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May 26, Hatch, New Mexico
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“Wow.” Mae Martin had never seen anything like Sparky’s. She outright gawked at the restaurant through the window of her neighbor Kenny’s old Dodge. Antique advertising statues—a towering Uncle Sam who held a green chile in one hand and a red chile in the other, a giant burger boy, and a five-foot metal robot holding an espresso-cup fountain—graced the patio where people lined up at one of the two front doors. “I hope there’s room on the dance floor.”
Blues Ridge, a legendary country blues group from Mae’s home state of North Carolina, drew a crowd that could hardly fit in a venue this size. Mae had been looking forward to dancing when Kenny invited her for live music at the strange hour of noon on Sunday, but now she wondered if they’d be able to move.
“We’ll go in the other door for music. There’s always plenty of room. The line is for food.” Kenny peered at the parking lots on both sides of the street. Both were full. “You may need to use your psychic sight to find us a parking place, though.”
Mae smiled at Kenny’s joke, but it pressed on an uncomfortable place in her mind. She hadn’t used the Sight for months. Caught up in college classes and her job at the campus fitness center, she’d put the psychic-and-healer part of herself on hold, and she missed it. However, no one had asked for her help, and she didn’t use her gift for her own curiosity.
Kenny drove a few blocks, found a place to park, and they walked back to Sparky’s, passing chile shops and Mexican restaurants. Music poured through Sparky’s walls. A man with long gray hair, a few locks gathered into random ponytails, smoked by the side door and bobbed to the beat. He wore an open Hawaiian shirt, pink shorts, and a purple plastic pendant.
“You look nice,” Kenny said.
At first thinking he’d flattered the smoker on his get-up, Mae took a second to register that the compliment was for her. Certainly, she’d earned it more. Her short, sleeveless dress, accented with earrings and flat sandals, showed off her curves and her long, toned limbs. She never bothered with styling her straight red hair and she’d quit wearing makeup years ago, so for Mae this was fancy.
Kenny said, “Someone’s bound to ask you to dance.”
“Thanks. Does that mean you’re not going to?”
Kenny, a muscular young man with curly hair and multiple piercings, was seven years younger and four inches shorter than Mae, but she hadn’t thought this would matter between friends.
“Sorry,” he said. “I like to just sit and listen. But I’m sure someone else will ask you.”
The smoker dragged on his cigarette and shuffle-bopped, his arms wagging like chicken wings. It’ll probably be him.
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The tables were full, but the dance floor empty. Shelves crammed with antique cookie jars, toys, and radios lined most of the walls, interspersed with early- to mid-twentieth-century advertisements and a huge bas-relief of a skeletal horse and rider. On a stage backed by a wall of autographs and more of the eccentric decor, Blues Ridge was in full swing. Harold Petersen, the lead man of the band, with his bald head, thick grizzled beard, and round face and body, reminded Mae of a well-used teddy bear. He belted out a hard-rocking country blues, eyes closed, playing his guitar with the fluid touch that only years could give. Mae was both thrilled and disappointed. How could the audience not dance?
Kenny took a seat at a small table near the death-horse bas-relief. “I think that dude up there wants you to dance.”
She looked around without much hope, expecting the smoker. “Where?”
“Up front to the right. He looks like Jangarrai.”
Jangarrai? It was Jamie’s stage name, his Aboriginal skin name. If anything had tempted Mae to use the Sight—though she hadn’t given in—it was worry about Jamie. Could he possibly have come all the way down to Hatch from Santa Fe? She scanned the front of the room.
A tall black man rose from a row of old theater seats at one side of the dance floor. He wore a white straw cowboy hat, a parrot-print Aloha shirt, and new-looking jeans. The top layer of his crinkly ash-blond hair was plaited into a curtain of tiny sun-bleached braids, and his dark goatee was braided into a little rope with a gold bead on the end, its narrow point emphasizing that his wide, square-jawed face was fuller and his neck thicker than when she’d seen him last. In spite of the extra weight, he carried himself with grace and power. He took off his hat with a sweeping, theatrical bow.
Mae’s hand flew to her mouth and she let out a little squeal. It was Jamie.
Leaving his hat on the seat he’d vacated, he met her eyes and opened his arms, beginning to dance with her from across the room. The place felt alive with his energy, and the audience looked at him instead of the band. A woman in a turquoise cowboy hat started to rise, then sat back down. Jamie’s eyes never left Mae. He’d changed, but not those eyes. Big, black, long-lashed, full of feeling. The dancing would be wonderful.
The rest might be difficult. Excited as she was to see Jamie again, she never knew what to expect with him. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been so depressed he could hardly function. Their only contact since Christmas had been one fractured call in March, during which he’d tried to make her think he wasn’t crying.
The months he’d asked for to pull himself together were almost over, though.
Mae pushed through the crowd. Jamie clasped her in a swing-dance hold, his face-splitting smile sparkling with a gold tooth left of center. She let his lead sweep her away, and they took over the dance floor. An explosion of energy charged her body, and he danced as if he had that same force running though him. At the end of the song, he swept her into an unexpected slide between his feet and back up, and hugged her as she shrieked with delight and surprise.
In their embrace, she felt both their hearts pounding. The contact made her more aware of the change in his body. Though there was muscle under the layer of softness, he was winded, and his belly pushed into her. No wonder he’d limited the new pictures on his web site to one distant shot in a loose, flamingo-print shirt and had no new videos. Jamie had worried about his weight even when he was at what he called perfect-one-seventy-five. He must feel self-conscious now.
The next song began. Jamie led her into an easier dance.
She said, “Good to see you, sugar.”
“You have no idea how good.” His clear Aussie-accented tenor was soft with emotion. “You have no idea.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. No worries.”
That was the end of the conversation. Dancing made him work too hard to talk.
When a slow song began, Jamie drew her in closer. Part of Mae wanted to melt into him, while another part resisted—it was too sexual too soon. “Let’s go outside and talk.”
“We can wait for the break.”
“No. Two months without a word? And we hardly talked when you called in March. We can’t just dance.”
He released her. “Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.”
He nodded toward the door, picked up his hat from the seat where he’d left it, and pushed it onto his head. Mae brought him over for a quick introduction to Kenny, who expressed his enthusiasm for Jamie’s music and cheerfully turned his attention back to Blues Ridge.
When they got out into the sun, Jamie transferred the hat to Mae’s head. “More use on you.” His voice was husky. “You’re more beautiful than ever. Jesus. You take my breath away.”
“Thank you.” She blushed. “How are you, sugar? Really. Tell me.”
He mimed a juggling act, catching imaginary balls, and then tossed them away with a partial laugh. “I’m all right. More so than not. Want to be shot out of a cannon into fucking samadhi, but what can you do? Still kind of—” He gestured peaks and valleys. “Y’know, getting better at happy. Not so good at medium.”
“I’ve thought about you a lot.”
“And you never ... y’know ...”
She knew what he meant. Never used her gift to check on him. “Of course not.” In the first week they’d known each other, she’d made that mistake, and he’d been furious. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I just worried. Daydreamed. I liked to imagine you were thinking about me, too.”
“Yeah. Been ...” He wrapped his hands around hers, looked down at them, then back to her face. “Trying to be ready.”
She felt like both a long-lost friend and a stranger, wanting to rush into loving him, and yet not quite sure she should. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. A lot of getting ... I don’t know how else to put it—reacquainted.”
He looked up at the Uncle Sam with chiles. “Yeah. Planned to be a little more ... dunno. Romantic, I guess. Invite you up. Have my place all ready. Have a date. But here we are.”
“It’s so funny. You being all the way down here. Kenny told me about the band when I was on my way out the door for a run. I almost didn’t come.”
“He’s not a date, is he? I mean, you didn’t act like it, but ...”
“No. He’s my buddy. My back-door neighbor. He expected me to dance while he’d sit and listen.”
“Would he mind if I stole you, then? I mean, you came with him ...”
“Steal me how?”
“Dunno. After the music. Do something.” Jamie swung their hands, watching them. “Got to grab Harold for a minute, but then ... mmm ...” A nervous smile flickered. “Jeezus. Not much to do in Hatch. Guess I can show you the best place to buy chiles.”
Mae didn’t like to cook. She made a little noise suggesting her doubt about this as a date.
“Sorry.” Jamie flashed another shy smile at her, and looked back down at their hands. “That’s not the whole date. I’d cook dinner for you after. If you want.”
Did he mean tonight at her place, or did he want to take her all the way back to his place in Santa Fe? That would mean spending the night, and she wasn’t ready for that. She hesitated.
“Come on, love.” He ran his fingers over hers. “You remember. I do some serious cooking.”
She gave in to a playful urge to tickle his tummy. “Looks like you do some serious eating, too.”
Wrong move. What had she been thinking? “Jeeeeeezus!” He threw his hands up, pulled his fists down, and spun halfway, cussed again under his breath, and faced her. “When you steal a man’s heart, you have to read the bloody owner’s manual.” He yanked a chair out for her at one of the outdoor tables, sat across from her, took an imaginary book from his back pocket and laid it open on the table. “Chapter Five. Fears: Abandonment. Dogs. Dentists. Spiders. Fat.”
He ripped out the bottom of the mimed page, crumpled it, pitched it, and slammed the invisible cover closed. “I threw out my fucking scale, all right? I’m over it. This is what you get. I’m sick to fucking death of hating my fucking body and killing myself to stay at perfect-one-seventy-five. So love me as I am and let me make the fat jokes. I’m not trying to lose it. I’m making peace.”
He didn’t sound peaceful.
“Sorry.”
“Repeat after me.” He smiled and imitated her sweet little voice and Carolina accent. “ ‘You look great, sugar. You feel nice to hug.’ ”
Being funny yet also serious, he had her on the head of a pin. No room to move except to go along with him. “You look good. You really do. And you feel wonderful to hug.” She reached over and tugged lightly on his braided beard. “I like this, too.”
“Well done.” He kissed her hand and kept hold of it as he set it down. “Now tell me about your life. Everything.”
“I haven’t done that much. I want to hear about you.”
“Nah. New rules. James Edward Jangarrai ‘Drama King’ Ellerbee has to wait. I’m not the center of the bloody universe anymore.” He looked into her eyes, his lips pressed together, stifling a smile, and then broke into a snort-laugh. He rocked back in his chair, hand to his heart. “Believe that?”
She wasn’t sure. “Do you?”
“Nah, but I’m trying. Your go. Six months in six minutes, and then I’m on.” He managed to stay deadpan for a few seconds, then grinned. “Kidding. Take all day.” He tucked his fingers behind his ears and pushed them forward. “I’m all ears.”
Mae summed up her five months. Jamie leaned on the table, quiet and attentive. She’d made all A’s and B’s last semester, and still enjoyed her job as a fitness instructor. Her stepdaughters from her second marriage had visited over spring break, a sweet yet sad reunion shortly before her divorce had become final in April. Her ex-husband would be marrying his girlfriend soon and giving his twin daughters a new legal mother. Jamie listened, and let silence and the passing of happiness or compassion in his eyes tell her that he’d heard. At the end of her story, he nodded, stood, and invited her in for another hug.
As sweaty as they both were from dancing and sitting outdoors in the heat, the embrace was wet and messy, yet strangely grounded and comforting. “You’re different,” she said. “What have you been doing?”
“Besides cooking and eating?” He let her go. “Fuck. Everything I can, y’know? Let’s get some water. I’m dying out here.”
He began to dance with her as they walked through the door. When they squeezed between the tables, his hips danced against her hips in spite of the obstruction of his belly. They were within an inch of the same height, and met in motion as if making love. She pushed the urge away as soon as it rose. Not yet. At least she wasn’t turned off by his weight gain, but she needed to get used to him again, and find out what had changed on the inside, not just the outside.
They stopped at the water dispenser in the middle of the room. Jamie didn’t fully release her, dancing side by side as they drank. Between gulps he switched his hat from her head back to his.
Mae said, “You still haven’t caught me up on your life, sugar. I can’t find out much from your web site, and Niall’s his usual tight-lipped self, if your mama’s told him anything.” Mae’s father’s partner was a close friend of Jamie’s mother.
Jamie swallowed another cup of water and led Mae the rest of the way through the crowd. “Short version: therapy. Long version has to wait.”
In a loose, open hold, Jamie led Mae into a dance so demanding it matched her uphill runs in the desert and left him panting, his fitness not on a par with the skill of his feet. He broke away from her at the end of the song and returned with two cups of water. Mae thanked him and drank.
“Fuck. I almost killed myself.” He laughed, spilling water on his already saturated shirt. He was still short of breath. “Danced hard, too.”
He undid his shirt’s top buttons and sank into one of the theater seats, fanning himself with his hat, and Mae excused herself to the restroom. On her way, a collection of life-sized skeletons in the passage startled her. One wore a sports coat and pirate hat. Another lay on the floor, crumpled and missing most of its torso, wearing a red veil like a cross between a mantilla and pool of blood. A third one in shredded khaki shorts grasped a metal steering wheel. The pirate-hatted and red-caped figures were pieced by swords. She looked around at the skeletal rider on the far wall. Sparky’s did Day of the Dead all year ’round. Fuck. I almost killed myself. Danced hard, too.
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Mae hoped to get the long version of Jamie’s story when she rejoined him in the theater seats, but as soon as she sat down Harold announced, “We have a singer from Santa Fe here, Jangarrai. I’d love to have him do a song. This man’s got a voice that makes me sound like some poor ol’ frog. Hope I didn’t take you off guard, man. Do me the honor?”
Jamie looked surprised, but nodded his consent. He kissed Mae and glided to the stage. She headed toward the back of the room to sit with Kenny. While Jamie conferred with the band, Harold strolled through the crowd to join Mae and Kenny, as if a rock star sitting with ordinary people was the most normal thing in the world. They introduced themselves and shook hands.
“Hope you don’t mind my borrowing him,” Harold said. “My ex-wife turned me into a big fan of his. He tell you her drum circle played with him in Asheville last winter?”
“Yeah.” Mae remembered how stressful and lonely Jamie’s tour had been. “We talked a lot while he was on the road. He really liked her. She was like a mama to him.”
A doubtful smile lifted one side of Harold’s mouth. “She was into doing something with that drum group. That’s Naomi’s big thing right now.” He paused. “You know that lady in Santa Fe that writes those books about women’s drumming and all that? Naomi idolizes her. Jill something?”
“No. Sorry. Never heard of her.”
“I have,” Kenny said. “I read one of her books.”
“What’d you think?” Harold had to speak up a little, as Jamie had begun some vocal warm-ups while the band’s piano man plunked a simple melody.
Kenny drank his iced tea, taking his time to answer. “I read the one on how she learned to be a shaman. I didn’t like it, but that could be because I’m in recovery. It seemed to me she didn’t know the difference between spirituality and getting high. Maybe the later books are better. Like the one your ex-wife likes, on the women’s stuff.”
Harold cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe. Maybe not. Naomi runs a New Age bookstore. I think she gets a little saturated with this woo-woo stuff. Guess it’s a risk you take living in Asheville—and so I’ve heard, Santa Fe.”
“I reckon,” Mae said. “I haven’t spent that much time there. Kenny and I live in T or C—Truth or Consequences. It’s just up I-25 from here.”
Harold exaggerated his own Carolina mountain accent. “I should have realized you’re from southern New Mexico.”
Mae smiled. “I’m from the North Carolina Blue Ridge. Born in Boone.”
His blue eyes lit up, and the lines around them crinkled as he gave her an unexpected avuncular side-hug. “My fellow hillbilly. We should all go out after the show, if you have the time. Jamie needed to see me about something anyway. We can make it a party.”
“Thanks. I’d like that.” It would give her a little space to get readjusted to Jamie. “I’m sure he would, too.”
Kenny thanked Harold but declined the invitation. “I need to stay out of slippery places.”
Onstage, Jamie spoke into the mic. “Thanks for having me up here. This song was written by a friend who thought he owed me a satire. As Harold said, I’m from Santa Fe— yeah, obviously from ’Straya to start with. Anyway, this is a crying-in-your-local-organic-microbrew song. ‘The Sensitive Man’s Santa Fe Blues.’ ”
He acknowledged the audience’s ripple of laughter with a grin, and the band began a lively tune. It wasn’t a typical Jangarrai song—more Western swing than world music.
“I’m a sensitive man
I’ve got the Santa Fe Blues
This city feels so different without you.”
Jamie took the mic from its stand and walked the stage, connecting with the audience like he was telling them a story. The song lamented the struggles of coping with the blues through therapy, yoga, and Reiki, as well as all-natural local brews. Mae wondered if it was a satire on Santa Fe generally or Jamie personally. Those Eastern practices were Kenny’s kinds of things, not Jamie’s.
He slowed the final verse down. Either he wanted to make sure no one missed a word or he was improvising.
“My answer to the question of ‘red or green?’
Is my red-haired, green-eyed dancing queen
She’s my hot Hatch chile who keeps leaving me
But with the sweetest rear view I ever did see.”
In a gesture like someone at a funeral placing a hat over his heart, he lowered his hat over his groin.
“Hard on a sensitive man—”
The audience mixed chuckles and groans at the pun, and a few looked at Mae. Her cheeks burned. Jamie snapped into a full spin, put the hat back on his head, and picked up the mic again, every move precisely on one of the four beats before the next line.
“Who’s got the Santa Fe blue——s.”
The last word stretched and slid up and down octaves in a vocal tour de force. Jamie jumped down from the stage and took a solo turn on the dance floor while the band played a coda. Light on his feet, with a Gene Kelly casual elegance, he looked like the happiest man in the world. Not a trace of the blues.