Faye

To continue my current series on characters in the novel with the working title of N3:

Faye is a head taller than Chet, N3’s first-person narrator.

At night, Faye paints-up gothic and dances on top of any bar she can find where anybody she can get can look up her shamelessly brief skirt. Chrome ankle chain clusters above her stiletto heels. Her hammer-toed feet are huge. Over the racket in the bar, Chet tells her she is “really pretty hot,” but that she should “down-play her feet.” She smells of vanilla and in Chet’s words, her “…legs don’t look like a man’s.” He never says her dark eyes get to him, but they do. Faye is very big on Chet.

Her drink of choice is blood-red. She never gets drunk.

Faye speaks in two voices – one very carefully practiced and disguised - soft, feminine, for when she’s out at night trolling. Faye’s other voice speaks only when he’s at home in his dilapidated, rental house boat and his wig comes off; his second voice? Faye reluctantly accepts that Chet is “straight as a wayst Texas hahway.”

Faye doesn’t show up in N3 until half way through the story because she spends so many  nights haunting the bar at the every-night-live-music Fife Truck Stop – a seventy-acre facility complete with hotel, tire shop, a ten-semi fueling bay and parking for a hundred rigs anyhow. At night, outside the bar and the hotel, with the huge engines and motor-generators of a hundred rigs running, the ground vibrates.

From the Fife Truck Stop, Faye’s house boat is walking distance under I-5; she knows a great deal about who and what ramps down off the I-5 Spin Cycle to the truck stop.

Faye has witnessed Lostine’s show in Fife’s bar – many times. Faye has a definite take on what Lostine is. But Faye will never let Chet down - not ever.