Faye.3

My N3 character Faye has taken on an importance I never expected. I just started describing a Truck Stop bar and woman started dancing up on the bar. Only later did I think she was male. Only later did I see her hammer toes. So, below, Faye escorts the narrator home:

Towing me by a sleeve, on foot, Faye led me out of there. She guided me amongst all the parked semis and over under I-5 into a curving lane that threaded only about a quarter of a mile through the dark beside a stretching, narrow body of water I never would have guessed was even there; she called it the Hylbos Waterway. I asked, “What?” She spelled it. She said it was salt water and that the tide came in from Commencement Bay and the Tacoma harbor.

I was real drunk. A distant fog horn moaned. I saw only dark blurs. Where the hell was she taking me? She wasn’t even a she. She was a he. I couldn’t figure how she could see where he was going. Faye told me we were headed down a “gangway.” Through the quiet, I heard a distant cat scream. Faye’s voice told me to “Hold my hand,” and “Don’t fall in.”

But the little dump of a houseboat Faye called home! I could hear the bloop, bloop, baloop of Faye’s floor joists sloshing – just barely supporting her flotsam life. Under a little gable-ended shelter, her miracle of a single-bulb porch light welcomed like a beautiful dream. I heard her turning her key in her front door lock.

Helpless, I sagged to my knees. I puked in the oily black of the waterway. My eyes overflowed down my face. Until it hurt, I heaved stinging stomach acid. Miserable, I watched my barf spread across the bottomless black water.

After I splashed my face with salt water, Faye took my hand and helped me to my feet and we went inside. She turned on two red lights – one, a candle she lit in front of some sort of shrine to the right of her front door. The shrine centered on an antique-looking, gold-framed picture of a brown-robed monk hugging a little, tow-head kid. The other light, she got to by turning left and clattering through a marvelously-beaded, sparkling curtain that separated her living room from a cubby kitchen.

She said, “You’re staring.” She handed me a big glass of water.

I was. I couldn’t help gawking. She had taken off her wig and set it over a silver-faced mannequin head that watched me from a tiny cabinet in the corner to the right of her shrine. She told me I could “sit anywhere,” but she had furnished according to an old Beatles’ song. She turned her back to me and shifted onto her left foot and the graceful curve of her hip beckoned me as she looked intently back at me over her shoulder. She jiggled her rear and shifted to her other foot. God! The way she worked that over-the-shoulder glance! Her black dress was some sort of snake-skin; it shimmered. She took off the little jacket that went with the dress. Her narrow, bare shoulders were beautiful as any woman’s. I gulped water. I couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go. As if to hasten some sort of antidote into my system, I gulped more water and kept trying to figure her flattop.

Faye took my hand and set me on her bed. She crouched onto her knees, and her face close to my lap, began to unlace my white Nikes. Her dark, dancing, shadow-framed eyes invited. With her lips, she did the same exaggerated thing as before. She started to massage my feet. She asked if I was feeling any better and offered to make me some pancakes. My feet began to feel wonderful, as if I didn’t have any, but I just gulped water. She was paying close attention to every move on my face. I asked for more.

Faye knew exactly what more meant. She took my glass to the kitchen and came back with it full again. Then she heaved out a big, resigned sigh and turned through a doorway that opened to the left of her bed and closed it, I thought, somewhat loudly. She came back out in plain, grey sweats.

With a hint of disgust, all she said was, “Yer straight own as a west Texas hahway,” then, “Straight own for thet Lostine.”

I wasn’t letting her know it, but Faye’s fearless directness had gotten to me. I felt my shoulders sag heavily. I told her what she just said was true, but that I didn’t know why. She said she really felt for me. She said she knew the feeling, but that he was married. She acknowledged it’s “a lonesome feelin’.” She said ten years now, she’d been in love with a man who was a “good papa.” She said she knew my situation was a lot worse. I asked her why she thought that. She said simply, “Thet Lostine’s soam sorta Drag’n Lady.”

Dragon Lady! Faye’s term hit me in the chest like a cannon ball. Each of us – we’re thrown into this world. No one knows where we come from or where we’re going, but each one of us is born etched by an acid that dates from what nobody can call anything but cosmic. Dragon Lady. We’d only been sixth grade and Koz and had I stood alone in Coffin Marsh beside Chapel Fifteen and he was mad and suspicious of Lostine and that’s exactly what he had called her back then – “Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady!”

And it had been true. What was the truth now! I asked Faye what she meant. She went through the curtain into her kitchen. She said she’d seen Lostine a lot of times. She told me once she’d heard Lostine warning “the other bartender” like he was her “horn-toad kid brother or somethin’.” She told me everybody she knew of that worked at the Fife Truck Stop only listened to Lostine and they never smiled when they did.

I heard the scraping beat, beat, beat of something being mixed in an earthen bowl. I started to swim in the wonderful, personal smell of pancakes cooking. I puzzled over Faye’s shrine; across the bottom, in scrolly lettering, it said, “Marina” For a couple of minutes, Faye just worked, then, still in her kitchen, she added,

“Ya know. Off thet dance floor, ah ain’t ne-e-ver seen Lostine cozy to a man or anybody. She’s awl lonesome business. Drag’n Lady. Thet’s her. An’ at Fahf, she flahs. Yew kin b’lieve thet!”

Faye’s pancakes melted in my mouth and settled my stomach and I started to fade bad. Before I fell back on her bed, she took my plate and said something about having to work in the morning and turned off her kitchen light. She said she didn’t know about me, but she was “gittin’ under the covers.” I couldn’t do one thing about Faye. I didn’t want to. It had been like three years since I’d slept even near anyone. Just Faye’s warm, breathing presence – I was good with it.

Faye kept turning over, away from me, then back. I just kept fading peaceful and further and further away and looking over at Marina the monk there in the lurid light of his little red candle, at the same time starting to worry and wonder where Faye was going to grab me. But she never did any of that. We just laid there in the dark together and breathed and faded, and then kind of hollow and sad, out of the dark, her voice floated to me asking that same question I never really answered before. She asked,

“Chet. Wah’re yew even talkin’ to me? Yew know jus’ what ah am.”

I asked her back, “You like Thorogood?”

She just said that was a dumb question, that everybody knows George Thorogood.

“Well,” I whispered, “then who-o-o do you lo-o-o-ove?”

She didn’t say anything right away. I began to think maybe she fell asleep, but suddenly, she sighed back,

“Ah guess truly - nobahdy. Doan think a person lahk me duhserves.”

“Faye!” I said, “The hell you say! Nobody can decide for you who you love. You’re a gem and you will, girl.” But then my mean streak let me sort of make fun of her with, “An’ yew kin b’lieve thet!”

The only thing I heard more was a sort of snuffle. The only thing I felt was the soft brush of his warm fingers across the back of my right hand.