by Maile Meloy
Travis, B.
Red from Green
Lovely Rita
Spy vs. Spy
Two-Step
The Girlfriend
Liliana
Nine
Agustín
The Children
O Tannenbaum
About the Author
Also by Mailie Meloy
Reviews
Copyright
CHET MORGAN GREW UP in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.
When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and unbroke horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.
“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.
He couldn’t explain, but he thought his father was wrong. He thought there was a difference, and that what people meant when they called a thing “wild” was not what he saw in the green horses at all.
He was small and wiry, but his hip made it hard for him to scramble out from under the horses, and he broke his right kneecap, his right foot, and his left femur before he was eighteen. His father drove him to Great Falls, where the doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee. From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.
His size came from his mother, who was three-quarters Cheyenne; his father was Irish and bullheaded. They had vague dreams of improvement for their sons, but no ideas about how to achieve them. His older brother joined the army. Watching him board an eastbound train, handsome and straight-limbed in his uniform, Chet wondered why God or fate had so favored his brother. Why had the cards been so unevenly dealt?
He left home at twenty and moved up north to the highline. He got a job outside Havre feeding cows through the winter, while the rancher’s family lived in town and the kids were in school. Whenever the roads were clear, he rode to the nearest neighbors’ for a game of pinochle, but mostly he was snowed in and alone. He had plenty of food, and good TV reception. He had some girlie magazines that he got to know better than he’d ever known an actual person. He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel shirts and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.
In the spring, he got a job in Billings, in an office with friendly secretaries and coffee breaks spent talking about rodeos and sports. They liked him there, and offered to send him to the main office in Chicago. He went home to his rented room and walked around on his stiff hip, and guessed he’d be stove up in a wheelchair in three years if he kept sitting around an office. He quit the job and bucked bales all summer, for hardly any money, and the pain went out of his hip, unless he stepped wrong.
That winter, he took another feeding job, outside Glendive, on the North Dakota border. He thought if he went east instead of north, there might not be so much snow. He lived in an insulated room built into the barn, with a TV, a couch, a hot plate, and an icebox, and he fed the cows with a team and sled. He bought some new magazines, in which the girls were strangers to him, and he watched Starsky and Hutch and the local news. At night, he could hear the horses moving in their stalls. But he’d been wrong about the snow; by October it had already started. He made it through Christmas, with packages and letters from his mother, but in January he got afraid of himself again. The fear was not particular. It began as a buzzing feeling around his spine, a restlessness without a specific aim.
The rancher had left him a truck, with a headbolt heater on an extension cord, and he warmed it up one night and drove the snowy road into town. The café was open, but he wasn’t hungry. The gas pumps stood in an island of bluish light, but the truck’s tank was full. He knew no pinochle players here, to help him pass the time. He turned off the main street to loop through town, and he drove by the school. A light was on at a side door and people were leaving their cars in the lot and going inside. He slowed, parked on the street, and watched them. He ran a hand around the steering wheel and tugged at a loose thread on its worn leather grip. Finally he got out of the truck, turned his collar up against the cold, and followed the people inside.
One classroom had its lights on, and the people he had followed were sitting in the too-small desks, saying hello as if they all knew each other. Construction-paper signs and pictures covered the walls, and the cursive alphabet ran along the top of the chalkboard. Most of the people were about his parents’ age, though their faces were softer, and they dressed as though they lived in town, in thin shoes and clean bright jackets. He went to the back of the room and took a seat. He left his coat on, a big old sheepskin-lined denim, and he checked his boots to see what he might have dragged in, but they were clean from walking through snow.
“We should have gotten a high school room,” one of the men said.
A lady—a girl—stood at the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, taking papers from a briefcase. She had curly light-colored hair and wore a gray wool skirt and a blue sweater, and glasses with wire rims. She was thin, and looked tired and nervous. Everyone grew quiet and waited for her to speak.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said. “I’m not sure how to start. Do you want to introduce yourselves?”
“We all know each other,” a gray-haired woman said.
“Well, she doesn’t,” another woman protested.
“You could tell me what you know about school law,” the young teacher said.
The adults in the small desks looked at each other. “I don’t think we know anything,” someone said.
“That’s why we’re here.”
The girl looked helpless for a second and then turned to the chalkboard. Her bottom was a smooth curve in the wool skirt. She wrote “Adult Ed 302” and her name, Beth Travis, and the chalk squeaked on the h and the r. The men and women in the desks flinched.
“If you hold it straight up,” an older woman said, demonstrating with a pencil, “with your thumb along the side, it won’t do that.”
Beth Travis blushed, and changed her grip, and began to talk about state and federal law as it applied to the public school system. Chet found a pencil in his desk and held it like the woman had said to hold the chalk. He wondered why no one had ever showed him that in his school days.
The class took notes, and he sat in the back and listened. Beth Travis was a lawyer, it seemed. Chet’s father told jokes about lawyers, but the lawyers were never girls. The class was full of teachers, who asked things he’d never thought of, about students’ rights and parents’ rights. He’d never imagined a student had any rights. His mother had grown up in the mission school in St. Xavier, where the Indian kids were beaten for not speaking English, or for no reason. He’d been luckier. An English teacher had once struck him on the head with a dictionary, and a math teacher had splintered a yardstick on his desk. But in general they had been no trouble.
Once, Beth Travis seemed about to ask him something, but one of the teachers raised a hand, and he was saved.
At nine o’clock the class was over, and the teachers thanked Miss Travis and said she’d done well. They talked to each other about going someplace for a beer. He felt he should stay and explain himself, so he stayed in his desk. His hip was starting to stiffen from sitting so long.
Mi
ss Travis packed up her briefcase and put on her puffy red coat, which made her look like a balloon. “Are you staying?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.” He levered himself out from behind the desk.
“Are you registered for the class?”
“No, ma’am. I just saw people coming in.”
“Are you interested in school law?”
He thought about how to answer that. “I wasn’t before tonight.”
She looked at her watch, which was thin and gold-colored. “Is there somewhere to get food?” she asked. “I have to drive back to Missoula.”
The interstate ran straight across Montana, from the edge of North Dakota, where they were, west through Billings and Bozeman and past Logan, where he had grown up, over the mountains to Missoula, near the Idaho border. “That’s an awful long drive,” he said.
She shook her head, not in disagreement but in amazement. “I took this job before I finished law school,” she said. “I wanted any job, I was so afraid of my loans coming due. I didn’t know where Glendive was. It looks like Belgrade, the word does I mean, which is closer to Missoula—I must have gotten them confused. Then I got a real job, and they’re letting me do this because they think it’s funny. But it took me nine and a half hours to get here. And now I have to drive nine and a half hours back, and I have to work in the morning. I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life.”
“I can show you where the café is,” he said.
She looked like she was wondering whether to fear him, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said.
In the parking lot, he was self-conscious about his gait, but she didn’t seem to notice. She got into a yellow Datsun and followed his truck to the café on the main drag. He guessed she could have found it herself, but he wanted more time with her. He went in and sat opposite her in a booth. She ordered coffee and a turkey sandwich and a brownie sundae, and asked the waitress to bring it all at once. He didn’t want anything. The waitress left, and Beth Travis took off her glasses and set them on the table. She rubbed her eyes until they were red.
“Did you grow up here?” she asked. “Do you know those teachers?”
“No, ma’am.”
She put her glasses back on. “I’m only twenty-five,” she said. “Don’t call me that.”
He didn’t say anything. She was three years older than he was. Her hair in the overhead light was the color of honey. She wasn’t wearing any rings.
“Did you tell me how you ended up in that class?” she asked.
“I just saw people going in.”
She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright, and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped—he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.
“Did I make a fool of myself ?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to come back?”
“When’s it next?”
“Thursday,” she said. “Every Tuesday and Thursday for nine weeks. Oh, God.” She put her hands over her eyes again. “What have I done?”
He tried to think how he could help her. He had to stay with the cows, and driving to pick her up in Missoula didn’t make any sense. It was so far away, and they’d just have to drive back again.
“I’m not signed up,” he finally said.
She shrugged. “They’re not going to check.”
Her food came, and she started on the sandwich.
“I don’t even know school law,” she said. “I’ll have to learn enough to teach every time.” She wiped a spot of mustard from her chin. “Where do you work?”
“Out on the Hayden ranch, feeding cattle. It’s just a winter job.”
“Do you want the other half of this sandwich?”
He shook his head, and she pushed the plate aside and took a bite of the melting sundae.
“I’d show you if you could stay longer,” he said.
“Show me what?”
“The ranch,” he said. “The cows.”
“I have to get back,” she said. “I have to work in the morning.”
“Sure,” he said.
She checked her watch. “Jesus, it’s quarter to ten.” She took a few quick bites of sundae and finished her coffee. “I have to go.”
He watched as the low lights of the Datsun disappeared out of town, then he drove home in the other direction. Thursday was not very far from Tuesday, and it was almost Wednesday now. He was suddenly starving, when sitting across from her he hadn’t been hungry. He wished he’d taken the other half of the sandwich, but he had been too shy.
THURSDAY NIGHT, he was at the school before anyone else, and he waited in the truck, watching. One of the teachers showed up with a key, unlocked the side door, and turned on the light. When more people had arrived, Chet went to his seat in the back of the classroom. Beth Travis came in looking tired, took off her coat, and pulled a sheaf of paper from her briefcase. She was wearing a green sweater with a turtleneck collar, jeans, and black snow boots. She walked around with the handouts and nodded to him. She looked good in jeans. “KEY SUPREME COURT DECISIONS AFFECTING SCHOOL LAW,” the handout said across the top.
The class started, and hands went up to ask questions. He sat in the back and watched, and tried to imagine his old teachers here, but he couldn’t. A man not much older than Chet asked about salary increases, and Beth Travis said she wasn’t a labor organizer, but he should talk to the union. The older women in the class laughed and teased the man about rabble-rousing. At nine o’clock the class left for beers, and he was alone again with Beth Travis.
“I have to lock up,” she said.
He had assumed, for forty-eight hours, that he would go to dinner with her, but now he didn’t know how to make that happen. He had never asked any girl anywhere. There had been girls in high school who had felt sorry for him, but he had been too shy or too proud to take advantage of it. He stood there for an awkward moment.
“Are you going to the café?” he finally asked.
“For about five minutes,” she said.
In the café, she asked the waitress for the fastest thing on the menu. The waitress brought her a bowl of soup with bread, coffee to go, and the check.
When the waitress left, she said, “I don’t even know your name.”
“Chet Moran.”
She nodded, as if that were the right answer. “Do you know anyone in town who could teach this class?”
“I don’t know anyone at all.”
“Can I ask what happened to your leg?”
He was surprised by the question, but he thought she could ask him just about anything. He told her the simplest version: the polio, the horses, the broken bones.
“And you still ride?”
He said that if he didn’t ride, he’d end up in a wheelchair or a loony bin or both.
She nodded, as if that were the right answer, too, and looked out the window at the dark street. “I was so afraid I’d finish law school and be selling shoes,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep talking about it. All I can think about is that drive.”
THAT WEEKEND was the longest one he’d had. He fed the cows and cleaned the tack for the team. He curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended.
Inside, he sat on the couch, flipped through the channels, and finally turned the TV off. He wondered how he might court a girl who was older, and a lawyer, a girl who lived clear across the state and couldn’t think about anything but that distance. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, but it wasn’t the restlessness he had felt before.
On Tuesday, he saddled one of the horses and rode it into town, leaving the truck. There was a chinook wind, and the night was warm, for January, and the sky clear. The plains spread out dark and flat in every direction, except where the lights glowed from town. He watched the stars as he rode.
At the school, he tethered the horse to the bike rack, out of sight of the sid
e door and the lot where the teachers would park. He took the fat plastic bag of oats from his jacket pocket and held it open. The horse sniffed at it, then worked the oats out of the bag with his lips.
“That’s all I got,” he said, shoving the empty plastic bag back in his pocket.
The horse lifted its head to sniff at the strange town smells.
“Don’t get yourself stolen,” Chet said.
When half the teachers had arrived, he went in and took his seat. Everyone sat in the same seat as they had the week before. They talked about the chinook and whether it would melt the snow. Finally Beth Travis came in, with her puffy coat and her briefcase. He was even happier to see her than he had expected, and she was wearing jeans again, which was good. He’d been afraid she might wear the narrow wool skirt. She looked harassed and unhappy to be there. The teachers chattered on.
When the class was over and the teachers had cleared out, he asked, “Can I give you a ride to the café?”
“Oh—” she said, and she looked away.
“Not in the truck,” he said quickly, and he wondered why a truck might seem more dangerous to a woman. He guessed because it was like a room. “Come outside,” he said.
She waited in the parking lot while he untied the horse and mounted up. He rode it around from the bike rack—aware that he could seem like a fool, but elated with the feeling of sitting a horse as well as anyone did—to where Beth Travis stood hugging her briefcase.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Give me your briefcase. Now give me your hand. Left foot in the stirrup. Now swing the other leg over.” She did it, awkwardly, and he pulled her up behind him. He held her briefcase against the pommel, and she held tightly to his jacket, her legs against his. He couldn’t think of anything except how warm she was, pressed against the base of his spine. He rode the back way, through the dark streets, before cutting out toward the main drag and stopping short of it, behind the café. He helped her down, swung to the ground after her, gave her the briefcase, and tied the horse. She looked at him and laughed, and he realized he hadn’t seen her laugh before. Her eyebrows went up and her eyes got wide, instead of crinkling up like most people’s did. She looked amazed.
