Hank & Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “Disposable?” She took a sip of the coffee. Double strength, it hit her system like a jolt. “Just the kind of nonsense I’d expect from a Republican.”

  He chuckled, then coughed. “Your color sure does come up when you’re ticked off. You can’t blame me for trying to take care of you. An old man like me needs a challenge to keep him young.”

  “So take up backgammon.”

  “Looks like I might have to. Come on. We’ll go get your saddle.”

  She abandoned the coffee to the desktop. It was littered with ledgers and invoices. No computer age for Wesley McNelly; he did his numbers by hand. Across the showroom floor he led her past expensive clothing and gift items; nearly everyone who could afford to keep livestock in this county was wealthy enough to stock up on geegaws. She admired the shining array of bits and breathed in the heady scent of new leather emanating from the bridle stock. Past all the new saddles was his limited stock of used ones, broken-down Courbettes that weren’t worth the original price the day they sold, one gloriously tooled Mexican leather job featuring a thistle-and-acorn design, and another with a flawless basket weave that never varied from its path. Trouble with that was, tear it down to the tree and you found yourself staring at a bunch of old Mexican newsprint and masking tape.

  “Here we go.”

  She felt a shiver traverse up her spine when she saw it. Wes laid one hand protectively across the seat and smoothed the stirrup leathers. She reached out to run her fingertips over the grainy leather surface. He’d cleaned and oiled it without asking, kept it dusted and looked after as if it were his own. The weight of the old stirrup iron felt as promising to her fingers as a gold ingot. She smiled, wanted to say thank you, but words wouldn’t come.

  “Marry me,” he whispered in the hush of the morning. “You can stay home and watch those fuckin’ soap operas and work yourself up a new layer of fat if that’s what you want. Or if you want to keep busy, you can help out here. I got a big old house out there in the canyon and some sorry excuses for children who don’t deserve to inherit. We could close up shop, buy a motor home, drive to Vegas and have a fling, spend every last dime together.”

  She studied his weathered face and steely gray hair. He was younger in heart than half the men she knew, and kinder than most of them put together. Was that a good enough reason to sign yourself over to another person’s bed for a lifetime? She looked down at the saddle. “If I ever was to say yes to anybody, Wes, I suppose it would be you. Bless your heart. Keep taking your vitamins. I’ll be back.”

  He shook his head and pocketed the folded money. “I won’t spend this for awhile,” he said, “just in case you think better of it.”

  Wes slung a fifty-pound sack of carrots into the truck bed, followed by another sack of four-way grain, a square one of A & M, and two twenty-pound sacks of Eukanuba for Hannah.

  “Take those back, Wes. I don’t have the money to pay you.”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Mistake on the invoice. They shipped me some extra. No skin off my back. Feed the jughead horse and pamper your mutt. Dogs’ll keep you going, honey. All that love. Now get out of here so an old man can make a buck. Drive safe, dammit.”

  Seven miles back up the hill and she was in the canyons again. She had, if she didn’t dawdle, twenty-five minutes at the stable to turn Absalom out before leaving for work. Mud splattered her wheel wells, and the truck shimmied in the dirt road. Damp hens scrambled across the road in front of her, one of them confusedly leaving a tan egg along the side. The pipe stalls were humming with bobbing heads, all the horses fidgety, counting down the time to breakfast. In number seventy-two, the dark bay thoroughbred shifted his weight from hoof to hoof, his muzzle grazing the top rail of his stall. She parked the truck on the angle of the hill so that if she had to, she could start it by popping the clutch. Only her rubber mucking boots saved her jeans from the muddy manure. She walked carefully between stalls to her horse. In black marking pen, she’d lettered onto his trough Media la comida en la noche, por favor. He did tend to fat. He whickered softly, deep in his throat, his lower lip trembling in anticipation.

  Without saying a word, Chloe slipped him a snap of carrot and in the same move haltered his massive head. She led him down the breezeway to the open arena gate. Inside, the sandy surface was whipped to a stiff froth, rainpocked and swampy where the drainage was poor. As soon as he was shut inside and she had removed the halter, his quiet flesh transformed into engorged muscle, breaking away from her hands into a full gallop. Damp sand sprayed up behind his hooves like the wake from a speedboat. She shinnied up the fence, hugging the rail to watch. He made long circle after circle, his muscular sides blurring past her, glittering like wet silk.

  There was nobody else around to see. The stablehands were asleep in the few trailers that dotted the grounds. No other riders were there; rain discouraged early morning workouts. Nobody to observe the grace of the running horse or document the wide smile of the woman watching him. Nobody saw when his forelegs caught beneath him, heard her intake of breath or noted the recovering stumble that kept him from falling. When the subsequent limp emerged, forcing him to slow his speed to a trot, only she was there to observe it, catalog the progressive symptoms, and compare them to the last time. The bute wasn’t working like it used to. She would have to call the vet, listen to Gabe’s philosophy of euthanasia, how a quick blue needle was a whole lot kinder than the slow shadow of age, no matter how she padded his time with fresh hay cubes and molasses. Gabe couldn’t help; it was a decision she’d have to make alone. No one else witnessed the singular moment when he came to her unbidden and laid his massive head in her lap.

  Winter of last year, when her bad cold settled down into chronic bronchitis, there was no apartment to go to, no place to get warm or rest. She was living in her truck, taking showers at the junior college, growing numb. She hadn’t wanted to count up her debts. After Fats, they just were, like breathing; bills that somehow had accrued and seemed to be bent on taking her inventory one by one, paring her stock from seventeen head of horses down to one, causing her to pawn the last of her tack for less than a quarter of its worth. When it was gone, the bills remained. Sleeping with Gabriel Hubbard, DVM, was the closest Chloe had come to lying down for money.

  She’d taken that two-day job working the rent string for the coyote hunt at Coto, currying up and cooling down for mostly drunk weekend riders, and managed, in between coughing spasms and white-hot chills, not to pass out. Once she and Fats had ridden the hunt themselves, merrily galloping around the acreage in pursuit of coyotes, the Western equivalent of foxes. Those green to the hunt were riding in earnest, determined to win whatever this prize might be, but the more experienced riders ran for the sport, jumping low fences and hedges because it was permitted. They played cowboy poker, drawing cards for their hands at various checkpoints, betting like the fools that they were, fueled by beer. Now she worked here, and tried not to look too closely at the riders. By the end of the day she would have fifty bucks to show for it, fifty bucks to dole out by the dollar to her debtors, and if she was lucky, enough left over to feed Hannah and maybe herself.

  Gabe rode up on a chestnut gelding. “That cough sounds nasty.”

  Busy checking the girth gall on an obese palomino, she didn’t bother to answer. The tough little horse could go again, if this weekend Little Joe with the Rolex would quit hammering his barrel with those fancy six-inch spurs. She shoved sheepskin under the cinch strap and slapped him on. “Go easy on him,” she wheezed. “He’s done this before. He knows where to go without all your kicking.”

  “Yee-haw!” the cowboy crowed, and she shook her head.

  Gabe was still there. “Hell, that guy’s almost too drunk to ride. If his horse doesn’t buck him off, likely he’ll fall off of his own accord.”

  She stared up at Gabe. The mirrored sunglasses he wore reflected her straggly hair in a fish-eye warp. “You need a new horse already?” she asked, then sat down hard in the dirt, so dizzy
she nearly went all the way over.

  He’d grabbed one arm and pulled her right up behind him on that monstrous Circle Y roping saddle, galloped her over to the clubhouse. Over two mimosas he’d bought and made her finish (the vitamin C will boost your immune system, and the alcohol will purify every cell), he made her an offer: Crash at my office.

  “No way.”

  “Look, Chloe. Everyone knows what happened. Fats left you holding a bag of rattlesnakes. Drop it. Let somebody help you out. Just until you get back on your feet again. What do you say?”

  He’d taken her there that night, shown her the back room with the simple cot. “Sleep here. It’s dry, and there’s a heater. Just be out by seven-thirty when I start seeing patients, and don’t make long-distance telephone calls.”

  “Who am I going to call?”

  “Maybe one of those 900 numbers, I don’t know.”

  Then he’d taken her back to one of the examining rooms, picked her up, and sat her down on one of the examining tables. With his stethoscope, he listened to each side of her chest, pausing at the lower lobes more than once. “How long have you had the fever?”

  “Week or two.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What the hell does ‘hmm’ mean? Am I going to live?” She half wished he’d tell her no.

  “If you do what I tell you, you might.”

  “Here it comes.”

  “Hey, I take doctoring seriously.” He went to the locked refrigerator and readied a syringe of ampicillin. “Drop your jeans. This hurts a lot less if I shoot it into fat.”

  She rolled to the side and unzipped her pants.

  “Jesus, you don’t have a lot of fat back here to spare, do you?”

  The pinch of his fingers, then the sting of the needle. It made a good focus for all her troubles. One tear escaped before she willed the others back inside. She yanked her pants back up, lay back against the chrome examining table that smelled of Lysol, which couldn’t disguise the undertone of terrified-animal pee. The metal was cool against her cheek. She heard a beagle howl from the kennel section.

  “Chloe, baby,” Gabe uttered hoarsely as he climbed on top of her.

  “Cut it out, Gabe. Get off.”

  “I can’t help myself.”

  “Sure you can. Concentrate on the fact that I’m contagious.”

  “So I’ll just give myself a shot. I can’t help it. You’re so goddamn beautiful, every time I saw you with Fats I just wanted to kill him so I could take you home myself.”

  Don’t. Don’t let this happen. But she was tired, cold, hungry, and too sick to listen. It had been a long time since any man had held on to her, wanted to make love to her. Fats had more passion for the bottle than he did for her. Her arms lay against her sides until Gabe gathered them up, one in each hand, drawing them above her head, holding her down in mock surrender. He liked that: being in charge. Vital clothes fell away, snaps loosening, buckles hitting the linoleum. The chrome table chilled her fevered skin. She shut her eyes and thought of Fats, the way he liked her up on top of him, the times he wasn’t too drunk to finish the job.

  “I’m going to fuck you,” Gabe breathed into her ear, and he was right about that, there wasn’t any other word for what they were doing, right here, twice, from thirty minutes after midnight until somewhere near two in the morning, with patient Hannah waiting outside in her truck—Hannah, three days without any supper and food samples right here for the taking on the counter.

  Gabriel. Was his mother thinking archangel when she named him? Chloe didn’t like him, didn’t want to like what he was doing to her, but goddamn, he knew so many ways to coax the flesh into response it just happened despite what her mind wanted. In the Cleveland National Forest she’d once seen him coax trust from a wounded mountain lion some asshole ranger had fired on, probably the first time he’d ever fired a gun in his life. Gabe sweet-talked the lion until it was calm, then with one well-aimed shot, dotted its skull like a bull’s-eye target, though he could have tranqued the cat and stitched him up again. She hadn’t forgotten that. No, he had no trouble at all kindling Chloe’s desire, no matter how deep she had buried it beneath her grief for Fats.

  When he’d come to deliver Phil’s mare, she remembered that first time. She knew full well Gabe took her to bed because he wanted to see if he could get away with it. He didn’t need to get laid. There were plenty of other women who thought him a demigod. He had a tennis-playing wife, twin daughters in an Arizona boarding school, twenty acres here, and a condo in Palm Desert. That new king-cab Ford truck every year and a half meant he had money to burn. Chloe knew she was a minor distraction.

  For three months they carried on, the sex never enough for him, she trying her damnedest to keep it a formality—the kind of nuisance a houseguest puts up with accepting the invitation—but eventually Gabe got to her, forced her back into her ghostly skin until he honed every nerve ending and all their spectacular responses. There were other men she’d slept with that she didn’t love, she reasoned, and Gabe was careful, always using a rubber, though he agreed she had such infrequent periods she probably wasn’t fertile. He was married, but only in the most general sense of the word. After awhile that didn’t bother her. What did bother her was the way she began looking forward to hearing his truck pull up, how just the sound of his key in the lock made her internal motor kick in. Here she’d vowed never again after Fats, and things were starting to get complicated. She’d quit eating all but one meal a day then, the free one she took at Wedler’s, and put the money she usually spent on food against bills Fats left behind. Nickels and dimes, the credit companies said. We need more than a gesture. Then she’d taken the Hermès to Wes McNelly, and he’d been very businesslike, talking “temporary loan, just to tide you over.”

  She’d let Wes introduce her to Hugh Nichols down at the Swallows Inn one night, and to a backdrop of country music on the jukebox, she listened to his tirade against the land developers. She agreed, they were all bastards, and Hugh took a shine to her, bought her a beer. He had the one shack available, but it was trashed from the previous tenant, so if Chloe wanted it, it was up to her to clean and repair it.

  “I can stand a little mess,” she’d told him. They shook hands. Wes nodded and lifted his glass to her; Hugh was his friend. That same night she left Gabe’s back room the way she’d found it; the army-green blanket folded over the stained cot.

  She had not been the first and would not be the last girl to pass through this office. His belt still had plenty of space for notches. Probably hers would be forgotten in a few weeks; he wouldn’t even miss her.

  She’d been wrong. Gabe was furious. She didn’t blame him; that was the way of men, they needed to be needed. Even Ben Gilpin, father of three dead children, had found time for the occasional bowling alley beauty. When she’d seen her foster father in the bar of the Kona Lanes, somehow her heart had tightened down a notch, though she wanted not to blame him—you took comfort where you found it.

  Hers was here—in Absalom—the dark horse who suddenly lifted his head from her lap and took off across the arena like a colt. She let him make a full lap, then whistled from her perch on the fence. The old horse rolled in the sandy dirt, groaned and struggled to his feet. Wet sand fell from the planes of his shoulders as he jogged to close the distance between them. His bright eyes and alert ears spoke of years of mutual training, but the bond went deeper than that, and she knew it. “Come on, mule,” she said to him. “This is your lucky day. Carrots for breakfast.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  After imagining her face for twenty-four hours he half expected the real thing to be a disappointment. His mother would have called it plain and honest; his father wouldn’t have noticed her at all. One could call it ordinary. The quick brown eyes that darted from customer to kitchen weren’t doelike or so remarkable as to inspire metaphor. She did nothing in the way of makeup to hide the smattering of freckles that canopied her nose. No lipstick either. When she smiled, th
e chipped front tooth was exposed. It wasn’t a knock-’em-dead kind of face, but it was alive, animated, utterly without pretense. The bones beneath the skin did a classy job on the flesh. Her skin seemed lit from someplace deep inside; she looked happy in the small restaurant. Confident, untroubled.

  Hank’s stomach rumbled at the smells emanating from the kitchen. Freshly baked bread and frying bacon—how long had it been since he’d smelled those? Both Chloe and the other waitress, the black-haired, bespectacled woman who wasn’t smiling, and who wasn’t as quick no matter how hard she tried, were hopping, filling orders. He’d hoped for the security of a booth and the armor of the sports page, but there was only a single swivel stool at the counter. He sat down. The spicy scent of cinnamon buns hit him full strength—four trays’ worth, fresh from the kitchen. Chloe stacked them into a tall metal cart. Maybe he would order one of those, though he usually didn’t indulge in pastry. The caramelized sugar glistened. Damn the counter. The small, lopsided stool with the ripply Naugahyde squealed each time he turned to look at her. She was everywhere at once, it seemed.

  It wasn’t much of a restaurant. Chalkboard specials, wall-mounted television in the corner, one old photograph of the town pre-1940 in a cheap wooden frame with a crack in the glass. Plastic roses that looked as if they could use a good dusting nestled in bud vases on each table covered with an eye-piercing mustard yellow oilcloth. Four ceiling fans kept the hot air circulating. The creaky floorboards dipped in places. The rest of the town was undergoing massive rehabilitation; Hank wondered how the café and the small row of shops alongside it had escaped development. Health-food stores came and went, little shops offered T-shirts and tourist fare, and restaurants like this one had drawn him inside when he lived on this side of town. He’d felt an immediate part of the community. This morning the diner was filled to capacity. Hank could see other customers waiting outside, even though the January air was chilly enough to require jackets and scarves. A quick head count: the thirty-odd customers were nearly all male, nearly all of them watching the same show he was—Chloe Morgan. She was friendly with everyone, knew many of the customers by name. If I pursue this woman, Hank thought, I will get fat. I’ll just ask for my shirt, drink a cup of tea, and walk out the door.