Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Dreaming among Men BRYN KANAR

Bryn Kanar began to write after working at two bookstores and three libraries. In 1996 he attended the Clarion West writers’ workshop, and since then he has sold a number of stories. His first appeared in the horror magazine Cemetery Dance. “Dreaming Among Men” is his second sale but his second appearance was in gothic.net. Kanar is currently working on a mystery novel.

Palinuro Rubio is a teller at First National. One day he comes home to find an unexpected letter in his mailbox.

He has never received a letter like this before. He had thought all his relatives were dead. He is afraid to open it.

Palinuro puts the letter on the passenger seat of his car and drives. An unaccountable forboding beats in his chest more loudly than his heart. The sky is as white and brittle as bone.

Crow flies at dusk over the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains, over arroyos made by rivers that dried up long ago, when time was sacred and uncounted. These days, Crow reminds himself, everything is numbered. A hundred and twenty-seven wing-beats past the Pecos. How many more until he reaches his nest?

Palinuro wants to scream when he feels the jar of the impact. But he does not scream. He looks in his rearview mirror at the red-faced man in the car behind him. The man is yelling and waving his arms accusingly as if the accident were Palinuro’s fault.

Palinuro swings his door open and approaches the man as he begins to roll down his window. He unbuckles his belt and pulls down his pants and the man begins to roll up his window again as fast as he can as Palinuro pees on it, a hot yellow stream more apt than any words.

All of Lubbock is a single wild whining stream of piss, shimmering in the sunlight, Palinuro thinks as he drives through downtown. The buildings glisten too wetly, too yellowly, for human habitation. It’s a newborn bear cub whose mother has not yet licked the placenta away. It’s a dawn trigger waiting, yearning, for someone to pull it.

Pull me, Palinuro thinks, out of this dream. Why doesn’t anyone else hear the drumming coming out of the sun. Why doesn’t anyone dance.

Crow lands in a chinkapin oak and combs the leftover wind out of his feathers with his beak. All around him the world is the color of sleep. He sniffs his nest before climbing in. There is an acid smell in the air.

Have you been dreaming?

Crow looks down and sees Rattlesnake curled against the base of the tree. Maybe I was, he says.

Palinuro drives to the edge of town to read the letter. He parks, and walks some distance from the road to an abandoned, half-dug drainage ditch. He sits on the clay earth and looks at the crumpled envelope.

A wind as dry as memory blows up out of the Llano Estacado and sucks the sweat from his hair. So many traps left unset. A russet sadness buried long ago where only the roots of the cactuses can reach it. Palinuro slits the envelope with his pocketknife. The letter claims to be from his older brother, an invitation to his birthday party.

You have the smell of men on you, says Rattlesnake.

And what if I do?

I just never thought I’d see you working as Coyote’s carrier pigeon. That’s all.

Crow flaps his wings, knocking sleeping oak moths out of the tree. They fall on Rattlesnake like snow. Be careful what you say, says Crow, or I may have to carry Coyote a message about you.

The next morning Palinuro sets out for Fort Stockton, where his brother lives, according to the letter. It’s seven hours from Lubbock.

He turns west at Big Spring onto the Pecos Plains. Sunlight dances on the windshield. It spells out words in a language he thinks he should remember. The origins of temptation, of love.

In the evening a wind blows up the Pecos River valley. It crawls into the car. It picks at his limbs like children. It brings smells of death and life and water. It wants him to remember something that he can’t remember. He has trouble breathing it, as if his lungs are in his legs.

Palinuro crosses the river and drives into the brown foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains. Eyes watch from shadows.

There is a banging deep inside the car. The road slows. And stops. Palinuro looks at the gas gauge. It reads empty. There must be a leak, he thinks, I just filled the tank at Odessa, but he doesn’t go out and look. The far off wail of a funeral flute holds his ear in its pale hand. The breath of the world is leaking out.

As the sun sinks toward the Guadalupe Mountains the song gets louder. Palinuro is afraid. The shadows of the mesquite trees stretch down the hillside until one of them reaches the road. Suddenly, a man stands up in front of the car. He climbs onto the hood. He is playing a long white flute made from a human femur and his ears are gray and pointy like a coyote’s.

Taking the instrument away from his lips, he holds it up and looks Palinuro in the eyes. Did you lose this? he asks.

Laughter rattles in the red corners of the sunset sky. The man is gone. The femur sits on the hood of the car.

Palinuro opens his door and steps out. He walks around to the front of the car. There is a human skeleton in the road. Palinuro knows beyond any doubt that it is his own. He screams and runs blindly into the hills, into the open arms of the shadows of the mesquites.

Fox runs as fast as he can through the dry arroyos but he can’t outrun his fear. It’s like trying to outrun the redness of his own fur.

In the direction of the rising night he smells water and veers toward it. Peace and the end of suffering. The wind’s wet nose on his nose.

Panting, he plunges through the cottonwoods and into the water’s dark smile. It takes him half the night to wash the dream out of his fur. Done at last, he crawls out of the river and lies down on the grass under a cottonwood tree. He closes his eyes.

He sleeps through the next day but wakes at sunset. Just in time for the party.

Coyote’s younger brother is back from dreaming among men.

“‘Dreaming among Men’” was written differently than my other stories. I didn’t plan it. One day I woke up from a nap with the phrase ‘Coyote’s younger brother’ running through my head. Still half asleep, I sat down at the computer and typed for about an hour. It wasn’t until the next day, when I read the document I’d created, that I realized I had written a story.

“Several months later, reading it again, I understood that it was more than that: it was a homecoming.

“I was born in Texas, but we moved away before I was three and I’ve never been back, ‘Dreaming Among Men’ reminds me that some part of myself still lives there on the shore of the Pecos River where my father played as a child, on the desert back road where my mother rolled her Chevy Corsica, in the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains where, somewhere, Coyote dances. …”