Hank & Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Maybe he would write her a letter—but where did one mail it? In care of Hughville—Postman: go as far as you can down a dirt road until you sink a wheel, then hoof it until a white dog comes after you, but keep in mind that’s nothing compared to the girl. In care of the restaurant—to Jack Dodge—how about the veterinarian, who danced her so close, who had known the pleasures she was capable of giving—who might know them again? Would she read it, or noting the return address, at once throw it away? He thought of her tough mouth, the grace she ascended to when riding horses, and how beyond all reasonable expectations, she had managed to make a limp and leaning on a cane attractive. She fit by his side in bed, her head tucked into the hollow of his arm, her calloused hand resting on his chest. Simply put, he fit inside her. Most nights he berated himself for his stupidity; other nights he stayed up all hours looking for hair shirts. He slept fitfully, trying hard to take pride in his repair work on the decomposing cabin, quietly troubled that at any moment the whole mess might come tumbling down on his mortal head.

  He looked for his sister, Annie, over long expanses of prairie. He stepped carefully across the rocky, pitted earth; the singsong chirp of yellow prairie dogs drifted past him like the jeering taunts of schoolchildren. He saw evidence of their burrows but never caught them out in the open. Bright golden flowers bloomed in wild patches. In their thick centers, a fat throat of dusty brown pollen lay exposed to the wind. Grasshoppers leapt everywhere, covering his boot tips when he walked through the brush. It was so quiet he could hear the sound of the insects constantly chewing, as if they’d learned their lesson and would make it through the snowy winter this time, no matter what. But Annie, like his grandmother, was nowhere to be found. He wanted to believe they both hovered near his shoulder, a mist of energy too important to leave the earth. A faint memory of touch, a soft smell that was gone the minute he tried to name it, a sharp ache inside his chest that lifted—was that Annie, or was it Chloe? He was tired of himself; he didn’t want to go back to California, didn’t care if he ever taught college again. He watched his skin burn, freckle, then tan up. Daily he drove his body into the cabin repair hard enough to sweat all over. He felt his beard begin to fill in since he’d abandoned his razor, the first time since he was nineteen years old he hadn’t scraped it down to the skin. He looked forward to icy cold showers under the hose he’d rigged up on the side of the house, tried his best to fill each hour with an act of purpose and never to let the Indian children see him without a smile on his face.

  “You’re living like a hermit, Hank,” Joyce Greer insisted in the doorway. “Come home with us to supper.”

  “I’m kind of working on something,” he told her, thanking Dave for dropping off his mail. He set his hammer down and wiped his sweaty face with a rag.

  “Writing a book, are you?” Joyce craned her neck in the doorway. The Olivetti sat on the table, a blank sheet of paper threaded in the platen.

  “Just a few letters.”

  Dave honked from the pickup. “Let him alone, woman. The man will survive another day without your pot roast.”

  “Next week, maybe,” Hank said, and watched them drive off in the battered old Ford. He threw the letters and bills on the tabletop without looking at them, and finished the hinge on the makeshift cupboard he’d fashioned from scrapwood. The cupboard face shut now, flush with the opening, but it had taken him six tries, and he’d ruined one hinge, forcing it. He set the cupboard into the toggle bolt on the wall and turned the screwdriver until it cranked down tight. He swept up the wood shavings, wiped the tools down with oil, set them in the toolbox, and shut the lid.

  For dinner he fixed himself a bowl of cereal, sat and watched the vitamin-infused flakes grow soggy, then pushed it aside, spoon still in it. Earlier, when he’d ripped out dry rotted paneling in the kitchen, he’d found a metal toy behind the wood, a lead soldier atop a stocky three-legged horse. He set it down by the lantern and turned to his mail. The large manila envelope from Asa contained a few bills and a note he didn’t feel like reading, but glanced over. Phil’s got Babycakes up for sale, can you believe it? He bought some quarterhorse he’s calling Burly Yippie-ti-yi-yay, Pardner…. There was a postcard from his parents, who were at their fifty-fifth high school reunion, somewhere in Michigan. Your mother is doing fine. Reassurances. Nothing between the lines except white space. There was a letter from the college announcing faculty meetings, forwarded, a mistake, assuming he was to be back for classes next term. Look as he might, there was no regular white envelope, hand-addressed in block printing to Hank Oliver.

  When they wanted to truly test the mortals, the gods wandered around disguised as beggars. It was always the poor old couple seeking a crust of bread who asked for a mortal’s hand, never a youthful magnificent in an ermine robe. If you refused—well, Arachne got turned into a spider, Echo and Narcissus ended up yoked to a life of repetition and reflection.

  He remembered watching her in the school arena, once after she’d left him. Her cane hung over the top rail, a length of rope tied to the halter of young Thunder. She moved slowly but surely, convincing the colt to follow, praising him each time he minded her, repeating her actions patiently when he missed her cue. Hank had stood watching, too far back for her to see him, too distant to hear her voice, not that anyone would have noticed him—Phil Green and his students were rapt, the awe spreading over their faces as she turned the skittery colt into her best friend. She knew animals the way he’d hoped to know myths, from a deeper instinct that was integral to her nature. Hannah sat by the fence, waiting. She was always accompanied by the dog, they were part of each other. Chloe in the ring—her quick, sure movements, the colt coming to her side as if he had finally found his teacher, his mother. Phil winking and tipping his cowboy hat, the students fixed—all of it blurred into that great blue sea of otherness that did not matter, could never matter in the way she did—would always matter.

  He took a sheet of paper from the box and clicked his pen. He drew a picture of the cabin, the sorry roof, the corral fence—how it would look when he got to that stage. He drew a map of the roads to take off the highway and indicated the few landmarks he now knew.

  “Dear Chloe:

  “We had a date August 13th—your ‘birthday’—remember? I’ll come to you, meet you halfway, or you can come here—you might like it—clean skies, no power, just enough rain in the afternoons to validate siestas, plenty of room to ride horses. Sometimes children from the Navajo reservation ride over on ponies, bareback, homemade reins, my God, you should see them, they’re fearless. Their horses don’t know what to make of carrots. The kids think that’s a terrible waste of vegetables. They tease me about my work on the cabin, and tell me I work so hard I’m missing what’s important—Father Sky, the summer flowers, the good hard rains. They live in such poverty it breaks my heart. I tank them up on lemonade and cookies, and then they lie, and tell me I’m doing a good job, that yes, everything looks just great.

  “Am I? Who can say. Wouldn’t you know it, all my schooling and when I need it most, there’s no myth for me to call on to say these words. I’m on my own here, Chloe, fumbling through my fingers, trying to say I miss you, I need you, and I want you with me, wherever that has to be. Say you’ll come visit me. At least think about it. There’s no phone, you can have your own room, I’ll sleep in my car, whatever you want.

  “Tell Molly I miss her. Say hello to Kit. Think about our good times, and how many more we can make together, looking for lost dogs, facing down the legal system, etc. This is two-step country, lots of bars where they play music just an hour south of here. You could teach me to dance. Think of it as one of those rare opportunities that come along once in a lifetime—the chance to get me away from the library once and for all. Does it sound as if I’m backing my way into asking your forgiveness? I know I’m a coward, but let me tell you, the scariest thing isn’t asking you to take me back and hearing you say no, it’s wondering if I’ll ever hear from you again.”

>   He sealed it inside the envelope, then made out a check to Phil Green. Give her the horse, he wrote. If she asks, you can say it’s a gift from a friend.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Chloe set up the summer riding program at the stables as usual, three groups of rich camp kids Saturday morning, then the teenage boys from the Carlson Youth Ranch for juvenile offenders in the late afternoon. The camp kids, though obnoxious and riding horses only because it was a camp requirement, paid well; the Carlson boys earned good behavior points for the privilege of riding, and them she taught for free. She smiled, complimented, and encouraged her way through three sets of spoiled girls in Camp Kiwah T-shirts, took time out to douse her steaming head with the hose at high noon, had a bite of sandwich, raced out to teach the last group, then worked the boys until sundown. The horses got tired and had to be watered several times. If it hadn’t been for Kit there alongside her, she couldn’t have managed. By dark she nearly always felt ready to cry, just plain tired-out miserable, too whipped to count her receipts. Summer wasn’t even halfway over. Maybe it would never end.

  “You should call Hank on the telephone,” Kit said one seethingly bright July lunchtime. “The telephone is neutral territory for feuding lovers.”

  “It’s what for who?”

  Kit shrugged and sipped her mocha Slim-Fast milkshake. “Just something I read in Cosmopolitan. You don’t have to try it. Put some of us might be getting a little bit tired of watching you pout all the time.”

  Chloe threw her sandwich to Hannah, who gratefully nosed the bread off the turkey and downed each ingredient in a single separate bite. “I don’t pout. I might be in a bit of a bad mood, but I hide it fairly well.”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Ask Francisco. Or my dad. Even Lita the terminally optimistic says so. She’s probably making you a crystal charm to wear to improve your chakras or something.”

  Kit’s smile was ingratiating. Chloe matched it with one of her own. “Don’t you have horses to water?”

  Kit tossed her can into the wastebasket. “On my way, master.”

  Hannah trailed Kit, her tail tucked under her haunches. She didn’t want any part of Chloe’s bad mood. After she and Kit left the office, Chloe thought about what Kit had said. Maybe she would call him up. What could it hurt? Just be friendly—no fooling around—just hi, how’s your mom doing, stuff like that. It had been over a month and a half now—surely they could be civil to one another. She used the tip of her pen to turn the office phone’s old rotary phone dial. It rang twice. “Could I talk to Hank, please?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Chloe Morgan.”

  “Oh, I see,” the voice said. “Well, sorry, doll, but you lost your chance. He moved to Arizona.”

  “He did?” She stopped drawing circles on the desk blotter. “When?”

  “Right after school let out.”

  “So who are you? His condo-sitter?”

  The voice laughed. “This is Asa, his officemate from the college. You remember me—I met you way back in January, and I came to your lunch gathering after court—sang harmony, didn’t I? With your fan club. I’m renting the place from him.”

  She remembered him now. The smart ass who ogled her breasts. “Right. Do you have his address in Arizona?”

  “I might be cajoled into parting with it. Listen, I’m alone, you’re alone, Hank’s five hundred miles away—any chance you might be free for dinner?”

  “Oh, piss off,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Kit stuck her head in the office door. “By the way, Hannah’s limping again.”

  “She is not.”

  “Okay. I made it up.” Kit let the screen door slam.

  There was a sound of brakes outside, then a chorus of screaming childrens’ voices. Chloe craned her neck to look out the window and sighed at the sight of the maroon van filled with wriggling girls. “I guess the second group’s here,” she said. “May as well go earn some money.”

  Camp funds kept her flush, but she lived for the Carlson youths. When Mark Chapman brought them in the first day, they were wary little macho men, strutting up and down, cussing in Spanish, making remarks about her cute behind, about Kit being a tidy mouthful—and it was true—Kit was voluptuous now, her fat melting away, revealing her breasts and the beginnings of a waist. Lita had showed her how to French-braid her hair to keep it out of the way while she worked, and the style showed off Kit’s cheekbones. Chloe liked to let the boys mill around awhile so she could study them, get a feel for their personalities. They’d been convicted of more than five misdemeanors apiece, ranging from petty thievery and vandalism to chronic truancy. By the time the court sent them to Mark at the Carlson Ranch, they were in a holding pattern between juvenile hall and committing their first felony, which Mark admitted wasn’t a possibility, it was an inevitability and would eventually send them to prison. Most of them would graduate the wrong way, no matter what the ranch did for them. They came from horrific home situations, worse than any of Chloe’s foster homes. By fourteen, they had been beaten, molested, gotten on a first-name basis with the juvenile court judges, and labeled incorrigible. Whatever Chloe did for them, she knew it was a Pollyanna notion to expect that six weeks of horses could straighten them out. Learning to ride wasn’t a family.

  She unlocked the tack shed door and whistled. Mark rounded the boys up. Three tall black boys, with geometric designs shaved into their haircuts; two stocky Mexican boys, with muscled arms and set jaws; one rail-thin white boy with ink-pen tattoos of swastikas carved into his hands—her group lesson. They lined up, and she handed them each a halter and lead rope. “Follow Kit,” she told them. “Down the hill there to the pasture. Each of you catch yourself a horse, and bring him back up here to get saddled.”

  “What?” they exclaimed, nearly in unison.

  “I said, catch yourself a horse.”

  Kit was already showing them the pasture gate. Six tough hombres, instantly humbled, transformed by thousands of pounds of horseflesh into scared children. She shaded her eyes and watched them timidly approach the wily geldings. The horses were sick and tired of camp kids; they wanted to spend the rest of the day eating hay and sleeping. No sooner would one boy lift a halter in hope than the horse would duck his head and turn away. She felt a big smile crack across her face. This was what it was all about.

  “You’re looking a little tired, Chloe,” Mark said. “Is this stuff with my boys too much for you? I wish I could get hold of some money to pay you.”

  “Not to worry, Mark. It’s the best part of my job.”

  “Have you ever heard of the concept of leisure?”

  She sighed and stretched her arms above her head. “What the hell am I going to do with a day off?”

  On the second visit, Anton, Marquise, Diego, Aaron, Cordero, and Willie were down to the pasture before she could tell them to go. By the third, they bargained over choices for horses, already having made favorites. From now on all Kit had to do was hold the gate.

  “They’ve been so good I hardly know what to do with them,” Mark said. “You ought to write up a grant proposal and get this program federally funded.”

  “And watch my liability insurance suddenly grow a whole bunch of zeroes after it? No thanks.”

  The fifth week the boys were mad to gallop those horses. It was like watching an old John Wayne movie, them getting Western. While they moved the horses through their paces, she and Kit spotted three apiece, correcting leg placement, trying to get them to understand the notion of rein length, to feel the horse’s mouth in between the leather and the nickel bit. They slowed down to a walk when Chloe asked them to, drew hands down to pet neckflesh automatically. Elmer was well-matched to Aaron, the slight white boy. Elmer didn’t know from swastikas; all he knew was the boy would never fail to bring him a lump of sugar, to stand quietly and brush him until the gelding’s lips started to droop in relaxation.

  “Next week we’re going on a trail ride,” she told
them. “We’ll go up and down hills, out past the dry lake, and across some pretty country. You boys think you’re ready for that?”

  A chorus of yeses indicated they were more than ready. But it was also the last lesson, after which they would return to the ranch, and she wouldn’t see them again.

  She sat on the fence railing while they walked the horses off to cool them. All day there had been the oddest sensation in her belly—a kind of fluttering now and then—as if something small flew inside her, confused, like a moth in a porch light. She placed a hand over her belly as if to quiet it. Too much of that processed lunch meat. She should get back to skipping meals, eating only one a day, but lately she was just so damn hungry. Filling up the empty places with food, like Kit used to, that’s what I’m doing. But deeper down, she knew it wasn’t that—that it might be something more serious, and she couldn’t even say what she feared out loud.

  She drove up to Gabe’s office that night around ten-thirty. The lights were out, but his truck was there. She touched the hood; cool, he’d been here a while. He never slept much, and she knew he nearly always checked in late in the evening when Cynthia was unconscious in her designer sheets and he was feeling at odds. If he had a patient just out of surgery, or was keeping an eye on some animal he was worried about, he’d sleep there all night on the cot she’d called home for a while. She walked around the building and knocked on the side door.

  Gabe opened it. “Hey, stranger. Come on in and bring that cranky blond girl with you.”

  “Quit trying to impress my dog, Gabe. She remembers your shots.”

  He ruffled the dog’s fur, and she took hold of his arm in her jaws and shook it playfully. “I had a sportsman’s lunch with Hugh today. Edith’s mare again. I spent two hours stitching her ass back together where she broke through the barbed wire.” He patted his stomach. “Got a pastrami sandwich in the bargain, but it seems like three days ago. I’m starving. You hungry?”