Coyote Dreams

So, of course, I’d turned around and told it to Morrison. I’d say I was still trying to work my way through that, but I was more trying to pull the covers over my head and pretend it hadn’t happened. Apparently good ol’ Captain Morrison wasn’t going to let me forget. I wished he would. Regardless of the name printed on my birth certificate, Siobhán Walkingstick was someone who barely existed. I pushed myself into a jog for a few steps, pulling ahead of the captain as we headed for my car.

Sunlight glittered across her windshield, and for a moment I saw dozens of spiderweb cracks in it, radiating out from a hole that punched nearly all the way through. A surge of panic yanked my stomach downward, but when I blinked the damage was gone. I came up to the car and leaned on the hood, fingers splayed and knuckles popping against the heated metal as I breathed through my teeth. My head dropped between my shoulders, making my neck ache, but I just wanted to touch my Mustang and know she was all right. I could hear the frown and the concern in Morrison’s voice as he said, “Walker?”

“Nothing. Thought I saw a crack in the windshield.” I had. It just hadn’t precisely been Petite’s windshield that was cracked. It was, for lack of a better word, my soul. Every flaw I’d ever run away from was imprinted on a sheet of windshield glass, my mechanic-trade influence weighting the way I saw myself. A few times over the past six months some of those cracks had fused, but there were a whole hell of a lot more of them left to heal. I had a pretty good idea of what moment had left the puncture hole, and I wanted to keep as far away from that moment as possible. I didn’t like it when my little avoidance techniques threw the whole intertwined mess of my emotional state back in my face.

“…who cracked your windshield,” Morrison was saying. I cranked my head up and turned it toward him without comprehension. “I’d pity the poor bastard who cracked your windshield,” he repeated.

“Don’t. He walked away.” My lip curled against the words. Morrison’d been talking about my car, and I was talking about something else entirely. Something I didn’t want to talk about, I informed the inside of my head, so if my brain would like to cooperate and pass sentences through it first before they got to my mouth, I’d appreciate it.

Great. Now the snide little voice was me. Not that it wasn’t all the time, but this time it was actively me. Lecture given, I shoved off Petite’s hood. Morrison got between me and the driver’s-side door, not quite touching me, his eyebrows drawn down in concern.

“Walker?”

“Do me a favor, Morrison, and forget I said that, okay?”

“I’m not sure I should.”

“Dammit, boss. Please.” I turned my face away, looking at the wheel well of the car next to my Mustang. Someone had put hollowed-out, spinning hubcaps on a Subaru station wagon, which seemed a lot like gilding a potato peeler. “It’s not what you’re thinking, okay?” I said to the Subaru.

“Are you sure?”

I sighed, looking back at Morrison. Sunlight made his eyes a ridiculously clear blue, even as he squinted into it to see me better. “Yeah, Morrison, I’m sure.” I didn’t want to say the word we were both thinking. It was ugly and scary, and besides, it hadn’t happened, despite my horrible phrasing. I edged around it with “Nobody hurt me, I promise. Not physically. And who gets this far in life without some emotional scars, anyway, right?” I even managed to dredge up a crooked little smile, just because Morrison looked so damned concerned. If he’d been someone else—if I’d been someone else—I’d have put my hand on his cheek and kissed him for fussing. But we were both ourselves, so all I said was, “Okay?”

After a long silence he nodded and stepped back. “All right, Walker. If you say so.” He walked around Petite’s wrinkled back end while I unlocked my door and climbed into her oven-hot interior to unlock the passenger door. Morrison put the drum in the back again, and I pulled out of the parking lot, concentrating on driving so I didn’t have to talk. Morrison didn’t push it, and the ride went as it always did when he and I were in a vehicle together: in silence.

I was the one who broke it, as we climbed out of the car back at my apartment building. Morrison nodded as he got out, a dismissal if there ever was one, but I reached across Petite’s roof and said, “Captain.” He hesitated and curiosity won out, making him turn to look at me again. “Thanks for getting me this morning. I’m sorry I wasn’t more help with Billy, and I’m sorry if I made things awkward with his brother.”

A faint smile curled the corner of his mouth. “What do you want, Walker?”

I ducked my head and breathed a laugh. “Nothing. I just wanted to say thanks. And…” I made a fist of my hand and bounced it lightly against Petite’s roof, twice. “That’s all.” I met Morrison’s eyes with a brief smile and shook my head. “That’s all.”

He waited a long, long moment before nodding. “You’re welcome.”

I watched him walk away, wondering just how much research he’d done on me, after I’d confessed Joanne Walker wasn’t my real name. I knew he’d done some. I would have, too, in his position. I just didn’t know how much. Maybe the flash of concern had been because he knew a lot more about me than I thought anybody west of the Carolinas or north of the Mason-Dixon line did.

Or maybe it was because Morrison was a decent man and I’d chosen unfortunate words at the hospital parking lot.

Either way, I’d just let the best opportunity I might ever have to find out go, throttled by anxiety and my own unwillingness to talk, think or act on my past. Someday I was going to have to turn around and face all of the crap piling up behind me. A lot of people had told me that recently.

It was the first time I’d ever said it to myself, though.

I sighed, thumped Petite’s roof again, got my drum and went upstairs to see who was left in my apartment.

Tuesday, July 5, 11:40 a.m.

The answer was an anticlimactic nobody. There was a note from Mark on top of the box of doughnuts Gary’d brought, which said Maybe we could get to know each other in a less Biblical sense over dinner, and had a phone number written on it. I crumpled the paper and dropped it in the trash, then got a maple bar out of the doughnut box.

Beneath the maple bar was another note that said Take his number out of the garbage, you crazy dame, and call him. I laughed out loud and went to pick up the phone as I crammed half the doughnut into my mouth. It was after eleven, which meant Gary was at work by now, driving his cab. The old man had changed work schedules so he’d be able to play drummer boy for me every morning. I didn’t know how I’d ended up with friends that good.

I got Keith, the guy who manned the phones, on the line, and asked him to have Gary call me when he had a chance. I’d sent Keith flowers once for taking a message, and since then his surly mood always took a turn for the cheerful when we talked.

Gary called as I lay on the couch, polishing off a third doughnut and feeling like a bloated warthog. “Did you read the note he left me?” I demanded without saying hello.

“’Course I did. Had ta let myself back in to do it, too. You ate the maple doughnuts, didn’t you?” He sounded proud of himself. I laughed and dragged myself off the couch. Talking on the phone always made me want to walk around. That was safe with the kitchen phone, but the one in the bedroom had a cord, and I’d half killed myself with it more than once.

“Yes, I ate the maple doughnuts, and, Gary, how did you let yourself back in? I know I haven’t given you a key.”

“Gotcha an apple fritter, too,” Gary said. “An’ I wrote down his phone number, so even if you didn’t take it outta the garbage like I told you, I’m still gonna leave it lyin’ around your apartment.”

“I ate it, too. I’d think you were my dating service, except I don’t think they’re supposed to fatten you up for the kill.”

“Three doughnuts ain’t gonna fatten you up, Jo. You should give him a call.”

“Can’t,” I said. “Isn’t one of those dating-rules things that you’re not supposed to call for three days, or something?” There was nothing interesting in the kitchen except more doughnuts, and I couldn’t face eating another one just yet. I wandered across the apartment toward my bedroom.

“That’s after the first date, Jo, not after you went to bed with the guy.”

I winced. “I don’t think seventy-three-year-olds are supposed to say things like that, Gary.”

“Darlin’, this old dog says plenty he ain’t supposed to. How’s Holliday?”

I winced again and sat down on the edge of my bed, pulling a pillow out from under the neatly arranged covers to hug it against my chest. It smelled like Mark. I thought augh again and got up to go stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. “Still sleeping. Something’s keeping me from waking him up. I was going to do some research and see what I could find about sleeping sicknesses.” The woman in the mirror looked just like she had yesterday. Short black hair, warmly tanned skin, hazel eyes. Scar on her cheek, generous nose scattered with a few freckles, all the same things I expected. I knew her pretty well. She wasn’t the kind of woman who got drunk and slept with men she didn’t know. Hell. She didn’t even sleep with men she did know. Arm wrestling, as Mark had mentioned, now that sounded like my style. I rubbed my biceps absently, still staring at myself in the mirror. He must’ve gone really easy on me, if I wasn’t sore.

Sore.

Something pinged at the back of my mind and I moved to the bathroom doorway, looked toward my bed. “I didn’t sleep with him.” There was a sort of fluting laugh to my voice, a sound of childish relief. I could all but hear Gary blinking at me.

“What?”

“I didn’t sleep with him. I mean, we didn’t have sex.” I sat down hard in the doorway, my legs no longer eager to hold me. “Jesus.”

“You gonna tell me how you came to that conclusion, Jo?” Gary sounded wary. I laughed, the same high sound as before.

“I haven’t had sex in ages, Gary. I’d be sore.” My heartbeat had jumped up to about a zillion miles an hour, making a lump of sickness that tasted like apple fritter in my throat. I didn’t know relief could feel so awful. “I’d be sore and I’d be sticky and I haven’t taken a shower this morning and I’m not either of those things and so I didn’t have sex with him. Oh, thank God.” For some reason I was ice cold and shaking.

There was a profound silence that suggested that old dog saying things he shouldn’t or not, I had perhaps overstepped the bounds of friendship with that particular announcement. I was about to apologize when he said, “Kinda glad to hear it, sweetheart. Didn’t really seem like your style.”

I drew my knees up, still shivering, and shook my head. “Not at all.” Then I laughed again, twisting to look back at the bedroom. “He even made the bed.”

“You oughta call this guy,” Gary said again, with a sort of gentle kindness in the command. “Makes the bed, doesn’t take advantage of pretty girls in the bed. Give him a call, Jo. How many guys make the bed?”

“I don’t make the bed, Gary.” I pulled a towel down to wrap it over my legs, trying to ward off the cold of relief. “Maybe I will.” I sounded very quiet even to myself. The prospect of calling Mark, if I hadn’t slept with him, was considerably more appealing than it had been when I thought I had, and that was its own kind of scary. “Maybe I will, okay? You’re pushy.”

“Parta my charm,” he said, still triumphant. “I gotta fare, Jo. Gotta go. Call the kid.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Gary.” I beeped the phone off and sat there in my bathroom doorway, staring at my bed. It sat there, bedlike, tidy except for the pillow I’d dislodged. No startling attractive men appeared in it. After a minute I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Just to get you off my back,” to Gary, though he was neither there nor likely to believe me if he could hear me. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed me. Either way, I got Mark’s number out of the garbage and hoped for an answering machine.

To both my delight and dismay, I got one. I straightened with surprise and stuttered out a message, not sure if I wanted any of it to sound like “Call me back.”

Right before I said, “So, uh, bye,” the phone got snatched up with a clatter and Mark, a trifle breathlessly, said, “Joanne? Hi, sorry, I was in the shower. I heard your voice on the machine. Are you still there?”

I slumped against the door frame. “Yeah. Hi, Mark.”

“I didn’t think you’d call. Gosh, I’m glad you did.”

“Did you really just say gosh?”

A laugh came through the line, somewhere between pleased and embarrassed. “I did. Does that count against me?”

“It’s kind of cute,” I admitted more honestly than I’d intended to. “Look, Mark, this really isn’t a good time. I just wanted to call because, um.” Because Gary had told me to. I was twenty-seven years old. I wasn’t sure because somebody told me to was a legitimate reason for calling a boy. “To say it wasn’t a good time.”

“Not a good time for what?” he asked, more insightfully than I would’ve liked. “To talk on the phone or to talk at all? Is this the ‘It was a horrible mistake’ speech?”

“It was a horrible mistake, or it would’ve been if we’d had sex, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t, so it wasn’t. Except I don’t bring guys home, so it was.”

“We didn’t?” Mark, unlike me, sounded sort of disappointed. “Are you sure?”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed, even if it was still a sort of shaky sound, and bonked my head against the door frame. “Physical evidence on my part suggests we didn’t. Look, I’m sure you’re very nice, but frankly, I don’t know how to deal with you, and I don’t really think I want to have to figure it out.” That, again, was rather more honest than I’d intended to be. To my surprise, Mark laughed.

“At least you don’t pull your punches. Tell you what. Everything I know about you is you’ve got a sexy car—”

Anybody who compliments my car earns a special place in my heart. I melted for a moment.

“—and a sexier body—”

“Oh, get real.” The thaw was over.

Mark ignored my protest and continued, “You don’t cook and you’ve got a bunch of early-rising friends and you can outdrink half a police department. Now, what do you know about me?”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and peered at it, then sighed and put it back. “You’re cute, you cook and for some reason you apparently find me attractive. That’s about it.” That and he made the bed, which I didn’t want to mention, even if it was a point in his favor.

“Right. So that’s enough to get a first date on, right?”

“Sure. Wait.”

Too late. “I’ll see you for dinner tonight, then. Eight?”

“I—”

“Great! We’ll go somewhere decent. You can drive.” I could almost hear his grin and wink. “See you tonight, Joanne.” He hung up before I had a chance to get out of it, and left me gaping at the phone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Plodding down to the parking lot wasn’t taking a shower, and it certainly wasn’t the best way to help Billy, but I found myself doing it, anyway, after finally putting the phone back in its cradle. I padded across the lot to the tree I’d parked Petite beneath, popping her trunk and wincing as the wrinkled steel creaked in protest. There hadn’t been time or money enough lately to start hammering the dents out. The insurance company still hadn’t paid up for the so-reported “act of vandalism” that had taken place back in January. I had full coverage on my baby. I thought the damned insurance company should stop dicking around and give me my money. It wasn’t like they even had to pay for a mechanic’s work, since I did all my own.

I pulled the jack and toolbox out of Petite’s trunk, still not quite thinking about what I was doing, and gave the gas tank cover an extra reassuring pat before I closed the trunk. It was an ongoing apology for having let somebody shoot an arrow through it, part of the same vandalism that’d ripped a twenty-eight-inch hole in her roof. I had no idea what else to call riders of the Wild Hunt taking axes and longbows to her. I didn’t think the insurance company would cough up at all if I claimed it was an act of gods.

A minute later I was on my back under the engine, tinkering with hot metal and inhaling the scent of gasoline and oil. Somewhat belatedly I realized I wasn’t wearing grubby clothes, and performed a shrug against the warm concrete I lay on. Yet another shirt and jeans relegated to the mechanic pile. I was going to have to go shopping soon.

A vague prickle of guilt set in as I fiddled with bolts. It wasn’t Petite that needed work. It was me. My head was spinning. I rarely got drunk. I never brought guys home, even if I had not, at least, actually slept with the one in question. I certainly didn’t find myself calling the guy back and agreeing to go out on a date. Well, I wouldn’t have thought I did, anyway. It’d never happened before, so apparently it was what I’d do in that situation. It still didn’t seem like me. I was by nature a much more isolated person than that.

I’d grown up on the road, my father unwilling to settle down for more than a few months. The one time he’d stayed anywhere over a year, a one-night stand he’d had showed up again and dumped a kid on him before flying back to Ireland without so much as an explanation. I’d had a pretty clear idea from a very early age what he was trying to leave behind.

Me.

My earliest memories were of mashing my nose against the car window, watching other vehicles whip by and calling “Zoom! Zoom!” at them. I loved the leather seats and the tangy scent of old cigarettes, the way the world skimmed by effortlessly and the thrum of power that shook the car as we took interstates and blue roads, always exploring. Dad taught me to read and how to fix cars, the two of us pulled off the road, me holding a flashlight while he bent his dark head over the engine. I got most of my primary school education that way, visiting historical sites and reading books about what had happened there. The one time I remember Dad having any real emotional response to one of those history lessons was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He never before or after made much comment about it, maybe because although he was as pureblood Indian as you could get, I was only a half blood, but there was a serious undercurrent of stupid white men to that particular lesson. The truth is, I’d think anybody who stood there and looked out over the battlefield lands would think stupid white men, because even I could tell that no one in his right mind would get in a fight there. But that wasn’t really the point, and after that, Dad started teaching me Cherokee. I didn’t remember much of it anymore, but there’d been a while when I was seven or eight when it was almost all we spoke.

That was also when we started stopping in small towns for up to a semester at a time, so I could get some proper education. Dad never really understood that I was badly socialized, having only had him for company, or that a white girl—because despite the tan I currently had, my coloring was my mother’s: pale skin, green eyes and black hair—who spoke an Indian language wasn’t going to fit in. He never had much idea that grades were at different levels all over the country, or that several weeks to a semester was only long enough for me to always be the new kid, not to belong. The older I got, the more I resented it, until I was old enough to enter high school and put my foot down. I told Dad he had to choose a place for us to stay for my whole high school career.

It was like he’d never seen me before. Behind all the years of resentment I had this feeling that at least it was always me and Dad against the world, but the way he looked at me was more like it’d been him on the road alone all that time, and suddenly this young woman had appeared to make demands of him. We went back to North Carolina, where he’d grown up and I’d never been. I spent my high school years in the Eastern Cherokee Nation, fitting in just as poorly as I ever had. Those were the borders I tended to define myself by. When I stretched outside of them, like I’d done with Mark, I found myself turning to the one thing I really knew I could rely on.

Cars. They were my home, my first memories, my comfort foods and smells, and they could take me away from all the things that were wrong with the world. When the going got tough, the tough went shopping, but I went to work on my car.

Concrete and asphalt, even sun-warmed, wasn’t exactly the most comfortable bed I’d ever lain on, but it was enough to have me yawning until my eyes watered within half an hour of starting to tinker on Petite’s undercarriage. A distant jangle sounded right next to my ear, the wrench sliding from sleepy fingers, but I couldn’t convince my hand to grope around for it. Eh, it didn’t matter. Nobody was likely to come along and nick my stuff while I was lying right next to it. It wasn’t as if I was actually going to take a nap in the parking lot, even if I did feel a bit stretched thin and gooey, like the asphalt was folding itself around me, one big comfy bed.

The sky was the wrong shade of blue. It was a color I knew, hard and pure and unrelenting, but it wasn’t the color I was used to. I squinted against it, tracking the sun from the corner of my eye. It, too, was without remorse or gentleness, heat intense enough to redden my skin just from a few minutes’ exposure. Weight pressed down on me, both in the dryness of the air and in the inescapable sense that this was one of the more important moments of my life.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, hotter and drier than the air. I turned to look up—unusual; I wasn’t used to looking up at much of anybody—and the scene changed around me.

Hot air became muggy, so full of water I choked on my first breath, tears suddenly blurring my vision. Heat vastly more intense than the air outside radiated at me, a fire built up in the center of a compact mudroom. I was one of four in the room, the other three sitting at cardinal points around the fire. I knelt, blinking against the heat, my hands on my thighs, and felt long hair sticking to my shoulders and back. I had never worn my hair long. My father had, but neither he nor I were patient enough to deal with a child’s tangles, and the unfamiliar feeling sent a shudder up my spine. I was not me, but I didn’t know who I was. Usually in dreams even when I was someone else, I thought I was me; now I felt like the butterfly wondering if he was a man, or maybe the other way around.

I tried to look down, but my head wouldn’t respond to my command, neck remaining stiff and my gaze direct and hot on the overwhelming fire. My heart knocked around inside me with a child’s excitement that I tried to quell: it wasn’t appropriate, no more than the grin that kept wanting to stretch across my face. I needed to be solemn and adult for this, the itchy idea that it would be taken away otherwise skittering over my skin. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I still struggled to be serious about it all. That was what everyone expected, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

Time compressed and ballooned, stretching me across it like taffy until I felt barely attached to my body, a heady swimming sensation that made nausea float in my belly. Voices sang in the background, drums thudding with resolute direction. Sometimes I joined in, singing words I didn’t know in a language I didn’t recognize. Mostly, though, I let the songs and the heat and the drums sink into my skin, and pull me farther and farther away from my body. That was the purpose: I was there to be guided. Later I would become more active in these rituals, but for now I was the student.

A part of me, far beneath the music and the taffy feeling, said, so this is how it should have been, but that didn’t make much sense to me as I snapped apart from my body and drifted into a place of absolute quiet blackness.

Oddly enough, I knew where I was. It wasn’t the Dead Zone, the starless place between life and death and other worlds, though how I could tell the difference between one utter darkness and another, I wasn’t sure. Sparks of life floated through this place, like invisible motes reflected from inside my eyes. I drifted for what felt like a long time, watching them, aware that somewhere behind the bones of my ears, I could still hear the drums beating.