by Gwen Florio
“Roughin’ it in the Stan.” The crew lounging in lawn chairs back at the base, throwing approximations of what people in Wyoming believed to be gang signs.
Lola remembered her own early days in Afghanistan, the seductive lull granted a newbie, cruising through the streets of Kabul with her driver and Ahmed, learning the lay of the land, snapping feature photos of the winsome children, the azure blurs that represented women hurrying past in burqas, and the magnificent wreck of the old king’s palace, its soaring domes reduced by shelling to ribby metal struts. Easy days. Tourist days, she’d later think disdainfully, days before the real work began.
Mike apparently encountered real work about a month in. “Firefight today 2 dead.” Lucky guy, Lola thought, that the first casualties his unit experienced came in a firefight, nice clean bullet wounds, nothing like what inevitably awaited. The inevitable arrived all too soon, as Mike noted in a text two weeks later.
“IED. Guy’s legs gone. Fuck.”
“Which ones you looking at?”
Lola jumped at the sound of Patrick’s voice. She’d been so immersed in Mike’s account she’d forgotten he was there. She held the phone before his face so he could see. He lisped through the gap in his teeth. “Fuck those. Go to the last ones.”
Lola looked toward the love seat. Mike’s mother slumbered on with Margaret—the child who’d recently declared herself too old for naps—tucked in beside her, her breathing rhythmic and peaceful, no doubt worn out from her tantrum. Bub sat beside the love seat on full alert, ears up, eyes intent. Lola imagined the same trembling intensity in Patrick’s mother when she watched over her son. No wonder she was so exhausted. Lola scrolled back up through the texts until she reached the final few.
“Here we go with the NDN shit again,” read one. “U know the drill.” NDN being shorthand for Indian, Lola knew. And, “Dude they all on her like dogs. Tryin’ to hold ’em back.”
“What the hell does that mean?” said Lola.
“Shit.” Patrick turned it into two long syllables. “What do you think? Giving him grief about being Indian. And pissed off Pal wouldn’t give it up.”
“Give what up?” Even though she knew, her stomach already turning.
“What do you think? Them boys wanted some snatch.”
“But.” Lola heard the stupidity of her words as soon as they slipped from her mouth. “They were his friends. And hers.”
“Bet that’s what they told her, too. Probably said she owed it to them. Friends with benefits.”
Lola could see it. Pal and Mike, hanging on each other back at the base. The weeks sliding by in long stretches of boredom and increments of blind terror. Everybody young and healthy and horny, looking for release from the boredom, and comfort from the fear. Mike had gotten his. Why shouldn’t they get theirs? She said as much to Patrick. “Was that what was going on? Share and share alike?”
“What are you talking about? Mike didn’t have anything to share. He was as hard up as the rest of ’em. Guess you didn’t read all his texts.”
Lola was just as glad she hadn’t. What she knew about the young male mind was bad enough. She didn’t need her worst suspicions confirmed. But her mind snagged on one thing Patrick had said. “I thought she and Mike—”
His chest rattled with that awful wet cough. He pushed himself up on his good elbow before Lola could help him. She snagged a tissue from a box on the nightstand and handed it to him. He held it to his mouth and let it fall when the coughing stopped. The floor beside the bed was a snowfield of crumpled tissues. He lay back and drew a ragged breath. “Everybody thought that. Because no way an Indian boy and whitegirl can just be friends, right? But that was the deal. They grew up together. Brother and sister, more like.”
Lola puzzled awhile. So—at least according to Mike—the other guys harassed Pal. Mike was trying to fend them off. Which jibed not one bit with what Skiff and T-squared had told her. “I got the feeling those other guys didn’t much like Pal,” she ventured.
His gap-toothed grin underscored the ugliness of his words. “So? Don’t have to like a girl to fuck her.”
Or a guy, Lola thought, remembering some of her own more pragmatic encounters. Patrick closed his eyes. Lola rued her promise to keep the interview brief. “What does any of that have to do with how Mike died? Lots of folks go racial without anybody ending up dead.”
His twitch could have been a shrug. “No clue. That text? That was last thing I got from him.”
Lola checked the text again. It was dated a few days before Mike’s death. Patrick’s breath escaped in a sigh that could have been a light snore. Her time was running out. She touched her fingertips to the back of his hand. “What happened in the bar?”
He spoke without opening his eyes. “Was just having a cold beer in an air-conditioned bar. Can’t do it on the rez, you know.”
Lola knew the Blackfeet reservation was unusual in selling alcohol. Wind River apparently was dry.
“Those two guys came in, already likkered up by the sound of them. Bartender told them to keep it down. But they just moved down to the other end of the bar, where I was. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at them.”
Rule Number One for an Indian guy in a whiteman bar, Lola knew. Eyes front. Don’t engage. Sort of like being a woman in any bar.
“But they started right in on me. ‘Just got away from all those sand niggers and now here we are sittin’ next to a prairie nigger. What the fuck?’”
“What the fuck, indeed,” Lola murmured.
“Yeah. So I turned around and told ’em that one of those so-called prairie niggers, Mike St. Clair, died for his country. They started laughing. Said Mike was nothing but a coward. That’s when I hit them.”
“Them?”
“Tommy. Then Tyson. They were likkered up, like I said. Moving kind of slow. At first.”
Lola imagined the surprise and outrage in their faces as the punches landed, their heads snapping back. She thought of how Tyson bunched his shoulders when he spoke, could imagine those muscles flexing as he began the windmill that would take Patrick down, could see Tommy jumping in, all aflame at the indignity of being hit by someone he considered beneath him.
“Who finally got them off you?”
“Sheriff’s deputy. Bartender wasn’t any good, nor those old guys who hang out there every day, neither.”
Lola had seen the sheriff’s office, a couple of blocks from the bar; calculated the time it would have taken the bartender to call 9-1-1 and a dispatcher to fetch a deputy. Only a few minutes. But more than enough time for near-lethal damage. “Jesus,” she said.
Patrick said nothing beyond another long, slow breath. Lola knew they were done.
She thought back over what he’d said. If the two had hurled the “prairie nigger” epithet at Patrick at home, precious little would have stopped them from using it against Mike in Afghanistan, especially if he’d been sticking up for Pal. Maybe they’d all been friends when they started, but Lola knew from her own experience among the foreign correspondents that friendships had a way of going sour amid Afghanistan’s strains. They might have been a single united tribe when outsiders threatened, but among themselves, divisions ran deep. So there’d been some unpleasantness over there, which unfortunately probably wasn’t all that different from the unpleasantness Mike had faced for much of his life at home.
Patrick’s information added nuance to the story, showing the stress of war. It didn’t shed any new light on how Mike St. Clair died. But it left Lola with still more questions, ones that—given that she’d had her last shot at Skiff—left only Pal.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lola waited until it was nearly dark to return to the ranch. She treated Margaret to a substantial meal in town, followed by ice cream, by way of apology for yet again abandoning their vacation. Margaret didn’t seem to mind, bouncing in her booster seat.
<
br /> “I get to see Jemalina! And Pal and Delbert. Faster, Mommy.”
She seemed to have forgotten about the bad truck. Lola hadn’t. The ride to the ranch in the near-dark was too reminiscent of the encounter. Yet she drove slowly, taking time to formulate a plan for approaching Pal. She’d have the element of surprise, given that Pal wasn’t expecting them. That was good. Lola usually soft-pedaled her interviews with most people, starting with the safe stuff, edging so innocuously into dangerous territory that by the time they realized that the nature of her questions had changed, they’d already answered enough of the crucial ones. That approach, she suspected, wouldn’t work with Pal, not with her fists-up approach to even an innocent “How are you?” Lola would hit her hard with all the information she’d gleaned, without letting on that so far, no one who’d been there the night Mike was killed had gone on the record. All she had were second-hand accounts, as inadmissible in a story as they were in court.
The ranch, nestled within its sagebrush-dotted bowl, looked almost welcoming as Lola pulled up. I’ve been in Wyoming too long if this place looks good to me, she thought. Long enough to appreciate the way Pal’s family had tucked the house below the ridges, sheltered from the screaming winds, which were annoying enough in summer but must have been punishing and potentially deadly in winter’s subzero fury. Long enough to take note of the fact that, despite its haphazard add-ons and indifference to paint, the house was solidly constructed, unlike the decrepit-upon-arrival bungalows that the Bureau of Indians Affairs had assigned to the reservation to replace the tribes’ practical and serviceable lodges. Long enough to have studied its layout, the proximity of house to calving shed, a sign that the ranchers cared enough about their livestock to give them a strong start in life. The house faced east, catching the morning sunlight. Lola wondered if the Joneses had copied the tradition of their Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone neighbors. But someone—Lola decided to credit the first woman who lived there—had also insisted upon a big window facing west, over the kitchen sink, to allow a ranch wife moving slowly through the end of her day’s labor the luxury of the evening alpenglow highlighting the peaks of the Winds. She herself had often halted, the dish in her hand only half-scrubbed, to watch as the sinking sun filled the sky with flame.
She sat in the truck, delaying the inevitable confrontation with Pal, watching as Margaret and Bub ran for the door, Bub swerving away toward safety as Jemalina made a beeline for Margaret. Not once, Lola thought as she hefted their bags and trudged behind them to the house, had the chicken pecked Margaret, despite the child’s increasing demands upon its attention. Margaret flung open the door and disappeared inside, returning a moment later.
“She’s not here.”
Lola hefted Margaret. The sun still wobbled atop the peaks, but much of the kitchen already lay in darkness. Lola flipped the switch and pointed to the bare space beside the door. “Her shoes are gone. About time she figured out not to run in the heat of day.”
“I want to stay up until she gets back.”
“Not a chance.” Lola carried Margaret back to the bedroom. There would be no distractions when she talked to Pal, Lola decided.
Margaret’s eyebrows met above her nose. Her lower lip pooched out. She crossed her arms over her chest.
Lola braced herself for another tantrum. Heaven help her if Margaret were entering a new phase, one that involved regular detonations. A creaking sound came from beneath the bed. Lola bit her lip to hide a smile. For the first time, she gave thanks for the chicken’s presence. “You,” she said to Margaret. “In bed. Now.” She bent and looked under the bed. “And you, out of the house,” she said to the chicken nesting contentedly on a folded towel that had somehow found its way beneath the bed. She clapped her hands at the edge of the bed, dodging the chicken’s feint toward her ankles as it beat a flapping retreat.
She pressed her lips to Margaret’s forehead and told Bub to stay. In the kitchen, she fetched the bourbon bottle and two glasses and went out onto the porch to wait for Pal.
Lola had thought to surprise Pal. Instead, Pal turned the tables.
“Hey.”
The voice reached her as she stepped onto the porch.
“Jesus Christ!” Lola jumped, dropping the bottle and glasses. Pal reached from the shadows to rescue the bottle. The glasses rolled somehow intact from the floorboards into the dirt.
“Leave them,” said Pal. “We don’t need them.” She sat down on the step, unscrewed the bottle cap, took a pull, and held it up to Lola, who caught a whiff of sweat and dust.
Lola took the bottle. “You scared the crap out of me. Where’d you come from?” She lifted the bottle to her lips and tried not to make a face. She’d never developed a taste for bourbon’s sweetness.
“From my run. Saw your truck and decided to wait out here for you. What brings you back? The Tetons not enough fun for you?”
Lola took a minute to appreciate the fact that Pal was doing to her just what she’d hoped to do with Pal, needling her, keeping her off balance. Pal knew good and well the Tetons weren’t a day trip. Lola decided not to answer. She lowered herself to the step beside Pal and tucked her feet up beside her. “Aren’t you worried about snakes, sitting down here like this?”
Pal lifted a shoulder. “Not really. You can hear them coming.”
“How’s that?”
“Listen. What do you hear?”
Lola heard what she always did. The wind, reduced to a sweet susurration, mild-mannered in the evening compared to its daytime shriek. Jemalina, high-stepping around the yard, head bobbing low to snag an occasional grub, burbling contentedly deep in her throat. “The wind. That stupid chicken.”
“That’s good. A snake, it makes a scritchy sort of sound. Not like either of those two. We’re fine.”
Lola was unprepared to concede the point. “Seems like, by the time you heard it, it’d be way too close.”
“All you have to do is sit still and wait for it to go away.”
Lola was disinclined to sit still and wait for a snake to do anything. Pal took the bottle back. Enough dilly-dallying, Lola thought. “So,” she said.
Pal put the bottle down and waited.
“You know I’m a reporter. Just like your cousin.”
A nod.
“And seeing that guy shoot himself at the airport, then hearing about your friend Mike getting killed over there, well, it made me think.”
“About what?” The warning in Pal’s voice could not have been more clear. Lola had no business thinking anything, it said.
“That it makes for a story. A story about the toll war takes. Not just in lives, but in psyches. Look at the six of you. Two dead and the rest of you all messed up.”
Pal’s teeth flashed. “I’m not messed up.” She held the bottle high in an exaggerated preview of her next drink. Lola decided she was being ironic.
“I’ve been talking to people around town for the story.”
Pal had been slouched against a porch support, but she sat up so quickly the bottle tilted. She grabbed it before any bourbon spilled. Not drunk yet; in fact, a long way from it.
“What people?”
Jemalina raised her head and cocked it. The alpenglow was gone, the Winds distinguishable only by their deeper black against the charcoal sky. Lola couldn’t see the chicken’s yellow eyes but imagined them trained on the porch, attentive to the change in atmosphere.
“I talked to some folks at the Fourth of July picnic. The high school principal, too. What’s his name again?” She supplied her own answer, and ticked off more names, letting Pal know—in case she was tempted to lie yet again—that she already knew quite a lot about what had happened in Afghanistan. “Those two guys who got arrested, I talked to them, too. Tommy McSpadden and Tyson Graff. And your friend from the parade. Skiff.”
“What?”
Lola continued inexora
bly. “I contacted the DOD, too.”
Pal was on her feet, breathing hard, holding on to the porch railing for support. “Oh, God. Please, no. Please tell me you didn’t do any of that. Especially Defense.” Her voice shook, the words running together.
“As a matter of fact I did. I wanted to get the straight story.” No reason for Pal to know that DOD would probably never come through with useful information.
Pal’s arm flew up. The bottle smashed against the porch support. Lola ducked bourbon and flying glass. Jemalina disappeared squawking into the darkness. The neck of the bottle slid from Pal’s fingers. It hit the porch and rolled, coming to a lopsided stop against the toe of Lola’s running shoe.
“You fool,” Pal said. “You’ve just killed us all.”
Lola retreated to the kitchen, snapping on lights, and returned with a broom and dustpan. She left the door open so that the yellow light spilled across the porch. Pal stepped away from its reach. Lola followed, thrusting the broom at her, trying to quash the thought that Pal might use it as a weapon. On the other hand, there was the snake-killing shovel, closer at hand and far more treacherous. If Pal hadn’t gone for that, Lola was probably safe.
“Clean up your mess,” she ordered Pal. “I don’t want Margaret or Bub or even that damn chicken cutting its feet on the glass.” Ordering Pal around had worked before. Not this time.
“You take that goddamn broomstick and shove it up your ass. I’ve got to get out of here. And if you’re smart, you will too if you care even the slightest bit about that little girl of yours. Which I’m not sure you do.” Pal shoved past Lola into the kitchen and headed for her bedroom. Lola followed close behind. Something bumped the back of her legs. She turned. Bub, alert to trouble. He followed her into Pal’s bedroom.
Pal’s Army duffel was on the bed. She yanked open dresser drawers, randomly pulling out underwear and T-shirts and socks and jeans, flinging them toward the bag.
“Hold on,” said Lola. “What are you doing? Where are you going? And why do we have to get out of here?”
