Secret Star Read online

  “Okay. But you got to admit it’s not a real common name. I’m wondering if we’re related some way.”

  She stopped walking and turned to face him. Hinkles Corner was not exactly a metropolis, and they had reached the edge of it. Tess was ready to turn off the road and cut across country, and she didn’t want to walk any farther with this Kamo Rojahin person by her side. What the hell kind of name was Kamo anyway? And who the hell was he? He didn’t look a thing like her. She was as pale as a person can get, and he was dark. She could have played fullback for Penn State, and he was slim and lithe. He was crazy if he thought they were related.

  Although—there was something alike about the shape of their faces. Straight brows. Square jaws. Chins that meant business. And something—Tess couldn’t quite say what—some glimmer in his one good eye that reminded her of a shadow she had sometimes seen in her own mirror.

  “Where are you from?” Tess demanded.

  He looked back at her quietly with the old stony hills rising behind him and the low evening light flashing off his black hair and battered face. “Nowhere. I mean, lots of places.”

  Was he a runaway or something? A fugitive? A criminal?

  Tess couldn’t place him. He seemed too old to be as young as he looked, and he seemed like a drifter yet something about him felt solid, and she couldn’t get past the way he talked, though she couldn’t have explained what it was about the way he talked that stopped her. Hard-voiced, she said, “How do I know your name’s what you say it is? How do I know you’re not some kind of con artist?”

  Kamo took a minute to answer, thinking, though his scarred face did not move. “You don’t,” he said finally. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

  She gave him a look that expressed her opinion, and maybe he got the message, because when she walked away he stood by the road and watched her go.

  3

  Tess went to her first day of work not expecting much except a paycheck. Certainly not expecting her heart to turn inside out.

  Then she heard “Secret Star.”

  She hadn’t dared to hope there would be real radio. In the front of the store where the customers were they played watered-down music like in the dentist’s office. But in the back, where Tess was, in the stockroom—radio. Real radio, classic rock and the latest hits—for Tess it was as if she’d been reunited with a best friend, with a long-lost brother, with the mother who used to sing her to sleep at night. Her heart felt hot. They were playing mostly standard music, stuff she already knew, but now she listened in a trance. Barely heard people talking as she wrapped radishes. It had been so long—

  When the first steel-blue guitar notes rang out, she forgot all about radishes and stood with the price gun in her hand pointing toward the sky. Then the singer’s voice made her gasp. A voice of flint and moonlight. It began deep in his chest and rose like a hawk on the wind as Tess stood listening with her mouth hanging open, barely breathing.

  In the sin-bin city

  you can’t see far

  In the shadows

  the bad pose

  bullets fly

  sirens cry

  the blood flows

  blows stun

  children sob for pity

  children cry for pity—

  But out past the pollution

  out beyond the fear

  out beyond the shadows

  shines a secret star

  It was kind of like poetry, because the words mattered, they drove the song. But it wasn’t just the words, because this dude could sing—oh, Mama, could he sing, with grit and gut but never just screaming out the lyrics—there was pain, but he got beyond it and turned it into real music. His whole sound was stony real. He was by himself, no band, no fake violins in the background, not even a drum machine—it was naked, the way he used his guitar for percussion, and Tess the drummer felt chills just listening. Among all the slick synthesized oh-baby-baby let’s-have-sex garbage on the top 40, this guy stood out like a lonesome bright star in a black-plastic sky.

  “Who is that?” Tess blurted out.

  The white-coated people in the back of the IGA looked at her.

  “Singing! On the radio!” she yelled as if they were the ones acting weird. “Who is it?”

  “Where you been, in a cave?” asked a high-school boy working across from her.

  “Nobody knows,” said the woman who ran the stockroom.

  “Huh?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “It’s a big honkin’ hairy mystery,” the boy said.

  The woman said, “He’s the secret star.”

  And the song hawk-swooped on, crying straight to Tess’s heart:

  In this dirty world

  you can’t see far

  but you gotta believe

  there’s a secret star...

  Tess had not been in a cave, just home with no electricity, no radio—but she had heard kids in school talking about some secret star thing. Hadn’t paid any attention. Just another fad, like designer jeans or the latest fashion model. If they liked it, she wouldn’t.

  In a way she had been wrong. And in a way she had been right. The other kids liked it, but she had been struck by lightning, she was riding a golden eagle, she was falling into a great white light. She stood listening to the last few bars as if she were tuned in to angels on high, and the boy across the table from her stood watching her. He grinned. “All the girls are hot for the secret star.” Teasing.

  “He don’t call himself that,” said the stockroom woman. “He don’t mean the song that way.” She was middle-aged and sad-eyed and she seemed to understand. “It’s the deejays call him that.”

  Sure enough, the deejay was yammering. “Waaal, paint me green and call me Gumby! Six weeks at number one and no concerts, no video, no pretty face, and that’s about as alternative as it comes—it’s not supposed to be able to be done, dudes! Hey, didja hear the latest rumor? This guy is supposed to be a captain in the Marines, that’s why he won’t come forward, he’s afraid they’ll think he’s gay. Ha-ha! Hey, do you believe that? I don’t believe that. I like the one where he’s supposed to be Jim Morrison’s ghost. Whoo—ee! Keep it right here, people. Coming up—”

  Tess stopped listening. She tuned out. Didn’t want anything to steal the sound of that song from her mind.

  “He calls himself Crux,” the gentle-eyed woman said. Tess looked blank, so she said it again. “The secret star calls himself Crux.”

  “It’s a gimmick,” said the boy, slapping paper tape around bunches of bananas. Tess knew who he was from school; everybody knew who he was. His name was Butch. He was an athlete, good-looking, with muscles and a cute grin. He was one of the popular boys. Tess had never spoken to him, because why would he want to talk to her? She wasn’t cute. No boy would ever like her. But here he was talking to her about “Secret Star.”

  He said, “It’s hype. Take a stupid song, make a big mystery out of it, and people go crazy, and somebody’s raking in a pile of money.”

  He didn’t understand. That was okay; Tess didn’t expect everybody to understand about “Secret Star.” How could they? It was a mystery song, a miracle song, a fusion of rap and rock and a throwback to folk at the same time, all melted together with a little bit of country and so much soul it made her want to dance naked in the rain, which was pretty radical considering that she didn’t know how to dance and she hated rain. Hype? No. What Tess heard was stone-bone real music, the kind only a real musician can deliver. Whatever was making this singer hide behind his song had nothing to do with making a pile of money. Tess didn’t know how to say this to Butch, but she knew it for a fact, like knowing the sky is high.

  Kamo knocked during supper. Tess looked up and saw who was standing outside and made her face freeze to show nothing. “Come in,” Daddy called without even looking up, but Kamo didn’t come in. He stood outside and spoke through the ripped plastic that was supposed to be covering the screen door, talking straight to Daddy.

/>   “You got work I can do? For food?”

  Food was something the Mathis household actually had now, because Tess’s boss, Jonna, had sent her home loaded down with two-day-old bread, dented cans of beans, damaged freezer boxes of meat. “Kindness of strangers,” Daddy had said. “How did she know?” Though probably Jonna had seen the Mathises spend their food stamps at the IGA often enough. Anyway, there was no place to keep the frozen stuff with the fridge not running, so they had cooked several packets of meat all at once—the stove ran on bottle gas, thank God. Processed beef patties in gravy sat steaming on the table. There was hot cooked food on a chilly April day, and there was plenty for Kamo.

  Daddy told him, “Come in here where I can see you, son.

  Kamo slipped in and stood on the cracked linoleum just inside the door, looking at Daddy, not looking at Tess. Smart boy, she thought. One look, one smirk, and she would have considered putting her table knife into him like he was butter for her bread. Smart boy, you’d better keep quiet. He had been spying on her again, and probably this “work for food” thing was a trick to get into her house. She sat glaring at him, but she couldn’t say anything in front of Daddy. Probably Kamo was counting on that.

  Well, he could count on this, too: he’d better not do or say anything to make Daddy upset.

  “What’s your name?” Daddy asked him.

  “Kamo.”

  Daddy lifted his eyebrows, waiting for the rest of it.

  “Just Kamo. Or Kam.”

  Tess breathed out. Kamo hadn’t told Daddy “Rojahin.” He hadn’t smirked, either. She started to simmer down.

  “Huh.” Daddy nodded as if he now knew enough. “Kam, why don’t you wash your hands. We don’t have no spigot water right now, but there’s a pump in the yard. Soap’s on the trough. Then c’mon in and have a seat and join us.”

  The thing about Daddy, Tess thought, was that for a guy in a wheelchair he had a lot of pride. Not stuck-up pride, but the kind of pride that made him put something in the “Help a Child” can on the drugstore counter even though his disability check barely paid the mortgage. The kind that made him stay in his own house in the country even though he could have gone on welfare and moved to some sort of subsidized apartment in town where the food pantries and public transportation and stuff were. The kind that made him offer a meal to a scar-faced loner he ought to be afraid of.

  Kamo had pride, too. Before he moved to do what Daddy said he asked, “You got work I can do?”

  “Later, son. You can’t work when you’re hungry.”

  Kam really was hungry. Ravenous. He seemed wobbly as he sat down at the table. His hands shook when he reached for the spoon to ladle some meat and gravy on his bread.

  Nobody talked much. Kamo was busy gulping, and Tess was watching him narrow-eyed, and Daddy was thinking about what he wanted him to do. Tess could see him thinking. “Slice of jelly bread?” he asked when Kam’s plate was empty, even though Kam had already had three slices of bread to sop up his gravy.

  “I think I better quit before I get a gut ache.” Kam turned his head so he could look at Daddy with his one eye, and the look was his thanks.

  Daddy nodded. “You still got a couple of hours of daylight left,” he said. “You think if Tess helps you find the ladder you could get up on the roof and clean the gutters and check the shingles?”

  “Daddy,” Tess complained, “I could do that myself.” Why did he have to act like she was a little girl? She could do things. She just hadn’t thought about cleaning the stupid gutters.

  “Not when it’s just me around. What if you fell? I couldn’t help you.”

  “I wouldn’t fall!”

  Kam was on his feet as if he were giving the Mathises room to argue, clearing his dishes off the table, taking them to the sink. He turned on a spigot to rinse his plate, and nothing came out. All Tess could see was the eye-patch side of his face, and it didn’t move, yet she got the feeling he was flustered. He put his plate down and turned the spigot off.

  Daddy was saying to her, “You don’t know what might happen. Look at me. Crap can happen anytime.”

  Tess always felt like shaking Daddy when he said “Look at me”—it was so preachy. She wanted to argue more, but Kam was on his way out the door, and she got up and headed after him. Once the two of them got to the shed and out of earshot of the house, she said to him none too politely, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was hungry.” He was already getting the ladder down from the shed rafters, but he let one end of it bang to the dirt floor and turned on Tess. “Why don’t you want me here?” His voice was soft and fierce. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

  She stared at him. It was dark in the shed. She couldn’t see his single eye. Her chest hurt, but not with fear. Why wasn’t she afraid?

  He said, “It’s like in the old movies, is that it? The ones with the messed-up faces, the hacked-off noses or whatever, those are the bad guys. You think I’m a bad guy, right?”

  She didn’t watch old movies much, or any movies, but she knew what he meant. She knew it all too well, and didn’t answer.

  He made a small, disgusted noise through his nose, took the ladder and strode out of the shed.

  4

  Tess watched Kam set the ladder up against the house. With quick, edgy movements he climbed to the roof and started working on the gutters, scraping last year’s rotting leaves out of them with his hands.

  Tess hit her fist quietly against the shed door for a moment, then went back into the shed and found a couple of trowels and an old peach basket. Carrying the tools, she climbed the ladder and walked along the edge of the roof to where Kam was working.

  “Here,” she said, poking a trowel toward him.

  He jumped so hard it startled her heart like a grouse going up. He leaped to his feet and jerked around to face her, coiling as if she had come at him with a switchblade, his single eye white-rimmed like the huge eye of a spooked horse—and his right foot missed the edge of the roof. It caught on the gutter a moment but the gutter started to let go and all of a sudden the idea of falling off the roof was no joke—Tess saw Kam’s mouth open as he lost balance and wavered at the edge, though he didn’t scream.

  Tess never remembered grabbing, but the next heartbeat she had hold of him by both arms, trowels and peach basket were clattering down but he was okay, standing on the roof, back from the edge. She could feel him trembling.

  “Jesus,” he panted, “you blindsided me!” He had been concentrating on what he was doing, or maybe on being mad at her, and she had come up to him on his eye-patch side. He had not known she was there.

  “Sorry!” she said at the same time. “I’m sorry.” She meant sorry for everything, because it was true, what he had said in the shed. She had been making assumptions about him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” He muttered it—now he was embarrassed. He pulled away from her and turned back to what he had been doing, hunkering down by the gutter again, straightening the bent place with his hands—mostly with his right hand, because his left hand wasn’t worth much. “Thanks,” he said without looking at her.

  She retrieved the trowels and peach basket, took a trowel, and went to the other end of the gutter from him and started cleaning it out. There was so much dirt in there that little maple trees had taken root, each of them just a sprout and one leaf—they reminded Tess of eighth notes sprouting up from the top of a music staff, except their baby leaves looked glassy and almost pink in the evening light. She tossed them and rotting gutter trash into the peach basket, which she had put halfway between her and Kam, and as she worked she moved slowly toward him.

  Something about the low light and sunset glow felt like French-horn music—it made Tess calm down, and she got a gentle rhythm going in her head, and she did some pretty clear thinking. About Kam. She still didn’t know a thing about him, and she got the feeling he wasn’t going to tell her much. He wanted her to trust him. And she wasn’t sure she should, because it
looked like he had been a gang fighter, or at least he had spent a lot of time on rough streets. Why else would he react that way when a person took him by surprise? And all the scars—if he had been a gang fighter, that would explain how he had gotten them. And if he had been in a gang, why should she trust him?

  Yet, Tess knew, she did trust him. She trusted him to understand.

  In the shed, she had known to her bones that he would not hurt her.

  More than that. She trusted him more than that.

  Across the little distance that still separated them she called to him, “Have you heard a song called ‘Secret Star’?”

  His head came up, and he turned toward her so he could look at her, though the look didn’t tell her whether he knew what she was talking about.

  “I am in love with that song,” she told him.

  He smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile, and it was a wide, warm, million-dollar smile that lit up his one-eyed face and made her forget the scars.

  “I just heard it for the first time today,” she said. “I am going crazy. That song gives me chills and fever. I need to get a radio. I need to get the CD. I need to get a CD player.” Yeah, right, and a pig with wings. “I want to put that song under my pillow.” Somehow she needed to have it to keep. All her life she would love it.

  For some reason, maybe because he was actually smiling, Kam ducked his head and turned back to his work.

  The peach basket was getting in the way. Tess shoved it back with her foot. She and Kam worked shoulder to shoulder digging out the last three feet of gutter, comfortable together, neither of them speaking.

  The singer, Tess wondered briefly, the secret star—who was he? But no, she didn’t really want to know. It would break her heart if he turned out to be what Butch had said, some plastic Hollywood guy using mystery as a sales gimmick. Forget about him. He was a star, and people like that, stars, they lived at the opposite end of the universe from real people like her. Stars never set foot on Appalachian hills, never stepped in cow poop, never—probably never talked to homely girls like her. Tess didn’t want to know who he was, because this way she could pretend his song was speaking straight to her.