Cat’s prediction, everybody ate. Janie took her plate and sat next to Stella and Cookie. Stella had taken off his shirt. Painted in gold and silver body paint across the broad canvas of his back were several stars. “What are the stars for, Stella?”
Ernie, sitting close by heard her. “You never told Janie how you got to be Stella?”
“It never came up.” Stella wiped a bit of bean from the corner of Cookie’s mouth.
Ernie took a swig of beer. ”Well, it’s kind of more than just your name, Clarence.”
Janie tilted her head, confused. “Who’s Clarence?”
Ernie grinned. “Janie, let me introduce you to Clarence Stubbs.”
Delores plopped herself down next to Ernie and took a bag of pot from her jacket. “Look what I’ve got.”
Ernie grabbed the bag, opened it and smelled the contents. “Nice looking bag of bud. Let’s break it out.”
Delores grabbed it back and emptied the bag of pot on a clean plate. From her wallet she took a plastic card and began sifting seeds and stems from the buds.
Paul sat down next to her and took the plate. “You can’t roll for shit, Dee.”
Ernie cleared his throat. “So, I was telling Janie Stella’s name and all.”
Ernie leaned back against the table, scratching his belly before taking a hit from the joint that came his way. “We all came up from the city. San Francisco. Me and Clarence met in Sister Mary Joseph’s second grade class. Paul was two years behind us. Still is.
“Anyways, me and Clare were friends from school and the neighborhood. Paul’s sister, Cathy, and my sister, Tina, were best friends so we knew each other. After high school, Clare wanted to go to college so he enlisted and went off to be a medic. He shipped out pretty quick cause of how many casualties the corpsmen were taking that year.” Ernie stared into the fire.
Stella shook his head. “Man, do we really have to talk about this?”
Ernie didn’t answer.
Ernie’s voice sounded like it was coming all the way from Vietnam itself. “You know, they don’t train you for war. I mean, you go to boot camp, but everything’s out of a book. It’s all clean there. Nobody’s really trying to kill you.”
Stella stood up and walked away. Cookie followed him.
No one spoke for a moment. There was only the sound of fire popping and the wind in the trees.
Ernie poked at the fire with a long stick stirring up the coals.
“As you get off the plane seems like everybody and their mother wants you dead. I got assigned to Lima Company and Stella was already there. He was our corpsman – our medic. Man, I was so happy to see somebody from home, somebody I knew. He’d already done one tour. At first I couldn’t figure out why he re-enlisted, but by the time I left I got it. You just change so far you don’t recognize the you that you used to be. You can’t see yourself back in the world.” Ernie took a sip of his beer.
“Nobody tells you how to survive heavy fire. They don’t tell you that if you’re six foot four and a medic – like Stella – you’re a prime target. Stella made it through his first tour ’cause he hung around the fire team and moved with them the first three months. Stella did the same for me. He showed me the ropes.
“You know how in the movies if a soldier gets hit some asshole always yells‘ Medic’? That never happened in ’Nam. Medics had code names so Charlie wouldn’t know to shoot you. Sometimes they’d get a man down and wait for someone to come give aid. That was the motherfucker with Stella’s job most of the time. Sniper’d be off in the razor grass waiting for a kill.
“So Clare got the name Stella because our platoon leader was a wop and a fucking Brando fan – I guess ‘stella’ means star in Italian. At night all you could see was his teeth. By the time I met up with him, he’d been Stella for some time. We were stationed out of Nui Kim San. Close to Marble Mountain and Da Nang. By then he’d learned shit they don’t teach at Lejeune. I seen him stop a sucking chest wound with the cellophane off the dude’s cigarette pack. And when he ran out of morphine, he’d give dudes M&Ms and tell them it was some righteous dope. We all thought Stella had some kind of special top-secret government drugs on him. Man, you had to be missing a body part or so wasted you were going home in a bodybag to get one of those M&Ms.” Ernie looked up and shook his head. “Enough. We were both lucky motherfuckers. I’m going to see a man about a horse.” Ernie got up, got another beer from the cooler and walked out into the night.
Delores sat next to Paul. “I met Ernie and Stella through Paul. Paul and me were living in the Haight on Piedmont. Remember that little studio we had, Paul? It was in the basement, but the windows faced the courtyard. This was back when you could rent a place in the city for pretty cheap.” Paul didn’t smile or nod. He looked at Janie and she wouldn’t look back.
Delores’s hair was piled up, and her skin glowed in the firelight, the auburn in her hair reflected the fire. In this light, she looked like the beauty she must have been ten years ago. “I was dancing at the Spanish Moon over on Exeter in the Tenderloin. Paul came by to pick me up and he sees this fat dude with a ponytail at the bar. Turned out to be Ernie and they knew each other. After my set, we all had some drinks and Ernie says I should get a friend and come dance at his place. It’s going to be in Alaska, he says. The pipeline and all. Turned out they never made it to Alaska, and I ended up in bumfuck Washington with Ernie dancing at The Habit. Now you know everything, Janie.”
Janie could see it wasn’t Dee’s intention to be friendly, or to just tell a story. Delores was marking her territory.
People began putting food away, nibbling on leftovers as they cleaned up.
Stella and Cookie came back with Ernie. Stella carried a set of congas roped together over his shoulder. He put them down and started to play. Janie had never seen him play anything. He popped out a rhythm, making the skins sing. Someone played a guitar. Moon had a harmonica. A girl called Pickle had a flute. It seemed to Janie everyone could play something.
Cat and Cookie started dancing with a black-haired girl named Demetra. She was belly dancing to the music. She wore a red velvet skirt that twirled out like a big red flower as she danced. Tiny bells sewn to her halter-top jingled to the music. Janie stood at the edge of the crowd watching the girls dance. In another life she had been fearless. Since the rape she didn’t wear girl clothes, didn’t dance, didn’t do anything that would make men notice her. She missed the dancing. More people were moving with the music. As she swayed into the crowd, Janie closed her eyes for just a second and pictured herself stepping off a rock cliff five hundred feet above a cobalt sea.
PAUL WAS HIGH, definitely high, but he didn’t think that even if he were straight he’d be able to stop looking at her. Janie was dancing. She moved like a storm coming in fast across the mountains. Her face was flushed pink in the firelight, her eyes wide open. She spun, she strutted, she barely missed colliding with other bodies. She was consumed by grace. Janie was dancing, and her face was so open with joy it hurt Paul to see the inch-long scar on her forehead and the bump from her broken nose. He had never wanted to touch a woman the way he wanted to touch Janie.
EVENTUALLY THE DANCING stopped. Cookie and Stella had gone off to the tipi. Janie went to clean up at the pump, trying not to stumble in the dark. From the path she could hear Tripper
