On the Shadow Stories

This afternoon I got a couple of very kind comments about the Shadow stories, which I really appreciated. Somebody wanted to know if there'd be a book.

That was the original idea, but the project pretty much died an embryo. I might find a way to take up some modified version, but most of these stories just didn't go anywhere for me. The later ones, like Water Well, had evolved from the ambiguous and faintly supernatural early stories into how-to's. It made more sense to me and was easier to write that way, but the stories themselves...boring. Who wants to read 3000 words about a guy fixing an engine?

The original idea, which I could never quite pull off, was something really offbeat. I just couldn't ever quite get it right.

It went like this:


Shadow and Coyote

Sage and lavender grew here, white flower and yellow flower and laceleaf, and four or five kinds of grass. Shadow didn’t know their names, and didn’t much care. He occasionally thought of hiking to town and looking them up in the library, but he didn’t much like the town. The townies were all right, but still…it was a town. Others occasionally took his propane bottles in for him, which was a kindness. He liked propane heat when he had it. But it wasn’t worth going to town.

He hadn’t put any of the plants in his garden. They came themselves when they felt like it, drawn by the water that soaked into the river rocks. The rocks were the only things he planted and tended here. Most of them, the river rocks, didn’t have any magic. But the big veined rock in the middle of his garden, and the white rock to the west and the tan rock to the east, they had a little magic. Maybe they called the plants. It wasn’t a lot of magic, just a feeling. Probably they’d lain against something covered up in the wash. Shadow liked magic. Mostly.

He wished the red flower cactus would come closer to his shack because he liked watching the hummingbirds that fed from and fought over them. But there was too much water here, and he wasn’t willing to do anything about that. Banana yucca was close to hand, though not so close he was always picking himself on it, and that was fine. It had bloomed and fruited in the early summer. An old Navajo woman, many years ago, had taught him how to make flat bread from the yucca fruit. Shadow thought it tasted like shit, but only a fool turned down free food.

He rose from the garden, wincing and rubbing his back. Damned old stiff back. Time to go down to the wash and tend his snares; that would work the kinks out.

He’d found an army canteen once, nearly new, still in its tan case with a nice shoulder strap. It was a fine canteen, didn’t stink at all, and he couldn’t believe some damned tourist would have lost such a valuable thing and not even come to look for it. Anyway, it belonged to Shadow now and he took good care of it. He slung it over his shoulder with his bag and strode down the ridge.

Times like this, starting out on a walk in the morning, he thought about that young dog that had come to live with him for a while. A fast, cocksure thing, it had never given him any name to call it so he just called it “Dog.” It seemed fine with that. Maybe it thought it was all the dog there was. He liked having it around, and wished it had shown more sense. But it just couldn’t bring itself to get along with Coyote, and that kind of foolishness always brought its own reward sooner or later. Shadow never did find the body. He missed his walks with Dog, and hoped its bones were at peace in the wash.

Down off the ridge and across a little meadow he went, taking his time. He saw dark lumps of fresh cow shit ahead, lots of it. Rancher’s cattle liked the meadow. Shadow didn’t much like the cattle; dumb, ugly beasts. He couldn’t eat them or Rancher would get pissed off and bring trouble. But Rancher didn’t think there was anything wrong with them rubbing their smelly selves against his shack and trampling their big stupid hooves through his garden. Damned cattle. Only useful thing they ever did was leave cow pies. Cow pie fire stank; Shadow much preferred juniper. But he had to go far to collect juniper dead fall, and the cow pies mostly came to him.

At the far side of the meadow the remains of an old barbed wire fence sagged. Some damned fool, years and years ago, had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to fence in a parcel of desert that didn’t no way care if he thought he owned it. The fenceposts were good solid T-rail that had been very useful to Shadow when he built his shack, though digging them out of the clay had been hell. The barbed wire might come in handy if he ever got around to building adobe walls like he’d originally planned. But old plywood seemed to work just fine, so for now he left the wire lay. “For now” had stretched on for years, and looked to keep right on doing it.

On the other side of the wire the clay turned to sand and sloped down to the wash. In some places the wash’s border was a gentle slope like this, in others it was big stone cliffs four or five times the height of a man. Some of those cliffs had magic and were worth scrounging; you never knew what you’d find there. But this morning his business was with the sandy banks with their tall tufts of grass and brush, where the rabbits ran. This was where he’d laid his snares. The first was empty, the second held a nice plump cottontail buck that had strangled itself, its eyes bugging half out of its head. He reset the snare and put the body in his bag. Rabbits were fast and wary when they saw you, but otherwise just plain stupid. If they thought there were no people or coyotes or hawks around, they never showed a bit of sense. In the desert, there was a word for that.

The word was “food.”

Shadow’s third snare had been tripped, but held no rabbit. Instead there was blood and bits of fur scattered around. God damn that son of a bitch! Shadow had told him over and over to leave the goddam snares alone! There were plenty of rabbits, why’d he have to go and take Shadow’s?

Shadow heard a snarling noise, far off down the wash and getting closer. Oh, hell. What day was it? Shadow had long ago fallen out of the habit of making distinctions between days. There were rainy days and dry days, windy days and still days, hot days and cold days and days that were just right. But there were no weekdays or weekends; not for Shadow. He often had to stop and remember that townies and tourists lived by a different calendar. This must be a weekend.

The wash curled and wove through the desert like a snake. Tourists with their stupid loud ATVs always stayed on the sand, so they could have miles to go before they got to Shadow, if they did, even though they were only a thousand yards or so away. He decided to have a look; sometimes they left good stuff. Across the wash, over the far bank and into the juniper scrub, that was the way.

Yep, they were on the sandy hills, just like he’d figured. Didn’t make any sense at all, what people did. Someplace off the county road, Shadow knew there’d be a big shiny pickup with an empty trailer. Folks would come from miles away, sometimes from clean down in the Valley days and days away by foot, and drive into the Mountains just so they could ride around on their dumb ATVs. Then they’d go back to their air conditioning and their cubicles so they could talk about their adventures in the desert. Come all the way out here, just to put tracks on some sandy hill.

The puzzling thing of it was they had plenty of desert right around their own cities if they wanted it. Only it was so low and hot not even the Apaches had ever wanted to live there. Now there were millions of people there, and Shadow had never figured out why or how they’d ended up there. He’d once asked a tourist, who’d come for a weekend away from the Valley, how he could put up with someplace so damned hot. “Air conditioning,” the man had said with a smirk, like Shadow had asked something stupid. And Shadow had seen it himself, a few times when he went along with some other folks to tear down an old building for cash and the material. Houses and businesses and every sort of thing for miles and miles, lots of cars going in every direction, but not a soul in sight. These people ran from their houses to their cars to their jobs and back again, day after day, never staying outdoors for a minute longer than they had to. They didn’t live in the desert. They lived in boxes. And they never gave a thought to what would happen to them if the electricity cut off one day. Shadow snorted to himself. He might be just plain Shadow, but those people were just plain dumb.

Shadow curled up under a spreading juniper to watch the tourists at their fun. Burned brown as the clay, dressed in his raggedy-ass tan t-shirt and pants, they couldn’t have seen him if they’d ever even thought to look. Damned good thing for them he wasn’t a mountain cat. All that frantic activity in the name of fun, and all the trouble they had to go to so they could do it; it just made no sense. Shadow enjoyed a good mystery.

He sensed the presence before he smelled it, and scowled. That son of a bitch had a lot of nerve coming here after stealing Shadow’s rabbit.

“Hey, Shadow.” The sinewy tan Coyote wove into visibility through the brush, approached confidently and sat on its haunches beside him like they were friends or something.

Shadow was in no mood to play with words. “What the hell’s the big idea? Get your own damned food.”

Coyote gaped his enormous jaws in a grin. “Oh, don’t be mad. It was only a little jack. You don’t like them, but the pups don’t care. I left you the good one.”

“A rabbit’s a rabbit. Anyway, you didn’t feed it to the pups, you ate it yourself.”

“Did not. Well, maybe I nipped its head off a little. But only so I could get it out of the snare. Brought the body to the den, I did.”

“Y’ought to chase your own rabbits. Fast game makes you strong.”

“I don’t see you chasing rabbits.”

“I’m plenty strong already. And you’re gonna find it out if you keep takin’ my food.”

Coyote grinned again. “Good luck with that.” He lay down next to Shadow. “What do we have here?”

Shadow grumpily relaxed. “Buncha damn noisy tourists, doin’ what they always do.”

Coyote sniffed in agreement. “Running around in circles, making noise. Just like pups, but they smell worse.” He abruptly lost interest and put his muzzle between his paws. “Hey, you see some of them cows are getting ready to calve?”

Shadow looked down in alarm. “You leave them cows alone! If the bulls don’t get you, Rancher will!”

Coyote rolled over, wiggling back and forth to scratch his back. “Rancher? He can’t catch me.”

“His rifle can. Don’t you give him a reason to hunt you, Coyote. He’s mean.” Shadow glanced back toward the sandy hills. “And quit movin’ around like that. You want the tourists to see you?”

Coyote snapped back to his feet facing the tourists and yipped loudly. “Already did!”

A couple of the tourists had stopped their vehicle at the top of a hill and were standing around talking. Now they pointed toward Coyote and Shadow and yammered loudly at the others.

Annoyed, Shadow crept back into the brush while Coyote made a big production of leaving. “Way to go. What’d you do that for?”

Coyote trotted ahead. “C’mon!” he called over his shoulder. “Wanna show you something!”

Up from this part of the wash was a low ridge with a dirt road running the length of its spine. Shadow knew it well. There was an old RV abandoned here, and much of its roof and walls and some of its upholstery had made its way to Shadow’s shack. It had had a really good screen door. Further up the road was a padlocked green trailer that Shadow often gazed at longingly but never touched, even though he hadn’t seen the owner for years. Inside, clearly visible through the unshaded windows, were two beautiful blue plastic water barrels that would look awfully good on stands next to Shadow’s wall. They were just going to waste but he couldn’t touch them. Shadow often caught himself skating awfully close to the boundary between scrounge and steal, but he’d never knowingly crossed it.

Coyote didn’t go as far as the trailer. He turned right off the road, toward the bluff overlooking another loop of the wash. There was an easy way down. Coyote scrambled down the rocks, not hurrying but not cutting Shadow much slack. Showing off.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see. Pick it up, two-legs!”

They crossed a rough, wooded meadow between the bluff and the wash. Here the wash forked for a bit before coming back together. There was an island of grass-encrusted sand that was easier to cross, then another wide expanse of the soft stuff. On the far side was a high cliff of crumbled rock, riven off to the left by a blind canyon. Coyote angled toward the canyon.

“Hey, Coyote! I don’t wanna go in there. It’s gone bad just lately.” Shadow had no idea why a place that had once been neutral, even beneficial with all the good things that washed and blew and snagged up in there, had suddenly turned bad a few months earlier. But it had, and Shadow didn’t go where he wasn’t wanted.

“I know!” said Coyote. “Wanna see why?”

Well, he was kinda curious. Magic gone bad, if that was what this was, could bring a patch of foul luck but had never really hurt him. It might be worth checking out, and anyway he wouldn’t back down in front of Coyote.

The canyon’s mouth was narrow, its floor choked with sand that had blown in from the wash. Further in it widened and rose, most of its expanse tangled with dead trees and rockfall. Only a little way in, Shadow caught a foul scent.

“Guh!” He snatched his brown bandanna off his pate and held it over his nose. “Rot!”

“Yep,” said Coyote as he loped ahead. “Wait’ll you see what it is!”

Shadow was pretty sure he didn’t want to see. Coyote wouldn’t have brought him here to look at a dead elk.

He carefully picked his way up the canyon, skirting the biggest boulders and jagged branches. One of these days this canyon would fill right in and be just another haunted depression on the desert floor, hiding its secrets. Shadow was about to learn one of those secrets now, and wasn’t any too happy about it.

Sure enough, up toward the head of the canyon he saw a familiar shape obscured by rocks. It was a man – or what was left of a man who had clearly been giving birds a feast for quite a while. He was spread-eagled on his face at the foot of the bluff, partly covered by fallen rocks. Shadow looked up: The rocks were loose up there, undercut by washed-out dirt. It was never a good idea to get too close to the edge. This fellow must have been a complete idiot, or in a mighty big hurry, or walking in the dark of night. Or some combination of the three.

So it wasn’t bad magic, it was just a haunt. This guy didn’t have any magic. From the looks of the way he ended up he hadn’t had any brains, either.

Coyote clambered up the rocks to the body. “Come see!”

“I’m just fine down here, thanks.”

“But you’ll miss the best part.”

“There’s a good part?” Shadow reluctantly joined him on the reeking rocks and saw what Coyote really wanted him to see. Next to the body, undisturbed by the carrion birds, was a big burlap sack bulging with lumpy stuff. Trying to hold his breath against the stench, Shadow opened the sack.

“Whoa! Check it out!” The sack was doubled, one inside the other, and a damned good thing or it would never have held the weight. It appeared to be stuffed with guns. Shadow saw shining revolvers in expensive holsters. At least one chrome 1911. A folding-stock AK47, but no magazines. Wealth!

Forgetting the rotting corpse beside him, Shadow sat down on the rocks and began pulling firearms from the sack. Below them – and there must have been a dozen – were thick wads of money held together with rubber bands or twine. Shadow stood up suddenly, backing away.

“I know who this guy is!”

Pleased with his surprise, Coyote had sat calmly through Shadow’s inspection and grinned at the rocks. “You recognize him?”

“No, I don’t know him. He must be a townie. But I know which one.”

“Who is he, then?”

“You hear about Willie Crawford getting killed?”

“After. I saw a bunch of white trucks at his place, for a week or so. Got curious and crept up to check it out. Knew he was dead, didn’t know somebody killed him.”

“Killed in his sleep, they say. Nobody knows how they got past his dogs without waking him up; I’ve heard he was always armed. But whoever did it is supposed to have stolen a whole bunch of guns and money. I didn’t know Willie; he mostly hung around doing jobs for townies. But there was always stories about him. He made a lot of money, didn’t spend it on anything but guns and liked to flash it around, or that’s what they say. Somebody killed him at night, two, three months ago. This must be the guy.”

“Then he took a fall while stumbling away at night. Smart. Don’t know why humans bother trying to play trickster. You’re not very good at it.” Coyote got up and sniffed at the corpse. The sight made Shadow want to gag. “Well, they’re yours now.”

Shadow began stuffing things back into the bag. “No way. This is stolen stuff. No way I need that kind of bad luck.”

Coyote looked up, displeasure on his face. “You find stuff all the time. Here I bring you something good, and you don’t want it?”

“I scrounge, sure. I don’t steal. That’s why folks leave me alone.” He sat down next to Coyote. “But now I don’t know what to do. Can’t go to the cops, tell them where the body is, even though that’s prob’ly the right thing. They start askin’ questions about me, and…well, let’s just say my papers ain’t in order.”

“What’re papers?”

“Long story.” Shadow tugged his beard. Didn’t seem right to just leave this guy for the buzzards, even if he was a murdering lowlife. The goods in the bag were stolen: If somebody else found them and took them they’d still be stolen. If somebody turned them over to the cops, the cops would either keep them for themselves or destroy them. Either way, stolen. They’d never make it back to Willie Crawford’s family, if he had any, and that was the only way to set the theft right. The killer had already balanced the murder.

Stealing was wrong, and there was no way Shadow could make this theft right. All he could do, all he could think to do, was end it here. Make sure the stealing didn’t keep happening.

He stood up. “Gotta bury him,” he said.

Coyote backed away a bit. “Bury that? What for? Birds gotta eat, too.”

Shadow shook his head. “Gotta bury him, so this stuff is never found. Only way I can think to keep it from gettin’ worse.”

Coyote wuffed in disapproval. “You can use that stuff yourself. Who’s gonna know?”

“Coyotes can steal without hurting themselves. People can’t. If I take it, it’s just gettin’ stolen more. Can’t give it back to Willie, he’s dead. So I gotta bury it.”

“Well, don’t expect any help digging a hole.”

Shadow looked up. “Don’t need to dig no hole, no-thumbs. He’s already in one and it’s already fillin’ itself up. I just got to help it along a little.”

Shadow didn’t want anybody happening by and asking why he was kicking rock into a canyon, so he came back to the bluff above the body at night. Coyote met him when he arrived, his eyes shining in the moonlight.

“You’re really gonna do this. See if I show you anything nice again.”

Shadow grunted with the weight of a big rock and dropped it in, trying to ignore the moist thud as it landed. “Wish to hell you hadn’t shown me this.”

Coyote grinned in the moonlight. “Maybe I wanted to see what you’d do with it.”

Shadow rounded on the big animal. “You devious sonofabitch! You didn’t really think I’d take it.”

“Thought you might not. Wanted to see. You’re a funny one, Shadow. I can pretty much always tell what people’re gonna do. You’re different; you mix it up. With you, I can never tell.”

He rose and trotted off into the darkness. But Shadow heard his voice in a parting shot. “I think I may not eat you.”

Shadow stood in the darkness for a few moments, then picked up another rock and let it fall over the edge. Soon the corpse and Coyote’s contaminated gift would be covered and he could leave. He wanted to get back to his shack, and his garden.

It wouldn’t stay covered, he knew. Nothing ever did, till it got to the wash. The murdering thief’s bones would dissolve with the monsoons and work their way to the wash. Everything did. It wasn’t safe until it was covered by the sands of the wash. Then the thief’s haunt would fade, as all haunts did. The bad magic would leave the canyon, and everything would be as it was before.

The wash knew all about covering bones, and bringing them peace. No matter what sins you brought it, the wash knew all about how to cover them.