"Go to Washington, Coyote!"
"Talk to the President, man!"
"Coyote for President!"
"Yeah," says Coyote. "I'll go to Washington and talk to the President!" And he changes into a multicolor Day-Glo ICBM and flies off, leaving a psychedelic vapor trail.
"Far out," say the hippies.
Above the White House, Coyote changes back into himself, crawls into a window, and goes looking for the President.
"Will the President talk to a Coyote?" he wonders, so he changes into a cartoon version of the President.
In the Oval Office, he bumps into the real President, who turns and screams.
"First my reflection starts looking like all those caricatures of me," says the President, "my jowl's getting heavier, my fiveo'clock shadow showing up fifteen minutes after I shave, my nose looking like a limp dick with an ass at the end of it – now I'm seeing myself!"
Coyote changes back into himself.
"Oh no," says the President, "I'm turning into a werewolf!"
"Don't be stupid," says Coyote. "I just disguised myself as you so I could get in to see you."
"What are you?" The President looks Coyote over.
"I am Coyote. One of the important native spirits of this continent."
"A spirit! A ghost! They've finally done it! Some damned hippies slipped me some LSD!"
"I'm not a hallucination! I am Coyote!" He howls and gets bigger and uglier, his fangs and claws long and sharp.
"No, please! I can't help it; being the President drives you insane! I thought it would make me powerful, but I'm helpless – I'm beginning to want to quit politics, and just write books and give interviews. There's good money in that media stuff – but right now it's as if I'm totally controlled by unseen forces!"
"I am one of those unseen forces!" Coyote snarls. He picks up the President by the throat. "If you don't do what I say, I'll make myself look like you again, and I'll go all over America, making you look like the biggest asshole that ever lived!"
The President shudders. "I'll do anything – just tell me."
"End the war."
The President laughs. Coyote puts him down.
"Is that all you want? Sure, I'll do that. I was planning on bringing our troops home anyway. It's not working. Not even the bombing. I don't even think the Bomb would help. I don't know what went wrong – it seems that the whole world's gone crazy!"
"I sure know that. The hippies keep coming to me, bothering me."
"You too? Is that why you want the war stopped; you want to make a deal or something?"
"I am Coyote. I have the power to change things. If I can get you to stop the war, not only will the hippies stop bothering me, but they will change."
"Change? How?"
"That's easy for me. I have my power, and they have their heads so full of mass-produced spirits and gods that they can't help but change with just a little prodding from me."
"Mass-produced spirits and gods? I don't get it."
"What you call the media – television and all that stuff."
The President runs a hand over his heavy stubble. "Yeah, the media, television has power. I know it."
"So do we have a deal?"
"Yeah," the President sticks out his hand; Coyote slaps it with his paw.
Dissolve back to me looking puzzled on the bus.
"You mean Coyote ended the war in Vietnam?"
"That's what I told you," says the Indian.
"And what happened to the hippies – the yuppies – was also Coyote's doing?"
"Yeah, you know how it is when Coyote changes things; it gets out of control and the unexpected happens."
I shake my head. This is all too weird to believe. "So what's Coyote done lately?"
"Well, haven't you been following the news? There's been a hell of a lot of change going on in the last few years. The world is getting stranger and stranger. Hey, they elected a movie star President, didn't they? Then there was that President who acted like a movie star! Hollywood is taking over the world. And the Internet is really screwing things around. And because things work that way, it all came back to Coyote."
(My mind makes like a TV set jammed between channels, then . . .)
Dissolve to a slick contemporary-style cartoon backdrop of a desert road. A car that looks like all the other foreign and American cars do these days – except it's too big – cruises down the road to the sound of techno music. There is no one driving it. It heads for Coyote's house, which has a brand-new satellite dish next to it.
Cut to inside Coyote's house. Coyote is seated before a stateof-the-art home entertainment system, using his remote control to flick through all broadcast channels and cable networks that his satellite dish can access. He can't find anything he wants to watch, just keeps switching channels.
"Maybe it wasn't such a good idea trading in my antique pickup truck for all this shit," he says.
The beep-beep of an amplified electronic car horn blasts.
Coyote goes outside to see what it is. There's the too-big generic contemporary car, idling with no driver, or passengers.
"A car that drives itself," Coyote says. "It figures."
The car makes some metallic squawks and parts of it unfold and separate until it transforms into five Japanese-style robots each with built-in calculators, document processors, and briefcases.
"Excuse me, sir," says Robot #1 in a pure Hollywood accent. "Are you Coyote?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Very good. My associates and I have been scanning for you a long time."
Cameras, microphones, and radar antenna sprout out of Robots #2 through 5, wiggle around, making beeping noises, and retract.
"Uh, yeah. What do you want with me?"
Robots #2 through 5 circle around Coyote, who turns around, looking suspiciously at them.
"We represent a Large Multinational Corporation," says Robot #1. "And would like to discuss business with you."
All the robots extend their arms with the built-in briefcases and rotate them to horizontal positions. The briefcases open revealing portable computer terminals inside. The screens light up and start flashing diagrams.
"Our Corporation has holdings of many different kinds, all over the planet and, hopefully soon, beyond," says Robot #1. "Among these are real estate, mining, construction, high-tech industries . . . and entertainment."
"Uh-oh," says Coyote.
"Primarily, we would like to negotiate with you on behalf of a holding of ours that produces animated cartoons."
Coyote shakes his head. "No way. Tried to make a deal years ago; it didn't work out. Ask the Mouse."
"We own the Mouse. We have for years. He is the one who told us about you."
"Hope he didn't tell you any lies."
"No. What he said made a lot of sense. About your ability to cause change, about your mythic connection to this most important continent . . ."
"What about why the studio wouldn't have anything to do with me?"
"Ah, Coyote, times have changed. This is the twenty-first century. Communications technologies are more varied. And that is part of our problem."
"Problem?"
"Yes, Coyote. Modern mass media, the Net, and the Web have not only sped up communication but also the process of mythmaking. As we go about our business, creating products, we create new mythologies, new gods, new realities. It can be very disruptive. It cuts into our profit margins."
"And you think I can do something about that?"
"That power to change that the Mouse told us of, you could use it to edit out realities that we find disruptive."
Coyote laughs. All the robots extend sensing devices and rows of question marks fill their computer screens.
"What's so funny?" asks Robot #1.
"It don't work that way," Coyote says, holding his sides to keep from laughing. "Every time I change something, it triggers the unexpected. I can't control it. Nothing can."
"Our R&D departments will get to work
on it, Coyote. That glitch can be solved."
Coyote laughs more.
"Please, listen to us. We not only can offer you money but can also make you part of some of the biggest deals in history. Just look at our screens."
Coyote gets dizzy spinning around trying to look at all five screens at once. Image after image flashes on them: storyboards for Coyote cartoon shows, Coyote dolls, Coyote designer underwear, Coyote theme parks, Coyote condominiums, Coyote shopping malls . . .
"Stop! Stop!" says Coyote, staggering around as if he were drunk. "What is all this stuff?"
"Things that could result from your association with us."
"Wait a minute! The amusement parks, condos, and shopping malls – where are you gonna put all that?"
"Why, right here. Through you we are going to obtain the rights to all this undeveloped land. There's so much we could do here and lots of raw materials – some even radioactive – and it disturbs us to see all this land going unused and not generating any profits."
"Get out of here!" says Coyote.
"But we are willing to let you have a share of the profits!"
"I've heard all of this before, and it always ends the same way – with me getting taken for more and more of what I've got!"
"So you refuse to even negotiate with us?"
"You betcha."
Robots #2 through 5 make some beeping noises.
"Yes," Robot #1 says. "We have no choice but to implement plan B."
"Plan B?" asks Coyote.
The robots refold themselves into new shapes, then link up into one giant Megarobot.
"Plan B," says the Megarobot in a booming, amplified voice, "provides for us to take you and your property by force. This is all vital to maintaining our profit margins and saving the world economy. We have no choice."
"Same old story," says Coyote.
The Megarobot raises its arms, retracting its hands and firing missiles into the sky. Lasers shoot out of its eyes and barely miss Coyote. Then it vomits napalm all over the place.
"No!" roars Coyote, as he summons his power of change and conjures up a thunderstorm and tornado that are both several times larger than the Megarobot.
The storm and tornado converge on the Megarobot, knocking it down, shorting out its circuits with water and lightning, sandblasting through its armor, and, with the help of traces of radioactive elements in the flying dust and mud, causing the Megarobot to fuse into a great robot-shaped rock formation.
Dissolve to me and the Indian on the Greyhound.
"So, is that it?" I ask, fascinated, but barely able to stay awake. "The Coyote stories brought up to date. Is Coyote retired now?"
The Indian laughs. "Hell no. Coyote is alive and well and . . ."
I fall asleep.
Dissolve to a dream. I am waiting at a bus stop in the middle of a desert that is drawn in the style of my own Coyote cartoons. Coyote comes up, carrying a big suitcase, sits next to me.
"You Coyote?" I ask.
"Yeah," he says.
"So what happened after you defeated the Megarobot?"
"Well, I got to thinking about what they, it – whatever – said about mass media and the Internet speeding up the making of myths and gods and realities. I realized that this is my business. Of course, I couldn't do it on their, or anybody else's terms, but it is what I should do, only my way."
"Your way?"
"Yeah, with me doing my usual trickster game of changing things around and letting the unexpected happen, with nobody to try and control it."
"How are you planning on doing that?"
"Easy, kid! I'm going to plug into corporations that own the communications and entertainment industries through the World Wide Web! Start my own mythology/god/reality business."
"Wow! That'll really change the world! So where you heading?"
"Where else? Hollywood."
Dissolve to me waking up on the bus. The Indian is gone. The only thing left on his seat is some animal fur.
The bus pulls into the Hollywood Greyhound station that, for all its mythic reputation, is small and unimpressive. I stagger out dazed, squinting at the blinding Southern California daylight. I can barely see and don't know where to go or what to do next.
For a while I think I see a coyote crossing the street.
Then there is a flash of light. I'm afraid that I've come all the way to Hollywood, just to be nuked. Was it world war? Terrorism? Foreign? Domestic? It doesn't really matter when you're being vaporized . . .
My eyesight comes back, and dingy, old Hollywood now looks like a Technicolor dancing cartoon backdrop. The street people, hookers, and bus passengers are all now cartoon characters.
I look at myself.
I am a cartoon character.
There's a spooky laugh, like the Indian's. I turn and see . . . Coyote!
He's a cartoon Coyote, in a three-piece suit, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar.
"Hey, kid," he says, "how do you like it? And this is only the beginning. There's a lot of work to do. We can use a few good cartoonists. Ya want a job?"
I say yes.
And now, in real present tense, because it isn't the tick-tock whiteman's time anymore, but something like a cross between Indian time and Einstein's space-time, with the past and future happening now. The myth and dreamtime happen before my very eyes, as I draw it. I'm doing my part in Coyote's new, improved mythotech trickster business.
Fade out, but not to black – fade to brightness.
Spicy Detective #3
Jerey Ford
On the bleary-eyed, whiskey side of midnight, when even the shadows have shadows and ghosts die of loneliness only to return as pale, flypaper memories of their former selves, when triggers are cocked and cocks are triggered, and all the dames left standing after sleep has swamped the world have a pile of bleached coif like a hair hive abuzz with stingered schemes of revenge and lust and greed, before the lipstick melts into a trickle of blood and the mascara mixes with tears to write lines of graveyard poetry on pancake masks (elegies of regret to be read by the first rays of a sun that might never rise), after the dirty cash has passed hands and the whispered promises are made with fingers crossed and gams uncrossed, leading to the split-tongued French kiss of Mephistopheles, Rent Johnson, of the square jaw, the doublebreasted pinstripe and existential malaise, private eye, sniffer out of the why of treachery, the how of betrayal, the who gives a flying fuck of good gone bad and bad gone worse like a shiv in the kidneys, a brass knuckle sandwich for grandma, a pair of concrete galoshes for a sad sack on a losing streak, whose present case was the search for Sammy Anole, the Lizard King, a stout dwarf of a heinous killer with serpent eyes and twin six-foot iguanas in his basement that cleared the flesh from his victim's corpses like two green-scaled Hoover uprights with needle teeth and blood colder than the beer at The Swan Dive, cleaved, with his flesh, snub-nose special, the hair-rimmed portal of soft wetness belonging to Winter Darling, Anole's current squeeze, spelunking her well-traveled cavern path, in and out, like one of those dying ghosts caught between coming and going, the bed springs in the flop house dive overlooking Pork Chop alley, bathed in blue neon from the Pabst sign across the street, squealing out a half-assed version of the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," and caught, in the reflection of Miss Darling's glass eye, Sammy's dragon stare in the doorway, which made him reach, with lightning speed, for his ankle-holstered piece, and shoot over his left shoulder, while shooting down below, directly drilling the thimble heart of the Lizard King, whose first sound heard through ghostly ears was the gasping, passionless sob of Winter.
Auspicious Eggs
James Morrow
Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its mos
t impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn't drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.
"Merribell, right?" asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.
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