Shaman's Blues Read online

  Although the couple looked interested, just then the lights in the gallery gave a double blink and began to dim, drawing their attention away. They said quick goodbyes and moved off into the theater. Other guests skimming through the books and laughing at them finished their purchases. The more serious attendees left off contemplation of the drawings. No one in the crowd migrating into the theater seemed to have any idea what Ruth had done in T or C.

  “What’s going on with you?” Jamie asked, as he and Mae walked to a table with a good view of the screen. “I thought you liked her stuff, you said you were looking for her. This was supposed to be, y’know, like a treat. Fun. Even if Ruth’s bloody heartless, Muffie’s a good laugh.” He looked at the floor. “Or was. Dunno. Thought we’d try to enjoy her still.”

  “It’s not your fault, sugar. We had our wires crossed.” They’d hardly talked about Muffie, and not at all about Ruth as an artist. Mae realized now that she’d found Muffie when she found Ruth in her psychic search, but it was such a stretch to connect the two, she couldn’t have known it at the time. “I even had my own wires crossed. You did the right thing to bring me here.”

  They took their seats, and a server brought plates of finger food, and took orders for drinks.

  “Get what you want, it’s all in the ticket.” Jamie put on The Smile, without full light behind it, and looked down, brushing one fist against the other. “Just want you to have a good time.”

  She asked for a glass of white wine, Jamie ordered a locally brewed beer, and the server left.

  “You’re not happy,” he said.

  “I’m mad at Ruth. I can’t figure out why she did this ... how can I explain it?” Mae searched for a way to describe the situation at Dada Café. “She started a restaurant as Muffie. This nice, artsy vegetarian restaurant. How could she do that as part of a joke?”

  “Ruth’s a beer heiress,” he said. “Beer truck heiress. Smyth Distributors. They bought some of the breweries later. Fucking rich, can do what she wants. Bit much to do a restaurant as Muffie, but she can swing it. Weird, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “So the art and the clothing, that’s all—what? A hobby?”

  “Nah, she makes money at that, too. Her brother-in-law, Alfredo Sanchez—that’s him over there—” Jamie nodded toward a table across the room, where a thickly built Hispanic man with a luxuriant moustache and collar-length hair sat with a plump brunette who resembled a younger and healthier Ruth with natural hair and no glasses. “He does the leather design and craft.” The man wore a spectacular pair of boots with cacti and mesas on them. “You’ve got to love the stuff, even if you’d have to be a bloody millionaire to wear it. Ginny, Ruth’s sister, is the business brains. They make all the clothes at a little factory in Albuquerque. Sell it in shops here, get those rich Santa Fe style people to wear it. The rich get richer.”

  Mae watched Ginny and Alfredo Sanchez chat with their server. Ginny wore a simple red dress with subtle silver stars woven into the fabric, and silver jewelry. Luminous, elegant, Sanchez and Smyth. How could Muffie—Ruth—go around telling people they had some spiritual need for the energy essence in these clothes? Couldn’t she just market her work honestly?

  “She tells people it’s good for their aura or something, to wear the clothes,” Mae said.

  “Well, yeah, the Muffie act.”

  “But she’s got another layer to the act—like it’s not an act.”

  “Yeah, totally deadpan. She never comments on her character when she’s in character. Some people around here see her and get pissed off, because the joke’s about them, y’know, but fuck, it’s about me, too, the sensitive vegan crap, and I think it’s funny. Used to, anyway. Not sure I can still laugh at her, after Dusty.”

  “I’m not explaining this well.” How could she expect him to grasp the idea? What he thought of as satirical performance art, complete with its whole pseudo-world of books, guru web site, and art, was being played out as if it were real—and being filmed. Mae cringed at the thought that she might show up on the screen. She’d signed the release, but with the understanding that Bryan was filming a documentary about the restaurant, not a satire on people like herself—a film with a fake psychic at the center. “She tricked people—”

  The lights dimmed, and Jamie signaled her to wait and tell him later. A transformed Ruth strode into the room in the same arrogant yet spacey way she’d entered Dada Café. She wore a long, flowing, full-skirted sky-blue dress with patterns of white star-like lines, belted with a Navajo-style concho belt. Heavy silver and turquoise jewelry hung on her neck and ears, and she carried a cream-and-white Western hat with an elaborately beaded band and softly quilted patterns of mountains and clouds in the leather. Her boots matched her hat. Her elaborate eye make-up picked up colors in the clothes.

  Mae understood now why all-natural Muffie was so heavily painted. It wasn’t just to go with her outfit. The artist used color, shadows, and highlights to practically create a new face. A healthy glow. Fuller cheeks and lips. A sharper nose, a wider jaw, a stronger chin. With her face made up, her blonde wig on, her waist cinched, and hips and bosom padded to full curves, she bore almost no resemblance to Ruth Smyth.

  “Nice dress,” Alfredo Sanchez said. A few people chuckled.

  “Thank you. And this is not tie-dye, by the way.” Ruth caressed her skirt, stopping in the middle of the room. “It’s ikat. I can tell half of you don’t know the difference so I’m telling you.” She put on the hat, sighed, and took it off. “I’m so torn between Santa Fe style and New Age.” She looked around at the crowd as if they weren’t laughing, and sighed again. “I guess I’m more Santa Fe style for now, since I’m still Muffie Blanchette.” The name itself tickled a few people. “But I hate it when people define me as Anglo. Do I feel Anglo? No. I am so in touch with animals and the earth.” She touched her concho belt, smiled. “I feel more Native.”

  She sat at Alan Pacheco’s table. “I really respect Native culture.” Her low, raspy voice droned with a mix of unworldliness and intensity. “I heard some people at the Taos pow-wow talking about me and they called me a Wannabe. No. I know who I am. I was reincarnated here because I was Native before. I don’t have to wannabe. In my soul, I am.”

  On a wave of laughter, she rose, moved back to the center of the room.

  “ And ... oh my god ... Indian men. No, Patel, not you.” She tossed a glance at someone in the audience who could be seen to rise halfway, a small East Indian man with a bald head. The face on the cover of Sri Rama Kriya’s books. The guru Kenny wanted Mae to meet. The audience laughed more, everyone but Mae and Jamie. “I mean American Indian. Oh, that’s right, George, you are American. I mean indigenous. I wish I were indigenous.”

  Her eyes passed over the crowds, and seemed to light on Jamie for a moment, as if he might be part of her next joke, but when his sullen glare apparently deterred her, she sat on a tall stool at the end of the room, to one side of the screen, addressing no one in particular. “If I were indigenous, I wouldn’t feel so guilty when I wear leather. Because I would have killed it myself.” She looked up, rapt and excited, and then snapped out of the apparent trance and said defensively, “I mean, in a sacred manner.”

  Jamie leaned in to Mae, whispered, “It’s like she’s making fun of Dusty. Fuck. I know there’s a lot of wannabes, but ... How in bloody hell could she do this like it wasn’t a joke?”

  “It’s how she ran the restaurant. No one knew she was Ruth.”

  “What?” The facts seemed to finally sink in. “Like she spent all day as Muffie?”

  The group at the next table gestured for silence, as Muffie talked of a women’s earth religion circle that had welcomed her. “They have such powerful female names, like Willow and Starfire. So goddessy. I tried out Coyote-Song or Cactus Flower, but it’s a neo-Celtic group, and I was still feeling sort of indigenous. We’re going to do a ceremony to find my power animal. If you’re a neo-Celtic goddess worshipper, I think you still get to hav
e a power animal.”

  Eyes closed, swaying, Muffie chanted about earth and sky and the waters that rise. She took off her belt and boots and danced, a side-step shuffle, arms upraised—like Dusty’s dance. The audience laughed the loudest they had all night. Mae gestured to Jamie to follow her back out to the gallery. He frowned, shook his head, with a quick nod toward Muffie. Mae understood—it would be rude to walk out. As a performer Jamie would feel obliged to stay, no matter what.

  “My circle leader is telling me to look for the animal I love ... I can see it, yes ... So gentle, so giving, so sacred ... the divine feminine. The cow.” Muffie opened her big brown eyes and stood with her large breasts thrust out, gazing fervently upward. “ I am ... a cow girl. My totem, my power animal.” She closed her eyes and spun, chanting again, this time a song about the gentle mother, the cow. “Oh, they are so abused. Drugged to give milk in factory farms.” She sat on the stool and sighed. “My spirit sisters ... My circle leader told me we can’t eat our power animals.” She looked at her extraordinary tooled boots, rose and picked one up and cradled it. “No wonder I love my boots. I honor the cows with this work of art.” She caressed her boots. “No animal could possibly have suffered to make such beautiful boots.”

  Mae whispered to Jamie, “How long has she been doing this act?” It was hard to imagine no one making the connection and catching on to her. T or C was a three-hour drive, but someone, even one person, from Santa Fe had to have eaten at Dada Café. Ruth shouldn’t have been able to pull it off. “Is it famous?”

  “Nah. Kind of guerilla art. Like, she’d spring it at her own gallery shows, walk out at the beginning leaving everyone pissed at her, and come back in an hour as Muffie. Or not even show up at all as herself. Inside joke. People who didn’t know her took a while to realize Muffie was Ruth. She’d let ’em think she’s this New Age flake who wants to meet Ruth Smyth because of the clothes. It got to be a game for people who’d caught on, seeing other people gape at Muffie until they’d get it, too.”

  “So this is her first real Muffie show?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “And it’s all local?”

  “Yeah. I heard someone say Ruth was going to T or C, but they figured she’d have a studio there—”

  Fierce shushing from the next two tables cut him off as Muffie put her boots, hat, and belt back on, sighing about the inner conflicts of being a walk-in among the crawl-ins who didn’t understand her. She rambled about various healers she had been to see to have her aura tuned, her energy balanced, her colon cleansed, her chakras aligned with the planets, an alien intrusion removed from her astral body, and to have her food karma analyzed.

  Then the screen came on, opening with a shot of Dada Café. “For those of you who haven’t been there, this is my restaurant, where all the food is karmically pure.”

  Ruth gestured to the screen and stood aside, letting the film take over the show.

  The servers, the kitchen staff, and Roseanne gathered for a line-up in the main dining room. Muffie, in her usual commanding style, strode in, and declared, “Jesus is the captain of all the spaceships circling the earth, in contact with the five great mothers who created the universe.”

  The Santa Fe audience chuckled, as on screen Roseanne seemed to struggle between outrage and laughter, her face growing pink, her lips pressed together, while Frank asked, “Is that what Sri Rama Kriya says?”

  Muffie gave a solemn nod, and Kenny uttered a soft, wide-eyed “Wow.” The audience exploded in laughter, drowning out half of Muffie’s reminders to the staff. Roseanne made a short speech about some practical matters, and let Muffie resume.

  “What is our creed?” Muffie raised her arms as if to conduct an orchestra. “Our mantra of work?”

  The whole group recited, “To serve is to serve, to feed is to nourish, to clean is to purify,” and ended with a long resounding om. The camera focused in on Kenny’s rapt face, as his strong voice carried over the others, and his om lasted the longest. More laughter. Mae felt like standing up and shouting, but she only whispered her outrage to Jamie.

  “It’s not right. They are not acting.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Someone at the next table hushed her again. Mae dug a pen out of her purse and wrote on a napkin: Staff and customers take her seriously. Short guy with piercings is my neighbor Kenny. He believes in her. She told them documentary, not satire.

  Jamie read, chugged his beer, and failed to silence the usual belch, earning a bug-eyed stare from Muffie. While a new film clip showed Roseanne fuming in the office, he wrote on the napkin. F! and drew a frowny sad face. Then he dropped the pen, clutching his beer bottle to drink again.

  In the next clip Muffie, in a black-and-gold skirt and jacket with subtle waves in the fabric and a black T-shirt with a gold sun-like eye in the center, patted a pinkish man’s bald head. “Your aura is wet,” Muffie told him, “and your crown chakra is clogged.”

  Jamie winced, and Mae wondered if the mockery of seeing souls was troubling him, or the meanness of making fools of people. He was sensitive enough, it could be both. She tried to catch his eyes, check in with him, but he was focused on his drink and on Muffie.

  The bald man on screen tightened his shoulders around his neck in a turtle-like retreat, stroking his smooth crown. “I can feel these things,” Muffie intoned ominously, and drifted to another table, where she closed her eyes and clasped the hands of the couple sitting there. “Oh, oh, too much cheese. The exploited energy of the divine female, the cow, it’s heavy. You need,” she frowned in concentration, “kale. Kale.” She suddenly opened her eyes and began to chat about a recipe, started to walk off, and then looked back at the couple and said, “Remember, I am always right.” This got a ripple of snickers and titters from the film’s audience.

  As the screen went dark, Ruth as Muffie said, “To help spread Sri Rama Kriya’s word and wisdom, I have my movie coming out at the Santa Fe film fest. I call it Sacred Cow Girl.” She waited for the laughter to pass, sat on her stool. “I was inspired when I was visited by beings from the stars. They are with me now.”

  She rose with a new burst of energy for what seemed like a grand finale, and went through the audience, claiming to read their energy and auras. “You have a really soft, soft energy ... You need to cleanse with goji juice, and protect your aura with red shoes. Your feet can take in all sorts of energies from the street and the floor. People walk there.” After each snip of advice she shuddered as if a spirit had moved through her and she were emerging from a trance, and then proceeded to another person. Jamie tensed and sat rigid in his chair.

  Mae wrote on another napkin, This is what she did in the restaurant, like it was serious. Jamie looked at Muffie, wrote back another F!, and balled up the napkin in his fist.

  Bringing her act to an end, Ruth whipped off the Muffie wig, bowed and thanked the audience. Her voice became brisker, perkier, and higher pitched, losing the drawn-out self-importance that was the Muffie character’s trademark. “If you liked the outfit, check out the source at Sanchez and Smyth.” She took off Muffie’s wire rims, traded them for her green glasses. With a grin, Ruth reached in the bosom of her dress and pulled out the pads from her bra, reached under her skirt to wiggle out of Muffie’s lower curves, and tossed the false breasts and bottom toward a back exit. “I’d like to thank the Santa Feans who gave my little café some nice online reviews and didn’t crack a smile while you were there. You were great.” She turned to a table at the back of her performance area, reached into a small bag, and brought out cold cream and tissues. Perched on her tall stool, she proceeded to wipe off Muffie’s painted face, dropping the wadded tissues on the floor. “Somebody bring me a brew.”

  One of the servers delivered a beer. The artist raised it in a toast to herself and called loudly, “Bryan? Bryan Barnes?”

  He rose from a table in the far corner of the room and flowed down front to stand by her, smiling.

  “My co-creator of Sacred
Cow Girl, Bryan Barnes.”

  He took a long, exaggerated bow and smiled.

  “I almost had to have him arrested for stealing my image, but I’m sure he’ll get an A on his senior thesis, and a prize at our festival.”

  More applause, from everyone except Mae and Jamie. Mae said, “He played it to me as if he didn’t take her seriously, but he never made it seem as if his film would make fun of the people in it.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I am.”

  “Fuck. Sue him.”

  “Can I?” She couldn’t afford to, but if Ruth thought someone might, it was worth a shot. “I signed a release. We all did.”

  “But not for that. Jesus. Not to be a bloody mockery.” Jamie stood and signaled Bryan with a huge overhead wave, and the tall filmmaker sloped over to their table. “Have a seat, mate.” Jamie sounded close to losing his temper. “Remember this lady?”

  Bryan did a double-take, then grinned. “Oh—wow. Yeah. Two business cards.”

  “She needs to talk to you.”

  Jamie chugged his beer, set the empty bottle down hard, and strode out to the gallery. Mae felt a stab of anger at Bryan mixed with worry about Jamie. Should she go after him? But she had to deal with the film and Dada Café.

  Watching Jamie’s dramatic exit, Bryan made a face, eyebrows high, mouth twisted. “Charming date you’ve got there.” He sat and smiled. “You know we made your scene the end of the film? You gave us the punch line. It was so perfect. ‘Bless your heart, I’m sure you think you are.’ ”

  Dragging her focus away from Jamie, Mae said, “I signed a release for a documentary.”

  “It is. A documentary of a joke.” Bryan started to laugh. “Best ending I could have asked for.”

  “But I don’t want any part of making other people look stupid. People are laughing at Kenny, they’re laughing at Roseanne for climbing the walls—and to them it’s serious.”