Ivory and the Horn

by Charles de Lint

  When Coyote turns his head, a muzzle is added to his silhouette and there can be no pretending that he is other than what he is: a piece of myth set loose from old stories and come to add to the puzzle of my being here.

  “So tell me,” he says, a touch of amusement in his voice. “With your wise eyes so dark with secrets and insights lying thick about you like a cloak… what do you know?”

  I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not.

  “My name’s Sophie,” I tell him. “That’s supposed to mean wisdom, but I don’t feel very wise at the moment.”

  “Only fools think they’re wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.”

  “I’m barely managing that.”

  “And yet you’re here. You’re alive. You breathe. You speak. Presumably, you think. You feel. The dead would give a great deal to be allowed so much.”

  “Look,” I say. “All I know is that I stepped through a door in another dream and ended up here. I followed this Kokopelli’s flute-playing and Grandmother Toad told me I have to stay here unless I either discover some secret need inside me that can be answered by the desert, or one of you help me find my way back.”

  “Kokopelli,” Coyote says. “And Grandmother Toad. Such notable company to find oneself in.”

  Now I know he’s mocking me, but I don’t think it’s meant to be malicious. It’s just his way. Besides, I find that I don’t really care.

  “Can you help me?” I ask.

  “Can I help? I’m not sure. Will I help? I’ll do my best. Never let it be said that I turned my back on a friend of both the flute-player and Nokomis.”

  “Who?”

  “The Grandmother has many names—as does anyone who lives long enough. They catch on our clothes and get all snarled up in a tangle until sometimes even we can’t remember who we are anymore.”

  “You’re confusing me.”

  “But not deliberately so,” Coyote says. “Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.”

  I give him a blank look.

  “Besides,” he adds, “it was a joke. We always know who we are; what we sometimes forget are the appellations by which we come to be known. There are, you see, so many of them.”

  “I just want to get out of this place.”

  Coyote nods. “I must say, I have to admire anyone with such a strong sense of purpose. No messing about, straight to the point. It’s refreshing, really. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

  It’s hard to believe that this is the same person who sat in silence across the fire from me for the better part of an hour before he even said hello. I wonder if archetypal spirits can be schizophrenic. Then I think, just being an archetype must make you schizophrenic. Imagine if your whole existence depended on how people remember you.

  “I gave it up myself,” Coyote says. Then he proceeds to open up a rolling paper, sprinkle tobacco onto it and roll himself a cigarette. He lights it with a twig from the fire, then blows a contented wreath of smoke up into the air where it twists and spins before it joins the rising column of smoke from the burning mesquite.

  I’m beginning to realize that my companion’s not exactly the most truthful person I’m going to meet in my life. I just hope he’s more reliable when it comes to getting a job done or I’m going to be stuck in this desert for a very long time.

  “So where do we start?” I ask.

  “With metaphor?”

  “What?”

  “The use of one thing to explain another,” Coyote says patiently.

  “I know what it means. I just don’t get your point.”

  “I thought we were trying to find your secret need.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t have any secret needs.” •

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you sexually repressed?”

  I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Coyote flicks the ash from the end of his cigarette. “It’s this whole flute-player business,” he says. “It’s riddled with sexual innuendo, don’t you see? He’s a fertility symbol, now, very mythopoetic and all, but it wasn’t always that way. Used to be a trader, a travelling merchant, hup-two-three. That hunched back was actually his pack of trading goods, the flute his way of approaching a settlement, tootle-toot-toot, it’s only me, no danger, except if you were some nubile young thing. Had a woman in every town, you know—they didn’t call him Koke the Poke for nothing. The years go by and suddenly our randy little friend finds himself elevated to minor deity status, gets all serious, kachina material, don’t you know? Becomes a kind of erotic muse, if you will.”

  “But—”

  “Ah, yes,” Coyote says. “The metaphorical bit.” He grinds his cigarette out and tosses the butt into the fire. “Your following the sound of his flute—his particular flute, if you get my meaning—and well, I won’t say he’s irresistible, but if one were to be suffering for a certain particular need, it might be quite difficult not to be drawn, willy-nilly, after him.”

  “What are you saying? That all I have to do is have sex here, and I get to leave?”

  “No, no, no, no. Nothing so crass. Nothing so obvious. At this point it’s all conjecture. We’re simply exploring possibilities, some more delightful than others.” He pauses and gives me a considering look. “You’re not a nun, are you? You haven’t taken one of those absurd vows that cut you off from what might otherwise be a full and healthy human existence?”

  “I don’t know about nuns,” I tell him, “but I’m outta here.”

  I stand up, expecting him to make some sort of protest, but he just looks at me, curiously, and starts to roll another cigarette. I don’t really want to go out into the desert night on my own, but I don’t want to sit here and listen to his lunacy either. ~

  “I thought you were going to help me,” I say finally.

  “I am, little cousin. I will.”

  He lights his cigarette and then pointedly waits for me to sit down again.

  “Weil, you haven’t been much help so far,” I say.

  “Oh, right,” he says, laying a hand theatrically across his brow. “Kill the messenger, why don’t you.”

  I lean closer to the fire and take a good long look at him. “Is there any relevance to anything you have to say?” I ask.

  “You brought up Kokopelli. You’re the one who followed the music of his randy little flute. You can’t blame me for any of that. If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  He cups his hands around those big coyote ears of his and leans forward as well. I try to keep a straight face, but all I can do is fall back on the ground and laugh.

  “I was beginning to think you didn’t have any sort of a sense of humor at all,” he says when I finally catch my breath.

  “It’s not that. I just want to get away from here. When I dream, I want to go to Mabon—to where / want to go.”

  “Mabon?” Coyote says. “Mabon’s yours? Oh, I love Mabon. The first time I ever heard the Sex Pistols was in Mabon. That was years ago now, but I couldn’t believe how great they were.”

  Whereupon he launches into a version of “My Way” that’s so off-key and out of time that it makes the version Sid Vicious did sound closer to Ol‘ Blue Eyes than I might ever have thought possible. From the hills around us, four-legged coyote voices take up the song, and soon the night is filled with this horrible caterwauling that’s so loud it’s making my teeth ache. All I want to do is bury my head or scream.

  “Great place, Mabon,” he says when he finally breaks off and the noise from his accompanists fades away.

  Wonderful, I think. Not only am I stuck with him here, but now I find out that if I ever do get out of this desert, I could run into him again in my own dreaming place.

  9

  “I’ve got to figure out a way to sleep without dreaming,” Sop
hie told Jilly.

  They were taking a break from helping out at a bazaar for St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged, drinking tea and sharing a bag of potato chips on the back steps of the old stone building. The sun was shining brightly, and it made Sophie’s eyes ache. She hadn’t slept at all last night in protest of how she felt Coyote was wasting her time.

  “Still visiting the desert every night?” Jilly asked around a mouthful of chips.

  Sophie gave her a mournful nod. “Pretty much. Unless I don’t go to sleep.”

  “But I thought you liked the desert,” Jilly said. “You came back from that vacation in New Mexico just raving about how great it was, how you were going to move down there, how we were all crazy not to think of doing the same.”

  “This is different. All I want to do is give it up.”

  Jilly shook her head. “I’m so envious of the way you get to go places when you dream. I would never want to give it up.”

  “You haven’t met Coyote.”

  “Coyote was your favorite subject when you got back.”

  Sophie sighed. It was true. She’d become enamored with the Trickster figure on her vacation and had even named her last studio after a painting she’d bought in Santa Fe: Five Coyotes Singing.

  “This Coyote’s not the same,” she said. “He’s not all noble and mystical and, oh I don’t know, mischievous, I suppose, in a sweet sort of a way. He’s more like the souvenirs in the airport gift shop—fun if you’re in the right mood, but sort of tacky at the same time. And definitely not very helpful. The only agenda he pursues with any real enthusiasm is trying to convince me to have sex with him.”

  Jilly raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that getting kind of kinky? I mean, how would you even do it?”

  “Oh please. He’s not a coyote all of the time. Mostly he’s a man.” Sophie frowned. “Mind you, even then he’ll have the odd bit of coyote about him: ears, mostly. Sometimes a muzzle. Sometimes a tail.”

  Jilly reached for the chip bag, but it was empty. She shook out the last few crumbs and licked them from her palm, then crumpled the bag and stuck it in the pocket of her jacket.

  “What am I going to do?” Sophie said.

  “Beats me,” Jilly said. “We should go back inside. Geordie’s going to think we deserted him.”

  “You’re not being any help at all.”

  “If it were up to me,” Jilly said, “I’d join you in a minute. But it isn’t. Or at least, we’ve yet to find a way to make it possible.”

  “He’s going to drive me mad.”

  “Maybe you should give him a taste of his own medicine,” Jilly said. “You know, act just as loony.”

  Sophie laughed. “Only you would think of that. And only you could pull it off. I wish there was some way to bring you over. Then I could just watch the two of you drive each other mad.”

  “You could always just sleep with him.”

  “I’ve been tempted—and not simply because I think it’d drive him away. He’s really quite attractive, and he can be very… persuasive.”

  “But,” Jilly said.

  “But, I feel as though it’d be like eating the fruit in fairyland—if I give in to him, then I’ll never be able to get away.”

  10

  So every night when I dream, I come to the desert and Coyote and I go looking for my way out. And every night’s a trial. My night-nerves are shot. I’m always on edge because I never know what’s going to happen next, what he’s going to want to discuss, when or if he’s going to put a move on me. We never do find Kokopelli, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is that I’m actually getting used to this: to Coyote and his mad carrying-on. Not only used to it, but enjoying it. No matter how much Coyote exasperates me, I can’t stay mad at him.

  And my desert time’s not all bad by any means. When Coyote’s being good company, you couldn’t ask for a better friend. The desert spirits aren’t shy around him, either. The aunts and uncles, which are what he calls the saguaro, tell us stories, or sing songs, or sometimes just gossip. All those strange madonna-faced spirits drop by to visit us, in ones and twos and threes. Women with fox-ears or antlers. Bobcat and coati spirits. Cottontails, jack rabbits and prong-horns. Vultures and grouse and hawks. Snakes and scorpions and lizards. Smoke-tree ghosts and tiny fairy-duster sprites. Twisty cholla spirits, starburst yucca bogles and mesquite dryads draped in cloaks made of a thousand perfectly shaped miniature leaves.

  The mind boggles at their variety and number. They come in every shape and size, but they all have that madonna resemblance, even the males. They’re all that strange mix of human with beast or plant. And they all have their own stories and songs and dances to share.

  So it’s not all bad. But Kokopelli’s flute-playing is always there, sometimes only audible when I’m very still, a Pied Piper covenant that I don’t remember agreeing to, but it keeps me here. And it’s that loss of choice that won’t let me ever completely relax. The knowledge that I’m here, not because I want to be, but because I have to be.

  One night Coyote and I are lying on a hilltop looking up at the stars. The aunts and uncles are murmuring all around us, a kind of wordless chant like a lullaby. A black-crested phainopepla is perched on my knee, strange little Botticelli features studying mine in between groomings. Coyote is smoking a cigarette, but it doesn’t smell like tobacco—more like piñon. A dryad was sitting on an outcrop nearby, her skin the gorgeous green of her palo verde tree, but she’s drifted away now.

  “Grandmother Toad told me that this is a place where people come to find totem,” I say after a while. I feel Coyote turn to look at me, but I keep my own gaze on the light show overhead. So many stars, so much sky. “Or they come to consult spirits, to learn from them.”

  “Nokomis is the wisest of us all. She would know.”

  “So how come we never see anybody else?”

  “I’m nobody?” the little phainopepla warbles from my knee.

  “You know what I mean. No people.”

  “It’s a big desert,” Coyote says.

  “The first spirits I met here told me it was somebody else’s dreaming place—the way Mabon is mine. But they wouldn’t tell me whose.”

  “Spirits can be like that,” Coyote says.

  The phainopepla frowns at the both of us, then flies away.

  “Is it your dreaming place?” I ask him.

  “If it was my dreaming place,” he says, “when I did this—” He reaches a hand over and cups my breast. I sit up and move out of his reach. “—you’d fall into my arms and we’d have glorious sex the whole night long.”

  “I see,” I say dryly.

  Coyote sits up and grins. “Well, you asked.”

  “Not for a demonstration.”

  “What is that frightens you about having sex with me?”

  “It’s not a matter of being frightened,” I tell him. “It’s the consequences that might result from our doing it.”

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a condom. I can’t believe this guy.

  “That’s not quite what I had in mind,” I say.

  “Ah. You’re afraid of the psychic ramifications.”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re afraid that having sex with me will trap you here forever.”

  Am I that open a book?

  “The thought has crossed my mind,” I tell him.

  “But maybe it’ll free you instead.”

  I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. “Only you’re not telling, right?” I ask.

  “Only I don’t know,” he says. He rolls himself another cigarette and lights up. Blowing out a wreath of smoke, he shoots me a sudden grin. “I don’t know, and you don’t know, and the way things are going, I guess we never will, hey?”

  I can’t help but react to that lopsided grin of his. Frustrated as I’m feeling, I still have to laugh. He’s got more charm than any one person deserves, and when he turns it on like this, I don’t know whether to give him a hug or a bang on th
e ear.

  11

  A week after her show closed at The Green Man Gallery, Sophie appeared on Max Hannon’s doorstep with Hearts Like Fire, Burning under her arm, wrapped in brown paper.

  “You didn’t pick it up,” she said when he answered the bell, “so I thought I’d deliver it.”

  Max regarded her with surprise. “I really didn’t think you were serious.”

  “But you will take it?” Sophie asked. She handed the package over as though there could be no question to Max’s response.

  “I’ll treasure it forever,” he said, smiling. Stepping to one side so that she could go by him, he added, “Would you like to come in?”

  It was roomier inside Max’s house than it looked to be from the outside. Renovations had obviously been done, since the whole of the downstairs was laid out in an open layout broken only by the necessary support beams. The kitchen was off in one corner, separated from the rest of the room by an island counter. Another corner held a desk and some bookcases. The remainder of the room consisted of a comfortable living space of sprawling sofas and armchairs, low tables, Navajo carpets and display cabinets.

  There was art everywhere—on the walls, as might be expected: posters, reproductions and a few originals, but there was even more three-dimensional work. The sculptures made Sophie’s heartbeat quicken. Wherever she looked there were representations of the desert spirits she’d come to know so well, those strange creatures with their human features and torsos peeping out from their feathers and fur, or their thorny cacti cloaks. Sophie was utterly entranced by them, by how faithful they were to the spirits from her desert dream.

  “It’s funny,” Max said, laying the painting she’d given him down on a nearby table. The two ocotillo cacti spirit statues that made up the centerpiece seemed to bend their long-branched forms toward the package, as though curious about what it held. “I was thinking about you just the other day.”

  “You were?”

  Max nodded. “I remembered why it was that you looked so familiar to me when we met at your opening.”