Coyote Blue (14 page)

Chapter 17 – A White Picket Fence

Around Chaos Santa Barbara

Sam hit the kitchen just as Yiffer stepped through the screenless section of the screen door.

"Cool! Ice cream!" Yiffer said, staggering to Calliope's side at the counter.

"Keep it down, Yiffer. I just got Grubb and J. Nigel down." Calliope picked up two full bowls of ice cream and nodded to the carton on the counter. "You can have the rest."

"Bitchin'." Yiffer grabbed a serving spoon from the empty salad bowl and dug into the ice cream, shoveling a baseball-sized clump into his mouth. Sam watched in amazement as Yiffer mouthed the ice cream until he got his jaws closed around it, then swallowed the whole clump, dipping his head snakelike to facilitate the passage. "Oh, shit, man," Yiffer said as he dropped the spoon and bent over, grabbing the bridge of his nose. "Major ice cream headache. Ouch!"

Sam heard footsteps on the stairs outside, ran to the door, and popped his head out to see who was coming, ready to duck back inside should it be the crazed biker from downstairs. To his relief, Nina was trudging up the steps, obviously a little drunk herself. "Did Yiffer come home?"

Sam said, "He's punishing himself with ice cream as we speak."

"I'll kill him." She ran the rest of the way up the steps and Sam helped her wrestle the door open, then he stepped out of harm's way as she stormed by him to Yiffer, who was still bent over, now holding his temples.

"You jerk!" Nina shrieked. "Who was that woman at the bar? And where the hell is my money?"

"Babe, I'm in pain here. I'm suffering."

Nina raised her fist as if to hammer Yiffer's back, then she spotted the serving spoon, picked it up, and began whacking the surfer unmercifully on the head with it. "You want pain (whack!), I'll give you pain (whack! whack! whack!). Suffering? (whack!) You wouldn't (whack!) know (whack!) suffering (whack!) if (whack!)…"

"Well," Calliope said. "I guess you guys need a little space. C'mon, Sam." She led Sam out of the kitchen and back to her bedroom. They sat eating and listening to Yiffer whining under Nina's attack. After a few minutes she was losing momentum and Yiffer's whines turned to moans. Soon Nina was moaning with him rhythmically. Sam stared at the candle on the dresser as if he hadn't noticed.

"They do this all the time," Calliope offered. "I think Nina gets in touch with that male energy that equates violence and sex."

"Excuse me?"

"Hitting Yiffer makes her horny."

"Oh," Sam said. He flinched at the sound of breaking dishes from the kitchen. Nina screamed, "Oh, yes, you asshole! Yes!" Yiffer groaned. The house shook with the sound of a door slamming downstairs and J. Nigel joined the din with a wail of his own.

"Lonnie must think that we're doing it," Calliope said.

"Do you think he'll give us time to explain before he shoots us?"

"Don't think about it." Calliope stood and stepped out of her dress, then gestured for Sam to take off his shirt. The moaning in the kitchen was rising in intensity and J. Nigel was wailing like a siren. The windows rattled with a salvo of door slams.

Sam looked at her and thought,
A bowl of ice cream, a load of loonies, and thou…
"Now?" he said. "Are you sure?"

Calliope nodded. She pulled his shirt off, then pushed him back on the bed and took off his shoes. Sam let her undress him as he tried to put the noise out of his mind. As she pulled the sheet over him and crawled in beside him, he imagined the two of them being shot in the act. When she kissed him he barely felt it.

In the crib next to them Grubb began to stir, and with the next series of door slams and a crash from the kitchen he came awake crying. Despite Calliope's soft warmth against him and the smell of jasmine on her hair, Sam was unable to respond.

"He'll be okay," Calliope said. She stroked Sam's cheek and kissed him gently on the forehead.

"I'll be back in a second," Sam said.

He got up and wrapped his shirt around his hips, then, checking the hallway, he darted out of the room and into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him and leaned against it, staring blankly at the ceiling. The sex sounds from the kitchen reached a crescendo with a piercing scream from Nina, then stopped, leaving only the sounds of crying babies and slamming doors. Sam took a deep breath. "I can't do this," he said to himself. "This is too weird. Too fucking weird." He lowered the lid of the toilet and sat facing the shower stall, assuming the posture of Rodin's Thinker. For once in his life, it really seemed to matter that the sex be good, but this was like a combat zone. "I can't do this," he said.

"Sure you can," a voice said from behind the shower curtain. Sam screamed and jumped to the top of the toilet tank. Coyote stepped out of the shower holding a beaded leather pouch.

"What in the hell are you doing here?" Sam asked.

"I'm here to help," Coyote said.

"Well, get out of here. I don't need your help."

"You are wasting that woman."

"Do you have any idea what is going on around here? Listen." Another door slammed and Nina resumed shouting at Yiffer. From what Sam could make out it had something to do with the yard sale.

"You must leave here, then," Coyote said. "You must find a place on the woman's body and live there. Hear only her breath, smell only her scent."

"If you don't get out of here I won't even have a chance. What if she sees you? How could I explain your being here?" Thinking about it, Sam realized that if he told Calliope that there was an ancient trickster god in her bathroom she would accept it without question – would probably ask for an introduction.

Coyote held out the beaded pouch. "Put this on your member."

"What is it?" Sam asked, taking the pouch.

"Passion powder. It will make you as strong and stiff as a lance."

Sam shook the contents of the pouch – a fine brown powder – into the palm of his hand. He sniffed it. "What is it?"

"Corn pollen, cedar, sweet grass, sage, powdered elk semen – it is an old and powerful recipe. Try it."

"No way."

"You want the woman to think you are not a man?"

"If I try it will you go?"

Coyote grinned. "Put just a pinch on your member and you will pleasure the woman to tears."

"And you'll go?"

Coyote nodded. Sam tentatively took a pinch of the powder and began to sprinkle it on his penis.

Calliope opened the bathroom door, catching Sam in mid-sprinkle. "You won't need that, honey," she said. "I'm on the pill."

"But…" Sam looked around for Coyote, but the trickster was gone. "I was just…"

"Being responsible," Calliope said. "Thank you. Now come to bed." She took his hand and led him out of the bathroom. Sam submitted, glancing over his shoulder for signs of Coyote.

Yiffer and Nina had taken the fight to their bedroom. Nina was calling Yiffer an idiot and going on about a newspaper ad being misplaced. A door slammed downstairs and Yiffer stormed out of the bedroom. "I'm going to kick his ass!" he shouted. In the hall he looked up at Calliope and Sam as he passed. "Hi, kids," he said, then he proceeded down the hall. Sam could hear the kitchen screen door ripping off the hinges as Yiffer went through. "You're history, biker boy!"

Calliope pulled Sam into the bedroom and closed the door.

"Shouldn't we call the police or something?" Sam asked.

"No, he'll be okay. Lonnie's afraid of Yiffer. He won't fight him and he's afraid to shoot him because of jail."

"Oh, everything's fine, then," Sam said.

"Come to bed," Calliope said. Sam shot a glance to Grubb, who was lying quietly on his side staring suspiciously at Sam over the edge of a pacifier, as if saying, "What are you doing with my mom?"

"Can we blow out the candles?" Sam asked.

Without a word Calliope blew out the candles and pulled Sam down on top of her on the bed. Outside, the sounds of Nina screaming down from the top of the stairs, Yiffer pounding on Lonnie's door, and J. Nigel crying for attention faded into white noise.

"You must find a place on the woman's body and live there."
In the dark, the noise far away, Sam ran his hands over Calliope's body and the world of work and worry seemed to move away.

He found two depressions at the bottom of her back where sunlight collected, and he lived there, out of the wind and the noise. He grew old there, died, and ascended to the Great Spirit, found heaven in her cheek on his chest, the warm wind of her breath across his stomach carried sweet grass and sage, and…

In another lifetime he lived on the soft skin under her right breast, his lips riding light over the ridge and valley of every rib, shuffling through downy, dew-damp hairs like a child dancing through autumn leaves. On the mountain of her breast, he fasted at the medicine wheel of her aureole, received a vision that he and she were steam people, mingled wet with no skin separating them. And there he lived, happy. And for the first time in years he felt that he was home. She followed, traveled, lived with him and in him as he was in her. They lived lifetimes and slept and dreamed together.

It was swell.

Chapter 18 – Shadowphobia

Saturday morning Josh Spagnola was sleeping in and dreaming of putting shampoo into bunnies' eyes when the Harley-Davidson crashed through his front door carrying a 270-pound, pissed-off, speed-crazed biker named Tinker. With the crash and thunder of the bike in his living room, Spagnola sat up in his nest of satin sheets thinking earthquake, listening for the sounds of his burglar alarms, which did not come. Spagnola's house was wired six ways to stop an elegant picklock or spry cutpurse from entering by stealth, sneak, or cat's-paw; he had, in fact, protected himself against someone exactly like himself. That anyone would break in on a battering ram of Milwaukee iron, in broad daylight, had never occurred to him.

Tinker, on the other hand, took the words
breaking and entering
quite literally, and found entering a rather empty experience without substantial breaking. He carried on his belt a policeman's riot baton, a blackjack, two hunting knives, and a set of brass knuckles. In a rare moment of sanity he had left his guns at home. His lawyer had advised against guns while on probation.

Tinker had received an early-morning call from Lonnie Ray, one of his brothers in the Guild.

"You want him dead?" Tinker had asked Lonnie.

"No, just fuck him up. And don't wear your colors. I don't want any connection to me."

"Is he big?" Tinker had a deep-seated fear of someday meeting someone as large and violent as himself.

"I don't know. Just wait until I call. You'll see the black Mercedes."

"You got it, bro," Tinker said, and hung up.

Tinker tried to wait for Lonnie's call, but he'd been up all night cooking up a batch of methedrine in the Guild's lab, and had lost his patience after sampling the product in order to take the edge off the case of beer he'd drunk. At daybreak his bloodlust got the better of him and he left.

In the bedroom, hearing a Harley do burnouts on his Berber carpet, Spagnola finally realized that something was seriously wrong. He leapt from bed and began searching through a trail of clothes he had left last night on the way to bed with the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday masseuse from the Cliffs. He remembered kicking his gun belt away from the bedroom door when he sent her home at midnight and scrambled to the door. He was bending to unholster the gun when Tinker kicked the door open, catching Spagnola square in the forehead, knocking him cold.

Tinker looked down at the naked, unconscious little man and let out a sigh. The absence of terror was wildly unsatisfying for him. As a gesture of brotherhood to Lonnie he pulled the baton from his belt and with two vicious blows broke both of Spagnola's legs, then he sulked out of the bedroom, mounted his bike, and rode to the Guild's clubhouse to watch Saturday-morning cartoons.

~* * *~

Sam awoke to Yiffer yelling, "Get down! Don't let them see you!"

Sam looked around the room. Calliope and Grubb were gone. He got up and reached for his watch on the dresser while shouts and whispers continued from the living room. Six in the morning. It must have gone on all night: the shouting, the pounding, the babies crying. He was lucky to have slept at all. He dressed and walked into the living room.

"Get down," Yiffer said. "Don't let them see you." Sam dropped to a crouch in the doorway. Nina and Calliope were huddled under the front windows holding the babies. Yiffer was crouched by the door that led to the balcony. He rose up to peek out the window, then instantly dropped to cover.

"What is it?" Sam said. "Is someone shooting?"

Nina said, "No, it's the garage sale people. Stay down."

"Good morning," Calliope said. "Did you sleep well?"

"Fine. Who are the garage sale people?"

"They're fucking predators," Yiffer said. "They keep circling like sharks. Look." Yiffer gestured to the window.

Sam duck-walked to the window and peeked over the edge. Dodge Darts and Ford Escorts were cruising slowly by, stopping in front of the house, then moving slowly on.

Nina said, "Yiffer put the ad in the paper for our yard sale with the wrong date. They're all looking for us."

"Five of them have been to the door already," Yiffer said. "Whatever you do, don't answer it. They'll tear us apart."

"Probably ten of them went to Lonnie's door and left when he didn't answer," Calliope said.

"What happened with Lonnie?" Sam said.

Yiffer rose up and peeked out the window. "Christ! There's a whole van full of them outside." He dropped to a sitting position, his back to the door. To Sam he said, "Lonnie didn't answer when I went down there last night. As soon as he heard me come back upstairs he got on his bike and left."

Nina said, "How long are they going to circle? I have to go to work today."

"They're never going to leave," Yiffer wailed hopelessly. "They're going to just wait and pick us off one by one. We're doomed. We're doomed."

Nina slapped Yiffer across the face. "Get a grip."

Sam could think of only one thing, the cigarettes on the seat of his car. He had gone sixteen hours without a smoke and was feeling as if he would snap like Yiffer in a few minutes if he didn't get some nicotine into his system. "I'm going out there," he said. He felt like John Wayne -before the lung cancer.

"No, dude. Don't do it," Yiffer pleaded.

"I'm going." Sam stood up and Yiffer covered his head as if expecting an explosion. Sam picked up Grubb's plastic donut on wheels. "Can I borrow this?"

"Sure," Calliope said. "Are you coming back?"

Sam paused for a minute, then smiled and took her hand. "Definitely," he said. "I just need to take a shower and handle a few things. I'll call you, okay?" Calliope nodded.

"You'll never see him alive again," Yiffer whined.

Nina looked up apologetically. "He had a lot to drink last night. I'm sorry if our fighting disturbed you."

"No problem," Sam said. "Nice meeting you both." He turned and walked through the kitchen and out the door.

As he went down the steps, the van that Yiffer had spotted screeched to a halt in front of the duplex and a dozen gray-haired ladies piled out and rushed him. They met at the bottom of the steps.

"Where's the sale?" one said.

"This
is
the right address. We checked it twice."

"Where's the bargains? The ad said bargains."

Sam held the plastic donut up before them. "This is it, ladies. I'm sorry, but everything was gone but this when I got here. We were all too late. The quick and the dead, you know."

A collective moan came from the mob, then one shouted, "I'll give you ten bucks for it!"

"Twelve!" another shouted.

"Twelve fifty."

Sam gestured for them to be quiet. "No, I need this," he said solemnly. He hugged the donut to his chest.

Their purpose gone, they milled around for a moment, then gradually wandered back to the van. Sam stood for a moment watching them. The other garage sale people who had been circling the block saw them leaving, and Sam could almost feel the disappointment settling into their collective consciousness as they broke pattern and drove off.

"Great night," Coyote said.

Sam's nerves had been so worn from the night and morning that he didn't even jump at the voice by his ear. He looked over his shoulder to see Coyote in his black buckskins and a huge, white ten-gallon cowboy hat. "Nice hat," Sam said.

"I'm in disguise."

"Swell," Sam said. "I can't get rid of you, can I?"

"Can you wipe off your shadow?"

"That's what I thought,". Sam said. "Let's go."

~* * *~

The shogun of the Big Sky Samurai Golf Course and Hot Springs was worried. His name was Kiro Yashamoto. He was driving his wife and two children in a rented Jeep station wagon up a winding mountain road to look at an ancient Indian medicine wheel. The day before, Kiro had purchased two thousand acres of land (with hot springs and trout stream) near Livingston, Montana, for roughly the price he would have paid for a studio apartment in Tokyo. The deal did not worry him; after the golf course and health club were built he would recoup his investment in a year from the droves of Japanese tourists who would come there. His children worried him.

During this trip Kiro's son, Tommy, who was fourteen, and his daughter, Michiko, who was twelve, had both decided that they wanted to attend American universities and live in the United States. Tommy wanted to run General Motors and Michiko wanted to be a patent attorney. As he drove, Kiro listened to his children discussing their plans in English; they paused only when Kiro pointed out some natural wonder, at which time they would dutifully acknowledge the interruption before returning to their conversation. It had been the same at the Custer Battlefield, the Grand Canyon, and even Disneyland, where the children marveled at the machinations of commerce and missed those of magic.

My children are monsters,
Kiro thought.
And I am responsible. Perhaps if I had read them the haikus of Basho when they were little instead of that American manifesto of high-pressure sales,
Green Eggs and Ham…

Kiro steered the jeep around a long gradual curve that rounded the peak of the mountain and the medicine wheel came into view: huge stones formed spokes almost two hundred feet long. In the center of the wheel a tattered figure lay prostrate in the dirt.

"Look, father," Michiko said. "They have hired an Indian to take tickets and he has fallen asleep on the job."

Kiro got out of the Jeep and walked cautiously toward the center of the wheel. He'd learned a lesson in caution when Tommy had nearly been trampled in Yellowstone National Park while trying to videotape a herd of buffalo. Tommy and Michiko ran to their father's side while Mrs. Yashamoto stayed in the car and checked off the medicine wheel on the itinerary and maps.

Tommy panned the camcorder as he walked. "It's just rocks, Father."

"So is the Zen garden at Kyoto just rocks."

"But you could make a wheel of rocks at your golf course and people wouldn't have to drive up here to see them. You could hire a Japanese to take tickets so you wouldn't lose revenue."

They reached the Indian and Tommy put the camcorder on the macro setting for a close-up. "Look, he has fallen asleep with his face on the ground."

Kiro bent and felt the Indian's neck for a pulse. "Michiko, bring water from the Jeep. Tommy, put down that camera and help me turn this man over. He is sick."

They turned the Indian over and cradled his head on Kiro's rolled-up jacket. He found a beaded wallet in the Indian's overalls and handed it to Tommy. "Look for medical information."

Michiko returned with a bottle of Evian water and handed it to her father. "Mother says that we should leave him here and go get help. She is worried about a lawsuit for improper care."

Kiro waved his daughter away and held the water to the Indian's lips. "This man will not live if we leave him now."

Tommy pulled a square of paper from the beaded wallet. He unfolded it and his face lit up. "Father, this Indian has a personal letter from Lee lacocca, the president of Chrysler."

"Tommy, please look for medical information."

"His name is Pokey Medicine Wing. Listen:

'Dear Mr. Medicine Wing:

'Thank you for your recent suggestion for the naming of our new line of light trucks. It is true that we have had great success with our Dakota line of trucks, as well as the Cherokee, Comanche, and Apache lines of our Jeep/Eagle division, but after investigation by our marketing department we have found that the word
Crow
has a negative connotation with the car-buying public. We also found that the word
Absarokee
was too difficult to pronounce and
Children of the Large-Beaked Bird
was too long and somewhat inappropriate for the name of a truck.

'In answer to your question, we are not aware of any royalties paid to the Navaho tribe by the Mazda Corporation for the use of their name, and we do not pay royalties to the Comanche, Cherokee, or Apache tribes, as these words are registered trademarks of the Jeep Corporation.