Christopher Moore: Coyote Blue

"I wish I had calf eyes — those long lashes." She pulled down the visor and looked in the vanity mirror, then bent over until her head was almost at the steering wheel and looked at Sam. He glanced at her and felt his breath catch in his throat as she smiled.

She said, "You have golden eyes. That's unusual for someone with such dark skin. Are you an Arab?"

"No, I'm… I don't know. I'm a mongrel, I guess."

"I never met a Mongrel before. I hear they were great horsemen, though. My mother used to read me that poem: 'In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…. I don't remember the rest. Someone told me that the Mongrels were like the bikers of their time."

"Who told you that?"

"This person who's a biker."

"Person?" Sam knew there was some reality to grab on to somewhere, a position from which he could regain control, if only he could get a straight answer.

"Do you know where the Tangerine Tree Cafe is on upper State? That's where I work."

"Just tell me a block or so before we get to it."

Even after twenty years Sam found it impossible to distinguish one area of Santa Barbara from another. Everything was the same: white stucco with red tile roofs. The city had been partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1925, and since then the city planners had required all commercial buildings to be built in the Spanish-Moorish style — they even dictated the shade of white that buildings were painted. The result was a beautifully consistent city with almost no distinctive landmarks. Sam usually spotted his destination just as he passed it.

"That was it back there," the girl said.

Sam pulled the car to the curb. "I'll go around the block."

She opened the car door. "That's okay, I can jump out here."

"No! I don't mind, really." He didn't want her to go. Not yet. But she was out of the car in an instant. She bent back in and offered her hand to shake.

"Thanks a lot. I work until four. I'll need a ride back to my car. See ya." And she was gone, leaving Sam with his hand still extended and the image of her cleavage burned onto his retinas.

He sat for a moment, trying to catch his breath, feeling disoriented, grateful, and a little relieved, as if he had looked up just in time to slam on the brakes and avoid a collision. He took his cigarettes from his jacket and shook one out of the pack, but when he reached for the lighter he noticed the bundle of clothes still lying on the seat. He grabbed the clothes, got out of the car, and headed down the street to the cafe.

The doors to the cafe were the big, heavy, hand-carved, pseudo-Spanish iron-banded variety common to almost all Santa Barbara restaurants, but once through them the decor was strictly Fifties Diner. Sam approached a gray-haired woman in a waitress uniform who was manning the cash register at the head of the long counter. He didn't see the girl.

"Excuse me," he said. "The girl that just came in here — the blonde — she left these in my car."

The woman looked him up and down and seemed surprised at his appearance. "Calliope?" she said, incredulously. Sam checked his tie for spots, his fly for altitude.

"I don't know her name. I just gave her a ride to work. She had a flat tire."

"Oh." The woman seemed relieved. "You didn't look like her type. She went to the back to change. I guess she won't get far without these." The woman took the clothes from him. "Did you want to speak to her?" she asked.

"No, I guess not. I guess I'll let her get to work."

"It's no problem, that other guy is waiting for her too." The woman nodded down the counter. Sam followed her gaze to where the Indian was sitting, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke in four directions with each drag. He looked up at Sam and grinned. Sam backed away from the counter and through the doors, tripping on the step down to the sidewalk, almost falling, but catching himself on the wrought-iron railing.

He leaned on the railing feeling as if he had just taken a hard shot to the jaw. He shook his head and tried to find some sort of order to what was happening. It could be some kind of setup; the girl and the Indian in it together. But how could they know who he was? How did the Indian get to the cafe so fast? And if it was blackmail, if they knew about the killing, then why be so sneaky about it?

As he climbed back into the Mercedes he tried to shake off the feeling of foreboding that was creeping over him like a night fog. He'd just met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and shortly he would see her again. He had come to her rescue; what better first impression? Even if he hadn't planned it. The Indian was a coincidence. Life was good, right?

He started the car and put it into gear only to realize that he couldn't remember where he was going. There had been an appointment when he left the office. He drove several blocks trying to remember the appointment and who he was going to be when he got there. Finally he gave up and pressed the autodialer on his cellular phone. As the phone beeped through the numbers to his office it hit him: the source of his discomfort. The Indian had had golden eyes.

In the time it took for his secretary to answer, twenty years of his life, of denial and deception, was pulled away in a stinging black undertow, leaving him feeling helpless and afraid.

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.