Disgraced (11 page)

SEVENTEEN

Rocks rushed toward her
so fast that Lola could barely steer among them. She didn't even try to miss the low ones, and prayed she'd see the bigger ones in time to swerve. The light ahead of them grew incrementally larger even as the truck roared closer. Its driver switched on the lights. The glare of high beams bouncing off her rearview mirror nearly blinded Lola.

She forgot to yell, forgot to feign any semblance of fun, forgot everything other than the need to keep the pickup upright and ahead of the truck gaining inexorably upon them. The pickup jolted down into a gully, pitching Lola forward so abruptly she clipped her chin on the steering wheel. She horsed the pickup up the other side, scanning the horizon for the light. She didn't see it. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, please,” she begged, forgetting she was a nonbeliever. A jagged rock loomed. She jerked at the wheel. And just like that, there was the light, farther to the left than she'd remembered, larger, too, the unmistakable outline of a building beside it, some sort of shed, probably, but maybe, just maybe, a house. Lola wrangled the pickup in its direction, giving thanks to Jesus and some other deities, too. Maybe they were going to make it.

The pickup shook with the force of the blow to its rear. This time, nobody screamed. Even Bub was silent, three legs planted solidly on the passenger seat, staring fixedly ahead. Lola braced herself for the truck's next strike. It came from the left, the truck's nose scraping along the pickup's side, both vehicles slewing sideways, their headlights highlighting the house looming before them. Lola leaned on the horn. The truck pulled even with them. The door to the house opened, a rectangle of yellow light silhouetting the person standing within, holding what even Lola, eyes awash in tears, could see was a long gun. He raised it.

“Head down, Margaret!” Lola yelled. She wrenched the wheel, throwing the pickup into an intentional skid. Lola ducked as it spun, expecting it to hit the truck. Or the house. Or to rotate smack into a bullet.

But the pickup slowed unimpeded to a stop and Lola, when she finally unclenched her hands from the wheel, decided she was unhurt. A ragged gasp from the backseat reassured her that Margaret was at least alive. Margaret lifted her head and provided more reassurance still.

“Holy shit, Mommy.”

By the time the man from the house reached the pickup, Lola was alternately laughing and sobbing with relief, holding Margaret so tightly the child protested she could barely breathe. Bub's growl gave her notice. The pickup door flew open and Lola and Margaret blinked in the overhead light that revealed a wisp of a man and his very substantial rifle.

“You'd best come out of there now.” His voice was reedy and halting. The rifle shook in his hand. She took him for elderly.

Lola considered the possibility that they might not be out of danger. She had scrambled into the back seat with Margaret as soon as the pickup stopped. Now she unlatched the belt that, just as advertised, had held Margaret solid in the booster seat. She extricated first herself and then Margaret from the truck, thinking as she did that the man seemed so fragile that whatever threat he posed might be easily neutralized. At least, if she could get that gun away from him. But she had a more immediate concern.

“Where's the other truck?”

“Went tear-assing on by. Probably in the next county by now. You mind telling me what sort of foolishness you people are up to? This here is private property, not somebody's goddamn playground.”

Bub's hackles rose apace with the man's voice. His presence made Lola feel better about her odds. “Foolishness, my ass. Some crazy man tried to run me off the road, rear-ended my truck, sideswiped it, scared the hell out of my little girl.”

A different note crept into the man's voice. “Says you.”

“That's right. Says me. Look, could we please use your phone to call 9-1-1?” It would do, she knew, little good. But she wanted to get Margaret indoors where she could get a better look at her, make sure she was truly okay, and truth be told, to close a door behind her, shutting out the blackness where she feared the truck still lurked.

The man lowered the gun and led the way to the house. The kitchen light jumped as the door slammed behind them, throwing startling shadows around the same sort of kitchen-dining room-living room space as Pal's. All resemblance ended there, though. The counters and tabletop gleamed bare. Light bounced off a floor buffed as shiny and antiseptic as an operating theater. The man replaced the gun in a rack beside the front door and Lola got her first surprise. She'd imagined the white equivalent of Delbert, all caved-in cheeks and stove-up body, but the man was young, maybe only ten years older than she was, the sorrow in his eyes so deep and commanding that it jerked her attention away from the stubble on his cheeks, the only thing about him or his home that appeared untended.

Those eyes. Her gaze came back to them after wandering the room and fastening on the feature that explained them, the sort of wondrous coincidence that would never fly in fiction but that, Lola had learned over years, occurred more often in real life than would have seemed possible. The clippings were magneted with military precision to the refrigerator door, each and every one of them about Cody Dillon, the soldier who'd shot himself at the Casper airport.

Shirl Dillon told her about his son over coffee as they waited for the sheriff's deputy the dispatcher had sounded reluctant to send.

“Cody was crazy to sign up. I told him so. But he had to go along with the crowd. If somebody he looked up to said, ‘Jump,' it wasn't just, ‘How high?' but ‘Over what cliff?' Always looking for a way to impress people. Those so-called friends of his signed up and he couldn't wait to be next. ‘You think gettin' yourself killed will do the trick? Think they'll be some kind of true friends now?' I asked him. Some friends. Not none of them's come around. Well. One has. Not come around, but at least he's talked to me about it. The rest, you'd never imagine they'd known Cody since he was in short pants.”

At some point, thought Lola, she was going to have to tell Shirl Dillon she was working on a story. Her chat with Skiff earlier in the day didn't count as a formal interview. She'd get another crack, a lengthier one, at Skiff. But she sensed that this moment would be her only time with Shirl. She glanced again around the room and shivered at its order, so purposeful as to make her suspect Shirl was preparing to follow his son into the hereafter. “There's something you should know,” she began. “Maybe you want some more coffee first.”

She waited until he'd poured himself some, and then she told him who she was and how she'd wanted to write the story ever since Cody had shot himself at the airport while she was standing right there, and especially since she'd read the story about his two compatriots who'd gotten in trouble so soon after their homecoming.

He held up his hand. “Wait a minute. What was a reporter from Montana doing at the airport in Casper? You writing a story down here? Or you have family on that plane?”

Damn, thought Lola. He hadn't been so sunk in sorrow, nor so angry at the unwelcome arrival of two battling trucks just outside his front door, that he'd failed to notice the Montana license plates on her truck. “Something like that,” she said. “I was in the area and a friend of mine asked me to pick up her cousin and give her a ride home.” She was careful to leave Pal's name out of the equation, and was glad when he didn't ask for more information. “These people, your son and his friends, they've all been through so much. Losing Mike St. Clair over there. That must have been a terrible thing.”

“Mike St. Clair!” Shirl set his coffee cup down so hard the liquid sloshed over the rim. “He was half the problem.”

Lola rose before he could, tearing a paper towel from a roll above the sink and mopping the table clean. She didn't want him distracted. She tossed the paper towel into a trash can beneath the sink and tore off another one and wiped his mug free of any drops, and added a fresh splash. Margaret fidgeted in her chair. Lola cut her eyes at her and shook her head. Margaret employed her lower lip to maximum pouting effect, but she stayed put.

“Why was Mike a problem?”

“Carrying on with that woman. The two of them rubbing everybody's noses in it, in front of all those other boys, no chance for them to get women of their own, not in a small unit like theirs. Don't get me wrong. I got nothing against girls in the military. But that sort of thing messes up discipline, ruins morale.”

It also was, Lola knew, a blatant violation of regulations—and probably the regulation most blatantly violated. Still, other than the principal's dirty-minded presumptions, this was the first she'd heard for sure that Pal and Mike were more than friends.

“How'd you know they were a couple?” Jan had said her cousin didn't have a boyfriend. Pal and Mike must have hooked up overseas, friendship at long last turning into something else. Cody probably emailed his father, she thought, grousing about everything from the food to the injustice of a flaunted affair. The answer surprised her.

“Skiff—one of the other boys who went over—he told me at the funeral,” Shirl said.

Lola offered a silent apology to the deceased Cody. He'd had enough smarts, and loyalty, too, not to blab in an almost certainly monitored email about his companions' breach of regulations. Still. “Why would Skiff bring up something like that at the funeral?”

“There was talk, you know. That Cody wasn't tough enough. Falling apart the way he did, killing himself in front of all those people. Skiff wanted me to know what Cody had been dealing with over there. He pulled me aside after and told me.”

Skiff couldn't have been happy that Pal and Mike were so obviously involved, Lola thought. Which made it more inexplicable still that he'd seemed so glad to see Pal earlier that day. On the other hand, she thought, he seemed determined to shield the families from any more pain than the unendurable blow they'd already suffered, wanting to keep the news about Mike falling asleep out of the paper, trying to reassure Cody's dad that the pressure on his son in
fact had been too much to bear. The thought rose that she would structure her story around Skiff, the group leader struggling to hold his friends together against increasing odds, losing first Mike and then Cody, but still fighting for them, even back on home ground.

“Did Cody ever write to you about what it was like over there? What'd he say?” Hoping for real-time tidbits, something to give a reader a sense of what the soldiers from Wyoming saw every day in Afghanistan, what they ate, how they amused themselves during the down times (although now she knew how Mike and Pal had done so) and, most important, what it was like to be on patrol where death lurked behind every rock, every mud hut, every herd of sheep.

Shirl shook his head. “Not a word beyond, ‘We're all fine.' Made a joke of it. ‘Not dead yet,' stuff like that. I think he didn't want me to worry. We lost his mom a few years back. Cancer. I probably hung on to him too tight after that. Might be what drove him to enlist.” The grooves around his mouth deepened. The coffee cup jittered anew in his hands.

Lola resisted an impulse to cover one of them in her own. Such moments made her doubt her choice of career, the way it demanded that people rip the scabs off unhealed wounds and displayed the raw, bleeding depths of their souls to her. Their sadness straitjacketed her, leaving her struggling against its bonds hours, even days, sometimes months later. Margaret looked toward the door. Bub rose from the floor. Lola heard it, too, the rumble of an approaching vehicle.

“Mr. Dillon. Shirl,” she said urgently, “your son shouted something before he … in the airport. ‘It's alive.' What did he mean?”

Shirl's head jerked. “I didn't hear it. I was late getting there. Truck blew a tire on the way in. Maybe if I'd gotten there sooner—”

Lola sucked in her breath, imagining herself in the same sort of position with Margaret, the nightmare scenarios that present themselves to any parent. Lagging to retrieve some forgotten item as Margaret skipped toward a creek running high with snowmelt; turning her back to tend to some inane task as Margaret, sometimes still unsteady on her feet, poked a marshmallow into a blazing campfire. She talked past her own hovering fears and Shirl's realized one, thinking back to that day in the airport, the incoherent shout, so like all the others around her as people recognized their relatives. “I heard him say something, but I couldn't make it out. I asked somebody and that's what she said.”

A car door slammed outside.

“‘It's alive. It's alive.' What did he mean?”

Shirl shook his head in emphatic denial. “I do not have a single goddamn clue.”

The deputy had been around awhile, long enough to acquire the air of detached courtesy that covered the fact that he knew the long drive out to Shirl's place was a colossal waste of his time.

All Lola could tell him about the truck was that it was light-colored and large, far bigger than the compact Toyota pickup she'd inherited after her friend Mary Alice's death. “American-made,” she told the deputy uselessly. Most pickups in that part of the world were. “Wyoming plates. Just the driver, nobody else. Big guy. Ball cap.”

The deputy pressed his lips together, containing his exasperation. Lola had described every other vehicle—and its driver—on Wyoming's roads. “And you say this truck actually struck yours?”

“He rammed us from behind. Clipped the front bumper. Sideswiped us, too.”

The deputy removed a flashlight the size of a small table leg from his duty belt. “Let's take a look.”

The flashlight threw a beam like midday sunshine, highlighting the scrapes on the front and rear bumpers, the long gouge down the driver's side of the pickup. Lola permitted herself a twinge of satisfaction. The deputy's skepticism had been clear. “Huh. Hold this for me.” He handed her the flashlight and she pointed it as directed as he snapped photographs of the damage and then scraped bits of silver paint that glittered against her own truck's red into an evidence bag. He retrieved the flashlight just as Lola's arm was beginning to sag from its weight. “You know this is a long shot. But we'll do everything we can. I don't suppose you saw anyone else on the road while this was going on.”