Don Coyote

Chapter 1:

The world creeps by at an easy pace as an age ends. Most have no clue, but some see the twisting of the world. Far and deep in the south, a man stirs from a sleep brought on by liquor and pain in the dusty heat of late June. Already, the temperature has reached 100 degrees, and noon has just passed as the man sleeps in his broken home. Some think it is a burnt-out shell, but a few know the sad truth. The Redman sleeps.

His face looks as if roads were carved in his red sunbaked skin. His hands are large and scarred from work and walls he could never quite punch through. His eyes are brown like the many hunters before him, and his hair, like straw, blends with the native grass of his homeland. He is a large man, both in height and girth, though the latter is due to liquor. His back is bare to the heat of the windowless home, and it too bears scars that overlap each other as if whipped by not only time but a careless owner for his slave.

The glass of the windows lies broken in the grass and weeds, mingling with objects once loved but now discarded through jagged windows, mixing with the roots of the trees that sprout up once a home becomes neglected. The thick leaves blend with forgotten memories and empty moments residing in faded pictures still in their frames. Once, long ago, life had meaning, and the days did not seem so long or empty.

Often, he does not remember sleeping but remembers the pain of being awake and finds safety at the bottom of spirits. He remembers her anguished face, the blood, and the deep, ever-present silence of the stillborn baby and mother. Life and death twisted around both the child’s neck and the mother’s womb. He remembers kneeling in her blood, begging the gods to leave him with one or the other. Begging the same silent gods to take his life for theirs. It took four orderlies to drag him from the room, to keep him from stroking her long dark hair and the beautiful blue curls on the gray baby boy’s head. He punched the priest in the face when he spoke of God's plan, and that it was meant to be. He raged like a madman until Orish came and wrapped his arms around him, speaking of peace that only the old could know.

In a single moment, he wakes from the same dream, and the same ache resides where his heart once beat. He reaches for his bottle, but it is empty. His bloodshot, vacant eyes sweep the room and find nothing but broken bottles and empty cans scattered around the room like dead little Indians. The pain of that thought, mixed with his hangover, forces him from his pallet on the empty floor. Today is the seventh year without his wife and son. The whites would call it an anniversary, but there is nothing to celebrate or remember fondly.

The wind casts long shadows across his skin and face, making him look older than his forty-five years. His frame appears as if it belonged to a younger man, except for the large belly, bloated from many years of drinking, forgetting, and remembering the past and better times of his spring. His body smells as if he has awoken from a long winter, not one night of drink and forgetting. The empty feeling in his belly begs for the taste of the night prior, but his head wants water and some crust of bread left over from the store down the road. The sour smell feels baked into his skin and hair that cascades to mid-back, streaked with gray that too needs to be washed out as soon as a moment presents itself.

In the past, he had bathed in the stream, but that too, like the bottle and life, has run dry. There was a time Orish would let him bathe there, but only if he wouldn’t bring the bottle. He could stop drinking if he wanted, but it helped with the memories. That thought brings him from his musing and makes him want to stand. Once he regains his feet, he finds an old plaid shirt and looks to find his boots as he sits heavily on the steps of his porch to escape the smell and heat of his home.

The first true thought in his mind is that it must have rained hard last night, as there are still little creeks of water running past his empties and cutting the grass into large squares of turf. His eyes turn toward the last part of his wife in the yard. Many years back, she had found an old bathtub to make into a decoration for his yard, and now it sits surrounded by the flowers she had planted. Blooming now, almost as if mocking the past in their petals. He had torn them out each time they bloomed because they hurt too much, but the roots run deep, and the need to destroy has dulled.

The morning sky has tendrils of clouds, white and high in the stratosphere, broken into zig-zags as jet trails etch through them. The morning light burns away the fog and traces the tall wall clouds in the distance. The heat seems out of place being so close to thunderheads and the weeping trees as water begins to fall from the leaves, causing the sound of dripping water from all directions. He walks toward the memorial of his wife and finds the tub filled with the rain of the past night, confused how it has not become stagnant. He bends down and falls to his knees to swim his hand through the perfection of the standing water, finding it cool. The mad impulse creeps into his foggy mind to just lay in the waters. So, he does. Removing his clothes and finding a dry place for them, he sits inside the pool and finds his pains not as bad. A deep breath, and under Don goes to find his bottom like he had so many bottles.

The distant sounds of hoppers buzz past with dragonflies darting in and out of the shade the trees make, and so it happens. A pause, just for a moment, and then gone. Gifts are given at the strangest times: when your child is protected in a wreck, or when a limb misses your car after a storm and smashes the ground and not your windshield, or when you find your bottom. The place where one reaches and can go no further. The face of his wife and the peaceful one of the child creep into his mind as the water floods over his head, and for a moment, it is good. The future that never was becomes as clear as the water, and he is happy. The times he missed teaching the child to walk or crying with pride when the little one spells his name. The image of himself with her as they watch their first child become their fourth. Their hands grasping at plays and events that are the gifts of parents. Then the water spins, and the empty truth floods into his mind. The dead wife, the children that will never be, the broken home, and the bitter man who is now a lost animal addicted to the bottle. Don becomes the water and the world around him, and the dark voices almost convince him to stay within the embrace of the pool.

The face of his wife comes again, and he watches her walk down a path he had never seen in his years. Past the empty desert, beyond the ruined mountains, and over the fallen tree. A lone man stands in an impossible forest leading lost to the found to a shore of glass spun by crows and faith. As she walks, she is followed by the crow and the coyote, sometimes trailing her and sometimes spinning overhead. The path is overgrown and filled with dangers, but it pulls him, tugs as if forcing him to the surface. The world has changed; the colors seem to have brightened, and the storm seems closer.

Don struggles from the depths of the tub, falling nude upon the grass and flowers as if born again, wet and chilled to the world. He retches all that he had swallowed from the water and the night’s drinking, puking as if he is filled with liquid and continuing until the need for air pulls him back, gasping. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees her face and the path. The moment passes, and he thinks of Orish. Rolling off the ground with his long hair tangling around his neck and over his face, he sees movement in the clearing a few dozen yards away and focuses. There stands a dog—no, a coyote—watching him, and as Don tries to find his footing, his eyes leave the coyote to the ground. Once he stands, the pup has vanished into the underbrush of the woods.

He wonders what a sight he must have looked to the beast, as it watched a wet human fall from a man-made pool to flop on the ground like some fish. The thought makes him smile in a bitter kind of way that he enjoys thinking about. The first thing he thinks of once he is standing and regains his balance is food, and how a crust of bread will not do. He muses he is clean enough to go to Orish and beg a bite if he can find his boots and a cleaner pair of jeans. He stands and stretches in the hot sun, nude as the day he was born, and feels better, better than he has in years.

As Don’s head breaks the pool’s surface, an age ends and the new one begins.

(this need refined but more to come)