by Gwen Florio
“Excuse me.” She stood before the librarian’s desk, assuming as she spoke that the librarian was, along with everyone else in town, familiar with the story of the six childhood friends who’d gone into the military together. “I’m looking for information on someone who went to school here. He and his friends all went to Afghanistan last year. But he doesn’t seem to be in any of the yearbooks.”
Lola waited for the stiffened shoulders, the crimped chin, the outward signs of resistance that preceded a refusal to divulge information. Her years working in Baltimore had taught her to expect it at every turn, even when she sought documents available by law to the public. The tendency wasn’t nearly as pronounced in small towns, but Lola expected it anyway, so it always came as a pleasant surprise when someone delivered.
“You’re talking about Mike St. Clair. Such a shame. But you’re right, there’s nothing about him in the Thirty yearbooks. That’s because he went to the Indian school. We don’t have their yearbooks. You’ll have to go to the rez for that.”
Lola returned her smile and called to Margaret. She braced herself against the blast of heat beyond the library’s door. But she was thinking so hard it barely bothered her. If Mike St. Clair had gone to the rez school, how had he ended up being such good friends with the group of kids from Thirty?
THIRTEEN
“It’s because of Miss Jones.”
Arlie Colton, Thirty High School’s principal, delivered the answer to Lola’s question about Mike St. Clair with visible distaste, immediately laying waste to her plan not to bring up Pal’s name. “She went to school with the others,” he said. He ticked them off on his fingers “Mr. Loughry, Mr. Dillon, Mr. McSpadden, Mr. Graff. But she grew up with Mike and so she always dragged him into our activities.” No corresponding mister for Mike, Lola noticed.
“I don’t understand,” said Lola.
“Miss Jones’ family—I suppose her parents’ grandparents, or however many generations back it happened—bought up fee lands.”
The light clicked on for Lola. A few years ago, the word would have meant nothing to her. But living with Charlie, and in such proximity to the Blackfeet Nation, she’d learned that reservations were hardly all-Indian bastions. During the starvation years after the reservations were formed, and with help from a federal abomination known as the Dawes Act that further wrested land from tribes by force of law rather than war, white people snapped up prime reservation land—fee lands—sold for a pittance by desperate tribes. A century later, many tribes were trying to buy that land back, parcel by newly high-priced parcel. Lola remembered Pal telling her that Delbert lived on the reservation. Funny, Lola thought, that Pal neglected to mention that her land, too, was on the rez.
Arlie Colton was still talking. “Their parents were neighbors. Such parents as Mike had. His grandfather, mostly. His father, you know, was killed in the Gulf War. And his mother—” He tipped his hand in front of his mouth, indicating drink. “He lost her, too. Miss Jones went to the schools in town, and Mike to the Indian school. That way, he got to play for the Chiefs.”
“The Chiefs?”
“You’re not from Wyoming, are you? Everybody in the state knows about the Chiefs, and the Lady Chiefs, too. They make it to the basketball finals just about every year, and to the championship a fair amount of time, too. Pity that’s as far as most of them go.”
Lola had heard the queasy-making soliloquy about Indian athletes—great in high school, but a tendency to fall apart in colleges far from their families—too many times in Montana to want to hear the Wyoming version. She tried to steer Arlie Colton back on track. “But he attended a lot of your school’s activities?”
“Miss Jones included him whenever she could at events in our school. Though why he wanted to come was beyond me. It can’t have been comfortable for him. But she insisted. They were friends. Closer than most.” The curl of his lip and flare of nostril indicated disapproval. “There was talk.”
“What sort of talk?” Lola asked. As if she couldn’t guess. A white girl, an Indian boy. Lola had grown up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, hearing the same sort of talk about white girls who had the temerity to say more than two words to black classmates. But she had to change the subject. She was not going to let another interview go astray on the subject of Pal. “Actually, I’m here to talk about the other students who went to Afghanistan.” She consulted her notes as if trying to remember, even though she’d memorized their names. A little feigned stupidity never hurt. “Let’s see. Here’s one.” She thought she’d ease into things before bringing up Cody Dillon’s suicide, or Tommy McSpadden’s and Tyson Graff’s near-deadly hijinks. “You mentioned him just a few minutes ago. Skiff Loughry.”
Arlie’s round face brightened. She’d found the principal at the school after walking into the unlocked and nearly deserted building in the middle of a summer day and following the smell of floorwax. A janitor, buffing a basketball court into renewed glassiness after a year of hard use, had directed her to Arlie’s office at the end of a darkened hallway. The principal hadn’t seemed surprised to see her. Lola wondered if Dave Sparks had paid a similar visit. If he had, she’d missed the story he’d written. More likely, she thought, once again he’d missed the story.
“Mr. Loughry. We’re planning some sort of celebration for him once school starts. We thought it would be more respectful to wait a few weeks after Mr. Dillon’s funeral and the other, ah, troubles.”
“Why a celebration?” Lola, turning to check on Margaret, whom she’d parked with a coloring book in the outer office, asked the question over her shoulder.
Arlie’s eyebrows, so pale they barely showed, disappeared into the mass of wrinkles on his forehead. He was short and egg-shaped, wearing a long-sleeved white button-down shirt and khaki pants even in the heat and informality of summertime Wyoming. He had a nervous, fussy aspect, more like that of an insurance man, Lola thought, than the weary authoritarianism of a longtime school administrator.
“Because of what he did, of course,” he said. “I thought you knew. Isn’t that what your story is about?”
Lola had gotten the email she’d hoped for the previous night, the go-ahead for the story from InDepth.org, one of the sparkly new online journalism sites creating a buzz in an otherwise-moribund business. “Send photos, too,” the editor had urged. “Some video would be nice. We’ll get the graphics guys”—Lola noted the plural with an envious sigh—“started on the maps. If your own photos don’t cut it, we’ll send a shooter out, but give it a try.”
“My story,” she told Arlie carefully, “is about all aspects of the situation.”
Arlie blinked rapidly. He caught his lower lip between his teeth and sucked it in, clearly envisioning the myriad ways a story might somehow make him look bad.
“Certainly,” she hastened to cut off any brewing objections, “Skiff’s role is a major part of it. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Arlie released his lip, sat back in his chair, and puffed up a bit inside the starched shirt. “He saved them all, of course. He’s our hero. If it wasn’t for Mr. Loughry, every last one of those kids would be dead.”
Something had awakened Skiff Loughry that night. Maybe Mike St. Clair had scuffled with the Afghani—just for a second, not even long enough to cry out—before the knife nearly parted his head from his neck.
Or maybe Skiff just had a sixth sense, Arlie said. Whatever, he awoke. Saw what was going on. Shot the Afghani before the rest could rouse themselves. “They were saved before they even knew what had happened. It was too late for Mike, of course. But one could argue he got what was coming to him. Falling asleep on watch like that. They used to shoot soldiers for as much.”
Lola suppressed an urge to prick the principal with the point of her pen, to see if she could deflate some of that self-importance. “Having your throat cut—that’s a pretty rough way to go,” she ventured.
Arlie sniffed. “Anyone going to that godforsaken place should have expected as much. How does the Kipling poem go?”
Lola hadn’t figured Arlie for a former English teacher. Math, she would have said. Or shop. She hated that poem. “I know it,” she said, hoping to forestall him. It didn’t work. A smile hovered around his lips as he chanted:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
“Well, he didn’t go like a soldier, did he?” Arlie said. “Asleep like that. Besides, he only got what his people had been doing to each other for years. He’s lucky to have kept his hair.”
Lola was on her feet, notebook in one hand, the other balled into a fist. Arlie Colton scooted back in his chair. She hadn’t, she thought with some satisfaction, had to jab him with her pen after all. He’d deflated all by himself. She took a breath and reminded herself that no matter how much she wanted to slap him into the next county, or at least go upside his head with a few choice phrases, it wouldn’t help to antagonize anyone just as she was starting to work on the story. If Thirty was anything like Magpie—like any small town—people would hear fast that they shouldn’t talk to the out-of-town reporter.
“Sorry,” she heard a calm voice say. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just remembered another appointment. I should have watched the time more carefully. You’ve been most helpful. And you’re right. The story about Skiff’s heroism deserves to be told.”
She turned away. His voice called her back.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What’s that?” Her fury flared new and undisguised. She didn’t dare turn to face him.
“You people from away. You’ve got this whole noble savage idea of the Indians. But you don’t live here, surrounded by them.”
Given that the reservation comprised small parts of only two of Wyoming’s twenty-three counties—Lola had looked it up—Thirty was hardly surrounded. But Lola kept the thought to herself.
“The crime level on the rez is through the roof. There’s drinking, drugging, gangs. Your Mike St. Clair is lucky he ended up in the Army instead of prison.”
Lola touched a hand to her face to reassure herself that the flush of anger was fading, and turned back to Arlie. “He ended up dead at the age of what—eighteen? Nineteen?”
“Which could have happened just as easily if he’d stayed here.”
True enough, Lola thought. Just as there was a grain of truth in what Arlie had said about the reservation. The issues facing the West’s reservations—remote, inadequately policed, targeted by outside gangs—were daunting. But Lola picked up her newspaper every day and saw stories about white people arrested for those same problems, yet nobody seemed to fault them as a race.
“He and Miss Jones, they were no angels. Not everybody’s a martyr.”
“Mommy?”
Margaret stood in the doorway, having sat in on enough of her mother’s interviews to know when one was over. Lola watched Arlie’s gaze take in Margaret’s braids, her coppery skin. “Oh,” he said.
Lola picked up her daughter and quick-stepped through the endless dark hallway as though the very air about them were contaminated with the poison of prejudice. But even as she fled the thing her daughter would have to encounter far too often in her life, she reminded herself that just because Arlie was a bigot didn’t mean he was wrong about Pal and Mike. She’d learned from hard experience that it was foolish to ignore information just because she didn’t like the source. Which meant that, as much as she wanted to stay away from the subject of Pal, she was going to have to probe deeper.
FOURTEEN
Lola had to give Pal credit. No matter how much she’d drunk the night before—and the routine deposit of empties in the kitchen trash can bore mute witness to exactly how much—she arose every morning in time to be at the table, nursing a cup of coffee, when Delbert arrived and Lola emerged from her own room. Lola attributed it to Pal’s military training. But the morning after Lola’s interview with Arlie Colton, that training deserted Pal.
Lola was already at the stove, flipping pancakes when Delbert arrived, grateful that among his earlier purchases had been a mix that required the addition of nothing but water. Delbert stood in the doorway, seemingly paralyzed by Pal’s absence. His glance darted around the kitchen. “Come on in,” Lola said. “We won’t bite. Although, Margaret might if she doesn’t get her pancakes.” Lola thought that in the healthy-eating department, the pancakes probably were only marginally better than doughnuts, but they saved her from wrestling more eggs into submission. Delbert, whose default gait was a shuffle, crossed to the table in two steps. “Where’s Pal?”
Lola wielded the spatula. A pancake fell back mid-flip, folding over on itself. Lola prodded it. “Still sleeping, I guess.”
“You guess? You didn’t check?”
“I know she likes her privacy—” Lola began. Delbert headed down the hall. Lola turned off the flame under the griddle and followed. “Margaret, you stay there,” she called, even as Margaret slid from her chair. They burst into the room, four of them, Delbert and Lola, Margaret and Bub. Pal lay motionless on the bed, clad in a tank top and shorts, arms flung above her head.
“Oh, Christ, she’s on her back. She could have choked.” Delbert put his ear to Pal’s lips and his hand to the chest that showed ribby through the flimsy fabric. “She’s breathing. Thank the good Lord. Help me turn her.”
Lola moved to the other side of the bed. She took one of Pal’s arms and pulled as Delbert pushed at her shoulder. Pal flopped boneless onto her side. Lola dropped Pal’s arm. Even in the dim light, the scars showed pale, the newer ones healing fast. Lola ran her finger over them. “What are these?”
Delbert pulled a blanket over Pal. “Her business is what those are.”
Message received, Lola thought. “Fair enough,” she said. A small hand slipped into hers.
“Mommy, is she sick?”
Delbert answered. “She’s going through a very hard time. It’s our job to help her. Make sure she eats, keep her in clean clothes. We got to do something else for her,” he said.
“What’s that?” Pal barely made a bump beneath the covers. Lola put her fingers to Pal’s neck, seeking the reassurance of a pulse. It fluttered beneath her fingers, life trapped within a body that appeared to be doing its best to snuff it out.
“We got to get her out of this house,” Delbert said. “She’s turning it into a grave of her own making. She needs to be amongst people again.”
Lola led the way back to the kitchen. “How do you propose doing that? Tie her up and kidnap her?”
“Fourth of July parade is tomorrow. Hard to say no to a parade. I say we make an expedition. All four of us. It’ll be good for this one, too.” He put his hand on Margaret’s head.
The word “parade” grabbed Margaret’s attention. “Candy!” Until they’d been presented with Delbert’s doughnuts, Halloween candy and the treats tossed at parades had been the only sweets allowed Margaret.
“Be good for you, too,” Delbert said to Lola. “You need a day off.”
Meaning, Lola supposed, everybody needed a day off from her cooking. Which, despite her credible attempt at barbecued chicken the previous night (chicken pieces doused with bottled barbecue sauce, an hour at 350 degrees, turned halfway through) was just fine with her. They could eat at the café in town after the festivities. “A parade sounds like fun,” she said. “What time does it start?”
Thirty’s Fourth of July parade began late in the afternoon. “That way, people who come in from out of town for the parade don’t have so long to wait for the fireworks,” Delbert said. “That’s the reason they give, anyhow. Me, I think it’s so you don’t have folks drinking all day lon
g and starting fights by noon.”
Despite the holiday, the event was better known as the Aunt Millie parade, he explained as they sat at the curb, waiting for it to start. Pal had agreed to the outing only if Delbert brought her home immediately after the parade, so Lola and Margaret had followed them into town in Lola’s truck. Lola told Delbert they wanted to watch the fireworks. She didn’t tell him she thought the parade would make for a perfect place for her to interview people about the veterans. She hadn’t anticipated how large that crowd would be.
It seemed as though all of Thirty’s residents, plus everyone from the surrounding ranches, had packed themselves into its three-block business district. Lola’s time in Afghanistan had left her panicky in crowds. Women reporters learned within days of arrival in the country that the men thronging the streets took the opportunity to grab their breasts or their rear ends, to slide their hands between their legs, before melting unseen into the masses. Whenever Lola covered anti-Western demonstrations, she found herself among a line of women journalists sliding along a street, their backs plastered to the buildings, fending off at least one angle of attack. The photographers had it worse. They had to wade into the fray, subjecting themselves to the worst sorts of manhandling, or risk verbal abuse from editors safe in their offices in their home countries, wondering why they hadn’t captured the same arresting images as their male colleagues. Now, as people brushed past Lola on Thirty’s main street, her buttocks clenched and her elbows went up. She raised a shaking hand to her face and rubbed sweat from her temple and tried to concentrate on the fact that the day was supposed to be fun.
Margaret pestered Delbert about the parade’s name. “Who’s Aunt Millie?”
“Well, now. Millie’s one of them Kendricks,” he said, as though that explained everything.
“The Kendricks have been in Thirty forever. There are about a million of them,” Pal said. Her raspy voice, when she was talking about something other than herself, rose and fell like a normal person’s. “They started the town, and the newspaper, too. You know, the Last Word. Remind me to pick up a copy today.”
