Dead Sleeping Shaman by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

For You.
    Eugenia used to concentrate on her own relatives, especially those who’d been hanged, until she claimed Billy the Kid and Annie Oakley—people like that. Some of us caught on they weren’t really her family, which took the fun out of it for Eugenia. Soon she was researching other people’s kinfolk. So far she hadn’t zeroed in on me, but there were quite a few in town getting mad at her when they walked in for a quiet meatloaf dinner and came face to face with old Aunt Tilly, who murdered her husband back in 1888, and who the family had been pretending never existed for more than a hundred years. EATS was a lot more interesting since a few of the local families stormed in to register their complaints with Eugenia’s “damn fat nose stickin’ into business you got no business sticking it into” or “don’t you go hangin’ no more damn lies about the Abbots, ya hear?”
    Angry families boycotted Eugenia’s place for a week or two but then, one by one, came back because staying away from EATS meant knowing nothing of what was going on in town. If EATS was the center of the universe for the meatloaf special, it was also the center of Leetsville’s gossip patrol and helping hands—if anybody got burned out and needed clothes, if a wife was getting beat up out at a house back in the woods and needed to hide, or if a teenager wanted somebody calm to talk to after getting in trouble with Lucky Barnard or Dolly Wakowski, EATS was the place to spread the word. People in Leetsville never turned their backs on each other. There was something so real about the people, I was still fascinated by how the village worked—taking care of their own, chastising their own. Committing a crime meant instant shame. Being a lush meant people trying to help find a cure—all kinds of suggestions from rehab to a copper bracelet. Problems belonged to everybody. A child going wrong wasn’t cause for gossip as much as cause for help. Leetsville was a place where troubles were talked about openly. “Things” weren’t hidden since those “things” were a part of everybody’s life. So many middle-class myths found no place in Leetsville. Life was as it was. Some ran to religion, some to alcohol, some to drugs, some to anger, but most accepted life the way it came. They enjoyed the good days and shared the bad.
    Every table in the restaurant was filled. The air was thick with smoke though Eugenia had installed something called a smoke zapper that added to the din with sudden ZAPs and sounds more like flies dying than smoke being eaten. I stood in the open doorway checking out the filled tables until I spotted Dolly and Crystalline in a corner booth. They sat with Eugenia of the big high blond hair and double chins that trembled as she talked earnestly to Dolly. Making my way across the room, threading through chairs stuck out in the aisles, people stopped me a couple of times. Word had spread I’d found a body out at Deward and I’d taken on a kind of macabre sheen of celebrity. Since it was a matter of pride to me that Leetsvillians now allowed me in, a stranger from a strange land—Ann Arbor—I stopped to talk, giving out as much information as I could.
    I greeted the women in the corner booth—Dolly and Crystalline on one side, Eugenia on the other. They were deep into something that was making Dolly and Eugenia mad, their chins stuck out toward each other, heads waggling, lips thin. I’d sat through many of these quarrels and figured it might take a minute or two.
    Eugenia was in the middle of a sentence, hand curled around the edge of the table, bottom slightly lifted from the seat, preparing to get up and let me sit down though she had things yet to say. I waited patiently, knowing Eugenia could hold her retreating pose for a good long time. She went on with whatever it was she was angry at until Dolly stopped her midway with a pithy thing she’d thought of.
    I waited, shifting from one foot to the other, hoping