He’s still handsome. But I just realized, just right now, that it hasn’t gotten on my nerves for a while.
“Why’s everybody looking at me?” he says.
Jordy says, “I like to look at you. Sue me.”
I don’t say anything. But I’m halfway thinking that—maybe just in this one moment—I was liking to look at Kevin, too.
“What are you guys doing?” he says.
I say, “Nothing.”
Jordy says, “Living life on Chloe time.”
Kevin says, “Those are two very different answers.”
I say, “Not so much.”
Jordy says, “She’s right. Not so much.”
“Mind if I join you?”
We say we don’t mind.
So Kevin puts on some jeans and a T-shirt and no shoes. And we do nothing—on Chloe time—for most of the rest of the night.
BEAUTIFUL
This is my paddling story for today.
Today Ethel and I are paddling on the blue sky. It’s the best, most amazing thing I’ve done with my life since Jordy and I stopped seeing the world and settled down.
The sun is out today. And the sky is blue, but with lots of puffy white clouds.
And there’s no wind at all, so the surface of the bay—I mean the estuary—is perfectly still. It’s like glass. Which makes it like a mirror.
So every time I look down at the water I’m paddling in, I see blue sky with puffy white clouds. It’s such a perfect reflection that some part of me really feels like we’re paddling across the sky. Which is exciting, but also scary. Because what’s holding us up? So I keep getting that feeling like the one you get when you’re walking on a pier, and you look down between the boards. And you feel like you should be falling, even though you’re not.
So I’m paddling on the sky today, and I’m not falling.
I wonder how many people can say that.
Okay, I have two paddling stories for today.
It’s an extra good day.
Ethel and I are really deep into the tidal flats. We’re paddling back in that spot where you have to steer your way along the little narrow canals. On both sides of our canal is something like land. But it’s the kind of land that’s waiting to be under water again. With those plants you don’t see on regular land. The kind that can breathe air or salty water, either one.
Like the ones we were standing on when we decided not to move to another apartment yet.
They’re my favorites.
This is where the most birds are.
Did I mention that Morro Bay is a bird sanctuary?
I guess I probably did.
Anyway, there are great blue herons and snowy egrets and brown pelicans and seagulls and sandpipers and a few kinds of other small birds that I don’t know the name for yet.
Off the left side of Blue Boat, a long way off, is Morro Bay State Park, where the birdwatcher people are gathered with their long camera lenses and their telescopes, watching the birds. I feel sorry for them. Because I have a much better view than they do, and they must like birds every bit as much as me. Maybe more.
No. Nobody likes them more.
All of a sudden, I see this really big flock of small birds flying. I mean really big. If I had to guess, I’d say there are about three hundred of these little guys. Each one smaller than the palm of my hand.
And when they fly, they somehow stay together.
I watch them for a minute, wondering how they stay together. They rise up high, all together. They sweep down low. All together. They even do loop-the-loops. How do they do that without even one single little birdy guy spinning out on his turn?
While I’m wondering this, they turn around and fly right in our direction. There’s like a cloud of them. They look like they fill up the whole sky. And they’re coming right at us.
And I get scared.
Not for myself, because little tiny birds like that won’t hurt much. I’m scared for them.
Ethel lets out a little whimper, but it’s so quiet that I think only I can hear.
Just as the cloud of birds is about to run right into us, it splits in two. Divides like a dark curtain when you throw it back in the morning to let the light in.
Half the cloud of birds passes safely on the right of us. The other half passes safely on the left.
And in that moment, there is the sound. It’s like a buzzing. Almost. It’s like the hum of the Earth coming alive. It’s the sound of six hundred tiny wings beating in the air near our ears.
I turn my head and watch the curtain close again on the other side.
Then the cloud of birds rises and swoops away.
I sit still with my paddle in my lap. With a thought.
Not thinking it exactly. It’s just here.
I think it’s thinking me.
Maybe it really is a beautiful world.
Then I’m so tired from that thought that I turn Blue Boat around—sort of a three-pointer in that little narrow canal—and I let the tide carry us home.
June 7th
Dear Dr. Reynoso,
You’re going to think I change my mind an awful lot. Maybe too much. But I’m thinking, sometimes my mind might have been wrong for a long time. And then it would be smart to change it.
Even so, first I said I’d write you again when I was ninety, and I wrote you again while I was still twenty. Then I said I wasn’t going to say what I decided about the world, because it wasn’t fair to decide, because I hadn’t seen everything yet.
I still haven’t seen everything yet. But I decided anyway.
I decided it’s beautiful.
I decided this when a cloud of hundreds of little birds, all flying together, opened up like a curtain and flew on both sides of me, and I could hear every single little tiny wing beating against the air.
That’s when I decided. But that’s not why. Because it isn’t about that kind of beautiful. We all know the world is full of that kind of beautiful. And we all know it isn’t enough.
It’s about people. Isn’t it?
I think I missed this point when Jordy and I were doing our big trip. He said the world was beautiful, and I said what’s beautiful about it, and he said the ocean and the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. So we went off to see them, and I thought that’s what it was about. But it wasn’t ever really about that. It was always about people.
So here’s why I decided it’s beautiful:
Because Jordy found a boy to marry, and he passed Jordy’s litmus test.
It might not sound like much, because the world is full of boys who are not that good. But that doesn’t really matter, because Jordy didn’t need lots of husbands. He only needed one.
That’s when I decided we’re all looking at the world wrong. We see beautiful things, but then we get stuck on the fact that lots of other things aren’t. But I’m thinking maybe we don’t need everything to be beautiful. Maybe we just need as much beauty as we need.
So, that’s it, I guess. I really don’t need to write again. But maybe I will anyway. Sometime. Just to say hi.
Thanks for telling me about blessing Jordy. It was a good idea.
Your friend,
Chloe
THE LION LOTTERY
Cowboy asks if she’s afraid of snakes. He’s six bales up in the hay barn, a roofed structure with open sides, and he has one in his hand. It’s green, not all that big but big enough, two or three feet long and the width of Cowboy’s thumb, which is to say, twice the width of her own.
“‘Fraid of snakes?” Cowboy asks, because he’s looking to hand it down. He’s using twin hay hooks to pull bales off the top of the stack in order to see if they are “moldery”; he doesn’t want to crush the snake.
She is afraid of snakes. But she reaches up on her tiptoes and takes it from him. She expects it to be slimy, but it’s not. Just dry and cool and strong, a long muscle. It whips both its halves around her wrist and hand, frightened.
This is the moment she knows. How it
will be between her and Cowboy, how far it will, by necessity, go. She wants to be wrong, but that won’t help. Someday soon, he will stand before her with only himself to hand off, and use the same tack. What’s the matter, girl? Scared? And she will take that bait, too.
Cowboys are like that. They test you, all the time. If you fail, it’s funny to them. That’s the sense of humor they’ve got.
She sets the snake down on the loose alfalfa and packed dirt, and it slithers away. Cowboy pulls a bale off the top of the stack and lets gravity bring it down. It lands with a muffled thump, dusting the retreating snake with greenish-gold hay flakes. A dozen mice scurry from their now-exposed cover, and Bob, the barn cat, goes crazy trying to chase them all at once. He splits his personality, fragments his little cat self, and has a temporary breakdown as they scatter.
“Git ‘em, Bob,” Cowboy says.
But Bob ends up with none.
Cowboy doesn’t feed Bob. Mousing is a vocation, Bob’s livelihood. Not a hobby, by any means. So he takes his mousing seriously.
He twitches, waiting for Cowboy to tumble another bale.
Diane briefly wonders at the fact that snakes should be saved and mice eaten. But in spite of her wanting it not to, it makes a degree of sense.
“Gonna ride today?” Cowboy asks. She knows it’s another test but not what the correct answer should be. She should write these things on her sleeve before leaving the house.
“He’s being snarky today. I’d have to lunge him for an hour to get the snark out of him, and I don’t have that much time. I might just bottle-feed the orphans and go home.”
Cowboy says, “Fletch is snarky every day.”
Diane realizes she adopted that word from Cowboy and feels ashamed. She has done that sponge thing again, taking up bits of the people around her. It’s one thing with Gil, one thing to absorb the man she lives with, but Cowboy—she doesn’t even like Cowboy.
“I thought horses were supposed to mellow with age.”
“Depends on where they started off, I guess.”
Another bale comes down. Only three mice scurry this time, and Bob learns from his mistake, targets one, and takes it. As he slinks around the side of the barn with his warm breakfast, Diane notices a baseball-size swelling on his side. Too sudden to be a growth. It wasn’t there two days ago. Abscess, maybe.
“You should have a vet look at that,” she says.
Cowboy laughs. “Bob don’t need all that.”
“Fine. I’ll take him.”
“They take care of themselves. And if they don’t, they don’t belong on a ranch.”
Great, she thinks. If they belong, they work their whole lives to survive, and if they don’t belong, they have to die to prove it. Hell of a thing.
Just before she leaves the hay barn, Cowboy asks if she’s heard about the bleeding-heart idiots who are out trying to make a game of messing up the state mountain lion lottery.
“I didn’t hear that,” she says, and her face feels numb. She thinks she’ll sell the damn horse, or give him away. Then she won’t have to work off his board anymore. Then she’ll never have to come back here and get caught in that lie, nor in any of the other messes she now sees as inevitable.
Diane sets the three warm bottles in the dirt at her feet. Plastic quart-size bottles with gigantic rubber nipples, filled with formula made of hot tap water and milk replacer powder. The three orphan calves run to the fronts of their respective pens and do that cow dance. Swinging back and forth, voicing their strange, impatient complaint. And they all do it at the same time, like some kind of singing, dancing musical group.
She doesn’t go in to feed them anymore, because they’re too big. Because they step on her feet and butt her thighs when the nipple clogs. And because last night’s rain has mixed with the mud and manure, and they’ve stomped it all into a homogenized, toxic muck that she doesn’t care to experience firsthand. Their tails and flanks are caked with the horrible loose, greenish stool of a nursing calf. They’re not cute anymore.
When they first came in from pasture, when their mommas died, they broke her heart with their cuteness. Lanky and fragile and doe eyed, no bigger than a good-size dog. Especially this one, with the black eye patch. She vaguely remembers thinking, How can people eat them? Although she has never been a vegetarian. Two months later, they’d grown so brutish and awkward and stupid that she actually heard herself ask Cowboy, “Feel like a hamburger?” But maybe she only said that because it was Cowboy, because she had to say something.
She pushes the nipple through the welded wire, letting the cross-hatched fencing prevent the little monster from pulling it off the bottle, which he tends to do. The sides of the nipple collapse, and she has to pull it away to allow air in; he butts the fence hard in protest three times before she can offer it back. A foamy white drool dribbles from his mouth as he sucks.
She hears Cowboy’s flatbed truck pull up. Come to check on that baby Barby, as he calls it, a Barbary sheep orphan. One of his new imports. He’s been trying to pair it with the nursing mother who lost one of her twins to a lion. Maybe. Fish and Game investigated and denied Cowboy a lion permit, judging it a coyote kill. But try convincing Cowboy. He’s tied part of the dead baby’s skin on the orphan to get the mom to nurse it. Good thing for everybody the undetermined predators are so goddamned brazen around here, they don’t even bother to drag the kill away.
“How’s it working?” she asks, to have something to say.
“Too soon to tell.” He glances over at the singing, dancing calves. “Roundup’s coming.”
It strikes Diane as a misnomer in the case of the orphans. How can you round up an animal already trapped in a six-by-six pen? But she knows what Cowboy is telling her. These three, along with all those pasturing free, will be vaccinated, castrated, tagged. Horns will be cut. The bellowing will be a nightmare, even if she’s at home. She’s been warned not to eat the “prairie oysters” at a roundup barbecue. She prefers not to go.
Before he vaults back in the truck, he says, “Remind ‘em to enjoy their balls while they can.”
It rankles Diane, because testicles are not any kind of oyster, and castration isn’t funny. Necessary, okay, but not funny. But the calf knocks that thought out of her, literally, because the bottle won’t draw.
She decides she will not try to ride her snarky gelding today. Just finish up as fast as she can and get home to Gil. On her way out, she does one more thing, something she hadn’t planned. She kidnaps the ailing Bob.
Gil says, “That’s an interesting-looking cat.”
“He’s one-quarter bobcat. I saw his daddy.”
She had, in fact, been the only one on the ranch to see him. Coming around a corner of the hay barn, when Bob’s mom, barely more than a kitten herself, first came into heat. The tom froze and looked at Diane, and Diane froze and looked at the tom. And wondered what exactly she was seeing. It was a wildcat, but no, it wasn’t. It was the size of a housecat. No, bigger. But not big enough to be a wildcat. But it had the face of a big cat, with tufted ears, and a stump for a tail. Only later did she learn that bobcats and housecats have been known to mate.
“Of all the kittens, he looks most like his daddy.” He is also the only one who has survived thus far. “But his nature is one hundred percent housecat.”
Gil scratches Bob behind the ears, and he purrs.
They stand in their studio apartment above the sprawling home of the old woman Gil works for, cares for, shops for, gardens for. Until he met the old woman, until they fled their last home, Diane had thought Gil to be increasingly unemployable.
Gil says, “There are twelve of us now. We’re all converging on the same hunter-safety course on Saturday. So we can get our licenses. We’ll need licenses.”
Diane says, “I’m taking Bob to the vet. I know there’s some money involved….”
Gil says, “Did you hear what I said? We have twelve now.”
“Yeah. That’s good. Can we afford it if I take him
?”
“I think you should.” His shoulders are sloped, belying his immense height, and his downturned head gives her a perfect view of his widening bald spot. Just once, if he would argue with her, make her life difficult. She would feel so much less guilty. So much more justified. But Gil never does anything to give her cause. Gil never does anything.
The straw bedding scratches her bare skin, but it’s not altogether unpleasant. It’s completely dark in this clean stall in the night, which is good. She is the first to speak. “I’ve just been thinking that my life would be simpler without him.”
Cowboy is quiet for a beat or two, but she can hear his breath. He still has his Wranglers half on, bunched around his thighs. She can feel that, where her leg drapes against his. Finally, he says, “That’s a decision only you and Gil can make.”
Diane laughs out loud. Spits laughter like a mouthful of something she meant to swallow. Even in the pitch dark, she knows she has wounded his pride in a manner impossible to quantify.
“Not Gil. I was talking about Fletch.” It was a continuation of a conversation they’d abandoned earlier. She can’t believe he thought she meant Gil. Wishful thinking, maybe.
“Oh. Fletch. Now why on earth would you go and give up on a good horse?”
“We’re not talking about a good horse. We’re talking about Fletch. Fletch is an idiot.”
An uncomfortable silence radiates. Then, like spare ammunition drawn from a back pocket, he says, “Know what I heard in town today?”
“If it’s about the goddamn lion lottery, I don’t want to know. It’s not something I want to talk about.”
Cowboy stands and rattles around briefly in the darkened stall, as if in search of lost clothing. “Fine,” he says. “Just so you know that a thing is true whether you talk about it or not.” Then he rolls back the big, heavy stall door and disappears.
Always Chloe and Other Stories Page 13
