Read Montana Online

Authors: Gwen Florio

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

Montana (4 page)

BOOK: Montana
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The man rolled over onto his back. His hair fell away from his temple and Lola saw the dent in his skull, long and deep enough to have accommodated the heel of her hand. “Mar’ Alice,” he mumbled. “Poor, poor Mar’ Alice.” He squinted against the light from the store and flung his arm across his face. His breath caught in something halfway between a sob and snore.

“Yes,” said Jolee. “Poor Mary Alice. But she’s got a friend coming now. She’ll take a rest.”

Lola tried to remember whether Mary Alice had told her about Jolee. Or Frank, for that matter. Probably. Mary Alice wrote about her new life in Montana in long emails, dense with detail, that Lola skimmed and then deleted, a calculated choice between maintaining ties to her old life and adapting as quickly as possible to Kabul’s bewildering realities. At some point Mary Alice’s lengthy missives had tapered off.

“I thought I’d gotten away from all of this when I left Baltimore,” a recent one read in its entirety.

Lola held Jolee’s directions in front of her eyes, straining to read them in the near-dark. The car swung wide around a curve. A tall shadow skittered bat-like at the periphery of her headlights. Lola dragged at the wheel and the shadow resolved itself into horse and rider, two sets of eyes rolling whitely as she swerved past. Lola straightened out the car, registering the glare shot her way from beneath a wide-brimmed, high-crowned hat. She raised a hand in belated apology as the apparition melded into the twilight. Her first cowboy, she thought, and she’d just about killed him. She stored the thought away, a tidbit to serve up later for Mary Alice’s amusement.

She slowed and scanned the west side of the road, looking for the opening Jolee said would appear just past a big tree. Even so, she almost missed it. She stomped at the brake and backed up a few feet, turning onto a track of flattened grass that led through the scrub. Stars emerged, catching and concentrating the fading light. The little rental car labored up a hill, ragged fingernails of brush dragging along its sides. The track took a final turn and opened into a meadow. Lola cut the ignition. The cabin stood at the far side of the clearing, nearly invisible in the shadow of a bluff. To one side, tall pines sheltered a shed and small corral. A spotted horse moved restlessly back and forth, tossing its head.

Lola got out of the car and inhaled the sharp clean scent of evergreen. The trees sighed, their branches rubbing and reaching as the wind wandered through. Lola leaned against the cool stream of air and let it slide across her face, and resisted an inkling that she was glad she’d come. She headed for the cabin, keeping to the edges of the meadow, avoiding exposure out of habit, stepping carefully through the darkness beneath the trees. She didn’t see the red pickup until she was nearly upon it. Lola flattened her hand against it. The metal was cold, its surface jeweled with dew. Mary Alice hadn’t parked it moments earlier and rushed inside to get her things before racing back out to fetch Lola from the airport, full of apologies for being late. No, she had not.

Lola looked at the truck awhile. Maybe something was wrong with it. Maybe Mary Alice had caught a ride with someone else or borrowed a friend’s car. Maybe she’d gotten halfway to the airport and then checked her cell phone and listened to Lola’s messages and was speeding back, readying a lecture for Lola on the value of patience.

Maybe.

Probably.

A dog barked.

Lola ducked behind the truck. She raised her head above the hood by degrees, scanning the forested hillside beyond the cabin. A shaggy black and white dog raised itself stifflegged from the grass and whined. Lola dropped to her knees, knocked off balance by a flood of recall and its accompanying relief. Mary Alice had gotten a dog. She liked to hike with it, she’d written. So that’s where she’d been.

“Hey, Mary Alice,” Lola called into the woods. “Your dog beat you back.”

The words rose on the wind and lost themselves amid the trees. Lola listened for an answering shout, for the sound of footsteps hurrying home. The wind settled. The silence that followed had weight and texture. Lola stood uncertain within it. The dog lay down across something heaped and shiny. It flattened its ears and sent a long, audible growl Lola’s way when she took a step, and then another toward it. Lola watched the ground, wary of losing her footing in the darkness. Halfway up the hill, she lifted her gaze. The shiny stuff was a jacket and someone was in it. She forgot about her feet and sprinted, almost falling beside a rolled-up sleeping bag.

Mary Alice’s eyes stared upward, a fat fly quivering atop a pupil, despite the evening chill. Lola avoided their unwavering scrutiny and concentrated on the neat hole in Mary Alice’s cheek and remembered a time years earlier when, still new on the job, she had held a ballpoint pen to a similar hole in a man’s chest, thinking that its very insignificance—so small, so defined—made a good detail for the story she was writing. She hadn’t known then, but she knew now, what the hole’s counterpart looked like; and so when she put her hands to Mary Alice’s head, she was careful just to touch fingertips to temples, and sure enough, when she lifted gently, not even an inch, there was nothing left back there, just a mess of congealed blood and brain and shattered bone, brocaded by long, long strands of bright golden hair.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he car sidewindered back down the grassy track, the steering wheel spinning in Lola’s hands.

Twigs snatched at her through the open window. Lola risked a hand off the wheel to punch 9-1-1 into her phone. “No service,” it blinked in response. She flung it to the floor. The car fishtailed onto the main road, slewing around the curve where she’d nearly hit the man on the horse. “Please,” she whispered. “Be there.” She saw the horse first, riderless, and then the man, crouched beside a ditch, fooling with a wheeled metal contraption. Lola mounted a two-pronged attack on horn and brake. The horse reared, dancing backward, hooves slashing the air. The car spun to a stop. Adrenaline abandoned Lola as quickly as it had rolled in, a tidal wave and its sucking retreat, leaving her fighting for air. She slumped across the steering wheel.

“Miss,” a measured voice said, “you have got to learn to drive more carefully.”

Lola lifted her head and took in a green-shirted midsection and a tooled belt with a silver buckle of considerable size. The man lifted his hat and she looked up into honed features moving fast beyond middle age, skin shrinking tight across bone, prominence of nose casting shadows across hollows of eye and cheek, an austere landscape made more so in contrast to a lavish sweep of silvering hair.

“Verle Duncan,” he introduced himself. “Are you all right?”

The kindness in his voice very nearly undid her fragile control. “Mary Alice.” It was all she could say.

“Mary Alice Carr?” He sat the hat back on his head. “You must be her friend who’s coming for the summer.”

Lola slammed a hand against the wheel. “Stop talking. She’s . . .” Her throat closed against the word.

“She’s what?”

“She’s . . .” Lola tried again.

“Is she sick? Hurt? Did she fall off that horse?”

Lola, mute, shook her head.

He crouched beside the car. “There now. I’m going to get some things and then I’m going to go back up there with you and figure out what’s going on. You sit tight.” He went to the horse and she heard the creak and flap of leather, something opening and closing. He returned with a flashlight and opened her door and took her arm and escorted her around to the passenger side. “I’ll drive,” he said, his voice light and even. “The way you handle this car, I think that’s better.”

“Your horse.” It poked a hoof at the ground, head down, reins dragging.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s a cow horse. He’ll stay wherever I leave him.”

“A cow horse?” she said. Then, to forestall any explanation: “Never mind. Hurry.”

He drove quickly, competently, back to Mary Alice’s, pulling up beside the red truck. The darkness was complete. Lola jumped out as he turned off the engine, feeling for the slope of earth with her feet, heading uphill. She couldn’t see the horse in its corral but heard its hooves thudding against the dirt. Verle caught up with her and put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the cabin.

“No. Up there.” She pointed.

“You stay here.” He raised the flashlight. His steps receded. It was getting cold. The cabin was a solid black square against the unreliable shadows of trees. She walked to it and sat on the porch steps, near a substantial stack of split wood, and blew one experimental breath after another and tried to think about nothing other than the small, perfect clouds condensing and dissolving before her. The dog yipped, once. There was no other noise. Even the horse ceased its restless perambulation. Some while later, Verle came back down the hill, the dog tucked under one arm, treading the blinding carpet laid down by the flashlight. He paused in front of Lola, and shone the light to one side. She blinked. They were in the aftermath. She knew this part. She started talking in mid-thought.

“The way she looks, it was probably your basic M-16,” she said. “Given where he got her—right in the face like that, but from far away—he knew what he was doing. He could have used something smaller. He didn’t need all that firepower.”

The light bobbed, pale brushstrokes crisscrossing her face. “We don’t use those much around here,” he said. “Maybe a .30-06 for elk. Shotgun for geese or pheasant.”

“Who would do this? Why?”

The light jumped again. “We need to call the sheriff. And we need to get you back to town. But first, we should take care of these animals. A few more minutes isn’t going to make any difference now. I’m sorry. But that’s how it is. They were precious to your friend.” He thrust the dog at Lola. “He’ll want food, maybe, water for sure. Take him inside and give him some, but not too much. If he’s been up there with her awhile, he’ll be dehydrated. I’ll deal with the horse.”

She grabbed the dog, all hair and eyes and scrabbling toenails, and held him away from her. He torqued, nearly throwing her off balance. She pulled him tight against her chest.

“Go on now,” Verle said. “We don’t want to be up here any longer than we need to.”

Lola walked across the porch and tried the door handle. It was unlocked. She stepped inside. Something hard and sharp went to powder beneath her feet. She ran her hand along the wall until she found a light switch. Wished she hadn’t. The kitchen table, the one at which she’d downed entire inky oceans of coffee during more than a decade of friendship and that Mary Alice apparently had hauled with her to Montana, lay on its side in a slurry of what appeared to be the contents of the refrigerator and all the cabinets. Lola lifted her foot and saw the blue-and-white remnants of Mary Alice’s grandmother’s dishes. She moaned and the dog whined, a quick call and response of sorrow and incomprehension. A folded piece of paper lay amid the mess. Lola saw her own name in Mary Alice’s back-slanting handwriting. She stooped and picked it up. Shook it open.

“Lola—Camping on the Two Medicine. Back before you get here. If you beat me home, you know where to find the liquor.”

Lola snapped her wrist, as if to free more words from the paper, ones that would make sense. Mary Alice had planned to meet her at the airport. She’d sent an email to confirm the time and flight number. And she’d left the phone message, too. The dog squirmed. Lola slid one foot ahead of the other, skating through the devastation, and found a lone intact bowl in the back of a cupboard. She started to set the dog down upon the floor, but considered the broken glass and instead swept an arm across the counter and listened to things fall. She ran a half-inch of water into the bowl, and set it and the dog onto the cleared counter. The water disappeared in a few frantic gulps. He lifted his head and sought more with a bifurcated stare, one eye brown, the other blue. His tail painted the air in feathery sweeps. Lola reached for the tag on his collar.

“Bub.”

Bub.

It was Mary Alice’s word.

“You sure that’s how you want to phrase that, Bub?” Not Mr. Mayor. Or Congressman. Or whomever she was addressing. “Fine with me, Bub,” she’d say to an editor who wanted to soften a story. Letting him know it was anything but. Or, “Sure, Bub, you can have my phone number.” When hell freezes over.

The dog looked toward the door. Hackles lifted along his spine. Lola slipped the note into her pocket. Verle kicked his way across the room with a tremendous commotion. The dog took a step away from him, backing into the space between the cabinets and the counter. “This is a sorry business,” he said. “Did you find any food for him?”

She shook her head.

“We can pick some up on the way into town. I’ve called down to Charlie,” he said. “The sheriff,” he added.

“How? My phone wouldn’t work.”

He reached for the faucet and held his hands under the water. “It’s tough to get service up here unless you’ve got a local plan. Most of us carry two cell phones, one for local and one for normal. Charlie’s on his way up. We can meet him down at the main road. No need to stay here with the . . .” He wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at her face. “We should just go on down.”

The sheriff intercepted them halfway back along the two-track, lights flashing red and blue, startling colors in the moonlit landscape of black and grey. Verle pulled over. The sheriff’s car came alongside. The siren cut off midway through its rising wail. Verle leaned out the window. “Charlie.”

“Verle,” the sheriff replied. He’d buttoned up his uniform shirt all cockeyed and his hair stood up in cowlicks. He was about half Verle’s age, younger even than Lola, and the disarray shaved off more years still.

“Going all out, aren’t you?” Verle asked.

“You said there was somebody shot up here. When was the last time we had somebody shot in this county? On purpose, I mean, not just somebody hunting and tripped? And not just any somebody, but Mary Alice?” Staring through Lola with every word.

“You got a point there,” Verle allowed.

The sheriff waited, giving Verle time to make introductions. Verle declined to oblige. Some kind of tussle going on between them, eyes locked, jaws set.

BOOK: Montana
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