Coyote Crossing

The rough wood deck feels good against my thighs, sun-warmed in afternoon. A yellow leaf from a cottonwood lands on my knee. I let it stay. My old workboots look good against the duff. There’s motion across the toe of the left one: an elongated dark beetle with two diagonal orange stripes. A box elder bug, fitting as there are three tall box elders just down the hill.

Sweet piñon smoke has followed me all day. Two days ago in a parking lot in Española a muscle car pulled up, stopped in front of me, and a dark-tinted passenger window rolled down. A sullen-looking teenaged girl sized me up. “You wanna buy some piñones?“

The owners of the house are cordial. I’d walked across their front yard and startled them. “Can we help you?” I explained that I was there with my friend, on whom their tenant – a practitioner of Chinese medicine – was working in the small studio around the back. They invited me in for soup, all smiles. But the scent of piñon smoke and the 7,000-foot altitude blue sky and the happy dog in the yard had conspired to get me out of the studio in the first place, and I demurred gratefully.

The happy dog is boisterous, a mix of golden lab and something else short-haired. He has a dead starling, still fluffy and clean-spotted, which he tosses gleefully into the air again and again. He looks happiest, eyes sparkling and jaw slack in a wide grin, when the bird is at the apex of each arc, before it succumbs to dead weight and falls undignified to the ground.  I imagine him hoping the bird will fly away.

I try to pick up the bird and he runs away with it, teasing.

Is it the sidelong canine regard, welcome after two years of drought? Spending time with my friend for the first time in a decade? Some unknown geographic chord with my heart’s harmonic? Whatever the reason, I feel here—sitting in cool sun waiting for Sharon to get her chi combed and repacked—more at peace, content, more like myself than I have in years.

The owners come outside, set to work getting their garden ready for winter. There are tomato vines to be uprooted and piled on the compost, leaves to be raked, cool-season crops to sow. The man sees I’ve been adopted by the dog and approaches us smiling. He’s older, perhaps 70, of East Indian descent and formidably distinguished even in overalls.

“Did you see the dog has a staple in his leg?”

I don’t understand the question for a moment. “Oh. I saw the cut. Is he supposed to have a staple there? Did the vet put it in?”

“Yes, and it was supposed to fall out some time ago, but it hasn’t. Every time I try to take it out he bites me. If you can try to get it…”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Be careful!”

“I will. He’s a good boy.”

The man smiles. “He’s completely useless.”

A Steller’s jay lands on the roof of the casita behind me. It scolds me. The dog runs across the yard toward me, starling in his soft mouth. He drops the bird at my feet. I put my left arm over his spine, hug his chest to mine. We spend a moment together admiring the afternoon light beneath the box elders.

As I start to think about casually examining the dog’s leg, the man shows up with a pair of channel-lock pliers. The dog sees them. He tries to squirm out from under my arm, but I pull him closer to me and murmur into his ear, my face buried in his ruff. The old man moves quickly; the dog flinches just a little. “Got it!” says the man, holding the pliers up, a thin wire clamped in their jaws. I let go of the dog. He examines his leg, then covers my face in kisses.

Comments

Leave a comment