by Gwen Florio
“What was it like?” Pal leaned forward. Lola suppressed a start at the curiosity lighting Pal’s features, so unusual was the emergence of anything resembling human emotion on that sharp little face.
“Odd. They’d feed me, of course. They’re the most hospitable people on earth. Even the poorest people would at least offer tea. But when it was a full meal, they’d often put me with the men for dinner. It’s like I was an honorary man. I suppose I should have been flattered, but it made me so uncomfortable, I’d go eat dessert with the women. They were more fun, anyhow.”
“How’s that?”
Lola laughed at the memory, and then again at the welcome realization that not all of her memories of Afghanistan were bad. “Because the women spent a lot of their time making fun of the men.”
“What was the food like?”
“Scary.”
Actual mischief crept into Pal’s eyes. “Like yours?”
“Just for that, I’m taking the last of the coffee.” Lola emptied the dregs into her cup and prepared a fresh pot. The food in Afghanistan had to have been unsafe for a western gut, the vegetables washed in water swimming with bacteria, the meat obtained from a market where it hung, buzzing with flies, all day in the sun. “But it was so good I couldn’t help myself. I ate it all!” she said. “The fruits and vegetables were nothing like the ones here, all good looks and no taste. The flavor was so intense. And for the most part, I never got sick. Just lucky, I guess.”
“Just immune from eating your own cooking,” Pal muttered.
“Let it go. Unless you want kitchen duty,” Lola shot back, warming to the beginnings of repartee, reminiscent of the same sort of smartassery she shared with Jan.
Pal obliged by returning to their earlier subject. “Did you make any friends? Among the locals, I mean.”
“Not really. Mostly I just interviewed people and moved on,” Lola began. “But there was one—” She stopped, teetering, fighting for balance at the lip of a bottomless chasm.
“Who?”
Lola closed her eyes against the images at the forefront of her brain, but that only threw them into sharper focus. The chasm yawned. Lola swayed. She grabbed at the table. “Never mind. Not important.”
A chair scraped. Footsteps. Hands on hers, clasping them tight, pulling at her, turning her in the chair. She opened her eyes. Pal crouched before her. “You want me to spill my guts to the whole fucking world about the worst thing that’s ever happened to me? I say you’d better start talking.”
Lola forced the words. “I can’t. I haven’t. Ever.”
Pal’s grasp tightened. The tiny bones in Lola’s hands crunched. “You can. I’m living proof. What was that little lecture you gave me about not cowering before the shit that scares us? Well, right back at you. Close your eyes if it makes it easier. But start talking. Get it out.”
Lola squeezed her eyes shut. “His name was Ahmed. He was a fixer,” she began. She felt herself leaning even farther over the edge, Pal pulling just as hard against her fall. She steadied herself. And, against all odds, kept talking.
Lola awoke in her bed, with little idea how she’d gotten there and none of how much time had passed. She had a memory of Pal leading her to the room, her arm around Lola’s shoulders, and urging her into bed beside Margaret. “You did great,” Pal whispered so as not to wake the girl. “You’re going to need to sleep now. You’ll feel better when you wake up. We’ll finish my interview and do the DOD report then.” Lola couldn’t even muster the energy to tell Pal she could have shouted without disturbing Margaret.
Lola’s throat was dry. She opened her eyes. The light hurt. She squinted against it, almost expecting to find herself back on a Kabul street, bloodied bits of human flesh beneath her feet, the grievously wounded flailing about, screaming for help or, worse yet, lying in the grey silence that precedes expiration. Pal had said she’d feel better after sleeping. She wasn’t sure. She went first to the bathroom and then the kitchen, waiting in the doorway as the room swam into focus, the humble Formica table, the long counter, Pal standing at it, doing something with food. Pal glanced her way.
“Welcome back to the world. It’s nearly lunchtime, and we’ve got a long afternoon ahead of us. I’m fixing some food for us, and Margaret, too. Poor kid. She’s been so good out there all morning. She’s teaching Jemalina some tricks, apparently. God help us.”
A can opener sat on the counter. Lola sniffed. Tomatoes. Oh, Jesus, she thought. Not ravioli. Something sizzled in a pan. A familiar, buttery smell. Lola let herself hope. “Is that—?”
“Grilled cheese. Tomato soup, too. Canned, but it’s all I’ve got. I know it’s hot food on a hot day, but comfort seemed the way to go. Here.” She set a plate and a bowl in front of Lola, and called Margaret indoors. Lola finished her sandwich before her daughter had even settled in her chair, breaking yet another rule, this one involving waiting to eat until everyone was seated. Pal raised her eyebrows, buttered another piece of bread, and slapped it into the pan, topping it with thick slices of cheddar and another piece of buttered bread. “Do you mind waiting for yours, big girl? Your mom had a long night and she’s in the middle of a long day. What say we take care of her before you and I eat?”
Margaret swelled at the “big girl” and nodded assent. “I’m teaching Jemalina how to fetch,” she announced. Bub’s ears stood up at the word “fetch.”
“Sometimes she beats Bub to the ball.” The ears flattened. Bub’s lip curled.
Lola held her bowl to her mouth and slurped directly from it. The more quintessentially American the food she inhaled, the farther Afghanistan receded.
“Rude, Mommy.”
Lola tilted the bowl high. Pal retrieved it and refilled it before she could even ask. “How can a chicken fetch a ball? It’s too big for her beak,” Lola asked in the interminable seconds before the bowl returned.
“She rolls it. Do you want to see?”
Pal stepped in with Lola’s soup and a second sandwich. “Your mom and I have a lot of work to do this afternoon. Why don’t you teach Jemalina a new trick, and then tonight, we can have ourselves a regular chicken circus? I’ll call Delbert and invite him up to watch. Maybe he can bring some popcorn.”
“Or ice cream.” Margaret cut her eyes toward Lola, who’d begun to think of Wyoming as the Land of No Rules.
Pal returned to the table with a sandwich and two plates. She cut the sandwich in half and put a piece on each plate. She went back to the stove and upended the pot over two mugs, filling each one about halfway. “One for you,” she told Margaret, “and one for me.”
She sat down. Raised her own sandwich. Took a bite. Swallowed. Put it down. Reached for her mug. Another swallow. Licked a bit of soup from upper lip. Back to the sandwich. Lola held her breath. It was the most food she’d seen Pal eat since she’d met her. Margaret watched open-mouthed.
Halfway through her sandwich, Pal raised her eyes. She looked from Lola to Margaret and back again. “What?”
Lola caught Margaret’s eye and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, rearranging her face so as not to reveal the relief welling within. It was just a start. Pal had a long way to go. But she’d planted her feet firmly on the path. “Nothing at all. Eat hearty,” she said to Pal. “We’re going back to your story next.”
THIRTY-ONE
Pal blamed graduation night. “The party. It was epic.” It was at Skiff’s place, in town, with the understanding that everybody would stay over. His parents barbecued early, then collected car keys and tactfully absented themselves when the kegs arrived.
“Wait,” said Lola. “Kegs, plural?”
“It was graduation.”
“How many graduated?”
“Seventy-five. Eighty, maybe.”
That sounded about right. Thirty was about the same size as Magpie, which had graduated sixty-five the year Lola got stuck coveri
ng graduation. “How many kegs?”
“Three or four. I can’t really remember. More than two.”
Lola tried to remember her own high school party math. She counted on her fingers. “A six-pack per person, then. At least.”
“Liquor, too.”
“No wonder you enlisted,” said Lola. “You’d have to be just that drunk to think it was a good idea.”
“Oh, we were all pretty trashed. Except Mike. He doesn’t drink. Didn’t.”
Lola knew that some of the reservation kids looked at the alcohol-fueled devastation around them and went straight-edge from the start; no drinking, no drugs, often with a good dose of religion. “Was it a church thing with him?”
“No. He wasn’t one of those Jesus Indians. But he watched alcohol kill his mom. It almost killed Delbert, too, but he got straight when his daughter died and he had to raise Mike.”
Something tugged at Lola’s memory. “I thought Mike graduated from the rez school. What was he doing at the Thirty party?”
Pal’s face went fond. “He was my, uh, shot blocker.”
Lola reminded herself that she was only about fifteen years older—okay, maybe closer to twenty—than Pal, to whom the difference likely loomed larger. But she couldn’t let that one pass. “I’m familiar with the term cock blocker.”
Pal had the good grace to blush. “I just wanted to be able to have a good time and not worry about anything.”
Lola had only experienced Pal as taciturn at best, and downright rude. She tried to imagine the lighthearted high school girl, tossing back that mane of hair, holding out her cup for another beer, razzing the guys, Mike hovering, smiling but protective. She wondered how much fun the night had been for Mike. He’d been a good friend, she thought.
“Sometime after midnight, we got into one of those now-what conversations,” Pal said. “You know, ‘School’s over. Now what are you gonna do?’”
“And?”
“Skiff said he was signing up. Town boy like him, not going to college, what else was there for him? At least the ranch kids have the whole legacy thing going on. Soon as he said that, T-squared got all macho and jumped in. ‘Us, too.’ And Cody. He’d go along with whatever anybody else was doing.”
Lola could see the idea taking hold in beer-soaked brains, images arising of uniforms, guns, regular paychecks, somebody else making all the tough decisions for them. Nobody ever pictured the downside, she thought. But she’d been just as bad, angling for Afghanistan, knowing it was the story, without stopping to think about what getting the story entailed. Yet again, she kicked her own memories aside. “How’d you and Mike get sucked into this clusterfuck?”
“Oh, come on.” Pal’s eyes met hers. “Indian guy’s gonna sit there and let the white boys march off to war while he stays home with the women?”
“Right.” Lola knew Mike probably would have enlisted anyway. But if he’d signed up later, he might have come back alive—or if not alive, at least dead at the hands of his enemy, rather than his so-called friends. She imagined that Pal had already come to that realization a few thousand times or so since Mike’s death. No wonder the woman drank herself to sleep each night. “What’s your excuse?”
“I couldn’t let Mike go alone.” The same sort of simple, naked truth that, months later, had sent Mike flying to Pal’s defense against the odds. “Besides, we figured everybody would have forgotten about it the next morning.”
“But they hadn’t.”
“Nope.”
They drove over to the recruiting office in Casper together, squashed into Skiff’s dad’s double-cab pickup, Pal on Mike’s lap, all of them red-eyed and in a fair amount of pain, cussing up a storm each time Skiff hit a pothole. “We had to stop twice so’s folks could puke,” Pal said. “Cody. And Tommy. Lightweights.” Her lips thinned in disdain. “We hit a gas station on the edge of town so they could clean themselves up. It probably didn’t matter. That recruiter, he must’ve thought it was Christmas. He couldn’t fill out the paperwork fast enough.”
Lola could imagine. A half-dozen ranch- and sports-toughened young people, none—not even T-squared, not at that point—with serious brushes with the law, all with good-enough grades, all of them able to pass a pee test despite their clear predilection for overindulging in alcohol. They found themselves in basic training before they knew it, overseas a blink later, plopped down in the midst of a desert country, albeit surrounded while on base by the comforts of suburban America, most of them unavailable in Thirty. “My big adventure to a foreign country and I might as well have been in Casper,” Pal said. “Burger King, movie theater, everything.”
“What was it like?”
“Hot. Boring. You can only watch so many movies, play so many video games. And the sand got into everything. I’d brush whole handfuls out of my hair every night and the next day it would be back again.”
Lola remembered the way she’d double-bagged her laptop and camera and satellite phone in zip-top bags, then wrapped them in an extra shawl and stashed them in the trunk of whatever vehicle they were traveling in that day, only to recover them filmed with dust when she retrieved them at night. She shook sand out of her clothing, her shoes and, on the rare occasions when she had a working shower at her disposal, she rinsed grit from her hair, her ears, the crevices of her knees and elbows. One day she’d walked into a tailor’s shop, handed him a few afghanis for the use of his scissors, and chopped her hair down to within an inch of her scalp. She started to say as much to Pal, then remembered why Pal had cut her own hair. She steered the conversation back to the steadying details of the mundane. “What about when you went on patrol? What was that like?”
“Hotter. All that gear. You think you can’t stand it for fifteen minutes and the next thing you know, you’ve been out there two, three hours. More. I never drank so much water in my life as I drank there. And I didn’t even drink as much as the guys.”
Lola knew that drill, too. “So you wouldn’t have to pee.”
They shared a knowing grimace. “The real penis envy,” said Pal. “Not having to drop your drawers.”
Pal’s story largely followed the outlines of the texts Mike had sent his friend. The larky early days, the initial combat forays before the brutal realization that when you shot at people, they shot back—and sometimes shot first. The fact that shooting was the least of it. The way they started looking at everyone and everything they encountered. The kid running toward them with a soccer ball—what was in that ball? The dead donkey by the side of the road. Was it bloated with the gases of decomposition? Or did it conceal a bomb? The thrumming tension that translated into increasingly rough hijinks in camp. The normal sarcasm ramping up, turning ugly. Along with the inevitable rejoinder to any protests: “Can’t take a joke?” The backslap that slid low, turning into a hand on the butt. An unasked-for adjustment to her flak jacket. Fingers sliding across her breasts. “Oops. What? You think I did that on purpose? Get over yourself. Bitch.”
“Are they born with that script?” said Lola.
Pal forced a laugh, a small shattering sound. Her lips trembled. They’d come to the day the group visited the village, Lola realized. Once Pal filed her complaint with the DOD, she was going to have to tell that part of the story over and over again. Lola held up her hand. “You’ve already told me this next part. How about if I just summarize what I remember you saying, and you tell me if I’ve got it right. And if I get anything wrong, for God’s sake, let me know about that, too. Here goes.” She spoke steadily, making notes on her own words as Pal nodded silent agreement, concentrating on her pen moving across the page so as not to see Pal’s face.
“That’s right,” Pal said finally. “You’ve got it all now.” Her voice was steady.
“Thanks. I know it’s hard to go over the … incident.”
Pal’s voice grew stronger still. “Rape. Call it what it is. I’m done hiding
from it.”
Lola held up her mug of cold coffee in a sort of toast. “How do you feel about using your name?”
“What the hell? In for a penny, in for a pound. In fact, I’ve got a better idea.”
“What’s that?”
“All those notes you just took? Can you type them up into a statement for the DOD, too?”
“Sure. And I’ll file a copy of the complaint with the story. But just for extra insurance, do you mind if we get the statement notarized? People love shit when it’s notarized.”
Pal had sounded so certain moments before. Now her voice wobbled anew. “Notarized? In a town the size of Thirty? How long do you think it’ll take to get back to Skiff exactly what’s in that statement?”
Lola leaned back in her chair. “This is the easy part. You don’t have to get it notarized in Thirty.”
“Then where?”
Lola waited for Pal to figure it out.
“The reservation!”
“Bingo. And once it’s notarized, I’ll fax a copy to InDepth.”
“Assuming you can find a working fax on the rez. There’s one more thing.”
Lola looked up. She was pretty sure they’d hit everything on her mental checklist.
“We’ve got to tell Delbert.”
That night, Jemalina demonstrated her prowess at fetch, rolling a ball past a glowering Bub to return it to Margaret. The chicken also fell onto her side and stretched out her neck and feathered feet when ordered to play dead, to loud applause from Delbert, Pal, and Lola. “Maybe she’s really dead?” Lola whispered. “Shoot,” she said a moment later when Jemalina arose, shook out her feathers, and accepted a bit of bread from Margaret.
Delbert put his hands on the arms of the porch chair and heaved himself upright. “Miss Margaret, you have provided us with a fine evening’s entertainment. Thank you. And thanks to your chicken, too. Dolores Wadda will be pleased to know she’s earning her keep.” He bowed toward Margaret. “Wherever did you learn to do this?”
