“You thought we’d slow-dance, maybe?” Butch was yelling. “I got news for you, baby. Nobody calls me out. Nobody.” He backhanded Kam across the face.
Kam did not flinch from the whack. He stood straight and still—a stance Tess remembered from the first day she had met him—his face hard, not acknowledging the blow, his body hard and alert, poised like a slim dark knife blade, ready to strike in any direction in an instant. He did not posture or thrust his chest out the way Butch was doing or tug against the hands gripping him. He just stood like flint and said nothing. Butch was not worth answering.
Tess felt dizzy with fear. There were six of them. Too many.
She had to do something.
Get moving.
She ran, carefully and quietly this time. Instead of running toward them she circled around, still in the woods. They were standing in a weedy clearing amid junk, near the shack where Butch had pulled a gun on her. Kam had probably picked the place. The idiot. Gutsy fool.
Leaving the cover of the woods, Tess crouched behind junked cars and scuttled closer.
“—gonna wish you never come here,” Butch was threatening. “You want to go now? You ask nice, maybe I’ll let you go. Get down on your knees. Say please.”
From where she was, behind a wrecked Dodge and almost behind Kam, Tess could not see his face but she could see the taut lines of his shoulders, waiting. He said nothing, but she could tell he was not about to say please. He had no intention of begging. She could tell: all he needed was a chance.
“I said on your knees, freak face!” Butch grabbed Kam’s headband like he was yanking somebody by the tie. The stitching snapped, the eye patch came off in his hand, and Tess saw Kam’s hard shoulders wince as if that hurt him worse than being hit. His fists clenched so hard he shook. For the first time he tried to pull free, lunging toward Butch.
Butch snarled and coiled to punch. They all yelled. Fight! They all piled into Kamo at once.
But not before Tess Mathis, the biggest, strongest girl in Canadawa High School, yelled and charged.
Half a second before they reached Kam she bulled in with her shoulder down and rammed one of the guys holding Kamo in the hollow of his back. She flattened him, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Kam tear away from the other one—she knew all he needed was a chance. He leveled the guy with one good punch while Tess plowed on through and butted her head into Butch’s gut. She heard the whoosh as Butch deflated. While he stood there struggling for breath, she punched him in the face.
“Bitch!” He hit back, catching her on the side of the head pretty hard. Tess still felt like she could take him—but things got busy and confused for a while. Forget Butch. She had to concentrate on staying alive, staying on her feet, not letting them get her down where they could kick her. She had to punch straight, kick hard, chomp down on whatever got too close, scream—she screamed like a psycho. Done right, screaming is fighting too.
But she was like Kam; she didn’t usually fight unless she had to. And she’d sure never fought six guys at once. They were slowing her down—
She felt somebody put his back against hers to keep them from coming at her from behind. “You all right, Kam?” she yelled.
“Compared to what?” he yelled back. He was okay. He sounded mad.
Kam fought as though he knew what he was doing. And by now Tess had a further opinion of Butch and his friends. They were chicken. She could see it in their eyes. They didn’t like actually having to fight instead of just beat up on somebody. Some of them were starting to pull back. They sure weren’t worth being afraid of.
“Cowards!” Tess screamed at them—Kam was mad, but she was white-fire nuclear-fission mad. Ballistic. Furious. Fighting felt good, burning the anger out of her. “C’mon! We’ll whip the whole bunch of you!”
Then for a moment she was afraid they would take her up on it. But they hesitated, looking over their shoulders. A car was coming down the salvage-yard lane, and she couldn’t see much in the dusk with the headlights making her squint but it looked like a Caprice, which is what a lot of Pennsylvania cops drive.
Butch ran for his truck.
“Tess.” Kam’s voice sounded strained. “Come on.” He touched her arm, and she ran after him, into the woods. On his wild black hair she saw blood.
12
No one followed. Tess looked back; Butch and his friends were busy piling into their turbo-powered smoke-in-your-face macho-mobiles and tearing out of there as the police car slewed around and swooped after them.
Fifty feet into the woods Kamo stopped running and walked, not too steadily. Tess walked beside him. “Damn them,” Kam said, his voice stretched thin and taut. “I never expected six of them.”
“You’re an idiot,” Tess said.
“I know I am. God damn them.” Kam was bleeding. His head, his face, his hands. He was shaking in reaction to the fight. Without its eye patch his face looked strange and naked to Tess. Walking on his left side, his blind side, she couldn’t help looking at the place where his eye should have been, and he was too stunned from the fight to notice at first—but then he slammed his hand over that side of his face and turned his head away.
“Kam.” She stepped in front of him, halting him. “Stop that.” Gently she took his bloodied hand and tugged it down from his face. “You think you’re ugly? You’re not.”
What he was trying to hide was just a scar, that was all. No blind staring withered eye, no empty eyelids, no eye socket, just scarring. A hollow, and on the skin, white lines that formed a crooked cross.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. So very beautiful. Far more beautiful than her first dream of the secret star had been. Far more brave. A quiet drumming started in her heart, a quiet singing in her bones.
“Crux,” she whispered.
She should have known when she heard him singing in the night. Of course the secret star was Kam. Of course Kamo was the secret star. Kamo was the most secret star person who had ever lived.
He gasped. She saw it hit him, stagger him like a gut punch—he knew exactly what she was talking about, and he didn’t pretend not to, but it seemed to knock him breathless for a moment. Tess exclaimed, “Kam, it’s all right!” She put out her hands to steady him by the shoulders.
She felt him quivering like a guitar string. “Are you—going to—tell—”
“Of course not.” She could never do that to Kam. In a way he was strong, but she knew well enough why he hid behind his music; in a way he was the most frail person she knew. Scarred, scared, shy, dreaming, crying sometimes—if the newspeople got hold of him, they would eat him for dinner. Headlines—STAR MUTILATED AS CHILD. WANDERING STAR SEEKS LONG-LOST FATHER. Photographers following him everywhere, fans mobbing him—it would kill him. Tess felt annoyed at herself for blurting out the word that had jolted him so much. After he had just taken on Butch for her sake, yet. Crazy fool. As if she couldn’t take care of herself.
She said, “It’s okay, Kam. Look, you may be Crux, but you’re still an idiot.”
That wrenched a noise out of him, a yawp that might have been either a sob or a laugh. “Tess—” He threw his arms around her and hugged her hard. She felt his chest heave.
“For God’s sake,” she complained even though she was hugging him back—it had been a rough couple of days, and she didn’t feel as though she could take too much more. “Don’t cry.” She patted him, but it was more like she was whacking at his back to make him stop. “Kam, c’mon.”
He put his head up and looked at her, wet eyed; tears ran down his bloodied cheek into his shaky smile. “Tess—you are beautiful. You are the most beautiful person on the face of the planet.”
Oh, sure. She rolled her eyes and started walking again. Kam walked beside her, down past the sawmill. Then through more woods. Then out of the woods, down the abandoned pasture toward the creek. Good. Cold water on cuts and bruises. Cold water would help Kam.
“You shouldn’t be fighting,” Tess grumbled at him. He was
still trembling. His face was bruised, his mouth was swelling, his hands were bleeding. “You’re a musician, not a fighter. What if you—”
Kam said, “I’m fine.” But he didn’t sound fine.
“Look at your hands. What if you messed up your hands?”
“I’m fine, Tess!”
They walked down a cow ledge to the river bottom then along the creek trail, looking for a place where they could get through the brush to the water.
Kam said, “I’m used to being beat up.”
“That don’t make it right.” Though in a way, Tess knew, it did factor in. Crux. The white scar, hidden. The hidden pain. He had named himself after the pain.
He said, “You’re a musician too. What are you doing fighting?” He sounded okay now. Tess looked at him, and he glanced back at her with a shadowy smile.
She said, “I wish I was half the musician.”
“Shush.” He flushed and looked away.
They came to an opening between sumac clumps where cows had trampled a way down to the creek years before. “C’mere.” Kam took Tess gently by the arm and steered her to a seat on a big weeping-willow root right at the creek bank. He squatted down, stripped off his T-shirt and dipped it in the water and pressed it to her face.
Until that minute Tess hadn’t noticed her face was a mess. The cold creek water burned, and Kam’s faded blue T-shirt came away from her red with blood. He sopped it in water again and dabbed gently, intent on her. It was getting late—the light was low and mellow, like muted trumpet music, and that golden glow lighting up the scarred side of his face made him look like a rough-cut angel.
He said, “I just wanted to sell a song. That’s all, just get the song out where people could hear it. But—this agent—he liked the way I sang it on the tape I sent him. I told him I didn’t want to do concerts and tours and all that crap. And once he got a look at me, I guess he could see I wasn’t any heartthrob.”
“Like you have to be?” Her tone was sharper than it should have been. But he looked up with that wide, warm, heartbreaker smile of his, as if she had said something wonderful.
“Well, yeah. He thought so. But he hated to pass on the song, so he said okay, let’s try something.” Kam’s smile went wry, and he looked away, crouching there with the wet cloth dripping down between his feet. “I thought maybe I’d make a couple of bucks.”
“So you made a couple million,” Tess said.
“No. Not that much. But enough.” He reached up to sop at her face some more.
But she took the wet cloth from him and started soaking the blood out of his hair. He was still trembling some. “C’mere,” she ordered. “They did something to your head.”
He let her look. It wasn’t so bad. A bump. He let her clean up his face.
Then he ducked his head. He said, “Tess, I know you’ve got to be wondering why the—why I haven’t helped you out.”
With money, he meant. “Hush.” But her voice came out harsh because yeah, the thought was starting to occur to her and she hated it. As if he hadn’t given her enough. She stood up to get away from herself. “C’mon.”
She led him up the pasture to his camp and started making a fire for him. He hung his wet shirt on a rope strung under the overhang and sat in the dirt, searching in a knapsack. He pulled out a shirt and put it on. He rummaged deep, then pulled out a spare eye patch and started to slip it over his head.
“Don’t,” Tess said.
With his hands in midair he peered at her.
“Don’t put it on,” she said. She liked the balanced look of his bare face, scars and all. Fire was leaping up from kindling and newspaper. She looked at him in the warm light.
“Huh,” he said, and he laid the eye patch aside. “Hungry?”
“No.” Her stomach felt tense, like the rest of her, still clenched from the fight.
“Neither am I.”
They sat. Silence. Tess fed sticks to the fire and knew there was another reason she felt knotted up like a pretzel.
Finally she mumbled, “Okay, why?”
“Why what?”
Why hadn’t he slipped some cash to her and Daddy, she meant. But she said, “Why are you living like a drifter?”
He looked up at the sky as if it could help him answer.
The evening was full of stars. It was the white-flower time of spring—blackberry blossom, cow lily, wild rose. Down in the creek bottom purple nightfall had gathered, thick with the smell of the white flowers, and they looked up from the dark ground to the darkening sky like stars, and maybe the real stars looked back.
“It’s what I’m used to,” Kam said. That sounded lame, even to him. He shook his head. “I dunno, Tess. It’s hard for me to sing in a house. I have one now—I even spent this past winter there. But—I need to get out under the sky. Look up at the stars.”
Made sense.
More silence.
As if he had heard the rest of what she was thinking Kam said, “I give pretty much all the money straight to the Children’s Defense Fund. I don’t want it. Don’t trust it.”
“I’ll take it,” Tess joked. Though no joke is ever really a joke.
He turned to her stark serious. “Tess, you don’t know how much I’ve thought about giving you a wad of it. But listen, is that what you really want? Some hotshot riding in and tossing a bundle of thousand-dollar bills out the limousine window?”
“Sure, I’d like that,” she said—but her voice quavered, uncertain, because somehow money seemed less important than it had a few days before. Too much had happened. Was money going to help her love Daddy again? Was money going to make her pretty so some jackass like Butch would like her?
Couldn’t depend on anybody, she’d decided. Forget dreams. Was money what she wanted instead?
“Tess, you don’t know.” Kamo’s eye had gone narrow and hard and dark as the valley shadows. “Money’s poison,” he said, his voice low. “It kills any real understanding between people.”
She didn’t say anything, but she knew it was true. She knew because she could feel the thought of money trying to work its poison right that minute.
“I’ve seen money in action.” Kam looked away from her, staring into the dusk. “My stepfather had money.”
Oh. Oh, God. “Kam, it’s okay,” Tess told him. “Forget the damn money.”
“You really understand?
“Yes.”
Partly true. She understood that she was in danger of hurting him badly if she wasn’t careful. She understood that he needed a friend, not somebody who owed him. She understood that she had to keep getting stronger.
“Forget I ever heard of money,” she said.
He could tell she meant it. His voice settled down, and he was looking at her quiet-eyed again. “You and your daddy going to be okay?”
“Yes.” She tried to sound sure. But she wasn’t sure at all. She didn’t feel like things between her and Daddy were ever going to be the same.
She trudged up Miller’s pasture in the dark, her legs aching. Staring at the ground in front of her, she didn’t even notice the glow in the sky. But coming over the crest of the hill, she looked up and blinked. It was like facing into the sun.
For a moment she didn’t recognize her own house with the lights on. Daddy must have had every light in the place on, including the outdoor lights front and back. Tess could see him sitting in the yard in his wheelchair, waiting for her.
“Power came back on in the middle of the day,” he called the minute he saw her. “The refrigerator started a-humming and the pump kicked on and I said, what the hell? Went over to Millers’ to call Met-Ed, and they say it’s no mistake. The bill’s been paid. Now who would have paid it?”
Tess opened her mouth, then closed it again.
“What happened to you?” As she walked closer, he had seen her messed-up face.
“I ran into a brick wall.”
“A brick wall with fists?”
She said nothing. It wasn’t the first
time she had been in a fight. And he sure didn’t want to argue with her, what with all that had been happening. He let it go.
“You want some supper?” he asked. “You’ve got your choice. The Millers dropped off a whole passel of goodies to fill the fridge ...” He was trying hard to make Tess smile, but she just stood there looking at the lights. His voice trailed away.
Low-voiced, Tess said, “It reminds me of that Christmas Eve when you were working that extra job and didn’t get home till late and we waited up for you. Mommy had every light in the place on, and all the Christmas lights, and candles in the windows, waiting for you.”
She saw his throat quiver as he swallowed. He didn’t say anything.
She said, “What do you mean, she loved him better than she loved you?”
“She did.” He was having trouble talking. “Your mama had a heart that don’t give up, Tess. She was nuts that way.”
“Was she—was she really crazy?”
He shook his head. “Just kind of nuts. And beautiful. I was crazy about her, but she never should have married me. She was too much woman for a guy like me.”
Guy like him? There he sat, an ordinary-looking bald man in a wheelchair, and Tess had known him half her life yet she felt all her brain cells bungee-jumping, stretching to believe he could be for real. “She—loved somebody else, and she—blamed you, shot you, almost killed you—and you still loved her?”
“Yes.”
“And—you still wanted to keep me?”
Tears shone on his pudgy cheeks. “You were her daughter. I loved you. Still do.”
She wanted to hug him. Couldn’t quite do it, but she put her hand out to him. He took it and held it in both of his. “We’re gonna be okay,” he said. His voice rubbed in his throat.
She nodded. “The minute I get paid I’m calling the phone people to get the service put back in.”
He nodded and smiled but said, “That’s not what I mean. We’re gonna be all right. We’re family.”
How could he sound so sure? Things were never going to be the way they were before, when he had been her capital-D Daddy who could do no wrong.
Secret Star Page 9