Coyote's Bag

You ever made an oh shit bag? I did once a 1.5x2x1 foot suitcase with everything I needed to survive the next week/week and a half and my entire life in it.

I took this job, like a taxi gig but under the table from one of my actor buddies in Ashland, Del, right. He gives me a little black Moleskine notebook with coordinates and directions written in it and a map with a red circle near Fruit Valley north of Portland. This was all going on during the news soup that was the Nixon administration. Right before Thanksgiving, I remember watching the Rams at Dallas from a bar in Mexico, so whatever year that was. I remember the 5 hours on the road; it's a helluva trip and a beautiful drive if ya ever get the chance; I got there in time to do a bit of navel-gazing before sunset.

So it gets dark. I'm passing the time with a couple cigarettes watching shooting stars and airplanes and such, or I would have been if the clouds and rain hadn't been in the way all week. When I shit you not, a man in a full business suit sans tie carrying 4 big ol' leather satchels calls outta the trees.

"You Del's friend?"

I damn near jumped near outta skin.

"Yeah, uh, I'm Coyote, You his army buddy?"

"Sure, call me Danny. You gonna be alright to drive Raccoon? or Coyote, or whatever?" Let me tell you right now, he might have looked like the world's sexiest bureaucrat, but the guy had ice in his veins. He was artic cucumber on Christmas cool, not even a full six-foot tall, but the way he was standing in my headlights in the sticks, you coulda told me he was 8 feet tall, and I'd have believed ya.

He puts 3 of his bags in the trunk of the Nova, and we took off south. In the back seat, he, Dave or Danny or whatever, went from Double ODesk job to Hawaii 5-0 and popped his head over the partition like.

"How do you know Del Coyote?"

So I tell him, "We tread the boards together at the Allen in Ashland."

"Still acting after all this time? He grew up right around the corner from Broadway never shut up about it some nights. You like it in Ashland?"

"Eh, it's cold in the winter, hot in the summer, Shakespeare festival is cool, not too much else to recommend. Great country though; it's all just mountains and trees for miles."

He turns that sub-zero stare to me in the rearview, I meet his eye, and my stomach nearly hit the pavement, he says to me.

"How far south you willing to take me?"

I swallow hard and look back to the darkened freeway. "I dunno. I guess you can come back to the Allen and meet up with Del. There's this little dive right across the street; it's haunting you'd love it."

He shoots back like he's reading outta the paper."Del's not coming back to Ashland kid. He's halfway to Yucatan by now." I was beginning to wonder what exactly I was becoming party to, so I voiced my 2nd thought instead.

"Well, I might be able to go a bit farther than Ashland, but if Del's expatriated himself, how am I getting paid exactly?"

Then as if it were nothing, with the same enthusiasm and obligation, you'd flip your brother the clicker to change off Cronkite. This pocket protector module in his floral shirt flips an Adobe 2 story in the suburbs on the front seat of my thousand-dollar Nova. I could feel his eyes on me. It knocked the wind outta me like jumping into the river in February. I couldn't tell which way was up. All logic and reason melted together into moral puttanesca, sure it stank more than all the whores in Roam, but I'll be damned if it didn't smell divine. I said the only thing that came to mind.

"I hear Panama is nice this time of year."

"With that kind of attitude, I think we can work something out. Call that California and Mexico. I'll give you another for every border."

"Summer's lease hath all too short a date" rolled through my mind, but "You know it's summer in Argentina?" is all that came out.

I felt his gaze shift a little closer to spring. The ghost of a smile could even be seen in the mirror. I was feeling courageous, so I said

"Mind if I ask where windfall came from?"

Winter descended again for a couple of seconds before he pulled a bottle outta the satchel and said. "I got it from Uncle Sam for jumping out of a plain."

The suburban 2 story in my mind shifted to a loft above my own dance studio, my ears filled with the rhythmic tattoo of Shakespeare in Spanish the whole 5 hours back to Ashland.

I made my bag in the wee hours of the morning. Having a go-bag packed and ready is one thing, but if you're gonna make an oh shit bag no matter the time of day, you're packing to leave in less than an hour. First things first, you need an oh shit, cause you never know what you really want in the bag until it's do or die. One day you'll say to yourself, Oh Shit! a fire, or a flood, earthquake, hurricane, fascist take over, or even a man just offered me $20,000 to take him to Mexico, and you may never see my home again. So what do you take? Start with the needs, do a clockwise pass around your house, get the pills, identification, cash, anything specific to keeping you moving. Then do a counterclockwise pass for anything sentimental, any chachkies, family jewels, or photos, journals, or important books, anything you'd be upset to lose in the proverbial fire or hurricane as it were. Next is tools, most things you can buy, but you'll need communication. I grabbed stamps and my Rolodex. You might have a fancy walkie-talkie or hand radios, also spray paint, chalk, mirrors. Then protection in a fire or pandemic we're talking masks, in a flood or hurricane flotation devices and a flare gun, a first aid kit never hurt ever, but in my case, I grabbed my grandad's .45, then finally a towel and as many clothes as you can stuff in.

Oh shit bag in hand, I went back to the car. It was just before dawn, and the town I grew up in was bathed in a blue-gray tint. Feeling like one of the characters in a black and white gangster flick, I looked back at Danny. Even asleep, this dude was ice cold. God knows how many more of these bills were in those bags, and yet here he was, nestled up with the whiskey still in his hand, not a care in the world.

That movie gangster, naturally being more immense, more attractive, and a little dumber than me, might have taken that old .45 and tried to take whatever the fool had for themselves. Then I imagined the kind of violence necessary to back up that level of confidence, and I figured I'd leave all that nonsense to Mary Joe and Bobby Sue.

I didn't have to wait all that long to find out I was right. We stopped in some podunk on the 5 to stock up on gas and cigarettes when we overheard this mountain of a good ol' boy getting worked up with some poor kid on the side of the building. Hate got slung. One of the words caught Danny boy across the jaw. In a flash, I watched the icebox turn into a blast furnace. I move in front of him and suggest

"Maybe if we respect their privacy, they will respect-"

I was cut off by the sound of skin on metal. We both turned to see the kid on the ground. He was gone, halfway out of sight by the time I was even turning to follow.

I finished fueling, parked, and turned on the radio. The coverage of a 30ft Mickey mouse floating down times square started to come in a little fuzzy and distant. I tuned it in just in time for the newscasters to switch to a story of a plane hijacking. I turned it off. I didn't want to think about a scary world full of violent criminals and Makavelian politics. I wanted to be thankful, I wanted to do this job, I wanted to think about how I'd spend my money and where I could get a Spanish to English dictionary on Thanksgiving.

Danny got in the car wearing the cowboy's smile on his loafers, and I got on the road. He took a pull off his bottle and swished it around in his mouth. I felt the chill of December encroaching as his eyes settled on me in the mirror again.

"There's this lie," He said, watching my reaction, "that gets repeated over and over again, it goes something like: Respect is not given its earned." He let that sit as he leaned back and took another swig, and continued, "We all believed in it because it was convenient. It lends legitimacy to those who wield power, which helps you parent a child, but that logic justifies whatever those in power need it to because they have 'earned' the respect, and those who would speak against them have not. The truth is the exact opposite. Every wretched curr on this God-forsaken rock deserves respect simply for serving in a world that offers medals for killing the right people and prison sentences for kissing the wrong ones. It's disrespect that's earned. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise have wracked up a debt their afraid of having called, like that peckerwood."

I remained quiet and flipped through a few radio channels until I heard the opening bars to "Smiling Faces Sometimes" by The Undisputed Truth starting to drip out of the speakers. We rode with nothing but the sound of music and wind until I started nodding off somewhere outside Sacramento. We switched spots for the first time, and I took a shift laying in the back seat. I honestly thought I wasn't nearly hard enough to be able to sleep with Danny and his money in the car, though I hadn't considered just how tired I was by that point.

You ever made an oh shit bag? A 1.5x2x1 foot suitcase with everything I needed to survive the next week/week and a half and my entire life in it. I did once. I took a job like a taxi gig but under the table, and now my Bureaucratic blizzard, my pencil-pushing Tsunami, was driving my thousand dollar Nova south of the sunset. Laying there on the shore between the conscious and unconscious world, I inspected the Naugahyde for a moment, then I felt his $20,000 pressing into my chest from my jacket pocket and fell asleep.