“Literal and metaphorical miles.”
“Yep, both kinds,” this amazing cop said. “Travels with Harley. I like it. It’s ballsy. And of course, I’d read any-thing you wrote, Mr. Marinville. Novels, essays, poems hell, your laundry list.”
“Thanks,” Johnny said, touched. “I appreciate that. You’ll probably never know how much. The last year or so has been difficult for me. A lot of doubt. Questioning my own identity, and my purpose.”
“I know a little about those things myself,” the cop said. “You might not think so, guy like me, but I do.
Why, if you knew the day I’ve put in already .. . Mr. Marinville, could I possibly have your autograph?”
“Of course, it would be a pleasure,” Johnny said, and took his own pad out of his back pocket. He opened it and paged past notes, directions, route numbers, fragments of map in blurred soft pencil (these latter had been drawn by Steve Ames, who had quickly realized that his famous client, although still able to ride his cycle with a fair degree of safety, ended up lost and fuming in even small cities without help).
At last he found a blank page. “What’s your name, Offi—”
He was interrupted by a long, trembling howl that chilled his blood … not just because it was clearly the sound of a wild animal but because it was close. The notepad dropped from his hand and he turned on his heels so quickly that he staggered. Standing just off the south edge of the road, not fifty yards away, was a mangy canine with thin legs and scanty, starved-looking sides. Its gray pelt was tangled with burdocks and there was an ugly red sore on its foreleg, but Johnny barely noticed these things. What fascinated him was the creature’s muzzle, which seemed to be grinning, and its yellow eyes, which looked both stupid and cunning.
“My God,” he murmured. “What’s that? Is it a—”
“Coyote,” the cop said, pronouncing it ki-yote. “Some people out here call em desert wolves.”
That’s what he said, Johnny thought. Something about seeing a coyote, a desert wolf You just misunderstood. This idea relieved him even though a part of his mind didn’t believe it at all.
The cop took a step toward the coyote, then another. He paused, then took a third. The coyote stood its ground but began to shiver all over. Urine squirted from under its chewed-looking flank. A gust of wind turned the paltry stream into a scatter of droplets.
When the cop took a fourth step toward it, the coyote raised its scuffed muzzle and howled again, a long, ululating sound that made Johnny’s arms ripple with goose-flesh and his balls pull up.
“Hey, don’t get it going,” he said to the cop. “That’s très creepy.
The cop ignored him. He was looking at the coyote, which was now looking intently back at him with its yellow gaze. “Tak,” the cop said. “Tak ah lah.”
The wolf went on staring at him, as if it understood this Indian-sounding gibberish, and the goose-bumps on Johnny’s arms stayed up. The wind gusted again, blowing his dropped notepad over onto the shoulder of the road, where it came to rest against a jutting chunk of rock. Johnny didn’t notice. His pad and the autograph he’d intended to give the cop were, for the moment, the furthest things from his mind.
This goes in the hook, he thought. Everything else I’ve seen is still up for grabs, but this goes in. Rock solid. Rock goddam solid.
‘Tak,” the cop said again, and clapped his hands together sharply, once. The coyote turned and loped away, running on those scrawny legs with a speed Johnny never would have expected. The big man in the khaki urn- form watched until the coyote’s gray pelt had merged into the general dirty gray of the desert. It didn’t take long.
“Gosh, aren’t they ugly?” the cop said. “And just lately they’re thicker’n ticks on a blanket. You don’t see em in the morning or early afternoon, when it’s hottest, but late afternoon … evening .. . toward dark.
. .“ He shook his head as if to say There you go.
“What did you say to it?” Johnny asked. “That was amazing. Was it Indian? Some Indian dialect?”
The big cop laughed. “Don’t know any Indian dialect,” he said. “Hell, don’t know any Indians. That was just baby-talk, like oogie-woogie, snookie-wookums.”
“But it was listening to you!”
“No, it was looking at me,” the cop said, and gave Johnny a rather forbidding frown, as if he were
daring the other man to contradict him. “I stole its eyes, that’s all. The holes of its eyes. I suppose most of that animal-tamer stuff is for the birds, but when it comes to slinkers like desert wolves . . . well, if you steal their eyes, it doesn’t matter what you say. They’re usually not dangerous unless they’re rabid, anyway. You just don’t want them to smell fear on you. Or blood.”
Johnny glanced at the big cop’s right sleeve again and wondered if the blood on it was what had drawn the coyote.
“And you don’t ever, ever want to face them when they’re in a pack. Especially a pack with a strong leader They’re fearless then. They’ll go after an elk and run it until its heart bursts. Sometimes just for the fun of it.” He paused. “Or a man.”
“Really,” Johnny said. “That’s. . .“ He couldn’t say très creepy, he’d already used that one. “. . .
fascinating
“It is, isn’t it?” the big cop said, and smiled. “Desert lore. Scripture in the wasteland. The resonance of lonely places.”
Johnny stared at him, jaw dropping slightly. All at once his friend the policeman sounded like Paul Bowles on a bad-karma day.
He’s trying to impress you, that’s all—it’s cocktail chatter without the cocktail party.
You ‘ye seen and heard it all a thousand times before.
Maybe. But he still could have done without it in this context. Somewhere off in the distance another howl rose, trembling the air like an auditory heat-haze. It wasn’t the coyote which had just run off, Johnny was sure of that. This howl had come from farther away, perhaps in answer to the first.
“Oh hey, time out!” the cop exclaimed. “You better stow that, Mr. Marinville!”
“Huh?” For one exceedingly strange moment he had the idea the cop was talking about his thoughts, as if he practiced telepathy as well as elliptical pretentiousness, but the big man had turned back to the motorcycle again and was pointing at the left-hand saddlebag. Johnny saw that one sleeve of his new poncho-bright orange for safety in bad weather— was hanging out of it like a tongue.
How come I didn’t ‘I see that when I stopped to take a leak? he wondered. How could I have missed it? And there was something else. He’d stopped for gas in Pretty Nice, and after he’d topped the Harley’s tanks, he’d unbuckled that saddlebag to get hisNevada map. He had checked the mileage from there toAustin , then refolded the map and put it back. Then he had re-buckled the saddlebag. He was sure he had, but it was certainly un-buckled now.
He had been an intuitive man all his life; it was intuition, not planning, that had been responsible for his best work as a writer. The drinking and the drugs had dulled those intuitions but not destroyed them, and they had come back—not all the way, at least not yet, but some— since he’d gotten straight. Now, looking at the poncho dangling out of the unbuckled saddlebag, Johnny felt alarm bells start going off in his head.
The cop did it.
That was completely senseless, but intuition told him it was true just the same. The cop had unbuckled the saddlebag and pulled his orange poncho partway out of it while Johnny had been north of the road with his back turned, taking a piss. And for most of their conversation, the cop had deliberately stood so Johnny couldn’t see the hanging poncho. The guy wasn’t as starry-eyed about meeting his favorite author as he had seemed. Maybe not starry-eyed at all. And he had an agenda here.
What agenda? Would you mind telling me that? What agenda?
Johnny didn’t know, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like that weird Yoda shit with the coyote much, either.
“Well?” the cop asked. He was smiling, and here was another thing not to like. It wasn’t a goony I’m-just-a-fan- in-love smile anymore, if it ever had been; there was something cold about it. Maybe contemptuous.
“Well, what?”
“Are you going to take care of it or not? Tak!”
His heart jumped. “Tak, what does that mean?”
“I didn’t say tak, you did. You said tak.”
The cop crossed his arms and stood smiling at him.
I want out of here, Johnny thought.
Yes, that was pretty much the bottom line, wasn’t it? And if that meant following orders, so be it. This little interlude, which had started off being funny in a nice way, had suddenly gotten funny in a way that wasn’t so nice as if a cloud had gone over the sun and a previously pleasant day had darkened, grown sinister.