A coyote, not a deer

She stood there in the freezing cold with her stick-bug skinny frame, coke bottle glasses, no make-up face.  She had on an over-sized coat and the kind of winter hat you would only find in Cleveland where no one gives a fuck about being attractive.  Staying warm, surviving the long winter; the only concerns when getting dressed and picking the appropriate accoutrements.  She did not look like a woman.  She did not look like anything, other than an anxiety-ridden bag of bones, with beady eyes.

When dispatch sent me, they had me call station.  They could not tell me what it was over the radio.  That was my first clue.  Some lackadaisical suburban family lost their new boxer puppy the day prior, and could not give a fuck.  Lost it near the library, whilst taking it for a walk without a leash, and the damn thing saw a deer and beat puppy feet for the woodline, chasing its wild companion down.  The suburbanites called us to report that the new, unable to really sustain life on its own, member of their family, was lost.  Please make a notation of same.  And with a phone call they fulfilled their obligation to society, and abruptly discontinued looking for their helpless pet.  So this insane lady with the winter hat (while cleaning the library- her profession) somehow heard about this lost soul, this puppy, and swore she heard it calling out in the night as she made her last passes with the vacuum.  All of this relayed to me over the phone because it was too embarrassing to warrant broadcast over channel one OR four.  My dispatcher apologized as she sent me.  But I didn't really care (a problem I've had lately).

I showed up expecting nothing, and this crazy woman ran at my truck, waving her arms, thanking me for arriving so promptly.  She had a stream-of-consciousness way of talking as if she wasn't used to sharing her personal space with others and told me, OKAY TURN ON YOUR FLASHLIGHT I'M SO SORRY IT'S COLD JUST FOLLOW ME I'LL SHOW YOU WHERE I HEARD IT AND MAYBE IT WILL COME TO US I'M SURE HE'S JUST SCARED, I KNOW I HEARD HIM.  She was frantic.  After securing my things I followed her through a pricker-patch (I still have the snags in my uniform pants and a welt on my knee that won't heal) into a large field that led us to the woodline.  We walked the awkward 200 yards to the forest in a stilted conversation that mostly she led; me having lost the desire to provide normalcy to others long ago, and finding a unique comfort in observing how people react to someone who is about as emotionally present as a wolf.

It was a full moon and as soon as we hit the field I saw the tapetum lucidum of something not human flanking our northern side.  I pointed my flashlight at it and told her we had a guest.  In her isolated madness she answered that it was probably a deer, and perhaps had been protecting the little lost puppy.  She told me that maybe it had been keeping the thing warm, heard us coming, and came to see what we wanted.  I had no words.  She persisted with her story until I realized that she had only one foot, maybe, in the cold, dark, reality of the night we were greeting.

Midnight.  We made it to the woodline and it was still, and quiet.  Cold.  I told her that I needed to get back to my truck, and promised (I lied, forgive me) to tell the family where she thought she heard their puppy.  We turned and started the walk back, and I made a point of taking the northern post to stand between her and our new friend.  She noticed.  She walked hastily, tripped, and her awkward turn of speech became painful.  I kept my flashlight trained on the thing that walked east and then west and then east again, its eyes always cast in our direction.  It bounded and crawled and leapt and stalked.  I fingered my gun in its holster and imagined drawing it, and not missing.  There was one other time in recent memory that came back, the way it comes back like searching for familiar files, but in it the gun was drawn and pointed and its subject was a biped and my mouth was barking orders and not just playing scenarios of woods and fields and the moon and nature.  Crazy how this shit takes shape and how people have no clue.  They want to know that when they call 911 it just works, and there's no room in their World Market living rooms for how. 

We carry how on our shoulders.  We bring it home and try to wash it off in the shower, but it doesn't wash off, no matter how hot the water.  We carry it in the places that we ask only God peer into, to wipe clean and to please re-strengthen.  The gunshot wound to the head I still have dreams about, the battered and bloodied wives I've counseled only to have them change their minds at court and drop all charges, the kids who have faced things I can't think about and not cry, the dopers, their enablers, the drunks in all their incarnations, the bullies, the just God damn lifers.  All of this swilling around inside my head on every mother fucking call for service and the soccer mom I stop for speeding wants to know why I'm wasting my time with her and not arresting a child molester.

Some days are okay.  Others are outright sacrilege.  And I ask myself; what are you doing with your life?!

We made it out of the field and back to the library parking lot, and the coyote made his peace with us and headed back to the woodline to finish his dinner.  She thanked me, again, for turning up, and reiterated the importance of me telling the family exactly where she had heard the lost puppy, tomorrow.  And me, thinking that life is a series of unlimited tomorrows.  I am frayed at the edges, I know.  I am not subtle, nor gentle, nor patient.  There is a coyote stalking my flank at 100 yards north, always, and I am always the only person in the crowd who sees it.  So it is with sheepdogs.  Please, give us a prayer when you are inclined to, and a patient tolerance when you are able.   

The Patron Saint of Fools

We set the cars like horses; faces nestled into bodies, nostrils spewing out the hot humid engine heat of an air-conditioned midwest summer night, intertwined.  The chirping of crickets and intermittent fuzz of far away radio chatter.  The languid air became thick with cologne that I knew he reapplied when I suggested our clandestine meeting.  The old habits we don't quit.  I remembered, I remembered, and I tried to shut it down but it kept.  Coming.  An evening with mom and dad at dinner and me dropping in and trying to keep it together, I had just found out but I couldn't tell them.  The way his voice sounded on the phone when I first told him.  Sunrises in the cemetery. Holding hands in the early morning when I felt so vulnerable.  Thanksgiving and cigarettes and her strength, carrying me.  Coded conversations where we pledged our undying allegiance.  The jokes, the declarations, the subtle glances, the devotion.  And that I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror one evening, and saying, you fool.  Whatever you are looking for, it is within you.  Stop.  Searching.

Standing prostrate in Nevada with a pack of Marlboro Lights, devastated.  And in the next moment a cell phone call from an acquaintance in panic and the quick transition into stoic elder, advice-giver.  The layers haven't gone away they've just become more complex.        

Old memories clattering in my head like skeletons, advancing on the front in a frenetic dying effort to escape.  To just, move, on.  But they never move on.  Retreating to the dark recesses of my soul, they perch on their haunches and wait, hollow, empty, with a fool's sense of injustice at their incarceration.  Plotting their next attempt at escape from the prison of my mind, my memories.  Why can't I let you go. 

He dismounted and moved toward me in that soupy late July night.  The sound of my leather when I mirrored him and the idling of engines.  And the crickets, and the distant lights, and the pregnant humming of daylight in the bible black predawn.  Gritty wet asphalt crunching underneath my toes.  The embrace.  I saw myself in the reflection of tinted windows and the girl looking back knew me before I knew me, the eyes so old and in some ways, bitter.  She looked disappointed, in a resigned, respectful way.  The heart wants what it wants, but the mind deceives the body into making a farce of it all.  The old know, the young desire.  This life.

And to whom do we listen.

The end is always poetry, so it is.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)