by Gwen Florio
“Charlie?”
Lola pressed her cellphone tight against her cheek, wishing that, for all her ambivalence about marrying the man, she were in his arms instead of being separated by nearly six hundred miles. Charlie’s most compelling appeal was his quiet, uncompromising strength, which was also the quality that left her most wary. When a potential threat—which was how she was starting to see Pal—presented itself, Charlie could be counted on to handle it effectively, without fanfare. But this time, Lola had brought the threat, if there was one, upon herself. And not just herself, but Margaret. Charlie had little patience with Lola’s tendency to get herself in trouble, and Lola knew that if he thought the trouble might involve his daughter, he’d break speed limits all the way through Montana and Wyoming to get to Margaret. Lola lectured herself to play it cool in their conversation. But apparently she’d already given herself away in the single word she’d uttered.
“Lola. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Why do you think something’s wrong? All I did was say your name. For heaven’s sake, Charlie.” She kicked herself, a real physical kick, left heel to right shin, reminding herself too late not to blather, a sure sign of guilt.
“It’s in your voice. And you didn’t answer any of my messages last night. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Honestly. It’s just—” The last few days caught up with her, the terrifying truck chase, the watery dalliance with Dave, the revelations about Pal, and all along, Pal’s lies and avoidance. Lola turned her head and faked a sneeze and held her face to the hot wind, hoping it would dry her tears. She sneezed again, a real one this time. “This place is giving me allergies. So much dust.”
Silence. Charlie knew better than to talk when someone was doing a fine job indicting herself.
Lola pasted a smile onto her face, hoping it would carry through in her voice. “How are you? How are things going with the new deputy?” It didn’t work.
“Where were you yesterday? Why you didn’t answer your phone?”
“It ran down. I misplaced my charger.” A fine and believable excuse. Lola was always losing things. She was on her fifth phone charger.
“What about the car charger?”
Damn. Because Lola lost her charger so frequently, she kept a backup in the truck. “I didn’t go anywhere yesterday. It seemed silly to run the truck just to charge the phone. Anyway, nothing much happened yesterday. I figured we’d just wait to talk to you today.” Her voice was stronger now, skipping blithely from one lie to the next.
“Speaking of we, put Margaret on.”
Lola waved to Margaret and held up the phone.
“Daddy!” Margaret charged toward her, Bub and Jemalina twin clouds of dust in her wake. Lola sidestepped Jemalina’s beak and handed the phone to Margaret.
“Daddy, I miss you.”
Charlie spoke for a long time. Margaret’s face brightened by degrees. “We are having fun, Daddy. Mommy lets me have ice cream here. And I have a chicken! Can I bring her home with me?” Margaret, no fool, didn’t give him a chance to answer the question. “And yesterday we went swimming! Me and Mommy and her friend, Dave.”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Lola didn’t even have time to think of a good story before the phone landed back in her hand. She waited for Charlie to speak. He didn’t. She waited some more. Gave up. “Dave’s a reporter at the paper here. I’m, ah, sort of helping him out with a story.”
“A story about swimming?”
Shit.
Lola’s laugh was so weak as to barely qualify. “No, he told us about a swimming hole. He thought Margaret might like it. Then he offered to show it to us.”
“Showed it to you yesterday? When you said you didn’t go anywhere? And you’re helping him out with a story?”
The question about a story was, Lola thought, a marginal improvement only in that it got them away from the topic of the swimming hole.
“Yeah.” She’d gone monosyllabic way too late. Charlie’s questions came so fast that she might as well have been sitting in the dingy interview room in the sheriff’s office, with its foul carpet, gray-painted cinder-block walls and tiny opaque one-way window through which an unseen video camera peered.
“What kind of help? What story? How’d you meet up with a reporter, anyway? Something tells me you went looking, right? So whose story is it, anyway? His? Or yours? It’s yours, isn’t it? Which means you’re working on your alleged furlough. Are you trying to get yourself fired? How do you plan to sell a Wyoming story to the Daily Express, anyway? Or is it even a story for the Express? Is that how you’re getting around this? Freelancing? And what about Margaret? This is supposed to be a vacation for her, real mother-daughter time, isn’t it? What sort of quality time is she getting if you’re working? Goddammit, Lola.” He’d asked all his other questions in the low monotone he’d perfected during his just-shy-of-a decade in law enforcement, but his voice broke on the final one. “Do I need to withdraw my question?”
Lola didn’t have to ask which question. He meant his proposal. This time, the silence was hers. She’d resented his ultimatum. Now, she found out she didn’t like having the option of marriage yanked away, either. He’d let her hear his anger. She fired back with a dose of her down frustration. “Dammit yourself, Charlie. Why couldn’t we just go on the way we were?”
Charlie’s words escaped on a long breath. “No matter what happens, we can never go back to the way things were.”
TWENTY-THREE
Lola waited until she was sure Margaret was asleep, breathing slow and easy beside her as the dog panted on the other side. She lay sandwiched and sweaty between them, wishing for her bed at home with Charlie’s bulk curved protectively around her.
He and Margaret were prodigious sleepers, their slumber deep and impervious to interruption, a thing of wonder to Lola. At home, she’d lay awake for hour after restless hour, turning her head occasionally against Charlie’s chest, inhaling his reassuring scent. Now, if she turned her head one way, she breathed in the cloying sweetness of candy—Margaret must have squirreled away her parade stash somewhere—while the other led to a mouthful of dog hair. She spit it out and checked the time on her phone. Two a.m. She tried to ease from the narrow bed without waking either of her companions. Margaret didn’t move, not so much as blinking when Lola snapped on the light. Bub stood yawning but game in the unexpected overhead glare. Lola shook the kinks out of her arms and legs. “Go back to sleep, buddy. I’m just going to get some work done.” She thought she might as well take advantage of being away from home. Charlie never woke during her occasional midnight forays into another room, where she’d tap furtively at her laptop until dawn, sneaking back into bed just before the alarm went off at five-thirty. But no matter how she tried to cover her tracks, he’d always find her out, prompting a lecture on the dangers of workaholism.
“How’d you know?” she’d say when he rolled his eyes in response to her standard denial. He’d point out the telltale ring of a coffee cup on an end table, the wadded up printouts in the trash can, a stack of inadequately concealed three-by-five cards tucked beneath a magazine. Lola, who used the cards to organize elements of her longer stories, wished she had them now. Instead, she tore pages from her reporter’s notebook and labeled them in the abbreviated references she’d developed over the years. The first page: “Skiff, A’stan.” It was all she needed, a signal to herself that the story would start with Skiff stumbling over the body on the rocky path, struggling to make sense of what had just happened, unable to stop Mike’s quick scuffle, the slide of knife across tender flesh, the whoosh and gurgle of an escaping last breath. She lay the paper on the floor and selected a new page.
“Statistics, blah-blah-blah.” The story’s second section would feature the standard pull-back from the drama, putting it in context. How many U.S. troops had gone to Afghanistan since the beginning of the war; how many were
there now, and how many of those were from Wyoming. How, statistically, Wyoming contributed more than its share of cannon fodder. Lola supposed that these days the more correct term would be IED fodder. She’d add a quick reminder for readers that without a military draft, kids from inner cities and rural areas comprised the bulk of recruits, and why. And, finally, the fact that tiny Thirty was off the charts when it came to the price paid for such default patriotism. She lay that sheet beside the first, and tore off another.
“Skiff, et al.” It was crucial to get out of the statistics as quickly as possible and back to people, with some history about Skiff and his friends, along with a quick portrait of Thirty and the hard life choices it demanded. She’d throw in a few extra paragraphs about the reservation to bring Mike into the story. Maybe the principal had had his doubts about Mike’s inclusion in so many of the white school’s activities, but given the recruitment photo of everyone smiling together, the others seemed to have had no such qualms. She’d lead the reader into thinking, as Mike must have, that everything among them was hunky-dory. She lay the paper down beside the others. When she was done, she’d have a long line of papers, a visual aid that she’d shuffle according to which elements needed to be moved up, which revised, and which discarded altogether.
Next up, “PTSD,” a section that would ground the reader in its complications. She wondered whether to introduce the topic so quickly, then realized that in her rudimentary outline, she had yet to mention Cody Dillon’s suicide, or T-Squared’s legal issues—the whole reason for doing the story. “For God’s sake,” she said. A week away from the job, and she was already losing her edge. Bub opened an eye and rolled onto his back, the stump of his missing leg tucked against his belly. She retrieved the second piece of paper, the one labeled “Statistics” and jotted a note to lead into the section with the riveting numbers from Thirty. She even penned some sample sentences: “Mike St. Clair, a Shoshone youth from the nearby Wind River Reservation, was the first to die, throat slashed nearly to the point of decapitation by an Afghani insurgent. Ranch kid Cody Dillon was next, dead by his own hand at the homecoming ceremony three months later. Within forty-eight hours, two more of the Wyoming soldiers there that night would find themselves in jail. They were among”—here, she left a series of dashes, awaiting the number to be filled in later—“U.S. troops to serve in Afghanistan this year … ” There. That was better.
She checked the time again. An hour had passed. For sure, it had been more productive than the times at home when she heeded Charlie’s admonishments and remained beside him in bed, occasionally using her phone to email herself thoughts about how to organize the story she’d write later that day. She turned back to her work and tried to close her mind to the memories of those languorous nights with Charlie. But it was harder to push away the inescapable realization that, given their most recent conversation, such times might be over.
Lola’s phone woke her, buzzing with an email alert. The bed was empty. She picked up the phone. Her eyes were too unfocused to read the small-print email, but the time, in tall numbers, was clear. Eighty-thirty. Somehow she’d slept through breakfast. Pal must have fed Margaret, whose hunger during her waking hours was as focused as her nighttime sleep.
Lola stumbled into a kitchen empty but for some dishes in the sink and two flats of strawberries occupying most of the counter space. She decided not to look too closely at the dishes, for fear of seeing remnants of ravioli. She poured the inch of suspicious liquid left in the coffee pot into a mug and studied the strawberries. Each flat held a dozen pints. During the brief weeks when strawberries made their way to supermarkets in Montana, Charlie occasionally would pick some up to slice over their cereal. A pint lasted a few days. Lola reckoned there were weeks’ worth of strawberries in the flats. Maybe Pal planned to freeze them. Apparently Margaret wasn’t the only one in the house with a sweet tooth. Lola ate a strawberry and ventured out onto the porch. The sun, already up for hours, had heated the floorboards beyond barefoot comfort. Lola moved into the shady corner Margaret had claimed as her own.
“Morning, sleepy Mommy,” Margaret said without looking up. She wielded pen and paper with fingertips stained red. Even if she’d had ravioli for breakfast, at least she’d balanced it out with some fresh fruit, Lola thought. Color flashed at the corner of Lola’s vision. She lifted her gaze. Pal jogged along the ridgeline, running within sight of the house. Lola waved, letting Pal know she was on duty. Pal disappeared over the ridge without an answering wave. Lola cast a wary eye about for the chicken, then bent and planted a kiss on Margaret’s head.
Margaret pulled away. “You’re messing up my story.” She held up a skinny sheet from one of Lola’s reporter’s notebooks, adorned with hieroglyphics.
“That’s nice, honey,” Lola said, her standard response to Margaret’s incomprehensible doodles. She took a sip of the coffee, lukewarm and grainy with sediment, but providing the necessary shot of wakefulness that reminded her to look at her phone. A moment later, she clenched her hand against the urge to hurl it in to the yard. Only the likelihood that she’d have to fish around beneath the rattlesnake-infested sagebrush, while the chicken emerged from its hiding place to ice-pick its beak into her bare ankles, saved it from her rage. She turned on her heel, stalked into the kitchen, smacked the phone facedown on the counter and counted through five long breaths, turning her head against the cloying scent of strawberries. She turned the phone over and looked again at her email. Maybe she’d been mistaken. But no, there it was, the note from the Department of Defense informing her in convoluted governmentese that nonetheless conveyed a clear message: that the investigation into Mike’s death remained classified information and as such was not subject to public scrutiny. Which meant that she did not have a description of the night’s incident on the record. The repercussion escaped aloud—“No goddamn story.” She glanced around to make sure Margaret had not followed her into the kitchen, and made a vow. “No goddamn way.”
She’d get the story, even though it meant confronting the single remaining, and most determinedly elusive, witness: Pal. Who, as though summoned by Lola’s very thoughts, reappeared on the ridgeline, a moving stick figure silhouetted by the sun. Lola stepped back into the kitchen and waited out of sight beside of the door. She heard Pal before she saw her, a pounding approach slowing to a reluctant walk, breath still ragged as she neared the porch. “Hey, kiddo,” Pal said to Margaret. “Where’s that killer chicken?”
“Over there. I think she’s made a nest under the bushes.” Good, Lola thought. Maybe the snakes would eat Jemalina’s eggs and, while they were at it, chomp on the chicken, too. A single venomous bite should do the trick.
“What have you got there?”
“I’m drawing a story,” Margaret said. “About a sweet chicken named Jemalina.”
Pal produced the dry sound that passed as a laugh. “So you’re a fiction writer.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Can I see?” Lola heard the rustle of paper. “Hey, I didn’t know you could write already.”
“I can’t,” Margaret said, but Pal spoke over her. “Wait a minute. ‘Skiff? A’stan’—I guess that means Afghanistan. What the hell? What is this? Lola!” She burst into the kitchen, incriminating paper in hand, Margaret’s scribbles on one side, Lola’s note on the other. Margaret followed close behind. “My story!”
“Your story, my ass. Your mother’s, more like. Lola, what’s this about?”
Lola backed up all the way to the counter and popped a whole strawberry into her mouth, giving herself a few seconds to come up with an explanation. She’d left her outline arranged on the bedroom floor. Margaret must have claimed one of the papers as her own. Lola spit the berry’s leafy cap into her hand. “You wouldn’t talk to me about Afghanistan. I thought Skiff might. It’s been five years since I lived there. I wanted to see what it’s like now, how things have changed.” True enough. “So I wrote mysel
f a reminder.”
“You had to write yourself a note just to talk to somebody?”
“It was just a thought. Sometimes I write my thoughts down.” Lola was deep in the weeds. She decided to see it as an opportunity. “I’d much rather talk to you about it.”
“Hell will freeze over before I talk to anyone about that godforsaken place!” The veins in Pal’s skull mapped blue lines beneath the blond furze covering her skull. They kinked and throbbed when Pal shouted. Lola looked away. When she looked back, Pal was gone.
TWENTY-FOUR
Dinner that night was as chilly as the array of cold cuts, cheese, and sliced peppers and tomatoes Lola had laid out. “It’s too hot to cook,” she said by way of explanation. Not that anyone demanded one. Her words dropped like stones into a black pool of silence. Ripples of bad feeling flowed to the edges of the room.
Delbert shoveled meat and whole tomato slices into his mouth as if to get that much closer to the point where he could leave. Pal didn’t even bother with the pretense of pushing food around, glaring at it as though it had somehow given offense. Margaret was so obviously worried about the adults’ bad mood that she forgot to “accidentally” select some pieces of forbidden cheese. Bub whined, padding back and forth across the room, finally stopping beside Pal’s chair and resting his head on her thigh. Lola caught his eye. Traitor, she said wordlessly. He looked away.
Lola supposed it was just as well Pal opted for the silent treatment, given that the alternative might be some anatomically impossible suggestions about what Lola might do with any further questions about Afghanistan. She was going to have to pose those questions to somebody, though. She could appeal the DOD’s denial, only to get turned down again months later—if she heard from them again at all. After two tries and two rebuffs, Tommy and Tyson were unlikely to be persuaded to go on the record, and Dave had made it clear he wasn’t going to help. She tried to imagine a telephone call in which she’d tell InDepth.org that her story had fallen through. She’d have blown her first and almost certainly her last chance to write for one of the few organizations that paid freelancers real money for serious pieces. It was time to talk again with Skiff Loughry, at this point the single fraying thread upon which her story hung. She’d called him, seeking one last interview. “General stuff,” she said. “Just to help me nail down some details.” He’d agreed to meet her the next morning. Lola tried to take that as a hopeful sign. “Hope,” at this point, being a word fast disappearing from her vocabulary.
