Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “Chloe,” he said, “I don’t remember a time in my life when I was a hundred percent. Welcome to the grown up world.”

  She shook her head. “I know you couldn’t possibly feel like that. You couldn’t drive a boat or play chords and feel like I felt.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. “Did you consider the possibility that I can’t drive a boat or play or sing unless I feel like you felt?”

  “No,” she said. “No.” She ate. She drank a Coke. She felt human. This was human. The other thing, that was possession. “Speaking of singing,” she said to change the unwelcome subject from pathetic self to fantastic him, “what are you going to do after the army? You’re not planning to be a career soldier, are you?”

  “I’m not planning very much at all.”

  She turned her head to his grave face. “You sing like no one I’ve ever heard in my whole life, Johnny. I’m not complimenting you, Johnny, I’m just stating fact. You have the great fortune of never having to figure anything out, like the rest of us dumb mortals. What am I going to be, what am I going to do, how will I live. All that handwringing. It’s not for you. You don’t have to ask yourself anything. You will be a rock star.”

  He smiled with rueful pride. “You think?”

  “I have no doubt. You’ve got the goods.”

  “All the goods?” he said provocatively without glancing at her. “How do you know I haven’t been there, done that? Not like a rock star, but like a lone star.” Lifting his black tee, he showed her the tattoo on his bare chest.

  “Wait,” she said, “is Johnny Rainbow your stage name? Like Johnny Rainbow and the Hail of Bullets?”

  He was delighted. He slapped his knee. “If I ever again get a band together, you can be sure that will be my name for it,” he said. “Johnny Rainbow and the Hail of Bullets. Fantastic. What did you say you wanted to be when you grow up? A creative director?”

  “A florist,” she said, and he laughed like she was Seinfeld.

  They were on the bench, Chloe still feeling like muddy water, gazing at him as he talked. Johnny was telling her about hazel and holly, the best tree fuels for warmth, and about collecting moss and bark tinder to make the strongest fire. A tall man walked by. He said something in another language, extending his hand.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Lithuanian,” Johnny said.

  “Do you have a few dollars for food,” the man said in English.

  “Oh, look,” Johnny muttered, leaning to Chloe, “a multilingual beggar.” And louder, “No, sorry,” barely even looking the bum’s way.

  The man in rags stopped in front of them. He didn’t move.

  “Maybe you can play me a song, then,” he said, a notch louder, pointing to Johnny’s guitar.

  Carefully Johnny gave back to Chloe the remains of her sandwich and raised his steady eyes to the foul-smelling man in rags.

  Chloe searched up and down the street. It was empty. A few blocks down she could see people, but they were two countries away for all the good they would do them now. Propelled out of her post-stoned mud into something colder and sharper and more real, she became afraid for Johnny’s guitar. That’s what she thought of first. Johnny’s guitar.

  “Dude,” Johnny said, pointing at the sidewalk. “Those feet of yours, they’re meant for walking. Use them. Keep on walking.”

  “Sing me a song, man, and I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “What did I say? And where’s this dollar?”

  From the mysteries of his ruined threads, the scrounger produced a torn piece of a crumpled greenback and threw it at Johnny. “Now sing,” he said. There was hard menace in his voice.

  Casually Johnny flicked the half-dollar off his jeans.

  “Johnny, we should go,” whispered Chloe, her legs feeling like macaroni.

  “No,” Johnny replied in his normal voice. “You haven’t finished eating, and I haven’t finished telling you about bark tinder.” To the man, he said, “I have a sore throat today. Not good for singing. Move along.”

  “I gave you money, so sing.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t fucking feel like it. Get going.”

  “I don’t feel like going,” the man said. “And I don’t think you understand me.” Chloe blinked. In his hands the man brandished a two-foot-long steel pipe.

  Chloe didn’t gasp. She didn’t have time to take a breath.

  Johnny grabbed his guitar and swung it over the back of the bench, and then and only then did he push Chloe sideways, forcing her to slide as far as possible away from the beggar, and then and only then did Johnny stand up. Without any preface, his leg kicked out, knocking the steel pipe out of the man’s hands and sending it flying twenty feet into the street, where it landed with a thud on the concrete.

  “You want to race for it?” Johnny said in his calm voice, as the man’s eyes darted wildly from his pipe in the street to Johnny’s face. “Go ahead. But you better be quicker than me, because trust me, you don’t want me to get to it first.”

  Mumbling furiously under his breath, the hooligan backed away, and when he was far enough from Johnny, he turned and ran screaming into the street. He grabbed his pipe and hightailed it down the boulevard, screaming the whole way. Johnny sat back down. “Can I have another bite of your sandwich, please? Now, where were we? Have I told you about close contact weapons?”

  Chloe inhaled, still staring down the street after the vagrant, the half-eaten sandwich lying dully in her lap. “Um, no, I don’t believe you have.” She handed him the baguette.

  “A knife or a long sharp bone is best,” Johnny said, taking a big bite. “A stone polished away on one end to a dull edge can also be useful for puncturing or post-making. But sometimes, at close quarters, do you know what’s needed most?”

  She shook her head.

  “A sochin dachi and a sokuto. An immovable stance and a foot kick.”

  “Ah.”

  “Finish, please. We have to go.”

  She couldn’t stop staring at him with fresh marvel. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “Do what? Kick a pipe? A baby could do it.”

  Yet the baby that was Chloe couldn’t do it.

  The Polish train from Sestokai to Warsaw was stuffed to the ceiling beams with people. Yes, she was awake and aware, but the loud, small, unpleasant others in their compartment precluded conversation, intimate or otherwise. A mother and father kept a sleeping baby next to them and placed two whining dervish children next to Johnny. A nasty-looking woman with underarm hair like a man’s sat across from Chloe, smelling awful and constantly reaching overhead to get food and magazines out of her bag, unabashedly displaying her hirsuteness. The light was on in the cabin, and outside was night. There was nothing to look at except her own reflection in the glass. She got out her book, Johnny got out his. The little brats yapped to Johnny in Polish. They pointed to his guitar. He answered them in Polish, shaking his head. “Proszę. Proszę coś zagrać na gitarze,” they kept repeating. The kids tried to touch it. Johnny said no. He stared pointedly at the parents, as if inviting them to do some damn parenting, but they kept eyeing their children with a mixture of impatience and adoration.

  Outside the corridor there was awful noise. “It’s forbidden to drink on Polish trains,” Johnny said. “But as you can hear, people manage. Especially on night trains.”

  Johnny said it sounded like a rave. Chloe barely knew what a rave was. She nodded wisely.

  Their door slid open and an old priest entered. He looked around, said something apologetic in Polish to the parents with the sleeping baby. Gruffly, they moved the child off the seat and into a lap so the priest could sit down. The priest said a few words. Johnny leaned to Chloe. “Father said he had the bad luck to be next door.”

  The door to their compartment opened again and two drunks stuck their heads in. One of them saw the priest and in clipped British yelled, “Fuck me, a priest!” Quickly they closed the door and move
d on. The priest had a good laugh about it.

  The lights in the compartment and in the corridor kept flickering off. Johnny said it was a bad sign. He said electrical problems were usually followed by more serious problems with the train. What kind of problems, Chloe wanted to ask, but the small kids kept pulling on Johnny’s arm. The priest was gazing at the children kindly and Chloe was embarrassed to be so shabby as to resent small children. It didn’t make her stop resenting them, but at least she felt bad about it in the presence of clergy.

  “Why are you really going into the Rangers, Johnny?” she asked him, pulling on his other arm, directing his attention away from the little monsters and back to her. “Won’t it make it hard for you to be what you’re going to be?”

  “Which is what?” He smiled.

  “A rock star, I told you.”

  “Why are you so funny?”

  “Does the army have something to do with your dad? Geez! Those urchins are driving me nuts. Can’t you tell them to leave you alone?”

  “I tried.”

  “Can’t you play one song for them to shut them up?”

  “I’ll be playing for the next two hours, then. I can’t. Now what were you asking?”

  “Rangers. Dad. Is it for him, or against him? Are you going into the army because of him, or despite him?”

  “Neither,” Johnny said.

  “Why can’t you just say no? Just say you won’t go.”

  “Don’t have that option anymore, Chloe,” Johnny said. “I had it once.” He sighed. “I got into a spot of trouble, you see, and my dad helped me out. But his price was the army. He had to pull serious strings to get me into OCS. I told him I didn’t think the army was for me, but he said it was. He said it was the only thing that could save me.”

  “Save you from what?”

  “From myself, I guess.”

  “Do you need to be, um, saved from yourself?”

  She fully expected him to joke, to say no, but he didn’t. He said nothing.

  The lights kept flickering. Each time, the kids squealed with delight, and the priest crossed himself. Each time, the drunks next door whooped and hollered.

  “What kind of trouble?” Chloe asked—either about the electrical problems or Johnny’s—but no sooner had the words left her mouth than the lights flared bright, as if in a last hurrah, and went out completely. The compartment, the corridor, the whole train was thrown into blackness. Chloe inhaled and waited, one second, another and another. The lights didn’t come back. They didn’t. She waited for her eyes to get readjusted to night.

  They didn’t.

  “Why is it so dark,” she whispered, almost rhetorically or inaudibly. She wasn’t sure Johnny could hear her, though he was sitting right next to her, his bare arm pressed against her bare arm.

  “It’s cloudy,” he said. “We’re not passing through any towns. There are no lights out in the forest, no roads, and no lights on the tracks.”

  “But how can the train be moving if the power is down?”

  “Diesel powers the train.”

  “Doesn’t it power the lights too?”

  “What did I tell you about Polish trains? It’s a feast. Don’t worry. The lights will come back on in a minute.”

  She sat, the drunken jeers from next door getting so loud in the blackness that she became frightened. The children started to cry. They weren’t next to Johnny anymore, but with their parents across the aisle. She could hear the priest muttering prayers in Polish. The drunks didn’t seem afraid, just the opposite. “What are they yelling about?”

  “They’re trying to figure out if they’re dreaming,” said Johnny. “Or if they’re having a drunken blackout. Apparently they can’t tell.”

  They laughed, sang crazy loud Polish songs, broke things, dropped things. It was obnoxious and stupefying. How could this be allowed? The train continued to roll forward. There was no light of any kind.

  She closed her eyes. It was black. She opened them. It was black. Closed, open, the world was free of all color.

  On her lids were images of light, even through the fear.

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered.

  “We?” he whispered back. “You can’t see light. You can only see what the light lights up.”

  “Which is everything.”

  “Not everything,” said Johnny.

  Images of Riga. The rainbow-lit Old City, lovingly rebuilt, recreated brand-new to look like the old. The blue roofs, the orange doors, the yellow window frames and sepia cobbles, the red tents of the men selling paintings in Livu Square, the lilac tents of the ice cream carts. The sun blinding everything into shade and white, and Johnny in the center, in the pinpoint of the kaleidoscope, in front of his microphone on a telescopic stand, mouth pressed against it (lucky microphone), eyes closed, gutbucket blues flying supercharged out of his throat, holding the note until Chloe felt it, telling her that all of love is forever or all of love is fleeting …

  Eyes open or closed? She couldn’t feel herself blink. Her mouth parted slightly to take in an inky breath. She reached out to touch his arm by her side, just to be sure of him, but it wasn’t next to her anymore. His arm was behind her. She didn’t feel his body turn, or even lean toward hers. She smelled his breath barely an instant before his open lips shivered like a tremor on her open lips. She gasped—into his mouth. His hand was in her hair. His tilted face was pressed against hers. He didn’t let her take a breath, he kissed her for the length of the dream that was her life, all in that one ebony moment. He kissed her forever and not long enough, terrifyingly long (what if the lights came on what if everyone else could see what if everyone else could hear his mouth bruise hot against her lips what if they could hear her moan what if they could see the shadow of his face against her face what if what if what if what if), and anguishingly brief. Her hands trembled, her arms, her legs; her quivering back was slung low on the seat, her head was thrown back. She felt at any moment she was going to slide down, onto her back, and he would fall on top of her, and crush her with his body (only if she was very very lucky) with all the Poles, the children and the sick, the sinners and the saints, all manner of souls, watching her.

  He was first to pull away. The lights came on.

  Or …

  The lights came on. He was first to pull away.

  She opened her eyes, so slowly, unwillingly waking in the winter dawn.

  The noise from next door was insulting her senses, but it also made it difficult to speak, so Chloe didn’t. She turned to the window, her hands shaking, her lips still wet, still parted. She clamped shut her mouth, clamped her hands into fists, and leaned against the glass. She was so hot. Drops of sweat streamed hot from her throat onto her breasts, her stiff nipples, down to her stomach. Her spine was wet with electric water. Everything on her was wrong and alive.

  Maybe she had imagined it. What would it feel like if she had? Would it feel the same? It was so unexpected, so pulverizing. She didn’t dare look his way, but from the corner of her half-blinded eye, she glimpsed him reading his survival manual. What did the book say about the kiss of life in an ice-cold space where everything was suspended without gravity? But she was both, floating and flying. And she wasn’t ice cold. She closed her eyes and imagined darkness.

  For a long time Chloe didn’t speak. The train lumbered on through a countryside she couldn’t see. Inside, four people were sleeping, three were reading. The eighth had her face pressed to the window. This eighth person, a wraith of a girl, a ghost of the old Chloe, stared into the mystifying blackness thinking everything and nothing. She came here across the world to doom herself. Encore, encore! Was she an angel or a whore? Did she want to wrap herself in heavy cloth or rip the sheer blue cotton off her body? Go abroad, Chloe, and love a boy, not the one you said you loved, not the one you thought you loved, the one who doesn’t love you, but fly across the world to find another lover. In an epileptic tremble she bobbed with the train, in her pretend-penitent reverie entwi
ned in his arms and legs, her hands on his bare back, in his black hair, swirling and swirling together to the murky watery bottom, both of them in a shipwreck.

  After this train stops at Central Station in Warsaw, what happens next? Where was Blake to tell her? She and Johnny go together down the street, searching for the hostel, their bags in hand, like travelers, like lovers. And tomorrow? When the others come? Can she talk her way out of this one, see her way out, lie her way out? Can she turn her warm breasts away? Was she caught? And what if she wasn’t? What was worse?

  To not think, not feel, not be. That was worse.

  Had his lips touched her? Encore, encore!

  “Hannah is beautiful, isn’t she?” Chloe said.

  “That’s what you’re thinking about, Hannah?”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Maybe,” Johnny said, neutrally. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “She’s blonde, she’s tall, she’s striking, yes,” he said. “But so what? Beneath the mask of her self-involved serenity is nothing but bitterness and boredom. She is frivolous. She is empty.”

  Chloe disagreed. “No, not empty.” Why was she always defending her friends to him? One wasn’t frivolous, one wasn’t crabby, one did love her. “She is full of terrors like everybody else. She’s trying to find her way, Johnny. Like you. Like me.”

  He shook his head. “She doesn’t know what she wants.”

  “Do you know what you want?”

  “Yes. Do you know what you want, Chloe Divine?” He lowered his voice an octave to rasp out her name. Otherwise nothing from their desultory words tells her if she dreamed the dream of his lips on her or lived it. She doesn’t tell him what she wants. Because what she wants is the last ray of sun all gold on the white foamy water. A mad kiss on a red plate. His rough fingers on her aching velvet skin. What if the boy you worship brings you a pitcher of lemonade? Would you drink it? How can you not?

  I’m just frozen champagne bubbling and melting against his flame mouth, O Lord. Forgive me. There is a fine but wretched chance he did not touch me and will never touch me again, and clicking my little boots I’ll be forced to walk away and live out the rest of my life haunted by what might have been, live out the rest of my life in the shadow of his streetlamp in the middle of pale night.