Coyote Dreams

“Parta my charm,” he said, still triumphant. “I gotta fare, Jo. Gotta go. Call the kid.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Gary.” I beeped the phone off and sat there in my bathroom doorway, staring at my bed. It sat there, bedlike, tidy except for the pillow I’d dislodged. No startling attractive men appeared in it. After a minute I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Just to get you off my back,” to Gary, though he was neither there nor likely to believe me if he could hear me. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed me. Either way, I got Mark’s number out of the garbage and hoped for an answering machine.

To both my delight and dismay, I got one. I straightened with surprise and stuttered out a message, not sure if I wanted any of it to sound like “Call me back.”

Right before I said, “So, uh, bye,” the phone got snatched up with a clatter and Mark, a trifle breathlessly, said, “Joanne? Hi, sorry, I was in the shower. I heard your voice on the machine. Are you still there?”

I slumped against the door frame. “Yeah. Hi, Mark.”

“I didn’t think you’d call. Gosh, I’m glad you did.”

“Did you really just say gosh?”

A laugh came through the line, somewhere between pleased and embarrassed. “I did. Does that count against me?”

“It’s kind of cute,” I admitted more honestly than I’d intended to. “Look, Mark, this really isn’t a good time. I just wanted to call because, um.” Because Gary had told me to. I was twenty-seven years old. I wasn’t sure because somebody told me to was a legitimate reason for calling a boy. “To say it wasn’t a good time.”

“Not a good time for what?” he asked, more insightfully than I would’ve liked. “To talk on the phone or to talk at all? Is this the ‘It was a horrible mistake’ speech?”

“It was a horrible mistake, or it would’ve been if we’d had sex, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t, so it wasn’t. Except I don’t bring guys home, so it was.”

“We didn’t?” Mark, unlike me, sounded sort of disappointed. “Are you sure?”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed, even if it was still a sort of shaky sound, and bonked my head against the door frame. “Physical evidence on my part suggests we didn’t. Look, I’m sure you’re very nice, but frankly, I don’t know how to deal with you, and I don’t really think I want to have to figure it out.” That, again, was rather more honest than I’d intended to be. To my surprise, Mark laughed.

“At least you don’t pull your punches. Tell you what. Everything I know about you is you’ve got a sexy car—”

Anybody who compliments my car earns a special place in my heart. I melted for a moment.

“—and a sexier body—”

“Oh, get real.” The thaw was over.

Mark ignored my protest and continued, “You don’t cook and you’ve got a bunch of early-rising friends and you can outdrink half a police department. Now, what do you know about me?”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and peered at it, then sighed and put it back. “You’re cute, you cook and for some reason you apparently find me attractive. That’s about it.” That and he made the bed, which I didn’t want to mention, even if it was a point in his favor.

“Right. So that’s enough to get a first date on, right?”

“Sure. Wait.”

Too late. “I’ll see you for dinner tonight, then. Eight?”

“I—”

“Great! We’ll go somewhere decent. You can drive.” I could almost hear his grin and wink. “See you tonight, Joanne.” He hung up before I had a chance to get out of it, and left me gaping at the phone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Plodding down to the parking lot wasn’t taking a shower, and it certainly wasn’t the best way to help Billy, but I found myself doing it, anyway, after finally putting the phone back in its cradle. I padded across the lot to the tree I’d parked Petite beneath, popping her trunk and wincing as the wrinkled steel creaked in protest. There hadn’t been time or money enough lately to start hammering the dents out. The insurance company still hadn’t paid up for the so-reported “act of vandalism” that had taken place back in January. I had full coverage on my baby. I thought the damned insurance company should stop dicking around and give me my money. It wasn’t like they even had to pay for a mechanic’s work, since I did all my own.

I pulled the jack and toolbox out of Petite’s trunk, still not quite thinking about what I was doing, and gave the gas tank cover an extra reassuring pat before I closed the trunk. It was an ongoing apology for having let somebody shoot an arrow through it, part of the same vandalism that’d ripped a twenty-eight-inch hole in her roof. I had no idea what else to call riders of the Wild Hunt taking axes and longbows to her. I didn’t think the insurance company would cough up at all if I claimed it was an act of gods.

A minute later I was on my back under the engine, tinkering with hot metal and inhaling the scent of gasoline and oil. Somewhat belatedly I realized I wasn’t wearing grubby clothes, and performed a shrug against the warm concrete I lay on. Yet another shirt and jeans relegated to the mechanic pile. I was going to have to go shopping soon.

A vague prickle of guilt set in as I fiddled with bolts. It wasn’t Petite that needed work. It was me. My head was spinning. I rarely got drunk. I never brought guys home, even if I had not, at least, actually slept with the one in question. I certainly didn’t find myself calling the guy back and agreeing to go out on a date. Well, I wouldn’t have thought I did, anyway. It’d never happened before, so apparently it was what I’d do in that situation. It still didn’t seem like me. I was by nature a much more isolated person than that.

I’d grown up on the road, my father unwilling to settle down for more than a few months. The one time he’d stayed anywhere over a year, a one-night stand he’d had showed up again and dumped a kid on him before flying back to Ireland without so much as an explanation. I’d had a pretty clear idea from a very early age what he was trying to leave behind.

Me.

My earliest memories were of mashing my nose against the car window, watching other vehicles whip by and calling “Zoom! Zoom!” at them. I loved the leather seats and the tangy scent of old cigarettes, the way the world skimmed by effortlessly and the thrum of power that shook the car as we took interstates and blue roads, always exploring. Dad taught me to read and how to fix cars, the two of us pulled off the road, me holding a flashlight while he bent his dark head over the engine. I got most of my primary school education that way, visiting historical sites and reading books about what had happened there. The one time I remember Dad having any real emotional response to one of those history lessons was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He never before or after made much comment about it, maybe because although he was as pureblood Indian as you could get, I was only a half blood, but there was a serious undercurrent of stupid white men to that particular lesson. The truth is, I’d think anybody who stood there and looked out over the battlefield lands would think stupid white men, because even I could tell that no one in his right mind would get in a fight there. But that wasn’t really the point, and after that, Dad started teaching me Cherokee. I didn’t remember much of it anymore, but there’d been a while when I was seven or eight when it was almost all we spoke.

That was also when we started stopping in small towns for up to a semester at a time, so I could get some proper education. Dad never really understood that I was badly socialized, having only had him for company, or that a white girl—because despite the tan I currently had, my coloring was my mother’s: pale skin, green eyes and black hair—who spoke an Indian language wasn’t going to fit in. He never had much idea that grades were at different levels all over the country, or that several weeks to a semester was only long enough for me to always be the new kid, not to belong. The older I got, the more I resented it, until I was old enough to enter high school and put my foot down. I told Dad he had to choose a place for us to stay for my whole high school career.

It was like he’d never seen me before. Behind all the years of resentment I had this feeling that at least it was always me and Dad against the world, but the way he looked at me was more like it’d been him on the road alone all that time, and suddenly this young woman had appeared to make demands of him. We went back to North Carolina, where he’d grown up and I’d never been. I spent my high school years in the Eastern Cherokee Nation, fitting in just as poorly as I ever had. Those were the borders I tended to define myself by. When I stretched outside of them, like I’d done with Mark, I found myself turning to the one thing I really knew I could rely on.

Cars. They were my home, my first memories, my comfort foods and smells, and they could take me away from all the things that were wrong with the world. When the going got tough, the tough went shopping, but I went to work on my car.

Concrete and asphalt, even sun-warmed, wasn’t exactly the most comfortable bed I’d ever lain on, but it was enough to have me yawning until my eyes watered within half an hour of starting to tinker on Petite’s undercarriage. A distant jangle sounded right next to my ear, the wrench sliding from sleepy fingers, but I couldn’t convince my hand to grope around for it. Eh, it didn’t matter. Nobody was likely to come along and nick my stuff while I was lying right next to it. It wasn’t as if I was actually going to take a nap in the parking lot, even if I did feel a bit stretched thin and gooey, like the asphalt was folding itself around me, one big comfy bed.

The sky was the wrong shade of blue. It was a color I knew, hard and pure and unrelenting, but it wasn’t the color I was used to. I squinted against it, tracking the sun from the corner of my eye. It, too, was without remorse or gentleness, heat intense enough to redden my skin just from a few minutes’ exposure. Weight pressed down on me, both in the dryness of the air and in the inescapable sense that this was one of the more important moments of my life.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, hotter and drier than the air. I turned to look up—unusual; I wasn’t used to looking up at much of anybody—and the scene changed around me.

Hot air became muggy, so full of water I choked on my first breath, tears suddenly blurring my vision. Heat vastly more intense than the air outside radiated at me, a fire built up in the center of a compact mudroom. I was one of four in the room, the other three sitting at cardinal points around the fire. I knelt, blinking against the heat, my hands on my thighs, and felt long hair sticking to my shoulders and back. I had never worn my hair long. My father had, but neither he nor I were patient enough to deal with a child’s tangles, and the unfamiliar feeling sent a shudder up my spine. I was not me, but I didn’t know who I was. Usually in dreams even when I was someone else, I thought I was me; now I felt like the butterfly wondering if he was a man, or maybe the other way around.

I tried to look down, but my head wouldn’t respond to my command, neck remaining stiff and my gaze direct and hot on the overwhelming fire. My heart knocked around inside me with a child’s excitement that I tried to quell: it wasn’t appropriate, no more than the grin that kept wanting to stretch across my face. I needed to be solemn and adult for this, the itchy idea that it would be taken away otherwise skittering over my skin. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I still struggled to be serious about it all. That was what everyone expected, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

Time compressed and ballooned, stretching me across it like taffy until I felt barely attached to my body, a heady swimming sensation that made nausea float in my belly. Voices sang in the background, drums thudding with resolute direction. Sometimes I joined in, singing words I didn’t know in a language I didn’t recognize. Mostly, though, I let the songs and the heat and the drums sink into my skin, and pull me farther and farther away from my body. That was the purpose: I was there to be guided. Later I would become more active in these rituals, but for now I was the student.

A part of me, far beneath the music and the taffy feeling, said, so this is how it should have been, but that didn’t make much sense to me as I snapped apart from my body and drifted into a place of absolute quiet blackness.

Oddly enough, I knew where I was. It wasn’t the Dead Zone, the starless place between life and death and other worlds, though how I could tell the difference between one utter darkness and another, I wasn’t sure. Sparks of life floated through this place, like invisible motes reflected from inside my eyes. I drifted for what felt like a long time, watching them, aware that somewhere behind the bones of my ears, I could still hear the drums beating.

I couldn’t remember being so relaxed. The darkness was warm, unlike in the Dead Zone, where it had weight and purpose and chill, even when it wasn’t being visited by deadly snake-gods. I could rest here forever, warm and content and safe.

One of the floaties popped into something brighter and more solid, making me chuckle. Last time I’d seen these things, a whole host of them had come tumbling out of the black to rassle for dominance over one another. This time only one creature came, that quick burst of light seeming distant and hopeful. It was a coyote, I could see that, more ethereal than my Coyote and much more playful than the Big Coyote I’d met in the desert. It disappeared, leaving me resting in darkness again, then leaped forward, suddenly far closer.

The fourth time it reappeared, it did so directly in front of me, and looked up with a loll-tongued grin before butting its head against my thigh so hard I felt the ache all the way to the bone. I offered my hand, grinning back at the spirit animal, and it wrapped its long tongue around my wrist, then without warning or pain, began chowing down on my arm.

Surprise ricocheted through me, more out of familiarity and unexpectedness than fear or anger, and I gaped down at the spirit coyote’s silver fur and see-through lines as it worked on swallowing me whole. I’d been through this before, though I realized quite suddenly that the person I was in my dream hadn’t been. That part of me knew to expect this, but still felt more than a little horror and panic at being had for lunch. I had the peculiar sensation of trying to reassure myself that everything would be okay, and the even more peculiar sensation of not getting through to myself. After a few seconds I realized that for the other part of me, having Coyote eat me hurt, and I remembered that being the thunderbird’s snack hadn’t been a bowl of cherries, either. I was trying to figure out how to get past the pain and offer new reassurances when something nudged my ankle.

I peeled my arm away from my eyes, blinking blearily at legs visible up to slacks-clad knees. The knees bent into a crouch, hands dangling over them as Mark peered down the length of Petite’s undercarriage to grin at me. “This your idea of a fancy date, Joanne?”

Tuesday, July 5, 7:53 p.m.

I crunched up several inches, then crashed back down again, having narrowly avoided smashing my head on Petite’s engine. “Ma—uh? What’re you—what time is it? Jesus!” I flinched up a second time, again just barely missing bashing my head, and rolled to the side, getting out from beneath my car before I did myself serious injury. “Did I fall asleep out here?”