Disgraced (21 page)

He dropped Pal's hands, rose, and unkinked his back to the extent that he could, achieving a semblance of military attention. “My grandson, he didn't fall asleep on watch.”

“No.” The word like a black line of certainty beneath this new information.

“Didn't put everybody else in danger.”

“No.”

“Died in defense of a fellow soldier.”

“Yes.”

“That being you.”

“Yes.”

“Killed by his own countrymen.”

“Yes.”

“Not a coward.”

“Never, Delbert. Not for a minute. Those other guys. They're the cowards.”

Delbert launched the separate movements required to turn and face Lola. “You go ahead and write that story. You write it all.”

THIRTY-TWO

Lola's phone rang as
Delbert's lopsided taillights disappeared over the hill. She didn't have to look at the number to know who it was.

“Hey, Charlie.”

She wished she'd forced something resembling warmth into her voice. But the long interview with Pal and then the wrenching conversation with Delbert had left her simultaneously drained and wired, the story buzzing in her head, her fingers itching to type. “Look. It's been a tough day. It might be better if we don't talk tonight.”

Charlie cut her off. “I don't care that you had a tough day. Or why. And I don't want to talk. At least, not on the phone anymore. It's too easy for you to avoid me. I'm wrapping up training. The deputy's ready to go solo. I'm handing the weekend shifts over to him and heading down there.”

“What? I don't think that's a good idea—”

“I don't, either. But I don't feel as though you've given me much choice.”

“Charlie—” She spoke to dead air. “Goddammit.”

She turned to go back into the house and nearly ran into Pal. “Who's Charlie?”

“Margaret's father.”

Pal blocked the doorway. Behind her, the scent of berries hung heavy in the kitchen's lingering heat. “And?”

“And I don't want to talk about it.” Lola paced the kitchen, an old habit, physical activity a prelude to writing. She wasn't ready yet. She'd give herself about another hour of fidgeting before sitting down to work. “Come on. Let's deal with those strawberries.” She pushed past Pal and retrieved an old newspaper from the stack by the front door and spread it across the kitchen table, then scrounged in the cupboards for a couple of colanders. She hefted one of the flats from the counter and sat it in front of Pal's chair, and the other in front of hers.

She calculated. If Charlie left first thing in the morning, it would take him at least nine hours to get to Thirty, despite his propensity for miles-gobbling speed. Some years earlier, Montana had abandoned its “reasonable and prudent” speed limit that effectively amounted to no speed limit at all. But Charlie saw no reason to change his ways, especially given his expectation of professional courtesy at traffic stops. Lola decided she could afford to worry about Charlie later. By the time he arrived, the story would be done.

She retrieved a paring knife from a drawer and sat down and plucked a strawberry from the flat, slicing off its top. She tossed the cap onto the newspaper and the berry into the colander and selected another. “This morning,” Lola said. “You were ready with that shovel. Didn't you see it was me?”

“No.” Pal popped a strawberry in her mouth. “These haven't quite turned, you know. We don't have to use all of them for jam. We can save some just for eating.”

“As far as I'm concerned, we don't have to use any for jam. How could you not know it was me?”

“You parked next to the house. I couldn't see your truck from the front door. And I didn't hear you pull up. I'd just stepped out of the shower and gotten my clothes on, when I heard somebody walking across the porch.”

Lola took a moment to appreciate the fact that Pal was showering upon rising. “Who'd you think it was?” Even though she knew.

“You know damn well who.”

“Do you really think he'd come after you?”

Pal let the question sit there, gave Lola a good long time to think about Mike, sprawled in fatal surprise on the hard earth, blood spurting from the gash in his neck, scarlet as the stains on Lola's fingertips.

“Okay. He would. But he probably won't. He thinks I've got no story. And he's got no way of knowing that you've contacted the DOD. Which you hadn't even done this morning.” And yet, Lola thought, Pal had been frightened enough to seize a garden implement. Lola gave serious thought to getting in her truck and heading downhill to Delbert's on the spot, retrieving the guns despite the lateness of the hour. The memory of the silver truck looming in her rearview mirror, and her desperate jouncing flight across the rocky valley floor, welled afresh. She tamped it down. “Here's what I'm going to do,” she said. “I'm going to write my story tonight. I'll write it out longhand. We can go to town in the morning. I'll type it into one of the library computers, and send it from there.”

Pal cast a dubious glance at the berries. “Then we shouldn't be capping these now. Don't you want to start writing your story?”

Lola shook her head. “I like to wait a little while after I've interviewed people before I start writing. It helps everything come together in my mind. This is the perfect brainless activity.”

“But they'll go bad before we can start cooking them.”

Which would give her a great excuse to throw them out, Lola thought, even as she acknowledged yet another hopeless instance of wishful thinking, about as productive as her fantasies about a dead or disappeared chicken. “I'll be done with the story by noon. Those berries will hold that long. Besides, you smash them up for jam, right? It's not like they need to be perfect.”

Pal's fingers moved over the berries in a blur, caps raining onto the newspaper. “I suppose. How long before your story goes public?”

Lola tried to match her own speed to Pal's, and ended up slicing the berries nearly in half in her haste, throwing away almost as much berry as she saved. “No idea. I've never dealt with these folks before. It'll take them awhile to get the story online. There'll be editing, and probably some lawyering.”

“These berries go quicker if you just use your fingers. Like this.” Pal slid her nail under a cap and flipped it onto the newspaper, a green speck against Lola's great berried blobs.

Lola tried it. A line of juice ran beneath her nail. Pal was right. It was faster. “By the time the story goes up, Charlie will be here. We don't have anything to worry about from Skiff,” she said, as much to reassure herself as Pal.

“Charlie's coming here?”

Lola capped another strawberry. It sailed into the colander, landing with the thud of fruit against fruit. Her colander was barely a quarter full. Berries mounded high in Pal's. Lola looked at the flat. She'd barely made a dent. “Yeah. He's heading out in the morning.” She slid her nail into another berry.

“Maybe things are going to be okay on my end,” Pal said. “But it sounds as though you've got a whole lot of worry coming your way.”

Lola typed her story into the library's computer with hands swollen and sore from capping the berries the night before, her fingertips darkened by strawberry juice that defied efforts to scrub it off. Margaret sat across the room, in a beanbag chair in the children's section, surrounded by every book she could find with a chicken on the cover. Lola glanced through the window. Pal waited outside, with a coffee she'd poured into a double thickness of super-size soda cups. The librarian had let them know in no uncertain terms that the coffee was to remain outside. So Pal stayed with it, and every few minutes Lola rose from her chair and opened the library's front door and leaned out and took a gulp, notching grim satisfaction at the librarian's aggrieved sigh as the scorching heat shoved up against the air conditioning.

Each sip jolted her synapses anew, fueling a fresh burst of typing. Within minutes, her fingers would slow, her eyelids droop, her shoulders slump. Once, she felt hot breath in her ear. “Mommy. Go get more coffee.” Once, the librarian. “Ma'am.” When, Lola wondered, had she made the transition from miss to ma'am? “We don't allow sleeping in here. Besides, people are only supposed to use the computers for twenty minutes at a time.”

“Do you see anybody else in here?” Lola asked. “But look. I'm leaving.” She performed another near-stumble toward the door, took another gulp of tepid coffee.

“How much longer?” said Pal. “You know it's freaking hot out here, right?” She had her own supersize cup in her other hand, filled with ice. She rolled it across her forehead.

“Give me some of that.” Lola flipped the lid of Pal's cup open without waiting for permission and snagged a couple of reduced ice cubes, dropping one down the front of her shirt and pressing the second to the back of her neck. “Oh, sweet Jesus. That's awful. And good. Just what I needed.” The story was taking longer than she expected. She was glad she'd left a very reluctant Bub back at the house.

“Just get your ass back in there and keep typing.”

Lola pushed back through the door. “Here I am again,” she announced. “Start that twenty-minute timer of yours.” But the librarian opted to ignore her for the hour it took before she hit the send key on the story, and printed out Pal's statement. During that hour, Pal went back to the convenience store and returned with a coffee refill. Lola figured she'd probably spend the rest of the day peeing. Maybe, she thought, she should just sleep on the bathroom floor when she got home. Of course, the way she was feeling she could probably sleep in the middle of the street outside the library. She fumbled for her phone, glad she'd thought to save the InDepth.org editor's number on speed dial. She wasn't sure that, at this point, she could have managed to dial the numbers in correct sequence.

“I'm printing it out right now,” he said in response to her call.

“I'll fax you a notarized statement in a little bit, too.”

“We've got the lawyers standing by. Should be pretty straightforward, given all the documents you're filing with it. Nice job on the photos, too, by the way. Stay close to your phone. I'll probably be checking in all day with questions.”

“Of course.” No need for him to know she planned to turn the ringer to high and lay beside the phone so she wouldn't sleep through his calls. She emailed herself a copy of the story, deleted the file from the library's computer, and directed a frosty smile toward the librarian. “We're out of your hair now. Thank you. Margaret? Time to put the books away.”

People who reshelved books improperly or not at all were among Lola's pet peeves. “I'm sorry,” she mouthed silently to the library gods as she stacked Margaret's books and left them on one of the small tables in the children's section. “You've been so good,” she said to Margaret on the way out. “We just have one more stop to make.” Although, Lola thought, it was likely to be a lengthy stop, given the fact that they'd hit the reservation offices right about the time people were taking their lunch breaks. She wondered if she could possibly drink even more coffee, then reminded herself that, at least for this brief moment, Margaret should get her undivided attention. “You deserve something special for how good you've been the past few days while Mommy was working.”

“Mommy's always working,” Margaret observed, larding her request with guilt before she pressed her advantage. “Pop? Ice cream?”

“Only if you can eat it or drink it in the car,” Lola said, too exhausted to object. “Otherwise, I'm going to embarrass you and Pal by falling asleep in the ice cream shop. Speaking of whom—where is she?”

She and Margaret stood in the shade of the library's awning where, moments before, Pal had perched upon the library's wide outer windowsill, twin cups of coffee and ice in hand. The cups remained, sweating circles onto the brick façade. But Pal was gone.

Lola looked up and down the street. No Pal. A large silver pickup, side defiantly dented, rolled toward them, the driver's hand raised in mocking greeting as the truck passed.

THIRTY-THREE

“Is he gone?”

The whisper hovered on the wind's exhalation.

Lola spun around. No one. “Where are you?”

“The alley.”

Lola checked the street. The truck was gone. She and Margaret hastened around the library's corner and found Pal pressed into a side doorway, face blank, eyes dead. Her lips barely moved as she spoke. “He already made one pass. He knows.”

Lola checked the street yet again. Still empty, but for her own vehicle parked at the curb. Not for the first time, Lola rued its look-at-me red paint job. She tried to infuse her voice with a certainty she in no way felt. “Doubtful. He probably saw my truck, and drove back around to check things out. He's gone now. You can come out.”

Pal flattened herself against the door. “Can't.”

Lola looked to Margaret. The girl moved to Pal's side and took her hand. Lola took the other. “Yes, you can,” Margaret said. She tugged at Pal's hand. Pal didn't move. “You come now. We're going to—” she shot a glance at Lola—“get some ice cream and then we're going to the rez and then we're going home. Mommy's going to take a nap. You can, too. I'll be good. I'll stay right in the room with you so you don't have to worry.”

Pal's feet moved, slow and jerky, as though separate from her body. Lola and Margaret guided her to the truck.

At the ice cream parlor, Pal held the cone before her lips, eating it with those same automatic movements, but finishing it nonetheless.

At the reservation, she walked without assistance behind Lola and Margaret into the Eastern Shoshone tribal headquarters and explained in coherent sentences to the one person who miraculously had opted out of her lunch break that they were doing some business for Delbert St. Clair, and could they please use the fax? Which, in further evidence of the existence of miracles, was working.

And at home, Pal shook off Margaret's repeated suggestion that she lie down and instead arranged a pillow and blanket for Lola on the bathroom floor and positioned Lola's phone by her head and herself outside the door. A belated thought wriggled through the murk in Lola's brain. She'd meant to stop by Delbert's and pick up the guns. But she'd driven right past his house, slumped over the steering wheel, barely-open eyes concentrating on the last couple of miles of road. “Damn,” she murmured. Then, to Pal, “Shovel?”

“What's that?”

It was too late. She was asleep.

When Lola awoke for good—she'd peed exactly as much as she expected, and she also had vague memories of a couple of befogged conversations with the editor—the air was redolent of strawberries. She put her hands on the side of the tub and pulled herself to her knees, then grabbed for a towel rack and pulled harder, until she was standing. She made the mistake of looking in the mirror. She bent over the sink, turning on the cold water and splashing it on her face until it was numb. She turned off the water and toweled her face, making sure to avoid a second encounter with her reflection.

She followed her nose to the kitchen. There, Margaret stood on a chair at the counter, wielding a potato masher against a bowlful of strawberries with such force that her face, hands, and clothing—along with a good portion of the surrounding real estate—were splattered with red juice. Pal stood beside her, methodically smashing berries with somewhat less force but more effectiveness, the contents of her own bowl a pulpy mass.

“That looks disgusting.” Lola's voice came out in a croak.

“
You
look disgusting. Don't you have a comb? And some clean clothes? You know, the last time I checked, there was a shower in that bathroom.”

Lola thought Pal was enjoying their role reversal just a little too much. Bub arose from a spot in the far corner, and circled the room to get to Lola, sticking close to the walls on the way. Lola saw movement under the table and realized the cause. Jemalina had settled herself there, on a nest of shredded, scarlet-blotched newspaper.

“Good Christ. What's that chicken doing in here?”

“Quarter, Mommy. She was lonely. Besides, she likes strawberries and Bub doesn't.”

“She can't eat strawberries outside? Oh, never mind.” A few hours of shut-eye, Lola thought, and the entire order of the universe had been upended. “Is there coffee?”

“No more coffee for you. How about some juice? And I thought we might go for a run later.” Pal elbowed Margaret. Giggling ensued. Lola hadn't thought Pal capable of laughter, let alone something as frivolous as a giggle. She brushed past the treasonous pair and made the coffee herself, holding a mug under the stream as it began to flow from the coffeemaker, not substituting the pot until the mug was full.

“Ahhhhh.” Her eyelids lifted. Joints became limber. Her ears, attuned moments earlier only to the gurgle of the coffeemaker, picked up a tinkling sound, simultaneously glassy and metallic. “What's that noise?”

Pal lifted a wooden spoon from her bowl, splattering the counter with red, and pointed with it toward the stove. Two outsize cast-iron pots sat there, one covered, its lid jiggling as puffs of steam escaped. “We're sterilizing the jam jars. If you must poison yourself with more coffee, finish it fast. We're about ready to start cooking down the berries. You can do that. All you have to do is stir. Even you won't be able to ruin it.”

More giggling.

A basketful of intact strawberries sat on the counter. They'd saved the best for eating. Lola picked one up and started to run her thumbnail under the cap. Then she remembered how long it had taken her to scrub the worst of the stains from her fingers. She found the paring knife in a drawer and sliced off the cap and popped the berry in her mouth, savoring the burst of flavor against her palate. She put down the knife and lifted her coffee mug.

“What do I have to do?” she said around the strawberry.

“Here.” Pal handed Lola the bowl of mashed berries and the spoon. “Put these in that pot. Add Margaret's. Dump in that sack of sugar. Stir until it dissolves. Squeeze those lemons over the pot. Make sure the seeds don't get in. Heat it until it simmers. Stir it up good so it doesn't burn. Keep stirring. That's it. Think you can handle that?”

Lola tilted the bowl over a pot that could have held all of Jemalina and a couple of her friends besides, something Lola thought would have been a better use for the pot. The strawberries slid out of the bowl with a sucking sound. Some missed the pot and slopped onto the floor. Lola looked askance at the sugar. “Do we need that much?”

“It's half what my mom used. Hey. Keep stirring or you'll ruin it. I'm going to take Margaret and clean both of us up.”

Lola dragged the spoon through the mashed berries, pinwheeling the white lines of sugar deeper with every swipe. Bubbles rose to the surface and broke noisily, a backbeat to the clinking jars. The mass of berries was surprisingly heavy. Her arm ached. She heard water running in the bathroom. Then a cracking sound—once, twice, three times, the old danger signal. Bub lifted his head. The chicken clucked. Lola glanced through the window. Nothing. She knew those cracks as gunfire. If she'd been in Afghanistan, she'd have assumed ill intent, bandits at best, insurgents a more likely and far more dangerous scenario. Here, it was probably somebody plinking at prairie dogs. Afghanistan had been years ago, she reminded herself. Time she got over it. Still, she listened hard. Nothing, other than the shower, still running. She picked up the paring knife and, still stirring, decapitated another berry one-handed, sucking the sweetness from it as she checked the window again. A line of dust hung above the ridgeline, signaling an oncoming car. Her heart jumped. She glanced at the clock. Two in the afternoon. Early for Charlie, but not too. She forgot to stir. She forgot that she'd resented his proposal. Forgot that they were in the midst of a fight. Forgot everything other than the fact that he was finally here, that for the first time in days, everything wasn't going to be on her. She left the spoon in the bubbling strawberries and crossed the kitchen in giant steps. She flung open the door, arms raised to wrap around him, face lifted for his kiss.

“Well. This is quite the welcome.”

A foot wedged into the doorway. Lola looked first at the unfamiliar cowboy boot, then the face. Skiff Loughry grinned down at her, even happier to see her than she'd been to see Charlie.