Disgraced (7 page)

TWELVE

Lola's reaction to the
chicken assured Margaret of a lavish book fund for months to come. Whenever Lola stopped for air, the chicken squawked, inspiring her to new levels of creativity.

Margaret finally intervened, taking the chicken from Delbert and cradling it in her arms. Once right-side up, it quieted, closing its eyes in bliss as Margaret stroked the top of its head. Its feathers, save for a glossy black band around its neck and chest, were a burnished gold and extended even over its feet, creating an illusion of fluffy boots. “Is it a boy chicken or a girl chicken?”

“This here's a hen,” Delbert said. “That's a girl,” he added. Just in case.

“Then her name is Jemalina,” Margaret pronounced. “Untie her.” She cast a glance toward her mother. “Please.”

Delbert fiddled with the twine binding the chicken's feet. Margaret put Jemalina down. The chicken fixed eyes like agates upon Lola. It bobbed its head twice, then dashed to her and jabbed its beak into her bare feet, first one, then the other. Once again, the air around Lola purpled as she danced away from Jemalina's unerring aim. Bub dashed to Lola's defense, only to receive a sharp peck on the snoot. He yelped and tumbled backward. Margaret laughed so hard she ended up on the floor again. She held out her arms to the chicken, who scooted back to stand beside her protector. It did not, Lola noted as she rubbed her own reddened toes, seem to have anything against Margaret's feet.

“What am I supposed to do with that thing?” Lola asked. Bub pasted himself against her legs and flashed his incisors at Jemalina. She fluffed her feathers and turned her back on him.

“You said you wanted chicken,” Pal reminded her.

“And this here is a chicken,” Delbert said.

“No way am I going to cook that.”

“You think all meat comes shrink-wrapped on Styrofoam trays?” Pal, always ready with a challenge.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. “We can't eat Jemalina!” Margaret was on her feet, Jemalina back in her arms.

“You might change your mind after a couple of days,” Delbert said.

“I won't. Where did she come from?”

“I ran into Dolores Wadda down at the store. When I told her I was after chicken, she said she had some for me.”

“Chicken,” Pal murmured. “Is that what they're calling it these days?”

“Mind your manners,” Delbert said. “Dolores said this one is a good layer, but she's always pecking at people. Dolores was about ready to put her in the soup pot herself. Oh, I almost forgot. I left something else out on the porch, too.” He left and came back with a package of supermarket chicken. It went into the refrigerator.

“Jemalina! You're saved,” Margaret cooed. Jemalina made a chortling noise and nestled deeper into her arms.

Lola looked at Bub. “Looks like you and I are outnumbered. Here's the deal,” she told Margaret. “The chicken is your responsibility. She lives outside. You feed her, you collect her eggs. And you keep her away from people's feet. Sorry, Bub.”

The dog slunk to the far side of the kitchen, casting occasional looks of betrayal over his shoulder. The wattage of Margaret's smile could have powered entire cities. “We'll bring her back to Montana with us. Right, Mommy?”

Lola tried to imagine the look on Charlie's face if they showed up with a chicken. If she rejected Charlie's proposal, she'd be stuck with the thing. “I am not,” she muttered to herself, as she turned her attention to putting away the rest of the groceries, “basing my decision to get married on a damn chicken.”

The good thing about Jemalina was that she occupied Margaret for the rest of the morning, leaving Lola free to tap out elaborate emails on her phone. Charlie had forbidden her to bring her laptop on the trip—“You'll just end up working,” he'd said—but now she wished she'd sneaked it into the truck after all. She'd brought a flash drive, but it was little use without a computer. She wrote out a query letter longhand and two-thumbed it into her phone, emailing it to various news outlets.

Then she looked up chicken recipes, clicking through them until she found one that looked both easy and required only the ingredients from Delbert's sacks of groceries. She did a quick tour of the house. No Pal. Nor did she see Pal's running shoes parked in their usual spot beside the front door. Good. She stepped out onto the porch—and hopped back inside, slamming the door behind her, when Jemalina made a beeline for her feet. Lola opened the door a crack. Her daughter stood beside the blasted bird, stroking its head as it turned a look of beady-eyed avian devotion upon her.

“Say goodbye to Jemalina for a little while,” Lola said.
For forever
, she wished she could say. “Today, we really are going to the library.”

Thirty's library indeed was air-conditioned, and clearly had undergone an upgrade, an interior version of the prettifying throughout the town. The library's improvements were practical as well as attractive. Rows of computers filled one side of the room, books the other. At one end of the stacks, a nook with a sofa and wingback chairs invited a pleasurable few hours of reading. At the other, an oversized stuffed bear and low tables strewn with brightly colored books lured children. Back in Magpie, Lola had often given thanks that the oil boom and its accompanying social and environmental devastation hadn't reached their part of Montana—yet—but now she took a moment to appreciate the benefits of the tax monies it reaped. She stood just inside the front door, pores contracting in the chill, as Margaret ran past her to the children's section. Lola resisted the temptation to follow her, to grab a novel from a shelf, to sink into one of the inviting armchairs and while away the day in cool delicious escapism.

A woman behind a desk raised her head and looked a question her way. Lola reminded herself that she was here to work. “Do you have high school yearbooks?”

“For every town in the county. They're in alphabetical order by town. Over there.” She pointed.

Lola found Thirty and pulled the previous four years' books. Early in her career, she'd discovered the font of information that lay between yearbook covers. Activities, athletics, best friends—all helped flesh out portraits of the people she'd written about, whether hero cop or serial killer. A single scowl in a smiling group photo, a star athlete who was also a member of the chess club, an excess of extracurricular activities or an utter lack of participation in same, all of it the rich fodder of telling detail that lifted a story above the mundane.

She pulled out her notebook and her phone, the latter to reproduce photos. An hour later, she had several pages of notes and a dozen photos. Pal barrel-racing, long ponytail flying behind her. Tyson Graff and Tommy McSpadden, bulky in football shoulder pads—no surprise there, Lola thought. Only a few photos of Cody Dillon, the suicide, a youth with a tendency to look away from the camera in all of his photos. In contrast, Skiff Loughry was all over the yearbooks. Student Council. Boys' State. Honor Society. Football, of course. Prom King, with Pal as one of the court princesses. Lola's grimace at the discovery mirrored Pal's expression in the photograph. Lola wasn't the only one who didn't see herself as the poofy-dress type. On the other hand, Pal was clearly no outcast. Lola wondered when the antipathy toward her had begun. In school? Basic training? Or had something happened in Afghanistan? She'd already decided that her next interview would be with Thirty's high school principal. But she'd learned her lesson. She'd leave it up to him to mention Pal. She started to close the final yearbook. Then checked her list. Someone was missing. She leafed through all the books again, knowing even as she looked that the name wasn't there.

“Excuse me.” She stood before the librarian's desk, assuming as she spoke that the librarian was, along with everyone else in town, familiar with the story of the six childhood friends who'd gone into the military together. “I'm looking for information on someone who went to school here. He and his friends all went to Afghanistan last year. But he doesn't seem to be in any of the yearbooks.”

Lola waited for the stiffened shoulders, the crimped chin, the outward signs of resistance that preceded a refusal to divulge information. Her years working in Baltimore had taught her to expect it at every turn, even when she sought documents available by law to the public. The tendency wasn't nearly as pronounced in small towns, but Lola expected it anyway, so it always came as a pleasant surprise when someone delivered.

“You're talking about Mike St. Clair. Such a shame. But you're right, there's nothing about him in the Thirty yearbooks. That's because he went to the Indian school. We don't have their yearbooks. You'll have to go to the rez for that.”

Lola returned her smile and called to Margaret. She braced herself against the blast of heat beyond the library's door. But she was thinking so hard it barely bothered her. If Mike St. Clair had gone to the rez school, how had he ended up being such good friends with the group of kids from Thirty?

THIRTEEN

“It's because of Miss
Jones.”

Arlie Colton, Thirty High School's principal, delivered the answer to Lola's question about Mike St. Clair with visible distaste, immediately laying waste to her plan not to bring up Pal's name. “She went to school with the others,” he said. He ticked them off on his fingers “Mr. Loughry, Mr. Dillon, Mr. McSpadden, Mr. Graff. But she grew up with Mike and so she always dragged him into our activities.” No corresponding
mister
for Mike, Lola noticed.

“I don't understand,” said Lola.

“Miss Jones' family—I suppose her parents' grandparents, or however many generations back it happened—bought up fee lands.”

The light clicked on for Lola. A few years ago, the word would have meant nothing to her. But living with Charlie, and in such proximity to the Blackfeet Nation, she'd learned that reservations were hardly all-Indian bastions. During the starvation years after the reservations were formed, and with help from a federal abomination known as the Dawes Act that further wrested land from tribes by force of law rather than war, white people snapped up prime reservation land—fee lands—sold for a pittance by desperate tribes. A century later, many tribes were trying to buy that land back, parcel by newly high-priced parcel. Lola remembered Pal telling her that Delbert lived on the reservation. Funny, Lola thought, that Pal neglected to mention that her land, too, was on the rez.

Arlie Colton was still talking. “Their parents were neighbors. Such parents as Mike had. His grandfather, mostly. His father, you know, was killed in the Gulf War. And his mother—” He tipped his hand in front of his mouth, indicating drink. “He lost her, too. Miss Jones went to the schools in town, and Mike to the Indian school. That way, he got to play for the Chiefs.”

“The Chiefs?”

“You're not from Wyoming, are you? Everybody in the state knows about the Chiefs, and the Lady Chiefs, too. They make it to the basketball finals just about every year, and to the championship a fair amount of time, too. Pity that's as far as most of them go.”

Lola had heard the queasy-making soliloquy about Indian athletes—great in high school, but a tendency to fall apart in colleges far from their families—too many times in Montana to want to hear the Wyoming version. She tried to steer Arlie Colton back on track. “But he attended a lot of your school's activities?”

“Miss Jones included him whenever she could at events in our school. Though why he wanted to come was beyond me. It can't have been comfortable for him. But she insisted. They were friends. Closer than most.” The curl of his lip and flare of nostril indicated disapproval. “There was talk.”

“What sort of talk?” Lola asked. As if she couldn't guess. A white girl, an Indian boy. Lola had grown up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, hearing the same sort of talk about white girls who had the temerity to say more than two words to black classmates. But she had to change the subject. She was not going to let another interview go astray on the subject of Pal. “Actually, I'm here to talk about the other students who went to Afghanistan.” She consulted her notes as if trying to remember, even though she'd memorized their names. A little feigned stupidity never hurt. “Let's see. Here's one.” She thought she'd ease into things before bringing up Cody Dillon's suicide, or Tommy McSpadden's and Tyson Graff's near-deadly hijinks. “You mentioned him just a few minutes ago. Skiff Loughry.”

Arlie's round face brightened. She'd found the principal at the school after walking into the unlocked and nearly deserted building in the middle of a summer day and following the smell of floorwax. A janitor, buffing a basketball court into renewed glassiness after a year of hard use, had directed her to Arlie's office at the end of a darkened hallway. The principal hadn't seemed surprised to see her. Lola wondered if Dave Sparks had paid a similar visit. If he had, she'd missed the story he'd written. More likely, she thought, once again
he'd
missed the story.

“Mr. Loughry. We're planning some sort of celebration for him once school starts. We thought it would be more respectful to wait a few weeks after Mr. Dillon's funeral and the other, ah, troubles.”

“Why a celebration?” Lola, turning to check on Margaret, whom she'd parked with a coloring book in the outer office, asked the question over her shoulder.

Arlie's eyebrows, so pale they barely showed, disappeared into the mass of wrinkles on his forehead. He was short and egg-shaped, wearing a long-sleeved white button-down shirt and khaki pants even in the heat and informality of summertime Wyoming. He had a nervous, fussy aspect, more like that of an insurance man, Lola thought, than the weary authoritarianism of a longtime school administrator.

“Because of what he did, of course,” he said. “I thought you knew. Isn't that what your story is about?”

Lola had gotten the email she'd hoped for the previous night, the go-ahead for the story from InDepth.org, one of the sparkly new online journalism sites creating a buzz in an otherwise-moribund business. “Send photos, too,” the editor had urged. “Some video would be nice. We'll get the graphics guys”—Lola noted the plural with an envious sigh—“started on the maps. If your own photos don't cut it, we'll send a shooter out, but give it a try.”

“My story,” she told Arlie carefully, “is about all aspects of the situation.”

Arlie blinked rapidly. He caught his lower lip between his teeth and sucked it in, clearly envisioning the myriad ways a story might somehow make him look bad.

“Certainly,” she hastened to cut off any brewing objections, “Skiff's role is a major part of it. Why don't you tell me about it?”

Arlie released his lip, sat back in his chair, and puffed up a bit inside the starched shirt. “He saved them all, of course. He's our hero. If it wasn't for Mr. Loughry, every last one of those kids would be dead.”

Something had awakened Skiff Loughry that night. Maybe Mike St. Clair had scuffled with the Afghani—just for a second, not even long enough to cry out—before the knife nearly parted his head from his neck.

Or maybe Skiff just had a sixth sense, Arlie said. Whatever, he awoke. Saw what was going on. Shot the Afghani before the rest could rouse themselves. “They were saved before they even knew what had happened. It was too late for Mike, of course. But one could argue he got what was coming to him. Falling asleep on watch like that. They used to shoot soldiers for as much.”

Lola suppressed an urge to prick the principal with the point of her pen, to see if she could deflate some of that self-importance. “Having your throat cut—that's a pretty rough way to go,” she ventured.

Arlie sniffed. “Anyone going to that godforsaken place should have expected as much. How does the Kipling poem go?”

Lola hadn't figured Arlie for a former English teacher. Math, she would have said. Or shop. She hated that poem. “I know it,” she said, hoping to forestall him. It didn't work. A smile hovered around his lips as he chanted:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

“Well, he didn't go like a soldier, did he?” Arlie said. “Asleep like that. Besides, he only got what his people had been doing to each other for years. He's lucky to have kept his hair.”

Lola was on her feet, notebook in one hand, the other balled into a fist. Arlie Colton scooted back in his chair. She hadn't, she thought with some satisfaction, had to jab him with her pen after all. He'd deflated all by himself. She took a breath and reminded herself that no matter how much she wanted to slap him into the next county, or at least go upside his head with a few choice phrases, it wouldn't help to antagonize anyone just as she was starting to work on the story. If Thirty was anything like Magpie—like any small town—people would hear fast that they shouldn't talk to the out-of-town reporter.

“Sorry,” she heard a calm voice say. “I didn't mean to startle you. I just remembered another appointment. I should have watched the time more carefully. You've been most helpful. And you're right. The story about Skiff's heroism deserves to be told.”

She turned away. His voice called her back.

“I know what you're thinking.”

“What's that?” Her fury flared new and undisguised. She didn't dare turn to face him.

“You people from away. You've got this whole noble savage idea of the Indians. But you don't live here, surrounded by them.”

Given that the reservation comprised small parts of only two of Wyoming's twenty-three counties—Lola had looked it up—Thirty was hardly surrounded. But Lola kept the thought to herself.

“The crime level on the rez is through the roof. There's drinking, drugging, gangs. Your Mike St. Clair is lucky he ended up in the Army instead of prison.”

Lola touched a hand to her face to reassure herself that the flush of anger was fading, and turned back to Arlie. “He ended up dead at the age of what—eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Which could have happened just as easily if he'd stayed here.”

True enough, Lola thought. Just as there was a grain of truth in what Arlie had said about the reservation. The issues facing the West's reservations—remote, inadequately policed, targeted by outside gangs—were daunting. But Lola picked up her newspaper every day and saw stories about white people arrested for those same
problems, yet nobody seemed to fault them as a race.

“He and Miss Jones, they were no angels. Not everybody's a martyr.”

“Mommy?”

Margaret stood in the doorway, having sat in on enough of her mother's interviews to know when one was over. Lola watched Arlie's gaze take in Margaret's braids, her coppery skin. “Oh
,” he said.

Lola picked up her daughter and quick-stepped through the endless dark hallway as though the very air about them were contaminated with the poison of prejudice. But even as she fled the thing her daughter would have to encounter far too often in her life, she reminded herself that just because Arlie was a bigot didn't mean he was wrong about Pal and Mike. She'd learned from hard experience that it was foolish to ignore information just because she didn't like the source. Which meant that, as much as she wanted to stay away from the subject of Pal, she was going to have to probe deeper.