Snake Face

by Amber Foxx

  A new surge of traffic released by a green light blocked Mae’s view of the black car’s next move, and she gave up looking for it. She tried to remember what state the plates had been from. Dark numbers on a white background. Virginia? Texas? It had been hard to tell from a distance at night. “You know what kind of car Sylvie drives?”

  “Fucking Beemer. A bar waitress with a Beemer. Spending her husband’s money on me.” He rubbed the belt again. “What in bloody hell does she want?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out.” As they turned the corner to approach Pamela’s house, a small dark car turned onto the street with them and parked. Its lights cut off, but the engine kept running. No one got out. “But I could swear, she knows you. Really well.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jamie stopped walking and looked back. “I thought that too, but she can’t—I don’t know her.”

  “Is that her car?”

  “Dunno. Black car in the dark.” He started toward it. The car, lights still off, pulled into the nearest driveway. The engine fell silent. He put on a deep, brave-bully voice. “Sylvie, what in bloody hell do you want, you creepy little weasel?”

  Mae tightened her hold on Jamie’s arm. She was curious to confront Sylvie, too, but not with Jamie drunk and reckless. “That could be someone coming home late, trying to sneak in quiet. Or it could be Sylvie with a weapon.”

  “Y’think she’d shoot me?” He froze and then laughed. “Nah—she only shoots my picture.”

  “You don’t know what she’s up to. Stalkers aren’t normal people. And if it’s the person who lives there, we’d be trespassing. We can’t go barging up to them. Especially in the shape you’re in.”

  They continued on to Pamela’s house, and Mae helped Jamie up the steps. He only tripped on one. Inside, she made him take his shoes off, reminded him to be quiet going upstairs to the guest rooms, and then directed him to the room next to hers. “All right, got you here. You’re on your own now.”

  “Nah. Need you to stay.” Jamie attempted to put his fedora on the bedside table and missed. It fell to the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. He opened his pack, got the roo out and set it on one of the pillows. “Got to check for spiders.” He took out his toothbrush. “Got to groom myself.”

  “You don’t need me for that.”

  “Yeah, I do. You have to supervise the bathroom. Make sure I don’t fall.”

  Annoyed, she went with him and stood by the door, making sure he didn’t crack his head on the sink. Who other than Jamie actually bothered to brush his teeth when drunk?

  “Need Gasser back. So I can sleep.” He spilled water on the floor, looked at it, and resumed brushing and rinsing. “Did you find him better? Did you see the address? Anything new?” Jamie studied his teeth in the mirror. “How’d you even know it was Brazos’s place?”

  “Stamos knew, because he knew Joe Wayne has basenjis. When I had that vision, one of the dogs yodeled.”

  Jamie dropped his toothbrush in the sink and looked at Mae with obvious disbelief. “Yodeled? Like—” He let out a loud falsetto, “Yodelidelodelay-i-hoooooo. The fucking dog?”

  “Hush. Pamela will not like that noise.” She nodded toward his room. “You need to get to bed and let me go to sleep. I’ll look for Gasser again, and Sylvie and Joe Wayne and anything else. First thing in the morning”

  Mae tossed the black hat through her open door and walked Jamie back to his room. He shuffled to the bed, flipped the covers back, peered beneath them, and checked under the pillows with a drunk’s exaggerated care.

  “Nice bloke, your almost-ex.” He sat on the bed, took a brush from his backpack and began brushing his hair, wincing at knots. “Agh, my hair hurts.” Letting the brush fall on the pillow, he stood and took the belt off. Was he going to undress in front of her? She started for the door. “Didn’t think I would, but I like him.”

  Mae paused with her hand on the doorframe, struck with that guerilla pain that Hubert could still bring on. “So do I.”

  Jamie pulled his shirt off, talking through it while it covered his face. “But you like me better.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Yeah, you do.” He rolled his shirt up and then let it fall. “Would you finish my hair?”

  “Are you—”

  “Out of my mind?” Bare-chested, scars showing, he burst out laughing. “Who, me?” He gave her a silly, hopeful smile, holding out the brush. “Nah. Just want to feel good.”

  “I’m tired. You drove my date off, and you’re drunk and noisy, so no, I’m not brushing your hair for you, and I’m not staying to tuck you into bed.”

  “Right.” Abruptly sullen, he turned his back. “Rack off, then.”

  She walked out the door, and then paused in the hallway. You like me better. Why on earth would he think that? Shaking off the unanswerable, she continued to her room and unpacked a nightgown and a paperback. No sounds came through the wall. Total stillness. Why? What was he doing?

  He wasn’t so drunk that he could die. She’d gone to that lecture all the students had to hear at school on BAC levels and alcohol poisoning, and she knew it would take more than six drinks to endanger a man his size. Still, she felt a need to turn back and check on him. She was guessing six drinks. Maybe seven.

  Jamie sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear, brushing his hair.

  Although she fought off the image, he reminded her of a solitary caged animal in a zoo, some social animal like a monkey with no companions to share his grooming rituals, self-soothing in the neurotic way of such damaged creatures.

  She walked in, took the brush, stroked his hair with it a few times, and set it aside, smoothing his hair with her hand. He was hot and sweaty in spite of the cool room. “Lie down, sugar. I’ll sit here ’til you fall asleep.”

  “I have to take off my grundies.”

  “I’ll turn out the light.”

  “Don’t make it dark.”

  “It won’t be.” A yellow star-shaped nightlight glowed in a wall socket, and light from the hall spilled into the room. “Got your roo?”

  He hugged it to his chest, nodded, and Mae turned off the lamp beside the bed. Jamie scrambled under the covers, wriggled around to finish undressing. “My sister,” he said, “always did my hair. When I was little, Mum wouldn’t cut it, not for years. Haley liked to play with it. Made sure I brushed my teeth and went to bed.” He curled on his side, clutching his battered toy again, and then thrashed suddenly onto his back. “Fuck. I have to grow up.”

  He might be drunk, but this was progress. As the saying went, in wine is truth. “I’m sure you can.”

  “Don’t want to be helpless.” He stared at the ceiling. “I got lost for nine fucking hours today. Nine fucking hours. Went over some bloody fucking giant river on this bridge. This bridge. Jeezus. That was a lot of water. Like it’d never end. Dunno where I was. I sat at some little country gas station and cried.”

  “That was the James River Bridge, sugar. You got yourself to Suffolk.” That was quite a mistake, but she could see how he made it, with so many detours and closed roads, and not knowing his way around. “You did good to get turned around and get here.”

  “I panicked five times, five fucking times. And cried. I wanted Gasser. I wanted to—Jeezus. What’s the matter with me? I was fine. I started this tour, I was fine. You saw me in Mesilla, I was fine. Bloody fucking fine. What’s the matter with me? I have to grow up.”

  “You are grown-up, sugar, in your own way.”

  He’d messed up a few times, but without Sylvie, he could have bounced back. Without her, if he was right about her pushing the drinks on him in Austin, he might not even have made the first mistake. Everything that had gone wrong was a chain reaction from that one event. If Sylvie knew him well enough to pull that off, and knew his anxieties about his weight and his teeth, maybe she knew the deeper cracks in his mind as well. She might be harassing him in order to split those fractures open. His repea
ted breakdowns getting lost suggested he was already starting to fall apart. For him to start healing again, to do what he called growing up, he’d have to get free of Sylvie first.

  Mae stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers, a maternal gesture that she realized undercut her previous words, but she couldn’t help it. “Don’t beat up on yourself. It only makes you feel worse.”

  He caught her hand and held on to it, sighed, mumbled something she couldn’t make out, and closed his eyes. To make sure he got to sleep without further distress, she let him hold on until his fingers relaxed their grip and the tension fell from his face. Without it, he looked even more exhausted.

  In the morning, Mae would track Sylvie. It didn’t matter how intrusive the psychic work was, even if it was like stalking that woman right back. For what she’d done to Jamie, Sylvie had given up her right to be left alone.

  Morning came too early, and too loudly, with Jamie’s operatic tenor singing something semi-classical, light and lively. “A wandering minstrel I, I sing of love and marriage ...”

  Mae rolled over and looked at the antique clock on the dresser. Quarter to seven. She had to do a workout with Pamela this morning, and it would feel good to be a trainer again for an hour, but a few more minutes of sleep would have been nice. This was supposed to be a vacation.

  For Pamela, though, the hour was late. Had she woken Jamie and made him cook as he’d promised? Hard to believe he’d woken up on his own, after all that “nasty grog,” but kicking a hungover man out of bed was in character for Pamela. She’d take vengeance on him for the previous night’s noise.

  Mae dressed and went downstairs, to find Jamie in his last night’s clothes taking muffins out of the oven, singing more softly now, while Pamela stood at the counter in workout clothes, frowning at a map on her laptop.

  “G’day love.” Jamie grinned at Mae and set the muffins on the stove top. Taking a few pears from a bowl on the dining table he juggled them, then put them on the counter and rummaged through a drawer for a knife. He was in a better mood than he had any reason to be. He began slicing pears. “Sleep well?”

  “I did,” Mae said. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t,” Pamela grumbled. “Yodeling? And Jamie, your laugh sounds like a pig getting frisky with a donkey. I could hear you with the pillow over my head.”

  He hastily tipped the muffins out onto a towel. Cupping a hot muffin in his hands, he knelt at Pamela’s feet, offering it up to her with a look so quaveringly pathetic Pamela choked on her coffee.

  “All right. You’re sorry. Put that muffin on a plate. If they’re good, you might be forgiven.”

  Jamie refilled her coffee, served her a muffin and a sliced pear, and then served Mae and joined her at the table.

  “You really feel as good as you’re acting?” Mae asked

  “Yeah. Head’s a little sore, but I’m good.” He slurped his coffee, slathered marmalade on a muffin and bit in, and began talking through it. He chattered at Pamela about where she could get better didgeridoos, like the ones his uncle in Australia made. Reminding her of the time-zone difference of half a day—“Don’t want you waking him up in the middle of the night, y’know”—he jumped up and wrote the number on her grocery list on the refrigerator, looked at it and rewrote it a few times. “I think that’s it.” He rejoined Mae, his smile glowing, and Pamela muttered her thanks, continuing her perusal of a web site. Without pause, Jamie continued to talk through eating and drinking, barely stopping to breathe. “So where can I swim today? I feel sort of flabby. Sort of woolly. Need a swim. That’ll fix me up.”

  “The baseball stadium is still flooded,” Pamela snapped. “Why don’t you try that? It’s near the waterfront. Maybe you’ll wash out to sea.”

  “Jeeezus. Am I bothering you? I’m just talking. Cooked you breakfast.”

  To her surprise Mae realized it felt good to hear Jamie’s random babbling, like the background noises of a familiar city. It was what he did when he was happy and striving to be strong and healthy. However, she could imagine that it grated on Pamela.

  “Fine,” Pamela said. “You cooked, and it’s good. Now stop rattling your brain around in your mouth.”

  Wiping a blob of marmalade out of his beard with his wrist, Jamie rose, walked to the counter, and stood beside Pamela. He bounced slightly, as if about to take off. “What are you looking at?”

  “Power outage map. Your hotel is still out. We’ve got our best one back up, though. Want to spend two hundred fifty a night and get out of here?”

  “Nah. I’m your cook. Saved some of the pears, I can do pear-ginger waffles for breakfast tomorrow—”

  “Zip the lips.” Pamela clicked on something, and Mae saw the colorful map change to a new one, with fewer blue spaces and more red spaces. It looked like North Carolina. “Mae. Where does your stepfather live?”

  Mae gave Arnie’s address and Pamela typed it in. “Not yet. Good. I need a kick-ass workout.” She looked over her shoulder. “I am paying you, by the way. Deducting room and board, of course, but not much.”

  “Waves,” Jamie said out of the blue of his inner busyness, where perhaps he had washed out to sea. “I could go look at the waves.” In a dramatic voice, he intoned, “Storm surge,” and mimed looking up at towering waves about to crash over him. “Mae, love, want to go to the beach?”

  “I don’t know. I need to do Pamela’s training session, call Arnie, and do ... you know, that business with the hat.”

  He leaned against the counter, picked up another muffin and pulled it apart, examining its interior and poking at it before eating it. A rush of thoughts seemed to go through him like his own personal storm surge. He turned to Pamela and spoke with his mouth full, unintelligible.

  She glared at him. “You have got the worst case of ADHD I have ever seen. Can you settle? And finish eating before you yammer at me.”

  To Mae’s relief, Jamie took it in stride, swallowed, and said in a slow, articulate manner, exaggerating his precision and diction, “I would like to look at my review from last night, if I have one. Perhaps since the event took place at your establishment, you would also be interested.”

  The extremely correct speech, in spite of the different accent, reminded Mae of Stamos. She wondered if she would hear from him, and if she wanted to. She would need a few days to sort him out.

  Pamela typed, then clicked on something. “I’ll get links to reviews here?”

  “Yeah, my blog. My manager really writes most of it, makes me look like I do it, though. I’ve got this learning disability, I forget what it’s called, I can’t write—”

  “How come I’m not surprised?” Pamela drawled.

  Curious about the review, Mae crowded alongside them, three tall, broad-shouldered people converging around the tiny screen. Pamela’s tapered shell-pink nail tapped the picture Cynthia had taken of Jamie in his sleeveless black shirt, black hat, and fancy belt.

  “That is weird. You look like a black Joe Wayne Brazos.”

  “You did me up like that.”

  “If I hadn’t, you’d have looked like a boiled hotdog. I didn’t have a lot of choice.” Pamela walked away from the computer, refilled her coffee. “Assuming your venue at the beach tonight has power, if I were you I’d get some new clothes if you can find anything open. Or if you have things that fit, do some laundry here. The waves can wait.”

  “Yeah.” Jamie sighed, a little sulky, still staring at the picture. His hand went to the belt and the waist of the tight jeans “I should get new things. Try ’em on this time.”

  “Mae, workout at eight?” Pamela strolled out of the room, coffee in one hand, pear slice in the other. “I need to get going after that.”

  “Eight is fine,” Mae called after her,

  “Fuck. Look at the comments.” Jamie dropped his hands onto the counter, fingers squirming in and out of fists. “Bloody hell, Mae. Look.”

  She read a comment from a visitor to the site. Get yourself a white hat, a__hole. The bl
ack one is mine. JWB.

  “Joe Wayne Brazos? He wouldn’t be on your web site,” she said. “That has to be a joke.”

  “Yeah.” Jamie’s hands relaxed and he laughed. “Like—blackfella white hat, whitefella black hat. Then we’d be color negatives, and I’d be his antimatter.”

  Mae looked at the picture, and then at Jamie beside her, surprised at his convoluted interpretation of the joke. It was odd but true. He was a kind of negative of Brazos. Did that have anything to do with Sylvie’s strange behavior? It was hard to guess what Joe Wayne and Sylvie’s relationship might be like, other than dysfunctional.

  “Sugar, I’m gonna do that psychic journey now, see if I can find out what’s going on.”

  Jamie faced Mae with wide, hopeful eyes. “Can I sit with you while you do it?” Afraid to hurt him, she said nothing. He withdrew and began washing the dishes. “Yeah, right, you need your quiet. I’ll clean up.”

  “We’ll do something together later. I’ll take you shopping. Go look at waves.”

  He gave her a radiant smile, as instantly delighted as he had been dejected a second earlier.

  After calling Arnie to make sure he was still all right in the power outage, Mae got out her crystals and sat on the floor of the bedroom. She wasn’t sure why, but she liked to do this work as close to the ground as possible. Resting one hand on the black cowboy hat, holding clear quartz points in the other, she asked, What do I most need to know right now about Joe Wayne and Sylvie? The situation was so complex and puzzling, she had to trust the force that guided her to show her the right information.

  The tunnel carried her, and then the cloudy edges of the vision cleared to show a hotel room. Several men in jeans and western shirts lounged on the sofa and the beds, and one strummed a guitar. Joe Wayne Brazos, slow dancing with a tall, slender blonde girl who looked to be nineteen or twenty, held a Lone Star beer in a long-necked bottle, and occasionally took a swig over his partner’s shoulder. He sang into her ear, and the girl giggled. Other Lone Star bottles, empty or half-full, stood on every table. A cigarette burned in an ashtray. Was this last night, or had Joe Wayne partied so long he’d gone past sunrise?