Always the larger question persisted: Would there be a red Jeep Cherokee meeting her at the confluence of the highways, eager to shadow her down the state? For reasons he couldn’t explain, Hank doubted it. He put his hands inside his jacket and felt the envelope from Tucson against his fingers. Maybe the best thing to do right now was crack open a beer, reread his letter, savor the offer one more time before he called to accept it. He would never forget the honor of being a third-grade teacher, and it would be difficult to leave the children, but in truth they were ready to move on without him. The academic world had invited him back. He would get chalk dust under his fingernails and learn how to play hardball with a new administration, but he would be in a college classroom, doing what he loved. He could feel the phantom imprint of Chloe’s body against his own, last night, this morning, less than half an hour ago. He had gripped her flank so hard he’d left a handprint, five fingers and the edge of his palm, marking her like an Appaloosa. He loved her that much. The sweetness and the impermanence of lovemaking turned him inside out; he was grateful for all of it.
The last few days, anyway, it seemed Hank Oliver was very much in demand. He walked up the slight incline toward the cabin, his boots leaving only the vaguest impressions in the silky cinder pathway.
Part 4
Cameron, Arizona
Twenty Years Later
24
It’s late November, but nobody’s explained that to the town of Phoenix. Outside the Heard Museum the honeysuckle bushes buzz with bees, and an endless stream of tourists files into the courtyard. Often I stop here, the halfway mark on my way north to Cameron. Sometimes the only thing to do is return to the place you swore you were done with in order to comprehend its role in your future. Hopefully, by the time I get to the cabin, things will make sense and I’ll know what to do.
I hand the clerk my pass, and like she thinks I brought it along to steal something, she insists on checking my backpack. The treasures here are so plentiful and varied they wouldn’t even fit into God’s knapsack. Baskets, clay pots, paintings, photographs, the few remaining beaded ceremonial dresses that don’t decorate hotel lobbies or western airport terminals. Arizonans may deserve the reputation of conservative politics, but no one can say we underestimate the importance of art.
My father was the first one to take me here. Pour him a few beers, and Hank likes nothing better than to wax nostalgic about our expeditions. The Fred Harvey railway exhibit, do you remember, Reed? Daddy, I was what, two? But the kachina room made an impression. It gave me nightmares, until over and over again, Junior explained the stories surrounding each doll. And I was impressed with the Edward Curtis photo gallery, the portraits of defeated-looking chiefs posing in the crosshairs of the white man’s camera. Daddy? I asked. Where’s Junior’s picture?
Poor Hank. But the man I think of as my second father (for lack of a specific term we call him my godfather) looks just as desolate as those conquered warriors. Someday his picture will probably be here, Daddy answered, and he was right. The Junior Whitebear collection has been on permanent loan since I was a teenager.
I’ve come to see the ring the Famous One is famous for. It’s the Lander stone, and it once belonged to my mother. By birthright I could lay a claim to it, I suppose, but that reminds me of those spooky stories of the Hope diamond, guaranteed unhappiness. I carry a letter granting me permission to handle the pieces. Today I want to study the ring and think about the only story I’ve ever been denied: How my parents, all three of them, met, fell in love, and rather than working that out in a conventional way—one man loving one woman—decided the solution was to share a child between them.
There are three different stories, three versions, all lies, and every one of those lies, in its own way, is true. Some nights it’s almost as if I can feel each of them depending on me, the daughter they love, to make sense of their messed-up lives, and then I feel terrible, because things have gotten a little more complicated than their old news. If I do what I think I’m going to, the flames won’t just fan up, there will be wildfire in the dry brush, everywhere I step.
Reed, you walked at nine months, probably trying to get away from me, ha! No more sense to you than God gave a rabbit, but there you were, standing on your hind legs, streaking barefoot across the prairie, looking for trouble. Says Mama.
I remember you used to pat my beard and lay your cheek so carefully against my own, saying in your small voice, Everything be all right, Daddy, and I always wondered if you were trying to reassure me or making a statement. Daddy.
Atsi’, my daughter. Right away I could tell you and me were connected for life. I cut the cord, and it was like you unhooked from Chloe and latched on to me. Maybe I’m not the father who made you, Reed, but I’m the one you chose on your own, enit? Junior, who I visited every month, as if they had worked out some bizarre custody arrangement. Hank drove me north on the excuse of having to tend to library business, or to see to our cabin. In the parking lot of the Cameron Outpost he’d kiss me good-bye, and there were Junior’s arms, waiting to catch me. Since I didn’t know any better, I thought nothing of having two fathers.
As I walk the staircase to the second floor of the museum, I’m thinking they kind of made up for Mama, who was at best prickly. We tried to forge a bond, but Junior and Hank nourished me in a way that she tried but never mastered. Growing up, all my friends were petrified of their fathers. Seeing the welts from their whippings astonished me. I thought guys like that got arrested. The two men who raised me allowed their children to grow into adults armed with consciences. Whenever I screwed up, one or the other sat me down and said, Think about how this will affect your life ten years down the line. How what you did will impact on the world. If you can live with it, fine. If you can’t, let’s do something about it.
How was I to know that wasn’t normal? These precious men I took for granted. In my studies I’ve learned that the evolution of the species proceeds slowly and arduously, and nine out of ten mutations are destined to fail. Yet my fathers seem to have apprehended the larger clues. In my house we didn’t need thirty-four states to ratify an amendment saying that women deserved equality. If I do one good, scientific thing for the world, it should be to have these men cloned and distributed, and pray that their tribes increase.
The same woman is always behind the special collections desk. Her name is Norma, and she has really ugly glasses connected to a beautifully beaded chain. Norma loves being in charge of the Junior Whitebear collection. She smiles when she sees me.
“Home for Thanksgiving, Reed?”
“On my way. College keeps me so busy I forget there are holidays until I look up and notice everyone’s gone.”
“I saw a spread on your father’s new work last month in Lapidary. Stunning. Will you see him over the holiday?”
Norma can’t help but ask any more than such a question would pierce Daddy’s heart. I’m a genetic throwback to my maternal grandfather, who was Mexican, with skin so dark he caused Gran’s father to chase them off the ranch when she turned up pregnant. This led to Mama being put up for adoption, a whole lot of sorrow, and me getting stuck with a face that looks nothing like Hank Oliver. In fact, I look so much like Junior Whitebear that everyone wants to believe I’m his blood. Him being so handsome, the stories behind the jewelry he made for Mama, people get caught up in what she calls the “soap opera” of his life. It makes Junior laugh, and Daddy’s a good sport about it, but it bothers me that he sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. “Sure,” I tell Norma. “I see Hank nearly every weekend. But if you mean Junior, not this year. I think he’s in Asia.”
Junior’s no more in Asia than I’m standing on the moon, but I’m not about to reveal to anyone that he lives year-round in Chinlé, within walking distance of the most beautiful canyon in the world. Canyon de Chelly is our special place, and I don’t want that violated. The Famous One insists that living close to the canyon is good for his heart. He lives in a two-room cabin heated by a wood stove
. I tease him and call that kind of thinking his hair-shirt philosophy. His oversized mailbox bears the generic name of J. White. Though it’s human nature to ache to spill them, there are some secrets you can keep. A long time ago, everyone made an agreement that no matter how the rumors flew, they’d keep silent. It was unspoken but assumed that their children would do the same. But lately I’m discovering that kept secrets never stop burning. There’s a hole in my heart I feel widening. Pretty soon it won’t be able to contain all I’ve discovered. Everything will fall out, and we’ll have no choice but to deal with it.
With the opportunity for gossip gone, Norma lets the subject of Junior drop. She answers the phone and shuffles her deskful of papers, and I stand there waiting patiently for the keys. Mama gets distracted like that when she senses that a mare’s going to drop her baby. During foaling season, the world could be on fire and you simply cannot get through to my mother. She paces around the house, puts dirty dishes into the cupboard and I have to repeat whatever I say to her twice. Finally she goes off to sleep in the barn. Daddy checks on her, but even he knows better than trying to talk her into coming inside to bed. And when she’s called away to somebody else’s ranch, until she returns it’s Daddy who does the pacing.
This one time she’d been gone a week, supposedly tending some rich guy’s broodmares, but I knew where she was. It was as if she could only last so long, then like one of her prize mares descended from old Sally Ride, she’d jump the fence and go to Junior. She’d stay away from us for as long as it took to run her heart good and tired, and return home armed with gifts that were supposed to fool us into believing her absence was due to some ardent shopping gene. All during my teenage years I hated her for doing that. If she said my hair looked pretty long, I cut it two inches from my skull. When I took six firsts in English Equitation classes and saw her applauding in the bleachers I traded every bit of my tack for a Western barrel-racing saddle. My father took the more practical approach, and had her truck painted red. Mama took one look at the Apache and said all that paint would have to be sanded off; Chevy never issued that year truck in red. Daddy didn’t bat an eye, and the color has faded very little over the years. It was a long time before she pulled an overnighter again, but eventually she resumed her pattern. Even Gran said it was nuts to try to stop her, that planets never vary in their orbit, even if it means they’ll get bombarded by meteors.
Tonight, while twilight scribbles that orange crayon across the winter sky, Norma will be sitting at home, petting some old tabby cat. She’ll haul out her Junior Whitebear fantasy and imagine herself in the position my mother will always be in. She’ll think: Lucky Chloe, while the truth is that a muse that can move the artist to genius lives her life like a unicorn on a chain. My mother loved two men, and gave up half her heart in the process.
Next month I’ll turn twenty-one. I want to go to medical school; I’ve got the grades. Discovering the art that lives inside the body, and ways to coax it into a state of balance, thrills me. But I’m in love with a man, a painter, and it’s a love so dangerous and all-encompassing I can’t imagine ever balancing it with something as consuming as medical school. I know what the practical thing is to do and I know what I secretly desire, and they are not even remotely the same pathways.
You’ve got smarts and a family that loves you. You can be anything you want. Brain surgeon pays a lot better than barmaid. Says Mama.
There’s all the time in the world for you, Reed. Maybe you should spend the summer in Europe, expose yourself to other cultures. Daddy’s always talking up travel.
Whatever you do, be careful of love, Reed. Don’t take it too lightly. Once your heart gets locked up it never finds its final destination. Aunt Kit, who ought to know after two colossally bad marriages. Following her latest divorce, she moved in permanently with Gran, and took over some of the harder chores on the ranch. This is where I belong, she told me, within the confines of my adopted tribe. When it comes to men, I have terrific luck with horses.
For reasons that will become obvious, I can’t tell Junior, who took care of Corrine the whole time her diabetes was out of control, who didn’t have to stay with her when she died, but did anyway, right until she took her last breath. Dog said that long ago, his father made him a promise. Junior keeps his promises.
“Reed, honey. I’m sorry that took me so long.”
Norma hangs up the phone and unlocks the drawer of a waist-high flat file and oh! my heart feels sore to look. On one hand, it is only a drawer lined with purple velvet, filled with odd pieces of silver someone has shaped into decorations for the body. I can name the properties of precious metals. I know the temperature it takes to melt silver, over a thousand degrees. I can even go so far as to call this art, but I have to acknowledge that what we have here are the products of a man’s broken heart. Spiny oyster, spiderweb turquoise, tumbled stones so common they once sold in bins inside gas stations along old Route 66. Now they’re so scarce they have become icons of the past, which always, always looks simpler than the present. Of course, to someone whose whole childhood held three adults’ lives together, that idea smells like bullshit. The past is complicated and mysterious, and adults speak less of the truth than children. We who want to know are reduced to studying the clues they’ve left behind: photographs, letters, jewelry.
The year I was fourteen, I came across some of my mother’s clothing in his cabin. Junior had always kept things like that hidden from me, but the faded flannel shirt, the blue jeans worn to the color of surf, and a fairly new bra, size 34B, were real. I held them in my hand and railed, You’re fifty-two years old, for God’s sake, hasn’t this gone on long enough?
At great expense he explained to me how the year I was born he learned that his blood had betrayed him, that he had to reinvent a self he could live with. That if it wasn’t for loving my mother, he couldn’t have made it through that year. He took me by the wrists and pulled me into his workroom, stood me in front of the silver and said, All this is the byproduct of your mother’s love. She sustains me, keeps my heart beating, even if we only get to be together every couple of months. It’s like the wax that is lost in the casting of a ring, Reed. Together Chloe and I make something that can’t become real until it burns away. What’s born is larger than two people going to bed. We made a choice. Your father understands that. Someday you will, too.
But I was so angry. I just wanted them to behave. At fourteen you know it all, and you can’t wait to explain this to the people you love. Make life all tidy, give it identifiable corners. Still, I understood what a secret it was for Junior to carry. We avoided each other a few days, then we rode horses down into the canyon, and the sheer rock walls made me speak up. I love you, I said, no matter what the hell kind of blood you come from. We’re all enrolled members of the tribe of human beings. Yes, he answered, but eventually you will learn that not even love patches every hole.
Whatever my mother did for him, Junior Whitebear’s breaking down to his simplest self led to this ring. Scholars in the art world call the Lander piece The Phoenix. The silver shines the way it must have the day he finished it. As radiant as sun rising from the ashes of the previous evening. There’s a story that if you slip your finger into this ring, your life will change so fundamentally that you can never go back to where you stood before. I pick it up, the cold metal warming quickly to the heat of my body temperature. The heavy ring is formed of two wings, one of them proudly tucked against the arc, the other one obviously broken, folding its sore feathers as best it can. In between the wings nests that slate-blue piece of turquoise, cradled like a precious egg. I slip it on my finger and the metal seems to grow hot. But this is a fraction of the heat he had to employ to make it, and that heat is but a microscopic portion of what he must have felt—still feels—for my mother, and oh, what I feel is too hot and huge for a girl of twenty to fully comprehend. That speckled, webbed, dusky blue stone settles in my heart. Now, the next time it rains, that color will rise in my throat like a
plug of lead. I’ll get a crying fit, and Mama will say, “It’s your period, isn’t it?” Never knowing how close she is to the truth. I slip the ring off, return it to its velvet bed, slide the noiseless drawer shut. Wanting to possess what was intended for someone else is behaving like a crow, anxious to steal what might perk up her drab nest. If there’s going to be a nest, I’ll have to decorate it in my own way. Besides, that ring doesn’t have to be on my mother’s finger to bind us together. I wave good-bye to Norma and think to myself, someday I should really tell her about those glasses.
Walking down the museum stairs, heading back toward my car, I check my watch and calculate the amount of daylight left. If Mama knew what I was contemplating, she would suggest we go for a twenty-mile ride, or get out hammers and say between the two of us, there’s no good reason we can’t mend a mile of new fence before supper. Or she’d pick up the phone and warn the folks at Paul Bond’s we were on our way, our wallets loaded: Lay out the ostrich skin and the patent leather, my baby needs new boots. After all her antics failed to move me, she’d send me in to talk to Daddy and go off in her precious truck to sulk.
And Daddy would patiently remind me that at age two, I was praised for every step I took, while my mother was left at a children’s home to basically rot. That her skittishness and distance have a logical evolution. That maybe I didn’t get a PTA mother and he didn’t get a faculty wife, but we both got something pretty wonderful anyway. I accept her for what she is, he’d tell me. I lose myself in loving the part of her she feels safe enough to give me. Forgive everything else, because you never know when you might find yourself in a similar position. And that if what I’m planning to do is what I need to do to be happy, then so be it; here he and Junior would be in perfect agreement.
Loving Chloe Page 34
