Gentle Cora was filling her wire-bound binder with copious writing. God alone knew what she made of this day’s lecture. He could imagine her evaluation: Mr. Oliver is a very nice man and he dresses neatly, although he doesn’t often wear ties. Sometimes I think he gets off on tangents, however, and wastes valuable class time with personal reflection. Maybe she was going to turn him in to her pastor, heathen Henry Oliver, the soulless community college professor. The female students looked around themselves uncomfortably, and the men were frowning. Only William Strauss frantically waved his hand, looking to Hank as if he had given this subject entirely too much thought. Hank simply would not call on him again today. Encouraging the imagination of this primal young man was touchy business.
Larry Kolanoski sat back up and rocked the legs of his chair. He was grinning. He flicked one finger upward, and Hank nodded in his direction.
“Mr. Kolanoski returns to us.”
“Is this, like, one of your personal stories, or is it going to be on a test?”
They laughed like hyenas. Even Cora was smirking, her tight, lip-sticked mouth twitching at the corners. Slackers. He assigned them six chapters on the underworld and dreamed up a paper on the spot. “Gods using animal forms,” he said. “Compare and contrast with what we’ve discussed this morning. Your own version of Coyote assisting our nameless dead golfer into the netherworld.”
It wasn’t in the syllabus, and they bitched. Seventeen more papers to read, but the caved-in expressions on their faces more than made up for it.
“Stop your groaning. Look in your textbooks. It’s fascinating.” He fanned pages and chose an example at random. “Morrigan, quite the quick-change artist. In her lifetime, she took the following forms: an eel, wolf, heifer, raven, and a mortal woman as well.”
The minute hand clicked over to the six, and they stood rapidly, as if an alarm bell had rung.
“Double spaced. No onionskin!” he called out as they exited. He knew he would be successful if one-fourth of them actually took the paper seriously. He wondered for possibly the billionth time if he was teaching them anything other than how to waste an hour and a half.
Phil Green was fitting a rubber nipple over a glass jar as Hank approached him in the school arena. Someone had expertly bandaged the colt’s legs and outfitted him in a jaunty new halter with brass buckles that shone brightly against his small face. Hank admired the baby’s determination as he yanked at the nipple and butted Phil’s legs. Intent on draining that bottle, he seemed to be unaffected by his orphan status.
Phil turned his face toward Hank. “What do you think, Oliver? Any chance he’ll grow into these bones?”
“I’m no expert,” Hank answered. “But he looks determined. Say, about my shirt. Any chance you’ll be seeing that girl in the near future?”
Phil shrugged. “Hard to tell. She comes and goes, sort of like this rain we’re having. In the spring I can usually cajole her into lecturing to one or two of my classes.”
“Actually, I was hoping to get the shirt back a little sooner than that.”
“Sure. I’ll try to hunt Chloe down for you.”
“Chloe?”
Phil slapped his milk-splattered hands on his jeans, and the sudden gesture sent the shying colt off into a stiff-legged canter that flung him into the dirt every fourth stride. The men stopped talking and watched the colt. Phil said, “Chloe Morgan. She used to break horses for Stroud Ranch before they got into land development. Worked with the legendary Fats Valentine, last of the old-time trainers. They were getting top dollar for some time, quite the team. She fell completely apart when he died. Nearly bought the farm, from what I heard. She still keeps a hand in, but I doubt it will ever be like the old days.”
Centipede scar, tough mouth, the peach skin. “She have a telephone number?”
Phil chuckled. “If she does, odds are it’s disconnected.”
“That was an eighty-dollar shirt, Green.”
“Eighty dollars? What’s it made of, the Shroud of Turin?”
“Probably a few threads of it.”
Phil Green snapped his fingers. “Come to think of it, I heard her say she was waiting tables at the café on Newport Boulevard. You know, the one with the striped awning. Next to a waterbed store or a Ticketron or something. They’re only open for breakfast and lunch.” He captured his colt, struggled unsuccessfully to attach a lead rope to the halter. “Sorry about the shirt, Hank. We were both a little goofy from all that blood.” He shook himself. “I’m still a train wreck, to be honest with you. Worse comes to worst, I’ll reimburse you for the shirt.”
Hank waved his hand. Phil couldn’t afford it, and he didn’t want that. “You’ve got enough to keep your hands full here. What the hell. Tomorrow I’ll eat breakfast out.”
“Great idea. Say hi to her for me—and tell her I said thanks.”
The colt whinnied and sprang across the muddy dirt of the arena, very much full of himself. His soiled bandages didn’t slow down his investigation of the world newly opened to him. He bent his nose low to sniff the earth his hooves raked up. When a crack of thunder left over from the morning storm sounded, the colt pinned back his ears and shot past them at a dead run, farting all the way.
Hank laughed.
Phil smiled for the first time that day. “Guess we’ll call him Thunder,” he said. “It’s best when they name themselves.”
That evening Hank watched the news recap on CNN while grading papers, a departure from his usual routine of MacNeil/Lehrer. Tonight his concentration was broken by a dozen idle worries. The last straw was the report on the dwindling ozone layer. All-too-distinct videotape of clear-cut rain forests, both aerial and close-up shots. There was no wilderness left. A rather formal translation of natives’ views narrated the segment, which he loosely translated for himself: Selfish white American pigs are to blame. How are we supposed to feed our children? The ramifications of the planet heating up magnified until it was impossible to take student thought seriously. He shut off the TV, went upstairs, stood under the shower until his skin felt pleasantly blistered, toweled dry, and brushed his teeth.
He’d bought the town house mainly to shut his father up. It was “time he invested his money,” according to Henry senior, though Hank liked renting the old Victorian on the west side of town. In the mornings he could smell the ocean breeze, though he had no ocean view. On Halloween, he usually ran out of candy feeding assorted ghosts and witches—kids who moved on to better neighborhoods before they grew up. He’d biked to the college in good weather.
The town house was brand new—no history to it. It was connected to four others, floor plans flipped every other one, but essentially the units were carbon copies of one another from the fake exterior stucco-adobe to the color-coordinated vinca plantings along the curving walkway. “Get an end unit,” his father insisted. “Better resale value.” One flaw of the end-unit design plan was that the master bedrooms butted up against each other, Hank’s to the bedroom of newlywed neighbors who seemed determined to break all known records for conjugal frequency. He towel-dried his hair, listening to their cries inching inexorably toward climax, the woman’s voice jumping an octave and shortly thereafter, the man groaning as if he were moving a piano. There you go, everyone had the requisite good time. Hank continued to listen through that timeless interval of peaceful aftermath, so deep it seemed as if you could drop a stone into it without ever hitting bottom. Secretly he hoped death was like that thick silence, but it wasn’t a concept he could easily articulate with his students. He imagined the progress of the man’s hands tracing his wife’s cooling skin. For a small portion of time everything was quiet, eyes washed clean, muscles slackened with exertion. But any minute now they would start in arguing, softly at first, then working into a torque that ended with slamming doors. They did it so often he had come to view it as part of their afterplay. No words he could make out, nothing serious, just two people used to living alone learning to compromise by verbally beating the tar out of one another.
He got up to shut the window and inhaled the rain-wet scent of the grass. Over the top of the parking structure and in the distance, he could see the outline of Saddleback Mountain, the two humps dipping in the middle to form the saddle seat. The night sky was puffy with clouds, a deep blue gray broken by wispy shadows. It was never dark enough to see stars due to the well-lighted master plan for the community of Irvine.
That woman who had his shirt—Chloe—one of the personas of Demeter—wasn’t she the “green” one, the caretaker of young crops? But that was the books talking, and Hank had seen her—she was a living, breathing woman. Still, what an odd name, old-fashioned, perhaps a diminutive of Clothilde? No telephone. From Phil’s intimations he’d gathered she lived marginally, almost hand to mouth. How did a person get to that point? Phil had said a horse trainer named Valentine. Were they lovers? Probably. She was out there tonight, somewhere quite different from where he was, he was certain of that. Maybe she was already in bed, tangled in sheets, turning now on her belly, the shoulder blade with the scar exposed. It wasn’t a scar one could easily identify, not an operation, perhaps a childhood injury. It looked rough, as if something had been torn away, as if she had been dewinged like some troublemaking angel who was summarily demoted to earth. But an unlikely angel, this woman. Not shy. That momentary swing of breast. He shouldn’t have looked. In her brief encounter she’d accomplished something he’d never been able to—she’d shut Asa’s smart mouth. If she were married, surely Phil would have said so. She wasn’t married. She had to be a singular unit, living life simply, he knew it. Waitress. He supposed it was proof of his inherent sexism, his weak spot for waitresses. But the ones who weren’t nineteen and giggly were generally earthy and primal, wise in nature. When one smiled and stood by your table, her weight sunk into one hip, asking, “What is it you want?” he always felt a distinct loosening in his gut and the desire to answer truthfully. I want to eat something good. I want to walk in beauty. I want to die inside of a quiet, loving woman. Can you get me those things? They had to know there was power in food. Whoever fixed your meal owned a part of you.
He got into bed. He smiled in the dark, bemused at late-night stirrings in his loins from this conjured fantasy. When he’d slept with Karleen, with other women, too, they were forgotten an instant later, nothing they said or did drew him back. He was careful not to lead them on with false hope. He knew when they were satisfied, and what they expected from him, but no magic made him remember them.
There were HIV posters in the faculty restrooms now, not just the students’. And what about that rumor about Alec in the art department testing positive when he wasn’t even gay? This wasn’t the sixties, which was probably where the whole nightmare had begun Well, fantasies couldn’t kill you.
He turned into his pillow, gave it a friendly punch, and shut his eyes. Still, that swell of breast.
CHAPTER
7
Chloe held the wet borrowed shirt up to the morning light outside her single pane of wavery window glass. All but one of the bloodstains had come out under her diligent laundering. It took gentle soaking and repeated blotting rather than scrubbing to lift the blood from the delicate weave. Just a faint orange tinge near the third button remained, nothing a day outside in the sun wouldn’t cure. She worked the arm of the pump again, splashing icy water onto the shirt in her secondhand basin. She wrung it out by hand, then went behind her house to hang the shirt on a line between two scrub oaks.
The sky was chambray blue, shot through with faint gray clouds moving eastward on the horizon. Yesterday’s storm had moved on to pound the desert senseless. She wished she were somewhere outside Blythe, watching the transformation take place when that dry earth received the damp blessing. Everything would bloom, from the tall-armed cacti down to the smallest of grasses, and for a few days it would be smorgasbord time for all the animals.
She stood still for a moment, her face lifted to the 5:30 A.M. air and the quiet of the canyon. The intoxicating aroma of damp trees and wet rock, the song of a single jay competing with the knee-high creek running at full force tempted her to grab a couple of apples and take off on an all-day hike. Deep in the box canyon, her small shack was tucked into the hillside, its back wall taking advantage of the landscape, almost like a dugout. The chimney for her woodstove—fifty bucks from the Santiago landfill—was patched with bright metal. Hugh had bought a load of propane tanks, dragged them in, meaning to outfit everyone with heat, but they were still unattached and had been for months now. Big on ideas, Hugh was, but when it came to screwing in the nuts and bolts, you were on your own. Her place was smaller than the others, but the location had advantages. After three gravel roads into potholes that sucked and bit tires, the most skillful explorer would throw in the towel. She wasn’t often surprised by visitors. There was a back path up from the main house, but only those who lived there knew about it. She could go for days and not see any one else from the community; the others kept their kids close by and didn’t let them wander out this far, fearing county agents more than they feared mountain lions. She unsnapped two clothespins from the line, secured the borrowed shirt, and whistled for Hannah.
Across the creek the shepherd yawned from her crow’s nest on sunny rocks.
“Up and at ’em,” Chloe called. “Time to go to work.”
The dog laid her head back down on her paws.
“Last chance to change your mind or here you sit until suppertime.”
Hannah seemed to be intent on studying the leaves and insect life the water sent downstream toward deeper pools.
“Suit yourself, Hannah. Don’t waste the whole day. Catch us something for supper—a fish would be nice.”
Letting the door bang shut behind her, Chloe dried her hands on a stolen towel from the Wedler Brothers Café. She plunged her hand into a dusty live-gallon jar that sat on the floor, fished past assorted rocks and pennies to extract a receipt that still smelled faintly of the pickled chili peppers originally housed there. She counted the wad of folded money for the second time that morning: $350.87. It was enough to get her saddle out of hock from Wes’s Feed and Tack, which had been its home for the last three months. It was her best saddle, a Hermès, the only one she’d ever owned that wasn’t second- or thirdhand. She’d won some major shows on it, gleaned countless ribbons and a few cash prizes, enjoyed her longest run of luck. The money she’d gotten pawning it had saved her from starving, and now it would be hers once again, come full circle. Lessons. Absolutely. Shows? Maybe. Definitely the Swallow’s Day costume parade, a little fun couldn’t hurt, for Christ’s sake. With that saddle, she had no doubt, the good life would start all over again.
Wes was at his shop early; deliveries. She caught him just as she’d hoped to, surrounded by bales of sweet-smelling alfalfa and stepping distractedly over bright yellow sacks of calf manna. His marmalade cat sniffed through the goods while Wes tallied the count onto a beat-up clipboard.
“Thieves raised my cost again,” he told Chloe when she threw the truck into park. “Look at this stuff. I swear the farmers save all the good hay for themselves, send me shit, and charge double.” He spit juice from his Skoal wad onto the cement floor of the warehouse. “If you don’t look like a goddamn angel after these everlasting numbers. Where’s your mutt? I saved her some biscuits.”
“Wanted to stay home and take a nap.”
“She’s healthy?”
“Current on her shots and getting regular meals.”
“And you?” Wes had no patience for those who didn’t look after their animals. Chloe’d heard him blister Hubbard once or twice herself, when he’d disagreed with the vet’s course of treatment.
“You won’t hear me complaining. Wes, I’m here to make you a happy man.”
His watery blue eyes crinkled in delight. “Finally going to marry my old ass—wait till I tell Chester and the boys.”
She waved the money. “Even better. I came to get my old seat out of hock. It’s only because you were kind enou
gh to hang onto it for me that some little rich kid isn’t using it.”
He set his clipboard down and walked over to the Chevy, reached inside, and turned the key off.
“Dammit, Wesley, you know how long it takes me to get this thing started.”
“I’ll give you a jump later. Now you come on out of that heap and get inside. We’re going to have some cowboy coffee and a little chat. Don’t you argue. Just come along.”
He turned without waiting to see if she was following, and she could hear the door shut inside the warehouse, the one leading to the shoebox-size office and the showroom. She sighed and followed after him. The smell of coffee was strong and bracing. Wes had her cup already poured. He nodded toward the secretary’s chair for her to sit down.
“I’ve really got to go. I got a job now. I’m making it.”
“Now you listen here, Chloe. If I had two I had me three hundred offers on that saddle for twice what you paid for it. You can’t touch new leather like that for under two grand. Why don’t you let me sell it and make you some decent money? It’s not like you’re competing regular.”
She stared into the brown surface of her coffee. “That’s so, but I’m thinking I might start up again.”
“When?”
“Anytime now.”
He was kind enough not to laugh. “Chloe, darling, it’s time you faced up. You’re a grown-up now. There’s work to be done, and bills to be paid, life to be got on with. Not a whole lot of time for ribbons, let alone come up with the purse. Fats—”
She raised a hand. “Closed subject.”
“Okay, sorry. I did promise. But let me pop you into one of these new Wintecs. Take it at my wholesale and keep half your money right there.”
She hissed. “What kind of leather comes so cheap? Monkey’s ass, I suppose.”
“Hell, it ain’t leather at all. Some kind of wetsuit material like the surfer boys use. Horse sweats it up, you hose it down. After a couple years you just throw the son-bitch away. Disposable.”
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