Dakota (18 page)

Thor hit the brakes. “Wasteland? Take another look.”

Lola looked. Town, rigs, prairie. White snow, grey sky. Wasteland, she thought, but decided against saying it aloud again. “It’s very . . . flat.”

“Not really.” Thor’s hand undulated across the windshield, tracing faraway bluffs and cutbanks, the washes and coulees. “We don’t make it easy for people here. Don’t slap them across the face with landscape the way those mountains do over in your part of the world. If you live here, you’ve got to develop a taste for subtlety.”

Implying, Lola thought, that she didn’t have it. She took a reluctant second look. “Maybe summertime improves things.”

That gaze again, burning through her. Lola fiddled with the heater knob, turning it down.

“Summertime! It’s fine, but you need to be here in spring. This place goes green as Ireland.”

Lola had been to Ireland. She’d also spent the previous summer in Montana, which she couldn’t imagine was much different than North Dakota, and had learned that the word
green
held considerably less intensity there than Ireland, more olive than emerald. She made a noise of vague assent, hoping to get them moving. But Thor was on a roll.

“And then the lupine comes. We go from Ireland to, oh, I don’t know. Whatever’s blue. The sea, maybe. Nothing but waves of blue flowers, as far as you can see. I grew up here, spent my whole life here, and still I never get used to it.”

“A philosopher and a poet,” Lola said, despite herself.

It was as though she’d granted some sort of permission. Thor leaned in and brushed her cheek with his lips. Not the safe part of her cheek, either, back toward the ear, but close in, the corner of his mouth catching the corner of hers, not a real kiss but near enough. “Everything you’ve been through the last couple of days, you deserve a little poetry,” he said. He put the car in gear and pointed it back down the bluff, talking of matters so inconsequential as to nearly convince Lola that a kiss from a man whose wife had been nothing but kind to her was equally insignificant.

But. Lola wondered how she’d feel if Charlie took a crime victim for a ride in his car for a little tour of the town that ended in a kiss. If maybe that’s how he’d met the woman who apparently had borne his child. Lupine, my ass, she thought. When Thor had first mentioned it, she hadn’t thought of the flower at all, but of the word’s alternate meaning. Wolflike.

“Then the lupine comes,” he’d said, and for just a moment, she’d pictured a wolf, eyes fixed upon her and mouth open, the gleaming teeth, the lolling tongue, loping toward her across the prairie.

L
OLA SCRAMBLED
out of the cruiser before Thor could bestow another not-quite-kiss. “I’ve got to go the library for some research before my meeting tonight,” she said, refusing his offer for a ride back to the house. It would be less embarrassing, she’d reasoned to herself during the ride back to the sheriff’s office, to look up Charlie on one of the library’s computers than it would to use her laptop at the house, where Charlotte, ever attentive, hovered. Besides, Dawg’s remarks that morning had piqued her curiosity. As a county employee, his hiring would be a matter of public record. She could get his full name, Google the “little of this, little of that” that the sheriff had hinted a basic background check would reveal. She waited until the door to the sheriff’s office had closed behind him, and went to the main county office, where she waited for a clerk to tear her eyes away from her computer.

“Do you know where I could look at the county budget?”

The clerk’s eyes strayed back toward a boxy monitor that looked a good decade old. Lola saw photos of beaches and palm trees and a come-on for cheap airfares. The clerk clicked on one. An array of umbrella drinks leapt to prominence.

“I’d like one of those, too,” Lola said, pointing to the drinks. “More than one, actually. The budget?”

“I can print you a copy. Ten cents a page.” Another click. A man and a woman reclined poolside in lounge chairs, their bodies bronzed, their bathing suits brief. The clerk’s face was pale and lumpy as unevenly risen bread dough. Her sweatshirt bulged in the wrong places.

“It’s not going to be like that,” Lola said of the image on the screen. “How many pages in the budget?”

“How do you know? You ever been to Hawaii?” She made it two syllables. Huh-why. “That budget. It’s a big, fat thing. I don’t know how many pages, but a lot.”

“I’ve never been to Hawaii,” Lola admitted. She generally didn’t take vacations, her trip to Montana the previous summer to visit Mary Alice a rare exception. And look how that had turned out. “How long would it take for you to make me a copy?”

“More time than I’ve got. I’m busy. You see these?” She patted a stack of manila envelopes that rose high above her inbox. “Building permit applications. Every one I review, three more come in. My eyes are about to fall right out of my head.”

So you’re resting them by looking at vacation ads, Lola wanted to say. She bit her tongue, reminding herself that she badly wanted to see the budget. She told the woman as much.

“Then whyn’t you go to the library? It’s right across the hall. They’ve got it on file. You can look there for free. ’Less you want a copy of your own. Then I’ll have to do it.” Her lower lip pooched out, letting Lola know exactly how she felt about that.

“The library will be fine.” Lola fled.

She stopped just inside the library door. There must have been books somewhere inside the library—actually, there were, in long shelves against the far wall—but most of the floor space was taken up by rows of computers, men parked in front of them, thousand-yard stares retrained upon screens far closer at hand. Lola saw pages of e-mail, housing ads, even some porn. The place was every bit as crowded as The Mint or, for that matter, the Sweet Crude. Except that instead of the clink of beer bottles and driving hip-hop, the hum of electronics and clicking of keys provided the soundtrack. She wasn’t going to get to look up Charlie’s child until she got back to the house after all. There were no vacant terminals; in fact, across the room by the bookshelves, a line of men waited for their own turn at a connection with home, a crack at a better job, a chance to look at naked women without having to pay for watery cocktails. Not one, Lola noticed, pulled a book from the shelves to while away the time while he waited.

She located the information desk and asked about the budget and within short order found herself with a weighty paper copy. She leaned against a bare spot of wall, and leafed through the pages. She halted when she came to the county-run health clinic, with its lines for a physician’s assistant and two nurses. Lola blinked at the salaries, thinking maybe a comma had been misplaced, a zero lost. She skipped ahead to the sheriff’s department. There wasn’t much to see. Some money for expenses, for maintenance. A request for a new cruiser, denied. Ditto the request for a deputy. Thor’s salary was barely forty thousand dollars. Lola wondered what it was like for him to arrest men paid three times that. To watch them bond out of jail with greasy wads of cash, only to show up again the next week. It had to get under his skin. Not just his, but Charlotte’s, too, as she gave them antibiotics and sent them back out the clinic door. And it had to bother the county clerk and her dreams of Hawaii as she shuffled through land deals worth more than she’d make in her lifetime, and the librarian even now rapping on her table and warning a roomful of unhappy men that their fifteen minutes of free computer time was up and would they please make room for the people waiting? Given what the oilfield jobs paid, Lola thought it entirely possible that the entire contingent of civil servants in Burnt Creek turned over every few months. Except for Thor. For some reason, he hung on. She closed the budget book and started back to the librarian’s desk and gave her a dime in exchange for a copy of a single page of the budget, the one detailing allocations to the sheriff’s office. Nowhere on that page, or in any other likely spot in the unwieldy document, was any record of Dawg’s presence.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

L
ola picked up her phone, put it down, picked it up again and watched until its clock advanced another minute. She’d passed an hour at The Mint waiting for Swanny and Ralph, but they had yet to show. Even given that she’d arrived fifteen minutes early, it was time to worry.

She sipped at the remainder of her second glass of wine and wondered if she should make the rounds of the bars. Ralph told her that Swanny had worked an extended shift out on the rig, spending days catching a few hours’ sleep in the on-site trailer instead of returning each night to the man camp. Maybe after a stint like that, Swanny wanted quicker oblivion than a few beers over a meal would provide. Or maybe he wanted more. Lola wondered what it cost to stay with a woman an entire night. According to Ralph, Swanny had “claimed” Judith. That must have entailed more than the standard transaction. Although, Lola realized, she had absolutely no idea what the standard transaction was. The longer she spent in Burnt Creek, the more she realized how unprepared the years overseas had left her for the realities of her own country. She could identify ordnance from jagged scraps of metal, tell factions by the wrap of turban and length of beard, sneak a roadside pee and refasten her pants before her male traveling companions even realized she’d stopped. Aside from persistent wistfulness about plumbing, her years in Afghanistan had turned her recollections of home scornful.

She thought of how she and her friends used to complain about crime in Baltimore. Purse snatchings, smash-and-grabs from parked cars. Never once had any of them worried about being blown to bits as she walked from the front door to the curb to collect the morning newspaper. As for the endless discussions among women about the fecklessness of men, Lola had often passed bitterly pleasurable moments in imagined conversations comparing a broken promise to call in the morning to the reality an Afghani woman faced if she so much as looked at, let alone spoke with, a man who was not her husband or a relative. Lola had written so many stories about forced marriage and bride burnings and stonings as to earn a curt e-mail from an editor one day: “Try writing about the other 50 percent of the population once in awhile.”

It seemed that an entire group of women in her own country faced equally serious repercussions for the wrong sorts of encounters with men. She thought of Judith’s stiffening body, the nightgown fluttering bright beneath her sweatshirt, of the girls who’d disappeared as completely as burned brides in Afghanistan. She’d spent the afternoon before her meeting with Swanny and Ralph perched on the narrow bed in Thor and Charlotte’s house, tapping restlessly at her laptop, coming up dry in her attempts to find any reference to Charlie’s child, then surfing statistics as a way to fill the time. She flipped through her notebook, reviewing the data she’d jotted down. On some reservations, Indian women were more likely to die at a man’s hand than afforded the dignity of breast cancer or heart disease or easeful old age. Across Indian Country, one in three was raped, but prosecution of their attackers was so rare as to be laughable and, if the men weren’t Indian—as most of them weren’t—legally impossible anyway. The women who survived lived in isolated areas together with the men who got away with hurting them. Lola scowled at the inexcusable numbers. The story they told, she thought, should have merited front-page news around the country. “Nobody cares about this?” she said aloud.

“How’s that?” Ellen stopped in front of her and banged down a basket of rolls. Lola wondered if the girl had changed her mind about working in one of the bars. More likely, she was just waiting to turn eighteen. “You want to go ahead and order food?” Ellen asked Lola. “Looks like your friends aren’t coming.” Two empty place settings flanked Lola. She’d felt lucky to snag a table when she’d gotten to The Mint, but credited it with her early arrival. An hour later, though, only half the tables were full and the room was uncharacteristically quiet. Big men who’d ordered the Roughneck’s Special—a chicken-fried steak with half a fried chicken and french fries on the side—pushed crispy bits of food around their plates like finicky children.

“Where is everyone?” Lola asked. “Did they all go home for their break at the same time?”

“Where’ve you been?” Ellen’s tone was newly assertive. She’d caked on the foundation as usual, but had added cat’s-eye swipes of inky eyeliner and green glitter on her lids, and switched her old pinafore apron for a waist model, showing off a clingy sweater whose neckline dipped so low Lola could see the bow on her bra. Lola fingered her own turtleneck and thought of how the cold would rush right into Ellen’s shirt. On the other hand, she imagined that Ellen had doubled her tips.

“I’ve been working. Did I miss something?”

Ellen lowered her voice. “It’s always like this when somebody dies. Creeps them all out.”

Given the time the men seemed to spend in strip bars, Lola thought maybe that was understandable. Most of them probably knew DeeDee, whose face was prominently featured in that day’s edition of the newspaper. Lola pulled a roll apart and rubbed a pat of butter against one of the pieces with her knife. The butter was cold, and crumbled back onto the plate. “Poor DeeDee,” she said.