Coyote Boy Chapter One

By F. Ellsworth Lockwood

Crickets and frogs had resumed chirping. Joshua lay at the edge of the irrigation pond, and peered through stalks of tall, green wheat. In the darkness below, his mom and her crew had tired of their night's work; they leaned on shovels and wispered like grave robbers, though there was no one to overhear. None other than Josh, the boy who had hidden in the wheat field.

Josh's mom turned toward her pickup. She raised her shovel, poised to toss it into the back end. Her pickup. The former owner was dead now. Buried in the remote plot in the little known graveyard at the end of Old Cemetery Road, seven miles from town.


Mary tossed her shovel in the truck and it hit metal. Crashed the silence of the night and startled the other grave diggers. They jumped like thieves, though they had stolen nothing.

The voices of the frogs and crickets stopped. Stillness. Then someone laughed. "What are you so nervous about?" The voice was Ralph's. Mary had recruited Ralph to help with the digging. The grave diggers laughed and relaxed exaggeratedly now, leaning against their dented old pickup trucks. But they were not accustomed to grave digging, especially at night, and resumed standing in nervous silence.

The man whose name was Ralph struck a match and the yellow flame glared in the darkness. The stench of smoke burned Josh's nostrils. Josh saw the red, glowing dot and knew that Ralph had lit a cigarrette. They stood there, silent. Resting in peace. Unlike the man they had buried, Josh supposed.

The sky was starting to turn pink now, and while it had been easy for Josh to sneak into the pickup bed under cover of midnight darkness, he now wished he had thought about how he would get back inside without being seen. The sun would be rising fast. A goose honked loudly, startling Josh and sounding much closer than the edge of the pond where the goose had been bedded down for the night. At first Josh feared the goose noise would cause the diggers to look his way and discover him, but they ignored the sound as if they could not hear. Ignored too the splash of the bass that jumped near the pond's edge. Ignored the rattling of ducks' bills as they started the morning splashing and their foraging for slugs and leeches. Nature's daily ritual had begun. Life had begun in the pond. But Josh did not feel as if life had begun. He felt as if it had ended. Life would never be the same again. Would never be as good, or as bad again. The cycle was over, and he was glad. Relieved. And strangely, surprisingly, sad at the same time.

"Don't suppose we could have waited for daylight to do this job, Mary?" Ralph's voice again. Josh didn't like Ralph much more than he liked the dead man they had buried together. Ralph was a tall, stringy man, a farmer who never stopped working long enough to launder his cloths. He was always covered with grime, from morning til night, and sometimes when he went home, tired from a day on the tractor, he went straight to bed without even washing. Ralph was strong. Violent. When he walked in a bar there was bound to be a fight, and the fight would go to the floor quickly; he would see to that. Once on the floor it took him only seconds to find the right position, the lock on the leg or the lock on elbow. There would be the cry of pain. There would be pleading and he would wrest the joint jarring the victim with one last emphasis of pain before he let go. The victim might walk again or regain use of the arm, but the healing would take months.

The memories would never be erased. Ralph had lots of enemies, no real friends. Everyone feared him. Josh feared him. Nobody liked him. But Ralph did not care. The only one Ralph seemed to care about was Mary, yet Josh knew that even Mary was not treated well by Ralph. Josh kept his distance from Ralph.

Mary did not answer Ralph's question. She brushed the dirt off her jeans; as she did so, she felt the callouses catching on the seams of her pants. She looked at her palms as if soothsaying; nothing there to read but more hard work, she decided, then got into her truck. The battery was sluggish but the truck started with a muffled puff puffing sound and she jerked the floor shift into reverse. The truck lurched, hired diggers jumped out of the way.

She backed up, turned around, and sped off, bumping along the gravel road and leaving the others choking in a cloud of dust. In this desert, dust coated everything.

(To be continued.)