Biting the Moon (13 page)

Andi said, annoyed and impatient, “Well, you memorize every card in everyone's hand.”

Mel stared, then laughed. With a scarlet fingernail she scratched her scalp and repositioned the pencil in her high bank of curls. “You mean where he was going after he left Cripple Creek? I don't think he said.”

“Or where he'd come from.”

“Well, you
know
that, for heaven's sake.”

“I don't mean his home, I mean like just before Cripple Creek.”

Mel put down her cards and shook a cigarette out of a pack of Winstons. “I do remember he talked a lot about boats. He liked boats—canoes, kayaks, motorboats, that kinda thing. Said he was going to—” She looked as if her memory was hard at work: eyes squinched shut, furrowed forehead. “I remember he said he was going to go down the Rio Grande . . . and then he and a couple of others got in an argument—well, a friendly one—about what river was best. Fellow here from Colorado said it was the Colorado River, another said it was the Rio Grande.” Mel shrugged. “Water's water.”

“Where did he say?”

“Where did he say what?”

“Where the best river was.”

Mel gave a soundless laugh, shook her head. “You ask the damnedest questions.” She stacked the cards, shuffled, reshuffled. “Snake River?” She paused, seeming to peruse the card she held. “The Salmon? I never heard of it. Someplace in—”

“Idaho.” Andi scraped back her chair and turned to Mary. “Let's go.”

It was so sudden that Mel's full house stopped in midair. “You leaving?”

“We have a long way to drive,” said Andi. “Thanks for your help.”

Outside the casino, Mary stopped and asked, “Don't you ever—have to
think
about it?”

“About what?”

“Never mind.”

“Let's go back to the car. We need to look at the maps.”

The maps, the maps.
Mary sighed.

•   •   •

“Laramie's there,” said Mary, pointing.

“Uh-huh.” Andi was judging distances. “With two of us driving, we could make it all the way to Idaho. That's only another four, five hours.”

“Yes, it's a good five hours to Laramie. So you're talking about another ten hours. And with ‘two of us driving,' I'd be surprised to get to the end of the block.”

Andi smiled. “Oh, come on, we got all the way to Cripple Creek, didn't we?”

Just,
thought Mary, getting into the driver's seat.

Andi gave in to Mary's insistence that they stop for the night in Wyoming, anywhere, as long as it was in Wyoming. By the time they got past Denver, they'd already been driving for ten hours, Mary insisted.

“No, we haven't. We had a two-hour rest in Cripple Creek,” argued Andi.

“A rest? That's what you call a rest? With that cop all but ready to slam us in jail?”

Andi slid down in the passenger seat, lifted her feet up against the dashboard. She yawned. “That's a big exaggeration.”

The policeman, hanging over the driver's window (thank God the car was still stationary), questioned their right to be tooling around town “in a auto-
mo
-bile. Can I see your licenses, girls?”

Smooth as Mel sliding out cards, Andi handed over Angela Hope's driver's license. The license said New Mexico, the plates said New
Mexico. Everything in order. “Says here you're twenty-eight.” He scratched the hair where it had sweated through the hatband. “You don't look it.”

Andi's smile was brilliant. “Everyone says that. I hope they still say it when I'm forty.”

The cop couldn't think of any other objection. He slapped the side of the car and said he hoped they'd enjoy their trip to wherever.

Mary wanted to stop because she was sick of driving, but she didn't want to complain because Andi would simply offer to take over. Andi alert made her nervous, much less Andi sleepy. Mary sometimes got the impression that earthly bids for attention—single-lane bridges, guardrails, no-passing signs, double yellow lines—didn't register on Andi's mind, not like the hard white stars, the cratered moon, the iron shadows of the Rockies.

They'd left Laramie behind, and also the interstate (at Andi's suggestion, so she could drive through the National Forest), and were on their way to Rawlins (
back
to the interstate, at Mary's suggestion) when Mary became adamant about not trying to make it to Idaho that same night. Not safely, at least. “Safe” was another word missing from Andi's vocabulary, a word invented to frustrate her. Now, Mary flat out refused to go any farther. To make her point, she pulled over in a turnout and stopped.

“Far as I'm concerned, we sleep right here.” She slid down in the seat, waiting not to be taken seriously.

But of course she was. Andi got out of the car and scanned the surrounding area. She stuck her head back through the window. “We can pitch the tent.”

“What? You can't just toss up a tent anywhere in a national park. You have to use a campground.”

“Where is one?”

“
I
don't know. It's the first time I've been here.”

As she got out of the car, she was conscious of how Medicine Bow National Forest loomed. It was the first time Mary had ever really felt the power of the word
loomed.
The uncontainable, the uncontrollable. It made her arms break out in a rash of goose bumps. The moon was full and chill, and in the silvery blackness the trees looked etched
against the Rockies. It was just the sort of dark through which animal eyes could glitter like gold darts.

Andi was whistling, back at the trunk, dragging the tent out.

Mary yelled, “This isn't a campground!”

Andi said, “We don't know where one is, so what's the difference?”

“I can just
feel
the rangers breathing down our necks.” But she helped pull the tent out and carry it over to a small clearing twenty or thirty feet off the road.

They undid the ties and Andi looked at the sprawling canvas. “How do we get it up?”

“I don't know, Pocahontas, I never used it before. My sister took it to Sedona on her trips.”

“I'm sure it's just common sense.”

“Then we're in trouble.”

They unrolled it, laid it on the ground, looked at it. It would be too unwieldy to raise. “Well, we've got our sleeping bags,” said Andi. “And this would be a good ground cover.”

They spread the tent, since that was all they knew to do with it, and laid their sleeping bags on top.

“I'm hungry,” said Andi. “We should've stopped back there at the truck stop.”

Mary retrieved the brown bag with the fruit in it and the thermos of tea. “Well, we didn't. Have a peach.”

Andi threw herself backward on her sleeping bag. “I'm tired of fruit.”

Mary ate a banana and then lay back too, and they both looked upward at the dark sky. Mary said, “The Milky Way's the closest galaxy and it's still a thousand light-years away. That's what I heard.” Andi didn't comment, and Mary went on. “I wonder what kind of animals are out here.” What she was thinking was grizzlies.

“Coyotes. Wolves,” Andi said, along the end of a yawn.

“Not wolves; there aren't any wolves in Wyoming, not anymore.”

“In Yellowstone there are, since they brought them back.”

Mary wondered how Andi knew this, Andi, whose memory might have perished with the wolves. She asked her.

“I read about it in the cabin. There was plenty of time for reading, and the owners had a lot of books and magazines like
National Geographic.
The government's been poisoning wolves and coyotes for decades. They call it ‘wildlife management.' ”

They were quiet for a long time, looking skyward. Silence hung over them like a canopy, impenetrable.

“They're so smart, coyotes,” said Mary. “You know what I think?” No answer; Andi might even be asleep. Mary didn't mind; she'd go on talking to the stars. “What I think is they could be the superior species, the higher form of life. Not us. See, it's always the size of your brain that makes the difference. But I wonder why? Why couldn't it be how good your instincts are? Do you know a coyote can tell if you're packing a gun? He doesn't have to see it. Tomkin told me. They just
know.
We wouldn't, not unless we saw the gun.

“Except—” Mary's eyes searched the silver mesh of stars as if something up there could help her explain what she was thinking. “Except there are a few people who can sense things almost as well as coyotes and wolves can. Dr. Anders, he can tell things about you without you saying anything. There are times I think he can feel my feelings. It's nice to know someone like that.” It was better than nice. There were times she wished she was older. It distressed Mary even to think this, much less to say it. She went back to the subject of coyotes. “Tomkin calls Sunny ‘Blue Coyote,' even though I told him Sunny's a dog, which he isn't. But I think he must have some dog genes. I found him when he was just a puppy. God's dog, maybe. That's what they call coyotes: God's dogs or, sometimes, song dogs. Because of their howling. They have ten or eleven different howls with different meanings. ‘Biting the moon'; Tomkin says that's what the Zuni call it. You know those greeting cards with coyotes against the moon? They look kind of like they're taking a bite out of it, don't they? They're probably a lot closer to the moon than we'll ever be.” Mary smiled into the darkness. She wondered if her teeth flashed white, like Tomkin's did. She didn't feel at all sleepy.

A small catch in Andi's throat made Mary turn to look at her. Andi was snoring.

How could she sleep so soundly? In spite of what had happened—and what probably
would
happen—she slept the way children do. Whereas Mary slept in fits and starts, coming awake at the slightest disturbance. It was as if Andi's terrible experience had given her life focus. Most girls would have been paralyzed with fear over what had happened, but not Andi. It was as if she had pulled the battered parts of herself together and was now aimed, like an arrow, at some destination that neither of them could see but that Mary was afraid would shoot beyond her, land out of sight.

Yet Mary, who had not been violated, felt her own life to be a tangle of conflicting needs. Her sister, Angela, had always talked about “centering,” finding one's “center.” Mary felt she had no center. She was the Scrabble letters spilled across the table, letters she could not put together to spell anything sensible. Andi, on the other hand, had mastered the game; as if magnetized, the letters flew together.

Mary envied such singleness of purpose, such determination. Never to be drawn from the path, never to shy at obstacles, never to be deflected. Andi had no doubts about what she was doing, whereas Mary had nothing but doubts. Andi might have doubts as to whether she'd succeed—whatever spelled success to her—but no doubts about whether she
should
do it.

Mary pulled the front of her sleeping bag up under her chin when a breeze chilled her face. The air felt clean and icy and glass-edged. The moon cast its veil of white over everything: trees, desert, the far mountains, themselves. She thought she heard a howl, but that was probably imagination. Under that covering, she slept.

A little after dawn, Mary lay in the deep forest silence, letting it soak into her, breathing it in with the frosty air. It was different from desert silence; it weighed heavier, made you slower in your movements. One
thing she was good at was silence. She was good at being by herself, living in her head, and she considered herself lucky that this was so. When Sunny (old “Blue Coyote”) woke up it was always quick, as if responding to some little sound too faint or too high for her to hear. It surprised her that her night hadn't been spent with sudden awakenings, survival wakenings, for the woods must be full of animals. Maybe that was why it felt so heavy: it was weighted with animal thoughts.

She turned her head. Andi wasn't in her sleeping bag. This didn't surprise her; Andi was probably scouting out the woods for traps and snares. Hunting was illegal in national forests, but that didn't stop some people.

She whipped around when she heard Andi's voice. “Come here!” It was more of a savage whisper than a shout. Andi had come out of the stand of trees some thirty feet away. Mary got up.

Through the undergrowth they watched a man bent over so that his fat buttocks hid whatever task he was performing. There was a pile of cones and dead branches beside him, as if he meant to build a fire. Then he moved and Mary could see his arm pulling something out of a hole.

He was using barbed wire to get at them. Two coyote pups were lying dead on the ground near him. Their yapping had ceased. The one he was pulling out now was making what weak noise it could.

“Here ya come, li'l fucker,” the man said, as he tossed it on the ground a distance from its two den mates.

Andi whispered, “He's got a gun in his holster. Stay here.” Quickly, soundlessly, she ran back in the direction of the car.

Mary heard a whirring, looked up and saw a helicopter floating its shadow across the forest, and then saw a big coyote—the mother, possibly—on a ridge overlooking the small clearing. The fat man heard the plane too, fell on the ground when the helicopter's passengers strafed the ground with bullets. The coyote's silver coat seemed to smoke in the cloud of cordite made by the shot. It disappeared from view.

The fat man shouted skyward, “Goddamn fools! It ain't only
ky-otes
down here!”

Mary felt stiff with rage. Fear, too, when Andi rushed back, this time carrying a handgun. “My God!” Mary whispered fiercely.
“Where'd you get—?” But hadn't she suspected it? That smiley-face bag had to have more in it than T-shirts and an Elmore Leonard book.