Chloe placed her hand over his. “Just rub him gently. Let him get to know your feel. Dry him, that’s right. Then we’ll work on getting him standing.”
The colt’s eyes glistened against the dark wet muzzle. He looked to Chloe like a bathroom rug thrown over an armature. Furred bones, done up hastily, folded like a backpacker’s idea of saving space. He had a classic mule head, ears still bent to the skull from all those months inside. She watched as Phil placed his hands beneath the breast and hindquarters to lift him to a standing position. All three of them took a good look at the feet, fetlocks touching the ground. Wonderful, she thought, a bad job all around.
Phil sighed.
“Don’t the two of you go out drinking just yet,” Hubbard said. “This is fixable.”
Phil tried his best to whistle, but it came out reedy, bagpipes at a funeral. “How?”
“Nowadays you splint, cast, exercise,” Hubbard said. “He’ll come around with some work.”
And barrels of money, Chloe thought.
An hour later, when Gabe had completed his examination, he clapped Phil on the back. “You didn’t come out empty-handed after all. It’s Miller time, cowboy.”
The colt pitched forward and whinnied, making his first exploratory nudge at the dead mare’s flanks. His impossibly long legs buckled, and Chloe did a quick save before he fell headlong into the mutilated back end of his mother. Lamblike cries sliced through the barn.
Phil shivered. “Gets to you.”
“You’re just worn out,” Chloe said. “Not to mention drenched from the rain.” Her own heart knocked at her chest wall.
They watched the jutting head poke into his mother’s side, harder now, questioning. Each jab dislodged another gelatinous clot from the mutilated vagina. Hubbard prepared the antibiotic and tetanus injections and asked Chloe to hand him a third syringe for vitamins. “There’s a colostrum farm in Chino,” he told Phil. “I’ll give them a call and order what you need. Pricey stuff, but you can’t get on without it. Meanwhile, you can try milking out the mare. Chloe can show you. I’ll finish up and see if I can scout you up a lactating mama.”
Phil reached into his Levi’s for his checkbook.
“Put that away,” Chloe said. “Dr. Hubbard can get his check in the mail in thirty days like the rest of us.”
Gabe chuckled. “That Chloe, she’s a punisher, all right.”
Chloe spread her jacket underneath the mare’s teats. She sent Phil to fetch sterile jars from Dr. Hubbard’s truck. For a moment, she sat there, adrenaline flooding her skin with infinitesimal tingles. An average birth took as few as ten minutes, the longest, maybe an hour, tops. They’d been here most of the night. The mare’s eyes stared up, recording nothing. Morning was beginning to flood the barn. In a shaft of sunlight, a particle of cedar shaving caught in the shifting air, fluttered down, and settled on the open eyeball. Without thinking, Chloe delicately picked it away. The colt butted her with his mulish head and whimpered.
Hubbard said, “Hey there, little guy. Be choosy who you imprint on.”
“Nice party, Gabe? Too bad you dirtied your tux. Guess you’ll have to buy a new one.”
“Don’t you start in on me. It was for a worthy cause.”
She snorted. “Your wife’s tennis bracelet fund.”
“No, actually it was a benefit for the homeless. Seems like it’s up to working folks like us to lend those poor bastards a hand. Maybe I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already heard.”
Chloe bit back the “son of a bitch” that erupted from the core of her being and wanted more than life to brand his forehead. Gabe had helped her out a little over a year ago when she’d gotten in over her head, deep. Despite paying back the money, there seemed to be no repaying the debt. If she snapped at him now, she’d only regret it later. He was an ex-Green Beret and he knew more about fighting than she could ever hope to. Simply put, there was no territory he considered neutral. He knew anatomy, not just the animal world, hers. Since she’d started saying no, she’d been on the receiving end of many a well-aimed verbal dart.
She sat back on her heels. “Let’s just get through this, Gabe. What do you say?”
“I’ll set some time aside to give it some thought.”
She watched him iodine the cord stump. The colt already trusted his hands. He wasn’t just good, he was the best when he worked at it. This baby would not only make it, but he’d see to shaping up those legs personally. As they said in the trade, he was a leg man, and she trusted no one else when it came to her own horse, Absalom, who suffered from navicular disease.
“You’re handy,” she said.
He smiled at her, fingers working almost of their own volition. “You should know.”
“Christ, you never, ever, ever quit! Thank the Lord I’m not your wife or I’d probably be in prison by now for murder.”
Phil opened the stall door and stepped inside. Chloe took the half-dozen jars from him, only to see him reach down to stroke the mare’s neck. It was already stiffening. He pulled his hand back as if he had touched flame.
“Guess I better call somebody.”
“Let Gabe take care of it.”
Phil bent his head and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “How do I say good-bye?”
“You just say it.”
Chloe looked to Hubbard. Do something, dammit. The vet fastened the foal halter around the baby’s head. “Chloe’s right, Phil. Get it over with. Walk away. Here’s an idea. Go make your calls. Sally, whoever. Then send me over six of your best students and we’ll do a necropsy, take care of things, and give them some hands-on experience in the bargain. You go get some sleep.”
“I don’t think I could sleep.”
“Bet you a beer you can. Go on, both of you.”
Chloe took Phil by the shoulder and led him out of the barn into the tentative light of the new day. Sun shone improbably through the rain, washing the brick buildings. Cars were starting to fill the parking lot—grounds staff, those diligent few students arriving for the early classes, the unlucky faculty, trudging blindly toward the coffee machines, a small herd of lean athletes headed for workouts.
“Come on,” she whispered into the crying man’s ear. “You look like a guy who could use a cup of coffee.”
CHAPTER
4
January rain fell outside the faculty office building. The sky delivered it at a noisy slant, scrabbling against the luckier offices that bore windows. Hank’s had one. Hank’s office mate Asa said they weren’t windows at all, but “visual strips,” something akin to a glass Band-Aid, and he wanted no part of them, thank you very much, Hank could have the window view.
Hank stepped carefully over the puddles forming on the slick cement, outside the secretarial offices. He was an untenured professor of Folklore and Mythology and taught three classes each semester. In his free hand he held his mail, collected for him by Karleen, one of the mailroom employees.
She’d handed it over personally with a mascaraed wink and then held stubbornly on to her end. “Come over tonight. I can rent a video, and we can both forget to watch it.” She paused meaningfully. “Again.”
He pressed his lips together to project a reasonable facsimile of a smile. Karleen. That solitary lapse of judgment on his part was turning into a canyon of regret. “Papers to correct. Maybe another time.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I do. And my students keep turning in papers.”
She frowned, let go of his mail, and spun away, her dangling plastic airplane earrings circling the clouds of her pink lobes.
His other hand firmly grasped the sturdy handle of an army-green collapsible umbrella he kept in the glove box of his Honda. Southern California be damned—there was always the possibility of sudden change—earthquakes, chemical spills, even rain like this could turn nasty, give you a cold in no time.
He unlocked the office door, closed it behind him, and sat down at his desk in the unlit office. It to
ok a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He listened to the rain knife at the walls, shivering slightly as he removed his good shirt and hung it on a hanger, then placed the hanger tip in the handle of the file cabinet. While he buttoned up the comfortable oxford cloth he’d brought to teach in, he stared at the good shirt’s creases and noticed how they mirrored his slight chest muscles, as if the heart of him had stayed behind, huddled inside the wheat-colored cloth.
“Time to get to that ark you’ve been planning, Noah,” Asa Carver said as he stood in the doorway shaking his imitation Burberry coat dry.
“Pardon?”
Carver switched on the light. “Two by two, that sort of thing. Wake up. Find a visual strip to peer out of. Lluvia. Rain.”
Hank blinked. “It’s just spitting.”
“Then it by God slobbered all the way up to my wheel wells on the boulevard of apartments.”
Southern California architecture was one of Asa’s pet peeves. Of Hank’s town house in Irvine he’d said: “Behold, the Emerald City, if you like living on a movie set. Tell me, are the boulders wire and papier-mâché?”
Hank took nothing Asa said to heart. Asa taught Medieval English and spoke fluent Spanish, so his position at the school was not quite as threatened as Hank’s—if budget cuts continued, they would simply make him teach composition, ESL classes. People could live without the myths, the old stories, but they needed to learn where the commas went. Asa was recently married for the second time, swamped in post-honeymoon libidinous bliss, only occasionally screwing his ex-wife on the side. The ark business was merely a variation on an old subject. All through his divorce from Claire, Asa repeatedly urged Hank to pair up. “Even chromosomes do it. I want you to be happy, man.”
“I am happy.”
“No, you’re not. You can’t possibly be happy until you’re thoroughly messed up by a woman.”
“Like Claire?”
“She’ll do as well as any.”
“Maybe I should marry her.”
Asa’s face had gone rubbery for a second, and Hank had to laugh. “That was a joke.”
Hank liked Claire. He never told Asa so, but she reminded him of Laurel, his first love, technically once his wife. The marriage, a Tijuana brainstorm, both of them sappy from cheap margaritas on Easter break their senior year, ended four weeks later when she walked out and had the whole business annulled. Twenty years had passed, but Hank remembered her when he saw shapely calves, when he looked at his female students and felt an ache that was difficult to put to rest. It had happened so long ago that he no longer mentioned it to people—why bother, when it took longer to explain than it had lasted? He kept quiet when he’d unlocked the office those predivorce mornings and found Carver asleep on the secondhand couch, the lanky coed destined to be the second Mrs. tucked beneath his arm. He wouldn’t venture to give advice where he had failed.
Carver grumbled, “Okay, gods. This is Southern California. Claire and I were going to play tennis today.” He shook the rain from his watch. “No rain for two years, and now this. Care to explain yourselves?”
Hank leaned back, and his swivel chair creaked in protest. “I don’t know, Asa. Rain, the obvious portent of doom. Maybe the gods are trying to tell you to cool it. For example, in film, rain is a signal of deep shit to follow.”
“How deep are we talking? Usual six inches?”
Hank smiled. “Well, gosh, I haven’t measured lately. Why did you get married again?”
“Because I am in love, man.”
“Love.”
“Bethany is…” He kissed his fingers and sighed. “I shit you not.”
“So why screw it up playing tennis?”
Carver shook his head. “You just wait, Oliver. You sit there so pompous, so immune, but your time’s coming. Some Valkyrie is going to storm into your life and grab you by the short ones. There is no cure for the sting of Cupid’s arrow.”
“Romance died a natural death along with the Industrial Revolution.”
Thunder cracked outside as if to underscore Hank’s words. Both men jumped slightly, and Asa Carver laughed, a hoarse, dry cough. “The official word from above,” he said. “The gods are busy fashioning a woman from a bolt of lightning. They do not want me to play tennis this afternoon. What the hell. I can knock off early. Bethany’s trying to impress me with home cooking. Can I endure a few bites of Gourmet’s latest Tuscan recipes?” He pinched his abdomen. “Solid muscle, thanks to my rejuvenated sex life. A man who works out has room to indulge.”
“Believe it or not, your sex life is not my sole source of entertainment.”
“Trying to tell me something?”
Hank picked up several papers and let them drop to his desk blotter. “Office,” he said. “Work. Paycheck.”
They bent to their desks and left each other alone. Asa owed Hank fifty-seven dollars, dating back two or three years. Penny-ante poker, where he habitually borrowed and lost. Hank wouldn’t ask for it, but he also would not play poker with him anymore.
Over Hank’s desk hung a dog-eared poster stating: “It will be a great day when the schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to build a bomber.” Over Asa’s were yellowing page proofs from articles he had published in little-known journals, partially obscured by five-by-seven glossies of Bethany on their honeymoon. She was twenty-two years old, sunburned hot-dog pink, wearing the style of bikini that Hank thought most closely resembled dental floss. Sometimes Hank would get up from his desk to look at that picture, trying to see what it was about her that had caused Asa to irrevocably alter his life. She was thin, not beautiful in any Breck-girl classic sense of the word, but the low-slung hips and pouty lips implied a portentous sexuality that threatened to act like heroin on whoever dared take a taste. She looked like any one of a thousand students Hank had encountered over the years: woman-child trying out the poses, working her lures in her mother’s high heels and rouge. When they finally met “formally” at that absurd church wedding, the guests on the bride’s side were all young and high-pitched, the men hooting, the women flushed and envious, jockeying anxiously for the bouquet. The guests on the groom’s side were spare in number and much too eager for the open bar.
Directly across the narrow hall that separated the faculty offices, Philip Green’s door stood open. The tattered brown easy chair the agriculture professor usually occupied was empty. Carver had dubbed Green “Cowboy” after he’d bought the mare and finagled keeping her on the school pastures, those three-odd acres as endangered as their own positions here at the college. The mare’s name was Cassiopea, and she was a five-year-old chestnut thoroughbred who’d run the track in Caliente until she’d bowed a tendon. Phil was thrilled with his acquisition. He told them over and over, “I got her for five hundred bucks. That’s nothing.” And then he’d discovered she was in foal, and spoke of this discovery as nothing short of providential. “Ten bones he names the baby Jesus,” Asa kidded, and even Hank had to laugh. Phil did go on.
The hallway skylight darkened with cloud cover, and Hank spoke without looking up at Carver.
“You suppose Phil’s horse is okay? All this damp can’t be terrific for Mama, not to mention Baby.”
“Foal,” Carver muttered. “His cowboyness would shit a biscuit if he heard you use the incorrect terminology. I wouldn’t worry. Undoubtedly he’s bought the creature little jammies with feet in them. Down in the barn tucking her in.”
“Probably.”
From their office on the second floor, they could hear the cattle feet of the students down below in passing, bits of conversation echoing as classes changed and they moved from building to building. Later in the day, students would hover in the alcove, making plans for the evening, arguing about politics, often giving each other the low-down on the professors themselves. Hank generally kept an ear peeled. As he marked a passage fraught with generalities and circled half a dozen misspellings, a male voice sharpened. Please.
“
Show time,” Carver said, scooting his chair back.
“Aw, come on, Eileen. Why the hell not? It’s not like I haven’t done my share of kneeling down for you.”
“Because, Guy, I, like, find it revolting. Totally.”
“Way to go, Eileen,” Hank said. “Hold the gate.”
“Whose side are you on?” Carver protested. “Guy wants his blowjob, that’s all. Probably deserves it, too.”
“Eileen’s a nice girl. Doesn’t do windows, either.”
“She’s spoiled rotten,” Carver insisted. Daddy just bought her a new BMW with leather upholstery. Guy deserves his turn.” He yelled out the window, “Give him a break, Eileen! You did it for me and you loved it!”
The voices went silent. Hank shook his head. On the paper before him, a student had dismissed the Odyssey in one terse paragraph as “this sort of boring story, you know? But it could be a totally radical flick if Peckinpah got hold of it.”
The sound of bootheels shot up the stairwell.
“Eileen’s coming to get you, Asa.”
The stairs outside the office creaked and a distraught voice ascended.
“Dammit, Chloe. I keep going over it in my mind, but—”
“Look. It’s over. Nothing you could have done.”
“Maybe a uterine tear. Early on in the labor.”
“Stop torturing yourself. Nobody could have known.”
Asa scooted his chair back and mimed to Hank, “What gives?”
“It’s just—” Again the words broke off jaggedly into the clamor of grief, and Hank recognized them as belonging to Phil Green. “So damn sorry.”
“Look at it this way. You learned a lesson about buying horse bargains.”
The woman’s voice was a whiskey tenor. She could have sung along with Willie Nelson, Hank thought. And Phil, well, this morning it sounded as if he could have written the lyrics.
“You and Hubbard did all you could. My fault for not having her vet-checked in the first place.”
Hank & Chloe Page 3
