The Blue Star

by Tony Earley

  “First base?” Dennis Deane said in disbelief. “You dated Norma Harris all that time and you only got to first base?”

  “Norma didn’t like baseball,” Jim said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  He noticed five pebbles resting in a small, bowl-shaped depression in the face of the rock. He wondered how the river had managed to pick them up when the water was high and deposit them so carefully in this one spot. He tossed them one at a time into the water. Then he stood and collected the shell casings that hadn’t rolled off the rock and tossed them into the water as well. Then he sat back down.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” Dennis Deane asked.

  “Who?”

  “Ellie Something.”

  “I guess so,” Jim said. “Do you?”

  “I guess I think she’s kind of nice to look at. I know she smells good.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Do you really think she’s pretty?”

  Jim hadn’t thought about Ellie Something one way or another, but he said, “Sure. Ellie Something’s a pretty little girl.”

  “That’s good,” Dennis Deane said. “At least I didn’t get no ugly girl pregnant.”

  “You never did tell me what it was like.”

  Dennis Deane frowned. “I don’t really know how to explain it,” he said. “It was different than I thought.”

  “Different better or different worse?”

  “Just different different. You know how, when you’re by yourself and you think about doing it?”

  Jim nodded slightly.

  “Well, I guess I never really thought about the girl being there.”

  “How can you think about doing it without thinking about a girl?”

  “I mean, sure, you think about a girl being there, but Ellie Something, she was really there. You know what I’m saying?”

  “No,” Jim said.

  “Okay, well, sex, I never thought about it being something girls were interested in. I guess I’d always just thought about it being something we did to them. I never thought about it being something they did to us. Does that make any sense?”

  Jim pondered a minute. “You mean you’re saying Ellie Something did it to you? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not exactly. I guess what I’m saying is that she did it, too. And I’d never thought about that before. You think about doing it, but you don’t really think about the girl. You don’t think about being with somebody like that. But then you’re doing it for real and you realize that somebody else is there with you and you realize that you’ve got your britches pulled down and your butt sticking up in the air and they’ve got their britches pulled down, too, and you feel like you’re going someplace together and it’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s fun at the same time. Although it don’t seem that much fun now.”

  Jim nodded slowly. “Huh,” he said.

  “Then, there you go. That’s what it was like.”

  “So, what happens now?”

  “I don’t know, but it ain’t going to be good. She was going to tell her mama and daddy today after church. Then I figure they’re going to come down here and tell Mama.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “You ain’t kidding about uh-oh,” Dennis Deane said. “I figure her daddy’s got some kind of hillbilly posse rounded up by now. They’re probably waiting for me at the house.”

  “Do you love her?”

  Dennis Deane didn’t say anything.

  “Hey,” Jim said.

  “What?”

  “Do you love Ellie Something?”

  “I guess so. I mean, I think so. I mean I think about her a lot. I didn’t used to think about her at all. What does that mean? I look forward to seeing her get off the school bus. Does that mean I love her?”

  “As far as I know. Are you going to marry her?”

  “Would you?”

  “Marry Ellie Something?”

  “Not just Ellie Something. Anybody. If you got somebody pregnant, would you marry her?”

  Jim closed his eyes. He thought about Chrissie and imagined carrying her over the threshold to his room and laying her down on his bed. He imagined holding a baby with black hair and found that the prospect made him happy. A little girl. He opened his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I would.”

  “I figured you’d say that. You always were a goody-goody.”

  “I don’t know what else you could do.”

  “But I’m too young to get married,” Dennis Deane said. “Do you have any idea how immature I am?”

  Jim laughed. “Yeah, I think I do. You’re pretty doggone immature.”

  “You ain’t fooling none there,” Dennis Deane said. “I’m the most immature person I know. I’m practically childish.”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Dennis Deane said. “Can I shoot your rifle some more?”

  “No.”

  At a point Jim hadn’t noticed, the sun had dropped low enough behind the trees that the light had left the surface of the water. The river had taken on a leaden hue; the water in the elbow had darkened into a color approaching black. Though the tops of the trees still glowed in the flat winter sunlight, the rock on which they sat lay completely in shadow. Jim shivered and buttoned the top button of his coat.

  “So, what are you going to do?” Dennis Deane asked.

  “About what?”

  “About Chrissie.”

  “Nothing,” Jim said. “There’s nothing I can do. All I’ve got to look forward to is graduating so at least I won’t have to look at her every day. Maybe she’ll move back to Oklahoma to live with Injun Joe and the rest of the Cherokees.”

  “Or something could happen to Bucky.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “I don’t know. You could always shoot him.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Jim said. “I probably would if I could get away with it.”

  Dennis Deane stood and picked up one of the sticks Jim had broken for target practice. “Well, why don’t you shoot him?”

  Jim stared at the stick in Dennis Deane’s hand and started to grin. “Why not?”

  “Sure,” Dennis Deane said, waving the stick at Jim. “Why not?”

  Jim retrieved his rifle from the bank and loaded the tube full of shells. He stepped to the edge of the rock and shouldered it.

  “You ready?” Dennis Deane asked.

  “Throw it out there.”

  Dennis Deane tossed the stick into the current on the far side of the river. “There he goes, Jim!” he said. “Don’t let him get away!”

  Jim sighted down the barrel. The stick turned in the current until it was broadside to the rock. As it nosed downstream, it began to pick up speed. Jim tracked the stick with the rifle and drew a bead on a spot in the middle of it.

  “Hey, Bucky,” he said. “Over here.”

  When they left the river, they met Uncle Zeno driving his truck toward them around the edge of the bottom. Uncle Zeno pulled the truck off the farm road and rolled down the passenger-side window.

  Jim stopped the Major beside the truck. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Uncle Zeno looked grim. “The Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said.

  “What’s Pearl Harbor?” Dennis Deane asked.

  Bucky Comes Home

  JIM HEARD the train stopping along the edge of his dream and, without waking, wondered why. Nothing ever stopped in Aliceville during the middle of the night. Then he heard someone pounding on a door, but he figured he would be okay as long as he didn’t open it. He heard heavy footsteps moving toward the door and the rattle of a knob and the creak of a screen on its hinges and the indistinct murmur of two voices, one asking questions, the other answering, the voices speaking urgently, almost on top of each other. The screen creaked again and the door clicked closed and the footsteps — Uncle Zeno’s, Jim recognized them now — grew louder as they moved down the hallway
through the house in which Jim had begun to remember he lived. He heard Uncle Zeno open Mama’s door and speak quickly to her, and he heard Mama throw back her covers. Her shoes scuffed against the floor as she slipped her feet into them. Jim, fully awake now, stared at his door until it opened.

  “Get up,” Uncle Zeno said.

  “What is it?”

  “Bucky’s here.”

  Jim squinted at Uncle Zeno’s silhouette. The light slanting past it from the kitchen hurt his eyes. “Here?” he said.

  “At the depot. Get dressed. They’re holding the train for him.”

  When Jim ran from his room, he passed Mama sitting at the kitchen table, the quilt she had made with Norma draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were red and wide, and she held both hands in front of her mouth. He burst through the screen door and leapt from the top step into the yard. The ground was frozen and his pants slapped icily against his legs as he sprinted beside the waiting train toward the depot. The boxcars, stilled in a place they weren’t supposed to be, bore the premonitory oddness of an apparition; from the corner of his eye, as he ran alongside them, they seemed to move silently toward the destination from which they had been kept. The windows of the depot were dark, but Pete Hunt, the station agent, stood on the platform beside a man holding a lantern. Jim slowed and climbed the steps. Pete and the man with the lantern stared at him. He heard himself panting loudly and tried to breathe through his nose. To his left gaped the open door of a boxcar, but he didn’t dare look inside it. He smelled wood smoke and wondered who else in town was awake at this hour.

  “Jim here played ball with him,” Pete said.

  “That right?” said the man.

  “Yes, sir,” Jim said.

  “He any good?”

  From the street behind him Jim heard footsteps jogging toward the depot. Uncle Zeno had rousted Uncle Coran and Uncle Al. Their change and knives jangled in their pockets as they ran. “He played shortstop,” Jim said.

  “Best I ever saw,” said Pete. “Boy had an arm like a gun.”

  Jim blinked at Pete. A gun that couldn’t shoot straight, he thought, and instantly felt ashamed.

  The man studied Jim’s face. “Too bad,” he said.

  The uncles clomped onto the platform behind him. Uncle Zeno briefly placed a hand on Jim’s shoulder as he walked into the lantern light.

  “This ought to do,” said the man. “Let’s get him off.”

  Jim fell in behind Uncle Zeno and stepped from the platform across the narrow gap into the car. Uncle Al came in after him. Jim found himself standing alongside Bucky’s coffin. Pete and Uncle Coran faced them from the other side of it.

  The man stepped into the car last, and when he held the lantern up in the air, their shadows loomed crazily around the walls. “Here’s your boy,” he said — unnecessarily, Jim thought, because the coffin was the only thing inside the car. It looked like it had been nailed together in a hurry. A bill of lading was tacked to the lid and the word bucklaw swam up at Jim before he looked away. The man placed the lantern on the floor behind him.

  “Y’all smell that?” Uncle Al asked.

  Jim gagged and put his hand over his mouth and nose.

  “He’s about ripe,” the man said.

  Uncle Coran backed up a step and looked around angrily. “Now, damn it,” he said. “This ain’t right. There ain’t nothing right about this.” When nobody disagreed with him, he stepped back up to the coffin.

  “I kept the doors open the whole way. I tried to freeze him, cold as it is, but I guess it didn’t work.”

  “You gonna make it, Doc?” Uncle Zeno asked.

  Jim didn’t think so, but he nodded.

  “He’s lucky he made it back home,” the man said. “I heard they only shipped a few. Let’s see if we can get him up.”

  Jim took a deep breath and held it and squatted and tried to work his fingers underneath the casket. He felt the box lift from Uncle Zeno’s end, then Uncle Al’s.

  “Up,” said Uncle Zeno.

  Jim lifted and stood and the casket swung unevenly into the air. The weight inside it was shocking. It was, well, dead.

  “I don’t have a good grip,” Pete said.

  “Get one,” said Uncle Coran, who stood next to Pete.

  Jim realized that the wood beneath his right hand was damp, the wetness slick and icy. “Oh, God,” he said.

  “I know, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said. “Don’t drop it.”

  The six of them began to shuffle sideways toward the door. “Watch your step,” the man said.

  They carried the coffin to the far end of the platform and carefully put it down, first Jim’s side, then the other. Everyone got their fingers out from underneath it intact. They stepped back and looked down at it. Nobody spoke. The man returned to the boxcar and retrieved his lantern and from the platform waved it in a bright arc at his side toward the engine. Jim stared at his right hand and considered wiping it on his pants, but he thought better of it.

  Up ahead a bell began to ring lazily in the darkness. Jim heard a determined chuff of steam and then another, and the wheels of the engine began a slow, almost animate screech against the rails. As each car began to move, it pulled with a heavy clank against the coupling of the stationary car behind it, dragging its brother, groaning, into reluctant motion. The sound of the individual couplings clanking together galloped in succession away from the engine, car to car to car to car, growing louder as it approached Jim’s position on the platform and softer as it ran away; in a second or two it leapt into the darkness beyond the far end of the train. And then the boxcars were moving smoothly, gaining speed, bracketed by thin slashes of darkness. The brightly lit caboose, when it passed, left them alone on the end of the platform in an exposed, unexpected quiet; as it drew abreast of the man with the lantern, he nodded toward them and touched the brim of his cap with his index finger and stepped nimbly onto the rear step of the car. He opened the door, walked inside, and closed it behind him. Jim watched the lighted window of the doorway until it passed out of sight around the bend. And then the train was gone. Jim stood with the uncles and Pete in the starlight on the platform. When the engine whistled at the crossing east of town, it already sounded far away.

  Uncle Coran tapped the coffin twice with his toe.

  “Now what do we do?” Uncle Al asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pete said. “I can’t keep him here. Not with him the way he is.”

  “We’ll take him home,” said Uncle Zeno. “Somebody run get the truck.”

  Jim scrubbed his hands in the kitchen sink until they ached in the cold water. He refused to say anything to Mama about what had happened. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would vomit. He changed his pants, even though he hadn’t wiped his hands on them, rounded up an armload of old quilts, and ran back to the depot, leaving Mama on the top step, worrying questions into the air behind him. At the depot someone had backed the truck up to the platform, and Pete and the uncles had slid Bucky’s coffin onto the bed. Uncle Zeno had tacked scrap pieces of two-by-fours around the base of the coffin to keep it from sliding. Jim hoped he wouldn’t have to touch it ever again. Just looking at it made him wish he had scrubbed his hands harder.

  “Boys, I’d be glad to at least make you some coffee,” Pete said.

  “We need to get on up the road,” Uncle Zeno said. “Jim, you going with us?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then, who’s going to ride in the back?” Uncle Al asked. “We can’t all fit up front.”

  “I will,” said Jim. He had shot Bucky. Nobody else knew that.

  “You sure?” asked Uncle Zeno.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do it.”

  “All right, then. Let’s load up.”

  Jim walked from the platform onto the truck bed and maneuvered around Bucky’s coffin, staying as far away from it as possible. Uncle Zeno stepped on behind Jim, and Jim handed him the quilts. When Jim sat down with his back against the cab and extended his legs, his feet
hit the end of the casket. He immediately jerked them back.

  “Go ahead and stretch out, Doc,” Uncle Zeno said, shaking out and tucking the quilts one at a time around Jim. “You ain’t going to bother him.”

  “Was that a joke?” Jim asked.

  “I don’t think so. If Bucky was in that box and you were kicking it, then he might raise up and ask you to quit. But Bucky ain’t in there.”

  “Oh, yes, he is.”

  “No, he’s not. What’s in that box will be dirt by springtime. You warm enough?”

  “I guess so. Not really,” Jim said.

  “Just stay hunkered down. Maybe Corrie or Allie will switch places with you when we come back down the mountain.”

  “All right.”

  “A box can’t hold the spirit, Jim. Right now Bucky’s sitting around the throne with the rest of those boys. You remember that.”

  “But I still feel like he’s in there.”

  “People are always looking for ghosts in the graveyard, Doc. But that’s the last place they’d be likely to find one.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Uncle Zeno stepped to the side of the bed and jumped off. “Unh,” he said. “Ground’s hard.”

  They drove toward the mountain beneath one of those winter skies that made Jim wonder why he didn’t study it more, why he didn’t bother to learn when and where the planets made their appearances, and the names of the constellations. So vivid and bright were the stars that the great mechanisms that moved them across the sky seemed almost understandable while remaining incomprehensible, like a familiar Bible story read aloud in a foreign language, or the ticking guts of a watch.

  The night was bitterly cold. Jim looked at the stars until the pain of the cold air swirling over his face became unbearable, then he pulled the quilts over his head and breathed into his mittened hands. Eventually he at least stopped shivering. Underneath the quilts, he tried to figure out, through the motion of the truck, exactly where they were on the trip up the mountain, but he lost track soon after they crossed the bridge over Painter Creek. The curves invariably bent opposite to the ways he anticipated. The road fell in the places he imagined it would rise, and rose in the places he was sure it would fall. Several times he tried to think backward and remember the sequence of the curves and hills they had just traversed so he could align the template of his memory atop the map of the road he carried inside his head, yet the two never matched up. Jim could have been anywhere, but he discovered inside that disorientation a small measure of comfort. As long as the road beneath him moved randomly, he found it possible to imagine that its destination remained fluid. He wasn’t on his way to the Bucklaws’ after all, and the corpse of a boy whose death he had wished for wasn’t lying inches from his feet. Bucky didn’t even have to be dead. Chrissie and Bucky could get married, for all Jim cared. And when the truck finally stopped and he looked out from beneath the quilts, the war would be over and he wouldn’t have to fight in it.