Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  Pride. He couldn’t see it was more disabling than admitting a need. “You should tell her about it, though. When you meet her, if you get that far, bring someone you trust with you. If you have trouble understanding a contract, that could matter a lot.”

  He tensed, pushing some unseen thing away, as if she had handed him a dense legal document that overwhelmed him. “Fuck. I can’t sign a contract. I’ll need to pay her. And I’ll have to drive on some fucking tour, I’ll have to go all over the fucking place by myself—” He paced away, arms clasped to his body again, massaging his forearms. “Jesus. I can’t do it.”

  “Slow down, sugar, breathe, before you get yourself in a wobbly, whatever you call it.”

  He walked back to her, leaned on the truck bed again, looking down into it. “Wish I could catch one of those cats.”

  “What for?”

  “Hold onto him while I talk. Jesus, I miss William. Y’know? I could hold him.”

  “Listen to me, before you get all scared about this call.” She didn’t want to make this offer, but if it would get the mission accomplished, it was worth it. “If you’ll feel better you can hold onto me, hold my hand while you talk.” It was hard to tell if his lack of response meant she’d insulted him or if his mind was simply in too much of a knot for her words to penetrate. “Let’s call her, sugar. If this works out, you can make a real living. You’ll be able to eat better, and sleep better, and move somewhere where you can have a cat. You might even make enough money to get therapy again. I don’t know. Maybe even get insurance.”

  “But I can’t pay her.”

  This, then, had been the big stumbling block. He sounded close to tears. When she’d guessed he was poor, she had guessed right.

  “Maybe her fees are like—” Mae took a guess, based on sharing percentages of her training fees with gyms, “a percentage, not something you have pay up front. You’d have to make money for her to make money.” If this wasn’t true, Wendy would correct him soon. “Remember, she’s new to this business. She can’t charge too much. And I think you’ll like her.”

  “Might. I like most people.” A shaky inhalation. He looked at her with a hint of The Smile and stood straighter. “You’ll hold my hand?” He reached out, almost laughing at himself. Then the laughter vanished, and his eyes became dark, deep pools that swallowed her. “Jeezus. You’re the most fucking decent human being I’ve ever met. D’you know that?”

  “I’m about average.” Mae looked away and took her phone from her purse. “But thanks for the compliment.”

  “I mean it.” There was passion in his appreciation, a kind of urgency. “If I let people see what a bloody mess I am—it’s like the blond hair, the gold tooth. People don’t see my face, they see the weird stuff. Find out I’m fucked, and no one sees where I’m all right. You act like I’m all right.” He squeezed her hand in both of his. “Like you can see my face.”

  Mae felt embarrassed. She’d asked him about the hair and the tooth, first thing when she met him. She was like everyone else—and she hadn’t for a minute thought of him as being all right.

  But she did see his face. Hopeful, open, anxious, and strangely beautiful.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They sat on the ground on the shady side of the truck bed. Not far away, the dirt swarmed with fat red ants piling up pink pebbles at the mouth of their underground city. Mae dialed Wendy’s number and handed Jamie the phone. “You can do this, sugar. It’s your new life.”

  He moved the phone to his left hand, took Mae’s hand in his right, and listened, lips pressed together, shoulders hunched in. A startled look then came over him, as if he hadn’t really expected Wendy to answer. “Uh, yeah ... G’day. This is Jamie Ellerbee. Jangarrai.” He listened, and seemed to tense all over like an animal braced for flight, still squeezing Mae’s hand. In spite of the parched air, his was as wet as if he’d dipped it in water.

  Mae wondered if he would tell Wendy the truth about his problems, and if it would get in the way of his career. He faced a double bind. It would be a long time before he’d make the money he’d need to get therapy, and he’d have to be stable enough to earn it.

  Before she fully realized she was making this decision, Mae’s free hand reached for the crystals in her purse. She felt the familiar shapes of the stones without looking, without showing what she was doing. Turquoise for protection, Apache tear for healing old grief, tree agate for trauma, and amethyst for clairvoyance. She folded her fingers over them. In a way, it went against her principles as a psychic and healer, to do this. What would be worse? To help him without his asking, or leave him so anxious and unstable he might not even finish this conversation? He needed to be grounded enough to commit to a manager and communicate with her, and to focus on the work that would follow.

  Mae wished she had seen the need for this sooner. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to do the full preparation she normally did as a healer, to raise her own energies and target the healing, but there wasn’t time to do it later. Jamie had to make the connection and decision now, and be ready to move on with it.

  While he talked, Mae closed her eyes and focused on reaching the seed moment of his career troubles, feeling the trembling, bright energy from Jamie meeting the power from the crystals. The healing needed to reach the root. She fell through the tunnel and emerged in a small, cluttered office.

  A robust, fair-skinned woman with erect posture and gray hair swept up in a twist typed at her computer, while a tall heavyset young black man with short dark hair looked on, seated in a chair at the far end of her L-shaped desk. The woman brought up a chart and said, “Look at your grades. This is your fourth year. You’re going to have to do a fifth. It’s not that you’re not capable musically, you’re more gifted than any student I’ve seen in this program in ten years, but you’ve missed classes, and you’ve missed rehearsals. I know it’s been ... medical, but—I don’t know how to put this—I think you need to change your major to music education, not performance.” Medical had clearly been an uncomfortable euphemism. “Just focus on your studies, not the stage. I don’t think it’s wise for you to,” she turned to face him, “to take the risks of a performing career. You need security, predictability. Health insurance.”

  “But ... I’d get work. Fuck. I can sing. I got into the Santa Fe Opera apprentice program when I was only eighteen.” Mae hardly recognized this boy as Jamie. He’d dyed his hair to look normal. He was seriously overweight and out of shape. Only the eyes, the voice and accent, and the f-word, told her this was him.

  “But you didn’t perform, did you?”

  He wriggled his shoulders, clasped his hands, elbows on his thighs, and looked down. “My parents were away. My sister had left for Australia. It was ... it was different. I was a kid.” He raised his face again, eyes huge and desperate. “Fuck, I hate fucking schools. I don’t want to teach.”

  “It’s music, though. Think about it, Jamie. What else would you do? If you needed to work?”

  “Nothing. I mean—no. Yeah. It’s all I can do. Music. That’s it.”

  “I want you to talk to Dr. Lawson and to academic advising about switching to education. You’ll need certain courses to be able to teach. We have to be realistic. You have the talent, Jamie, but I don’t think you have the toughness it would take to compete and survive. A performing career is not for everyone. I did it, but I find teaching just as rewarding.”

  “Yeah, because you succeeded first. You didn’t get shuffled off into the bloody failure wagon before you’d even started.” He stood and strode out of the office, hands in his pockets. His advisor rose and called after him from her office door, but he kept going.

  Was this his deep wound, then? Had this professor’s advice destroyed his confidence? Unsure if she’d reached the seed moment, Mae hesitated to send the healing yet. The tunnel moved her vision through to another setting, a darkened bedroom. Rock music, loud voices, laughter, and an occasional thud suggested a party in other rooms. In the
bedroom, two figures moved under a sheet.

  A young woman’s exasperated voice whined, “Not like that, come on, what is the matter with you? Haven’t you ever done this before?”

  “No. Sorry.” The breathless partner under the sheets was Jamie. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You idiot.” She sounded raucously drunk. “I want you to ram your dick in me and fuck me.”

  The sheets changed shape in the dark, as he knelt over her. Silence. “Bloody hell. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Give me a minute.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m sick of waiting.” A brown-skinned young woman with long, disheveled hair swung her legs out of the bed and sat up. She still wore a black lace bra, and a pair of tiny black panties clung to one ankle. After yanking the panties over her other foot, she lost her balance when she stood to pull them all the way up, and sat back on the bed. “I must be drunk. I can’t believe I got into bed with the fat guy. And then he’s a virgin. A virgin! Can’t even get the—”

  “Don’t yell it, please. I’m ... I never drank before. Not supposed to. These meds I’m on, and—it’s that, it’s not you, it’s not your body, you’re sexy, you’re beautiful. I want you, it’s just—”

  “You’re damned right it’s not me.” Standing unsteadily, she grabbed a dress off the chair near the bed and pulled it over her head. “It’s you. You’re hopeless.”

  “Oh, fuck.” He got out the other side of the bed, staggered, and pulled on a pair of jeans, while she fished under the bed for her shoes and struggled to fit her toes into them, as if she couldn’t aim her feet properly. “It’s over,” he groaned. “Fucking over. Every bloody fucking thing is over.”

  Stumbling past the girl, Jamie crossed through a living room full of loud, dancing people, some in couples, others standing on the sofa clapping and singing along with the music on the stereo. A young man with spiky reddish hair, bouncing among the couch-dancers, called, “Ellerbee must have done it! Coming out of his cave!”

  Jamie ignored the cheery shout, his urgent, unsteady steps taking him into the kitchen. Dishes lay in the sink, and he reached into the heap as if he knew what he would find, coming up with a short, sharp knife. Closing his eyes, he grasped the handle with both hands, and thrust hard into his own belly, falling to his knees with a groan. Blood flooded over his hands and onto the floor as he stabbed again, and again.

  The spiky-haired boy ran into the kitchen, grabbing Jamie’s arms from behind and hauling them up over his head. “Somebody call 911. He’s lost it.” The boy was smaller than Jamie, but seemed stronger, and slightly less intoxicated. He managed to force Jamie’s arms apart so he lost his two handed grip on the knife. From there, the red-haired boy knocked Jamie face down and sat on him, while Jamie still clutched the knife in one hand, stabbing at the floor over his head. “You stupid ass.” The friend’s tone was tender as well as angry. “I can’t believe you did that. God, you’re crazy.” He rested a hand on the back of Jamie’s head, where the hair was light at the roots over the scar on his neck. “You are one fucked-up dude.”

  Jamie stopped struggling as other people crowded into the kitchen doorway, one of them talking on a phone. The vision went dark.

  He must have gotten drunk after his professor had crushed his hopes, and tried to prove himself at something by bedding this girl—only to fail there as well. Mae felt profoundly uncomfortable that her vision had shown her this, but maybe it was the bottom of the hole where the healing needed to reach. Fear of rejection.

  She took a deep breath, opened the energy channels in her heart and hands, and visualized a soft light, something pale blue and delicate, moving from her hand into Jamie. She knew she couldn’t fully heal him, could only take the edge off his pain and traumas, but it was better than nothing. To her surprise, he drew his hand away, and turned from his talk with Wendy to say softly, “No love, you mustn’t do that.”

  “You could feel that?”

  “I’m a sensitive man.” He took her hand again, brought it to his lips for a kiss, and gave her an unexpectedly radiant smile. “I’m your friend, not your patient.” He placed his arm over her shoulders, resuming his talk with Wendy, laughing, happy, excited. Then, giving Mae a quick side-hug, he stood up and began to sing over the phone, belting out a song Mae had never heard before.

  “I feel so good, I feel so good.” The word feel stretched out, rose and fell, as the melody rolled through his extraordinary range. “I feel so good that I—-—can’t stand it.”

  Handing Mae the phone, he drummed a rhythm on the truck bed, sang another verse, and took the phone back, laughing. She wished Wendy could see this performance. Mae had never seen Jamie so exalted, and wondered if she had touched a note of healing before he stopped her. Or if all it took was courage and hope.

  In his subsequent call to Mwizenge, Jamie was almost unable to get the words out, startling and scattering the cats as he executed half turns and occasional low jumps, as if he literally couldn’t keep his feet on the ground.

  When he hung up and handed Mae her phone he said, “Jeezus, I’m going to do this! I’m going to make it! I’m— Fuck, I can’t—I’m—” His inarticulate ecstasy exploded in a hug that lifted Mae an inch off the ground, and he sang his feel-good song on the way back to the office. If they hadn’t been so close in height and weight, she suspected he might have swung her up to the sky.

  With Jamie in that ebullient mood, she found it easy to drop him at Mwizenge’s house in a neighborhood between and Rodeo and Cerrillos, behind the malls and hotels. Mwizenge had a home-based graphic design business and had agreed to take some time out to help. He didn’t have a professional recording studio, but he had enough technical expertise to get a song onto a computer file and sent, which was more than Jamie had.

  As he got out of Mae’s car at the adobe ranch house, Jamie said, “See you at the Plaza at six. I’ll bring a picnic. Wear your dancing shoes,” and jogged up the walk before she could say No, I need time off from you.

  She’d been too deep into Jamie’s life and feelings. She was glad he was happy, but even then, he was somehow disruptive to be around. At the house on Delgado, she went into the garden to put out her crystals for cleansing in the sun, and then decided to use them on herself, the way she did after working with healing or psychic clients. Something inside her felt off balance.

  Closing her eyes, Mae used her grandmother’s unpolished ruby, a piece of the North Carolina mountains, for balancing and restoring herself, brushing the air around her with it. Her mind went quiet and she stood still, feeling the steadiness of the ruby’s vibration, the earth’s pull, the strong New Mexico sun, and something from the statue, like the spirit of both the art and the rock it was made from. The disturbance she’d been carrying faded. It didn’t leave, but it diminished enough that she felt more like herself.

  Relieved, Mae laid the ruby with all the crystals she had used since the night before on the bench to be cleansed by the sun. Between her vision of the hawk ghost and this immersion in Jamie, it would take more than this to fully relieve her. At least she had the afternoon alone. Time out from everything.

  After visiting the museum in the Palace of the Governors, Mae strolled along the arcade outside, admiring the pottery and jewelry of the Indian vendors, and then stopped to sit on the wall around the monument in the center of the Plaza to rest her sore legs before walking home. The tourist activities had helped clear her mind, though they hadn’t helped her legs much. She had perspective now, a realization that all this stuff with Jamie, while intense, would be over soon.

  She’d done what she needed to as far he was concerned. He’d talked with a manager, taken that step toward recording again. Deborah would be able to order his music. That was the mission, and it was accomplished. Hard to believe it had taken so long or been so difficult. It amazed and puzzled her, when Jamie wasn’t around, how she kept getting swept up into more plans with him. She was done with him. And yet she wasn’t. She was dancing with him tonight, something she w
ouldn’t have agreed to if he’d held still long enough for her to say no, or he’d had a working phone. She couldn’t very well have hollered her refusal, could she? And she was going to Ruth’s opening with him, which she also should have refused. How does he talk me into all this?

  With a moment’s thought, she halfway understood how she’d ended up with the plan to see Ruth. It had been the shock of finding out Jamie knew Muffie and where to find her. This reminded her of the other business she hadn’t quite finished, with Roseanne and that awful web site, and Kenny and Frank. She’d gotten too wrapped up in Jamie’s business, let him take over so much of her time and energy that she still hadn’t talked to Kenny since leaving the message that she would see Muffie.

  Putting her feet up on the wall and massaging her calf muscles, she called him. He should be between shifts about now.

  While she waited for Kenny to answer, she remembered the woman in purple she’d seen here her first day, dancing around alone, and Jamie, flashing through like a shooting star. Mae hadn’t danced, though she’d wanted to. There isn’t a law against being crazy. The woman had meant her own kind of crazy, free-spirited and eccentric, not dysfunctional crazy. Jamie seemed to be a little—or a lot—of both.

  Kenny’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “Namaste.”

  “Um— Hey, Kenny, this is Mae. What did you just say?”

  “Namaste. It’s Sanskrit, hello or goodbye. It means like, my spirit honors your spirit. How are you?”

  “I’m good. I like Santa Fe.”

  “Cool. I knew you would. Your message was weird.”

  “Sorry. I guess I should have explained how I’m gonna see Muffie, if she said she was ascending. A friend here says he’s sure she’ll be at this artist’s gallery opening tomorrow. That she never misses this woman’s shows. I got the feeling she might even be involved in the catering or something, if I remember what he said. Maybe not. But anyway, he’s taking me to meet her.”