That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen Valentine’s Days.
I remember that sad summer after the Ocotillo Ball just as clearly as
everything else. One day, feeling needy, empty, I walked over to her
house. A For Sale sign pierced the ground out front. I peered through a
window. Nothing but bare walls and floors.
I went to see Archie. Something in his smile said he had been
expecting me. We sat on the back porch. Everything seemed as usual.
Archie lighting his pipe. The desert golden in the evening sun.
Señor Saguaro losing his pants.
Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
“Where?” I said.
A corner of his mouth winked open and a silky rumple of smoke
emerged, paused as if to be admired, then drifted off past his ear.
“Midwest. Minnesota.”
“Will I ever see her again?”
He shrugged. “Big country. Small world. Who knows?”
“She didn’t even finish out the school year.”
“No.”
“Just…vamoosed.”
“Mm-hm.”
“It’s only been weeks, but it seems like a dream. Was she really here?
Who was she? Was she real?”
He looked at me for a long time, his smile wry, his eyes twinkling.
Then he shook his head as if coming out of a trance. He deadpanned,
“Oh, you’re waiting for an answer. What were the questions again?”
“Stop being nutty, Archie.”
He looked off to the west. The sun was melting butter over the
Maricopas. “Real? Oh, yes. As real as we get. Don’t ever doubt that.
That’s the good news.” He pointed the pipe stem at me. “And well
named. Stargirl. Though I think she had simpler things in mind. Star
people are rare. You’ll be lucky to meet another.”
“Star people?” I said. “You’re losing me here.”
He chuckled. “That’s okay. I lose myself. It’s just my oddball way of
accounting for someone I don’t really understand any more than you
do.”
“So where do stars come in?”
He pointed the pipe stem. “The perfect question. In the beginning,
that’s where they come in. They supplied the ingredients that became
us, the primordial elements. We are star stuff, yes?” He held up the
skull of Barney, the Paleocene rodent. “Barney too, hm?”
I nodded, along for the ride.
“And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little
more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a
little more in touch with the stuff we’re made of.”
The words seemed to fit her, though I could not grasp their meaning.
He saw the vacant look on my face and laughed. He tossed Barney to
me. He stared at me. “She liked you, boy.”
The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink.
“Yes,” I said.
“She did it for you, you know.”
“What?”
“Gave up her self, for a while there. She loved you that much. What
an incredibly lucky kid you were.”
I could not look at him. “I know.”
He shook his head with a wistful sadness. “No, you don’t. You can’t
know yet. Maybe someday…”
I knew he was tempted to say more. Probably to tell me how stupid I
was, how cowardly, that I blew the best chance I would ever have. But
his smile returned, and his eyes were tender again, and nothing
harsher than cherry smoke came out of his mouth.
