Snake Face

by Amber Foxx

  His awkward grace touched her. Who else could save face on rejection with a fart joke?

  The wind blew in from the ocean with a rank odor of low tide, reminding Mae of Jamie’s joke. The winter’s abnormal warmth made the damp breeze feel rotten. She paced the sidewalk in front of Flanagan’s Bar and Grill, scanning the cars that crawled by on the waterfront street for the black BMW. This stretch of the city seemed lively, although there were no lights in the neighborhood around the curve of the beach. The surf, only the width of the street and the boardwalk away, was so wild she could hear it over traffic. Through the walls of the building, Jamie’s voice soared.

  He was making up a song for the benefit, a lively upbeat melody with a repeating line like the bass in a doo-wop song, “Del’s roof.” Mae suspected he couldn’t afford to donate his proceeds from this show, but at least he’d get some music sales and some new fans. She hoped that the waiter who’d had the bad luck to lose his roof and everything under it would spread the word about Jamie’s generosity.

  Stop worrying about him. It was Wendy’s job to keep his career on track, and keep him in some kind of order. It wasn’t Mae’s place in his life, except for this one last thing before they parted tomorrow, he to his show in Greenville, North Carolina, she to Cauwetska.

  The gift bags had normally arrived before the shows had started. Sylvie never delivered them directly, as if she wanted to keep Jamie guessing. Recognize me. Remember me. Solve this puzzle. She never signed them, didn’t admit they came from her, though by the time the hat arrived it was obvious, or would be to someone who knew Sylvie was Joe Wayne’s wife or songwriting partner. Sylvie had no reason to think Jamie knew that. The last time he’d seen her was in the coffee shop in Durham, before Mae had explained who she was.

  The hat was a hint in a game. That would make the black hat-white hat comment on his blog what—a nudge from Sylvie herself? Some random fan catching the resemblance and making a joke? Joe Wayne getting jealous? If it had been from Sylvie, it seemed that her next move might be a bigger attempt to make Jamie recognize her. She must be getting frustrated.

  Mae had thought she would just challenge Sylvie and tell her to leave Jamie alone, get the bag and be done with her, but it wasn’t that simple. Would Sylvie recognize her? What effect would that have? As far as Mae could tell, Sylvie hadn’t been in the Cellar, and when she’d been in Spirit Body and bought the belt from Pamela, she might not have noticed Mae sitting in the audience. If Sylvie had been driving that car last night, she’d been following from quite a distance. It was possible that she’d assumed the tall, shapely woman in a calf-length dress was Pamela. Possible, but far from certain.

  To a stalker, talking to a woman who took Jamie home would be different from talking to a stranger. If Sylvie thought Mae was Jamie’s girlfriend, it might, as Jen had put it, put a nail in her stalker coffin. On the other hand, it might make Sylvie jealous and competitive, and willing to raise the stakes. Seeing Jamie with someone, even if unidentified, might have already had that effect. Jamie had warned Mae, Don’t make her mad. She’s got Gasser.

  A small black car zipped into the parking lot behind the bar too fast for the turn, but the driver steered like an experienced speeder. Mae moved over to look in the window of the shop next door to Flanagan’s, pretending to be fascinated by the trendy clothes. Soon after the engine stopped, the clip-clop of hard heels approached, and a slim young woman less than five feet tall marched up to the front door. She wore a short denim skirt, a tight knit shirt, an open leather jacket and cowboy boots, and she carried a small yellow gift bag. Mae kept her eyes on the window, watching Sylvie in her peripheral vision.

  The short woman paused. Mae drifted toward the next shop window. It was a surf shop. Not very convincing to browse a single surfboard. She took her phone out and checked the time. It was hard to fake having something to do. She wanted to grab Sylvie and tell her exactly what she thought of her and to stop harassing Jamie, but it had been a silly plan, if she even could call it one. Hearing Sylvie’s boot steps clip away again, Mae turned. She had to do something about this stalker, though she had no idea what. The bag was on the door, tied with a length of yellow ribbon through the long metal handle.

  Sylvie hadn’t quite rounded the corner. She stopped with a swivel of her hips. Her butt was as small and flat as Jamie had said, not much to swivel. Hand to hip, she fixed her narrow-set, dark eyes on Mae, looking at her over one shoulder. The pose made her look like a mannequin in the girls’ department of a store, inappropriately set up like an adult.

  Did Sylvie recognize Mae or not? As Sylvie stared at her, Mae wondered if she was making the same sort of calculations. They might be equally unsure what to do with each other.

  I have to get the bag. She can’t take it back. Mae strolled as casually as possible back to Flanagan’s.

  “Is that bag for Jangarrai, or for the benefit?” She pulled at the edge of the yellow paper and looked inside. “Ooh, cookies. And brownies. That’d be real sweet for that guy that had the flood. Did you make those?”

  The quantity was absurd. Mae pictured Sylvie in the Healing Balance store a few blocks away, buying up their entire stock of vegan desserts at the deli counter, going to her car for one of her endless supply of yellow bags and packing it full. Crazy. “We should make sure this doesn’t get stolen.” Mae rapped on the door and waved through the window above the heavy wooden panels, catching the attention of the nearest server.

  A heavyset young Asian man in a black apron unlocked the door and opened it a few inches, explaining through the crack that they wouldn’t be letting people in for twenty minutes yet.

  “We were bringing a gift,” Mae said. She untied the ribbon and handed the bag to the waiter.

  He peered into it. “That’s a lot of stuff. This for Del? He’ll love it.”

  Sylvie made a noise halfway between spitting and hissing. A pair of lines furrowed vertically between her eyebrows, and she squeezed her lips together hard, smearing her red lipstick beyond its outlined borders. “Read the tag.” To Mae’s surprise, the stalker sounded close to tears.

  “Sure. I will.” The waiter nodded. “And thanks for this. Come back when we’re open.”

  “Read the damned tag.” Sylvie’s eyes blazed. “It’s not for Del.”

  Sylvie ran. Mae walked to the edge of the building and called down the alley to the parking lot. “Hey, Sylvie. If you come back for the show, we should sit together. I’ll be looking for you.”

  No answer, but Mae knew she had to have been heard. Sylvie’s car pulled out at raging speed a few minutes later.

  “Is she okay?” the waiter asked.

  “I wouldn’t worry about her.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll see you when we open—”

  “She’s all right, mate.” Jamie’s voice came from the far side of the bar. “Let her in. She’s my road crew.”

  Mae waited until she saw the BMW drive a long way down Atlantic Avenue before she went inside. The waiter locked the door behind her.

  At the sight of the bag Mae carried, Jamie mimed terror as if warding off Godzilla, then jumped from the stage and joined her. She dumped brownies and cookies and a little yellow package onto a table, and folded the bag into her coat pocket.

  “More fucking poison.” Jamie poked a cookie as though he expected it to crawl. “Did she explain herself?”

  “No, I couldn’t figure out if I should even ask her. But I think I scared her out of coming to the show. I don’t think she likes being recognized.”

  “That’s fucked. She wants me to recognize her.”

  “But not me. Kinda ruins her stalking.” Mae picked up the little package and felt it. A book. It bent easily, and had a soft cover like leather. It felt like a child’s Bible. How strange. “She was real anxious about getting this to you. Want to see what’s in it?”

  He made the warding-off-monsters sign again, then dropped the act. “Nah—not now. Need to stay ...” He gestured a rising, swirling moti
on, like puffs of something rising from his heart to his head. “Y’know? Tell me after. Thanks for doing all that.”

  Jamie gave her a quick hug, returned to the stage, and began to run through some tests with the bar’s sound system. Mae sat at a table facing the door. She hadn’t done much of anything, and yet Jamie was so grateful. One night free of Sylvie meant that much to him. The psychic search Mae would do later should do more good, though, if she could finally see something that would reveal Sylvie’s motive. Making Joe Wayne jealous was part of it, but why she’d chosen Jamie for that was still a mystery.

  Mae stacked the brownies and cookies. Maybe the guy that lost his roof would want them. He must have lost his food, too. A note taped to a cookie identified them as vegan. That had been proof all along that the poisoner knew Jamie.

  She examined the wrapped package. No tag. A tiny, flattened bow of curly ribbon. Was it really a little Bible? Mae’s mother had given her a white one around this size when she was eight or nine, with a lecture about reading it daily. She hadn’t, and she’d misplaced it without much attachment to its fate. Sylvie didn’t seem like someone who’d cling to such an item, either. What else was this size and shape? Mae’s mother had given her another book like this a few years later, when she turned thirteen. She’d used it to record her running times and her batting averages, probably to her prying mama’s great disappointment.

  A diary.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mae ripped the paper without hesitation. Sylvie hadn’t earned any privacy.

  Unless this latest gift had been part of her plan all along, it looked as though she had gotten desperate for Jamie to recognize her. The little pink book had yellow sticky notes flagging several of its pages. Mae pictured Sylvie rereading key passages and marking them as she packed the diary for her stalking trip, perhaps to fuel a feeling and relive a memory—or to show to Jamie if all else failed.

  On the inside of the front cover was a flowery panel with the preprinted words My Diary and a place for a girl to write her name. Sylvia Ramirez.

  Glossy black-and-white pictures that looked like clippings from a yearbook fell out. They had been taped to the inside cover, but the tape had dried and let go. The first picture was a faculty group portrait. Mae would have had a hard time finding Jamie in it, even as only one of two dark faces, if Sylvie hadn’t circled his picture. She’d also labeled it: September. He had short dyed-black hair as he had in college, no beard, and wore a tie and a button-down shirt. He was soft-looking, baby-faced, and thick around the middle, like the student opera singer on the UNM web site, but without the flattering benefit of Otello’s elaborate costume.

  The second picture was taken at a dance. Sylvie had dated it May of that academic year. Jamie’s hair was longer and blond, as if he hadn’t cut it since the first picture was taken except to trim off the dyed ends. He had grown the goatee and lost about fifty pounds, to become lean, fit, and graceful. He had one arm in a sling and yet was spinning a partner in a dance—an elegant woman with straight blonde hair, a slim figure except for full, round hips, and an aristocratic face. The printed caption read “Mr. Ellerbee and Ms. Savage chaperone the spring dance in style.” Here, he was recognizable. He was himself, wildly alive and eccentric in a loud print shirt, not the proper, almost formless young fellow of the first portrait. Between September and May there had been a radical transformation, and Sylvie had been keeping track of the changes.

  Mae closed the pictures back into the diary. Another good guess confirmed. Sylvie had been Jamie’s student.

  Soundless as always, Jamie had arrived at some point and was looking over her shoulder. “What in bloody hell is that?”

  She looked up into his worried eyes. “I thought you didn’t want to deal with her before your show.”

  He mimed juggling balls, left them suspended in midair.

  Mae said, “It’s her diary.”

  “Bugger. She’s off the deep end.” Jamie sat beside her and began to toy with the wrapper on a cookie, and then a brownie. “Look at all this.”

  “You’re not gonna eat that are you?”

  “Nah. Not anymore, now that I know it’s Sylvie food. But I’m tired. Makes me crave it.”

  Mae offered the sweets to the server who had let her in, telling him they were for Del. The man carried the goodies off. Jamie watched him go. “That was two pounds if I’d still been eating that crap.” He looked at the diary. “So is this her stalker journal or what?”

  “No. It’s the high school diary of Sylvia Ramirez.” She waited for recognition. He frowned and pulled his head back like a turtle. Mae asked, “You still don’t know who she was?”

  “Nah. More Hispanic names in my classes than anything else. Lot of short people, too.”

  “As short as her?”

  “Some. Yeah. Pueblo Indians. Short people everywhere.”

  “But she’s not Indian. Wouldn’t she stand out a little?”

  He shook his head and fidgeted, sliding his fingers back and forth through each other. “Could you do what Wendy does with reviews? I’m such a bloody coward, she reads ’em first. Then if they’re bad, she sets me up to handle it.”

  “Sure, sugar. I’ll read it.” I was going to anyway. “I’ll watch the door, too. In case she comes back.” She squeezed one of his restless hands. It was hot and damp. “But I doubt she will.”

  Mae read while Jamie finished his warm-ups. She didn’t go straight to the marked pages but to the Sylvie who wasn’t selected for display, starting at random a few days into September.

  Sept. 5. I don’t know what I’d do without Dylan. The only cool kid who likes me. Or pretends to. He needs me for math and I need him for status, so I guess we pass for some kind of friends. Maybe we really are. Yesterday I couldn’t figure out why he hung around so long after choir auditions. Our new director is such a plurb. That’s Dylan’s made up word for fat nerds. He says I’m not a plurb, that I’m cool for a fat kid, which is mean in its own way, but I get it.

  Fat kid. So she had changed as much as Jamie had.

  Our new teacher was starting to play something on the piano and sing, like he’s by himself, and he’s got this huge opera voice, except it doesn’t make you want to shut him off like real opera. It was a pretty song but he’s not very good on the piano. Dylan butted in and asked all these nosy questions, like he wants to be buds. Starts out friendly, like “Where are you from?” We can’t make out Mr. Ellerbee’s accent, it’s like all the vowels are wrong. Then it’s “Why aren't you an opera singer?” Mr. Ellerbee gave us a fuzzy answer on that, but Dylan got as far as “How come your hair is coming in blond at the roots” which is REALLY WEIRD—and “How come you have a gold tooth,” and “What’s that big scar on your neck?” And Mr. Ellerbee answered all of it except that opera question. Mr. Pompous Plurb, showing off because he lived all over the world. He’s half Australian Aboriginal, he got bitten by a dog in Bali that practically tore his ear off, and he broke his tooth in India. Whoop whoop. And then he asked Dylan a bunch of boring dumb stuff, like what year are you, what’s your favorite subject, stupid crap Dylan could care less to talk about. Mr. Ellerbee has no idea how to relate to kids even if he’s not much older than us. I didn’t bother to write all this down Monday because I was getting bored and I wanted to get done with tutoring Dylan in calculus so I could go home, but today—Dylan sneaked his mother's Yorkie in, in his backpack, and he let it out right when Mr. Ellerbee was coming up to teach the tenors something, showing off that voice of his, and he PANICKED. That tiny little dogette got loose, and Mr. Ellerbee stopped breathing just about, landing on the piano bench with his head in his hands and sweating. This great big tall fat guy practically fainting like a girl. And then Dylan acts like he’s really concerned, he says, “Geez Mr. Ellerbee, I didn’t know you had panic attacks. You know they train service dogs to help people like you?”

  People giggled a little, the way you laugh when it shouldn’t be funny but it kind of is. Mr. Ellerbee sent us
all out, just waving like he couldn’t talk. He didn’t fight back, he just put his head down on the closed cover of the keyboard. Like he was crying or something. I think a lot of kids felt bad, but no one said or did anything. It was too embarrassing.

  Mae understood why Sylvie hadn’t flagged this, but she hadn’t torn the pages out, either. Did she expect Jamie to go to the flagged parts and skip the rest? He had a short attention span and an aversion to Sylvie, so it was possible he would, but she might not mind if he came across this passage and it upset him all over again. Dylan had been a teacher’s nightmare. A creative, perceptive bully.

  Behind her, Jamie’s voice floated through scales. Mae thought of watching a great baseball player in batting practice. She knew more about sports than music, but in the same way the basics were beautiful when the art was great.

  She turned to the first page that was marked with a sticky note.

  October 20th. Today I absolutely fell in love with Mr. Ellerbee. Until now I always thought he was so boring and nerdy. He’s been making us sing this AWFUL modern classical stuff for the winter concert, we all hate it—Samuel Barber—and he keeps pushing it on us so seriously, like he’s trying to impress us with how smart and sophisticated he is about music. New teacher syndrome: intimidate the kids with your brilliance if you aren’t really basically intimidating. Which he most definitely isn’t. Dylan started that thing of the kids calling him Mr. Jellybean. I get teased myself, but I still think it’s funny.

  So we’ve been grinding through this dismal choral crap for almost two months and today in rehearsal Mr. Ellerbee just lost it. Lost it. Took off his tie and acted like he wanted to rip it up, started pacing, gave us the signal stopping everything, and then he IMITATED US. Only worse. Like this slow, off-key groaning kind of singing, and then he like wound himself down like a screw going into a piece of wood and sat on the floor. And said, “Jesus! Where should I send the flowers? You sound like somebody died.” It was SO funny. I wanted to laugh, but no one else did, so I swallowed it. He got up and looked at us like he’d never seen us before, like really intense, and said, “You’re in the bloody CHOIR. What the fuck is this? Don’t you fucking like to SING?” And Lydia Sanchez says, in that thick accent of hers, “Yes, but not this shit.”