Disgraced (9 page)

Lola turned and saw Dave Sparks, his scarecrow frame jackknifed into a crouch. He lowered a Leica. Not from the
Last Word's
equipment closet, Lola was willing to bet. Dave examined the camera's screen. “Nice mother-daughter image. Might even make it into the paper. Want me to text you a copy?” The smile that accompanied the offer was almost innocent.

Not a bad way to ask for her phone number, Lola thought even as she gave it to him. A baton bounced at his feet. The sisters were working their way back along the parade route, maximizing their annual moment in the public eye. Dave picked up the baton and tossed it to one of the sisters. She blew him a kiss from withered lips. “Aw, hell,” he said. “I'll be in a world of hurt if we don't run a picture of the Weird Sisters.” He ran down the street after them, his long stride eating up the distance. Lola wondered if he'd said things like “world of hurt” before he landed in Wyoming.

“It's time to go.” Delbert stood behind Lola. She clambered to her feet. People drifted away from the parade, probably heading to the barbecue at the park. She wanted to interview them before the combined effects of heat and beer took their toll. Margaret, fists full of brightly wrapped pieces of candy, planted her feet in a stance Lola knew all too well.

“No. More.”

“No more,” Lola echoed. She knew better than to expect a smile from Margaret. She didn't get one. “You've had enough candy for one day. For the whole week—the month in fact.”

“Look here.” Delbert pulled his hand from his pocket. He'd collected his own hoard of candy. “Might be that I could be persuaded to share this. But only if we leave. Pal needs to go home.”

Pal still sat at the curb, bent double, arms wrapped around her head.

“Is she sick again?” Margaret asked.

“Something like that. Let's help her to the truck. Miss Margaret, if you put that candy of yours in your pockets, maybe you can hold mine for me.” Margaret was delighted to help.

“Need a hand?” Skiff Loughry was back from wherever he'd been. “She okay?”

“Too much sun, maybe,” Lola offered when no one else spoke.

“Doubt it,” Skiff said. “We patrolled in Afghanistan when it topped a hundred in the shade, and in full packs and body armor. This girl kept right up. Sun doesn't bother her. Nor nighttime cold. Right, Pal?”

A long shudder ran along Pal's bent back.

“We got this,” Delbert said. “Thanks.”

Skiff stood a few moments more as Delbert took one elbow and Lola the other, not moving away until they'd started half-walking, half-carrying her toward Delbert's truck. It was like carrying a bird, Lola thought, nothing but feathers and hollow bones, her spirit weighing heavier than all of her body parts combined.

When Lola looked back, Skiff was gone.

FIFTEEN

Margaret pulled at Lola's
hand, trying to turn them back toward the truck. “Go with them, Mommy,” she said.

“No,” said Lola. “Pal doesn't need a lot of people hanging around her.”

Margaret squared her shoulders. She dug her feet into the dusty soil of Thirty's block-square city park. On the far side of the park, under the shade of some cottonwoods, dozens of people gathered around smoking barbecues. Lola couldn't see the band, but she heard the plinking of banjos. Skiff Loughry was over there somewhere and Lola aimed to find him. She tried to pick Margaret up, marveling at how a forty-pound child could turn herself into dead weight. The girl sagged in her arms, body yearning back toward the ground. Lola released her into a heap. Bub curled an upper lip, not brave enough for outright defiance, but registering clear disapproval nonetheless. “She's sick, Mommy. She's bad sick.” A tear leaked from Margaret's eye.

Guilt dealt Lola a swift kick. She'd been careful, too careful, to shield Margaret to the extent possible from the realities of sickness and fear in her young life, and now—when she finally encountered them—Lola's response was to ignore her understandable reaction. She knelt in the dirt beside her daughter and rubbed her thumb beneath each of Margaret's eyes. A burst of laughter sounded from the partiers across the way. Lola took Margaret's hand. Her interviews were going to have to wait.

“You're right,” she told Margaret, over ice cream cones in a shop air-conditioned to the point of discomfort. “She is sick. But not the kind of sick like when you get a cough or a cold.”

The cone twirled in Margaret's hand, its stacked scoops of vanilla and chocolate dwindling with each turn. Ice cream was a rare and wonderful treat for Margaret and she was making the most of it before her mother changed her mind. At their feet, Bub polished a plastic dish with equal concentration. Lola had paid for one for him, too. Guilt was costly, she thought. She wondered how to explain PTSD to a five-year-old. “Her heart is sick,” she offered.

“Like Auntie Earline's?” Fresh tears welled in Margaret's eyes. “Is she going to die?” One of Margaret's babysitters had suffered a heart attack a few months earlier.

“That was different. Let me see if I can put it another way—not so much her heart, but her soul.”

Margaret's hands sketched an outline around her head and torso, and crossed over her chest. “Soul?”

“Yes,” said Lola, “the thing that makes her who she is.”

The ice cream was gone. Margaret's teeth crunched on cone. “Why is her soul sick?”

Where was Charlie when she needed him, Lola wondered. If she turned down Charlie's proposal, she'd face a lifetime of answering Margaret's tough questions on her own. She wondered if that realization was why he'd sent her off with Margaret. “Pal was a soldier,” she began. Margaret nodded. Soldiers were always coming and going on the reservation, and every tribal ceremony featured a contingent of veterans. “She had to go to war.”

“That's when people fight,” Margaret said through a final mouthful of cone. “With guns.”

“No talking and chewing at the same time,” Lola reminded her. “But yes, war is when people fight, with guns and all sorts of other things. Sometimes people die. Soldiers see that. It can hurt their hearts. Their souls.” A memory arose. She pushed it away. Others flooded its place.

Sometimes the dead weren't even the worst of it, Lola thought. The war in Afghanistan wasn't noted for big body counts. But other things were just as insidious. The constant twanging threat that each new footstep could be the one that tripped a mine, that each madly beeping Toyota pickup could be the one that bore a bomb, that each new face could be that of a potential friend—or killer. And the faces themselves, gaunt with hunger and desperation and resentment. Children so relentlessly deprived of childhood that they'd turned feral, swarming around Lola and other journalists in pint-sized mobs, faces oozing with sores, fingers worming into pockets and emerging with precious photo cards, passports, rolls of rubber-banded cash, making it nearly impossible to work. One particular memory nudged hard. She shoved it away, but still more arose, a trickle turning too fast into a flood.

Lola thought of a day she'd visited a hospital, of the scrawny cats drifting like shadows past the puddles of stinking indefinable liquids on the hallway floors, of the babies who lay gray and motionless three to a crib. A doctor lifted a little girl's gown to reveal ribs that threatened to slice through her papery skin. “Starvation,” he said. “She'll be dead by morning.” Lola stumbled retching from the building. That night her colleagues, singly and in pairs, tapped at the door of her darkened hotel room, where she lay curled in her sleeping bag
atop the narrow pallet. “Are you all right?” they called through the flimsy plywood panel. “Can we get you anything?” Refusing her the dignity of pretending nothing had happened. At least, by the time the worst thing occurred, they'd learned to let her be.

“Really,” she assured Margaret now, “she'll want to be left alone. And when we see her tomorrow morning, we're to act like we always do.”

Margaret's smile was sly. “You mean hungry?”

Lola laughed at the way her daughter's humor so reliably vanquished the ghosts. “I love you, baby girl,” she said. Bub, reassured by the change in atmosphere, lifted his head from the ice cream bowl and wagged his tail in approval.

By the time they made their way back to the park, darkness softened the day's hard edges. The crowd had multiplied. The mingled scents of smoke and beer and charred meat hung in the air. A man in a sauce-spattered apron pressed what appeared to be a quart-sized plastic cup into her hand and directed her to a line in front of a keg of beer. “Lemonade for the little ones is over there.” He jerked his head toward a picnic table beside a small play area. Children and dogs swarmed around it, not a parent in sight. Margaret looked a question at Lola. She surveyed the crowd, located Skiff within the playground's sight lines, and nodded permission to Margaret, who ran without a backward glance, Bub at her heels. Lola directed a foaming stream of beer into her cup. A woman with a brew was a lot less off-putting than a reporter with a notebook. Some of the people she approached even offered to hold her beer when it came time for the notebook to emerge. They said all the predictable things. Cody Dillon's suicide—such a shock. His poor father. And then, those boys getting in trouble barely two steps off the plane. You just knew it had something to do with the terrible things they'd seen.

In any other place, Lola thought, this would be the part where people questioned the wisdom of a far-away war that took their healthy children and returned them broken in body and spirit. But this was the rural West, with its staunch and unquestioning patriotism. She mm-hmmed and took notes and thanked people for sharing their thoughts and for holding her beer. “Where can I read this story of yours?” an elderly man asked.

“Online,” Lola said. “A website called InDepth.org. People all over the country can read it. All over the world.”

“Maybe they can read it all over the world, but I can't read it in Thirty. I don't have a computer.”

“Give me your address and I'll print it out and send it to you,” Lola said. She probably would never see this man again in her life. Then again, she might. At which time, the small courtesy of having sent him the story would pay big dividends. “I don't know when it's coming out,” she said, as he wrapped an arthritic hand around her pen and printed his name and address in crooked block letters in her notebook.

“Aren't you the busy one?” Skiff materialized beside her. “I heard a reporter was working the crowd. Didn't know it was Delbert and Pal's ‘old friend.'” He rolled his eyes at the phrase. So much for thinking he'd bought her explanation. “You must be hungry.” He handed her a paper plate with a hamburger fat with fixings and led her to a picnic table. Lola took a bite and tried not to think of her own disastrous attempts at this most simple fare. Skiff sat across from her.

“How do you really know Pal?”

Lola shrugged and chewed.

“How well do you know her?”

Lola put her burger down. She retrieved her beer and took a sip.

A grin split his square face, letting her know he was on to her, and that he didn't mind. “Fair enough,” he said. “But I take it you don't know her well. Because if you did, you wouldn't be hanging around with her.”

Bingo. Lola swallowed. “And why is that?”

A shriek came from the play area. Lola ascertained it was one of happiness—Bub expertly herded a group of kids, Margaret among them, circling them in ever-tightening arcs, forcing them into a bunch—and turned back to Skiff.

“She's trouble,” he said. “She was trouble in school, and she was trouble in Afghanistan.”

“I heard what happened to Mike,” Lola said. “But what about Pal?”

It was hard to see his expression in the fading light. “Mike,” he said. “Now that's a tragedy.”

Tragedy. It was the same word that Dave Sparks had used. “How so?”

“You must have heard how he died. Even if you're not from here, you only have to spend about two minutes in town. People are still talking about it.”

Lola feigned ignorance and thus was treated to a second recitation of the story Dave had told—a patrol out too late, the broken-down vehicle, Mike standing sentry as they napped while awaiting a replacement, the shepherd happening upon the group, taking full advantage. “Well,” said Skiff. “Not full. If he had, we'd all be dead. Instead we got lucky.”

Lola noticed that he left out his own part in it, the part the principal had told her, how Skiff himself had killed the shepherd, saving his companions. She prodded him. “Lucky how?”

“We shot him,” he said. “It had to be done.”

We
. Sharing the credit. The more Skiff talked, the more Lola liked him. “How come there wasn't anything in the paper?” she asked
before remembering, too late, that the only way she could have known what was in the paper was by searching it out. Nothing flickered in Skiff's earnest gaze, no spark of realization, no jerk of suspicion.

He gestured toward the people a few yards away. “Everybody already knows about it.”

It could have been a gathering in Magpie, Lola thought, the old folks at the picnic tables, the younger guys at the keg, toting beer back to their wives and girlfriends, the moms in a cluster, knocking back more beer than they should, so grateful were they for a respite from one-on-one child-rearing. Not a brown face in the crowd, Lola noted. That, too, was like Magpie. The Indians would be observing the day on the reservation, holding their own ceremony at the cemetery, leaving oranges at the graves, making sure the departed had good things to eat in the spirit world. There was no one for Skiff to point to when he evoked Delbert, again echoing Dave Sparks's words.

“Can you imagine how it would affect Delbert, the whole tribe, to have that out there in print? Best just to let it lie.”

Lola's beer tasted flat. “But everyone knows, anyway. Isn't the truth always better? It's messy, but so is war. I don't know that there's even that much shame to it. An Afghan summer, all that gear. All of you must have been exhausted. It could have been any one of you. Me, I think it humanizes the situation, lets people know what things are really like over there. Gives them something to think about next time they go to vote.” Lola wished she'd held back those last words. She hurried on. “Especially given what happened to that other soldier. The one who killed himself. That has to have hit people hard, too.”

Skiff's expression darkened, more in sorrow than in anger, Lola decided, no heat coming off him. “All the more reason,” he said, “to just let it go. People have been through enough. Want another beer?”

Lola shook her head. He wasn't going to say anymore about the suicide. Maybe he could shed light on something else that bothered her. “Why'd you let Mike out of the vehicle? You all couldn't have stayed awake until the replacement got to you? Everybody knows Afghanistan at night makes Afghanistan by day look like a picnic.”

His voice was soft as the fading light around them. “What do you know about that?”

Answering a question with a question. Lola lost patience. “It's time for us to go,” she said. “Margaret's got to be exhausted. She'll probably sleep all the way back to the ranch, and then I won't be able to get her to bed.” Let him find out on his own that she'd done time in Afghanistan, too.

“You can't go,” he said. “Look around.”

People were packing up leftover food into their coolers, dousing the coals in the barbecue grills, and moving to the center of the park, spreading blankets on the ground. “The fireworks are about to start. Come on. You can sit with me.” He led them through a patchwork quilt of overlapping blankets crowded with generations of families, from oldsters nodding off in lawn chairs to babies likewise asleep—at least for the moment—in bouncy seats. Lola didn't see an obvious space, but people made one when they saw Skiff. A man leaned forward to pat him on the shoulder as they settled onto an itchy green Army blanket of a vintage probably dating to Skiff's grandfather. “Helluva job over there, son,” the man said. “Thanks for bringing them back.” The man's grin faded as he remembered the obvious. Not everyone had made it back. And among those who had, one never made it home.

“Thanks, sir,” Skiff said, giving cover to the man's embarrassment. “That's real nice of you. But I was just doing my job. You're going to like these fireworks,” he said to Lola, as a way to end his conversation with the well-wisher. Bub flopped down with a theatrically superior yawn. Most dogs hated fireworks, ranking them right up there with thunderstorms. Lola had friends who fed their dogs Valium on the Fourth. But Bub was impervious. The first time Lola had taken him to Magpie's July Fourth celebration, he'd fallen asleep. She said as much to Skiff.