Disgraced (20 page)

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 covering 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 mo
ment 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?”

“YouTube.”

“Say what?”

“It's videos. Mommy lets me watch them on her phone.”

Lola had a dim memory of Margaret's favorite video, one in which a seven-year-old demonstrated how she'd trained her 4-H chicken. “I can do that,” Margaret had said at the time.

“You can't,” Lola had retorted. “She's seven. You're five. And you don't have a chicken.”

Showed you
, Margaret's glance said now.

Pal rose. “Margaret, it's time to sleep. Your mom told me I could put you to bed tonight.” The idea was to give Lola time to talk privately to Delbert. Lola walked with him to his car. “Hey.” She nudged a front tire with her foot. It sat low and squashed, throwing the car off to one side. “You're working on a flat here.”

“Aw, hell.” Delbert spat tobacco. He whipped around at Lola's next words, sending the stream wild, splashing across the car door.

“Do you still have Pal's guns?”

“I do. Why?”

“I thought maybe you could bring them up here. Now that she's getting better and all.” Lola listened to herself lie and wondered if she had ever fooled anyone in her life. Delbert, however, was still focused on his car.

“Won't be able to get them up to you for a couple of days. This thing will barely get me home. Any chance you can call the garage in town, tell them I'll need a new tire? I'd call them myself but,” he rubbed a toe in the dirt, “phone got cut off last month.”

In her hurry to cover the embarrassment of his admission, Lola only made things worse. “Don't you have a spare?” Lola knew better before he even answered. He'd probably been driving on his spare for months. This time, she thought before she spoke. “Maybe I'll run down tomorrow and get those guns. Pick up that tire for you, too. Save somebody a trip.” She changed the subject before he could question her further as to why she wanted the guns.

“I know you're worried about that tire,” she said. “But can you wait here until Pal gets Margaret to sleep? She has something she needs to tell you. And I need to be there when she does.”

Pal arranged two of the kitchen chairs so that they faced one another, placing herself in one, Delbert in the other, knees nearly touching. She took his brown, twisted hands in her small white ones. Lola sat across the table, “record” button pushed on her phone, pen in hand.

“I'm going to tell you something hard,” Pal said. “Lola here's writing a story about it. She's going to take notes while we're talking. But when I'm done, if you decide you don't want her to write about this part, you can tell her. And she won't. She'll erase everything and we'll put her paper notes in the woodstove. She promised.”

“That's right,” said Lola. It wasn't how things were usually done. But it was the right way.

The wrinkles in Delbert's face remapped themselves, starting in a smile that mocked Pal's serious tone, moving to puzzlement and then to apprehension. “Hell, girl. Whatever it is, just say it. I got a tire going fast down to the rim. You don't want that wreck of mine stuck in your front yard.”

So Pal said it. She talked for a long time. Delbert bent over her hands, clinging to them as if to keep from falling altogether. He took one harsh breath after another. “You're saying—”

He raised his head. “You're saying—”