by Kevin Hearne
A slow, drawling voice tinged with amusement interrupted. “You’re both right. They don’t have chicken-apple sausage, but it’s here.” A slim Navajo man in a black cowboy hat peered around the corner of the main dining area; a brown paper bag liberally stained with grease dangled in his hand.
“Hey, Coyote,” I chuckled, and he smiled back. “Come and join us.” Like me, Coyote could hear Oberon’s words, but his comment that we were “both right” had me wondering if he could hear my side of the conversation as well. It was uncomfortable to think that maybe he could read my mind, but perhaps I could chalk up the thought to my paranoia. He could have easily inferred what I was saying based on Oberon’s side of the conversation.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and then he turned on the charm to greet Granuaile. “Good morning, Miss Druid. Nice to finally meet ya.” Coyote had seen Granuaile before, but at the time she’d been communing with the elemental Sonora, and she’d missed Coyote’s brief visit entirely.
“Oh. Um, I’m not a Druid yet. Call me Caitlin.” She looked a little starstruck, but that was understandable. Coyote was the first immortal she’d met.
“Caitlin?” Coyote squinted at me as he sat down gingerly so as not to disturb Oberon. “Thought you said her name was Granuaile.”
“It is, but we’re using different names now,” I said. In the past I had taken the trouble to mimic his pattern of speech, drawling my words a bit and dropping g’s off the ends, but I saw no need to do that now. Our deal had already been struck, and any advantage that would have given me was gone. “We’re in hiding, see. It would kind of waste all your effort yesterday to make it seem like I died if you keep calling me Mr. Druid. You should call me Reilly.” Granuaile and I were supposed to be known to the world now as Reilly and Caitlin Collins, brother and sister. We had driver’s licenses and fake documents to prove it, courtesy of my lawyer down in Tempe.
“Aw, hell with that, Mr. Druid. I ain’t gonna call you anything different.”
“Think your hound might be hungry. Mind if I give him something to chew on?” he asked, pointing at the bag on the table.
“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “I appreciate the thought, and I know he does too.”
“Well, I told him I’d bring him some the next time I saw him.”
Try to snarf quietly.
I grinned. It’s a deal. You’re the best hound ever.
What? Where’d you score two?
Okay, but I was also right about the sausage, so it’s 3–1.
Coyote opened the bag and withdrew the sausages, placing them on the seat next to him where Oberon could easily get to them. The waitress arrived at that point to take our orders, and the three of us tried to keep talking constantly to disguise the smacking, chop-licking noises that Oberon was making. She picked up on it anyway and regarded us uncertainly, trying to figure out who was making the juicy sounds and whether or not she should be concerned or even offended.
Coyote ordered four sides each of bacon, sausage, and ham, plus coffee.
“Do you want any eggs or toast?” the waitress asked.
“Hell, no, keep that shit away from me,” Coyote said, then remembered who he was talking to and added, “I mean, no, thank you. ’Scuse my language.”
Granuaile asked for a gorgeous stack of pancakes, and I ordered a fluffy omelet with cheese, bell peppers, onions, and mushrooms, with skillet potatoes and dry wheat toast on the side. I also ordered three sides of bonus bacon for Oberon.
The waitress did her best to keep her expression neutral, but I could tell she thought we were the weirdest people she’d ever served—and perhaps perverted too, considering that one of us kept making licking noises. That discomfited me; I wanted to blend in and be forgettable, and we were doing a terrible job of it. What if, in the course of their investigation, the FBI came around here asking about unusual people? As far as I knew, the killing site hadn’t been discovered yet, but it couldn’t be much longer before it was. What if they published some picture of me in the local paper and the waitress recognized it? I voiced these doubts to Coyote after the waitress left, and he scoffed.
“Ain’t nobody ’round here ever gonna talk to the feds,” Coyote said. “The way it works is, if the feds want something, we don’t wanna give it to ’em, unless they want directions off the rez. We give those out nice and easy.”
“All right, if you say so. I imagine you’d know better than anyone.”
“Yep.” Coyote grabbed a couple of napkins and courteously wiped down the seat, now that Oberon was finished with his chicken-apple sausages.
“So you held up your part of the trade very well yesterday,” I said. “The deal was, I’m supposed to move some earth for you in return, so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody physically, emotionally, or economically.”
“That’s right, Mr. Druid. You ready to hear the details?”
“Shoot.”
“All right, then. Look at this town—or, hell, anywhere on the rez—and what do you see?”
“Lots of red rock and shepherds. You see groups of houses here and there, but you can’t figure out what everybody’s doing for a living.”
“That’s right. There aren’t any jobs here. We can open casinos or we can open up mines. That’s where the jobs are. But, you know, those mines are all big companies beholden to shareholders. They don’t care about our tribe. They don’t care about anything but their bottom line. And once they’ve stripped our land clean, they’ll move on and strip somebody else. There’s no vision for a sustainable future. So I came up with one.”
The waitress came back with Coyote’s coffee and he thanked her and took a sip before continuing. “The American Southwest could be the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy, you know that? We have enough solar and wind potential on the rez alone to power most of the state, if not all of it. Problem is, nobody’s going hard after it. Everybody’s makin’ too much money off oil and coal and buyin’ congressmen with it to make sure it stays that way. Besides, you need a ton of capital to start a new energy industry. So that’s going to be your job, Mr. Druid. You get us the capital to get going, providing a few mining jobs in the short term, and then we’re going to invest all that money into renewable energy and infrastructure, creating plenty of jobs in the long term. And it’ll all be owned and operated by my people, the Diné,” he said, using the term that the Navajo called themselves.
“I see. And how am I going to provide capital, exactly?”
“Gold. You know the price o’ gold has tripled since 2000 or so?”
“You want me to create a gold vein on the rez so you can mine it?”
“That’s right.”
I didn’t have to pretend to look distressed. “You know I can’t really do that, right? I’ll have to ask an elemental to do it, and it might not agree.” I could move small amounts of earth myself through some basic binding, just shifting topsoil around, but I wasn’t particularly fast at it. Finding large amounts of gold, concentrating it, and moving it long distances through the earth was far beyond my compass.
“I don’t need to hear your problems, Mr. Druid. All I need to hear is that you’ll get it done, because that’s the trade we agreed to.”
“I’ll do my best, of course. But if the elemental says no—”
“Then you’ll convince it to change its mind. There ain’t no room here for negotiation. A deal’s a deal.”
“All right,” I said, holding up my hand
s in surrender. I hoped the elemental in this part of the state would be amenable to a scheme like this. It wasn’t Sonora, with whom I’d worked for years, but rather Colorado, and I’d had very little contact with it, or her … whatever. Granuaile had me questioning all my pronouns.
Mollified, Coyote changed the subject. “You still friends with that vampire down in Tempe?”
I narrowed my eyes. He was referring to Leif Helgarson. “Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
Coyote shrugged. “How’s he doin’ these days?”
“He’s recovering from a strenuous journey. Jet lag, I guess.” Which was true, if jet lag equaled getting his head smashed to pulp by Thor.
Coyote smirked. “Right, Mr. Druid. Let’s call it jet lag.”
“What about it?”
“Well, I’ve noticed he ain’t protectin’ his territory like he used to. We got us vampires all over the place now.”
“All over the place? Which place? Can you be more specific?”
“Well, we got us two right here in Tuba City, which is two more than anybody needs. There’s one in Kayenta and a couple more over in Window Rock. I bet there’s three or more in Flagstaff, and that’s only northern Arizona. That’s seven or eight more vampires than there used to be for sure, and your friend ain’t doin’ a damn thing about it. Who knows how many you got crawlin’ ’round Phoenix and Tucson? Probably a whole lot more.”
“Are they killing people here?” Granuaile asked.
“Not yet,” Coyote replied, shaking his head. “They’re just takin’ little sips and scaring people.”
“I’ll ask about him next time I talk to my lawyers,” I said. Hal Hauk, my attorney, was now alpha of the Tempe Pack and could get an update from Dr. Jodursson posthaste. “Maybe he’s getting better.”
“Maybe he ain’t, and that’s why we have all these new ones lookin’ to take over.”
“Anything’s possible,” I agreed.
A trio of servers arrived with our food and looked curiously at Coyote, the guy who’d ordered twelve sides of meat. The tabletop quickly filled up with plates, and Coyote ogled them greedily.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked, a curious half smile on her face.
“Yeah, wow, this sausage is really good,” Coyote said. He was already chewing on an entire patty he’d folded into his mouth. “Four more orders o’ that, if ya don’t mind. I’ll be ready when it gets here, I promise.”
Yes, she did. Hold on, it’s coming.
The waitress returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, and I passed my bacon over to Coyote so he could put it on the seat for Oberon.
My omelet looked scrumptious, and I promptly showered it with Tabasco to perfect it. Granuaile slathered her pancakes in butter and maple syrup and sighed appreciatively. For a while we did nothing but celebrate gluttony. After we’d tucked in long enough to take the edge off, I broached a subject that had been pestering me.
“What I don’t understand,” I told Coyote, “is how you came up with this idea in the first place. This long-range planning, this sudden altruism—well, it doesn’t sound like your sort of enterprise, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Umf,” Coyote grunted around a mouthful of ham. He held up a finger, telling me to wait, there was more to come after he’d swallowed. After he gulped down the ham and chased it with a swig of coffee, he said, “Know what you mean, Mr. Druid. It’s a fair question. An’ it came about because I asked myself a differ’nt question, like why I’d never bothered to do somethin’ good for my people.”
“Hold up,” I said. “What made you ask yourself that question? I mean, you’ve been around a long time, Coyote, and you could have asked yourself that centuries ago if it was in your nature. What changed your outlook?”
“Oh. That.” He looked shamefaced and mumbled something about oompa loompas.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“I said Oprah Winfrey,” Coyote growled, his irritation clear. Granuaile’s jaw dropped, and Coyote pointed a finger at her. “Not a word outta you, Miss Druid.” She wisely took a large bite of her pancakes and chewed as if he’d been discussing nothing more than the nice weather outside.
Coyote and I chuckled over this, and Granuaile knew Oberon had said something amusing, but she refrained from asking what it was. She was still trying to keep her amusement over the Oprah revelation from showing on her face.
Sensing this, perhaps seeing the flicker of a smile at the corners of Granuaile’s mouth, Coyote chose to move on. “Look, Mr. Druid. A long time ago, I fucked things up for people. Brought death to the world, you know, made it permanent. It’s tough to live that down. I’ve always done things to satisfy my own hungers; seems like I’m always hungry,” he said, gesturing to the stack of empty plates in front of him. He paused as the waitress arrived with his four additional orders of sausage and cleared away his dishes. Then he continued, “But I see now there are other hungers than mine to feed. An’ I want to do somethin’ about it. I want to do somethin’ that is one-hunnert percent good. People will look an’ say, where’s the downside? What trick is Coyote playin’ now? But there won’t be any. An’ that’ll be my finest trick of all.”
Coyote ate his sausage even faster than before, then got up to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. That meant I got stuck with the bill; I should have seen that one coming. The trickster was waiting for us out in the parking lot with a grin on his face.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
Coyote called shotgun and was visibly surprised when I moved to the rear door. “She’s driving?”
“Yeah. It’s my car,” Granuaile said, then arched an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“Good.” She beamed at him briefly, then ducked into the driver’s seat.
At Coyote’s direction, we drove on 160 northeast toward Kayenta, but before we got there we turned off on a dirt road just on the far side of a massive sandstone wonder called Tyende Mesa. It was rough, dry country, covered in red rocks and infrequent attempts by plant life to make a go of it. The trees were scrub cedars and junipers; there wasn’t the cactus you’d find to the south in the Sonoran Desert. People tend to picture the state of Arizona as all saguaros and rattlesnakes because that’s the sort of postcards they keep seeing, but saguaros don’t grow on the Colorado Plateau. Parts of the plateau are pretty lush with pine, like the southern tip of it known as the Mogollon Rim, but on the reservation the topsoil is shallow and sandy and mostly unable to support large trees, except in the bottoms of old washes.
The road was extremely rough in places. Discarded tires bore mute testimony to the fact that the thin layer of sand covered sharp rocks. We crossed a one-lane metal bridge that spanned a narrow defile—a flash-flood canyon that eroded anew every time it rained and the water trailed off the bare rock of the mesa—and, shortly after that, Coyote d
irected us to pull over onto a cleared patch on the left side of the road. There, the mesa rose up steeply in a sort of terraced fashion until it flattened out again, then two magnificent buttes jutted up almost like the dorsal fins of some massive, mad creature, an avatar of erosion swimming in sand. The flash-flood wash we had crossed no doubt began between those buttes. In the other direction, the plateau was flat and covered with various bunch grasses and a few stunted trees, all the way to Kayenta and beyond. We took some canteens with us and began hiking up the mesa toward the buttes.
“First thing I need you to do,” Coyote said halfway up, “is make a nice smooth graded ramp here to speed up the construction of a road. Down there where the car’s parked,” he pointed to the flat, arid plateau, “we’re going to build the work camp that will eventually become a town. And once we build the factories for our solar and wind companies, it’ll be a proper city. A carbon-neutral one too.” He put a hand next to his mouth and whispered as if he were sharing a secret, “I learned that carbon-neutral shit from a hippie in Canyon de Chelly.”
We continued to hike until we crested the first terrace. The next layer, sort of like a wedding cake, loomed on either side. We walked west down a valley dotted with scrub cedar for about a quarter mile, until Coyote stopped and spread his arms wide to indicate the northern butte face. “Here is where you make my people rich,” he said. “Move the gold underneath this mesa. We’ll put the entrance to the mine in that little cave right there.” He pointed to a small depression at the base of the butte that qualified more as a niche than a cave.
I shook my head. “You know, Coyote, this makes no sense geologically. You can’t put gold underneath this kind of rock. Geologists will scoop out their eyes with a melon baller and ruin their shorts when you start hauling precious metals out of here, because it will put the lie to everything they know. Then you’ll have prospectors searching for gold underneath every chunk of sandstone around the world and getting pissed when they don’t find any.”
“I don’t care, Mr. Druid. This is the place.”
“It has to be here? We can’t pick a spot elsewhere on this huge reservation that makes more sense in the natural world?”