by Gwen Florio
“What about Thor and Dawg? And Finch, too? What are they being charged with?”
“Well.” Charlie rubbed his toe across the melting snow, revealing the sparse, frozen grass beneath. “That’s a problem. Finch, especially. His part’s pretty nebulous. Pretty sure he’s the courier and the special customer, too, but none of the girls saw who took them from the reservation. And for sure nobody’s identifying him as the special customer, although it makes sense. Maybe Dawg or Thor will dime him out, but I don’t have much hope. Dawg’s easier. He’s on the run from charges in about a half-dozen states. They’re all fighting, each trying to push him off the other, because nobody wants the cost of jailing him and prosecuting him. We might be able to go after him for that poor trucker. The boot prints match, for starters. Although other states have stronger cases.” He moved his foot in a circle, uncovering more grass.
“And Thor?”
“That’s problematic, too.” He sounded so tired, so uncharacteristically embittered, that most of Lola’s fear and anger drained away. “But I’ll let you find out for yourself why. Come on. Let’s get this stuff into the truck.”
Lola, numb, walked behind him in the strip of grass. He led her to the porch and handed her a box. He stacked another box atop a third and lifted them both. It took less time to load them than she’d thought. Charlie stood by, a hand on the pickup’s hood. He had to know, she thought. He’d just been bluffing.
“You’re wrong,” Lola said. Her voice wobbled. She cleared her throat. “What you said awhile ago about family. I do have a concept of family. More than just a concept.” There. She’d given him an opening.
He slapped the hood. “You take care of yourself, Lola. You and—”
She held her breath. So he did know. Which meant there was no way he’d let her drive away. As long as he stopped her, she could forgive him the bluff. He cleared his throat. “You and Bub,” he said. “I’ll miss him.” He whistled. Bub, fur soaked and paws muddy, streaked beneath the corral fence and jumped into the truck, leaving tracks across the seat. Lola brushed at them, succeeding only in smearing dirt into the upholstery. She climbed in after Bub. Started the engine. Headed down the lane. The phrases she’d practiced on the way to Charlie’s came back to her. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. The clinic in Missoula . . . She rested her hand on Bub’s back until she stopped shaking. She tried out her voice. It, too, had lost its quiver. Good, she thought.
“Let’s go back to Jan’s and pack. How do you feel about a couple of days in the big city, Bub? Looks like we’re headed to Missoula.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Lola didn’t recognize the car parked outside Jan’s house. She assessed it—the sagging profile resulting from shocks defeated by too many years on too many gravel roads—and decided Jan’s visitors were from the reservation. She hurried into the house, Bub at her heels, and confronted the lineup on Jan’s futon.
Alice Kicking Woman sat in the middle, flanked by Tina and her mother, and Josephine and her niece, Nancy. In their regalia, slowly circling the trailer in the man camp, the women had been regal, powerful. Now, sleeplessness scribbled their faces. Distress bent their spines. Brenda and Josephine twined their girls’ hands in their own, as though to release them would be to see Tina and Nancy disappear again.
Jan rose from a chair across the room, her face a warning. “Here’s Lola now. We’ll get coffee for everyone.”
“What’s going on?” Lola hissed as soon as they were in the kitchen. “Did you set up an interview without telling me? Are you trying to cut me out of this?”
“Don’t go all preggo emo on me,” Jan said. “They just showed up.”
Lola thought of what Charlie had said. That the case was problematic. And that he’d let her discover how. She figured she was about to find out.
“Shit.”
“What?” Jan paused with a cutting board that she’d pressed into service as a makeshift tray, mismatched coffee mugs balanced upon it.
“I’ve got a bad feeling. Let’s get this coffee ready.” She and Jan worked wordlessly, Lola making the coffee while Jan opened and shut cupboard doors, finally emerging with a package of Oreos. “You had Oreos?” Lola whispered. Jan wiped dust from the package with a paper towel before opening it and arranging the fossilized contents on a plate. Lola turned the wrapper over to check the sell-by date, but Jan shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. They’re all I’ve got.”
Both Lola and Jan took their coffee black. Lola took a quart of milk from the back of the refrigerator, opened it, sniffed, then shoved it even farther back into the fridge. Jan scrabbled around the same cupboard that had yielded the cookies until she found a can of condensed milk. She shoved a sugar canister toward Lola, who chipped at the crystallized surface, digging through to the soft stuff beneath, shoveling it into a soup bowl. Lola thought of the times she’d showed up unannounced at Josephine’s house, at the way home-baked rhubarb bread or steaming bowls of stew, thick with chunks of beef or venison, miraculously appeared. Lola procrastinated in the kitchen, lingering over the thought that for all the difficulties of the women’s lives—husbands away for weeks in the oil patch, girls gone missing, the unrelenting grind of reservation poverty—they somehow managed orderly households. Whereas she and Jan, with their adequate incomes and no one else to care for but themselves, seemed stuck in some sort of slipshod dorm room time warp. Lola had looked through Jan’s underpopulated cupboards and seen the packets of ramen noodles there. She knew they had more to do with ease than thrift. Since moving in with Charlie, who apparently cooked himself dinner every night and simply doubled the amount to include her, she’d gained weight. Or at least, she thought, rubbing her abdomen, she’d assumed that’s why she’d gained weight.
Lola carried the cutting board into the living room and sat it on the carton of printer paper that served as Jan’s end table. Jan followed with a clutch of spoons and a roll of paper towels. Lola went back into the kitchen and returned with the soup bowl of sugar and another mug full of the condensed milk. “I couldn’t find a pitcher,” she apologized.
Jan dragged another chair in from the kitchen. She and Lola sat facing the women. Sunlight spilled through the windows, highlighting the dust that furred the room’s surfaces. The women doctored their coffee, the condensed milk running down the sides of the mugs as they poured it, splattering onto the printer-paper carton, raising damp blisters. They stirred in sugar with great solemnity. No one spoke. Alice raised her mug to her withered lips, blew across the coffee, and took a sip. Everyone else followed suit.
“Please,” said Jan. “Have a cookie.”
Alice picked up one of the Oreos and gummed it. She sat it back down on the edge of the plate. It showed no appreciable damage. Josephine, who had reached for one, withdrew her hand. Lola wondered if it would be rude if she took one—or three—for herself. Her stomach rumbled audibly.
“Why don’t you tell Lola what you started to tell me?” Jan said to the women.
Josephine looked to Alice, who nodded permission. “You two are planning to do a story,” Josephine began.
Lola spoke quickly into the pause. Best to halt Josephine’s objections before they started. “Naturally. What happened here—people kidnapping these girls, using them the way they did while the law not only looked the other way but actively participated—it’s outrageous.” She’d hoped for a murmur of assent, but the women sat still and silent. Her stomach, so recently emptied, issued another demand for food. She grabbed a cookie and bit into it, then ran her tongue across her teeth to see if she’d chipped one. She submerged the cookie in her coffee and tried again. It was better, just. She chewed and chewed.
Josephine put a hand to her forehead and patted a stray hair back into place. Lola doubted Josephine had had a full night’s sleep since boarding the van for the man camp days earlier. Yet her beehive towered as stately as ever, and she’d drawn on her eyeliner and applied her lipstick with a steady, sure hand. Josephine was singlehanded
ly credited with bringing years of slipshod, even felonious, tribal bookkeeping back into legality because, it was said, even the most corrupt tribal officer feared her wrath far more than any penalty the IRS might impose. Now she turned that wrath—contained, but only just—upon Lola.
“There will not be any story about our girls.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Lola sprayed cookie crumbs and coffee. Jan tore a paper towel from the roll. Lola took it and blotted her mouth and chin and dabbed at the front of her sweater. “Why not?”
“These girls.” Tina’s mother spoke this time, her voice shaking with strain. “What they went through. You know what people say about them already. And that’s without even knowing the details.”
Lola didn’t have to ask what she meant. The Daily Express, like so many newspapers, provided a place on its website for people to comment on stories, a feature that, as far as Lola could tell, attracted nothing but bottom-feeders. She envisioned armies of brooding resentful men, bedeviled by dandruff and ear wax, skin like damp dough lapped over on itself in multiple layers, hunched in white cotton underwear gone grey, typing vileness into the night. No sooner had the story about Tina’s disappearance gone online than the comments had begun. “Sl*t probably ran off with a white guy,” was one of the few that actually made it past the profanity filters by dint of its sneaky asterisk. “I’m sorry about the comments,” she said. “Try not to read them. I keep asking Jorkki to take them down, but the marketing guy says we have to do it.”
Brenda Kicking Woman waved her hand. “It’s not just that. Our daughters need to heal. It’s going to be hard enough without this being in the public eye. You helped get them out of there. You know what they went through. Do you want to be responsible for even more damage to them? Do you know what people are calling them? Oil patch pussy.” Despite eyes filling with tears, she fixed Lola with a look. Tales of her red pen abounded. Mrs. Kicking Ass, her students called her behind her back.
Lola put down her coffee and leaned forward. “Don’t you see? It’s only by exposing it that we put a stop to things like this, save other girls from the same ordeal.” That old line.
Brenda Kicking Woman’s left eyebrow arched high. “Really? A story in the Daily Express is going to put a stop to prostitution in boomtowns? Do you know what Charlie told me?”
Lola was afraid to ask. Brenda told her anyway. “That what was going on in Burnt Creek is the least of it. That up in Williston, they’ve got big-time cartels moving in, bringing in drugs and girls from all over the country, even from out of the country. The local cops and the feds both are running themselves ragged trying to deal with it. How much time do you think they’re going to invest in one penny-ante operation? That sheriff out there might never get half of what’s coming to him.”
“Which makes it even more important that the story be told. Burnt Creek is like the tip of the iceberg. The canary in the coal mine.” Lola bit her tongue before another cliché could escape. “That’s why you have to talk to us.”
“We don’t have to do a goddamn thing,” Nancy broke in. “Sorry,” she muttered before Josephine could rebuke her for impermissible rudeness. Nancy’s voice was strong, her eyes clear. She’d be all right, Lola thought. With a good rehab program and a few years beyond that, she’d be every bit as formidable as her aunt.
“I don’t appreciate the way she phrased it, but Nancy’s right,” Josephine said. “Those cops filling in at Burnt Creek, now that the sheriff’s gone, they’ve got better things to do with their time than to keep browbeating people who won’t say a word.”
“But what happens to Thor? He needs to be held accountable.”
Josephine’s laugh raised the hairs on the back of Lola’s neck. “Oh, my dear.” Josephine wiped her eyes. “Do you know what happens to white men who rape Indian girls?”
Lola thought back to the statistics she’d reviewed. “I do, unfortunately. Nothing.”
Josephine slammed her empty coffee mug onto the cutting board with such force Lola wondered the cup didn’t shatter. “That’s right. Nothing.”
Jan spoke into the corrosive silence. “He might never face a single charge in connection with this. But believe you me, everybody knows what he did. That’s the thing about small towns.” Lola thought of the way news zipped around the reservation and figured things weren’t much different in Burnt Creek. “He’ll never work in law enforcement again,” Jan said. “And he won’t be able to get back in the sex trade, either. Word gets around there, too. He’d be viewed as too much of a liability. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up as a roustabout. That’s its own punishment.”
Taking away a person’s livelihood, especially when the line of work was as much an identity as a means of support, was indeed punishment, Lola thought. Like taking away a story. She had one last hope. “Tina?”
The girl had been leaning against her mother, face pressed into Brenda’s shoulder. She pulled herself upright.
“You want to be a journalist,” Lola said. “All that talk about sunlight in dark places—this is it. What you went through, that’s about as dark as a place gets.”
Brenda started to speak. Tina squeezed her hand to stop her. “Please, Mom. I understand why you want to do it,” she said to Lola and Jan. “And if it were just me, I might say go ahead. But it’s not just me. It’s my elders, my mother, my aunties, my cousins. My family. My people. I can’t hurt them beyond how they’ve already been hurt.”
Lola dropped the appeal to civic duty. “Fine. You don’t have to talk. But we were there. I saw it from the inside. Jan rode over with all of you. She can write what she saw. I can, too. We can write the story without having to talk to you at all. We won’t name any of you, of course. We never name sexual assault victims. But we can still tell the story. Whether anybody gets prosecuted or not, there’ll still be documents. They’re public record. And there were plenty of witnesses. We can interview them. This is a story with national implications. We have to write it.”
Lola elbowed Jan. “She’s right,” Jan said, none too convincingly. “Lola likes her national stories. International.” Jan’s tone was mild, but Lola felt the sting of her words. Jan rarely missed an opportunity to tweak Lola about her former status as a foreign correspondent as compared to her job at the Express, especially on days when Jorkki would throw an agricultural story Lola’s way. “My, oh, my,” Jan would say. “I see coyote depredations are up again. How does fifteen chomped-on sheep compare to a suicide bombing?”
Tina raised her head. Looked Lola in the eye. “You’d do that? Write it even when we’ve asked you not to?”
Lola stared back and thought of everything the girl had seen in the last few days. Worse, of the things she’d imagined. Of the things she’d believed, with every reason, would happen to her. “There’s no shame in it,” Lola said. “Nothing happened to you. And the others, they were forced. There’s no shame in it for anyone.”
Alice’s voice floated into the fray, a tiny croaking bird. “But people will say there is.”
“Yes,” Lola said. Stupid to pretend it was any other way.
“Don’t you think our people have been shamed enough?” Alice asked. She hoisted her bent frame from the sofa and hobbled to Lola and put her hand on Lola’s stomach. “Our people—and now, your people, too. You would do this to your own?” She pressed hard, as though feeling for the knot of cells relentlessly dividing within. “Would you?”
Lola took Alice’s hand, meaning to remove it, but Alice grabbed hers tight and pressed it back against her belly.
“How does it feel,” she asked Lola, “to be on the other side of the story?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
There were two routes to Missoula. One, the fastest and in winter, the safest, followed two-lane roads to the interstate, where state snowplow crews worked round the clock to keep a single lane in each direction free of drifts. The snow was different farther west, heavier, resistant to the wind that blew the powdery stuff around on the p
lains wherever it pleased. The other road, its treachery as breathtaking as its beauty, unspooled along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park—or Not-Glacier, as some people had taken to calling it, in a nod to the climate change quickly overriding the eponymous designation. Lola took the latter.
Safer in a way, she reasoned, to negotiate a road that demanded maximum attention, rather than one that would allow her to cruise along focusing on her own thoughts, which were darker than the patches of black ice on the pavement, more punishing than the north wind that sliced the Chinook into fragments of memory. Roadside signs warned of avalanches, falling rocks, unwary wildlife. Still, Lola’s pitiless thoughts intruded. The past several days had amounted to little more than a litany of failure, she thought, with ever more additions to the list: Job questionable. Charlie gone. Story dead.
“Oh, and you, too.” She tapped her stomach. She’d taken to talking to it, in much the same way she spoke to Bub. “Biggest fuckup of all. At least I can do something about you.” It would be the first step in retrieving mastery over her life, she told herself. Then she lost control of the wheel.
One moment it was steady in her hand, the next it spun without regard for her attempts to wrestle it into submission. Someone intoned “Oh, no. Oh, no.” She recognized the voice as hers. The truck tilted and righted itself and kept moving. A postcard vista of snow-capped lodgepole pines slid past, then whipped away as the truck rotated in the middle of the road. And then . . . stopped.
Bub scrambled from the floor and sniffed her up and down. Lola leaned against the seatbelt that had pinned her hard in place. It gave reluctantly. “I’m fine,” Lola assured Bub, as well as herself. “I’m alive. We’re all alive.” And shocked herself by bursting into laughter, and then tears.
WITHOUT ITS lights, the black and white cruiser blended into the landscape. Lola thought maybe she’d been mistaken. But the apparition grew larger, definitively resolving itself into Charlie’s car. Slowing. Pulling up beside her. Stopping.
