by Gwen Florio
“Aren’t you the busy one?” Skiff materialized beside her. “I heard a reporter was working the crowd. Didn’t know it was Delbert and Pal’s ‘old friend.’” He rolled his eyes at the phrase. So much for thinking he’d bought her explanation. “You must be hungry.” He handed her a paper plate with a hamburger fat with fixings and led her to a picnic table. Lola took a bite and tried not to think of her own disastrous attempts at this most simple fare. Skiff sat across from her.
“How do you really know Pal?”
Lola shrugged and chewed.
“How well do you know her?”
Lola put her burger down. She retrieved her beer and took a sip.
A grin split his square face, letting her know he was on to her, and that he didn’t mind. “Fair enough,” he said. “But I take it you don’t know her well. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be hanging around with her.”
Bingo. Lola swallowed. “And why is that?”
A shriek came from the play area. Lola ascertained it was one of happiness—Bub expertly herded a group of kids, Margaret among them, circling them in ever-tightening arcs, forcing them into a bunch—and turned back to Skiff.
“She’s trouble,” he said. “She was trouble in school, and she was trouble in Afghanistan.”
“I heard what happened to Mike,” Lola said. “But what about Pal?”
It was hard to see his expression in the fading light. “Mike,” he said. “Now that’s a tragedy.”
Tragedy. It was the same word that Dave Sparks had used. “How so?”
“You must have heard how he died. Even if you’re not from here, you only have to spend about two minutes in town. People are still talking about it.”
Lola feigned ignorance and thus was treated to a second recitation of the story Dave had told—a patrol out too late, the broken-down vehicle, Mike standing sentry as they napped while awaiting a replacement, the shepherd happening upon the group, taking full advantage. “Well,” said Skiff. “Not full. If he had, we’d all be dead. Instead we got lucky.”
Lola noticed that he left out his own part in it, the part the principal had told her, how Skiff himself had killed the shepherd, saving his companions. She prodded him. “Lucky how?”
“We shot him,” he said. “It had to be done.”
We. Sharing the credit. The more Skiff talked, the more Lola liked him. “How come there wasn’t anything in the paper?” she asked
before remembering, too late, that the only way she could have known what was in the paper was by searching it out. Nothing flickered in Skiff’s earnest gaze, no spark of realization, no jerk of suspicion.
He gestured toward the people a few yards away. “Everybody already knows about it.”
It could have been a gathering in Magpie, Lola thought, the old folks at the picnic tables, the younger guys at the keg, toting beer back to their wives and girlfriends, the moms in a cluster, knocking back more beer than they should, so grateful were they for a respite from one-on-one child-rearing. Not a brown face in the crowd, Lola noted. That, too, was like Magpie. The Indians would be observing the day on the reservation, holding their own ceremony at the cemetery, leaving oranges at the graves, making sure the departed had good things to eat in the spirit world. There was no one for Skiff to point to when he evoked Delbert, again echoing Dave Sparks’s words.
“Can you imagine how it would affect Delbert, the whole tribe, to have that out there in print? Best just to let it lie.”
Lola’s beer tasted flat. “But everyone knows, anyway. Isn’t the truth always better? It’s messy, but so is war. I don’t know that there’s even that much shame to it. An Afghan summer, all that gear. All of you must have been exhausted. It could have been any one of you. Me, I think it humanizes the situation, lets people know what things are really like over there. Gives them something to think about next time they go to vote.” Lola wished she’d held back those last words. She hurried on. “Especially given what happened to that other soldier. The one who killed himself. That has to have hit people hard, too.”
Skiff’s expression darkened, more in sorrow than in anger, Lola decided, no heat coming off him. “All the more reason,” he said, “to just let it go. People have been through enough. Want another beer?”
Lola shook her head. He wasn’t going to say anymore about the suicide. Maybe he could shed light on something else that bothered her. “Why’d you let Mike out of the vehicle? You all couldn’t have stayed awake until the replacement got to you? Everybody knows Afghanistan at night makes Afghanistan by day look like a picnic.”
His voice was soft as the fading light around them. “What do you know about that?”
Answering a question with a question. Lola lost patience. “It’s time for us to go,” she said. “Margaret’s got to be exhausted. She’ll probably sleep all the way back to the ranch, and then I won’t be able to get her to bed.” Let him find out on his own that she’d done time in Afghanistan, too.
“You can’t go,” he said. “Look around.”
People were packing up leftover food into their coolers, dousing the coals in the barbecue grills, and moving to the center of the park, spreading blankets on the ground. “The fireworks are about to start. Come on. You can sit with me.” He led them through a patchwork quilt of overlapping blankets crowded with generations of families, from oldsters nodding off in lawn chairs to babies likewise asleep—at least for the moment—in bouncy seats. Lola didn’t see an obvious space, but people made one when they saw Skiff. A man leaned forward to pat him on the shoulder as they settled onto an itchy green Army blanket of a vintage probably dating to Skiff’s grandfather. “Helluva job over there, son,” the man said. “Thanks for bringing them back.” The man’s grin faded as he remembered the obvious. Not everyone had made it back. And among those who had, one never made it home.
“Thanks, sir,” Skiff said, giving cover to the man’s embarrassment. “That’s real nice of you. But I was just doing my job. You’re going to like these fireworks,” he said to Lola, as a way to end his conversation with the well-wisher. Bub flopped down with a theatrically superior yawn. Most dogs hated fireworks, ranking them right up there with thunderstorms. Lola had friends who fed their dogs Valium on the Fourth. But Bub was impervious. The first time Lola had taken him to Magpie’s July Fourth celebration, he’d fallen asleep. She said as much to Skiff.
“These are different. Not your usual run-of-the-mill small-town stuff. Guy who does them is some kind of expert. He lives here, but goes all over the country doing fireworks displays. He’s even been to China to study fireworks. Brace yourself. Miss Margaret, don’t you be scared. They’re really loud, but they’re like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
And they were. The fireworks lit up the sky with a mighty blast, daylight above, all black dark and shaking earth below. The crowd’s cheers drowned Lola’s scream. She bit her lip, but her fear leaked free in a long moan, much like the sound she’d made that day in Kabul when she’d been standing in the security line outside a government office, lingering to chat with another reporter one minute, and found herself flat on the ground the next, knocked senseless by the same sort of explosions surrounding her now. Or, at least they felt the same. Lola caught a glimpse of Margaret’s rapt expression before she closed her eyes. The memory she’d resisted all day, one that had taken her years to suppress, hit her full force—the way the world had gone silent after the blast, the way her feet and legs moved like deadweights as she staggered toward the building where her fixer had gone on ahead of her. The way she’d shoved past the guards so preoccupied with holding back screaming family members that they’d ignored her. And, finally, the unforgettable thing, the bloodied bits of clothing and flesh, the round object a few feet farther, the thing that could have been a broken melon, a squashed soccer ball, but for the fact that it bore recognizable remains of a face. Which signaled the second unforgettable thing. On
e of the bits of trivia floating around in Lola’s head, information useless in the real world but crucial in war zones, was the fact that a suicide attack often decapitated the bomber as the blast detonated upward. The realization that had sent Lola to her knees in the scarlet-spattered dust informed her that one of the few people she’d considered a true friend in Kabul had actually been her enemy. The ground shook again. “Christ!” Lola shouted into the din. “Make it stop.”
“Hey. Hey.” Skiff’s arm was around her, his face close. “What’s up?”
“I was there,” she blurted. “Kabul. I was there.” It was all she could manage.
His eye went knowing. “Got it,” he said. “We’re outta here. Hey, Margaret. We’re going to make some room for other people. How ’bout you let me carry you? That’ll make it quicker. Lola, where’s your outfit parked?” Once again, the crowd parted at the sight of Skiff. He wrapped his free hand around Lola’s wrist and guided her with a firm, reassuring touch, not releasing her until they stood beside the pickup. Wonderment still rained from the sky, but this far away, Lola could no longer feel the blasts rising up through the ground. She drew a quavering breath. “Thank you,” she said.
“When?” he asked. They were on common ground now, speaking in a sort of code, the surface shorthand that disguised the roiling emotions below. The subtext: I know.
“Six years ago,” she said. “I’ve been back a lot longer than you, and this shit still gets to me.” She tried to smile. His look told her she didn’t need to.
“You weren’t in the military.”
“Journalist.”
“Embedded?”
“No.”
His eyebrows went up. “Tough on a woman.”
“Sometimes.” All the time, she thought.
“You okay to drive?”
“Sure.” She forced herself to meet his gaze, to hold it. Steadied her voice. “Really. Thank you. For everything.”
He helped hoist Margaret into her booster seat, leaving it to Lola to fasten the belt tight. “If you ever want to talk sometime—”
“No!” she said. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”
He laughed in acknowledgment of the constant admonishments, from the VA on his part, human resources departments on hers, that counseling was in order for anyone returning from a war zone. “Hell, no!” he threw back at her. “Excuse the language, but fuck that woo-woo shit.”
“Damn straight,” she said. She’d spent years not talking about it. She wasn’t about to start. She climbed into the truck and rolled down the window. The memory slithered back to the dark crevice within her heart where it usually slumbered undisturbed. A fresh burst of fireworks lit up the sky, the kind that showered soft twinkling white lights that dissolved over the heads of the crowd. “They really are pretty,” she said.
He slapped the side of the truck and stepped back. She gave it some gas. It wasn’t until they were headed home she realized that, even though she’d let him get away with deflecting every single important question she’d asked him about Cody Dillon and Mike St. Clair, she’d neglected to press him on the most intriguing thing. Everyone to whom she’d mentioned Pal’s name had reacted with revulsion. Skiff, on the other hand, had seemed happy to see Pal, even inviting her to the barbecue where no doubt they’d run into some of those others who so despised her. But then he’d warned her that Pal was trouble.
There would be, she vowed, more conversations with Skiff Loughry.
SIXTEEN
Margaret in fact did not sleep all the way back to the ranch. Lola wondered if maybe she’d sneaked some Coke or 7-Up, or possibly shared a cupcake, something sugary that on top of the candy and ice cream left Margaret wide-eyed and alert despite an afternoon romping with kids and dogs in the merciless heat. She tried a few discreet questions, only to have Margaret respond by getting directly to the point. “Mommy. You know I don’t eat bad food unless you let me.”
“Right.” It was hardly a direct denial. Lola thought of all the times Margaret had hovered at the edges of her interviews, and wondered what sort of evasive skills she might have acquired. She trained her eyes on the long, empty road ahead. Low light still outlined the peaks to the west, and rendered eerie the rocky upthrusts from the valley floor. The day’s heat fled before the darkness. The wind sliding past the open window took on an edge. Lola raised the window and tightened her hands on the wheel, glancing right and left. It was the hour when deer and pronghorns became suicidal, sauntering down to the roadside, seeking the day’s warmth leaking from the blacktop. Lola suspected that somewhere in the dim recesses of their walnut-size brains, they took mute enjoyment in the startled faces within the vehicles that swerved hard when they caught sight of the deer, tires occasionally hooking the soft shoulder, cars flipping and bouncing away through the sagebrush. Intentional or not, it was a dangerous business. Lola occasionally occupied the empty miles by counting the corpses of deer. She couldn’t recall seeing a flattened pronghorn. The antelope were usually too agile to lose the game, vanishing with a last-minute pirouette and a mocking flash of white rump.
“Mommy.”
Lola scanned the roadside again. “Potty time?”
“No. Mommy.”
Bub yawned and stretched and stood up on the seat beside Lola. He turned toward Margaret, then hopped into the jump seat beside her. His tail stretched back past Lola, stiff, quivering. Something had caught his attention. “Mommy. Look.”
Again, Lola looked left, right. She didn’t see any deer. “What, honey? Nothing’s out there.”
“Behind us.” Margaret’s voice caught. Bub growled.
Lola glanced in the rearview mirror and slammed her foot against the accelerator. Margaret cried out. Bub listed to one side, toenails scrabbling for purchase.
The truck came up fast behind them, traveling with only its running lights, inches from the pickup’s rear bumper. Lola goosed the pickup. The speedometer crept past ninety. “Some idiot on a cellphone probably. Bet he doesn’t even see me.” She tapped the horn, trying to get the attention of the driver behind her. “Hey, idiot. Hang up and pay attention. And turn on your lights.”
The truck fell back just short of contact. Lola sighed and let her foot drift upward. “That was scary. Thanks, Margaret.”
The truck behind them—something silvery, it was getting too dark for Lola to make out the exact color or model—pulled into the passing lane. “Better yet,” she said. “It’s going to go around us. Then we won’t have to worry about it anymore.” She wished she’d left the fireworks sooner. In Magpie, she’d learned to leave such events early, wary of back roads full of folks who’d spent the evening partying in town. Drunk drivers claimed an unconscionable number of lives. Charlie pulled them over when he could, but the savvier ones knew to refuse the Breathalyzer and hired the lawyers who got the charges dropped, then continued their boozy ways, gaming the system time after time until the night their luck—or, more likely, the luck of the unfortunates they hit head-on—ran out and they finally ended up behind bars on a vehicular homicide charge. For a little while, at least. Judges were only slowly coming around to the concept that a person was just as dead after getting hit by a drunk as if he’d been shot.
“Mommy!” Margaret shrieked. Bub flung himself across her in a crescendo of barking. The truck was beside them and then it was in their lane. Lola stomped the brake, and braced herself against the jolt when the truck’s rear bumper clipped the front of her pickup as it slipped past. She caught a glimpse of a man with a ball cap angled low over his eyes, a license plate with Wyoming’s bucking bronco, Steamboat.
“Goddammit!” she yelled, as though anything could be heard through closed windows, the roar of challenged engines, and Bub’s racket. “I’ve got a child in here.” Bub increased the volume, something she wouldn’t have thought possible. “And a dog, too.” She let the pickup coast to a crawl. The farther ahead of
them the truck got, the better. “Everybody okay?”
Bub regained balance on his three legs. Margaret met her mother’s gaze in the mirror and nodded, eyes stark and staring. The truck was nothing but taillights in the distance, too far away for Lola to catch the license number. She reached for her cell phone anyway, thinking to call 9-1-1. She could at least describe it—a little—and let dispatchers know when it happened. Even before she saw the phone’s “no service” message, she knew it was an exercise in futility. Lacking a license number, it was hopeless. Charlie always fumed about such emergency calls, especially if they came from locals, who—as opposed to the tourists—knew full well Charlie was likely to be at the far end of the county, as much as fifty miles away from whatever mishap someone was trying to report. The ugly downside of law enforcement in the remote reaches of the West was that people were mostly on their own.
“Suppose,” Charlie said to Lola one night, “Old Man Baggs starts beating on his wife. Again.” Lola’s mouth twisted downward. The Baggses’ domestic issues were an open secret. She’d heard there was a pool among the regulars at Nell’s Café as to when Lorene Baggs would finally turn up dead by her husband’s hand. “Only this time,” Charlie continued, “he takes it up a notch, gets his gun out, waves it around, holds it to her head, that sort of thing.”
“Hasn’t he already done that?”
Charlie thought a moment. “You’re right. I’m getting the Baggses mixed up with the Howards. But, anyway, suppose whatever Old Man Baggs does this time, Lorene’s lucky enough to sneak away, maybe says she’s got to pee, calls me on her cell from the bathroom, saying this time looks like he’s gonna make good on all those threats to kill her. But maybe they live out by Annie’s Tit, and it’s just rained and their road has gone to gumbo, so even after I’ve driven a half-hour at a hundred miles per, then I’ve got to hike in the last mile. I told Mrs. Baggs to get her own damn gun and learn how to use it. Which, if she ever does, there’s still somebody dead, and it’ll be the wrong damn person on trial.” By the time he was done talking, his face was gray. He’d only been sheriff for a few years, but he’d already dealt with too many actual cases like the hypothetical one he’d just outlined. City amenities such as counselors and support groups and shelters for the likes of Lorene Baggs and Jeannie Howard were unknown in their part of the world.
