The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise

by Dan Gemeinhart

  Houses and businesses whizzed past me.

  The outdriving-a-cop-in-a-speeding-school-bus adrenaline drained slowly out of my body and a lump grew in my throat.

  That familiar, almost-forgotten-home feeling that the shapes of the hills had given me a few miles back returned with a vengeance on the streets of Poplin Springs. There was a white house with green shutters that I kinda remembered. I’d gone to a birthday party there, I think. Back when my mama was alive. And a little convenience store on the corner—I remembered walking there with Ava to buy Popsicles on a sweaty summer day. Back before she died. And out in front of the grocery store, there was still that plastic horse you could ride that’d buck and rock if you put a quarter in. In my mind I could still see Rose sitting on top of it, holding on tight and smiling huge, bright-eyed with the little-kid thrill of it. But that was when she was still my little sister. Before she became just a memory.

  Memory swirled around me, thick as campfire smoke, choking me and making my eyes burn.

  This was it.

  I was here.

  * * *

  My hands started to shake.

  For a second, just a second, I totally understood why Rodeo had never wanted to come back. But just for a second. Because right on the heels of that feeling, and even overlapping and mixed up in it, was the feeling of knowing that coming back was maybe the rightest thing I’d ever done.

  Because they were here. Memories swirled around me, as sweet and sad as a voice singing you to sleep at night.

  I loved them. I missed them. And I’d been missing them for way too long.

  I felt a tugging at my shoulder and realized that Salvador was saying something to me.

  I flicked off the radio. Without the music and the siren and the highway noise, the world was surprisingly still. Peaceful, even.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you know the way?”

  I blinked at him in the mirror. He was blurry. Come on, Coyote—everything was blurry.

  “Yeah,” I answered, then cleared the hoarseness out of my throat with a cough. “Yeah, I know the way.”

  I saw Salvador looking at me in the mirror and I looked away and cleared my throat again and Salvador didn’t say anything, but he kept his hand on my shoulder, just kept it sitting there in the quiet stillness of that bus.

  He’s a good one, that Salvador.

  Eventually the peace was broken by the sound of a siren coming up behind us fast. I wasn’t worried, though. Nothing was stopping me now. Salvador looked back to check on the cop, but he still left his hand on my shoulder. Gladys clopped up to stand beside me, and she nudged my leg gruffly with her nose until I dropped a hand from the wheel to pet her. Ivan weaved between her legs and hopped up onto my lap. He rubbed his nose against my elbow and then settled his body in close to mine.

  The road curved around a corner. And then it was there. Right in front of me.

  There were the trees. And some grass. A big clearing.

  And the machines. Big, yellow steel machines with treads and scoops and pistons and teeth. Some were parked, but some were moving, jerking and digging and scraping, kicking up dust. Workers tramped around among it all, wearing bright vests and hard hats and blue jeans and sunglasses. A pile of knocked-down trees sat off to one side.

  “There,” I said, or tried to, but it came out as almost a gasp, like I’d been punched in the stomach.

  They’d already started.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-TWO

  “Get as close as you can and then just park anywhere,” Salvador was saying, letting go of my shoulder and jumping to his feet. “Then just run. Go get it. Don’t let anyone stop you. I’ll take care of the cop.”

  I nodded numbly.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean be careful. That cop doesn’t know you. He thinks we’re crazy. Dangerous criminals, maybe. Just … keep your hands up and be careful.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll be careful.”

  There was a moment when I was almost paralyzed by all the madness I’d gotten myself into. A moment when I almost just kept driving, almost just cruised right by that torn-up park. It all just seemed like too much.

  I guess sometimes life does seem like too much, especially during the big moments. But usually you can dig inside yourself and find what you need. You can find what you need to grow into those big moments and make ’em yours.

  I saw my spot. A smashed-down patch of dirt that’d once been grass, just past a tore-up strip of gravel that had once been a sidewalk.

  “Here we go,” I said, and turned the wheel. We cut across the left lane of the road and bounced over the gravel, then came to a dusty skidding stop in the patch of dirt. Workers were pointing and shouting, and I saw one jogging over toward us. The siren got louder and pulled up right behind us.

  “Go!” Salvador shouted.

  I didn’t need him to tell me. But it helped.

  I didn’t even kill the engine. I yanked on the parking brake, scooped Ivan off onto the seat I jumped out of, jerked the door open, and bolted down the stairs.

  I hit the ground running.

  There was a little plastic orange construction-zone fence, but I jumped it no problem and sprinted through the worksite toward that back corner of the park I’d traveled thousands of miles to get to.

  This did not seem to be a popular move among the dudes working at the site. The kind of vague shouting and pointing turned into some pretty specific shouting and pointing once I cleared that little fence.

  Behind me, I heard some yelling that sounded sort of police-ish and risked a quick look over my shoulder. Sure enough, there was the cop car parked all sideways behind Yager. And there was the cop, walking with all sorts of angry, uptight body language toward Salvador, who was walking back toward the cop with both hands up high in the air. The cop didn’t have his gun out, thank the lord, but he did have one hand down on its grip sticking out of his holster. I couldn’t hear his words, but I could tell that Salvador was talking, and that he was angling himself to stand between the cop and me.

  God bless that boy.

  I looked forward again, and just in time, too. A beefy guy in a flannel shirt was lunging toward me, hands ready to grab. I veered to the side, dodging him, but just barely. He took a couple of halfhearted steps in pursuit, but his belly outweighed his ambition and I left him gasping and swearing.

  I bolted through where I was pretty sure there used to be a swing set and a slide but was now just a mess of dirt and holes and bulldozer tracks. I had some good memories about that swing set—memories of a mom’s hand on my back, pushing me high; of Rose learning to kick her pudgy toddler legs; of jumping-off contests with Ava when I felt like I was flying, but lost to her long legs every time—but it was too late for the swing set now, and I wasn’t here for it anyway.

  I cut around a bench and then zipped sharp around an idling front-end loader and then I had a straight shot toward the back corner, the wild corner, the overgrown corner … the wooded corner where on a sunny spring day five years ago I’d knelt with most of my family and buried some memories.

  But … it wasn’t there. And I don’t mean that just the box wasn’t there. None of it was there.

  There was no corner. There was no wild, there was no overgrown, there were no woods.

  My steps faltered, my stride slowed, but I kept on charging forward because my legs didn’t quite believe what my eyes were telling me.

  There was no memory corner. There was, off to the side, a stack of stripped down logs and a ragged pile of leaves and branches. And there was a big ditch clawed into the ground. And there was a giant mound of soil and dirt and rocks. And there was a big, rusty backhoe, this one being moved by a man inside, scraping the bottom of the ditch with its enormous steel scoop and then pivoting with a lurch and dumping the load on the top of the mound.

  “Hey, kid!”

  I heard the shout and saw the man running
my way on a diagonal. My brain was still catching up to the mess in front of me and what it meant, but I’d gone this far and wasn’t gonna stop now, so I added some juice to my legs, stretching out my stride and surging past the guy.

  I looked urgently around as I ran up to the scene of the crime, trying to size up where things were, where things had been, where things were supposed to be. I was out of breath, the sun was in my eyes, memories and desperation had their hands around my throat, and I was trying to compare the present torn-up, dusty wasteland with the green, wooded park of my five-year-old memories.

  What I’m saying is, I was having a real hard time.

  I squinted around, looking at the shapes of the hills, at the distance to the street, at the houses nearby, sizing up where I thought I was compared to where I’d knelt that day in memory. I tried to place the ghost of my mama, the ghosts of my sisters, where they had been—laughing, smiling, touching, breathing, alive. I tried to find them there amid the root-ripped trees, the gouged ground, the torn trench. I listened for where their echoes might still ring.

  That park was like my heart in some ways, I guess: scraped bare and scarred, alive mostly in memory.

  But I was pretty sure I knew where I was in it.

  I jumped down into the ditch.

  I was at the part where I started digging for memory.

  The ditch was waist-deep. The guy in the big metal digger was shouting at me, waving his arms, but his concern was no concern of mine. The machine fell silent and the guy stepped half out of it, yelling. But my ears weren’t listening for his anger. They were listening for my ghosts.

  I picked my way through the ditch, stumbling but not falling.

  I wasn’t seeing the dirt, the stones, the roots around me. I was seeing a tree-shaded clearing, and the shadows of two sisters, and a mama’s face. And I was hearing her words.

  “All right, now, everyone put a hand on the box. Yes, just like that, Rose.”

  I paused, turned, half-closed my eyes. I held the memory behind my eyelids, looked through it at the world around me, tried to find where my feet needed to be, where my hands needed to dig.

  “Perfect. Now repeat after me.” I could see the shared smiles we passed each other, the shining eyes. “I promise,” “I promise,” “as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister,” “as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister,” “to hold my mother, my daughters, my sisters in my heart,” “to hold my mother, my daughters, my sisters in my heart,” “and I promise to come back,” “and I promise to come back,” “to this very spot,” “to this very spot,” “to retrieve this secret box of memories,” “to retrieve this secret box of memories,” “ten years from today,” “ten years from today.” “Amen. The end,” “Amen. The end.”

  I breathed in, slow. Breathed out.

  “I came back,” I whispered to the dirt, to the memory, to the ghosts. To my mom and my sisters. “A little early, but I’m back. Promise kept.” I opened my eyes, looked around. “So where are you?”

  And there was no answer. And I almost, almost, had expected one. Come on, Coyote—ghosts aren’t real. Memories don’t talk.

  It was just me, standing in the dirt, alone.

  A gust of wind blew, spitting dust into my eyes. It brought with it the yells of the men, the sounds of a park being ripped out, the noise of the world going on with its business. And it almost, it almost, blew those memories away. I felt them, tugging loose from my heart’s fingers, like feathers.

  But, no. Heck no. Absolutely freaking not.

  A promise is a promise. And I’m the kind that keeps them.

  The rest of the memory played. Us lowering the little box into the hole we’d dug with a little spade, there between the roots. Covering it with dirt, then a big rock, then some leaves. Hiding our memories with care so they wouldn’t be stolen. Rose, screwing her face up at my mom, asking, “But what if we can’t find it, Mama?” And my mom putting on her playful serious face and answering, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll remember where it is.” And me nodding and smiling, saying, “I’ll remember!” and Mom winking at me, bending down to kiss my forehead while she wiped her dirty hands on her jeans. “There, see? Ella will find it. Ella will remember.”

  I rubbed the dust from my eyes. Clenched my jaw. Looked up the trench I was standing in. Looked down it the other way. Ella will remember. Took three steps farther along. Two more. Ella will remember. Stopped. My feet in the dirt. My eyes looking up, looking for the memories of trees. Finding them.

  “Here,” I whispered.

  Ella will remember.

  I was there. I was in the memory place. I was on the ground in the place between the trees, the place where sisters knelt with their mom and buried a treasure.

  But I was standing in a ditch that came up to my waist. We hadn’t buried the box that deep. Not even close. The hole hadn’t even been knee-deep, scratched out clumsily by kid muscles wielding a little spade.

  It had already been dug up.

  I looked at the backhoe operator, who was standing on his machine saying something to me, a look of pure pissed-off on his face.

  “Did you find something?” I asked him.

  He stopped whatever growling he was doing.

  “What?”

  “Did you find something? When you were digging. Right here where I’m standing.”

  He gave me a you’re-ruining-my-day scowl.

  “I found some rocks, kid. Now move it. I got—”

  “That’s it? You didn’t find anything else? Like a box?”

  “No, I didn’t find no box. Look, it’s a big shovel I got here. I could scoop up a microwave and not see it. Now you gotta—”

  “Where’s the dirt? Where’s the dirt you dug out from right here?”

  He gestured at the mound of dirt that towered over me at the ditch’s edge.

  “Where d’ya think?”

  I turned and looked up at the pile. It was well over my head. It would’ve been over my head even if I hadn’t been standing waist-deep in a hole.

  It was a lot of dirt, is what I’m saying.

  It didn’t matter. I mean, it didn’t matter at all, not one little bit.

  I dug into the bottom of the pile with both hands. With bare hands. I didn’t need gloves. I didn’t need a shovel. I didn’t need anything except to keep that promise.

  “Hey!” the guy hollered, and then followed it up with something else (likely about stopping or knocking it off or getting out of the way or some such), but I didn’t slow down and I didn’t stop and I didn’t turn to answer or explain.

  The dirt gave way before me. It tumbled down into the ditch at my feet, but more spilled from above to take its place and I kept clawing at the pile.

  I didn’t stop to catch my breath or rest my hands or flip off the surly shouter, didn’t pause for even a heartbeat until a pair of hands grabbed my shoulders and pinned my arms and then, strong but not in a mean way, spun me around.

  I thought I’d see that cop glaring down at me, but instead it was just some guy, a guy with scuffed-up boots and a few days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks. He was looking into my face, and he looked worried.

  “Hey,” he said, then said it again, “Hey. Hold on a sec.”

  I stood there in his grip, my breath coming in heaves.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I have to find it,” I said, and tried to shake loose.

  “Find what?”

  “There’s a box and we buried it and I have to find it,” I said in one breathless burst.

  “Hey!” he said again when I struggled to break free and turn around. “Listen. Sorry, kid, but if you buried it here, it’s gone. And you gotta leave, all right? This is a work zone. It ain’t safe.”

  I shook my head.

  “No. I have to find it.”

  “Well, you aren’t going to. Sorry. You’re gonna get out of this ditch and then get on home.” He grabbed me firm, his fingers around my wrist, and started to walk, pulling me wit
h him toward the end of the trench.

  I dug in my heels and wrenched my wrist free and when he turned to grab me again, I raised both my hands up out of his reach.

  “I have to find it!” I shouted, and I brought my fists down on his chest. He stepped back, taken by surprise, and I raised my fists again. I was almost ready to hit him again. Almost ready to hit and claw and scratch and kick and do whatever fighting I had to do, because what I was fighting for was worth fighting for.

  But then I remembered Rodeo. I remembered how he talked to folks. How he didn’t raise his voice, but talked soft. How he talked right into their eyes. Person to person. Always kindness, Coyote.

  Folks like that. They like being talked to like people. Like they matter.

  And at the end of the day, if you give them half a chance, people want to help other people. Most of ’em, anyway. They do.

  So I lowered my fists. And I gave myself—and him—two breaths to calm down. And I lowered my voice. And I looked that fella right in his eyes. I looked long enough and close enough that I saw their color, a yellowy brown flecked with bits of green. And I talked right into his eyes, my voice as human and gentle as Rodeo’s.

  “Please,” I said. “I have to find it. It’s important to me.”

  And that fella, he paused. I saw it. And it was the kind of pause I’d seen a hundred times before when Rodeo talked with his Rodeo eyes and his Rodeo voice and won someone over, when he made them pause and then listen and then get on his side.

  The man’s eyebrows that had been scrunched-down angry rose, just a bit. The hard line of his frown softened, just a tad. He looked at me. I looked right back.

  “Please,” I said again. “Help me.”

  The man blinked. And he took one good, deep breath.

  And then he said with a little shrug in his voice, “What kind of box is it?”

  And I didn’t smile because it wasn’t a smiling kind of moment.

  “It’s a metal box. About the size and shape of a shoebox. We buried it right here five years ago.”