folkloristics
In one story, Coyote is waiting for his flight from Boston to LA. He’s sitting in the airport, watching one of the televisions they have everywhere, and he sees one of those advertisements they’re always playing for amazing destinations, Aruba, how much nicer it is, all of that, and Coyote wishes he had a ticket to one of those places. Coyote is always wishing things like that. Coyote is always hungry.
When I asked Coyote to help me collect all the different versions of the story, he laughed. It had nothing to do with me. He had no choice. He can’t not laugh any more than he can not be hungry; it was only for the rabbit-meat I’d brought in my satchel that he’d been willing to talk to me at all.
But anyways, the part that’s common to every version is that he wants to go to Aruba, and of course Coyote doesn’t have the money to go to Aruba because the government valued his land as nearly worthless before taking it and cutting him a check; he sleeps in a tent behind a fro-yo shop– that’s where I found him. The best he can afford is a flight to LA to visit his son. So what does he do?
What he does is he sits, and he thinks about it, and he thinks about it, and then he uses his magic to shift his shape into a lovely airline-stewardess. In most versions of the story, Coyote manages to transform all of his body but his tail, his ears, and the circles under his eyes, so that the children have something to imagine and laugh at as the storyteller describes him stuffing the tail into the skirt so that no one will see it, hiding the ears under one of those little stewardess-caps, and just leaving the eyes as they are and pretending it’s bad makeup– the parents usually laugh at that one, especially the parents with teenagers.
Coyote goes sauntering up to the desk with the flights to Aruba and says “Oh, sorry, I’m supposed to be working this flight– Sheila and I switched shifts, didn’t she tell you?”
There’s no one who was supposed to be working the flight whose name was “Sheila”, of course, or at least probably not, but this is Coyote and this is a story, and it’s not time for him to lose yet so the woman working the desk nods and says “Here, go on through, they’re about to take off.”
The next ten minutes or so of the story are spent making the children laugh some more, talking about the flight, and Coyote trying to do the job of an airline-stewardess, but obviously he’s very bad at it. He keeps eating the fancy meals he’s supposed to be bringing to the first-class passengers, because he’s always hungry; he eats what he finds. He keeps getting distracted by the in-flight-movies and pausing to watch them over people’s shoulders and complain about how bad the acting is. His ears and tail keep slipping out from where he’s hidden them, and he has to keep tucking them away again before anybody notices. It’s great stuff. But really the point of the story is after he’s landed in Aruba, and he helps all the passengers get their luggage out of the overhead bins– more hijinks, naturally– and then there he is in paradise. He shapeshifts back into his usual self, except he doesn’t quite transform back completely at first, just like before, and now he’s a regular coyote with a pair of large human breasts, and the storyteller acts out that bit and the children are just rolling on the floor, faces wet and red with laughter.
But there he is in Aruba. And he’s still got no money. And everything is so expensive. So he’s just as helpless and hungry as before, but in a beautiful place.
In one version of the story, the point is that it doesn’t matter where you run away to, your problems will always be your problems. In another version of the story, the point is that your problems will always be your problems, there’s no changing that, and so you might as well find ways to be happy, nice things to look at, warm breezes to feel while you face your life. There’s another version too where the point is that happiness isn’t free anymore. The world has become corrupted, even its most beautiful places. Especially its most beautiful places.
Those are just a few of the versions. There are much more out there than that. There are more versions of every story than one person alone could ever hope to count, much less find and categorize. But Coyote isn’t a person at all, no. He is a wretched, gorgeous thing, he is a cubist painting of himself. His ribs are like the buttresses of a cathedral. His teeth are the rusty fan-blades across the yawning intake of his turbojet mouth. His eyes are lamplights, burning pitchballs. He doesn’t have any organs at all except for his lungs so he can pant and yip, and his stomach so that he can be hungry. He wouldn’t be Coyote if he wasn’t hungry. Aside from those, nothing– his abdomen is just a lumpen rope from his shoulders to his hips, glazed with patchy fur. I tossed him a second strip of meat and in return, he went leaping all around, wrestling all the different versions to the dirt and ripping out their throats with his claws. He was careful, though, not to tear their wings or any of the other pretty bits; he left them perfect and beautiful for me to pin row by row in my anthology while he sat off to the side finishing the last of the rabbit.
The meat was soggy and rotten. But Coyote eats what he finds.
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