Revelation

by Wilson, Carter;

  “Jacob is happier now than he ever has been. You wouldn’t know because you haven’t talked to him in months.”

  “Take it easy,” Emma said. I wasn’t sure which one of them she was talking to.

  “It’s not a religion,” Coyote said, his voice soft. “It’s not a cult. It’s a . . . methodology.” Coyote was the first to take his second shot, tilting it back with ease. “I’m telling you, Derek. It’s not bullshit. I’ve discovered something and I want to tell people about it.” He glanced sideways at Emma. “The hard part is finding people who are willing to listen. Really listen. Open their minds to new possibilities.”

  I felt an anxiousness creeping over me, the kind that makes you want to walk away from an argument rather than weather the futility of carrying on. But I couldn’t help myself.

  “Coyote, your whole experiment was based on something I wrote. It was an experiment from the beginning, because you were bored and you wanted to see if it could be done. How can you tell us now that it’s a real thing?”

  “Harden.” Coyote spread his hands in a pacifying gesture. “I’m not here to convince any of you. I just came here to buy you a drink, man.”

  “He asked you a simple question,” Derek said.

  Coyote looked over at Derek and gave him the exact look he had given to that Colombian right before he leaned in and threatened to kill him. “I’m not asking any of you to believe in what I am doing. I’m just telling you it’s real.” He lightly tongued a drop of tequila still hanging on the edge of his shot glass, eying Emma as he did. “You can choose to follow whatever path you want to take. I’ve found mine.”

  Derek’s words squeezed through a tight mouth. “Jacob’s parents have driven up here three times, and he’s refused to see them each time.”

  “Yes,” Coyote said, seemingly disinterested. “I know.”

  “He’s broken their hearts,” Derek continued. “They’re thinking about getting the police to investigate.”

  Coyote shifted his gaze to Emma. “Breaking a heart is not a crime,” he said. “It’s merely a shame.” Emma dropped her own gaze to the table.

  “Yet you think Jacob is better off now than he was seven months ago?” Derek asked.

  Coyote didn’t seem to be bothered by the inquisition. It was as if he was in control of the conversation, choosing which pieces he wanted to engage and which he wanted to parry away. “Jacob is a believer,” Coyote said to Derek. “Just as I hope Harden here will one day be. As for you and Emma . . .” Coyote shrugged. “I don’t think you could ever open your minds enough to see all the things Jacob can now see.”

  Emma started to say something, but Coyote cut her off. He leaned across the table to Derek.

  “You know, we have a word for people like you, Derek. We call you Andalusians.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Coyote leaned back. “They were the first ones killed in the Spanish Inquisition in 1481. They were the original doubters.” Coyote settled back and waited for a reaction, the part he always seemed to like the best.

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “So part of your methodology is to torture and kill people who disagree with you?” I asked. It was time for me to down another shot, which I did with no hesitation.

  Coyote nodded. “We have a special set of rooms for just that purpose. Not here, of course. In another state.” His gaze set upon each one of us, intense but brief. Then he broke out his famous Coyote smile. “Jesus, lighten up, everyone. I’m only kidding.”

  “I so don’t get you,” Emma said.

  Derek abruptly stood. “You are so full of shit, man. I’m out of here.”

  I reached out with my hand, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. “Derek, come on.”

  He turned to me. “Happy birthday, Harden. You’ll have to get drunk without me.”

  Then Emma stood. “Yeah, I think I’m calling it a night, too.”

  She gave me a quick but telling look, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. If I loved her, I would go with her and Derek.

  But I couldn’t.

  I was wearing the wire, and I needed Coyote to talk. I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

  “Well, aren’t I just a big fucking buzzkill?” Coyote said. For a moment I feared he’d offer to leave and let everyone else stay, but he didn’t budge.

  I looked up at Emma, trying to tell her so many things without speaking and failing miserably. “I’m going to stay here a bit longer,” I said.

  Her eyes widened just a bit and then her face relaxed into the pantomime she had developed during our secret affair. “Suit yourself,” she said. She leaned in and, to my surprise, gave me a small kiss on the cheek. “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks.”

  Without saying good-bye to Coyote, Derek and Emma walked out of Benny’s.

  After they left, Coyote poured us another shot and told me to drink up. I did and he followed suit, and, with the bottle of tequila still two-thirds full, he peeled another hundred from his wallet and dropped it on the table like it was a used tissue. Two hundred dollars for a stupid bottle of Cuervo and tip.

  “Take a walk with me,” he said.

  It was the last thing I should have done, but it’s exactly what I did.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The rain started coming down ten minutes into our walk. It was a light summer rain, the kind that did little but wet the roads and relieve some of the pressure that had been building in the pregnant air all day. It certainly wasn’t enough to deter Coyote from his path, which as far as I could tell was a direct route down the western slope of campus toward the downtown area. I only asked him once where we were going. When he didn’t answer, I didn’t ask again.

  For the most part I walked alongside my former roommate, though when the path narrowed I walked behind him, which I’m sure secretly pleased him. It occurred to me that following him blindly was exactly what he sought of me. This walk was a metaphor, and though I didn’t want to help fulfill any fantasies he had, I needed Coyote to talk before I went in my own direction.

  I began to bait him.

  “Does it bother you that you’ve lost your friends?” My words were spoken into his back as I struggled to keep up with him.

  “I haven’t lost anything,” he said, not bothering to turn around.

  “What about Derek and Emma?”

  “Derek was never a friend,” he said. “He was always threatened by me, so I never let him get close. And Emma . . .”

  I wiped rain from my face. “Emma what?”

  “Emma isn’t lost. Not yet, at least.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He finally turned. “Emma is like you.” It was dark, and a nearby streetlight illuminated half of his face, the raindrops giving him a waxy, jack-o’-lantern expression. “She wants something, but she isn’t sure what exactly that is. You’re both searching so hard and wanting so much, but there’s a door in front of each of you that you refuse to open.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder, just as he had that night at the library. It didn’t seem friendly. He seemed to be holding me down. “I know you don’t, Harden. That’s the problem.”

  He turned and kept walking. I didn’t want to follow anymore. I wanted to turn in my own direction—anywhere but his—and lose myself in my own life. In a few days I would be gone, I reminded myself. Gone from this. Gone from everything except Emma. But tonight I needed to focus.

  “The boy you killed,” I said. “Do you think he opened a door he shouldn’t have?”

  Coyote turned and faced me, his one illuminated eye showing surprise.

  This is it, I thought. He’s going to talk about it.

  I was suddenly worried that the rain had soaked though my jacket and pants and into the recorder. But I couldn’t let that distract me. I leaned in, hoping for the best audio.

  Yet Coyote said nothing. Instead, he slowly wagged his finger at me and gave m
e a grin that, for all my efforts, I could not interpret.

  Did he know what I was doing? How could he?

  Then he turned, once again. “We’re almost there. Then you’ll understand.”

  The rain picked up, as if what had previously been coming down was only an overture. I flipped up the collar of my Army jacket, which only served to drip water down the back of my neck. Coyote turned right down a small side street lined with hundred-year-old houses, and after a block I saw where he was taking me.

  The Tillman Cemetery rested on a sloped piece of land that couldn’t have been more than a couple of acres, yet it seemed to hold the history of the world within it. The plots ranged in years and condition. I couldn’t imagine it was still open for business; there was simply no room left. What amazed me most was the abundance of mausoleums: intricate, carved chunks of granite rising several feet above the ground, each proclaiming a simple Anglo-Saxon surname at the top. Tillman never seemed the place where anyone had enough money for such an elaborate decaying bed, yet here were these markers of history proving otherwise.

  The cemetery was dark; no artificial light guided us. The moonlight filtered just enough through the clouds so I could make out the shapes closest to me, and none of them seemed inviting. I instinctively inched closer to my guide, though I wondered if I was safer with the ghosts.

  Halfway through, Coyote stopped and turned to me.

  “There are over six hundred bodies in here,” he said. “Six hundred people buried over a period of a hundred and twenty years.” He had to raise his voice over the rain, which by now had soaked through to my skin and chilled me. Coyote raised his finger. “Not one person in here was well known. Not a single name would be familiar to you, Harden.”

  I waited. I glanced around me, but didn’t want to take my eyes off him. There was something wrong with Coyote, and it wasn’t the tequila.

  “They lived their lives for shit, Harden. They might have been happy, they might have raised normal, productive children. They might have fucked beautiful women and eaten unimaginably exquisite food. But in the end, here they are, and no one remembers their names.”

  “So that’s it? You just want to be remembered?”

  Coyote shook his head. “You don’t get it, Harden, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “I don’t want to just be remembered, Harden. I want to be.”

  “Be what?”

  “Harden, you need to feel what it’s like. I can open that last door for you. Once you go through, you will never want to go back.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “You just haven’t allowed yourself to understand.”

  I pushed my fingers back through my hair, squeezing the water out as I did. “Why do you need me, Coyote? Why is it so important to you?”

  As soon as I asked the question, the answer blindsided me. It was so simple.

  Coyote was talking nonsense on purpose.

  He didn’t need me to see anything. The truth was that only a handful of us knew Coyote was full of shit, and no one more so than me. His whole grand experiment was based off something I had created, and now that it was potentially turning into something much larger than all of us expected, he didn’t want anyone unmasking him.

  Jacob had followed him because he was too stupid to see Coyote was nothing more than a slick carnival barker. Coyote was hoping I, too, would believe he’d discovered a new form of existence, and here he was, soaking wet in the middle of a cemetery at midnight, testing me. He wanted to know which direction I was going to go.

  I became uneasy. I didn’t want to be here anymore.

  “What if I don’t go with you?” I asked.

  “You have to, Harden. It’s no longer a choice for you to make.”

  “Or what? I’ll end up like the boy in the woods?”

  He cocked his head and gave me another grin, his lips crooked and waxy in the wan light.

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that tonight. Why is that? Is there something you want me to say, Harden? Is there something you need to learn from me?”

  My pulse raced and my face flushed despite the chill of the rain. I wasn’t even sure the recorder was working at this point, yet I had decided one more time to broach the subject, and I had just aroused his curiosity. In a bad way.

  “I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve just been thinking about it a lot, that’s all. It . . . it haunts me.”

  “You don’t know what haunting is, Harden. It’s time now, okay?”

  “Time?”

  “It’s just time.”

  Coyote was suddenly gone, and I could barely make out his figure running down the crooked cemetery path, down the hill, and toward the sleepy street at the base of the cemetery.

  I ran after him. I was so close. He hadn’t said anything yet, but I could feel it. Just a little more time was all I needed. I suddenly wanted this more than anything. I wanted Coyote to be caught, exposed. Humbled.

  Seconds later I caught up with him. Coyote had exited the cemetery and was now standing in the middle of the street, his arms held out wide. As if responding to a command directly from him, the rain suddenly started to come down in sheets. I was drenched and stood on the curb, my back facing the short cement wall that encircled the cemetery. I shouted out.

  “What are you doing?”

  There were no cars to be seen, and only a handful of houses dotted this quiet side road that connected the university to the downtown area. Coyote spun around in a tight circle, his arms still outstretched.

  “Get out of the road, Coyote.”

  I knew he heard me over the pouring rain, but he didn’t pay any attention. We were on a tight bend at the base of the hill, and a car traveling in either direction wouldn’t see Coyote until it was almost on top of him.

  Especially at night. Especially in the rain.

  He wanted to convince me. He needed me to join his side. One less liability. But what was he doing? How was he . . .

  Headlights came. I saw them before I heard the car.

  A small car. Traveling from campus. It just rounded the bend.

  Going fast. Too fast for these conditions. Probably a student.

  “Coyote, get the fuck—”

  Then I heard the tires catch what they could of the asphalt, which wasn’t much. Coyote didn’t move an inch. He had been facing up the road the whole time, as if he knew exactly when the car would be coming.

  I was about to watch him die. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to do something, but there was only time to helplessly watch it all unfold.

  The car veered sharply to the left—missing Coyote—and came right at me. It was the last thing I had expected, but now I was the one about to die.

  Instinct finally pushed me off my feet into a dive to my right. At the same time, the driver must have spotted me and pulled to the right. If the car had turned in my same direction, I would have been crushed between the front fender of the car and the cement wall behind me.

  The front tires slammed into the curb and exploded. Yet the car barely slowed. In the split second before it hit the wall, a million thoughts went through my head, not the least of which was that it was a small car. Coupe. The kind you bought your kid for college. The kind that didn’t stand up well to a cement wall.

  The sound of it all was horrible.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The car smashed against the concrete wall, crumpling like a massive beer can under a heavy boot. The wall didn’t seem to budge at all.

  “Go to a house and call nine-one-one!” I shouted toward Coyote as I raced to the front of the car. I didn’t know what I could do, but I had to do something. Stinging rain streaked my vision, making everything a desperate blur.

  I looked back toward Coyote, who walked toward me like a gunfighter knowing he was going to win. There was no hurry to his stride, but goddamn if there wasn’t purpose.

  Why won’t he get help?

  I tu
rned back to the car and yanked at the driver’s door. It was bent, but after using both hands and all my strength to pull on it, it cracked enough for me to pry it halfway open. I was terrified of what I was going to find on the other side.

  I heard the moan as I bent down and peered in.

  A woman. No. A girl. Maybe even younger than me.

  Her wheezing confirmed she was alive, but in the washed streetlight I could see that the steering column had bent directly into her chest.

  She turned her head toward me.

  “Help . . . me.”

  I gulped the air, smelling rain and piss. She must have lost control of her bladder shortly after she lost control of her car. I didn’t smell gasoline. Good sign.

  “It’s okay,” I said, hoping I was a good liar. “You’re okay. We’re getting help.”

  I straightened from the car and a fresh wall of rain pelted my face. Coyote was still ambling toward me.

  “Why aren’t you getting help? She’s hurt! We have to hurry!”

  I felt her touch me, and I lowered my head back into the car and found her reaching out, grabbing at my arm, turning as much as her pinned torso would allow. She wore a thin shirt, long-sleeved. Dark stains covered what looked like white fabric, and as much as I wanted those stains to be nothing more than shadows, I was certain it was blood. Her nails weakly scraped my forearm.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I said.

  “Please . . .”

  Stop wasting time. Get her out.

  But I couldn’t. For all I knew her chest was crushed. Didn’t they say not to move the victim unless absolutely necessary? And what if the steering column was the only thing keeping her organs inside her body? How was I going to help her? How were we—

  I spun, ready to release all my fear and frustration on Coyote. The only people who could help this girl were paramedics, and we had to call them. Why wouldn’t Coyote call?

  A hand pushed me against the car. Hard.

  Coyote then grabbed my shoulders, yanked me around, and punched me in the face. A flash of pain shot through my head, heating my body against the rain.