Coyote Thursday
Cold fog stings the skin like tiny needles. Below the cliff, ocean rushes back and forth, roaring in and hissing out. Raven stands on the edge, facing a moonset he can't possibly see.
Jade leans on her car, arms folded against the chill.
It's three-forty a.m.
"Do you know what it means?"
Jade turned to face the man who'd spoken. Sweat trickled down the newly bare back of her neck from the heat of the mid-afternoon desert sun. She'd seen no buildings around other than the convenience store attached to the gas station. She was trying to talk herself into continuing forward.
"Do you?" He watched her closely with sharp, black eyes.
"From that," she gestured at the billboard displaying the ample charms of five young actresses, "I'd say Coyote Ugly means a cheesy T & A flick, and I seem to recall it's a club in New York." He nodded with a slow blink. "And I've heard the phrase somewhere…?"
"It refers to the person you brought home the night before, who's sleeping on your arm, and who is so hideous without beer goggles on that you'd happily chew your arm off to get away."
"Ah." Disgust ruined her voice. "A two-bagger."
"It's not my phrase."
The sun burned down like the top element in an oven. Jade squinted at the movie ad again, chilled from the inside out by memory. "A misnomer, then."
"I'm not sure I'd want to wake up next to any of them. Too bony." He sounded like Graham Greene in Dances With Wolves. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know. Are you hitchhiking?"
He laughed, a rich, merry sound that boomed across the desert. The sour expression faded from her face. "No. Just wondering."
Jade folded her arms on the roof of her car, relishing the heat that seared her skin. "I really don't know. I just woke up and needed to move."
He nodded, stroking black hair away from his face. "I've been there. What did you walk away from?"
Her back stiffened, but her eyes never left his face. "What makes you think I left anything?"
"Isn't that what moving's all about?"
The gas pump shut off with a sudden snap. Jade reached down and yanked the nozzle out of the tank. He was still watching her when she straightened up. She slammed the nozzle into the pump.
"What?"
"I'm Raven. You're tense."
She exhaled sharply through her nose. "Probably. Native?"
"Not exactly."
The flare of heat through Jade's body had nothing to do with the sun and she turned on her heel and stalked away.
Jade had come to with a start that shook the bed. Peter's thick body had lain heavy on her arm, pinning her to
the bed. Hating them both, she'd pulled, cautiously, not wanting to wake him up. The motion had disturbed him
and he'd shifted enough for her to get loose. She'd stayed perfectly still, making sure he was still asleep before
she had rolled off the bed. Her knee had hit the floor with a solid smack. She'd crumpled into a keening ball.
"Back in bed, Jay," Peter'd mumbled, his hand creeping off the bed. She'd avoided his fumbling touch, crawling across the floor to the bathroom. She'd closed the door and switched on the light. Echoes of the night before had pounded in her temples, even though she'd promised herself she was going to stay sober.
She'd pulled herself up, using the sink for leverage, and checked the bruise already forming on her knee. It had been a fine match for the one she discovered on her collarbone. Her gray eyes had gazed back at her from the mirror, bloodshot and numb. There'd been a smear of red on her cheek, too bright to be blood, and she'd rubbed it. Lipstick.
Some part of her had remembered kissing the other woman, who Peter hadn't bothered to introduce. If anything else had happened, it had faded into an alcoholic haze.
Her hair had snarled, an oily mess of serpentine curls. She saw the dark line of her roots. She'd tried to remember the last time she'd been to a salon. It had been hard to recall much of anything.
The dog in the next room had started to bark, and Jade had pounded on the wall.
"Damn it, shut the fuck up!"
She'd sunk back in the tub, drained, head pounding double-time. The dog's sharp bark had ricocheted off the tile until she covered her ears to cut the din.
Raven still leaned on her car when Jade walked back from the store, stuffing her change into her pocket. She'd
left her purse with Peter, grabbing only her wallet and keys from the countertop.
The cold bottle of water tucked into her elbow couldn't cut the desert heat. She slowed under Raven's bird-like gaze, missing a step. Finally, she folded her arms and stopped altogether, staring back at him as frankly as he watched her. She blushed. He didn't.
Raven's black hair was pulled into a careless ponytail; several strands had escaped and he showed no interest in recapturing them. It was hard to say what color his skin was, though it was many shades darker than Jade's alcoholic pallor. Desert dust yellowed his tan. His denim jacket had faded down to gray and even in the heat covered a washed-out plaid shirt. She suspected his jeans had once been black, and though she couldn't see them behind the car, she was sure one of the knees would be out, thin white strings showing over his skin. Probably the same knee she'd bruised that morning. She remembered how angry Peter had been when he'd caught her picking at a hole in her jeans until the threads were all gone. His clothing was loose on a frame Jade interpreted as either all muscle or all sinew.
They sized each other like animals--Raven curious, Jade skittish--and then she stepped up to her car.
"Not in the way you meant Native." His voice stopped her before she could pop the door open.
"How do you know what I meant?"
He plucked a brilliantly red handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his face. "'Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.'"
"I didn't mean to offend you."
"You didn't." He squinted at the sun. "How long you been moving?"
"A while," she admitted. "What time is it?"
"About two-thirty."
"Okay, about nine hours, then."
"Really?"
"What?"
He shook his head, stuffing the kerchief back into his pocket. "You don't strike me as an early riser."
Jade angrily tried to suppress the red crawling up her cheeks. "I'm not, usually. Like I said, I woke up and had to move."
Raven nodded, turning his head to peer into the flat plane of the desert. Jade followed his gaze, the emptiness of the place soaking into her like heat. She wondered, for a moment, how else he was different from people she'd known.
"Maybe you wanna come with me?" The hand not holding her car keys flew up to cover her mouth. Raven's eyes skewered her again, and she said, "That wasn't a proposition."
"No." He smiled. "Sure, I'll come along."
Her lips curled, wanly, and then she opened the driver's-side door. A wave of heat baked her stomach and thighs. She brought her fingers up to her mouth and whistled, piercingly.
From the back of the convenience store came an equally piercing bark, and then a yellow bundle of fur raced around the corner as though he were trying to outrun the sounds he made. The mongrel leapt into the car, immediately made himself comfortable in the back, and flopped his head onto his forepaws.
"Hm." Raven leaned to have a look at him through the dusty window. "Wouldn't have taken you for a dog owner, either."
Jade had gotten out of the shower, hair dripping wet. The dog had still been barking. She'd hunted around in
her bag until she'd found a pair of scissors. Her hair had been slick in her hands. She'd begun cutting it down
to the dye-line.
A sudden banging on the door. Her heart had raced. The dog's barking had increased in intensity.
"Jay, what are you doing in there? It's four-thirty in the fucking morning."
"Don't call me that."
"Jay," Peter'd sneered, drawing out the hated nickname. He'd pounded on the door again. "Open the damn door!"
"How can you stand to yell?" Jade had looked around the bathroom for something to cover herself. He'd woken in a foul mood, and she hadn't wanted her nudity to give him any ideas.
"Let me in there."
"What is your problem?" she'd demanded, then leapt back with a scream. It sounded like Peter'd thrown his whole body against the door. She'd stumbled backward until her knees had hit the toilet and she'd gone over backward, still holding the scissors in front of her.
She'd lain there, half-sprawled between the john and the bathtub. The dog, for a wonder, had stopped barking.
Five minutes pass, and Jade and Raven still hold their positions. Jade, for the first time in her life, feels
like a character in a play. She knows she's waiting for the curtain to rise or to fall. She wishes she knew which,
and looks into the back seat of the car, where Arthur snores and chases rabbits in his sleep.
The wind whispers, and Jade looks away from the car, away from Raven and the ocean, toward the scrubby trees and bushes that surround their lookout point. For just a moment, she thinks she sees a coyote watching her. She blinks.
"Turn here."
Jade followed Raven's lazy gesture toward the lowering sun. She couldn't see a road in the dry grass at first, but then her eye picked out the faintest trace of tire tracks heading off to the west. She turned, following them. Arthur, startled, began to bark from the back seat.
"Will you shut up?"
Raven laughed and reached over the back seat to pat the yellow mongrel's head. "He's just excited."
"No, he's just noisy," she groused, not really meaning it. "I'm not going to start a fire, am I?"
"You should be fine."
The car bumped over the uneven ground, occasionally groaning and clattering with the effort. Jade felt every jar in her lingering bruises. Raven braced himself against the door.
"Maybe you want to slow down," he suggested. "This isn't a highway."
"Am I making you nervous?"
"Maybe a little."
This time, Jade laughed. "That's a lot of 'maybes.'" She brought her foot back off the gas a little, though, slowing. "I never thought there was much prairie in California." The dry yellow grass spread out a long way on all sides of the car. She could see mountains ahead of her and to her right, and perhaps a smudge of forest to her left.
"How much have you seen?"
"Not much."
"Is that why you're moving?"
"You keep coming back to that."
"I don't know your name, I don't know where you're going or why. So, I keep asking." Raven brought out his kerchief and wiped sweat from his face again. It didn't hide his smile.
"Jade."
"What?"
She laughed, surprised to have startled him. "My name is Jade."
"And him?" Raven gestured with his thumb to the back seat, where Arthur was trying to pace back and forth. Every time they hit a bump he slipped on the vinyl seat.
"I don't know. I call him Arthur."
The dog didn't react to the name, instead pushing his nose out Raven's open window and sneezing loudly. Raven relaxed back into the seat, content that they were no longer roughly bouncing over the faint trail. She decided he was a good-looking man after all. "Stray?"
She shook her head. "I stole him."
When Peter hadn't said anything else, Jade had started to giggle at the position she'd landed in, tears pouring
down her cheeks. She'd half-expected him to start pounding on the door again, but all was silent except for the
laughter she couldn't quite hold back. She'd squirmed her way upright, wincing. She'd given herself several new
bruises. Still, they wouldn't have happened if Peter hadn't frightened her.
She'd finished cutting her hair, and had stood for a long time looking at the change in her reflection. She'd shook for a moment, as she'd considered the fact that Peter was going to hate it when he saw it. All the blonde had been shorn away, and her hair had curled into a skullcap that she'd thought emphasized all the best things about her sharply-featured face. Calmer, she'd grabbed a pale blue towel from the rack above the john. She'd wrapped it around herself, then kicked the trimmings next to the toilet. She'd giggled again as the hair tickled her feet.
Despite the mirth bubbling uncontrollably inside her, she'd opened the bathroom door with caution, expecting Peter to be lurking right outside. Instead, he'd gone back to bed, and was laying there with his pillow over his face.
"Don't tempt me." She'd picked her way over to the closet around the detritus of their life. One bag of empties had gotten caught on her foot, and she'd kicked. The glass had made a satisfying smacking sound when it hit the wall.
"You wouldn't dare."
She'd snorted, and began stuffing her clothes into their empty laundry bag. She'd paused long enough to drag a pair of jeans and a t-shirt on.
"What are you doing?" He'd pushed the pillow aside and switched on the unshaded 30-Watt lamp next to the bed.
"What does it look like?"
"Make sure you bleach my underwear, then."
She'd whipped around to face him, the strap of the bag cutting into her wrist. "Do you really think I'm going to do your laundry?"
"What the are you doing, then?"
"Leaving your sorry ass here to rot." She'd shoved her feet into the only pair of shoes she could see and so her Grand Exit was ruined by the way she'd tottered on the high heels. She'd heard Peter's derisive laughter behind her until she'd walked out the door, locking it behind her.
Quickly, she'd opened the trunk and tossed the duffel in next to the tent and sleeping bags they'd bought and never used. The dog had started to bark again. She could see him, now, pulling against the leash that was tied tight to the railing of the motel walkway.
"Stole him?"
She flashed a grin at Raven, but the road took most of her attention. "I couldn't leave him there."
"Ah. You didn't like his owners."
Jade shrugged. "I didn't know them."
"So you're running from the neighbors, then?"
"I told you, I'm not running from. Don't know why you insist I am."
She caught him tilting his head, birdlike. He didn't comment when she realized she'd nearly missed a turning on the trail and took a sharp left to bring them back in line. The forest that had been a smudge on the horizon was satisfactorily closer.
"I've never met anyone who was running to."
"I don't know where I'm going." Her hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and she forced herself to ease her grip. "Except right now I'm following your directions to the ocean. Which I've also never seen."
Silence ruled the car until the sound of her engine flushed a covy of quail from the thickening brush and Arthur began to bark again.
"I swear, hound, I'd let you go chase them but I'd never catch you again."
"Would you want to?"
Jade pulled the bottle of warm water from next to the emergency brake and unscrewed the lid. Water flowed over her hand.
"Shit." She giggled, and licked it away. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Raven watching the motion from the corner of his eye, though it looked like he was watching the scenery.
Ahead of her, she saw a thin dark line before the forest, one that she might not have noticed if it weren't for the setting sun.
"Is that the highway?"
Raven squinted, then nodded. "Yep."
"Another good reason not to let Arthur go and run, then."
"Hm."
"'And suddenly, my passenger turned into a man of few words.'"
"Just thinking, Jade." Her name sounded strange in his voice, not sharp and angry as it had when her mother said it. Peter had never called her anything but "Jay," not even when they were first introduced.
"About?"
"What you'll do when you get there."
Startled, she laughed. They pulled onto the highway. "I think first we have to figure out where 'there' is, don't you?"
Jade's eyes open again, and instead of a canine she sees a woman standing in the brush. Her hair flows down past
her shoulders to her knees over a white dress that Jade is sure is embroidered buckskin. Jade is suddenly aware
of the bareness of her own neck, and she shivers. The woman is holding a deep basket against her hip; Jade can't
see what it contains through the fog, though she can see that the woman is barefoot.
Raven turns and smiles at the new arrival. She sets down the basket as Jade watches, then comes and takes his hands in hers. They are long and delicate, and Jade once again feels worthless and out of place. The way Peter always made her feel. She starts to open the car door.
They are there, on either side of her. Raven's body radiates warmth. The newcomer, who Jade now sees has a broken nose and scarred lip, feels cooler. She rests her weight on the door, so Jade can't open it.
"Jade," Raven's voice is gentle, almost reverent. "This is Sinkali."
"You could have told me you were meeting someone." Jade imagines her words turning green and lingering in the fog. Raven takes her hand and presses her open palm to his cheek. His skin is coarse; she can feel the wiry hairs beginning to poke through the surface. She looks up at him.
"I did not know...she would be here."
Although Jade looks for it, as she should have looked for it in Peter, she cannot find any sign of dishonesty in Raven's face. She feels Sinkali press against her, feels the faint heat of the other woman's body as it pushes the fog away from her.
"It is too late for you to continue on." Jade jumps. Sinkali's voice is low, mannish. "You will have an accident if you don't sleep soon."
"You should trust her. She sees what is true."
"I don't -" Jade wants to protest, but can't find the words. Sinkali's breast is rubbing gently against her arm, and Raven still holds her hand to his face.
"Come back to my lodge." Sinkali's voice is gently insistent, and Jade bites her lip. "You fear. We are not the man you left behind."
Wanting to ask how Sinkali knows about Peter, what she knows about him, Jade hesitates.
"I can't leave Arthur." Jade hears the weakness of her excuse and sighs. Raven brings his hand up to cup her face, brushing his fingertips beneath her eyes where they catch her tears. She feels at once eternally precious and infinitely unworthy.
Sinkali catches Jade's elbow in her slender hand and draws her to the basket that sits in the brush. Jade can now see that it contains furs, though she has no idea what kind. Raven slides his arm around her waist, and they lead her into the underbrush. She hears panting and wonders how Arthur got out of the car to follow them.
There is something at once ancient and childish about Sinkali's lodge, but the inside is warm. Insulated from the fog, Jade ceases shivering. There is a fire in the center of the lodge that provides flickering light.
Sinkali pulls the pelts from her basket and creates a nest on the floor spacious enough for all of them.
"Say 'no,'" she says to Jade, "and we shall merely sleep together. Say 'yes'..." she smiles, and Jade realizes her eyes are an intense amber. She had expected them to be as black as Raven's, as black as the secrets in her own heart. She blushes at the silence.
"The power is yours," Sinkali says, finally. She sits next to Raven. "The choice is yours. This time, and for all time."
Jade considers the two of them for many long heartbeats before she gives her answer.
Friday morning, Jade will awaken to Arthur licking her face. The lodge will no longer surround her, allowing the
sun to warm her face, and the skin that is not covered by furs. Her clothing will be nowhere to be found, and
it will not matter to her. She will not look for Raven or Sinkali.
When she returns to the car, she will be wearing Sinkali's doeskin dress. The furs are a
pleasant gift, and she will wrap them up and tuck them into her trunk. The other gift they have given her, the
greater gift, cannot be held in her hands. For now, she will not question what has happened. That she will leave
until memory has become habit.
The rest of her clothing will go into a Salvation Army bin some hundred miles up the road as she continues north, following the ocean.
