Coyote Girl Chapter One

By F. Ellsworth Lockwood


(Draft of a story in progress)
"I am a virgin." She giggled as she said it. "The holy thing that is in me is of the Great Coyote Spirit."

Leaning forward, the counselor looked straight into Mary's eyes. Unnerved by the counselor's intensity, the girl stopped talking. Serious now, her face puckered. Her lips quivered. A little sob escaped, then her shoulders began to shake, and tears streamed down her cheeks, the salty drops falling from the tip of her chin.

Counselor Kerrington waited. After a bit, Mary sat up straight, drying her cheeks with the back of her hand. "Ok ... So I am not a virgin. The baby is still ... holy. Isn't it?" She hesitated, then went on, "Out in the graveyard, I even had this vision ... A great female coyote ..."


The school psychologist peered over the top of her glasses then, and the girl's voice petered out.

"The graveyard. You mean the cemetery?" The girl stiffened but nodded yes. "Ok, Mary, why don't you tell me about the cemetery?" The girl did not respond. "You don't want to talk about the graveyard, as you called it. Fine. Let's talk mothers and babies."

Kerrington had first counseled Mary a year earlier ... for fighting. "She is just a confused little girl," Dr. Kerrington had advised an interdisciplinary team of educators.

Mary's teacher, shoving the conference table as she rose, had jumped to her feet and screamed, "Little girl; she's an animal!" Shocked, Kerrington caught her breath and stared, but her voice remained neutral: "Let's remember that we are professionals and, please, refrain from name calling."

Animal or not, however, Mary had attacked a boy in the hallway. Tore his shirt, scratched his face, left bloody stripes from forehead to throat. She then shoved him against the lockers, banged his head into a metal locker door, and smashed his eye against the latch. Teachers came running just in time to see the boy holding his hand over an eye. "I can't see!" Hysterical then, he swung blindly. By the time the teachers could intervene, blood had spattered the walls and the fight had gone to the floor. They pulled her off him, still scratching, biting, and pulling his hair.

She was expelled for the remainder of the semester, of course. Before reentering school, Mary had undergone psychological evaluations with Counselor Kerrington. Depression. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to physical and mental abuse at the hand of her stepfather and neglect on the part of her mother. Added to that, she was diagnosed with attention Deficit Disorder. A triple whammy. Now, a year later, the name on the folder was Mary Davidson Wolfe. Her mother had remarried, but it was the same girl; Mary was again or, more likely, still in trouble. Wanda glanced through Mary's Manila folder. Mary had missed her period.

"Abortions. More children raising children. Cycles of poverty. When does it stop?" Twenty years earlier, Wanda had been the chipper new counselor with an impetuous smile and unlimited optimism, but years of dealing with troubled youth, angry parents, and demanding administrators had sobered her outlook. Her expectations had lowered. "I have become a fossil now," she told herself. Tired. Old. Burned out. Deadwood. "Stop that!" she said to herself aloud. "Stop that right now." She forced herself to quit the self-pity party. She also decided from here on to avoid the teachers' lunchroom ... and the gossip and negative talk which it generated.

Dr. Kerrington then donned the counselor persona and browsed through Mary's file: Seldom smiles. Breaks out in tears for no apparent reason. Panic attacks.

Just then, Mary appeared in the door, which Kerrington always left intentionally open.

"Hello Mary, nice to see you. I see from the files that you have gone a whole year with no more referrals. And ... You have been avoiding fights. That is real progress. What's up?"

From the school records, Kerrington knew what was up, of course. The cycle was what was up -- begin with poverty, add neglect, pour on abuse and combine with a poor diet, and the rest follows: low self-esteem, rebellion, substance abuse, unprotected teen sex, teen pregnancy, brain damaged fetuses or sexually transmitted diseases, single motherhood, and back to poverty again.

The sullen, defiant face that entered Wanda's office wore a pout all right, yet the girl's resolve would both surprise and impress Wanda. "I am going to have this baby." The voice was firm, determined. Defiant even. When the session was over, Wanda stood and held out her hand. "Good luck." Mary hesitated but reached out and they shook hands. "Mary, you will have to think differently now. You must become an adult. You are going to be a mother."
***

Months later, at midnight, Wanda Kerrington could not sleep. "It's nothing. Just another girl in trouble," the 43-year old school counselor had told her husband. "Can't go into it. Confidentiality laws." Wanda, AKA, Doctor Kerrington, looked out her bedroom window just as a shower of shooting stars streamed across the sky, and she thought about Mary. Pregnant at 14, experimenting with illegal drugs, popping hallucinogenic mushrooms, hanging out with the wrong crowd, Mary seemed typical of the girls that Wanda counseled, yet Mary was somehow ... different. Wanda had returned to bed, turned off the light. "Perhaps a complete psychological analysis ..." and she had at last fallen asleep.

Across town in her own bedroom, Mary also had lain awake. She had felt buoyant all evening, and not from drugs either. Since the doctor's report, she had abstained from recreational drugs. Self-medicating, the doctor had called it. "Stop self medicating immediately." And she had. Stopped. "And no more wild mushrooms."

"OK. No more 'shrooms then," Mary had consented. "But I am not having an abortion. I don't care what you or my parents say about that." She became shrill, almost hysterical, "I won't!" And she had carried the child. She could feel it now, alive, moving within her own body, felt herself loving it, longing to see it, to hold it, to feed it, to wrap it in blankets. To talk to it. To teach it. "How are you going to provide for a child?" Mary's mother had screamed. "You are just a child yourself!"

Somehow, she would make it, she knew. She had to. The first time she had felt the child moving in her womb, Mary's spirit had soared, as if she were in imaginary flight, as if she were feeling the freedom of an invisible bird that had flown into her heart and back out again. It was as if the bird were taking her in flight, releasing her from a dark prison cell, or from some cage in which she had been trapped since birth. That magical mourning dove, arriving from beyond planets, stars, galaxies and the universe, had led her through the imaginary door, and now she knew she would never return. Could never be stuffed back inside the box from which she had sprung.

Mary had always been hyper imaginative. "A dreamer," her mother had said. Now she imagined that the "dove" within her glowed with a soft warmth like the orange coals on a midnight hearth. Her powerful imagination had created a reality that only she knew, that only she could comprehend; she felt a pair of tiny dove wings softly fluttering against the beating motions of her own heart. The effect was to heighten the sense of the vague Presence Within that Mary had also imagined, had conjured so many times in the past. The Presence was now so close that Mary was constantly aware of it. In the early mornings it often felt as if the Presence descended upon her, then lifted from her ascending and descending, over and over, fanning her with the invisible beat of heavenly wings.

At night as well, as she drifted off to sleep she had felt herself rising into moonlit sky to join the Presence in a cloud of stars. During quiet moments, she had begun to deliberately breathe in the fragrance of this Presence, her soul welcoming it like a suffocating man welcomes a breath of fresh air. And sometimes the Presence had seemed to rise like a shadow from the deep, as if from an ocean floor, from far beneath the surface of the seas of her consciousness. At times the Presence came as a longing, like a pining for a lost loved one, like a childhood dream half forgotten, but lingering on the edges of her consciousness.

Whatever the Presence was, it just now had seemed to have emitted a mournful wail, like a sound, yet it was not sound. The "sound" could not have been detected with human ears. It was not heard, rather, it was felt. Felt! And the feeling had induced a spiritual energy resembling the howl of a lone coyote, ever so lost, yet always at home everywhere.

Mary had not been not the first to observe, to feel, such a Presence, Uncle John had said. Modern males often seem oblivious to the Voice or the Presence or whatever it is, but every mother instinctively knows the Voice within, he said. Mary's ancestors had listened to the inaudible sounds of it and had created myths and legends and stories of a Great Spirit, of spirit animals and of dream people that inhabited the skies and visited tribes to help them in times of draught, war, want or illness.

People from many cultures had created myths about the Presence. In Egypt, Palestine, India, China, in every time and place where the sun and moon and stars could be seen, the Voice had been there too, and each tribe, tongue and nation had invented its own stories to explain the Voice.

Uncle John's Ignorant and Unlearned Explanations

Before she was twelve years old, Mary had often turned to her Uncle John to help her clarify her experiences. Sometimes his explanations confused her, though usually they merely amused her. Rather than advice, it was his attention she had craved; she loved him deeply. Ever ready to heap metaphor upon symbol upon hyperbole, Uncle John always provided creative, if not insightful, explanations for Mary's experiences.

Recently, however, ever since her first period came and she entered into "womanhood," an inaudible "sound" had disturbed Mary's dreams, filled her nights with an uncomfortable hum.

The annoying "sound," which was not really a sound at all, felt like wet sand at the bottom of the lake which was her soul; it felt rather like the tailings, the remnants after God had mined Universe in search of material from which to make the two Great Spirits, Male and Female. The sound droned on like the beating of waves, like the fathomless flowing of a river, the surface of which was so far above her that no light could ever possibly penetrate to her darkness.
Perhaps the sound had always existed. Perhaps the sound was only the background noise of creation.

As a teenager, Mary no longer consulted Uncle John. Often she wished he would just shut up. One night when he came in drunk he had put his arms around her and put his stinking alcoholic lips to hers. That was the night when anger had overcome her fear, and she had yelled scratched his face. Shut your stinking big mouth, Uncle John," she had screamed. Surprised, he had released her, but his voice had only paused a few short seconds before he went on with his ranting.

He spun and spun his awful stories while Mary held her ears and ran from the room.

In the darkness of her room she could still hear his voice. According to his drunken tale, Mary in her pregnancy had reached the stage of quickening, when something had disturbed certain energy fields in that great vacuum we call space. The drama had begun light years earlier as something akin to what humans refer to as "destiny" or "fate." It began in a place, yet, it was not a place. It originated in something like a time, yet it was not time. It began as a tiny whisper in the great void but was destined to grow to a roar. Much smaller in its immaculate conception than fragments of atoms, the energy disturbances "moved," though moved is not the correct word either, for there was nothing to move. No particles, no matter, nothing having mass, only that phenomenon that some humans had begun errantly, and erringly, to call "pure energy."

Nor was "disturbance" the correct word for what happened either, for a disturbance implies something out of order, something wrong or against the natural order. Soon to be viewed by humans as unnatural, the sound was only as unnatural as matter itself. Anyhow, this sound, or vibration, or disturbance, Presence, was moving but not moving; disturbing, yet soothing all disturbances. Perceived as totally wrong, it was, in fact, perfectly right. This particle, which had consisted of no particulate matter, had begun to move, to grow, to create, to germinate into something much bigger than all of that which some humans would come to call "the Universe." This little disturbance, this troubling of the cosmic "water" of infinity began to resemble something like an invisible stream of living water; it grew and grew and grew until all the universe was permeated with its essence.

But suddenly the Presence had gone, dissipated into the womb of nothingness. Sucked back up into the vacuum of infinity, it left only the Silence. Still, the fragrance of the Presence lingered, and everyone, not only the humans, but all of the animals too, the coyotes in the fields, the foxes in their dens, the birds in their nests, could smell the aroma which the Presence had left behind, like the smell of honeysuckle in bloom. And all would wonder, "From whence comes that lovely fragrance?" The fragrance itself had scattered among the stars, drifted with the clouds, fallen with the rain and risen again, died each winter and risen again each spring.

Soon humans were telling each other, the Presence will return. The trumpet will Sound and the Presence will come again and will fill all the earth with his glory. The legends became so popular, folks now asserted that the whole world of living and non living things had come to live in anticipation of the return of the great Presence.

Yet not all looked forward to the return of Presence. There were skeptics. There were those who called the Fragrance "pollution." Still others denied the Presence had ever existed, other than in people's minds. Great, intellectual scholars were called in to study the phenomenon and they came up with mathematical formulae which convincingly demonstrated that the Fragrance was a physical impossibility, and that, even had there been a Fragrance, it was not necessary to postulate a Presence in order to explain it. And some said the Presence was evil, and those who experimented with it would lose their minds, would become insane, or would become demon possessed.

Such was the state of the world when Coyote Boy first stirred within Mary's womb. On the one side, all the great spirits were hoping, longing for the Presence. On the opposite side, skeptics were rising. The world had divided into two opposing camps: Skeptics and believers. "The Great Presence will come again," the believers said. But then artists drew pictures and painted paintings of what the Presence must be like. Musicians composed great orchestrations having great, swelling movements intended to inspire people to appreciate the Presence. Architects designed buildings and even entire cities dedicated to the Presence. And each had a different idea of the Presence. And along with all of this activity, there developed numerous myths and legends about how the Presence would some day reappear. And then the prophets came. They came in droves, like great hordes of ants, the prophets swarmed over the earth, devouring all in their paths. But the prophets were not in agreement with each other.

The Presence would arrive like a cloud of Shekina glory in the sky, some prophets said. As the female counterpart of a male God who would be restless until He found himself complete in Her. No, others claimed, the Presence would appear, not as Shekina light, rather as a Great Darkness that would cover all the land with Sorrow. Some said the Arrival would begin with a tempest at sea, others with a hurricane or an earthquake that would devastate the earth. The Coming would originate in a dust storm out in the desert or in a snow flurry on certain mountain top, or with floods in the valleys. It would sneak up quietly, like a thief in the night. No, it would blare its way in dramatically, with a blast of heavenly trumpets.

It would be preceded by cataclysm: a devastating tsunami, the lunging motions of tectonic plates far beneath the surface in the deepest of seas. Or it would be introduced by aliens arriving in space ships, traveling millions of light miles from other universes. It would come just in time and save the world from destruction. It would come to judge and destroy the world and bring about a new heavens and a new earth. The earth would turn to a block of ice. The elements would melt with a fervent fire.
So the earth was divided of opinion, and divided again, and again, and again. And the peoples of the earth became very fond of their opinions, and in their zeal they began to kill each other. War followed war until a third of the earth's income was spent eradicating the infidels of the opposing viewpoints, all according to the most unreliable source in all the world -- Uncle John. Mary fell asleep crying, here heart now filled with loathing for her uncle and his tobacco and his whiskey and his awful tales.

Still, John continued: As a matter of self defense, the more technologically advanced tribes would develop great smart weapons that could look inside the homes and observe the intimate details of the occupants. They could see if they were worshipping false gods and play the proof back on televisions in court. Those who were captured and convicted would be thrown into jail indefinitely, beheaded, burned on crosses, drowned, or thrown into a valley of fire and molten rock where the armies burned off excess rocket fuels, natural gas from the earth's few remaining oil wells, and methane from digesters which would cover one third of the inhabitable land and which would process the earth's bio-waste, all the bi-products of human and animal digestive systems. The government would name the lake of fire "Natural Organic Waste Accelerator Y" , or NOW-AY, Uncle John claimed, but the people living near the inferno would refer to it as NO-WAY, or simply "Hell."

"Nonsense," Josh's grandmother Elizabeth said. "Your Uncle John should get a job and quit smoking those funny weeds in his pipe. Then he would tell you a different story."

John didn't care what Grandma said. He just kept talking. Between the warfare and the stench from the burning bodies, everyone would run air purifiers while staying indoors. "They will have to wear respirators and gas masks when working or playing outdoors."

Having grown up listening to such stories, Mary was pondering them in her heart when something very strange happened. It was the birth of the Coyote Boy.

End of Chapter One.

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Dear Readers: If you would like to read more, please tell me so in "comments." I would love to hear from you.
Also I would enjoy hearing from you about why you think the characters may have acted as they did.
What do you think will happen next?
What do you hope will happen next?
What do you hope will not happen next?
Which characters do you like and why?
Are there any you dislike, and why?
Background Information Sought

I am seeking background information that would help me in writing the rest of the story.

• If you are a psychologist specializing in troubled youth like Mary, and what makes them tick, talk to me.
• If you are a specialist in myth and folklore, please talk to me.
• If you understand why a guy would talk, act, think and behave like 'Uncle John," please talk to me.