Becoming Chloe (16 page)

I follow Trent out to the barn in the dark, carrying our blankets under my arm. Trent has a flashlight, and I watch the beam of it slide across the dry grass.

There’s no electricity in the barn. Apparently not. He sets the flashlight on the ground still lit like a weak lantern. He brushes by me to get the pitchfork, purposely bumping up against me on the way by.

I’m thinking maybe I should go back to the house. But I don’t. I stand behind him, watching him fork straw into a clean stall. I feel as though he can feel me watching. And I can hear him feeling me watch. It’s enough electricity to make me worry for all that dry tinder.

I hear Bailey making contented little horse noises in the next stall.

When Trent’s done, he turns around and looks at me.

“All done,” he says. And we stand face to face for an awkward moment.

I’m not going to pretend the thought doesn’t cross my mind.

I put all my sexual stuff on hold a long time ago. Told it to sit down and shut up and await further instructions. And it’s worked pretty well. But now I can feel it down there, wanting to know how long it’s supposed to wait. It talks to me, sensing this opportunity. It says, Let me out, just this one night, and then I’ll go back in and be good again. But that’s a lie.

Sex urges lie, all the time. They’d tell you any kind of shit to get their way. This is the biggest lie of all. If you let it out for one night, it doesn’t go right back in the box again. It grows big and strong and then it won’t even fit. Then it laughs at the box and laughs at you, and says, How did you think you were going to keep me in there? And it’s too late, because you let it out. Mine tries one last mean trick on me. Brands me with an image of Trent falling to his knees in the straw. He would do it, it says.

You know he wants to. You know you want him to. Before I can successfully wrestle that one away, Trent lurches forward and tries to kiss me. I just barely feel his lips touch mine, and then my head jerks back and the connection is broken again.

“Whoa,” I say. “Whoa.”

He turns around and sits down in the straw with his back to me.

“Did I just do a really stupid thing?” he asks. His voice is thin and small, like I just made him younger. “Did I just make a complete jerk of myself? I thought—”

“You thought right,” I say. “You’re right. But I can’t. I just . . .

I don’t know how to explain it.” I just don’t see where the joy is in that. Not anymore. Having sex with a total stranger and then moving on the following day. I just don’t understand the joy in that. And there’s another thing. It’s easier to say, so I do. “I’m a guest in your parents’ home. I don’t think that’s the way they were hoping a guest would behave.”

I sit down next to him, but he still won’t look at me.

Trent says, “Is it about her, too?”

“Well, maybe a little. I mean, we don’t have sex. But we’re a team. We do everything together right now. I’d hate to do anything to break that apart. For now, I mean.”

“Why you don’t have sex if you’re together like that?”

“It’s just not like that with us.”

“Why then? Why you even with her?”

“It’s not always about sex, Trent. Everything isn’t always about sex. Some people are just together. Sometimes they just are.”

Chloe and I are lying on the thick straw bed together. Chloe is comfortably draped over my chest. Trent is sitting at the end of the stall with his back up against the half-door. The flashlight is off. We’re just sitting here together in the dark. Talking. It turns out Trent talks. Who knew?

“I hate being a virgin,” he says.

“I don’t blame you,” Chloe says. “You should always try everything at least once.”

Then a silence falls, but a comfortable one.

It’s funny, because just an hour ago I was stinging over the strange newness of this whole thing. The way it banged into my life like a speeding car might crash through a picnic, leaving me half shocked and more than a little bit invaded. Now we’re sitting alone together in the dark, all three of us, and Trent has been holding forth on all kinds of life topics, and I think back to my morning, and it seems strange because there was no Trent anywhere on the horizon, and I didn’t know to expect one.

Life keeps changing so quickly. I wonder which column that belongs in.

“Don’t be in any hurry,” I tell Trent. “I know that’s easy for me to say.”

“I think sometimes about moving to San Francisco. I think it would be better there. But all my family is here. I got to at least finish high school.”

“Are you going to college?” I ask.

“Not sure yet.”

“You should go to college. It’d be a half step between Arkansas and San Francisco.”

“Think I’d meet somebody there?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

“My grades are good enough. My folks want me to go. They don’t even know, by the way. So do me a favor and don’t say nothing. Not that I think they wouldn’t love me anymore. I’m their son and all. I’d still be their son, right? I’m just trying to find the right way. How did you tell your folks?”

“They pretty much stumbled on the information themselves.”

“And were you still their son?”

“No. But then, I never really had been. You’re right, a thing like that can’t change everything. You’re either their son or you’re not.”

“What are you guys doing going all around the country like this?”

“Jordy is showing me all the beautiful stuff,” Chloe says. “All the stuff I’ve never seen. He thinks the world is beautiful. So he’s showing me.”

“It is,” Trent says. “I never been more then sixty miles outside where we are right now, and I can tell you for a fact the world is okay.”

“You sure, Trent?” Chloe asks. Like she’ll really believe him if he stands by the opinion.

“Sure as I can be.”

We hear a different voice suddenly, and it makes us jump.

“Trent!” it says. It’s his mother. “Get on in the house and let these poor tired souls get a decent night’s sleep.”

“Good night, Trent,” Chloe says. “Sorry you have to go.”

In the morning Trent brings us half a loaf of home-baked wheat bread and a bottle of milk. Breakfast for the road. His father is already out working in the field and his mother has already driven into town, but they said to say goodbye and have a great trip. Chloe kisses everybody goodbye. Sincere kisses on the face, with hugs to follow. First Bailey, then Margie, then Trent.

“Your parents will always love you,” she tells Trent. “You’re their son.”

On the one hand, she’s absolutely right. On the other hand, it never worked for either one of us, so I wonder how she’s able to know.

❃ ❃ ❃

Chloe and I are cycling in the dark on a quiet road. I’m guessing it’s about nine o’clock at night. We see a glow in a field up ahead. See it light up the sky. A kind of reddish glow illuminating the night. It makes the trees look spooky.

She says, “I wonder what that is, Jordy.”

Then we hear a siren coming up on us from behind. We stop the bikes and walk them off the road, just to be safe. A fire engine roars by, its lights flashing around and around.

We walk our bikes up around the bend until we see three more fire trucks. We lean the bikes on a tree and go a little closer on foot. Right up to a rail fence, where we lean over and watch the farmhouse burning down. It’s completely engulfed, with flames curling out the windows and columns of smoke twisting up to the sky. Firefighters are training three or four big arcs of water onto the house at once. The window frames and porch supports are all blackened and cracked, shiny black charcoal.

Just as I’m thinking that, the porch awning collapses, throwing smoke and ash in the direction of the firefighters. It’s hard to stop watching.

Then a big piece of the roof collapses, raising a shower of sparks that fly hundreds of feet. It sparks a big handful of grass fires, which the firefighters have to try to put out at the same time.

It dawns on me that if the dry grass gets going, this is a bad place to be. So I grab Chloe by the arm and try to pull her away.

She doesn’t really get pulled, though. She’s holding on to the fence. And the fire is holding on to her. Finally an arm of the brushfire races toward the fence, and I grab her hand and pull and she runs with me, back to the bikes.

We ride a mile or two down the road, Chloe looking back over her shoulder every second or two. Then we see a diner that looks open. There are people inside. It seems too good to be true, in such backcountry. A diner open at nearly ten o’clock.

We lock up the bikes and stick our heads through the door.

“You open?”

There’s just a waitress inside, leaning on the counter drinking coffee, and a heavy old man back in the kitchen, staring out from under the warming light into the empty dining room.

“Yeah, I guess, hon,” the waitress says. “Might as well come on in if you’re hungry. Usually we close at nine, but we’re staying open tonight for the firefighters. They might be coming by all hungry and thirsty any time now.”

We sit at the counter and order grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries.

“Whose house is that?” Chloe asks.

“Oh, a family name of Pete and Dorothy Rogers and their kids.”

“They’re not still in there, are they?” I ask.

“Oh, no, hon. I hear everybody got out fine.”

Then we don’t know what else to say to them, or them to us, because we don’t know each other at all, and it isn’t even us they’re staying open for.

We just eat quietly for a while, except when Chloe says, “These are the best French fries.”

“Thank you,” the guy in the kitchen says. He hardly sounds like he bothers to wake up to say it.

The waitress comes out from behind the counter and wipes off a bunch of tables that I really don’t think needed wiping.

She’s wearing white stockings, and her varicose veins make a strange pattern underneath. Every now and then she goes to the front window and peers down the road. I don’t get the impression that she sees what she wants to see. Whatever that is.

Then the first fire truck pulls up and about seven firefighters pile in, their big waterproof jumpsuits peeled down to the waist, their hair plastered to their heads with sweat. Their hip boots make a strange sound as they mill about the place.

They almost all just want coffee to go. One wants coffee and a Danish.

When they pick it up at the register they try to settle up, but the waitress holds up her hands like two stop signs. “No charge, guys.”

One of the guys tries shaking money at her, pushing it at her, but nothing works.

“Okay, thanks, Dori,” he says.

Dori says, “What those poor people are gonna do, I don’t know.”

“They got family, though. They got family enough to take ’em in.”

“I guess, yeah.” She makes a kind of tsking sound with her tongue, like the whole thing is just too tragic for words.

Then the guys all pile out again, and Chloe and I get back on the road.

We ride all night, without ever opening our mouths to discuss the plan with each other. We just keep riding. We really don’t say another word all night.

In the morning we set up our tent in the middle of nowhere, hoping this middle of nowhere doesn’t belong to anybody who’ll tell us to go. Chloe takes out her notebook and writes. But I notice that she’s writing on a page that’s not divided into columns.

Also that she doesn’t stop as soon as she usually does. She fills up about two pages. I’d like to know with what, but it’s like reading someone else’s diary, I guess. Maybe someday she’ll show me her notebook from the trip. I’d be interested. But it has to be her own idea.

Chloe has more of a sense of direction and timing now. She wants those damn mountains. Her inner eye is on them, and she won’t let go.

She even takes the lead when we ride now, like that will put her closer.

When we stop for a meal or to rest, she says, “Are you sure this is the road to Angel Fire?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Route 64. Goes within a few miles of it.

Through Agua Fria.”

Sometimes I show her the map so she can see for the tenth time or the twelfth time that Route 64 still intersects with the road into Angel Fire, just like it did yesterday.

Today she looks at the map all through lunch, when she should be eating.

“You have to eat something,” I say. We’re fairly fresh over the border into New Mexico, and the mountains are coming, and Chloe’s getting excited. And when Chloe gets excited she doesn’t want to eat. “You know how high Angel Fire is?” I ask, to try to hammer home a point about the food issue.

“Not as high as heaven.”

“No. Not that high.”

“Not as high as Wheeler Peak.”

“No. But it’s eight thousand feet. The town. The ski resort is higher. It’s not easy pedaling to eight thousand feet. You need to keep up your strength.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“If you plan on getting to Angel Fire, you have to eat. That’s a fact of nature.”

She puts down the map, picks up half of her B.L.T. Eats about five bites in rapid succession, barely stopping to chew.

“There,” she says, her mouth still full. “Are you happy?”

When we get our first glimpse of the Sangre de Cristos, Chloe just stops. Not just stops pedaling. Puts on the brakes and stops her bike and we just stand there at the side of the road and look.

We can see the tree line. See the snow on their peaks, settled into the folds and crannies. Patchy, like Randy said. “I feel better already,” she says.

When we get close enough to see Angel Fire, Chloe’s whole mood changes. Her whole physical bearing changes. She sits up straight and she’s pedaling hard and fast, ready to get to someplace that I expect she sees as almost home. At least a solid destination.

We stop the bikes to look.

The day is lightly overcast, making the sky look white, with the shaggy green of the pine trees as a friendly contrast. We watch our breath puff out in clouds. The air is thin up here, making me breathe a lot more and a lot harder. I feel like I’m gasping for breath all the time. But it’s okay. It’s okay to go heavy on breathing. It reminds you you’re alive.

“Randy was right,” Chloe says. “When you’re closer to heaven, you can just tell. You can just feel it. I bet when I think about Randy he can tell. I bet he’s back in his bike shop right now and when I think about him I bet he gets that look in his eyes.” Then she points in the direction of the ski lifts. “What are those?”