Dakota

by Gwen Florio

  He rubbed his hands together. “Is it cold in here? I swear as soon as it gets dark, the temperature drops ten degrees inside for every twenty outside.” He hopped down from the desk and fiddled with a thermostat. Heat curled around Lola’s ankles. She leaned toward it. Thor Brevik snapped the cover back over the thermostat. “How can we help you while you’re here?”

  Judith’s photo, deep within a hip pocket, burned against her thigh. Lola hesitated. He’d already had one conversation with Charlie. What if he had another? “I’m assuming I won’t be able to get a room tonight, or any night while I’m here,” she stalled. “Is it okay if I park my truck in your lot for the night?”

  Thor flung his arms wide. “Be my guest.” A phone buzzed on his desk. He leaned back and hit a blinking button. Dawg’s voice came tinny through the speaker. “I’m calling it a night, sheriff.”

  Lola had thought him already gone. She wondered if he’d lingered at the door, listening. She was glad she hadn’t asked the sheriff about Judith yet.

  “I’m right behind you.” Thor hit the button and the phone went dark.

  Lola gestured toward the phone. “That guy. Dawg. He’s—”

  “He’s what?” Thor parried. The corners of his eyes crinkled, as though the two of them were about to share a delicious joke.

  Lola thought any number of words could apply to Dawg, none complimentary. She went with tact. “He’s unlikely. What does he do here?”

  Thor chuckled. “Little of this, little of that. He’s sort of a deputy. That’s where he gets his nickname. You know—Deputy Dawg.”

  Lola thought the nickname an insult to the portly cartoon character. “What do you mean, sort of a deputy?”

  Thor leaned toward her and stage-whispered, bringing her into a cozy conspiracy. “I call him a reserve deputy. He can’t be a real deputy, of course. He didn’t pass the background check. But he’s a tremendous help.” He patted his belt buckle. “Back in the day, a bull stomped right on my backbone. The older I get, the harder it is to deal with. But Dawg deals just fine. And then there’s the way he looks. What with the element we’ve got coming into town, it actually works to my advantage to have him along on some of the calls we get. Otherwise it’s just me. Towns like Williston in the next county up from here, they’ve gotten big enough to justify extra law enforcement. But Homestead County’s still too small, at least when it comes to permanent residents. The old-timers here might not like the looks of Dawg, but until they approve the money to let me hire a real deputy, this is what they’re stuck with.”

  Lola thought that if she lived in Burnt Creek, she’d be banging on her county commissioner’s front door, demanding he raise taxes or do whatever it took to get Dawg out of the sheriff’s office and a real deputy in. Then she thought of the bar she’d seen on the way into town. The Train. She imagined the sort of clientele it attracted. Maybe Dawg had his uses after all.

  Thor watched her, expectation in his eyes. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  She pulled the clipping from her pocket and smoothed its creases on the surface of Thor’s desk. “You can help me by telling me anything you know about this girl.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lola had trimmed the clipping free of copy, so that only Judith’s photo remained, with no way to tell that it belonged with an obituary. Judith usually pulled her hair away from her face with a thin headband and further tamed it into a ponytail, the way she wore it for basketball games, but in this photo her hair swung free, flowing over her shoulders. Even in the slightly off-register black-and- white newspaper photo, it shone, vying for brightness with the smile so wide it farther lifted the corners of her uptilted eyes. It was the same photo that had accompanied the announcement that in her senior year, Judith had yet again made the National Honor Society.

  That was the thing about Judith. Somehow, even through the worst of her drugging, she’d managed to keep up with her studies. It wasn’t unusual for Joshua to bond his sister out of juvie on a weekend, and then show up at the café the following week brandishing another one of Judith’s tests with an A+ scrawled across the top. “Why can’t she ace the rest of her life the way she does school?” he’d ask, glaring at the test paper as though it somehow refused to give him the answer.

  The furnace knocked a few times and fell silent. The heat went away. Thor held the clipping like a piece of evidence, pinching its far corners between his fingertips. He stared at the photo for a long time. Lawmen, thought Lola. They were all alike. Give them something perfectly obvious and they focused on it as though it held the key to a serial murder case. Lola had seen Charlie turn the same look on a menu, presumably scanning it for the thing that didn’t fit. “The cheeseburger did it,” she said once. He hadn’t laughed.

  “Indian girl?” Thor said finally.

  “Blackfeet.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  Warm air whooshed again from the heating vents with an asthmatic gasp. Lola gave the furnace another year, tops, before the county got stuck with a big replacement bill. The county courthouses Lola had seen so far in Montana, even in Magpie, were imposing affairs, built of blocky stone with soaring clock towers, meant to impress a harsh land with the fact that civilization had arrived. Civilization apparently ran out of steam in North Dakota. The courthouse containing the sheriff’s office was a low frame building shaped like a squared-off C, town offices on one side, county on the other, paint peeling on both. Thor’s window faced the city offices. That side of the building was black. Lola thought it likely that at this hour, she and Thor were the only two people in the whole place.

  “We don’t get a whole lot of Indians over this way.”

  Lola shifted in her seat. “Actually, you do. Or, at least you’re getting more. That’s why I’m here. To write about all the people from the Blackfeet reservation who are coming over here for work.”

  “Ah. That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “What you’re doing here. Your sheriff didn’t say.”

  Lola wished he’d quit calling Charlie her sheriff. How was Thor Brevik supposed to take her seriously if he saw her first and foremost as the sheriff’s girlfriend? “I’m a reporter. That’s what brings me here.” She heard the edge in her voice and tried to soften it. “I was hoping you could help me. Are there places in town where Indians hang out? Where they maybe feel more comfortable than others?” It had taken Lola about five minutes in Montana to figure out that attitudes about Indian people were sometimes delivered word-for-word in the same disparaging phrases that white people directed against blacks in Baltimore. She didn’t expect much difference in North Dakota, but worried nonetheless that her question might offend Thor. Instead, he laughed. “We got the woo-woo Indians—so you tell me—we got India-Indians, we got colored, we got Mexican, we got Chinese and Japanese and every other kind of ‘ese’ you can think of coming here for work. People would go crazy if they try to keep to themselves.”

  Lola told herself that Thor was a product of his environment, his characterizations of other people due to the fact that, until the oil boom, every single person around him most likely had been white. She’d met people in Montana who’d gotten all the way to high school without having seen a black person. “Men, mostly. Right?”

  “That is a fact. Fifty-to-one men-to-women, I’d say. Maybe a hundred-to-one. The other day I told the Chamber of Commerce they ought to start marketing Burnt Creek as the marriage capital of the world. If a girl can’t find herself a man here, she might as well hang it up and join a convent.”

  Lola tiptoed toward her next question. “That must pose some law enforcement problems.”

  Thor was ahead of her. “You want to know if there’s whorin’.”

  Lola checked a wince. “It seems logical.”

  The furnace clanked with the finality of a jail door slamming shut. The chill moved in fast, brushing Lola’s fingertips, the end of her nose. Thor rubbed his hands together. “You want
me to kick up the heat another notch? Or are we about done here?”

  “We’re about done. But—prostitution,” Lola reminded him. The word sounded prim. She thought of the roughnecks who’d wreaked such havoc at Nell’s. Given the clientele, whoring seemed the more appropriate team.

  “It stands to reason we’ve got it. I’ve kept an eye on the titty bars, but they seem clean enough. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of the dancers set up dates on their own, though.”

  “What about”—what was the phrase the man at the café had used?—“the man camp?”

  “Which one?”

  “Which one what?”

  “Camp. We got a new man camp just on the edge of town and then all the damn campgrounds—excuse my language—that might as well be man camps now, too.”

  Lola slumped in her chair. “The new one. I guess.”

  Thor’s denial was swift and decisive. “Not a chance. They got security guards, everything. That place is tighter than a tick.”

  Lola decided it was too soon to ask him about the trailer that the man in Nell’s had mentioned. If he didn’t know about it, the question would only embarrass him. And if he did know, his denial of problems in the man camp meant she’d need a lot more information before she hit him with a question. Thor, however, had one for her.

  “Was this girl a hooker?”

  “Maybe. It’s not important.” Stupid, she thought, as soon as she said it. If it hadn’t been important, she wouldn’t have brought it up. And, by the way Thor’s face went all bland and accommodating, she knew he realized that, too. No use even mentioning the other girls at this point. She’d already tipped her hand too soon. Lola reached for her coat. She retrieved the clipping from Thor’s desk and shoved it into her pocket. It seemed rude to talk about Judith in such terms with her smiling up at them.

  “If she was a hooker,” said Thor, “she never got caught. I’ve never seen that girl in my life.” His gaze slid sideways when he said it.

  Some liars, Charlie had told Lola, look you straight in the eye when they spin their tales. That’s how you know. Other ones, they glance away at the last minute. How do you tell, Lola asked him once, which is which? “Instinct,” Charlie told her. “You’ve got to trust your gut.”

  Lola did a gut check. It told her nothing at all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time Lola left Thor’s office, the storm he’d mentioned had started. She let Bub out of the truck for a minute, then ran the engine awhile to warm the cab before shaking some kibble into his bowl and going in search of her own dinner. She ducked her head against the stinging flakes and dodged semis as she crossed the street to a bar called The Mint. As far as Lola could tell, every single postage-stamp town across northern Montana into North Dakota had a Mint Bar, along with a Stockman’s.

  “The Mint harkens back to the railroad days,” Thor had told her when she’d asked for a recommendation. “In the old days, you’d never have sent somebody to a railroad bar, especially not a lady. But some of the characters we see these days make those old brakemen and gandy dancers look like Sunday school girls. Lucky for all of us that they don’t favor The Mint.”

  The Mint was all warmth and light and shouted conversations. Every table was taken. Lola elbowed her way to the last counter stool, brushing past a hesitant man of about fifty whose coveralls still bore the store shelf’s creases. His work boots looked stiff and blister-making; his haircut careful, his belly soft. She wondered what sort of work he’d done before taking a run at the patch. Cubicle rat, probably. At the counter, she pushed away the proffered menu and ordered a steak and a beer. Then she thought of the long night facing her in the back of the truck, the roll of toilet paper stashed there, the need to limit her liquid intake. “Better make that wine,” she said. That, at least, would give her a fighting chance of making it until morning with her dignity intact.

  The waitress held a jelly glass beneath a box for a long time. She slid it cautiously across the counter toward Lola, who bent her mouth to it for the first sip. “That’s what I call a pour,” she told the waitress. The girl, who didn’t look more than fifteen, blushed beneath a plastering of makeup that failed in its attempt to mask the acne that ridged her cheekbones and clustered in a volcanic mass on her chin.

  “Did I do something wrong?” She sounded as though she was used to being told yes.

  “No.” Lola took another sip, lowering the level just enough to allow her to actually lift the glass without spilling. “You did just right.”

  “That one’s on me.”

  Lola turned to look at the man on her right who had spoken up. He sat with elbows planted firmly on either side of a plate mounded high with starchy things, knife in one hand, fork in the other. A drop of gravy hung from the end of his walrus mustache. Beneath it, his lips moved. Lola thought maybe he was smiling.

  “No, thank you.”

  The man turned his attention back to his meal, scraping a dollop of mashed potatoes onto the fork with his knife and shoveling it under the mustache.

  “Well, then, it must be on me.”

  Lola swung to her left. The man there was younger, cleanshaven, a toothpick at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth. The overhead lights glinted off his Oakleys. Hopped up on something, Lola thought, not wanting anybody to see those telltale pinpoint pupils.

  “More your style than Grandpa over there, right? Go ahead. Have another glass. Whatever you feel like drinking, I’m buying.” The toothpick swiveled to the other side of his mouth.

  “No.” Lola put some spin on it. “Thank you.”

  He winked and pointed his finger at her. Made a tch sound against his teeth. “Can’t blame a fella for trying.”

  Can’t blame a woman for trying to eat a meal in peace, she thought. But she kept it to herself. No use prolonging the encounter. A heavy hand fell on her shoulder. She turned and saw the man who’d been waiting for a seat when she came in. She looked down at the hand. It was soft and pink, the nails trimmed and clean. She wondered if he’d gotten them manicured in his former life. She’d heard that, while she’d been in Afghanistan, men back home had taken to doing such things.

  “Sorry those men are bothering you,” he said. “I just got a table. Perhaps you’d like to join me there. You might enjoy the company more than—” He glanced from one side of Lola to the other.

  “No.” Her patience fled. “Go away.” The hand slid from her shoulder. He trudged back to his table accompanied by guffaws from the counter crew.

  “Is it always like this?” Lola asked the girl behind the counter. “Because when I checked the mirror this morning, I looked the same as I always did. It’s not like I turned gorgeous sometime in the middle of the day.”

  “You here alone?”

  “Clearly.”

  The girl leaned across the counter and whispered. “You packing?”

  Lola thought of the toylike revolver beneath the seat in the truck. “Sort of.”

  The girl slid her gaze to the men on either side of Lola and kept her voice low. “Good. You want to keep that thing on you day and night. We only live two blocks from here, but my dad doesn’t even let me walk to work alone. He drops me off and picks me up. And when my mom wants to go up to the big stores in Williston, he sticks to her like glue. Women have gotten felt up in the aisles, raped in the parking lot. I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t carry pepper spray, but most of us go for something stronger.”

  Lola thought that sounded farfetched and said as much.

  “All I know,” the girl said, “is I don’t go anywhere alone anymore. And if you’re smart, you won’t either.”

  “Hey, Ellen.” The shout came from the other end of the counter. A knot of men, balancing their plates in their hands, called again to the waitress. “When are we going to see you down at The Train? Nice, healthy girl like you, you’d make three times in a night there as you do in a week at this dump. Over there, nobody’d care about your face. Hey. C’mere.” One of the men waved
her toward him. Ellen plodded the length of the counter. The man reached across it and slid a bill beneath her apron strings. The girl jerked away. Their laughter drowned her gasp. “There’s more where that came from, girl.”

  Ellen disappeared into the kitchen and came back with Lola’s steak. Patches beneath her eyes shone clean and damp, entirely free of the makeup that would have disguised the redness of recent tears. “You know,” Lola whispered, “you don’t need to hide under all that gunk. And you don’t need to listen to those jerks.”

  Ellen slammed down the plate. “Go to hell. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lola sawed at the steak, her jaw already aching in expectation of the prolonged chewing that awaited. Her months in Montana had accustomed her to the fact that no matter how she ordered it, her steak would arrive well done. “Yes, I do.” She worked a bite of steak from one side of her mouth to the other, and spoke around it. “You find out, eventually, that looks are the last thing that matter. Maybe not the last thing. But not always the first either.”

  “You want to know what matters?” Ellen reached into the rear pocket of her jeans. The motion threw her shoulders back. Even beneath the disguising apron, Lola could see a lush figure. She hadn’t noticed, but the men at the end of the bar had, and from a distance, too.

  Ellen withdrew her hand from her pocket. She thrust it beneath Lola’s nose. Let her fingers unfold. The bill that one of the men had tucked beneath the apron lay there, creased lengthwise. “Go ahead,” Ellen urged. “Look at it.”

  Lola expected to see a phone number on it, maybe some crude message. She shook it open. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Ellen.

  Lola had thought they’d given her a five or even a twenty, but she held a hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

  Ellen snatched it back. “You were right. My looks don’t matter at all. And they were right, too. I could make way more there than I can here. And I turn eighteen this summer.” She turned her back on Lola and headed back down to the other end of the counter, hips swaying, chest outthrust.