The town of Chinlé did little to impress Chloe. It was industrial in appearance, with huge storage towers for grain or gas, maybe both. She rubbed her eyes, yawned, and decided it looked like a long-drawn-out truck stop, a place where somebody might waitress her whole life away with very little excitement beyond car wrecks and daily specials. But that didn’t mean anything. Cameron, Arizona, wore the same outfit, and look what had happened to her there. There were no signs advertising Junior’s beloved canyon, just a four-lane blacktop, roadside diners, and too many gray buildings. Maybe it would turn out to be a little ravine he felt sentimental over from childhood. She scanned the horizon but didn’t see mountains.
“You slept through everything worth sleeping through.”
“Good.” She’d make the best of it and go back home tomorrow, wait for Hank and Reed to return. Junior stopped at a light, put on his blinker, and they turned right. Suddenly there were groves of cottonwoods, late-afternoon sun hitting the leaves at an angle that caused them to dance, and a feeling rose up her chest that felt like dozens of trapped birds struggling to get out.
The Thunderbird Lodge was just ahead of them, funky, southwestern architecture, and a directional sign pointing to a campground, which was empty. There was a huge green four-wheel drive parked out front of the Trading Post and Lodge, with enough empty seats to take a tourist group on a trek into the canyon.
“All right,” she finally said. “I’ve been patient. Where is it? This famous canyon.”
“Not far. When we go into the Post, I’ll show you on a map.”
She stretched her arms and felt the chill in the air. It smelled like snow. A yellow stray dog came running up to her, and she fed him some beef jerky. Junior sighed.
“Lecture me,” she said, “and I’ll make you find a market and buy up all their dog chow.”
“I’m not saying a word.” He opened the door to the Trading Post, and walked to the window where they sold the various canyon tours. “I need me a tour into Canyon del Muerto,” he announced. “You ladies got one of those?”
The woman behind the counter put her hand to her mouth. “Lettie!” she called out. “Oh, my God, Lettie. Look who’s here. It’s Jimmy’s boy.” Two old women came around the counter and began to fuss over Junior.
Chloe stood watching, astonished that two crinkled old Navajo ladies found Junior Whitebear’s arrival reason enough to weep. She wondered if leafing through a brochure was enough, or if maybe she should go outside and wait in the car.
He put his arms around the old women and looked at Chloe. “These are my aunties,” he said. “Lettie, Dawn, meet Chloe.”
They giggled and smiled, and Lettie gave her a hug, too, but Dawn was shy and held on to Junior’s arm speaking softly in Navajo. Chloe looked to Junior for translation.
“The horseback tours aren’t fully operational yet,” he explained. “But we can take the Jeep trip in as far as Antelope House Overlook, then pick up horses. That sound all right by you?”
“Are they decent horses?”
“I’ll ask if they’ve had their vaccines.”
“Very funny.”
He laid down some money, and Dawn pushed it away. Junior walked around the other side of the counter, opened the cash register, and put the money inside before giving her a kiss on the forehead. He waved Chloe into the gift shop. “You want to take a look around? This place isn’t as big as Cameron, but it’s got its own charm.”
Tony Hillerman books abounded, their glossy paperback covers featuring all manner of Indian designs. Sweatshirts in every size were folded onto shelves, and everywhere she turned there was pottery, animal fetishes, sandpaintings, rugs, and so much silver it was almost blinding. Chloe wondered how it would feel to be able to say yes to all those things, just to open your arms to what you liked and start filling them up. How a life surrounded by beautiful objects made by real artists might change a person’s soul. The glass case nearest the register held an assortment of Junior Whitebear’s jewelry, more designs than Chloe had ever seen at the Cameron Post. A part of her wanted to ask to look at everything, but she was afraid his aunts would think her some disposable one-night stand, and who could tell, that might not prove to be far from the truth. Junior was deep in conversation, so Chloe wandered through the store. In the back of the first room, she stopped at the collection of burden baskets, which hung from the ceiling. Chloe stood on her tiptoes, examining them. Woven with varying sizes of reed, they were strung along the edges with rawhide. They featured long, dangling threads of leather with metal wrapped into cone shapes on the ends, like bells minus the clappers. When she brushed her fingers against them, they clattered pleasantly. She admired one particular basket with three different colors woven into it. If, as the name suggested, they were for unloading one’s burdens, they didn’t make them in big enough sizes to be of any practical use. Junior’s shy aunt came over with a long pole and pulled the basket down, handed it to her.
“Take.”
“I can’t,” she said, noticing the price tag, $180.00. “It’s beautiful, but I can’t afford it.”
The aunt pressed the basket into her hands. “Junior my favorite nephew. You can have basket.”
Chloe held onto it, afraid. The small, wizened woman possessed a kind of power, an authority. She looked pleased when Chloe kept the basket, then hurried back to the small crowd of people that had gathered around her nephew. For such a small town, word spread fast.
Among the T-shirts and sweatshirts, Chloe fingered a pair of baby moccasins. They were nothing special, mass-produced with the requisite beading, but they were within her budget. She wondered if Reed would tolerate anything that fancy, or given her independent temperament, kick them off.
Junior came up behind her and took her arm. “We got to have dinner at the cafeteria or break these ladies’ hearts. Then, I promise, we can go to our room.”
“The sign out front said the lodge was full up. What makes you so sure we can get a room?”
He gestured toward the building. “They keep a room for me here, Chloe. In the older part of the lodge.”
“I guess you rate.”
“It’s an Indian thing. Don’t worry about it. Come eat a hot supper with my aunties and hear about what a rotten little boy I was.”
The booths were ordinary overstuffed red vinyl, the same type as in the diner she had worked in back in California. If she didn’t look up at the walls—which were covered with incredible weavings, rugs priced in the thousands of dollars, intricately beaded purses that looked as if they belonged in a museum, buffalo skulls bleached white, decorated with chips of turquoise, and all manner of baskets, large and small, including an entire case devoted to miniature horsehair braided baskets—the restaurant could be called ordinary, too. There was hardly time to appreciate it all as the aunties rushed her through the food line. They loaded up her tray with squash stew and three kinds of bread. Dawn urged her to have two desserts.
“Cake and pie,” she suggested. “Ice cream good on both.”
Chloe laughed nervously. “I feel like I’m being fattened for sacrifice.”
Junior replied, “You are,” and kissed her cheek, which made the ladies titter, and him squeeze her knee under the table.
Long after the food was eaten, they lingered over coffee, during which time the conversation began in English, then when someone was having trouble locating a word, switched fluidly to Navajo. Junior seemed to be in his element, fussed over by women who hung on his every syllable, but he wasn’t merely reveling in adoration. It was as if he needed these women to approve of him, required that connection. Chloe realized she was privy to a side of him he generally kept hidden. He hugged his aunts at the restaurant door while Chloe fed her scraps to a couple more stray dogs. The ladies waved goodnight, walking across the parking lot while she and Junior headed in the opposite direction. Junior led Chloe down a gravel pathway under a lamp spilling yellow light. A few hardy moths danced in the incandescence. In front of a small co
ttage, independent of the lodge, he stopped her.
“Kiss me.”
His mouth was soft and yielding. This kiss took nothing but the moment for granted. Chloe laid her head against his jacket and listened to his heart beat slow and purposeful inside his chest. He handed Chloe the key to the door. “You open it.”
Inside there was one cozy room containing a couch, a small knotty pine armoire, and a television set. There was a double bed in a lodgepole-pine bedframe, with a worn Pendleton blanket woven in a chevron design covering the mattress. Clean sheets were folded on top; they’d have to make up the bed. The bathroom to the right of the bed was tiny, with a utilitarian shower, toilet, and an old pedestal sink complete with a dripping tap. A wrapped bar of soap sat on the edge of the porcelain. A window looked out on a huge old cottonwood tree that seemed to have stood there forever. The tree had a presence, as if maybe its roots reached clear down to the center of the earth, to the earth’s secret core. It had stood here a long time, listening to people fall in love, fall out of love, make love, argue, cope with their lives. You didn’t have to be Indian to understand that love grew at the center of that tree. Chloe let the curtain drop and walked back into the common room.
Junior was holding the burden basket in his hands, looking at the tag. “Velma Padilla made this.”
“Let me guess, you know her, too?”
“I think I must have met her once. Probably one of Lettie’s bingo buddies. It’s a real nice basket. It’s the one I would have chosen.”
“Did you see the price tag? I felt horrible accepting it.”
“They wouldn’t have given it if they couldn’t afford to.”
“I hope that’s true.” Chloe ran her fingers through her hair. “Junior? Now that we’re here, I have a question.”
Junior came to her, holding the basket in front of him, looking for all the world like an altar boy bearing the collection plate. “Put all your questions in here tonight and forget about them. This is where I’ve imagined taking you since the day we met. This room.”
“Hearing that’s not exactly helping me relax.”
“The air’s thin up here, Chloe. Lie down and before you know it, you sleep like you’re dead.”
She took the burden basket from his hands and set it on top of the TV set, hoping Mrs. Padilla wouldn’t mind her so casually abandoning her fine handiwork. Standing in front of Junior, she willed only pure sensation to flow through her body, ordered guilt and good sense to take a hike, for this moment to exist in and of itself. That was the only way what was going to happen could happen. To Junior, these walls held enough history that they mattered, the way driving past the house where you grew up mattered to people who’d experienced that luxury. Here was where he’d imagined making love to her. The moment his hands had caught hold of Reed the day she was born, she had become a part of Junior’s history. They were connected. This night, and whatever it held, would be a onetime thing, would never come again, whether they deliberately walked away from it or followed it into a future. Making love with Junior could be as simple as friction of the flesh or it could change the courses of three lives. He wouldn’t make things easy on her by taking charge, by throwing her down on the bed and acting macho. He respected her wishes enough to let her make this choice. Hank had been like that, too, and the recognition that two such men in the world existed and wanted her posed some disconcerting thoughts. Maybe there was nothing left to do except surrender to the moment. How many times had Chloe imagined how Junior’s hands would feel on her breasts, cupped under her buttocks, his fingers tracing along the sides of her flanks, where the shivers ran so deep she could feel the echo in her stomach, in her throat, between her legs. Tacitly she understood Junior would take his sweet time discovering all that, placing his hands carefully there, and elsewhere, and likely come up with a few surprises of his own. The idea of all that yearning and fulfillment made her shake. Is this how I was conceived? she wondered, A moment like this? When things made so little sense but my mother wanted it bad enough to wreck her whole life anyway? Maybe if I’d had a real mother, I’d have the huevos to walk away. Maybe I would have learned my own worth. But I didn’t, I don’t, and goddammit, I want this.
“Enough procrastinating,” she told him. “Make me a fallen woman.”
“Soon as you get on over there and make the bed.”
“Me? I get to do it?”
“Yes, you.”
“And you’re not going to help.”
“Not right now,” he said.
“That’s pretty sexist.”
“Call it whatever you want to. Later, I’ll help you unmake it. Right now, I’m just going to watch and enjoy the show.”
22
Junior pulled Chloe against him, feeling the heat of their bodies transfer warmth to the chilly sheets. The wind whistled across the parking lot. The night was full of voices: late-arriving travelers, a nocturnal bird’s cry, his own memories. Chloe was in his arms. Outside this room that old cottonwood tree he’d tried to climb as a boy was busy growing its spring leaves. When he was young and believed anything was possible, its branches seemed spindly. Every time he managed to grab hold of one, he fell smack on his scrawny butt. Now, like the tree from which his mother had swung, the branches were too high for him to grasp. He thought about how the desire to hide in trees had left him, and he’d outgrown the notion that it was the other tree’s fault his mother hadn’t survived. But neither concern had prevented this tree’s blood from coursing through the massive trunk, down those same, elusive branches. Chloe’s mouth moved against his neck. His senses were so on edge he could almost hear the tree striving to shape its heart-leaves. Wonderful old tree, he thought, survivor. Be here for whoever next sleeps in this room. Wait for those lovers who’ve only just been born. Hundreds of years after what this woman and I are about to do is long forgotten, it won’t matter that tonight two people behaved selfishly. You’ll be rooted there, a rational old standing piece of timber that belongs to nobody but the earth.
He ran his fingers down Chloe’s face, stopping at her mouth. With the tip of his index finger, he gently pressed between her lips until she let him in to explore. He traced this damp finger down her cheeks, across the bridge of her nose, over her eyelids. Then he palmed her throat, that racehorse neck of hers, which he enjoyed watching her defiantly thrust forward when she was trying to drive home some point she herself didn’t quite believe. He lightly stroked her breasts, admiring the way each fit into his cupped hand. Touching her called forth past summers, chasing after playful dogs, catching horses that didn’t want to be ridden, running for the utter joy of having legs. He wondered if that was because her blood, charging through her veins and various tissues announcing pleasure to the animal self that was her body, now belonged to him. He traced the angry scar across her soft belly. There was a sense of emptiness there, sorrow that throbbed behind the doctor’s stitching. He wouldn’t have given up delivering Reed for anything, but he was relieved that he hadn’t become a doctor. Some women pretended that losing their childbearing ability didn’t trouble them. When it came to that subject, these days too many women were downright men in skirts. The time Junior had asked Chloe, she’d responded, Reed’s healthy; I’m grateful. One baby’s way more than I ever thought I’d have. Which Junior understood to be a lie, only one of many her body had been telling for years. Honesty opened you to pain. Chloe’d already had too much experience in that corner, and here he was in bed with her, making her take step one of what was sure to add to her list.
He slid his fingers lower, glancing against her pubic hair, dipping into the hot cleft of skin beneath, trailing the dampness that met his fingers onto her thighs. He wanted desperately to enter her. She was more than ready for him to be inside. The obstacle was his unwillingness to sacrifice all this before. Doing so would take them both that much closer to the after. With both hands, he encircled her body, reaching around her buttocks, holding on, lifting her body to his. It was almost as if she b
ecame one entire taut, arching muscle of need. This discovery left him a little in awe, encountering the breadth of her desire for their coming together, the necessary abandon required for her to admit those feelings, her dismissal of the consequences, and—oh, man—he was sure there would be consequences.
Junior knew a million different ways to show a woman a good time. But that wasn’t what tonight was about. They were on holy ground here. He held her close for a long while, observing the pull of desire, listening to her quick, soft breaths, exploring how it felt to behold all that yearning. When Chloe grabbed hold of his penis, trying to hurry things along, he laughed and gently removed her hand, kissing her fist until each finger opened. As much as he enjoyed the feel of her encircling him, her directness, he was not about to let it happen that way. Even when her face contorted with longing, her cries of pleasure dwindled to whimpers and rose in pitch to outright pleas for him to enter her, he held her back. He took hold of her wrists and kissed each one hard, moving down her hands, taking her fingers one by one into his mouth. With his tongue, he attended every knuckle, traced each working-girl callus. Fairness was his intention, not to favor any one part of her body over another. He wanted Chloe to believe he cherished the soles of her feet as much as being allowed inside her. And that worked for about five minutes more, until he realized he was starting to forget why she had feet and the throbbing aches of his own center obsessed him. It was a lie to continue so halfheartedly, so he stopped altogether, and at once she sat upright in bed.
“You’re torturing me, dammit. Either get down to business or I’ll take care of myself.”
He shushed her, lowered her back to the mattress, kissed her face, her neck, the arch of each foot with exquisite, prolonged tenderness, pressed his mouth onto every part of her body his fingers had explored. Then he said a silent prayer of thanks, slipped his middle finger and forefingers, the same two fingers he’d used the night he delivered her daughter, inside her. He felt for the nerve root bundle that he understood was the source of a woman’s deepest pleasure. He listened to her skin and membranes and muscles with his fingertips. The same way that Babbitt had ordered open the floodgates into the Grand Canyon, a man could make a woman come, with a torrential force that washed away whatever didn’t belong. But only if she gave herself over to the process willingly. He wanted to take Chloe to those same floodgates, to show her that her pleasure mattered more to him than his own, that he considered it a sacred undertaking. Slowly, he began to move his fingers. She resisted at first, then, in time, began to float with the rise and ebb of her feelings. It took awhile, but they were in no hurry, and he helped her find her way. When he felt her on the precipice of falling away, he clasped his entire hand close around her, held her close and listened to her surprise as the blinding sensations hovered, then began to flutter the way a hawk’s wings trembled as he held himself in midair before striking, then with one sharp war cry, swiftly took down targeted prey. Junior heard Chloe cry out in pleasure and in loss. He held her in his arms, letting her revel in her feelings. When all the sighing slowed down, she yawned, breathing out the words, “I love you.”
Loving Chloe Page 30