Montana (24 page)

Lola leaned across Jan’s trembling body. She pumped her fist. “Go Griz.”

The man stooped so that his head was level with the car window and scrutinized Lola.

He put a hand to the small of his back and straightened and walked to the booth, indictment in each heavy step. Jan reached for the gearshift. Lola clamped a hand around her wrist. She wondered if they’d send her back to Charlie’s jail or if she’d end up in some Canadian form of rendition. She wondered what would happen to Jan. The man came back. He looked at Lola but spoke to Jan.

“That thing on her head has got to go. They’ll laugh her out of the Stampede. Make sure she gets a hat to go with those boots,” he said. He handed back their passports. “Welcome to Canada.”

“I
COULD
kill you. Should kill you.”

Jan had held her breath, her face reddening dangerously, as the road unspooled downhill, the border crossing growing smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. By the time they hit the prairie, the road running through wheat fields dotted with bobbing oil derricks, she’d let it out and sucked enough oxygen back in to fuel quite a rant. “Maybe I’ll put you out right here. Let one of those meth-head roughnecks find you by the side of the road. Those guys work two-week shifts without seeing a woman. I’m sure there’s an ax murderer among them who might want to turn you into kindling. But only if I don’t do it first.”

Lola curled toward her burning feet, trying to get a good grip on the boots. “I get the picture. You want me dead.
There.
Oh, that’s better.” The boots loosened with a series of jerks. Lola rubbed at the top of her feet and flexed her toes. “Ten more minutes in those boots and I’d have confessed to anything.”

The car slid onto the shoulder in a hailstorm of gravel, and stopped. Lola’s head snapped back against the headrest. Jan turned off the engine. Clouds of dust boiled around them and sifted to earth. The landscape reemerged. The oil rigs were larger than they looked. Lola puzzled over the way the circular motion of their gears produced the drill’s monotonous bobbing. She started to ask Jan how they worked, but Jan cut her off.

“Lola. Seriously.” Her voice shook. “What was that about? Do you have any idea how much trouble we could’ve gotten into?”

“But we didn’t. Charlie won’t let me leave the county, let alone the entire country. It was the only way I could think of to get to Calgary. Besides, this was nothing.”

“Nothing? We could have ended up in jail.”

Lola thought of border crossings that involved intricate doublespeak about bribes in currencies whose values she grasped only faintly, never sure whether she was paying tens of dollars or hundreds, abandoning mathematical calculations when the muzzle of a gun rose before her face. “Better jail than dead,” she murmured.

“What was that?”

“Never mind.”

Jan’s head fell back. She sent a scream across the prairie. Lola leaned over and turned on the ignition. “Did you even think,” Jan gasped when she was done, “about asking me?”

“Of course not. You’d have said no.” Lola tapped the clock on the dashboard. “Do you mind driving while you yell at me? Because we’re never going to get there at this rate.” The car began to move, slowly at first, and then faster until it was hurtling along at what seemed to be Jan’s default speed.

“Lesson Number One,” Lola said. “Don’t ask for anything. Ever. The only way to get what you need is to go after it. Just like we’re doing now.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

L
ola and Jan cut across the campus toward the law building, switching scalding lattes from hand to hand.

The sounds of the waking city eddied around them, leaking through the trees that screened the university from the streets beyond. The sun was already high, glazing Calgary’s glass towers, turning the city’s broad avenues into sparkling thoroughfares. Lola, who’d grown up beneath clotted skies that absorbed the exhalations of automobiles and industry and returned them as grimy, pelting raindrops, lingered at the edge of campus.

“Come on,” Jan urged. “You’re the one who wanted to get here early.”

“You’re the one who insisted on stopping for lattes. It’s just that I’ve never seen a city this clean.”

“And you’ll never see a latte in Magpie. Have you already forgotten that dishwater at the cafe? Drink up while you can.”

Lola tucked the fat morning newspaper she’d bought at the hotel under her arm and hurried to keep up with Jan. After days of scanning the relentless coverage of weather and livestock in the
Express,
she had without protest accepted the extraordinary penalty that involved paying for the paper with U.S. rather than Canadian currency.

“Are you sure?” the hotel clerk had asked. “You know, we have a saying up here for you people when it comes to the exchange.”

Lola flipped through the paper’s sections. There were many. The food section alone was bigger than the entire
Express.
“What’s the saying?”

“BOHIC.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bend Over. Here It Comes. That’ll be five dollars.”

Jan jogged ahead of her to the law school’s door. Her hair, still wet from the shower, slapped at her shoulders, leaving a dark stain on her shirt. She grasped the handle and rattled it. “I knew it. It’s locked. We drove all the way up here for nothing. Now what do we do?”

Lola dropped the newspaper to the sidewalk. It made a satisfying thump. “We wait. It’s early yet.” She folded herself onto the concrete beside the newspaper, pulled out a section, and opened it. She took a sip of her latte and licked a bit of foam from her upper lip. Jan shook the door again, then came back and stood over her. Her shadow slid across the newspaper. Lola moved it back into the sunshine and turned the pages, searching for news about Afghanistan.

“Is this the sort of thing Mary Alice would have done? Stake out a place and just wait for somebody? What was she like when she was just starting out? How long did you know her?”

Lola placed her finger on a rectangle of print that recounted, too briefly, another suicide bombing in Kandahar with no mention of which factions were involved. She squinted at Jan and tried not to think of a puppy, all quivering eagerness mixed with the confusion of recent loss.

“Longer than you did. Try not to be so gushy when we talk to Gallagher. In fact, don’t talk at all. He sounds like a hard case. He’ll play you.” She turned back to the newspaper so as not to see Jan’s face crumple, her shoulders fold in, her arms wrap her torso. “You want to know what Mary Alice was like when she was just starting out? Tough. You need to be, too.”

“She
was
tough. But she wasn’t a complete and utter bitch.” Jan drained her latte and flung the cup into a nearby trash can and tapped at her phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“No one.”

Lola turned the page. Another story, a bit longer, about Karzai’s slow slide from favor. Except that the newspaper spelled it “favour.” “Then what are you doing?”

Jan ran her fingers through her drying hair. “Same thing you are. Reading the newspaper. Same one, in fact. But I didn’t have to pay any five dollars for it.” She held up her phone to show a miniature version of the story Lola had just read.

“Who’s the bitch now?” Lola said. She scooped up the newspaper and stood.

“Indeed,” someone drawled. “I’d like the answer to that one myself.”

Lola looked around. She didn’t see anyone. Then she looked down.

“Are you squabbling young women waiting for someone in particular? Or did our humble law school seem like a particularly good spot for a catfight?”

D
URING THEIR
brief telephone conversation, she’d taken in the nasal, dismissive intonations, the corrosive layer of frustration that chafed at the lingering vowels, and pictured an aging product of boarding school, rangy in khakis and a pale summer sweater, someone who’d come up through Canada’s version of the Ivy League and had only recently begun to accept the fact that he’d never make his way back there. Even though there’d been no photo of Gallagher on the school’s website, there was no mistaking the voice. But nothing else was as she’d imagined.

Gallagher rolled closer, propelling his chair silently across the walk with arms and shoulders like hams beneath a polo shirt that draped to his knees. His legs were those of a boy, dangling uselessly in what Lola could only assume were specially tailored twill pants. Lola had been self-conscious about her height for so long that she took her own discomfort for granted. Now it wormed through her anew as she simply reached over Gallagher’s head and wrestled away the door he had just unlocked. “We spoke on the phone,” she said. She stuck her foot into the door. Gallagher propelled himself backward into the hallway. “I’m Mary Alice’s friend.”

Jan squeezed past her and bounded up to Gallagher and held out her hand. “I’m her friend, too. My name’s Jan Carpenter. We haven’t met. Not even on the phone.”

The chair gleamed in the hushed, dark hallway. It looked new. Gallagher looked from Lola to Jan and back to Lola. “You want to talk about Johnny Running Wolf, don’t you? Just like Mary Alice did.”

G
ALLAGHER HAD
an electric teapot in his office, and a small refrigerator, too, and he fussed with them as Lola and Jan settled themselves into the chairs before his desk. He shook pungent leaves from a flowered metal tin into a teapot. The hot pot bubbled and sighed. He pulled a carton of milk from the refrigerator and poured some into a pitcher he took from a cupboard behind his desk, along with three cups and saucers. He doused the tea leaves with the boiling water and sat staring at the teapot as though he could see through the translucent china as dark tendrils of flavor curled through the water. His desk was polished and bare, his chair a high-backed leather affair with brass studs. He poured the tea, and then hoisted himself from one chair into the other with those meaty arms and arranged his legs straight out in front of him. “There’s lemon if you prefer. And of course sugar. I myself don’t use it, but you Americans seem to prefer it.”

“Milk is fine,” Lola said.

“I like sug . . .” Lola shook her head at Jan, who finished after a pause, “milk, too.”

The teacups balanced on three curled feet atop the saucers. Lola wondered if Gallagher and Mary Alice had established a working relationship based on discussions of antique china. Gallagher slurped when he drank.

Lola waited until he swallowed. “Do you know Johnny Running Wolf well?”

“Of course. Our program for aboriginal students is quite fine. They go on to noteworthy careers. Which makes Mr. Running Wolf’s outcome doubly unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate? You told Mary Alice you weren’t surprised that”—Lola fished the story’s phrase from her memory—“he’d gone on to prominence.”

“I spoke of our students in general. I did not specify Mr. Running Wolf. Mary Alice quoted me accurately. Your memory, it appears, is less than accurate.”

Lola sat her cup down so hard that some tea sloshed into the saucer and tried again. “What do you mean, unfortunate? He won the gubernatorial primary. That sounds pretty fortunate to me.”

Gallagher wrapped his hands around the chair’s arms and flexed first one bicep then the other, swinging the chair from side to side. “Miss Wicks,” he chided. “You want me to give you a story without giving anything in return. That’s not how we play this game. Mary Alice learned that when she spoke to me.”