Montana (27 page)

“Wait,” she said. The car rounded a curve. She sat up.

Jan turned to her. “Now?”

“Wait.” Another bend in the road. The bobbing oil derricks were behind them. They were back in cattle country. A mile rolled by. Another.

“Okay. Now.”

Jan steered to the side of the road. Stopped. She and Lola looked at each other. They flung open the doors. Ran circles around the car. Whooped. High-fived as they passed one another. Slapped at the hood, the doors, the rear window. Cattle wheeled and scattered, tails kinked high. Meadowlarks exploded like shrapnel from the high grasses.

“We did it,” Jan gasped. “We made it.”

“You.” Lola jabbed an index finger at her. “You did it. You were right there with me.”

“God,” said Jan. She was upright, standing tiptoe in triumph, and then she was down, cross-legged in the dirt beside the car, head in her hands, shaking. “Tell me this isn’t par for the course. I thought for sure you’d blown it when you took his picture.”

“Diversionary tactic. The picture became the issue, not my passport. Same thing with the scarf on the way over. It distracted him.”

Jan raised her head. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”

Lola stood above her. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never done anything quite like that. Maria’s my emergency backup. I’ve never had to use her before. Mary Alice getting killed, though. That seemed like an emergency.” The cattle wandered back, curious. “And it worked. It got us across the border, got us to Gallagher. And to Fantonelli. I don’t know what it means yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

“You?”

“We. I meant we.”

Before Lola could react, Jan was back in the car, engine running, windows rolled up, and doors pointedly locked. She lowered her own window an inch. “You didn’t mean any such thing. You just used me to get across the border. You didn’t even need to do the whole Maria thing. You could have sent me up to Calgary alone to talk to Gallagher and do the research in the library. You just didn’t trust me. Either that, or you want it all to yourself. I don’t know which is worse.”

Lola considered the fact that during the long minutes the car had been stopped beside the road, not a single vehicle, not even one of those ubiquitous hay trucks, had passed. She looked to the darkening east, turned to the west, where the sun wobbled atop the mountains. The cattle were dwarfed by their own immense shadows. The wind coolly explored the back of her neck, still a caress at this point. Soon it would feel more like a slap.

When Lola had first met Jan, she’d taken her for one of those perfectly nice young women who drifted into journalism, frequently from an English major, and who lingered there awhile, maintaining their girlish softness on a diet of sugary feature stories, until they married a fellow reporter whose surface cockiness masked an insecurity that preferred a woman not quite as talented as he. The women, wives now, would disappear into the world of babies and freelancing and the wistful line that accompanied introductions at parties: “I used to be a reporter.”

But something smoldered beneath Jan’s deceptive earnestness. It lit up her features when she’d discovered the news about Gallagher, propelled her confident flirtation with the border guard, and flared in her eyes now as she issued her ultimatum to Lola. Lola knew she should just say something agreeable, defuse the situation so they could be on their way. The wind shouldered past. “I don’t trust people in general,” she said. “That’s how you make mistakes.”

She thought that would probably piss Jan off. Instead, Jan nodded thoughtfully. “You may have a point. For instance, you trusted me to get you into Canada and back. Which I did. But maybe you shouldn’t have trusted me to get you all the way back home. That may have been a mistake.”

The wind took another whack at Lola. She was tired. She was cold. She wanted to go home. Which, it jolted her to realize, meant the cabin. She thought of the woodstove’s steady glow, the dog curled at her side on the commodious sofa, sprawled on his back, his feet pawing the air in doggy dreams, a spectacle so ridiculous and tender it always made Lola laugh—but quietly, quietly, so as not to wake him.

“Fine,” she said. “A real partnership.”

The window hummed lower. Jan held her hand out. “Wanna spit and shake?” And spent the next five miles protesting to Lola that she’d been joking, she really had.

CHAPTER TWENTY

J
oshua had left the cabin unlocked.

Of course, thought Lola, shaking her head. She turned the handle. The door scraped across the floor, shoving things aside. Lola froze. Something flew through the opening, whomped her in the gut. She fell backward onto the porch, hands automatically cradling her head. Bub’s cold nose shoved them aside. His tongue bathed her face. He barked in her ear. Lola lay still until her heart resumed something resembling a normal, if galloping, rhythm. Then she pushed herself up to see what had happened inside.

It wasn’t as bad as the night she’d found Mary Alice. But it was close, so close that she’d reached for the phone, ready to call 9-1-1, when she realized the dog had vanished. Fright turned to suspicion as she scanned the disarray. A Tupperware container lay on its side, empty but for the crusted remnants of her attempt at a spaghetti-and-meatballs meal. She turned toward the refrigerator. The door stood open, Bub nearly disappearing into the interior, balancing on his back paws, front legs scrabbling for what remained of its pathetic contents. The refrigerator door swung wide, the newly tattered dishtowel fluttering from its handle. Lola’s eyes narrowed. She reached for the door and closed it, Bub standing his ground until the last possible moment, growling as the door’s rubber gasket pinched him against the frame. He shimmied away and cast a resentful glance at Lola. Then he braced his legs and sank his teeth in the dishtowel and tugged until the door gave way, diving once again into the chilly interior before Lola hoisted him bodily and tossed him behind her. She shut the refrigerator, this time removing what was left of the towel.

“Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass you are?” She righted the chairs. “I’ll bet you were cute as a puppy.” She picked up the salt and pepper shakers and replaced them on the table, wadded up the lone placemat and napkin and tossed them in the general direction of the washing machine. “That’s probably why Mary Alice got you. She took one look at that blue eye and fell for you.” She lifted the Tupperware container, noted the teeth marks, and threw it in the trash. She looked awhile for the lid and gave up. “She didn’t know you’d grow up to be a devil dog.” She worked the floor over with a broom, then a mop, Bub watching intently from the living room doorway. As soon as she was done, the floor gleaming damp and clean, he danced across it, trailing paw prints. Lola hoisted herself onto the counter and swung her legs above the wet floor. She picked up the grizzly bear fetish and tossed it from hand to hand while she spoke, feeling the stone warm against her palms. “I could bean you with this thing right now. I had a seventy mile-per-hour fastpitch in college. If I bounced this off your head, you’d be done for.”

The dog leapt from the floor onto one of the chairs. He turned his head, fixing her with that blue eye and, before she’d divined his attempt, flew through the space between them, landing on the square foot of bare counter beside her. He climbed into her lap and curled himself against her and closed his eyes and sighed, deep and contented. Lola’s hand dropped to his neck, slid to his back. She stroked him mindlessly, trying to sort out the puzzle posed by Johnny Running Wolf’s association with Vince Fantonelli.

T
HE NEXT
morning, she reminded Bub that he wasn’t the only one needing attention. She thought of the instructions she’d Googled a few days earlier. People rode horses all the time. For fun, or so she’d been given to understand. She went into the shed and located the bridle, hanging on its hook. Its wide leather straps and nickel hardware felt heavy, substantial. She held it up and studied it awhile, matching parts with her memory of the drawings on the Internet. She looped the reins over her arm and let herself into the corral, making sure to latch the gate securely. Her feet sank into the soft dirt. Spot raised his head. She held the bridle’s hinged bit in her hand to warm it, then nudged it against his teeth, surprised when he actually opened his mouth and let it slip in. She arranged the headstall behind his ears and fastened the throatlatch, sliding two fingers between it and the soft loose skin behind his jaw to make sure of a comfortable fit, and then undid the halter completely and slipped it out from under the bridle. She hung the halter on a fencepost and tied the bridle’s reins around the top rail and went back for the saddle and a fleece blanket. She hefted them together. The saddle horn dug between her breasts. She approached the horse from the left, the way the Internet instructed—but why? She’d wasted a good ten minutes trying to ascertain the answer, to no avail—and hoisted the saddle high. The far stirrup swung and caught the horse in the ribs, and he shied away and the saddle came down onto thin air, dragging Lola with it. It hit the dirt and her face hit the seat and she realized she’d done a wholly inadequate job of dusting it. She sneezed and slid the blanket from beneath the saddle, and walked to the far side of the corral and shook it out so as not to further spook Spot; then came back and arranged the blanket on his back, smoothing it away from the bump where his neck met his back. “Withers,” she’d learned the spot was called.

She lifted the saddle again, this time hooking the stirrups and the cinch to the horn, and got it onto his back and unhooked everything without giving offense. The cinch, soft and ropy, dangled almost to the dirt. She eyed Spot’s hooves, but his feet stayed planted while she caught at the swaying cinch and then tried three times before catching and buckling it. She stepped to Spot’s head, stroked his nose and waited. Bub crept close. Lola waited. Bub whined. Spot let out his breath with a long, resigned sigh and Lola yanked at the cinch and buckled it tighter, taking up the slack. He’d filled his belly with air when she plopped the saddle down, and had she ignored the instructions to tighten the cinch after a few minutes, the saddle would have slid sideways and she’d have gone into the dirt. Or so Google had told her.

Lola congratulated herself.

Too soon. A moment later, she lifted her foot toward the wooden stirrup, its instep rubbed shiny by Mary Alice’s boot. Just as she was about to slide her toe into it, Spot sidled a half-step away. Lola came down hard, falling against him. She lifted her foot again, with the same result. She edged him against the fence, but when her foot left the ground, he took a step forward, all the while maintaining an alert, interested look as though watching something happening over which he had no control.

Lola thought back, but could not remember the instructions covering this particular development. Spot yawned. Lola moved fast, but he moved faster, just a last-minute halfstep, one that, due to her momentum, sent her sprawling onto hands and knees, staring at his cinched belly. She remembered how she’d fallen across him up on the mountain, somehow managing to stay on even as he moved forward. She grasped the horn with both hands, bent her knees and crouched so low that her head brushed the bottom of the stirrup. Then she tensed her calves and pogoed upward, using the horn to leverage herself high, ignoring the stirrup entirely, falling once again across his back, grateful for the saddle and all of its strange protrusions, loosing one hand from the horn and grabbing at the leather strings—“latigos! latigos!” she grunted—somehow getting a leg over, even as Spot stepped and turned and moved about on the short tether of the reins, agreeable look long gone, ears laid tight against his head. Lola fitted her wide hiking boots, barely, into the stirrups. She reached and stroked Spot’s neck, babbling soothing nonsense until he stilled and his ears, those barometers of intent, stood upright again. She gathered up the reins and wound them around one hand, keeping a death grip on the saddle horn with the other. She took a breath and flexed her calves. Nothing. She flexed again and squeezed her knees against his sides and he stepped out, sedate as a granny out for an after-church stroll, as though there were nothing more he wanted to do than walk slow, crooked circles around the corral.