Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “Here you go, Walter. I can never keep them on my lap either.”

  “Nobody calls me Walter.”

  “I do.” In those eight years away from the res, Junior had come to understand that one of the best things about Indian kids was that they weren’t shy, constipated about displaying affection. Anglo kids stiffly shook hands, afraid to hug, already emulating adults. This boy was equal parts eager and uncertain. Corrine had brought him up proper, respecting his elders, even when they showed up unannounced after eight years and suddenly turned out to be his father.

  “I ordered you some pie,” Dog said. “And coffee. But if you don’t like coffee, there’s Coke and other stuff. I mean, I could drink the coffee.”

  “I like coffee. Why don’t you come on over here and let me look at you?” Junior said. “Eight years old. Imagine, all this time my heart was missing something, and it turned out to be you. Damn. I’m your dad, Walter.”

  The boy fitted his slim shoulder under Junior’s, causing the beads on his jacket fringe to rattle. He looked up at him, eyes shining with Corrine’s same fire.

  “You don’t have to say anything. We’ll get to know each other. See what happens.” Junior let the boy set the boundaries. He kept his desire to swoop this child up in his arms and dance all through the restaurant in careful check. He’d learned a lot in that other world the past eight years. But smelling that boy, feeling his warmth, knowing his flesh was here, he knew he’d missed a great deal more.

  9

  “Get in and try not to piss me off,” Corrine said, indicating the passenger door of the truck.

  Junior looked around the old Chevy short-bed, seeing the broken radio knobs, the hairpipe necklace hanging from the rearview mirror, candy wrappers, and Coke cans littering the floor. “Jeez, Corrine, I never knew you were so sentimental. This is the same truck, enit?”

  “Used to be Uncle Oscar’s,” Dog said. “He gave it to Mom.”

  Junior remembered his and Corrine’s last night together, their bodies slick with sweat. In the bed of this truck, they had made a baby, Walter, perhaps on that last night.

  “It runs, and it’s a reliable vehicle,” Corrine answered. “That’s all there is to it. Everybody buckle up. We got to get home for dinner. There’s people coming.”

  “Oscar’s making deer-meat stew,” Dog said. “He invited my teacher. I want you to meet him.”

  “I’d like to. Better ask your mom, though.”

  Stretching his fingers across the bench seat, Dog measured out the space between his parents. Junior smiled, already thinking of Arizona summers, when the weather was bright as sterling, and they could practice roping cattle, play basketball, ride horses through the hills, go exploring. Or rent a houseboat on Lake Powell, do a little fishing, camp out. Maybe, if Corrine was feeling generous, he could take the boy back to Massachusetts and show him the Atlantic. “How’s my mare doing?” he asked.

  Corrine snorted. “Nine years later, he bothers to ask about his horse.”

  “Eight. I send money for her care. All I was asking for was a report.”

  “This white lady been riding her,” Dog piped up. “She lives with my teacher, Mr. Oliver. Mr. Oliver likes my drawings. He says I make great pictures. She’s horse crazy, and she’s going to have a baby.”

  “Horse crazy, huh?”

  Dog nodded. “She’s real good with horses. She don’t spoil ’em or hit ’em, and still they mind her.”

  “Doesn’t spoil them,” Corrine corrected. “Which is lucky for you, Whitebear.” She switched on the wipers and chuckled. “White girl looking after the old horse thief’s mare. That’s amusing.”

  Junior put his arm around Dog. The hell with what Corrine thought about that. They rode in silence the fifteen miles up Highway 89 to the 160, the road that led to Tuba City. Eventually, if you turned right, it went by Second Mesa, Kearns Canyon, and Fort Defiance. Then it forked off to the left into 191 and Canyon de Chelly. At the Main Street light in town, they took another left, passing the Chat ‘n’ Chew burger palace, the independent gas station, and several stores that had been built during his absence. The Navajo-owned Chevrolet dealer was advertising great deals on used cars, secondhand trucks, and four-wheel-drive Jeeps. How about that? Junior thought. Here, in this one small corner of the world, people still possessed the morals to call a used car used instead of “pre-owned.” The Quality Inn came into view, and Junior looked over at Corrine. “Right here’s fine.”

  She clicked on her turn signal indicator, braked, and Dog shifted in his seat. “Mom?”

  She smoothed her boy’s hair. “What?”

  “Oscar could drive him back,” he said. “After dinner.”

  Corrine hesitated. A car passed them, then another. She clicked the blinker off and continued down the street. Junior kept silent. He knew better than to say a word.

  He left the Johnsons at the doorway of their frame house, assuring his son that he only wanted to say hello to his mare before dinner, that he could walk the short distance down to the school by himself, he knew the way. The horse wasn’t going anywhere; he wanted to give Corrine and Dog some space, as well as think about being a father himself. Hearth smells came at him from various doorways as he made his way down the side road past parked pickups, junked-out cars, woodpiles, and stacks of old tires. The frozen ruts in the dirt toward the old school were deep and familiar. At the tail end of his elementary schooling, Junior had gone here. Jimmy’d stayed sober long enough to march him into the office and enroll him. The white kids called him “brown shit” or the more eloquent “timber nigger.” The Indian kids whispered stories about his white mother. Though it was culturally taboo to speak of the dead, their childlike fascination with such matters often overpowered the ban, and face it, his mother’s story was as dramatic as her pale skin color had been. Veronica Whitebear had hanged herself from a cottonwood tree out by the fairgrounds, a grocery store sack thoughtfully pulled over her face to spare whoever found her the more gruesome aspects of her chosen method of earthly exit. Her fingernails were newly manicured in a vivid shade of pink that to this day Junior could not bear. Below her bare feet, new patent-leather high heels lay on their sides in the dirt. Every last grisly detail was passed around the school. What the teasing white kids didn’t understand was that Junior felt grateful to be lumped in with the Indians. He’d choose to be a bona-fide goat roper any day over mixed blood. What the Indian kids didn’t understand was that his father had driven his mother to that noose, practically given her lessons on how to tie good, strong knots on a nightly basis. For years, in order to keep her from the cottonwood tree and the length of rope, Junior’d had to make himself very quiet, very still. But eventually the noise got to be too much to bear, and Veronica embraced the tree.

  The classroom exteriors were painted a sandstone color that made the demarcation between dirt and building indefinite. The school boasted a new sign with those pin-on letters, like every other school in America announcing basketball season. There was a game this weekend, Tuba vs. Cameron. He thought he might ask Dog to go, maybe Oscar too, if Oscar didn’t punch him out on sight. In the past Oscar had always appreciated a good game of ball.

  At the school barn entrance, Junior noticed a white woman bent low over the horses’ watering trough. She braced herself, one gloved hand clutching the tank’s metal edge. With the other she was hammering hard at the icy surface. She was breathing hard, her blond hair falling into her face, winter jacket unzipped to reveal an advanced case of pregnancy. Everywhere he looked today the world seemed to be full of mothers. He leaned against the weatherbeaten wooden doorframe, hands in his pockets, watching the woman pound away at the ice. Behind her, horses nosed over their stalls interestedly, but he didn’t see Sally. Well, goddamn, a defrosting iron only cost around fifty bucks. Maybe he’d buy one for the school, donate some time to work on fixing up this ratty old barn. He walked forward a few paces, and then from the recessed stalls, Sally looked up from her flake of hay, her whi
te muzzle tinted green, her comma-shaped nostrils quivering as she took in his smell, cataloged the memories, decided whether or not she knew him. She let out an inquisitive whinny, and Junior’s heart just about broke in two. He fell in love the same way he had all those years back when she was a damp little filly peeking around her mama’s flank. Hey, Beautiful, he thought, you’re growing up. Pretty soon, we’ll go for a ride again, talk things over, just you and me and the earth underneath us.

  The noise stopped as the pregnant woman let the claw hammer fall to the dirt. She placed both her hands on her lower back but made no sound. Junior watched her suck in her breath, grit her teeth for several long minutes, so long that he straightened up, thinking he was going to have to go over to her in a minute more, maybe pound her on the back or something to get her started breathing regular again. He remembered the children playing at the gate at Sky Harbor airport, and tried to picture Dog as an infant. Corrine would have held him every minute, sung him through fevers, celebrated every time he turned his head. Then when he started in with the crayons and the sketchbook, she had to have begun worrying. Damn, he wished he had been there. The pregnant woman squatted down to retrieve the hammer and apparently thought better of her actions.

  “Dammit, dammit, damn, damn, damn!” Her voice rose in fury almost one entire octave.

  Seemed pretty clear to Junior that breaking through the ice was only a matter of time; she was unhappy being in labor. So why wasn’t she tucked in a hospital bed, surrounded by nurses and monitors and all that expensive bilagáana medical equipment? He couldn’t imagine what she was doing in a reservation school barn. “Ma’am?” he said softly, trying not to alarm her.

  She turned to look at him, her mouth slightly open, a chipped front tooth visible. Her eyes startled like a skittish colt’s; then, as if she was ashamed to be caught here, she let him have it. “Who the hell do you think you are, spying on me like that?”

  He kept his voice casual, conversational. “I’m Junior Whitebear. That’s my mare, Sally. You need a hand there with the ice?”

  “I don’t need a hand with anything.” She grimaced. “Why’d you have to come back?”

  There didn’t seem to be a reason that would please anyone. From the guy on the plane on down to Corrine, every time he tried answering that particular question he came up short. “Well…” He didn’t bother explaining any further because right then the woman’s water broke. He’d seen this happen before, with animals, as well as in his brief and ill-fated year of premedical study at U. of A. The gushing fluid darkened her sweat pants. She let out an embarrassed “Oh,” splaying her legs like a horse, and clutched at her belly.

  He went to her. “Let’s get you inside somewhere warm.” He bent and scooped her up in his arms.

  She struggled in his grip. “Put me down, goddammit. I can walk wherever I’m going.”

  A tough one, and a mouth on her. “You planning on doing a Mary-and-Joseph in the dirty straw and horse buns here? Giving birth you need a clean, warm place. We can go right up the road here to my friend’s house.”

  She screwed up her face. “I’m not ‘giving birth,’ here or anywhere. Put me down.”

  “When the bag of waters breaks, you’re supposed to lie down and have the baby. Getting up can give you an infection.” He started to walk, looking at her belly, that taut basketball shape poking at her thermal shirt. “Surely your doctor told you that by now.”

  “My doctor said I’ve got thirty days to go.”

  He laughed, continuing to walk back toward the Johnsons’ house. Another contraction seized her, and she cried out. “You got maybe a couple hours.”

  “No! Don’t say that!”

  In his arms, she felt like maybe 150, not so much to carry back to the Johnsons’—the equivalent of two Western saddles and a sack of grain. As the contractions came and went, she rounded her back, burying her face in his neck. “It’s okay to yell,” he said, his laboring breath coming in visible silver wisps in the evening air. “Scream if it helps. That’s supposed to move things along.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “I went to college.”

  “Bully for you.” Her heart was no longer in fighting him. Junior held her close and reserved his strength for carrying her, for breathing, taking a brief time-out every fifteen feet or so to rest before moving on. She reined it in the entire way back to the Johnsons’, and for some reason he felt amused by that and oddly paternal, as if somebody upstairs had decided winter solstice was the perfect occasion to send Junior Whitebear as many lessons as could be stuffed into one day.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said, huffing steamy breath out into the cold night. “We can lay you down in the front seat of Oscar’s truck and drive you to the hospital in Flag. There’s time.”

  “Oscar?” she said.

  “Yeah, my friend.”

  “Oscar’s my friend.” She curled up in another contraction, stifled the yowl, and, counting back from the last one, Junior decided, Well, no, maybe there wasn’t time. This baby was going to be born soon, probably in the Johnson home, wherever they could clear space. “Better tell me your name,” he said. “I always like to know the names of the women riding my horse.”

  “Chloe Morgan.” Her voice sounded small and controlled for the large event taking place inside her.

  “Chloe,” he repeated. “Tell me, you always tend horses when you feel labor coming on?”

  “We’re having dinner at the Johnsons’. I went to see to the school horses’ water. They can go without hay, but not water. On the weekends the tank sometimes freezes—” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, and Junior could tell that this new pain thumbed its nose at the previous contractions.

  “Like today?” he said, trying to distract her.

  “Can’t you hurry?”

  “It’s not much further.” Her face was close enough to his that he could see her chipped front tooth up close and the lack of makeup, a plain girl, not what he was used to, pretty enough, but a hard kind of pretty.

  The contraction passed, and she took a breath, squeezing his arm. “I think we should stop.”

  “Out here in the road?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m nowhere near ready to have a baby. We don’t have a crib or anything.”

  Junior laughed. “It’s not like it’s the end of the world. Women say it hurts wicked bad during, but after, you have the present of a sweet-smelling new little baby to keep.”

  “Some present. Jesus. It really hurts.”

  Humming a little, he said, “A baby’s the best kind of present I can imagine. Even if it comes to you through pain.”

  “Like you’d know anything about that.”

  He winked. “I might surprise you.”

  She smelled like the Atlantic, fishy and raw, elemental, like some watery creature making a difficult transition to land. Standing outside his rented cottage in P-town, he had smelled the ocean hundreds of times over, taken the bracing scent for granted. Now he knew he’d never inhale it again without remembering holding this woman in his arms. Years of working the grinding wheel had erased his fingerprints, rendered his identity to a name in a gallery catalog. He was the sum of his work, nothing more. But here he stood, flesh and blood, holding on to a woman about to give birth, a woman who wielded a hammer like a journeyman carpenter.

  On the Johnsons’ porch, he turned Chloe sideways in his arms and kicked at the doorframe with his bootheel. When Dog opened the door, Junior shouldered his way inside. “Found her in the barn,” he said. “Somebody better call her doctor.”

  “Dad?” Dog said, trying out the word. “That’s the horse lady I was telling you about.”

  “Hank.” Chloe stretched her hands out to the pissed-off-looking white man standing behind Oscar. “I’m sorry.”

  Junior laid Chloe down on the living-room floor. He stripped off his jacket, rolled it up, and placed it beneath her head for
a pillow. The TV was on Wheel of Fortune, somebody’s grandmother getting all excited about buying an E. “Corrie?” he called. “Got a blanket?”

  Behind him he heard the clatter of silverware.

  “Oh, my God, is that Chloe? What did you do to her, Junior?”

  “Nothing except give her a lift. Her baby’s coming.”

  “I think we can see that.”

  “Who are you?” the white guy demanded, and Junior stepped between him and the woman in labor.

  “Listen,” he said. “She doesn’t need a bunch of questions, she needs some clean towels and the doctor. Quit acting like a jackass and get on the phone. Her water broke down in the barn.”

  The man’s face blanched until he looked like he was going into labor himself. “She’s in labor?”

  “Buddy, I’m telling you, she’s really in labor,” Junior said. “This baby’s coming now.”

  “Hank?” Chloe asked, then let loose with a string of words Junior couldn’t quite catch. It sounded like Spanish.

  Hank sobered up in a hurry. “Call the paramedics. Oh, my God, Oscar. Do you guys have paramedics?”

  Oscar said, “We got great volunteer firemen.”

  Junior surveyed the commotion taking place in the Johnson living room. Every corner was taken up by somebody posturing and complaining and paying no attention to Chloe. He looked around the room for Walter, and found him standing by the telephone in the kitchen. They made eye contact, and Junior tried to let his son know everything was going to be fine.

  Corrine grabbed the old Chief’s blanket from the couch, knelt down next to Chloe, tucking the blanket beneath her knees so her legs were bent. “You doing okay?”

  Chloe smiled. “Oh, sure, Corrine. I peed all over myself, my favorite thing to do. And by the way, this really fucking hurts. Way more than that stinking doctor said it would.”

  Corrine looked up at Junior. “It’s supposed to. Otherwise, people’d do nothing but make babies day and night. And that wasn’t urine, Chloe, it was birth waters. There’ll be more where that came from.”