Hank & Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  HANK & CHLOE

  JO-ANN MAPSON

  For Valerie Mason Brannon,

  who taught me to ride horses,

  and Stewart,

  who taught me how to love

  As in the choice of a horse and a wife a man must please himself, ignoring the opinion and advice of friends, so in the governing of each it is unwise to follow out any fixed system of discipline.

  G. J. WHYTE MELVILLE, RIDING RECOLLECTIONS, 1878

  Sometimes I think

  life is just a rodeo,

  the trick is to ride

  and make it to the bell.

  JOHN FOGERTY, “ROCK AND ROLL GIRLS,” 1984

  The community of “Hughville” and all of its inhabitants,

  while likely to resemble such growing communities,

  are products of the author’s imagination.

  Other places mentioned are actual but are used fictitiously.

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  Answer the door after midnight and you might as well…

  CHAPTER 2

  At 6:00 A.M., Henry Oliver, Hank to his friends, “Yo,…

  CHAPTER 3

  Invoking the gods would do no good. The stench of…

  CHAPTER 4

  January rain fell outside the faculty office building. The sky…

  CHAPTER 5

  Raw skin chafed beneath the shirt she’d taken from Phil…

  CHAPTER 6

  He might as well have been reading them model airplane…

  CHAPTER 7

  Chloe held the wet borrowed shirt up to the morning…

  CHAPTER 8

  After imagining her face for twenty-four hours he half expected…

  CHAPTER 9

  Rich came out of the kitchen and stood beside Chloe.

  CHAPTER 10

  Sorry about the tree business. Hannah doesn’t take to strangers.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Oh, the trouble with sex wasn’t that it made you…

  CHAPTER 12

  If I get to pick when I have to die,”…

  CHAPTER 13

  Kathryn Price’s fuchsia-and-black aerobics top and tights clung to her…

  CHAPTER 14

  Hank tried but couldn’t name another teacher he knew, male…

  CHAPTER 15

  I hope you’re practicing safe sex with that goofy teacher,”…

  CHAPTER 16

  Absolutely a lawsuit is in order,” Jack Dodge said across…

  CHAPTER 17

  You look like you’re in a real bad mood. Are…

  CHAPTER 18

  Absalom’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Just who are your people?” Iris Oliver asked Chloe over…

  CHAPTER 20

  Come ride fence with me,” Hugh Nichols called out as…

  CHAPTER 21

  The balance of Hank’s silk shirt hardly made a dent…

  CHAPTER 22

  The bright blue sky was cloudless, quiet, the kind of…

  CHAPTER 23

  He stopped twice on the long drive—once in Needles…

  CHAPTER 24

  Chloe set up the summer riding program at the stables…

  CHAPTER 25

  No matter what grew inside her, tomorrow was a full…

  CHAPTER 26

  Of course, he hadn’t really expected her to answer his…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  CCHAPTER 1

  1

  Answer the door after midnight and you might as well set a place at the table for trouble—Chloe Morgan’s first thoughts when the knock came. Hannah, her shepherd, let out an initial throaty growl from her nest of blankets, then thumped her tail in the dark for the all clear. Tugging the horse blanket from her bed, Chloe padded barefoot across the rough plywood floor.

  Rule one: You were damn careful out here in the middle of nowhere. Hugh Nichols let a select few live in the slapped-together shacks on his two hundred acres; he’d be damned if he’d sell out to developers so they could fling stucco around his land. But when it came to just who got to stay and who didn’t, he was mercurial. You did nothing to make him question his decision. Few of the shacks had electricity, but Nichols had tapped into the county water, so it wasn’t all that bad. Rig up a hose and you could take a cold shower. If you wanted to read after dark, you could light a hurricane lamp—oil wasn’t expensive. Living here was safer than the streets had been, when she’d lain awake in her truck till dawn, fearful of every noise. Each night since she’d moved here, she said a silent prayer of thanks for the roof. So far the county had left them alone, but she wasn’t naive enough to think it would last. Who knew? You did what you could and then you moved on.

  She walked quietly through the dark and rested her cheek against the plywood door. “What do you want?”

  “You got a call.”

  The voice was Francisco Montoya’s, who lived nearest to the pay phone and the main house, where Nichols slept off his legendary drunks and fought with a series of women he believed were after his considerable bankroll.

  Bad news could always wait. “Tell whoever it is to call back in the morning.”

  He tapped louder now. “Chloe, you got to wake up. Mr. Green from the college. His mare is foaling. He asks for your help.”

  She cursed softly to herself. “Okay, Francisco, thanks. Go on back to sleep.” Naked except for the blanket, twelve hours’ work under her belt and only two hours’ sleep, she wanted to go back to bed and the respite of unconsciousness. Earlier, the night air had smelled like rain and her truck tires were showing steel. Now Phil Green’s mare was giving birth. So what? Did he want her to share in the joy of it? She despised foaling—the utter mess it could turn into, the way owners got stupid with pink or blue birth announcements, and all that crepe paper nonsense. Too often she’d seen tiny hooves lacerate the vaginal wall, an ignored infection rack fine horseflesh until death came like an awkward blessing. The heartbreaking view of twins haunted her still—she’d sworn off all that—simply tried not to think about it and get on with her own work, teaching people to ride. But Phil was a good friend. He hadn’t begged—he never would.

  Out her only window, she watched the reflective stripes on Francisco’s jacket dim as he trudged back up the hill to his own place. Home was an old tow-along silver Airstream, complete with electricity he’d jerry-rigged off a truck battery. Constantina was pregnant again, and their four-year-old daughter, Pilar, was just out of County Med with a winter bug that had turned into pneumonia. Out here a lot of things could level you, but Francisco and Constantina were illegals. They lived in fear of illness. The expense and the lack of proof of citizenship were more nightmarish than enduring the sickness. Once in the hospital, anything could happen. Social workers didn’t help any, separating everyone. So they took care of each other out here, circled their wagons when there was trouble, recycled scrap aluminum, fed each other’s animals when money was tight.

  Hannah sat obediently by Chloe’s side, snapping at some unseen insect. She had slim pickings in winter. Chloe shut the door, lay back down in bed for a minute, cursing motherhood, winter rains, the night in general. Then she got up, threw a pink sweatshirt over a denim miniskirt and found her tennis shoes, the only pair of footwear dry enough to be of service.

  “Go get in the truck,” she told the dog, and Hannah flew out the door, down the fire road, and into the bed of the old Chevy Apache, her bent tail folding beneath her like a flag at dusk. The truck started on the second try, a good omen. Chloe drove out of the compound without her headlights so as not to wake any more of the squatters than she had to.

  Forget reason and plaus
ibility, there were times Chloe swore she heard voices out here. Not babbling or devil tongues, human voices. Once she figured she wasn’t crazy, she decided maybe they belonged to people who had died long before, whose very lives had been erased by time and progress, but who weren’t quite done speaking their piece. On nights like these when she drove through the canyons in darkness, half asleep, on the watch for deer crossing, she heard them the clearest. Hermana, hija…. They called her back from swerving off the highway, kept her awake. Tonight they were saying, La yegua sufre…tocala…. She kept the windows rolled up and didn’t stop for anyone. You didn’t need a newspaper story to learn the wisdom of the road—everyone was suspect—everyone had an agenda. But that didn’t stop her from stealing sidelong glances at two hitchhikers, noting their hopeful grins, the echo of others who seemed to single her out, speak to her. Date prisa, por aca! She would have liked the company of another warm body, even if they never touched or spoke. Just someone along for the ride. Like Fats had been, Fats Valentine. Stop it. Her life was singular now, since his death.

  There, past the junction at Cook’s Corner, as she waited for the traffic light to turn, she watched two bikers stumble out onto the tarmac. That character with his thumb out—his face held an echo of Fats’s smile. Probably dangerously drunk, his liver halfway to cirrhosis. The other guy had the jutting brow of a Neanderthal and probably a survival knife to match every outfit. Forty years ago, he might have been an immigrant orange picker, his overalls thick with the labors of a night spent smudging, hope suffusing the weariness in his bones as he rounded another row of trees in the glistening frost. But the trees weren’t there anymore, were they? A whole town surrounding the giant, nearly new university had sprung up like concrete circus tents. Still the words whispered in her ear, the breath faintly erotic as it tickled her neck flesh: Nunca seremos vencidos. Este niño representa mi sufrimiento, y mi esperanza….

  She shook her head drowsily and in the distance before her saw the freeway, a trickle of moving cars. Stay awake, she commanded herself. Phil Green needs your help. No good for anyone if you fall asleep and crash someplace like Irvine. You think the city fathers would name a street corner after you? No way, sister. Scrape you up like the rest of the trees and pour concrete for a new foundation.

  But under the hard shell of highway she felt something else press against her tires. Preremembrances she could not possibly know, yet did. The faint outlines of roadhouses from sixty years ago shimmered before her eyes like heat mirages. She heard bits of tinny music from an old upright that had traveled the plains in a covered wagon, losing a few strings to the desert animals who thought they might make fine nesting material. Old music, simple, prim love songs asking permission to court and woo. People who weren’t there. Visions. The result of some kind of brain irregularity you developed, deprived of sleep and adequate protein? All she knew was they had to do with the earth somehow, a past so charged with promise that it couldn’t quite give up its grip on the present. Not that it was unpleasant; she never felt lonely. She saw them shimmer in those heat mirages; they were in serious desert now, land not in the least fertile, no longer preoccupied with rain but resigned to the stasis of hot waiting. All those faces—what did they want to tell her? Didn’t the people coming west sense that they’d never leave? Why not go back to what they knew? A certainty of weather, seasons that descended like ritual? What promise drove them on? Was any struggle worth it? To stay alive. Bear children to increase the tribe. Some notion. Underneath that notion another surfaced, equal in weight: Someday they would each have to give up with grace.

  It was raining hard now, the water hitting her windshield at an angle. The wipers were just about useless. She slowed down to help the old tires gain purchase on the slick highway. It was a twenty-minute drive to the junior college. A couple of hours might go by in an instant, seeing to that mare. She craned her head out the window to see if it was clear to change lanes. She hadn’t brought her work clothes. She would have to drive back home, hopefully have time for a quick nap, get dressed for work. She worked at the Wedler Brothers Café from six to three-thirty, its sole waitress, but Rich didn’t need her in until nine today—a miracle. He’d been promising to break in a new waitress for a relief shift, and after several who quit in their first hour, he’d found one he swore was a jewel: Lita. Whatever kind of name that was, Chloe hoped she would work out, didn’t have those fifteen-inch-long fingernails or a penchant for the color black. If she smoked the same brand of cigarettes that would be nice. They could bum off each other.

  She exited the freeway at the old Fairview Road, driving past all the sleeping houses in the subdivisions. Used to be that this road led straight into the fairgrounds. The extra-wide lane was designed for horse trailers and cattle trucks. They held a swap meet here every weekend now—cars and hundreds of vendors forming an outdoor mall. This was the last stretch of county to be paved over and civilized. Slowly the college was following suit, phasing out whole departments that seemed impractical and leveling anything that resembled the California style of architecture in favor of blocky, two-story brick buildings. She drove the back way through the service roads and parked in a handicapped slot near the Agriculture building. Outside her car she was immediately drenched—the rain’s signature to the storm. After it quelled, she whipped wet hair from her face and hustled toward the lighted barn. Inside, after nodding hello to Phil, she straddled the prone chestnut mare, her skirt hiking up nearly to her crotch.

  “Well?” Phil’s face was pulled tight. The trouble light hanging from a nail on the barn wall flickered across his damp forehead.

  “I don’t know anything yet.” She checked pulses, gum color, respiration. “How long has she been prone?”

  “A couple of hours. I thought she was just getting comfortable. But then I couldn’t get her back up. She’s not going to make it, is she?”

  “I’m not a vet, Phil.”

  “But you’ve been around this before. I can handle it. Tell me.”

  Chloe smiled, stretched her hand over the horse’s neck to give his shoulder a pat. He sighed with relief, and immediately she felt sorry she’d given him any kind of gesture that could be mistaken for hope. Truthfully, it looked like no good; the mare was nearly beyond fighting, committed to lying down and apathetic when Chloe goosed her. With all those textbooks, all his telling students how it’s done, had Phil missed the early signs of trouble? Not likely.

  She stroked the mare’s muzzle and her hand came away bloody. What the hell was that about? She wiped her hands in the straw and cedar shavings.

  “I waited too long, didn’t I?”

  “Probably had nothing to do with it.”

  “So?”

  “Phil, this is a grace time. What we do is call in a vet, stand here, and hold a hoof.”

  “And watch the lights go out.”

  “Maybe.” She stepped over the horse and took his hand. His calluses nearly matched her own. She wished she could erase his pain, but it was beyond her, beyond just about anything short of a miracle. Cross fingers, she said to herself. Pray.

  CCHAPTER 2

  2

  At 6:00 A.M., Henry Oliver, Hank to his friends, “Yo, Professor,” to the current batch of students who pegged his class as an easy A, buttoned his best shirt. It was an Irish cotton Henry Grethel, requiring both the judicious attention of his dry cleaner and the use of his only pair of cufflinks—silver buffalo nickels, handed down from his maternal grandfather, who’d died just before Hank’s mother was born. The shirt was too expensive for a junior college instructor’s budget, and he’d walked away from it as soon as he’d seen the price tag—a whopping seventy-nine dollars. He didn’t spend foolishly. But later on, he’d gone back. He wanted it so badly he hauled out rationalizations, telling himself it was practical in the long run—high thread count, the beige color neutral enough for any season, formal or casual occasion. Dining in the peninsula’s better restaurants, slow dancing to big band music—the shirt would per
form up to its price tag in time. Today he wore it to act as a pallbearer.

  William “Hoop” Hooper, one of his father’s golfing buddies, had died of something, but at just this moment Hank couldn’t recall what it was. Probably a coronary, or maybe it was the inevitable cancer. His septuagenarian parents had a burgeoning cadre of recently deceased friends. Henry senior and Iris had finally sold their bayfront home and were renting a one-bedroom unit in World of Freedom, a retirement community in the inland hills of Laguna. Much as he disliked the idea of the two of them in this holding pattern, he had to admit it made sense. The complex served three meals a day and had medical staff on call. Funerals came with the territory, Hank supposed, just as able-bodied sons were enlisted to assist at them.

  Now he stood by the other men, in the properly somber posture, waiting for the end of the eulogy. The pug-faced minister appeared determined to embroider layers on each fact of Hoop’s life as if he were waxing the moon by hand. Hank glanced over at Hoop’s widow—Ella?—in the front pew, dressed in navy and white. She held a dry hand kerchief and looked up, puzzled, as if perhaps she had accidentally ended up at the wrong service. She cleared her throat loudly, twice, and the minister looked up, faltering for a moment. Then he launched into what Hank recognized as your classic “death-on-a-higher-plane” crescendo. He threw in a little “God Bless America” motif, cashing in on Hoop’s World War II service and the current trouble brewing in the Gulf. That, of course, was the trouble with Christianity. Soldiers of Christ never quite made the leap from the service of the martyred Jesus to perform any significant service of their own. It fell under the heading of your everyday loss—ordinary. Hank knew several dozen myths on death, but his personal favorite involved a tribe of Malaysian pygmies. They had the right idea. First, a week-long walk as one left the body, certainly enough time to get used to the idea of doing without it. There was, of course, no escaping unpleasantness with the other spirits. They broke one’s bones, and then that rather unfortunate business with the eyes. But weren’t skeletons and sight unnecessary baggage in the afterlife? In the end the departed soul was encouraged to drink its fill from the mapic tree, whose flowers were not perfumed petals cupping a center but full human female breasts where a man was allowed to drink until sated while dreaming of rebirth. He smiled slightly at the thought of Hoop lapping, guzzling, calling out to Hank’s father, “Christ, Henry, hurry and get up here!” But the only human voice saying anything at all was that of the minister’s forced awe: “the mystery of it all!”