Loving Chloe Read online

  They had only cantered for a few moments. Maybe she’d come down wrong. That sharp pull inside her, and later on, when she peed, it was a funny color, not bloody, no “mucus plug,” whatever the hell that looked like, just wrong. She’d walked the mare back to the pasture, stepping gingerly, expecting something dramatic, like a bona-fide labor pain, to strike her belly. But it didn’t happen. She even went so far as to wander over to the clinic, hoping some doctor might be around seeing to an emergency, but everybody had gone home, and those people worked long enough hours as it was without bothering them with what was probably nothing. When, an hour later, the pain disappeared, she saw no reason to mention it to Hank. Hank worried enough, and with his mother in such bad shape he didn’t need any extra problems.

  At home she’d let him tuck her in bed early, finished a mug of horrible green soup, and sneaked a Milky Way when he was busy working on the leaky kitchen faucet. Fear tired her out. For an hour she lay in unbroken sleep. Then she’d awakened with a variation of her losing-the-baby nightmare. This time she’d left it in the woods in order to enter a cross-country horse event. She was riding Absalom. Together they took fences at record speed. When she remembered that Absalom was dead and the baby might be trampled, attacked by wild animals, crying all alone out there in the woods, she woke drenched in sweat, her heart racing. Hank was asleep next to her, his right hand beneath her pillow. She hadn’t the heart to wake him.

  This morning she’d felt fine, had almost erased the pain from her memory. Then the walk from the truck brought the shadow of the pain back, a little yanking pull that refused to be ignored.

  She placed a hand on her back, took deep breaths, and felt much better. In her mind’s eye she pictured the rattle made by Junior Whitebear. February 2 was thirty-three days off. Plenty of time to get the stuff Dr. Carrywater said they needed. A clown kachina suddenly appeared from behind one of the ladders leaning against the old building. His black-and-white stripes blurring in front of her eyes, he leaped straight at her, shaking his watermelon rattle, puffing out his belly in a parody of her condition, making everybody laugh. Chloe stood rooted to the spot, afraid to move. The dancer smelled of the rich black-and-white oxides with which his face and midriff were painted, and down deep, a masculine scent as strong as a horse’s. Again he shook the rattle, his oversize lips and paint-dotted cheeks so close to her own he seemed frustrated she didn’t understand what he wanted. Then Hank was at her arm, gently backing her away.

  “He’s warning you to move aside, Chloe. Watch now. Right where you were standing, that’s where the next dancers will come from.”

  And they did. They seemed to rise out of the earth itself, scores of them appearing from empty spaces, transforming the drab brown buildings and gray winter sky to a festival of colors. Big-eyed Buffalo Dancers carrying bows and arrows, Rainbow Dancers with muffs of white fur and massive headpieces, the heavy-winged Eagle kachina with his yellow wooden beak. It was otherworldly, the singing and rattles focused on celebrating the shortest day of the year with a dance to bless their people. A sun-faced kachina in his red-yellow-and-blue circle face shuffled by, turning to face the non-Indian onlookers. His slit eyes and inverted triangle mouth appeared mocking. Hank seemed entranced, but the painted stare made Chloe understand how distinctly out of place they were. Here, they were watchers, not members of a tribe three times attacked by the Spanish. The Hopi had had the Catholic religion foisted on them; had been ordered to surrender a good portion of their crops to that same church, responsible for beating their warriors and for burning some of them alive. Until that moment they hadn’t been a fighting culture. In desperation they’d thrown a couple of priests off the cliff, and since 1680 no Catholic church had bothered them. This was deep spiritual calling being enacted before her. They had no business gawking at it like some Hollywood movie. She glanced over at Hank, witnessing the yearning in his eyes. He ached to know all cultures inside out. Maybe he wanted his white skin and fractured life to fit into the sea of brown faces and their ancient family ways now that his family was so far from him. Iris’s letters all sang the same refrain: Henry, your father and I simply have to believe you’ve taken leave of your senses….

  Chloe stepped aside to let a kid dressed in so much winter wool that only his eyes and nose were bare find a spot between adults to stay warm. The wind stung her face and blessedly, once again, the baby inside her seemed quiet.

  The Johnsons’ house was close to home. Hank had a beginner’s technique book on acrylic painting for Short Dog, one of his used-bookstore finds. Chloe could always say she was too tired, could they drop off the book and go home instead? Oscar’s award-winning venison could be packed for the road. It’s the best, he’d said, a rib-sticking meal, you know? Come eat with us. I promise you guys an evening you’ll never forget.

  She looked up at the dull sky and knew it would be rude to turn the Johnsons’ supper invitation down. I’ll ask Hank to rub my back, she thought to herself. It’s just a pulled muscle. I won’t ride anymore. Everything will be okay. In front of her, the dancers stepped in their ancient knowing rhythms.

  Part 2

  Tuba City

  8

  It was into a true Phoenix rainstorm that Junior Whitebear deplaned from the United 747 and began the long, slow trek across Sky Harbor Terminal. From his window seat he’d noted the runway blackened with rain as the plane landed, imagined the hiss as landing gear met wet tarmac. Now visible through the splattered airport windows was the wintry worst southern Arizona had to offer: a gray December rain, just verging on sleet. Back in the Bay State, where he lived, weather like this suggested an optional raincoat and an excuse to sit inside and have a drink until it passed. Here people drove into one another’s cars, sandbagged their non-native landscaping, called up the television stations as if hassling the weathermen might do something about it.

  In one hand Junior held a zippered leather duffel carry-on, in the other one of those trashy lawyer-turned-thriller novels with the embossed gold title. Once inside the terminal, he set it down on the first empty seat he came across. Stupid book had cost him almost seven bucks at an airport newsstand. They weren’t known for being repositories for great literature, but by the end of chapter one, Junior’d decided he’d rather read the magazines in his seat pocket instead. Nevertheless, for that kind of béeso the least he could do was recycle it.

  All around him travelers walked purposefully in every direction, squinting at dim terminal screens, trying like hell to get the numbers squared up with the gates. Junior had spent most of the five-hour flight anticipating how he’d feel once he reached Arizona. Only subtle differences were discernible. His breathing seemed slower, aligning itself with the pace of eight years previous, when he’d charged out of the state into a larger world he was convinced would bring him satisfaction. He checked his watch; he’d have to hustle to claim the old man’s remains before the mortuary closed. Maybe he should hold a memorial service, dump Jimmy’s ashes in an old Gallo bottle, let the drinking buddies stop by and tip one last swallow in memory of Jimmy Whitebear. One thing drunks always had plenty of was buddies. They possessed a unique logic, which at its most fundamental layer insisted there was no reason they could not imbibe the fruit of the vine for fifty years and emerge unscathed. Jimmy was no different than anyone else in that particular tribe, except that now he was dead, but there was company to be found in the afterlife, too. Nobody in Arizona would miss one more dead Indian.

  After dispensing of the earthly remains, Junior would be alone in the world, with no immediate relatives connected to him whatsoever. There were a few distant aunties and a cousin or two, but he hadn’t seen them in over a decade. He had the feeling this change diminished the jewelry he’d made, the money he’d earned, the miles traveled in his thirty-eight years—his worldly résumé disintegrating while he flew over the country, back into his old life. Well, to be honest, that worry had lurked in the back of his mind all the time before Jimmy died anyhow. Lately he pretty
much started over every single day, beginning with waking up and discovering with whom he’d fallen asleep.

  He got in line at the America West ticketing counter behind a young couple trying to manage six pieces of luggage and their little boy. About four years old and wound up with energy, he was wearing hearing aids that plugged into a radio-size battery pack. His mother, a tall, tough-looking blond with hair shorter than her husband’s, was signing to him the same offhanded way she might have spoken if the kid could hear. Junior didn’t know sign language, but its translation was fairly universal: Settle down, young man, or there will be memorable consequences. The line moved ridiculously slow, and the boy kept on trying to run off. Finally the father scooped the rambunctious young one up in his arms. The boy hugged him fiercely, jabbering to himself and driving a toy car across his father’s shoulders. The look of complete acceptance that came over the man’s face made Junior want to take up Jimmy’s profession, professional wine tasting.

  “Ticket to Flagstaff,” Junior said when he made it to the ticketing counter.

  “This must be your lucky day,” the America West clerk said. “Last seat on the last shuttle going out tonight. Weather’s coming in.”

  “Looks to me like it’s already here.” Junior leaned the arm of his deerskin jacket on the countertop so that the beaded fringe hung downward as he signed the credit card receipt. His black hair was bound into two plaits that hung down his back nearly to his waist, heavy as a second set of arms. He had bound them himself early this morning, in another time zone, in the false light of a hotel bathroom. This woman ticket seller had the look: She wanted to undo the bindings, rake her fingers clear down to his scalp. She was just inches away from reaching across the counter to give them a tug. When women did that he fought the urge to tweak their nipples, ask them how they liked their own space being violated. Thanks to Kevin Costner and the Hollywood movie studios, Indians were sex symbols, dark skin and long hair a source of enviable intrigue, not emblems of poverty and injustice. He chided himself. She just wanted a little flirting, that’s all. “Should I expect a lot of turbulence?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  The bruised-plum smile the counter girl shot him seemed to cast her teeth in a shade of blue that reminded him of the inside of mussel shells. The lipstick starkened her already white cheeks to an unhealthy pallor, similar to what he’d seen on too many sick boys in the seaside art colony where he’d been living for the last couple of years. These nineties ladies and their Elvira makeup—they looked like they had chalk running through their veins. Did they think all men were latent necrophiliacs?

  “You could always stay at a hotel here in town. Wait and see what the skies are like in the morning.”

  “Yeah, I could do that.” He raised one eyebrow and she stared at him, fingers poised over the ticket. Any man approaching forty appreciated a pass, but Junior got the feeling the wild bareback ride in fancy sheets she was offering came with a hidden price tag. In the morning she’d squint and ask him what kind of Indian he was, claim some distant relative of hers was Cherokee; they frequently said Cherokee. Despite all outward appearances, she could be carrying the virus he’d watched decimate the population of his little town on the tip of the Massachusetts coast. These days you wrapped the rascal and said your prayers. Was one night and another debit on his credit card worth the worrying? He leaned closer to let her know he was flattered. “Sugar, you’re making it awful hard”—he paused to let the double-entendre perform its trick—“for me to walk away. Maybe we can do something another time. I got to get on up to the res tonight.”

  “The reservation?” Her eager smile withdrew. She didn’t look like she’d heard of anyone actually living on a reservation. “I guess somebody there’s expecting you.”

  He adjusted his inlaid bracelets along his wide brown wrist and thought of the old man, his fists seemingly made of bone, the cutting remarks that slipped so easily from his father’s tongue just before he started hitting his wife or his son. Imagine, all that pain reduced to what fit in a casket, a crematorium fire, a mortician’s ash box. “No, ma’am, not a soul. Just have to settle up one old debt and be on my way back east.”

  “Too bad. Here’s your ticket, sir.”

  Sir. Adios. Sexual tension ebbed, and her smile geared up for the next customer as she waved good-bye.

  He was hungry, but on board United Junior’d accepted one of those awful hot bread sandwiches, and now his gums felt purely lacerated. Coffee, he thought, a little jump start, if there was a decent cup to be found that didn’t cost five bills now that, thanks to Seattle, coffee had been elevated to near religion. Airport terminals all smelled the same: Dirty carpet, recycled air, the sweat of nervous travelers rushing to planes, their poky souls unable to keep up, left stranded and fretting in the cavernous building. Terminals were spooky to begin with, homes to heavy machinery passengers depended on to lift them from here to there without a second thought of all the underpaid, pissed-off help at the controls. Junior watched out the window of many a plane while luggage flew from hand to asphalt and the guys in the yellow jumpsuits enjoyed the perks of the job. He never traveled with any more than he could stuff under the seat in front of him. Like the storm clouds gathering upstate, he could feel the presence of all those travelers’ confused spirits, their leftover expectation for a vacation they missed and the childlike ability to huddle together in corners where nobody swept. It was such a lonely, lost-dog feeling that it made him tally up all his regrets of the last nine years.

  Women used to top his do-over list. Simple girls who broke him in that he’d outgrown and abandoned. Their needs had never entered into the equation. Somehow, they had led a skinny half-breed to these long-legged beauties who got hot for him the moment they saw his jewelry. Despite their bony appearance, these women could be ungodly strong. They’d wrestle him into bed and ride him until he lay drained at their long, elegant feet. Next they talked him out of earrings or a bracelet, dumped him, and went on to the next guy. He guessed he’d become immune to women. His regrets weren’t about the female sex anymore. Things went a little deeper than that. He was going home to settle his conscience, deal with the guilt of having done well in the off-reservation world once and for all. Nothing but physical confrontation could remedy that particular illness. Not the money his jewelry was bringing in, not those big-city galleries that hosted his shows, not the parties people threw for him that he always ended up sneaking out of when he could no longer pretend to be enjoying himself. It was time, and Jimmy’s death gave him the prod he’d needed.

  Hoisting his duffel, he made his way to the gate. This was Arizona, all right. Weavings draped down the cinderblock walls in the escalator area. A group of tourists pored over the jewelry case in one of the airport gift shops. They were buying turquoise earrings and liquid silver necklaces, spending large. It was maybe the last hour of vacation and they wanted a memorable purchase to make up for whatever had been disappointing. For every tourist woman walking into the gift shop, a minimum of seventy-five dollars fell on the credit card. Double that, if it was a trading post, which was one reason he still let them sell his work up at Cameron.

  He bought some mocha java from a college-age Indian kid, and the boy smiled at him as he handed over the cup. “How’s it going, brother?”

  “Good enough so I can’t complain. And you?”

  “I’m in out of the rain.”

  “A good place to be.” Junior stuffed a buck in the kid’s tip jar and walked on. There was a time he would have felt at the peak of success to have mass-produced pieces of his work on consignment in one of these gift shops. Such ambition was considered high for reservation life, but after a year or two away, he knew how low it placed in the larger world. His success had exceeded his ambition. Sami Gee, his agent, said he was now considered “collectible,” a word that sometimes made him feel good, like an Anasazi petroglyph turned up unexpectedly on a canyon wall when hiking a difficult trail that led to someplace beautiful.
Junior could lay down cash for fine things. The Nogales custom bootmaker Paul Bond had plaster casts of his feet. All he had to do was punch up their telephone number and tell Ernesto what kind of skins he fancied, and select a style for the tooling on the shaft. The trappings of success didn’t measure much on a person. Their actions spoke the larger truth. In Tuba City his French jeans would draw smirks and comments of selling out. The old guys who’d taught him silver would look at his work and give that half nod that meant, Sure, this is flashy stuff. What are you doing to make a difference, here, among your people?

  A question he knew better than to try to answer. Three hundred odd miles up the mountain, providing the snow held off, then in the dusk he would see his old stomping grounds. Along the way, the bonus of a Flagstaff sunset. Somebody might take pity on his old skin, offer him a tasty meal of squash stew, want to listen to his stories. He thought of Corrine Johnson, his first love, and wondered if she still lived in the same old house of her mother’s, or if she’d moved on to the city, like she always threatened she’d do.

  Junior stared out the windows at the arriving and departing jets, waiting for his flight to be called. Kids from the adjacent gate raced back and forth, thick into the business of play. Every so often their parents set down their newspapers and made feeble attempts at hushing them, but he could tell they were hoping they’d wear themselves out and sleep on the plane. Junior loved children. They were tiny aliens inspecting the planet. Especially infants. On planes they gave adult passengers the once-over and an opportunity; all they wanted in return was a genuine smile and some respect. Give them any bullshit, they’d reward you with crying the flight’s duration. If he was lucky enough to make eye contact, Junior always made certain to give babies a respectful nod.