Lone Star (40 page)

This spur, said Johnny, leads to a quarry four kilometers inside the forest, a quarry of white sand that was mined for industrial and urban development.

That quarry is now an empty sandlot, he said, surrounded on all sides by forest. The soil is infertile, and farmers don't cultivate it. Nothing grows there. Wasteland has remained wasteland.

“This barren wilderness,” Johnny said, “was selected by the gestapo and approved by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler for the construction of a human slaughterhouse, the breadth and likes of which the world had never seen.”

No one heard him but Chloe and me.

Blake

The tour group that hired Johnny and his bus and ominous driver was a peculiar bunch of ducks. They showed up an hour late in full Indiana Jones gear. They had on khaki cargo pants, vests with dozens of pockets, fancy hiking boots, wide-brim hats to keep out the sun, and lots of cameras. Yes, they were all good on the cameras. There were five of them, three men and two women. The men carried an SLR each, a Nikon, a Canon, a Pentax. The camera bag they brought was the size of Johnny's duffel that contained his whole life. In this bag, they had five or six lenses for each camera, flashbulbs, filters, extra batteries, cleaning solutions, a small screwdriver kit, in case, I presume, either the cameras or their eyeglasses went kerflooey, and extra lens caps.

“You sure you don't have a printer in there?” I quipped, thinking I was being witty, and the bald man slapped me on the back and pulled out a black cuboid.

“Canon makes the best one. It's light,” he said. “You can carry it anywhere, and it prints pretty well. Would you like to see?”

“Um, no, that's okay.”

He stuffed the miraculous prism back in the bag.

They were older than us by some forty years. They were too enthusiastic by half. They included even the truculent driver in their bonhomie, pumped our hands, slapped our backs, asked interminable questions about what and where and how, commented about how wonderful it all was, and then launched into a five-person harmony about who they were, where they lived, what they'd seen so far, and where they were headed.

Apparently they had been friends since high school, just like us. They grew up in Arizona, in Carefree or something. More like care-less, as in, could not. I laughed out loud at my own inward joke, unfortunately not at the most appropriate time as they had just finished telling us that the wife of the fifth wheel with them had recently passed away. They said “passed away” in a hush-hush voice, as if they didn't want the fifth wheel to know. Their names were kitschy and rhymy and alliterative. I thought they were joking with us. Brett and Yvette and Dennis and Denise. I didn't catch the widower's name because he was all by himself and couldn't poetize. They said they
loved
our names, and they
loved
our tour guide's name.

“Johnny
Rainbow
! Isn't it
fantastic
! How did you come up with that? Your mother name you that? Give that woman a medal!”

Denise said, “Give that woman a medal for having a child, period.”

And Yvette leaned over my seat to my head and whispered into my ear, “I
love
Denise to death, but she doesn't have any
kids
!”

“You don't have to tell them my whole life story, Yvette!” Denise shouted. “Why don't you tell them that Dennis got snipped while you're at it?”

I looked into my lap. Even my lap was embarrassed.

“How long have you been in Warsaw?” Yvette yelled to us. She was sitting behind Hannah and me, and kept leaning over
into every millimeter of my personal space. She was leaning over into personal spaces that even my girlfriend had not visited. The woman was right up my ass, and shouting into it. “We've been here a week already, waiting for Johnny! He's the
best,
so we didn't want to have a death tour until he came, we're
so
happy it worked out, I wish you could've come with us yesterday, yesterday was
amazing,
wasn't it, Brett, tell them, wasn't it?”

You might think that they would marry their opposites, the way people sometimes do if they want to stay married. But no. Brett also leaned over into Hannah's crevices and began shouting.

“It was
incredible
! Johnny said you were going to join us, but you missed your train? Those trains are a bitch, aren't they? We didn't want to travel the Baltic states for that reason! Too much hassle, and we don't want any hassle, we
hate
hassle!”

Across the aisle Denise leaned over to Chloe. “Darlin', did Johnny tell you his chaos theory? He explained it yesterday on the way to Lublin when he told us all about you. We had time. It was like a three-hour tour!”

Dennis broke into an out-of-tune theme song for
Gilligan's Island
.

The widower from the last seat in the back, slightly quieter than the rest, bless him, said, “Johnny's chaos theory is why we felt so bad about keeping you waiting this morning. Totally our fault. I hope it doesn't ruin our day. Please let your theory be wrong, Johnny,” he continued. “Otherwise we're screwed—pardon my French.” He took off his hat and fanned himself.

“Why are you fanning yourself?” Emil suddenly bristled, glancing through the rearview mirror. “There's air-conditioning on my bus. It's running on max.” The poor overheated man apologized and stopped fanning himself!

“I hope I'm wrong, too, Artie,” Johnny said. Artie! That was his name. Please remember it, Blake. You're a writer now. “Chaos theory states that one small change out of the ordinary
order of initial things multiplies by geometric expansion all the subsequent things until unpredictability follows. That's why they say that a tennis ball lobbed in error can lead to the collapse of the universe.”

“Isn't that the butterfly effect?” Brett said.

Johnny nodded. “It's the double pendulum theory. Minute changes in initial motion result in drastically different patterns of consequences.” His gaze kept circling back around to Chloe.

“Wait, what's your name again?” Denise said to Chloe. “Chloe what?”

“Chloe Divine.”

“Oh, Yvette, isn't that just divine! Aren't they darling, all four of them, simply divine, aren't they? Do they remind you of anyone, Yvette? They're just like we used to be. Aren't they precious?”

“What about me, Denise?” Johnny smiled, but after catching my humorless face looked away, toward Chloe, of course.

“You are the divinest of them all, darling boy!”

“How do you know anything about double pendulums?” Hannah asked Johnny. I wanted to know this myself, but I wouldn't abase myself to ask. That might mean I was interested in his answer.

“I told you, my grandmother is a mathematician.”

“Lucky you,” Yvette exclaimed. “Your grandma is still alive?”

“Yes,” Johnny said. “Grandma taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the laws of mathematics.” For some reason he then glanced at Hannah! What a freak.

“Lucky, lucky! And your grandpa?”

Johnny grinned. “He taught me how to fight. Just kidding. How to fish, I mean.” But his eyes were all twinkly.

I nearly groaned. He fished, too? I know Hannah wouldn't be that impressed, but Chloe loved fishing. Sure enough, when I glanced to my right, there was Chloe, blinking, all soft in the eye, probably thinking, oh you fish, too . . .

Bastard.

Trouble was, when I looked over at my brother, to see if he was as disgusted as I was, Mason was gazing at Johnny with Chloe's expression, all doe-eyed and smiley. Oh you fish, too . . .

I give up. I. Give. Up.

Yvette and Brett, Dennis and Denise, and Artie told us that they'd been traveling together since the last of Yvette and Brett's and Artie's kids left for college. Before they regaled us with stories about which countries they had been to, they regaled us with stories about their children, grown, successful, two of them married, one of them popping with twins, one engaged, one almost engaged but pregnant, so Artie was going to be a grandpa again, and “Oh, how Arlene would have loved to have a little girl after having all them boys!”

Hannah turned to the back of the bus, to face Artie. “Do they plan to get married?”

“They don't know. They gonna have the baby first, then see how they feel.”

“What do you think about that?”

“Good, fine. If they're happy, I'm happy. They're my kids, I just want them happy.”

Hannah nodded but uncertainly, as if she didn't quite understand or believe it. Johnny stared at Hannah with a mixture of pity and regret, and I wanted to ask him what the hell he was staring at, but Denise, happy not to be talking about the kids she never wanted to have, tapped insistently on my shoulder and resumed telling us about the places the six of them had traveled to over the years, but when Arlene “passed away” (in a whisper) last year, they pledged they were not going to stop just because they lost one of their ranks. “Arlene wouldn't want that, would she, Artie?”

Artie agreed that his deceased wife wouldn't want that.

“So we realized,” Denise continued, “that though we'd been to Greece and Spain and Italy, and all round the Mediterranean islands, though we'd spent a month in France and a month in England, we've never been to the Baltic states. We decided there
was no later. And being that Arlene was Jewish, we thought we'd honor her memory by going to see the camps in Poland. Artie approved, didn't you, Artie?”

From the back, Artie grunted his approval.

“Though we'll tell you frankly, we don't like the travel here. It's a slog, and the distances are too far. We much prefer the Alps, or Marseilles. We're actually thinking of cutting the trip short and flying to Cote d'Azur for a few days, just to wash the grime off our bodies, relax a little bit by the sea, aren't we, Yvette?”

“I don't know if we'll have time, Denise,” said Yvette. “There's a lot to see.”

“Yesterday Johnny was so efficient with time,” Yvette said. “We can do it if he's with us. He was swinging that pendulum all day, weren't you, dear boy? He swung it back and forth between Sobibor and Majdanek.”

“Sobibor was the worst,” Brett said.

“Johnny didn't think so!” Yvette said. “He was most affected by Majdanek, weren't you, Johnny?”

“I don't get why,” Brett said. “It wasn't nearly as impressive as Sobibor. It was so small. A few barracks, one little gas chamber, all overgrown with grass.”

“A lot of destruction for a small place,” Johnny said.

“I agree with Yvette,” Denise said. “Majdanek wasn't that impressive.”

“It looked different from the way my grandfather had described it,” Johnny said.

“Different? How? How would your grandfather know? Did he come here?”

“Yes,” said Johnny. “He came here.”

“Well, according to the guidebook, the camp's been like that for years. He must've come a long time ago. How was it different?”

“He said there were shoes in the barracks and giant cabbages growing in the ashes,” said Johnny.

An odd hush fell over the bus.

“What ashes?” Denise said.

“There were no cabbages,” Yvette said.

“Or shoes in the barracks.”

“Maybe we didn't see everything,” Denise said. “Dennis, did you see shoes?”

“I did not see shoes,” said Dennis.

“How long ago was your grandfather there?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said. “Sixty years.”

There was an exhale of relieved air among our seasoned travelers.

“Oh!” Yvette said, “so a
really
long time ago! Well, no wonder!”

And then from the back came Artie's voice. “Sixty years, Johnny?” he said. “Wouldn't that be 1944?”

“I guess it would,” said Johnny. “Give or take.”

“Give or take what?”

“A few days.”

“What was he doing here?” asked Denise. “No wonder he saw cabbages. Probably on the farms all around Lublin. They were destroyed during the war. Are you sure he was in Majdanek?”

“Oh, I'm sure,” Johnny said. “Emil, stop the bus.”

Emil slowed down and pulled into a dusty half road by the edge of the forest.

“Why are we stopping?” Yvette said. “Are we taking a bathroom break?”

“Oh good,” said Hannah. “I could use one.”

“We're stopping,” Johnny said, “because we are here.”

“Here where?”

“Treblinka.”

Chloe

The two of them walked to get the flowers, half a block away in Castle Square. A lady on a sunlit corner sold roses under her umbrella. They had been picked fresh that morning. Johnny paid for two dozen red roses with baby's breath in pink cellophane
and handed them to Chloe as if he were giving them to her. She took them, without lifting her eyes, and said thank you, and he said look at me.

I can't, she whispered back.

Please, Chloe. Look at me.

I can't, Johnny. They're watching us. I can't.

Just raise your eyes to me.

What could she do? Not look at him was one thing she could do. That's not what she did. She lifted her gaze. His blinkless tar eyes stared back at her dumb with love.

Not nearly enough roses for you, he said, his voice catching on all kinds of things.

Johnny, please, she breathed out, like begging.

I want to kiss you right now. He bent his head toward her. I'm going to kiss you right now.

Johnny, please!

She staggered away. He stood motionless. I can't take this, he said.

Me neither.

Khloya Deveeny, what are we going to do?

Nothing. You are going to spend the day telling us about the death camps.

I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to show you. I don't mean that. I mean after.