Lone Star (34 page)

She opens her eyes. She is lying across three seats. He is opposite her, reading his survival manual. What does it say about stoned girls spread out across your bench? He helps her up. He seems completely normal, as before. She feels slightly better, though woozy and thirsty. As if he knows this, he gives her a drink. Wow, he says. You are something else. She doesn't think he means it as a compliment. She sits like a lump for a few minutes, three or forty, she can't tell. He says soon they'll be in Sestokai. How long was I out? she says. More than two hours, he replies.
Possibly three. Oh, the black regret! Three hours. Gone. She won't have another chance to be on the train alone with him. She won't have another chance to sit close to him. This was it. And she wasted it, literally. She found the longed-for diamond hours taped to the lid of the communal toilet, a hot bounty of time, a gift of grace, and flushed them down the bowl, and wasn't even cognizant enough to watch them swirl.

By the time they got off in Sestokai, she was famished. She bought herself another parma ham–and–cheese sandwich and devoured it on a lonely bench in a small dim park nearby. It was after seven in the evening, sun still out, but shadows long.

“Sorry I'm such a baby,” she said.

“It's my fault. I never should've offered. I'm the one who's sorry.”

“I took it from you.”

“I didn't know you'd react like that. I won't do it again. I was worried for a minute. But then you went to sleep. I hoped after you woke up, you'd be better.”

“I am better. Not a hundred percent.”

“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. 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 hand wringing. 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 T, he showed her the tattoo of the star of Texas 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 new 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 toward 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 moved 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. She waited for her eyes to get readjusted to night.