by Gwen Florio
Lola already had that particular task on her list. She couldn’t wait to see the paper, to see if Dave Sparks had written anything more about the veterans. But she didn’t want to seem too eager. She pressed Pal for more details on the parade.
“Millie Kendrick was born on the Fourth of July.” As Pal told it, when Millie was still a teenager, she took to wrapping herself in a green sheet, holding up a green-painted flashlight, and marching in the parade as Lady Liberty. It didn’t take too many years for the rest of the Kendricks to get into the act, following behind Millie with kazoos, playing all the patriotic songs they could think of. Now that Millie was getting on in years, she rode in a convertible from the local car dealership.
“She’s upped her game in the costume department, too,” Pal said. Some years back, Millie had ordered herself a new get-up from a store in Denver, with a realistic looking crown and torch, and a gown that draped flatteringly around her expanding form, and about half the town marched behind her now. People still played kazoos, but the high school band came along, too, and there was always a float or two, and the whole bunch of them ended up at the park, where Benjy’s Banjos, the band that played at the Stockman on Friday and Saturday nights, set up a makeshift stage and people had themselves a time.
It was, Lola thought, the longest speech she’d ever heard Pal make. Delbert’s eyes met Lola’s. He gave the slightest of nods, an acknowledgment that the outing was already accomplishing its purpose. A bass drum boomed. Margaret jumped up. Lola leaned forward and took firm hold of Bub’s collar. He wasn’t used to parades. The last thing she needed was for him to run beneath a passing fire truck.
Baton twirlers led the way. Of course, thought Lola. She looked again. These were no teenage girls. Two women stepped high in white tasseled boots, shiny short skirts, and skimpy tops that revealed too much of their leathery bosoms. Their sprayed-stiff spit curls were more white than blond. Creases spiderwebbed their faces. They pirouetted, bent, passed the batons through arthritic knees spread wide, shook skinny bums at the crowd, all to dutiful applause. Delbert put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Lola turned to Pal. “What the hell?”
“The Becker Babes.”
“Are they like the Kendricks?”
A high school marching band appeared, kids in red T-shirts and khaki shorts and sneakers. They raised their instruments to their lips and burst into the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Trombone slides dented the air. Margaret clapped her hands over her ears.
“Those two are all that’s left of the Beckers,” Pal said. “But what they lack in number, they make up for in—let’s call it personality.”
“What’s their deal?”
“Twins. They won some sort of twirling championship in high school, so they got to lead the parade that year. Once they got that spot, they never gave it up. Never married. Twirling is their life. You’ve got to give them credit. The Becker Babes are about as strange as they come, but those girls figured out early who they were and never strayed from it. I think those costumes are the same ones they wore in high school.”
“Looks like they’ve updated their routines,” Lola said as the sisters circled the band, shimmying, running their tongues around scarlet lips, touching fingertips to hips and jerking their hands away as though burnt. A baton landed at Margaret’s feet.
“Don’t touch that!” Lola said.
Margaret picked up the baton and handed it to a Becker babe. “Thank you, little girl,” the twirler croaked.
“Look there!” Delbert hollered.
A fire truck followed the marching band. Its siren whooped. Candy showered around them. Margaret scrambled. Bub lunged against Lola’s grip. People rose and began to applaud. Quite a frenzy for candy, Lola thought. Then she saw the cause. A contingent of veterans followed the fire truck, the World War II vets on folding chairs in the back of a flatbed truck, the Vietnam graybeards marching behind them, and finally—the obvious cause of the crowd’s adulation—veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Skiff Loughry.
“Skiff! Skiff!” People shouted, clapped, stamped their feet. Lola would have recognized him anyway, from the same square face and prominent ears she’d seen in the newspaper and yearbook photos. He marched eyes front, flushed face the only acknowledgement of the cheers. But when the veterans passed the spot where Lola and the others sat, Skiff broke ranks and veered to the curb, his shadow splashing across them.
“Pal? Private First Class Palomino Jones? Is that you?”
Lola and Delbert rose. Pal remained seated at the curb, her body twisted into itself like a question mark.
“Hey, Delbert. How you holding up? Tough deal about Mike.” Skiff grabbed Delbert’s hand, knuckles whitening as he squeezed. Delbert let his hand fall away. He seemed somehow diminished in Skiff’s presence, shoulders rounded, head angled downward. Lola wondered if that was simply because Skiff was so big, not just tall but with the blocky shoulders and taut physique of someone who’d retained his Army workouts along with the haircut. He had a snub nose and a wide generous mouth that suggested a smile even amid the military solemnity.
“Aw, Delbert. You got to pay no mind to what people say. None a them know what it was like over there. Right, Pal?”
Pal said nothing at all.
Skiff looked to Lola, awaiting an introduction. When none came, he stuck out his hand. “Skiff Loughry.”
“Lola Wicks.” She put her hand in his and braced herself. He stopped just short of cracking bone. Skiff reached for Margaret. She dodged behind Lola’s knees.
“Shy, huh? She’ll need to outgrow that. Lola, how do you know these fine people?”
“Old family friends. Just passing through. Stopped for a visit.” Lola thought she was going to have to develop a standard story for her association with Pal.
“You come on by the barbecue after the parade. It’s in the park. You’d like it. All of you. Delbert, it’s been too long. And Pal, I haven’t seen you since we got back. Time you quit being a stranger.”
Lola expected Delbert to leap at the invitation, given his concern for getting Pal out and among people. But he wagged his head, regret creasing his features. “Much appreciated, Skiff. But Margaret here, she runs down pretty quick. Afternoon is naptime.” Lola shot him a look. Delbert knew good and well Lola wasn’t bringing Margaret back to the ranch for any afternoon nap. “You give my regards to your folks.”
“Sure thing.” Skiff stepped past Lola and stood over Pal. “Invitation’s open. Anytime. We can get reacquainted. Put all that shit past us. Karma’s a bitch, huh?”
Pal jerked as though he’d slapped her. Skiff whacked Delbert between the shoulder blades, a guy’s equivalent of a hug.
“You take care, Delbert. Lola, nice to have met you. And you, too, little girl.”
Lola looked down at Margaret just in time to catch her sticking out her tongue. She never took kindly to being reminded that she was little. Skiff, already walking away, seemed not to have noticed. Lola sank back down on the sidewalk, mulling over Pal’s silent reception of Skiff, as well as Delbert’s own reticence. Aunt Millie cruised past, weighing down the back of the convertible, torch held high, loose flesh flapping from her upper arm. Margaret strained in Lola’s grasp. Another fire truck approached. Firefighters balanced on its steps, hanging on one-handed, their other hands filled with candy. Margaret escaped Lola’s arms. “Go!” said Lola, admitting defeat.
Click.
Lola turned and saw Dave Sparks, his scarecrow frame jackknifed into a crouch. He lowered a Leica. Not from the Last Word’s equipment closet, Lola was willing to bet. Dave examined the camera’s screen. “Nice mother-daughter image. Might even make it into the paper. Want me to text you a copy?” The smile that accompanied the offer was almost innocent.
Not a bad way to ask for her phone number, Lola thought even as she gave it to him. A baton bounced at his feet. Th
e sisters were working their way back along the parade route, maximizing their annual moment in the public eye. Dave picked up the baton and tossed it to one of the sisters. She blew him a kiss from withered lips. “Aw, hell,” he said. “I’ll be in a world of hurt if we don’t run a picture of the Weird Sisters.” He ran down the street after them, his long stride eating up the distance. Lola wondered if he’d said things like “world of hurt” before he landed in Wyoming.
“It’s time to go.” Delbert stood behind Lola. She clambered to her feet. People drifted away from the parade, probably heading to the barbecue at the park. She wanted to interview them before the combined effects of heat and beer took their toll. Margaret, fists full of brightly wrapped pieces of candy, planted her feet in a stance Lola knew all too well.
“No. More.”
“No more,” Lola echoed. She knew better than to expect a smile from Margaret. She didn’t get one. “You’ve had enough candy for one day. For the whole week—the month in fact.”
“Look here.” Delbert pulled his hand from his pocket. He’d collected his own hoard of candy. “Might be that I could be persuaded to share this. But only if we leave. Pal needs to go home.”
Pal still sat at the curb, bent double, arms wrapped around her head.
“Is she sick again?” Margaret asked.
“Something like that. Let’s help her to the truck. Miss Margaret, if you put that candy of yours in your pockets, maybe you can hold mine for me.” Margaret was delighted to help.
“Need a hand?” Skiff Loughry was back from wherever he’d been. “She okay?”
“Too much sun, maybe,” Lola offered when no one else spoke.
“Doubt it,” Skiff said. “We patrolled in Afghanistan when it topped a hundred in the shade, and in full packs and body armor. This girl kept right up. Sun doesn’t bother her. Nor nighttime cold. Right, Pal?”
A long shudder ran along Pal’s bent back.
“We got this,” Delbert said. “Thanks.”
Skiff stood a few moments more as Delbert took one elbow and Lola the other, not moving away until they’d started half-walking, half-carrying her toward Delbert’s truck. It was like carrying a bird, Lola thought, nothing but feathers and hollow bones, her spirit weighing heavier than all of her body parts combined.
When Lola looked back, Skiff was gone.
FIFTEEN
Margaret pulled at Lola’s hand, trying to turn them back toward the truck. “Go with them, Mommy,” she said.
“No,” said Lola. “Pal doesn’t need a lot of people hanging around her.”
Margaret squared her shoulders. She dug her feet into the dusty soil of Thirty’s block-square city park. On the far side of the park, under the shade of some cottonwoods, dozens of people gathered around smoking barbecues. Lola couldn’t see the band, but she heard the plinking of banjos. Skiff Loughry was over there somewhere and Lola aimed to find him. She tried to pick Margaret up, marveling at how a forty-pound child could turn herself into dead weight. The girl sagged in her arms, body yearning back toward the ground. Lola released her into a heap. Bub curled an upper lip, not brave enough for outright defiance, but registering clear disapproval nonetheless. “She’s sick, Mommy. She’s bad sick.” A tear leaked from Margaret’s eye.
Guilt dealt Lola a swift kick. She’d been careful, too careful, to shield Margaret to the extent possible from the realities of sickness and fear in her young life, and now—when she finally encountered them—Lola’s response was to ignore her understandable reaction. She knelt in the dirt beside her daughter and rubbed her thumb beneath each of Margaret’s eyes. A burst of laughter sounded from the partiers across the way. Lola took Margaret’s hand. Her interviews were going to have to wait.
“You’re right,” she told Margaret, over ice cream cones in a shop air-conditioned to the point of discomfort. “She is sick. But not the kind of sick like when you get a cough or a cold.”
The cone twirled in Margaret’s hand, its stacked scoops of vanilla and chocolate dwindling with each turn. Ice cream was a rare and wonderful treat for Margaret and she was making the most of it before her mother changed her mind. At their feet, Bub polished a plastic dish with equal concentration. Lola had paid for one for him, too. Guilt was costly, she thought. She wondered how to explain PTSD to a five-year-old. “Her heart is sick,” she offered.
“Like Auntie Earline’s?” Fresh tears welled in Margaret’s eyes. “Is she going to die?” One of Margaret’s babysitters had suffered a heart attack a few months earlier.
“That was different. Let me see if I can put it another way—not so much her heart, but her soul.”
Margaret’s hands sketched an outline around her head and torso, and crossed over her chest. “Soul?”
“Yes,” said Lola, “the thing that makes her who she is.”
The ice cream was gone. Margaret’s teeth crunched on cone. “Why is her soul sick?”
Where was Charlie when she needed him, Lola wondered. If she turned down Charlie’s proposal, she’d face a lifetime of answering Margaret’s tough questions on her own. She wondered if that realization was why he’d sent her off with Margaret. “Pal was a soldier,” she began. Margaret nodded. Soldiers were always coming and going on the reservation, and every tribal ceremony featured a contingent of veterans. “She had to go to war.”
“That’s when people fight,” Margaret said through a final mouthful of cone. “With guns.”
“No talking and chewing at the same time,” Lola reminded her. “But yes, war is when people fight, with guns and all sorts of other things. Sometimes people die. Soldiers see that. It can hurt their hearts. Their souls.” A memory arose. She pushed it away. Others flooded its place.
Sometimes the dead weren’t even the worst of it, Lola thought. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t noted for big body counts. But other things were just as insidious. The constant twanging threat that each new footstep could be the one that tripped a mine, that each madly beeping Toyota pickup could be the one that bore a bomb, that each new face could be that of a potential friend—or killer. And the faces themselves, gaunt with hunger and desperation and resentment. Children so relentlessly deprived of childhood that they’d turned feral, swarming around Lola and other journalists in pint-sized mobs, faces oozing with sores, fingers worming into pockets and emerging with precious photo cards, passports, rolls of rubber-banded cash, making it nearly impossible to work. One particular memory nudged hard. She shoved it away, but still more arose, a trickle turning too fast into a flood.
Lola thought of a day she’d visited a hospital, of the scrawny cats drifting like shadows past the puddles of stinking indefinable liquids on the hallway floors, of the babies who lay gray and motionless three to a crib. A doctor lifted a little girl’s gown to reveal ribs that threatened to slice through her papery skin. “Starvation,” he said. “She’ll be dead by morning.” Lola stumbled retching from the building. That night her colleagues, singly and in pairs, tapped at the door of her darkened hotel room, where she lay curled in her sleeping bag atop the narrow pallet. “Are you all right?” they called through the flimsy plywood panel. “Can we get you anything?” Refusing her the dignity of pretending nothing had happened. At least, by the time the worst thing occurred, they’d learned to let her be.
“Really,” she assured Margaret now, “she’ll want to be left alone. And when we see her tomorrow morning, we’re to act like we always do.”
Margaret’s smile was sly. “You mean hungry?”
Lola laughed at the way her daughter’s humor so reliably vanquished the ghosts. “I love you, baby girl,” she said. Bub, reassured by the change in atmosphere, lifted his head from the ice cream bowl and wagged his tail in approval.
By the time they made their way back to the park, darkness softened the day’s hard edges. The crowd had multiplied. The mingled scents of smoke and beer and charred meat hung in the
air. A man in a sauce-spattered apron pressed what appeared to be a quart-sized plastic cup into her hand and directed her to a line in front of a keg of beer. “Lemonade for the little ones is over there.” He jerked his head toward a picnic table beside a small play area. Children and dogs swarmed around it, not a parent in sight. Margaret looked a question at Lola. She surveyed the crowd, located Skiff within the playground’s sight lines, and nodded permission to Margaret, who ran without a backward glance, Bub at her heels. Lola directed a foaming stream of beer into her cup. A woman with a brew was a lot less off-putting than a reporter with a notebook. Some of the people she approached even offered to hold her beer when it came time for the notebook to emerge. They said all the predictable things. Cody Dillon’s suicide—such a shock. His poor father. And then, those boys getting in trouble barely two steps off the plane. You just knew it had something to do with the terrible things they’d seen.
In any other place, Lola thought, this would be the part where people questioned the wisdom of a far-away war that took their healthy children and returned them broken in body and spirit. But this was the rural West, with its staunch and unquestioning patriotism. She mm-hmmed and took notes and thanked people for sharing their thoughts and for holding her beer. “Where can I read this story of yours?” an elderly man asked.
“Online,” Lola said. “A website called InDepth.org. People all over the country can read it. All over the world.”
“Maybe they can read it all over the world, but I can’t read it in Thirty. I don’t have a computer.”
“Give me your address and I’ll print it out and send it to you,” Lola said. She probably would never see this man again in her life. Then again, she might. At which time, the small courtesy of having sent him the story would pay big dividends. “I don’t know when it’s coming out,” she said, as he wrapped an arthritic hand around her pen and printed his name and address in crooked block letters in her notebook.
