The coyote panted.
"You'd realize I'm a very dangerous fellow." Gray chewed the jerky. A half pound of the cured beef remained in his hand.
The coyote's snout was sharp and its ears restless. Teeth gleamed like pearls.
"The reason I don't like coyotes," Gray explained to the coyote, "is that if I had a heart attack right now — hypothetically, you understand — and were to roll over dead on the ground, you'd be over here in two seconds, ripping hunks of flesh from my corpse, our new friendship be damned."
The coyote ducked its head at some sound only it heard, and in doing so appeared to be agreeing with Gray.
"My friend Pete Coates tells a joke you'd appreciate. He said that one time he dated a woman so ugly he had to do the coyote trick. I asked Pete, 'What's the coyote trick?' Pete said that when he woke up the next morning with this woman in his arms he chewed off his arm rather than wake her up."
The coyote waited. Gray's bandaged calf ached where he had stitched the palm-sized flap of skin and muscle back to his leg with a needle and thread from his mother's sewing kit.
"I didn't think it was funny either." Gray paused, then said, "When I was on a mission in Vietnam I would be so in tune with the terrain that I would merge with it. I'd become a part of the soil and trees and bush. The enemy couldn't see me because I wasn't there to be seen. I was absorbed by the terrain. Are you listening?"
The coyote watched.
Gray glanced at the remaining beef jerky. When he held it out to one side as far as he could the animal's eyes followed it. "Just as I thought. You aren't listening. But I do admire undisguised greed. You want this meat so bad you are willing to reveal yourself to me, and that means you're mighty hungry. And this is truly superior beef jerky. Too bad for you."
Gray took another bite, gnawing it off with his teeth, smacking his lips for the coyote's benefit. "I'd go into enemy territory, entirely assimilated by the ground I was walking on. The field seemed to do my thinking for me, guiding me and warning me. I was so plugged into the bush that I lost my separate identity. I shared an awareness with the ground and all that was on it. If I were a hippie, I'd call it sharing my consciousness with the earth, but snipers generally aren't hippies. No surprise there, I suppose." Gray hesitated. "Is this too Zen for a coyote?"
The coyote ran its tongue along its black lips.
"That's what I'm out here doing now," Gray explained, his voice suddenly uneven. "I'm trying to get these goddamn trees and bushes to take over, to absorb some of what I'm feeling, to take some of it off me, goddamnit."
The animal sank to its belly, its eyes glowing like ice.
"But it's not working." Tears glistened in Gray's eyes.
Gray worked ferociously on the jerky, trying to hide his emotions from the coyote. The animal waited.
After a moment Gray could continue. "Here's another tactic I'm trying while you watch me. A sniper learns that much of what he sees is illusion." He held up his palm as if the animal was about to argue. "It's true. For example, distances are usually overestimated when the target is lying down, like you are. The same is true when the enemy can't be seen clearly against the background. And it's also true when the target is seen over broken ground. In all these instances the enemy is closer than you think, and so you generally become dead. Do you know why? Because your bullet soars over the enemy's head, alerting him to your presence, and he fires before you can get another round in the chamber."
Gray bit off a small piece of jerky. "The mind has performed a deadly slight. I'm trying to do something like that now, something more benign, and so, you'd think, more simple. An easy trick. All I want is to hide a memory, a little sleight of hand with a recollection." He chewed. "But it's not working either."
The coyote bounced up to sitting. It yipped once and bowed its head. The eyes were still fixed on Gray.
"Anguish and desperation aren't going to be fooled, are they?"
Gray rose to one knee. The animal was instantly alert, rising fully, ready to bolt, its tail down.
"This is the absolute nadir of my existence," Gray said. "Talking to a coyote."
Gray tossed the remaining beef jerky across the stream. It landed five feet from the coyote. The animal leaped high and dove at the jerky, as it does when it hears a mouse beneath the snow. The jerky was the size of a hand. The coyote seized the meat with its teeth, shook it once to make sure it was dead, then tilted its head back and swallowed it whole, rapidly shaking its entire body as it urged the meat down its throat. The coyote licked its mouth again, then without another glance at the human it loped away, disappearing in the underbrush.
Gray's hands burned as he gingerly lifted the rifle and backpack. He began walking downstream toward the cabin. "Whining to a coyote. The absolute nadir."
CHAPTER TEN
The stolen station wagon began to fail after three hundred miles. With all its miles and years, it could not tolerate hour after hour of freeway driving. First to go was the air conditioner. Then a left rear retread blew away and was replaced by a threadbare spare. Then the rods began to knock ominously. But only when an idiot light came on did Nikolai Trusov pull off the highway to raise the hood. The fan belt had disappeared. The car needed a replacement. He would face less risk in finding a new belt than in stealing a new car.
He drove off the freeway and passed through a worn and grimy section of Cleveland, full of warehouses and light industry and potholes. It was nearing one in the morning. Tractor trailers and delivery trucks were on their night runs, but otherwise the streets were empty. Most businesses — the metal fabricators, sand and gravel lots, and oil distributors — were closed. The few open gas stations Trusov could find had minimarts rather than service bays. Street lamps cast silver cones of light on the roads.
He turned onto Center Street. A flatbed truck carrying I-beams was parked at the side of the road. The truck's mud guard had the inscription "Show Me Your Tits." On the corner was a freight company with coils of razor wire atop its security fences. He passed Lincoln Towing, a Mayflower Moving and Storage, and the Thor Gasket Company.
At the end of the block was a service station. The sign identified it as Hal's Independent Service, and the fluorescent lights shining down on the service island announced the station was open. The two service bay doors were closed, but the office door was open and lights were on in the office. Leafing through a magazine, an attendant was sitting in a chair, his feet propped up on a desk. The station wagon drove onto Hal's lot and up to a gas pump. The bell rang in the office.
Hal's Independent had seen more prosperous days. The fuel pumps were old models, with money and gallon totalizers that rolled on a reel rather than with digital readouts. The metal skirt below the dial face was splotched with grease and dirt. The panels above the dials carried no advertising and instead were marred by bits of old adhesive that had once held brand-name placards in place. The rubber fender guards around the nozzle were tattered. The station had once been painted white, but stains and smog and sun fading had stippled the building in brown and yellow. Plywood covered the window openings of the service bay doors. A sign at the corner of the building read "Rest Rooms Closed." Two black fifty-five-gallon drums were near the bay doors.
The attendant brought his head up when the station wagon arrived but continued with the magazine, a lurid publication called Gent, Home of the D Cup. He had a hand in his pants pocket and a cigarette in his mouth. He wore a Penzoil hat backwards on his head and a blue zippered sweatshirt open at the front. A book of matches and his Camels were in the pocket. Underneath the sweatshirt was a T-shirt that had imprinted on it "Nixon Was Cool." His face resembled a greyhound's, narrow and knobby with a weak chin. His ears had pendulous, sagging lobes. An empty Domino's Pizza box was on the desk near a manila envelope from the state patrol. Hal's Independent was still receiving mail even though Hal hadn't been to the station since his business went belly up. The attendant had opened the envelope and glanced at its contents, but it didn't have anything to interest him. The state patrol was always sending bulletins.