TWENTY

Lola had told the truth when she said she wanted to see what the reservation looked like off the beaten path, especially considering that the beaten path itself consisted of nothing more than a handful of two-lane roads.

But first, she saw the mine. The clerk hadn’t mentioned it in her directions, but towering wire fences, topped with razor wire, presaged its presence. Small signs sported the company logo of stacked C ’s. Lola wondered if she could drive directly onto the mine’s property, maybe even ask for a tour. Industrial sites usually were locked up tighter than CIA safe houses, but things in the West tended to be more relaxed and open.

A large warning near the mine’s entrance exploded Lola’s hopes of a friendly western howdy. EMPLOYEES ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED, it shouted.

“Prosecuted, huh?” Lola glanced back at the girls. If she’d been alone, she might have risked it. Sometimes, stupid—“What sign? I didn’t see a sign”—actually worked. A handful of protesters lounged in bubba chairs about a hundred yards from the gate. As the pickup approached, they rose and brandished signs.

Coal Kills.

Say No to Mine Expansion.

And, in a play on the company’s Conrad Coal Keeps Them On motto, Turn Off the Lights.

Lola noted a couple of elders in traditional clothing. The others were young, white, and in shorts and T-shirts, the hippie-dippies that Charlie and Edgar had discussed. Lola gave them a nod of acknowledgment. As soon as she’d passed, they sank back into their chairs.

A truck, just like the one destroyed by the bomb, rumbled through gates manned by security guards. It turned toward Lola, who fought an urge to swing the pickup entirely off the road in an effort to give the truck as wide a berth as possible. What if someone detonated another bomb? She hit the accelerator, ignoring the girls’ cries of protest and Bub’s muttering, and turned onto a dirt track, only the smallest of signs indicating the road the store clerk had told her to take. The pickup’s hotshot suspension failed the challenge of the higher speed she demanded in her effort to put as much distance between them and the mining truck as possible.

The track kinked. The main road with its other vehicles and occasional buildings vanished behind them. Just like that, Lola was beyond civilization.

She thought she’d seen desolation in North Dakota, where the plains rolled on forever, or Wyoming, with its treeless stretches of sagebrush. But at least the tight-packed sagebrush had represented signs of an abundant, if toughened, life. Here, even the sagebrush appeared cowed, only a few lonely clumps dotting expanses of bare rock. An occasional butte reared from the desert floor. Hawks soared on the downdrafts, specks against the painful glare of sky. Lola wondered what they possibly could be hunting. It seemed as though nothing could survive the frying pan of desert floor. She caught Juliana’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Do sheep really graze here?”

“Of course.”

“Whatever in the world do they eat?”

Juliana looked as though she didn’t understand the question. Her mother had described the land as bountiful and generous to the Navajo and Hopi people. Once again, Lola realized—as she had when she’d been assigned to Afghanistan, and then again when she’d ended up in Montana—that she was going to have to learn a new way of looking at things. Arizona must have hidden charms, or at least benefits, which her untrained eye had yet to detect. Maybe Betty Begay could explain them to her. In fact, Lola thought, that would be a good way to start their conversation. Assuming Betty was home. From what Naomi and Edgar had said, Lola knew it was entirely possible that Betty might be miles from her home, trailing a band of skinny sheep across the redrock.

“Auntie Lola! Auntie Lola!”

At Juliana’s unexpected and welcome use of auntie, Lola eased her foot from the accelerator.

“There’s Shimá’s house.”

Lola had nearly missed the turnoff. She steered the truck toward the bump on the horizon that eventually resolved itself into a hogan and worked on persuading Juliana about coincidence.

“Do you visit Mrs. Begay a lot?”

Juliana nodded. “With my mom,” she added.

“Then we should stop and see her, too,” Lola said. Let Juliana think everything had happened by chance while they were out exploring.

A familiar small figure emerged from the hogan as Lola parked the truck. Juliana wriggled out first. “I brought my new friends,” she announced.

“Ya’at’eeh,” Betty said.

Lola mumbled the greeting back, uncertain of her ability to get the breaks in the right places, to pronounce the final syllable as eh instead of ay.

Betty Begay directed a shrewd smile at her. “You’re from the meeting. Now you’re here to see me.”

Lola rubbed her foot in the dirt and offered a vague semblance of truth. “We were just driving. Sightseeing. And then when we took this road, Juliana told me you lived here.”

“Hmph.” Betty Begay’s skepticism could not have been more obvious.

“We brought you some water. Girls, help me out, please.” She handed each of the girls a gallon jug and balanced the other three in her arms.

“You bring water even though you don’t plan to see me? You must be a mind reader, know that somewhere on the mesa, an old lady needs more water.”

For just a moment, Lola felt sorry for the mine managers or anyone else who tried to bullshit Betty Begay.

“I had it in the truck in case we got stuck somewhere—” Lola began, but Betty cut her off with another “Hmph.”

“You come on,” she added, and led the way into the hogan. “You girls want some lemonade?”

Lola motioned Bub to stay outside. She thought the hogan might be stifling, given the small space and the day’s heat. But the thick mud walls pushed back against the sun, and the interior was cool and dim and soothing. An oil-drum stove stood beneath the smokehole. A pallet of sheepskins lay against one wall. A photo dangled from a nail. The oval frame surrounded the image of a middle-aged woman with softly permed hair and a severe expression lightened by a crinkle at the corners of her eyes.

Betty saw her looking. “She was my daughter.”

“Oh, no. When did she … ?”

“No. Not that. She was taken from me. By those people. To convert her, civilize her.”

“A boarding school?” That story, at least, Lola knew. Religious warriors of various denominations had long waged battle on the tribes’ so-called heathen ways. The Blackfeet had endured the Jesuits; the Salish and Kootenai, the Sisters of Mercy. In California, Father Junipero Serra—a Franciscan elevated to sainthood—persuaded people to Catholicism with the help of a lash. And everywhere, the forced removal of Indian children from their homes to the boarding schools, where nuns and priests cut their hair and forbade them from speaking their own language or following their own spiritual practices.

“Worse than boarding school. Worse than the Jesus people.”

Lola couldn’t imagine what might be worse, and said as much.

“The Mormons. They took our children, adopted them outright. Legally, my Loretta is their daughter.”

Lola’s head jerked involuntarily to look for Margaret. She could hear the girls chattering in the shade house. She tried to imagine what it would be like if people took Margaret from her and claimed her as their own, a vision that included a strong probability of herself ending up in prison for murder. She dusted her hands together, as if to rid herself of the unthinkable. Compared to the removal of a people’s lifeblood, the problems posed by the mine suddenly seemed manageable.

Lola looked again at the photo. Betty’s daughter was not a young woman. “It seems as though you’ve been in touch over the years.”

“Oh, yes. She says she has two families. Me. And those people.”

Betty appeared to have forgiven her daughter, Lola thought, but not the family who’d taken her. She couldn’t blame her. “Does she live here now?

“Salt Lake.” A quick, sly smile added another crease to Betty’s features. “She’s an adoption lawyer.”

Lola returned the smile. No matter that other people had raised her; Betty’s daughter appeared to have inherited her mother’s subversive tendencies.

Betty took three metal cups from a shelf, poured water from one of the jugs into them, and mixed in the off-brand powdered lemonade so familiar to Lola. The cups were small. Lola glanced around the hogan. Empty water jugs sat in stacks against one wall. It appeared that the five gallons she’d brought represented the whole of Betty’s water supply, making the offer of a drink even more precious. Betty herself, Lola noted, drank nothing. As Lola watched, she furtively touched her tongue to her lips. Lola set her own cup down.

“You know what? I’m not as thirsty as I thought. Would you like it?” She expected another “Hmph,” but Betty sipped in silence.

“Shimá”—Juliana glanced toward Lola, and this time translated—“my mother, can I show Margaret around?”

Lola couldn’t imagine there was much to see, but Betty nodded permission. Lola waited until the girls’ chatter receded. “How many other people live up here?”

Betty’s sigh plumbed depths. “Now? Hardly any. Most left. Some few way over there”—she waved vaguely—“but up here, just me.”

“Isn’t it lonely?”

Betty’s laugh, like her voice, was full and rich, and startling from such a small frame. “Lonely? I have sheep. And every day, birds, hawks, lizards.” The laugh trailed away.

“But?”

“Not so many anymore. They all need water, too.”

Lola held up one of the jugs. “Speaking of water. How do you get it?”

Not a full laugh this time, but a delightful chortle nonetheless. “You bring me!” And others, too, Betty said. “Anybody who drives by, knows to bring me water. If I run out, I fetch from the spring, carry it on my back.” She made sketching motions with her hands, indicating a sort of sling. Lola winced as she recalled the weight of the water as she’d carried the short distance from the truck to the hogan.

“I thought all the springs dried up.”

“Not all. One about five miles that way.” Again, the vague wave.

“Five miles!”

“Nice and close, not like the others.”

Lola couldn’t tell if Betty was serious or having some fun at her expense.

“Juliana knows where. You get her to show you. Nice and cool there. Good spot for a picnic.”

Again, Lola searched Betty’s expression for signs of mischief. Was it possible that the woman had somehow communicated with Naomi, that she knew Lola and the girls were planning a picnic? She banished the thought as absurd. The hogan lacked plumbing and electricity, along with phone lines, and for sure cellphones didn’t work on the mesa; Lola had checked hers repeatedly on the drive. When Betty finished her lemonade, she gathered up the cups and sat them in a plastic basin. Lola wondered if she’d scour them with sand rather than water. She wondered what sorts of things she herself would do if every drop counted. Betty turned toward the door. The visit appeared to be ending.

“We passed the mine on the way here,” Lola said quickly. Clumsy, she chided herself. The only way to the hogan—at least from the road—was past the mine.

But Betty seemed to have anticipated the subject. “You want to know about it.”

“Everyone seems to think the bombings are directed at it.”

Betty’s smile lit up the hogan’s dark interior. “Everybody’s right.”

“But who would do such a thing?”

The question hovered between them like a hummingbird, cheeky and demanding attention, the air around it vibrating with intensity.

“Anybody. Everybody. Maybe even me. Little Betty is big bomber. Boom!” She raised her arms, pantomiming an explosion.

Lola’s laugh was a beat too late. She followed Betty into the sun with relief. “Girls!”

They charged around the side of the hogan. Bub jolted behind them on his three legs, tongue dangling nearly to the ground. “We were under the shade house,” Margaret said. “Mom, come see what Betty does there.”

“No,” said Juliana. “We don’t have time.” She grabbed Lola’s hand and dragged at it, pulling her toward the truck. “Come on, Auntie Lola,” she said, with all the considerable winsomeness a nine-year-old has at her disposal.

“Plenty of time, girl.”

Betty’s rebuke was mild, but Juliana dropped Lola’s hand. “Please,” the girl said. “I want to go.” A trembling lip replaced her smile.

“Just two minutes,” Betty said. “You come see. You’ll like this.”

The shade house backed up to the hogan, a tiny makeshift version of Edgar and Naomi’s lavish patio. Still, it featured the same deep shadows and pleasantly rustling branches. A card table and folding chair sat beneath it, strewn with miniature versions of patterned rugs attached to key rings.

“I make these,” Betty announced. “Sell them at markets and the trading posts.” She selected one. “Here. You take.”

Lola tried to thank her, glad when Betty brushed her words away before she could utter them, leaving nothing in her own tone or choice of words to raise Betty’s suspicions as she folded her hand about the woolen key chain Betty pressed into her palm—the same sort of key chain that Juliana had filched from the backpack in the ruins.