“So don’t go.” Asa ripped another chunk of bread off the loaf and dunked it into his bowl.
“I’m going.”
“Phil Green’s thinking about having her train Babycakes. I heard him talking in the hall the other day.”
Hank listened as Asa went on, the ministrations of the teaching staff were Asa’s universe, the one kingdom where he could feel in control. If Claire took him back, which he bet she would, he hoped she’d sink a tether into his groin to keep him from making the same mistakes all over again. And himself? For weeks now he’d had the essentials detailed out on a list—what to take to Arizona, what to leave behind—a few books, sleeping bag, three pots to cook in, his old manual Olivetti, paper. Boxes were everywhere. Always the list ended before he penned her name, the one item he couldn’t purchase at the discount store, couldn’t fit into a suitcase, couldn’t have simply for wanting. On the television screen they were showing footage of the Patriot missiles. Now that the war was over, suddenly everyone was worried about what it had cost. The bright red ribbon of flame whooshed like a kite tail behind the two-million-dollar bomb. It reminded Hank of the Challenger accident, that moment of suspension when it was all just a fantastic light show, and everyone stood looking skyward, trying to be impressed and feel proud to be an American, nanoseconds before they became grieving parents and shamed citizens. Her mouth, the smoky voice as she sang along with the country-and-western station on the radio, her rough hands touching objects in this house, his shoulders, his skin. He felt her presence crowd each cell, some slow virus working its dark magic from the heart outward and downward.
Today, in his box outside the office where he collected term papers and late assignments, there had been a large brown envelope, and inside it a copy of Kit Wedler’s journalism assignment. Hank, I got a B+! Isn’t that too far fucking out? I know everything’s hasta la vista with you guys, but I thought you might like to read it anyway. See you Saturday and remember to keep your heels down! Love ya, Kit. He’d set it aside; grading final papers was the order of business. But they were done now, and he could savor it until the sun came up, if he wanted to. He took his dishes to the kitchen and loaded them into the dishwasher. His briefcase lay by the sliding glass door, and he picked it up, set it on the crowded table next to newspapers and bills. He unlatched the catches and took out the envelope, laid it down on the table, and went to the refrigerator to get himself a second beer.
“My friend Chloe Morgan…” it began, and for a moment Hank marveled at the luxury of those words before he sank himself into the text.
“…says that she doesn’t really have a philosophy about life, but I think she does, because when something needs doing, even if it’s a real rank chore and you wish that some other person would magically appear and do it for you, she just goes ahead and gets the job done without complaining. One time I heard her say ‘hard work might give you muscles, but it’s hard times that make you strong.’ I think that she is totally right because my own life hasn’t been that great since my mom left, but here I am anyway!
“The thing I like best about Chloe is that even when I am being a total spasmoid pest, she won’t ignore me like other adults do. She makes me stop and take a good look at myself and what I’ve said or done, and usually afterwards I think, hmm, maybe I don’t need to do that again!
“…we have all kinds of adventures, some of which I can’t really mention because they sound way stupid on paper, but the thing she taught me that I think about the most often is that I can do anything if I face up to it honestly and don’t let being scared get me goofed up. She helped me make out a diet that I can live with and so far I’ve lost twenty-two pounds, halfway there! She taught me to ride horses and now she is teaching me how to be a teacher for other people who want to learn about horses. Chloe has a saying in her office that goes ‘the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse,’ by Winston Churchill, a man. I never heard of, but whoever he is, it goes for women, too. Now I want to study to be a vet or maybe a trainer. If Chloe still is into horses when I am grown up maybe we could be partners. I hope so. That would be way cool if that happened.
“She had a hard start in life because her mother couldn’t take care of her and so she lived with a lot of different families but never got adopted which I think is the saddest thing I ever heard but Chloe says there are way sadder things than that, and that she has a good life and a great dog and some kind people who care about her. But she lives in a kind of rough place and some bad things have happened to her lately. Still she never lets herself get bitter about it because she says she has too much other stuff in her life to love. For example, horses! She knows everything about a horse and can take the most scared person and get them to relax around a horse. It is amazing! She can take the nastiest horse and with time get him to feel all happy again and do what she says without biting and stuff. Why? Because everything she does she does out of love and with respect for that person or that animal. I used to wish she was my mom, because what could be better than having a cool mom who doesn’t rag on you, but now I think I am way luckier to have Chloe Morgan as my friend.”
Asa came in and set his dishes in the sink. He walked over to the table and pressed a hand to Hank’s shoulder. “Why didn’t I figure this out before?” he said. “They rule the universe, don’t they? And they’re just letting us live here.”
“You’ve been an exceptional class,” Hank began as he nearly always did on the last day, “one of my best.” Then he made his way through a quick recap of which assignments he was returning, his obvious delight in the caliber of the term paper, and then prepared to show a film as a treat and to entice them to further their studies in mythology, some semester in the future when it was offered again as a regular course. “I hope the legends we’ve discussed here provoked your thinking about your own lives,” he said. “Somehow I feel we shortchanged the goddesses a bit, so this film’s sort of an attempt to give them a moment in the sun.”
He went to the back of the room and threaded the projector with the old sixteen-millimeter reels—someday audiovisual would get around to converting this to videotape. It snagged and he had to remove it and start again. Finally it was ready. “Larry? You want to hit the lights for me?”
The room went dark, and the countdown numbers leapt off the screen into the opening credits. He’d seen the film countless times, always lost himself in other thoughts before the first few minutes were up, but this time he tried to make himself watch. It began with a long sweeping shot of the sea, frothy breakers combing over the dark ocean until the image of horses began to appear, the white foam in the breaking waves became manes, and the narrator explained in his fatuous baritone that the word mare and its French equivalent originated from the Sanskrit, mah, for mighty. On he rambled, explaining that adding mah to gan—for birth—formed Morrigan, the transformative goddess who embodied the triple nature so common to women in myths. When they appeared, everything about them occurred in threes: three phases of the moon; three mothers; a maiden, a matron, and a crone; a daughter, mother, and grandmother. Old Morrigan worked her angles. She got around. The black-and-white footage made his students chuckle—the zealous actor portraying Cuchulain, the booming Wagner soundtrack. Larry whipped an imaginary conductor’s baton, and even Cora was chuckling. There was one moment in the film Hank found unspeakably sensual. He folded his hands and waited. Here Morrigan bared a shoulder, revealing collarbone and the start of a curving breast as she offered herself to the warrior. Pride made him refuse her love. I can best thirty men a day—on the battlefield or on the bed! To make love with her meant he would lose his power. Thus began the mess all men had been in for the last 25,000,000 years. When he further refused to help her in battle, he lost the war without even lifting his sword. Why is it that men fail the at the simplest of tests? Hank wondered. All we have to do is listen and women show us the way. But we insist on making our own way. Morrigan the horse, Morrigan the raven, Morrigan the crone. She save
d Cuchulain’s sorry ass, even though he betrayed her, and still he was too blind a fool to praise his luck. Well, I had my small blessing, Hank thought. What I didn’t do was respect her magic. I read investigative papers instead of asking her what I wanted to know. He settled back in his chair, and suddenly the film began to darken as it burned, and he jumped up to shut off the projector.
“Well, fuck,” Larry said. “I was just getting into this. You gotta tell us, Professor Oliver, does Sinbad get it on with the babe or what?”
Laughter.
“I’d rather show you the film, Larry, but it looks like this one’s cooked.”
He opened the door to let out the scorched odor, then crossed to the front of the room and sat down on the table in the front. “Basically, what it boils down to is that man doesn’t learn what’s good for him until he loses it. Morrigan tried, she gave Cuchulain every chance, but he was stupid and proud.”
Kathryn cleared her throat. “Well, stop me if that sounds familiar.”
Larry shouted, “Woman, give me a break!”
She made a fist and shook it at him. “I wish I could. I know right where I’d fracture to do the most damage.”
Hank waited for their ribbing to cease. Was a romance budding between these two, now that William was out of the picture? “We are all on heroic journeys,” he said. “Some of us have more difficult starts to get over than others. Alcoholic parents, foster homes, domestic violence—it’s all a kind of mythic journey we spend the rest of our lives figuring out, that’s the beauty of myths. We can learn from them about our own lives.”
Carlos threw his hands up. “Sure. Easy for you to say. You have a great job and probably own your house. What did you ever have to get over?”
“I was your age once.”
“So?”
“So, I went through the same kinds of difficulties you did. Life’s not that much different now than when I was growing up.”
Larry smacked his desk with a fist. “It is so! Nowadays we have to worry about AIDS everytime we get laid, and there’s so many bombs we might as well all commit suicide. There’s gangs everywhere, and drive-by shootings, even on the freeway. My cousin OD’ed when he was sixteen years old. Tell me you ever went through anything like that—it’s completely different.”
The depth of his students’ vulnerability often dazed him. It was as if they believed the classroom provided sanctuary, a place to confess and to witness. They knew nothing about him other than his soft-spoken delivery, the fine print he pencilled on their papers. Soon he would be gone, and they would forget him entirely. “Well, in my own case, Larry, it was the death of my older sister, when I was around five. Too young to remember? Everything makes an effect, causes a ripple. The distance my parents put between us so that they would never have to hurt that way again profoundly affected me. It’s cost me a lot of years.” He paused. “And to put it on a more personal plane, lately it cost me a woman I loved.”
Kathryn sighed. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Ms. Price?”
She swung her hair back. Her face was dark. “Really, Mr. Oliver, you’re a nice guy. If you know what went wrong, why don’t you go after her and just fix it? See, that’s the thing with men. They’d rather wait for the woman to make the first move, the second move, all the important moves. Men make the mistake of thinking we think like they do. We’re just waiting for one of you to have the balls to ask for what it is you really need.”
“Ha!” Larry called out. “What a lie. Would you have gone out with William? That’s what he really needed.”
Kathryn, Larry, Carlos, William. Kit. Annie. Everywhere he looked, there were children, telling him what to do. “Have your best summer ever,” he told them as he threw papers into his briefcase. “I will never forget this class.” His throat was tight, and the words came painfully, blunt instruments bruising his throat. Gentle Cora stood up to give him a hug good-bye. He hugged her back, waved, then beat them out the door for the first time in his life.
CHAPTER
23
He stopped twice on the long drive—once in Needles to gas up, where a Unocal station attendant with a name tag that read “Junior” tried to talk him into buying a new tire.
“You’re showing steel on the left rear,” he said. “I just happen to have a Michelin inside. Can let you have it for, oh, ninety-five bucks.”
“For a single tire? That seems rather steep.”
The man looked up, his Ray-Bans reflecting Hank’s disbelieving smile. “It’ll seem reasonable enough when you have a blowout in the middle of nowhere, buddy.”
“I’ll take my chances. I have a terrific spare.”
Hank finished pumping his unleaded and stood still in the dense, steamy air. The temperature had to be in the high nineties, but the clean swift breeze rushing past his face felt cool. Nobody much lived here—it was an oasis, a rest stop where you could gas up, grab a bellyful of pancakes at the Teddy Bear Café, then—sufficiently refueled—move on with the map.
In Flagstaff, at the Exxon station, the sign above the pumps read DAN’S: FULL SERVICE WITH A SMILE. No cherry pie, but the petite woman in the cowboy hat who took his credit card was smiling as she approached his car, and more than happy to take a look at his tire. “Looks all right to me. Don’t suppose I could talk you into some Indian jewelry,” she said, “seeing as you’re headed out into the res. Mind what you buy, though. Some of those dealers jack up the silver the second they see a new face. Shop around.”
“Thanks, I will” He stretched his muscles and got back in the Honda. Less than an hour to go, and he would be at the cabin. He got groceries before leaving town, some dry milk from a hiking store for his morning cereal, and one of those old-time coffeepots with a percolator. The bright aluminum surface of it made him remember Boy Scouts, the scoutmasters always lugging the pot from the water to the fire, grouchy and squinting until they’d downed a few cups. How soon we come to depend on coffee, he thought. Anything to jump-start the heart into beating another day.
The moment he saw it—crumbling fieldstone walls, once-green composition roof sanded by the weather down to the roofing paper, filthy windows, sagging rail fence that had completely decomposed in places, weedy plants in the front yard, doorless outhouse in back—he knew she would have christened it heaven on earth and set about staking her claim. The nearest neighbor was two miles north. To say it needed work was something of an understatement. Henry senior would have ordered it gutted, sold the land, and forgotten about it in less than a day. Hank circled the perimeter, slowly assessing his plans. Around the cabin’s boundary, old pines towered, aromatic, solid witnesses to a childhood he could only recall in fragments. He tried each key in the front door, jiggling the old lock gently, but it took him several tries to get the stiff, aged bolt to turn. He opened the door and ducked through the six-foot opening to a clean, spare room that had seemed much larger to him as a child and found a note from Dave Greer propped on the table. We’ll check in on you in a couple of days, Hank. You might have to work the pump handle a while to get it running. There’s lamps and oil in the closet. Joyce and I expect you for Sunday supper. The cabin consisted of two rooms, the kitchen-living space with the iron sink and wood stove, sagging cupboards, and the bedroom, now empty of furnishings. The matchwood pine ceilings dipped so low that he could reach up and touch them with the flat of his hand. He tore a sheet of newspaper from the copper woodbox by the fireplace and used it to wipe a window clear. Sunlight emerged from the pane as soon as he dropped his hand, creating a warm shaft that puddled a few feet away on the floor. So tired he felt ready to drop, he ran his fingers through it, watching the dust dance in the shaft of light. Sundogs, spirit puppies, you can reach right out and touch them. “Hello, Nana,” he said aloud. “It’s Henry. I’m back.”
Several mornings a week Indian kids rode over on rangy bay horses to check on his progress. The crazy white man lugging lumber and roofing materials in the foreign car sometimes invited them to shar
e a cup of lemonade. He made friends with their horses—even offered them his good apples. Mostly he was content to have them watch him hammer and saw. Mister, what are you doing? I’m repairing my house. No, really. Yes, really. You going to live there? I’m going to try. It snows in the winter, Mister. Then I’d better get this roof fixed, hadn’t I? Very little in the way of the roof was salvageable. He peeled away crumbling shake, and used a putty knife to expose the beam frame. He worked on the roof until midafternoon, then covered it with a plastic tarp weighted down by rocks. When the heavy clouds that gathered near the mountains delivered their offering to the earth, there was nothing to do but stand back. Here weather was respected. When the monsoons came, Hank stood in the doorway, witnessing lightning crackles that lit the dull sky. He got so he could hear the rumble of warning in the distance long before the rain fell. A few times he stood out in the middle of it, shutting his eyes, feeling the water jab at his skin, weigh down his clothing. Sometimes he took a nap in a corner of the cabin, lulled dreamless into his sleeping bag by the heavy thrumming, sleeping as if he’d been hit over the head with a sap.
Frequently he didn’t wake until dusk, and then he’d light the lantern and read, or sit on a stump behind the cabin and watch the sky darken completely to black. Maybe the California sky had stars, too, but it must have kept them hidden. Here so many bright white points shone from the night sky that he tried to learn each one’s name, and to place them all, as part of his after-dinner chores. Hard work made his body throb with exhaustion, but tired muscles didn’t help him sleep. He could feel them toning up from use, see a visible difference in his body. Kit Wedler would have loved it, he mused, placing moleskin over his first set of blisters, soon to be followed by a series of others. He wrote his mother letters, filled his stomach with simple food, tried hard to find peace in the red rocks and wildflowers, but as soon as he lay down in the sleeping bag, he missed Chloe so badly his heartache kept him tossing half the night.
Hank & Chloe Page 31
