Montana Read Free Page B

were hurrying toward the airport, but the message had been left twenty-four hours earlier. Lola punched and repunched Mary Alice’s number into the phone, hanging up each time the voicemail began its automated spiel. It was already late afternoon and Lola was nearly a day into her so-called vacation. She tossed the phone high, palmed it on the return, and headed toward the rental-car counter.
    “No.” Lola told the young woman there what she already knew. “I don’t have a reservation.” The woman reached for a pair of keys, and shoved a form and a map at her. Lola pulled out her phone to call Mary Alice one last time.
    “Is that a flip phone?” The clerk’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know they made them any more. Can I see it?”
    “No.” She waited until she was outside the airport before leaving a message for Mary Alice, her voice stiff with annoyance. She glanced at the map and calculated the mileage, irritation flaring anew. There was a closer airport, but Mary Alice had insisted upon meeting her in Helena, saying she needed to do some research there. “I’ll see you in about three hours,” she told Mary Alice’s voicemail.
    She bit back an urge to add a sarcastic “love you,” and hung up.

    T HE CITY was in the rental car’s rearview mirror and then it wasn’t, vanishing without the softening aspect of suburbs. Ahead, bare foothills bunched like fists, knuckled ridges pressing back against the weight of sky. The road arced around the hills in lazy swooping curves, then without warning hair-pinned through cliffs that leaned in above her, slicing the sky to manageable size. Lola stole glances at the scoured rock-faces as the car maneuvered through the narrows, and imagined engineers months into their desolate assignment, laying lines of dynamite, sending up a cheer as an opening blasted through to the valley beyond.
    Signs indicated the distance in miles and kilometers to the Canadian border, closer than she’d thought. The occasional billboard rose up, guideposts to this new place. Election season was in full swing. Candidates, some big-hatted and horsed, grinned down at Lola. Others walked through thigh-high golden wheat, stood next to oil rigs, leaned on split-rail fences. One man dangled leather work gloves so yellow and bright and obviously unused as to make Lola smile at the universality of campaign fakery. One candidate’s sign had no photo at all, only a puzzling slogan and a name: “Run with the Wolf. Johnny’s Chasing Jobs.”
    Meth apparently was a problem, warnings against it almost outnumbering the candidates’ come-ons. One billboard showed a young woman slumped on the floor, cavernous eyes pleading with the camera. Large men, T-shirted and tattooed, leered over her. “Meth—You’ll always have a date,” was the message. Someone had taken pink spray paint to her face: “Your mom.” Lola snorted her appreciation. Her lifeline grasp on the wheel eased. She’d spent the past few days fighting the culture shock of First World re-immersion, bumping up against the hard shiny edges of hygiene and haste; of wide ribbons of highway traveled by smoothly feinting cars unimpeded by pedestrians, donkey carts, or drifting herds of fat-bottomed sheep. She hadn’t been allowed to drive herself anywhere for years. Relegated to the back seat, she endlessly negotiated truces between drivers who fought with translators, who in turn sulked and refused to tell her what the hopped-up kids with Kalashnikovs at the checkpoints were saying.
    She slouched, steering with two fingers, old attitudes rising from muscle memory. She checked the map again. Mary Alice lived outside a town named Magpie, not far south of the Canadian border. Lola steered the car off the interstate, heading north on a tapering road that picked its way through a rock-strewn valley floor. To the west, a line of mountains higher than any she’d yet seen wedged darkly upward. A pickup appeared in the rearview mirror. Out of habit