Lone Star (66 page)

“What makes you think those two people were his family?”

“A hunch. A coincidence of the sick boots and the couple's appearance in my bar. This isn't the kind of place those two frequent, let me tell you. But I may be wrong.”

Chloe wants to say he is definitely wrong about one thing. That is not a coincidence. It's a correlation.

“Go,” he says to her. “Get out of here before you forget.”

She walks out into the sunshine. It blinds her for a few minutes. San Diego has nothing on Phoenix on cloudless days. San Diego is tempered by the ocean. Not Phoenix, all in a scorch.

Johnny Kick a Hole in the Sky

It's a long way from downtown Phoenix to the address etched into the cold stone inside her heart. Every dusty road looks the same. It's desert flat, streets on a grid, measured lights, civilization, and suddenly nothing but mountain. She makes a left and drives north at ten miles an hour on a road called Pima. It's an old Indian road, and the canal the Hohokam built three hundred years ago to water the desert still runs between the road and the sagebrush hills. The cars behind Chloe roll down their windows and curse her loudly as they speed by her on the left. A man on a galloping horse passes her by!

Though she wears nothing but a tank and shorts, she is overdressed. Chloe has never been this hot in her life. The miserably inadequate AC in the Beetle stopped working long ago. Now it pumps out nothing but hot air. Soon the engine will
set itself on fire, like every other thing here. Every other thing except the cold stone inside her heart.

She stops before she makes a right onto the road Lou made her memorize. She doesn't have the courage to make the turn, to go up the hill. Right now, she thinks, she can make the choice to just keep going. North on Pima, straight to the interstate, go east, drive on, not know. The fear of turning onto the road is so great that Chloe starts to hyperventilate. What would Lou think if he saw her now? He thought she was histrionic before, when, in a calm soft voice, she had asked him a simple question.

She imagines driving on. She imagines driving up. She imagines not knowing. She imagines knowing. She doesn't know what to do. She wishes her mother were here to tell her.

It depends on the outcome,
she hears Lang say. Which Chloe doesn't know.

Can she live with it, unknowing?

Can she live, unknowing?

Her palm is unsteady. It takes her several tries to shift into drive. Whatever happens, she cannot live the way she has been living, in purgatory.
Top of Jomax
is the only way out of the hell of her suspended haunted life.

After making the right, she drives up the sloping narrow unpaved road overgrowing with deer grass and pink muhly. The road stretches up and up and up for a mile into the desert foothills. There are only a handful of houses on it, four sprinkled at the bottom and one sprawling adobe mansion at the very top. That's where Chloe stops, as Lou's napkin had instructed her.
Top of Jomax, off Pima
. She had left San Diego at eight in the morning, and it's almost four. The Arizona sun still seems to be at its zenith. Go, Arizona sun.

There is no one outside. It's a hundred and twenty degrees; of course there is no one outside. In five minutes everything is singed.

But she is wrong. In the front yard of the adobe house near a sunlit mountain, a woman in her forties crouches in a sombrero
hat, gardening. The porch radio is playing something Spanish on the guitar. Perhaps “Bamboléo.”

Chloe gets out of the car. The door slams shut. The sombrero lady glances up. “Excuse me, please,” Chloe says, walking to the white rail fence. “Can you help me?”

The woman stands up from crouching and sways as if she's light-headed. She is tall and blonde. She wears khaki shorts and a long-sleeved linen shirt to protect her from the sun. For some reason Chloe becomes light-headed herself.

“Yes?” The woman isn't rude, but she isn't not rude either. Perhaps she thinks Chloe is a Jehovah's Witness.

Chloe raises her hands to show she has no pamphlets, nothing to hawk, nothing to proselytize. “I'm looking for a friend of mine,” she says. “I'm sorry to bother you. I'm having trouble locating his exact address.”

“Who's your friend?”

“Johnny Rainbow?”

The woman blinks. She says nothing, but Chloe can almost swear she takes a half stagger back on her garden clogs. It could be a mirage. Under the desert sun, in the waves of heat and light, everything appears slightly jittery.

“No one here by that name,” she says. “Wrong house.”

“Jane.” A voice sounds from the covered porch off the wide center promenade, a soft voice, but one that demands to be heard.

“It's all right, Mom,” Jane calls out. “It's nothing.”

“Jane,” the voice repeats.

Chloe watches a small platinum-haired woman, dressed in cream linen, walk carefully holding on to the railing down three steps and toward them through the garden. She also wears a hat. She is so tiny and fragile she seems translucent.

The daughter steps toward the mother and immediately puts a protective arm around her. “Mom, it's fine. I'll take care of it. Go back in the shade. You know it's not good for you to be out—”

The woman lifts her hand to stop her daughter from speaking.

The daughter stops speaking.

The woman continues slowly through the garden to the road and stops on her side of the low fence in front of Chloe. For a few moments she doesn't speak, she simply appraises the young girl with her seafoam eyes. She is silent, like the daughter, but unlike the daughter, she gazes on Chloe with a distant sisterly compassion. “Why the question mark at the end of his name?” the old woman finally says. “Don't you know who your friend is?” Her voice carries a trace of a distant accent, a faint Slavic rounding of Teutonic English.

“He didn't tell me his real name,” Chloe says, and instantly regrets admitting it. She is certain they judge her now, as in, perhaps if he cared more, he would've told her.

Jane has joined her mother in front of Chloe. The two women, one tall, the other small, exchange a brief glance. The daughter shakes her head. “They still come to our house looking for him,” she says. Irritation is in her voice. “When will it stop?”

“Imagine if he had told them his actual name,” the old woman says, speaking gentler than her daughter, though not by much. She levels her eyes at Chloe. “My grandson's name was Anthony,” she says. “He died a long time ago.”

Chloe's legs buckle.

“I'm not looking for Anthony,” she mutters. “I'm looking for Johnny Rainbow.”

The women don't speak.

“Maybe I have the wrong house,” Chloe whispers. “The wrong name.”

The women don't speak.

She tries to stand erect. She leans on a fence post, she hangs her head. Her shoulders slump. It is minutes before she is able to compose herself to speak again. And through it, they stay quiet, as if they understand. All she is praying for is not to break down in front of his family. She remembers this from losing Jimmy. Vocal grief of strangers is unfair and hard to endure. “In Afghanistan?” she says, not looking up.

“No,” the old woman replies. “Though I agree with you, that would've been better. To die in a blaze of glory. Our boy never saw Afghanistan. Three weeks into OCS training he was booted from the program. Not even his father could fix it that time.”

He was caught with a half pound of rock—thirty baggies of crack cocaine. Plus two dozen other assorted sins. He went off the grid after that. “We searched for him everywhere,” Jane says. “We hired private detectives in twenty states.”

“Eventually we found him,” says the old woman. Chloe almost hears the words ahead of the whisper-soft voice. “He overdosed in a motel room somewhere in California.”

“In Death Valley,” Jane says. “Near Funeral Mountains maybe? It was hopeless. Nothing anyone could do for him. How his father tried.”

Silence rolls back and forth between them on the parched ground. Chloe has not looked up. Her tears fall onto the sand and instantly dry, sizzling as they evaporate. When she does look up, she stares off to the side of the two women, to where the trains are, where the guitar lies, where the sea and the moon and the rain in Trieste is, to the mouth near the mic, the mouth near her mouth, the twinkling, smiling dark eyes.

Jane puts her hand around her mother. “Come on, Mom. Please. Get out of the sun. Excuse us,” she says to Chloe. “She can't be out here this long. It's too hot for her.”

“Stop mothering me,” says the woman. “Not your job.” She addresses Chloe. “When did you know our Anthony?”

“We met in Europe before he went to Fort Benning. We visited his mother.” She cannot keep her voice from breaking. “How is she?”

“Outlived him,” Jane replies. “Though not by much.”

And all this time Chloe thought she would find him walking down the road. All these years she hoped to see him on the mesa above the ocean, on the moonlit beach. When, she asks. When.

Not three months after he enlisted. Before Halloween.

Not three months after he left her. She waited for him for four years, and he had been gone the whole time, the bow, the air kiss, the march to the plane, the vanishing.

“He was going to be a rock star,” Chloe whispers.

“Yes, he could've been anything,” the old woman says. “He had almost every gift.”

Mother and daughter start toward their house. Chloe concentrates on the desert flowers because her eye is drawn to the things she loves. She appraises the blue hydrangeas, and wants to compliment the women on the excellent fertilization and watering of the sandy soil. Hydrangeas are difficult to grow this big and beautiful, especially in the desert. I'm really sorry, Chloe wants to say, but her throat won't cooperate.

“Would you like some lemonade before you go?” the old woman asks Chloe. “It's terribly hot out.”

Chloe shakes her head. She watches them make their slow way to the porch. The daughter fusses over the mother, getting her comfortable in the chair, pouring her a lemonade from a pitcher, adjusting her hat. The old woman is annoyed but tender.

What now?

Now everything.

Now anything.

Now nothing.

He had everything.

He lived, he flew, he wasn't a smudge. He was somebody. Look how he was loved. All they wanted was to see him happy.

And he chose nothing.

Chloe might fall down from her great sadness.

She blinks away the sun and sees a man come out into the courtyard from the heavy double doors of the house. The man is tall and white haired, slightly stooped from age, from the weight of his nine decades on earth, but only slightly.

“Who is that?” he says to the women in a gruff deep voice, stopping in the garden and squinting at Chloe.

“It's nobody, Dad, just another girl about Anthony Jr.,” Jane says.

“Did you ask this nobody her name?”

“Uh, no . . .”

“I told you to ask their names,” he says. “Why doesn't anyone ever listen to me?” He steps forward. “What is your name, child?”

“Chloe,” says Chloe. “Chloe Divine.”

With rebuke the man turns to his daughter. “You were going to let her drive off, and yet she is the one we've been waiting for.” Guiltily Jane looks away from her father, and glares at Chloe! As if it's Chloe's fault Jane didn't ask for her name. “Wait here,” the man says and disappears back inside. Chloe isn't sure if he is speaking to her or his daughter. But whoever he is addressing, they wait. Because he tells them to, and his voice brooks no argument.

The man's wife beckons Chloe to come inside the garden. “I know it's a shock,” she says when Chloe is at the foot of the porch steps. “We were like you once. It's been almost four years for us. Only five minutes for you. We learned to live with it.”

“Not his father,” Jane says, and twists deeply away. She doesn't look at Chloe again.

The mother tips her head in pained assent.

Chloe wants to tell them about her brother, wants to say that she knows something about learning to live with the unlivable. That's not what this feels like. This feels like the washing away of all waters. Chloe is charred by the remorseless sun.

Carrying something in his hand, the man reappears after some long awkward minutes. Coming to stand in front of Chloe, he hands her an envelope. She clings to the railing. She looks up at him. Under the external age, under the machine, it is the ghost of Johnny's eyes that peers down at her from a different face, a broad, calm, watchful, sanguine face. She can't look away from the man. She doesn't even blink away from him. Johnny's eyes are staring down at her!

On the small greeting-card envelope, in Johnny's block-letter scrawl, her name is written, as if in the stars. C
HLOE
D
IVINE
.

“Among the things left in the room where he was found, there was this,” the man tells her. “It's been waiting for you to come and claim it.”

Her hands shake.

The envelope is flimsy. It feels as if there is nothing in it except a postcard or a photograph. One or the other, but not both. That is even worse. Either a picture or a letter. What does she want? Him. She wants him alive. Not even for herself. For himself. She wants him not to fall down, not to give up, not to die alone in a bed in a motel. In a minute she won't be able to stand upright. She needs to leave.

“We saved it because he had saved it,” the man says. “His father took most of his things. Like the guitar and his clothes. We have the rest. The boots, the mic. And this letter. Look, he was trying to remember your address. We couldn't figure it out. We couldn't tell if it was Maine or Mississippi or Montana. And the name of the town, what is that? Looks like Firetown? Firegrad?”

“Fryeburg,” Chloe says. She had been right. He couldn't remember it. The crack cocaine neurons were a micrometer too far apart.