Montana (9 page)

“What is that?” Lola asked. “Your old prom dress?”

Jan’s fingers stilled at their task. “I just want to ask you a few questions about Mary Alice. About finding her. Charlie—he’s the sheriff—won’t tell us anything other than that she was shot.”

“I know who Charlie is.” Lola glanced back toward Johnny. The toothless man, Frank, had taken over the conversation. His body twisted as he spoke. He staggered and nearly fell. The sheriff stood a few feet away, openly watching them. “Forget it,” she told Jan.

“It’s my only black dress,” Jan called after Lola as she pushed her way through the clusters of mourners. Frank showed his gums as she approached.

“Mar’ Alice,” he said. “She’s dead.” His cheeks puffed. “Puh-pow.” He raised his hand and pointed a forefinger and folded the other fingers against his palm. “Mar’ Alice got shot. Pow.” He dug the finger in his cheekbone. “Right in the
face.
Poor Mar’ Alice.”

Lola recoiled. The sheriff stepped in, folding his hand around Frank’s, lowering the offending finger. “Yes, Frank. That’s what happened to Mary Alice.”

Johnny used the moment to take his leave. “Frank. Charlie. Good seeing you both again. Shame about the reason.”

Lola put her hand on his arm. Firmly. “You’re Johnny Running Wolf?” He tried to pull away. She tugged him back, just hard enough to be obvious about it. As soon as one head in the crowd turned, so did all the others, a progressive motion from the core of the throng to the edges. Johnny smiled weakly. “My condolences. Sorry I can’t stay. Campaign’s got me on a tight schedule.”

Lola had always envied people who could cry on command. She couldn’t. She put a hand to her eyes anyway, wishing she still had Verle’s handkerchief, and injected a pitiful quaver into her voice. “I just want to talk about my friend.”

Johnny made a big show of it then, the protective arm around her shoulders, lips pursed in concern. “Sure thing. We’ll talk all you want about Mary Alice. She was quite a little gal, that one. Come on over here.” Cars and pickups nudged up against the church on three sides. He led her around the back. “What the hell are you up to?” he whispered as they walked.

“I might,” Lola said through a clenched smile, “ask the same of you.”

T
HE WIND
caught them as they rounded the corner. Lola stood close to the warped boards of the church, splintery and sun-warmed, and ducked out from under Johnny’s arm. “What were you talking about back in there? That so-called eulogy?”

He rolled shock and pain and indignation into a long look that made Lola want to slap him. “Mary Alice was my friend.”

“No, she wasn’t. She was a reporter. You were a story, not a friend.”

Engines stuttered in the parking area. Exhaust swirled around the corner of the church. Johnny coughed. Lola spoke over it. “Why was Mary Alice so interested in writing about you? How come you didn’t like what she wrote? And where’d you get shoes like that in a place like this?”

“Hold on,” he said. “You know who I am. But you still haven’t told me who you are or what you’re doing here.”

“I’m a friend of Mary Alice’s—a real friend. I came out for a visit. It’s not going well.”

“Guess you’ll be heading back now.”

“The very minute I can. Just as soon as I find out what happened to Mary Alice.” Might as well put him on notice, she thought. She expected defensiveness, maybe a flash of anger. Surprise, at the very least.

Instead, he threw back his head and sent a laugh rolling across the prairie. When he held out his hand, she took it automatically. “You do that. Nice to have made your acquaintance, Miss Wicks.”

Lola dropped his hand. He disappeared around the corner of the church. His laughter drifted back to her.

Lola shouted into the wind. “Wait!” She rounded the corner just in time to see him getting into a white Suburban with tinted windows. “Miss Wicks,” he’d called her. But she’d never told him her name.

CHAPTER SEVEN

L
ola gave it half an hour, long enough for Johnny to be sure that he’d dodged her.

Then she went in search of the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall where the sheriff said Johnny had scheduled a campaign stop. Lola recognized the VFW by the obligatory World War II-era tank slowly rusting in front of the cinderblock building. But for the addition of wives, still in their funeral best, their eyes bright with suspicion, it was as though she’d somehow ended up back at the cafe. Conversation stopped when she walked in. Cutlery cascaded onto plates. Lola walked through the silence and took her place in the line, waiting at the tabletop griddle where Johnny slopped batter out of a plastic bucket with one hand and flipped golden hotcakes with the other. Whispers floated toward the ceiling, mingling with the combined scents of fake maple syrup and real butter and stale beer rubbed into floorboards by generations of booted feet. A man said something about Mary Alice. A woman shushed him. Johnny’s voice boomed through the room.

“What’ll it be, what’ll it be? Short stack or tall? Silver dollar or cover your plate? Just tell me what you want and I’ll try to provide, just like I’ll do when I’m in the governor’s house in Helena. . . . Well, look who’s back.”

The change in his voice made Lola glad she’d come. “Tall
and
cover the plate,” she said. “Please.”

He recovered fast. “I’ve been putting Mickey Mouse ears on ’em for the kiddos. How about you? Want some Mickey Mouse on your hotcakes?” His broad brown face seemed streaky under oddly spaced ceiling lights that left parts of the room in shadow, others floodlit. It looked hot behind the griddle. He’d changed out of his funeral suit into jeans and cowboy boots.

“Maybe some jackass ears,” Lola suggested.

“For me or for you?” He poured three simple circles of batter, no ears of any variety. Bubbles formed on their surface and exploded in slow motion. “What brings you here, Miss Wicks? Business or pleasure?” He turned the pancakes. They browned quickly, edges recoiling from the scalding surface.

“Breakfast brings me here. And the fact that you and I were never properly introduced.” She accepted her pancakes with a bland smile and held the plate beneath her nose, letting the steam from the pancakes warm her face, and carried it to an empty table at the far side of the room where she could watch the proceedings without the bother of talking to anyone. Verle Duncan strolled in. Lola bent her head over her pancakes. She wondered if she should go back for another plate and bring it home to Bub. She’d ended up leaving him in the motel, yapping his feelings of betrayal as she drove away. She poured syrup onto her plate. It flowed into the pancakes and disappeared. Lola turned her fork on its side and cut a wedge.

The line at the griddle was down to a few people. Johnny handed his spatula off to a pallid young aide. Lola judged him to be still in college. The line began to move more quickly as the aide dipped and flipped in silence while Johnny worked the room, shaking hands, patting backs, even—Lola wondered if the politician existed who had failed to make this move—picking up each and every one of the few babies there, maintaining the same enthusiasm regardless of whether the brat in question slept or squalled throughout the encounter. He moved within Lola’s earshot just as a woman approached him, her voice sugared and warm as the syrup Lola had just poured all over her pancakes.

“Mr. Running Wolf, I am so glad to meet you. There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask.”

Johnny reached for her hand. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’ll be so glad to answer. Although one of these might tell you what you need to know.” He handed her a flier. “This here is put out by a group that very much supports the same goals at the center of my campaign.”

The woman dropped his hand. She spindled the flier as she spoke. “If you get elected, Mr. Running Wolf, what are you going to do about your people?”

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

Lola put her fork down.

“What are you going to do”—the woman rolled the flier tighter—“about all of them living off the government tit, sucking my tax dollars dry, being paid not to work while me and my Arlie are going broke trying to hold onto our place? They tax us more and more every year and all of our money goes right out of our pockets and onto your reservation.” She might have been talking about orphaned children, so earnest and concerned was her tone.

Lola did a quick survey of the room. People sat pushed back from the tables, lingering over empty plates. A few rose and refilled their coffee mugs from the tall stainless-steel dispensers, while others looked around, waiting to see who would be the first to lead the general exodus. Their gazes swept Johnny and his genteel interrogator and kept moving; and then the woman took a step forward, and rapped Johnny on the chest with the rolled-up flier and said, “You answer me that, mister,” and just like that she had everyone’s attention.

Verle stood up. His eyes met Lola’s.

“Ma’am, I can assure you that my people want jobs,” Johnny said, and his words were low and measured and slow. “They want to work hard to earn enough to survive, just like you. But the reason you and I—yes, Indian people pay taxes, too—are getting taxed through the roof is that big corporations aren’t making investments in our state because of our tight-assed regulations. There I go with my French, ma’am, and I do beg your pardon.” His words pulled people from their chairs, drawing them in close. “Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a need for regulation. But there’s a place for development, too, responsible development that’ll provide jobs—real, living-wage jobs, not just that minimum-wage baloney—for folks like you and your Arlie and for my people, too. I see all of us down at the bottom of the same dark hole looking up at the bright sky, and I’m looking for a way for each and every one of us to climb into the sunshine, with the corporations coming back to Montana, only this time being responsible and paying their fair share of taxes so your road gets plowed every winter, so that you can get to town and buy groceries, and so the school can buy the new books it needs to give your kids that good education they deserve. That way, you can keep working that place of yours in the most efficient way possible so we don’t lose yet another family ranch for no good reason at all. Ma’am—what’s your name again?”

“Carrie. Carrie Rudbach.”

“Mrs. Rudbach, does that answer your question?”

The flier slipped from her hands and seesawed to the floor. “I guess you answered something. By the time you were done talking, I couldn’t hardly remember what I asked.”

The aide put the spatula down and glided to the woman’s side and took her arm. “He has that effect on people.”

“Mrs. Rudbach,” Johnny said. “This here is Riley. He’s going to get your name and address.”

Lola knew that whatever Carrie Rudbach might think, Riley’s attention meant only that she’d end up with a raft of campaign literature in her mailbox, requests for donations coming every other day. Johnny turned and worked his way around the silent circle that had formed, grabbing dangling hands and moving them energetically up and down, introducing himself over and over again, as though every single person in the room didn’t already know his name.

“Johnny Running Wolf. Remember it. Hunting just as hard as a whole pack of wolves, sinking my teeth into every single thing you’re owed from your government and bringing it all back to Montana, including the right to be left alone. Pleased to meet you. Here, hand that baby over. I don’t think I’ve met this little princess yet. My, she’s a pretty one.”

Lola picked up the forgotten flier, looking for the fine print at the bottom. “Paid for by TMResources.” Verle waved in her direction. Lola pretended not to see him and put the flier in her pocket and slipped out a side door. She wanted to intercept Johnny before he went to his next event. The steroidal white Suburban she’d seen leaving the funeral was parked down the street, a gleaming iceberg amid a rough sea of pickups crusted in ancient layers of sediment. She ducked behind one as Johnny and Riley emerged from the VFW hall. The wind carried a reedy voice toward her.

“You’ve got the Chamber of Commerce in Sand Creek at two. Then nothing else until this evening. That would be a good time for phone calls, hit people up for money. The county Dems have their dinner tonight, and if we hustle afterward, we can make it on over to Aster and catch the end of the League of Women Voters’ dinner. The state organization wants a sit-down with you, and it wouldn’t hurt to meet with some more of the county groups. Tomorrow, there’s another breakfast over in Trapp. Then you’ve got the chili cook-off in Mineral at noon, and the dunk booth for the Children’s Fund at the fair in Whiting at three. I still don’t think you should do a dunk booth, by the way. It’s undignified.”

For all Johnny’s self-assurance with Carrie Rudbach, Lola knew the very fact of Riley gave away his precarious political status. Before she went overseas, Lola had spent years covering politics—often indistinguishable, she’d joked with Mary Alice, from the police beat—and she remembered the ranks of callow Rileys that trailed the no-chance candidates like runty pups after a lop-eared mongrel, slinking aside when the alpha dogs trotted past, fat and contemptuous. The real candidates, the ones with the party’s blessing, got seasoned handlers, not some college-age intern who was in the mix only because his mother had spent the last twenty-five years licking envelopes and baking cookies for the poll workers on Election Day. The fact that Johnny had won the primary but was still stuck with Riley was a sure indication of party unease—which made it likely that, in addition to seasoned staff, the party was withholding serious money, too. Lola wondered how Johnny was paying for his campaign.