Secret Star (3 page)

“You got work I can do? For food?”

Food was something the Mathis household actually had now, because Tess's boss, Jonna, had sent her home loaded down with two-day-old bread, dented cans of beans, damaged freezer boxes of meat. “Kindness of strangers,” Daddy had said. “How did she know?” Though probably Jonna had seen the Mathises spend their food stamps at the IGA often enough. Anyway, there was no place to keep the frozen stuff with the fridge not running, so they had cooked several packets of meat all at once—the stove ran on bottle gas, thank God. Processed beef patties in gravy sat steaming on the table. There was hot cooked food on a chilly April day, and there was plenty for Kamo.

Daddy told him, “Come in here where I can see you, son.

Kamo slipped in and stood on the cracked linoleum just inside the door, looking at Daddy, not looking at Tess.
Smart boy,
she thought. One look, one smirk, and she would have considered putting her table knife into him like he was butter for her bread.
Smart boy, you'd better keep quiet
. He had been spying on her again, and probably this “work for food” thing was a trick to get into her house. She sat glaring at him, but she couldn't say anything in front of Daddy. Probably Kamo was counting on that.

Well, he could count on this, too: he'd better not do or say anything to make Daddy upset.

“What's your name?” Daddy asked him.

“Kamo.”

Daddy lifted his eyebrows, waiting for the rest of it.

“Just Kamo. Or Kam.”

Tess breathed out. Kamo hadn't told Daddy “Rojahin.” He hadn't smirked, either. She started to simmer down.

“Huh.” Daddy nodded as if he now knew enough. “Kam, why don't you wash your hands. We don't have no spigot water right now, but there's a pump in the yard. Soap's on the trough. Then c'mon in and have a seat and join us.”

The thing about Daddy, Tess thought, was that for a guy in a wheelchair he had a lot of pride. Not stuck-up pride, but the kind of pride that made him put something in the “Help a Child” can on the drugstore counter even though his disability check barely paid the mortgage. The kind that made him stay in his own house in the country even though he could have gone on welfare and moved to some sort of subsidized apartment in town where the food pantries and public transportation and stuff were. The kind that made him offer a meal to a scar-faced loner he ought to be afraid of.

Kamo had pride, too. Before he moved to do what Daddy said he asked, “You got work I can do?”

“Later, son. You can't work when you're hungry.”

Kam really was hungry. Ravenous. He seemed wobbly as he sat down at the table. His hands shook when he reached for the spoon to ladle some meat and gravy on his bread.

Nobody talked much. Kamo was busy gulping, and Tess was watching him narrow-eyed, and Daddy was thinking about what he wanted him to do. Tess could see him thinking. “Slice of jelly bread?” he asked when Kam's plate was empty, even though Kam had already had three slices of bread to sop up his gravy.

“I think I better quit before I get a gut ache.” Kam turned his head so he could look at Daddy with his one eye, and the look was his thanks.

Daddy nodded. “You still got a couple of hours of daylight left,” he said. “You think if Tess helps you find the ladder you could get up on the roof and clean the gutters and check the shingles?”

“Daddy,” Tess complained, “I could do that myself.” Why did he have to act like she was a little girl? She could do things. She just hadn't thought about cleaning the stupid gutters.

“Not when it's just me around. What if you fell? I couldn't help you.”

“I wouldn't fall!”

Kam was on his feet as if he were giving the Mathises room to argue, clearing his dishes off the table, taking them to the sink. He turned on a spigot to rinse his plate, and nothing came out. All Tess could see was the eye-patch side of his face, and it didn't move, yet she got the feeling he was flustered. He put his plate down and turned the spigot off.

Daddy was saying to her, “You don't know what might happen. Look at me. Crap can happen anytime.”

Tess always felt like shaking Daddy when he said “Look at me”—it was so preachy. She wanted to argue more, but Kam was on his way out the door, and she got up and headed after him. Once the two of them got to the shed and out of earshot of the house, she said to him none too politely, “What are you doing here?”

“I was hungry.” He was already getting the ladder down from the shed rafters, but he let one end of it bang to the dirt floor and turned on Tess. “Why don't you want me here?” His voice was soft and fierce. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

She stared at him. It was dark in the shed. She couldn't see his single eye. Her chest hurt, but not with fear. Why wasn't she afraid?

He said, “It's like in the old movies, is that it? The ones with the messed-up faces, the hacked-off noses or whatever, those are the bad guys. You think I'm a bad guy, right?”

She didn't watch old movies much, or any movies, but she knew what he meant. She knew it all too well, and didn't answer.

He made a small, disgusted noise through his nose, took the ladder and strode out of the shed.

4

Tess watched Kam set the ladder up against the house. With quick, edgy movements he climbed to the roof and started working on the gutters, scraping last year's rotting leaves out of them with his hands.

Tess hit her fist quietly against the shed door for a moment, then went back into the shed and found a couple of trowels and an old peach basket. Carrying the tools, she climbed the ladder and walked along the edge of the roof to where Kam was working.

“Here,” she said, poking a trowel toward him.

He jumped so hard it startled her heart like a grouse going up. He leaped to his feet and jerked around to face her, coiling as if she had come at him with a switchblade, his single eye white-rimmed like the huge eye of a spooked horse—and his right foot missed the edge of the roof. It caught on the gutter a moment but the gutter started to let go and all of a sudden the idea of falling off the roof was no joke—Tess saw Kam's mouth open as he lost balance and wavered at the edge, though he didn't scream.

Tess never remembered grabbing, but the next heartbeat she had hold of him by both arms, trowels and peach basket were clattering down but he was okay, standing on the roof, back from the edge. She could feel him trembling.

“Jesus,” he panted, “you blindsided me!” He had been concentrating on what he was doing, or maybe on being mad at her, and she had come up to him on his eye-patch side. He had not known she was there.

“Sorry!” she said at the same time. “I'm sorry.” She meant sorry for everything, because it was true, what he had said in the shed. She had been making assumptions about him. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” He muttered it—now he was embarrassed. He pulled away from her and turned back to what he had been doing, hunkering down by the gutter again, straightening the bent place with his hands—mostly with his right hand, because his left hand wasn't worth much. “Thanks,” he said without looking at her.

She retrieved the trowels and peach basket, took a trowel, and went to the other end of the gutter from him and started cleaning it out. There was so much dirt in there that little maple trees had taken root, each of them just a sprout and one leaf—they reminded Tess of eighth notes sprouting up from the top of a music staff, except their baby leaves looked glassy and almost pink in the evening light. She tossed them and rotting gutter trash into the peach basket, which she had put halfway between her and Kam, and as she worked she moved slowly toward him.

Something about the low light and sunset glow felt like French-horn music—it made Tess calm down, and she got a gentle rhythm going in her head, and she did some pretty clear thinking. About Kam. She still didn't know a thing about him, and she got the feeling he wasn't going to tell her much. He wanted her to trust him. And she wasn't sure she should, because it looked like he had been a gang fighter, or at least he had spent a lot of time on rough streets. Why else would he react that way when a person took him by surprise? And all the scars—if he had been a gang fighter, that would explain how he had gotten them. And if he had been in a gang, why should she trust him?

Yet, Tess knew, she did trust him. She trusted him to understand.

In the shed, she had known to her bones that he would not hurt her.

More than that. She trusted him more than that.

Across the little distance that still separated them she called to him, “Have you heard a song called ‘Secret Star'?”

His head came up, and he turned toward her so he could look at her, though the look didn't tell her whether he knew what she was talking about.

“I am in love with that song,” she told him.

He smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile, and it was a wide, warm, million-dollar smile that lit up his one-eyed face and made her forget the scars.

“I just heard it for the first time today,” she said. “I am going crazy. That song gives me chills and fever. I need to get a radio. I need to get the CD. I need to get a CD player.” Yeah, right, and a pig with wings. “I want to put that song under my pillow.” Somehow she needed to have it to keep. All her life she would love it.

For some reason, maybe because he was actually smiling, Kam ducked his head and turned back to his work.

The peach basket was getting in the way. Tess shoved it back with her foot. She and Kam worked shoulder to shoulder digging out the last three feet of gutter, comfortable together, neither of them speaking.

The singer, Tess wondered briefly, the secret star—who was he? But no, she didn't really want to know. It would break her heart if he turned out to be what Butch had said, some plastic Hollywood guy using mystery as a sales gimmick. Forget about him. He was a star, and people like that, stars, they lived at the opposite end of the universe from real people like her. Stars never set foot on Appalachian hills, never stepped in cow poop, never—probably never talked to homely girls like her. Tess didn't want to know who he was, because this way she could pretend his song was speaking straight to her.

The song was the important thing; it meant something. Like, there was a star out beyond everything, like, there was hope, there was light—that was what mattered. The singer didn't matter as much as the song.

Yet when Tess went to bed that night and lay there with the song fever pulsing in her, not even trying to go to sleep, she daydreamed about him. The singer. In her mind she gave him form, and he was a passionate angel of a man, more beautiful than any man she had ever met, with his heartbeat drumming in his temples and his long hair lifting like a stallion's mane and a face worth weeping over and under his perfect brows his hot eyes shining like a thousand stars.

The next day, Sunday, Tess's day off, Kamo came back to the Mathis place to help clean the cistern.

Benson Mathis had told Kamo he was welcome to sleep in the shed, but Kam said he had a place to sleep. He showed up in time for breakfast, and then except for lunch he and Tess worked all day. Tess found him good to work with—steady, quiet, didn't talk constantly or get peevish about little things or sling orders around, which was more than she could say for some people at the IGA. She found it hard to stay on guard against him.

Cleaning the cistern was a bear of a job. It took both of them to heave the cover off, and then they had to get all the water out with buckets on ropes, and then they had to get into the cistern, which if you are not real fond of dark, cramped, damp places is like crawling into hell. Then they had to scrape out all the gunk that had come down from the gutters, and scour slime off the bottom and sides, then rinse the cistern out with water hauled from the hand pump in the backyard. Then they dipped out the dirty rinse water because they couldn't just run it off through the spigots because the electric pump wasn't working. And cleaning the cistern while it wasn't being used had sounded like such a good idea.

“You got any more torture for us?” Tess asked Daddy when she and Kamo were finished with the stinking cistern.

“Sure. I got a list long as my arm.”

She and Kamo went around and ripped the ratty plastic off the doors and windows. Then they cleaned out the accumulation of winter trash in the shed. Then they went up on the roof and admired their clean gutters and looked for loose shingles and nailed on some new ones. All that time Kam didn't ask about Tess's Rojahin father, and she sensed that he was not going to, not when they were working. So as far as she was concerned they could just keep working, and they did, right until dark. When Daddy finally called them in for supper, she was so tired she felt silly.

Daddy had creamy beeswax candles from the crossroads church stuck in mayo-jar lids for light. “No dessert,” he said cheerfully after the Mathises and guest had devoured half a loaf of bread and a big box of fish sticks. Daddy was in a happy mood. “No sorbet, and no strolling violinists either, but who needs 'em? Give us some music, Tess!”

In front of Kamo? But why not. The rebel in Tess tried never to care what other people thought. She put the flats of her fingers on the table and started drumming.

In her head she had been working out a rhythm arrangement for “Secret Star,” and it had been simmering and stewing and brewing in her all day, and when she started drumming it was like starting a nuclear reaction. Fusion. She leaned into a light-speed double-stroke roll and kicked out for things to bang with both feet, she was slapping out eighths with one hand and triplets with the other, popping snare chops against a table leg, drumming till her chair shook, every muscle rocking. Kam looked stunned. In the candlelight his eye shone as big as a half-dollar, and who could blame him.