Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 12, December, 1953

The Coyote by David Chandler

I was sick, to my stomach. There was my father, the gun in his hand, saying, “Take it! Take it!”

Mama told me to see Beaver but when I got to the toolshed I saw that someone had already tethered him, maybe the hired man from Ventura Father had sent away that morning after hardly a day with us. I went straight back to the house. I could hear them still talking in Father’s room. A lot of it I couldn’t understand but what they were saying about me I could figure out all right, and I stood by the door listening to them.

“You just haven’t cared about trying to understand,” Mama said.

“Anything that isn’t to your liking you won’t hear about.”

“Have it your way,” Father said. “I will not waste my time arguing with a woman or a boy.”

“But this is like everything else in our life,” Mama said. “You won’t bend an inch for Tommy or for me. That’s the way you run the ranch, that’s the way you treat your family and your help. Why won’t you leave even a little bit of what was once our marriage, Tom?”

There weren’t any words for what seemed a long time. All I could hear was my breathing. Then there was a sound like a slap and Mama called out Father’s name, “Thomas!” And it was awfully quiet in there again, not even anyone moving on the floor. When Mama started to talk it sounded like her throat was drowned in tears. She said, “You’re doing this because you know there’s nothing I won’t take on Tommy’s account.”

“Look,” Father said, “we’ve been through all that before. If you get any fun grubbing around in dead ashes, keep yourself a diary. You know how I feel, I know how you feel. It’s an old story and it always comes out the same, that if it wasn’t for Tommy we wouldn’t stay together an hour. All we can do is hate each other and wish to God one of us falls into a threshing machine or gets hit by a truck so Tommy need never know how it was with us. But while you’re living here, on my ranch, mothering my son, we’ll have no trouble so long as you understand what you’re to do. I won’t have you bringing up that boy a lacey-pants. He’s my son and I’m not giving in to childish whims.”

I could hear Mama clear her nose. “Thomas,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like Mama, “I told you the boy doesn’t want to go hunting with you. It’s a simple thing. He loves you very much but he doesn’t like to kill anything, even in sport.”

“Kill!” Father exclaimed. “I’ve heard of men shamed by the soft eyes of deer, but this is only coyotes.”

“It doesn’t matter. Tommy doesn’t like to kill anything.”

“What kind of damned boy is that?” Father shouted. “I’d be the laughing stock of every rancher in the valley if they thought I had a son too chintzy to kill a lousy coyote.”

“He’s a gentle boy, don’t you see? Take him camping with you, sleep out on the range, shoot skeet, he likes that very much, but don’t ask him to kill living things. Try to understand the boy, not for my sake, for his. He wants so to admire you.”

“What do you mean, wants?” Father said, very loud. “Have you been turning him against me?”

“Please,” Mama said, “don’t shout. He’s out with his pony and I’d die if he heard us. I haven’t, Tom. I swear I haven’t. I’m just trying to tell you he’s the kind of boy who never even killed caterpillars out of curiosity.”

“It’s your doing!” Father exclaimed. “You’re making a lousy flower-sniffer out of him. What you want me to do, go chasing with him, with a butterfly net? Is that your idea how a boy should be brought up? You’ve kept that boy chocked tight to your apron and I’m damped glad I found out in time.”

“What’s the use?” Mama said. Her voice sounded tired. “You won’t understand anybody but yourself.”

“I’m not interested in your opinion of me. I’m telling you no son of mine is going out into the world afraid of a little blood, too good to do what killing’s got to be done or to make a sport of a thing like thinning out the coyotes. Go tell him to get his shotgun. I’ll be ready to leave in half an hour.”

“Thomas,” Mama pleaded. “Thomas, I’m begging you. I know the boy. He’s only eleven years old. Maybe when he’s older, if you don’t force things, maybe he’ll grow out of this.”

“He’s going with me,” Father said, like he hadn’t listened to anything after all. I was beginning to cry then and I was afraid they’d learn I’d been listening to everything they’d said, so I went to the outside door, stepping carefully so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak and I ran away where I could cry without Father ever knowing about it.

She put her hand softly on my back and leaned forward to press her cheek on my cheek. She smelled clean and sweet and she picked up a straw and put it in my ear to tickle me when I wouldn’t turn to look at her. If I hadn’t heard what I did I would have thought it was like it had always been, but now I knew she was play-acting me and I couldn’t look at her for wondering how long she had been play-acting me without my knowing it.

“Tommy,” Mama said, “I couldn’t imagine where you’d gone. Until I remembered this place.”

“Mama, please let me stay here awhile. I just want to think.”

“Of course.” Mama leaned down and kissed me. “I know how you like it here. I’ll wait for you in the house. But don’t be too long. Father’s waiting for you to go hunting with him.”

I stood up in the loft. “Mama, I don’t want to, I don’t!” Now I couldn’t keep from showing her I had been crying and I ran to her and she put her arms around me and pressed me very close to her. “I hate it, Mama, I hate it!”

She held me close to her and let her fingers touch my face and my hair and then she said, “Sit down, Tommy,” and we sat and she took my two hands in hers and looked right in my eyes and said, “Tommy, sometimes we have to do things we don’t like doing. You can understand, can’t you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, “but I don’t want to go hunting with Father.”

“But it will be fun, Tommy. Just the two of you, when the desert floor is cooling and the colors are so nice in the sky. There’ll be no one but you two. Think of the good time! I wish I were a boy so I could go along, too.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

She pressed my hands very tight. “Tommy,” she said, “even if we didn’t like it, for the sake of the ranch, we might have to destroy coyotes. They kill things, you know.”

“No, they don’t, Mama,” I said. “They’re too timid. They only eat what others leave behind and what we throw away. They don’t hurt anything.”

“A boy must shoot, Tommy.” Mama said it like she was a teacher telling me about fractions. “Even if you don’t like it for sport, then for the ranch. Can you see that? Coyotes are disorderly. Do you remember when the vet said we’d have to inoculate the puppy because the coyotes might give him rabies?”

“Father’s not doing it for that reason,” I said. “He’s doing it because he likes to kill things and he wants me to start to like killing things, too.”

“What a thing to say!” Mama said. She let go of my hands and turned her head from me and when she talked again she sounded the way she had before when the tears were bubbling in her throat but she hadn’t wanted to let on. “Father is only trying to bring you up so you can take your place next to him when you grow up.”

Mama took my head in her hands and pressed it to her shoulder. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said. “I wish I could help you. But you must go if only because it’ll be easier for you to go than not to go. It will please your father and you must do that. We must always do what Father wants us to do.” She stroked my hair and I couldn’t talk. I thought about everything and I tried to figure it all out.

We walked around the alfalfa, across the last irrigation ditch and over a little rise in the ground from which I could see the house. “Come along,” Father said, “I never saw a boy walk so slow in all my days.” Father was walking ahead of me, his shotgun slung easy across his two shoulders like a yoke. Father didn’t believe in going hunting with your gun broke in half. That’s the way I liked to carry my gun. It seemed better balanced that way. But Father said if you carried it like that and saw something suddenly you wouldn’t have time to fire, so the thing to do was to keep your gun loaded all the time.

We walked for a long time, not seeing anything, Father ahead of me turning around every now and then to hurry me up and me trying to do my best to keep up with him.

Suddenly, Father turned toward me and pointed off. “There!” he said. “Over there! Go on, boy. Shoot him!”

Just a few steps from him a big brown jack was bouncing up and down across the brush. He must have sensed something because he was going very fast.

“Let him have it!” Father cried. “Shoot him on the run!”

I looked at the rabbit and then at Father and then to where the rabbit had been, but he was gone.

Father came over and grabbed my arm right below the shoulder. He shook me hard. “You stupid little fool,” he said. “When you see something, think and act quickly. Shoot! Don’t go looking for any by-your-leave.” He shook me again. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

I couldn’t talk. I turned my head from him.

“Why didn’t you shoot? Why?”

“I forgot, I guess,” I said. I wasn’t telling the truth, but I knew what would happen if I told him the truth. It would have sounded wrong to him to say I knew I could have got that jack but he looked so pretty bounding there among the sage, so I said I forgot.

He let my arm go with a push. “Next time I won’t ask for explanations. I’m going to spank you, like a little boy. Understand? If you don’t shoot first and think after, I’ll thrash you.”

He went away from me and motioned for me to come after him. I walked quickly, the gun in my hand at the side. Father turned to see how I was going. He came up to me again, swiftly, and pushed the gun to the ground. “Not like that, you fool!” he exclaimed. “You want it to go off and kill me?”

I bent down to pick up the gun. He put his foot over the barrel. “I said, do you want it to go off and kill me?” I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say and I was afraid to say anything at all for he’d be able to tell I was trying to keep from crying. I bent down again, but Father seized my shirt and straightened me once more. “Do you?” he shouted. “Do you?”

I started to cry. “I want to go home, Father,” I said, but I was crying so hard I think he didn’t understand me.

“You stop that cry-baby stuff,” he said. “Stop it, I tell you!”

He waited till I did what I was told. I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes and my face and I could taste the salt on my mouth.

“All right now, pick up that gun and watch it, you fool. You handle it carelessly, you’ll blast your leg off.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Father looked at me. “Very well. We’ll go on and forget the whole thing.”

But I could see it wasn’t the same. Father didn’t turn to look at me the way he had before. I had displeased him again, the way I always did whenever we went out together and I wished I could tell him I was trying. But he was too far away and too angry at me, so I walked as fast as I could to keep up with him. Then I saw him, dead ahead, and he was resting on one knee and gesturing to me to come up to him fast. When I broke into a run, he put his finger to his mouth and made a face to tell me to be quiet. I walked softly to him and there, not far from us and straight ahead, was a coyote, the wind coming from behind us so he didn’t even know we were watching him, and he was eating something he was holding like a dog between his two paws.

“All right,” Father whispered. “Now. Quickly.”

I looked at Father, but he only tightened his mouth and repeated, “Now.”

I brought my gun to my shoulder. I looked at Father again, and I could see him grow more furious at me. Then I looked at the coyote as best I could, my eyes suddenly hazy, and I squeezed the trigger and there was a blast and I wasn’t holding the gun properly, I guess, for it seemed to have an awful kick, hurting my shoulder. I could see the coyote fall over.

Father got up. “You didn’t take proper aim,” he said. He started to walk to the coyote who got hit in his side and who was trying to get up and run but couldn’t. “You’ve only injured him, you damned fool. Now you’ve got to do it properly.”

The way Father looked at me frightened me, so I started to run. Father caught me by the crook of the elbow and dragged me with him. “I don’t want to!” I cried. “Papa! Papa!”

He squeezed my arm and pulled me with him. “That’s what comes of being sentimental. Now he’s bleeding to death out there and you’re going to put him out of his pain.” He let go of me. “Come on, we’ll go on over to him and you can bash him over the head with your gunstock and end his misery. He isn’t worth another shell.”

“No, Father,” I shouted.

He struck me across the face. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he said. He took hold of my shirt behind my neck and started to walk. We circled around the coyote who was still trying to get to his feet. His eyes were redshot and his tongue was hanging out, gray foam flecking his mouth.

I turned to Father. “Let’s take him home, Father. Let’s make him well again.”

“Kill him, you fool,” Father said, hardly opening his mouth. “Kill him now.”

We were standing over the coyote now, his eyes upturned to me.

“Put him out of his pain,” Father said.

I lifted my gun in the air, looked at Father, and then let the stock crash into the coyote’s head. I could feel the bones crush like dry adobe and the coyote let out a long little sigh that sounded like, “Oh,” and his legs stiffened and he was dead.

Father had walked away from me. I stood over the dead coyote. “There,” Father said, turning to me. “You’ve killed. You’ve learned to kill. The next time it won’t be so hard. Put a shell in your barrel and come on.”

I broke my gun and the spent shell popped out. I put a new one in.

I looked at Father. He was trying to smile. “See, now you’ve learned, it isn’t so bad, is it?”

I was walking toward him when his eyes grew big and afraid. “I told you not to carry the gun that way, you fool.” Then he tried to move away from me. “Don’t carry it like that!” he shouted. “Don’t! Don’t!” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t!”