Montana (3 page)

“No.” Lola told the young woman there what she already knew. “I don’t have a reservation.” The woman reached for a pair of keys, and shoved a form and a map at her. Lola pulled out her phone to call Mary Alice one last time.

“Is that a flip phone?” The clerk’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know they made them any more. Can I see it?”

“No.” She waited until she was outside the airport before leaving a message for Mary Alice, her voice stiff with annoyance. She glanced at the map and calculated the mileage, irritation flaring anew. There was a closer airport, but Mary Alice had insisted upon meeting her in Helena, saying she needed to do some research there. “I’ll see you in about three hours,” she told Mary Alice’s voicemail.

She bit back an urge to add a sarcastic “love you,” and hung up.

T
HE CITY
was in the rental car’s rearview mirror and then it wasn’t, vanishing without the softening aspect of suburbs. Ahead, bare foothills bunched like fists, knuckled ridges pressing back against the weight of sky. The road arced around the hills in lazy swooping curves, then without warning hair-pinned through cliffs that leaned in above her, slicing the sky to manageable size. Lola stole glances at the scoured rock-faces as the car maneuvered through the narrows, and imagined engineers months into their desolate assignment, laying lines of dynamite, sending up a cheer as an opening blasted through to the valley beyond.

Signs indicated the distance in miles and kilometers to the Canadian border, closer than she’d thought. The occasional billboard rose up, guideposts to this new place. Election season was in full swing. Candidates, some big-hatted and horsed, grinned down at Lola. Others walked through thigh-high golden wheat, stood next to oil rigs, leaned on split-rail fences. One man dangled leather work gloves so yellow and bright and obviously unused as to make Lola smile at the universality of campaign fakery. One candidate’s sign had no photo at all, only a puzzling slogan and a name: “Run with the Wolf. Johnny’s Chasing Jobs.”

Meth apparently was a problem, warnings against it almost outnumbering the candidates’ come-ons. One billboard showed a young woman slumped on the floor, cavernous eyes pleading with the camera. Large men, T-shirted and tattooed, leered over her. “Meth—You’ll always have a date,” was the message. Someone had taken pink spray paint to her face: “Your mom.” Lola snorted her appreciation. Her lifeline grasp on the wheel eased. She’d spent the past few days fighting the culture shock of First World re-immersion, bumping up against the hard shiny edges of hygiene and haste; of wide ribbons of highway traveled by smoothly feinting cars unimpeded by pedestrians, donkey carts, or drifting herds of fat-bottomed sheep. She hadn’t been allowed to drive herself anywhere for years. Relegated to the back seat, she endlessly negotiated truces between drivers who fought with translators, who in turn sulked and refused to tell her what the hopped-up kids with Kalashnikovs at the checkpoints were saying.

She slouched, steering with two fingers, old attitudes rising from muscle memory. She checked the map again. Mary Alice lived outside a town named Magpie, not far south of the Canadian border. Lola steered the car off the interstate, heading north on a tapering road that picked its way through a rock-strewn valley floor. To the west, a line of mountains higher than any she’d yet seen wedged darkly upward. A pickup appeared in the rearview mirror. Out of habit Lola checked for the telltale glint of sun off rifle barrels, feeling foolish but also relieved when the truck finally whipped past, the driver lifting a forefinger in greeting. She tried the radio, but it hissed and popped like severed electrical wires. She flinched and turned it off. She’d plugged in her laptop at the airport and booted it up while there to scan news sites online, a cumbersome operation that made her envy the people she’d seen simply rubbing their fingers across their phones. The truce between the Islamists and the military—the one that would allow her to slip back into the highlands—was holding, but only just. Counting the time she’d already wasted getting home, she’d been away from the story a week. She’d stay in Montana for three more days. Then, a full day of traveling just to get back to Baltimore. Another couple of days messing with the London-Dubai-Kabul transfers and layovers, not to mention at least a few days on the ground in Kabul once she arrived to dispense the bribes necessary to renew her travel permits and round up a vehicle and find another fixer, her old one barely able to disguise his relief when she’d been summoned home.

“Six children,” that sad-eyed man had reminded her. “Would your newspaper have supported them if anything had happened to me?”

“Nothing did,” she’d snapped. When she got to Mary Alice’s, she’d email him and ask that he line up someone new who’d be waiting when she arrived. He owed her that much, she thought, given that she paid him the equivalent of a year’s salary every month or so. Just in case, she’d ask him to find yet another person ready to step in once the new one seriously contemplated the prospect of the car rolling over an innocuous jumble of wires and packed powder, body parts somersaulting high, the white summer sky spattered scarlet.

The car crested a bald ridge. Ahead, the mountains rose like a wall. With some effort, she focused downward, toward a scatter of houses and spindly trees, scraps in the bottom of a vast bowl of valley lipped by those foreboding peaks. A sign pointed: “Magpie.”

L
OLA’S CAR
coasted along a three-block business district anchored by a square sandstone courthouse with an oversized clock tower. The faded brick storefronts were dark, the sidewalks lonely. The “Closed” signs in some of the windows had a permanent aspect. Lola checked her watch. Nine o’clock. A neon glow beckoned from a convenience store at the far end of the street. Lola drove to it, waiting as a semi hauling a flatbed stacked with rolls of hay maneuvered itself out of the store’s lot. She parked and tried Mary Alice’s number yet again. “The mailbox is full,” the computerized voice repeated with its odd mechanical hesitations. “The mailbox is full.” She left the phone on the seat and got out of the car. Something stirred at her feet.

“Got change? Got a dollar? A five? Ten would be better.” A man lay beside the store’s front door, using a backpack as a pillow. His grin shone pink and toothless. Dirt drew black lines beneath his fingernails and seamed the hand he raised. A few longish hairs straggled from his chin and a filthy red kerchief wrapped his neck. “It’s not a handout. I got money comin’. Pay you back.”

Lola edged around him into the store. Two teenage boys with gleaming black hair bound into thick braids studied refrigerated shelves of soft drinks. A heavyset woman stood behind the counter, eyes on the boys. “Help you?” she said without turning her head.

“I just need some directions,” said Lola.

“Well, now.” The woman shuffled her feet until she faced Lola and fixed hooded, unblinking eyes upon her. She leaned against the counter, letting Lola know that she intended to enjoy this new distraction. “That depends on where you want to go.” The woman threw a glance at the boys, who hacked up dutiful laughs.

Lola resigned herself to playing her part. How often had this happened to her, in how many places, the stranger in town put through her paces for the enjoyment of the locals? She looked at the woman on the other side of the counter, her green store tunic straining across those hunched shoulders, shapeless feet stuffed into canvas shoes with the laces left untied, and reminded herself that she needed so very little from this woman compared to those whose hazing had been far worse.

The woman lifted her head. “You boys going to buy anything? Because if you’re not, you can’t loiter here. Sign says so.” She pointed to the placard on the front door. The youths conferred, then pooled their change and brushed past Lola with a single can of Mountain Dew. “Hey,” the woman called after them. “Take Frank back to the rez with you, why don’t you? He’s pestering the customers.”

One of the boys stooped beside the man and put a hand on his shoulder. The man shook his head. The boys looked back toward the store, then departed without him in a car that was more rust than paint, perched aslant four bald tires.

“Now,” the woman said, “where exactly do you want to be?” Broken veins rouged her cheeks. Lola took in her slow, deliberate movements and the way her shoulders mounded up against her neck, and thought of a turtle.

“I want,” Lola began, before too much travel and too little sleep caught up with her all at once. She wanted to be at Mary Alice’s. Mary Alice would surely be back from whatever had delayed her; would have gotten Lola’s messages, would even now be brewing coffee for Lola and smoky-flavored tea for herself in her grandmother’s china pot. There’d be two glasses and a bottle of Jameson’s within easy reach to supply the “wee drop” traditionally served guests. She’d put on Leonard Cohen or Billie Holliday—“that mournful shit you like”—and then she’d lean her elbows on the scarred antique table that went wherever she did. She’d listen to Lola’s stories and laugh and laugh, her breathy girl’s voice transformed wholly unexpectedly into the whiskey-and-smokes cackle of a broad. Lola had perfected a tight, economical smile for the times people seemed to expect one, but couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed, really laughed. She was long overdue.

The woman’s stomach pressed against the counter, a soft roll of shiny green nylon lapping the dull surface. “You need some sort of help?” Her lids dropped over her eyes, then she opened them wider than before.

“A friend was supposed to meet me at the airport and she never showed. She lives north of here. I just need to know how to get to her place.”

“You’re Lola.”

Lola took a step back. “And you would be?”

“I’m Jolee. Mary Alice told us all about you. Showed us pictures and everything.” Her monotone rose a quarter-decibel in what Lola guessed was enthusiasm. “You’re a real world traveler.”

“I guess right now I’m just a Montana traveler who doesn’t know how to get where she’s going.”

Jolee rooted around under the counter, emerging with notepad and pen. “I’ll get you out there. Just give me a minute to write it down so you won’t forget. That Mary Alice. She’s probably off on one of her stories. She’s been working day and night these last few weeks.” She made a fist around the pen. When she tore the paper from the pad, Lola saw the letters outlined on the sheet beneath. “Turn west out of town,” the instructions began.

“Which way is west?”

Jolee layered her words with superiority. “Look for the mountains. Go that way. The road takes a jog north after about ten miles. That’s about halfway. You just stay with it. Mary Alice is up in the foothills, in the old Jepsen cabin. She’s fixed it up nice. I’ll give you a couple of days to get settled in, but then I’ll want you girls to come on over and eat with me. I make quite a pie.”

“I don’t eat pie,” Lola said. But Jolee was out from behind the counter, urging her toward the door.

“You’ll want to hurry on up there. You’re not used to driving around here, and it gets dark fast back there under the trees where her place is. There’s just a little two-track up to the cabin. You don’t want to miss it.”

Lola studied Jolee’s map. “What’s the name of the road? Is there a sign?”

Jolee took the map back and added a child’s version of a tree, stick-straight trunk and cloud of leaves. “Look for the big cottonwood.”

Lola considered the possibility that she might never find Mary Alice’s place. She opened the door. “That guy’s still out there.”

“That’s Frank.” Jolee came and stood beside Lola. “He’s brain-bad. Took one of those IEDs over in Iraq. Goes wandering now. Been weeks since I last saw him. Usually he sticks to the rez but this afternoon he made it all the way down here. I’ll call the sheriff to come pick him up.”

The man’s head had rolled off the backpack. He’d wedged a hand between his bony cheek and the concrete.

“Why?” asked Lola. “He’s not hurting anybody.”

Jolee’s eyes bulged again, importing a significance Lola didn’t understand. “It’s so nobody hurts him. You go on now. Mary Alice is probably waiting on you. I’m glad you’re here. Maybe you can get her to take a break. I see her outfit go by here at all hours.”