Coyote Weather

PROLOGUE
1967


The banner read GOOD LUCK, RANDY in gold letters. It hung from the curtain rod above the picture window and the curtains were open so that everyone inside could see the newly-installed flagpole in the front yard. The flag was new too. It shone in the winter sun against the bright blue of the sky and the mountains that ringed the valley. It was a sign that the Ottleys were patriotic, and proud to have their son serving.
His mother put a plate with more cake in his hands and one of his father’s friends slapped him on the back. “Army’s gonna be good for you,” he told him jovially. “You’ll see. You’re a good boy, not like these punks trying to get out of their duty.”
“You’ll get to see the world,” another older man said. “I envy you, son.”
To Randy Ottley the room felt claustrophobic, small and suddenly airless. When their guests had left, his father would drive him to the Los Angeles induction center and he wouldn’t be able to come back. His sister Mimi, Ellen Callahan, Martin Alvarez, and a handful of other high school friends stood awkwardly around the cake, now a half-eaten jumble of crumbs with icing letters and half the Stars and Stripes.
“Time to go, Randy,” his father said, and the guests began to make their goodbyes. His dad picked up the suitcase and motioned him toward the waiting car.
“Good luck, man,” someone called.
“Give the Viet Cong hell.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“Come home soon, man.”
 



I. SOMETHING IN THE AIR


When Randy Ottley first began trying to come home that summer the people who felt his presence were never sure what they had seen, if anything. He was more a breath on the back of the neck, a flicker out of the corner of the eye, an urge to open the window and call out for whoever was late getting home that night.
The coyotes saw him in the distance, floating toward the valley above the Channel Islands, a spectral translucent shimmer in the darkness, and they puzzled over him. For one thing, he was going the wrong way, not out to sea. The Chumash, the people who’d been there first, had worn the path over the dark water between the islands, and even now most of those departing followed it, trailing footsteps of faint blue light behind them. But this one was trying to get into the valley, and he didn’t seem to be dead, not in the way humans usually were.
At night he closed his eyes, stopped his ears to the screaming voice of the drill instructor, the humiliation, the insults, the exhaustion of running until his legs gave way under him, the ridicule for questions to which he knew no answers. Then he could lift out of his physical self, a soul departing a body it was no longer tethered to. Furious, desperate concentration would lift him above the barracks the way he’d lifted over his back yard as a dreaming child. Once he was well up it was easier. He drifted south along the coastline, like floating in a pool, cutting through the night, a silent plane homing.
As always when he neared his goal, he lost his balance and slowed, tipping precariously above the humpbacked forms of the Channel Islands. He righted himself, face down, yearning and determined. It was harder going and the salt air was thick, like pushing through a bubble. It clung to him as he followed the highway past the oilfields, passing above the refinery lights, a spangle of stars masking the solid ugliness of tanks and pipes, a fairy castle that would vanish, like his flight, with the sun.
Closer. Up the grade past the apple orchards, following the train tracks that went to the packing sheds at the end of the valley. The air grew thicker and more elastic as he tried to turn off toward the cul de sac where his mother’s house would be, with the flagpole in the yard.

* * *

“There’s something in the air, man.” Jerry Manoury scratched the back of his neck. He kept feeling like something was crawling there.
“It’s dry.” Aaron pinched out the end of his joint and slid it carefully into his jeans. “Coyote weather. We’re gonna have a fire sure as shit. I saw Char Man last night.”
Jerry figured Aaron might have seen anything last night.
“No shit, man,” Aaron insisted. “Kind of hovering over Creek Road, bigger’n life, all burned black.”
Jerry scratched his neck again. Char Man was a local legend, subject of ever-evolving campfire recitations. Something was out there, but it wasn’t Char Man. Probably just the Santa Ana wind. It always made his skin crawl. It had been coyote weather all summer— dry, brown and ready to catch fire. All anybody could grow was foxtails, and the stream that ran along Creek Road had shrunk to a few puddles between the stones where the long green moss was drying out like moldy beards. The wild peacocks in the East End flew into town to roost on the red-tiled roof of the Arcade and drink out of the fountain in the park. Jerry heard their screams echoing in the bougainvillea. The air was dry with static electricity, and the gray-brown coyotes came down out of the foothills and ate people’s cats.
There were more coyotes than usual that year. Jerry saw them at dusk, scrambling along a ridgetop where a new house was going up, nosing through the debris, or trotting under the live oaks, ears pricked like radar receivers, tuning in the evening news. They watched the war in southeast Asia through living room windows, on televisions flickering bluely in the dim light. They sat outside City Hall and cocked their big ears toward the City Council’s efforts to chase the hippies out of the park. They stuck their noses into overturned garbage cans and read the draft board’s memos. Jerry had a letter from the board in his dresser drawer. He looked at it occasionally but there wasn’t any point in opening it because he knew what it said.
“Char Man,” Aaron said again, “I swear,” and Jerry shook his head.
“You’ll see.” Aaron ambled up the street to some dubious appointment Jerry would just as soon not be involved in and Jerry looked up at the sky again. A big fat moon hung over the eucalyptus trees, overlaying their pungent scent with a milky haze. Up the street, Irish dance music unwound from the open door of the Ayala Art Center. He felt at a loose end tonight, like most nights. Might as well dance as anything else. It was one of the few things so far that gave him any sense of accomplishment. He had been no good at math in high school, but he could see the complicated geometry of the dances like blueprints in his head.
Inside the Art Center the dance had just ended and everyone was sorting themselves out for the next one: kindergarten teachers in embroidered peasant skirts and leotards, Hollywood types in polo shirts earnestly slumming with the locals, and the usual assortment of teenagers with nowhere else to go.
The instructor, a storklike figure in ballet flats, dropped the needle on the turntable with a mild skrawk and a fast Russian dance started up. Two people Jerry knew opened up the line and hooked him in. The music was like the crack-the-whip at a fair, a line of flying feet in a snake shape on the polished floor.
As the snake’s head wove past its tail, he spotted a girl across the room. She had a curtain of long brown hair, and was dancing between Martin Alvarez, a boy he knew vaguely, and a stunner of a girl. The stunner looked dangerous to him, too beautiful for mortal man, but the brown-haired girl might be approachable, and he had a thing for long hair.
He caught her eye as they danced past each other and he smiled, just because she was cute, and she smiled back, startled. Then she was gone, dancing down the room near the head of the line. He broke loose with a flying leap into the air, landing on the balls of his feet, dancing backward into the line again, while it opened up to take him in, showing off even if the chances she would be interested in him were slim. Still, when the dance ended, he headed for the corner where she and Martin and the stunner leaned against each other, panting.