Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “Not to mention redheaded,” Chloe answered back. “That kind of stubborn she’ll never grow out of.”

  They sat on their respective beds and watched the television for a while. Junior could tell Chloe wasn’t really interested in CNN. He switched it off with the remote and turned the small radio/alarm clock on the table separating their beds to the college jazz station. He checked on his socks and turned them over so they would dry on the other side. Chloe lay down on the bed, staring at her hiking boots.

  “Want those off?”

  “I need help with the laces.”

  He sat on the edge of her bed, untied the shoes, and pulled her feet free. Her wool socks were a tweedy blue, typical winter wool, but she hadn’t learned to layer a pair of cotton ones underneath, so her toes were icy. He rubbed her feet through the heavy weave. “Get under the covers.”

  “I will in a minute. Need to do something first.”

  “Can I help?”

  She laughed dryly. “Sure, if you’ve expressed milk from aching breasts, you’re the man.”

  “I’ve milked cows.”

  “Well, that’s about what it boils down to, but I think I can manage. If you’ll excuse me.”

  He got up and stood between the beds as she passed. She walked into the bathroom and switched on the light, closing the door behind her. It wasn’t a very well-constructed door. The molding had warped from the steamy heat of long showers travelers took when it wasn’t their utility bill. The door touched the frame and bounced back open a few inches, a gap through which Junior could see Chloe’s elbow lift as she raised her arms to unbutton her blouse. Her blond hair spilled forward as she leaned over the sink. She sighed, a painful exhalation to which Junior listened hard, the resonance of such pure, physical relief causing him to shudder. His thoughts explored side routes with determination: calving time on the ranches he’d worked; the bawling of cows that needed to be milked; his fingers closing around the warm, rubbery teats of a swollen udder; Chloe’s fingers against her own nipples. The fact that he was standing only a few strides away, listening, did not help any. He looked down at the legs of his jeans, the left side riding slightly tighter now, and was ashamed of himself. He heard water run in the sink. Eventually she came back to her bed, buttoned up, grim faced.

  “Didn’t take you very long.”

  “Oh, I gave up,” she said. “Nobody said there would be so much of it. Or that getting it out would be such a bitch. I’ll try again later.” She grimaced. “God, listen to me. Count yourself lucky that I can’t bore you with the story of my labor. It’s all just so damned female. Men hear women talk about it, they turn white or flee. Sight of blood used to send me running. But after delivering Reed—well, you were there.”

  “It doesn’t send me running. I cherished every minute of it. In fact, I’ve been thinking how Reed sort of connects us for life.”

  Chloe laid her head down on the doubled-up hotel pillow. “You and Reed, maybe.”

  “It connects you and me, too.”

  “That kind of talk scares me, Junior.”

  “You’ve been scared since the day we met.”

  “Entirely possible.”

  “Why is that?”

  Chloe tipped her head back to look at the painting hanging above her bed. In varying shades of pastel, a big-eyed Indian girl and her pet lamb looked up at a rainbow arcing across the sky. “Did you flood your room on purpose?”

  “No. But I did want to be alone with you.”

  She sighed. “Come on, Whitebear. I live with someone. I just had a goddamn baby. My insides are all torn up. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t sleep with you.”

  “That’s what white guys are like, isn’t it? Every time you’re alone with a woman it has to mean sex. No wonder they all die so damn early.”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t classify it as a white thing, Junior. You boys all seem pretty equally infected with girl flu.”

  “Hey, now. I just want to get to know you, here, in private where we can talk. How dangerous can that be?”

  “Dangerous as ice.”

  He turned the radio down. “Yeah, it’s dangerous being an adult and having control over your emotions. Damn, you’re pretty.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ve never been pretty, and saying I am doesn’t impress me.”

  “How about attractive? Can you be attractive?”

  “No, goddammit. Now change the subject, or I will hitchhike home.”

  “I love how you cuss like a hand. You’ve got a worse temper than I did at sixteen, and I was a handful.”

  “But that’s okay because I’m pretty.”

  “Sally misses you. I come into the barn with a bucket of oats, she looks around behind me, disappointed you’re not there.”

  “She likes cube sugar. Don’t leave your horse alone for eight years and maybe she’ll remember you next time.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He folded his hands. “I been with a lot of women, Chloe.”

  “Well, give yourself a badge!”

  “I said that only to give you an example. Put all those women together on a list, and they don’t add up to anything memorable. You, on the other hand—”

  “Live with somebody.”

  “Who’s not even here.”

  She sat upright. “Hank’s mother has cancer, Junior. She’s probably dying while we’re sitting here, and you’re trying to figure out how to make a pass at me. Can we fault her son for wanting to be there when she goes? Or does that sound old-fashioned to a guy like you? Maybe you’d leave your mother to die alone, but Hank sure wouldn’t.”

  Junior rubbed his face before he answered. “I’m sorry to hear Hank’s mom is sick.”

  “Mighty big of you to admit while you’re sitting here about to deliver the come-fuck-me line.”

  “My mother killed herself when I was about Dog’s age. Your mother’s death is not something you really get over.”

  Chloe looked at him hard. “I’ll be damned. You’re not lying. She really killed herself?”

  “Your daughter came into the world through more blood than I thought was inside anybody.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Stop. You misunderstand what I’m trying to say. This past year I volunteered with the Project Angel Food people. It was just spending a couple hours a week with sick people, men mostly, artists I knew. Walking their dogs, changing the CDs on the stereo, reading to them.”

  “Sick people?”

  He nodded. “HIV hit the gay community where I lived awful hard. I thought maybe helping out would make me feel less guilty about being healthy. But those boys just—” He stopped and searched his mind for the proper word. “Dried up. I’m telling you, Chloe, no more to them at the end than husk. After a while I had a hard time putting together jewelry at all. Everything piled up on me. I felt like a coward, but I had to stop doing it. Delivering Reed, all I meant to say was, you have no idea what a relief it is to be a part of what happens at the other end of the spectrum. Welcoming somebody who’s just starting her life. Especially when Corrine decided to keep my son’s birth from me. There’s nothing logical about it, but I’m clinging to Reed’s birth like a lifesaver.”

  Chloe swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about your friends dying. That must have been horrible.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Just sad, the waste of it, being able to offer only temporary comfort when they were begging for a cure. With my mother, it was too late even for that. I found her strung up in this old cottonwood tree. Try as I might I couldn’t get the knot loose. Had to leave her there. I was short, like Dog is. Had to go find somebody taller, you know, to cut her down. I picked up her shoes, ran like hell to the nearest house, clean out of my head, holding onto those stupid high-heel shoes. I’ve been mad about that for most of my life, you know? Project Angel Food helped. Those men allowing me to help them, one less thing for them to worry about.” He inhaled dee
ply and began to unravel the suede binding on his left braid. “But your daughter is the first real healing medicine to happen to me in a long while.”

  “Me, too, Junior.”

  Junior was quiet. He heard the tremble in her voice. He wound the rawhide into a spiral on the table separating the beds, and sat there with one braid tight and the other hanging loose. “Does shit like this happen with every man you meet?”

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You, too, then? You feel it?”

  “Maybe I feel it. Which doesn’t mean I have to act on it.”

  “But you can sense how badly I want you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sitting here spilling my guts.”

  “Maybe that’s typical behavior for a world traveler.”

  “Let me tell you, it’s not. How about I just come on over to that bed and hold you?”

  “No. You’ll want to touch me and kiss me, and neither of those things’ll be enough. That’s not dangerous, it’s just plain stupid.”

  “So what are you saying—we sit here and hold it in?”

  She nodded. “It’s the responsible thing to do.”

  “Even when you admit you feel it.”

  “Hank is the first decent man who ever loved me. God knows why, but he does. I haven’t had that great a life until now. Bills, bad relationships, lost my apartment, for a while there I lived in my truck. Last year I hit this cop and got thrown in jail. You want to know who paid my bail, got me a lawyer, stuck it out with me? Hank. Here I can’t even manage birth control, and it doesn’t dawn on me the reason I’m not having periods has anything to do with a baby until it’s too late for an abortion. How many men do you know who’d not even miss a beat, just outright propose when a woman shows up with news like that?”

  “Me, for one.”

  “Hank.” She gave Junior the finger, and he lay down on his bed facing her. They stared into each other’s faces. Desire was so backed up inside him, Junior felt dizzy and congested. Chloe’s smile had taken the long adios. Maybe it wouldn’t ever come back. She stared into his eyes, then, after a long time, reached her hand out between the beds. Junior quickly slid his hand into hers, clasping her fingers. She pulled each digit loose, took hold of them one by one and studied them, touching the short, clipped nails, the dark, hardened calluses under his knuckles, his smooth fingertips. She examined his jewelry with care, and pushed her fingers under his watchband to where the skin of his wrist was thin, where the veins lay blue and full-to-bursting with his blood like individual rivers. As if the action was an afterthought, she kissed him there, just once, her eyes tearing up. He’d pushed her too far. Now he didn’t know what to say, and damn sure didn’t think he better do anything. She let go long enough to reach up and tuck her thumb under the first button of her blouse.

  “You want me? Fine, then, here I am.”

  “Chloe, stop it.”

  But she didn’t. Like a dog who’d eaten much too fast for his own good, Junior felt his gut twist into a figure eight, punishing him for his hunger. Chloe separated the two halves of the shirt and he could glimpse white bra, the left cup stained damp. She arched her back and undid the catch, pulled the bra away. Her nipples were as dark as the plum sauce in the corner of her mouth when they were in the Chinese restaurant. She cradled her breasts in her fingers, looking down at them, her hair obscuring her face. Junior knelt at the side of her bed.

  “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

  He gave her his hand. Gently, she showed him how she used her thumb and forefingers to press the milk down and out of herself. Like he had demonstrated with the chopsticks, she closed her hand around his, and he saw bluish fluid begin to spill, to collect in his palm. Wordlessly he brought his palm to his mouth and took a taste. At that moment her brown eyes opened to him. He could have made out an itinerary for the furthest corner of the planet, and in this moment and no other, he knew she would travel with him willingly.

  She shivered, pulling his face down to hers and murmured something into his ear so low he thought it must have been his own blood speaking, giving him instructions. He caught her lower lip in his teeth, then hungrily pressed his mouth to hers, his tongue catching on the chipped tooth, lingering there, then moving decisively beyond.

  Around two in the morning the message indicator light on the phone began to pulse orange. There it was, the beacon back to the world they’d effectively left behind. Junior reached a hand out and placed the complimentary note pad over the light. Chloe slept next to him, turned away, snuggled deep in the covers, her mouth as bruised as his own. He didn’t move in case she might wake up, look outside, and see that hours earlier, the snow had stopped.

  15

  I guess it would be selfish of me to ask you to stay any longer, wouldn’t it? Even one more day. You’re busy. You have a life over there….

  His mother’s power to instill guilt was peerless. Iris’s last words rang in his ears the whole flight home and would—he felt certain—echo in his head for months, possibly years to come. After sitting fourteen hours in the Phoenix airport, the weather broke enough they finally started letting the shuttles take off. He’d caught a ride with Chuey Alberto’s uncle at the Flagstaff airport, smiling inwardly at the idea of the weary traveler home from another battle, surprising Kit and Chloe. He hadn’t expected to walk into his grandmother’s cabin and find Junior Whitebear holding Reed in his arms, rocking the fussing infant as if she were his daughter, or that Chloe would be standing out in the snow screaming at one of the tribal policemen who’d finally appeared following her repeated calls about Kit being missing.

  “It’s your job to find her no matter how old she is, goddammit,” Chloe was saying, getting right up in the man’s face as if he didn’t take her seriously next she might go for his gun.

  The T-shirt he’d bought in the airport gift shop—featuring a silk-screened John Wayne on horseback—seemed superfluous when she explained that Kit had been missing since the previous evening. Chloe and Junior had driven to the hospital that morning after spending the night in Flagstaff. The news that everyone had been waiting for—Reed had gained the necessary weight to be released—allowed them to drive back to Cameron bearing precious cargo, only to discover that everyone believed Kit was with somebody else.

  “Something happens to her, I’ll skin and cook your balls myself,” Chloe said, her voice shaking with rage.

  From experience Hank knew that kind of anger hid massive, underlying terror. Only veterans of the Chloe wars were able to recognize it. “Jesus H. Christ, Hank, make this guy do something,” she insisted. All this before hello.

  He motioned to the policeman to wait a minute and led Chloe inside to the couch. “Lie down,” he said. “Shut your eyes.”

  Hank invited the man into the kitchen. He threw his carry-on bag in a corner, saw that there was coffee in the pot, poured the man a cup, and asked how his animals were doing this winter.

  The cop nodded at Hank. “Cattles’re fine, never to worry. It’s those damn horses about to break me.” He shook his head. “Hate lettin’ ’em go hungry, but the cost of grain, you know.”

  “Tell you what, Nelbert. We’ve got surplus grain. Let me make you a gift of a couple of sacks.”

  The cop smiled. “That’d be great.”

  “I’ll just load them in your car, then.”

  As they walked out back, Chloe opened her mouth to say something, and Junior patted her hand, silencing her.

  Methodically Hank slid the fifty-pound sacks into the trunk of the car. “You know, we could sure use some help on that missing girl.”

  Nelbert made a face. “Your wife say that girl near to fifteen. Plenty old enough to be goin’ home with a boy. Give her few days.”

  “Nelbert, I hear where you’re coming from. But this girl’s young for her age. She’s not a local. You know how that can be. Whatever you think we can do to help locate her, I’m open to hearing it.”

&n
bsp; The cop took a panoramic view of the property and then glanced back at Hank. “My grandmother knew your grandmother, Mr. Hank. Said she was pretty nice schoolteacher.”

  “Glad to hear she’s still remembered. I aim to carry on the tradition.”

  Nelbert thought awhile. “Let me gather some guys together, see what we find.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  He drove off, and Hank stood alone in the razor-edged wind, shivering. He heard the barn siding soughing as the metal torqued in the swiftly moving current. He gazed across the snow-dusted prairie and wondered how he was supposed to handle the presence of Junior Whitebear in his house. Snatch the baby from his arms, chew him out, and tell him to hit the road? Or was he supposed to thank him once again for being there when he was not? Junior came out of the house and stopped a few feet in front of him.

  “I’ll find her, Hank. You don’t hear from me, it only means I’m still looking.”

  Hank watched the Indian get into his fancy Jeep and drive off toward Tuba City. Maybe he would find Kit. He hoped he did. That was as far as he could allow his thoughts to travel at this moment.

  “It’s all my fault,” Chloe said, her voice hoarse with worry and crying. “The snow got so bad we had to spend the night in Flagstaff. I called, she got kind of nervous about the idea of being alone.” She bit her thumbnail. “Not that there was anything to worry about.”

  Hank understood all too well how Kit must have felt. There were times Chloe’s past actions preceded her and this sounded like one of them. “Maybe she felt abandoned.”

  Chloe’s face crumpled. “Hank, I told her we’d be home in a few hours; I checked with Oscar to make sure he knew what was happening. He and Corrine wouldn’t let her stay alone overnight. She was supposed to call them. I don’t know what went wrong.”

  “How long has your truck been missing?”

  Chloe struggled upright, the facecloth falling to her lap. Reed whimpered from the playpen across the room. “She took my truck?”

  Hank wondered just how preoccupied Chloe had to be to overlook the absence of her dearest possession. “Well, let’s say you were a teenager cut loose in a strange place, and there were keys hanging on the rack. Don’t you think it would at least cross your mind?”