Secret Star (9 page)

Tess slowed down a little and got herself under enough control so she wasn't bawling like a moose too. It was okay. It was okay. She could see Kamo's camp-fire now, burned down to embers, guiding her to his camp like an oversized golden star somehow knocked to the black ground.

She blundered her way up to it, and there he was, sitting very still on the other side of the glowing coals, and the way the faint light found him she felt for a minute as if his face were floating in the black night, a tawny butterfly lifting toward her.

“Kam.” She could barely talk, she was panting so hard. “Kam, don't go.” He was packed to leave, she could tell even in the dark. The rope he had hung his clothes on was gone from under the eaves. No pots sat by the fire. His knapsack bulged.

He stood up, and his face blinked out. All she could see were his jeans from the knee down and his booted feet.

“Kam, please. Don't go away.” Still crying, damn it. “I'm working on it, I—I'm so close. I can almost remember.”

He kicked dirt over the fire. She couldn't see, didn't know where he was.

“Kamo!”

“I'm right here.” His gruff voice sounded near her ear. He stood beside her and put an arm around her shoulders—just one arm, light and easy, but it was as if he were made of peace. Calmness seeped through her from his touch. Gently he turned her, aiming her toward home, and he started her walking. He walked beside her with his arm lightly riding on her.

“Your daddy's never gonna forgive me now,” he teased. “Leading you astray. You're out running around in the night, and he's gonna fetch his shotgun. He and Ernestine are gonna hunt me down.”

“Don't go,” Tess said.

He sighed. She could feel the sigh run like a soft drumroll through his warm shoulder. He said, “I have to keep looking for him.”

His daddy, he meant. She said, “I'm telling you, I'm almost there. I'm going to remember.”

“You been—trying to force yourself?”

“Kind of.”

He stopped walking, faced her even though they could barely see each other in the darkness and put both hands on her shoulders. “How come?”

“I have to do something, don't I?”

“No, you don't. Not for me. Listen, if you're gonna remember, you got to do it for yourself.”

She had thought he would be grateful. She flared at him, “I'll do it for you if I want to!”

“It might—it might hurt you, Tess.”

“I don't care!”

He turned and started walking again. Taking her home the back way, toward the creek bottom, he didn't blunder into a thing. He walked through the dark like a cat. Sometimes he seemed barely human. Where did this guy come from? Who was he? Trying to figure him out was as frustrating as trying to see into her dreams. Tess demanded, “What the heck kind of name is Kamo, anyway?”

With a quirk in his voice he shot back, “What kind of name is Tessali?”

“So my mother got in a poetic mood.” Girls were allowed to have weird names. “I'm serious, Kam. What flavor are you? Greek or something?”

He sighed again. “I don't really know.”

It sounded like his mother hadn't told him much more about this Rojahin man than Daddy had told her. Tess tried another question. “What kind of musician? You said your father was a musician.”

“Played piano in a bar.” He said it without a hint of put-down, and she had a kind of flash, almost a vision, of a little boy sitting right under the piano, awash in the music, feeling it, breathing it, and how melodies must have come down like thundershowers, and how big and wonderful that piano-playing daddy must have seemed.

“Then—your mother left him, or he left her—”

“Right. One of those things.”

“And—you never saw him again.”

“Since I was five. Right.”

There were questions she didn't want to ask, but he heard them in her silence.

“The way my stepfather was, Tess—it was no damn wonder my father never came to see me.”

But the father should have been there. He shouldn't have left his son to a stepfather who beat him. It was illogical that Kam could forgive his father for doing nothing when he blamed his mother for the same thing.

Kam said, “I'm scared I'm gonna find out he's dead. Nothing left but a white wooden cross along some roadside, where he drove himself into some ditch, the way he used to drink. But then—I'm scared I'm gonna find him still around, and he just didn't care.” His voice was going thin. “Dead would be better.”

So he did think about it.

They didn't say much the rest of the way back. She could have told him about Butch, but she never thought of it; Butch wasn't important. She'd handled him. Far up a hillside she heard a deep-voiced owl crooning, and far down the creek bottom a fox yipped, singing high and thin as a new moon.

By the time they reached the Mathis place the cloudy sky was starting to lighten from black to rainy gray. At the edge of the backyard Kam faced her.

“Kamo,” she whispered, “please stay.”

In the quicksilver dawn light she could see him looking back at her. For some reason he seemed afraid, as if she could do something to him. Didn't he know she would never hurt him?

“Just a few more days,” she begged.

She saw his jaw tighten. But he nodded.

“Don't go without telling me.”

He nodded again. It was a promise.

It rained all that day. Tess got soaking wet hiking to the IGA after school.

She walked in, and Butch looked straight at her and said, “Bitch.”

She didn't care. She was so falling-down tired from being up half the night that she could barely keep moving. She was too tired to do anything about Butch, even if she knew what to do.

“I'll get you, bitch,” he said to her, low and mean, when nobody was listening. “No slut disses me. I'll get your snotty ass.”

All through shift he was like that. During break she couldn't go outside to get away from him, because it was raining. Yawning, she went up front to look at the
Rolling Stone
special issue on Crux.

She was dreaming about Crux wild-haired on a faraway mountaintop, under a shadowy moon, singing rhythm and blues with the wolves, when somebody grabbed her nasty-hard by the arm. “Bitch,” somebody hissed in her ear.

Tess knew who it was. She yanked her arm out of his grip, whirled around, and caught him by the front of his shirt. All of a sudden she had her energy back and she was blazing mad. She got a fistful of shirt and hauled him close to her face so she could make an impression on him without yelling. “Butch,” she told him very softly and sweetly, “you are being a colossal jerk. Let me alone.”

He tore away, ripping his shirt. His face had gone clay white. “You are gonna die,” he said, his voice choked as if she had strangled him. His hand shot to his pants pocket.

Tess heard jeering. Looking in the plate-glass window were half a dozen guys, high-school kids she recognized, Butch's friends. Butch had been trying to show off in front of them, apparently, and they were yowling and meowing and laughing ha-ha.

For just a moment Butch looked so much like a cornered little boy that she actually felt sorry for him. “Look,” she told him, “you let me alone and I let you alone. It's that simple.”

He didn't seem to think so. His hand gripped his pocket. “You're gonna crawl, slut,” he said, his voice thick and dark, like tar. Then he stalked away.

Tess felt tired again, so tired she wanted to sit down, lie down, go to sleep and not wake up until Butch was an old man in a nursing home somewhere—but forget sitting down; break was over. She picked up the
Rolling Stone
she had dropped on the floor, put it back on the rack, and headed back to her work station. The radio would get her through the day. She listened to the music, drummed with her fingers on the boxes of grapefruit she was opening, ignored Butch. In her experience that was the best way to deal with a nuisance—ignore it.

Her mistake was to think that Butch was just a nuisance.

He got off work the same time she did. And Kam was not out back waiting for her. No reason why he should be. Probably staying out of the rain like a sane person.

But Tess wished he were there. What a pukey day.

It had stopped raining, finally, but the air felt chilly dank. After checking for Kam, Tess slipped back inside and hid out in the women's bathroom while Butch left, then hung around the IGA back room till she was sure he was gone, not waiting for her in the soggy dusk out back—but then she didn't hang around any longer. She thought of going home by the roads, where there were people in houses, people in cars, but nah. Too long, and she was too tired, and she hated to give in to a bully anyway. She walked out of town, then down through the salvage yard the way she usually did.

Hearing nothing but the sound of clammy wind through dead cars. Weeds whispering. A rusty hinge creaking.

All alone.

Then for the first time all day her brain kicked in and she realized she should have been anywhere else.

Stark staring awake now. She moved as fast as she could. No music going in her head that night. She kept scanning woods and brush in all directions, on the lookout—but they didn't try to hide. When she got halfway down the salvage yard she saw them waiting at the bottom, all studly like a row of fence posts.

No way! She had expected Butch himself, not him and all his friends. Tess took off, sprinting behind a row of dead cars piled up like rusty fish, knowing she couldn't outrun them, looking for a place to hide. Hot with fear, she knew she didn't have much time, because she heard them yell—they had seen her.

Moving fast, she was also thinking fast, and the thoughts were not pleasant: hide in some old Buick or panel van? They would just find her and drag her out.

The junkyard shack. She ran to the door, and it wasn't locked—it didn't even have a lock on it, because there was nothing of value in there except maybe a coffeemaker. She lunged inside and closed the door and leaned against it, looking for something to pile against it besides herself.

In a back corner she saw an old armchair with the stuffing spilling out like guts. She darted to it.

Then she heard the door open.

Facing the chair in the dark corner Tess thought hazily of stair rails; why were there no stair rails for her to hide behind? She straightened up, taut, at bay. She turned.

Butch stood in the doorway, menacing, silhouetted, with an ugly little gun in his lifted hand.

“Get out here,” he ordered.

Tess screamed.

Not because of Butch. He couldn't make her scream just by showing her a gun. But she screamed because—

The—man, it was Butch in the doorway, she knew it was Butch, yet she was seeing—the nightmare man—

But it was confused, all confused. The blond husky one in the door should have had a knife, and the one getting up from the chair in the dark corner should have had the gun, and he was saying,
Get out, get out, I'm warning you,
and—how dare he, how dare he—kill…

Fear hit like a red explosion, she couldn't think, she couldn't move, it was all shards and sparks swirling around, Butch's face, gun, hate, knife, anger, the yelling, the hot smell, that other—beloved face—

Then, like fire shifting, the shards fell together.

She remembered.

She screamed. Remembering hurt so badly that she had to scream, but not just with pain—the anger was worse. Anger, searing through her and turning her to flame. Tess screamed with white-hot fury and lunged straight at the gun.

10

Butch shouted and staggered back as Tess jumped him—and then there was a bang that should have stopped the world.

Tess went berserk.

The bullet just grazed her arm. The next instant Tess knocked Butch flat, so smoking incandescent raging mad that she snatched the gun out of his hand and hit him on the head with it. His gang just stood there not making a sound. Tess was making enough noise for everybody involved. She charged at them—they jumped back from her, faces stony sweating white, and she ran through them. Then she just kept going, though she wasn't running away. She was running to somebody.

She was running to the only person who would listen, and help, and keep her sane. She was running to Kam.

Out of the salvage yard and halfway through the sawmill yard she realized she still held Butch's gun in her hand—no wonder they had all flinched away from her. Probably they had thought they were dead. Tess started to laugh, but it was not a good laugh. She flung the gun down so hard it went off again, could have killed her. So what. Sounded good. She wanted to do it again, but her momentum kept her running, down through the lumberyard and the woods.

Then suddenly she was bone tired. Couldn't run anymore. She just wanted to lie down and die. But she had to keep going, so she did, walking down the overgrown pasture in the dusk. After the rainy day the twilight seemed the color of tarnished silver, but there was still enough of it for her to find her way along the patches of soft spring grass between the rocks and cedars and sassafras and honeysuckle tangles. To keep herself going Tess was trying to be calm, like the pasture, quiet, like the muted light—and thank God, Kam was there in his cowshed camp. As she got near it she could hear his radio going.

Out past the pollution

out beyond the fear

out beyond the shadows

shines a secret star…

Crux. But the bullet scratch on Tess's arm felt like somebody had pressed a red-hot knife there, it hurt clear to her toes, and her heart hurt even worse than the wound did, and the song couldn't help her. She started running again. “Kamo!” she cried.

The music stopped. Another few strides and she could see Kam standing in front of his shed, staring toward her, his shoulders stiff, his face—frightened?

He heard calamity in her voice, probably. And he was right. What she had to say was terrible, and too heavy for her to hold by herself. She needed somebody to help her bear the weight.