Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  “Were they looking for him?” Jamie snapped awake, and Mae regretted bringing up the topic. She should have waited and let him take a nap. Would she ever get the hang of choreographing the emotional steps of communicating with Jamie? “They didn’t tell me that.”

  “Ruth called them when he got into the garden. At least she told him she had, and I saw someone driving up Alameda, but I couldn’t tell if it was a police car. I don’t think they could see him. Then the car turned like it was coming here. But my vision was with him, not Ruth.”

  “Maybe she changed her mind, since he ran off.”

  “She was angry, though. I saw her three times, and it was like she hated him, or at least like he really bothered her. I can’t believe she’d drop it. Was there anything about him in the papers? There had to be.”

  Jamie sat up, stroked Pie. “Yeah. Something. Not much.” He stood and went into the kitchen. “I need coffee. You want some?”

  “You need sleep.”

  “Coffee. We have more galleries to see. Canyon Road.”

  “My legs need a break, and so does your hip. Let’s wait an hour or so. I want to look this up, see if there’s anything in the papers. When did it happen?”

  Silence, then the coffee grinder. Was she pushing too hard? He’d already shared the worst of it, though, talking about seeing death.

  A death that might have been prevented if the police had gone that one block from this house to the bridge.

  Mae got up, followed Jamie to the kitchen, and unfolded her laptop on the table. She repeated her question. Jamie poured water into the coffeemaker. “Jesus. I didn’t write it on my fucking calendar, did I? Find dead boy.”

  “Sorry. But—it was winter. When?”

  “January. I know that much.” Jamie got mugs from a cabinet. “Getting my own place when I should have been on my fucking honeymoon.”

  “That must have been hard.” Mae brought up the web page for The New Mexican. A whole month would still be too much to sort through. “Can you give me a week, maybe?”

  “Yeah. Got off crutches around Christmas, so Lisa was finally free to get rid of me. You get your hip pinned, you spend a week in the hospital and then six to eight more on crutches. Had to stretch out the breakup an extra two months until I could walk.” Jamie opened the cake box, cut a large piece of cake and offered it to Mae. She shook her head, and Jamie bit into the gooey chocolate and talked through it, crumbs falling on the floor. “I started looking to help him out as soon as I could ride my bike. Sorry.” He swallowed. “Fuck, I could still hardly walk when I moved. Skipped PT—insurance, y’know?”

  He seemed determined to talk about his injury instead of Dusty. Mae tried to make use of his detour. “That trail isn’t much good for bicycling—it’s so narrow and overgrown and short.”

  “I know. I was looking for him.”

  “Why?”

  Jamie shrugged, ate cake. “Dunno. I liked him.” He licked his fingers. “The way he stole Lisa’s dinner. Impressed me.” A half-smile, a single shoulder lifting. “There I was, all heavy, gloomy sort of crazy, and there he was, crazy like a rocket, y’know?”

  Leave it to Jamie to think other people could be crazy better than he could. “You were depressed.”

  “Didn’t tell you that.”

  “Sorry. Were you?”

  “Maybe. Yeah. But gray depression.” He rubbed crumbs out of his beard. “Not the black hole, y’know? Just medium to foggy.”

  “Dusty might have been schizophrenic or manic or something. How long did you know him?”

  “Couple of weeks. Must have been ... second week of January, when he died.”

  Mae clicked on the police reports, but found they only went back two weeks on the web site. She tried the archives, but she would have to pay for anything as far back as January. It would have to be a feature article, and she would need more information to search for it, even if she wanted to pay.

  “Clean up your crumbs, sugar. Get a plate.” Unoffended, Jamie obeyed. “Do you remember what it said in the paper? I can’t get anything.”

  The coffeemaker made comforting gurgling noises. Jamie, standing with his back to it, now eating off a small plate, leaned on the counter. “They thought someone had killed him. Healthy young bloke, no drugs, no alcohol, wouldn’t fall off a bridge like that. And you don’t jump into two inches of ice to drown yourself.”

  “Did the police keep looking?”

  “Dunno. Never found anyone if they did. Fuck—of course. Because he jumped.”

  “Did they find out anything about him?”

  “Yeah.” Jamie poured coffee, his hands covered with frosting, and stopped to wipe the mess off the carafe handle. “Paper said he was Dustyn Dwayne Gobble. Jesus, can you picture living with a name like that? From some little place in West Virginia. Ran away in the middle of December after his parents asked him to go into a mental hospital. He’d got these obsessions with Indian lore and begun to identify himself as Apache, said they weren’t really his parents. Family had no Indian ancestry.” He carried their coffee mugs to the table and went back for his cake. “That’s really all they said. Nothing about Ruth or trespassing. More about what someone here or there said about him back home, what sports he’d done in high school, or some evidence of his being strange ...”

  Dusty’s parents wanted him to go into a mental hospital. Jamie had given a kind of doubting respect to the boy’s delusions, and had sympathy for his fear of going to an institution. She looked up at Jamie, and he immediately turned to the counter and cut another piece of cake. Hiding from her.

  “What happened to you after that? Were you—” She thought of how Marty had put it, that Jamie had been shaken up pretty bad. “Did you have some kind of breakdown?”

  “I didn’t go into a hospital, if that’s what you mean.” He came back to the table and slurped his coffee. “Fuck. Sorry. Bloody annoying.” Then through a mouthful of cake, “Don’t let me do that.” He swallowed. “Or that.”

  She let the manners pass without comment. He wasn’t panicking, which was amazing, given what they were talking about. Maybe eating cake helped. Maybe eating at all, like having breakfast, made him more stable. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  The one-two shrug dance. “Couldn’t afford therapy or anything, but I did all the things that worked, y’know, exercised, ate healthy, slept with my cat, did a lot of music. Called my parents a lot. I pulled out of it, mostly—having panic attacks still but otherwise, y’know, not bad—”

  “What about the visions, sugar? Are you sure you really got better?”

  “Fuck. I even looked good. Got back down to perfect one seventy-five, the magic number.” He drank his coffee without noises, sniffed it, and sighed. “Jeezus, that’s nice. They should give you this in the hospital instead of that weak, fucking crap they have. Instead of drugs. This’d cure what ails you.”

  Evasion. He’d coped with the topic well, but hadn’t touched her last questions. “You’re a lot less than perfect-one-seventy-five now.” From what she’d seen of his history and how he ate, he wasn’t one of nature’s thin people, and he’d just implied that he’d worked hard to get down to that ideal weight. “You want to explain that?”

  “Nah, I’m healthy. No worries. Just busy. Drink your coffee. We have art to enjoy.”

  As they walked toward Canyon Road, their route was the one Dusty had taken in his final run. Still working on the puzzle of Ruth’s trespass complaint, Mae stopped as they were about to cross Alameda and looked back at her house. “Last night, when you were massaging my legs in the street, I could see and hear that guy on the bike all the way to the bridge. You’d think Ruth could see or hear Dusty. I don’t get it.”

  “Can you let go of that, love? I’m on my lovely last day with you. Look at the sky, look at me, come on, not at this death crap.”

  She looked at the sky, brilliant blue with tall, fat clouds gathering, and into Jamie’s deep black eyes, and hesitated. “But if Ruth tried t
o get him arrested, he shouldn’t have died. I have to figure this out.”

  Jamie sighed, pulled his hat lower on his head. “Jeeezus. All right, then. Look, can you see the garden wall from here?”

  “No.”

  “So she couldn’t see him from there. End of story.”

  “No, it’s not. What would you do if you’d called the cops? And the person you wanted arrested had run away?”

  “I’d try to see—fuck, you’re right. She’d hear him run up the alley, make a mad dash though the house to see where he went—”

  “And tell the police she saw him jump.”

  Jamie glanced to the bridge. “He was a fast runner, love. Lightning. She might not have seen.”

  “He’d hurt his ankle. He was still fast, but he had to be slower than usual.”

  “You want to know? Let’s get this over with, then. Go back and do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Act it out. I start from where he went over the wall, and you run through the house as fast as you think she would, maybe she has to grab her phone again, trip on the dog, I dunno, but give or take a few seconds, say, make it the long version of—”

  “It’s a good idea, but you can’t run.”

  “It hurts, but I can. I’d run like a bloke with one limb fucked up—perfect. I’m in shape, just damaged.”

  “If we’re gonna do that, I should run.”

  He shook his head. “Both your legs hurt. You’ll cramp up again.”

  He was right. If she ran now she risked her calves knotting up again. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s more death stuff.”

  “You’re going to hang onto it like a fucking dog if we don’t, and I want it out of your head so we can have a good day.”

  “You’ll hurt yourself, and you’ll feel sick after all that cake.”

  “I already have, and I already do. And I’m about to hurt myself more walking all day. Anyway, running one block isn’t going to break my hip. Or if it does I can get a refund and I won’t owe all that money.”

  He turned back toward the house. Mae sensed there was something wrong with the plan. The sound of a car behind her—of course. Traffic. Dusty had run in the middle of the empty night. She could use the stopwatch on her phone to time how long Jamie paused if he had to and still know if the time it took to rush through the house explained Ruth missing or seeing Dusty. It wasn’t perfectly accurate, but close enough, and it would, as Jamie had said, get it out of her head.

  She unlocked the house so she could go through from the back to the front. In the garden she showed Jamie where to start. He walked around through the carport and down the alley to the place where Dusty had landed, and Mae took the spot where she had last seen Ruth in her vision of that night. Setting her phone to its stopwatch function, Mae said, “Ready, don’t hurt yourself, set, go.”

  As Jamie took off, she hurried into the house, imagined and mimed having to hastily close an excited dog into the bedroom, and rushed out the front door in time to see Jamie plunge into traffic. Her heart jumped. Not stopping to look, he forced cars to slow down for him, brakes squealing. He sprinted onto the bridge, and then sat on the railing and waved to Mae.

  She felt herself breathe, and realized how long she had suspended that function. A shaken anger rose inside her as her fear faded. After hastily locking the house again, she walked the block of Delgado, stopped to let a car pass, and then crossed Alameda and planted herself in front of him. “I can’t believe you ran in front of cars.”

  “Twenty-five zone.” He put on a little smile. “No worries.”

  “You could have killed yourself.”

  Jamie let out a roar-and-snort of laughter.

  “Sugar, that isn’t funny.”

  “It bloody well is. Jesus. You could have killed yourself.” Still laughing, he stood and hugged her, holding on until he settled down and caught his breath. As he let go, he turned to look over the railing, intense and serious now. “Could she have seen him?”

  “Did you to stop at all before you played chicken with the cars?”

  “Nah, took off like he would.”

  “Then she would have seen him, if she came out front.”

  “Means she let him die.” Jamie removed his hat and leaned his elbows on the railing. “On purpose.”

  He dropped the hat and watched it fall.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mae checked the time. Only twelve minutes had passed since she’d started timing their reenactment of Dusty’s and Ruth’s movements. If the car coming up Alameda in her vision of that night had been the police, it might not have taken that long to reach Ruth. Maybe five minutes, and then a minute to get to Dusty.

  Ruth had to have known where he’d gone. While Mae was outdoors, she had heard the normally soundless Jamie running, landing harder on one foot to spare the painful joint, like Dusty would have run. Jamie’s steps had faded into the sounds of traffic, but at night there would have been nothing to drown out Dusty. The only way Ruth wouldn’t have heard the boy was if she had gone indoors and not come back out. “She might have stayed in the house—I don’t know why. We can’t think of her letting him die like that if we don’t know for sure.”

  Jamie stood up straight, walked to the edge of the bridge, and started down the riverbank. Mae followed. Ever since he’d finally started talking about Dusty’s death, he seemed less frightened by it, an angry gloom replacing his anxiety.

  In the shadow under the bridge, Jamie stood still. His hat lay in the dirt of the empty riverbed. Walking further into the cave-like space, he sat on a large rock and stared at the place that had been Dusty’s bed.

  Mae picked up his hat and brought it to him. “Are you sure you want to be under here? We did what I needed to do—”

  “And you don’t fucking believe what you found out. Ruth let him die.”

  “Maybe. You can’t know that. She had to know he was hurt from a jump like that, but not that he hit his head. She couldn’t see that.”

  “Right.” He stared into his hat, holding it in both hands. “But you can.”

  “I already did.”

  “Nah. I mean, see what she did. Did she watch him jump and say, ‘Fuck it, good riddance’? Send the cops off?”

  “We got rid of all her stuff, every trace of it. Unless I can pick up something she’s handled a lot at her opening tonight, I can’t do anything as a psychic.” The light outside the bridge’s dark shelter dimmed, and the air cooled. Clouds. A reason to get moving. “Let’s go before it rains.”

  Jamie sniffed the wind. “Rain won’t come for a while.” He stood and paced to the edge of the shadow. “I want to drag Ruth under here and make her see where he died. Wish his ghost was still around to haunt her.”

  He walked over to the cluster of rocks where Dusty had landed, touched the projecting edge of the largest rock. “This where he hit?”

  “Yes. Please, you don’t need to dwell on this.”

  Looking up to the bridge, and then back at the rocks, Jamie said, “In the dark, with ice ... Jesus. Bet he didn’t even look. Probably war-whooped and just took off.”

  “He did.” Mae had forgotten that whoop. How could Ruth not have known where he was unless she had suddenly started ignoring him? The shout was loud. “And when he crawled in and lay down here he did this hawk scream.”

  “Yeah? Doesn’t surprise me. He was a tough kind of lunatic, y’know? Fearless. Like a hawk.” Jamie jammed his hat on. “I’m a fucking rabbit.”

  “You are not. It took courage for you to come under here and try to help a mentally ill homeless person. And he was afraid of some things, like the social worker taking him someplace.”

  “Nah. He had fun running from her. Probably made his fucking day. Gave him a chance to be a wild Apache.” Jamie rubbed a foot along the rock where Dusty had taken the death blow. “I was just feeding my ego, feeding him. He’d rather steal and forage. He could hang from his knee pits upside down into a dumpster and grab the decen
t food out of a pile of stinking garbage. Like a monkey hanging by its tail picking fruit.”

  “You went with him?”

  “Not into the dumpster. Jesus.” Pausing, Jamie seemed to watch something in his mind and gave a small shudder. “I couldn’t eat that crap. Fuck, if I was starving, I couldn’t.” He stared at the rock. “Dusty was strong, though. He would have eaten the lizard.”

  It took Mae a moment to connect this to Jamie’s story of his exposure to the Aboriginal diet, how he’d been overcome at the death of the goanna.

  “Jamie, being sensitive isn’t being weak.” It sounded like a cliché as soon as she said it, and she could tell by the twist of a half-smile and the one-up one-down eyebrows, Jamie heard it that way too. “Okay, it sounds corny, but I mean it. You’ve finally talked about all this—that took strength. Now let’s get out from under here. I’ve had enough.” She thought he’d had all he could handle, but it was better to put the need for a break on herself. She felt guilty now for putting him through the reenactment. It had been foolish to think that she could lighten his load a little by proving that someone else should have saved Dusty. Instead, she’d added another burden. “Be my tour guide again. You’ve done great so far. You wanted to enjoy the day.”

  He nodded, and they walked back up the riverbank to Delgado. “Yeah. I want you to enjoy it, too, love. Sorry I’ve been so—Jesus, whatever I’ve been. The Death Man.”

  “It’s not your fault. I’m the one who wanted to figure this thing out.”

  “Still, I owe you a good time, y’know? I’ll get the old charm back up.”

  But he didn’t launch the random chatter that she expected as his charm. They walked to Canyon Road in silence, and Mae stopped to stretch again in front of a gallery displaying silently whirling metal sculptures on poles. It reminded her of Frank and Kenny’s pole in their backyard. Aiming to lighten the mood, she said, “Muffie might think those could contact aliens from the Pleiades.”