Snake Face

by Amber Foxx

  A cell phone gave off a twangy guitar ringtone. Joe Wayne muttered, “Toss it to me, Bubba, I don’t want this dance to end.”

  The fat man with the big moustache pitched a phone to the star, who caught it while still keeping his arms around the girl.

  “Hey, take my beer a second, babe.” Joe Wayne nuzzled her ear. “I need one hand free for love.”

  She took the beer, laid her head on his shoulder and snuggled into the dance, while Brazos talked on the phone and stroked her back.

  “Yeah, babe, what’s up?” He listened. “Shit. Roxana only takes them out once a day. She leaves them in the pen. They hate that ... Okay, okay, your sister comes before my dogs. Maybe ... Yeah, got your e-mail, I like those ideas. Great lyrics. ‘Hope Dies’ is great, I got a tune for that already. You doin’ okay, sweetheart? ... Good. You take care. Get my poor puppies outta prison as soon as you can, you know they don’t like jail any more than I do ... Yeah, yeah, love you too.” He turned off the phone, shook his head, and tossed the phone back to Bubba. “Sylvie. Phew.”

  The phone rang again as Joe Wayne took his beer back from his dance partner and whispered something that made her giggle. Bubba held up the phone. “Sylvie again. Picture message.”

  “Open it for me, man. What is it?”

  “Her. With some crazy-looking black dude.” Bubba chortled as he looked at the picture. “She’s hanging onto him like she caught a trout.”

  Joe Wayne sighed, let go of the blonde, and ambled over to take his phone. He looked at the picture. “I’ll be damned. Sick sister my ass.” He guffawed. “She’s gone feral, the little skunk.”

  He passed the phone around for his band mates to see and sat down on the bed, pulling the girl onto his lap. She pointed a finger into his chest. “Who’s Sylvie?”

  “My songwriting partner. Thought everybody knew that.”

  “So she’s not your wife?”

  Joe Wayne licked the girl’s long white neck. “Not usually.”

  Holding the phone and studying the picture, a lean freckled man with lank ginger hair said, “That’s Jangarrai.”

  “Who?”

  “Singer-songwriter.” The ginger-haired man tossed the phone back to Joe Wayne, who missed it. It landed behind him on the bed. “You should hear him.”

  Joe Wayne grew serious. He let the tipsy girl slide off his lap onto the bed as his arms released her, and he turned toward his band mate. “What’s he do?”

  “Hard to describe. Mixed bag—world music, ballads. A lot of a cappella stuff. His voice could knock the walls down. I heard him at this little place in Santa Fe on our night off while y’all were shit-kicking at Cowgirl back in September.”

  Some of the other band members began to joke and chat about that night, as the ginger-haired man continued, “Sylvie’s sister in Santa Fe?”

  “Yeah.” Joe Wayne lay back and made a call. “Hey babe. Got the picture ... Oh no, it was not a picture of your sister. Unless she got a real dark tan and a sex change.” He hung up, and the girl turned to straddle him in a desperate, drunken play for attention, but Joe Wayne rolled her off as if she had been a pillow or a blanket. “Bubba, Gary, somebody, look up this Jangarrai dude.”

  “I thought she wasn’t your wife,” the girl pouted. “So why do you care?”

  Joe Wayne stood and helped the girl to her feet, pushing her toward the door. “Because she’s my genius.”

  Mae’s thinking mind intruded and she lost the vision.

  Why would Sylvie lie and say she was away from home to care for a sick sister in Santa Fe, and then send a picture of Jamie, saying it was going to be a picture of her sister? That was a clumsy falsehood. Who took pictures of sick people to share? Here’s Sis after her operation, doesn’t she look awful? Sylvie had to be pretending the “wrong” picture was an accident, as if she had a secret and had let it slip, in a game to make Joe Wayne jealous.

  It hadn’t at first. Joe Wayne had laughed at the idea of Sylvie cheating and lying—until he found out Jangarrai was a musician. He wasn’t jealous of losing his wife, but of losing his genius.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jamie felt as if a spider were walking on his grave. His hands recoiled from Pamela’s computer as if it were contaminated. Anyone at all could e-mail him through his web site, yet Sylvie’s message was a breach, an invasion. I have song lyrics for you. Straight from Da Vinci. “Vows begin when hope dies.” It made him see Sylvie in that coffee shop in Durham, reading that old translation of the Da Vinci notebooks, flirting in her weird, incompetent way. The lyric was depressing. Maybe Da Vinci had felt that way, but Jamie couldn’t imagine a song to go with it. Why had she sent it to him?

  That one’s perfect as is. And here’s my favorite: “If liberty is dear to you, may you never discover that my face is love’s prison.” Make it rhyme for me, give it a tune. See you soon. Sylvie.

  She must not listen to his music much if she sent him ideas like this. It might be Da Vinci, but it sounded like country. Fucking downtrodden gloomy country. She couldn’t seriously think he’d use anything she suggested. Could she? Did she have some insane idea she could collaborate with him? He wanted to delete the e-mail, but he knew he had to save it. If she was a dangerous stalker, this was possibly proof of it, though he didn’t see how. My face is love’s prison? He didn’t know if that was tragic or creepy. Or threatening.

  He paced the kitchen, looked out the window. The sun had come out. He wished he had his bike. Stealing the wheels had been cruel. Why would she do that? If she wanted to sabotage his tour, stealing the instruments was enough—if she’d really been the thief. Stealing the wheels was sabotaging his mind and his body.

  Mae and Pamela were down in the workout room, and he felt isolated and suspended, walking around in a towel with his clothes in the laundry. There were three muffins left and he picked one up. Craving won out over the fear of fat. He’d been edgy since the tour started, but Sylvie had made it worse. Stalking him with chocolate. Now she gave him bizarre song ideas. A belt and a hat. What had Mae found with the hat? Jamie had been in the shower when Mae was doing her psychic work. She hadn’t reported to him and was all the way downstairs when he got out. He walked away from the last two muffins and returned to his e-mail, wondering if he should answer Sylvie.

  He wanted to say something like Rack off, you evil little weasel, and that he didn’t want to see her soon, but she had Gasser and his didg and drums and wheels. That was what he needed to say to Sylvie—something about Gasser.

  Thnaks, odnt need lyrisc, need my cat. Tell your pets ietter to give him more toys, and brisha nd bateh him, he cantl be left on his own so much. She has to love him. Funny how the last line came out with no errors. He painstakingly corrected everything else—most of his typos defeated spell-checkers—and sent the message.

  Hearing footsteps on the stairs, he closed his e-mail and dodged into the laundry room. Fuck. He’d left a piece of almost eaten muffin on the counter near the laptop. He closed the door and opened the dryer. The pants that fit best were still damp, but that meant they wouldn’t shrink. He dressed, decided to take the ill-fitting clothes to the thrift shop where he’d get new ones, and folded them neatly. Or should he keep them? The extra pounds would have to come off. He’d weighed himself and not liked what he’d seen. One seventy-five was a BMI of 24.4, and anything over that was officially fat.

  “Jamie?” Mae’s voice came from the kitchen, girlish and soft, like Southern sweet tea talking. A charming sound, especially when calling his name. “Where are you?”

  He opened the door. “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Mess.” Embarrassed, he hastened to throw away the damp, bitten clump of muffin, and wiped the counter. Had it seemed weird to be in the laundry room with the door closed? “Is Pamela gone? Can I make noise now?”

  “Yeah. Not that you didn’t.” She smiled, a sparkle in her eyes. He loved the way they looked in the morning sun, green with little flecks of gold. “What were
you hollering about upstairs? We heard you all the way to the basement.”

  They’d heard him when he got on the bathroom scale. Jeeeezus, bugger, bloody hell! Seven pounds, eleven days. It wasn’t possible.

  “Um ...” Jamie ducked back into the laundry room, picked up the towel he’d left on the floor, put it in the washer, and took it back out. It needed to go back upstairs. Or did Pamela have hundreds and wash them daily? He didn’t want to do things wrong in her house. Why was this so hard? He came back out. Every second strained his nerves, yet Mae beamed at him like he was some adorable kitten. He managed to get the word out. “Scale.”

  She giggled. “You cussed like that because you weighed yourself?”

  “It was bloody awful.” He bunched the towel up and kneaded it. “Like some fat bloke was on it with me.”

  “Pamela keeps the scale set a few pounds up. Like keeping the clocks set a couple minutes fast. It motivates her. I thought you’d seen something scary, like maybe I needed to get rid of a spider.”

  “Nah. Nothing that bad.” He pictured Mae running up the stairs with a cup and a piece of paper, ready to come to his rescue. Finding him on the scale naked and hollering at the number at his feet, she would grab the one eighty-two in the cup and take it away like a spider, leaving him at perfect-one-seventy-five again. His imagery shifted to Mae as a mother. Saving her stepdaughters from crawly things. Supermum. “Must have hit all your Mum buttons. Kids screaming at bugs.”

  “Not really. The young’uns like bugs. I send ’em pictures of the big beetles in my yard.” She sounded delighted, like a little girl herself, holding her hands out to illustrate an insect the size of a piece of fruit. “They’re that big. They like the tarantulas at Elephant Butte, too. I got a good shot of one coming out of its hole. The girls want one for a pet.” Jamie cringed, and her smile changed to fond amusement mixed with apology. “Sorry. Talking about creepy critters. Come on, I thought I’d do my own workout now. Pamela’s got a bike you could ride.”

  Was she sending him away? “Couldn’t you come with me? Run or walk or something?”

  “An exercise bike.”

  The gripe came out before he could stop it. “I’ll be bored shitless in thirty seconds. It’s almost as bad as weight lifting.”

  “You’ll live.” Was that mischievous little look directed at the inch? “I’m gonna lift weights, and we can get caught up on this Sylvie business.”

  “Yeah—almost forgot. She sent me an e-mail.”

  “How could you forget that?”

  Jamie looked down. What was wrong with him? The towel was still in his hands. Mae gently took it from him and tossed it into the washer, easily accomplishing the simple decision he’d been unable to make. She removed his clean clothes from the top of drier, carried them to the hallway, and set them on the bottom stair.

  “Dunno.” Watching her, he felt embarrassed over the chaos of his mind, like a psychological inch bulging over the belt of attempted normality. “I can forget anything.”

  She started down to the basement workout room, and he followed, admiring the rear view. She had the world’s most perfect bum, round and firm in her tight exercise pants, and yet she never acted like she was beautiful. It made the lovely bum all the more endearing.

  “You remember a lot,” she said, “like the words and tunes to all that stuff from back when you sang opera.”

  “Different part of the brain. That’s why you can do music therapy with Alzheimer’s patients.”

  Mae walked to a rack of dumbbells and picked up a pair. “Come on, sugar, that’s one diagnosis you don’t have.”

  Jamie sat on the exercise bike sideways, overcome with both humor and delight. He loved her. She was so at ease with him, she could make a joke like that. As she did squats holding the weights, Mae regarded him with an uncomprehending little smile-frown, as if she didn’t get why he was laughing so much.

  Sobered, he straddled the bike, stared at its keyboard. It was complicated, with too many choices. Ignoring all of them, he started pedaling. At least Pamela was around his height and he didn’t have to mess with the seat. The bike flashed red lights and graphs, demanding a decision. Complaining under his breath, he stabbed at a few buttons until something changed, showing him little fake hills he was going to climb.

  Mae set the weights down and got down on the floor to do pushups. “Tell me about this e-mail from Sylvie.”

  “Song lyrics. And that she’d see me soon.”

  “She tried to give you song ideas?”

  “Yeah. Not my type of lyrics.”

  “Do you remember any of them?”

  “Nah.” He thought, and a line came to him. “One. Yeah. Really gloomy, like a bad marriage thing. ‘Vows begin when hope dies.’ ”

  “Hope dies? She’s giving the same lyrics to Joe Wayne.” Mae described her vision of Joe Wayne in his hotel room, and his reaction to the possible betrayal of his genius. “Sounds like she’s trying everything she can to make him jealous.”

  “Yeah, but of me?”

  “I don’t get it either, not yet. I need something of hers. The hat was his.”

  Jamie looked for something to cover the busy red lights of the bike’s dashboard. It made him feel sick, as if he were trying to read in a moving car. The workout room was uncluttered, no magazines on the floor, no towels, nothing he could use. He let go of the handlebars and spread his hands over the screen and looked at Mae. She had resumed her pushups—full out, straight body, like a man. Jamie imagined leaping off the bike and sliding underneath her so fast she couldn’t see him coming, and she would descend atop him face to face. Surprise. Give me a kiss.

  He refocused out of the mini-fantasy. She was talking to him. “Sorry. I was away.”

  “I noticed. I asked if Sylvie used your personal e-mail or professional one. Did she contact Jamie Ellerbee, or Jangarrai?”

  “Jangarrai.”

  “What does she call you? Does she even know your whole name?”

  “Dunno. She calls me ... What does she call me ... ? Cowboy.” He shivered. “She might have called me Jamie once, but I might have made that up. Not sure.”

  Mae got to her feet with a sigh and walked back to the rack of weights. “I know it was mean what Pamela said earlier, but your attention span is bad, sugar.” She grasped a dumbbell and started a bent-over row exercise. “You had a good therapist way back, when you got your teaching job. I remember you said he taught you all these ways to cope without meds. You still know how to do that?”

  “Jesus. You remember I told you all that?” Leaning over the bike to cover the screen with his hands made his stomach feel stale and queasy. He sat straighter, but then the moving red lights made him sicker. “Yeah, he had me exercise an hour a day at least, get eight hours sleep, never eat crap, do a lot of breathing exercises, make lists and plans, spend time with people I trust every day, have a routine—Jesus. Like, don’t go on a fucking tour. Only part of that I can keep up with is breathe.”

  Mae raised her eyes to him. Was that look worry? He’d meant to get her respect today, to be upbeat and adult and passing for competent. He had two days to do this, now that he’d got rid of the bloody perfect Greek. She said, “You were doing all right while you had Gasser, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Mostly.”

  The sick feeling roiled, and he got off the bike and lay on the floor and closed his eyes. Sweat cooled in the roots of his hair and in his shirt. He was wet with it, far beyond the demands of his few minutes of exercise.

  Mae sounded worried—again. “What’s the matter?”

  “Fuck—shoot me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Shoot. Fuck me.” He opened his eyes to see if she liked his joke and offered her a little grin. “That was supposed to be better. Sorry—feel like crap. Dunno what happened.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you to ride that bike.” Mae set her dumbbell down and came to sit on the floor beside him, smoothing his hair back. “I didn’t thin
k you had that bad a hangover. You were all bouncy and happy at breakfast.”

  “I forgot.”

  She sounded amazed. “That you had a hangover?”

  “Yeah. I ...” How could he explain it? “I felt weird but I ...” The words that finally came struck him as perfect and yet alien, as if he’d heard them somewhere and borrowed them. “I attributed it to my defective essence.”

  “Sugar, you do not have a defective essence.” The sweet fire that rose in her could light the city and push away the floods, and her undersized voice grew as strong as it could. “Your essence is smart and gentle and full of goodness. I know how hard it is for you ... to be you, and how you fight to keep going. I need you to fight harder. You have to.”

  She could have converted him to the faith of her choice: Christianity, Zoroastrianism, toad worship, it didn’t matter. Jamie nodded. He was too sick to sit, let alone stand, but he looked deep into her glittering eyes and in silence he agreed to be strong. Sane. Successful. For her. He had to. The phoenix had two days to rise from ashes.

  When he felt better and she’d finished her workout, they made a list, sitting side by side at the kitchen table. Mae wrote it down, sparing Jamie his scrambling of letters, and prodded him for ideas about what should go on it. He came up with four questions. Had Wendy contacted him today with any updates on his schedule due to the storm? Was the power on where he had to play tonight? Could he find a thrift shop open and get better fitting clothes? Would it have a bike?

  “Good. Now we look at how you cope on your tour.”

  With Mae there to keep him calm, he could easily see what he needed to do. Stock up on healthy snacks, stop to stretch every few hours on a drive, go to bed early and do breathing exercises, call someone every night who could help him relax, use the pool morning and night if his hotel had one, and make a list every day. It wasn’t enough to keep him happy, though. So he put Gasser on the list.

  Mae frowned as she wrote it down. “You know I’ve been trying to help with that, but you may not get him until the end of your tour. We can go to the shelter today, though, and get you another cat. Then Gasser will have a buddy when you go back to Santa Fe. You’ll have two cats.”