Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Today he was in some kind of meeting with the principal of the elementary school where, next week, owing less to his credentials and more to their desperate need, he’d begin teaching third grade. At night she could hear him sighing in his sleep, grateful down to his dreams. Compared to the breadth of knowledge he carried around, what he required seemed so childlike. He was a true puzzle. In her thirty-four years, there had been three humans to whom she’d uttered the words “I love you”: a boy in high school whose name she couldn’t remember. Ben Gilpin, her last, best foster parent. And Fats Valentine, who never once, not even when he lay in his hospital bed dying, said it back.

  Chloe had said those words every time they made love, which was infrequent and, it seemed, always at her instigation. He’d be lying on the couch watching the races on television, drinking his gin, and she’d climb on, kiss his whiskered neck, run her hands down his pants until she had something to work with. Chugging along on top of the always-tired horseman, sensing how ridiculous that probably looked, she didn’t care, she needed so badly to feel connected. Gabe Hubbard, DVM, had known exactly where to touch to make her respond. With Gabe screwing was so automatic that it wasn’t even fun. With Hank, somehow, every time they turned to each other sex was brand-new. One time it might be fierce, each of them pulling so hard to get what they needed that they were slick with sweat and gasping for air. Another time, like a kiss on the cheek that grew into an embrace, things evolved slowly, transforming passion into something larger and kinder than she felt she deserved. After those times, Hank whispered in her ear, “You know, people aren’t really allowed to feel this happy,” he’d say, his breath raising the tiny hairs on her neck. “This happy, you’re supposed to have a license.”

  He meant marriage. Chloe understood just how overdue she was to say those three words to him. They were only words. She’d fix him supper and sneak up behind him and kiss his neck and just come right out with it. Maybe. She fingered the horsehair halter, the heavy silence broken only by the occasional passing of RVs headed to Lake Powell or, depending which way they turned, the Four Corners.

  One reason I’m excited about this job, Hank had said, is insurance benefits. The birth wouldn’t be covered because it fell under the category of pre-existing conditions, but the baby would be, covered the minute he was born. In the bright sunlight and perfect eighty-degree weather, Chloe Morgan felt her unborn child stir inside her. Stay put, she mentally sent to the baby. Nobody here is in any kind of rush.

  Ganado Elementary was linked by common buildings. Painted blue doors led to individual classrooms. The playground featured two basketball hoops and four-square lines newly painted onto the uneven blacktop. Across the way a few individual trailers served as offices. The school itself was set below a grassy yellowed hillside where most of the vegetation had been trampled down to earth by children’s footsteps. Chloe followed the pathway around the back of the main building until she came to a barn with stalls.

  In the fall air there was a definite equine scent. Cottonwood leaves blew across the makeshift corral, which was littered with aging, straw-laden droppings. If horses lived here—and the few pieces of equipment seemed to indicate they did—they were out to pasture for the day. She inspected the fence, constructed of tree limbs and baling wire. Maybe it looked like a joke, but against her hands it held, surprisingly sturdy, the way her own shack back in the canyon in California had added up to a larger sum than any of its individual parts. She wondered who had moved into it after she left, and if to that person, as it had to her, the four walls felt like a safe haven. Behind the corral the hillside rose gently. Chloe climbed all the way to the top, grateful to feel the pull of muscle in the back of her legs as she lengthened her stride. Near the top, a hundred yards away, five horses lazily grazed the scant forage near an old stock tank. Chloe shaded her eyes and studied them: An Appaloosa, one old gray so thick and stocky he had to be half draft horse. A buckskin, too, and one paint mare with conformation that, from where Chloe stood, seemed too good to be true. Chloe idly ran down the list of what the drawbacks could be—blindness, bad legs, a truly evil temper? Aside from the paint, the horses looked as if they’d served their usefulness and had landed at the school for tax purposes only. Well, that still beat Purina.

  She sat down on the ground to wait. Below her, Hank was inside one of those buildings, being so nice and helpful that by the end of the first week of teaching he’d have made friends, earned his students’ adoration, and have all those new stories to tell her at night while they ate dinner. What would she have to show, besides another inch to her midsection?

  Every now and then the horses looked her way, unimpressed, then continued to dine on their scant surroundings. Slowly, in no particular hurry, they were coming her way. Four horses, like those she’d imagined while sitting in her truck on the side of the highway. All present and accounted for, except for one, their leader, the black gelding with three ermine spots and the wide, wide heart, who should have been there, leading everyone home.

  3

  Nine girls and eleven boys stared up at their new teacher. Dark eyes, black hair, little moon-shaped brown faces, each one expectant, curious, and empty of judgment. Hank’s heart thudded inside his pressed shirt and his underarms grew damp. He wished Chloe were here beside him. She never got the jitters, whether squaring off with cops or confronting wild horses. That morning, she’d sleepily kissed him good-bye and said, “You won over Kit Wedler, I think you’ll survive third-graders,” and rolled over, snuggling deeper in the covers. The second he was out the door, he knew Hannah would weasel into his side of the bed, press her furry back against Chloe’s pale, scarred one, and the pair of them, looking for all the world like the animal and human halves of one mythological self, would sleep hard another hour. Sleep was good for the baby. He’d recommended she take naps, too, until she pointed a finger at him and he knew he was close to crossing a line.

  “I thought today we’d spend some time getting to know each other.” Aside from a few quick grins, the faces remained blank. “My name is Mr. Oliver,” he said quickly. “Before I moved to Arizona, I lived in California.” He pulled down an outdated wall map and pointed out the state. “Six hundred miles from where our classroom stands is where I lived. Right here. In a town called Irvine.”

  He traced the jagged coastline of his home state, remembering how easy it had been to teach at the community college. On the first day of classes, he passed out his course syllabus, briefly discussed which textbooks they would be using, mentioned the research paper that was mandatory to passing his course, and to prove he wasn’t all business, attempted a few jokes. Then he assigned fifteen pages of reading and cut them loose. By the next class, three or four had always dropped out, stunned by the fact that he expected them to do some actual work.

  Finally a hand shot up. Hank smiled, inwardly sagging with relief. A gold star for this kid. “Walter Johnson, isn’t it?”

  The children broke out in laughter, and Walter pursed his lips, pointing them at the others. “Gé!” he ordered, and jumped up from his seat, but the children didn’t stop giggling until another child spoke up.

  “Nobody be calling him Wal-tah,” the girl said.

  Hank checked his seating chart. His name informant was Belva Small. “Thank you for pointing that out to me, Belva. Tell me what they do call you, Mr. Johnson.”

  The boy sat down. “Dog.”

  “Short Dog!” another child hollered. “On account of he’s not so tall, enit?”

  This part wasn’t in the guidelines Mr. Genoways had handed him. This part was strictly seat-of-the-pants. “Dog, then,” Hank said calmly, ignoring Belva’s laughter. “Back there on my desk there’s an aquarium that needs setting up. Maybe later on you’d like to help me with it.”

  Dog Johnson nodded shyly, resting his embarrassed cheek against his fist. The other children stopped their teasing and wriggled in their seats, ticked off that the butt of their jokes had gotten the aquarium assignment.r />
  “Since I’m new to the school, I wonder if anybody has any questions for me.”

  He expected all hands to wave, children to leap to their feet, things to get a little out of hand. But the children were quiet again, looking slightly self-conscious, and Hank pondered what tribal faux pas he’d committed ten minutes into what looked to be a very long day. He sighed, remembering Principal Genoways telling him that direct questioning was considered bad manners in the Dinéh culture, particularly with strangers. Well, he’d have to remedy his stranger status, and turn questions into discussions. Hank called on Chuey Alberto, the tallest boy in the class.

  “Chuey,” he said, running his finger along the coastline of California, where the map changed from desert brown to coastal green to an impossible blue he’d never witnessed in the water. “I used to live near the Pacific Ocean, close enough to drive to in my car.”

  “Must be good fishing,” Chuey commented. “Big old trout in deep water.”

  Hank smiled. “Too salty for trout. But lots of clams, some tuna. I’m not that great a fisherman, truthfully. Maybe you can give me some pointers about the lakes around here.”

  Chuey nodded, the epitome of cool, an eight-year-old professional angler, and Hank got the feeling he’d made his first friend in room nine. “I know some of you have never seen the ocean. Let me tell you a little bit about it. The ocean makes a wonderful, rushing noise all the time because of the waves,” he went on. “Dolphins and whales live there. Every winter they swim down the coast on their way to Mexico, where it’s warmer.” They had no idea what he was talking about. “I can get us a book from the library about whales, or maybe a film. If you’d like that.”

  A movie! They grinned, and he began to relax. “I want you to know something. Here in room nine, our classroom,” he said, “it’s okay to ask questions. In fact it’s considered exceptionally good manners. So if anyone ever feels like asking me something, just raise your hand and I’ll try to answer. If I don’t have the answer, we’ll look it up together.”

  Rain Desbar held out both her hands and wagged them furiously. “Can I touch your beard?”

  Hank fingered it self-consciously, wondering if such a thing were permitted within the school boundaries. For the most part, the Dinéh men did not wear beards, lacking the profuse facial hair of whites. Hank envied them that each morning when he stood in front of the mirror deciding whether or not to shave off his summer’s folly. “I don’t see why not.”

  The children came to the front of the classroom, where they began to crowd one another to get to him. “One at a time,” he said. “We’re going to be together all school year.”

  Philberta Johnson and Nelbert Begay touched his forearms and squealed. “Ooh, he got hair on there, too.”

  “You swim in that ocean? Next to them whales?”

  Juanita Littlebird wanted to know on average just how many fish he’d caught and what he used for bait. Waterdogs?

  “You married?” Anna Ortiz and Tanya Blackwater asked in unison.

  “Don’t be asking him stupid marrying questions,” Chuey Alberto warned the giggling girls. “Mr. Hank, you got a son helping you chop wood? I am one good wood chopper, anybody here can tell you that.”

  Hank had lost most of the previous night’s sleep fretting. An hour before the bell, he’d printed MR. OLIVER, WELCOME TO THIRD GRADE, on the blackboard, then looked at the words from a few paces back, certain they looked bogus as he felt. But here they were, swarming over him, patting his face, offering to chop his firewood, curious and friendly.

  He managed to pass out the art supplies and help them make namecards for their desks, half of them decorated with blue whales, before the first recess. They squabbled over who got to hold onto his hands as he walked them out to the playground into the bright Arizona fall weather.

  “I’ll show you around,” Mickey Spottedhorse insisted. “I already been in third grade. I know way more than these awéé’ baby guys.”

  Hank was torn between eating his lunch in the sun and watching his students play, or retreating to the teachers’ lounge and enjoying forty minutes of peace and quiet. He supposed he needed to be social with someone over three feet tall if he was ever going to become a part of the whole at this school.

  The lower-grade teachers and the principal made room for him at the Formica table in the teachers’ “lounge.” After lunch ended, the room was transformed back into its original status: waiting area for parents, ersatz nurse’s office, and supply room. The fourth-and fifth-grade instructors, a man and a woman, sat by themselves on the couch next to a film projector. Like Hank, they were also white, but older, while the two women who taught first and second grade looked Indian and barely into middle age. Everyone said hello politely, scooted aside their chairs. Hank sat down, unscrewed the lid of his Thermos, and poured himself a cup of peppermint tea, the grassy color reminding him of Chloe’s blatant distaste for anything green. Except money. That I’ll take with an open hand, she often told him. The truth was, she didn’t eat enough fruit or vegetables, and vitamins alone couldn’t perform miracles. He kept up the threats. You want our child born with rickets?

  “Hank Oliver, third grade,” he said to the group, and after they said that’s nice, where you from, what did you do before this, they went back to reading old magazines or finishing their private discussions. Hank ate his carrot sticks in silence, dreaming about the baby, imagining as he often did that it would be a girl. He envisioned her barreling into the world the same dramatic way her mother had entered his life, uncivilizing every neatly swept corner. He heard his daughter’s first strong cries as she hollered out loud, declaring her presence. She would possess such an even disposition that the whole event would persuade Chloe that marriage was a part of the natural evolution of their procreation. There would be a small ceremony, during which he would slip a plain gold band onto her ring finger. She would kiss him and feed her bouquet to the ravenous colt. Then the three of them would put their shoulders to the wheel, work hard, and live long, productive, rewarding lives on the red rock his grandmother had left him.

  Of course he understood that babies were unique, their little personalities shaped in utero by the union of each parent’s DNA (which, there were studies, could be warped by diet), and God alone knew what other kinds of mysterious alchemy occurred in the womb. Simply to underscore her independence, Chloe might not agree to marriage. Walk with a light step there, he told himself. She’s here, and that’s what matters. Love doesn’t come easily to women like her, but maybe when the baby’s born…. In the meantime he was throwing as much money as he had into remodeling the cabin. One thing Hank knew for certain would transpire when this baby was born: For the first time since he’d met Chloe Morgan, tendered her his heart, the weary organ would be divided in affections.

  “So, how are you finding your first day, Hank?” Mr. Genoways asked, as he made his way toward the trailer’s door. “Everything going okay for you? You need anything?”

  “I’m fine,” Hank answered. “They’re great kids. Very enthusiastic. I’ve got high hopes for them.”

  The principal nodded and tightened his necktie. “Just the words I like to hear to settle my lunch,” he said and shut the door behind him.

  Hank folded his sandwich wrappings into his lunch sack. He had time for another cup of tea, more daydreaming, too, and was looking forward to both events. All the teachers were staring at him, but only Mrs. Chee, second grade, and Ms. Redwing, who taught first, were smiling. “Excuse me?” he said. “Is there a problem?”

  Mr. Walker, who taught the fourth/fifth combination class, directed his comments to Mrs. MacNeal. “Let me get this straight. He’s been here four hours and he still has hope.”

  Mrs. MacNeal laughed, picked at her greasy fried chicken bones, and the primary teachers looked away, annoyed.

  “Permit me an admonition, Mr. Oliver,” Mr. Walker said. “Set your expectations low. Half of these children are here only to take advantage of the free l
unch program. They can’t be expected to excel at anything academic, certainly not to master much above the basics.”

  “Oh, really? And why is that?”

  Walker smiled. “Quite simply put, the very nature of the beast.”

  Hank looked down at his empty cup. A large part of him was so uncertain of his ability to do this job justice that he wanted to walk straight out of this room and keep going, not stop until he tasted his troutless, familiar ocean. But a larger part, he was discovering, intended to stay. Hank crumpled his lunch sack and assembled his Thermos. He rose and pushed his chair in to the table. “I’d love to continue this riveting intellectual debate, but I need to get to the library before the bell.”

  Mrs. Chee stood up. “Let me tag along with you, Hank. I’ll show you where it is.”

  “Thanks.” Muffled laughter echoed behind him as they crossed the tiny schoolyard.

  “Betsy Redwing and I should have warned you,” Mrs. Chee said, her small strides alongside his forcing him to slow down. “Ken Walker drove our last third-grade teacher out two weeks before the Christmas break. Poor girl swore she’d sell shoes at minimum wage down in Phoenix rather than teach again. It’s not so bad here, honest. Just different. But his kind of bitterness is a real burden for the school.”

  “Then why on earth does he stay?”

  “Three more years until he gets his full retirement benefits. You couldn’t move him with a crane.”

  “And the children suffer? Is that school policy, Mrs. Chee?”

  She slipped her keys from her skirt pocket. “Change takes time. Try not to let it interfere with what you can do. And call me Audrey,” she said. “Betsy, Louise, and I are glad to have you on staff.”