"But you told me you could find him for me."
"I told you I would try."
"This is trying?" I ask. "Sitting around a campfire, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and telling stories that don't make any sense?"
He gives me a hurt look. "I thought you liked my company."
"I do. It's just—"
"I thought we were friends. What were you planning to do? Dump me as soon as we found the flute player?"
"No of course not. It's just that I want... I need to have some control over my dreams."
"But you do have control over your dreams."
"Then what am I doing here? How come every time I fall asleep, I end up here?"
"When you figure that out," Coyote says, "everything else will fall into place."
"What do you think I've been trying to do all this time?"
Coyote takes another long swallow from his mug. "The people of your world," he says, "you live two lives— an outer life that everyone can see, and another secret life inside your head. In one of those lives you can start out on a journey and reach your destination, but when you take a trip in the other, there's no end."
"What do you mean there's no end?"
Coyote shrugs. "It's the way you think. One thing leads to another and before you know it you're a thousand miles from where you thought you'd be, and you can't even remember where it was you thought you were going in the first place."
"Not everybody dreams the way I do," I tell him.
"No. But everybody's got a secret life inside their head. The difference is, you've got a stage to act yours out on."
"So none of this is real."
"I didn't say that."
"So what are you saying?"
Coyote lights another cigarette, then finishes his coffee. "Good coffee, this," he tells me.
15
"And these stories of his," Sophie said. "They just drive me crazy."
Jilly looked up from her canvas to where Sophie was slouching in the window seat of her studio. "I kind of like them. They're so zen."
"Oh please. You can keep zen. I just want something to make sense."
"Okay," Jilly said. She set her brush aside and joined Sophie in the window seat. "To start with, Barking Dog is just another one of Coyote's names."
"Really?"
Jilly nodded. "It's a literal translation of Canis latrans, which is Coyote's scientific name. That last story was his way of telling you that the two of you are much the same."
"I said sense," Sophie said. "You know, the way the rest of the world defines the term?"
"But it does make sense. In the story, Coyote's looking for arrow paints, but after he gets sidetracked, all he can do is wonder what happened to Buzzard."
"And?"
"You were following this flute music, but all you can think of now is finding Kokopelli."
"But he's the one playing the flute."
"You don't know that."
"Nokomis told me it was either Coyote or Kokopelli who tricked me into this desert dream. And she told me that it was Kokopelli's flute that I heard."
Jilly nodded. "But then think of what Max told you about how out of context she is. You've got a dream filled with desert imagery, so what's a moon deity from the eastern woodlands doing there?"
"Maybe she just got sidetracked."
"And maybe she really was Coyote in another guise. And if that's true can you trust anything she told you?"
Sophie banged the back of her head against the window frame and let out a long sigh. "Great," she said. "That's just what I needed— to be even more confused about all of this than l already am."
"If you ask me," Jilly said, "I think it's time you left Coyote behind and struck out on your own to find your own answers."
"You don't know how good he is at sulking."
Jilly laughed. "So let him tag along. Just take the lead for a change."
So that night Sophie put on the tape she'd bought around the time Geordie was messing around with his medicine flute. Coyote Love Medicine by Jessita Reyes. She lay down on her bed and concentrated on the sound of Reyes's flute, letting its breathy sound fill her until its music and the music that drew her into the desert dream became one.
16
Coyote's stretched out on a rock, the brim of his hat pulled down low to shade his eyes. Today he's got human ears, a human face. He's also got a bushy tail of which he seems inordinately proud. He keeps grooming it with his long brown fingers, combing out knots that aren't there, fluffing out parts that just won't fluff out any further. He lifts the brim of his hat with a finger when he sees me start off.
"Where are you going?" he asks.
"I've got an appointment."
From lying there all languid in the sun, with only enough energy to roll himself a cigarette and groom that fine tail of his, suddenly he bounds to his feet and falls into step beside me.
"Who're you going to see?" he wants to know.
"Kokopelli."
"You know where he is?"
I shake my head. "I thought I'd let him find me."
I hold the music of the medicine flute in my mind and let it draw me through the cacti and scrub. We top one hill, scramble down the dusty slope of an arroyo, make our way up the next steep incline. We finally pull ourselves up to the top of a butte, and there he is, sitting crosslegged on the red stone, a slim, handsome man dark hair cut in a shaggy pageboy, wearing white trousers and a white tunic, a plain wooden medicine flute lying across his knees. A worn cloth backpack lies on the stone beside him.
For the first time since I stepped into this desert dream all those weeks ago, I don't hear the flute anymore. There's just the memory of it lying there in my mind— fueled by the cassette that's playing back in that world where another part of me is sleeping.
Kokopelli looks from Coyote to me.
"Hey, Ihu," he says. "Hey, Sophie."
I shoot Coyote a dirty look, but he doesn't even have the decency to look embarrassed at how easy it was for me to track Kokopelli down.
"How do you know my name?" I ask the flute-player.
He gives me a little shrug. "The whole desert's been talking about you, walking here, walking there, looking every-where for what's sitting right there inside you all the time."
I'm really tired of opaque conversations, and I tell him as much.
"Your problem," he says, "is that you can't seem to take anything at face value. Everything you're told doesn't necessarily have to have a hidden meaning."
"Okay," I say. "If everything's going to be so straightforward now, tell me: Which one are you? Peter or Max?"
Kokopelli smiles. "That would make everything so easy, wouldn't it?"
"What do you mean?"
"For me to be one or the other."
"You said this was going to be a straight forward conversation," I say.
I turn to Coyote, though why I expect him to back me up on this, I've no idea. Doesn't matter anyway. Coyote's not there anymore. It's just me and the flute-player, sitting up on the red stone of this butte.
"I didn't say it would be straight forward," Kokopelli tells me. "I said that sometimes you should try to take what you're told at face value."
I sigh and look away. It's some view we have. From this height, the whole desert is lain out before us.
"This isn't about Peter or Max, is it?" I say.
Kokopelli shakes his head "It's about you. It's about what you want out of your life."
"So Coyote was telling me the truth all along."
"Ihu was telling you a piece of the truth."
"But I followed your flute to get here."
Kokopelli shakes his head again. "You were following a need that you dressed up as my music."
"So all of this—" I wave my hand to encompass everything, the butte, the desert, Kokopelli, my being here. "— Where does it fit in?"