Disgraced (15 page)

TWENTY-THREE

Lola waited until she
was sure Margaret was asleep, breathing slow and easy beside her as the dog panted on the other side. She lay sandwiched and sweaty between them, wishing for her bed at home with Charlie's bulk curved protectively around her.

He and Margaret were prodigious sleepers, their slumber deep and impervious to interruption, a thing of wonder to Lola. At home, she'd lay awake for hour after restless hour, turning her head occasionally against Charlie's chest, inhaling his reassuring scent. Now, if she turned her head one way, she breathed in the cloying sweetness of candy—Margaret must have squirreled away her parade stash somewhere—while the other led to a mouthful of dog hair. She spit it out and checked the time on her phone. Two a.m. She tried to ease from the narrow bed without waking either of her companions. Margaret didn't move, not so much as blinking when Lola snapped on the light. Bub stood yawning but game in the unexpected overhead glare. Lola shook the kinks out of her arms and legs. “Go back to sleep, buddy. I'm just going to get some work done.” She thought she might as well take advantage of being away from home. Charlie never woke during her occasional midnight forays into another room, where she'd tap furtively at her laptop until dawn, sneaking back into bed just before the alarm went off at five-thirty. But no matter how she tried to cover her tracks, he'd always find her out, prompting a lecture on the dangers of workaholism.

“How'd you know?” she'd say when he rolled his eyes in response to her standard denial. He'd point out the telltale ring of a coffee cup on an end table, the wadded up printouts in the trash can, a stack of inadequately concealed three-by-five cards tucked beneath a magazine. Lola, who used the cards to organize elements of her longer stories, wished she had them now. Instead, she tore pages from her reporter's notebook and labeled them in the abbreviated references she'd developed over the years. The first page: “Skiff, A'stan.” It was all she needed, a signal to herself that the story would start with Skiff stumbling over the body on the rocky path, struggling to make sense of what had just happened, unable to stop Mike's quick scuffle, the slide of knife across tender flesh, the whoosh and gurgle of an escaping last breath. She lay the paper on the floor and selected a new page.

“Statistics, blah-blah-blah.” The story's second section would feature the standard pull-back from the drama, putting it in context. How many U.S. troops had gone to Afghanistan since the beginning of the war; how many were there now, and how many of those were from Wyoming. How, statistically, Wyoming contributed more than its share of cannon fodder. Lola supposed that these days the more correct term would be IED fodder. She'd add a quick reminder for readers that without a military draft, kids from inner cities and rural areas comprised the bulk of recruits, and why. And, finally, the fact that tiny Thirty was off the charts when it came to the price paid for such default patriotism. She lay that sheet beside the first, and tore off another.

“Skiff, et al.” It was crucial to get out of the statistics as quickly as possible and back to people, with some history about Skiff and his friends, along with a quick portrait of Thirty and the hard life choices it demanded. She'd throw in a few extra paragraphs about the reservation to bring Mike into the story. Maybe the principal had had his doubts about Mike's inclusion in so many of the white school's activities, but given the recruitment photo of everyone smiling together, the others seemed to have had no such qualms. She'd lead the reader into thinking, as Mike must have, that everything among them was hunky-dory. She lay the paper down beside the others. When she was done, she'd have a long line of papers, a visual aid that she'd shuffle according to which elements needed to be moved up, which revised, and which discarded altogether.

Next up, “PTSD,” a section that would ground the reader in its complications. She wondered whether to introduce the topic so quickly, then realized that in her rudimentary outline, she had yet to mention Cody Dillon's suicide, or T-Squared's legal issues—the whole reason for doing the story. “For God's sake,” she said. A week away from the job, and she was already losing her edge. Bub opened an eye and rolled onto his back, the stump of his missing leg tucked against his belly. She retrieved the second piece of paper, the one labeled “Statistics” and jotted a note to lead into the section with the riveting numbers from Thirty. She even penned some sample sentences: “Mike St. Clair, a Shoshone youth from the nearby Wind River Reservation, was the first to die, throat slashed nearly to the point of decapitation by an Afghani insurgent. Ranch kid Cody Dillon was next, dead by his own hand at the homecoming ceremony three months later. Within forty-eight hours, two more of the Wyoming soldiers there that night would find themselves in jail. They were among”—here, she left a series of dashes, awaiting the number to be filled in later—“U.S. troops to serve in Afghanistan this year … ” There. That was better.

She checked the time again. An hour had passed. For sure, it had been more productive than the times at home when she heeded Charlie's admonishments and remained beside him in bed, occasionally using her phone to email herself thoughts about how to organize the story she'd write later that day. She turned back to her work and tried to close her mind to the memories of those languorous nights with Charlie. But it was harder to push away the inescapable realization that, given their most recent conversation, such times might be over.

Lola's phone woke her, buzzing with an email alert. The bed was empty. She picked up the phone. Her eyes were too unfocused to read the small-print email, but the time, in tall numbers, was clear. Eighty-thirty. Somehow she'd slept through breakfast. Pal must have fed Margaret, whose hunger during her waking hours was as focused as her nighttime sleep.

Lola stumbled into a kitchen empty but for some dishes in the sink and two flats of strawberries occupying most of the counter space. She decided not to look too closely at the dishes, for fear of seeing remnants of ravioli. She poured the inch of suspicious liquid left in the coffee pot into a mug and studied the strawberries. Each flat held a dozen pints. During the brief weeks when strawberries made their way to supermarkets in Montana, Charlie occasionally would pick some up to slice over their cereal. A pint lasted a few days. Lola reckoned there were weeks' worth of strawberries in the flats. Maybe Pal planned to freeze them. Apparently Margaret wasn't the only one in the house with a sweet tooth. Lola ate a strawberry and ventured out onto the porch. The sun, already up for hours, had heated the floorboards beyond barefoot comfort. Lola moved into the shady corner Margaret had claimed as her own.

“Morning, sleepy Mommy,” Margaret said without looking up. She wielded pen and paper with fingertips stained red. Even if she'd had ravioli for breakfast, at least she'd balanced it out with some fresh fruit, Lola thought. Color flashed at the corner of Lola's vision. She lifted her gaze. Pal jogged along the ridgeline, running within sight of the house. Lola waved, letting Pal know she was on duty. Pal disappeared over the ridge without an answering wave. Lola cast a wary eye about for the chicken, then bent and planted a kiss on Margaret's head.

Margaret pulled away. “You're messing up my story.” She held up a skinny sheet from one of Lola's reporter's notebooks, adorned with hieroglyphics.

“That's nice, honey,” Lola said, her standard response to Margaret's incomprehensible doodles. She took a sip of the coffee, lukewarm and grainy with sediment, but providing the necessary shot of wakefulness that reminded her to look at her phone. A moment later, she clenched her hand against the urge to hurl it in to the yard. Only the likelihood that she'd have to fish around beneath the rattlesnake-infested sagebrush, while the chicken emerged from its hiding place to ice-pick its beak into her bare ankles, saved it from her rage. She turned on her heel, stalked into the kitchen, smacked the phone facedown on the counter and counted through five long breaths, turning her head against the cloying scent of strawberries. She turned the phone over and looked again at her email. Maybe she'd been mistaken. But no, there it was, the note from the Department of Defense informing her in convoluted governmentese that nonetheless conveyed a clear message: that the investigation into Mike's death remained classified information and as such was not subject to public scrutiny. Which meant that she did not have a description of the night's incident on the record. The repercussion escaped aloud—“No goddamn story.” She glanced around to make sure Margaret had not followed her into the kitchen, and made a vow. “No goddamn way.”

She'd get the story, even though it meant confronting the single remaining, and most determinedly elusive, witness: Pal. Who, as though summoned by Lola's very thoughts, reappeared on the ridgeline, a moving stick figure silhouetted by the sun. Lola stepped back into the kitchen and waited out of sight beside of the door. She heard Pal before she saw her, a pounding approach slowing to a reluctant walk, breath still ragged as she neared the porch. “Hey, kiddo,” Pal said to Margaret. “Where's that killer chicken?”

“Over there. I think she's made a nest under the bushes.” Good, Lola thought. Maybe the snakes would eat Jemalina's eggs and, while they were at it, chomp on the chicken, too. A single venomous bite should do the trick.

“What have you got there?”

“I'm drawing a story,” Margaret said. “About a
sweet
chicken named Jemalina.”

Pal produced the dry sound that passed as a laugh. “So you're a fiction writer.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Can I see?” Lola heard the rustle of paper. “Hey, I didn't know you could write already.”

“I can't,” Margaret said, but Pal spoke over her. “Wait a minute. ‘Skiff? A'stan'—I guess that means Afghanistan. What the hell? What is this?
Lola!
” She burst into the kitchen, incriminating paper in hand, Margaret's scribbles on one side, Lola's note on the other. Margaret followed close behind. “My story!”

“Your story, my ass. Your mother's, more like. Lola, what's this about?”

Lola backed up all the way to the counter and popped a whole strawberry into her mouth, giving herself a few seconds to come up with an explanation. She'd left her outline arranged on the bedroom floor. Margaret must have claimed one of the papers as her own. Lola spit the berry's leafy cap into her hand. “You wouldn't talk to me about Afghanistan. I thought Skiff might. It's been five years since I lived there. I wanted to see what it's like now, how things have changed.” True enough. “So I wrote myself a reminder.”

“You had to write yourself a note just to talk to somebody?”

“It was just a thought. Sometimes I write my thoughts down.” Lola was deep in the weeds. She decided to see it as an opportunity. “I'd much rather talk to you about it.”

“Hell will freeze over before I talk to anyone about that godforsaken place!” The veins in Pal's skull mapped blue lines beneath the blond furze covering her skull. They kinked and throbbed when Pal shouted. Lola looked away. When she looked back, Pal was gone.

TWENTY-FOUR

Dinner that night was
as chilly as the array of cold cuts, cheese, and sliced peppers and tomatoes Lola had laid out. “It's too hot to cook,” she said by way of explanation. Not that anyone demanded one. Her words dropped like stones into a black pool of silence. Ripples of bad feeling flowed to the edges of the room.

Delbert shoveled meat and whole tomato slices into his mouth as if to get that much closer to the point where he could leave. Pal didn't even bother with the pretense of pushing food around, glaring at it as though it had somehow given offense. Margaret was so obviously worried about the adults' bad mood that she forgot to “accidentally” select some pieces of forbidden cheese. Bub whined, padding back and forth across the room, finally stopping beside Pal's chair and resting his head on her thigh. Lola caught his eye. Traitor, she said wordlessly. He looked away.

Lola supposed it was just as well Pal opted for the silent treatment, given that the alternative might be some anatomically impossible suggestions about what Lola might do with any further questions about Afghanistan. She was going to have to pose those questions to somebody, though. She could appeal the DOD's denial, only to get turned down again months later—if she heard from them again at all. After two tries and two rebuffs, Tommy and Tyson were unlikely to be persuaded to go on the record, and Dave had made it clear he wasn't going to help. She tried to imagine a telephone call in which she'd tell InDepth.org that her story had fallen through. She'd have blown her first and almost certainly her last chance to write for one of the few organizations that paid freelancers real money for serious pieces. It was time to talk again with Skiff Loughry, at this point the single fraying thread upon which her story hung. She'd called him, seeking one last interview. “General stuff,” she said. “Just to help me nail down some details.” He'd agreed to meet her the next morning. Lola tried to take that as a hopeful sign. “Hope,” at this point, being a word fast disappearing from her vocabulary.

She stabbed at a slice of tomato as though it were a DOD functionary. It obliged by squirting her in the eye. “Damn—darn it!” Margaret opened her mouth and closed it before she could request the obligatory quarter. Lola didn't much care that Pal was in yet another snit. And, although she felt sorry that Delbert was caught in the crossfire of malevolent emotion, she knew he'd handled worse in his life than quarreling women. But Margaret, who'd already endured so much on this trip, drooped wan and dispirited in her chair. Lola owed her at least the pretense of normalcy. She straightened and threw a shine into her voice.

“Where'd all those strawberries come from? And what are they for?”

Delbert's look was one of pure relief. Take
that
, Pal, Lola thought. I'm the one who extended your buddy a helping hand.

“Dolores Wadda.” He paused to give Pal time for the smartassery that emerged whenever Dolores' name arose. Pal failed to oblige. Delbert soldiered on. “Said they were two-for-one at the market. They're full ripe now, going bad soon. She thought they'd be good for jam.”

Lola had no idea how one made jam, and didn't want to know. “Don't they sell jam at the store?”

Delbert flashed a tooth or two. “Not like Pal's mother made. You've never tasted anything like it. Bet Pal will show you how.”

Pal looked at Lola for the first time since their morning encounter, her own false brightness mirroring Lola's. “I'd love to. It's easy. I've got all of Mom's old jars and lids. I'll show you what to do and then get out of your way.”

First the chicken. Now, strawberries. Lola knew that plenty of people around the world transmogrified fruit into jam, and that they still slaughtered their own dinner before they cooked it. Lola had made the mistake of petting a goat one morning in the courtyard of a guesthouse in Kabul, only to glance out a window shortly before mealtime to see it on its back, all four hooves pointing skyward, as men with knives carved her lunch from the carcass. She wasn't squeamish as to the source of her food. She just didn't want to be the middleman when it came to preparation. Her nascent plans snapped into focus.

“That sounds like fun,” she said. To hell with you, Pal, said the smile that accompanied her words. “But we're leaving first thing in the morning.”

“We are?” Margaret did not sound nearly as enthusiastic as Lola expected. “Why? Where are we going? Home? Jemalina's coming, right?”

Where indeed, Lola thought. Back to Montana, to face Charlie's anger and her own damnable ambivalence? She supposed she and Margaret could resume their vacation. The Tetons were only a few hours away. Rather than camping in the back of the truck, as they'd been doing, she could spring for a night in one of the lodges. She'd talk to Skiff on their way out of town, and work on the story in the comfort of the lodge. There. She had a plan, one that eliminated the strawberries from the equation. “We've taken up far too much of your time, already. Pal, you seem like you're feeling better.”

Pal speared a slice of ham, swallowing it with obvious difficulty, and followed it with some cheese as though to underscore the tenuous fact of Lola's statement. Delbert nodded his approval. Given that Pal had lied to her about so many things, Lola felt justified in floating a fib of her own. “When I started this trip, I made some reservations in advance. We've got a motel room in the Tetons for tomorrow night. We'll leave first thing in the morning.”

Lola spent much of the drive into town the next day explaining to Margaret that continuing their vacation didn't mean abandoning Jemalina. She steered with one hand, sliding the other beneath her thigh and crossing her fingers.

“We could pick her up on the way back,” Lola said, trusting that Margaret was still too young to realize that vast chasm that yawned between “could” and “will.” Not to mention that a trip back to the ranch from the Tetons would involve a monumental backtrack from the most direct route to Montana.

“Back from where?”

Lola explained. Again.

“What's Tetons?”

Mountains that look like titties, was all Lola could think of. She cast about in her memory for images from guidebooks and postcards. “A place with moose. And bears. It'll be fun.”

Bub threw himself down in disgust, sensitive as always to deceit in her voice. Margaret's yawn echoed Bub's in theatricality. Bear were so plentiful around Magpie that Lola had taught her the “stop, drop, and protect your head” routine for grizzlies as soon as she could walk.

“I don't want to go on vacation. Vacation is boring,” Margaret said. “I want to stay with Pal and Delbert and Jemalina.”

Lola was in full agreement with Margaret's assessment of vacation. But she failed to see the charm in a hardscrabble, snake-infested ranch populated by a surly young woman and a psychotic fowl. “We're going on vacation,” she said, in a tone meant to brook no argument. She'd forgotten that Margaret invariably opted for bargaining over defiance.

“Is there ice cream?”

Lola cursed herself for having set an unfortunate precedent on the trip. But the thought clearly appealed to Margaret, in a way that nothing else about their departure did. And Lola had yet to see the tourist destination that lacked an ice cream stand. “Of course there is. Lots and lots.” It seemed to suffice. Lola knew her daughter at least as well as Margaret knew her mother. Quickly, before Margaret could speak again, she made clear that there would be no ice cream until they arrived at the Tetons; that they would not, no matter what, be paying a repeat visit to Thirty's ice cream parlor. “You'll have to make do with playing in the park again.”

She'd arranged to meet Skiff there, away from the prying ears of patrons in a café or, God forbid, another bar. He was waiting when they pulled up, a solitary broad-shouldered figure shooting and sinking baskets on the baking courts along the park's west side. He posted a final lay-up and dribbled toward them. Lola's truck was the only vehicle in the park's lot, a fact that Lola noted aloud.

“My parents' place is only a few blocks away,” he said. “I walked.”

“In this heat?” Lola spoke over her shoulder as she arranged Margaret's toys and snacks on one of the tables in the shade, brushing away fallen cottonwood leaves so dry they crumbled at her touch.

Skiff dropped to one of the benches. “I'm still getting used to the fact that I can walk around in shorts and a T-shirt, without all of that body armor.”

“I hear you,” said Lola. It had taken her weeks after her return to feel comfortable with baring her arms and legs, to relax and enjoy the freedom of loose, light clothing. “Do you remember Skiff?” she asked Margaret.

“Hi, Spiff.”

“Skiff. Here.” Skiff bounced the ball toward Margaret. “That basket's a little far away for you, but you can kick this around like a soccer ball. Let me show you how. You want to use the inside of your foot.”

The ball rolled toward Margaret. She stuck out her tongue in concentration and aimed a savage kick. The ball flew past Skiff.

“Gooooaaaalllllllllll!” He held up his arms. Margaret awarded him with a grin.

“Pretty good for a rookie,” he said. “But you're going to want to practice. Try kicking it around in big circles. We'll watch you. Looks like your dog wants to help.” He blotted his forehead on his sleeve. Damp patched his shirt. A metal water bottle sat on the picnic table. Ice clinked within as he drained it in two long, gurgling pulls. The cottonwoods creaked and rattled in the useless wind. A car crawled past, its elderly driver hunched over the wheel. A pickup revved impatiently behind it. Despite windows cranked closed to keep the air conditioning in, Lola heard the deep thump of a bass beat. Inside, kids in cowboy hats jerked their heads to the rhythm of rap. Someday, Lola supposed, she'd get used to that. Thunks sounded a backbeat as Margaret whacked the ball again and again with her right foot. “Try one foot and then the other,” Skiff called. He turned back to Lola. “What'd you want to talk to me about? As if I couldn't guess.”

The ball rolled to a stop against Lola's leg. She picked it up and threw it toward the middle of the park. “Stay away from the street,” she told Margaret. She knotted her hands together before responding to Skiff.

“About what happened in Afghanistan.”

“I already told you.”

“No. About what really happened.”

She laid it all out, just as T-Squared had in the bar, the interminable hours in the village, the trek through the darkness after the vehicle broke down. The Talib hunt. The shepherd. Mike. She stopped.

Skiff's face twisted. “Where'd you get this? You must have talked to Tommy and Tyson.”

Lola sliced the air with her hand. “I can't reveal my sources.” Her automatic response, silly given that only three other people knew what had really happened. Still, Lola thought it was interesting he hadn't assumed the information had come from Pal.

Skiff called Margaret to him. He patted his lap. She hopped onto it and he wrapped his arms around her. Lola tensed. He noticed.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I won't hurt her. This little girl;
big
girl, I mean”—Margaret beamed up at him—“helps me remember the world isn't all black darkness.” Margaret wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. He released her. “Maybe,” he said, “if that poor shepherd had had a child with him, she'd have held off. Captured him instead of shot him.”

“Maybe the child would have gotten killed, too,” she said. “You can't go there.” Even though she knew he would. He was going to spend the rest of his life on what-ifs, Lola thought. She had a few what-ifs of her own. “Nobody's told me anything on the record,” she said.

“And I won't, either,” he said. “Try to see it from where I sit.”

Lola
could
see it, and what she saw was that, as leader of the group, his ass was on the line. Which, to her surprise, he acknowledged.

“She may have shot him, but I'm the one responsible. No matter how safe the situation, there was no excuse for dropping discipline. If I'd kept everybody in line, Mike would be alive, and maybe Cody, too. And then there's Pal. If this comes out, she'll be court-martialed. We all will, for the thing happening in the first place, and for covering it up. But they'll come down hardest on her. They'll want to show that they're not going soft on her because she's a woman.”

“I don't get it. Why protect someone everybody hates? Even you. You told me she was trouble. And you were right. She's the one who caused this, and she's the one who gets off scot-free.”

“You know why.” He looked at her a long time, all patience.

Lola shook her head. “I don't know.”

“Pal's a pain in the ass, but she's one of us. You know? I know that you do. You reporters are the same way. A tribe. You stick up for your own, no matter what.”

Lola thought of Ahmed, her fixer. He hadn't been a reporter, but a translator. But he worked with the journalists every day, risking his own life alongside them. Lola had thought their bond was just as strong. That, had she seen danger heading Ahmed's way, she'd have thrown herself in its path. And then Ahmed had tried to kill her, to kill them all. Had Ahmed survived, would Lola have protected him just as Skiff now stood up for Pal?

“I don't know,” she said, as much to herself as to him.

“I do,” he said. “No question.”

Lola envied his certainty. Admired the fact that despite everything, he'd managed to hang on to it. Yet the ass-covering aspect nagged at her. She said as much.

“No question that I come out better by keeping it quiet. All of us do. But it's not as though nobody's been punished. Look at us. Two dead and two more fucked up. How long do you think it'll be before those two idiots do something else that lands them in jail? They won't get off so easy the next time. And Pal. I saw her that day at the parade. She was a mess. Do you really think she's not paying for what she did?”