Dakota (4 page)

Joshua looked at the cigarette in his bare hand as though he’d never seen one before. “Funerals cost money. I just finished paying off her rehab. She swore she’d pay me back if it took the rest of her life. I never wanted money from her. I just wanted her healthy and safe. Goddammit.”

“When’s the funeral?”

He lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “Same as always. Four days after. That’s what our ceremonies require. But we’re worried about the uncles in the patch. They’re trying to arrange for at least three days off. A day to get here, a day for the funeral, and a day to drive back. They might not have time for the vigil, the rosary. People are almost as upset about that as they are about my sister.”

“Come inside. You’ll freeze to death out here.” Lola put a hand to her mouth, too late to block the words. “I’m sorry. That was awful.”

He dropped the cigarette into the snow. Its tip flared, then turned black. “Everything’s awful today.” He followed Lola back inside.

A rotating group of locals usually presided over the café’s large center table throughout most of each day, but on this morning young men in steel-toed boots crowded around it. Ranchers bundled into quilted canvas coveralls perched on the edges of their chairs at side tables, as if waiting to reclaim the natural order of things. Lola went straight to the counter, where Nell studied order slips fanned like poker hands before her. “Coffee and a cinnamon roll to go?” she asked without looking up.

“Better make it two. Jan’s mad at me again.”

Nell swept the slips into a stack. “A cinnamon roll should do the trick. What have you done now?”

“I haven’t done anything. She gets territorial with stories.”

“Hah. Reminds me of someone else I know. I can’t keep up with you two. One minute you’re best friends, the next you’re each sneaking around, trying to get something over on the other.” She punched a couple of buttons on the cash register. The café had yet to switch to a computer. “I’ll ring you up before I get started on these guys. Otherwise you’ll be here all day.”

Lola put down a ten. “Keep the change and put it with Joshua’s tips. What’s with the crowd?”

Nell smoothed her pink nylon skirt over the generous hips she termed the best advertisement for the café’s cooking. “Bunch of roughnecks on their way back to the patch from Idaho. I guess they usually drive straight through, but they ran into that storm and got held up overnight. Those boys got more money than God. Every last one of them ordered steak and eggs. Good thing you don’t want steak. We’re out.” She rang up Lola’s order and slipped the change into her apron pocket. “I’ll see that Joshua gets this. You’re not the only one today.”

“All the way from Idaho?” Lola whistled. “That’s a long way to go for work.”

Nell slid a to-go cup across the counter. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of trained observer. We get guys from Seattle stopping here on their way to jobs in Dakota. They say they make almost as much on the rigs as they did in those tech companies that went bust.”

Lola nodded toward the bunch at the center table. To a man they looked hard and capable and—given the volume and animation of their conversation—well versed in the proper calibration of amphetamines to mileage. “Don’t tell me a single one of those guys ever held a desk job.”

“You’d win that bet,” Nell acknowledged. “My guess? Ranch hands who don’t care if they never buck another bale of hay in their lives.”

Lola took the cup and crossed the room to the coffee urns behind the table of roughnecks. She caught a whiff of booze amid the scents of charred steak and fried potatoes and wondered if the men were sweating off the previous night’s excesses, or if they’d dosed their morning coffee from the hip flasks she saw protruding from a couple of pockets. The
Daily Express
was spread out before them. One of the men flipped through it, stopping at the obituaries. Judith’s photo took up two columns. Lola had to remind herself, as she always did when she saw Judith, that her model’s cheekbones were the result of the near-starvation resulting from drug abuse; that such beauty came at too high a price to be admired. The men staring at her photo had no such perspective. “Damn,” one said, his voice low and appreciative.

Another drew the newspaper closer. “Hey. I seen that girl before.”

Lola jerked, then gasped as the hot coffee hit her hand. She redirected her cup beneath the stream and then busied herself adding the cream and sugar that she never used, as a way to linger within earshot. Joshua, mopping nearby, stroked the linoleum with infinite care. So he’d heard, too.

“You have not,” another man said. “You’ve never been here in your life until today.”

“Not here,” the first one said. His tangled reddish mutton-chops curled toward fleshy lips. A scratch clawed its way across his cheek. “Back in Burnt Creek. She’s one of them girls from the man camp—you know, the trailer.” He twisted a hand into his crotch and grunted. “Made me go back for more.”

“She scratch up your back the way she done your face?” His friend was smaller, rabbity, with protruding eyes and teeth. His shoulders twitched in nervous laughter. “Either way, won’t be any scratchin’ to go back for now. This here’s an obit. Looks like you fucked her to death, Swanny.”

“You couldn’t fuck that girl long enough to fuck her to death. The way she turned it on, it’s a wonder that’s not my obit. I damn near had to kill her myself just to get out of there alive.”

Joshua’s hand slammed into Lola’s back, shoving her out of the way. She staggered and flung out her arms to catch her balance. Her cup flew from her hand. Coffee sprayed the wall. Joshua grabbed the rabbity guy by the scruff of his skinny neck and flung him aside. He planted his foot in Swanny’s chest and sent him and his chair backward. He reached down, seized the muttonchops and hauled at Swanny’s head and smashed a fist into his nose. Gouts of blood patterned Nell’s linoleum. The man came up fast, and Lola saw how much bigger he was than Joshua. Rabbit Face latched onto one of Joshua’s arms and someone else wrestled the other one behind his back. Joshua’s head whipped back and forth from the force of the bleeding man’s blows.

“Stop!” Lola yelled. She took a step forward and someone straight-armed her and she hit the floor as Swanny resumed his methodical demolition of Joshua’s face. A sheet of soapy water fell over the scene. The knot of men drew apart and came up gagging. Nell stood with Joshua’s mop bucket in her hand.

“Out of here. Every last one of you.”

Swanny dragged a hand across his face and wiped it on his chest, leaving scarlet streaks. “This asshole jumped me. For no reason.”

Lola clambered to her feet. Her hip ached where it had struck the floor. “Idiot,” she hissed. “That’s his sister.”

The man jerked a bloody thumb toward Nell. “Her?” he said, his disbelief clear.

Lola limped to the table and put her finger on Judith’s photo. “No. Her.”

The men coughed and shuffled their feet and moved muttering toward the door. Lola and Joshua and Nell waited motionless until the last of the trucks had passed before the window. “Shit,” Nell said. “I forgot to make them pay. All that goddamn steak, right down the drain. I don’t even have any left to put on your eye. Are you okay? What about you, Lola?”

Joshua turned his head to one side and spat a tooth into the mess on the floor. “Sure. Everything’s great.” He spoke around a hard lump in his jaw.

Lola winced. “I’m fine.”

Nell kicked the bucket away. “Go on home, Joshua. I’ll pay you for the day. I’m already out so much money, what’s a little more?”

The door banged behind him. Lola reached for the mop. “I’ll help you clean up. I’ve got a little while yet before I have to be at work.”

Nell disappeared into the kitchen with the bucket and came back with it refilled with water so laced with bleach that Lola’s eyes watered. She dipped in the mop and squeezed it against the side of the bucket and drew it across the floor. The blood ran pink and gradually disappeared. Nell righted the chairs and swept the broken dishes into a dustpan and tossed them with a clatter into a trashcan. She picked up the newspaper and hesitated over Judith’s photo.

Lola looked over her shoulder. “Do you think she really went to the patch?”

Nell wadded the paper into a ball and hurled it toward the trashcan. It bounced off the rim and lay uncrumpling on the damp floor, revealing Judith’s face by degrees. “Could be. The way these things usually go, the men make their money off the rigs and the women make their money off the men. It’s tough to think about Judith that way, though. She was a sweet girl who got dealt a hard hand, what with losing her parents and then her grandmother. No surprise that she started using. A lot of people do without half the reasons she had. But she worked so long to get straight. Never thought she’d end up like this.”

Lola stooped and picked up the newspaper and shook it out. Judith’s face was wet and blurred. Lola threw the paper away. She wished she’d gotten a chance to ask the men about Judith before Joshua had started in on them. She said as much to Nell.

“They probably wouldn’t have told you anything, anyway,” Nell said. “Half the guys working there are running away from something. The last thing they want is somebody nosing around about their personal lives. You could be something even worse than a reporter. A parole officer, maybe. Or somebody’s ex-wife, trying to collect child support. You want to find out about the patch, you need to know somebody who works there.”

“I don’t know anybody like that.”

“Yes, you do.” Nell stood the mop in the bucket and wheeled the contraption across the floor, letting Lola work it out for herself.

“The uncles,” she said to Nell’s retreating back. “They’ll be at the funeral. And so will I.”

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he uncles made it back for the funeral, just, the scents of clean snow and dirty industry accompanying them as they eased into pews beside their families just before Father Szczepanski raised his arms in benediction. Somehow he’d managed to avoid being rotated to another parish, as was customary. He often speculated that was only because the church hierarchy had assumed he’d been dead for decades.

He and Alice Kicking Woman, the tribe’s oldest member, were contemporaries and great friends besides. In warmer weather they sat at the picnic table outside the rectory, reminiscing about earlier times as they softened biscuits in glasses of syrupy unconsecrated communion wine. Over the decades, every last hair had fallen from the priest’s head, leaving its surface as shiny and smooth as the marble baptismal font that was the pride of St. Anthony’s, paid for with years of bake sales. Lola suspected that his hair hadn’t actually fallen out, that instead it had somehow wormed its way under his scalp and reemerged from his brows, dense white thickets that grew so long and snarled they threatened his vision and negated the need for his impossible name. People from outside referred to him as “that priest with the—” accompanied by a vague gesture toward their foreheads; on the reservation, everyone knew him simply as Father Eyebrows.

He peered from beneath them now, pausing to allow the men to take their places. They apparently had come straight from the rigs, faces and hands bearing telltale dark smears, as though they’d halted for the quickest of truck stop washups before barreling back onto the two-lane highway paralleling the railroad tracks that carved their way across the top of Montana, just below the Canadian border. Because of the railroad, the region was called the Hi-Line, a term understood by the rest of the state to be synonymous with wind and desolation. Given time, Lola knew, the men would have gone home first and showered until the hot water ran out before donning starched snap-front shirts, knife-creased jeans, boots polished to a high gloss, and stiff-brimmed felt hats brushed free of every last speck of dust and parked with solemnity atop hair gleaming with fragrant oil.

“Let us faithfully remember our dear child,” Father Eyebrows began, somehow infusing his wobbly old man’s voice with extra warmth, as though to reassure the men their presence was the important thing. A sort of sigh went through the congregation, an exhalation of both grief and respite, an acknowledgment that even if they’d lost yet another of their own, the men had returned to help bear the weight. Several moved their lips along with the liturgy they’d heard too many times. Death on the reservation was, if not a friend, at least a constant companion. People drank themselves into permanent oblivion, or drove old cars with bald tires on bad roads, or signed up for the military and came back in flag-draped boxes, or were too intimidated by the brusque and overworked Indian Health Service doctors to mention that strange lump or cough until the cancer had raged throughout their bodies. Obituaries from the reservation outweighed those from the rest of the county three to one in the pages of the
Daily Express
. Charlie once told Lola that as a child he’d been to so many vigils in the high school gym that he was shocked to attend his first basketball game there. He’d had no idea of the building’s real purpose. The night before Judith’s church funeral, Joshua had held reluctant court in the gym as people crossed the varnished wooden floor to pay their respects before her casket, those mourners no doubt thinking of the youngsters in their own families, offering silent thanks that their children had chosen a different road, or saying prayers that they would find their way back to sobriety before sharing Judith’s fate. From her pew near the rear of the church, Lola craned her neck for a better view of Joshua. He looked as though he hadn’t slept, crossing himself sluggishly, intoning the responses to Father Eyebrows’s prayers a beat too late. He uttered his own “amens” barely above a whisper, but they sounded throughout the church during the pauses in the interminable service, each lagging a little longer behind the prayers than the last, until Lola feared Joshua had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. The mass ground toward completion. “As we grieve over the loss of one so young,” Father Eyebrows intoned, “we seek to understand Your purpose.”

“Ha! What purpose?” The congregation stirred as Joshua pushed himself to his feet, shoved past the others in the pew and headed for the church door. Father Eyebrows rushed through the final few phrases of the service. He made as if to follow, but Charlie intercepted him, whispering something into the old priest’s ear, leaning so close that he risked entanglement with those fearsome brows. Lola saw Charlie’s eyes scanning the crowd over the priest’s gleaming pate, tracking Joshua’s beeline toward the men who’d returned from the patch. Lola moved with the rest of the mourners as though she hadn’t seen Joshua backing one of the uncles into the stairwell that led to the church’s postage-stamp choir loft. The stairwell housed what was, to Lola, the church’s most remarkable feature, a long-neglected statue of Saint Lucy. The plaster image was a relic from the days when the church more enthusiastically celebrated the martyrdom of unfortunates like Lucy, whose eyes were said to have been gouged out before she was put to death for her refusal to marry and give up the virginity she’d dedicated to Christ. Lucy the statue cradled a saucer with a pair of blue eyes, the whites veined red, the orbs trailing scarlet stalks. Another pair, miraculously intact, gazed serenely from her face. Lola looked over her shoulder. Someone else had claimed Charlie’s attention. His back was to her. She hurried toward the stairwell, stopping just outside.