with fake enthusiasm I hopped down the three steps to the waxed floor and Roxie Bouchie’s suspicious smile.
“Ready to learn!” I pronounced weakly. Everybody else milling around on the floor was wearing cowboy boots and shirts with at least five mother-of-pearl snaps at the cuffs. I felt bland and underdressed.
“Girl, you must be lost,” Rox said, grinning. “The Society for the Preservation of Boring Clothes meets across the street. To what do I owe the honor of your presence on my dance floor?”
“I need a psych eval,” I admitted. “It’s a woman at Las Colinas. She’s confessed to killing a man. The body in the public freezer out by my place. Her lawyer says she’s crazy.”
“Whoa!” Rox replied, interested. “How did you get involved . . . ? Never mind. You’re gonna have to dance real nice for this, hear?”
“I hear,” I said, taking my place in a row of people whose thumbs were already hooked in the waistbands of their jeans. We were going to learn the Tush-Push, Rox announced as a spotlight clicked on, highlighting her in gold.
Misha, I have a good reason for doing this, I thought into the haze around the yellow light. I pushed the thought on through the ceiling and out into a dark sky beneath which Misha Deland probably was, somewhere.
Misha hated country and western music, although the hillbilly accent she tried to bury under her contrived Bostonese suggested that she might have had some familiarity with it in the past. She said country music reinforced the subservient role of women, who in its lyrics did nothing but sob over abusive husbands who’d run off with other women. The other women, she pointed out, would later sing about empty beer cans and foreclosures on double-wide trailers when the same men ran off with yet other women. Misha would have preferred a classic two-step urging housewives to shoot their husbands and live communally, growing their own food and hammering out social policy at night. I never bothered explaining to her why that two-step wouldn’t work.
Although I know why. It’s one of my favorite notions that the universe is essentially music, and that we came from there. Psychoneurologists document cases in which people with brain deficits who can’t talk or read or understand words at all can nevertheless sing entire arias after one or two exposures to the music. Mute and autistic idiots savants have surprised their caregivers by sitting down at a piano and playing the themes from every commercial on television in the dayroom that morning. Even the ancient reptile brains of certain snakes respond dramatically to music.
I think music is the original language of life, half buried in the crumpled map of the brain. I think verbal discourse is an evolutionary newcomer, like opposable thumbs and politics. Music about communal utility bills would be like a mountain wearing a sweater. Beyond incongruous. Music has to be, and always is, about joy and despair, illumination and darkness, life and death. Even reptiles know this. But Misha wouldn’t have gotten it.
That is, she wouldn’t have gotten the theory. The practice she had down pat. Everyone said that on a good day Misha could seduce furniture, and it was true. She didn’t mean to be seductive, certainly didn’t cultivate an image suggesting steamy nights in heroin-chic hotel rooms. Scrawny little Misha in a leather bra and crotchless net tights would arouse guffaws from the dead. It wasn’t that kind of seduction.
It was more like an old hunger, deep and lonely and mean. Misha could touch people just by pronouncing their names and then staring at them with those huge gray eyes. Men, women, animals. Everything seemed stunned by some coded message she conveyed. It made her extremely good at her work, which involved organizing, getting people to show up and do things. I have seen the most rampantly macho throwbacks—cops, dry-wallers, tow truck operators—paralyzed with fascination for this butchy little middle-aged woman in designer clothes that never quite fit. Misha’s blouses were always buttoned wrong, the cuffs of her slacks coming untacked at the seams. She never cut the pocket threads of her jackets, but her pockets sagged anyway. She was everybody’s favorite waif, with an attitude.
And, she was music. Minor chord darkness, chaos, something from before even the idea of order. And then a nearly beatific sense of light I could almost see trailing from her fingers. I did see it once, when she touched Brontë’s head that first night at the Emergency Animal Clinic. Misha didn’t either like or dislike animals, and would later forget to feed Brontë half the time. It was something about hurt that made Misha into music. Hurt in others and a scrambled hurt that permeated the woman herself. I never knew what it was about. I did know that I was supposed to make the very strength of my soul available to her, stand with her in some battle raging just beyond my comprehension. I still know that.
“Blue!” Rox yelled over Garth slipping on down to the OH-ay-sis, “that’s slide, step-step, slide, honey. Not step, stop, and stand there.”
“Yes’m,” I shucked back. It was already clear that I wasn’t going to make the line-dance team, but then I look dead in green, anyway.
After an hour I could boast a beginner’s proficiency with three different line dances, although my hair was matted with sweat and I’d have to bury my blouse as soon as I got home.
“Where’s my minnow badge?” I asked Rox when we settled at a table in the back. I ordered an Evian for Brontë and a hazelnut-flavored Italian fizzy thing for me. Rox ordered tap water and took a baggie of soda crackers out of her purse. I thought it was strange, since Rox is usually one of the few who still order drinks with names like Cuba Libre and Singapore Sling.
“No minnow badge,” she said, letting most of her hundred and fifty beaded braids clatter against the tabletop as she leaned into a cracker. “And don’t drink out of my glass. Stupid stomach flu’s just about shut down the prison and me, too. You don’t want it, trust me. I’ve been barfing for two days.”
“What makes you think I’d drink tap water?” I replied.
“Oh, that’s right. Out at your place you squeeze water out of barrel cactus.”
“Actually, the liquid from barrel cactus pulp is poisonous when it’s milky,” I noted. “It’s just one of the reasons I drink the stuff that comes in bottles. So when can you do the psych eval?”
“She’s at Las Colinas.”
“Saturday, but only if her attorney or the court requests it. Have the attorney call me tomorrow at Donovan. How did you get messed up in this thing?”
Fifty people were two-stepping around the dance floor now, some in routines so polished that the rest applauded after a tricky turn or bit of footwork. The best dancers were two gray-haired guys in Wranglers and button-down dress shirts. The president of a small bank and his boyfriend of thirty years, a TV actor easily recognizable for his ongoing role as the bishop-sleuth in a religious detective series. My dad loves the show.
“Her brother showed up at my pool yesterday and hired me to help her,” I told Rox. “How outrageous would it be if I asked Bishop Brannigan to autograph a napkin for my father?”
“Tacky. Most people buy an Auntie’s T-shirt and he autographs that. I didn’t know you had a father. And why would this brother hire you? Hire you to do what?”
“To use my great skills as a social psychologist in proving his sister innocent,” I answered after paying fifteen dollars for a T-shirt. It featured the Wicked Witch of the West in cowgirl drag right down to her ruby-red boots. Beneath was the message, “It’s the shoes, stupid!” The actor signed his name across the back in red laundry marker. Dad would be overjoyed.
“And why would you
