Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  Her blood went up. Hostile but not knowing what to say, not having a defense for herself, she stepped off the narrow path, into the underbrush, to let him pass, to let him go.

  “Don’t you know anything?” he said. “Don’t they teach you anything in that damn school of yours?”

  Clearly not how to find your way out, or make your way back, or use detective skills, or be the kind of girl a boy might come back for, or the kind of girl who wouldn’t go around disappointing her closest, most intimate friends. And worst of all, the very worst of all, teach her not to be the kind of girl who was so overjoyed to get a single word that meant something or might lead somewhere that she didn’t even have any regrets except one. That she hadn’t asked Blake sooner.

  “They teach me everything I need to know, thank you very much.”

  “Not the important things.”

  “And what in your opinion are those?” Chloe said, snide as snide can be. Both her parents were yelling now.

  “That the dude who goes off to war never comes back.” Blake raised his hand before Chloe spoke again. “Never. I can’t believe you don’t know that basic fact.”

  “No, that’s not true, his grandparents … you don’t know about them, don’t—”

  “It’s been three years!” Blake’s voice broke with strangled emotion. “A thousand days. I may not know much about chicks or the fucking meaning of life, but I’m a guy, and I know this—that if I wanted to find you again, and there was breath still left in my body, there would be nothing that could stop me. Nothing!”

  She opened her mouth to speak.

  “Save it,” he said. “I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m done, Chloe. I’m fucking done.”

  “Blake …”

  He cut her off. Not by arguing, or yelling, or raising his hands, or getting out of the truck, or grabbing her or shaking her, or anything her. He cut her off by stepping on the gas and dusting her with the wheels of his F-150 as he revved away, not looking back.

  The Blue Suitcase

  A young, extremely good-looking man named Alastair thought he was going to haul junk for a living, but he became a private detective instead. He lived in Maine, and ran his small business with his brother Marley. They thought they would do well since private eyes were a rare commodity in their area. But the business struggled. No one was interested in their services.

  One day, a local woman named Lenora DuPrix called to hire them for a “small but very important job.”

  Lenora was a stern humorless woman who had recently lost her mother. Lenora told the brothers that she had hired a junk-hauling company to clear the unwanted things from her mother’s house, but they accidentally, or on purpose, took something that was never meant to be taken. This is where Alastair and Marley came in. Lenora wanted the brothers to locate the junk dealers and retrieve the missing article: a shiny hardshell electric blue Samsonite suitcase.

  She offered them a thousand dollars for this seemingly simple job, but when they called the number for the junk dealers, they discovered it was a bogus business. There was no such thing as BCN Junk Professionals in Denmark, Maine. There was not even a house at the fake street address the two men had given Lenora.

  Alastair and Marley were ready to give up. Lenora wasn’t. She increased the price for the recovery of the suitcase. She offered them fifty thousand dollars plus all expenses. At first the amount seemed startlingly large. It was two years’ profit.

  But then Alastair asked what was in the suitcase. After Lenora told him, he began to suspect fifty thousand dollars wasn’t nearly enough. The suitcase contained all the jewelry that had been given to the mother by the father over seven decades of their marriage. The mother had been partial to rubies, her birthstone. Most of the bracelets, necklaces, rings and pins were rubies. The jewelry had tremendous sentimental value. It was irreplaceable. But it also had actual value. It was worth over a million dollars. Lenora suspected that the men who took it were not junk dealers but jewel thieves who had come to rob her.

  Alastair and Marley set out to find the purveyors of this theft. They learned that near the fake address in Denmark, two men with foreign accents had recently rented a broken-down shack in the woods. A few weeks ago they vanished. One of the men, a creepy guy with a long greasy ponytail, went by the name of Giancarlo. The other one was called Rubio, but he was the assistant, not the ringleader, according to the landlady. They told the landlady they had come from Latvia, but she thought they were lying. They looked vaguely Mediterranean. She said she was glad they were gone because the neighbors kept complaining about the noise and the filth. Late at night they would get drunk, break bottles and sing very loudly, even though they were both terrible singers, absolutely atrocious.

  During a search through and around the dump of the rented house, Alastair and Marley found an empty matchbook from a restaurant in Riga. They asked Lenora for additional funds to cover international travel and followed this thin trail to Latvia. They met many unsavory characters, dark shady men doing dark shady things. They learned there was active black market for precious gems.

  Pretending they wanted to buy some expensive jewelry at a discount price, our heroes were finally led to Giancarlo. He was a real charmer. They hated him immediately. They confronted him about the blue suitcase.

  At first Giancarlo fiercely denied ever laying his hands on this suitcase. After Alastair and Marley persisted, he admitted that he and Rubio did indeed take it from Lenora, and then as a joke, swore on Rubio’s life that there had been nothing in it of any value. When he saw that the brothers were in no mood for jokes, Giancarlo changed his story slightly. He told them that he took the Samsonite, but didn’t realize he wasn’t supposed to. He and Rubio were paid to clean the house of junk, and that is what they did. He was very sorry for the inconvenience. He had sold the blue suitcase to another junk dealer in Warsaw. For a price he agreed to take the brothers to him.

  Giancarlo was a snake-oil salesman, and Alastair and Marley knew it. They had no choice but to trust him. They gave him half of the agreed upon sum, and traveled with him to Poland. In Warsaw, Giancarlo had the brothers cornered, beaten and robbed in an alley, and all remaining expense money from Lenora stolen. They searched for Giancarlo in Warsaw, but the man disappeared. The brothers concluded that Giancarlo knew very well what was inside the blue suitcase and wanted the contents of it for himself. And who wouldn’t?

  Enraged, injured, and now with a personal stake in the outcome, they agreed between themselves that a fifty thousand dollar payment was not nearly enough to balance the grave risk to their life and limb. They decided that if and when they eventually recovered the suitcase, they would take some of the rubies for themselves. To justify this course of action, the brothers reasoned that if they were truly terrible men with no scruples, they would keep the entire suitcase for themselves, as Giancarlo was clearly planning to, and never return to Maine, or see Lenora again. While stuck in Warsaw with no cash and no leads, they fantasized about what they would do with a million dollars worth of rubies.

  The brothers had no choice but to call Lenora to ask for another infusion of cash. While they waited for the wire to come through, they tried to figure out from where in Europe Giancarlo could possibly conduct his nefarious business. While Googling for some possibilities at an Internet café, Alastair keyed in the initials of the fake Maine junk company, BCN, into the search engine, and the very first item that came up was Barcelona International Airport. BCN.

  It was nothing more than a hunch, but the brothers had no other leads. They decided to follow it. Giancarlo looked as if he could be from Spain. They headed south.

  In the underbelly of Barcelona, Alastair and Marley encountered a network of jewelry thieves far more elaborate than in Riga or Warsaw. They could not ferret out Giancarlo. He was too well protected on his own turf. Our two heroes were beaten up, plied with drugs, thrown off trains. They refused to give up. They contrived a plan to lure away Giancarlo’s bodyguards with a clever deploy
ment of irresistible strippers, and then to impersonate them (bodyguards not strippers). Once Giancarlo was in their clutches, they would persuade him by all interrogatory means in their power to return the stolen suitcase. The mission had become very personal for the brothers.

  They succeeded in this thrilling and elaborate sleight of hand. The bodyguards were seduced, tied up and muzzled, and Alastair and Marley, in masquerades, accosted Giancarlo, who himself was a masquerade. They dragged him into an alley, tackled him and beat him, demanding he surrender what was never his.

  A bloodied but unbowed Giancarlo gleefully informed Alastair and Marley that yes, he and his partner Rubio travelled all over the United States, posing as junk dealers and preying on the gullible daughters of recently deceased mothers. They removed jewelry from their homes, and then brought it to Europe to sell over their vast underground network. Giancarlo admitted he cleaned out Lenora’s mother’s house, and he had taken the blue suitcase because he assumed from its prominent position in the bedroom that it contained valuable items. But neither the suitcase nor its contents were here with him in Barcelona. The suitcase never made it to Europe.

  “I already told you this in Riga,” Giancarlo said, “and you didn’t believe me. You should’ve listened to me, you morons. The suitcase contained nothing valuable. Only old papers. Think of all the trouble you could’ve saved yourselves and me, if you had only returned to the States immediately, when you learned weeks ago you were chasing nothing but a phantom.”

  Alastair and Marley hadn’t believed him then, and they believed him even less now. They resumed beating him until Giancarlo pleaded for his life. Swearing on every church, cross, saint, Buddhist temple, he vowed what he was telling them was true. He was so disgusted with the worthless Samsonite that he never even took it to Europe. He left it where he opened it, in the woods right behind the rented shack.

  Alastair and Marley refused to believe him. They had walked around the small cottage in Denmark and nothing blue caught their eye in the forest. They knew that if there were no rubies, they would get no money. Enraged at Giancarlo’s repeated assertions to the impossibility of their demand, they continued to physically insist Giancarlo produce what he didn’t have. During this night of endless assault and interrogation, they dragged him to a remote Barcelona beach on the Mediterranean coast. Their desperate ploy of waterboarding to get him to disclose the location of the suitcase went on one minute too long. Giancarlo drowned and died in the shallow waters.

  Now they were truly out of options. They disposed of Giancarlo’s body in the sea, and returned home to Maine, defeated and penniless. Before they went to see Lenora to tell her of their failure, they decided to drive to the Denmark shack one last time to confirm for themselves that Giancarlo had been lying.

  They spotted the electric blue suitcase almost right away. They didn’t know how they had missed it the first time. It was almost in plain sight, in the woods, a few yards away from the house. It lay on its side in a ditch, partly covered with old leaves and moss. The thieves hadn’t even bothered locking it after they ransacked it; the locks were still flapping open.

  What a horror. Giancarlo had been telling the truth! To the brim, the small case was filled with nothing but papers. Junk. There was no million dollars worth of jewels, no rubies. After latching it and cleaning it off, Alastair and Marley took it to Lenora’s house, ready to confess everything.

  Through the curtain of her living room, Lenora saw them walking to her front door, carrying the blue case. She dashed out, grabbed it out of their hands, asked tremulously if it was full when they found it, and when they said yes, she started to weep. She ran back inside the house, carrying the case like a baby in her arms. Bewildered, they followed her inside. They found her sitting on the floor of the living room, face streaked with tears, suitcase open at her legs, papers spilling out. She was on the phone with her sisters. “They found it,” she cried. “By God, they found it!”

  Alastair and Marley stood baffled. One thing had to be true: either Lenora or they had gone insane. She wiped her face, got up off the floor, went to her desk and wrote them a check. She handed it to Alastair. The check was for a hundred thousand dollars—double what she had agreed to pay them.

  “If I told you the suitcase had in it nothing but letters,” Lenora said, “would you have risked your life and searched all over Europe to find it and bring it back for me and my sisters? I know human beings, and I knew that if you believed the case had a million dollars worth of jewelry, you would bluster and chafe at being grossly underpaid. Which would make you turn Eastern Europe upside down to find it. And I was right.”

  The brothers were aghast. They did a lot more than turn Europe upside down. They killed a man. Granted, he deserved to be dead, but still. They didn’t want his death to be on their hands.

  “What’s really in that thing?” Alastair asked.

  “Love,” Lenora replied. “Nothing but love.”

  She took out an envelope from the desk. The envelope contained a letter from her mother. Alastair and Marley read it.

  “My dear daughters,” the letter began. “Of all the things in my house, I beg you, implore you, command you, preserve the contents of the blue suitcase with your entire hearts, with your entire souls. Everything else is vanity. In the suitcase is each and every one of the letters your father wrote to me over our seventy-four years of married life. I leave you these letters to let you see with your own eyes how he loved me once. I leave you love instead of rubies.”

  39

  Senior Summer

  San Diego University Senior Schedule

  FALL SEMESTER:

  Fitness Triathlon

  Kant’s Deontological Ethics

  Special Topics in Music Theory

  Armed Conflict in American History

  Philosophy of Law

  Internship Law Society

  SPRING SEMESTER:

  Judo Multi-level

  Belief and Unbelief

  Plants and Landscapes

  Post Tonal Music

  Drugs in U.S. Society

  Philosophy of Love

  Philosophy of God

  Dani Falco

  Dear Chloe,

  I’m glad you liked my story. Thanks for letting me know—again. As I said before, it means a lot that you liked it.

  To answer your other question, I haven’t been in touch because I’ve been super busy. Besides working, I spent most of February and March in court, trying to clear my name from accusations of thievery and greed. We settled a few weeks ago. Best thing really. I was done with the MF lot of them. I get to keep Lupe’s Jackson house and the bed and breakfast for Hannah and Orville. I’m also elbow deep in the Spring Fair prep. We’re expecting fifty thousand people this year. Mother has quit her school job to administrate. Dad and I are building a stage. Nick Santino and The Maine are performing.

  I must run, I’m supposed to be babysitting my nephew, not emailing. Best of luck with deciding on law school. I’m sure SDU will be perfect if you stay on. You’ll make a pretty good lawyer and a fine florist wherever you go.

  P.S. I know you’re sorry and confused and whatever, but you gotta work out your shit, Chloe, all the shit. Or not. I’m good either way. I’ve got nothing more to add on the subject. Stop asking.

  Blake

  Dear Chloe,

  I hear you, sister, you sound swamped. You’re almost at the end though, a college grad. So exciting. As for your question, we’ve seen a bit of Blake, not much, because he’s been wrapped up in that lawsuit. They settled out of court, but Joey says Blake should’ve never done it because he definitely would’ve won. From Joey I heard he’s been keeping time with Dani Falco from seventh period trig, remember her? She was the one with the braids and the thick glasses. Apparently, she let her hair out and got contacts, so.

  They didn’t break up in April. Dani told her brother who told his best friend who told Joey that it was getting serious between them. FWIW, don’t be surprised if
there’s an announcement soon, said Dani’s brother’s best friend to Joey.

  Write, if you have time, but otherwise, I’ll see you in a month. I think Joey might propose soon too! Fingers crossed. Can’t believe you’re driving back by yourself. That’s mofo scary! You’re a ninja.

  Love,

  Taylor

  Lone Star at the Flying Monkey

  Blake’s casual but costly mention of Carefree, Arizona, leads Chloe to an oblique Tumblr post deep in the search pages, with a sad face next to the title, Lone Star at the Flying Monkey.

  Come back, Lone Star, the post reads. How we miss you on rowdy Saturday nights. Please come back. No address, except the copper state. She researches that one. Apparently it’s the other nickname for Arizona. Well, Carefree is in a copper state. And when she googles further, she finds this: a Flying Monkey joint in downtown Phoenix. About an hour from Carefree. A small lead. But a lead nonetheless.

  After graduation weekend, her parents fly back home with Ray, while Chloe jams her boxes into the used red VW Beetle her parents had bought her for sophomore year Christmas and takes off one morning after sunrise for the copper state.

  There are a million reasons to let him go, and only one to drive through the rain shadow dust of the parched Mojave Desert north of Yuma, all dirt and brown sand. The ink isn’t dry on her degree, the ink isn’t dry on her twenty days on another continent. His rendition of “The One I Love” still crowds her soul. Kierkegaard is right. Each human being has infinite reality. She can barely remember what he looks like, but she cannot forget what she felt like when she looked at him. The ragtag troubadour has not given Chloe back her only heart.

  The Flying Monkey is a dive bar with a stage in the back. The burly dude with tattoos on his neck and his gut falling out of his easy-fit jeans looks as if he hasn’t slept or shaved since the Lone Star days. His name is Lou.

  “Johnny Rainbow? Boy, you’re really dredging up the past,” he says. “I haven’t seen him in years. He’s not in town, cause I woulda heard about it. I didn’t, so.”