by Amber Foxx
Bored shitless. The image of Jamie popped up as if he were there. Lights are out, love. He could still see souls when he said that. Her lights. Not a metaphor. Going out. And lighting up for him?
Chapter Thirty
Finally unpacked and settled in her first real place of her own, Mae felt a kind of love for the pea-soup green former trailer and its dirt yard with its strange thorny trees and ants and lizards. She walked through the rooms, imprinting the place as home. It felt good, yet the padding of her bare feet echoed, and her own presence took up too much of the space. Something was off, but she couldn’t place it. Something empty or missing.
She stepped out to the backyard and the blazing sun. It was too early in the day to use the hot spring, but she wanted to clean the big metal tub for a soak under the stars when the air cooled down after dark, if she could stay awake that long. After the night with Jamie, which seemed like another life, almost a dream, she was as tired as she could remember being in years.
She switched on the pump to release the water from underground. Amazing that under this desert there was all that hot water, waiting to burst up. Mae scrubbed away bird droppings, shoved the windblown grit toward the drain, scooped up the small dry mesquite leaves, and turned off the pump. A noise against the fence drew her attention. A tall ladder knocked against it, and soon Frank appeared among the towering, scraggly sunflowers that peered from his yard into hers. He turned, a precarious move in Mae’s opinion, to grab hold of a tall wooden pole decorated with colorful bits of metal. The device for attracting communication from the Pleiades.
“You got it?” Kenny’s voice behind the fence. Good. He must be steadying the ladder.
“Yup.” Frank hooked the end of a looped piece of twine over the top of the pole and tugged it down to where it caught on some of the metal, and then added another. He faced the fence again and brought the two strands to the boards and hammered nails into his side of the fence. Two strings of small, colorful square flags now waved from the pole to the fence, each flag a different color, decorated with a graceful, curly golden script in some mysterious alphabet.
“Oh, hi.” Frank waved. “Hope you like the addition to the view. I’m Frank.” The introduction made her realize she’d only met him in a psychic vision, and seen him in Bryan’s film. “Kenny told me about you, said we have a cool neighbor.”
“Thanks. I think I’ve got cool neighbors, too. What are you hanging up?”
“Tibetan prayer flags. Each one has a Buddhist prayer on it, and when the wind blows, it sends the prayer, like we never stop praying.” He looked down to Kenny. “Any idea what they say?”
“I’m not sure. Peace and happiness to all sentient beings, something like that ... probably.”
“Got ’em at a yard sale. Figured we might as well make something of the pole. We’ve got a lot to pray over. You got some time? Come on by. I’ve got to go to work soon, but, you’re the source. We want to talk to you.”
The source? Of what? It took a moment to remember her undoing of the Muffie illusion. Mae had been so wrapped up in Jamie, she hadn’t thought about Ruth and her restaurant since leaving the gallery the night before. Frank and Kenny seemed okay, but as much as they had invested in Muffie, it still had to have come as a shock that she was a fraud. “Yeah, I’ll be right over. Thanks for the invite.”
Mae locked her doors and walked around the block to get to her back-door neighbors’ front door, again impressed by the smallness of their house. Frank met her on the little shelf of a porch and shook hands. “Now we’re officially friends. Got to go prep for dinner. We’ll have to work out some sort of fence signal system, like a sign that means drop in if you feel like it.”
“I like that. Great idea. Have to ask Niall for a back gate, too.”
“We’ll figure it out. Kenny’s expecting you.” Frank pressed his hands together at his heart, made a small bow. “Namaste,” he said, and started down the street.
Mae tried saying “Namaste” in response but it sounded funny with her accent. She knocked on the door, and Kenny called to her to come in.
As she stepped into the dim, cool room, her eyes went to the altar. The picture of Sri Rama Kriya—George Patel—was gone. A new set of spiritual teachers now graced the setting for Frank and Kenny’s contemplation. Tiny statues of the Buddha, and pictures of the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.
“I’m in here. Making tea.”
In the kitchen, Mae found a barefoot Kenny in tattered cutoffs, looking cheerful. He took some decaffeinated green tea and a jar of agave nectar from the cabinet and filled the kettle. “Hope you like hot tea in hot weather.”
It was probably some Muffie idea, but Mae accepted the offer nonetheless. “Thanks. Good to see you. Frank said you wanted to talk to the source.”
“Yes. We had a staff meeting about Ruth and her movie today. Roseanne wants us to decide.”
“On what?”
“Everything. Like, do we still want it to be Dada Café or change the name, do we want her to fire Bryan or forgive him, and do we want to accept an offer Ruth made, or sue her.”
“She’s asking you all that?” Rather than sit, Mae used a chair to stretch her legs in several positions. The three-hour drive had left her feeling stiff. “That sounds like a lot’s happening with the place.”
“We’re going to be an employee-owned cooperative. Roseanne’s the majority owner when we buy it, but we all buy in. So we get to help with big decisions like these. Feels like Survivor, though, if we vote Bryan off the island.” Kenny used his arms to hike himself up to sit on the counter, his short legs swinging, and watched the blue flames of the gas burner lick the kettle. “We probably will, though.”
“I don’t blame you. He wasn’t honest with you. Neither was Ruth.”
“But she still helped me. Dishwashing may not be a big deal to most people, but she gave that job to me. No one else might have given me a chance And she got us into yoga. She really did a lot for us. I don’t care if some people think she was making fun of us. I think she really cared about me and Frank, a lot, and didn’t dare let anyone know how much. It would have ruined the joke.”
Mae wondered if she should tell Kenny any of what Ruth had said about him. Or about the beer and bacon and cigarettes. It might disillusion him too completely. She started with the most obvious. “So you know the aura readings were fake.” But Jamie could really see that. “And the walking in and walking out.” He could see that, too, in a way. Stop thinking about Jamie. Kenny nodded assent, untroubled. She went on. “And the nutrition was kind of wacky.”
“Yeah.” Kenny grinned. “She really got us with that. But I needed to detox, what the heck. No harm done. Drank a bunch of green stuff. I still do. Might keep it up a little longer, ’til I hit my one-year sobriety anniversary.”
“I thought you’d be more upset with her. Or with me for finding it all out.”
“No. She didn’t hurt me. Not at all.”
“But I saw clips from the movie, in Santa Fe. She’s making fun of everyone who believed her like you did, and of the people who didn’t, too. Like Roseanne. For putting up with her.”
“That’s why Roseanne thinks we could sue her. But I’d rather take the offer.”
The kettle whistled, Kenny hopped down, poured the water onto tea bags, and washed the counter where he’d perched. Once a restaurant-kitchen man, always a restaurant-kitchen man. He carried his mug to the table and sat cross-legged on the seat of his chair.
“The offer?” Mae drizzled a little agave nectar into her tea. “Is that what you’re praying over, with your flags?”
“How did you know? Yes. That and firing Bryan. And changing the name and theme. Some of it’s hard. The Bryan part. But the offer is easy ... I think she did it to,” he looked into Mae’s eyes, “to thank me. I think it’s actually her way of saying I meant something to her, that I reached her heart, even if she didn’t mean to get connected.”
Ruth, connected? The woman was as unfeeling a
s a bacterium. Mae waited for Kenny to say more—she couldn’t think of a reply.
“If we don’t sue her, she’ll release the movie locally in Santa Fe, where she has a following, and sell the DVDs at a gallery—oh, and on that web site, too. Bryan will put it back up, without the stuff about the staff, and all the proceeds will go the Interfaith Shelter in Santa Fe.” He beamed. “Can you believe that?”
The building with the dinosaurs on the roof. Mae could believe it. Someone more organized and rational had to have come up with the details, but Jamie would have planted the idea to support the shelter. The plan must have gone from Jamie to Alan to Ruth. She needed the art critic’s good opinion. It was the logical chain of events, unless Ruth really had that soft spot in her heart for Kenny and all homeless people. Probably not.
“That’s a great use of that movie.”
“I think so. But I kind of think we should fire Bryan. I hate to judge people, but ...” Kenny fished his teabag out. “He wasn’t nice to us.”
“Not really. I’d feel better without him around if I were you. What about the name of the place?”
“I think I’ll vote to keep it. I mean, look at it. It’s Dada. We shouldn’t redecorate. We’ve got a Ruth Smyth design, right? That’s pretty cool. Now that we know who she is.”
Roseanne had promised Mae, Niall, and Marty dinner on the house at Dada Café as an expression of appreciation for Mae’s efforts above and beyond paying for her psychic work. Looking forward to enjoying the food without the Muffie act, and to Niall and Marty’s company, Mae approached their house shortly before sunset.
Niall stood by the adobe wall that surrounded the yard, inspecting something and smoking. In the dimming light, the objects embedded in the wall were still visible—broken ceramics, a boat propeller, an aluminum bat, hubcaps with beaded strings of fuses seeming to dangle from them, and other apparently random things arranged in a pattern that ended up both pleasing and puzzling, catching the mind as well as the eye. Beyond the wall, the house glowed, its purple door and red shutters against its red-brown adobe exterior suggesting vibrant life inside.
Mae wanted to make Niall stand straight and to tell him to quit smoking, but she’d known him less than a week. She hoped the urge would fade, and that eventually she could look at him without getting snagged on his bad habits.
“Need to patch this,” Niall muttered with barely a glance at Mae, rubbing his hand along a large blue ceramic shard that must have been a bowl in its prior life. “Don’t suppose you’d notice it.”
“I noticed the wall. I like it.”
“I meant this.” Addressing her as if she were stupid, Niall tapped a small white spot in the blue glaze. “This is chipped.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be?”
“Broke in the kiln. Put the good side out. Now it’s the bad side, too.” He inhaled on his cigarette, exhaled the words as if he wanted to go slowly to keep the smoke in his lungs, and narrowed his eyes behind the thick lens of his glasses. “You got a minute?”
“Aren’t y’all ready to go to dinner?”
With a sharp sniff, Niall nodded toward the gate in a follow-me gesture and stepped inside. He crossed the bare dirt yard, butted his cigarette in an ashtray on a picnic table, and walked up the steps to his studio, a corrugated metal building that clashed with the aesthetics of the house. Mae followed. She sensed Niall had an agenda.
The interior of the studio was littered with machine parts and old rusted tools on the cement floor, while new, shiny hand tools and power tools, welding masks and torches filled shelves and pegs along the walls above workbenches. A bookshelf lined one wall, and a small refrigerator hummed in a corner.
Niall nudged a set of large rusty gears with his work-booted foot, and paused to examine a work in progress that might be a masked dancer when it was finished, made from pipes and flywheels, rakes and hoes and mufflers. He sat on a wooden stool beside the workbench, and Mae took the only other seat, a paint-splattered chair with an uneven leg, waiting for his speech. Niall seemed to be setting up for something.
He pointed a thumb at the refrigerator. “Soda, beer, if you want it.”
“No thanks.”
“Probably drink that nasty sweet tea like your father.” Niall got up, got himself a cola, popped the can open and took a sip. He set it on his workbench and looked at it as if seeing something more than what was there, and then walked over to his bookshelf. Running a finger along the spines of books, he pulled out a thin paperback. “What’d you think of Jamie Ellerbee?”
Mae found herself locked in by Niall’s oddly magnified gaze through his lenses. “I don’t know. He ...” Her thoughts about Jamie made even less sense than the man himself. “He’s ... intense. Not much of a filter on him.”
“That’s an understatement.” Niall chuckled, and then lost the smile, flipping through the book. “Storm Child. Poetry by Adelaide Ellerbee. Jamie’s the light of her life and her worst nightmare all in one.” Niall held out the book to Mae. She shook her head—she wasn’t ready for Typhoon Jamie yet, even in print—and Niall returned to his stool and picked up his soda again. “She called me today. Glad he’s at our place for a few days.” Niall glanced at the book of poems, then back at Mae. “And grateful to you. She thanks you for taking care of him.”
“I’m glad I could help.” Mae stood. “Daddy probably wonders where we got off to. I’m never late.”
“I’m not done yet. Addie put in a plug for Jamie. She recommends him to you.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“She knows him.” Niall drank half the soda. Jamie would have let out a deafening belch if he’d done that. “I’ll see him in a couple of days, and you know he’ll ask about you.”
“Just make sure he met with Wendy Huang and that he’s got some kind of plan—”
Niall grinned. “I’ll tell him you’re thinking about him.”
“You’ll tell him I wish him well. That’s all. And he already knows that.”
Niall handed her the book. “Addie wants you to read this.”
She didn’t look at the book until late at night, under the light of a half moon and a streetlight while soaking in the hot spring.
The cover image showed a stuffed toy kangaroo, battered and lying in the dirt. Mae recognized it as Jamie’s roo that still lived in the van, photographed in better days when it still had two ears. The author was A. Nungarrayi. Jamie’s mother kept some privacy when she bared her soul, not publishing as Ellerbee.
Careful to keep the pages above the water, Mae flipped through the table of contents. Some of the titles were Fault Lines, Ecstasy, and Sirens. She scanned that one. Ambulances mixed with imagery of the mythical sirens singing sailors to their deaths, the temptress siren song of death.
It had to be so hard to be his mother. To be his sister, his father, his friend. His lover. Jamie saw Mae as his soul mate. Addie had probably wanted Mae to read this so she would know what she was in for and see if she could bear it.
Larger than Life
“He’s larger than life, your boy,” a friend said
As your laughter rocked the room.
Bloody stupid, I thought. Life is huge.
So what if you’re big and loud and bright?
Life ripped you at the seams like outgrown clothes.
Only death is larger than life. Life is huge
And even your stretched-out soul can’t hold it all.
The rest of us stay whole by staying small.
Mae closed the book, gently let it drop onto the path, and sank back into the into the 110-degree water. Resting her head against the rim of the tub, letting her body half float, she watched Frank and Kenny’s Tibetan flags flutter prayers across the half-empty cup of the moon.
Was she staying small?
If she pictured her life alone, she had no doubt of her own strength. She could survive without marriage, without a man. Would that be shrinking herself? Or would it be courage? She had to do it to find out.
<
br /> She sat up and looked at the book cover again, the picture of the fallen toy lying on the ground, and remembered last night in Santa Fe, seeing Jamie stagger out of his van, trying to hide his homelessness. Did he put that roo in his backpack to go sleep in some gulley? That would break his mother’s heart.
When Mae had let him into her bed, it hadn’t been the match Niall or Addie had in mind for them, or the kind of love Jamie had hoped for. It fell short, too, of the deep urge Mae’s broken heart had reached for and couldn’t grasp. But it was the kind of love she had to give right now. She hadn’t stayed small. When he’d needed her most, she’d had room for him.
She sank deep in the water and let go of Jamie as best she could, looking up to the sky. The brilliant stars of the desert night shone like openings into another world, where the light was like the eye of some unimaginable god.
Epilogue
November, Truth or Consequences, NM
The barking of a chorus of dogs came and went, the town grew quiet again, and the cool air of the autumn night floated through the open windows in peace. Kenny lit a candle on the altar. One year without drugs. He really didn’t need to make a big deal of it, he’d only been doing what he should have done all along: living a healthy life. So his normal life was the way to celebrate.
Alone, he honored the clean and sober year with an hour of intense vinyasa yoga, stood on his head longer than usual at the end, and then lay in savasana, corpse pose, letting the stillness capture him. A year of celibacy, of meditation, of being vegan, of being clean. Of having a job. Of being fully human. He felt both full and empty, a paradox of bliss.
When he rose, he sat to meditate. The old Jangarrai CD, Sound Bath, still played, and Kenny let his mind focus on the music. The drone of the didgeridoo, the floating chanting tenor voice, kept him still and took him deeper into his inner peace.
At the end of the last track, he eased his mind back into the ordinary. He’d go to NA in Silver City tomorrow, where he’d first joined. That would be celebration enough, but he also might spend a little money. Frank said Jangarrai had some new music.