He is turning in tight rabid circles now, and I must admit my own head is getting quite a workout, but I hang on for dear life.
Suddenly Mr. Coyote comes panting to a dead stop.
His head hangs so low I am in danger of using it for a ski slope were I not hanging on tooth and nail, literally. “If you let go,” he offers. “I will.”
`There is nothing you have ahold of, except stupidity.”
“I will go off, leaving you and this cursed spot alone,” he growls between gritted teeth.
“Sounds like a good idea. If you try to pull anything silly while retreating, I will really get nasty.”
“Wolf’s honor,” he says, invoking his bigger, stronger brother in absentia.
“Lion’s honor,” I say, loosening first one shiv, then another.
Finally I drop off, still on all fours and ready to rumble.
Mr. Coyote’s appetite has lost its edge, even if my shivs have not. (Nothing better for sharpening than a little raking and clawing.) He is backing away, head and tail lowered. “What did you say your name was?” he asks just before he turns tall and runs.
“Louie,” I answer. “Midnight Louie. And I like my opponents shaken, not stirred.”
With those words the coyote turns so fast it could eat itstail like a certain worm Ouroboros I have heard discussed around the Circle Ritz .. . and disappears.
I do not take long to stand there and congratulate myself.
An unpleasant task awaits at my unguarded rear: somehow I must conceal Miss Midnight Louise from the oncoming human retrieval team so that she can be interred later among her own kind, with appropriate honors.
Had I not assigned her instead of me to tail Kitty the Cutter, I would be lying there dead in the dust … sand, rather.
I begin to understand Mr. Max’s long-held regrets, and even Mr. Matt’s more recent ongoing angst about the lady known as Vassar. We guys have it tough. Because the world relies on us to be in charge (except for some female exceptions, who are in the minority of exceptional females), when something goes wrong we tend to take it too personally. Guyness is a heavy load to carry, but I have just acquitted myself at the peak of it in facing off the coyote.
Miss Louise would be proud of me, were she still here.
With this thought I steel myself to turn and face something even worse than a ravenous coyote: my dead partner.
Before I can add action to thought, I hear a rasp behind me, then another.
No! More desert scavengers! What are they? Whiptail lizards? Kangaroo rats? Rattlesnakes? I will take them all!
I whirl around, prepared to battle a legion of creepy crawlies, but find the night still and dark behind me.
The puddle of shadow is all that remains of Midnight Louise—rather like the dark puddle the Wicked Witch of the West came to in The Wizard of Oz, but the parallel is purely visual. I make no comment on the personality of the late Miss Midnight Louise vis-à-vis the WW of the West—the puddle is still as motionless as an oil slick.
I approach. A guy has to do something when his partner is killed, but what? I have hounded off the desert dog. I guess I need camouflage first. I spot a lacy tumbleweed blown up against a prickly pear. That is it! It will be light to drag over and will hide ML’s resting place from the prying humans about to descend on this site of tragedy and death.
At least my former partner took Kitty the Cutter down with her! I grasp the tumbleweed by the thick stem and drag it over. It catches on every cactus needle betwixt its lodging and Miss Louise, I swear.
At last I lay it carefully across her.
The desert wind starts to lift it up, up, and away. I cast myself on it to hold it down … ouch!
Again I hear the furtive rasping noise. but there I am spread-eagled on a tumbleweed, trying to keep it from escaping its duty as a makeshift headstone.
Rasp, rasp. Enough with this rasping! My nerves are irritated already. One more rasp, whatever you are, and I will eat you!
I have in mind, of course, a desert mouse. I would not eat a desert rat. You never know where they have been. And then the earth moves.
Or, rather, the tumbleweed does.
Who could imagine it? Midnight Louie thrown by a mere tumbleweed?
But tossed aside I am, like balsa wood.
I come up sucking sand and squeezing my eyes shut against a sleet of grit.
If that coyote is back, I am kitty litter!
Blind as a kitten I struggle to my feet, game for Round Two.
The rasping noise I have been hearing has escalated into a spitting sound.
There are lizards who attack that way, I have heard. Euw! Talk about not fighting fair.
I bat my eyelashes as if I were the Divine Yvette at home plate (bizarre as that image may be), but still I cannot see past the dark and grit and the, ugh, spit that have sewn my lids shut as if I were on some embalming table.
Finally, though, I see the tumbleweed heading into the dim distance like the bouncing ball on a set of on-screen lyrics.
I gaze down at what I presume to be ground and thedenuded dead body of my former partner, not to mention my questionable next of kin.
It is gone!
Well, it depends if you believe in the dead walking. Me, I do not.
On the other hand, I have seen Elvis, and more to the point, Elvis has seen me and been very cordial.
I feel and pat my way around the crime scene and find nothing but cactus quills for my pains. And I do mean pains!
The only conclusion is that the night gust that ran off with the tumbleweed also whisked away the earthly remains of Miss Midnight Louise.
She was only a slip of a girl, like my Miss Temple, I think maudlinly.
Nothing much holding her to earth but her determined shivs, and my poor Miss Temple only has them on two, not four feet, and only through artificial implementation.
I am getting quite choked up, what with the sand and dust and unhappy thoughts of my two female associates.
I have saved Miss Temple’s skin more than a few times, but in this case I have sent Miss Louise to certain death, as it turned out.
Whoa is me.
I stagger back to the human crime scene, my perked ears hearing no sirens yet, hearing nothing but the vast, empty desert and the vast, empty echo of my guilt.
The motorcycle and rider remain a macabre still life on the wild desert floor, flesh and machine separated by death but complicit in death.
Finally my vision has cleared except for an odd blurring. Poor Miss Louise. She only did what I had told her to do. Why did I not choose to tail Kitty the Cutter? I am always one for the dames anyway.
Why was it not me whose fresh furry corpse was jostling even now through Joshua trees and saguaros and cat-claw patches?
Well, I might not be jostling, being somewhat too heavy even for a Kansas-strength tornado to sweep up. Face it, Toto was a wimp as well as a dog. Midnight Louie would not go gently onto the Yellow Brick Road, let me tell you!
So if I had gone with Kitty the Cutter, I would be alive and kicking, as I have so recently proven, and Miss Louise would be in the safe custody of Mr. Max, who was wise enough to keep clean away from this messy accident/death scene.
Poor Louise! She was not so bad, even if she was not likely any relation. I bow and shake my head at the vagaries of life, and death.
A sudden cough to my rear interrupts my sober vigil. “Do you mind?” a raspy, faint voice asks.
I glance first to the still form of Kitty the Cutter. She is not moving.
I glance second all around me in a 360-degree circle. And I see that the puddle has been wafted near the downed motorcycle.
I approach with caution. As well I should.
The puddle lifts a spiky head and then lifts a lip to bare sharp, white fangs.
“First,” it says, croaking, “you send me on a death trip. Then you try to plant a tree on my spine. Then you let a dust devil have its way with me.”