Coyote Blue (13 page)

Sam stood by, trying to fight the objections that were rising in his mind about the speed at which things were progressing. She just assumed that he would say yes; it made him feel like – well – a slut. Then again, if this beautiful girl wanted to make love with him, who was he to object? Okay, so he was a slut; he was a tough and adaptable slut. Still, there was one thing that bothered him. "What if Yiffer and Nina come home with the pizza?"

"Oh, I don't think they'll be home that soon. This first time will be pretty fast."

"Hey." Sam thought he might have just been insulted, but on second thought he realized that the girl had just voiced something that he had really been worrying about, without even admitting it to himself. On second thought, she had relieved the pressure on him to perform.

Calliope finished fluffing the pillows, then unlaced her dress and let it drop to the floor. She stepped out of it and went to the stereo, where she turned up the volume, then she crawled naked under the top blanket and pulled it up to her neck. "Okay," she said.

Sam sat on the couch, stunned. She was stunning. But where was the seduction, the deception, the sweet lies and tender posturing? Where was the hunt, the cat-and-mouse game? Sam just stared at her and thought,
This is entirely too honest.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yes, it's just kind of…"

"You want me and I want you. Right?"

Who did she think she was? You can't just go around blurting out the truth like a prophet with Tourette's syndrome. He said, "Well, I guess. Yeah, that's right."

"Well?" She threw the covers back to make room for him.

Sam leapt off the couch and fought his way out of his clothes. He was under the covers, taking her into his arms, before his shirt settled to the floor. At the touch of her skin, her warmth, he felt every muscle in his body tense, then melt against her. He kissed her for a long time with none of the fumbling or awkwardness that he expected. He entered her and they began to move together in slow rhythm to the music. Calliope let out a long, low moan and dug her fingers into the muscles of his back. He joined her in the moan and pushed deeper, losing suddenly any thoughts or images or reservations, damn near losing consciousness to the warm, dark rhythm. A door slammed, violently shaking the windows of the apartment.

Sam pushed up on his arms. "What was that?"

"Nothing," she said, pulling him down.

Another door slammed, louder than the first. Sam pushed up again. "They're home."

"No, that's downstairs. Please." She wrapped her legs around his back and pulled him tight.

Distracted, Sam began to move again and Calliope moaned. A door slammed, glass shattered, and J. Nigel began crying in the front bedroom.

"What in the hell was that?"

"Nothing. Not now. Make love to me, Sam."

The house shook with the impact of a slamming door, then another, and Grubb began to cry as well. Sam winced, and came completely without pleasure. "Sorry," he said as he rolled over onto his back. Calliope stared at the ceiling for a moment as if she was bracing for the next impact. When it came she leapt to her feet and stormed naked out onto the balcony.

She bent over the railing and shouted, "Why are you doing this?"

Sam turned down the stereo and listened. Another door slammed, shaking the house, then a pathetic male voice came from below. "You've got someone up there. You slut."

"Don't talk to me that way. I don't act this way when you have someone down there."

Sam wanted to join her on the balcony, come to her defense ("Hey, buddy, she's not the slut here!"), but he couldn't seem to locate his pants.

"You whore!" the male voice said. "I'm taking my son."

"No, you're not!"

"You'll see," the voice said. Another door slam. Sam flinched. He was getting a little shell-shocked trying to put the pieces of this mystery together between slams.

"Jerk!" Calliope screamed. She stormed inside, slammed the door, and breezed by Sam on her way to tend to Grubb and J. Nigel. Sam sat naked on the floor wishing for a cigarette, or a clue, and repeating his new mantra in his head,
tough and adaptable, tough and adaptable…

In a few minutes, after the door slams had dwindled to one every few minutes, as if the guy downstairs was calming down, then losing his temper in spurts, Calliope appeared in the doorway, still naked.

"We need to talk," she said.

Sam was dressed now, desperately yearning for a cigarette, but he'd left them in the car and he wasn't about to pass the maniac downstairs without more information. "That would be good," he said.

Calliope picked up her dress and slipped it on, then sat down on the couch. "You're probably wondering who that is downstairs."

For the first time she seemed really uncomfortable, and Sam felt for her. "It's okay. I've had some trouble with my neighbors recently. It happens."

She smiled. "I used to be with him. He's Grubb's father "

"I gathered that."

"I was doing a lot of drugs then. He was exciting: riding his Harley, tattoos, guns."

"Guns?"

"I left him when I found out I was pregnant. He didn't want me to have the baby and he didn't want me to quit getting high."

"But why move upstairs?"

"I didn't. He moved in downstairs. You're the first man that I've had over since the split. I didn't know he'd act this way."

"Why don't you move?"

"You know how Santa Barbara is. I couldn't even pay rent here if it weren't for Nina, let alone come up with first, last, and a cleaning deposit."

Sam could see that she was still embarrassed. "You could ask the landlord to remove his doors. It would be quieter."

"I'm sorry. I really wanted it to be nice."

"Maybe I should go." Despite the weirdness, he didn't want to leave.

"I wish you would stay. When Grubb goes to sleep we can go in my room. If we're quiet…"

"I'll stay," Sam said. "He won't come up here and shoot us, will he?"

"No, I don't think so. He keeps talking about getting custody of Grubb. Killing us would look bad with the judge."

"Right," Sam said. So what if she had been involved with a psycho. At least it was a psycho who thought ahead.

Calliope led Sam down a hallway to her room at the back of the apartment. "I'll get us some salad," she said, leaving Sam to sit on the twin bed next to the crib where Grubb was drowsily gnawing a pacifier. The room looked like it had been decorated by a Buddhist monk from "Sesame Street." On top of the dresser sat effigies of Buddha, Shiva, Bert, Ernie, and Cookie Monster, as well as an incense burner, a small gong, and a box of Pampers. A stuffed Mickey Mouse on the dressing chair wore a necklace of quartz crystal and a rawhide ring that Sam recognized as a Navaho dream catcher. The walls were hung with pictures of the Dalai Lama, Kali the Destroyer, and the Smurfs.

Looking around, Sam felt tempted to construct an excuse and bolt. Now that he'd had a moment to think about it, his tough and adaptable veneer was feeling pretty thin. If he could just get back to normal for a while he'd be okay. Then it hit him: there was no normal to return to. The controlled status quo that had been his life was no longer there; it had been shattered by Coyote, and Coyote was out there somewhere. Calliope, and all the chaos around her, had made him forget. Even with Smurfs, psychos, and kitchen pals, the forgetting was worth staying for.

Chapter 16 – Live, Via the Spirit

World Satellite Network Santa

Barbara

Lonnie Ray Inman was sitting in a worn leather easy chair listening for noises to sift down from upstairs. He had loaded and unloaded his Colt Python.357 Magnum four times, nervously fumbling its deadly weight as he alternately entertained fantasies of vengeance and prison. Every few minutes he would rise and go to the window to see if the black Mercedes was still parked out front, then he would pause at the front closet, where he opened and slammed the door until the violence in his heart subsided enough for him to sit again. He was short and dark and muscles stood out on his bare arms like cables. The front of his black tank top was soaked with blood where he had ripped the skin of his chest with his fingernails, trying to destroy the tattoo of a naked woman, the same woman whose picture was airbrushed on the tank of his Harley, the same woman who had turned his thoughts to murder. Lonnie Ray Inman dropped six cartridges into the cylinder of the Python and snapped it shut, determined this time to make it out the door and up the stairs, where he would burst through the door and kill Calliope's new lover.

Fuck prison.

~* * *~

A thousand miles away, ten thousand feet up in the Bighorn Mountains, Pokey Medicine Wing watched Lonnie loading the gun. Pokey was into the second day of his fast and had been searching the Spirit World for clues to the whereabouts of his favorite nephew, Samson Hunts Alone. He had called for his spirit helper, Old Man Coyote, to help him, but the trickster had not appeared. Instead he was seeing a white city, with red roofs and palm trees, and a man who wanted to murder Samson.

Pokey's body sat, dangerously close to death, in the middle of a two-hundred-foot stone medicine wheel, the holiest of the Crow fasting places, just west of Sheridan, Wyoming. Pokey had been under the hoof of a bull-moose hangover when he began the fast, and now the dry mountain wind was sucking the last life-water from his body. Alone in the Spirit World, Pokey was unaware of his heart struggling to pump his thickening blood. He looked for a way to warn Samson, and called out for Old Man Coyote to help.

Coyote was in the locker room of the Santa Barbara YWCA when he heard Pokey's call. He had entered as a horsefly, and after watching the women in the showers for a while had changed himself into a baby hedgehog and was rolled into a ball in the soap dish, imitating a loofah. Lazy by nature, Coyote had given his medicine to only three people since time began – Pokey, Samson, and a warrior named Burnt Face, who had built the ancient medicine wheel – so it took him a while to realize that he was being called. Reluctantly, he left the hedgehog body in the capable hands of a soapy aerobics instructor and went to the Spirit World, where he found Pokey waiting.

"What?" Coyote said.

"Old Man Coyote, I need your help."

"I know," Coyote said. "You are dying."

"No, I need to find my nephew, Samson."

"But you are dying."

"I am? Shit!"

"You should end this fast now, old man."

"But what about Samson?"

"I've been helping Samson. Don't worry."

"But he has an enemy who is going to kill him. I saw him, but I don't know where he is."

"I know he has enemies. I am Coyote. I know everything. What's this guy look like?"

"He's white. He has a gun."

"That narrows it down."

"He has a tattoo of a woman on his chest – it's bleeding. He looks out a window and sees a motorcycle and a black car. That's all I know."

"Do you have any water on the mountain where your body is?"

"No. There's a little snow."

"I will help you," Coyote said. "Go now."

Suddenly Pokey was back in his body, sitting on the mountain. In his lap he found a package of dry Kool-Aid that had not been there before. He looked down at it and smiled, then fell forward into the dirt.

In the shower of the YWCA a naked aerobics instructor screamed and ran into the locker room when the loofah she was using turned into a raven. The bird circled the locker room twice and nipped her on the bottom with its beak before flying down the hall, into the lobby, and out an open skylight.

~* * *~

Across town, Calliope took the empty salad bowl from Sam and set it on the dresser next to a statue of Buddha. "More?" she asked.

"No, I'm full," Sam whispered. Grubb had fallen asleep in his crib and Sam didn't want to risk waking him. "Calliope," he said, "is this guy dangerous?"

"Lonnie? No. He thinks he's tough because he's in a biker club, but I don't think he's dangerous. His friends are a little scary, though. They take a lot of PCP and it makes them spiritually dense."

"I hate that," Sam said, proud because he was spiritually dense without the aid of drugs.

"I'm going to take the dishes out and check on J. Nigel. Why don't you light some candles? I don't think we should turn on the stereo, though. It might irritate Lonnie."

"We wouldn't want that," Sam said.

~* * *~

Outside, a raven landed on the hood of Sam's car. Lonnie Ray saw it from his window. "Shit on it. Shit on it," he said, but as he watched the raven seemed to disappear. Lonnie slammed the closet door until the doorframe splintered.

Coyote was a mosquito making his way through the air vents of the Mercedes. He flew out of the defroster vent and settled on the driver's seat, where he became a man. Sam's Rolodex was on the passenger seat next to his pack of cigarettes. Coyote lit a cigarette and flipped through the Rolodex until he found the card he was looking for. He removed it and tucked it into the waist of his buckskins.

~* * *~

Lonnie Ray was rattling through the kitchen cabinets, looking for liquor, when he heard the pounding at his front door. On his way through the living room he snatched the Python off the easy chair and shoved it in his jeans at the small of his back. He threw open the door and was nearly knocked down by the Indian who brushed him aside on the way into the room.

The Indian looked around the room and wheeled on Lonnie Ray. "Where is he? Where's the bastard hiding?"

Lonnie Ray recovered his balance and dropped his right hand to the grip of the Colt. "Who the fuck are you?"

"Don't worry about it. Where's the guy that drives that Mercedes?"

In spite of his own anger, Lonnie Ray was intrigued. "What do you want him for?"

"That's my business, but if he owes you money, you'd better get it back before I find him."

"You going to kill him?" Lonnie asked.

"If he's lucky," the Indian said.

"You got a gun?"

"I don't need a gun. Now where is he?"

"Chill, man, I might be able to help you out."

"I don't have time for this," the Indian said. "I'll just catch him at his house."

"You know where he lives?" Lonnie Ray asked. This was like a gift from heaven. He could send the Indian up to Calliope's to do the dirty work: no risk, no prison. If it didn't work, he and the boys could surprise the guy at his house tomorrow, no witnesses. Lonnie Ray hadn't really relished the idea of having to shoot Calliope, anyway.

"Yeah, I know where the bastard lives," the Indian said. "But he ain't there. He's somewhere around here."

"You give me his address, I'll tell you where he is."

"Fuck that," the Indian said, shoving Lonnie against the wall. "You'll tell me now."

Lonnie brought the barrel of the Python up under the Indian's chin. "I don't think so."

The Indian froze. "It's on a card in my pants."

Lonnie Ray held out his free hand. "Don't ever tell someone you don't have a gun, dipshit."

The Indian lifted his buckskin shirt, pulled a card from his waistband, and handed it to Lonnie Ray, who glanced at it and spun the Indian around by one shoulder, pointing him out the door.

Lonnie ground the barrel of the Python into the Indian's spine, stood on his toes, and whispered threateningly into the Indian's ear. "You didn't come here and you didn't see me. You understand?"

The Indian nodded.

"He's upstairs," Lonnie whispered. "Now go!" He shoved the Indian out the door. "And never, never fuck with a brother of the Guild." Lonnie closed the door. "Fucking A," he said with a giggle.

~* * *~

Upstairs, Calliope said, "Tell me what you know, Sam."

"About what?"

"About anything." She sat down next to him on the bed and brushed his hair back with her fingers. "Tell me what you know."

The silence that followed would have been awkward except Calliope seemed to expect it. She stroked his hair while he tried to think of what to say. He sorted through facts and figures and histories and strategies. Clever retorts, meaningless jokes, sophistries and non sequiturs rose in his mind and fell unspoken. She rubbed his neck and found a knot in the muscle that she worked her fingertips into.

"That feels good," Sam said.

"That's what you know?"

A smile rose to Sam's lips. "Yes," he said.

"What do you want?" she asked.

He shot her a sideways glance and saw the candlelight gleaming in her eyes. She was serious, waiting for an answer. "Is this a test?"

"No. What do you want?"

"Why don't you ask me what I do for a living? Where I live? Where I'm from? How old I am? You don't even know my last name."

"Would that stuff tell me who you are?"

Sam turned to face her and took her hand from his neck. He still had a niggling mistrust of her and he wanted to let it go. "The truth now -Calliope, are you part of something he cooked up? Some trick?"

"No. Who's he?"

"Never mind." Sam turned away from her again, stared at a candle flame on the dresser, and tried to think. She really didn't know about Coyote. What now?

"Well, what do you want?" she asked again.

He snapped, "Dammit, I don't know."

She didn't recoil or seem hurt, but began rubbing his neck again. "You came here because you wanted me, didn't you?"

"No. Yes, I guess I did." It wasn't bad enough that she had to keep telling the truth; now she was expecting it back, and he was out of practice.

"We've had sex. Do you want to go now?"

Christ, she was like some gorgeous New Age district attorney. "No, I…"

Do you want a bowl of chocolate marshmallow ice cream?"

That would be great!" Sam said. Off the hook, no further questions, Your Honor.

See, it's not that hard to figure out what you want." She got up and left the room, heading for the kitchen again.

am sat back and waited, realizing that it had been some time since a door had slammed downstairs. Suddenly he was very uncomfortable with the silence. When he heard footfalls on the stairs outside he leapt to his feet and ran to the kitchen.