Nineteen
Coyote
on a Leash
I could tell you that I didn’t intend to sleep
with Frosty that night. I’d be
lying. Let’s face it – I saw a weak,
frustrated man, I drank with him, I told him stories about travelers suffocated
by pear blossoms, I got naked. I seduced
about as well as anybody ever has.
Not to worry – my guilt was
short-lived. I woke up on the floor of
my Mitsubishi, the gray light of overcast seeping in through the windows. Thank God it wasn’t bright, because I had one
helluva hangover. I undid my origami
body to a Catholic kneel and scanned the windows. Not much doing at the Bel Canto. No one at Gilda’s yet. Good.
A note taped to my steering wheel.
You already know what was in that
note. Frosty was in love with
Carlotta. A round of blotto boinking
with the old flame was not about to change it.
Frosty being Frosty, of course, he put it much more gracefully.
My mind had been sparking like a
nuclear reactor since my boring lunch with George, but now I felt calm. And focused.
I fired the engine and headed for the Waterfront. Once there, I slipped into a homey little
coffeehouse for a change of clothing, a splash of water on my face, two
Extra-Strength Tylenol and a double cappuccino.
Thus fortified, I drove to the
entrance of Knickerbocker State Park, paid my day-use fee, and then left the
Mitsubishi in the parking lot and took the old trail. As I neared Frosty’s campsite, I took a
deer-trail through the bushes and ventured a peek, finding that Frosty and his
car were both gone.
I raced back to the Mitsubishi
and drove the narrow, looping road to the ranger’s cabin, finding that he,
also, was gone. I parked in the road
near Frosty’s secret entrance and snuck into the backyard, bringing along my
lug wrench. The lock on the shed looked
pretty sturdy, but I walked the perimeter and found the aluminum walls to be
downright flimsy. I discovered a seam at
the back where I could insert the chisel end of the lug wrench and pop the
sheeting right over the rivets. After
removing several along the bottom and a few up the seam, I took the corner with
both hands and folded it back, creating a sort of tent-flap opening. God!
I thought. I’m pretty good at this.
I quickly grabbed three white
buckets marked B, W and G, and set them outside the shed. Then I noticed two yellow buckets and one
black, so I took those, too. By the time
I lugged all six down to the Mitsubishi, my muscles and joints were in full
revolt. Still, I managed to give the
on-duty ranger a smile and a wave on the way out.
I was tempted to pull over in
Depoe Bay and revisit the Spouting Horns – especially when I spotted an
Internet café just across the street.
But I was on a mission from Frosted Glass Woman, so any delays were out
of the question. I waited out a dozen
stoplights down the long thoroughfare of Lincoln City, passing the Chinook
Winds Indian Casino’s large billboard, boasting of Bobby Vinton.
A few miles north I saw a sign
for Highway 18 to Portland, and decided it was time to escape the Pacific
Ocean. A few miles past Otis, zippering
through thick deciduous forests knifed off at the roadside like boxwood hedges,
it finally occurred to me to ask my newly placid mind where the hell it was
taking me.
I suppose my dogleg could be
explained by Hessie’s gravitational pull.
But I knew it wasn’t time to see her yet. Just then the woods to my right disappeared
to reveal a soaring, broad-shouldered mountain, and at its base, what looked
like a Silicon Valley shopping mall.
It turned out to be another Indian
gambling joint, Spirit Mountain Casino, crouching in a small sea of parking
lots. The casino was a pillow of terra
cotta, wearing a headband of bright geometrics, like the patterns in Indian
jewelry and the logos of high-tech corporations. I found myself entirely charmed, and fished
around the parking lots until I found a space.
I wandered into the plush
interior, relieved to know that not a single soul here gave an even-odds
goddamn about my hovering spiritual predicaments. I purchased a two-dollar ticket and looked
for the simplest nickel slot I could find.
The winning candidate was a country and western number with payoffs for
different cowboy combos: a double-x branding iron, a broncin’ buck, a white Stetson,
snakeskin boots, etc. My plan was to
kill an hour or two making pathetic little five-cent bets, but in my weary
state I misfired, pressing the “Bet 40” button and somehow failing to hit on
any of eight possible lines. Just like
that, my two-dollar ticket was gone (Crazy Horse snickering in his grave).
Strolling through the surrounding
slots, I noticed that almost everybody was tethered to their stations by little
plastic curly-cords. I was dying of
curiosity, so I queried an old guy wearing a navy squadron cap. He seemed pleased with the chance to explain
something to a youngster.
“Coyote Cards,” he said. “They give bonus credits – the more you play,
the more you get. The little wire is
just so you don’t forget and leave it in a machine somewhere.”
I thanked him and moved on,
thinking Cripes! (No, really -
cripes.) You can’t put a coyote on a
leash!
I moved on to the gift shop,
where I saw a basket of used craps dice and playing cards that were drilled
through the middle with small, clean circles.
A redheaded girl with braces asked if she could help.
“These are sacred, you know,” I
answered. “These are the tools of a
wounded people, used in the service of their redemption.”
Oh
God, I thought. I have
become a crazy person.
The girl, who must have been used
to weird people in casinos, smiled and said, “Yes, you’re right. I like that!”
Bless
you and all your DNA, I thought. May you
have many boyfriends who are terrific in bed and always bring extra condoms.
“I’ll take two decks and four
dice,” I said. I was relieved to find
that my thought balloons were not yet leaking into my speech balloons.
As she was handing me my change,
Redhead Girl told me I could find other sacred items down the hall, where a
gathering of native artisans were hawking their wares. I checked it out, but found their jewelry,
ceramics and moccasins to be ruthlessly predictable. Exiting their meeting room, however, I found
a grove of trees to my left. Suspecting
hallucinations, I ventured over to inspect.
No, they were trees all right –
genuine fake trees. It was a dark
hallway, twenty feet wide, twenty feet high, forty feet long, between the
casino and the lodge. A sign at the
entrance read, Hall of Legends. The
trees were lined up at either side, their trunks disappearing into a black
ceiling spotted with stars. Behind the
trees were realistic, woodsy murals, to the right a deepening forest, to the
left a brook bordered by patches of snow.
The dirt in the center was made over like a campground, peppered with
fir needles and carefully set tracks of deer, raccoon and coyote. Hidden speakers played a soundtrack of
crickets, breezes and coyote cries.
The only obvious man-made device
was a light beam extending from the base of a cedar like some kind of security
device. I was willing to bet that
something would happen if I tripped that light, and I wasn’t disappointed. The thunder thundered. The lightning lightninged. Fortunately, the rain did not rain. A stern-looking Indian appeared on the trunk
of the cedar – broad forehead, proud tomahawk nose, granite cheekbones – and
commanded my attention with roaring baritone syllables.
“Come! Hear the stories of my
people. Hear the legends that whisper in
the land. Listen for the sounds of
spirits in the forest.”
The face faded away, and I
noticed that the bark underneath was formed into smooth echoes of his
features. The crickety silence returned,
then a second projector clicked on, conjuring a heavy-set native woman on the
wall behind me. She set herself squarely
on her feet and addressed her hidden audience, speaking in spare, clean
syllables, telling how it was that Coyote, The Trickster, deceived the Frog
People into liberating their hoard of water so that all the creatures of the
forest could use it freely.
My next visitor was a tall,
broad-shouldered man who appeared over the brook, his features sharper, more
aquiline than the cedar man. He wore his
hair in two long braids and held up his hands like a punter receiving a snap
from center. Speaking between them, he
told of Coyote’s love of the moon, how one time the moon tricked Coyote into
allowing himself to be lifted into the night sky. The moon ignored Coyote’s pleas for release
until he had traveled to the top of the heavens. When he finally let him go, the impact of the
fall sent Coyote’s blood flowing upon the land in a great river. And that was why, ever since, the sons of
Coyote would perch on the ridgelines and let out howls of anger and grief at
the bright villain who murdered their father.
Just as the tall man was nearing
the end of his story, poor Coyote dangling from the end of the crescent, two
grandma types barged through the double doors from the lodge, chatting
full-volume about someone’s fucking wedding in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I nearly slapped them silly, but I figured
I’d best not exhibit any further signs of insanity. Curiosity eventually shushed them and drew
them to a spot behind my shoulder. “My,”
said one. “He’s quite handsome, isn’t
he?”
I stayed for a couple more
stories (How Coyote Created the Stars, Why Dogs Sniff Each Other), then
wandered through the doors to the lodge, finding a long hallway painted the
colors of autumn. The walls hosted a
gallery of framed landscapes engraved with the shapes of leaves; and the carpet
held the familiar patterns of Navajo blankets.
At the end I found a lobby centered on an outcropping of boulders, a
water fountain cutting between them to a pond littered with gamblers’
pennies. Standing guard at the pond was
a bronze Coyote, nose to the wind, eyes slanted, one paw lifted, ready for
flight. I placed a weary hand on his
head, searching his keen metallic eyes for some sign, a lucky number, a hint of
my direction. Then I went to the desk to
check in.
I had a beautiful room at the
southwest corner, its windows facing a high, barren hill and, just over its
western shoulder, the casino’s namesake mountain. All right, I’m guessing, but it certainly
looked like a Spirit Mountain, its peak rung about with clouds, dancing like
ancestors at a pow-wow.
The furniture was made of bulky,
rough-hewn wood, comforting and muscular.
The blankets and covers were a continuation of the Navajo patterns in
the carpeting, and the walls carried three more of those warm landscapes with
the leaf-shaped etchings. All very
homey, and if that didn’t work, there was a huge grandfather spirit of a
television with all kinds of premiere movies (including a soft-porn channel,
which the bellhop, a toothy redhead kid, seemed a bit too eager to point out).
Fending off a combination of
paranoia and fatigue, I brought in the buckets one at a time, at random
intervals (I didn’t want anyone thinking I was running a meth lab). On a jaunt to the nearby town of Sheridan, I
found a hardware store with lots of tile grout and a furniture store with
several glass tabletops.
Over the course of the following
days I dove into my work, taking time-outs for meals in Coyote’s Buffet,
five-dollar slot sprees and visits to the Hall of Legends, where I lifted my
eyes to my spirit fathers and mothers and learned their dozen stories by heart
(including How Coyote Built Willamette Falls, which inspired the sculpture in
the lobby). And yeah, you’ve probably
figured this out by now, but Coyote was exactly the guy I was in love with: the
Trickster, the Man of Glass, transparent and evasive as ever.
My creative visions flew in all directions. I began with the primary colors, exploring
different patterns and groupings. For
the first of these, I got very precise, using blue painter’s tape to divide a
circle of glass into three stripes, then taping it across the middle to give
myself six sections. I filled the center
stripe with nothing but white. I did the
top left section all in green, then covered the section below in a rough checkerboard
of green and white. I did the same to
the stripe on the right, only with brown instead of green. The results were pleasingly symmetrical but
not overly so, as the randomness of the material guaranteed a certain
organic-ness.
For my next piece I spun a large
green spiral, its emerald gyres cut off by the table’s square edges. With this one, the thrill was all in the
beginning; filling in the remaining spaces with a mottle of white and brown was
much less exciting. The effect of the
whole, however, was quite satisfying, in a primitive, unified sort of way.
I jumped from this into something
more evasive, marking off an oval table with cave-drawing figures – antelopes,
sea lions, coyotes, poodles – then scattering the letters S-A-N-D-R-I-N-A among
them. I filled in the remaining spaces
by complete chance, effectively turning my symbols into subliminal rebels. A person could own this mosaic for years
before discovering its menagerie, and I expected the letters would forever
remain a mystery.
With my artistic bravado mounting
(and my flat pieces dwindling), I abandoned functionality for form, selecting a
long, narrow rectangle for the crags, nuggets, corners and bottle-threads I had
previously set aside. The end-product
carried two elements I adored: the added dimension of contour, and the
unmistakable Bronx attitude of “Hey! Don’t put your glass down here. I’m a fuckin’ piece of art, okay?” It also
gave me an almost sexual thrill when I ran my hands over its Badlands surface.
Finally, after six days of
frenetic creativity, I unloosed the yellow buckets. The first contained nothing but pastels –
clear pieces with the faintest hints of blue, green and purple. The approach here seemed pretty obvious:
simply place the pieces and let their subtle variations dance the rumba. I chose a square tabletop framed in
straw-colored wicker, giving it a nice Caribbean vibe.
The second yellow bucket
surprised me, because it didn’t contain glass at all. What it held were sea-worn fragments of brick
and porcelain, likely gathered at Glass Beach.
This spoke to me of great artistic possibilities, so I set it aside and
waited for some wild inspiration.
I had already recalled what lay
in the black bucket, but the sight still lifted me out of my shoes: a whole
U.S. Mint of the rare and lovely blue.
This demanded no ingenuity at all – the beauty being right there in the
raw materials – but it did demand patience.
Being cobalt, the pieces were all rather tiny, and the smallest of my
two remaining tabletops – a smoked circle with beveled edges – was still rather
large. The placement of the pieces alone
took two days, and the grouting was sheer hell, necessitating dozens of passes
with the sponge in order to fill in all those little nooks and crevices. By the time I finished the buffing, my back
was killing me, but the pain lessened immensely when I held the finished
product to the sunlight. It looked like
the entire left eye of Frosted Glass Woman.
I rewarded myself with a long
breakfast at the Legends Restaurant and a thorough reading of the Portland Oregonian. I was drifting by the gift shop afterward
when I saw the Redhead Girl, Sylvie, refilling the sales-basket with craps
dice. Red dice, white spots – Sh-boom!
There was my inspiration. I bought all
the dice she had and headed back to my studio.
I taped off the back of my last
tabletop – a grand Thanksgiving-dinner oval – dividing it into four neat
sections. At the center of each section
I applied an ace from my deck of holy playing cards. Over these I glued a ten-by-ten square of
craps dice, paying no particular mind to their numbers. Toward the center of the table, however, I
used DNA groupings of dice to count out my home phone number, my high-school
locker combination, my best-ever bowling score, and the exact date and address
of my deflowering.
I marked off the circumference of
the oval with an inch-wide band of porcelain, then a two-inch band of brick,
then another band of porcelain. I
peppered the remaining surface with an even spray of red and white. As you might have imagined, the end results
were fabulous. I celebrated by entering
the Hall of Legends just in time for my favorite story, Coyote plummeting the
cobalt sky to pour out his brick-red blood on the hard Earth.
And my time was up. I drove to a drug store in Willamina and made
my purchase. For something so
monumental, the device was alarmingly simple, sort of a magic wand with a tip
of stiff, absorbent material like the filter on a cigarette. All you do is squat over the toilet, hold the
tip in your urine stream for five seconds, then watch the little windows – a
small circle and a slightly larger square, cut into the white plastic handle.
Step 2 of the instructions tells
you that a little blue line will appear across the circle to signify that the
test is working. Which it did. Step 3 says that if a second blue line appears,
this one across the square, that means that you’re pregnant.
Which it did. And I was.
And it was time to go see Hessie.
Photo by MJV
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