JUST COYOTES
: False Forks and Empty Graves
by Nowick Gray
Beside me Harah grabbed covers, threw
them off, thrashing with her fever. My reading light burned down
on her open face banked by strands of damp hair. Finally she sat
up, slowly, and reached away from me for her dog-eared paperback,
short stories of Poe called Master of Terror. She wore
an old white turtleneck riding over her bare bum. I was wrapped
up in Naoya's The Paper Door, a book of Japanese short
stories which featured characters (usually the narrators) facing
painful choices: like the husband caught in a crisis in his marriage
caused by an affair with another woman. How to choose the proper
course of action--to be true to himself when fate has presented
him with another path?
Harah coughed wetly. I put a hand
on her thigh, and kept reading. Not much longer to the end of
the story. After that, maybe one more. The weekend had been a
busy one for both of us. She'd dug new beds in an old section
of garden, before succumbing to the chicken pox our daughter had
brought home from school the previous week. I'd dug blackberries,
greased the truck, stayed up late playing music with friends.
I'd fished without luck by a cold, windblown river. Now my torpid
limbs soaked up heat from Harah's fever under the winter covers.
"I wonder," she said while
still looking at the page she was reading, "what I did during
that week as a child." She was an only child, raised by a
brutal father in a harbor town, after the unsolved murder of her
mother.
"What week?" I knew that
to continue reading now was fruitless. I looked at her blotchy
complexion, her puffed temples.
"The week I chose not to get
the chicken pox--saving it till now, instead."
"I don't know." I really
wanted to finish Naoya's story. The husband, a novelist, had arrived
at a critical point of decision. In the meantime, life had to
go on: he was reading his son a story about an enchanted lion,
while his wife wept in the bath. Wept, I imagined, as Harah did
in those black episodes in which she tried to express some deep
pain locked inside her, and was never able to. Did she try? Did
she really want to? Maybe it was only I who wanted her to. But
now was not the time; her tone was too casual, the hour too late.
I fell asleep before finishing the
story. That night I suffered vivid dreams of a teenaged girl who
had been killing people (her mother and sister) and had buried
their parts in the row-house backyard. Someone made her dig up
the shallow graves, and she showed me the grisly, half-rotted
remains. With horror in my heart, I tried to take a compassionate
attitude toward her, as a neighbor, a friend. But what could I
do? I woke up in the gloomy dawn haunted by her words: "Then
I'll find a way to kill you."
I tasted onions from the previous
night's supper, and blamed the nightmare on them. "I should
have known better," I said to Harah as I dressed. She lay
glassy-eyed, unmoving, her head propped up on the reading pillow,
the Poe book closed beside her, the reading light still on. "Are
you all right? Did you stay up all night reading?"
"I'm fine," she said with
a slack mouth. "I couldn't stop. I think my fever's better."
"I'll make some breakfast for
you. What do you feel like eating?"
"Hmm. Nothing I can think of.
I'm not really hungry. You go ahead."
It was not yet light out. Our nine-year-old
daughter, Niki, was crying from her room down the hall, a tiny,
distant wailing. When I got up and went to her to see what was
the matter, she said she'd had a bad dream.
"Coyotes were coming after me.
I tried to chase them away by throwing my chicken pox scabs at
them, but it didn't work."
"So did they eat you, then?"
"Stop teasing." She didn't
smile. It was hard to tell her freckles from the scars of the
chicken pox.
Toast and jam, apple juice, mint
tea. Harah had no appetite; Niki licked the last of the jam from
his plate and said, "I'm still hungry."
"I almost made eggs," I
pleaded.
"That's all right," they
both said at once.
Niki told Harah of her dream.
Outside, the wind blew high and gusty.
I retreated to my study, and from time to time glimpsed tantalizing
patches of blue sky which never quite broadened through the gray
March cloud cover. The writing went slowly. By the end of the
afternoon I was ready for exercise . . . but hesitated before
trading the cozy house for the damp, cold outside air.
Harah appeared in the study door,
holding foamy glass mugs of homemade milkshake, and smiling.
I pushed my work away and leaned
back in my chair. "You look like you're doing better."
"I think I may have turned the
corner." Her black eyes had a new sparkle.
"Did you manage to take a nap?"
"No, but I think I'll have a
hot bath now, then maybe try. Want to join me?"
"I was thinking of maybe taking
a walk. I'm stuck on these revisions. I can't decide which way
the story wants to go. But the weather doesn't look that inviting."
We sipped the milkshakes: Harah still
in the door, me in my chair.
I felt vaguely disappointed, as if
I wanted Harah to tell me which way to go, what to do. Or, was
I just picking up on something she wanted from me, but wouldn't
say?
"Where's Niki?"
"In her room coloring. I suggested
she make a picture about that dream she had. Now she's totally
absorbed in it."
"Good idea. Get the demons out."
"Yeah, like that Poe guy. Maybe
it's better for some people to keep them in!"
"I don't know. He might have
been like his characters, then, instead of just writing about
them."
She drained her mug and looked at
me strangely.
"What, are you afraid I've got
some demons in me? We all do, I guess." I finished my milkshake
in a gulp and stood up. "Well, I guess that puts me over
the hump. Might as well go out while there's still daylight."
I kissed her in the doorway on the
way out. After days and nights of fever, her lips and cheeks now
seemed cold. When I remarked on this, her black eyes sparkled
and she replied, "Probably just the milkshake."
I started with a leisurely climb
along the deer-trail slanting up the wooded hillside to the east
of the house. Where the ridge flattened out I eased into a loping
run, enjoying the clean, cool air, and the ground underfoot with
its carpet of brown leaves. The birches stood bleakly awaiting
the new year's growth. I ran on through them to the cedar grove,
where I stopped as I always do to stare up at the trees and sky,
and into the calm, all-forgiving forest.
A notion occurred to me, as I started
running again: Why take the same old path to the right, which
loops around to the road and back down the driveway home; why
not go left this time instead, and see how that choice develops?
It could turn out like one of Naoya's
slighter stories, I thought, in which a trivial incident on the
subway or in the countryside is described, and left by its author
to stand by the wayside, a little Shinto shrine to everyday experience.
But I knew the left-hand trail, after
all. I'd been that way a couple of times before. Nothing unusual
or interesting was going to happen. It would make a story more
like the contemporary American kind in which the point is to say
that nothing interesting happens.
I decided to take the left fork;
but right away hesitated again because the trail was not clear.
It was less traveled by deer; it was crooked and somewhat obscured
by brush and the undulations of a seasonal creekbed. I looked
more closely at the ground. A ragged, foot-deep trench, roughly
six feet long and a foot wide, gaped up at me, giving the impression
that someone had dug here: a forestry agent, sampling?
Or had some tiny, localized earthquake
pulled the ground apart in this one spot? Ridiculous, I know.
But this is the effect it had on me. Some cause was to be found
somewhere: some blame assigned.
I bent through some overhanging branches
and followed a more or less clear passage along the slope to the
west. The forest cover thinned, opening ahead to a white, close-hanging
sky that was condensing into a sparsely blowing snow. It was here
that my opinion of the uneventfulness of my choice came to be
qualified by a sense of the ominous, of the possibility of something
beyond my ken looming ahead, ready to precipitate out of the heavy,
roiling air.
Around the hump of the hillside the
terrain flattened again and I came to a place where a few birch
trees had been cut to enlarge a natural clearing. Bits of black
plastic poked out from under the sticks and leaves, and I inspected
the ground more closely. Little mounds of dug earth appeared around
a formation of crude terraced beds. Again I found myself looking
into trenches: these deeper and wider than the stream cut, and
four or five feet long. A few were covered with a casual lattice
of sticks, as if to obscure sight of them from above.
Was this place the source of that
sense of foreboding? I knew this to be an old pot plantation--not
a graveyard. I could recall that Harah and I had chanced upon
it some years previously. And then, for some inexplicable reason,
I began to wonder if Harah had ever contemplated suicide. Suddenly
I wanted to return home quickly. I was comforted to know that
Niki was there, coloring coyotes.
Heading back down the gentle southward
slope, I figured I was pointing homeward. I expected to come first
to a rocky ridge face and adjoining ravine--the place where thirteen
years before, I'd brought my unmanageable dog, Miso, at the end
of a chain. My options for dealing with him had come to a dead
end. Then for once in his life he'd sat obediently, while I put
a rifle to his head. I buried him there and covered the shallow
grave with a large heap of leftover cedar shakes. The following
autumn I noticed a hole in the side of the mound of wood, making
it look like a hut. The grave had been robbed: probably by coyotes.
Making hasty choices on the braided
animal trails, I stayed too high and bypassed the homestead. Instead
I stayed on the flat ridge, past the now-tranquil scene of another
murder: a fresh deer kill, only
partially covered in leaves by a cougar. This discovery had come
more recently, in the winter of the previous year. I'd found the
carcass still pliable, half-eaten--on a trek that began as a morning
stroll down the driveway and detoured through the woods, on a
whim. Now, of course, there was nothing, the bones far-scattered.
But my heart beat unsteadily as I came out of the woods on the
dirt road by the house of my nearest neighbor. To complete the
figure eight of crossing loops I walked home on the roadway, welcoming
the cheery column of smoke I saw rising from the house at its
end. I left my psychic agitation behind in the dark woods, drinking
in the fresh air and enjoying the live feeling in my limbs.
Supper was ready: corn macaroni,
kidney beans, tiny spinach thinnings; Parmesan cheese for sprinkling
on top. The three of us held hands until Niki said, "Silence
is spooky," and we broke to eat. Harah served herself small
portions but I was glad to see her with some appetite again.
I told her about my outing, having seen a number of "empty
graves." She scraped her fork slowly on her plate as she
listened, her cheeks rosy from the bath and yet still gaunt from
the sleepless night in Poe's crypts.
When I mentioned the plantation site,
her sunken eyes widened. "Oh--I was just thinking about that
place earlier today! It's the first time I've thought of it since
we were there."
I felt a sudden chill, myself, and
tried not to think of my own premonition there. "That's pretty
eerie. Why were you thinking of it today?"
"After reading all those Poe
stories, I was wondering--as I was lying in my bath: If I murdered
someone, what would I do with the body? I could take it up in
the woods somewhere and bury it; but then, would someone notice
the turned-over dirt?"
Niki stopped chewing and put down
her fork; she seemed a little shocked at what her mother had said.
I too was taken aback and said to
Harah, "What a morbid imagination you have."
My wife of ten years looked hurt,
and lowered her eyes in the manner (I imagined) of a Japanese
farm wife; then, unable to eat, she turned her head and looked
out the window into the gloomy twilight.
I didn't know how seriously to take
this fantasy of hers. It was totally unlike her, or what I knew
of her, to have such thoughts of violence. Maybe it was just the
fever, or, as she said, the Poe stories.
"Wanna see the picture I drew
today?" Niki broke the uncomfortable silence.
"Sure," I said, getting
up from the table. Let's go have a look. You can tell me all about
it."
I didn't like going down the dark
hallway that evening, but it seemed no worse than that brightly-lit
kitchen with its idle cutlery and brooding, unknown desires.
As I read to Niki I thought of Naoya's
story, the one with the unfaithful husband reading to his son.
Niki's freckled face looked genderless: as it was before the chromosomal
die was cast. All a matter of X's and Y's: crossroads and forks
. . .
In such a manner did my divided attention wander.
Then when we came near the end of our chapter from The Lion, The
Witch and The Wardrobe, I heard a faint yelp, a distant, high-pitched
keening. "What's that?" I said, listening.
My daughter's eyes shone bright and black as her
mother's.
"Just coyotes," she said.
© Nowick Gray
