David Denny, Cupertino, California
1
I heard her before I saw her. I heard the yips and the growls and, when the moon shone upon the dry grass on the hill behind my house, I heard her howl—a long, plaintive cry that rose and fell like a passing siren. I’m told that most coyotes move in packs, often a couple and a litter of cubs. But this one was as solitary as me.
The moon shone through the branches of the tall trees, setting the long grass aflame with a lavender fire. She howled one long cry, followed by a series of barks meant to claim the moon, the woods, the grassy hillside, my house, and me. The trees echoed with her terrible love. Even the grass shivered.
* * *
It had been a long, hot, lonely summer, that summer after my wife left me. The dryness that had cracked the soil had also leached all the moisture from my spirit, leaving me in a desert of self-pity. I spent most days indoors, reading and pacing. I might have taken up smoking and drinking: cigars and something bitter over ice. Instead I read books about grief. I became an expert in grief. I paced with my hands in my pockets and my slippers scuffing around the tile floors.
One day I sat on my back patio, reading. I must’ve dozed off. When I awoke it was dusk. I heard a rustle in the tall grass and saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Suddenly there she was, stalking a rabbit. I could see its ears twitching in the deep, tawny grass. Then, like a bolt, the coyote leapt and descended upon it. Grabbing its neck in her jaws, she whipped the body from side to side until it went limp. Then she dropped the rabbit and looked around. When she saw me, our eyes locked. She sat in the grass and devoured her prey.
* * *
Six months earlier there had been a shooter on campus at our neighborhood middle school. Before he was dropped by a sheriff’s bullet, he killed six children, most of them in the campus library. My wife’s best friend was the school librarian. She charged the shooter when he came through the door. He shot her in the face. Then he turned on the children, who were huddled between old wooden shelving units. He sprayed the room with bullets, took a minute to reload, then kicked open the side door, where the sheriff stood with his weapon drawn. Among the dead was our son.
My wife lost her son and her best friend on the same day. Later she would say that I died on that day, too, which was most certainly true. The melancholy that gripped me made me incapable of providing the comfort and support she needed. I will never blame her for leaving; it was by all accounts the right move. She now lives in another state, in another time and climatic zone. She also lives with another man. For none of these things can she be blamed. She left behind an empty shell of a husband and a house full of painful mementoes.
* * *
At night I sat out on the back patio and examined the sky. I live on the edge of a subdivision, and the other side of my back fence is that grassy hill. Above the hill, woods. Above the woods, sky.
It was under a gibbous moon that I heard her sing. It was a distinctly human song, a throaty lament that defies description. The language was unidentifiable, but the rise and fall of her keening syllables formed a haunting melody that scared and soothed me all at once.
* * *
I was standing at the window the next morning, watching the dawn’s light illuminating the big trees from top to bottom. It was eerily silent. Where had the lush songs of our morning birds gone?
She entered my field of vision, crossing the dry grass again, this time in pursuit of nothing. Her movements were elegant in their deliberation. Without hesitation she topped my redwood fence in a single leap, her front paws springing on the top rail and her rear paws boosting her down into my backyard. She stood in the center of the lawn. Then she moved about with caution, her nostrils flared and lifted, her ears stiff and focused.
She walked the perimeter of the yard. She twitched her tail toward the azalea bushes in each corner and left her scent. My yard was now her territory. Or part of her territory. The rest of it stretched, presumably, up the hill and into the woods. How far beyond I can’t say. According to recent research, suburban coyotes often mark and patrol a territory of ten square miles or more. Usually they live in families, but everywhere coyotes dwell there are solitaries that roam the boundaries of human development.
I gaped. I don’t know if she could see me standing on the other side of the glass. As I watched her move with slow intentionality around the yard, I admired her beauty. Her coat was light gray overall with cinnamon patches mixed in along her muzzle and forehead, her chest and flanks. Her ears were actively twitching and her golden eyes examined each bit of the yard. It occurred to me that she could detect the lingering odor of our cat, who now lived with my wife.
She yipped three times and lifted her chin. She howled long and low, a sound that welled up from the belly, resounded from torso to throat, and emerged through open jaws. With the ease and grace of an Olympic vaulter, she leapt the fence once again, barely touching the top rail, and bounded through the tall grass and into the freshly lit woods, leaving my gut heavy with fear, anticipation, and yearning.
2
One cloudy afternoon I took a walk over to the middle school. The classrooms had stood empty and silent all summer long. I peeked into the windows of my son’s former classroom. The chairs and desks were stacked against the wall. The janitor had polished the floors to a shiny clean gloss. The library was boarded up. Only the front office was lit, where the administrators planned for the new academic year.
The city and the school district and a host of local donors had installed a marble memorial on the front lawn with the etched names and embedded photos of the victims. There was talk early on about renaming the school after the librarian, my wife’s friend, but her family asked the district to establish an annual scholarship fund in her name instead.
There was a large outdoor service on the day the monument was dedicated, complete with the speeches of dignitaries, the prayers of the pious, and music by a local children’s choir. I watched it from a distance. My wife had already left town.
Once upon a time I was a high school history teacher, before the shots rang out in my son’s middle school, and elsewhere, at schools across the country, before our small family became one of the casualties, instead of merely one of the witnesses, in a strange nation that loved its weapons more than its children, and before we collapsed beneath a burden of grief far heavier than we could bear, before my own desiccation, my own death upon the cross of melancholia.
* * *
My front door remained bolted. I no longer answered the bell. Anyone who knew me came through the side gate and went to the kitchen door, or around to the back patio. But the only people who visited anymore were my brother and his wife. They dropped off two bags of groceries and sundries every Saturday. Sometimes they sat with me and drank iced tea on the patio, unless their kids had sports or church activities scheduled. Then it was one or the other—my brother or his wife, who dropped provisions and left. I had not seen their kids in eight weeks. Their sad uncle was unfit company.
So when the coyote walked upright through the side gate and appeared on my back patio in human form, I was briefly startled but somehow not shocked. She was beautiful in her skin. Her hair was the same mix of light gray and cinnamon, and her eyes had golden flecks among the hazel. She was poised and elegant and spoke in a low but distinctly feminine voice.
She sat on the patio with me and seemed to enjoy the cookies and iced tea I served, examining every bite and sip. Her sense of smell was especially acute. When I mentioned that I had heard her sing by moonlight, she blushed. But she willingly sang for me again, and this time the song was comprehensible. Its theme was the phases of the moon and the light it shone upon a solitary hunter in winter. It drew from my bitter depths tears that I had suppressed since my wife had packed up her things and loaded them all into a big yellow taxi idling at the curb. Her name, she said, was Tralanis, and after she licked the tears from my cheeks, she left without a sound. I sat stunned. Then let loose.
I wept for an hour, and then I slept the sleep of the dead. When I awoke the heat spell had finally broken, and I relished the breeze that moved among the trees and the tall grass. I could smell a fresh kill up there somewhere. Perhaps you know the feeling of life pulsing through the arteries once again, of senses enlivened after sickness or dull slumber? Into the cool breeze I whispered, Tralanis. Tralanis, I whispered.
* * *
The weather continued to cool as autumn approached. I could sense Tralanis up there roaming, keeping watch beneath the strange moonlight. Three nights passed without a sighting. Just knowing she was there lifted my spirits. Then I began to wonder if she was just a dream or a delusional fantasy. The grief books spoke of these things. During certain stages of deep mourning, it was possible to enter into a false reality if reality itself were too much to cope with. I didn’t care. I had begun to feel better after the cathartic meeting when she drew out my sorrow. I started cooking actual meals instead of opening packages of pre-prepared food and picking at them. I had begun to walk more, strolling morning and evening again in the streets of my neighborhood as our family once had done. Two of the neighbors had even come out on their porches to wave and to greet me by name.
Then one evening I heard her howl. I wrapped myself in a blanket on the back patio and waited for her beneath the full moon. I drifted off and dreamed of storm clouds overhead, thunder in the distance, and a gentle rain that grew to a downpour. Suddenly I awoke to perfect silence, moonglow upon the lawn. Tralanis stood over me, watching me sleep. The sound she then emitted was a low kind of growl. Fear struck me, beginning with a sour feeling in my gut. A strange but sweet warmth spread through my torso and into my throat, which opened as I lifted my face and let out a howl of my own, a long, low cry that I had never heard from any human. My senses hummed with electricity—I could hear rustling in the grass, smell owls in the trees and burrowing voles beneath the bushes. My skin bristled with sensitivity. I rose from my chair and embraced her.
I awoke next morning in the woods, naked, covered with sweat and mud, blood and brambles, semen and tufts of fur. In my mind was a blur of images and impressions: the moon’s pull upon my heart like that of a strong tide, a shuffle of animal claws and teeth and growls, pungent odors that I could not identify, the rich and woody flavors of earth and sky upon my tongue, and a violent, passionate wrangling into the ecstatic depths of night and underworld and death’s brink.
Overhead sunlight shone through the branches. Crows rattled and cawed at me. Squirrels chipped and scratched around the trunks of the big trees. Down below, the mourning doves cooed from my patio.
3
After I showered and tended to my wounds, I stood again in the window looking out at the sky, which even at midday had begun to darken in the west. Clouds roiled in. Distant thunder and the occasional storm clap. Big drops on the patio. The burnt odor of ozone. I went out and put a tarp over my patio furniture, just as the rain swept through.
It only lasted an hour. And then again the sun broke through. In yet another hour the sky was clear and blue and filled with birdsong. A host of white-crowned sparrows came in to pick at the lawn. I cooked and ate a pot of hearty stew with some fresh sourdough and butter.
That night I slept as deeply as ever. My son appeared in a dream. He was walking past our house with a group of other children. School chums with their backpacks. He showed no recognition of our house. They were simply walking together, those kids, absorbed in conversation. Walking to school.
* * *
I began walking in the woods and in the neighborhood. I belonged somehow to both. In the woods I learned to breathe and to observe in silence; in the neighborhood I helped the elders with yard work and the children with homework.
Once I was a history teacher. And then history repeated itself. I was offered a job at the middle school, which reopened after Labor Day. I walked the halls again. I peeked into my presumptive classroom with its bare walls, shiny floors, and rows of desks. Its promise. I would soon pick up the key. I would soon mark it as my territory.
My brother and his wife brought my niece and nephew over to play Rummikub on the back patio. We shared iced tea and cookies. We remembered together the family that used to live here. We toasted the renewed health of its lone survivor.
* * *
I have no more fear and no more yearning. There lingers a sadness and of course the pain of a broken heart. The melody of the coyote’s song I recall each afternoon as dusk settles in the tall grass and the moon appears in the trees. I’ve forgotten who said we are part animal, part spirit. And are we not at once both wild and tame?
It’s October now; yesterday morning as I was preparing for school, Tralanis returned to the tall grass beyond my fence, trailing a litter of cubs. She was teaching them to stalk a small rodent that she had let drop from her jaws. They leapt and growled and jostled for position. When one of the cubs brought the prey to its mother, she barked her approval and sat with her brood in the grass to watch them feed.
David Denny’s fiction has recently appeared in Narrative, New Ohio Review, and Catamaran. His books include Sometimes Only the Sad Songs Will Do, The Gill Man in Purgatory, and Some Divine Commotion. He lives in the coyote-haunted foothills of Cupertino, California.
More information: www.daviddenny.net.