Coyotes
FROM Love Life (1989)
Cobb’s fiancée, Lynnette Johnson, wasn’t interested in bridal magazines or china patterns or any of that girl stuff. Even when he brought up the subject of honeymoons she would joke about some impossible place—Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Lapland, Peru.
“I just want to go no-frills,” she said. “What kind of wedding do you want?” She was sitting astride his lap in a kitchen chair.
“I want the kinky-sex, thank-God-it’s-Friday, double-Dutch-chocolate special,” he said, playing with her hair. It smelled like peppermint.
She was warm and heavy in his lap, and she had her arms around him like a sleepy child. It bothered him that she hadn’t even told her folks yet about him, but he had put off taking her to meet his mother, so he thought he understood.
It was the weekend, and they were trying to decide whether to go out for dinner. They were at his apartment at Orchard Acres—two-fifty a month, twice as much as he had paid for his previous apartment. His new place was nice, with a garbage disposal and a patio. He had moved out of his rathole when he began working with the soil-conservation service, but now he wished he had saved to buy a house instead of splurging on an expensive apartment with a two-year lease. She kept clothes in his closet and in the chest of drawers, and the bathroom was littered with her things, but she was adamant about holding on to her own place for the time being. Lynnette had such definite ways. She always got up early and ran six or eight miles, even in the winter. She ate peanut butter for breakfast—for protein, she told him. She claimed weeds were beautiful. She had arranged some dried brown weeds in a jug on the dining table. She had picked the weeds from a field when they went pecan-hunting back in the fall. Wild pecans were small, and the nuts were hard to pick out. Cobb still had most of them in a cracker box.
“You wouldn’t believe the pictures I saw today,” she said a bit later when they were lolling in bed, still undecided about going out to eat. Cobb was trying to lose weight.
Lynnette worked in a film-developing place that rushed out photos in twenty-four hours. The pictures rolled off the chain-drive assembly and through the cutter, and she examined and counted them before slipping them into envelopes.
“There was a man and a woman and a dog,” she said. “A baby was asleep in a bassinet at the foot of the bed. Some of the pictures were of the man in bed with the dog—posed together like they were having breakfast in bed. The dog was sitting up on its haunches against the pillow. And in some of the pictures the woman was in bed with the dog. You couldn’t really tell, but I don’t think either of these people had a stitch of clothes on. They were laughing. The dog, I swear, was laughing, too.”
“What kind of dog?”
“A big one. Blond, with his tongue hanging out.”
“Sounds like a happy family scene,” said Cobb, noticing that he and Lynnette were sitting up against their pillows the way she said the people in the photos were. “It was probably Sunday morning,” he said. “And they were fooling around before the baby woke up.”
“No, I think it was something really weird.” She held her wrist up near the lamp and studied her watch. Getting out of bed, she said, “I saw the woman come in and pick up the pictures. A really nice woman—middleaged, but still pretty. You’d never suspect anything. But she was too old to have a baby.”
Some of the pictures Lynnette told him about frightened her. She saw people posing with guns and knives, grinning and pointing their weapons at each other. But the nudes were more disturbing. The lab wasn’t supposed to print them, but when she examined negatives for printing she saw plenty of nude shots, mostly close-ups of private parts or couples photographing themselves in the mirror in much the same pose they would have struck beside some monument on their vacation. Once, Lynnette saw a set of negatives that must have been from an orgy—a dozen or more naked people. One was a group shot, like a class picture, taken beside a barbecue grill. Cobb suggested that they might have been a nudist society, but Lynnette said nudists were too casual to take photographs of this kind. Those people weren’t casual, she said.
Cobb was his real name, but people assumed it was a nickname—implying “rough as a cob.” Rough in that sense, he thought, meant prickly, touchy, capable of great ups and downs. But Cobb knew he wasn’t really like that. He guessed he hadn’t lived up to his name, or grown into it, as people were said to do, and this left him feeling a little vague about himself. Cobb was twenty-eight, and he had had a number of girlfriends, but none like Lynnette. Ironically, he first met her when he took in a roll of film to be developed—his trip to Florida with Laura Morgan. He had dated Laura for about a year. They had driven down in her Thunderbird, spending a week at Daytona and then a couple of days at Disney World. They took pictures of the motels, the palm trees, the usual stuff. When he went to get the pictures, he struck up a conversation with Lynnette. From something she said, he realized she had seen his photos. He suddenly realized how trite they were. She saw pictures like that come through her machine every day. He felt his life take a turn, a hard jolt. They started going out—at first secretly, because it took Cobb a few weeks to work matters out with Laura. Laura wouldn’t speak to him now when he ran into her in the hall at work. She was the type who would have wanted a wedding reception at the Holiday Inn, a ranch house in a cozy subdivision, church on Sunday. But Lynnette made him feel there were different ways to look at the world. She brought out something fresh and unexpected in him. She made him see that anything conventional—Friday-night strolls at the mall or an assortment of baked-potato toppings at a restaurant—was funny and absurd. They went around town together trading on that feeling, finding the unusual in the everyday, laughing at things most people didn’t see the humor in. “You’re just in love,” his older brother, George, said when Cobb tried to explain his excitement.
Cobb went to his mother’s for supper on Tuesdays, when his stepfather, Jim Dance, an accountant, was out at his Optimist Club meetings. Their house made Cobb uncomfortable. The furnishings defied classification. He hadn’t grown up with any of it; it was all acquired after his mother, Gloria, married Jim. The walls were covered with needlepoint scenes of castles and reproductions of paintings of Amish families in buggies. The dining room had three curio cabinets, as well as Gloria’s collection of souvenir coasters, representing all fifty states. In the living room, Early American clashed with low modern chairs upholstered with fat pillows. The room was filled with glass paperweights and glass globes and ashtrays, all swirling with colors like the planet Jupiter.
Cobb had come over to tell her he was going to marry Lynnette. His mother was overjoyed and gave him a hug. He could feel the flour on her hands making prints on his sweater.
“Is she a good cook?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know. We always eat out. I don’t want any ham,” he said, indicating the platter of ham on the table. “Do you want me to marry a good cook who will fatten me up or a lousy cook who’ll keep me trim? What’s your standard, Mom?”
Gloria forked a piece of ham onto his plate. “What are her people like?” She tore into the ham on her own plate.
“They’re not in jail. They’re not on welfare. They don’t walk around with knives. They’re not cross-eyed or anything.”
“Why am I surprised?” she said.
“I don’t even know them,” Cobb said. “They’re not from around here. She moved down here from Wisconsin when she was in high school. Her daddy worked at Ingersoll, but now he’s been transferred to Texas.”
Gloria smiled. “It’ll be awful hot in Texas by June. Are they going to have a big shindig?”
“I don’t think we’ll get married there.” Hesitantly, he said, “Lynnette’s different, Mom. She’s real serious and she doesn’t like anything fancy.”
“You ought to learn something about her people,” Gloria said anxiously. “You never know.”
“She’s real nice. You’ll like her.”
Gloria poured mo
re iced tea into her tall blue glass. “Well, it’s about time you married,” she said. “You know, when you were a baby you walked and talked earlier than any of the others. I had faith that you’d turn out fine, no matter what I did. But when you were about thirteen you went through a stage. You got real moody, and you slept all the time. After that, you never were the same lively boy again.” Gloria bowed her head. “I never did understand that.”
“That was probably when I found out about nuclear war. That’s a real downer when it dawns on you.”
“I never worry about nuclear war and such as that! The evil of the day is enough to keep me busy.” Sullenly, she chomped on a biscuit.
“The evil of the day is where it’s at, Mom,” said Cobb.
After supper, when he returned from the bathroom, she was standing by a lamp, consulting the TV Guide, with the magazine’s cover curled back. “On ‘Moonlighting’ they just talk-talk-talk,” she said. “It drives you up the wall.”
He flipped through her coffee-table books: The Book of Barbecue, The Art of Breathing, The Perils of Retirement. Everything was either an art or a peril these days. When he was growing up, his mother didn’t read much. She was always too tired. She worked at a clothing store, and his dad drove a bread truck. There were four children. Nobody ever did anything especially outrageous or strange. Once, they went to the Memphis zoo, their only overnight family trip. In a petting-zoo area, a llama tried to hump his sister. Now his sister was living in Indiana, and his daddy was in Chicago with some woman.
Cobb noticed how people always seemed to be explaining themselves. If his stepfather was eating a hamburger, he’d immediately get defensive about cholesterol, even though no one had commented on it. Cobb never felt he had to explain himself. He was always just himself. But he was beginning to think there was a screwy little note, like a wormhole, in that attitude of his. He had a sweatshirt that said “PADUCAH, THE FLAT SQUIRREL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.” Lynnette was giving him a terrible time about it. The sweatshirt showed a flattened squirrel. It wasn’t realistic, with fur and eyes and a fluffy tail or anything; it was just a black abstract shape.
“It’s in extremely bad taste,” Lynnette said. “I can’t even stand to mash a bug. So I can’t begin to laugh at a steamrollered creature.”
It was the first thing that had really come between them, so he apologized and stopped wearing the sweatshirt. The shirt was just stating a fact, though. Driving down Broadway one day in the fall, Cobb counted three dead squirrels in three blocks. It was all those enormous oak trees.
“You’re sweet,” Lynnette said, forgiving him. “But sometimes, Cobb, you just don’t think.”
The incident made him wonder. It startled him that he had done something others would instantly consider so thoughtless. He wondered how much of his behavior was like that, how much Lynnette would discover about him that was questionable. He felt defenseless, in the dark. He didn’t know how serious she was about getting married. She told him she couldn’t ask her folks to throw a big wedding. It would make them nervous, she said. He figured they couldn’t afford it, so he didn’t press her. She never asked for much from him, but her reaction to the sweatshirt seemed blown out of proportion. He did not tell her he’d been out rabbit hunting a few times with his brother George.
Cobb saw a strange scene in the Wal-Mart. He had gone in to buy rubber boots to wear hunting on George’s property, which was certain to be muddy after the recent thaw. Cobb was trying to find a pair of size-9 boots when he noticed one of the clerks, a teenager, calling to a couple over in the housewares aisle. “I’ve got something to tell y’all,” she said. The boy and girl came over. They were about the same age as the clerk and were dressed alike in flannel shirts and new jeans. The clerk had on a pale-blue sweater and jeans and pink basketball shoes. She wore a work smock, unbuttoned, over her sweater.
“Well, we got married,” she said in a flat tone, holding her hand up to show them her ring.
“I thought y’all were going to wait,” said the girl, fiddling with a package of cassette tapes she was holding.
“Yeah, we got tired of waiting and we were setting around and Kevin said why not, this weekend’s as good as any, so we just went ahead and did it.”
“Kevin never could stand to wait around,” said the boy, smiling faintly.
His girlfriend asked, “Did y’all go anywhere?”
“Just to the lake. We stayed all night in one of those motels.” She pushed and pulled at her ring awkwardly, as if she was trying to think of something interesting to say about the trip. The boy and girl said they were going to Soul Night at Skate City, even though it was always so crowded. Another explanation, Cobb realized. They drifted off, the girl tugging at the boy’s belt loop.
Cobb momentarily forgot what he had come for. His eyes roamed the store. A bargain table of snow boots, a table of tube socks. His mother and the CPA had been to Gatlinburg, where they saw tube socks spun in a sock store. She said it was fascinating. At a museum there, she saw a violin made from a ham can. Cobb was confused. Why weren’t these three young people excited and happy? Why would anybody go all the way to Gatlinburg to see how tube socks were made?
George’s place used to be in the country, but now a subdivision was working its way out in his direction and a nearby radio transmitter loomed skyward. When Cobb arrived, the dog, Ruffy, greeted him lazily from a sunny spot on the deck George had built onto the back of his house. Above a patch of grass beside a stump, a wind sock shaped like a goose was bobbing realistically, puffed with wind.
“Hey, Cobb,” said George, opening the back door. “That thing fooled you, didn’t it?” He laughed uproariously.
George worked a swing shift and didn’t have to go in till four. His wife, Ceci, was at work, waitressing at the Cracker Barrel. Toys and clothes and dirty dishes were strewn about. Cobb stepped around a large aluminum turkey-roasting pan caked with grease.
After George put on his boots and jacket and located a box of shotgun shells, they headed through the fields back to a pond where George had set some muskrat traps. It was a biting, damp day. Cobb’s new boots were too roomy inside, and the chill penetrated the rubber. Tube socks, he thought.
“I hate winter,” George said. “I sure will be glad when it warms up.”
Cobb said, “I like it O.K. I like all weather.”
“You would.”
“I like not knowing what it’s going to be. Even when they say what it’s going to be, you’re still not sure.”
“You ain’t changed a bit, Cobb. I thought you were getting serious about that Johnson girl. I thought you were ready to settle down.”
“What does that mean? Settle down?”
George just laughed at Cobb. George was nine years older, and he had always treated him like a child.
“If you’re going to get married, my advice is not to expect too much,” George said. “It’s give-and-take. As long as you understand that, maybe you won’t screw it up.”
“What makes you think I might screw it up?”
George whooped loudly. “My God, Cobb, you could fuck up an anvil.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
A car horn sounded in the direction of George’s house. “Hell. There she is, home early, wanting me to go after that shoulder we had barbecued at It’s the Pits. Well, she can wait till we check these traps.”
There was nothing in the traps. One of them had been sprung, apparently by a falling twig. Cobb felt glad. He thought he would tell Lynnette how he felt. Then he wondered if he was trying too hard to please her.
George said, “I was half expecting to catch a coyote.”
“I thought coyotes lived out West.” George pronounced “coyote” like “high oat,” but Cobb pronounced the e. He didn’t know which was right.
“They’re moving this way,” George said. “A fellow down the street shot one, and there was one killed up on the highway. I haven’t seen any, but when an ambulance goes on, they howl
. I’ve heard ’em.” George formed his lips in a circle and howled a high “woo-woo” sound that gave Cobb chill bumps.
Cobb couldn’t stop thinking about the teenage bride at the Wal-Mart. He invented some explanations for the behavior of those three teenagers: Maybe the girl wasn’t great friends with the couple and so she was shy about telling them her news. Or maybe the guy was her former boyfriend and so she felt awkward telling about her marriage. Cobb remembered the smock she was wearing and the gray-green color of the cheap boots lined up on the wall behind her. When he told Lynnette about the girl and how empty she had seemed, Lynnette said, “She probably doesn’t get enough exercise. Teenagers are in notoriously bad shape. All that junk food.”
Lynnette was never still. She did warm-up and cool-down stretches. Even talking, she used her whole body. She was always ready to make love, even after the late movie on TV. At his apartment that weekend, they watched The Tomb of Ligeia. She wanted to make love during the scary parts.
It was almost one in the morning when the movie ended. She got up and brought yogurt back from the refrigerator—blueberry for him, strawberry for her. He liked to watch her eat yogurt. He shook his carton up until the yogurt was mixed and liquefied enough to drink, but she ate hers carefully—plunging her spoon into the cup vertically, all the way to the bottom, then bringing it up coated with plain yogurt and a bit of the fruit at the tip. He liked to watch her lick the spoon. George would probably say that this was a pleasure that wouldn’t last, but Cobb felt he could watch Lynnette eat yogurt every day of their lives. There would be infinite variety in her actions.
Each of them seemed to have an off-limits area, a place they were afraid to reveal. He couldn’t explain to her what it felt like to get up before dawn to go deer hunting—to feel for his clothes in the dark, to fortify himself with hot oats and black coffee, and then to plunge out in the cold, quiet morning, crunching frost with his hard boots. Hardly daring to breathe, he crouched in the blind, listening for a telltale snort and quiver, leaves rustling, a blur of white in the growing dawn, then a sudden clatter of hooves and a flash of joy.
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