“Junior.”
“What?”
“If I know any one thing about being a mother, it’s that you can’t behave selfishly one hundred percent of the time. Sooner or later, you have to put the child’s needs first.”
Her words made his heart feel as ancient as the canyon, as if a soldier’s gun pressed against the organ, ordering it to keep on walking despite its exhaustion, its penetrating thirst. He took off his beaded jacket and laid it down on the soft sand, smoothing its fringe. “Then make love with me,” he whispered. “Right here, out in the open. Nobody’s looking except maybe a few ravens. One more time, Chloe, so I’ll know I didn’t imagine you.”
She looked at him a long time. “You want too much.”
“Only your heart and your daughter.”
Chloe began pulling her clothes off, angrily yanking at buttons. “Us falling into each other’s lives has to be some kind of cosmic joke, that’s what it is. Jesus, what a mess. We’ll make love like there’s no tomorrow, but what about when the sun comes up?”
“Then we’ll get dressed. We’ll try to bear up. All my life I’ve been doing that, Chloe. I’m a fucking expert.”
There were tears in her eyes, too. When he could bear to open his own, Junior looked over her shoulder, checking to make sure the horses hadn’t strayed too far. Every rock, reed, and ruin was blurred, doubled. Where there were two horses there now stood four, two of everything, including themselves. If magic really did exist, why weren’t there separate lives available, ample space, another point in time where one half of Chloe’s heart could grow into another whole, make each man happy, grow old alongside him, from morning coffee to their final goodnights? In his mind’s eye he saw Reed growing into a strong young woman, skipping between her two fathers like their lives were nothing more complicated than a series of stones one balanced upon to cross a river. Maybe, if he was lucky, he might walk away with that much.
Despite her attempts not to, Chloe started to cry on the drive home. Junior offered to pull over, get her a drink, but she shook her head no, told him to keep driving. They continued on that way, her biting back sobs and him feeling useless and responsible until the last thirty miles or so from town, when he watched Chloe start to pull herself together. She scrubbed her face with the back of her hand, she ran her fingers through her hair. She reached over and touched him with such tenderness that he wanted to scream. She asked him what was wrong.
Junior found it difficult to string the words together. He patted her knee. “Nothing.”
By her expression, he could tell she misunderstood, thought he was shutting her down.
“I can tell something’s bothering you.”
“I’m thinking, all right?”
“Tell me what about.”
He shook his head.
Five miles later she tried again. “I picked up a letter from Kit just before we left town. I haven’t read it yet. Want to hear it?”
“Why not.”
“Look at that. There’s two letters in here. Well, I’ll read the first one and look at the other one later.
“Dear Chloe,
“Here’s the deal. I did everything you asked me to do so please don’t say anything to Lita or my dad, promise? I got a pregnancy test, negative. I got that HIV test, also negative, but the lady said I have to get another one in six months just to be sure even though I’m probably totally one hundred percent fine since we used the rubber, that groady green thing I will never, ever forget! And I went to the group thing and I wasn’t the youngest idiot there, I wasn’t even the first girl to go to bed with some dork because she thought it would solve all her problems. It’s like, an epidemic or something, girls believing that fucking will make a guy love you! Sorry, I know you hate it when I cuss, but I mean, really, what’s the correct vocabulary word? Screwing? Is that any better? Intercourse, I don’t know, somehow that sounds even dirtier than just saying fucking which is probably what everyone calls it in secret.”
Chloe laughed. “Score one point for the redhead.”
“Yeah, I guess we could all take a lesson there,” Junior said.
“I get now why you wanted to sleep with Junior but I am so glad you didn’t! Hank needs you, Chloe. What a geek he was when you first met him. It’s like you single-handedly gave him a life while Junior—”
Chloe stopped reading. “Never mind. This was a dumb idea.”
“Finish it.”
“Junior, you’re already upset. You don’t need the ramblings of a romantic teenager on top of—”
“Finish the damn letter, will you?”
Chloe looked at him. “If you want me to.
“Junior could have anybody, even somebody famous and beautiful, like that Isabella Rosselini chick.
“Now it’s your turn to deal with stuff. I’ve put your mom’s letter in here. I hope you read it. Go see her, Chloe. Find out. In the words of somebody I know and trust, ‘It’s not going to get manageable until you do.’
“Love forever and ever,
Kit”
“P.S. Tell Reed I miss, miss, miss her! Hannah, too. Have you broke Thunder to saddle yet? You promised you’d wait for me. Don’t forget. High school still sucks, but oh well, only three more years! If you see Junior, tell him I will always think he is the handsomest Indian in the whole entire world.”
She stopped reading. “Oh, my God.”
Junior said, “She’s right, especially about that last part.”
Chloe folded the letter back into the envelope. She leaned over and kissed Junior’s cheek. “Yes, she is. You are one studly hunk in buckskin. I just wish you’d tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Sorry. It’s personal.”
“And what happened last night wasn’t?”
He gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Chloe. Can you maybe give me some space here?”
“I can give you all the space you want.”
Now she was really pissed. What was he supposed to do? Being called handsome was small consolation when you were not going to end up with the prize. In the parking lot of the Post, he cut the engine and looked down at his deeply pigmented hands. A fine trace of ash lined the creases of his palms. More than anything he wanted a shower and to scrub that away, even if in the process it took his skin off. Chloe scooted over next to him. He felt her arm graze his, as painful as nettles. It was unbearable to have her so near when he knew she was going home to Hank.
“We’ll work this out,” she said. “Some way or another. Some miracle will come to us.”
“Or not.”
She took his hand. “Junior, let’s just give things a day to settle. I’ll meet you here tomorrow, for lunch. We’ll talk. I love you.”
He nodded. Sure, right. Maybe someday world peace would be number one on everyone’s agenda. Chloe got out of his car and walked to her truck, her limp pronounced from the strenuous ride into the canyon. She held the letter from Kit in her hand. He watched her drive off and sat alone in the Jeep for a long time, nursing his sore heart. Well, he needed gas or he wasn’t going to make it home to Aaron’s. He pulled into the Chevron station and set the pump. Leaning against the car, he noticed the manila envelope lying in the backseat. He opened the door and reached for it. It was something to do while the gas pump ticked off its gallons.
Jimmy’s death certificate said he had died of exposure; the secondary cause of death was listed as liver disease. A bank account with a passbook was there, with a seven-hundred-dollar balance. It surprised Junior no end, as he’d never known the man to hold onto a nickel when he could unload it in a liquor store. He’d give that money to Ganado Elementary, let them establish an art supply budget. Then in a small white envelope at the bottom of the packet, he found something entirely unexpected: his own birth certificate. The embossed seal was barely discernible to his fingers. It was as if over the years, somebody had rubbed the paper over and over while they gave its contents considerable thought.
Long ago the problem of lacking proper bi
rth registration had been resolved when Junior’s mother had produced his baptismal records, his tribal registration, and in a story he’d often found amusing, recounted Jimmy having to claim his only child while standing before a Flagstaff judge. Junior had forgotten about the birth certificate. His passport and driver’s license served for identification. Never having expected to encounter the piece of paper, he now inspected it eagerly.
CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH
State file #15136
THIS CHILD: Walter James
RESIDENCE OF MOTHER: Phoenix, Arizona
MAIDEN NAME OF MOTHER: Veronica Louise O’Reilly
MOTHER’S RACE: White
FATHER OF CHILD: Manuel Hector Lopez
FATHER’S RACE: Mexican
BIRTHPLACE: Sonora, B.C.
USUAL OCCUPATION: Laborer
KIND OF BUSINESS OR INDUSTRY: Agricultural
There had to be some kind of mix-up. This kind of thing happened all the time with Indians. But why had he never heard that his mother had lived in Phoenix? And the birthdate was his own, May 29. Jimmy Whitebear was his father; he’d sworn to the fact in a courtroom. But if James Walter Whitebear wasn’t his father, then maybe Junior wasn’t half-blood Navajo at all.
The car behind him politely honked. He removed the pump from the Cherokee’s tank, question after question tumbling forth into his brain. Where did he get to call home—the place where he’d grown up, fought his battles of acceptance, or was all that suddenly dismissed? Would his aunties turn their backs to him? Or did he have living relatives he’d never met? What did that make his son? Definitely more of an Indian than his father. And—he couldn’t say it out loud. He could hardly bear to think it—what did it mean for his jewelry?
Junior set the envelope on the passenger seat, paid for his gas, and pulled out of the lot. He felt his heart turn upside down and shake itself empty, like the crematorium box minus the ashes of a man who he now understood had a perfectly good reason for hating him. Had his mother’s sadness come from holding in her secret while her husband beat her child? How had she made the move from a Mexican laborer to Jimmy Whitebear? Did she consider the reservation a step up, or had she been so desperate for security she was willing to sacrifice herself and her son?
He drove blindly into town, stopped at the Navajo barber’s and sat thumbing through a two-year-old Newsweek. All the stories of impending doom seemed as pertinent and hopeless as the day they were first published. When it came his turn for the chair, he sat down. The barber took hold of the ends of his long braids. “What are you after, brother? Trim the ends?”
“Cut them off,” he told the man. “Make me look like everybody else.”
23
The Greeks appropriated all the credit, but it was the Oriental sages who articulated the concepts of reincarnation, the four ages of man, that whole business of the dreamless sleep. Yet when you boiled down all the myths and stories, the emergent soup made things clear and simple: Only matriarchal religions came to grips with death.
Hank stood at his mother’s hospital bedside, holding his daughter, tears scoring his face. From time to time, he reached down and stroked his mother’s hand. The doctors and nurses were boating down the river of denial here; nobody he asked would affix the word “terminal” to her condition. Which was absurd. It hardly took a medical degree to ascertain Iris was dying. He wanted her to look peaceful, but the truth was that thanks to the morphine, she appeared remote, uninvolved with the business at hand. Most women saw old age as the end of things, but it was a time to be respected, to be heard, as vital as any earlier beauty. Women had two doors before them, the start and the finish, while men could visualize only the way out. That’s because women give birth, he thought. The door for entering this spinning, daft planet never leaves them, it’s there inside, even if they lose a baby, or when the ability no longer exists. So wouldn’t it logically follow that death signals a graceful passage into the company of the departed? He thought of his sister, Annie, dead nearly as many years as he had been alive. Mother, wherever you go, I hope there are temple bells and violets in bloom. She’s waiting for you, so go whenever you’re ready.
He carried Reed into the lounge so he could feed her a bottle. She nestled her sleepy head against his chest and squeezed his index finger. When Chloe fed her, Reed held onto a hank of her mother’s hair as if this thin tether bound them. Chloe always laughed, but Hank understood how Reed felt. Caring for her these past few days, he was overcome with love for his dusky-skinned daughter. All the male poets took a stab at explaining women at one time or another—Yeats with his spiraling gyres was on the right track. Whether one was caught up in loving a woman or losing one, the path was twisted and dangerous. Nervous little orations executed in tidy meter were nice stuff, but when it came down to your mother’s deathbed, what could a son do but stand there, weak-kneed, acknowledging the utter futility of being allowed on the planet with women in the first place?
Hank thanked God he’d had a daughter, because there was no way on earth he could possibly have explained all this to a son. The simple fact that Reed’s life stretched out so far ahead of his own humbled him. Raising her was what mattered, not whether he dented any of the world’s larger problems by where he taught school. He could make it through his mother dying because he had Reed to hang onto. And Chloe.
But the last six times he’d called, there’d been no answer at the cabin. The phone rang on and as he listened, he pictured her in his mind’s eye, riding the green colt without her helmet, cupping a cigarette in her palm, standing at the fence Hank had built with his own hands and turning her face to speak to someone, and that someone always turned out to be Junior Whitebear. Hank figured the odds were pretty high that she was sleeping with the jeweler. Hadn’t he practically turned the sheets down for them? Shit, maybe that was for the best, giving Chloe the wide-open opportunity to explore this preoccupation of hers. Force the issue to crisis. Hank felt ashamed to admit it, but there was an infinitesimal part of him titillated by the idea of the two of them together that charged the atmosphere. If he gave his mind free rein, however, that arousal quickly sank lower in his gut, settled in, and renamed itself terror. Suppose she decided the Indian jeweler was the man to make her happy, the one to marry. She could do that. Jesus, how could she? Corrine had raised Dog on her own; she said the man was off in Europe half the time. Plenty of men fathered a child, shook off their dicks, and walked away, but Junior had come back, made himself a part of the boy’s life. Dog adored him. During that colicky period where Reed was making them all nuts, only Junior knew the secret to make her stop crying. It was pretty damn hard to top a man who was unafraid of singing to another man’s baby, who behaved as if there were nothing he’d like better than to have a hand in helping your daughter grow up. Which was to say nothing of the horse element, their connection there. I may be able to ride, Hank thought, but I’ll never get to where those two are on that score. Christ, if it came down to custody, Hank could lose them both. If he hadn’t left Chloe behind, hadn’t continually forced the idea of marriage, hadn’t been so goddamn controlling, he might have a wedding ring on his finger instead of a dangling pacifier.
“Da,” Reed chirped at him.
They were random vocalizations. All the books said so. Six months was too young for predictable verbalization, but whether it was coincidence or effort, hearing her he was a grateful man. “Yes, that’s right, I’m your dad,” he said, gathering the bag of diapers in the crook of his elbow. “Let’s take a break from all this, you and me.”
He took Reed across the street to McDonald’s, ordered himself a hamburger. There were plenty of families to observe. Burger joints probably sold more food than grocery stores. He could pick out the divorced dads awkwardly trying to make up for things by indulging in Happy Meals, placating their weekend children with movie tie-in toys. Hank tried to imagine forging any kind of relationship with Reed on a part-time basis. He thought of Jack Dodge, his old attorney, and how the man
transformed into a shark in a suit the moment you cut him a check. The larger percentage of his caseload involved divorce and financial arbitration. He was a local phone call away, and attorneys were sworn to uphold the confidentiality of their clients, even if the discussion at hand was of a mere speculative nature. Dodge would say, Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and you, my lad, cradle the bird in your hand.
Hank threw his uneaten hamburger into the trash and extricated Reed from the high chair. He drove back to his parents’ condo, bracing himself, but his father wasn’t there. Maybe he was at the hospital. After the look his father gave Reed upon their arrival, each had made it a point to give the other a wide berth. Hank bathed Reed and rocked her to sleep. Without trying to reach Chloe again, he went to bed.
In the morning, when he returned to the hospital, his father was at the nurse’s station.
“She passed away at six this morning,” the nurse said.
“Excuse me? Why didn’t I get a call? I asked specifically—”
“Your father said we should let you sleep.”
Hank was furious. The man always insisted on writing his scripts. Now he couldn’t say a proper good-bye. That privilege had been denied him by a man who didn’t deserve the honor.
“Mr. Oliver?”
Both men turned to the nurse. “Yes?”
She came around the desk and extended her arms for the baby. “I’d be glad to hold your daughter if you and your father would like to spend a few moments alone with your mother.”
“Well, Dad?” Hank asked. “Think we can get through this without fighting?”
Henry set down the pen and papers.
Loving Chloe Page 32
