River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(44)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"Not an innocent bystander," I told him.

"But he is your father. He’s entitled to worry."

"What did the dance mean?" I asked.

"Not a spell," he said. "Sometimes dancing is a spell–like the rain dance or the ghost dance. This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as `Look, Apistotoki, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.’" He gave me a sly look. "Or he might describe the dance as `Look, God, see what I made. Pretty cool, eh? Could you watch out for it?’"

For me. That dance had been for me.

"Tell me," I said, swallowing down the feelings that were roiling around inside me. There was so much I needed to know, and this might be my only chance. "Tell me about Joe Old Coyote." There was something odd going on. Some connection between my father and Coyote, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. Direct questions hadn’t worked so well; maybe I could get him to elaborate if I went at it sideways. And maybe I’d learn more about my father than my mother had been able to tell me.

The man who looked like my father grunted. "He was a bull rider."

I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say. "I did know that," I prompted him.

"Wasn’t Blackfeet. Or Blackfoot, either."

That was new information. "He told my mother he was."

"Nope." He shook his head. "No. I’m pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion."

"Was he from Browning?" I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn’t sure for whom. My mother who’d been so young? Maybe.

"I was bored and lonely," he said with a sly shyness. "So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo." He made a pleased noise. "Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly ’cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it."

Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn’t and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

"So Joe was born in Browning," I said slowly.

"You might say that," agreed Coyote. "Joe usually did."

"Joe was a person you became." I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

"Exactly."

"So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn’t you."

"Sort of." Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. "This explaining stuff isn’t where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him– though he never knew that. There were just things he didn’t worry about very much–like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me– and he was dead."

Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote–but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug- thing in the Men in Black movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug’s human suit, Coyote’s had had a life of his own.

"Joe was real?"

Coyote nodded. "And so is his ghost–even though that is me as well."

I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn’t really a person would throw me off my game again.

"If he was born in Browning," I told Coyote, "maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan." I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. "The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don’t they? He’s their trickster. It’s the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe."

The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. "Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning–they know how to party, those Indians in Browning."

"And then he met my mother." My father was a construct of Coyote’s boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn’t. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black- and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote’s.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

"Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn’t she somethin’." There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. "Who’d have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway."

"But coyotes don’t mate for life, do they?" I tried to keep my voice neutral.

"He would have," said Coyote. "Oh, he would have. He loved her so much."

His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

"If he’d known about her sooner, he wouldn’t have killed the vampire nest over in Billings," he said after a while. "But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know–not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains."

He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, "Maybe that’s where you get it. I always assumed it was just too much Star Wars, but maybe it was genetic." After a moment’s thought, he shook his head. "No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been Star Wars."

"The vampires?" I said tightly.

"Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn’t too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn’t thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty damn hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire."

He tossed his piece of grass away with a violent gesture, and his grass fell into the river.

"Don’t know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him."