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 i
t 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.
Yet—she had to try. She had to keep trying. For Kam.
For herself.
7
“So where were you so late?”
It was breakfast time, there was bread but no margarine, and Tess couldn’t quite tell whether Daddy was in a better mood or not. He was trying to be. He was talking to her. He was keeping his voice down, keeping it light. But there was worry in his eyes.
Tess didn’t exactly answer. “Daddy, I wasn’t that late. You went to bed early.”
“I never heard you come in.”
“You went to sleep.” She tried to tease. “It’s hard to hear anything when you’re asleep. Hard to tell what time it is when the clocks don’t work, either.”
He nodded, smiled, changed the subject, letting it go. They talked about the Phillies, losing again, as usual. They talked about making some pork and sauerkraut sometime if pork shanks went on sale. He kept looking at her as they talked.
She asked him to sign a blank piece of notebook paper for her because she needed a note for a field trip. He knew she was lying, she could tell he knew. But he didn’t say anything. He signed it. She wrote herself an excuse and used it to get back into school that day.
After school, and after getting called to the guidance office as usual when the deficiency notices went out, she hiked to the IGA to see whether she still had a job, and she did. Butch had said she was sick. They knew she didn’t have a phone. It was okay. So Tess went back to the stockroom to get to work.
Butch was there. “Hey,” he said, flashing his famous grin at her. “You notice I didn’t tell them anything.”
She had expected him to be mad at her, like yesterday. But he wasn’t. And she still had her job. She smiled at him.
“I’ll buy you a soda over break,” he said.
She wanted to read magazines over break. There was a special issue of Rolling Stone all about Crux—nobody knew who this guy was and they could still write about him, like what the songs were supposed to mean, and what the name “Crux” was supposed to mean, what kind of cross, like the Christ cross or a pagan universe symbol or a tree of life or an ankh or the constellation Southern Cross or what? Or just an X, like a poor man’s mark? Tess had read the article and she wanted to read it again, she wanted to memorize it. But Crux was just a dream, right? Here was a real boy saying he was going to buy her a soda. A cute boy. A popular boy.
“Sure,” she answered, even though what he’d said hadn’t sounded like a question. “Thanks.”
She worked till closing that night. Then slept like a sack of potatoes, no nightmares. Was back at the IGA at eight the next morning, Saturday, and worked all day.
She looked for Kam at breaks but didn’t worry when he wasn’t there. He had said he was sticking around. Anyway, she had nothing to tell him yet.
Every two hours “Secret Star” came on the radio and Tess stopped whatever she was doing to listen. The song made her breathless every time. Strong words, but it was the strong, complicated rhythms that made her tingle—those, and the strong, wild voice. She’d know that voice anywhere. She played it in her head. She heard it sometimes in her dreams.
“I’ve got the CD,” Butch told her.
The last couple of days Butch was being so nice Tess was beginning to think maybe he really did like her. It seemed impossible, but if that wasn’t it, what was going on? He had bought her a Pepsi, a Milky Way bar, an ice cream sandwich. He talked with her while they were working and during breaks. He told her things. Like her, Butch didn’t have a mother. His father traveled a lot making speeches. His father expected him to go into one of the military academies after high school.
At the back of her mind, Tess had always kind of believed in the Cinderella story, all those romantic stories where the boy was bad like a wild stallion but he was good to the girl so the girl knew he really loved her, love like a miracle that changed her life. Tess’s life needed help so bad, maybe Butch was her miracle. Maybe Butch was going to make her his girlfriend, make her popular. Maybe Butch was her prince.
“The Crux CD,” Butch said. “I have it.”
“You twit. I hate you.”
He took this the way she intended it, as friendly envy. “You want to hear it?”
“Nooooo.” As if he didn’t know she about wet her pants every time Crux came on the radio. Butch knew she wanted to hear that Crux album worse than anything.
“I’ll play it for you after work.”
She was supposed to go home. Daddy would have supper waiting. But she would have walked through razor wire to hear that CD. Tess said, “Okay.”
“I’ll show you my room. I got all sorts of things you’ll like.” Butch sauntered off.
Lupe was listening. When Butch was far enough away she said softly, “Tess. You know, he is the kind—I hear him talking to his friends. It is all about what he does to girls. How he scores.”
But that was just the way the popular boys tried to impress each other. “He likes to talk big,” Tess said. “He’s not a bad guy, really. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Butch drove one of those pickups on huge wheels, Tess noted, the kind with lollipop lights and a roll bar. Instead of taking her straight to hear the CD he took her to Canadawa first and bought her a burger and fries to go at the Hot’N’Now. Then he headed out via twisty hill-country back roads, driving so fast it was hard to eat. But finally he and Tess got to his house.
Tess hadn’t realized till then that Butch was rich, at least by her standards. In a fancy development, the house was big as a barn and shiny as a Cadillac. Butch’s father wasn’t home. Sure, Tess realized, most fathers weren’t home much, not like Daddy was always home for her, but what was it like walking every day into that big barn of an empty house? Who was he supposed to talk to, the cleaning service? Butch’s kid sister was home, but when she saw him coming in with a girl she went to her room and stayed there.
Butch took Tess by the hand. “In here,” he said, tugging her down a long hallway toward his bedroom.
When they got into his room he led her to the bed. Tess felt funny sitting on Butch’s bed, but there was nowhere else to sit. No desk or chair, though a whole wall of the room was taken up by a monster piece of furniture holding TV and VCR and a sound system with three-foot speakers and piles of videos and CDs. No wonder he had the Crux CD—he probably bought every CD that came out. Butch didn’t need a job at the IGA. Big house, big stereo, DAT deck, he had plenty of money. Tess wondered why he bothered to work at all. Maybe just so he had people to talk to and something to do.
He closed the door and put on the Crux CD and turned it up loud enough so she could hear it with her whole body.
Right from the first note Tess was gone. It didn’t matter that she was sitting on Butch’s bed, or that he sat down next to her and slid closer to her and started talking to her; she nodded an
d smiled and didn’t hear a word he said. All she heard was Crux, the messages in his words and his salt-and-sugar voice and the red-and-blue rhythms of his guitar—nobody else played guitar like he did, and the music mags she read during breaks at the IGA were full of stupid articles by experts trying to figure out how he did it. His chords, his finger-picking—the whole sound of his music was different and shivery and awesome; she could have listened to him all night and day. She was drumming along with Crux, tapping out rhythms on her knees, kicking the floor, pounding on the edge of the mattress as the tempo rose. Most of the time she didn’t even notice that Butch was there.
Tess wanted—something she didn’t have the words to name, but she felt it when she looked at the cover of the Crux CD, a lonesome four-rayed star floating in a midnight sky that was the huge pupil of an indigo eye. She wanted—she wanted to fly or something. She wanted more than just stupid dreams, but that was all she had, dreams. One magazine at the store had had a contest for artists to come up with pictures of what they thought the secret star looked like, and some of the pictures were as if the artists knew her dreams of him. One woman painted him crucified on a guitar. Another woman showed him as a constellation dancing along with all the old Greek stuff that was supposed to be up in the sky, gods and swans and sheep and lions and bulls. Some man painted him riding a palomino horse bareback through a sunset city, blond hair blending with the horse’s wild mane and the evening star rising in the tawny sky. Each artist made him look different, yet he was always perfect, always angel-beautiful, always guitar-god mountaintop take-my-breath-away—transcendent, that was the word—like his songs.
Tess wanted—hope? A life? Him? Listening to his music made her heart ache, yet whatever it was she needed, he was there, giving it to her.
When the CD stopped, though, Crux wasn’t there anymore. Butch was.
All too real and solid, there he was, pressed against her with his arm around her shoulders.
“Okay, baby, my turn,” he said, and he mashed his face into hers.
Secret Star Page 5