One time, after we stomped the Greenville Bulldogs 42-0 I saw Coyote under the stands, in that secret place the boards and steel poles and shadows and candy wrappers make. Mike Halloran (kicker, #14) and Justin Oster (wide receiver #11) were down there too, helmets off, the filtered stadium lights turning their uniforms to pure gold. Coyote leaned against a pole, smoking a cigarette, shirt off—and what a thing that was to see.
“Come on, QB,” Justin whined. “I never hit a guy before. I got no beef here. And I never fucked Jessie, either, Mike, I was just mouthing off. She let me see her boob once in 9th grade and there wasn’t that much to see back then. I never had a drink except one time a beer and I never smoked ‘cause my daddy got emphysema.” Coyote just grinned his friendly, hey-dude-no-worries grin.
“Never know unless you try,” he said, very reasonably. “It’ll make you feel good, I promise.”
“Fuck you, Oster” shot back Halloran. “I’m going first. You’re bigger, it’s not fair.”
Halloran got his punch in before he had to hear any more about what Justin Oster had never done and the two of them went at it, fists and blood and meat-slapping sounds and pretty soon they were down on the ground in the spilled-Coke and week-old-rain mud, pulling hair and biting and rolling around and after awhile it didn’t look that much like fighting anymore. I watched for awhile. Coyote looked up at me over their grappling and dragged on his smoke.
Just look at them go, little sister, I heard Coyote whisper, but his mouth didn’t move. His eyes flashed in the dark like a dog’s.
LaGrange almost ruined it all at Homecoming. The LaGrange Cowboys, and wasn’t their QB a picture, all wholesome white-blonde square-jaw aw-shucks muscle with an arm so perfect you’d have thought someone had mounted a rifle sight on it. #9 Bobby Zhao, of the 300 bench and the Miss Butter Festival 19whatever mother, the seven-restaurant-chain owning father (Dumpling King of the Southland!) and the surprising talent for soulful bluegrass guitar. All the colleges lined up for that boy with carnations and chocolates. We hated him like hate was something we’d invented in lab that week and had been saving up for something special. Bobby Zhao and his bullshit hipster-crooner straw hat. Coyote didn’t pay him mind. Tell us what you’re gonna do to him, they’d pant, and he’d just spit onto the parking lot asphalt and say: I got a history with Cowboys. Where he’d spat the offensive line watched as weird crystals formed—the kind Jimmy Moser (safety #17) ought to have recognized from his uncle’s trailer out off of Route 40, but you know me, I don’t say a word. They didn’t look at it too long. Instead they scratched their cheeks and performed their tribal ask-and-answer. We going down by the lake tonight? Yeah. Yeah.
“Let’s invite Bobby Zhao,” Coyote said suddenly. His eyes got big and loose and happy. His come-on look. His it’ll-be-great look.
“Um, why?” Jimmy frowned. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck that guy. He’s the enemy.”
Coyote flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and picked a stray maple leaf the color of anger out of Jimmy’s hair. He did it tenderly. You’re my boy and I’ll pick you clean, I’ll lick you clean, I’ll keep everything red off of your perfect head, his fingers said. But what his mouth said was:
“Son, what you don’t know about enemies could just about feed the team til their dying day.” And when Coyote called you Son you knew to be ashamed. “Only babies think enemies are for beating. Can’t beat ‘em, not ever. Not the ones that come out of nowhere in the 4th quarter to take what’s yours and hold your face in the mud til you drown, not the ones you always knew you’d have to face because that’s what you were made for. Not the lizard guarding the Sun, not the man who won’t let you teach him how to plant corn. Enemies are for grabbing by the ears and fucking them til they’re so sticky-knotted bound to you they call their wives by your name. Enemies are for absorbing, Jimmy. Best thing you can do to an enemy is pull up a chair to his fire, eat his dinner, rut in his bed and go to his job in the morning, and do it all so much better he just gives it up to you—but fuck him, you never wanted it anyway. You just wanted to mess around in his house for a little while. Scare his kids. Leave a little something behind to let the next guy know you’re never far away. That’s how you do him. Or else—” Coyote pulled Cindy Gerard (bottom of the pyramid and arms like birch trunks) close and took the raspberry pop out of her hand, sipping on it long and sweet, all that pink slipping into him. “Or else you just make him love you til he cries. Either way.”
Jimmy fidgeted. He looked at Oster and Halloran, who still had bruises, fading on their cheekbones like blue flowers. After awhile he laughed horsily and said: “Whaddaya think the point spread’ll be?”
Coyote just punched him in the arm, convivial like, and kissed Cindy Gerard and I could smell the raspberry of their kiss from across the circle of boys. The September wind brought their kiss to all of us like a bag of promises. And just like that, Bobby Zhao showed up at the lake that night, driving his freshly waxed Cowboy silver-and-black double-cab truck with the lights on top like a couple of frog’s eyes. He took off that stupid straw hat and started hauling a keg out of the cream leather passenger seat—and once they saw that big silver moon riding shotgun with the Dumpling Prince of the Southland, Henry Dillard (linebacker #33) and Josh Vick (linebacker #34) hurried over to help him with it and Bobby Zhao was welcome. Offering accepted. Just lay it up here on the altar and we’ll cut open that shiny belly and drink what she’s got for us. And what she had was golden and sweet and just as foamy as the sea.
Coyote laid back with me in the bed of my much shittier pick-up, some wool blanket with a horse-and-cactus print on it under us and another one with a wolf-and-moon design over us, so he could slip his hands under my bra in that secret, warm space that gets born under some hippie mom’s awful rugs when no one else can see you. Everyone was hollering over the beer and I could hear Sarah Jane laughing in that way that says: just keep pouring and maybe I’ll show you something worth seeing.
“Come on, Bunny Rabbit,” Coyote whispered, “it’s nothing we haven’t done before.” And it was a dumb thing to say, a boy thing, but when Coyote said it I felt it humming in my bones, everything we’d done before, over and over, and I couldn’t even remember a world before Coyote, only the one he made of us, down by the lake, under the wolf and the moon, his hands on my breasts like they were the saving of him. I knew him like nobody else—and they’ll all say that now, Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley and Cindy Gerard and Justin Oster and Jimmy Moser, but I knew him. Knew the shape of him. After all, it’s nothing we hadn’t done before.
“It’s different every time,” I said in the truck-dark. “Or there’s no point. You gotta ask me nice every time. You gotta make me think I’m special. You gotta put on your ears and your tail and make the rain come for me or I’ll run off with some Thunderbird QB and leave you eating my dust.”
“I’m asking nice. Oh, my Bunny, my rabbit-girl with the fastest feet, just slow you down and let me do what I want.”