Montana (20 page)

“It’ll be gone by morning,” said Old Man Frazier, to whom Lola had been handed off. He turned out to be only slightly more approachable than his dog. The beast had refused to release its grip on Frank’s lifeless leg, and ended up being dragged into the ambulance along with the body. A call to Charlie, who was simultaneously dealing with Billy Worden’s mother while trying to locate Joshua, elicited the terse suggestion to shoot the goddamned thing. Instead, the EMTs conferred on the telephone with a vet about a knockout injection, and then dumped the drooling, staggering creature into the back seat of Old Man Frazier’s car, where it emitted a rattling wheeze just often enough to convince Lola it was still alive.

“Snow in June,” Old Man Frazier said as he stopped in front of Mary Alice’s cabin. He sat behind the wheel, a stumpy gentleman with alarmingly tufted ears, making no move to open her door. Flakes glittered in the headlights. “Bodies dropping like flies. How do you like Montana so far?”

Lola got out without answering. She stood outside the cabin, snow sifting onto her hair and sliding icy fingers beneath her collar, until his taillights disappeared. Bub greeted her at the door, nosing her up and down, narrow-eyed. He ran out to relieve himself, then scratched on the door to come back in. Lola peered toward the corral. The horse lowered himself into the snow and rolled back and forth, grunting in obvious pleasure. She envied his enjoyment. The air in the cabin was glassy with cold. Lola eyeballed a woodstove at one end of the living room. She made a circuit of the walls, looking for a thermostat. She came back to the woodstove. She blew on her fingers and tucked them beneath her armpits and stamped her feet. She jogged to the front door, pulled it open, and contemplated the staves of wood that rose nearly to the roofline. She stood on tiptoe and selected a few pieces from the top, then hurried back indoors and dumped them on the floor by the stove, Bub at her heels.

Her appreciation for his solicitude vanished when he snatched away the only packet of matches she could find, apparently intending a merry chase around the cabin. His eyes went wide and he spat out the matchbook when the piece of kindling Lola lobbed his way smacked the floor mere millimeters from his paws. Thirty minutes later—after a few false starts that involved several days’ worth of shredded newspapers, and a cloud of greasy black smoke that preceded her discovery of the flue and necessitated throwing open the windows and letting in still more cold air—a fire hissed within the stove. Bub abandoned further attempts at thievery and lay stretched on the floor, eyelids fluttering, legs twitching in a doggish version of REM sleep. Lola drowsed beside him, languorous with belated warmth and exhaustion. She closed her eyes and let her breathing slow as the day’s images began to flicker past. She’d learned it was best not to fight them, lest they rise up in far more fearsome fashion in her dreams.

She saw again Frank’s collapsed features, his mutilated body. The fat boy, his livid skin so at odds with his utter stillness. Judith and her labored grip on life. The sheriff’s voice, desperate and condemning: “The murder rate in this county has tripled since you got to town.” As sleep descended, Lola’s thoughts wandered. What was it Jolee had said about Mary Alice that first night? Something about working day and night. And the sheriff: “She’s been writing a lot about Johnny Running Wolf.” Johnny’s voice ringing through the church. “That name was on top of a lot of stories in the newspaper about me.” Nodding, smiling toward everyone else, but ignoring her efforts to catch his eye. Ignoring, likewise, a wave from the toothless guy. Frank. Who’d turned up dead in a ditch.

Lola sat up.

The room tilted.

The sides of the stove glowed faintly. She pushed herself to her feet and tottered to the door and stumbled out onto the porch, sucking in clear, cleansing air. Her thoughts swirled and settled. The first few tumblers clicked into place. Nothing swung open, revealing answers, but questions began to form, the start of a search. Not twenty-four hours earlier she’d righted Mary Alice’s desk, restored the pens and paper clips and other things in what seemed to be their proper containers and cubbyholes, and put the printer back on the desk and wiped it clean. Now she reached beneath the desk and pulled hard at a heavy box of paper there, sliding it out into the room. She lifted the top and removed a ream of paper, tore open the wrapping and loaded the printer. She retrieved her laptop and attached the printer and the router. One of Mary Alice’s few complaints about Montana lamented the dearth of wireless. Lola grinned as she entered her own name into the access code window. She and Mary Alice had used one another’s names for years as a basis for passwords. She followed Jan’s instructions for accessing the
Express
archives. She typed in Mary Alice’s byline, and sat back and watched as the list of stories scrolling down the screen grew and grew and grew.

Five years’ worth. Everything from stories about Magpie town council meetings and casino finances on the reservation, to stories about something called “captive shipping,” which sounded intriguing but appeared to be about railroads. Stories about weather. Stories about wheat. Stories, inevitably, about animals. Lola waited until the list was complete and then clicked on the first story and hit Print. The printer whirred into action. She slid the cursor to the next story. Open.
Click.
Print.
Click.
She looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen, where the bottle of Jameson’s waited, and ran her tongue across her lips. She went into the bathroom and unhooked the shower radio, hoping for music to help her stay awake, before she remembered that the day’s events had thwarted her plan to buy new batteries in town.

The clock’s hands inched toward midnight. Open.
Click.
Print.
Click
. There were hundreds of stories and she was going to print out every single one of them, and then read them and sort them according to their potential for trouble. If she were lucky, very lucky—and read very, very quickly—she might accomplish the initial task in a single all-nighter. The Jameson’s would have to wait. Open.
Click.
Print.
Click.
Lola pulled the first story from the growing pile in the printer tray. She reached for a yellow highlighter in a container on the desk and pulled off the cap and gnawed on the end as she read. At the end of each page, she looked back at the screen and tapped at the keyboard. Open.
Click
. Print.
Click
.

The first story was about the weather, about a wind so strong that it shoved a locomotive off the tracks. Lola read two sentences, scrawled “No” across it with the highlighter, and started to put it aside. Then she thought: “A locomotive?” She read it through to the end and sat a moment, listening to the printer’s buzzing hum, the fire’s sibilance in the stove. The dog rolled over and sighed. Beneath it all, slithering over and around the cabin, the low moan of wind. She put the story down.

Open.
Click.
Print.
Click.

She reached for the next story.

S
UNLIGHT ASSAULTED
Lola, cascading through the living room window. She’d closed the bedroom door against the sight of the shattered window and slept on the sofa with the bear spray in hand, the phone at her side. It was six o’clock. She’d last looked at the clock at three, clutching a printout of a story whose revelations were so perplexing it seemed appropriate to note the hour. Now, her stomach clamored. An ache in her hip asserted itself. She rubbed at it, and felt a lump in her pocket. She reached inside and discovered the Zuni fetish she’d taken from Verle’s. It was a grizzly bear of fiery coral, about two inches long, with startling turquoise eyes. A strip of buff-colored leather bound a miniature obsidian arrowhead to its back. She lifted the bear into a shaft of sun, admiring the way its turquoise eyes caught the light and glowed.

“Why do you do that? Take things?” Mary Alice had asked her more than once.

Her reply always a wordless shrug. How to explain, even to her best friend, that all of those people had taken little bits of her, security and trust, hope and certainty, pieces she wasn’t sure she’d ever get back? It seemed a fair exchange. She cupped the fetish in her hand and moved stiff-legged into the kitchen. Behind her, Bub slid from the sofa with a thump. They yawned in unison, stretching in the luxury of slow waking. She sat the bear on the counter. Its head was raised, mouth open, carved teeth respectfully detailed. Lola thought back to the stuffed bear in the airport, incisors like scythes. These bears didn’t simply bite, she guessed. They slashed and shredded, lay waste to whatever got in their way. She liked that. “Grrrr,” she said to the bear. She raised her hand to it, fingers bent, in her own approximation of a long-clawed salute. Bub slunk toward the door, radiating canine disgust. Lola remembered what Verle had said about superstitions. She went through the kitchen cabinets until she found the cornmeal. She shook a little into her hand, rubbing its grittiness between her fingertips, and sifted it onto the counter in front of the bear.

“Eat up,” she told it. “We’re all going to need our strength.”

She let Bub out and stood at the edge of the porch, waiting for him to finish his business. For years she’d arisen within one guarded compound or another, yanked from sleep by the muezzin’s insistent call to prayer rising above the final defiant blasts of nighttime gunfire. In her house in Kabul, her roommates would already be at work, twisting their lips around indignant French phrases directed at the
stupide
demands from their editors in Paris, the time difference in France making for earlier deadlines than she faced. The cook would be crashing around with all the pans in his arsenal, the end result being only a few green-tinged hard-boiled eggs to go with the previous day’s leathery naan. And the guards would almost certainly be asleep on their rope charpoys beside the compound gate, folded into fetal positions within their wide brown woolen shawls, cradling their Kalashnikovs.

Now she stood in unaccustomed solitude, postponing the moment when she’d have to deal with the previous night’s discovery. The sun did battle with the blackness of the mountains, its victory preordained. The air smelled of damp pines. The snow was already melting, droplets plinking from the eaves like piano keys. Even the wind had settled into a lazy, tuneful version of its customary shriek. A brown bird, its yellow breast chevroned with black, coasted to a straightlegged landing onto the corral fence. The horse turned toward it and nickered.

The horse.
She’d forgotten all about it.

She kicked high fans of snow on her way to the shed, the flakes spangling the air. The horse stood at the fence, waiting. Lola went into the shed and found the coffee can sitting on a shelf in the shed and filled it with grain from the bin Charlie had shown her. She dumped it into one of two rubber buckets hanging inside the fence. The horse plunged its nose into the grain. Lola put a tentative hand against its neck. Its hair was short and smooth. She patted it, lightly at first, then more surely, getting used to the feel of the long muscles beneath the skin. She stroked his bony face, careful not to touch the quivering unprotected hollow above his eye, marveling at the surprising velvet of his nose. She moved a hand behind a tender ear and scratched. The horse swiveled its ears in her direction and leaned into her touch, still chewing. Lola looked around for someone to see her achievement. Bub sat a few feet away. He thumped his tail.

“He likes it!”

Thump.

Bub pranced ahead of her on the way back to the cabin. She scooped some snow and formed a loose snowball. He yelped and turned an aggrieved eye upon her when it disintegrated against his rear. Charlie had said the dog needed a job. Maybe he could catch. She went back into the house and retrieved the softball and Mary Alice’s glove, stiff with disuse, from the closet and called to Bub. He was already at the door, waiting.

O
NE HUNDRED
pitches into the side of the shed, boards popping like shots upon impact. Inside drops and fastballs. Down on one knee for a while. Arm whips. Wrist snaps. Distance throws and then close. Speed drills. After a half-hour, she was nailing the zone and had worked up a pleasant burn in her arm, but was no closer to making sense of what she’d read the night before. Bub flopped at her feet. His tongue lolled from his open mouth. He’d retrieved each and every pitch, giving, Lola thought as she rubbed the ball against her pants, a whole new meaning to the term spitball. By the time they stopped, the snow was already shrinking from their footprints, grass showing through.