Dakota (2 page)

“An eagle feather.”

“That’s odd. Isn’t it?”

“Stop fishing, Lola. She probably died of exposure. We haven’t turned her over yet, but there’s no obvious injury. Maybe she was trying to hitchhike home from wherever she ran away to last year. If somebody dropped her off at the crossroads in the middle of the night, the cold would’ve gotten her before anyone else came along, given that storm last night. It’s a shame. She didn’t have much farther to go.”

“If she was hitchhiking,” Lola asked, “what’s she doing all the way out here? Did an eagle drop her from the sky?” The tribal cops’ heads swiveled as one, turning to take in the road a quarter mile away. Lola had bumped across the prairie’s frozen ruts in her pickup, a ride that challenged the very fillings in her teeth.

Charlie didn’t respond to her question. He dropped his mittens into the snow, snapped blue latex disposable gloves over his hands and stooped beside Judith’s body. He hooked a fingertip in the sweatshirt’s sleeve and drew it up to Judith’s elbow. Checking to see if Judith had been using again, Lola thought. The girl’s struggles with whatever drug was most easily available at any given moment were public knowledge. Lola leaned over Charlie and looked. “Hell,” she said. Bruises with pinpoint centers laced the soft pale skin of Judith’s inner arm. Something else, too. Charlie’s breath caught. The tribal cops crowded close. Charlie ignored the track marks and ran a gloved finger over a tilted heart shape. The lines were raised and brown and shiny.

“That’s new. Right?” Lola said.

“Yes.” Charlie bit the word off.

“That is one messed-up tattoo.”

“It’s not a tattoo,” Charlie said. “It’s a brand.”

C
HARLIE’S ANNOUNCEMENT
occasioned an outbreak of subdued activity. A tribal officer turned his head and hawked and spat. Another walked a slow circle in the snow. A third took off his gloves, blew in them, and put them back on. Lola stood and bent backward from the waist, as though to ease the nonexistent crick in her back. Only Charlie remained motionless, kneeling beside Judith’s body as though in prayer.

“I guess it’s the latest trend,” he said. “Tattoos and piercings weren’t enough.”

“But Judith didn’t really go for those,” Lola pointed out. “Other than the star. And earrings—everybody’s got those. Everybody.” She liked reminding Charlie of the faint dimple in his earlobe, a reminder of a youthful exuberance she could hardly imagine. As far as she could tell, Charlie had been born old.

Charlie stood and peeled off the gloves. He threw them into the snow and kicked at them. The sun hung pale and indistinct within the mottled sky, lowering over a line of mountains whose names bespoke their history as Blackfeet territory, despite the fact that the reservation’s whiteman-drawn boundaries relegated the mountains to nearby Glacier National Park. Lola studied their shapes. Somewhere over there was Sinopah. As a way of filling the long winter evenings, she’d set herself the challenge of learning the names of the more imposing peaks, poring over atlases and online photos, and querying Charlie as to their Blackfeet names. Her most recent focus, Sinopah—a woman’s name, the daughter of a chief—was known for the perfection of its shape, the snowcapped triangle of a child’s drawing. But to Lola, a born flatlander, all the peaks looked distinctive. A gust shoved exhaust fumes into her face. The cruisers and Lola’s pickup sat running nearby. Lola knew each vehicle’s heater was blowing full blast. She stuck her hands under her arms and hopped on one foot, then the other. She wore padded arctic boots with layers of synthetic stuff between her feet and the snow, along with the requisite multiple pairs of socks, and still her toes were icy. “Does Joshua know yet? It’s going to be tough on him, losing a twin.”

“We called the tribal offices as soon as I saw who it was,” one of the cops said. “They said they’d send somebody over to tell him. That was about an hour ago.”

Lola groped at her sleeve until her watch emerged. She peered at it and pulled the cuff back down over the exposed skin. “So you all got here around three? Who found her?”

Charlie’s boots squeaked across the snow. He opened the door of Lola’s truck. A black and white dog peered out, then shrank back into the warmth. “Hey! You’re letting all the heat out. Bub’s going to freeze.” Lola kicked her way through the snow and tried to wrest the door from his hands.

“Forget it, Lola. You’re not doing this story. This isn’t officially a death by natural causes until I say it is. And I’m nowhere near that point. You go back to the newspaper and do whatever you were doing before you started listening to the scanner. Have Jan give me a call. I’ll give her what I’ve got.”

The heat inside the truck enfolded Lola like a blanket. She was not entirely sorry when Charlie slammed the door behind her. Bub stood up and braced his forepaws against the dash and balanced expertly on his single hind leg as Lola steered between drifts and wind-scoured earth, hard as bare rock. The road was not much of an improvement. Wind buffeted the truck. Snow slid across the blacktop. Lola drove down the middle, pulling into her own lane whenever a tanker truck blew past. This happened frequently. Lola stopped at a crossroads. Arrows nailed to a fence post indicated the county seat of Magpie in one direction, the Blackfeet Nation in the other. Lola dialed her cellphone.

“Magpie Daily Express,”
a voice of indeterminate gender warbled in her ear.

“Hey, Finch.”

The voice cooled considerably. “Lola. I’ll switch you over to Jan.”

Lola began without preamble when Jan picked up. “They found Judith Calf Looking in the snow just past Deadman’s Curve. Charlie thinks she probably froze to death, but he can’t say for sure. So I can’t write the story.” Jan’s reply started loud and got louder. Lola held the phone away from her ear. “Yes. I know I never should have slept with him. Do we have to have this conversation again? Look, I’ll grab your town council meeting tonight if you cover this. Thanks.” She ended the call and looked at the phone. Its face had fogged in the heat of the truck. She rubbed it. It wasn’t yet four. The council meeting wouldn’t start until seven.

“An eagle feather?” she said.

The feathers were reserved for the most solemn occasions. Warriors received them upon returning from Afghanistan or Iraq. They might be presented to family members after the death of a person who had helped the tribe in significant ways. Or given to people for particularly significant graduations, or election to office. But not to a drugged-out teenager. Lola let herself wonder, for just a second, if Judith might have stolen the feather. Impossible, she knew. Feathers were so sacred that if one fell to the ground, only a veteran or someone specially designated could retrieve it.

She turned the truck toward the reservation. It was only right that she pay her respects to Judith’s family, she reassured herself. And if she happened to glean some answers in the process, well, that would be just fine, too.

CHAPTER TWO

L
ola parked a block away from the Calf Looking home. Not much more than a couple of hours had passed since Charlie called the tribal offices, but news traveled the reservation with a speed that put the Internet to shame. Pickups—some new, most far from it—and sprung-suspension cars were already double-parked along the street in a signal that the multiday process of a reservation funeral had already begun. Lola urged Bub from the truck. He took two steps, tilted onto his remaining hind leg to pee, then hopped back in.

“Back in awhile,” she told him. When winter first set in, she’d worried about leaving Bub in the truck. Charlie had pointed out the scores of cattle and horses that overwintered outdoors, as well as the ranch dogs who seemed to spend their lives in the beds of pickups, no matter what the weather. “He won’t freeze,” he’d reassured her. “And you do him no favors by having him spend too much time indoors. He’ll lose his winter coat. And he needs his just as much as you need yours.”

Lola swung her legs wide in the best approximation of a jog she could manage in her swaddling gear and caught up with a knot of women entering the house. Inside, the air was tropical. By the time Lola had shucked out of her parka and kicked off her boots, adding both to the heaps by the front door, sweat slicked her face. The house, like all the reservation prefabs, was cramped at its best. On this evening, it had gone claustrophobic—at least to Lola, who had yet to grow accustomed to the crush of relatives at each and every occasion of note. At least as far as she could tell, everyone was related in some way to everyone else; it seemed as though the entire reservation turned out for each graduation, each military sendoff and each funeral.

“It’s a pain,” Charlie had told her once, the affection in his tone belying the words. “As a kid, I could never get away with anything. Aunties everywhere. They’d feed you, sure, but they had their eye on you all the time.”

Lola, an only child of only-children parents, couldn’t fathom such a total-immersion experience of family life. Would it feel protected, cocoon-like? Or smothering? “A little of both,” Charlie had allowed. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and stood on her toes and searched the crowd for Joshua.

“Over there.” Josephine deRoche pointed with pursed lips. Lola knew Josephine from covering tribal council meetings. As treasurer, Josephine managed the budget as meticulously as she did her own appearance. But the twin assaults of heat and grief were too much for her, causing her normally shellacked beehive to list to one side. Mascara pooled atop plump cheeks.

People clustered around a pair of easy chairs in the corner of the room where Joshua, who appeared to be the only man in a roomful of women, sat beside Alice Kicking Woman. He clutched a framed graduation photo of himself and Judith, star quilts draping their shoulders, waist-length hair flowing free beneath their mortarboards. Lola put a hand to her head, self-conscious as always on the reservation about her thin, kinked curls. Every head around her was topped with hair so strong and shiny and straight that it could have been featured in a shampoo commercial. Every head except Joshua’s, that is. His own hair, freshly shorn, stood up in clumps. Alice’s twisted frame curled toward him like a question mark. Deep grooves seamed her face, disappearing into the hollows of her cheeks, reemerging as vertical stitching around her mouth.

Lola hesitated. Etiquette mandated that attention be paid first to an elder. But what happened when someone died? Would the bereaved then take precedence? She looked around for Alice’s great-granddaughter, Tina, a high school senior who’d recently declared herself a reporter in training. Lola allowed Tina to follow her around on stories and in return, Tina helped Lola navigate the swirling complexities of tribal custom. Lacking Tina’s guidance, Lola finally knelt between the chairs and took Alice’s hand in one of her own and Joshua’s in the other. “I’m so sorry about Ju—” A foot nudged her shin. She glanced up. Tina’s familiar ponytail switched back and forth as she shook her head at Lola.

“No names now,” Tina mouthed.

“—your sister,” Lola finished.

Joshua gave no sign of having heard. Lola stood to make room for the next person, and followed Tina’s bobbing ponytail into the kitchen, where a fry bread assembly line was in progress. “What happened to his hair?” she whispered as they moved to join it.

“He cut it as soon as he heard,” Tina said. “It’s a traditional sign of mourning. Give me your hands.”

Tina dusted Lola’s palms with flour and then slapped a ball of dough into her hands. Lola began rolling and shaping it, her movements awkward compared to the swift, sure work of the others, and waited for the feeling of strangeness she always felt, as the lone white person in the room, to subside.

“It’s so sad,” someone said. “First their parents and then their gran’mother. Those two practically raised themselves after she died.”

Lola looked to see who’d spoken and put a finger through her disc of dough. It was Josephine’s married granddaughter, Angela Kills At Night. Lola rolled the dough back into a ball and started over. “When was that?”

“Maybe five, six years. The twins were just starting high school,” Angela said. “They were a couple of years behind me.” She used a fork to flip a piece of fry bread from the pan and onto a stack of paper towels, which darkened instantly beneath it. She dropped her own circle of dough, paper-thin and sized perfectly to the pan, into the smoking lard. It puffed high and golden. “And half their relatives who are left, the men anyway, are working over in the oil patch. It’s going to be a problem getting them here for this.”

“Because of the weather?” Lola asked.

“Because they just started their three weeks.”

Lola nodded, catching the reference to the fact that people commuted to jobs in western North Dakota’s Bakken oil field in multiple-week shifts.

“I don’t imagine those bosses let anything, even a funeral, mess with their production schedules,” Angela said. “Bad enough we lose our men for weeks on end. Now they’ll have to worry about losing their jobs if they want to do the right thing.”

Even Lola felt the way the air leaked out of the room. Especially in winter, when the seasonal jobs catering to tourists on their way to Glacier dried up, unemployment on the reservation often soared toward 70, 80 percent. Still, funerals took precedence over jobs. Everybody—all the local employers, at least—knew that. But would bosses nearly five hundred miles away understand?