River Marked (24 page)

We must have been sitting there in a companionable silence for ten minutes before he said, “You aren’t sleeping, you know.”

I took the grass out of my mouth and dropped it into the river—or that’s what I meant to do. A stray gust of wind caught it, and it flew onto the riverbank on the swimming-hole side instead.

“Shouldn’t I feel the need to scream and run?” I asked.

“Do you?” He sounded mildly interested.

“No.” I considered it. “I am pretty convinced that I
am
probably dreaming, though.” Apologetically I shrugged. “Despite your assertion that I’m not.”

He looked up at the half-moon and squinted at it, as if he might see something in it I couldn’t. “I’d guess that’s because you were sleeping when I called you out here. I didn’t know if it would work. I can’t do a lot of the things I used to do. Still, I am not lying. You are quite awake.”

The moon lit the face of a man who’d died more than thirty years ago. A man who had been a ghost, dancing for me in broad daylight. He was handsome and young with a devil-may-care air that was obvious even on such short acquaintance.

“
Are
you my father?” I asked.

He shook his head, the movement emphasized by the grass in his mouth. “Nope. Sorry and all that. But your father was Joe Old Coyote.” He pronounced it as two syllables instead of three. Kye-oat not Kye-oat-ee. “He died in a car wreck and a mess with a pair of vampires. They don’t like walkers very much, and they liked him rather less than most.”

I’d thought I knew why until no one but me had seen the ghost tonight. If you can see ghosts in the daylight, you can find where vampires are sleeping no matter what magic they use to hide. I’d always attributed it to being a walker, but if the other walkers hadn’t seen it, maybe there was something to what Gordon Seeker had been implying so heavily.

“Oh, that,” he said, as if I’d spoken aloud. “Just because you
can
see something doesn’t mean you
have
to. I’d have thought that anyone who hangs out with werewolves would know that. I mean, who but an idiot would look at a werewolf and think, ‘dog.’ Yet they do.”

“That’s pack magic,” I told him.

He nodded. “Some is. Sure. But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a ‘galaxy far, far away.’ A man can’t fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice.”

“You watched
Star Wars
?” I asked.

“Joe did,” he answered as if that made sense. “Loved it. A cowboy-and-Indian story where the Indians are the good guys and everyone fights with swords.”

“Cowboys and Indians?” I asked while I chewed on the first part of the sentence.

He grunted. “Think about it. Good versus evil. The foe has better armament and seems impossible to defeat—the invading Europeans. The good guys are few in number and restricted to a few bold heroes with an uncanny connection to the Force. Indians.”

I’d never thought about it that way, but I supposed I could see where someone might. Of course, people said that “Puff the Magic Dragon” was about doing drugs, too. For me,
Star Wars
was space opera and “Puff” a kid’s song about growing up and leaving your dreams behind.

“What about the Ewoks?” I asked. “Aren’t they supposed to be the Indians?”

He grinned at me, his sharp teeth flashing white from the moonlight. “Nope. Indians aren’t cute and furry. Ewoks were a good marketing ploy.”

I took a deep breath of the night air and smelled
him
. The ghost who’d danced for me, then turned into a coyote.

“Why did you dance? I thought you were a ghost.”

“That was a ghost,” he said. “That was Joe. He worried because you were headed into danger.” He slanted a laughing glance at me. “Not that you haven’t been in danger any number of times since you were born. But this is different because I’m called to this one for some reason. Things that involve me tend to be chaotic—and chaos can be fatal for the innocent bystanders.”

“Not an innocent bystander,” I told him.

“But he is your father. He’s entitled to worry.”

“What did the dance mean?” I asked.

“Not a spell,” he said. “Sometimes dancing is a spell—like the rain dance or the ghost dance. This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as ‘Look,
Apistotoki
, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.’” He gave me a sly look. “Or he might describe the dance as ‘Look, God, see what I made. Pretty cool, eh? Could you watch out for it?’”

For me. That dance had been for me.

“Tell me,” I said, swallowing down the feelings that were roiling around inside me. There was so much I needed to know, and this might be my only chance. “Tell me about Joe Old Coyote.” There was something odd going on. Some connection between my father and Coyote, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. Direct questions hadn’t worked so well; maybe I could get him to elaborate if I went at it sideways. And maybe I’d learn more about my father than my mother had been able to tell me.

The man who looked like my father grunted. “He was a bull rider.”

I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say. “I did know that,” I prompted him.

“Wasn’t Blackfeet. Or Blackfoot, either.”

That was new information. “He told my mother he was.”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “No. I’m pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion.”

“Was he from Browning?” I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn’t sure for whom. My mother who’d been so young? Maybe.

“I was bored and lonely,” he said with a sly shyness. “So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo.” He made a pleased noise. “Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly ’cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it.”

Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn’t and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

“So Joe was born in Browning,” I said slowly.

“You might say that,” agreed Coyote. “Joe usually did.”

“Joe was a person you became.” I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

“Exactly.”

“So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn’t you.”

“Sort of.” Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. “This explaining stuff isn’t where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him—though he never knew that. There were just things he didn’t worry about very much—like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me—and he was dead.”

Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote—but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug-thing in the
Men in Black
movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug’s human suit, Coyote’s had had a life of his own.

“Joe was real?”

Coyote nodded. “And so is his ghost—even though that is me as well.”

I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn’t really a person would throw me off my game again.

“If he was born in Browning,” I told Coyote, “maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan.” I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. “The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don’t they? He’s their trickster. It’s the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe.”

The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. “Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning—they know how to party, those Indians in Browning.”

“And then he met my mother.” My father was a construct of Coyote’s boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn’t. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black-and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote’s.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

“Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn’t she somethin’.” There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. “Who’d have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway.”

“But coyotes don’t mate for life, do they?” I tried to keep my voice neutral.

“He would have,” said Coyote. “Oh, he would have. He loved her so much.”

His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

“If he’d known about her sooner, he wouldn’t have killed the vampire nest over in Billings,” he said after a while. “But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know—not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains.”

He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, “Maybe
that’s
where you get it. I always assumed it was just too much
Star Wars
, but maybe it was genetic.” After a moment’s thought, he shook his head. “No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been
Star Wars
.”

“The vampires?” I said tightly.

“Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn’t too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn’t thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty damn hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire.”

He tossed his piece of grass away with a violent gesture, and his grass fell into the river.

“Don’t know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him.”

The story made my heart hurt, but not in a bad way. More like a wound that has just been scrubbed with iodine or hydrogen peroxide. It stung pretty badly, but I thought it might heal better in the end. “So when my father was dead, you were left?” I asked.

“Just me,” he said. We sat in silence again for a bit; maybe both of us mourned Joe Old Coyote.

The man who looked like my father broke the silence. “He didn’t know about you.”

“I know. Mom told me.”

“I didn’t know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered—which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay.” He glanced at me. “Which is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear.” His eyes laughed though his face was perfectly serious. “Terrifying, that one.”

“I think so,” I told him truthfully.

He laughed. “Not to you. He’s a good man. Only an evil man needs to fear a good man.”

“Hah,” I said. “You obviously never had Charles catch you doing something he disapproved of.”

We lapsed into silence, again.

“What can you tell me about the thing in the river?” I asked finally.

He made a rude sound. “I can tell you she’s not a poor misunderstood creature. Gordon is right. She’s Hunger, and she won’t be satisfied until she consumes the world.”

She. That answered several things. There was only one. That seemed more manageable than a swarm of monsters that could bite a woman in half and make a man shoot Adam.

“How big is it?” I asked.

He looked at me and poked his tongue into his cheek. “You know? That’s a good question. I think we ought to find out.”

And he knocked me into the river.

THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn’t move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.

I could hear him laughing.

Son of a bitch. I would kill him. I didn’t care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.