Ghost Sickness

by Amber Foxx

  “Misty, too?”

  “Dunno. Maybe. Mel found the door locked.”

  “So—he was keeping relatives out while he had his secret visitor. And then he had the party to drive Melody away.”

  Jamie bit his lip. His left hand massaged his right, prodding an old injury. “I don’t like this. Need to talk with him. Find out what he’s up to.”

  “You already said he wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Not yet. But I’ll keep asking. I don’t let my mates fuck up.”

  “Let me know if you find out. Misty wanted me to do some psychic work—”

  “To find out what Reno’s up to? Jeezus. That’s a healthy fucking relationship. Hope you told her no.”

  “I said I’d think about it. Reno gave her a ring, and—”

  “He did?” Jamie’s face lit up. “That’s wonderful. They’re getting married.”

  “Sugar. It’s not wonderful. What have we just been talking about? He’s into something he won’t tell her about. He won’t even let her into his house anymore. This isn’t normal.”

  “Yeah—but if he loves her enough to marry her, they can talk. They can work things out.”

  “I don’t know. Reno doesn’t talk much. What if she marries into some big dirty secret?”

  “I’ll get it out of Zak. Don’t like you doing psychic stuff with people I know. Feels weird. You don’t just find what you’re looking for, y’know? You get leaks.”

  Mae ducked Jamie’s intense gaze. He was right. She did get more information that she sought sometimes. Her psychic vision was strong, but her aim could be imperfect. “I won’t do it if there’s any way around it.”

  “Thanks.” Jamie took her hand and led her around his parents’ tent to an open patch of grass separating it from the neighboring tent. “Come on. Say g’day to the oldies. And Lonnie. You met Lonnie, right?”

  While his parents and Lonnie exchanged greetings with Mae, Jamie passed a plastic tub of muffins around, then refilled coffee mugs. The elderly man sat in a camp chair, while Stan Ellerbee, a tall, bearded white man with glasses and silver hair, and Addie, a compact black woman with thick hair going white at the temples, sat cross-legged on the grass. Jamie offered Mae the one unoccupied chair, but she shook her head and sat on the ground. In spite of his recent yoga studies, she doubted that sitting on the ground would be comfortable for his bad hip. Jamie gave her a little Japanese bow of thanks and took the chair.

  Lonnie sipped his coffee and smiled at Mae, his eyes twinkling. “So ... how are you liking camping?”

  Was there some special tease-you-to-death Apache sense of humor? He was putting her on the spot when he knew darned well she disliked camping. And today she had come to like it even less. There’d been a long line for the stinking green toilet cubicles in the morning. She’d run six miles and hadn’t taken a shower yet and didn’t know when she would get one—and when she did, it was going to be at Zak’s house. What could she say that wasn’t negative? Jamie had wanted to make it a nice experience. Mae smiled back at Lonnie. “It was real cozy in that little tent.”

  Jamie drew his chair close to her, leaned down, and kissed her head.

  Lonnie chuckled. “You’re a good sport, to sleep in that thing.” He gave Mae a wink. “Jamie, we need to take a walk. I’d like to talk with you.”

  “Minute,” Jamie mumbled through a mouthful of muffin. He took a slug of coffee to wash it down. “Need to brush my teeth.”

  Mae tried to convey a message to Lonnie with her facial expression: Don’t tell him I don’t like camping. He made the same face back at her, lips pressed in, eyes wide under furrowed brows. “Are you all right, young lady?”

  She sighed. It was funny, but it wasn’t.

  When they’d gone, Mae asked for water. “Jamie meant well, but after a run, coffee doesn’t cut it.”

  Addie filled a plastic cup with water and handed it to her. “He always means well. Think you’ll last four nights?”

  Mae blushed. “Y’all could tell?”

  “The minute Lonnie asked, everyone but Jamie could tell.”

  Stan turned his mug in his hands, looking down into it. “You can’t get into the habit of being afraid to upset Jamie. Sometimes you have to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear.”

  “But the way he looks at me—it’s so hard.”

  “You think we don’t know?” Addie burst out laughing. “Imagine being his mum, having to send him to his room.” She had features much like Jamie’s and did a perfect imitation of one of his wounded looks. “Of course it’s hard. His sister never did learn not to spoil him. But he’ll be all right.” Addie lifted her mug and took a drink. “It’s not the little stuff that breaks him. He can handle this.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to him. If Lonnie isn’t already doing it.” Mae gulped the cup of water. “I’m dying for a shower. Do we all go to Zak and Melody’s house?”

  “No,” Stan said. “We spread ourselves around. They’re Jamie’s best friends here, so he’s got a standing invitation, and Orville Geronimo invites Addie and me. Well, he gives us a key. He’s hardly home during the ceremonies. He and his boys run that booth all day and all night.”

  “What about his wife? He isn’t married?”

  “His second wife died two years ago—cancer. It’s sad, Florencia dying the same way now.”

  “That’s got to be tough for Reno. He was close to Florencia.”

  Addie raised her eyebrows. “Didn’t realize you knew him.”

  “Not well. The only time he’s really talked to me, it was because he was suspicious about me being psychic.”

  “Dunno why he would be. Lonnie’s a seer.”

  “It wasn’t like he didn’t believe I had the ability. More like he was worried what I’d do with it. Like he had a secret he thought I’d dig up.”

  “Can’t imagine that boy having much to hide. Let Orville down when he didn’t go to college, but that’s the biggest issue I can think of. Reno’s not what you’d call a colorful character.”

  “Reckon not. My neighbors work with him and they never talk about him. No complaints, no gossip, nothing. But he seems kind of ... standoffish. His girlfriend’s worried about him.”

  “That’s just how he’s made.” Addie stretched her legs out and rolled her shoulders. “Doesn’t talk. S’pose he got even more like that after his mum died, but he never was Mr. Sunshine. Serious little bloke, even when he was five and six years old.”

  “Misty’s afraid he might be in trouble.”

  “Reno? He’s too boring to get in trouble.”

  And according to Jamie, Zak was too good.

  Mae ruminated over this paradox while Stan and Addie recalled stories about Reno’s strange, unchildlike personality growing up. He’d stayed in his father’s studio and drawn pictures while other boys were out playing. Once, Orville had given Reno a dollar to bribe him to stop and go outdoors. Reno had ignored him, instead trying to copy the eye and the pyramid from the dollar. When he did go outside, he would sit and watch ants or lizards for hours.

  It was hard to picture virtuous but obnoxious Zak having much in common with silent, serious Reno. They probably didn’t share some dark secret. They were around ten years apart in age, and they weren’t exactly next-door neighbors. Though Truth or Consequences and Mescalero sat opposite each other at the narrowest point on a loop of roads, there was no direct route through the San Andres Mountains and the White Sands Missile Range. The trip took nearly three hours. Zak and Reno both had old cars. Neither was likely to be driving that far.

  Unless Misty and Melody wanted to get together. Then Zak or Reno had a reason to travel and to see each other. They did have something in common after all. The Chino sisters.

  Chapter Eight

  Lonnie nodded in the general direction of his camper and remained silent for a few minutes as he and Jamie walked. The request for a private conversation was unusual and made Jamie uneasy, as if he might have done something wrong, though he couldn’
t imagine what.

  Gazing straight ahead, Lonnie finally spoke. “Can an old man give a young man some advice?”

  “Dunno.” Advice. It was another word for nagging. What would the medicine man want to advise him about? Fuck. Dad must have told him. About the reemergence of Jamie’s unwanted spiritual gifts. Seeing souls. Healing. “I’m not ready to deal with that yet.”

  Lonnie cocked his head. “You knew what I was going to talk about?”

  “What else? Dad told you, right?”

  “Ah. That. Yes, he did. This gift that keeps coming back.”

  “Whether I like it or not.”

  They reached Lonnie’s camper and went inside. Lonnie filled the kettle, got a jar of freeze-dried coffee crystals from a cabinet, and turned on the gas stove. “You want more coffee?”

  Jamie hated instant coffee almost as much as advice, but from an honored elder, he had to accept both. He sat at the tiny table, squeezing into the tight slot between it and the back of one of the short padded benches. “Yeah, thanks.”

  Lonnie tapped spoonfuls of the brown grit into mugs. “I heard you can help animals. Heal them.”

  “Once in a while.”

  “But that’s all you do. Why don’t you help people?”

  “Too scared. Tried a couple of times. Makes me see too much. Pain, dark places ... People are complicated. Dunno if I’m ready.”

  “Why not?”

  Jamie tipped the salt shaker back and forth. It had fingerprints, something like butter or bacon grease on it. He wiped it clean with a paper napkin and then caught himself. Lonnie might take the gesture as criticism of his housekeeping. Jamie wadded the napkin and pitched it into the trash. When he looked up at Lonnie again, he noticed fingerprints and smudges on the old man’s glasses and wanted to clean those, too. Anxiety and distraction. Jamie knew what his mind was doing but it was hard to rein it in, and he had to look past Lonnie’s head. “Had another bad spell this winter. Didn’t end up in the hospital or anything, but ... it was bad. Still in pretty intensive therapy.”

  “Then you need to be careful. Being good with animals is a place to start. You might find animal spirit helpers. But someday, you’re going to be ready to heal people. Who are your teachers?”

  “No one, anymore. Took a workshop with an energy healer. Studied about six weeks with a shaman. But I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it, y’know? Just trying to get a grip on the stuff that kept happening.”

  “If you have a healer’s touch, you have to use it or it’ll turn on you. If I tried to retire all the way, I’d get sick.”

  “I know. That’s why I practice on my cat. Started volunteering to help cats at the shelter, too, get ’em sort of tuned up. Makes ’em easier to adopt. Might see if I can help at the parrot rescue place, too, when I get back from my tour.”

  “That’s good, but it’s not enough. Do you still do the healing music?”

  “Volunteer in the hospital? Yeah.” Jamie had been part of the Music in Medicine program at the UNM hospital in Albuquerque for several years.

  “And the music you write? Are you recording healing music?”

  “Nah. Been working on performance stuff lately. The healing albums were all studio work—got to have ten or twelve tracks of just me to get those effects. All the instruments, my voice ... What are you getting at?”

  “I want to make sure that you don’t waste what you’ve been given.”

  “Not wasting it. Just taking my time. I’ll do another healing album eventually. Felt like writing love songs lately, though.”

  Lonnie smiled. The kettle whistled and he filled the mugs, delivered them to the table and sat opposite Jamie. “Mae has this gift, too. You’re fortunate. It helps you understand each other and the things people ask of a healer. My first wife, she didn’t understand. Why I was always on call, day and night. Why I had to go out on the mountain and think so much.”

  “Um ... We don’t ...” Jamie felt the way he had when trying to defend his choice to stick to healing animals, but he had to be honest. “It’s not like that for us. Don’t have people asking for help much.” Misty’s request, which Mae had so far turned down, was hardly an inundation. “We know what it’s like to have weird stuff happen, with spirits and all that, so we understand each other that way, but, y’know, dunno if we understand it. Don’t really have the same gifts. Can’t say either of us exactly goes out on a mountain and thinks about it, either.”

  Lonnie drummed his fingers on the table. “At least you’re careful, maybe too careful, but that’s better than not careful enough. Orville said his friend is a little confused by what Mae did for him.”

  Jamie took a tiny taste of the watery brew. Stale. He drank again to pretend he liked it. “He wasn’t expecting it. She did it by accident.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Lonnie stirred sugar into his coffee, tasted it, and added half a spoonful more. “Strange things can happen to people like you and Mae—gifted people without traditions. You’re driving around the spirit world without a map.”

  “I’ve got maps.”

  “Yes, from every culture your father ever studied. But I don’t think you follow any one of them, am I right?”

  Jamie felt his shoulders wriggle in a right-left shrug. He juggled a few imaginary balls, watched them vanish into thin air, and looked at his empty hands. “Yeah. You’re right. So what’s your advice?”

  “I don’t teach people outside the tribe. This wasn’t what I wanted to give you advice about.”

  Jamie jerked to attention as if someone had woken him up. “Jeezus. I thought ... Fuck. Sorry. Shoot me. I made that up, didn’t I?”

  “You did.” Lonnie placed his hands flat on either side of his mug. “I wanted to talk to you about love.”

  Bloody hell. Since when was Lonnie an expert on that? His new wife wouldn’t even come camping with him. “Don’t think I need advice on that. Love is good.”

  “What do you think makes it good? How do you show her you love her?”

  “Tell her. All the time. Call her a lot. Give her backrubs, sing to her, cook for her ... Loving her—fuck—it’s one of the few things I’m good at. Really. I just love her all the time.”

  “So, you do things for her. Maybe ... surprise her?”

  “Yeah.” Jamie grinned. “Think I might get her a pet.”

  Lonnie looked startled. “Does she like animals?”

  “Yeah. Mae even likes bugs. Tarantulas. Lizards.”

  “Don’t get her any of those.”

  “Be scared to visit her if I did. I was thinking about a bird. They’re sort of like lizards.”

  “A bird?”

  “Yeah. Parrot. Teach it to talk like me so she won’t miss me so much while I’m touring.”

  Lonnie burst out laughing. “Do you know what you’re getting into? The worst pet I ever saw was that crazy parrot Orville and his first wife had. Great big hyacinth macaw.”

  “That kind is scary looking, but they’re nice if you raise them right. I like parrots.”

  Lonnie’s amusement subsided and he studied Jamie, no doubt taking in his parrot-print Aloha shirt. “So I see. And how do you know these parrots are nice?”

  “Visit the parrot stores in Santa Fe a lot. The Exotic Aviary is near the place where I take yoga. Not as good as Feathered Friends, but it’s all right. I hang out after yoga and talk with the birds. Pet ’em. I’m really good with ’em. The one I’m getting for Mae is really smart. Great personality. Says ‘g’day’ when he sees me.”

  Lonnie asked, “Are you sure you don’t want this bird for yourself?”

  “Can’t. I travel a lot. But I made friends with the girl that works there and she lets me play with him.”

  Lonnie raised his eyebrows.

  “What?” Jamie asked. “Is that fucked up?”

  Lonnie bypassed Jamie’s question—an answer of sorts—and drank his coffee.

  “Shelli doesn’t think I’m weird.” Jamie slid his mug back and forth, finge
red up the grains of spilled sugar that it ground across and brushed them off into a napkin. “You might have met her here—she and her husband are potters. They do a lot of selling at powwows and feasts.”

  Lonnie nodded. “They’re the people who have the feather jewelry?”

  “Yeah, that’s them. Parrot feathers. He does the Acoma miniatures, and she does the feather earrings and that gold-looking Pojoaque stuff.”

  “Micaceous pottery.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Did you tell Mae about the parrot?”

  “Nah, like to surprise her. Getting her this nice little green Eclectus. Sweet bird. He likes to groom the other birds, preen their feathers for ’em.”

  Lonnie’s prolonged silence reminded Jamie of his psychologist. Like Dr. Gorman’s pauses, it was a silence that carried weight and purpose. Jamie felt pressured by it, obligated to produce an attempt at insight, but nothing came to him.

  “This bird,” Lonnie said finally, “is like you, isn’t he? He does things for other birds. It’s his nature. Maybe he’s good at telling what they need. But then, maybe all parrots just want to have someone preen their feathers. People, however—as you said earlier—are complicated. It’s not as easy to do the right thing for them.”

  “What? You saying I shouldn’t surprise her?”

  “I thought Violet was annoying. She used to whistle the way Orville does while he’s puttering around. What if this bird imitates Mae? Would she like this?”

  “She likes me. And I’m annoying.”

  “This is my advice. Don’t just guess what will make her happy. Ask.”

  “I do.” In bed. Jamie asked a lot of questions there. He had less confidence in his skills as a lover than he did in his general lovingness. Now Lonnie wanted him to be less confident in that area too. Jamie’s soul felt small and ashy. He slugged down the rest of the disagreeable coffee, slid to the end of the bench, and stood. “I ask. And she’s happy. She told me I make her happy.”

  “Did you like my coffee?”