Montana (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” gasped Lola. “I’m so sorry. Get a blanket or a sheet or something, so we can lift it into the car. I’ll bring it to a vet. Think there’s one on the reservation? Or should I just go straight to Magpie?”

Johnny bent over the dog. It rolled its eyes and lifted its head and snapped at him. Johnny stepped back to avoid the spray of blood. He moved around behind it and put his stocking foot on its shoulder, pressing the dog deeper into the dirt. He grabbed the dog by the back of its head, lifting and twisting hard. At the crack, the other dog stumbled backward. Then it lunged forward, stopping just out of Johnny’s reach. Another dog raced from around the corner of the house, then a third. Johnny dropped the dog’s head and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Go on,” he said to Lola. “Get out of here. You don’t want to see this.”

“I’ll chase them away,” said Lola. She picked up a stone.

“Forget it. They smell blood now. They’ll all be on him in a minute.” Still another dog slunk out of nowhere.

“Hurry up.” His tone had lost its gloss. “I’d hate to see your delicate sensibilities offended.”

Lola got in the car and waited until she’d put three ridges between herself and the house before she stopped in the middle of the road. She pressed her hands to her eyes. They came away damp. The dust, she thought. She wiped them on her pants and tried to focus on her conversation with Johnny. He’d never answered her question about TMR. And he’d ignored the subject of Frank altogether. She reached into the front of her shirt and extracted the narrow bundle anchored stiffly in her bra and unwound the toilet paper from the sugar spoon.

CHAPTER TEN

L
ola passed the aspen grove before she registered the break in the trees, the bridge over the irrigation ditch, and remembered Verle’s invitation.

Her pulse throbbed anew against the skin of her wrist. The car slowed. She thought of Bub, locked for long hours in the motel room, the way he leapt joyously against her whenever she returned, no matter how brief the absence. She felt again the sickening thump beneath the wheels, signaling a dog that would never leap again. “Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” She looked skyward. The sun was still high. She pressed a reluctant toe to the accelerator. Twenty minutes later, she was on the Sleep Inn’s floor, knocked to her knees by Bub’s welcoming assault, turning her face away from his apparent determination to coat every inch of it with his tongue. He left off briefly to dash outdoors to do his business, but was back before she’d finished filling his bowl with kibble.

“You shouldn’t eat all of that now,” she said as he nudged her hand out of the way and attacked the bowl. “I might be late getting home. Be good while I’m gone and you’ll get an extra treat when I get back.” He raised his head and gave her a doggish grin, his tail on fast-forward. The food was already gone. “Listen to me,” Lola said. “I’m trying to reason with a dog.” His outraged howl followed her as she left. “That’s not what I meant by being good,” she called through the closed door. And spent most of the drive to Verle’s trying to tamp down a sense of guilt, dislodged only by the rattle of planks beneath the wheels as she turned onto the bridge over the irrigation ditch. The car slid through the stippled shade of the aspens. The trees ended and the view began. Lola stopped the car and rolled down the window. Verle appeared from someplace, walking toward her. Saying something.

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m looking.”

T
HEY WERE
at one end of a crooked valley. A low log house stretched before her, deep eaves shading a porch where rocking chairs invited lingering occupancy. The house was sizeable but the mountains framing the valley turned it toylike. Lola had to readjust her gaze downward to fend off the sense that she’d somehow shrunk. When she looked straight ahead, things regained their normal proportions. But to glance upward even for a moment at those ice-wrapped peaks was to be sucked back into a world of miniatures.

“What is this place?”

“Mine,” Verle said, and everything about him changed when he spoke, the pride and pleasure encompassed in that single word tinged with defiance, his intensity almost unseemly.

Lola looked away. At the far end of the valley, smoke crawled up into the sky. “What’s that?”

“A fire. They start up about this time every year. Lightning and such gets them going. Don’t you want to get out of the car?”

Lola stayed put. “Shouldn’t you call somebody?”

“Naw. It’s up in the national forest. They’ll let it burn unless it gets too close to houses. Though, dry as it’s been this year, that’s a distinct possibility.”

Lola rolled the window back up and got out of the car. It beeped behind her as she clicked the keychain’s automatic lock.

Verle raised his eyebrows. “I’m not going to try to steal your car.”

“Habit.” She turned a slow circle, trying to orient herself. “I thought you said you were Mary Alice’s neighbor,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be able to see her cabin from here?”

“The property line’s somewhere over that way”—he pointed vaguely back the way she’d come—“just a few miles south as the crow flies. It’s a lot farther by the road. To the north, this place goes all the way up into the reservation. Glad you like it. I figured you could use a change of scenery before you head back.”

“Didn’t you hear? I’m not going anywhere.” She told him about the sheriff and his edict. The mention of Charlie Lau-rendeau acted like a ragged cloud across the sun, stealing warmth from the day.

“Well, now,” Verle said. “That seems extreme. Walk with me. Let’s put this ugliness aside for a while.”

Lola had to hurry to keep up with him. He was shorter than she was, but he had a deceptive loping stride. He led her toward a high-fenced enclosure, where a man leafed segments from a bale of hay as a trio of horses stood at quivering attention before him. Lola noted their elegant faces, the flowing excess of mane and tail, and figured they were a step up from the stolid, serviceable mount she’d glimpsed in Mary Alice’s corral. The man threw what was left of the bale onto the ground and backed through the barn door when Lola and Verle turned his way.

“It is a sad fact that Charlie couldn’t find his ass—sorry, ma’am—with both hands, let alone find out who killed Mary Alice. I hate to see you caught up in his incompetence. But the whole point of inviting you out here was to get your mind off things. This should help. They’re Arabians.”

“Excuse me?”

“The horses. They’re purebred Arabians. One of the world’s oldest breeds.” He lifted a latch and held a barred metal gate aside as she reluctantly followed him into the enclosure. The horses wheeled and trotted toward them. Verle dug in his pocket and brought out a handful of white sugar packets from the cafe. He tore one open with his teeth and poured the contents into his palm and held it out. Imperious arched necks stretched and straightened. Fleshy wet tongues wrapped his hand.

“Here,” he said, tossing one of the envelopes her way. She caught it before she could think about it. “You do it.”

The horses were small, but with powerful deep chests, smoothly muscled hindquarters and absurdly delicate legs, hooves dainty enough to perch atop teacups. They blew hot breath through flared pink nostrils and turned wise dark eyes upon her, making low, considering sounds in their throats. Lola took a step back, the sugar clutched within her fist.

“Not a horse person?” Verle asked.

She shook her head and backed into a fencepost. The horses surged forward. Verle distributed the last of the sugar and slapped their rumps. He opened the gate to free her right about the time she was seriously considering climbing the fence. “What do you do with them?” Lola asked, once the gate had safely closed behind her. “I assume you don’t chase around after cows on horses like that.”

“Breed them. Show them. They go all over the place. Colorado, California, Idaho. There’s a roomful of ribbons in the house. Come on. I’ll show you.”

Sunlight gilded the valley. Lola and Verle trod their own angled shadows as they drew near the rambling house, its logs almost black, an emphatic brushstroke at the base of the sky’s enameled blankness. Verle pointed beyond the house, to a shed wedged against a bluff overhanging a creek, its boards gone gappy beneath a caved-in roof. “See that? My grandfather, his wife, and eight kids homesteaded there and called themselves lucky, given the dugout where they spent their first winter. My mother wanted to tear that shack down once they built a real house, but my father wouldn’t let her. Said it was her heritage. She told him she kissed her heritage goodbye the day she got indoor plumbing.”

“What happened to that house?” Lola looked around for a logical step up from the homestead cabin. The home before her, she realized as they approached, was considerably larger than its unassuming profile suggested.

“It’s the center part of this place.” His hand sketched the outline in the air, the faint seams where old logs joined older ones. “I sent people all over the state buying up wrecked homesteads so the additions would match. Couldn’t tell, could you?”

Wide warped planks echoed their footsteps back at them as they crossed a porch where generations of boots had worn a path of hollows toward the front door. A rifle leaned against the doorjamb. “What’s that?” Lola asked. The worker had reappeared, holding a wooden-backed brush in his hand. He approached one of the horses. She wondered what he’d do if he heard a shot’s innocuous
pop.
Whether he’d run to her aid, or continue stroking the brush along the horse’s commodious back, his own back obligingly turned. Then she saw the bulky sidearm on his hip. She hadn’t noticed it before.

“What’s it look like?” Verle picked up the rifle and held it out to her. She took it and checked to see that the safety was on. She jacked the lever, the action liquid, the steel almost warm against fingers gone icy. She’d half-expected a spent shell to fly out. None did. She checked the chamber, clicked it shut and rolled the gun back over in her hands, giving herself time to let relief wash away the spike of fear. A load from a gun like that would have taken off Mary Alice’s entire head.

“Why all the firepower?” she asked, once she was sure her voice would sound normal. “This rifle. That man’s gun.” She pointed toward the corral.

“Grizzlies.”

“Here?” Lola whirled and studied the valley.

Verle laughed, easy and full-throated. “You won’t see them this time of day. Dawn and dusk, they come down out of the foothills—where your friend has her cabin. A big griz has been hanging around, scaring the hell out of the horses. Eduardo’s had to put them in the barn at night. If I catch him down here again—the bear, not Eduardo—he’s a goner.”

“Isn’t that illegal? Aren’t they endangered, or something?”

The laughter left Verle’s eyes. “Way I look at it, he’s endangering me. He’s already taken a couple of my calves. This is my land. His home is up there. As long as he stays there, he and I will get along just fine. But if he comes down here, I could drop him at a hundred yards with that.” He nodded toward the rifle.

Lola hefted it anew, appraising its easy balance. The stock’s tight-whorled walnut gleamed like good furniture. She ran her fingers over the trigger guard, where a tiny, hand-engraved elk lifted its head in a long bugle.

“It’s custom. From Germany. Come on in.” He held the door for her.

She replaced the rifle by the door, stepped inside and waited for her eyes to adjust. High-backed leather sofas rose up within the cool dimness, anchoring either end of the room. Patterned woolen rugs sectioned the vast space between them. Verle clicked a switch and light splashed onto recessed shelves, where pots nestled in their nooks like plump hens. Lola crossed the room and examined one, narrow of neck and wide of base, its surface a high jet gloss cut by matte lines.

“You’ve got a good eye. That’s out of San Ildefonso Pueblo. If I’d started collecting before the woman who made it died, I probably could’ve gotten this for a quarter the price I paid. Even so, it just keeps going up in value. Not that it much matters. I’d never sell it.”

He turned her attention to another shelf bright with small, carved animals of polished stone, turquoise, serpentine, carnelian. He selected a bighorn sheep the size of a chestnut, its horns painstakingly ridged, swirls on its rump suggesting its thick woolen coat.

“Zuni fetishes,” he announced. “Look at the workmanship. You’re supposed to feed them.”

“The Zuni?”

“The fetishes,” he said. “Give them cornmeal, or some such, to help them keep their power. I don’t hold with all of that superstition.” He led her around the room, reciting the provenance of rough-surfaced sand paintings and scowling Hopi kachinas.

“All of these things,” Lola said. “They’re from the Southwest, aren’t they? What about the tribe here? Don’t you have anything of theirs?”

Verle waved a dismissive hand. “You want to create art, you need leisure time. People like the Zuni built high-rises, cultivated crops, created thousand-mile trade routes. Nothing against the Blackfeet, but they were nomads, dragging their tipis all over the Plains, chasing buffalo, one step ahead of starvation.”