Montana by Gwen Florio Page B

the day after Mary Alice’s shooting. “Everyone in town knows how she died.”
    Lola took the paper from him and skimmed through the story. “Here,” she said. She ran her finger under the sentence. “ ‘Carr was shot in the head,’ said Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau.”
    “The head,” she told Wilson. “It said the head. Not the face.” And she drilled her forefinger into her cheek, mimicking Frank’s motions after the funeral. “The only people who knew where Mary Alice was shot were the ones who saw her. That’s me, Verle, Charlie, and the coroner. And then, the person who shot her.”
    She knew her irritation showed. Didn’t care. The day was slipping away with nothing to show for it. Lola wanted to go back to her motel and check out the name of the group that had paid for the campaign flier she’d picked up at Johnny Running Wolf’s meet-and-greet. But first, she needed to ask Wilson about Johnny. Not when he was pissed, though. Which he appeared to be, in about equal measure to her own frustration.
    “So Joshua’s your nephew,” she said, hoping to lessen the tension. “That’s such a Biblical name.”
    Wilson went to work on his glasses again. Lola heard the building’s outer door open and close. The woman from the front desk crossed before the window. The wind shook out her hair in a dark shining sheet and laid it back down over her shoulders. She walked a few steps away from the building and bent the upper part of her body. She straightened, her lips pinched around a cigarette.
    “Joshua’s mother was one of those Jesus Indians got dragged off to boarding school,” Wilson said. “Some of those people listened to the missionaries. Some not. She was one who did. She named her daughter Judith because she liked the story about how Judith saved her people by deceiving Holofernes and cutting off his head. Same thing with Joshua—the way he blew his trumpet, the walls coming down. Said those oldtime Indians could have used a Joshua when they attacked the whiteman forts. I don’t think that’s quite what the missionaries had in mind when they taught her about Joshua and Judith.”
    Lola wrested her attention from the window. She imagined Joshua’s mother, a young girl torn from her family, force-fed Bible stories along with strange unpalatable foods and customs. Taking the stories and turning them to fit her own world. “I like that,” she said. “Is their mother still alive?”
    Wilson shook his head. “No. She died. Long time ago. Their gran’mother raised them. But at least we got to keep them. Not like Johnny.”
    He’d circled back to Johnny without any urging from her. The conference room door swung open and the woman from the front desk stuck her head in, delivering warring scents of fresh air and cigarette smoke. Lola directed murderous thoughts her way. “I’ve got to go to class,” the woman told Wilson. “I’ve ordered a pizza for the council meeting later. If the phone rings, can you grab it?”
    Lola looked at the telephone at the other end of the table and wondered if she could disable it by the sheer intensity of her stare. She needed Wilson to keep talking. The woman left without closing the door. “You were telling me about Johnny. About how you didn’t get to keep him,” Lola said. She added a nugget from the overheard conversation between Johnny and Riley. “I know they took him away when he was a little boy. That must have been hard.” And just like that, with Lola nodding as though she’d heard it all before, he told her.
    How Johnny’s mother ran off with a whiteman from Chicago, taking her son with her, cutting off all connection with her people so that nobody heard from them again, not even when her mother died. Wilson’s voice eased into singsong recitation. “That old lady went to church twice every day, praying for their return, mourned in the old way, too, just for good measure, singing songs all day and night, but couldn’t do it right because no