Archie said, almost in a whisper, “She’s not easy to put into words, is she?”
I shook my head.
“An unusual girl,” he said. “Could see that from the first. And her parents, as ordinary, in a nice way, as could be. How did this girl come to be? I used to ask myself. Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me. She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing.” He looked at me. “Hm?”
I nodded.
He turned the mahogany bowl of his pipe upside down and rapped it with his knuckle. A small stream of ash spilled onto a thicket of dead mesquite.
He pointed the pipe stem at me. “You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then…”
He pulled out his pouch and repacked his pipe.Cherryscent flew. He struck a match. The pipe bowl, like some predator, or seducer, drew down the flame. “…and then—ah—we open our eyes and the day is before us, and”—he snapped his fingers—“we become ourselves.”
Like so many of Archie’s words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.
We walked in silence. Yellow blooms had appeared on a cactus, and for some reason that made me incredibly sad. The purple of the mountains flowed like watercolor.
“They hate her,” I said.
He stopped. He looked intently at me. He turned me around and we headed back. He put his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s consult Señor Saguaro.”
Shortly we were standing before the derelict giant. I never understood how the Señor managed to convey a sense of dignity, majesty even, considering his stick-rickety, see-through skeleton and the ridiculous, leathery crumple of hide about his foot, his fallen britches. Archie always spoke to him with respectful formality, as to a judge or visiting dignitary.
“Good day, Señor Saguaro,” he began. “I believe you know my friend and charter member of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone, Mr. Borlock.” He whispered an aside to me: “I’m a little rusty, but I think I’ll use Spanish now. He prefers it on delicate matters.” He turned back to the cactus. “Parece, Señor Borlock aquí es la víctima de un ‘shunning’ de sus compañeros estudiantes en el liceo. El objeto principal del ‘shunning’ es la enamorada del Señor Borlock, nuestra propia Señorita Niña Estrella. El está en búsqueda de preguntas.”
As Archie spoke, he looked up toward the elf owl hole. Now he turned back to me and whispered, “I asked for questions.”
“Questions?” I whispered. “What about answers?”
But he was turning from me, tilting his head toward the great cactus, his finger on his lips—“Shh”—his eyes closed.
I waited.
At last he nodded and turned back to me. “The esteemed Señor says there is only one question.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“He says it all boils down to this—if I’m translating correctly: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’? The Señor says everything will follow from that.”
I wasn’t sure I understood the Señor any more than I understood Archie half the time, but I said nothing, and I went home. In bed that night, as the moonlight reached high tide under my chin, I realized that in fact I understood the question perfectly. I just didn’t want to answer it.
20
Twice a week the results of the state basketball tournament were posted on the plywood roadrunner in the courtyard. The surviving teams were into the sectionals now; then would come the regionals; then, with only two teams left, the big show, the Arizona state championship. Glendale, the team we had lost to, got bitter, masochistic attention on the roadrunner with scores in foot-high numerals, as they continued to win and move through the tournament.
Meanwhile, Stargirl was involved in a tournament of her own, the oratorical contest. As Mica High’s winner, she qualified for the district “talk-off,” as the Times called it. It took place in the auditorium of Red Rock High School, and lo and behold, Stargirl won that, too. Next stop was the state finals in Phoenix on the third Friday in April.
In my homeroom, when the announcement came over the PA about Stargirl winning the district title, I was about to let out a cheer, but I caught myself. Several people booed.
Getting ready for the finals, Stargirl practiced on me. Most often we went into the desert. She did not use notes, nor did her words seem memorized. Each time she gave the speech, it was different. She seemed to insert new material as it popped into her head. She matched her words so perfectly that the speech was not a speech at all, but one creature’s voice in the wild, as natural as a raven’s caw or a coyote’s howl at midnight.
I sat cross-legged on the ground, Cinnamon sat on me. We listened in rapture, and so, I half believed, did the tumbleweed and cacti, the desert, the mountains, all listening to the girl in the longfalling skirt. What a shame, I thought, to pack her performance into a schedule and present it to rows of plush-back seats in an auditorium. Once, incredibly, an elf owl landed atop a saguaro not ten feet from where she was speaking. It paused for a full minute before ducking into its hole.
Of course, we did other things, too. We walked. We talked. We rode bikes. Though I had my driver’s license, I bought a cheap secondhand bicycle so I could ride with her. Sometimes she led the way, sometimes I did. Whenever we could, we rode side by side.
She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.
She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else’s; but timid, introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.
She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see.
She was forever tugging my arm and saying, “Look!”
I would look around, seeing nothing. “Where?”
She would point. “There.”
In the beginning I still could not see. She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as “nothing.” I walked in a gray world of nothings.
So she would stop and point out that the front door of the house we were passing was blue. And that the last time we had passed it, it had been green. And that as near as she could tell, someone who lived in that house painted the front door a different color several times a year.
Or she would whisper to me that the old man sitting alone on the bench at the Tudor Village shopping center was holding his hearing aid in his hand, and he was smiling, and he wore a coat and tie as if he were going somewhere special, and pinned onto his lapel was a tiny American flag.
Or she would kneel down and pull me down with her and show me the ants, two of them, lugging the lopped leg of a beetle twenty times their size across the sidewalk, as might two men, were they strong as ants, carry a full-grown tree from one end of town to the other.
After a while I began to see better. When she said “Look!” and I followed her pointing finger, I saw. Eventually it became a contest: who would see first? When I finally did it—said “Look!” a
nd pointed and tugged her sleeve—I was as proud as a first-grader with a star on his paper.
And there was more to her seeing than that. What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart. The old man on the bench, for example, made her cry. The lumberjack ants made her laugh. The door of many colors put her in such a snit of curiosity that I had to drag her away; she felt she could not proceed with her life until she knocked on such a door.
She told me how she would run the Mica Times if she were the editor. Crime would be on page 10, ants and old men and painted doors on page 1. She made up headlines:
ANTS HAUL MONSTER LOAD
ACROSS VAST, BARREN WALK
MYSTERY SMILE: OLD MAN
NODS OFF AT TUDOR VILLAGE
DOOR BEGS: KNOCK ME!
I told her I wanted to be a TV director. She said she wanted to be a silver-lunch-truck driver.
“Huh?” I said.
“You know,” she said, “people work all morning and then it’s twelve o’clock. The secretaries in the offices walk out the door, the construction workers put down their hard hats and hammers, and everybody’s hungry, and they look up and there I am! No matter where they are, no matter where they work, I’m there. I have a whole fleet of silver lunch trucks. They go everywhere. ‘Let Lunch Come to You!’ That’s my slogan. Just seeing my silver lunch truck makes them happy.” She described how she would roll up the side panels and everyone would practically faint at the cloud of wonderful smells. Hot food, cold food, Chinese, Italian, you name it. Even a salad bar. “They can’t believe how much food I fit into my truck. No matter where you are—out in the desert, the mountains, even down in the mines—if you want my silver lunch service, I get it to you. I find a way.”
I tagged along on missions. One day she bought a small plant, an African violet in a plastic pot on sale for ninety-nine cents at a drugstore.
“Who’s it for?” I asked her.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “I just know that someone at an address on Marion Drive is in the hospital for surgery, so I thought whoever’s back home could use a little cheering up.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I said.
She gave me a mischievous grin. “I have my ways.”
We went to the house on Marion Drive. She reached into the saddle pack behind her bicycle seat. She pulled out a handful of ribbons. She chose a pale violet one that matched the color of the tiny blossoms and stuffed the remaining ribbons back into the seat pack. She tied the violet ribbon around the pot. I held her bike while she set the plant by the front door.
Riding away, I said, “Why don’t you leave a card or something with your name on it?”
The question surprised her. “Why should I?”
Her question surprised me. “Well, I don’t know, it’s just the way people do things. They expect it. They get a gift, they expect to know where it came from.”
“Is that important?”
“Yeah, I guess—”
I never finished that thought. My tires shuddered as I slammed my bike to a halt. She stopped ahead of me. She backed up. She stared.
“Leo, what is it?”
I wagged my head. I grinned. I pointed to her. “It was you.”
“Me what?”
“Two years ago. My birthday. I found a package on my front step. A porcupine necktie. I never found out who gave it to me.”
She walked her bike alongside mine. She grinned. “A mystery.”
“Where did you find it?” I said.
“I didn’t. I had my mother make it.”
She didn’t seem to want to dwell on the subject. She started pedaling and we continued on our way.
“Where were we?” she said.
“Getting credit,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s nice to get credit.”
The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. “Is it?” she said.
21
On weekends and after dinner, we delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. She made her own cards. She wasn’t a great artist. Her people were stick figures. The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails. You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name.
But finally, after much pestering from me, she did tell me how she knew what was going on in people’s lives. It was simple, she said. She read the daily paper. Not the headlines or the front page or the sports page or the comics or the TV listings or the Hollywood gossip. What she read were the parts that most people ignored, the parts without headlines and pictures, the boondocks of the paper: the hospital admissions, the death notices, the birthday and wedding announcements, the police blotter, the coming events calendar.
Most of all, she read the fillers.
“I love fillers!” she exclaimed.
“What are fillers?” I said.
She explained that fillers are little items that are not considered important enough to be a story or to have a headline. They’re never more than one column wide, never more than an inch or two deep. They are most commonly found at the bottoms of inside pages, where the eye seldom travels. If the editors had their way, they would never use fillers. But sometimes a reporter doesn’t write quite enough words, and the story doesn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the page. The paper can’t have a blank space there, so the editor dumps in a filler. A filler doesn’t need to be “news.” It doesn’t need to be important. It doesn’t even need to be read. All it’s asked to do is take up space.
A filler might come from anywhere and be about anything. It might tell how many pounds of rice a typical Chinese person eats in a lifetime. Or say something about beetles in Sumatra. Or the filler might come from down the street. It might mention that so-and-so’s cat is missing. Or that so-and-so has a collection of antique marbles.
“I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,” she said.
“So that’s it?” I said. “You read the papers?”
“No,” she said, “that’s not all. There’s also the place where I get my hair cut. I always overhear good stuff there. And of course there’re bulletin boards. Do you know how many bulletin boards there are in town?”
“Sure,” I said facetiously, “I count them every day.”
“So do I,” she said, not kidding. “So far, I’m up to forty-one.”
Offhand, I couldn’t think of one, except the plywood roadrunner. “What do you learn from bulletin boards?”
“Oh…somebody just opened a business. Somebody lost a dog. Somebody needs a companion.”
“Who advertises for a companion?” I said. “Who needs one that bad?”
“Lonely people,” she said. “Old people. Just somebody to sit with them for a while.”
I pictured Stargirl sitting in a dark room with an old woman. I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing. Sometimes she seemed so far from me.
We were passing Pisa Pizza. “There’s a bulletin board in there,” she said.
It was just inside the door. It was smothered with business cards and notices. I pointed to one that said “Odd Jobs—Ask for Mike,” call this number. “So what’s that tell you?” I said, with more challenge in my voice than I intended.
She read it. “Well, it could be that Mike lost his regular job and can’t find another, so he’s hiring himself out. Or even if he has a regular job, it’s not enough to make ends meet. He’s either not very neat, or he can’t afford a whole piece of paper. This is just a scrap.”
“So what would you do for him?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know. My parents might have an odd job they need done. Or maybe I do. Or maybe I could just send him a card.”
“What kind of card would he get?”
“A Keep-your-chin-up card.” She poked me. “Hey, want to play a card game?”
I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about poker. “Sure,” I said.
She said she invented it. “All you need is your eyes and one other person. I pick somebody on the street, the mall, a store, wherever, and I follow them. Say it’s a her. I follow her for fifteen minutes, not a minute more. I time myself. The game is, after fifteen minutes of watching her, I have to guess what kind of card she needs.”
“But how can you get it to her?” I said. “You don’t know where she lives.”
“True. That’s as far as it goes. That’s why it’s just a game. It’s just for fun.” She snuggled into me. She whispered in my ear, “Let’s play.”
I said sure.
She said we needed a mall. I usually steered us away from the Mica Mall—too many silent-treatment MAHS kids hanging around there. We drove ten miles to the Redstone Mall. It was a Saturday afternoon.
We picked out a woman. Lime-green skort. White sandals. We guessed her age was early forties. She was buying a soft pretzel—regular, salted—at Auntie Anne’s. She carried the pretzel in a little white paper bag. We followed her into Suncoast Video. We overheard her ask for When Harry Met Sally. They didn’t have it. She passed Sonoma, then came back and went in. She wandered about, touching pottery with one fingertip, feeling surfaces. She stopped before the dinner plates. She lifted one with a French café painted on it. “Van Gogh,” Stargirl whispered. The lady seemed to think about the plate, even closed her eyes, holding it to her chest with both hands, as if feeling vibrations. But then she put it back and walked out. On to Sears. Lingerie. Bedclothes. I was uneasy, spying from behind a rack of frilly somethings. She was flipping through nightshirts when time ran out.
Stargirl and I conferred in the corridor.
“Okay,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I think I feel like a stalker,” I said.
“A good stalker,” she said.
“You first,” I said.
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