Dakota (11 page)

A couple of the men looked her way, but most of the others continued what they were doing, even if that involved nothing more than staring into space. Roy reached for one of the blankets over the windows and ripped it away. The light did the room and its occupants no favors.

“Damn, Roy,” one man said. “Why you got to do that?”

“You can sleep in the van,” Roy said to him. “Come on. We’ve got to clear out. They’ve got some renters coming in tomorrow.”

“What’s going on?” said Lola.

“What’s it look like?” Roy shrugged into an oil-stained Carhartt coat and slung the bundle over his shoulder. “We’re out.”

“Out?” Lola could think of only one meaning—but one so unimaginable that she asked anyway, hoping for a different answer.

“Fired,” Roy said.

“Shitcanned,” another man chimed in.

“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

“There’s sixteen more where you came from, and another hunnerd sixteen waiting to take their places.”

Lola flung up her hands to stop the barrage of euphemisms. The plastic containers tumbled like frozen bricks onto a vacant cot. “But why?”

One of the men laughed, a short barking noise. “The patch is like the army. If they’d wanted someone in your family to go and die, they’d have killed her themselves.”

The men were on their feet now, looking toward the door.

“Wait. Please. You got fired because you took time off for Judith’s funeral?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Roy said. “Guess the van’s gonna get repo’ed. Doesn’t matter, really. No use for it now, anyway.”

A burly man ran his right hand over his face. It was missing two fingers, the scar still red and raw, coarse black stitches poking up from the skin. “Easy for you to say. I took out a loan on an addition to the house so my daughter and her husband and our grandbaby could come home and live with us instead of being jammed into that apartment and working shit jobs down in Great Falls. There goes my credit. Think they’ll repo the sheetrock?”

Grim, knowing smiles passed around the room. Lola thought of the new trucks, the cow-calf pairs meant to fatten on summer grazing, the seed money for a spouse’s coffee cart—the reservation’s first. The new clothes for kids instead of hand-me-downs, the spill of presents beneath Christmas trees, the occasional dinner out at the local café, ice cream for the whole family. The debts paid off, the savings accounts started. The clutch at the bottom rung of the ladder, the daring gaze upward. She sat down on one of the cots with a thump and pulled out her notebook.

“Whose decision was this? What did they tell you? And when?”

Roy motioned for her to stand. “That cot’s coming with us,” he said. “No time to talk now. Call us when you get back to Magpie. Maybe people will feel like talking. Maybe not.”

The men filed past her, stooping to retrieve the containers of food, and stashed the casseroles and the cots and their duffels and small sad bundles into the van and climbed in after them. Roy started the engine and lifted a hand to Lola as she stood on the sagging steps and watched the story that had brought her to Burnt Creek vanish in a swirl of exhaust and snow.

L
OLA LINGERED
in the yard, uttering every curse word she could think of. She started with the good, solid Anglo-Saxon ones, all sex and excrement, then moved on to profanity, a vocabulary that had increased considerably during her time in Afghanistan, where all manner of deities were cursed, a rising flow of invective halted only by the slam of a door on the other side of the house and the appearance of a red-faced bowling ball of a woman waving a broom at Lola as if to sweep her off the very face of the planet.

“Shame! Shame! Decent people live here. Begone!”

“Begone?” Lola said. “Begone? Who talks like that?” She headed for the truck, where Bub’s nose had smeared the passenger-side window nearly opaque, calling back to the woman. “Forsooth. As it happens, I was just taking my leave.” But she spun on her heel at the woman’s next words.

“I finally get rid of those filthy Indians and now this.” The woman stomped back toward her side of the house, rolling sailorlike as she walked, the broom trailing behind her in the snow.

“What did you say?” Lola ran to confront her, blocking her way. “What about the Indians?”

The woman dropped the broom and folded her arms across her chest. She’d left the house without a coat and her face purpled dangerously, whether from the cold or indignation Lola couldn’t tell. “Crammed into that place on top of each other. Living like animals. If they hadn’t gotten themselves fired, I’d have had to evict them.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” Lola’s voice rose. “You’d have kept right on taking their rent money every month, overcharging them for living in that hole just like you’re going to do the next people. Shame? The shame’s on you.” She heard herself shouting, her face inches from the woman’s, blasting all the morning’s frustration at an ignorant woman who probably for the first time in her life was on firm financial footing and whose only experience of Indians was likely the seemingly rough men who outnumbered her sixteen-to-one on the other side of her home’s too-thin walls. Lola headed for the truck. “Sorry,” she muttered. Which, she thought to herself, was more than the woman deserved. Bub whomped against her as she got into the truck, keening as he sensed her agitation. Lola stroked him until he quieted and her own breathing settled. The woman was back inside. Lola saw the curtains stir on her side of the house. She started the truck and drove away, turning down one street and then another. She wondered how long it would take Jorkki to find out that the reason for her trip to Burnt Creek had vanished. Someone on the van had no doubt already texted a relative with the news, which meant it was all over the reservation. Tina would know, but might not volunteer the information at the office. Lola knew she could go home and write a story about the men’s firing, about the effect on the reservation’s economy. But her trip to Burnt Creek would supply nothing more than a few paragraphs of description of their brief time in the patch. She thought of Joshua, materializing beside her the morning she left, begging for news about his dead sister. About one of the uncles, wishing for a body for a proper burial. She didn’t have anything for them, either.

“A thousand-mile round-trip deserves more than a few paragraphs,” she assured Bub, whose worried look had disappeared, replaced by his typically agreeable manner, now that her voice was back to normal. “Jorkki probably won’t hear anything at least until tomorrow. We’re already here. Might as well ask around about Judith and those girls.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

E
ven though Thor had said he thought some of the strip-club dancers might be turning tricks on the side, Lola couldn’t face The Train. She opted instead for a place called the Sweet Crude, driving three times around the block before she worked up the nerve to walk inside. The Sweet Crude was in one of the prefab buildings that seemed to comprise half of Burnt Creek proper and all of its outskirts, set so low to the ground that a dancer who forgot herself and flung up an enthusiastic arm risked bruising it against the ceiling. Music pounded Lola’s eardrums. It wasn’t yet noon, but every barstool was taken by men who didn’t even look away to place their drink orders, so focused were they on the young woman whose very presence seemed a contradiction of physics, given that she remained upright when the size and weight of her breasts should have toppled her forward. Men crowded behind the stools, jostling for a better view, both of the dancer and of the levels in the drinks at the bar, hoping a near-empty glass signaled a soon-to-be-vacant seat. Bowls of peanuts sat beside the drinks, and the men dug into them with hard scarred hands and cracked the shells between their teeth. They spat them out without aiming, justifying the presence of a bikinied waitress whose sole job appeared to be to sashay behind the barstools with a whisk broom and dustpan, bending and presenting her impertinent bottom at regular intervals, sweeping diligently until someone tucked a bill or two beneath her thong, at which point she moved on to the next pile of peanut shells. Lola recognized one of the men at the bar as Dawg, the sheriff’s deputy, who turned on the dancer the same moist devoted gaze he’d bestowed upon the sheriff. Lola, trying to skirt the walls of the room, was glad he was so preoccupied. Yet despite the gravity-defying assets of Miss Double Derricks, the morning’s advertised entertainment, Lola still managed to attract attention. She willed an approaching man to walk past, but he blocked her way. His lips moved. “What?” Lola mouthed. Maybe she actually said it. She couldn’t hear a damn thing over Salt-N-Pepa’s shoopin’. The man took her arm and steered her toward the door.

“Sorry,” the man said when they stood in the cold. A couple of roughnecks shoved past, openly assessing Lola before going inside. “I know it’s cold, but I can’t hear over the music. Here’s the deal. Sixty a night. That’s what you owe me for stage time. Plus a cut of tips. And don’t think you can squirrel them away somewhere. That’s what Summer thought and that’s why she’s gone and we’ve got ourselves a job opening.”

The tip of Lola’s nose was going numb. “Sixty seems high,” she ventured.

“Miss, we’re talking a thousand or more a night in tips. We’re the closest thing in Burnt Creek to a class act. You don’t like this deal, get yourself on down to The Train. You can keep your tips and pray to God they’ll cover the hospital bill you’ll end up with when that place is done with you.” He imparted the information with all the matter-of-factness of a conversation about the weather. Lola felt a chill that went beyond the thermometer reading.

“I’m not here for a job. Look, is there someplace inside where we can talk—and hear ourselves think, too?”

“Damn.” He turned and spat into the snow. “Miss Double-D isn’t going to like it when she hears she’s got to be Miss Double Shift today. You sure you aren’t looking for work? Haven’t you ever danced even a little? Maybe at your high school prom?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and I didn’t go to my prom.” She led the way back into the bar, until he finally maneuvered himself around her and steered a course through the whiskey-soaked crowd into an office whose walls didn’t exactly muffle the din, but at least kept it manageable.

D
ENNY
B
LAIR
very nearly guided Lola right back outside again when she confessed to being a reporter. Only when she assured him, and then reassured him, that her story had nothing to do with his bar did he settle into a wooden swivel chair that would have looked at home behind a schoolroom desk. And in fact, Denny told Lola, he’d been a high school social studies teacher before the boom. “I got more sociology in fifteen minutes here than I did in twenty years of teaching,” he told her. “Back then, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in a place like this, even before I was married. Now look at me. I paid off my house in my first year at the Sweet Crude. When the owner took me in as a partner, I got a big enough bump so my wife could retire. You put your scruples aside real fast when it comes to things like that.”

Lola could see him back in the classroom, a pilled cardigan hanging off his scarecrow frame, the chalk dust settling in his wispy hair. If Burnt Creek was anything like Magpie, it had never made the jump from blackboards to dry-erase panels.

“It really doesn’t bother you?”

“Only when my old students come in. Funny thing is, it doesn’t seem to bother them a bit. I guess we’re all making so much money now the old rules don’t apply.” He fiddled with a loose thread on his sweater.

“Speaking of rules—what about the dancers? Is dancing their only . . . duty?”

Denny Blair threw back his head and laughed. His sagging neck briefly tightened. Lola calculated that he was about the age her father would be if he had lived. She tried to imagine that gentle man, who treated cancer as though it were an annoying relative to be tolerated with an excess of civility, running a titty bar. She shook her head. Try as she might, the image wouldn’t come.

“Do you mean are they hooking? Damned if I know. I’m sure some of them freelance. As far as I know, there’s only one place in town that does it in any kind of organized fashion and believe me, you don’t want to get crosswise with them.”