Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  “No. He took off to the bar.”

  “Smart move. He’d have bit her head off otherwise.”

  “I almost did. She told me I had some kind of blockages. Niall says health nuts and spiritual tourists are suckers, so I thought maybe she took me for a fool because I look healthy. I tried to be polite about it, but I disagreed with her. She hasn’t been back there since. The manager thinks she might have come up here to see her guru. When you lived here, did you ever hear of a guru named Sri Rama Kriya? Or a place called the Center for Ascended Bliss?”

  “No. But we’re not into that scene. Why are you interested?”

  “Kenny wanted me to go see him. And I might find out if that’s where Muffie went.”

  “Don’t waste your time on that. Kenny gets more crazy ideas from that woman. He and Frank put up some big rod, this twenty-foot pole, to attract messages from the Pleiades because Muffie told them her guru said to do that. Skip it, babe, it won’t do him any good. He’s got a perfectly good, sensible yoga teacher here. He doesn’t need that nonsense from whoever this guru is, or Muffie.”

  Attracting messages from the Pleiades? That was more ridiculous than the green slime. Mae would have to look at the pole when she got back to T or C. She’d thought it was a flagpole.

  “How’s the house coming?” Marty asked. “You get hold of Pie yet? She come out for you?”

  “Not yet.” Mae felt a pang of guilt. She needed to get back to cleaning, and try again to heal the cat. “I need to check on her.”

  “You do that. She’s a sweetie. Needs some loving care.”

  Mae looked under the sofa. No Pie. She checked under the bed. The eyes stared at her. She brought the food and water dishes in and lay on the floor speaking softly, but the cat only shrank further away. Giving up for the time being, Mae resumed cleaning, taking the curtains out and beating the hairs out of them, and bringing them to the laundry room along with the towels from the bathroom closet. They all smelled like smoke. She had to clean the washing machine and dryer of food spills and dog hair before she could use them. This work would take every bit of the week here. She still had all the walls to wash, floors to wash, every nook and cranny of the kitchen to clean, and more furniture to free of dust and dog hair.

  With the laundry room cleaned and laundry in progress, she took another break, setting up her laptop again. Reading The Reporter online, she looked for music listings. Tonight, at La Villa Real Center, Afreaka was playing. Free. This was going a lot better than the Muffie search. Or the cleaning, or the cat healing. She could find people who knew Jangarrai tonight.

  Chapter Six

  Still reluctant to face the revolting refrigerator, Mae hadn’t shopped, and would have to eat out. She dressed again in the little black dress, put on earrings and sandals, and brushed her hair, pleased with the Santa Fe version of herself in the mirror. More dressed up than she would be back home, she was looking forward to taking herself out on a date. After all her years of marriage, it was a dinner date, in a way, with a stranger.

  She walked downtown and picked a small restaurant that had outdoor dining overlooking a courtyard between shops, where she could enjoy the evening breeze. While she waited for her meal, she remembered to call her stepdaughters before their bedtime on the East Coast, and made up for lost time talking with them. Long-distance connections were always bittersweet, especially the part where she had to talk with Hubert first, and hear him and his new girlfriend in the background while Brook and Stream chatted.

  Reminding herself that she was better off on her own, Mae took her time over dinner after the call, letting the clear desert light and the soothing simplicity of the city’s shapes and colors ease her again into her solitude.

  When it was time to find the concert, she walked several blocks west of the Plaza and looked for La Villa Real Center, but it seemed invisible at first. The mall was at the end of a short side street, set back from Guadalupe Street. Mae found it only after passing it twice, and wondered how she could have missed a black 1941 Dodge truck on a pedestal, its bed full of petunias, across from the mall entrance. She hurried in to find the music already in progress.

  The band was playing in the atrium in the center, in what normally served as a food court. All the seats at the first floor tables were occupied, and the upper level looked crowded as well.

  Onstage, Mae saw three black men seated on tall stools, one man very dark, short and round faced, with a graying beard, another lighter brown with a long narrow face and a thin, lanky body, both playing drums as they sang, and then—the blond man from the Plaza. Two tables on either side of him displayed an array of flutes, wooden, bamboo, and metal. A drum sat on the floor behind him, and he was playing a rhythmic drone on a bamboo tube about five feet long and eight inches in diameter, painted with dotted patterns that looked like abstract aerial photography, the instrument’s end resting on the floor at his feet. Those instruments. He had to be Jangarrai after all.

  Elated by the music and her easy success, Mae climbed the stairs to find a seat on the upper level, noticing the effects of the high altitude on her heart during this normally effortless exercise. She had to share a table with strangers, but they smiled and didn’t object.

  The song built up in tempo, the short man’s strong, husky voice pouring out rapid-fire words in his native tongue. He smiled while he sang, making eye contact with members of the audience, and the other drummer added harmonies on choruses, Jangarrai keeping pace on the didgeridoo as if he never stopped to breathe. The energy swelled so high Mae felt herself and the rest of the audience disappear into the wave of the rhythms, as if they and the trio all had one great heart.

  At a table near the railing, two young women watched with visible excitement, often leaning into each other and talking, sometimes holding hands. They seemed to be a couple, a slightly plump black woman with short, natural hair and gold-rimmed glasses, and a graceful Asian woman wearing a short dress with an uneven hem, tall boots, and hair captured in a spray atop her head like a cockatoo’s crest. The Asian woman stood several times and snapped pictures with her cell phone. She was tall, with colorful tattoos of tigers, Buddhas, moons, and suns, on every willowy limb, and when she got up she partly blocked Mae’s view of the band. Fortunately, her partner reminded her to sit down for the next part of the song.

  The lead singer looked to Jangarrai, and he set down the huge didgeridoo and stood, picked up a small bamboo flute, and blended its ethereal, flying sounds with the African drums. The drummers picked up the tempo yet again and added another layer of rhythms. As he finished the flute solo, Jangarrai burst into an ecstatic flight of dance while the other men sang. The three of them finished on drums with a pounding finale. The two women at the table near the railing applauded loudest of anyone upstairs, and the tattooed woman jumped to her feet.

  The band faced the audience with formal little bows as the applause crested, and then slowly faded. The lead singer said, “Before we take our break, let me introduce the band. We were Afreaka, but I’m sad to say Mike Donkor went home to Ghana. Sad for us, happy for him. We have a new name tonight, and a brand new permanent member. We are now Zambethalia because I am from Zambia—Mwizenge Chomba.” He touched his chest lightly, and then gestured to his bandmates. “And from Ethiopia, my friend Dagmawi Molalenge on drums and vocals. And from Australia, Jangarrai, on drums, vocals, flutes, didgeridoo, and general mayhem. We’ll be back with more in a few minutes. Thank you.”

  The band dispersed, and Mae stood to try to see where they’d gone. She needed to pin Jangarrai down. Both Deborah and the man selling CDs in the Plaza made him sound like he was hard to get hold of, and seldom seen. She could easily spot Jangarrai by his silly hat, the straw fedora with a pink-and-green band that he’d worn earlier in the day at the Plaza, and his wild, fair hair. He had to be vain, a man who dyed his hair like that. Performers were probably kind of conceited. He stood at an open coffee kiosk talking with the other men, and he and the short man looked up at her.
Mwizenge clapped Jangarrai on the shoulder. The blond man nodded, smiled, and began to weave through the crowd toward the stairs.

  He bounded up the steps, spilling slops of coffee, stopping to sip it hastily, wiping it off his beard with his sleeve, and then bounding up again. As if he were a child and somewhere up here was Christmas.

  When he reached the second floor, he was stopped by a couple whose gushing manner suggested they were praising the music. Mae wondered if she would get a chance to ask him about Deborah ordering his CDs. The tattooed woman looked impatient to speak to him also, edging toward him, but he looked past her at Mae, flashed the gold-toothed grin at her, said something to the couple he was talking with, and crossed over to Mae.

  “Hi. Um ... uh ... My mate said ... Well, no, I ... Sorry. Let me start over.” He set his coffee on her table. “I’d like to give you a compliment. I looked up and saw your legs and—” He placed a hand to his heart, giving her a shy version of the shining smile. “It made my day. Or night. Or whatever this is. That’s all.” He was her height or an inch taller, about five eleven, but he seemed to be shrinking himself somehow as he looked into her eyes. “Sorry.” A quick grin, and then he looked at his feet, his gaze snagged briefly by her breasts. He was like a kid who’d delivered a Valentine to his first-grade sweetheart, except for that pause at chest level. “You’re nice to look at.”

  He seemed so nervous that the brief ogle didn’t come across rudely like a southern boy’s whoop and whistle. She found herself wanting to help him relax, the last thing she had expected in meeting such a confident performer. “Thank you,” she said. “That was real sweet.”

  “I love your accent.” He looked at her again, suddenly open and interested. “Where’re you from?”

  With his Australian accent charmingly strange to her, she found it funny that he was intrigued by her speech. “North Carolina.” This seemed to please him. He nodded and looked hopeful. She added, “And then Virginia. I know someone there who wants me to put you in touch with her.”

  “Is this ... What?” He picked up his coffee, drank, and held onto it, more guarded now. “Don’t follow you. Sorry. Dense, I guess.”

  “She wants me to talk to you about ordering your music. She could sell a lot of it if she had a way to get hold of you.”

  He stared past Mae, half-smiling, shook his head and looked away, the smile fading. “What does she want me to do?”

  “Sell CDs. Get your web site back up. Whatever. You’ll have to talk to her. I can give you her contact information.”

  He took a deep breath, walked over to the railing and gazed over it, squeezing his paper cup so that the liquid slopped onto his hands. “Bloody hell.” He set it on the floor and looked around as if he had no idea what to do. Mae brought him a napkin from the holder on her table. He wiped his hands off, and stared at them and the napkin. “Sorry. Um. Yeah. I ... I’ll see you after the show, then? I mean—can you stay? Take you out for a drink?” His huge dark eyes searched her face. “If that’s all right.”

  She needed to talk to him for Deborah, and he seemed unnerved by the prospect. Or was it by Mae? “Sure, I can stay. I’ll see you.”

  He grinned, started to leave, and turned back. Making a gesture toward his head as if twisting something, perhaps meant to imply his brain needed winding, he bent down and grabbed his coffee and resumed his exit.

  Mae watched the musician disappear, weaving through the tightly packed tables with animal grace. So this was Jangarrai? Hearing the soothing, mysterious music on his recordings, she’d expected someone serene.

  The tattooed woman trailed him as far as the stairs, called to him to wait, but he seemed oblivious, off in his own head. She went back to her table, spoke to her partner, and both looked at Mae.

  The trio returned to the performance space, and as the Zambian lead singer started to announce a song, Jangarrai held up a hand, and pointed to the basket in front of the performing area.

  He addressed the audience, “Come on now, you stingy bastards,” and laughed hard, sitting back onto the tall stool as if what he’d said was so funny it knocked him down. His laugh was short and loud, a single blasting “hah” interspersed with snorts, funnier than his joke and contagious to much of the audience. “These blokes have families.” He broke into the country song I’m Busted for a few lines, changing his voice and accent to a nasal satire of the style. “And buy some f—ing ,” he barely stifled a full f-word, “CDs while you’re at it.”

  Jangarrai shot the audience a sparkling grin, stood and spun around as if he’d just finished a dance rather than a couple of sentences, and gestured to Mwizenge. The drums began again, Jangarrai blending the western flute into the eclectic mix with a jazz-classical flair.

  The two young women by the railing waved to Mae to join them. They must think she knew Jangarrai, since he’d talked to her instead of them.

  Wishing she’d gotten a drink on the break, Mae walked to their table and took a seat. “Thanks for the invitation.”

  “Thanks for joining us,” the tattooed woman said. “I’m Wendy Huang, and this is my partner, Andrea Jones.”

  “Mae Martin-Ridley.” She had to start dropping the Ridley. “Looked like you were trying to get hold of Jangarrai.”

  “I am. He’s my next project. I’m going to discover him.” Wendy sipped a tall fizzy drink. Mae didn’t like soda, yet the sight of it made her even thirstier. “How well do you know him?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Darn. I could swear he acted like he knew you.”

  “I’m gonna see him after the show. This lady that runs a store where I used to work wants to order his music and no one can find him or get hold of him, at least back East no one can.”

  “Same here so far. We just moved here from Denver, but Andrea’s been trying to buy more of his music, and it’s a dead end. This is the first time I’ve gotten close. It’s like he's invisible, and he’s not exactly someone you’d overlook. It’s weird. Like he’s hiding in plain sight.”

  “If you can hang around after the show, maybe I can get him to hold still for you.”

  Wendy glanced at Andrea, who shook her head and said, “Crack of dawn.”

  Andrea explained that she was a massage therapist at a spa, and she had a client who wanted a sunrise special, a massage and wrap to start the day. She and Wendy had planned to leave after Wendy caught up with Jangarrai on the break. Wendy picked up the thread from there. She had a tedious midlevel management job at a large hotel and wanted to do something more exciting with her marketing and business skills. Her project was to find musicians whose careers seemed to need help. The two women had moved to Santa Fe for Andrea’s job, and Wendy, who had sold her vintage record store in Denver, was looking for a new outlet.

  “I have no musical talent at all and I love music, so I come up with ways to be part of it. I’d be a real hands-on, creative manager. I’d take care of anything he needed, and steering his career. I think he could be big. I could do something for him. Considering his disappearing act, I think he needs me.”

  Mae asked, “Can you discover him if he already has music out?”

  “Yes. He’s only done these New Age things. They’re great, don’t get me wrong. Andrea uses that stuff a lot for massage, but some of the tracks make me think he could do something more. Doesn’t his voice just blow you away? I’d have him do some songs on the other instruments at intervals, but not all that orchestration. Not with that voice at the center of it. I mean, he’s an incredible composer, and he had a good producer on those CDs, but I want to showcase him in a new way. Did you know he’s never toured? Never played outside Santa Fe and Albuquerque?”

  “But he’s with this trio now. They might already have an agent or manager.”

  “Performing free and taking donations? It doesn’t seem that way. Anyway, they’re good, but the industry has plenty of world music groups. Not that I’d say no to them if they wanted my help, but he’s my project.”

  “Wend
y—” Andrea glanced at her watch. “We need to go, if I’m getting eight hours sleep.”

  “She’s an inner-peace junkie,” Wendy grumbled. She finished her soda, took a brocade business card holder from a patchwork velvet purse, and gave a few cards to Mae. “Please. Get him to call me.” She glanced at Andrea. “It’d be worth your sleep if I could pin him down.”

  “You saw him,” Andrea said. “He’s like a ping-pong ball. You won’t pin him down even if you stay. Let Mae do it for you. It’ll help her friend order his music if he works with you, so it’s all covered. And,” she gave Mae a playful smile, “he’d obviously rather talk to you.”

  Ignoring the suggestion that Jangarrai was attracted to her, Mae promised to get Wendy’s card into his hands, and to explain her interest in working with him. It would, as Andrea said, help Deborah get more of his music.

  “Call me. Let me know how it goes,” Wendy said as she and Andrea stood to leave. “Don’t let him slip away. Make him call me tonight if you can.”

  She’d be an aggressive manager. Wendy’s pushiness reminded Mae of Roseanne at Dada Café, only nicer. “I’ll do my best.”

  A set of African songs came to an end as the two women departed, and Mwizenge stood still, letting the applause die down. “I don’t know if he knows I’m going to do this, but,” he smiled at Jangarrai, “I want to turn our new man loose. We haven’t had a chance to hear that voice solo.” Off the mic, he spoke to the other musicians. The conference seemed to come to quick agreement, the two African men stepped back slightly, and Jangarrai came to the center mic.

  “Um ... something new ...” He looked up at Mae, almost smiled, and then took the mic from its stand and closed his eyes. Taking a long pause, he seemed to disappear inside himself, to gather force until the song rose up to whip through him. A hard-driving blues filled every corner of the building with a power Mae felt all the way to her bones.