"Sure you can," a voice said from behind the shower curtain. Sam screamed and jumped to the top of the toilet tank. Coyote stepped out of the shower holding a beaded leather pouch.
"What in the hell are you doing here?" Sam asked.
"I'm here to help," Coyote said.
"Well, get out of here. I don't need your help."
"You are wasting that woman."
"Do you have any idea what is going on around here? Listen." Another door slammed and Nina resumed shouting at Yiffer. From what Sam could make out it had something to do with the yard sale.
"You must leave here, then," Coyote said. "You must find a place on the woman's body and live there. Hear only her breath, smell only her scent."
"If you don't get out of here I won't even have a chance. What if she sees you? How could I explain your being here?" Thinking about it, Sam realized that if he told Calliope that there was an ancient trickster god in her bathroom she would accept it without question — would probably ask for an introduction.
Coyote held out the beaded pouch. "Put this on your member."
"What is it?" Sam asked, taking the pouch.
"Passion powder. It will make you as strong and stiff as a lance."
Sam shook the contents of the pouch — a fine brown powder — into the palm of his hand. He sniffed it. "What is it?"
"Corn pollen, cedar, sweet grass, sage, powdered elk semen — it is an old and powerful recipe. Try it."
"No way."
"You want the woman to think you are not a man?"
"If I try it will you go?"
Coyote grinned. "Put just a pinch on your member and you will pleasure the woman to tears."
"And you'll go?"
Coyote nodded. Sam tentatively took a pinch of the powder and began to sprinkle it on his penis.
Calliope opened the bathroom door, catching Sam in mid-sprinkle. "You won't need that, honey," she said. "I'm on the pill."
"But…" Sam looked around for Coyote, but the trickster was gone. "I was just…"
"Being responsible," Calliope said. "Thank you. Now come to bed." She took his hand and led him out of the bathroom. Sam submitted, glancing over his shoulder for signs of Coyote.
Yiffer and Nina had taken the fight to their bedroom. Nina was calling Yiffer an idiot and going on about a newspaper ad being misplaced. A door slammed downstairs and Yiffer stormed out of the bedroom. "I'm going to kick his ass!" he shouted. In the hall he looked up at Calliope and Sam as he passed. "Hi, kids," he said, then he proceeded down the hall. Sam could hear the kitchen screen door ripping off the hinges as Yiffer went through. "You're history, biker boy!"
Calliope pulled Sam into the bedroom and closed the door.
"Shouldn't we call the police or something?" Sam asked.
"No, he'll be okay. Lonnie's afraid of Yiffer. He won't fight him and he's afraid to shoot him because of jail."
"Oh, everything's fine, then," Sam said.
"Come to bed," Calliope said. Sam shot a glance to Grubb, who was lying quietly on his side staring suspiciously at Sam over the edge of a pacifier, as if saying, "What are you doing with my mom?"
"Can we blow out the candles?" Sam asked.
Without a word Calliope blew out the candles and pulled Sam down on top of her on the bed. Outside, the sounds of Nina screaming down from the top of the stairs, Yiffer pounding on Lonnie's door, and J. Nigel crying for attention faded into white noise.
"You must find a place on the woman's body and live there." In the dark, the noise far away, Sam ran his hands over Calliope's body and the world of work and worry seemed to move away.
He found two depressions at the bottom of her back where sunlight collected, and he lived there, out of the wind and the noise. He grew old there, died, and ascended to the Great Spirit, found heaven in her cheek on his chest, the warm wind of her breath across his stomach carried sweet grass and sage, and…
In another lifetime he lived on the soft skin under her right breast, his lips riding light over the ridge and valley of every rib, shuffling through downy, dew-damp hairs like a child dancing through autumn leaves. On the mountain of her breast, he fasted at the medicine wheel of her aureole, received a vision that he and she were steam people, mingled wet with no skin separating them. And there he lived, happy. And for the first time in years he felt that he was home. She followed, traveled, lived with him and in him as he was in her. They lived lifetimes and slept and dreamed together.
It was swell.
CHAPTER 18
Shadowphobia
Saturday morning Josh Spagnola was sleeping in and dreaming of putting shampoo into bunnies' eyes when the Harley-Davidson crashed through his front door carrying a 270-pound, pissed-off, speed-crazed biker named Tinker. With the crash and thunder of the bike in his living room, Spagnola sat up in his nest of satin sheets thinking earthquake, listening for the sounds of his burglar alarms, which did not come. Spagnola's house was wired six ways to stop an elegant picklock or spry cutpurse from entering by stealth, sneak, or cat's-paw; he had, in fact, protected himself against someone exactly like himself. That anyone would break in on a battering ram of Milwaukee iron, in broad daylight, had never occurred to him.
Tinker, on the other hand, took the words breaking and entering quite literally, and found entering a rather empty experience without substantial breaking. He carried on his belt a policeman's riot baton, a blackjack, two hunting knives, and a set of brass knuckles. In a rare moment of sanity he had left his guns at home. His lawyer had advised against guns while on probation.
Tinker had received an early-morning call from Lonnie Ray, one of his brothers in the Guild.
"You want him dead?" Tinker had asked Lonnie.
"No, just fuck him up. And don't wear your colors. I don't want any connection to me."
"Is he big?" Tinker had a deep-seated fear of someday meeting someone as large and violent as himself.
"I don't know. Just wait until I call. You'll see the black Mercedes."
"You got it, bro," Tinker said, and hung up.
Tinker tried to wait for Lonnie's call, but he'd been up all night cooking up a batch of methedrine in the Guild's lab, and had lost his patience after sampling the product in order to take the edge off the case of beer he'd drunk. At daybreak his bloodlust got the better of him and he left.
In the bedroom, hearing a Harley do burnouts on his Berber carpet, Spagnola finally realized that something was seriously wrong. He leapt from bed and began searching through a trail of clothes he had left last night on the way to bed with the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday masseuse from the Cliffs. He remembered kicking his gun belt away from the bedroom door when he sent her home at midnight and scrambled to the door. He was bending to unholster the gun when Tinker kicked the door open, catching Spagnola square in the forehead, knocking him cold.
Tinker looked down at the naked, unconscious little man and let out a sigh. The absence of terror was wildly unsatisfying for him. As a gesture of brotherhood to Lonnie he pulled the baton from his belt and with two vicious blows broke both of Spagnola's legs, then he sulked out of the bedroom, mounted his bike, and rode to the Guild's clubhouse to watch Saturday-morning cartoons.
Sam awoke to Yiffer yelling, "Get down! Don't let them see you!"
Sam looked around the room. Calliope and Grubb were gone. He got up and reached for his watch on the dresser while shouts and whispers continued from the living room. Six in the morning. It must have gone on all night: the shouting, the pounding, the babies crying. He was lucky to have slept at all. He dressed and walked into the living room.
"Get down," Yiffer said. "Don't let them see you." Sam dropped to a crouch in the doorway. Nina and Calliope were huddled under the front windows holding the babies. Yiffer was crouched by the door that led to the balcony. He rose up to peek out the window, then instantly dropped to cover.