Sacred Alarm Clock

by John T. Biggs

  My hands smell like pepperoni, and my previously owned T-shirt smells like fear, and the feral dogs like those smells better than anything else in the world. Their claws scratch the pavement behind me—no stealth at all. More than five of them, I think. More than the number of bullets in my deadly pistol with its fang firing pin. I wonder if the dogs know that.

  Every now and then I pick up a rock with my pistol-free hand and throw it at the closest animal.

  They stay out of range, about fifty feet, because I throw pretty good for a girl.

  • • •

  Two hours, four Hostess CupCakes, five Slim Jims, and two Diet Cokes is how far I have walked when I come to my house. It’s dark inside, like all the others, but it’s not as scary. The door is locked, but there is a key hidden in a gray Keystone that looks completely unnatural in the dried up juniper beside the front door. Two dog packs are following me, poorly organized. One pack might be a little larger than the other but it’s hard to tell because some of the dogs switch from one side to the other.

  By the time I get the door open, the two biggest dogs are fighting. The others growl and bark at each other, waiting to see who will win. I shout at them to stop, but they ignore me.

  I’m not the leader of the pack, so I go inside.

  Without calling out, I know the house is empty, but I call out anyway, “Dad, it’s me. It’s Karma.”

  The house smells stale, but not like something dead, so I walk from room to room, looking at what is left of my life.

  In the kitchen there’s a bulletin board. Dad made it out of wine corks stuck into a frame with Elmer’s glue.

  “Artsy-craftsy,” he called it. “And cheap.”

  Dad drank a lot of wine, usually when I wasn’t looking. One cork for seven glasses. One cork every four days. Quicker if the days were difficult. How much wine did he drink when his daughter went into the hospital, and he couldn’t visit because only soldiers were allowed to drive?

  I open the refrigerator, but I close it quickly because it smells like the confessional at St. Gregory’s.

  There is peanut butter in the pantry, and crackers, and Kashi Go Lean snack bars, from when Dad was on a diet. All good food, and the water is still running, so I can drink my fill, and take a shower. I can put on clean clothes that actually belong to me, and cotton panties with a real elastic band.

  Dad’s room looks just the way it always did, neat and orderly for the end of civilization. The only thing out of place is a pocket watch on a piece of blue note paper in the middle of his bed.

  His writing—easy for me to tell, because it’s neat and perfectly oriented on the page, each letter exactly the same size as if it came from a longhand font on a word processor.

  Dear Karma—

  This watch is all wound up, but doesn’t work anymore. Like the world, I guess.

  I think that means you should take all the time you need to figure out what comes next. Nobody’s keeping track any more.

  Remember, friends are precious. Take them where you find them and find them where you can.

  Don’t be choosy. Look for the signs.

  Love,

  Dad

  Neatly written, but hard to understand. The watch has stopped at five o’clock. Dad used to say, “It’s always five o’clock somewhere,” before he drank a glass of wine.

  The watch feels lonely in my pocket. And cold, even though it’s late summer and the air conditioning’s been off for months.

  I pack my Slim Jims, and my peanut butter and crackers, and a thermos full of tap water into the L. L. Bean backpack I bought when I thought I might go camping. Now it looks like I might be doing a lot of that while I go looking for Joseph.

  Four pairs of jeans, four shirts, six pair of socks, and eight pair of lovely underwear nestle around the food. A bar of soap, a bottle of aspirin, and Dad’s old Swiss Army knife with the ivory toothpick and the useful blades all go into special compartments. The only things I don’t pack are my fully cocked six-shooter, and my authentic Cheyenne War Ceremony Knife.

  I don’t look out the window before I open the door and step outside, because this is home and I never did those things when civilization was still around.

  But now I should.

  The dogfight in my front yard is finished now, and the new improved pack looks ready for action. The new dog-chief has a bloody ear, and blood on his muzzle, and maybe he’s eaten the loser, because that one’s nowhere to be seen.

  The pack leader might be part chow, because he’s big with fur-like armor and a growl like a garbage disposal. He’s tired of taking crap from humans who’ve chained him in the backyard and fed him scraps for years.

  I point my pistol at him and shout, “Git!” in my best deranged hillbilly accent, but this dog has heard it all before, and he’s not impressed.

  The other dogs aren’t sure what comes next. They wag their tails and look at me like I might be about to throw them a treat, but what I do is hold my pistol in two hands the way cops used to do on TV shows, and I put my feet into a wide target shooting stance, and give the dogs a count of three to clear out.

  When they don’t clear out, I give them another count of three. I’m getting ready to count one last time, just in case they are a little slow with math, when the dog-chief charges me.

  I pull the trigger and the hammer falls.

  Click. The dog-chief stops for a moment, but now he knows for sure, something he’s suspected since I walked out my front door and closed it behind me without checking first.

  I’m defenseless.

  I prove that by pulling the trigger again and again, listening to the hammer fall onto empty cylinders a lot more than six times. Why didn’t I think of this before? Suicide only takes one bullet.

  The dog-chief charges me again, and this time no amount of clicking is going to slow him down. It’s too late to go back into the house. It’s too late to draw my authentic Cheyenne War Ceremony Knife, so when the dog-chief jumps at me with his mouth open, ready to shred me like last week’s homework, I swing my nearly useless cowboy pistol at his face.

  There’s lots of yipping and yelping after that, and I see blood on the shiny silver barrel and cylinder of the pistol, and broken dogteeth on the sidewalk, and a hopeless look in the eyes of the dog who wanted to chew me to death but can’t chew anything now.

  This time when I yell, “Git!” the big pack scatters into smaller packs with leaders who remember that people are the boss.

  “Git!” I yell again, and put the pistol into my waistband in case I need to beat another dog with it later.

  • • •

  I’m chewing on a Slim Jim, taking big steps along the street, hardly thinking of how far I’ve got to go, or all the ugly things I’ll pass on the way. Not thinking at all of how I might never find Joseph or bullets for my six-shooter, or how all the Hostess CupCakes in the world—except maybe for Twinkies—will go stale in a couple of weeks.

  Not thinking about much at all, because I’m acquiring a taste for Slim Jims and surviving a dog attack feels really cool after the fear wears off. Until you hear something behind you that you’d forgotten about.

  Claws on pavement.

  I pull the pistol out of my waistband and get ready to fend off another dog attack, but nothing’s there.

  I cock the hammer back, even though I don’t have bullets and shout, “I’m not afraid to use this.” What do feral dogs know about six-shooters anyway?

  I see a movement in my peripheral vision, and suddenly there’s a coyote where nothing was before, sitting on her haunches not afraid, but not aggressive either.

  I suppose the coyote was always there, blending into the background the way wild animals do, waiting for my eyes to pick her out.

  No wagging tail. No subservient look.

  There’s a sound behind me like a breath being let out in a rush, and when I turn around, there are three more coyotes, watching, waiting.

  I tear my Slim Jim into four roughly equal parts and
toss them to each of the coyotes. Perfect tosses. Perfect catches. Each piece is swallowed in a gulp.

  They saw me defeat the chief of the feral dog pack. Now I’m giving them food. It’s a coyote ceremony older than America.

  I’m the alpha female. The new leader of the pack. They follow me down the street into the dangerous heart of Oklahoma City. Friends are precious now. Like Dad said, I can’t be choosy.

  • • •

  My coyote pack likes Slim Jims, but they like jerky better. They snatch pieces of cured meat out of the air with zero energy. No jumps, no lurches, almost no chewing at all. They’re always standing in the right places with their mouths open.

  “It’s probably not good for you.” They listen but they don’t stop eating, and I don’t stop throwing. It’s all part of the canine bonding process.

  “Here it comes.” A two-inch section of Slim Jim follows a parabolic arc like the ones we studied in geometry and intersects a coyote mouth. They’ve never been to school, but they understand the math perfectly.

  “Trajectory,” I tell them. “Ballistic vectors,” as if these are words they need to know. I fake-toss a time or two, but coyotes can’t be fooled. They have no expectations of free meat sailing through the air.

  The coyotes space themselves out around me so they can disappear in case of danger. Like I’m their pet human, good for laughs but not so good they’ll die for me.

  “Sorry for all the things my people did to yours,” I tell them. “You know, the traps, the poison bait, the bounties.”

  I can’t be sure they understand, so I say, “Habla Espaniol?”

  The one in front of me looks back. Just my luck. I’m hooked up with a pack of Chicana coyotes.

  Just to be sure I say, “Viva Zapata,” and they all look at me. A quick glance but there’s no doubt.

  Each coyote has a different face, a different posture, a different way of walking, a different attitude—individuals, like dogs and cats and people. I name them after the four directions, because of the way they space themselves around me, like I’m the center of a compass and they are the four compass points. Joseph would like the direction names. It’s one of those Indian things.

  North is the biggest and the smartest. She walks in front of me, as if she knows exactly where I’m going. East is to my right, West is to my left, and South walks behind me. As far as I can tell they never change. Coyotes don’t look friendly like dogs. Their ears stand up and their tails are high, as if to say, “We’ve gotten along without you very well for thousands of coyote generations. We’ll be fine when you’re not here anymore.”

  They don’t mind if I talk about Joseph.

  “You can’t repeat this to anyone.” I toss a little jerky to each of them, starting with North and ending with West. They wait their turns, as patient as house cats. My secrets are safe with them.

  “Joseph looks sort of like a movie star.” North looks at me over her shoulder. One of her ears twitches as if she can’t believe what I’m saying.

  “Not in A-list movies, but Disney pictures about lost animals and kids who save the world.” North accepts this after another piece of jerky.

  I tell the coyotes how I’ll probably let Joseph make love to me.

  “If he really wants to,” and I know he really wants to but so far he hasn’t asked. “I won’t let him do it right away.” I tell the coyotes about the bases. “First base is just a kiss.” That still works even after the sexual revolution came and went. “Maybe the other bases have changed, but I don’t have to worry about that now that civilization’s gone.”

  North looks back at me as if to say, “You call that civilization?”

  The coyotes space themselves around me like a magic circle, as if I were St. Francis of Assisi, or Beastmaster, or some X-man superhero with telepathic power over animals. It feels pretty good, but when I start to tell the coyotes my new theory, I can’t find them anymore.

  Gone, just like civilization. I don’t have a clue, and all of a sudden, I feel vulnerable.

  I reach for my empty six-shooter, even though the Cheyenne War Ceremony Knife is probably a better weapon, and I point it at the shadows of empty buildings and abandoned cars, where ghosts might be hiding now that my magic coyote circle is gone.

  To my left, the door of a Love’s gas station stands partway open, like the spring on the automatic door closing mechanism is stuck. The door is mostly glass, but it’s dark in there, full of mysterious superstitious things that I never believed in until this moment.

  I cross myself the way the dead priest in St. Gregory’s probably did before he put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger—playing a fixed game of Russian Roulette. I point the weapon at the partially open door and wish the priest had taken the time to fill the empty cylinders with bullets.

  A threat sticks in my throat. Saliva trickles past my larynx and makes me want to cough almost as much as I want to hide.

  Human, or animal. Which is worse?

  I panic quietly and point my useless pistol and wait because I don’t know how to turn invisible. My arms cramp and a trickle of sweat runs between my shoulder blades, and the Slim Jims in my stomach are filing a writ of habeas corpus—God how I miss watching Court TV with my father.

  A big raccoon—at least forty pounds—crowds halfway through the door before she sees me. Her eyes lock on mine, but she doesn’t pull back inside. I put the empty pistol into my belt, and step backwards, holding up both hands as if surrendering.

  She runs forward a few feet and stops. Bobs back and forth on her feet like an autistic child.

  Four baby raccoons follow her outside. This might be happening all over Oklahoma City, only I’m not there to see. All it takes is a few broken doors, and convenience stores that were once owned by Iranian and Vietnamese immigrants now belong to Mother Nature.

  “Cute,” I tell the mother raccoon. “You have cute babies.”

  She isn’t persuaded I’m harmless yet, so she keeps her eyes on me as she leads her family away, as close to an opposite direction as she can go without re-entering the building.

  “Bye-bye.” I smile and wave the way I would to human babies, making all kinds of new friends in the animal kingdom.

  Then my coyote girlfriends are there. Suddenly visible again, surrounding the raccoon family, who all look at me as if I have betrayed them.

  “Stop!”

  North is the first to attack. Then the other coyote sisters, breaking necks and tossing bodies into the air, pawing them for signs of life. North picks up a baby in her mouth. She brings it to me,drops it at my feet.

  “Damn. I’m not part of this.” But I guess I am. I’m the raccoon distraction, the harmless threat that misled a mother and her children until it was too late.

  The coyotes like fresh raccoon almost as much as Slim Jims and jerky. It’s disgusting, but I know this is the part of nature that Disney documentaries never showed us. I have a lot to learn, but I already know this much—family is when you know everything bad about somebody but you love them anyway.

  “Good old North.”

  The coyotes all look at me in turn. Their English is better than I thought.

  • • •

  I want to follow Interstate 40, because it’s easier to walk on pavement than dirt, and I have a long way to go. My magic circle of coyotes has other ideas. They nudge me to the shoulder and into the woods. They’ll let me walk close to the road, but not on it.

  “What’s the point, guys?” There’s no reasoning with wild animals. They nudge me farther into the trees and underbrush where I have to watch out for thorns and poison ivy. I drift back toward the road whenever I can, so my pack and I reach a sort of equilibrium—I like that word. It reminds me of chemistry and democracy and it makes me feel like I know more about the world than I really do.

  “Equilibrium.” I repeat the word out loud, as if my coyote girlfriends will get the idea, but they nudge me deeper into the trees, and there are a lot of trees since we left Okl
ahoma City.

  I push toward the highway again, but before I get into the ankle-high buffalo grass beside the pavement, I hear horses. It’s like part of the soundtrack to Oklahoma, and for a moment, I want to run up to the road and sing a couple of verses of “The Cowboy and the Farmer Should be Friends”.

  But then I remember that people have been killing each other ever since the electricity went off. And even if they have a good excuse like the New Flu virus, people are a lot more dangerous than poison ivy and thorns.

  “Maybe it’ll be Joseph,” I whisper to my coyote girlfriends. “Or some of his Choctaw buddies.” I hope so, because we are barely out of Oklahoma City, and the sun is already low in the western sky, and I am so tired and hungry all I can think about is peanut butter and sleep.

  Two men ride by, both wearing cowboy hats and carrying rifles—the kind with big bullet clips shaped like mechanical bananas.

  “Not Joseph,” I whisper to the coyotes, but they are nowhere to be seen.

  One of the cowboys says, “You hear that?” He adds a string of curses that probably mean his mother didn’t love him. He points his rifle in my general direction and fires a three-shot burst.

  The horses don’t like the noise. The other cowboy doesn’t like it either.

  “Damn it, Bill, use the single-shot setting.” He’s afraid of his horse, and his horse is afraid of the gunshots. It makes him forget all his complicated woman-oriented swear words for a few seconds, but they come back to him when the horse settles down. He recites them one at a time in no special order.

  “Heard somethin’,” says the trigger happy cowboy. “Ain’t you heard it too? Sort of a whisper-voice.”

  He points his ugly rifle right at me. If he shoots again, he’ll hit me for sure, but now he has other ideas.

  “A girl’s voice. I’ll bet anything.” He tells his nervous partner exactly what he means to do once he finds the girl who belongs to that voice. It doesn’t sound like anything I learned in sex education.