EIGHT

Charlie had strength, but Lola a mother’s desperation. She reached the girls first, flinging herself to the ground beside them, her face to Margaret’s, her hand on her daughter’s chest. Charlie fell to his knees beside her.

Margaret opened her eyes. “Ow.”

Juliana sat up. “Double ow.”

“Stay down,” said Lola. “I don’t know what that was. It was too loud for a gun. And that bomber’s out there somewhere.”

A new sound rang out. Laughter. Naomi and Edgar bent double, whooping, slapping their thighs. Edgar straightened first. “Bomber? You mean this miscreant?” He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes.

A young man walked around the corner of the house. He touched fingertips with Edgar, accepted a kiss on the cheek from Naomi. “What’s so funny?” He continued on toward Lola and Charlie without waiting for an answer, stopping a few feet away. A hesitant smile vanished at the sight of the girls on the ground. “Juliana, are you all right? Who’s this? What happened?”

Juliana hopped to her feet and dusted off her rear end. She reached a hand to Margaret and pulled her up. “This is my cousin, Margaret, the one I told you about. We were riding Valentine until your stupid car scared him. He bucked us off.”

Charlie shook his head at Lola, trying not to smile. Lola’s glance in return promised retribution.

The pony stood some feet away, reins dragging in the dirt. He stamped a hoof. “Come back here, Valentine,” Juliana called. The pony gazed at a distant butte.

“Get him, Bub,” Margaret said. Bub, who knew about horses’ hind legs from long experience with Spot, nipped at Valentine’s fetlock and then danced away before a sharp hoof could land. Valentine pinned his ears back. A second nip drew another ineffectual kick. When Bub darted in for a third, the pony turned and trudged toward them, ears still signaling extreme discontent.

“I’d keep that dog if I were you,” the young man said. A thread of scar tissue along his cheekbone lifted with his slow smile. “I’m Thomas Benally. Owner of the stupid car.” He shifted a bookbag from one shoulder to the other.

“Which Lola here thought was a stupid bomb.” Edgar couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself.

“You can’t blame me,” Lola said. “Given what happened here just a few days ago.”

Naomi stepped between them. “Let’s all go back into the house. It’s cooler there. Girls, put Valentine away and feed him.” She didn’t invite Thomas to dinner. It was, in the Indian way, assumed.

Lola reached for Valentine’s reins, smacking the pony’s nose when he tried to take a bite out of her arm, and led him step by reluctant step to Juliana. The vacation had already begun to feel too long.

Thomas was a sort of ward, Naomi explained to Lola, putting it in white terms first, then narrating the clan kinships that Lola had never been able to sort out among the Blackfeet, let alone an unfamiliar tribe like the Navajo. Bottom line, he was a relative, even if not in the strict blood relationship understood in the white world.

What it came down to, in the end, was that Thomas had needed a place to live for some years and Naomi and Edgar provided. It was a practice—without the complicating and clueless machinations of government supervision—that Lola knew to be so commonplace among Indian families as to go unremarked. Now, Naomi said, he spent most of his time at the tribal college in Tsaile, about an hour and a half away, but still stayed with them during holidays and summer breaks. “He’s pre-law. Not officially, of course. But that’s the goal.” Striving for casual, failing to keep the pride from creeping in. Diné College, like all thirty-four tribal colleges around the country, was a two-year program. “He’ll go to the University of Arizona from here, and then their law school, or better yet, one of the Ivies. After that he’ll come back and work for the tribe.”

He will go, Lola noted. He will come back and work for the tribe. She hoped Thomas was on board with the program.

As Naomi spoke, she pulled things from the refrigerator, assembling the meal with an efficiency Lola envied. She peeled plastic wrap from a bowl of pasta salad heavy on vegetables and light on dressing. Lola ran her hands, useless, unoccupied, over the counter’s polished moss-green surface. Granite? She realized that she wouldn’t know.

“Refill on that?” Naomi lifted her chin towards Lola’s lemonade glass.

“Sure.”

Naomi refilled her own glass as well. She glanced over her shoulder and took from the cupboard a large bottle of clear liquid, hand-labeled as almond flavoring.

“I didn’t know that came so big,” said Lola. She was pretty sure that somewhere in her own cupboards, among all the other unused things, she had some almond flavoring, albeit about a quarter of the size of the bottle in Naomi’s hand. She wondered if she should be putting almond in more things—especially given that she’d never put it in anything at all.

“It doesn’t.” Naomi flashed a conspiratorial grin and waved the open bottle under Lola’s nose—whatever was in it wasn’t almond—and then gestured toward the window, where the sky glowed orange and gold, a final burst of glory before the sun slid behind the rampart of butte. “Sun’s over the yardarm, I’d say.” A slug of “almond” went into her lemonade. “Lola?”

Lola thought of the tension between the brothers, of the girls on the ground, of the bomber possibly lurking somewhere on the vast reservation. She could have kissed Naomi for her offer. She held out her glass.

“Between us,” said Naomi.

“Definitely.” Lola filed that away for future reference, too.

Naomi called to Edgar and handed him a pan of lamb kabobs marinating in olive oil and fragrant herbs. Lola held her breath as he brushed past her in the kitchen, even though she probably didn’t need to. She was pretty sure the “almond” was vodka, less incriminating than gin.

“You can grill these now,” Naomi said to him. “From our garden,” she told Lola. “The herbs, the vegetables, all of it. Edgar built raised beds and rigged up a drip irrigation system. And the lamb is from our own sheep. My family ran them on the mesa until—” Her face darkened.

“Until?” Lola prompted.

“Let’s wait until dinner. Or after, when the girls have gone to bed.”

Lola picked up the bowl of pasta salad and carried it across the kitchen. She bumped the door open with her hip and turned toward the shade house. The sun already was gone. Dusk shrouded the yard. Movement caught her eye, a blur of gray against the dun of desert. She froze and waited. Sure enough, a coyote trotted from behind a rock. It stopped and turned toward her. Then it stood on its hind legs, barely visible in the fast-deepening gloom. Lola gasped and stepped back. The salad bowl tilted in her hands. She checked to make sure none had spilled. When she looked up again, the coyote was gone.

Silence, broken only by the hiss of flames in the fireplace, fell over the table after the girls departed. With full nightfall, the shade house grew cool and then cold, surprisingly fast. Chairs scraped across the flagstones as people dragged them from the table to the fire, which provided the only light. The wavering flames threw faces into high relief and deep shadow, exaggerating dominant features. Charlie looked fiercer, Edgar haughtier, Naomi lovelier. Lola didn’t want to think what she looked like. Haggard, she imagined. Thomas sat apart from the rest, alone in the shadows. The fountain’s murmur, subsumed during the evening’s conversation, asserted itself. Lola remarked upon it.

“Like the creek at home,” Edgar said to Charlie. Crick. “Remember how Mom always yelled at us? ‘You boys keep away from that crick.’”

Affection softened Charlie’s voice. “Told us the Under Water People would get us, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, told us the herons were Boy Eaters. That they’d spear us with those long beaks and roast us over a hot fire.”

“No!” Lola and Naomi chorused.

“Yes,” Edgar said. “And not just at the creek. There was water every­where at home.” Lola saw the motion that was Charlie’s nod. Finally, the brothers, whatever strain had kept them apart for so long, were in sync, united by memory. “Sloughs, the Two Medicine River, all the lakes in Glacier,” Edgar went on. The Blackfeet Reservation, bumped up against Glacier National Park, had even encompassed it at one point until whitemen decided they knew best how to manage the land—and make a pretty penny from tourism, too—where tribes had roamed from time immemorial.

“You miss it.” The way Charlie said it, it wasn’t a question.

“Be crazy not to. All that water, so clear and cold and good. And not just the water itself. The grass, tender and green in the spring before summer fries it. And the air. It’s softer back home. Doesn’t attack you the way it does here, sucking you dry. And the way the sage smells after rain.”

“The best,” said Charlie. He and Lola each liked to break off bits of sagebrush, crushing the leaves in their palms, holding their hands to their faces, breathing in. If water were nearby, Charlie would dip sage sprigs into it, intensifying the scent still more.

“Speaking of home,” Lola said. “I saw something tonight that reminded me of Montana.”

Charlie and Edgar looked into the darkness beyond the shade house, as though they could still see the distinctly un-Montana-like rock formations. “What’s that?”

“A coyote.”

Charlie shot her a warning look that Lola couldn’t interpret. Naomi and Edgar locked eyes for a moment. Thomas made a choking noise.

Lola soldiered on. “It was so strange. It stood up on its hind legs. I’ve never seen one do that before.”

Naomi bent in a spasm of coughing. Edgar pounded her back. “You were mistaken,” he said. Not allowing for any possibility that maybe she wasn’t.

Naomi rose and ran to the kitchen. Lola and Charlie followed in time to see her scoop something from a container on the counter. Naomi opened the door and looked at Lola. “Where was he?”

Lola pointed with her chin. Naomi stepped into the yard and sprinkled something on the ground. “Corn pollen,” she said as she brushed past Lola on her way back to the shade house.

Charlie put his hand to Lola’s arm to hold her a moment in the kitchen. “Coyote’s a trickster here, just like at home, but he can be bad luck, too. He likes to set the world on fire.”

Lola dropped her head in her hands. Yet another reminder of her whiteness. Gratitude washed through her when, with everyone back in the shade house, Naomi returned to the subject of Charlie and Edgar’s homeland.

“At least it’s still there, your creek.” The words sliced knifelike through the conversation, all the good feeling leaking away like blood from a wound not yet recognized as mortal. “Your creeks, your lakes.” She threw Edgar’s own words back at him. “All clear and cold and good. You can still drink it. And you can go back there. Spare me your nostalgia.”

Thomas rose from his chair and joined their circle, crouching beside her. The firelight flickered across his face. “It’s okay,” he said. “He loves his home just as much as we loved—still love—ours.”

“You see,” Edgar said, “Naomi and Thomas, they’re from the mesa.”

Lola didn’t see, and said as much.

So Naomi told her.