Coyote
Too many walkers in the encroaching darkness. I cannot see them until we almost collide. The light on my handlebars does not light my way so much as it makes me visible. So how do they not see me? The thing is set on strobe, flashing obnoxiously in the deepening darkness, yet we almost collide. I pass under a bridge and it is total dark except for the strobe and I wonder if the thing could precipitate a seizure. Yes, ‘precipitate’ is the word thought in my head.
Why won’t that guy control his dog? So frustrating. He’s not even attempting to keep the dog close. He isn’t using a leash. What is wrong with him?
The dog is white, so white it almost glows …
A coyote? Not a dog at all. A white coyote near Riverside High School, near the stoner skaters hanging out in the waning moments of light before they do whatever it is they will do when darkness sets in
“Patrick.”
Huh?
The coyote stands on two feet and says my name again, “Patrick.”
Somehow he is in front of me without having moved and I stop. We dissipate. We just dissipate right there on the bike path and turn ephemeral. A woman sitting upright on a hipster city cruiser bike with a woven basket on the handlebars wearing silly ear muffs passes through us … a warm wind swirling in my chest … then she goes …
Coyote strides across the path and into the woods along the river. He gestures for me to follow. Well, why not? Might as well embrace this hallucination.
“I thought you were more of a Hopi or Navajo thing? Shouldn’t we be talking turtle island, Manitou, and Naniboujou?”
“Coyote is everywhere now.”
Then he was silent.
“I see you are the cryptic sort of hallucination.”
“I speak when necessary.”
“Ahh, my laconic subconscious! Delightful. Hey, can you give me some ancient knowledge insight on Canada Geese and how to stop them from shitting everywhere?”
“No,” bipedal coyote man growled at me. He could not exist - a coyote mouth and throat could not create the phonemes necessary to speak English (or any other human language for that matter). Of course a coyote man could not exist.
“Are we going to do a new age native thing? Seven generations stuff? I don’t have a lot of time for that. Or a journey of self-discovery. Not a lot of time for that either. I don’t want to face my wife’s anxiety morphing to anger thing if I am home ridiculously late.”
“You understand that I am a talking coyote and yet you worry about arriving home late?”
“I don’t know where you go after this episode is done, but I have to go home. And when I go home, she will be pissed because I will have no legitimate reason for coming home late. And she will be suspicious and my night will suck. And I will have to wake up to her still cross self tomorrow. I am assuming that this,” I said, gesturing to my translucent shimmering ghost-self, “will prove to be more temporary.”
Coyote man looked at me. Being a coyote man, I could not read his expression. I gathered that most persons behaved with awestruck wonder or at least appeared surprised when they met him. What happens happens - how can what happens surprise anyone? I shrugged my shoulders and moved on …
We negotiated the brambly, tortuous path toward the river. I saw the path and the obstacles clearer than I did on bright, sunny days. A preternatural confidence guided me over hidden roots and around barely visible rocks, the sort of traps that sent me flying during my daydream hikes here. I heard the forest: small animals skittering and flying bats chittering hypersonic communiques to each other and staccato blasts at trees and the insect prey to guide and hone their frenetic flapping into an evening’s meal, the deer that nibble cautiously then stop and listen, look, the paranoid neurotics of the urban forest until they move whereupon they transform into the epitome of fluid grace flowing through and over the underbrush impossibly fast and silent, the mother fox feeding on a small rodent wheezing unto death then padding over leaves and grass to her den to the suckling pups slurping at her teats; even fishes can be seen heard felt to disrupt the rivers flow and make themselves known to me, I feel the barely perceptible eddies where the water spreads and swirls behind them, I can “see” all the dark shapes spread through the water holding swimming stalking waiting; we almost floated through the woods to the river, but that is not right entirely because I still put one foot in front of the other and sensed the cool, moist ground and the crystallizing dew, harbinger of an early season frost. I walked, I did not float. I felt more, moved as a man and an animal - all animals, with nothing beyond my ken, which extended past the far edges of thought, past the aporia of rationality...
Following coyote man I fell out of the future.
We reached the water and coyote man bent over, lapping at the river with his black pink tongue. He invited me to drink. I refused.
Shocked out of mindfulness, I thought to myself that this is the Milwaukee River. I saw plastic six-pack nets enmeshed in the tree branches that touched the water. I saw soda bottles floating and condoms dropped on the shore. I saw the alcoholic homeless urinating from the dam, singing hopeless dirges to the world that once was before they fell, before the strand of thought to which they desperately clung fractured and became a multitude of voices competing inside their heads, before the arrests and the violence, before perplexed despair, before a drink then many drinks became the only way to slow things down and to sleep without fear-filled dreams; pissing the detritus of a broken world into the dark river water. I saw the filth and waste of a city carried on these waters - the secret excrement that we still deny and hide with Victorian duplicity as if we never shat or sullied the world with our dirty rapacious ways. I would not drink even though I knew that filth and waste already sullied me, that my life placed me inside the dirty river of urban piss whether I admitted it or not, that the waste entered me through rain and faucet, that I already drank from the dirty slough a million times.
Coyote man sat on the damp ground with his legs folded under him. His eyes turned to the silver moon, nearly full, waxing toward its apogee. Coyote man motioned for me to sit, pointing at a downed oak. I smelled the musty aroma of vegetal decay, lichen and moss, wood louse and slug, the slow churn of life and death, not opposed as we fancy them to be but facets of a singular phenomenon that we ruin and taint with our self-reflexivity, our mortal paranoia, and our eschatological dreams.
I sat on the old oak and asked her if she remembered the river when humans were sparse. The long silent rings assured me that she knew the iterations of many persons and many waters - waters that teemed fresh with life, waters that choked her roots, and the waters that teemed with life again but could never again be wholly cleansed and still ferried refuse to the lake and made her weep. She lies in a transitory place, playfully senescent, deliquescing with a withered smile, still living despite our haughty judgments about what is and what is not, singing, for those who stop long enough to listen, her lyrical dirge. I find myself with open hands on the fleshy necrotizing bark, the backs of my legs pressed onto the curve of her, feeling her history, her presence, the banquet of her slow demise; I smell her and her community of flora and fauna, her slow, blended words in the plural aroma. She gave me the history of this river and I thanked her, I mouthed the words, “thank you” then I said the words aloud.
Coyote rose. “Shall we walk?”
“Sure.” I followed him.
He took me up a steep deer trail. We climbed silently. A feral cat hissed at Coyote, a big tabby tom whose yellow eyes gleamed ferociously on the moonlight hillside. I bent over and patted his head. He looked suspiciously at Coyote who laughed softly, but Wild Tabby Tom let me pet him and he rubbed against my leg, purring, his body vibrating with delight.
Rubbed against my leg? I was solid again! A man and here was a cat rubbing against my leg purring and mewling.
We returned to the bike path and Coyote bade me farewell, vanishing as he waved his hand. Tabby Tom still followed me. “Want to come?” He mewed at me and licked his front right paw with feline grace and nonchalance, as if to say, “I suppose I could ennoble you with my presence,” lacking, as all good cats do, humility and dependence. “Okay, you gotta hop in the bag though,” I said, pointing at the messenger bag I held open on the ground. To my great surprise he hopped in. I honored the bargain and slung the bag and the cat over my shoulder to pedal the ten miles home.
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