“That’s a real pro-job!” says the Red Neck Shaman, “A real fiberglass beauty.”
The whole upper part of him has disappeared into a metal crate, one of several. There is a sound of rummaging, of a great deal of metal turning over and over. A rusted handsaw pushes over the edge and clatters to the ground.
‘Not that one,’ I hope, quietly, ‘Not that one.’
A cold draft pushes under the sheet door and across my naked upper-half. I shiver and rattle the ramshackle table I am attached to, attached by a metal vice pressed deeply into the cast on my arm. It has cracked under the pressure already, which I take as a good sign. If the cast will give easy under the vice, then it shouldn’t take too much sawing.
“There are well-intentioned denizens that live by the wayside, people and businesses that mean little harm and, in the grander scheme, do little. ‘The Red Neck Shaman’ is one of these people. Questioned about the authenticity of his title, ‘shaman,’ the man will agree with the common definition and say little else. When asked about the ‘red neck’ portion of his offerings, he simply calls your attention to the headquarters of his business, a rented storage shed, and the source of power for his more intricate tools, a car battery. The Red Neck Shaman’s services are worth more than his asking price but his asking price, reader, is very little to begin with.”
The Red Neck Shaman, still hidden in the steel box, goes very still, leaving me with the sound of my breath and the squeaking of my nervous sneaker on the cement floor. He hangs there, bent limply in half at the edge of the thing, moving not a muscle. I bring my hand, my good hand, to the vice and consider releasing it. The iron there is thick and cold and, to my surprise, vibrating very slightly. As soon as I feel it in the vice, I feel the same vibration in the metal of the chair, in the air around me, in my skeleton, deeply buried under flesh and clothes.
“Found it!” the Red Neck Shaman says, animating suddenly.
The hum has gone and the skeletal man in red flannel emerges with a hack saw, no less rusted than its cousin on the floor. Thankfully, he unfastens the blade and pulls another out of plastic, settling on an old stool to switch them out.
“Was that hum the spirits?” I ask, wincing at the potential idiocy of the question.
“That were them!” he says, “Some like to misplace my tools, others like to find’em for me.”
“In that regard…” I begin, “Are the spirits usually more helpful or… mischievous?”
“Spirits’s mostly just folk like you an’ me that’s passed,” he says, “Plenty’a assholes among’em.”
“How did you get into this line of business? Shamanism?”
“Done what they told me an’ started makin’ money doin’ it.”
I try to stretch but the vice grip restrains me. The hack saw is coming together quickly in the man’s callused fingers.
“How specific are the spirits when they talk to you? What do they say?”
“You heard’em just now.”
“But it just sounded like a hum to me.”
“Gotta tune it in jus’ right.”
“You mean like a radio?”
“As good an’ analgee as any.”
“Could you actually use a radio to hear them? As a medium?”
“Not ‘less they got miker-phones in the life beyond. Otherwise I’m all the medium you ought need. Now…”
The Red Neck Shaman examines the assembled saw in the dim lantern light and shrugs before wheeling over on the stool.
“Real pro-job,” he observes again, flicking the cast with his broken fingernail, “Makes a man wonder what a feller like yerself’s doin’ comin’ to a feller like me.”
“The spirits can’t tell you?”
“They said ain’t none my business but it don’t stop me from wonder’n.”
“Trouble with insurance.”
The old saw blade clatters off the table as the Red Neck Shaman looks on.
“Good n’ bad spirits alike don’ take well ter lying, sir, but I’ll leave yer business yers and get to mine. Do this right n’ you ain’t gon’ feel a thing. Do it wrong and you feel a bunch.”
The blade’s teeth bite into the cast and my arm moves painfully back and forth despite the man’s attempts to hold it in place. I wonder, too late, if I should have given the bone more time to set.
I grit my teeth.
“Wouldn’t ‘medicine man’ have been more apt?” I ask over the sound of sawing.
“Medcin’ man’s a term steeped in genner,” he grunts, putting his weight into the motions, “Don’t set much an example to my daughter, fer instance.”
The saw’s teeth graze my skin and the Red Neck Shaman halts himself before I can warn him. He clips the connecting bridge at my thumb with bolt cutters and the cast splits up to my elbow.
“We’re gon’ have to get a tad intermate fer this next part, I’m ‘fraid,” he says, pointing to the length of plaster that extends up to my shoulder. “I’ll take’er slow.”
Smelling of moonshine and exhaust, the man hacks away at the plaster from a position over and behind me in the chair. He mutters to himself and to me and to the spirits, invisible, as he works.
I try not to let my teeth chatter.
Slowly my arm emerges from its cocoon- hardly a butterfly but free, after a long time, from constraint. The tender skin feels out currents of air, otherwise unknowable. Perhaps these are the man’s spirits, coming to observe their colleague’s work.
“Stinks t’high heaven, don’it?” he says, pausing thoughtfully before adding: “Spirits say that’ll be ten bucks.”
-traveler
