Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Kit tucked Reed’s blanket under her feet. “Well, it kind of started out that way.”

  Chloe bit the inside of her cheek. She knelt down at Kit’s chair and laid her head in the girl’s lap, pressing her cheek against Reed’s tiny sleeping face. She reached a finger up, hovering above the soft spot in Reed’s skull.

  “The fontanel,” Kit whispered. “I learned that in Science.”

  Chloe lifted her face. “Don’t chicken out on me, Kit.”

  Kit sighed. “Afterwards, all I could think was that someday some asshole was going to try to put his hands on Reed. It made me so goddamn angry! I’m glad Junior beat him up. No, I’m not. I mean, I sort of liked him until he stuck his thing in me. It hurt, and he wouldn’t stop when I asked him to. He goes, ‘It’s already in, I have to finish,’ like I was a video game he’d paid for. I wanted to like it. It seemed important. He sort of reminded me of Junior, and I love Junior, he’s so nice. And handsome. But it was pretty much like you said it would be, nasty, and I wish I could go back and do it over.”

  “Did he use protection, Kit? A rubber, spermicide?”

  Kit let out a nervous giggle, and Chloe could hear the sob building up behind it. “A green condom. Green! Never thought the first one I’d see in action would be that color.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Don’t say that, Chloe. None of it was any good. Here I’ve been waiting all my life for a boy to like me, and now I’ll have to become a lesbian.”

  “I think there are a few more alternatives open to you.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Even if that happened, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. Especially if you wore the same size shoes.”

  Kit smiled. “Right.”

  Chloe stroked Kit’s hair, pulling damp strands away from her flushed cheeks. Rich’s daughter wore her emotions like gaudy makeup. In the hospital, toting her bag of hamburgers and the teddy bear, Kit had seemed wide open and innocent. The last two weeks the only place she looked was inward.

  “Chloe?”

  “What?”

  “Did you and Junior—you know—while you were in that motel?”

  “Of course not. I just had surgery. And I’m with Hank.”

  “But you’re not married. You said you couldn’t make a commitment.”

  “People don’t have to be married to keep promises. We slept on separate beds and waited out the snow. That’s all.”

  Kit sighed. “I’m glad. Because if something happened to you and Hank, I’d just give up on the world, I swear I would.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Kit wrinkled her nose. “Whoa, all of a sudden Reed smells really funky. I think she needs her diapers changed.”

  Chloe patted Kit’s shoulders. “Go take a long bath. I’ll deal with Miss Stinky. Use up all my bubble bath. Promise me you’ll cry. Then the three of us will go into town and buy something really good for dessert. You can even drive my dented truck.”

  Kit looked up at her in awe, the way she used to when Chloe had explained to her various secrets to riding horses. No way was Chloe going to jeopardize that by telling the truth.

  At two A.M. she got up to feed Reed, surprised when the baby went back to sleep. Sitting alone in the rocker, Chloe was restless, fitful, the lies ricocheting around in her skull. Could she keep them all straight? Dinner had been fraught with jagged silences. Hank talked about his day; Chloe nodded in the appropriate places. They made hot fudge sundaes, but nobody finished eating them. Kit still avoided direct eye contact. Now she was asleep on the floor, but sooner or later, Chloe knew Kit would have her own two A.M. accounting to face down, and she couldn’t help her with that. She wondered where Junior was. Asleep? Or deep in conversation at the Museum Club bar with some woman who was deciding whether or not she’d take him home. The best thing to do was take Kit to Dr. Carrywater tomorrow, get her checked over and outfitted with birth control. That wasn’t overstepping boundaries, it was thinking smart. All those years ago, she wished there’d been someone to do it for her.

  Hospitals were bound by law to report such crimes, but laws hadn’t convinced Chloe it was necessary to press charges. Her foster parents had warned her about older men. Plus, she had beer on her breath, had gone with the cowboy willingly. The fair job ended, and she went back to working for Fats. The Mexican boys who loved to tease her and steal kisses quickly learned to take no for an answer. La Rubia is in a bad mood, they whispered behind her back, loud enough for Fats to hear. Under the tiny stitches in her breast, the tooth imprints turned black, then began to ooze yellow with infection. She returned to the doctor. Chloe remembered standing in the privacy of an empty stall late one afternoon, her shirt unbuttoned, bra lying on a nearby bale of hay. The doctor said to finish all the antibiotics and change the dressing three times a day. Fats walked in, carrying three sacks of feed, which he dropped when he saw her. He groaned, a low, sorrowful, male noise she never wanted to hear again in her life. He high-stepped through the spilled sweet feed, saying, “Morgan, who’s responsible for this? Better tell me now, otherwise I’m going to rip anyone who comes within five feet of you to shreds with my bullwhip.”

  She hadn’t, but Fats didn’t let her alone. He heaped on chores, forced her to exercise twice as many horses, bought her lunches she didn’t want, and insisted she eat when simply the idea of anything entering her body made her throat close. He’d said, “You may hate me now, but together we’ll make you forget about what happened.”

  Men always wanted to make things better, even when all they could possibly accomplish in doing so was make it worse. The really good ones had a complex that way. The blue-dark of the night was broken by Arizona’s winter stars, and in a few hours the sky would begin to lighten at the edges. Hank would get up, shower in the dark so as not to wake anybody, eat his breakfast cereal alone, drive off to work. His life moved forward in a linear progression. Chloe was amazed that even sixteen years physically removed, the past kept tapping her on the shoulder. Fats had meant well. While rape seemed like the worst thing that could happen to a girl, it wasn’t. A year later she’d turned up pregnant with Fats’s baby, purely by accident. The sleep anesthetic cost more than she had in her savings. The doctor’s job was to switch on the machine. It made a constant, whirring noise until the fetus was expelled, when it thumped distinctly, just that one time. He checked the contents of the canister, patted her knee, went on to his next patient. A half hour later, the nurse let her sit up and get dressed, made her drink a Dixie cup of pineapple juice. Dear God, she prayed, let that green condom have done its job. Do not let Kit be pregnant.

  She must have nodded off in the rocker, because one minute she was feeling regretful about the abortion, and the next Hank was there, kissing her neck, placing Reed in her arms. “What a picture you two make,” he whispered, quietly so he wouldn’t wake Kit.

  Chloe could feel Reed rooting around for her nipple. Hank stood there a moment, his briefcase in hand. “I love you,” he said, as if he’d been up all night rehearsing for a part he knew he wasn’t going to get. Then he shut the door quietly behind him.

  17

  “Because I think there’s a little more to being a father than taking the boy to dinner on Saturday nights, Corrine.” Junior presented his case, taking care to mention that Dog deserved both their best efforts, but Corrine wasn’t hearing it.

  “He calls you on the phone every night.”

  “Sure, and I get to say ‘Sweet dreams,’ but that isn’t the same as telling him a bedtime story. There’s no hug at the end, only a dial tone. I can’t speak for Walter, but that’s not enough for me.”

  Corrine sipped her Coke, attending to the stacks of paperwork covering her desk. Junior hovered in the doorway to her small office, waiting. Would the winds shift his way? He’d been in town over a month now—proof he took his son seriously. Things around the Trading Post were tense. Over the next few days, magazine people would shoot the yearly advertising layouts. Unhappil
y for Corrine, who liked to run it all, this coincided with a Trading Post trunk show of pawn bracelets. Tourists were due to descend. The motel was already full up with reservations. When Shane Myers ran the Post that kind of schedule was regular day-to-day business, but Shane was a wild man. Corrine didn’t look equal to the task. Not to mention it was January, the dead of winter. The best people could do was bow their heads and trudge out the long trek toward spring. Yet Junior sensed there was something else going on: Corrine’s cheeks were puffy, and her coppery skin had the slightest yellow cast to it. Secret drinking, or just plain neglect? Junior watched her crumple her empty Coke can into the wastebasket, yank another off the six pack on her desk and pop the tab.

  “You got a touch of flu going there, Corrine? Maybe you need to take a couple of days off instead of jacking yourself up on sugar and caffeine.”

  “I take one afternoon off, this place falls apart. What I need is a vacation.”

  “Take one. The Post will survive.”

  She tapped her pen against the Coke can. “Too much going on right now. I’ll go just before spring, before things get really busy.”

  Junior knew she meant that about as much as he intended to pick up his father’s ashes today. Corrine might send Dog on a trip. She might even tell Oscar to bag the repair work for a few days and go elk hunting, but she hadn’t been kidding when she’d told him she was married to the job. He understood. Once he’d felt that same way about the silver.

  She motioned Junior to step aside so she could sign a UPS receipt. The waiting driver grabbed the clipboard and scurried away.

  “Come grab some late lunch with me, Corrine. We can’t settle anything with all these interruptions. We need to finish this conversation concentrating on what’s best for Walter.”

  In the Trading Post restaurant she ordered a bowl of mutton stew, then jumped up out of her chair to holler forgotten instructions to one of her clerks. While the cook assembled the meal, Junior stared out the plate-glass windows at the rocky outcroppings behind the restaurant. Drab by comparison to what lay a few miles to the west, eventually the stones gathered enough strength of conviction to fall off into the colorful maw of the Grand Canyon. Long ago, before his mother got sad about everything and stayed indoors all the time, she had taken him hiking, entering the canyon via a secret trail, which only the Havasupi claimed to know about. First People lived here over four thousand years ago, she’d told him, and his child’s mind tried hard to wrap itself around so large a number. To what could he compare it? Stars in the night sky? Grains of sand at the edge of Lake Powell? Hand in hand, they walked among the travertine pools, looking for evidence of his ancestors. His mother was a white woman, but she knew about the split-twig figures the people had left behind, examples of which he’d only seen in museums. She knew stories deep in her heart, and when she told them, his own heart listened. That was supposed to be Jimmy Whitebear’s task, but Jimmy only knew one story and it came in a bottle. Junior’s mother revered this canyon as much as she did the Navajo way of life. She prodded her boy to seek out arrowheads, which somehow she stumbled across by the score while her son had trouble spotting a single one. He understood now that what she intended did not concern the locating of arrowheads; this was her way of instructing him to develop an affinity with the natural world, a world in which solace existed. If as a child he learned to behold the natural beauty of the landscape, he might not be lured into town away from his tribe. He might believe the reservation was home, not a ghetto. Paradise, she had called it. But paradise hadn’t been strong enough to keep her tethered to the land of the living. She’d hung from that tree like a broken bird. He wasn’t tall enough to cut her down. He would never be that tall. The waitress brought his tea over, and he smiled, thanked her, and meant it.

  Junior blew over the surface of the hot liquid. Outside the snow was thin, blown away by the incessant wind. Hardly more than a glittering dust now coated the rocks. He thought of Chloe’s mouth under his a few days ago, when he’d kissed her in the parking lot and lightly touched his fingers to his lips. We have traveled miles beyond smitten, he said to himself. We are standing at the edge of the canyon, and all that plenty is within our reach. But it’s a long ways down. We got no parachutes to help us make sure we land in one piece.

  “So when is the memorial service for Jimmy?” Corrine asked when she returned to the table. “Or you planning to hand him over to the Catholic church?”

  “Let them do the dirty work? I don’t think so.” Junior stirred his tea though he’d added nothing to it. “Jimmy’s pretty comfortable up there on the undertaker’s shelf. The other night I had this dream about him. He asked me to leave him there until spring. ‘Wait until the first good solid sunny day,’ he said. ‘Then crack open a bottle of green death, dump me in. I’ll toast my own passage.’”

  “He’s haunting you,” Corrine said. “Chindee.”

  “In the spring I’ll haul his ashes off to Canyon del Muerto. He always enjoyed going to Chinlé. He just didn’t much care for doing any work once he got there.”

  “I’m so tired I can relate.” Corrine’s stew arrived. She pushed it around the bowl with her fork creating a little well in the center, then she laid the fork down on her napkin. “Dog says you promised him a camping trip. I expect you to clear things like that with me before you go getting him all worked up.”

  “If I give you a hundred dollars, will you try to call him Walter?”

  Corrine held out her hand for the money.

  Junior emptied his wallet.

  “This is only sixty-five dollars.”

  “I’m good for the rest of it. I told him we can’t go camping until spring or summer. Thought maybe by then you might not hate the idea so much.”

  “So you really are planning to stick around that long.”

  Junior picked up Corrine’s fork and speared a tasty chunk of mutton on the tines. He dipped it in the gravy and held the bite out to her. Sauce pooled downward, forming a tear that threatened to drip. Corrine made a face, but after awhile took it in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “It’s kind of hard to be a father long distance.”

  “Staying at that motel without room service must be getting pretty old.”

  “It’s not so bad. I’m getting me a great soap collection. Every day, rain or shine, they leave me a new bar. Camay brand. Easy on the skin. Might never have to buy soap again.”

  Corrine signaled the waitress for a refill on her Coke. “We’re running low on your stock. I heard Aaron Scholder is looking for a roommate. Unless you plan on setting up a studio in your motel room.”

  Junior paused a minute. “You’re going to wreck your kidneys drinking that brown sugar water, Corrine. How about a cup of chamomile tea? It’s great for settling the nerves. Once your nerves settle down, you can develop an appetite for something more nourishing than potato chips.”

  “Coke and chips have served me just fine all these years. I don’t need a lecture from somebody who lived off room service and takes all his meals in restaurants.” She unfolded her napkin, twisted it into a cone shape and tucked it next to her bowl. “You and I both know why you’re sticking around. It has very little to do with Dog—sorry, Walter. Don’t try to hide it, Junior.”

  “Never said I was.”

  “We get one halfway decent white schoolteacher, and you make it your personal goal to drive him down the highway? He leaves, you’ll break the boy’s heart.”

  “I like the man,” he said. “I’m here for Walter, so why on earth would I go after hurting his teacher?”

  Corrine shook her head. “I don’t know Chloe that well, but Oscar seems to think she’s all right. Intuition tells me her heart’s the kind that once broken, don’t mend.”

  In the fading winter light, Corrine looked as old as her auntie, who had slowly succumbed to diabetes, helping things along with alcohol. Junior was about to bring up the subject of genetic links, the importance of regular exercise, having her insulin levels tested, and to
once again put in his two cents’ regarding diet, but Corrine had cared for the woman all her growing-up years, she didn’t need to hear that sad refrain spill out of the mouth of a man whose father drank his dinner. “Walter can probably get along without a dad, but not a mom. I wish you’d start taking care of yourself, Corrine.”

  She forced a smile. “You pick him up from school, I can make it home an hour earlier.”

  He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “You’re the mother of my child. All you had to do was ask.”

  Junior stopped at the pawn case on his way out. The clerk had all the jewelry out, and was in the process of separating and cataloging the bracelets. She’d polished each item and now spritzed the glass with Windex. When Junior was a kid, examining the pieces in this case felt akin to studying the masters in a museum. These guys knew how to keep the designs simple, showcase the stones. Nowadays, the craft seemed dependent on the silver’s ability to fancydance, shake a tail feather, detract from the poor quality stone available.

  “That ring over there. What’s the Indian-to-Indian price for it?”

  The clerk scurried off with the ring in hand to get Oscar to figure it. Corrine was deep into negotiations with the magazine people regarding their layouts. The jewelry, the jewelry. So much silver in this one room he could hear the echoes of tools grinding, polishing, smell the lost wax burning away from one-of-a-kind molds. He felt the ghost of sweat gathering between his shoulder blades on those nights when he was one with the silver and didn’t want to let go of how good working felt. A real father set up a proper workshop and invited his son in, spent long afternoons and early mornings on weekends revealing the secrets of his trade. A real artist answered Sami Gee’s telephone messages, which, when turned face down in a stack, made their own kind of recycled notepad. All he needed to do was cruise some Scottsdale galleries, strike the profile and he’d be thick with orders. Take the first step. Execute the old style. People would buy. The stock was low. But whenever he let his mind approach the subject, it was as if he encountered a castle wall. There didn’t seem to be any drawbridge to lift, or chink in the mortar wherein he might carve entrance. If the desire had dried up entirely, from now on, that was how it would be, this burned-out dead spot in his heart, this cultivated black hole. He considered the energy he was expending on wanting Chloe and wondered, briefly, if it might consist of redirected jewelry passion. It made him ashamed to admit it, but just the idea of having her seemed compelling enough to risk jettisoning his craft. What was art besides a pose one struck? He was tired of inlaid spiny oyster shell, the way it flaked when he tried to coax it into interesting shapes. Decent turquoise in workable sizes was almost impossible to locate, and nobody liked the imported stuff, which seemed crazy, since it all came from the same earth. But that was what had caught his eye about the ring. It was a damn good stone.