Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “You remember Lone Star?” Chloe holds on to the edge of the counter. It’s mid-afternoon, almost opening time. The clean glasses are stacked in pyramids along the bar. It’s quiet. It smells of fermented hops and old smoke.

  “Him. I remember him,” Lou corrects her. “Who could forget? What a piece of work he was. Did some wild shit. But I never in my life heard a voice like his. Before or since.”

  “That’s him,” says Chloe.

  “He was the only thing on that stage. For years I had people coming in asking about the kid who sang Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Johnny Kick a Hole in the Sky.’ He was something, that animal man.”

  She cries, she cries. “Do you remember his name?”

  Lou frowns. “Are you being funny with me or something? You know his name. Johnny Rainbow.”

  “I mean his real name.”

  “Nah, have no idea.” He busies himself with wiping the counter.

  “What happened to his band?”

  Lou shrugs with hostile indifference. “What always happens? The lead singer and the guitarist chick start banging other people and their dreams of stardom vanish with the latest bonk.”

  Chloe wants to know if that is what happened.

  “It was a long time ago, girly,” Lou says. “I got a lot of bands coming through here, I can’t remember why they all stopped playing.”

  Chloe listens to him, appraises him. For some reason this overflowing man sounds too clipped in his speech. Chloe peruses the options why. “Is that what happened here?” she repeats, gleaning something.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember Lone Star or you don’t remember what happened?”

  Lou mumbles. She asks him to repeat. He mumbles. She asks him to repeat.

  “Look, sweetheart, what do you want? Do I remember him? Sure I remember him. I told you. You hear him sing, you don’t forget a thing like that.”

  Chloe stays motionless and mute.

  “But that’s not enough. Are you here on his behalf or something? Is he looking for a gig again? I’m not interested. I was glad for the business he brought. But that boy was trouble. With a capital T. A larger door means nothing if the cops are shutting me down, or worse, throwing me in jail for illegal shit conducted on my premises.”

  “Are you saying you let Johnny go because he was doing things in your club?”

  “I’m not saying that.” He glares at her suspiciously. His bulbous nose inflates. “Who did you say you are?”

  “I’m not sent by him, or by anyone. This isn’t entrapment. I’m just trying to find him.”

  “Get in line, girly,” Lou says. “Look, I can tell you I didn’t want to fire him. He was a sweet kid. Sure, Lou. Sorry, Lou. I know the rules, I know the law. Don’t worry. Won’t happen again. And then the next weekend, bam. More trouble. More dudes coming to my place, dealing, using, fights, cops, just awful. And on Mondays I’d haul his ass in here and say, now look here, Johnny, and he’d be all smiles and charm, disarming me with his pipes. Sorry, Lou, won’t happen again, Lou. Blah, blah. In the end, he made it impossible for me to keep him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Some asshole keeled over in the john of my fine establishment. Johnny sold him the rock and the Mexican mud for a speedball, and a hundred people saw it. That was the end. It’s all fun and games until a junkie expires in a toilet stall. That black tar bitch is satanic. Takes everything in its path. He came in once or twice after that, apologizing, but I was done. Told him to straighten himself out before he came to me again. Haven’t heard from him since.”

  Yeah, Chloe wants to say. Me neither. “Is he from around here?”

  “Not sure.” Again, too clipped.

  “But what about his name?”

  Lou chews on a toothpick as he eyeballs her. “Johnny Rainbow is his name.”

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t know nothing else.”

  “So how did you pay him? Didn’t you need his social security number, an address maybe?”

  Lou laughs. “Clearly you never sang in a bar band. I pay cash from door receipts. They like it, I like it, that’s how it’s done.”

  “So you don’t know where he lives?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or his real name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” says Chloe, “without one of those two things, I can’t find him.”

  Lou studies her. “Personally,” he says, “I think he didn’t give out his real name because he didn’t want to embarrass his family if he got caught. And trust me, they always get caught.”

  “Who’s his family?”

  “How should I know? Just a hunch, I tell you.”

  “Who is his family?”

  “Girl, you’re not listening to me.”

  She is listening. To all the things he’s saying and not saying. She fails to suppress a sigh, an eyeroll, a fistclench, a pained frustrated ugly breath. “So you refuse to say or do or remember anything?” Chloe raises her voice. She sounds desperate because she is. “I’m asking you. I’m begging you. I’ve been looking for him for four years. I have no one else to go to if you don’t help me. I’m going to have to get in my car and drive three thousand miles back home. I came here for one afternoon, just trying—” She breaks off. Takes a deep breath. “To find him.”

  Lou leans over the bar, elbows on the counter, chewing his toothpick. His eyes are blank.

  “Thank you,” she says, grabbing her bag. “You’ve been very helpful.” She starts to walk away.

  She hears his voice behind her. “Come back,” he says with a sigh. “Stop wigging out.”

  Chloe quickly approaches the bar. That was wigging out?

  The man scribbles down a few words on a napkin. He places the napkin on the counter but won’t let go of it. “No, I can’t give it to you,” he says. “You have two seconds to look at the words before I get rid of it. If something bad happens because I gave this out to a stranger, I won’t have a business no more. Don’t shake your head. I don’t know who you are. You could be a stalker, or a killer. You could be an ex-convict with a death wish. It’s happened. It gets found out I gave you this, forget about my business, I might not even keep my life. And I’m not fucking kidding you about that. So read up, girly. Two seconds.”

  Her hands reaching for it, Chloe stares at the napkin with five short words scribbled on it, her heart pummeling her chest. Before she can explain to Lou about dendrites and synapses, he snatches the napkin from her, flicks on his lighter and holds the flame to the paper over the bar sink. In fifteen seconds, the water washes the ashes down the drain. Not a trace of the address remains.

  “Now I’m going to tell you a story,” Lou says. “One Saturday night, an extremely well-known locally prominent gentleman and his wife came to my bar to watch Johnny perform. They sat in the corner in the back like they didn’t want to be noticed. I was so honored to have them, I talked about it for months. I brought them my best whiskey and of course never charged them, would never charge them. The wife saved my niece’s life. Horrible car accident, no one could stop the bleeding. But she did. Because she was holy. Anyway, right after they came, Johnny suddenly started working the stage with a six thousand dollar microphone and wearing twelve grand worth of alligator boots. I asked him where he got the mic because I’m in the business, I know a dope mic when I see it, and he said it was a gift from his family.”

  “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, girly.”

  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 Die
go 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-sleeve 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 wo
man. “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.