At sixteen Chloe Morgan fit into size three blue jeans. Her butt was barely two man-size handfuls of flesh, her calves muscled tight in the stovepipe legs, just aching to grip the barrel of a horse, any horse. When Ben and Margaret gave her the go-ahead for a part-time job, she was at Whistler’s Stables the following afternoon. The only work Eddie Whistler had available was mucking stalls, and he raised some doubts as to whether she’d hold up.
“You just try me,” she said. “One week. If I don’t pan out, fire me. But if I can keep up, I get to keep the job.”
She was built for hard work, and her muscles sang under the weight of the pitchfork. After three days, she’d learned enough Spanish to play a fair hand of poker with the boys and she’d caught the attention of the lone trainer, a broken-down racetrack man named Fats Valentine. Once he’d been legendary for matching horse to rider on the show circuit between California and New Mexico. He’d lived high, driven Italian cars, and weathered his share of the successes, partying with team Leone, Shoe, some big names. But the horse world favored the young. Drugs and alcohol splashed like cheap cologne. The down times, nobody wanted to be his friend. A succession of three wives had left him, taking the cars and the cash. He’d screwed up more than his share, and the last down time, he stayed too long trying to balance a diet of gin with a comeback, and sunk for good. Small-time training was all he was capable of handling. He was forty-seven the year Chloe came to work at Whistler’s; she was a few months shy of seventeen. He took one look at her rough-and-ready style, pulling a rocking-horse canter out of an old half-Arab, half-Morgan gelding she was allowed to exercise on her time off, and his heart beat hard against the wave of gin in which it floated.
“Just might make a rider out of that one,” he said to his cronies, a continual parade of men he owed or who owed him money neither would ever be able to pay. “Check out her leg, boys. Look at that flexion.”
By way of the grooms, Chloe heard his compliments repeated, peppered with the insinuation that the old man was really after her body. They danced around each other for a few weeks in that testing manner Chloe’d learned in various foster homes; distance a man’s interest and you won’t jeopardize the situation.
One rainy Saturday when lessons were canceled, Fats called her over in the barn and showed her Absalom, then a greenbroke four-year-old. He was beautiful in the way most thoroughbreds are, long back, perfect neck, chiseled features, shining body-clipped coat, and polished hooves, an ebony angel among the ruins of a third-rate operation. The girl who’d been showing him in halter classes was leaving for college in the fall.
“Who you going to put with him?” Chloe asked.
“You,” Fats answered, taking a puff on his cigar.
“Right. What do I have to do? Suck your dick?”
He laughed so hard he got into a fit of choking. Chloe went glowering back to her stalls and filled up the wheelbarrows with steaming piles of manure in double time. At six o’clock she settled down in a box stall with her history book beside an old paint mare named Sheila to wait for her ride home. The rain beat its tune against the metal roof. She hated history, but Ben held the threat above her head, anything below a C, adios job. Sheila was excellent company. She didn’t care about due process or constitutional amendments. It wouldn’t be so bad to own an old horse. Sheila’d never rear up on you nor spook, not even if you lit a string of Mexican firecrackers underneath her. You could ride her all day, right across traffic. Dependable. After awhile Chloe realized Fats was standing in the aisle, watching her.
She kept her face in her book. “I got friends in these Mexican boys,” she told him. “They’re pretty handy with knives. You try anything on me and you’ll be singing the high notes, buster.”
“You don’t trust any man, do you?”
“Give me one good reason why I should.”
“Because a few of us are good guys.”
“Well, you know what they say. For the money, there’s nothing like a gelding.”
“Ouch. Don’t be so quick to cut. You’re missing out on a whole world of good times.”
“Sure, I’m going to end up pregnant with some lifetime brat just so a guy can get his rocks off. No thanks.” She scoffed. “Get lost. I have to pass history or I can’t even ride, and that’s the one thing I want to do.”
“Want doesn’t even enter into the equation, darlin’. You have to ride. With you it isn’t even a question of want. But you’re wasting your time with nags like Sheila. You can’t learn anything on an easy horse. You need a challenge.”
She shut the book. “I’ll say one thing for you, mister, you’re not above dangling a long line.”
“Well, you know where my trailer is. Come see me if you want to ride the thoroughbred. Maybe we can work something out.”
Then he was gone, his cheap cigar smoke with him, the gravelly voice just an echo in the barn. Had she dreamed him? That night as she lay in bed she wasn’t thinking of American history, she was seeing herself in a full riding habit, all new stuff, atop a fine saddle and fixed to that thoroughbred: Absalom’s Dancing Irish. Word was his line went clear back to Northern Dancer, but as Francisco said, probably if you pricked him with a pin all the famous blood would leak out in two seconds. She didn’t sleep at all, copied the answers to the test from a spectacled boy who had the hots for her, and managed a B-. Ben was thrilled; he gave her twenty-five dollars as a reward. She took the money to Mr. Valentine and asked for as many lessons as it would buy her. He thought about it for a half an hour, during which time she mentally rehearsed several apologies that bordered on groveling. Then he walked by and said, Okay, five lessons, but you have to groom all the summer shows for my regular students and we start tonight, after I finish group lessons. Find yourself boots, a helmet, and have the horse saddled and bridled and in the ring when I get here. She thanked him soberly, went into the portable toilet, and threw up her lunch.
“Embarazada, chica?” Francisco and the Mexican boys teased.
“Mocosos!” She chased them around the barn, grinning stupidly. “You vatos just cut it out,” she told them, unable to stop her stupid grin. “Just cayense!”
They were inseparable, the blond girl and the dark bay horse. That Chloe Morgan’s better than a goddamn billboard, Eddie Whistler said. People see her riding Black Beauty around town and follow her, just to see where they’re headed. And that had brought him a ton of new business. She was there before school for morning turnout, there when the vet came to do Ab’s shots, there when the farrier was out to see to his feet, personally mucked out his stall and brought him his feed, carefully adding trace elements and vitamins in mathematics she hadn’t heretofore understood.
Out in the ring, Fats would stand in the center and holler at her: Position yourself, you ride like a sack of old laundry. Straighten that back! You trying to hide your tits? Act proud you’re endowed! Drop your heels, you ain’t riding bareback now. Slow down, you think you’re on a fucking motorcycle? Slack up on the reins, Chloe, Jesus, I’d hate to be your boyfriend if you hold on that hard. She glowered and did everything he said. Along the rail the Mexicans and Eddie Whistler stood watching and laughing, everybody garnering the maximum entertainment from the Fats and Chloe show, talking long odds, taking bets on who’d get mad and walk out of the ring first. Nearly always it was Chloe, leading the bay horse properly, calmly, each stomp of her boots packing rage into the arena sand, but every once in a while it was Valentine, lighting up a cigar, his face suffused to a port wine with anger, muttering, You can’t teach anything that hardheaded, Lord God, what a mistake.
Absalom learned fast, Chloe a little more slowly. By the following summer she was showing in her first equitation classes, baby hunter, green over the low fences, winning everything, pressuring Fats to let her start Absalom in pre-first-level dressage. Fats slowed down his drinking. He got regular haircuts. On Chloe’s high school graduation day he declined an invitation to the ceremony, but the stablehands went, hair slicked down, over the
ir worn jeans, clean white shirts, the creases where the pins had been stuck still showing. Eddie Whistler went too and lived up to his name, letting go with a big-city taxi-raising toot when the principal announced her name. Eddie gave her a silver necklace with a horseshoe charm; Chloe got tears in her eyes, kissed his whiskery cheek, embarrassing him so badly that his hands shook. Francisco gave her a bunch of wildflowers. Back at the barn, Fats had a gift for her, too: a brand new Hermès saddle and girth.
“You stole that son of a bitch,” she said, handing it back. “I don’t want it. I’m nearly eighteen. All my life I’ve been stuck in institutions. No hot saddle is about to make me add jail to the list.”
He took out his wallet and showed her the receipt. He’d gotten a hefty discount—he still had connections—but it was paid in full and it still cost a fair chunk of money. No one had ever given her such a present. On the back of the cantle a small brass nameplate bore her name in cursive script: Chloe Morgan. In the cool June air, Chloe stood before him in her jeans and a sweatshirt, the silver horseshoe and chain glittering between her small breasts. She had a blister on her left foot from the high heels Margaret bought her to wear to the graduation ceremony. They and the dress were in the back of Ben’s truck, the rebuilt Chevy Apache. She told her foster parents she was going to the school graduation party, an overnight do at Disneyland—they locked you in and you rode the Matterhorn bobsleds until you never wanted to see a mountain or a roller coaster again—Sounds like fun, Sweetheart, go on and have a good time. Here’s twenty bucks for snacks and souvenirs. She pocketed the money for lessons, and she came here as she had intended to all along. A whole night alone with the horse, no timetables, now that was a party. She rode Absalom in the dark, and Fats came out of the trailer to watch her. He leaned against the arena railing, the glowing tip of his cigar and the occasional flash of uplifted pint bottle defining him. An hour before dawn she and Fats were cantering on the damp sand at Huntington State Beach, laughing through a couple of beers at the way the horses pawed the breakwater.
Fats was a fine rider. He’d done some trick riding as a kid on the rodeo circuit, polished up his equitation during a brief marriage to an Alabama deb whose father raised Arabs before the breed was spoiled. When they stopped to rest, he reached over to give Chloe a friendly kiss, and though she was terrified, it was she who made the fatal turn of her face to meet his lips. She’d thought it over for months, how illogical it was to be attracted to a gray-haired drunk who smoked cigars and had a potbelly, how boys her own age were after her all the time, the Mexicans sometimes got into fistfights over her, and she’d kissed Francisco often enough to know she liked him, and kissing—but it was Fats she dreamed about—always. The breathy electricity inside that kiss surprised them both.
“I am old enough to be your goddamned daddy,” he said.
“Well, I never had one, but I guess you are that old. Still, you don’t kiss like it.”
He pointed a finger. “One foolish kiss in the moonlight don’t mean spit. You’ll be getting your hopes up for a house with a picket fence and rug rats. I’ve been through that more times than I care to recall. It don’t work, it will never work, and I don’t want it.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I just want to be your friend.”
“My friend.”
“Your close friend.”
They argued about that for a good ten minutes, then agreed to race across the sand to Pacific Coast Highway. Absalom snorted and pranced in the sea air, and Chloe gripped his mane with her right hand, leaned forward, squeezed her eyes shut, and gave him his cue. As Absalom exploded into a full gallop, she thought how she should have bet money on the race. Fats would bet on just about anything. It was a fair race. Both horses were in good shape and near the same age. Still, just as she knew she would, she won.
“We gave it a fair trial, Chloe. Now let go. He’s suffering.”
It had been that time a long while ago. They both knew it. Chloe motioned for Kit to come inside the stall. The girl grasped her outstretched hand. “What do you need? You name it and I’ll get it.” Tears overflowed and streaked her plump cheeks.
It took her a minute to find her voice, and when she did it was reedy. “It’s time to say good-bye, Kit.”
“No.” Kit pulled away. “No. I don’t want to.”
Chloe pulled her back. “Don’t be scared. You don’t have to stay, I won’t make you. But he was your friend, too. You were good to him. You were a part of his life. If you say good-bye now it won’t hurt so much later on.”
Kit looked around as if one of the bystanders might tip the vote.
“Like with your mom, Kit.”
“Don’t bring that up. It’s not fair to bring that up. Let go of me!”
“Please.”
She scooted in next to Chloe, put her arm around her shoulders, and together the two of them made her shaking hand press down onto Absalom’s neckflesh. Kit’s hand was clammy from wiping tears, Absalom’s neck was damp from sweat. Chloe held Kit’s hand and made her pull it once through the short black hair. When she lifted her hand, four tracks from Kit’s fingers stayed behind in the lather.
“I thought someday I might get good enough to ride you,” Kit said. “You are the most beautiful horse I ever—”
Her words choked off in her throat. She pulled her hand free from Chloe’s and ran out of the stall.
“Chloe?” Gabe said.
She nodded. “Every day of my life was a way of saying I love you to this beast. I never expected it to last even half this long. Send him home, Gabe. Do it quick.”
The silver needle pierced the intravenous tubing and the barbiturates penetrated the horse’s bloodstream. He breathed for a time, then, after one long body-racking shudder, he no longer breathed. His body fluids released into the cedar shavings. Chloe hugged Gabe to her, laid Absalom’s head down into the shavings, and stood up with Gabe’s help. One of the stable hands came inside and covered Absalom’s body with an old cooler blanket. Chloe looked back. The embroidery glinted in the flashlight glow. On the side of the blanket were two stitched oranges and the cursive lettering champion.
Gabe removed his doctoring tools and tossed them into the back of his truck.
Chloe said, “Did I have lessons to give tonight? I can’t remember.”
“Diane took them for you,” somebody answered.
“Maybe I’ll go on home.”
Gabe put an arm around her and thrust his hand into her right jeans pocket, removing her car keys. “You go on and take a little walk and then you come back here. We’re not quite finished.”
Numbly she did as he said, Kit leading her along. Alone inside the portable toilet, she stared up at the blue plastic walls. No tears would come. She threw up the Coke Kit had bought her, rinsed out her mouth with the hose outside, and walked back to Gabe, dragging the ankle cast in the dirt.
Midway between her truck and the breezeway stalls, Gabe stood with Casper and Billy, two of the rent string horses saddled up with full Western tack. They were rangy quarter horses, nothing much to look at, but sound and dependable, or they never would have lasted as rent horses. “Get on,” he said, indicating Billy.
“I should wait for the knacker,” she said. “He’ll want money.”
“It’s taken care of.”
“And Kit, I’m supposed to get her home.”
“She already called her dad. You’re flat out of excuses. Mount this horse, Morgan.”
She bit a thumbnail, looked back toward the breezeway to where his truck was still parked at a crazy angle. She whispered, “I don’t ever want to ride again.”
“You get back in the car after somebody blindsides you, honey. The first thing you do is get back behind the wheel and drive. This is the good doctor talking to you.”
“You’re a veterinarian.”
“Only difference between horse medicine and people medicine is the goddamn labels they glue on the prescription bottles. I stitched up your shoulder, didn�
��t I, when the tendon was showing, and it works. I’ve shot more penicillin into your butt than any white-coated M.D. It’s a matter of opinion, but I’d say it looks like I did right by you.”
She put a foot into the stirrup, and he hefted her behind, sending her the rest of the way up. Billy, always one for the moment, whinnied a spine-rippling hello.
Gabe led the way, taking them up a steep incline and off-trail to the fire road leading to the Old Camp trail. In the dark Chloe rode carefully, concentrating on each footfall. They went five miles at a walk, down into the forest floor where the last of the winter rains still shone from the creekbed, washing the smooth stones to a gray roundness. They were mounded up as if they had been hand fashioned, bright clay circles, a child’s architecture. Out of the thickest oak and eucalyptus trees they rode into the fire road proper and stopped at a cattle trough to allow the horses to drink. Just past here was where she and Kit had found the dead cow, but she couldn’t make out any carcass now. Coyotes might have dragged it into the underbrush, and turkey buzzards had probably set to recycling it. Gabe tapped her shoulder and she saw the outline of a barn owl resting on a tree stump. It stood so still it could have been carved of wood, but when a rein buckle rang against the horse trough, the bird took flight, its head turning nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. Then with that strange vertical lift of stubby body that flung it into the darkness, it was part of the night sky, one dark motion.
Gabe set Casper in an extended trot down the length of the fire road, forcing Chloe to follow. Billy had a stumpy gait, and if you didn’t post his trot, the next day the only thing you moved was your finger on the heating pad switch. Then Gabe went off through the brush, and Chloe lost sight of him. Billy set to whinnying again, that old call-and-response communication peculiar to horses. Each whinny resounded in her tailbone. Chloe called out in the darkness, “Gabe! Goddammit, this isn’t funny. Where are you?”
“Right here, come on up.”
Following his voice, she cut a series of switchbacks into the steep hillside, cursing Gabe’s path. She hated hills, everyone knew that; she’d ride on the flat all day if she had the choice. There was a perfectly good trail on the other side of the hill that inclined slowly, but no, had to be this way or not at all—men. Hills made her fearful. There was always that primal urge to throw herself over the edge. It came from nowhere, insisting she follow. She was out of breath and scared to her marrow by the time she found him, standing one foot up on a rock outcropping, smoking a cigarette. She dismounted, unhooked one side of the reins from the bit, and let the rein drop; Billy was trained to ground-tie, and he wouldn’t stray now that he stood next to his friend.
Hank & Chloe Page 22