Dakota by Gwen Florio Page B

noise. “The patch is like the army. If they’d wanted someone in your family to go and die, they’d have killed her themselves.”
    The men were on their feet now, looking toward the door.
    “Wait. Please. You got fired because you took time off for Judith’s funeral?”
    “That’s about the size of it,” Roy said. “Guess the van’s gonna get repo’ed. Doesn’t matter, really. No use for it now, anyway.”
    A burly man ran his right hand over his face. It was missing two fingers, the scar still red and raw, coarse black stitches poking up from the skin. “Easy for you to say. I took out a loan on an addition to the house so my daughter and her husband and our grandbaby could come home and live with us instead of being jammed into that apartment and working shit jobs down in Great Falls. There goes my credit. Think they’ll repo the sheetrock?”
    Grim, knowing smiles passed around the room. Lola thought of the new trucks, the cow-calf pairs meant to fatten on summer grazing, the seed money for a spouse’s coffee cart—the reservation’s first. The new clothes for kids instead of hand-me-downs, the spill of presents beneath Christmas trees, the occasional dinner out at the local café, ice cream for the whole family. The debts paid off, the savings accounts started. The clutch at the bottom rung of the ladder, the daring gaze upward. She sat down on one of the cots with a thump and pulled out her notebook.
    “Whose decision was this? What did they tell you? And when?”
    Roy motioned for her to stand. “That cot’s coming with us,” he said. “No time to talk now. Call us when you get back to Magpie. Maybe people will feel like talking. Maybe not.”
    The men filed past her, stooping to retrieve the containers of food, and stashed the casseroles and the cots and their duffels and small sad bundles into the van and climbed in after them. Roy started the engine and lifted a hand to Lola as she stood on the sagging steps and watched the story that had brought her to Burnt Creek vanish in a swirl of exhaust and snow.

    L OLA LINGERED in the yard, uttering every curse word she could think of. She started with the good, solid Anglo-Saxon ones, all sex and excrement, then moved on to profanity, a vocabulary that had increased considerably during her time in Afghanistan, where all manner of deities were cursed, a rising flow of invective halted only by the slam of a door on the other side of the house and the appearance of a red-faced bowling ball of a woman waving a broom at Lola as if to sweep her off the very face of the planet.
    “Shame! Shame! Decent people live here. Begone!”
    “Begone?” Lola said. “Begone? Who talks like that?” She headed for the truck, where Bub’s nose had smeared the passenger-side window nearly opaque, calling back to the woman. “Forsooth. As it happens, I was just taking my leave.” But she spun on her heel at the woman’s next words.
    “I finally get rid of those filthy Indians and now this.” The woman stomped back toward her side of the house, rolling sailorlike as she walked, the broom trailing behind her in the snow.
    “What did you say?” Lola ran to confront her, blocking her way. “What about the Indians?”
    The woman dropped the broom and folded her arms across her chest. She’d left the house without a coat and her face purpled dangerously, whether from the cold or indignation Lola couldn’t tell. “Crammed into that place on top of each other. Living like animals. If they hadn’t gotten themselves fired, I’d have had to evict them.”
    “No, you wouldn’t have.” Lola’s voice rose. “You’d have kept right on taking their rent money every month, overcharging them for living in that hole just like you’re going to do the next people. Shame? The shame’s on you.” She heard herself shouting, her face inches from the woman’s, blasting all the morning’s frustration at an ignorant woman who probably for the first time in her life was on