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Coyote and Badger
The people thought Coyote odd when he came to live among them. He broke into laughter at unusual times. He sang loud laments in his sleep. He snapped at the air, as if chasing flying insects no one else could see. He was crafty, and they were wary of him at first.
Over the weeks, though, the people grew accustomed to his manner, and he proved helpful in keeping rats out of their corn. Coyote would dig clay from the river bank and shape from it lithe figures, deer that looked like they might leap from the road into the brush, fish so real they could flick a clay tail and dart into the depths of unseen waters.
Coyote was always beautiful, with eyes of ponderosa pine amber, a tail like silk. But when he sculpted his beauty became almost terrifying, as if those eyes held lightning. Most of the people avoided him politely at those times. But there was one woman, a young woman, who could not tear her gaze from Coyote even at his fiercest. Each night for a month she sat quietly as he worked, watching him from behind the old cottonwood. If he knew she was there he did not show it.
At long last one dawn, the third-quarter moon setting, he startled her awake. “It is done,“ he said. He took her hand and led her from behind the tree, turned the sculpture so that she could see it. It was her likeness, faithful enough a reproduction that it made her feel a little faint.
She took him as her mate.
That winter was bitter cold, and there was little food. Her belly swelled with their child, and she was ravenous, but they had only cornmeal to eat, and whatever small game Coyote could capture. On the day the sun hung lowest in the south, a terrible blizzard raged through their town. It got very cold, and they burned a month’s supply of firewood in three days just to keep warm, huddling in damp blankets near the fire.
On the third day Coyote stood. “I am going.“
She gasped. “But where?“
“I must go find some food for us to eat, gather some fuel to keep us warm. We will die otherwise.“
And with that he strode out the door into the face of the storm. She waited for him to return.
He did not return, for a very long time.
Winter passed, and then the next one, and the next.
Coyote was always beautiful, but — on this one day the fifth summer on — he was resplendent. Eyes like melted honey flashed behind his coral-tinted Louis Vuittons, and he watched himself in the rearview of his blue metal-flake 1966 Mustang as he drove. Thick silver hung from his wrists and wrapped his fingers, the silver studded with enough turquoise to replace the summer sky. His fur was clean and well-brushed beneath the hand-tailored denim shirt he had picked up in Sedona, and his perfectly faded stone-washed Levis looked just right with the blue and carnelian Tony Lamas down there in the footwell. Resplendent was exactly the right word to describe him, or so he told himself.
Badger was not resplendent. Badger was wearing Carharrts from the trading post over a T-shirt stained with transmission oil, a UNLV Rebels cap topping off the ensemble. Coyote pulled over to pick him up anyway.
“Hey!“ said Badger, a bit more familiarly than Coyote expected. “Hey yourself,“ said Coyote. The tires sprayed gravel across the desert as he rolled back onto the pavement. Coyote reached for his top-of-the-line insulated travel mug sitting in the after-market cupholder, a double cappuccino with caramel shot, still hot an hour from the Starbucks in Sparks.
Badger clicked his seatbelt. “So. Heading home?“
Coyote looked at him for a long moment.
“Aaaah… no. No, I have this thing in Moab tomorrow. Meeting a gallery owner there.“
“A gallery in Moab, huh?“
“Yeah. I sculpt some. Those boxes in the back seat? Artwork. I sell them to the galleries, they sell them to the tourists.“
“Huh. Don’t that beat all.“
“So.“ Coyote sipped his coffee, cleared his throat. “Odd place for you to be hitching, out in the middle of nothing.“
“Ditched boarding school,“ said Badger. “They were coming after me and I hid in this stakebed full of cardboard heading east out of Fallon. You found me where the driver kicked me out.“
They crested the top of a low pass, and all of Central Nevada was laid out before them. Fifty miles east, the Toiyabe Range shimmered in the heat. Nothing lay between the Mustang and those mountains except for sagebrush and achingly straight road.
Badger watched the mountains for a bit. “You sculpt in clay, right?“
Coyote turned to face Badger, stared at him.
Badger didn’t move. “You keep looking at me. Do I look familiar to you or something?“
“No! I mean, how did you…“
Badger met Coyote’s gaze. “I’m a badger. We dig holes in riverbanks. Smells like clay in here.“
“Ah. Ha.“ Coyote forced a laugh. “Yeah, it’s clay. Ironwood’s played out, and everyone and his grandfather’s carving cottonwood nowadays. I’m about the only New Age sculptor working in clay between Salt Lake and Vegas.“
“Make good money that way, I imagine.“
Coyote laughed, held up his arm, shook it so that his silver jangled. “I do OK.“
Badger looked him up and down. “Yeah, seems that way.“
Five minutes, at sixty miles an hour, means five miles of sagebrush-filled valley floor passed in silence.
“So this sculpting thing’s treating you right,“ started Badger.
“Heh, yeah, sure is. Kid, I gotta confess: I’ve never made such easy money in my life.“
“But somehow the child support payments are still a problem.“
A prodigious cloud of dust rolled westward across the desert then, its origin four grooves in the shoulder carved by the wheels of a 1966 Mustang, blue metal-flake. The driver’s side door opened. The driver emerged. The driver brushed hot steamed milk from the lap of his jeans where he had dropped his double cappuccino with caramel shot, still hot an hour and a half from Sparks.
“You OK?“ Badger raised a laconic eyebrow.
“You… You’re…“
Badger unbuckled, got out of the car, walked over to a tall clump of sagebrush and pissed. “I was a lot younger five years ago. Not surprised you don’t recognize me.“
“Badger. You’re Badger.“
“The slow light of dawn glimmers at last in the velvet night of the noble song-dog’s skull.“
“Yeah. Heh.“
“He starts school in a month.“
“Damn.“
They looked at each other for a long moment.
Badger shrugged, reached for the door handle, got in the car. Coyote followed suit. After a moment of trench-digging by way of spinning tires, the Mustang fishtailed back onto the road.
Badger seemed to Coyote to be very much at ease with the uncomfortable silence.
“So… how is your sister, Badger?“
“Broke. Tired. Hates your guts. Says she’s gonna neuter you if she ever sees you again. You know.“
“Yeah. You know, the thing is, that what with the business overhead, being on the road all the time, my percentage of the gross isn’t actually…“
“His shoes have holes in ‘em, you know.“
“Sorry?“
“Your son. His shoes. They have holes. Cause they’re old. Worn out. Needs new ones.“
“Ah. Right.“ Jesus, Coyote thought. Of all the goddamn people to pick up. What were the odds?
“Y’know, Badger, I do feel really bad about this. I’ve always meant to do the right thing. It was always just one thing coming up after another, you know?“
“Yeah, I know. Car insurance payments come due, April 15 gets earlier every year, bad day at the track, loan shark wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. Life’s complicated.“
“It is! It really is.“
“They ate beans and rice all last winter.“
Wince. “Yeah.“
“Ran out of beans in February.“
Down in his perfectly faded stone-washed Levis, Coyote’s tail drooped. His shoulders slumped. They arrived in Austin in silence. Coyote pulled into a convenience store parking lot, cut the engine. “I gotta take a leak. You want anything?“
“You buying? Coffee.“
Filling the cup in the store, Coyote thought hard. He was pretty sure Badger hadn’t thought to write down his plate number. If he could lose Badger somehow, Coyote could vanish again. He just needed a way to ditch Badger without arousing suspicion beforehand, something that would look not at all like Coyote’s doing.
Hmmm.
“Here’s your coffee.“ Coyote reached through the passenger side window, handed Badger the cup. “Hey look, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you’re right. I really have been kind of an asshole. But I want to make it right.“
Badger eyed Coyote levelly.
“Here’s the idea. You’ve ditched school anyway. Come to Sedona with me, wait while I meet with this gallery guy.“
“Sedona? I thought you said Moab.“
“No, man. It’s totally in Sedona. Where I live. Sedona. Not Moab. You come stay with me for a few days, I’ll meet the gallery man and get paid. I’m gonna gross about four kay. I only need half that to get by until the next sale. I’ll give you the other two thousand to bring to your sister, and I’ll buy you a bus ticket home. From Sedona. Your sister gets some of the money I owe her, you get to go sightseeing, and I get a little bit of relief from this burdensome, crippling guilt I’m feeling now. Whattaya say?“
Badger shrugged. “I’ve never been to Sedona. Could be cool.“
“It’s settled then.“ Coyote walked around the front of the car, eased himself into the driver’s seat. He fastened his belt, slipped the key into the ignition lock, turned the key.
Nothing happened.
“Shit,“ said Coyote. He twisted the key again. Nothing.
“FORD,“ said Badger. “Feed Oil, Repair Daily.“
“Ha,“ Coyote laughed. “Naw, this is just a loose starter circuit. Happens now and then. Probably that little bit of unplanned off-roading we did vibrated it loose.“ He pulled the hood release. A solid metallic clunk came from up front; Coyote got out and propped the hood open, looked underneath.
“Know what I’m looking forward to?“ said Badger.
“What’s that?“ said Coyote.
“Explaining to the paramedics why you were wearing all that metal to do electrical work.“
“Joke’s on you, Badger. No paramedics out here.“ Coyote pulled off three bracelets, five rings and a bolo, walked around and put them all on the dash, then went back under the hood for a while. “Hey Badger! Crank that key for a second!“ Badger turned the key. Nothing happened. “Did you turn it yet?“ “
Been turning it.“
“Shit.“ Some more clanging came from up front. “Again!“ Badger turned the key. Nothing.
“God damn it anyway!“ Coyote slammed the hood down. The hood failed to latch. It rebounded, hanging ajar. Coyote walked over to the passenger side window. “Solenoid’s fried. I could smell the burning insulation.“
“Well shit,“ said Badger.
“I got this friend in Battle Mountain,“ said Coyote. “Mustang nut. He’ll have a solenoid for us. Might take him um, three hours to get it to us, twenty minutes to put it in.“
“That’s not so bad.“
“Nope,“ agreed Coyote. I’m gonna go in the store here, call him, tell him to meet us across the street at the restaurant. We’ll wait there, get something to eat. Sound OK?“
“Sounds OK,“ said Badger. He got out of the car, leaned against it with a delinquent air.
Coyote walked back into the store, asked the clerk for a phone book. He walked to the payphone chuckling to himself. “Never thought I’d be glad I didn’t get that dead starter switch fixed,“ he thought. “Eight months of driving with the hotwire. Ha.“ There was a click at the other end of the phone line. “Hello? Fallon Residential School.“ “Uh, hi there. I think I picked up one of your runaways,“ said Coyote. “Austin. Two hours? Thanks… thank you. Yes, we’ll be here. Yes, I’ll hold.“
Out in the parking lot Badger reached into the chest pocket of his Carharrts, pulled out the Mustang’s distributor cap. He walked around to the front of the car, lifted the hood for a moment, then pushed it shut until it latched. In the driver’s seat, he brushed wire on wire, twisted the key Coyote had left in the ignition, and the engine roared.
Badger picked the six pounds of silver off the dash and tossed it onto the several thousand dollars worth of clay in the back seat, pulled out of the parking lot, and drove off to meet his sister.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Nothing like a good run followed by a good story to start the morning off right.
By: By Charles on 2007 12 12
:)
By: By Pica on 2007 12 12
“No regrets, coyote
I just get off up aways
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway”
-Joni Mitchell
By: By Prufrocky on 2007 12 12
Go write me a book of short stories like these! Now!
Get moving, damnit!
*grin*
By: By Rana on 2007 12 12
Love it.
More, please!
By: By Ancrene Wiseass on 2007 12 12
A worthy edition to the Coyote corpus. Fun! Thanks.
@Rana, have you seen the Heyday Books edition of Maidu Indian Myths and Stories by Hanc’ibyjim? A very good Coyote cycle in there. I’m sure Chris can recommend lots more. Haven’t seen the Barry Lopez volume on Coyote, but I know the purists hate it.
By: By Dave on 2007 12 12
Dave - I hadn’t - thanks for the recommendation!
By: By Rana on 2007 12 14
Great, with one caveat: I’ve never seen anybody going only 60 in the desert. Five minutes should be at least 7.25 miles.
By: By Kat on 2007 12 15
Please sir, may I have another?
By: By thebewilderness on 2007 12 16
