Secret Star (6 page)

“I'm not. I—”

“Where you been! I told them you were sick.”

“Tess,” Kamo said, his voice quiet, surprised, warm, as if nothing were wrong now that she was there. “I been looking for you.”

“Get the hell inside,” Butch told her. He grabbed her by one arm and tried to propel her toward the stockroom door. She yanked her arm away.

“Stop it! I'm not going in. I've got to talk with Kam.”

“What the hell for? You talk with freaks?” Butch tried to step past her to hassle Kam some more. She stood in his way. He glared, then turned and stomped into the IGA, slamming the door behind him.

Tess felt her knees go watery. Without meaning to, she folded to sit on the gravel. Kam hunkered down and swiveled his lopsided face to peer at her.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“About what?” He hadn't done anything wrong that she knew of.

“Everything. How's your dad?”

His voice was too gentle. And she hadn't wanted to think about Daddy being sick, Daddy acting mad at her. Without warning tears started running down her face. She sobbed.

“Tess?” He sounded frightened. “Is it bad?”

“No,” she managed to say through her sobbing. “He's okay.”

Kamo put his arms around her.

It felt strange, yet right, having him close. She leaned against him. He patted her back and didn't say anything, just held her.

It felt good. But Tess hated to cry. What if somebody came out of the IGA and saw her? “Crap,” she muttered, pulling away from Kam, rubbing her face, hiding behind her hands. Her face had to be as red as turkey wattles.

Kam crouched watching her.

“Daddy's okay,” she told him. “He gets that way, and then he takes his pills, and then he's all right again.” Until sometime maybe he wouldn't find his pills, or somebody would ask too many questions, maybe he wouldn't be all right. But Tess didn't want to think about it. “He's mad at me. Or upset. He's not talking.” Daddy had hardly said a word to her that morning. “I been looking for you all day, and now my gut's killing me.”

“You were looking for me?”

It had seemed like everything depended on finding him, yet Tess found she could not explain why. She fumbled for words without finding any, and God knew what he was thinking. She felt her face burn even redder.

He looked away from her, studying the hills, the locust trees standing black and feathery against the sky. He said, “You going to work?”

She shook her head. Couldn't go in there now, not with tear tracks on her smudgy red face.

“Home?”

“No. Daddy knows I'm supposed to be at work.”

Kam seemed to understand that there were some things she couldn't explain to Daddy. He nodded. “C'mon,” he said, and he stood up and stretched his right hand, the good one, down to her.

She got up without touching his hand. They walked silently up the steep road, out of Hinkles Corner, down through the salvage yard and past the sawmill. Tess began to suspect he was taking her home after all. “Where we going?”

“Dinner.”

They cut through the woods, came out in an abandoned pasture, and headed downhill between clumps of sassafras and honeysuckle toward the creek. Tess could see an oxbow of water shining in the low light. But halfway down to the river bottom, Kam rounded an outcropping of rock and turned toward a run-in shed cows had once used. When they reached it he ducked inside, and Tess realized it was his camp.

He had a tarp on the ground, and some blankets to sleep in, and a blanket spread over a muddle of stuff in a back corner, and cardboard tacked up over the drafty places in the walls. A roof to keep off rain, three walls—it could have been worse. The open side was screened by sumac, so he had some privacy. Tess noticed a black circle of ground inside a ring of stones where he'd built a campfire. No fear that anybody would see. There was nothing around but pasture and woods, no houses or anything, for probably a mile.

Kam got on his knees near the fire ring, rummaging in a knapsack. Tess stood and watched as he pulled out a packet of graham crackers, and her stomach started to howl like a chained dog.

“C'mon in, sit down,” he said. He handed her the crackers and kept rummaging. “I'll get the fire going and cook us some soup.” He pulled out a couple of dented cans of store-brand beef-and-barley condensed.

Tess settled in with her back against an upright and gulped graham crackers. Kam had firewood ready, stacked along the back of the run-in shed to stay dry. She sat, eating more slowly once her belly quieted down, and watched him break a punky dead branch into kindling.

He said, “That guy at the IGA must like you.” He looked up from his kindling and gave her a flicker of a smile. “He acts jealous as a rooster.”

If Kam was trying to make her feel better, he was succeeding. Butch, an actual boy, seemed to like her? But—nah. Tess said, “That's just the way Butch is. Acts like he owns the place.”

“He's territorial, all right.” Kam crumpled a piece of newspaper, tented slivers of punk wood over it, and lit a match to it. The paper blazed, then dwindled. Little flames licked up from the wood. Kam fed finger-thick sticks to the small fire, then pulled a dented metal pot out of his knapsack, got up, and headed down through hoppleberry bushes to the creek. In a few minutes he came back with the pot full of water and said, “Thank you for getting him out of my face. You keep saving my ass. Thank you.”

He seemed to mean it. Tess set down the graham crackers in surprise. “You could have handled him.”

“Maybe.” He crouched to open the soup cans. “I'd rather not. I'll stay out of a fight whenever I can.”

“You—you will?”

“Not much punch in this.” He lifted his withered hand and glanced at her. “Guys like whatsisname, Butch, they scare me.” His shoulders shivered. “Anything happens to the good eye, that's it, I'm blind.”

She shuddered with him. Okay, it made sense. Of course he wasn't a fighter.

But—she had thought—

Tess blurted out, “What happened to your other eye?”

Mixing soup, his hands stopped moving. He canted his head and looked up at her. The sun was going down, putting Kam and everything inside the cowshed into shadow. Firelight flickered on his face; shadows moved but he didn't. Tess couldn't tell what he was thinking or feeling. He stared so long she thought he wasn't going to answer, like she shouldn't have asked the question.

He said, “My stepfather.”

At first she didn't understand. Then she started to understand, and she couldn't speak.

Oh, my God. It happened when—when he was just a little kid
.

“He killed the eye just hitting me all the time,” Kam said.

She didn't want to believe she had heard him right. “Your—your stepfather? Your own family?”

“Beat me silly whenever he felt like it.” Hard and blunt as creek stones.

“God,” Tess whispered. “Kam, that's awful.”

He tilted his head down. He turned back to fixing soup.

She said, “Your scars—” She hated to ask, but she needed to know. He was Kam, he was just right, he was the greatest thing since somebody took electricity and ran it through a guitar, yet—nothing about him was making sense to her. He was tough, yet—he wasn't a tough guy at all? “Your hand—”

“He did that too.”

She didn't ask how. “Was it—like—the whole time you were a kid—”

“As long as I can remember he beat me. I left when I was twelve.”

God.

“Been on my own pretty much ever since.”

Her chest hurt for him, her mind hurt.
It shouldn't have happened
. “Where was your mother? Dead?”
Like mine?

Kam placed his cooking pot carefully on the dirt floor. He got up and brought two small logs from his stack of firewood. He added a few sticks to his campfire, keeping it small; it was already burning down. He placed the logs one on each side of it and balanced the pot on them, over the embers. He did not look at Tess.

He said, very low, “She was right there all the time. She let him hurt me.”

Something sizzled. With a shock Tess saw that Kamo was silently crying. His face did not move, but his scarred cheek shone in the firelight, wet. His tears were falling on the hot ashes at the edge of the fire.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. She didn't know what else to say. Her hand lifted toward him, but stopped; maybe he would not want to be touched.

“She would feed me cookies afterward,” Kam said, his voice stretched tight and hard, like a drumhead.

“I'm sorry.” Maybe he knew what she meant.

He nodded. “She's probably still with him.” He left his soup on the fire and sat back, facing Tess. He made no effort to wipe away the tears or hide them. “Hell,” he said.

She nodded. “So you got out.”

“Not soon enough.”

She waited. He went on.

“What happened was, when I got to be bigger, eleven, twelve, I started to fight back. Made it worse. He beat me so bad sometimes I thought I was gonna die—but one night, the son of a bitch was so drunk when he came after me that I got him down. I got him down on the floor. And then I had to decide.” Kam faltered. His gaze slipped away from her. Looking at the fire, slowly he said, “I wanted to kill him. I wanted to do him the way he did me and then kill him slow.”

Tess felt her breath congeal in her chest. Twelve years old, he had been forced to decide whether to be a murderer.

Kam glanced up at her. “See, the ironic thing is, usually kids who get beat up, like me—they grow up to be just like the people who did it to them.”

But not Kamo. With uncanny sureness Tess knew what he had decided, and she knew his mind was strong enough to make it stick. “You didn't kill him,” she said. “You didn't want to be like him. You ran away to look for your father.”

He ducked his head. He lifted his arm and scrubbed away the tears with his sleeve.

Tess decided it was time for her to shut up. She sat back, leaned her head against the shed wall and closed her eyes. The soup was starting to heat up; it smelled good. So did the smoke. So did the faint, sweet, grassy aroma of cows that still came up from the ground. Tess heard a quiet slow-dance rhythm start inside her head, yet at the same time she was thinking. About Kam. About what his life had been like.

He had been serious when he told her nobody had ever loved him.

He needed to find his father.

She opened her eyes. He was stirring the soup. “Kam,” she asked, “you sticking around?”

He looked over at her and nodded. “A little while longer. There's something I have to do.”

Tess knew she had to help him. And she had an idea how. It scared her—but she knew what she had to do.

Daddy was in bed, asleep, when she got home. Since he didn't have TV to watch, he got bored in the evenings and went to bed early. Or maybe he was still in his silent mood and didn't want to talk to her. Fine. She wouldn't have to deal with him until morning.

Tess felt bone tired, her head ached from too much to think about, and all she wanted in the world was a hot shower. Instead, she bathed at the pump, shivering and muttering to herself. Forget hot showers for the foreseeable future, especially if she had lost her job. Damn, she hated being poor, she hated it, she hated it! All her life, or at least all her life that she remembered, it had been poor, poor, poor, government-surplus cheese and powdered milk, which tastes putrid, and brush the teeth with baking soda, which tastes even worse, and don't lose the pencil the teacher gives you.… Store-bought clothes? Forget that. Get by with secondhand. Being poor was supposed to give a person character, and Tess knew this was true because she sure was the school character in all those funky old clothes. Which was another reason why, damn it, she wanted things. She wanted a CD player and the Crux CD, she wanted a Walkman, she wanted some real clothes—all right, mostly she wanted jeans, brand-name jeans so the other kids would stop thinking she was contagiously and terminally uncool.

She wanted—a chance.

She went to bed and lay there twitching her fingers in time with the rhythms going in her head, trying not to think. She went to sleep.

The nightmare came, as she knew it would. Just a little different this time. The walls were soot black and solid brick. Gloomy, but strong. They would never give way.

Yet they moved, they bulged, the dull black paint cracked, the brick started to crack, and Tess was scared—

Don't wake up
.

Even in her sleep, Tess knew what she had to do to help Kamo. She was going to take charge of her dream. Whenever she had her nightmare she was going to stick with it and—find out. Find out what it was about. Whatever was walled in, hidden away from her and trying to get out—that was the scary stuff she couldn't remember, and it was time to remember. She wanted to remember. For Kam.

The black brick walls thinned and rippled and turned to a black curtain. And behind it there was something—terrifying—

Don't wake up!

She stuck with it. The next moment, it was as if the curtain pulled away, like she was watching a play, and she could see—the rectangle of sunlight as a door opened, and she could almost see—the man—silhouetted in the—doorway—

Then there was a red explosion, a black scream, someone crying. Tess woke up, gasping and sweating, her heart pounding, feeling dizzy weak shaky like in school once when some girl with asthma had given her a whiff of her inhaler, except this was worse—she felt like a heart attack case, a candidate for one of Daddy's pills. She sat up in bed, trying to calm down, afraid to go back to sleep if she had to face the red-and-black terror again.

Just a nightmare
.

No, dammit, not a nightmare, really. A memory. Walled in. She knew that now.

It's too hard. I can't do this
.