I met a coyote once. I’ve talked about it before, but I think it’s worth a revisit.
It was 1986, and I was driving a cab at night. I’d given up around 2 a.m. and taken a night owl bus home. Home was a building north of the U that was cut into multiple rooms. Mine was 100 square feet and had a sloping ceiling so I could only stand by the entrance. Everywhere else I had to crouch.
Naturally, I didn’t enjoy winding down in my room after work. This night was a warm summer night, so I went down to the porch at the front of the house. I had my cheap cassette player and a tape I’d bought from a thrift store. The tape featured ragas performed by tabla, violin and sitar.
I started listening, wearing headphones so as not to disturb my fellow tenants, even though I didn’t think they deserved it.
You see, the building had been abandoned some months before by its landlord, so no one was collecting rent anymore. My loser neighbors reacted to this not by assuming ownership and responsibility for the building left in our hands, but by trashing it in every way imaginable.
They kicked walls in. They shot up rooms. They stopped flushing the toilets and let them fill up and overflow.
But still I wore the headphones. I started the first raga, and it began slow and easy, as they all tend to do. But it got faster and more vigorous as I listened more, and pretty soon it was completely alive.
Just as soon as the raga reached its peak, a coyote appeared in my line of sight, walking down the exact middle of the street in front of me. This was about 3 or 4 a.m. and dark but well lit by street lamps, so I could see it was a coyote and not just some domestic dog.
I get challenged on this point. I have to say I know enough to tell the difference. Domestic dogs are floppy and goofy. Coyotes are not at all floppy. Their backs hardly move as they walk. Their feet land one after another, and they seem to almost glide along.
I say “it” because I had no opportunity to turn it over for an inspection.
As soon as I saw it, we both froze. I stopped breathing altogether. The raga continued relentlessly in my ears. The coyote stared at me for about two seconds and then grinned at me.
Seeing it smiling relaxed me, and I blinked.
When I got my eyes open again, it had moved on down the street and was approaching some cars parked on the opposite side. Then it ducked between them, and that was the last I saw of it.
I didn’t tell anybody about it for a long while. Nobody asked. No one ever said, “Hey, Wes, seen any wild animals lately?”
The next spring, I quit driving cabs and became broke. I got down to three cents. A man observed that I was starving, so he offered to buy me sandwiches, and I accepted because starving isn’t fun. I knew the saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” but I’d figured I’d deal with the price later, whatever it was.
What it was, was I was supposed to join his religion. He wanted me to join his journey to heaven.
I didn’t want to be rude and say I didn’t want to follow him to heaven just like that, so I tried to think of a way to say it gentler.
What I did was I made up a story about how, overnight, Jesus came down from heaven in a VW bus, horn blaring, and said, “Hop in.” In the story, I did, and we drove around while he looked for more passengers, and pretty soon the bus was full of mostly homeless people, and he was about to haul us up to heaven — when I noticed a coyote looking for food in a trash can. I said to Jesus, “Please take the coyote,” and he said, “OK, but I’ll have to leave you.”
Next day I told my benefactor this story, and he was furious because it was not only sacrilege, but there are no coyotes in Seattle, he said. So the story was a total lie.
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