Coyote Blue (2 page)

Chapter 2 – Montana Medicine Drunk

Crow Country, Montana

Black Cloud Follows thundered across the dawn silence of a frost-glazed Little Bighorn basin, out of Crow Agency, under Highway 90, and into the gravel parking lot of Wiley's Food and Gas. A '77 ocher-colored Olds Cutlass rattletrap diesel, Black Cloud Follows stopped, coughed, belched, and engulfed itself in a greasy black cloud of exhaust. When the cloud moved on, wafting like a portable eclipse through the golden poplar and ash trees on the Little Bighorn's banks, Adeline Eats stood by the Cutlass twisting the baling wire that held the driver's door shut.

Adeline's blue-black hair was layered large and lacquered into a flip. A hot-pink parka over her flannel shirt and overalls added a Michelin Man concentric-circle symmetry to her oval shape. As the Cutlass chugged and bucked – the thing that refused to die – Adeline lit a Salem 100, took a deep drag, then delivered a vicious red Reebok kick to Black Cloud Follows's fender. "Stop it," she said.

Obediently, the car fell silent and Adeline gave the fender an affectionate pat. This old car had been indirectly responsible for getting her a husband, six children, and a job. She couldn't bring herself to be mean to it for long.

Walking around to unlock the back door, she noticed something lying in a tuft of frost-covered buffalo grass: something also frost covered, that looked very much like a body.
If he's dead
, she reasoned,
he can wait until I've made some coffee. If he ain't, he'll probably want some.

She let herself into the store and waddled around turning on lights and unlocking doors, then started the coffee and went out to unlock the laundromat, another of the cinder-block buildings in the Wiley's Food and Gas complex, which also included an eight-room motel. Crunching back through the grass, she looked at the body again, which hadn't moved. But for the frost, Old Man Wiley would have been out at dawn setting gopher traps all over the grounds and would have taken care of the body problem. He would have also given Adeline no end of shit about Black Cloud Follows, which he had been doing for fifteen years.

It had been Wiley, a white man, who had named the car in the first place. It was not the Crow way to name cars or animals, but Wiley missed no chance to get in a dig at the people from whom he made his living. Maybe, Adeline thought, a morning of peace was worth dealing with a body.

When the coffee was finished, she filled two large Styrofoam cups (one for her and one for the body) and poured a generous amount of sugar in each. The body had long braids, so she assumed he was Crow and would probably take sugar if he was alive. If he was dead Adeline would drink his, and she definitely wanted sugar.

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds.

She took the coffee, butt-bumped through the back door, and crunched through the grass to where the body lay. He was facedown and his Levi jacket and jeans were crystalline blue with frost. Adeline nudged him in the ribs with her foot. "You froze?" she asked.

"Nope," the body said into the ground; a little dust came up with the steam.

"You hurt?"

"Nope." More dust.

"Drunk?"

"Yep."

"You want coffee?" Adeline sat one of the cups by his head. The body – she was still thinking of him as the body – rolled over and she recognized him as Pokey Medicine Wing, the liar.

Creaking, Pokey sat up and tried to pick up the coffee, but couldn't seem to get his frozen hand to work. Adeline picked up the cup and handed it to him.

"I thought you was dead, Pokey."

"I might have been. Just had me a medicine dream." As he raised the cup to his lips the shakes set in and he had to bite the edge of the cup to steady it. "I died twice before, you know…"

Adeline ignored the lie and pointed to one of his braids, which had fallen into his coffee cup.

Pokey pulled the braid out and wiped the beaded band around it on his jacket. "Good coffee," he said.

Adeline shook a Salem out of her pack and offered it to him.

"Thanks," he said. "You gotta offer a prayer after a medicine dream."

Adeline lit his cigarette with a Bic lighter. "I'm a Christian now," she said. She really hoped he wouldn't use the cigarette to carry a prayer. She'd only been a Christian for a few weeks and the old ways made her a little uncomfortable. Besides, Pokey was probably lying through his tooth – he had only one – about the medicine dream.

Pokey squinted up at her and grinned, but did not pray. "I saw my brother Frank's boy, the one with the yellow eyes who threw that cop off the dam. You remember?"

Adeline nodded. She really didn't want to hear this. "Maybe you should tell a medicine man."

"I
am
a medicine man," Pokey said. "Just no one believes me. I don't need no one else to tell me about my visions. I saw that boy with Old Man Coyote, and there was a shade with 'em that looked like Death."

"I got to go to work now," Adeline said.

"I need to find that boy and warn him," Pokey said.

"That boy's been gone for twenty years. He's probably dead. You was just dreaming." Pokey was a liar and Adeline knew that there was no reason that she should let his ravings bother her, but they did. "If you're okay, I got to go to work."

"You don't believe in medicine, then?"

"Mr. Wiley will be coming in soon. I got to open the store," Adeline said. She turned and started back toward the store.

"Is that a screech owl?" Pokey shouted after her.

Adeline dropped her coffee, fell into a crouch, and scanned the sky in a panic. In the old tradition the screech owl was the worst of omens; vengeful ghosts lived in screech owls; seeing or hearing one was like hearing the sound of your own death. Adeline was terrified.

Pokey grinned at her. "I guess not. It must just be a hawk."

Adeline recovered and stomped into the store, praying to Jesus to forgive Pokey for his sins, but adding to her prayer a request for Jesus to beat the shit out of Pokey if He had the time.

Chapter 3 – The Machines of Irony

Bring Memory Santa Barbara

After Sam's secretary gave him the address of his appointment he hung up the cellular phone and punched the address into the navigation system he'd had installed in the Mercedes so he would always know where he was. Wherever Sam was, he was in touch. In addition to the cellular phone he wore a satellite beeper that could reach him anywhere in the world. He had fax machines and computers in his office and his home, as well as a notebook-sized computer with a modem that linked him with data bases that could provide him with everything from demographic studies to news clippings about his clients. Three televisions with cable kept his home alive with news, weather, and sports and provided insipid entertainments to fill his idle hours and keep him abreast of what was hot and what was not, as well as any information he might need to construct a face to meet a face: to change his personality to dovetail with that of any prospective client. The bygone salesman out riding on a shoeshine and a smile had been replaced by a shape-shifting shark stalking the sale, and Sam, having buried long ago who he really was, was an excellent salesman.

Even as some of Sam's devices connected him to the world, others protected him from its harshness. Alarm systems in his car and condo kept criminals at bay, while climate control kept the air comfortable and compact discs soothed away distracting noise. A monstrous multiarmed black machine he kept in his spare bedroom simulated the motions of running, cross-country skiing, stair climbing, and swimming, while monitoring his blood pressure and heart rate and making simulated ocean sounds that stimulated alpha waves in the brain. And all this without the risk of the shin splints, broken legs, drowning, or confusion that he might have experienced by actually going somewhere and doing something. Air bags and belts protected him when he was in the car and condoms when he was in women. (And there were women, for the same protean guile that served him as a salesman served him also as a seducer.) When the women left, protesting that he was charming but something was missing, there was a number that he could call where someone would be nice to him for $4.95 a minute. Sometimes, while he was getting his hair cut, sitting in the chair with his protections and personalities down, the hairdresser would run her hands down his neck, and that small human contact sent a lonesome shudder rumbling through him like a heartbreak.

"I'm here to see Mr. Cable," he said to the secretary, an attractive woman in her forties. "Sam Hunter, Aaron Assurance Associates. I have an appointment."

"Jim's expecting you," she said. Sam liked that she used her boss's first name; it confirmed the personality profile he had projected. Sam's machines had told him that James Cable was one of the two main partners who owned Motion Marine, Inc., an enormously successful company that manufactured helmets and equipment for industrial deep-sea diving. Cable had been an underwater welder on the rigs off Santa Barbara before he and his partner, an engineer named Frank Cochran, had invented a new fiberglass scuba helmet that allowed divers to stay in radio contact while regulating the high-pressure miasma of gases that they breathed. The two became millionaires within a year and now, ten years later, they were thinking of taking the company public. Cochran wanted to be sure that at least one of the partners could retain controlling interest in the company in the event that the other died. Sam was trying to write a multimillion-dollar policy that would provide buy-out capital for the remaining partner.

It was a simple partnership deal, the sort that Sam had done a hundred times, and Cochran, the engineer, with his mathematical way of thinking, his need for precision and order, his need to have all the loose ends tied up, had been an easy sale. With an engineer Sam simply presented facts, carefully laid out in an equationlike manner that led to the desired answer, which was: "Where do I sign?" Engineers were predictable, consistent, and easy. But Cable, the diver, was going to be a pain in the ass.

Cable was a risk taker, a gambler. Any man who had spent ten years of his life working hundreds of feet underwater, breathing helium and working with explosive gas, had to have come to terms with fear, and fear was what Sam traded in.

In most cases the fear was easy to identify. It was not the fear of death that motivated Sam's clients to buy; it was the fear of dying unprepared. If he did his job right, the clients would feel that by turning down a policy they were somehow tempting fate to cause them to die untimely. (Sam had yet to hear of a death considered "timely.") In their minds they created a new superstition, and like all superstitions it was based on the fear of irony. So, the only lottery ticket you lose will be the winning one, the one time you leave your driver's license at home is the time you will be stopped for speeding, and when someone offers you an insurance policy that only pays you if you're dead, you better damn well buy it. Irony. It was a tacit message, but one that Sam delivered with every sales pitch.

He walked into Jim Cable's office with the unusual feeling of being totally unprepared. Maybe it was just the girl who had thrown him, or the Indian.

Cable was standing behind a long desk that had been fashioned from an old dinghy. He was tall, with the thin, athletic build of a runner, and completely bald. He extended his hand to Sam.

"Jim Cable. Frank told me you'd be coming, but I'm not sure I like this whole thing."

"Sam Hunter." Sam released his hand. "May I sit? This shouldn't take long." This was not a good start.

Cable gestured for Sam to sit across from him and sat down. Sam remained standing. He didn't want the desk to act as a barrier between them; it was too easy for Cable to defend.

"Do you mind if I move this chair over to your side of the desk? I have some materials I'd like you to see and I need to be beside you."

"You can just leave the materials, I'll look them over."

Technology had helped Sam over this barrier. "Well, actually it's not printed matter. I have it in my computer and I have to be on the same side of the screen as you."

"Okay, I guess that's fine, then." Cable rolled his chair to the side to allow Sam room on the same side of the desk.

That's one
, Sam thought. He moved his chair, sat down beside Cable, and opened the notebook computer.

"Well, Mr. Cable, it looks like we can set this whole thing up without any more than a physical for you and Frank."

"Whoa!" Cable brought his hands up in protest. "We haven't agreed on this yet."

"Oh," Sam said. "Frank gave me the impression that the decision had been made – that this was just a meeting to confirm the tax status and pension benefits of the policy."

"I didn't know there were pension benefits."

"That's why I'm here," Sam said. It wasn't why he was there at all. "To explain them to you."

"Well, Frank and I haven't gotten down to any specifics on this. I'm not sure it's a good idea at all."

Sam needed misdirection. He launched into the presentation like a pit bull/Willy Loman crossbreed. As he spoke, the computer screen supported his statements with charts, graphs, and projections. Every five seconds a message flashed across the screen faster than the eye could see, but not so fast that it could not nibble on the lobes of the subconscious like a teasing lover. The message was:
BE SMART, BUY THIS
. Sam had designed the program himself. The
BE SMART
part of the message could be modified for each client. The options were:
BE SEXY, BE YOUNG, BE BEAUTIFUL, BE THIN, BE TALL,
and Sam's personal favorite,
BE GOD
. He'd come up with the idea one night while watching a commercial in which six heavily muscled guys got to run around on the beach impressing beautiful women presumably because they drank light beer.
BE A STUD, DRINK LIGHT.

Sam finished his presentation and stopped talking abruptly, feeling that he had somehow forgotten something. He waited, letting the silence become uncomfortable, letting the conversation lay on the desk before them like a dead cat, letting the diver come to the correct conclusion. The first one to speak loses. Sam knew it. He sensed that Cable knew it.

Finally, Jim Cable said, "This is a great little computer you have. Would you consider selling it?"

Sam was thrown. "But what about the policy?"

"I don't think it's a good idea," Cable said. "But I really like this computer. I think it would be smart to buy it."

"Smart?" Sam said.

"Yeah, I just think it would be a smart thing to do."

So much for subliminal advertising. Sam made a mental note to change his message to:
BE SMART, BUY THE POLICY
. "Look, Jim, you can get a computer like this in a dozen stores in town, but this partnership policy is set up for right now. You are never going to be younger, you'll never be in better health, the premium will never be lower or the tax advantage better."

"But I don't need it. My family is taken care of and I don't care who takes control of the company after I'm dead. If Frank wants to take a policy out on me I'll take the physical, but I'm not betting against myself on this."

There it was. Cable was not afraid and Sam knew no way to instill the fear he needed. He had read that Cable had survived several diving accidents and even a helicopter crash while being shuttled to one of the offshore rigs. If he hadn't glimpsed his mortality before, then nothing Sam could say would put the Reaper in his shaving mirror. It was time to walk away and salvage half of the deal with Cable's partner.

Sam stood and closed the screen on the computer. "Well, Jim, I'll talk to Frank about the specifics of the policy and set up the appointment for the physical."

They shook hands and Sam left the office trying to analyze what had gone wrong. Again and again the fear factor came up. Why couldn't he find and touch that place in Jim Cable? Granted, his concentration had been shot by the morning's events. Really, he'd done a canned presentation to cover himself. But to cover what? This was a clean deal, cut and dried.

When he climbed back into the Mercedes there was a red feather lying on the seat. He brushed it out onto the street and slammed the door. He drove back to his office with the air conditioner on high. Still, when he arrived ten minutes later, his shirt was soaked with sweat.