Lone Star

To Natasha, my first resplendent light

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions.

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

We're not serious when we are seventeen.

One fine evening, full of pints and lemonade,

In rowdy cafes with their dazzling chandeliers,

We stroll under the linden trees in the park.

Now you're in love, till August anyway.

You'll make her laugh, you'll write her poetry

At night you wander back to the cafes

For more pints and lemonade . . .

We are not serious when we are seventeen,

And when we have green linden trees in the park.

Arthur Rimbaud, “Romance”

C
HLOE SAT ALONE ON THE BUS RIDE HOME ACROSS THE TRAIN
tracks, dreaming of the beaches of Barcelona and perhaps of being ogled by a lusting stranger. She was trying to drown out Blake, Mason, and Hannah verbally tripping over one another as if in a game of drunken Twister as they argued the pros and cons of writing a story for money. Hannah's Blake, with sawdust permanently on the soles of his boots, was planning to write a story that would win ten thousand dollars! Threads of songs played their crowded lyric notes in the static inside Chloe's head. Under the boardwalk like no other lover he took my hand and said I love you forever—all suddenly overpowered by Queen's matchless yawp,
Barcelonaaaaaaaaa . . . !

She placed her palm against the glass. The bus was almost at their road. Maybe then this psychodrama would end. What made him think he could write a story? What could he possibly write about? Outside the dusty windows, made muddy by the flood of recent rain, past the railroad, near a clearing of poplars, Chloe spied a fading billboard of a giant rainbow, which two white-suited workmen on ladders were papering over with an ad for the renovated Mount Washington Resort in the White Mountains.

She had just enough time to glimpse the phrase on the soon-to-be-obscured poster before the bus lunged past it. J
OHNNY
G
ET
Y
OUR
G
UN
. This left her to contemplate, alas
not
in
perfect silence, the philosophical meaning behind a rainbow being papered over.

Just before the bus stopped, she remembered where the sign was from. It was an ad for the Lone Star Pawn and Gun Shop in Fryeburg. Remembering it didn't answer Chloe's larger question, but it answered the immediate one.

“What idiot thought a rainbow was a good symbol for a gun store?” Hannah's mother had said. Soured on men and life, she had pawned her engagement ring there. Got seventy bucks for it. Took Chloe and Hannah for lobster in North Conway with the money.

They all got food poisoning afterward. So much for rainbows.

Is that what they called karma?

Or was it simply what happened next?

“Character is everything,” Chloe said doggedly, to everyone and no one. “Character
is
story.”

The small blue bus pulled up to the pine trees at the top of Wake Drive, a dirt road marked with a rock painted with a black whale. Four kids jumped off into the dust. Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Because it was the merry month of May and almost warm, they wore the clothes of the young out in the boonies—denim and plaid. Though to be fair, that's all they ever wore, blizzard or heat wave.

The mile of unpaved road at the end of which they lived was all downhill between dense pines. It meandered through the thick forest, getting narrower, crossing the train tracks, hugging the small lake, ending in pine needles and disarray, not a road anymore, just dust, and that's where they lived. Where the road ended.

The bus had been dropping them off at the same rural stop for thirteen years. Soon there would be no more blue buses, no
more lurching afternoon rides. In a month they would all be graduating.

And then?

Well, and then . . .

But before then, there was this.

“Don't be hating on my story already, Chloe,” Blake said. “It barely began. Give it a chance. It's a good story, you'll see.”

In what universe could a five-minute speech by Mrs. Mencken about the Acadia Award for Short Fiction right before lunch, when no one was listening, result in Blake and Mason suddenly deciding they were writers and not junk collectors?

“Yeah, Chloe.” Mason took her hand with a cheerful wink. He was ten months younger than his brother and ten inches shorter. He had no choice but to look up to him.

Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Two couples, two brothers, two best friends. A short girl, a tall girl, and two brawny dudes. Well, Blake was brawny. The neat, scrappy Mason was all about sports the last few years, ever since their dad had his back broken. Blake was the one who got the large lumbering body of a man who lived in a rural town and could do anything: lift anything, build anything, drive anything. Was
write anything
going to be added to that list too?

And next to the loping, uncontained Blake walked opalescent, contained, scrubbed-clean Hannah. With tall, detached elegance, Hannah conducted herself as if she didn't belong in tiny Fryeburg, Maine. She wore ballet flats! Even now, as she schlepped a mile through the dried mud and pine needles. No butch Timberlands for her. Hannah walked with her shoulder blades flung back, as though wearing a Chanel blazer. She carried herself as if she was too good for the place that by an unlucky accident of birth she had found herself living in, and couldn't
wait
until the moment she was sipping wine on the Left Bank with other tall, artistic, beautiful people.

Chloe, in stark contrast, was not lean and long of limb. She
didn't care much about not being tall when she wasn't with Hannah. But next to her reedlike, put-together friend, she often felt like an armadillo.

That Mason didn't agree—or said he didn't—Chloe thought only spoke to his poor judgment. Nonetheless, the armadillo and the star ballplayer strolled hand in hand, past old Mr. Leary out on the lawn, surrounded by every bit of garbage scrap he owned, trying to make it look less garbagey so he could sell it.

“Blake, dear boy,” Mr. Leary called out, “you said you'd come by after school and help me with my block saw. I still can't get the dang thing to turn on.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Leary. But later, okay?”

“Why not now?” the craggy man said. “I have some snacks for you and your friends. Doughnuts.”

“Thank you, sir, but not now.”

Because now Blake was busy. He had to clear the brush from the dusty path of his own winding life.

Chloe felt that all the trouble began when Blake turned eighteen last July and was allowed to enter the Woodsmen Day competition at the Fryeburg Fair. He entered five contests. Tree felling, crosscut sawing, axe throwing, log rolling, and block chop. He lost the crosscut and the log roll and the block chop, and you'd think he'd remember that and be humbled—that he lost three out of five—but no. He beat the best time that year on tree felling by six seconds, coming in at twenty-three seconds flat, and he set a fair record on the axe throw with six bullseyes in a row.

You'd think his head was the bullseye: it swelled to four feet in diameter. He strutted down dirt roads and through Academy halls like an Olympic gold medalist. Chloe would remind him that Fryeburg Academy—which all the local kids attended for “free” through a tax deal between the school and the state of Maine—was one of the most prestigious preparatory high schools in the United States. “No one here gives a toss about your axe toss, I promise you,” Chloe would say to him, but you'd think he were deaf. Mason was used to winning, with his dozen
sports trophies lining the dresser, but Blake became impossible. He acted as if he could do anything. Like, for example, write.

With their dad's ancient truck, they had been going to houses around the lakes in Brownfield and Fryeburg and asking if, for a small fee, the residents would let them take their trash away. Now, most people aimed their shotguns to point the brothers in the direction of the exit, but there were some—widows, the feebleminded—who agreed to pay them a few nickels to cart away their old refrigerators, nonworking snowblowers, rusty rakes, newspapers, chain saws. The boys were strong and worked hard. They flattered Hannah into designing their business logo: T
HE
HAUL BROTHERS H
AULING
S
ERVICES
. “W
E
H
AUL SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO
.”

They got a decal made for the truck, painted the vehicle a hideous lime green, and figured that if they worked full-time, hired two more guys, and bought another truck with a lift, they could make six figures at the end of three years. Six figures! They had an advertising plan: Yellow Pages, the
North Conway Observer,
local ads on TV, three radio spots—and then their dad's Chevy died.

It was over twenty years old. Burt Haul loved that pickup so much that even after the accident that nearly ended his life, he refused to let it go and spent his own scarce money rebuilding it. “I drove your mother home from our wedding in that truck,” Burt told his sons. “The only reason I'm alive today is because of that truck. I ain't parting with that thing.”

But now the truck engine was like Mr. Leary's gas-powered block saw. Defunct.

No one had money for a new truck, even a used one. Burt and his boys were being shamefully carted around in Janice Haul's Subaru. Were they even men? The senior year passed, truck still broke, and Janice had to not only drive to work and shop for the family, but also share her inadequate station wagon with two restless boys with divergent friends, interests, and schedules. To make money, the boys shoveled snow, cut grass, and did
shopping for the infirm, and reluctantly put their plans for a business on hold. Fast-forward to today, when they are hopping off buses and yammering on about how a prize-winning story about junk dealers will help them with their unrealized dreams of becoming actual junk dealers. You had to hand it to them. The two were single-minded in their pursuits.
All
their pursuits.

“Chloe, speak up.” Blake always got irked by her disapproval. “What don't you like about it?”

“I'm staying silent.”

“Not silent enough. What? You don't think it'll make a good story?”

“So far I'm not sold,” she said.

“Why? I haven't stopped selling you on it.”

Chloe opened her hands in a
my point precisely
. “Who are the main characters?”

“Who cares? Can I finish telling you before you judge?”

“You mean you
haven't
finished? And I'm not judging.”

“Yes, you are. That's your biggest problem.”

“I'm not—”

Blake stuck his finger out, nearly to her mouth. “The premise of my story is—are you listening? Two dudes run a junkyard.”

“That part I got.”

“They do say write about what you know.”

“I. Got. That. Part.”

“Two dudes run a junkyard and one day they find something awful.”

“Like what? All you find is Wise potato chips and Oreo wrappers.”

“And condom wrappers.” Blake grinned, slowed down, and threw his big arm around Chloe's shoulder.

“Hannah, control your boyfriend.” Chloe pushed him away. “But okay, even still. Where's the story?”

“Can there be anything more full of possibilities than a ninety-year-old woman throwing out a Hefty bag full of used condoms?” Blake laughed.

“Not used condoms,” Mason corrected him. “Condom wrappers.”

Chloe glanced at the lost-in-thought Hannah for support. “What else have you got?”

“Not much past that,” Mason said. “Hannah, you think it's good so far, don't you?”

“So far there's nothing!” That was Chloe.

“He wasn't asking you!” That was Blake.

They had ten minutes before they reached home to hammer it out. It wasn't enough time. Blake pulled them off-road, away from home and onto the train tracks that ran through the woods and divided their small lake down the middle. Arms out, backpacks on, they balanced on the rusty tracks and skipped on the ties as they attempted to brainstorm a plot. Writing a story for money! What a thing. Acadia's first prize was ten thousand dollars for a novella. Blake didn't even know what a novella was until Chloe told him. To the Haul brothers, a sum that large was like winning the lottery. It was a new truck and the start of their own business. It was the rest of their lives. They acted as if they had already found the money lying under a tree in a suitcase. All that was left to do was count it.

And little naysay-y Chloe was not allowed to even
mention
that:

         
1.
   
They had no story.

         
2.
   
They were not writers.

         
3.
   
There would be at least five hundred other applicants, who (a) might have a story and (b) were writers.

         
4.
   
A new truck was more than ten thousand dollars.

Chloe couldn't help herself. If only she could learn to keep quiet, like Hannah or Mason. “Who are these junkyard boys?”

“We are. Blake. Mason. We're ambling along, asking for no trouble, and suddenly—trouble comes.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The awful kind.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Like dead rats.”

“Rats are good,” Chloe said. “But then what? Someone not wanting dead rats in their house is hardly a story. It's more like a truism.”