Coyote Blue

CHAPTER 13 Forget What You Know

Crow Country — 1973

Of all the people who had seen Enos go over the side of the dam, only Billy Two Irons seemed to have avoided a state of stunned silence. While the others were still staring over the edge into the darkness, Billy was already formulating a plan to save his friend.

"Samson, come here."

Samson looked back at Billy. He was beginning to shiver with unused adrenaline; a look of dreamy confusion had come over him. Billy put his arm around Samson's shoulders and led him away from the railing.

"Look, Samson, you're going to have to run."

A moment passed and Samson did not answer until Billy jostled him. "Run?"

"You have to get off the res and not come back for a long time, maybe never. Everyone here is going to think that they're going to keep this a secret, but when the cops start kicking ass, your name is going to come out. You've got to go, man."

"Where will I go?"

"I don't know, but you have to. Now go get in the car. I'm going to try and raise some money."

Grateful that someone was thinking for him, and because he didn't know what else to do, Samson followed Billy's instructions. He sat in the car and watched his friend going from person to person on the dam collecting money. He closed his eyes and tried to think, but found that there was a movie running on the back of his eyelids: a slow-motion loop of a fat cop with a spare tire in his face going backward over a rail. He snapped his eyes open and stared, unblinking, until they filled with tears. A few minutes later Billy threw a handful of bills on the front seat and climbed in the car.

"I told them you were going to hide out in the mountains and I was getting money for supplies. You should be able to get a long way before the cops figure out that you're not on the res. There's about a hundred bucks here."

Billy started the car and drove off the dam toward Fort Smith.

"Where are we going?" Samson asked.

"First we have to stop and fill up these jugs with water. I'll take you to Sheridan and you can catch a bus there. I don't trust this car to go any further. If we break down in the middle of nowhere you're fucked."

Samson was amazed at his friend's ability to think and act so quickly. Left to himself he knew he would still be staring over the dam wondering what had happened. Instead he was on his way to Wyoming.

"I should go home and tell Grandma that I'm going."

"You can't. I'll tell them tomorrow. And once you're gone you can't call or write either. That's how the cops will find you."

"How do you know that?"

"That's how they caught my brother," Billy said. "He wrote a letter from New Mexico. The FBI had him in two days after that."

"But…"

"Look, Samson, you killed a cop. I know you didn't mean to, but that won't matter. If they catch you they'll shoot you before you get a chance to tell what happened."

"But everyone saw."

"Everyone there was Crow, Samson. They won't believe a bunch of fucking Indians."

"But Enos was Crow — part Crow, anyway."

"He was an apple, only red on the outside."

Samson started to protest again but Billy shushed him. "Start thinking about where you're going to go."

"Where do you think I should go?"

"I don't know. You just need to disappear. Don't tell me where you're going when you figure it out, either. I don't want to know. You could try and pass for white. With those light eyes you might pull it off. Change your name, dye your hair."

"I don't know how to be white."

"How hard can it be?" Billy said.

Samson wanted to talk to someone besides Billy Two Irons, someone who didn't make as much sense: Pokey. He realized that for all his craziness, all his ravings, all his drinking and ritual mumbo jumbo, Pokey was the person he most trusted in the world. But Billy was right: going home would be a mistake. Instead he tried to imagine what Pokey would say about escaping into the white world. Well, first, Samson thought, he would never admit that there was a white world. According to Pokey there was only the world of the Crow — of family and clans and medicine and balance and Old Man Coyote. The white man was simply a disease that had put the Crow world out of balance.

Samson tried to look into the future to see where he would go, what he would do, but any plans he had ever made — and there hadn't been many — were no longer valid, and the future was a thick, white fog that would allow him to see only as far as the bus station in Sheridan, Wyoming. He felt a panic rising in his chest like a scream, then it came to him: this was just a different type of Coyote Blue. He was trying to look into the future too far and it was ruining his balance. He needed to focus on right now, and eventually he would learn what he needed to know when the future got to him. What did Pokey always say? "If you are going to learn, you need to forget what you know."

"Don't use all your money for the bus ticket," Billy said. "Once you get out of the area you can hitchhike."

"Did you learn all this when your brother got in trouble?"

"Yeah, he writes me letters from prison about what he did wrong."

"He put a bomb in a BIA office. How many letters can that take?"

"Not that. What he did wrong to get caught."

"Oh," Samson said.

Two hours later Samson was climbing on a bus headed for Elko, Nevada, carrying with him everything he owned: twenty-three dollars, a pocketknife, and a small buckskin bundle. He took a window seat in the back of the bus and stared out over the dark countryside, really seeing nothing, as he tried to imagine where he would end up. His fear of getting away was almost greater than his fear of being caught. At least if he were caught his fate would be in someone else's hands.

After an hour or so on the road Samson sensed that the bus was slowing down. He looked around for a reaction from the other passengers, but except for an old lady in the front who was engrossed in a romance novel, they were all asleep. The driver downshifted and Samson felt the big diesel at his back roar as the bus pulled into the passing lane. Out his window he saw the back of a long, powder-blue car. As the bus moved up Samson watched the big car glide below him, seeming to go on forever. He saw the back of the driver's head, then his face. It was the fat salesman from his vision. Samson twisted in his seat, trying to get a better look as they passed. The salesman seemed to see him through the blackout windows of the bus and raised a bottle of Coke as if toasting Samson.

"Did you see that?" Samson cried to the old lady. "Did you see that car?"

The old lady turned to him and shook her head, and a cowboy in the next seat groaned. "Did you see who was in that car?" Samson asked the bus driver, who snickered and shook his head.

The cowboy in the next seat was awake now and he pushed his hat from over his eyes. "Well, son, now that you got me wetting myself in suspense, who was in the car?"

"It was the salesman," Samson said.

The cowboy stared at him for a second in angry disbelief, then pushed his hat back over his eyes and slid back down in his seat. "I hate fucking Mexicans," he said.

CHAPTER 14 Lies Have Lives of Their Own

It took just six weeks for Samson Hunts Alone, the Crow Indian, to become Samuel Hunter, the shape-shifter. The transformation began with the cowboy on the bus mistaking Samson for a Mexican. When Samson left the bus in Elko, Nevada, and caught a ride with a racist trucker, he became white for the first time. He expected, from listening to Pokey all those years, that upon turning white he would immediately have the urge to go out and find some Indians and take their land, but the urge didn't come, so he sat by nodding as the trucker talked. By the time he got out at Sacramento, California, Samson had memorized the trucker's litany of white supremacy and was just getting into the rhythm of racism when he caught a ride with a black trucker who took amphetamines and waxed poetic about oppression, injustice, and the violent overthrow of the U.S. government by either the Black Panthers, the Teamsters, or the Temptations. Samson wasn't sure which.

Samson was booted out of the truck in Santa Barbara when he suggested that perhaps killing all the whites should be put off at least until they told where they had hidden all the money. Actually, Samson was somewhat relieved to be put out; he'd only been white for a few hours and wasn't sure that he liked it well enough to die for it. His immediate concern was to get something to drink. He bought a Coke at a nearby convenience store and walked across the street to a park, where, under the boughs of a massive fig tree, amid a dozen sleeping bums, he sat down to consider his next move. Samson was just summoning up an obese case of hopelessness when a nearby bundle of rags spoke to him.

"Any booze in that cup?"

Samson had to stare at the oblong rag pile for a few seconds before he noticed there was a hairy face at one end. A single bloodshot eye, sparkling with hope, the only break in the gray dinge, gave the face away. "No, just Coke," Samson said. Hope dimmed and the eye became as empty as the socket next to it.

"You got any money?" the bum asked.

Samson shook his head. He had only twelve dollars left; he didn't want to share it with the rag pile.

"You're new here?"

Samson nodded.

"You a wet?"

"Excuse me?" Samson said.

"Are you Mexican?"

Samson thought for a moment, then nodded.

"You're lucky," the bum said. "You can get work. A guy stops near here every morning with a truck — picks up guys to do yard work, but he only takes Mexicans. Says whites are too lazy."

"Are they?" Samson asked. He figured that after persecuting blacks, hiding money, stealing land, breaking treaties, and keeping themselves pure, maybe the whites were just tired. He was glad he was Mexican.

"You speak pretty good English for a wet."

"Where does the guy with the truck stop? Has he been by today?"

"I'm not lazy," the bum said. "I earned a degree in philosophy."

"I'll give you a dollar," Samson said.

"I'm having trouble finding work in my field."

Samson dug a dollar out of his pocket and held it out to the bum, who snatched it and quickly secreted it among his rags. "He stops about a block from here, in front of the all-night diner." The bum pointed down the street. "I haven't seen him go by today, but I was sleeping."

"Thanks." Samson rose and started down the street.

The bum called after him, "Hey, kid, come back tonight. I'll guard your back while you sleep if you buy a jug."

Samson waved over his shoulder. He wouldn't be back if he could avoid it. A block away he joined a group of men who were waiting at the corner when a large gate-sided truck pulled up, the back already half full of Mexicans.

The man who drove the truck got out and walked around to where the men were waiting. He was short and brown and wore a straw Stetson, cowboy boots, and thick black mustache over the sly grin of a chicken thief. The men who worked for him called him patron, but ironically, the common term for his profession was Coyote.

He scanned the group of men and made his choices with a nod and the crook of his finger. The men chosen, all Hispanic, jumped onto the back of the truck. The Coyote approached Samson and grabbed him by the upper arm, testing the muscle. He said something in Spanish. Samson panicked and answered him in Crow: "I'm on the lam, looking for a one-armed man that killed my wife." To Samson's surprise, this seemed to satisfy the Coyote.

The Coyote had been smuggling illegal aliens into the country for five years, and from time to time he encountered an Indian from the South, Guatemala or Honduras, who could not speak Spanish. Not being able to tell one Indian language from another, he assumed that Samson was one of these. All the better, he thought, it will take longer for him to find out.

After the Coyote brought his men over the border, he gave them a place to live (two apartments in which they slept ten to a room), food (beans, tortillas, and rice), and three dollars an hour (for backbreaking work that most gringos would never consider doing). He charged his customers eight dollars per man-hour and pocketed the difference. At the end of each week he paid his men in cash, after deducting a healthy amount for food and lodging, then drove them all to the post office, where he helped them buy money orders to send home to their families, leaving them nothing for themselves. In this way the Coyote could keep a crew under his thumb for three or four months before they found out that they could make more money working at menial jobs in restaurants or hotels. Then he would have to go back to Mexico for another load. Lately, however, he had been augmenting his crew with Mexicans who had found their own way over the border, and this allowed him to stretch his time between border runs.

The work was the hardest Samson had ever done, and at the end of the first day, back knotted and hands bloodied from swinging a pickax, he slept in the back of the truck until the patron slapped him awake and led him into the apartment to show him his cot. Sleeping in a room with nine other people was nothing new to Samson, and the food, although spicy, was plentiful and good. He fell asleep listening to the sad Spanish love songs of his co-workers and feeling very much alone.

As the weeks passed he would hear the other men in the room whispering in the dark and this made him feel, even more, that he was the only person in a world of one. He had no way of knowing that they were talking about him, about how they never saw him send any money home, and about how they could take his money and no one would know because he was a dumb Indian and couldn't speak Spanish. Samson listened and imagined that they were talking about their homes and missing their families. He knew nothing of the Latin quality of machismo, which tacitly forbade the admission of a man's melancholy except in song.

The plan was to wait until the boy was taking a shower, then go through his pants and take the money. If he protested, they would cut his throat and bury him on the large estate where they were terracing hills into formal gardens. Whether they would have really killed the boy was doubtful; they were good men at heart and had only turned their minds to murder because it made them feel worldly and tough. When the boy was gone their nocturnal whispers turned back to boasts of the women they would have, the cars they would buy, and the land they would own when they returned to Mexico.

Samson was saved on a hot afternoon when the owner of the estate approached the Coyote while the crew was taking a break, eating cold burritos in the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

"Immigration took one of the busboys in my restaurant," the rich man said. "Do any of your guys speak English? I'll pay you to let him go."

The Coyote was shaking his head when Samson spoke up: "I speak English." The Coyote's chicken-stealing grin dropped like a rock. He had thought that he would be able to hold on to the Indian boy for a long time, and here he had gone and learned English in his spare time. The boy was worthless now. Better to cut the loss and see what he could get.

To quell their curiosity and dampen their ambition, the Coyote told the rest of the crew that the rich American had bought the boy for sexual purposes, and they all grinned knowingly as they watched Samson ride away in the long white Lincoln.

Samson found that it was easier to be Mexican while working in the restaurant. The work, although fast paced, was not heavy, and he was given a cot in the storeroom to sleep on until he found a place of his own. The owner was content with speaking a pidgin English peppered with Spanish words and Samson answered him by speaking a modified version of Tonto-speak. By this time Samson had also picked up a few essential Spanish phrases ("Where are the spoons?" "We need more plates." "Your sister fucks donkeys in Tijuana") which helped him make friends with the Mexican dishwashers and cooks.

From the moment he had arrived in Santa Barbara, a grinding homesickness began to settle in Samson's heart. When he lay in the dark storeroom at night, waiting to fall asleep, it would rise up and wash over him like a black tide, carrying with it a slithering blind predator that gnashed at the last shreds of his hope. "Forget what you know," Pokey had told him. With this in mind he set to do battle with his rising hopelessness. He refused to think of his family, his home, or his heritage. Instead he concentrated on the conversations he overheard in the restaurant as he cleared tables and poured coffee. Because he was Mexican, and a menial laborer, he was invisible to the affluent Santa Barbara customers, who spoke openly about the most intimate details of their lives, oblivious to the Spanish fly on the wall….

"You know, Ashley has been having an affair with her plastic surgeon for six months and…"

"If I can get my legal ducks in a row, I should be able to push the convention center through the city council and…"

"I want the bathroom Southwestern, but Bob likes Art Nouveau, so I called our attorney and I said…"

"I know the offshore drilling is ruining the coast, but my Exxon shares have split twice in two years, so I said to my analyst…"

"Susan and the kids went to Tahoe, so I thought it was the perfect chance to show Marie the house. The bitch spilled a whole bottle of massage oil in the hot tub and…"

"I don't give a damn whether they needed it or not. If you do your job right you can sell air conditioners to Eskimos; need has nothing to do with it. Remember the three m's: mesmerize, motivate, and manipulate. You're not selling a need, you're selling…"

"Dreams," Samson said, coming out of his shell to finish the sentence of a young insurance sales manager who had taken his agents to lunch so he could chew their ass. Samson surprised even himself by speaking up, but the man at the table seemed to be giving the same speech that he had heard from the powder-blue dream salesman. He couldn't resist.

"Come here, kid," the man said. He was wearing a wash-and-wear suit, as were the other five men at the table. A half-dozen acrid aftershaves clashed among them. "What's your name?"

Samson looked around the table at the men's faces. They were all white. He decided at that moment to use a new name, not the Mexican name he had taken, Jose Cuervo. "Sam," Samson said. "Sam Hunter."

"Well, Sam" — he extended his hand — "my name is Aaron Aaron. And I'll bet with some training you could outsell every man at this table." He put his arm around Samson's shoulders and spoke to the rest of the group. "What do you say, guys? I'll bet you each a hundred bucks that I can take a busboy with the right attitude and turn him into a better salesman than any of you hotshots inside of a month."

"That's bullshit, Aaron, the kid's not even old enough to get a license."

"He can work on my license. I'll sign his applications. C'mon, hotshots, do I have a bet?"

The men fidgeted in their seats, laughing nervously and trying to avoid Aaron's gaze, knowing from Aaron's training that the first one to speak would lose. Finally one of them broke. "All right, a hundred bucks, but the kid has to do his own selling."

Aaron looked at Samson. "So, kid, are you ready to start a new job?"

Samson tried to imagine himself wearing a suit and smelling of after-shave, and the idea appealed to him. "I don't have a place to stay," he said. "I've been saving so I can get an apartment."

"I've got it covered," Aaron said. "Welcome aboard."

"I guess I could give my notice."

"Fuck giving notice. You only give notice if you're planning to come back. You're not planning on moving backwards, are you, Sam?"

"I guess not," Samson said.

At twenty-five, Aaron Aaron had already accumulated fifteen years of experience in the art of deception. From the time he skimped on the sugar at his first lemonade stand to the time he doubled the profits on his paper route by canceling his customers' subscriptions, then stealing the papers out of a vending machine to continue the deliveries, Aaron showed a near-genius ability for working in the gray areas between business and crime. And by balancing dark desires with white lies he was able to sidestep the plague of Catholic conscience that kept him from pursuing an honest career as a pirate, which would have been his first choice. Aaron Aaron was a salesman.

At first, Aaron's only interest in Samson was to use the boy as an instrument of embarrassment to the other salesmen, but once he dressed the boy in a suit and had him trailing along on sales calls like a dutiful native gun bearer, Aaron found that he actually enjoyed the boy's company. The boy's curiosity seemed boundless, and answering his questions as they drove between calls allowed Aaron to bask in the sound of his own voice while extolling the brilliance of his last successful presentation. And too, the rejection of a slammed door or a pointed «no» seemed softened in the sharing. Teaching the boy made him feel good, and with this improvement in attitude he worked more, sold more, and allowed the boy to share in the prosperity, buying him clothes and food, finding him an apartment, and cosigning for a loan on a used Volvo.

For Samson, working under the tutelage of Aaron was perfect. Aaron's assumption that no one beside himself had the foggiest idea of how the universe worked allowed Samson the opportunity to hear lectures on even the most minuscule details of society, information he used to build himself into the image that Aaron wanted to see. Samson delighted in Aaron's self-obsession, for while the older man waxed eloquent on the virtues of being Aaron, it never occurred to him to ask Samson about his past, and the boy was able to surround himself in a chrysalis of questions and cheap suits until he was ready to emerge as a full-grown salesman.

As the years passed and his memories of home were stowed and forgotten, learning to sell became Samson's paramount interest. And Aaron, fascinated with seeing his own image mirrored and his own words repeated, failed to notice that Samson had become a better salesman than himself until other companies began approaching the boy with offers. Only then did Aaron realize that most of his income was coming from the override commission on Sam's sales, and that for five years Sam had trained all the new salesmen. To avoid losing his golden goose, Aaron offered Sam a fifty-fifty partnership in the agency, and with this added security, the business became Sam's shelter.

Now, after twenty years with the business as his only security, Sam was going to Aaron to sell his shares. As he entered Aaron's office he felt a deep soul-sickness that he had not felt since he had left the reservation.

"Aaron, I'll take forty cents on the dollar for my shares. And I keep my office."

Aaron turned slowly in the big executive chair and faced Sam. "You know I couldn't come up with that kind of cash, Sam. It's a good move, though. I'd have to keep paying you out of override, and with interest you wouldn't even take a cut in pay. I don't think you're in a position to negotiate, though. In fact, after the call I got this morning, I think twenty cents on the dollar would be more than fair."

Sam resisted the urge to dive over the desk and slap his partner's bare scalp until it bled. He had to take his fallback position sooner than he wanted to. "You're thinking that because Spagnola can put me with the Indian I have to sell, right?"

Aaron nodded.

"But just imagine that I ride this through, Aaron. Imagine that I don't sign off, that the insurance commission suspends my license, that criminal charges are filed and my name is in the paper every day. Guess whose name is going to be right next to mine? And what happens if I maintain my association with the agency and the insurance commission starts looking into your files? How many signatures have you traced over the years, Aaron? How many people thought they were buying one policy, only to find out that their signature showed up on a different one — one that paid you a higher commission?"

A sheen of sweat was appearing on Aaron's forehead. "You've done that as often as I have. You'd be hanging yourself."

"That's the point, Aaron. When I walked in here you were convinced that I was hung anyway. I'm just making room for you on the gallows."

"You ungrateful prick. I took you in when you-"

"I know, Aaron. That's why I'm giving you a chance to stay clean. Actually, you've got more to lose than I do. Once your files are open, then your income is going to become public knowledge."

"Oh!" Aaron stood and paced around to the front of the desk.

"Oh!" He waved a finger under Sam's nose, then turned and walked to the water cooler.

"Oh!" He kicked the cooler, then returned to his chair, sat down, then stood up again.

"Oh!" he said. It was as if the single syllable had stuck in his mouth. He looked as if he were going to launch into a tirade; blood rose in his face and veins bulged on his forehead.

"Oh!" he said. He fell back in the chair and stared at the ceiling as if his brain had pushed the hold button on reality.

"That's right, Aaron," Sam said after a moment. "The IRS." With that Sam moved to the office door. "Take your time, Aaron. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy Spagnola; he can probably give you the current exchange rate of cigarettes for sodomy in prison."

Aaron slowly broke his stare on the ceiling and turned to watch Sam walk out.

In the outer office Julia looked up from applying lacquer to her nails to see Sam grinning, his hand still on the doorknob.

"What's with all the 'ohs, Sam?" Julia asked. "It sounded like you guys were having sex or something."

"Something like that," Sam said, his grin widening. "Hey, watch this." He opened the door quickly and stuck his head back in Aaron's office. "Hey, Aaron! IRS!" he said. Then he pulled the door shut, muffling Aaron's scream of pain.

"What was that?" Julia asked.

"That," Sam said, "was my teacher giving me the grade on my final exam."

"I don't get it."

"You will, honey. I don't have time to explain right now. I've got a date."

Sam left the office walking light and smiling, feeling strangely as if the pieces of his life, rather than fitting back together, were jingling in his pocket like sleigh bells warning Christmas.

CHAPTER 15 Like God's Own Chocolate I'd Lick Her Shadow Off A Hot Sidewalk

Santa Barbara

In spite of the fact that he was losing his home and his business, and was precariously close to having his greatest secret discovered by the police because of an Indian god, Sam was not the least bit worried. Not with the prospect of an evening with Calliope to occupy his thoughts. No, for once Sam Hunter was voting the eager ticket over the anxious, taking anticipation over dread.

Calliope lived upstairs in a cheese-mold-green cinder-block duplex that stood in a row of a dozen identical structures where the last of Santa Barbara's working middle class were making their descent into poverty. Calliope's Datsun was parked in the driveway next to a rusy VW station wagon and an ominous-looking Harley-Davidson chopper with a naked blond woman airbrushed on the gas tank. Sam paused by the Harley before mounting the stairs. The airbrushed woman looked familiar, but before he could get a closer look Calliope appeared on the deck above him.

"Hi," she said. She was barefoot, wearing a white muslin dress loosely laced in the front. A wreath of gardenia was woven into her hair. "You're just in time, we need your help. Come on up."

Sam took the stairs two at a time and stopped on the landing, where Calliope was wrestling with the latch on a rickety screen-door frame that was devoid of screening but had redwood lattice nailed across its lower half, presumably to keep out the really large insects. "I'm having trouble with the dinner," she said. "I hope you can fix it."

The screen door finally let loose with the jattering noise one associates with the impact of Elmer Fudd's face on a rake handle. Calliope led Sam into a kitchen done in the Fabulous Fifties motif of mint enamel over pink linoleum. A haze of foul-smelling smoke hung about the ceiling, and through it Sam could make out the figure of a half-naked man sitting in the lotus position on the counter, drinking from a quart bottle of beer.

"That's Yiffer," Calliope said over her shoulder as she headed to the stove. "He's with Nina."

Yiffer vaulted off the counter, on one arm, fully eight feet across the kitchen to land lightly on his feet in front of Sam, where he engaged a complex handshake that left Sam feeling as if his fingers had been braided together. "Dude," Yiffer said, shaking out his wild tangle of straw-colored hair as if the word had been stuck there.

Feeling like a chameleon that has been dropped into a coffee can and is risking hemorrhage by trying to turn silver, Sam searched for the appropriate greeting and ended up echoing, "Dude."

In jeans, a sport shirt, and boating moccasins with no socks, Sam felt grossly overdressed next to Yiffer, who wore only a pair of orange surf shorts and layer upon layer of tan muscle.

"Calliope biffed the grub, dude," Yiffer said.

Sam joined Calliope at the stove, where she was frantically biffing the grub. "I can't get the spaghetti to cook," she said, plunging a wooden spoon into a large saucepan from which the smoke was emanating. "The instructions said to boil for eight minutes, but as soon as it starts to boil the smoke comes out."

Sam waved the smoke from the pan. "Aren't you supposed to cook the noodles separately?"

"Not in the sauce?"

Sam shook his head.

"Whoops," Calliope said. "I'm not a very good cook. Sorry."

"Well, maybe we can salvage something." Sam removed the pan from the heat and peered in at the bubbling black magma. "Then again, maybe starting over would be a good idea."

He put the pan in the sink, where a trail of ants was invading a used bowl of cereal. Sam turned on the water and started to swivel the faucet to wash the intruders away when Calliope grabbed his hand.

"No," she said. "They're okay."

"They'll get into your food," Sam said.

"I know. They've always been here. I call them my kitchen pals."

"Kitchen pals?" Sam tried to adjust his thinking. She was right — you couldn't just wash your kitchen pals down the drain like they were ants. He felt like he'd been saved from committing genocide. "So, I guess we should start some more spaghetti?"

"She only bought one box, dude," Yiffer said.

"I guess we can eat salad and bread," Calliope said. "Excuse me." She kissed Sam on the cheek and walked out of the kitchen while he stared at the ghost of her bottom through the thin dress.

"So, what do you do?" Yiffer asked with a toss of his head.

"I'm an insurance broker. And you?"

"I surf."

"And?"

"And what?" Yiffer said.

Sam thought he could hear the sound of the ocean whistling through Yiffer's ears as if through a seashell. "Never mind," he said. He was distracted by the sound of a baby screaming in the next room.

"That's Grubb," Yiffer said. "Sounds like he's pissed off."

Unable to see the second b, Sam was confused. "I thought grub was biffed?"

"No, Grubb is Calliope's rug-rat. Go on in and meet him. Nina's in there with J. Nigel Yiffworth, Esquire." Yiffer beamed with pride. "He's mine."

"Your attorney?"

"My son," Yiffer said indignantly.

"Oh," Sam said. He resisted the urge to sit down on the floor and wait for his confusion to clear. Instead he walked into the living room, where he found Calliope sitting on an ancient sofa next to an attractive brunette who was breastfeeding an infant. The sofa was lumpy enough to have had a body sewed into it; stuffing spilled out of the arms where the victim had tried to escape. On the floor nearby, a somewhat older child was slung inside of a blue plastic donut on wheels, which he was gaily ramming into everything in the room. Sam gasped as the child ran a wheel up over his bare ankle on a kamikaze rush to destroy the coffee table.

Calliope said, "Sam, this is Nina." Nina looked up and smiled. "And J. Nigel Yiffworth, Esquire." Nina pulled the baby from her breast long enough to puppet-master a nod of greeting from it, which Sam missed for some reason. "And that," Calliope continued, pointing to the drunk driver in the blue donut, "that's Grubb."

"Your son?" Sam asked.

She nodded. "He's just learning to walk."

"Interesting name."

"I named him after Jane Goodall's son. She let him grow up with baboons — very natural. I was going to name him Buddha, but I was afraid that when he got older if someone met him on the road they might kill him."

"Right. Good thinking," Sam said, pretending that he had the slightest idea of what she was talking about and that he wasn't wondering in the least who or where Grubb's father was.

"Nina moved in when we were both pregnant," Calliope said. "We were each other's Lamaze coaches. I was farther along, though."

"What about Yiffer?"

"Scum," Nina said.

"He seems like a nice guy," Sam said, and Nina shot him an acid look. "As scum goes," he quickly added.

"He only lives here sometimes," Calliope said. "Mostly when he doesn't have gas money for his van."

Nina said, "We're having a yard sale day after tomorrow to raise some money to get him out of here. You might want to look at the stuff down in storage before the sale, pick up a bargain before it gets picked over."

Yiffer entered the living room munching on a loaf of French bread. He stood next to Sam and thrust the bread under Sam's chin. "Bite?"

"No, thanks," Sam said.

"Yiffer!" Calliope said. "That bread was for all of us."

"Truth," Yiffer said. He held the loaf out to Calliope. "Bite?"

"You ruined their dinner," Nina said, letting J. Nigel's head drop and wobble.

Yiffer grinned around a mouthful of bread and gestured toward Nina's exposed breast with his beer hand. "Looking good, babe."

Nina reattached J. Nigel and said to Sam, "I'm sorry, he's only like this when he's awake." To Yiffer she said, "Take some money out of my purse and go down to the corner and get a pizza."

Sam reached for his wallet. "Let me."

"No," Calliope and Nina said in unison.

"Cool!" Yiffer exclaimed, sandblasting Sam with a spray of bread crumbs.

"Go!" Nina commanded, and Yiffer turned and bounded out of the room. In a moment Sam heard the screen door open and footfalls on the steps.

"Sit down," Calliope said. "Relax."

Sam took a seat on the couch next to the two women and for the next forty minutes they exchanged pleasantries between the screaming demands of the babies until Nina handed a damp J. Nigel to Sam and left the room. Like most bachelors, Sam held a baby as if it were radioactive.

"That fucking asshole!" Nina shrieked from the other room, frightening Grubb, who screamed like an air-raid siren. J. Nigel was following suit when Nina returned to the living room, her purse in hand. "He took my rent money. The asshole took all my rent money. Can you guys watch J. Nigel for a minute? I've got to go find him and kill him."

"Sure," Calliope said. Sam nodded, adjusting J. Nigel for long-term holding.

Nina left. Calliope turned to Sam and over the din of screaming infants said, "Alone at last."

"I think J. Nigel needs changing," Sam said.

"So does Grubb. Let's take them into Nina's room."

Sam had slipped into the personality he referred to as "tough and adaptable," one he reserved for the more chaotic and bizarre situations he had encountered in his career. "I can do this," he said with a grin.

He hadn't changed a baby since the days on the reservation when he used to help with his cousins, but when he opened J. Nigel's diaper the memory came back on him like a fetid whirlwind, and he had to fight to keep from gagging. The adhesive strips on disposable diapers were a completely new adventure and he found after a few minutes that he had diapered his left hand perfectly while a squirming J. Nigel remained naked to the world. After changing Grubb and returning him to his plastic donut, Calliope liberated Sam from the diaper and started on J. Nigel, who giggled and peed like an excited puppy at her touch. Sam sympathized.

"Don't feel bad," she said. "The last time we let Yiffer baby-sit he duct-taped J. Nigel's diaper on and we had to use nail-polish remover to get the adhesive off."

"I haven't had much practice," Sam said.

"You don't have any kids?"

"No, I've never met anyone I wanted to have kids with." Sam wanted to smack himself for saying it. Remember, tough and adaptable.

"Me either," Calliope said. "But Grubb is the best thing that ever happened to me. I used to drink and do a lot of drugs, but as soon as I found out I was pregnant I stopped."

Sam looked for an opening to ask about Grubb's father, but none came and the silence was becoming awkward. "That's great," he said. "I had my own battle with the bottle." Actually it hadn't been much of a battle. Aaron had insisted that social drinking was part of the job, but each time Sam had gotten drunk he was haunted by the stereotype of the drunken Indian that he thought he had left behind. It had been ten years since he'd had a drink.

"I'm going to put these guys down," Calliope said. "Why don't you go in the living room and put some music on."

In the living room Sam found a briefcase full of loose cassette tapes. Most of the tapes were New Age releases with enigmatic titles like Tree Frog Whale Song Selections by artists with names like Yanni Volvofinder. With further digging he found one called The Language of Love by a female jazz singer he liked, but when he opened the box he found that the tape had been replaced with one called Catbox Nightmare by a band called Satan's Smegma, obviously a Yifferesque selection. Finally he found The Language of Love languishing boxless in the bottom of the case and popped it into a portable stereo on a bricks-and-boards bookshelf.

Calliope returned to the living room just as the first song was rising in the speakers. "Oh, I love this tape," she said. "I've always wanted to make love to this tape. I'll be right back." She left the room again and returned in a moment with an armload of pillows and blankets, which she dropped in the middle of the floor. "Grubb sleeps in my room and he won't be asleep for a while." She began to spread the blankets out over the floor.

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.

Sam 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.

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 Iacocca, 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.

'While your proposed boycott of Chrysler products by the Crow tribe and other Native Americans saddens us deeply, research has determined that they do not represent a large enough demographic to affect our profits.

'Please accept the enclosed blanket in thanks for bringing this matter to our attention.

'Sincerely, Lee Iacocca

'CEO, Chrysler Corporation. "

Kiro said, "Tommy, put down the letter and help me sit him up so he can drink."

Tommy said, "If he knows Lee Iacocca he will be good to have as a contact, Father."

"Not if he dies."

"Oh, right." Tommy dropped to his knees and helped Kiro lift Pokey to a sitting position. Kiro held the bottle to Pokey's lips and the old man's eyes opened as he drank. After a few swallows he pushed the bottle away and looked up at Tommy. "I burned the blanket," he said. "Smallpox." Then he passed out.

CHAPTER 19 Five Faces of Coyote Blue

Ever since the morning Adeline Eats had found the frost-covered liar in the grass behind Wiley's Food and Gas there had been a screech owl sitting atop the power pole in front of her house, sitting there like feathered trouble. In addition, Black Cloud Follows had blown a water pump, all of her kids were coming down with the flu, her husband, Milo, had gone off to a peyote ceremony, and she was trying desperately to stay out of Hell. It was unfair, she thought, that her new faith was being tested before the paint was even dry.

She wanted the owl to go away and take her bad luck with it. But to a good Christian, an owl was just an owl. Only a traditional Crow believed in the bad luck of owls. A good Christian would just go out there and shoo that old owl away. Of course, it wouldn't bother a good Christian.

Adeline had come to Christianity the same way she had come to sex and smoking: through peer pressure. Thinking about her six kids and her smoker's hack, she wondered if perhaps peer pressure didn't always lead to the best habits. Her sisters had all converted and they had referred to her as the heathen of the family until she caved in and accepted Christ. Now, only three weeks after being washed in the blood of the Lamb, she was already backsliding like a dog surprised down a skunk hole. The owl.

Adeline looked out the front window to check on the owl; he was still there. Had he winked at her? She had pinned up her hair and was wearing sunglasses and a pair of Milo's overalls, hoping the owl wouldn't recognize her until she figured out what to do. She was tempted to pray to Jesus to make the owl go away, but if she did that, she would be admitting that she believed in the old ways and she'd go to Hell. There was no Hell in the old ways. Then again, she could load up Milo's shotgun, walk out in the yard, and turn that old owl into pink mist. She couldn't see herself doing that either — no telling what kind of trouble that would unleash. And she couldn't wait for Milo and ask him for help: not after weeks of working on him to leave the Native American church and trade in his peyote buttons for wafers and wine.

She ducked away from the window. One of the kids coughed in the other room. Eventually she was going to have to take them down to the clinic for treatment. But she was afraid to pass by the owl. According to the priest, God knew everything. The sunglasses and hairdo wouldn't fool God. God knew she was afraid, so He knew she still had faith in the old ways, so she was going to Hell as sure as if she'd been out all morning worshiping golden calves and graven images.

"I got bad medicine from being Crow," she thought. "And I'm going to Hell for being Christian. I should have let that old liar Pokey freeze to death." She slapped herself on the forehead. "Damn! Another Hell thought."

A nun with an Uzi popped up on the parapet of Notre Dame like a ninja penguin. Coyote shot from the hip, winging her before she could fire. She tumbled over the side, bounced off a gargoyle, and splattered on the sidewalk below. A synthesized Gregorian chant began to play as her spirit rose to heaven, a steel ruler in hand. Coyote strafed a stained-glass window and took out a bazooka-wielding bishop for two thousand penance points.

Sam walked into the bedroom, hair wet, a towel wrapped around his hips. "Nice shot," Sam said.

Coyote glanced up from the video game. "The red ones have killed me three times."

"Those are cardinals. You have to hit them twice to kill them. Wait until you get to the Vatican level. The pope has guilt-beam vision."

Before Coyote could look back to the screen the cathedral doors flew open and St. Patrick fired a wiggling salvo of heat-seeking vipers.

"Hit your smart bomb," Sam said.

Coyote fumbled with the control, but was too late. A snake latched onto his leg and exploded. The screen flashed GAME OVER, and a synthesized voice instructed Coyote to "go to confession."

Coyote dropped the control onto the bed with a sigh.

Sam said, "You did good. Gunning for Nuns is a hard game for beginners."

"I should have brought some cheating medicine. My cheating medicine never fails."

"This isn't like the hand game. This is a game of skill."

"Who needs skill when you can have luck?"

Sam shook his head and turned to go back to the bathroom. During the night something inside him had changed. Each time he thought things had reached a plateau of weirdness, something even weirder had happened. The result, he realized, was that he was now accepting anything that happened, no matter how weird, without resistance. Chaos was the new order in his life.

The phone rang and Sam, hoping it was Calliope, grabbed the receiver off the vanity. "Samuel Hunter," he said.

"You low-life, scum-sucking shithead!"

"Good morning to you too, Josh."

"You win, dickhead. There'll be a meeting of the co-op association tonight. They'll vote you back in. You can keep your apartment, but I want your guarantee that this is over."

"Okay."

"I hope you know I've lost all respect for you as a professional, Sam. The doctor says I'm going to walk with a limp for the rest of my life."

"There was a crooked man who had a crooked-"

"You broke my legs! My house is destroyed."

Sam peeked into the bedroom where Coyote was attacking the Sistine Chapel with a helicopter gunship. "Josh, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm glad you came to your senses."

"Fuck you. I'm using up years of collected dirt to get your apartment back."

"Townhouse," Sam corrected. "Not apartment."

"Don't fuck with me, Sam. I'm in a cast up to my nipples and a sadistic nurse has been force-feeding me green Jell-O for an hour. Just tell me it's over."

"It's over," Sam said.

The phone clicked. Sam walked back into the bedroom. "What did you do to Spagnola?"

Coyote was rolling on the bed in exaggerated body English to tilt the gunship. "These birds are eating my tail rotor. I can't control it."

"Uh-oh, St. Francis released the doves of death. You're dead meat." Sam took a cigarette from the pack on the dresser and offered one to Coyote. "What did you do to Spagnola?"

"You said you wanted your old life back."

"So you broke Spagnola's legs?"

"It was a trick."

"You can't just go around breaking people's legs like some Mafioso fairy godmother."

The gunship spun out of control and crashed on the mezzanine. Coyote threw the joystick at the screen and turned to Sam. "How can I win if you keep talking to me? You whine like an old woman. I got you your house back!"

"I wouldn't have lost it if you had left me alone. Be logical."

"What gods do you know that are logical? Name two."

"Never mind," Sam said. He went to the closet and pulled his clothing out for the day.

Coyote said, "Do you have a light?"

"No."

"No? After I stole fire from the sun and gave it to your people?"

"Why, Coyote? Why did you do that?" Sam turned to point out the lighter on the dresser, but the trickster was gone.

Calliope's upbringing in the Eastern religions, with their emphasis on living in the now — of acting, not thinking — had left her totally unprepared to do battle with the future. She'd tried to ignore it, even after Grubb was born, but it had become more and more difficult to function on karmic autopilot. Now, Sam had entered her life and she felt like she had something to lose. The future had a name. She wondered what she had done to manifest the curse of a nice guy.

"It feels wonderful, but I want more," Calliope said.

"I don't get it," Nina said. They were cleaning up the kitchen. Grubb was scooting around on the linoleum at their feet, tasting the baseboards, a table leg, a slow-moving bug.

"I've always felt separate from men, even during sex. It's like there's this part of me that watches them and I'm not really involved. But it wasn't that way with Sam. It was like we were really together, no barriers. I wasn't watching him, I was with him. When we were finished I lay there watching the pulse on his neck, and it was like we had gone to some other world together. I wanted more."

"So you're saying you're a hosebeast."

"Not like that. It was just that I want to feel that way all the time. I want my whole life to feel — complete."

"I'm sorry, Calliope, I don't get it. I'm happy if Yiffer doesn't pass out before we finish."

"I guess it's not a sexual thing. It's a spiritual thing. Like there's a part of life that I can touch but I can't live in."

"Maybe we just need to find a house where your ex doesn't live downstairs."

"That was pretty awful. I couldn't believe Sam didn't just leave."

Nina threw a dish towel at Calliope and missed. "You had a little good luck for a change, accept it. Not every guy has to be a creep like Lonnie."

"I'm a little afraid to leave Grubb with him when I go to work today."

"Lonnie won't hurt Grubb. He was just pissed that you were with someone else. Men are like that. Even when they don't want you, they don't want anyone else to have you."

"Nina, do you think there's something wrong with me?"

"No, you're just not very good at worrying. You'll get the hang of it."

"I've got to get back to the house," Lonnie said to Cheryl, who was pouring peroxide on his damaged chest. She wiped away the foam with a tissue, then poked the wound with a broken black fingernail.

"Ouch! What are you doing, bitch?"

Cheryl got up from the bed and pulled on a pair of leather pants. Lonnie could see her hipbones and shoulder blades pushing against her pale skin as if they would poke through any second.

"You're always thinking of her. Never me. What the hell is wrong with me?"

She turned to face him and he stared at her breasts lying like flaps against her ribs. She pulled back her lips in a snarl and Lonnie knew his face had betrayed him. "Fucking asshole," she said, pulling on a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

"It's not her, it's the kid. He's my kid. I have to watch him when she goes to work."

"Bullshit. Then why won't you fuck me?" She tossed her head and her long black hair fell into her face like seaweed on the drowned.

Because you look like you just escaped from fucking Auschwitz, Lonnie thought. He'd been with Cheryl for three months and had never seen her eat. As far as he could figure she lived on speed, come, and Pepsi. He said, "I worry about the kid."

"Then get custody. I can take care of him. I'd make a good mother."

"Right."

"You don't think so? You think that vegetarian bitch is a better mother than me?"

"No…"

"You start treating me right or I'm gone." Cheryl took a purse from the floor and began digging in it. "Where the fuck is my stash?" She threw the purse aside and stormed out of the room.

Lonnie followed her, carrying the denim vest sporting the Guild's colors. "I've got to go," he said.

Cheryl was dumping a bindle of white powder into a can of Pepsi. "Bring back some crank," she said.

As Lonnie walked out she added, "Tink called while you were sleeping. He said to tell you he took care of things."

Outside Lonnie fired up his Harley and pulled out into the street. Tinker's news should have cheered him up, but it didn't. He felt empty, like he needed to get fucked up. He always felt that way lately. At one time being a brother in the Guild, being accepted for who he was, had been enough. Having all the women and drugs and money and power he needed had been enough. But since Grubb was born he felt like he was supposed to be doing something, and he didn't know what it was.

Maybe the bitch is right, he thought. As long as the kid tied him to Calliope he was going to feel shitty. It was time to feel good again.

Frank Cochran, the cofounder of Motion Marine, Inc., had spent most of the morning in his office milling over the bane of his existence: the human factor. Frank loved organization, routine, and predictability. He liked his life to be linear, moving forward from event to event without the nasty backtracking caused by surprises. The human factor was his name for the variable of unpredictability that was added to the equation of life by human beings. Today, the human factor was represented by his partner, Jim Cable, who was in the hospital after being attacked by an Indian.

Frank's thinking went thus: If Jim dies there'll be insurance hassles, legal battles with the family, and someone will have to comfort Jim's mistress. But if Jim lives — maybe Jim's mistress should be comforted anyway….

His train of thought was broken by the buzz of the intercom on his desk. "Mr. Cochran," his secretary said, "there's a man from NARC here to see you."

"I don't have any appointments until after lunch, do I?"

The office door burst open and Cochran looked up to see an Indian in black buckskins striding toward him. His secretary was shouting protests from her desk.

Cochran spoke into the intercom, "Stella, do I have an appointment with this man?"

"Native American Reform Coalition," Coyote said. "I understand that some insurance agent is taking credit for what happened to your partner."

Cochran had a very bad feeling about this. "Look, I don't know who you are, but I don't like surprises."

"Then this is going to be a very bad day for you." Coyote slammed the door behind him. "A very bad day." The trickster extended his right hand. "Nice to meet you."

Cochran watched in horror as the Indian's hand began to sprout fur and claws.

CHAPTER 20 Nevermore

Santa Barbara

When Sam walked into his office Gabriella met him with a cup of coffee. "Mr. Hunter, I'd like to apologize for my behavior yesterday. I don't know what came over me."

"That's okay. I do."

"I hope you were able to resolve the difficulties at the Cliffs."

Sam wasn't prepared for civility from Gabriella; it was like encountering a polite scorpion. Life was changing before his eyes. "Everything's fine. Any calls?"

"Just Mr. Aaron." She checked her message pad. "He would like you to stop into his office if it wouldn't be too much trouble."

"Exact words?"

"Yes, sir."

"My my, has the Sugarplum Fairy been through here today?"

Gabriella checked the pad. "No message, sir."

Sam smiled and walked away. Down the hall Julia told Sam to go right in.

Aaron stood and smiled when Sam entered the office. "Sammy boy, have a seat. We need to talk."

Sam said, "Forty cents on the dollar, plus interest. You keep the office. I want out. That's it. You talk."

Aaron dismissed Sam's comment with a wave. "That's all behind us, buddy. Cochran's lawyer called. There isn't going to be any lawsuit. You and I are square."

"What happened?" Sam knew he should be elated at the news, but instead he felt dread. For a moment he had relished the idea of giving up all the pretending. Now what?

"No explanation. They just backed off. They apologized for the mistake. You'll get a formal apology in the mail tomorrow. I never doubted you, kid. Not for a minute."

"Aaron, did you talk to Spagnola today?"

"Just briefly. Just a social call. He was pretty heavily medicated. I'm not sure I trust him, Sam. You want to watch your back around that guy. He's unstable."

Sam felt his ears heat up with anger. Aaron expected him to act like the betrayal had never happened. There was a time when he would have, but not now. "Forty cents on the dollar, plus interest."

Aaron lost his friendly-guy salesman's smile. "But that's behind us."

"I don't think so. You're a shit, Aaron. That doesn't surprise me. But it does surprise me that you went after me when I was down. I thought we were friends."

"We are, Sammy."

"Good. Then you won't mind having the papers on my desk by midweek. And you can pay the attorney fees. They're tax deductible, you know. And if you're late, you will need the write-off." Sam got up and started out of the office.

Aaron called after him. "We don't have to do this now."

Without turning Sam said, "Yes we do. I do."

Sam nodded to Julia as he passed but he couldn't muster a smile. What have I done? he thought.

In his outer office Gabriella was kicked back in her chair with her skirt up around her armpits. She seemed to be hyperventilating and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

"Gabriella! Again?"

She pointed to his office door. Sam threw the door open, banging it against the wall and disturbing a raven that was perched in the brass hat rack just inside. Sam stormed over to the bird, barely resisting the urge to grab it and rip its feathers out.

"Goddammit, I told you to stay off my secretary!" Sam shook his fist at the bird. "And what kind of bullshit did you pull over at Motion Marine to get them to drop the lawsuit? Can't you just leave me alone?"

"Why are you yelling at the bird?" The voice came from behind him. Sam looked around, his fist still threatening the raven.

Coyote was standing in the opposite corner of the office by the fax machine. Sam's anger turned to confusion. He looked at the bird, then Coyote, then the bird. "Who's this?"

"A raven?" Coyote speculated. He turned back to the fax machine. "Hey, what is this button that says 'network'?"

Sam was still looking at the bird. "It sends simultaneously to the home offices of all the companies we represent."

Coyote pushed the button. "Like smoke signals."

"What?" Sam dropped his fist, ran to the fax machine, and hit the cancel button a second too late. The display showed the transmission had gone out. Sam pulled the paper from the machine and stared at it in disbelief. Coyote had obviously lain on the copy machine to get the image.

"You faxed your penis? That machine prints my name at the top of each transmission."

"The girls in the home office will think highly of you, then. Of course, they will be disappointed if they ever see you naked."

The raven squawked and Gabriella appeared at the open door. "Mr. Hunter, a gentleman is here to see you from the police department."

Coyote held the Xerox up to Gabriella. "A picture of your friend," he offered.

A sharp-featured Hispanic man in a tweed sport jacket pushed his way past Gabriella into the office. "Mr. Hunter, I'm Detective Alphonse Rivera, Santa Barbara PD, narcotics division. I'd like to ask you a few questions." He held out a business card embossed with a gold shield, but did not offer to shake hands.

"Narcotics?" Sam looked to Coyote, thinking he would have disappeared, but the trickster had stood his ground by the fax machine. On the hat rack, the raven cawed.

"Nice bird," Rivera said. "I understand they can be trained to talk." Rivera walked to the bird and studied it.

"Pig," the raven said.

"He's not mine," Sam said quickly. "He belongs to-" Sam looked around and Gabriella was gone from the doorway. "He belongs to this gentleman." Sam pointed to Coyote.

"And you are?" Rivera eyed Coyote suspiciously.

"Coyote."

Rivera raised an eyebrow and took a notebook from his inside jacket pocket. "Mr. Hunter, I have a few questions about what went on at Motion Marine a couple of days ago. Would you prefer to talk in private?"

"Yes." Sam looked at Coyote. "Go away. Take the bird with you."

"Nazi scum," the raven cawed.

"I'll stay," Coyote said.

Sam was on the verge of screaming. Sweat was beading on his forehead. He composed himself and turned to Rivera. "We can talk in front of Mr. Coyote."

"Just a few questions," Rivera said. "You had an appointment with James Cable at ten. Is that correct?"

"I was there for about an hour."

"I was there too," Coyote said.

Rivera turned his attention to the trickster. "Why were you there, Mr. Coyote?"

"I was raising funds for NARC."

"Narc!" the raven said.

"Narc?"

"Native American Reform Coalition."

Rivera scribbled on a pad.

Sam said, "I don't understand. What does this have to do with narcotics?"

"We think someone put hallucinogens in the coffee over at Motion Marine. Two days ago James Cable claims he was attacked by someone fitting Mr. Coyote's description. He had a heart attack."

"I just asked him if his company would make a donation," Coyote said. "He said no and I went away." He had taken the Xerox of his penis from the desk and fitted it back into the fax machine. He searched the buttons. "'Insurance commissioner, " he read as he pushed the button.

"No!" Sam dove over the desk for the cancel button. Too late. He turned to Rivera. "That document wasn't signed." He grinned and tried to move the conversation away from his panic. "You know, I was thinking — we've got an Indian, a policeman, and an insurance broker. We're only a construction worker away from the Village People."

Rivera ignored the comment. "Did you have any coffee while you were at Motion Marine, Mr. Hunter?"

"Coffee? No."

"And you didn't drink from the watercooler?"

"No. I don't understand."

"Today, three people at Motion Marine, including Frank Cochran, claim that they saw a polar bear in the offices."

Sam looked at Coyote. "A polar bear?"

"We think that someone slipped them some LSD. We're testing the water and the coffee now. We just wanted to talk to anyone who has been in the building in the last two days. You didn't see anyone strange hanging around while you were in the building?"

"I only saw Cable's secretary and Cable," Sam said.

Rivera flipped the notebook closed. "Well, thanks for your time. If you have any strange reactions or see anything strange, could you give me a call?" Rivera handed a card to Coyote. "And you too, if you would."

"Cabron," the raven said.

"He speaks Spanish, too," Rivera said. "Amazing." The detective left the office.

"'Santa Barbara News-Press advertising, " Coyote read as he pushed the button. The fax machine whirred.

Sam started to go for the machine, then stopped and sat down in his chair. He sat for a minute rubbing his temples. "If that cop runs a background check on me, I'm going to jail. You know that, don't you?"

"You wanted your old life back."

"But a fucking polar bear?"

"Well, you have your old life back, whether you want it or not."

"I was wrong." It felt good saying it, the honesty in it. He wanted a new life. "I just want you to go away."

"I'm gone," Coyote said. "The girl is gone too."

"What does that mean?"

The feathers on Coyote's shirt turned black and his fingers changed to flight feathers. In an instant Coyote was a raven. He flew out the office door followed by the raven from the hat rack.

CHAPTER 21 All Happy Families

Santa Barbara

Calliope stood in the driveway, holding Grubb, waiting for Lonnie to return. Nina had been right: she wasn't very good at worrying, but she was giving it a good effort. She was sure that Lonnie wouldn't hurt her or Grubb, but then again, Lonnie had never acted the way he had the night before. She wished that she could have asked Sam to stay with her and help her with a decision, but it would have been too much to ask so soon. She wished, too, that there were phones at the ashram and that she could call her mother for advice. And she couldn't just jump in the car and drive to see her mother as she always had before. She had her job, her house, and there was Sam now.

She was trying to push the dark specter of the unknown to the back of her mind when she heard the Harley approaching. She looked up to see Lonnie rounding the corner a block away, his new girlfriend clinging to him like a leech. Lonnie pulled into the driveway next to her and killed the engine.

"I'm late for work," Calliope said, wiping a trail of drool from Grubb's face with her finger.

The woman behind Lonnie glared at her and Calliope nodded to her and said, "Hi."

Lonnie reached for Grubb without getting off the bike. Calliope hugged Grubb close. She said, "I don't want him riding on the bike with you."

Lonnie laughed. "The way you drive? He's a hell of a lot safer on the bike."

"Please, Lonnie."

The woman reached out and took Grubb from Calliope. The baby began to cry. "He'll be fine," Cheryl hissed.

"Why can't you just stay at home with him?" Calliope asked.

"Places to go, people to meet," Lonnie said.

"I could get Yiffer to watch him." Calliope felt her breath coming hard. She didn't like the look of this hard woman holding her Grubb.

Lonnie said, "You tell Yiffer to watch his ass or I'll shoot it off."

"Lonnie, I have to go. Can't you just stay here? I'm only working the lunch shift today."

Lonnie grinned. "Aren't you going to stop by the hospital on your way home?"

"Hospital? No. Why?"

Lonnie fired up the Harley. "No reason." He laughed and coaxed the big bike around in the driveway.

As he gunned the engine and pulled into the street Cheryl shouted, "Don't worry, bitch, we'll put a dollar on black for you."

Over the roar of the Harley, Calliope could hear the woman grunt as Lonnie elbowed her in the ribs.

Calliope saw Grubb looking at her as they rounded the corner. Panic tore at her chest as what the woman had said sunk in. She turned and ran back up the steps.

By late afternoon the contractors had replaced Sam's sliding glass door and patched the bullet holes in the walls. Sam canceled the week's appointments, which gave him time alone with his thoughts. He soon found, however, that his thoughts, like monkeys in church, were bad company.

He tried reading to distract himself, but he found that he was simply looking at the pages. He tried napping, but as soon as he closed his eyes, images of Coyote and the police filled his head. When the worry became too much for him he thought of Calliope, which set off a whole new set of worries. What had Coyote meant, "The girl is gone"? Did it matter?

She was trouble. Too young, too goofy, probably too attractive. And the kid — he didn't need a kid in his life either. Trouble. If she had gone somewhere he probably was better off. He didn't need the hassles. That thought still bouncing through his mind, he grabbed the phone and dialed her number. No answer. He called information and got the number for the Tangerine Tree Cafe. She hadn't shown up for work today.

Where in the hell is she? Where in the hell is Coyote? The fucker knew where she went and he wouldn't tell. What had started as a niggling irritation turned to dread. Why in the hell does it matter? he thought.

Terrifying and black, a word rose in his mind that matched his feeling. He recoiled from it, but it struck him again and again like an angry viper. Love: the sickest of Irony's sick jokes. The place where logic and order go to die. Then again, maybe not. It was only bad if you were hiding, pretending to be something that you were not. Maybe the hiding could end.

Sam got up and headed out the door in what he knew was a ridiculous effort to find Calliope. He drove to the cafe and confirmed what they had told him on the phone. Then he drove to Calliope's house and found Yiffer and Nina getting out of the van as he pulled up.

Nina said, "I don't know where she is, Sam. She left a note saying that Lonnie had taken Grubb and she was going after him."

"Nothing about where she was going?"

"Any note at all is a big step for her. She used to disappear for days at a time with no note at all."

"Fuck." Sam started to get back in the car.

"Sam," Nina called. He paused. "The note said to tell you she was sorry."

"For what?"

"That's all it said."

"Thanks, Nina. Call me if she shows up." Sam gunned the Mercedes out of the driveway, having no idea where he was going.

He needed help. All his machines and access to information wouldn't help. He needed a place to start. Twenty-four hours ago he would have given anything to get rid of Coyote. Now he would welcome the trickster's cryptic, smart-assed answers — at least they were answers.

He drove around town, looking for Calliope's Z, feeling hope rise each time he spotted an orange car, and feeling it fall when it turned out not to be Calliope's. After an hour he returned home, where he sat on his sofa, smoking and thinking. Everything had changed and nothing had changed. His life was back to normal, and normal wasn't enough anymore. He wanted real.

At the Guild's clubhouse Tinker was digging at a flea bite on his leg, trying to pull his grimy jeans up over heavy boots to get at the tiny invader. "Fucking fleas," he said.

The Guild's president, Bonner Newton, let out a raucous snort. "You know what they say, bro," Newton said. "Lie down with dogs…" A din of harsh laughter rose in the room from the other Guild members.

"Fuck you guys," Tinker said, feigning anger while enjoying the attention. It wasn't that he liked ugly chicks, but who else would have him?

Nineteen of the twenty full members of the Guild were draped over furniture and sprawled on the floor, smoking joints and cigarettes, drinking beers and feeling at the few old ladies present. Outside, two strikers, members who had not earned their full colors, sat on the front porch watching for the law.

The house was a ramshackle stucco bungalow that had been built in the 1930s as part of a housing tract, before the term housing tract was part of the language. The walls were stained with blood, beer, and vomit. The carpet was matted with motor oil; the furniture was minimal and distressed. Only Tinker actually lived at the clubhouse. The rest of the club used it for meeting and partying.

The Guild had paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash for the house. The deed was registered under Newton's married sister's name, as was the ranch house the Guild owned in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Santa Barbara, which housed the lab that provided their income. Ironically, the ranch's nearest neighbor was a wobbly-headed ex-president who had declared a war on drugs, and who, from time to time, would stand on the veranda of his palatial ranch house sniffing the odor of cooking crank and calling, "Mommy, there's a funny smell trickling down out here."

The lab produced enough income to support all of the Guild's members and ensure that none of them had to work except to man the counter of the Harley-Davidson shop that Bonner Newton used to launder drug money.

Newton held an M.B.A. from Stanford. In an earlier time, before he fell from grace for smuggling cocaine, he had stalked the glass-cube buildings of Silicon Valley, wearing Italian suits and commanding crews of brilliant computer designers who could define the universe in terms of two digits, explain the chaos theory in twenty-five words or less, and build machines that emulated human intelligence — but who thought a vulva was a Swedish automobile. Newton's experience in coddling these genius misfits served him well as president of the Guild, for the members of the Guild were nothing more than nerds without brains: fat, ugly, or awkward men who found no acceptance in the outside world and so escaped into the security and belonging of an outlaw biker club. A Harley-Davidson and blind loyalty were the only requirements for membership.

"Listen up, you fucks," Newton said, calling the meeting to order. "Bitches outside." He paused and lit a cigarette while the women filed out the door, glaring at him over their shoulders. He was not a large or imposing man compared to the other members, but his authority was not to be questioned.

"Lonnie's not here yet," Tinker said.

"Lonnie's running an errand for us," Newton said. "We're going to take an impromptu road trip. A little business and a little pleasure."

"Fuckin' A," someone yelled. Newton gestured for quiet.

"Seems like someone forgot to tell me that we were running low on ether up at the facility." Newton always referred to the crank lab as "the facility." Tinker stopped scratching his leg and hung his head.

"Tink, you fucking idiot," someone said.

"Anyway," Newton continued, "I wasn't able to arrange a delivery, so we have to go get it. There's a rally in South Dakota in a couple of days. At Sturgis. The Chicago chapter is going to meet us there with a couple of barrels. I want three fifty-five-gallon drums rigged with false tops so if we get stopped by the law it looks like we're hauling motor oil. Tinker, you'll drive the pickup."

"Aw, come on, Newt," Tinker whined.

"Warren," Newton said. A thin biker with curly red hair looked up. "You fix one of the barrels for weapons, and make sure no one is packing. I don't want any weapons on anyone while we're riding."

A series of snorts, moans, and "Oh, fucks" passed around the room. Newton dismissed them with a wave. "Advice from the Gator," he said. Gator was short for the litigator, the Guild's attorney, Melvin Gold, who handled all their criminal cases free of charge in exchange for the assurance that he could also handle their personal injury suits. Bikers got run over a lot.

"Look," Newton insisted, "half of you are on probation. We don't need some rookie pig looking for glory to fuck us on a concealed-weapons charge. Are we clear?" Newton paused until someone answered, "We're clear."

"All right, then. Lonnie's making a run to Vegas with his old lady to get the money to pay for the ether. He'll meet us in South D. We're out of here at nine tomorrow morning, so don't get too fucked up tonight. Bring your camping shit. Let your bitches carry your stash." Newton dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the carpet. "That's all," he said.

The room filled with conversations about the trip. A few of the members got up to leave. When they opened the door a single flea hopped out with them. Once past the steps the flea changed into a horsefly and took flight. A block away the horsefly changed into a raven and headed toward the mesa and the Cliffs condominium complex.

CHAPTER 22 Sprinkling the Son of the Morning Star

Santa Barbara

After almost twenty years as a salesman, Sam found that when he was confused his head filled with homilies that pertained to the profession. Win an argument, lose a sale. If you look hungry, you will be. You can't sell if you don't pitch. There were hundreds of them. He'd been running them through his mind for hours, trying to find some clue as to what he should do. The one that kept returning was Never confuse motion with progress.

To leave the house in search of Calliope without a clue as to where she might be would be movement for the sake of movement. Progress would be actually finding a clue to her whereabouts. He had no idea where to start looking for clues, so he lay on his bed and smoked, and tried to convince himself that he didn't want her.

She's probably found some other guy, he thought. Losing the kid is just an excuse, a cowardly Dear John letter. It was just a one-night stand and I refuse to let it mean more to me than it meant to her. I've got my life back, intact, and there's no room for a young girl and a child. Nope. I'll rest up today and get back to work tomorrow. After I close a couple of deals, this week will just seem like a bad dream. It was a good rationalization. Unfortunately, he didn't believe a word of it; he was worried about her.

Sam closed his eyes and tried to imagine the pages of his appointment book. It was a visualization he used to relax, a salesman's version of counting sheep. He saw the days and weeks spread out in front of him, and he filled in the blanks with lunches and prospects. By each of the names he made mental notes on how he would approach the pitch. Before long he was lost in a world of presentations and objections; the image of the girl faded away.

As he started to doze off he heard the sound of heavy breathing. He rolled on his side and steamy hot dog breath hit him in the face. He didn't open his eyes. There was no need to. He knew Coyote had returned. Perhaps if he feigned sleep the trickster would go away, so he lived there in the land of dog breath. A wet nose prodded his ear. At least he hoped it was a nose. With Coyote's sexual habits it could be…. No, he still smelled the breath. It was the nose.

I'm asleep, go away. I'm asleep, go away, he thought. He'd seen opossums try the same method to fool oncoming semi trucks, and it was working about as well for him. He felt the coyote climb onto the bed. Then he felt a paw on each of his shoulders. He groaned as he thought a truly sleeping guy might groan. Coyote whimpered and Sam could feel the canine nose press against his own.

Dog breath, Sam mused, seems to have no distinction to it, yet it is distinctly dog breath. You could be at the cologne counter at Bloomingdale's, and someone could mist your wrist with an atomizer, and a single whiff would reveal the elusive scent to be dog breath as surely as if it had been squozen straight from the dog. Yet, what a wide spectrum of foulness dog breath can span, both in odor and humidity. This particular version of dog breath, he felt, is especially steamy, and carries a top note of stale cigarettes and coffee, as well as the usual fetid meat and butthole smells found in more common dog breath. This, he thought, is supernatural dog breath. I'm not likely to be breathed upon by another dog in my lifetime that has recently enjoyed a Marlboro over a cup of Java.

Despite his effort to distract himself with dog breath aesthetics, Sam's tolerance was wearing out and he thought he might sneeze or throw up any second. Coyote licked him on the mouth.

"Yuck!" Sam sat upright and wiped his mouth on his arm. "Ack!" He shivered involuntarily and looked at the big coyote, who grinned at him from the end of the bed. "There was no need for that," Sam said.

Coyote whimpered and rolled over on his back in submission.

Sam got up from the bed and grabbed his cigarettes from the nightstand. "Why are you back? You said you were gone for good."

Coyote began to change into his human form. No longer afraid, Sam watched the transformation with fascination. In a few seconds Coyote sat on the bed in his black buckskins wearing the coyote-skin headdress. "Got a smoke?" he asked.

Sam shook one out of the pack and lit it for the trickster. Sam took a small plastic box from his shirt pocket and held it out to Coyote. "Breath mint?"

"No."

"I insist," Sam said.

Coyote took the box and shook out a mint, popped it in his mouth, and handed the box back to Sam. "The girl is going to Las Vegas."

"I don't care." The lie tasted foul in his mouth.

"If she tries to take her child from the biker she will be hurt."

"It's not my problem. Besides, she'll probably find another guy to help her out." Sam felt both righteous and cowardly for saying it. This role he was playing no longer fit. Quickly he added, "I don't need the trouble."

"In the buffalo days your people used to say that a wife stolen and returned was twice the wife she had been."

"They aren't my people and she's not my wife."

"You can be afraid, just don't act like it."

"What does that mean? You're worse than Pokey with your fucking riddles."

"You lost Pokey. You lost your family. You lost your name. All you have left is your fear, white man." Coyote flipped his cigarette at Sam. It hit him in the chest and hot ashes showered on the bed.

Sam patted out the embers and brushed himself off. "I didn't ask for you to come here. I don't owe the girl anything." But he did owe her. He wasn't sure what for yet, except that she had cut something loose in him. Why couldn't he cut loose the habit of fear?

Coyote went to the bedroom window and stared out. Without turning he said, "Do you know about the Crows who scouted for General Custer?"

Sam didn't answer.

"When they told Custer that ten thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors were waiting for him at the Little Bighorn he called them liars and rode on. The Crow scouts didn't owe Custer anything, but they painted their faces black and said, 'Today is a good day to die. "

"The point?" Sam bristled.

"The point is that you will never know what they knew — that courage is its own reward."

Sam sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Coyote's back. The red feathers across the buckskin shirt seemed to move on the black surface of Coyote's shirt. Sam wondered if he might not be light-headed from prolonged dog breath inhalation, but then the feathers drew a scene, and in a whirl of images and feathers, Sam was back on the reservation again.

There were three of them: boys hiding in the sagebrush by the road that led into the Custer Battlefield National Monument. Two were Crow, one Cheyenne. They were there on a dare that had started in ninth-grade gym class. The largest boy, the Cheyenne, was from the Broken Tooth family — descendants of a warrior who fought with Crazy Horse and Red Cloud on this very land.

"You going to do it?" said Eli Broken Tooth. "Or are you full of shit like all Crows?"

"I said I'd do it," Samson said. "But I'm not going to be stupid about it."

"What about you, breed?" Eli asked Billy Two Irons. "You a chickenshit?" Broken Tooth had been taunting Billy about his mixed blood for the whole school year and citing his own "pure Indian" lineage. The fact was that in buffalo days the mortality rate had been so high for young plains warriors that a woman might have three or four husbands in her lifetime, and have children by them all. Sometimes one of the husbands was a white man, yet since they all traced their kinship through their mother's line, the white ancestor could easily be forgotten.

Billy said, "I'll bet you got a few whiteys in your wigwam you don't even know about, Broken Dick."

Samson laughed and the others shushed him. The security guard was making a pass by the monument's high wrought-iron gate. They ducked their heads. A flashlight beam passed over them, paused, and moved on as the guard turned to walk up the hill toward the Custer burial site.

"You going to do it?" Eli asked.

"Once he's past the grave he has to go check on the Reno site. He'll take the jeep for that. When we hear the jeep, we'll go."

"Sure you will," said Eli.

"You coming?" Samson asked. He was more than a little afraid. The monument was federal land, and this was a time when an Indian causing trouble on federal land was something the government was going to great lengths to discourage after the Alcatraz takeover and the killings at Pine Ridge.

"I don't have to go," Broken Tooth said. "My people put him there. I'll just sit here and twist up a doobie while you girls do your thing." He grinned.

"The gate will be the bitch," Billy said. They looked at the fifteen-foot iron spears suspended between two stone pillars. There were only two cross members they could use as footholds.

They watched the guard amble the hundred yards down the hill to the visitor center. When they heard the jeep fire up, Samson and Billy took off. They hit the gate at the same time. The gate swung with the impact and clanged against the chains and padlock that held it closed. They scrambled up the bars, then hung over spearpoints and dropped to the asphalt. As they let go the chain sent a loud clang ringing down the valley. They both landed on their butts.

Samson looked to Billy. "You okay?"

Billy jumped to his feet and dusted off his jeans. "How come the Indians in the movies can do this shit in complete stealth?"

"Vocational training," Samson said. He started running up the hill toward the monument. Billy followed.

"Snake ahead," Samson said as he ran.

"What?"

"Snake," Sam repeated breathlessly. He leapt into the air over the big diamondback rattler that was lying in the road, warming itself on the asphalt. Billy saw the snake in time to pull up and slide on some loose gravel within striking distance.

When he heard Billy's shoes sliding he stopped and turned.

Billy said, "You were saying 'Snake, right?"

"Back away and go around, Billy." Samson was so out of breath he could hardly talk. The rattler coiled.

"I thought you were saying 'Steak. I was wondering, Why is he yelling 'Steak' at me?"

"Back away and go around."

"'Snake. Well, I guess this explains it." Billy backed slowly away, then once out of striking distance ran a wide arc around the snake and up the hill.

Samson fell in beside him. The monument was still a hundred yards away. "Pace yourself," he said.

"Did you say 'Snake' again?" Billy said between pants.

Rather than answer, Samson fell into a trot.

The monument was a twenty-foot granite obelisk set on a ten-foot base at the top of a hill that overlooked the entire Little Bighorn basin.

"Let's do it," Samson said, heaving in breaths. The hill had been longer and steeper than he'd thought.

Billy unzipped his pants and stood beside Samson, who had already bared his weapon. "You know," Billy said, "it would have been easier to gang up on Eli and beat the shit out of him."

"I think I hear the jeep coming back," Samson said. A long yellow stream arced out of Billy and splashed the side of the monument. "Then you better get going." Samson strained. "I can't."

Billy grunted, trying to force his urine to run faster. "Go, man. That's headlights."

"I can't."

Billy finished and zipped up, then turned to face Samson. "Think rivers, think waterfalls."

"It won't come."

"Come on, Samson. He's coming. Relax."

"Relax? How can-"

"Okay, relax in a hurry."

Samson pushed until his eyes bugged. He felt a trickle, then a stream coming.

"Push it, Samson. He's coming." Billy began to back down the hill. "Push it, man."

The jeep's headlights broke over the hill and descended toward the monument. "Duck!" Billy said.

Samson squatted by the base of the monument and managed to stream urine down both pant legs before he got himself reaimed. Billy dove for cover next to Samson.

"Did you say 'Duck'?" Samson whispered.

"Shut up," Billy snapped.

Despite his fear, the adrenaline had made Samson giddy. He grinned at Billy. "I thought you were saying 'Truck, which would have made more sense, but-"

"Would you shut up?" Billy risked a peek at the road. The jeep was coming toward them, rather than returning to the visitor center where it had started. As the jeep approached the monument, they worked their way around its base, keeping the obelisk between themselves and the guard. "He won't stop, will he?" Billy said.

Samson could hear the jeep slowing as it passed the monument on the other side of them, not twenty feet away. They held their crouch until the jeep descended the hill and stopped halfway to the gate.

"He sees footprints," Billy said.

"On asphalt?"

"He saw us. I'm going to end up in jail like my brother."

"No, look, it's the fucking snake. He's waiting for it to get out of the road."

Indeed, the guard was inching the jeep forward slowly enough for the rattler to slither off into the grass. When the snake was gone the jeep revved up and continued down the hill, by the iron gate, and back around to the back of the visitor center.

"Let's go," Billy said. They ran down the road, Samson almost falling while trying to zip his pants and run at the same time. As they reached the gate Samson grabbed Billy's shoulder and pulled him back.

"What the fuck?" Billy said. Samson pointed to the chain. Billy nodded in understanding. The clanging.

Samson went to the center of the gate and grasped it. "Go," he said. "When you get over, hold it for me."

Without hesitation Billy leapt to the gate and climbed over, sliding down the opposite side instead of dropping as before. He held the gate and Samson started over.

As Samson reached the top of the gate and was working his feet between the spearpoints, he heard Eli's laughing from down the road and he looked up. A second later he heard a metal fire door slam at the visitor center. The quick turn took his balance and he tried to jump, but one of the spearpoints caught his jeans leg and he was slammed upside down into the gate. Billy held the chain, but there was a dull clank as Samson's forehead hit the bars.

It took Samson a second to realize that he was still hanging from the gate, his head still eight feet off the ground. "Unhook your leg," Billy said. "I'll catch you."

In this position Samson was facing the visitor center. He could see some lights going on inside. He struggled to push himself up on the bar, but the spearpoint was barbed. "I can't get it."

"Shit," Billy said. He held the gate with one hand and drew a flick knife from his back pocket with the other. "I'll come up and cut you down."

"No, don't let go of the gate," Samson said.

"Fuck it," Billy said. He let go of the gate and it clanged with Samson's swinging weight. Billy jumped on the bars and as he climbed Samson could hear the fire door open and slam again, then footsteps. Billy stood at the top of the stone pillar and put the knife to Samson's pant leg. "When I cut, keep hold of the bars."

Billy pulled the knife blade through the denim and Samson flipped over and slammed the bars again, this time right side up. The gate clanged again. Samson heard the jeep starting and saw the beams of the headlights come out from behind the visitor center. He looked to Billy. "Jump!"

Billy leapt from the fifteen-foot pillar. As he hit the pavement he yowled and crumpled. "My ankle."

Samson looked to the visitor center, where the jeep was pulling out. He grabbed Billy under the armpits and dragged him down into the ditch. They waited, breathlessly, as the jeep stopped and the guard, gun drawn, checked the lock and chain once again.

After the guard left they crawled down the ditch toward Eli. When he came into view, Samson helped Billy to his feet and supported him while he limped up to the big Cheyenne, who was taking a deep hit on a joint.

"Want a hit?" he croaked, holding the joint out to Billy.

Billy took the joint, sat down in the grass, and took a hit.

Eli let out a cloud of smoke and laughed. "That was the funniest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life." Then he spotted the wet streaks on Samson's pants. "What happened, Hunts Alone? I thought you were going to piss on Custer's grave. You get so scared you wet yourself?" He threw back his head to laugh and Samson wound up and tagged him on the jaw with a vicious roundhouse punch. Eli dropped to the ground and didn't move. Samson looked at his damaged fist, then at Eli, then at Billy Two Irons. He grinned.

Billy said, "You couldn't have done that twenty minutes ago and saved us all this trouble, could you?"

"You're right," Samson said. "I couldn't have done that twenty minutes ago. Let's get out of here before he comes to."

Samson helped Billy to his feet, then out of the ditch onto the road. As they headed toward Crow Agency it seemed to get darker as they walked, then darker still, until there was no light at all and Sam was in his bedroom staring at the back of a black buckskin shirt trimmed with red woodpecker feathers.

"It was a stupid thing to do," Sam said.

"It was brave," Coyote said. "It would have been stupid if you had failed."

"We found out later that Custer wasn't even buried there. His body was taken to West Point, so it was all for nothing."

"And what about the night on the dam? Was that all for nothing?"

"How do you know about that?"

Coyote turned and stared at Sam with his arms crossed, his golden eyes shining with delight.

"That was nothing but trouble," Sam said finally.

"Would you do it again?"

"Yes," Sam said without thinking.

"And the girl is nothing but trouble?" Coyote said.

Sam heard the words echoing in his mind. Going after the girl was the right thing to do. After all the years of doing the safe thing, it was time to do the right thing. He said, "You really piss me off sometimes, you know that?"

"Anger is the gods' way of letting you know you are alive."

Sam got up and stood face-to-face with the trickster, trying to read something in his eyes. He moved forward until their noses almost touched. "All you know is that she's going to Las Vegas? No address or anything?"

"Not so far. But if she misses them there, the biker is going on to South Dakota. She'll follow. I'll tell you the rest on the way."

"I don't suppose you could change into a Learjet or something practical."

Coyote shook his head. "Just living things: animals, bugs, rocks."

Sam reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out the box of breath mints, and handed them to Coyote. The trickster raised his eyebrows in query.

Sam said, "Eat those. I can't handle dog breath through an eight-hour drive."