Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  Although her legs still felt the effects of the barefoot shoes the next morning, a short run-walk along the trail exploring the river in the opposite direction from the day before appealed to Mae. She’d had almost no tourist time. Maybe she could fit in the museums this afternoon, after the workout and the car appointment. Jamie had threatened—no, offered—to be her guide to go to galleries before Ruth’s opening. Not that she needed a guide. Maybe she could put him off on that.

  The section of trail she took led along the river through a park with tables where people played backgammon or checkers, and then to a bigger, hilly park where the river plunged into a deep ravine thick with trees—and litter. Mae left the trail and ran on the grass. Sadly, the treed area looked like another homeless camp.

  After she passed a skateboard park, she found herself faced with too much traffic and pavement to keep running. Her short workout came to an end near a set of impressive, institutional-looking buildings and a four-way intersection. Out of curiosity, she crossed the street and found herself at a church with a statue of the Lady of Guadalupe. Hoping it wasn’t irreverent, Mae took time to stretch while admiring the statue, its golden corona, full-body halo and blue cape full of stars. She didn’t believe in any religion, but the feel of the place was spiritual. The adobe building’s subtle curves, the Lady’s kind face and radiant colors, and the scent of roses in a nearby garden made her wonder if what she felt here was like what Dusty had felt in her garden. A healing presence, a kind of maternal divinity.

  Since her calf muscles objected to more barefoot running, Mae walked back toward the park. Hearing faint traces of music, she detoured toward it, crossing the street and following the sound two blocks in to the Plaza. It was not time for a concert, but a small crowd of about eight or ten had gathered. Around Jamie.

  He was on the green, not the stage, and had a drum and several flutes. As he ended a lively song accompanied by drum that had his listeners swaying and clapping, he took off his straw fedora. In one graceful swoop he set it down as part of a bow, and picked up the bamboo flute. A few people dropped money into his hat. Smooth, how he’d made it look like he was getting a new instrument, with a kind of choreographed plan so he didn’t openly ask for the money. He began a sweet, haunting tune that contrasted with the pounding excitement of the one before. Most of his audience was now sitting down on benches or the grass. One couple leaned into a close embrace and started to kiss.

  Mae watched from a distance. How much did he make doing this? Did the city encourage it, or was he doing something he might get arrested for? After the flute song, he picked up the drum again, slinging its strap over his shoulder, and asked people to sing, teaching the audience parts to an old song, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. With the low “weem-awuh” parts, the high, almost howling parts, and the main melody sung by members of the little crowd, Jamie switched around among all the parts while playing the drum.

  Was he just having fun, or was this how he made his living? What a fall-off from aspiring to a career in opera, from his extraordinary albums, or even from being a teacher, much as he’d disliked that job. He might be embarrassed if he knew Mae had seen him.

  She resumed her run in spite of the altitude and the objections of her soleus muscles. Jamie’s voice followed her. Even in a silly song like this, he sang with a power and purity and passion that seemed to vibrate right through her body to her soul. At times he seemed like he could hardly function enough to handle the basics of survival, but the man could sing. Far too well to be collecting dollars in his hat.

  Mae cooled down to a walk as she reached Delgado Street, and went to the garden to stretch and collect her crystals. Inexplicably, her heart felt full, and as sore as her legs. She lingered through another long, slow stretch, bewildered by her feelings, and then went inside to put the crystals away. What was happening to her? It had to be the altitude, too much strangeness, and too little time alone. And now it was time for more of Jamie.

  She would have to tell him how Dusty had died. But could he handle it? She’d need to be careful. Her number-one goal was still to get Jamie to talk to Wendy, the first step toward getting his life together. Off Mae’s hands and into better ones.

  Jamie arrived at the front door almost on time. Mae heard his knock, but no gasping of the van’s sickly engine. He hadn’t brought it. Carrying his drum and a backpack, he flashed his best smile when she opened the door, and stepped in with a hesitation that Mae sensed as a conscious effort to stop himself from hugging her.

  “G’day, love. Ready for the next adventure? Mind if I leave the drum here?”

  He seemed so lively, she hated to break the bubble by telling him about Dusty’s leap from the bridge. She’d have to find the right moment. “Where’s the van?”

  “Can’t part with it while the bike’s being fixed. Need some sort of wheels.”

  “But you didn’t use it.”

  “Don’t need two cars for this trip. Save the planet, right?”

  He walked to center of the room, sat on the floor at the coffee table, unpacked his flutes from his backpack, and laid them out on the table, along with a laminated City of Santa Fe business license. At least he was legal. Why was he unpacking it all here?

  “What are you doing, sugar?”

  “Don’t want to take all this into the locker room. Too valuable. Got the shakuhachi in Japan when I was little. Hardly knew what I was doing, but I loved it. Wherever we went I picked up a little something. Started the Native flute when we moved here.” He caressed a wooden flute, and stood. “Got into drums in India.” Closing his eyes, he hummed an Eastern-sounding tune and played air drum. “Didg in Australia, of course. Family heirloom, that. Sorry. I get drifty. Shall we? Fill your water bottle. Don’t leave home without it. Ever.” Jamie hoisted a huge steel bottle from his pack, making his point, and then put it back in. “You’ll dry up like dead dingo’s donger.”

  Mae sensed a high level of evasion in his chattiness and good cheer. What was he crowding out? Dusty’s death? His reason for not bringing the van? Both?

  Approaching the car, she noticed he had a subtle hint of a limp, limiting the range of motion in his left hip joint. He’d walked too much on pavement, which meant he wasn’t using the van while the bike was in the shop. Why had he lied? “You got a hitch in your git-up.”

  “Swim’ll fix it.” He put on The Smile again. “No worries. Did you have a good run this morning?”

  “I didn’t think you saw me.”

  “You can’t disappear in a crowd, love, any more than I can.”

  She unlocked the car, they got in, and she backed out of the parking spot. “You sing in the Plaza a lot? Is that most of your work?”

  “Mm. Yeah—nah—maybe. Stuff coming up with Zambethalia. I’m not a beggar, y’know. I have a business license.”

  “I saw that.” He must have displayed it to her on purpose. “Give me directions. This city confuses me.”

  He recited a series of simple directions, leaned the seat back and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when we get to Rodeo.”

  Sleeping again as soon as he was in the car. Avoidance or exhaustion? Mae sighed. She couldn’t tell him about her vision of Dusty if he was asleep, but it gave her a kind of time-out from him. When Brook and Stream were little, they slept in the car easily. Maybe Jamie felt safe, like being a child again, in this contained place with someone beside him.

  The drive through an adobe version of every city’s strip, slowed down by construction and lights, took her past the shelter Jamie had recommended to Dusty. With its pair of green dinosaurs on the roof, the building was unmistakable, though there was no sign other than a thankful farewell from the former pet store.

  It was a long way from downtown. When Jamie had brought Dusty the bus pass, he had to have planned ahead. Or did Jamie live out this way, and give away his own bus pass? No, he seemed to live closer to downtown, since she’d seen him hanging out on the river trail. Did he take this trip for his swim in that unreliable va
n every day? She hoped he took the bus instead. Depending where he lived, riding his bike to the fitness center could be enough of a workout in itself. He’d hardly need the swim. Eating one meal a day and getting that much exercise, he’d be running on empty. He must have lost as much as forty pounds since the winter, as well as part of his mind.

  He was not only not eating, but getting how little sleep, to nap so abruptly as soon as the car was moving?

  Jamie seemed to drop into a dream, making small, distressed sounds. Should she wake him up? Was he dreaming about finding Dusty? Reliving earlier traumas? All of it? But at least he was sleeping, which he needed badly.

  When she made the left onto Rodeo at the big four-way intersection, Jamie woke with a start before she could say anything.

  “Fuck.” He adjusted the seat upright. “I made noises, didn’t I?”

  “Little ones.”

  “Sorry. Lisa used to say I whimpered.”

  “That’s what I’d call it, yeah.”

  “Drove her up a wall. Can’t help it, though—I’m asleep, y’know? I don’t do it on purpose. Dunno why I do it.” Staring out the window, he sank into himself. “What are my chances, really?”

  “For what?”

  “Sorry. Inner question.”

  “You have nightmares?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes, dragged his hands through his hair. “Jeezus. Fucking crap in my head. It never ends.”

  “Would it help to know what happened to Dusty?”

  Jamie looked at her, tension around his eyes. “Is it bad? Did somebody kill him?”

  “No. Had you thought that?”

  “Maybe. Police did. No one was ever arrested or anything, but—Jeezus. His head was fucking smashed—that wasn’t from just slipping on the ice.” Squirming, Jamie turned to the window again. “Thought that was why he was haunting me.”

  “No. He jumped. He thought he had those hawk powers. He was—like he was excited, like it was a superpower sort of jump. Ruth caught him trespassing. He had some obsession with our Indian statue. She was really mad and he jumped the wall, if you can believe that—”

  “Yeah, I can. Come on. Don’t drag me through all this. How’d he die?”

  “When he got to the bridge, he thought he could fly. I think he wanted you to know that.” Mae’s tension released. There. I said it. He can have some peace. “No one pushed him.”

  Nodding his head slowly, Jamie closed his eyes. “And no one saved him.”

  Maybe it had been too late and Dusty’s injury too severe, left untreated all night. Maybe not. The rescue squad had to have arrived within minutes of Jamie’s call. Santa Fe was a small city, and there was not much traffic at the crack of dawn, but those minutes without oxygen could have been the difference between life and death. How long did it take? Four minutes? Ten minutes? Jamie had panicked those minutes away.

  “You tried.” She knew he had fallen apart, but what could she say? She couldn’t tell him that she’d seen this. “You did your best.”

  “Not really.”

  Eyes open and staring now, he turned his head away just enough to avoid her, but she could still see his face. The ghost might be gone, but Jamie remained haunted.

  The workout felt good, the best exercise she’d had since being in Santa Fe. The sound of weights clanging into racks and the occasional grunts of other exercisers made her feel both at home and homesick for the steadiness and sense of competence she got from her work. After she showered and dressed, Mae went to the lobby. No Jamie. She looked at the clock. This was when they’d agreed to meet. She found the pool and entered the deck area, to see if Jamie was still swimming. He’d been distressed. Maybe he needed an extra-long swim to feel better.

  His hair tied back in a little round wad of ponytail revealing the scar on his neck, Jamie slashed through the water, making smooth rolling turns at the end of each lap. As he flipped over to do a backstroke, Mae noticed another scar, this one on his left shoulder, all the way down to his elbow. That explained the long sleeves. It must have been an agonizing fall, tearing skin, not just breaking bones. She could see the scar on his right shin, too, but his trunks covered whatever had been done to his upper thigh and hip.

  Then she noticed more scars. Three short, thick scars on his belly. What in the world had happened there? She watched him through another few laps of backstroke. No one would fall on their belly from a rock, people curled up instinctively, didn’t they? And it seemed that gravity would make a heavy bone mass, like a hip or shoulder or head, strike first. A man might try to land on his feet and break his lower leg—Jamie had done that once. These scars on Jamie’s belly didn’t look like the thin, clean lines of surgical scars or the jagged tearing of rocks and branches and gravel. More like a knife—no.

  No one could do that. He must have gotten into a fight, made someone that angry with him. He had a hot temper, he threw things, and snapped quickly. It would be traumatic to be attacked like that, even if he had provoked it. No—Lisa had wanted to keep him away from knives. He said he’d hurt himself once, and there were no marks on his arms like a typical cutter, or on his wrists like a suicide attempt. But stab wounds? How could anyone turn on himself that way? The thought made her shudder, worse than the idea of a fight.

  She walked to the end of his lane and knelt to meet him when he arrived. He stopped, coiled, feet and hands on the wall, hiding the scars with his thighs tucked up against his belly. “Bloody hell, you scared me. Am I running late? What are you doing in here? I said the lobby.”

  “Too late.” She glanced down toward the hidden scars. “You’ve had a long swim. Let’s go make some phone calls.”

  Mae returned to the lobby. Jamie kept her waiting, taking more time than a man should in the shower, so that she began to wonder if he’d had a panic attack and passed out. It seemed that facing anything stressful, including dealing with his career, could trigger panic. If he’d wanted to hide his body from her, her seeing him in the pool could have upset him. She was on the verge of asking a man from the front desk to go check on Jamie when he finally appeared, his hair fluffing out from under his hat. He wore clean clothes, a bright pink shirt of thin, crinkly cotton that matched the pink stripe in his hatband, and old, soft black jeans.

  “Sorry. Had to shave, beard trim, all that,” he said, surprisingly cheerful. “Did you have a good workout?”

  “I did.”

  As they walked out to her car, he avoided her eyes, but seemed full of a secret bubbliness, and said remarkably little once they got in, other than to give her directions to the Ford dealership down Cerrillos Road. Facing the window, he sang to himself, dancing a little in his seat.

  Once her Focus was in for its oil change, Mae put on her visor hat and sunglasses, and suggested a walk. Jamie might be more relaxed outdoors, and they couldn’t make a phone call with the TV running in the waiting room.

  “Can’t walk much. My hip’s bad. There’s a good place to go sit outside though,” he said. “I’ll show you. Out at the back of the lot.”

  He led her past the new cars, the used cars, and the offices to a chain-link fence around a small lot with some older vehicles in it, perhaps employees’ cars and trucks, and through that to an unpaved lot bordering on a patch of pink dirt desert speckled with cacti and scrub juniper. In this final lot sat a tire-less truck bed detached from its cab, and five or six camper shells, some propped up on bricks or cinderblocks, others tipped against each other, making a kind of tent. As Mae and Jamie approached, cats scattered.

  “Hold still,” he said. “They’ll come back.”

  Mae did as he asked. On an old wooden pallet under a tent-like pair of leaning shells someone had put water and food dishes. The longer she looked, the more dishes Mae discovered as well as blankets and cushions in each little house-like contraption. It was a cat village.

  One by one, cats of all ages, sizes, and colors crept back. Cautious at first, they came in slow motion, freezing in mid-step to gaze at the intruders. S
ome sat and stared, while others went into the shelters. Gradually, they resumed their lives, older cats eating, sleeping, and bathing, kittens wrestling.

  Mae sensed a strange tenderness in the way Jamie felt about the odd scene. “You like this,” she said.

  “I do. It’s sweet.” He leaned on the detached truck bed. “Safe place for the little wild ones. Food and shelter. I like how they made it with the camper shells, like they’re all just camping.” He let out a sigh. “That gray one looks like William. My late cat.”

  She suspected the feral colony brought up thoughts of the homeless Dusty as well, and Jamie’s attempts to get him food and shelter. To make the wild one safe. “Don’t go getting all sad on me, sugar. We have a deal. You’re gonna call Wendy, and you’re gonna call Mwizenge about recording so she can hear your solo act.”

  “But—” He stood straighter, gripping the metal rim with both hands. “You’ve told her about me, haven’t you?” His voice grew tight and his speech sped up. “She won’t want to work with me—I’m fucked. I can’t—”

  “I didn’t tell her your diagnoses or anything. Worst I said was that you’re high maintenance, and she didn’t care.” In retrospect, that description seemed like an understatement. “I think you should tell her everything, though, when you get started working with her.” Mae paused. This next step needed to be handled carefully. “Tell her your whole story. Even what you haven’t told me.”

  “Jeezus.” He sighed. “More diagnoses.”

  This wasn’t what she’d expected. “You have more?”

  “Maybe. ADHD, LD, I think. Not bad, though. I mean, someone said so, some school in one place we lived. I’m not sure. We moved too much, different teachers.”

  Hard to believe he didn’t know for sure. She had already figured this out just observing him. “But you were here all through high school. You’d know.”

  “Yeah, fuck. All right, I know. But I don’t—I don’t believe in it, y’know? I can handle it, it’s not like I need special treatment or anything. I don’t like being learning disabled.”