over there?”
“Stop that talk. First of all, if I had seen her, that’d mean I’d have been in one of those places. If they even exist. I’ve never heard of such. But then, I wouldn’t. None of us would. We work, sleep, keep to ourselves, away from the whitemen. Safer that way. Besides, people make money in all sorts of ways over there. Motel maids, waitresses, that sort of thing.”
“The guy who said he’d seen her—he wasn’t talking about any motel maid.”
“What difference does it make now? She’s gone. We’ve all had our losses. At least you’ve got somebody to bury.”
Lola wondered at the level of grief that could make one grateful for the knowledge that a loved one was actually dead. One of the missing girls, she remembered, was related to Josephine’s husband. The girl had been gone for nearly a year, but pain stabbed through Roy’s voice. Lola imagined that agony multiplied exponentially among all the relatives of all the missing girls. Joshua apparently had the same thought.
“I’m sorry, uncle,” he said. “I forgot myself.”
Lola heard the thumps and exhalations that marked men hugging. “You understand why I’ve got to get home to Josephine. I need to spend some time with my family before we head back to Burnt Creek.”
So much for visiting the uncles, Lola thought. None would appreciate an intrusion into precious family time. She flattened herself against the church wall as Roy escaped the stairwell’s confines. She stepped into the place he’d fled. “You really think your sister was in the patch? Those roughnecks could have mistaken her for someone else.”
Joshua leaned against Lucy’s pedestal, clutching one of her sandaled feet. Lucy watched over them with all four eyes. The wine-colored paint of her gown had faded to pink and had flaked away in places, exposing the crumbling plaster beneath. Lola wondered if someone touched up the veins in the detached eyeballs, which remained vivid.
“You heard Roy. What does it matter?”
Lola took his hand. He pulled away. “Listen to me, Joshua. It matters because she isn’t the only one. You know that. Finding out what happened to her over there might help us find out about those others.” What was that shopworn term? “You know, so people could have closure.”
It was the wrong word. “You got closure on Mary Alice yet?”
And just like that, the words conjured Lola’s friend Mary Alice, tossing her head in her throaty laugh, giving Lola good-natured shit about some story or another, a posture mimicked when Lola had found her body, neck arched, head blown back by the force of the gunshot that killed her. Lola blinked hard. Maybe Lucy’s eyes hadn’t been dug from her head. Maybe she’d cried them out after seeing all the loss around her. Lola picked at the scabbed plaster, widening a gouge in Lucy’s foot. “No,” she said. “No closure.”
Indian people considered it rude to look someone in the eye, but Joshua’s gaze met Lola’s and held it. She looked away first. But stuck to her guns. “It matters, Joshua. Not just because of those other girls, too, but for your sister herself. Otherwise, we’ll never know how she ended up dead in the snow not five miles from home.”
CHAPTER SIX
Lola moved her reporter’s notebook across the upper quadrant of the large Montana map that took up most of one wall in the Daily Express newsroom.
Jan Carpenter propped booted feet on her desk and watched from two desks away. Those desks, purchased decades earlier at a government surplus sale, were two of the four that housed the Daily Express news staff. Lola had to tamp down memories, whenever she walked into the building, of her old newsroom in Baltimore. Despite taking up most of a city block, it had felt cramped—at least before being decimated by layoffs and buyouts—with the feral ambitions of five hundred reporters and photographers and editors, all of whom firmly believed they belonged at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Lola had snatched the brass ring of the Kabul posting, only to have it torn away when the newspaper shuttered all the foreign bureaus, ordering her back to a job in the Baltimore suburbs.
More and more these days, she fought the uneasy suspicion that she’d been too quick to avail herself of the shelter that the Daily Express—and Charlie—had offered after the one-two punch of being downsized, and then discovering Mary Alice’s body during a consolation visit to Magpie. When it came to Charlie, Lola considered herself a realist about the temporary nature of most relationships. And the Express, she reassured herself, almost certainly would turn out to be a rest stop, the place where she’d figure out what to do with the rest of her life. In the meantime, she had to contend with the unnerving presence of Jorkki Harkannen, the cadaverous Finn who’d edited the paper long enough to remember printing Jan’s birth announcement. When Lola first heard his name, she’d thought of a small, incessantly yapping dog. But Jorkki spoke in monosyllables, glowering through the pale forelock that hung lank over no-color eyes and skin like bleached linen. Brian Finch sat beside him, round and pink and glistening as a canned ham, an oppressively cheerful counterpart to Jorkki’s near-transparent presence. Finch worked the night shift, compiling the police blotter, along with the marriage and divorce listings, the birth announcements and obituaries, after which he put the paper to bed before vanishing into the night. Never once had Lola seen him around town—not stopping for coffee at the café, or picking up a quart of milk at the convenience store, or pumping gas into his sea-green cruise liner of a Cadillac, an eye-popping anomaly in a town of serviceable pickups and Subarus. Magpie was small enough that, even after only a few months in town, Lola knew most people by sight and generally where they lived. But Finch locked the door behind him at midnight and materialized at his desk every afternoon at two, his face already glazed with sweat as though his very exuberance were its own exertion. He took his vacation in two-day increments, one long weekend every month. Speculation about his whereabouts during those longer disappearances comprised a longstanding guessing game at the Express. Lola didn’t mind him, much, but he drove Jan to distraction. She seethed as he chirruped in Lola’s direction.
“Planning a trip?”
“What the hell are you doing, Wicks?” Jan spoke over him.
“Math,” Lola said without turning. She held the notebook against the map and jotted some numbers on its cover.
“Come again?”
“If it’s eight note
books from here to the patch, how many miles is that?”
Jan’s auburn hair trailed down her back in a thick braid. When something bothered her, as apparently was the case at the moment, she chewed on the end. On the rare occasions when she undid the braid, her hair cascaded around her face in chorus-girl waves that caught the light and held it. Lola thought, not for the first time, that it seemed to be her own fate to be the pretty girl’s gawky friend; everything about Lola herself too by comparison—jaw too strong, shoulders too broad, chest too flat, butt too skinny. Mary Alice had been tiny and blond and distractingly rounded; with Jan, there was the added insult of her youth and ranch-girl fitness, the shoulders-back, light-on-her-feet stance that casually proclaimed her ability and eagerness to kick some ass.
Jan wrapped the braid around her neck and pulled tight, sliding down in her chair. “Better get ready to hire another reporter, Jorkki,” she choked out. “I’m going to kill myself out of despair for the stupidity that surrounds me.” One pointy-toed boot thudded onto the execrable carpet, followed by its partner as she sat up. Jan wore her cowboy boots throughout the winter, somehow retaining her slick-soled footing even on Magpie’s icy streets. She hammered at her keyboard and read Lola the results. “Four hundred seventy miles, depending on where you’re going once you get there. This time of year, allowing for weather, better count on ten hours minimum. Maybe more.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why the interest in the patch? Isn’t that a few hundred miles outside your territory? Or maybe you’ve decided to go to work there?” She feigned—maybe—a hopeful tone. “You could make twice as much slinging ten-dollar burgers for greenhorns and roustabouts as you could working here.”
“Knock it off, Jan,” Jorkki rasped. He didn’t smoke, but to Lola he always sounded like he was on his tenth cigarette of the day. “The last thing you need is for Lola to leave. Your work has gotten about one hundred percent better since she got here. Besides, who’d you pal around with after work if she were gone? I figure the two of you are like checks and balances, keeping each other more or less in line.”
Pleasure and indignation fought one another to a draw across Jan’s features. “I thought it was your job to make me better. Not hers.”
“Way I see it, you watch what she does and then you do the same thing. My job gets easier as a result. It’s a win-win.” He threw Jan a bone. “Pretty soon, you’ll be giving Lola a run for her money.”
Finch spoke up. “I’d pay to watch that.”
“Shut up, Finch.” Something Jan said to Finch several times a day.
Lola returned to her desk. She and Jan sat next to each other, facing Jorkki, whose sole form of exercise, as far as Lola could tell, involved bobbing from one side of his chair to the other, peering around his computer monitor to see which of them was available to do his bidding. Sometimes he turned to Tina Kicking Woman, who came by after school to help Finch with obituaries and the occasional feature story on the days when Jorkki was either feeling magnanimous or desperate. Tina made a space for herself and her secondhand laptop at the long table at the back of the room where the newspapers were stacked according to week. That gave her the advantage of turning her back on Finch, who beamed moistly whenever she made the mistake of glancing his way. She hunched over her laptop, but Lola could tell by the way her fingers stilled on the keyboard that she was eavesdropping.
“I thought I might head out to the patch for a story,” Lola said.
Jorkki raised his head an inch. “Oh? Jan, I expected that autopsy story an hour ago.”
Jan hit a couple of keys. “There. It’s all yours. But it’s just the coroner’s initial report. The autopsy results will take at least a couple of weeks.”
“If it was done, why didn’t you send it to me?”
“Because I like watching you break into a sweat. It’s good for that delicate Finnish complexion. Look at Finch. Soon you’ll be just as rosy as he is.” She walked to the map and put her left hand on Magpie and stretched her right as far as it would go, across the state line into North Dakota. “You’re talking a hell of a mileage bill,” she said to Lola. “Betcha Jorkki says no.”
“Jorkki says yes,” Jorkki said. “What’s the story?”
Jan spoke before Lola could answer. “If it’s in the patch, it’s one that’s already been done. Repeatedly. The fracking boom has been written to death. Besides, Lola probably doesn’t even know what fracking is.”
Lola hoped she sounded more authoritative than she felt. “I do, too. It’s a way of going after oil.”
Jan’s grin anticipated victory. “And gas, too. What’s it mean?”
Lola tried to joke her way out. “Damned if I know, but it sounds like a cuss word. Which seems to be how people think of it.”
“Hydraulic fracturing,” Jorkki informed her. “They blast liquid into deep rock to break it up and release the oil. Or, as Jan pointed out, gas. And not everybody thinks of it as a cuss word. Before the boom, that area was losing people so fast the census folks classified it as frontier again. You’ve got counties out there with fewer than one person per square mile. Fracking means salvation for entire towns. People are working jobs with living-wage pay and benefits for the first time in their lives.”
Lola shot a triumphant grin of her own at Jan. “And that’s exactly the idea of my story. Those towns aren’t just in the patch. A lot of the Blackfeet people are going over there for work. I thought maybe I’d do a story”—Lola calculated—“maybe a whole series of stories, about that fact. They’ve got to leave their families for three-week shifts. Then, when something happens like Judith’s dying, they’re away when their families need them most. I’d like to see what their lives are like so far from home.” She wandered to Jorkki’s desk and tried to look over his shoulder at Jan’s story on the screen.
Jan joined her and reached around Jorkki and hit “store.” The screen went blank. “Half of Montana is driving back and forth to Dakota for work. There’s nothing new about that.” She sat back down at her desk.
“But it’s different on the rez,” Lola said, warming to her own nascent idea. “The money they’re bringing home, it’s changing everything there. People can finally afford to buy things, real things, like furniture and houses.” She stopped, aware that she’d made a fine argument for doing a story on the reservation, but had yet to justify a trip to the patch. “But at what cost? Extended family is such a big deal. Now you’ve got family men living on their own in—what do they call them?—man camps.”
“She’s right.” A soft voice came from the back of the room. It had taken months for Tina to realize that deference was something she had to shed along with her coat and schoolbooks whenever she walked into the newsroom, but she was learning.
“Did you hear that, Jorkki?” Finch asked. “Tina said she’s right. And she should know.”
Tina grimaced obligingly in Finch’s direction. He felt around on his desk for a stray paper napkin and mopped at the freshet on his brow.
“Good lord,” Jan said. “The man is going to blow an aneurysm.”
“How long?” said Jorkki.
Lola wished she’d done a little more preparation. “I think people from the reservation have only started going over in a big way for about six months or so. Just about the time I got here. Long enough now so that Josephine’s husband just started up a van service to run people back and forth.”
“I don’t give a shit about Josephine’s husband.”
Lola slumped, avoiding Jan’s eyes.
“Scratch that. It’d make for a nice sidebar. I meant, how long will you need?”
Lola let out a long breath. “Couple, three days. Not counting the driving. Four. Five.”
“Three. And the driving’s on your own time. Jan’s right. The mileage alone is going to wipe out petty cash.”
“We’ve got a petty cash fund?” Jan asked.
Jorkki ignored her. “Leave Monday so you’re back by Friday.”
“What the hell?” Jan bounded up from her desk.
“Why does she get to go? You’ve never sent me anywhere and I’ve been here three years. She’s here all of what—three months? Besides, how am I going to write the whole paper by myself?”
Something shifted in Jorkki’s face, not quite a smile, but a shade less dour than his usual death mask. “You never asked. We reward initiative here. Or at least we would, if anyone ever showed any. As for writing the paper, Tina’s been doing just fine on feature stories. Time we threw some news her way.”
Tina glowed quietly. “That’s a great idea,” Finch enthused. “One of your best ever.”
“Shut up, Finch,” Jan and Lola snapped in unison.
“Can’t I at least go along and watch? I want to see how Lola here handles that bunch over on the eastern plains and beyond. They’re a different breed of human. Tough. More than tough. Got to be, to live in that godforsaken place.”
