In Gallup, Greed -- The Coyote Chapter
A
coyote drifted by the front window, cautious, gray-gold, sniffing the
dirt. The college campus
surrounding Burro’s apartment lay quiet in the late morning. A gray cloud
drifted by in the distance, foreshadowing the monsoon. Burro watched, and the cautious
animal raised his eyes towards the cloud, and then turned towards Burro, as if
to communicate the coming torrent.
A coyote vision, Burro thought, based on intuition, evidence, and the
inner workings of coyote genes.
He identified. Burro knew his own visions were part a creation of his
genetically corrupted mind, his intuition, and real world evidence. As soon as
Alice’s voice came over the phone this morning, Burro had felt a new hallucination
wash over him.
“Hey, Burro. Mirage – you know – the woman Momma
roomed with in Gallup? She thinks
she killed her brother, Lonnie.”
He saw the money first, sprouting like weeds from
a kitchen floor.
“They all started this gallery together: Mirage, Lonnie, and some friends. Lonnie gave a party – he did that all
the time – with pizza and beer, that sort of thing. Mirage drank too much, blacked out, and apparently passed
out in an alley outside Lonnie’s place.
When she went back in the house, she found Lonnie dead.”
An open concept kitchen appeared, and the money
sprouts grew more quickly, shedding large bills onto the carpet, the sofa, and
the countertops. The room oozed
money and shame. That’s how the
vision felt – like money and shame.
Burro steadied himself on his clean kitchen counter, as Mirage continued
to explain the crime.
“Lonnie was in bed, Mirage says, stab wounds to
his stomach. The police don’t
suspect her or anything like that.
There’s no weapon. All the
gallery people were at the party, some others dropped by, so there’s no reason
to think Mirage killed her brother.
It’s just the blackout, I guess.
It scares her that she might know something and not remember it.”
Brains oozed up out of the center of a large iron
frying pan and began to scramble on the stovetop. Burro sensed confusion, damage, a lack of understanding,
missing pieces of information – it was hard to express what he felt when he saw
the brains oozing and frying in the money filled kitchen and dining area. The floors started to tilt.
“I sense confusion,” Burro spoke tightly into the
phone.
“You have a vision?”
“It’s forming now.”
“Okay.
That’s good, I think.
Mirage wants to hire you and Cinnamon as private investigators to find out if she killed Lonnie. Or who killed Lonnie. Like that.”
“There’s money involved,” Burro edged out the
words.
“Yeah.
The artists ran a pretty successful gallery.”
Burro held the edge of the counter and, using his
foot as a hook, pulled one of the metal chairs over to him and sat down.
“I’ll call Cinnamon.”
“We need to go today, Burro. You two were planning
to go to Gallup anyway for another job, and Mirage was Momma’s friend. So it’s a good way to get to know her
and find out what she knows about Momma.”
“Today,” Burro repeated faintly.
“Call me and let me know, okay?”
“I will.”
Burro placed his smart phone carefully on the
counter. Money poured through the
windows of the vision, busting out glass, invading every space, beneath the
sofa, under the coffee table -- pushing open cabinet doors, covering every
surface. And, still, the brains
oozed and fried, overflowing the edge of the pan, as if the money fed the
confusion, fed the loss of order and sanity.
Burro breathed, practiced bringing up pleasant
memories. He thought of his
childhood, reflecting back on the adobe house on the east side of Santa Fe
where he grew up. He tried to
visualize his mother, peeling green chile at a white porcelain sink. His mother was brown-eyed and slim.
Both his parents were brown-eyed, actually, and Burro’s light hair and blue
eyes were said to be the legacy of ancient blond ancestors from Europe.
Thinking of his mother at the sink, and his
grandfather’s stories of bold blond ancestors, Burro’s breath returned to
normal, his blood pressure lowered, and the brains and money slowed, transformed
into a still life drawing. Burro
picked up the phone to call Cinnamon.
As it rang, he noticed the coyote, spooked by a sound, slip quickly into
a row of juniper trees, gone in a second, a mirage of orange dust and gray
clouds, like a trick of the mind.
