Dakota by Gwen Florio Page A

she never wanted to repeat.
    “Come on, Bub. Looks like we’d better go track down Judith’s uncles.” Could she help it if any of them might have run into Judith in Burnt Creek, or at least heard through the Indian Country grapevine about what Judith was up to in the patch? More to the point, the places she needed to go to ask about Judith—the strip bars like The Train and its ilk—probably wouldn’t be open until later in the day.
    Bub shoved his face against hers, something he did whenever she became agitated. She ruffled his fur. “Everything’s going to work out just fine.” But just to be sure, she held her finger over the phone’s on/off button until its screen went black.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    R oy deRoche and assorted relatives and friends—Lola had long ago given up trying to track relationships—had somehow managed to snag one of Burnt Creek’s rare apartments, where the sixteen men split the twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month rent on two shoebox bedrooms, a closet of a bathroom, and a microwave and minifridge. They lined up four cots in each of the bedrooms and duct-taped blankets over the windows so that the eight men coming off the night shift could tumble onto still-warm, just-abandoned cots and sleep through the day’s weak light. The blankets served as extra insulation against the icy winds that sliced through the gaps between window frame and walls, but also served to hold in the mingled odors of sweat and farts and feet that had spent twelve hours and more in heavy work boots.
    The smell greeted Lola as the door swung inward. She clutched an armful of plastic containers closer to her chest. She’d stopped by Josephine’s house the day before she’d left for Burnt Creek, collecting frozen offerings of stew and casseroles so that the men would have a taste of home, a gesture calculated to win the good will of both the women and their men—altruism that she hoped would make them more likely to talk with her, and with Jan, too, about matters normally too sensitive to discuss with outsiders. “I sent Roy off with plenty of food,” Josephine had assured Lola, as though she might assume otherwise. “But those guys work so long and so hard, they’ve probably inhaled every last bit of it by now.”
    Lola had hurried to be at the apartment early, thinking to catch the night shift crew before they hit the sack, but instead the apartment was impossibly crowded. Some men sat two to a cot, testing the limits of the threadbare canvas. Others rooted around beneath the cots, stuffing belongings into duffel bags. Lola squinted into the dimness, searching for Roy. He emerged from the second bedroom, carrying a bundle of what appeared to be clothing wrapped in a sheet.
    “Lola,” he said. “I forgot you were coming.”
    A couple of the men looked her way, but most of the others continued what they were doing, even if that involved nothing more than staring into space. Roy reached for one of the blankets over the windows and ripped it away. The light did the room and its occupants no favors.
    “Damn, Roy,” one man said. “Why you got to do that?”
    “You can sleep in the van,” Roy said to him. “Come on. We’ve got to clear out. They’ve got some renters coming in tomorrow.”
    “What’s going on?” said Lola.
    “What’s it look like?” Roy shrugged into an oil-stained Carhartt coat and slung the bundle over his shoulder. “We’re out.”
    “Out?” Lola could think of only one meaning—but one so unimaginable that she asked anyway, hoping for a different answer.
    “Fired,” Roy said.
    “Shitcanned,” another man chimed in.
    “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
    “There’s sixteen more where you came from, and another hunnerd sixteen waiting to take their places.”
    Lola flung up her hands to stop the barrage of euphemisms. The plastic containers tumbled like frozen bricks onto a vacant cot. “But why?”
    One of the men laughed, a short barking