Coyote blue

with an atomizer, and a single whiff would reveal the elusive scent to be dog breath as surely as if it had been squozen straight from the dog. Yet, what a wide spectrum of foulness dog breath can span, both in odor and humidity. This particular version of dog breath, he felt, is especially steamy, and carries a top note of stale cigarettes and coffee, as well as the usual fetid meat and butthole smells found in more common dog breath. This, he thought, is supernatural dog breath. I'm not likely to be breathed upon by another dog in my lifetime that has recently enjoyed a Marlboro over a cup of Java.
    Despite his effort to distract himself with dog breath aesthetics, Sam's tolerance was wearing out and he thought he might sneeze or throw up any second. Coyote licked him on the mouth.
    "Yuck!" Sam sat upright and wiped his mouth on his arm. "Ack!" He shivered involuntarily and looked at the big coyote, who grinned at him from the end of the bed. "There was no need for that," Sam said.
    Coyote whimpered and rolled over on his back in submission.
    Sam got up from the bed and grabbed his cigarettes from the nightstand. "Why are you back? You said you were gone for good."
    Coyote began to change into his human form. No longer afraid, Sam watched the transformation with fascination. In a few seconds Coyote sat on the bed in his black buckskins wearing the coyote-skin headdress. "Got a smoke?" he asked.
    Sam shook one out of the pack and lit it for the trickster. Sam took a small plastic box from his shirt pocket and held it out to Coyote. "Breath mint?"
    "No."
    "I insist," Sam said.
    Coyote took the box and shook out a mint, popped it in his mouth, and handed the box back to Sam. "The girl is going to Las Vegas."
    "I don't care." The lie tasted foul in his mouth.
    "If she tries to take her child from the biker she will be hurt."
    "It's not my problem. Besides, she'll probably find another guy to help her out." Sam felt both righteous and cowardly for saying it. This role he was playing no longer fit. Quickly he added, "I don't need the trouble."
    "In the buffalo days your people used to say that a wife stolen and returned was twice the wife she had been."
    "They aren't my people and she's not my wife."
    "You can be afraid, just don't act like it."
    "What does that mean? You're worse than Pokey with your fucking riddles."
    "You lost Pokey. You lost your family. You lost your name. All you have left is your fear, white man." Coyote flipped his cigarette at Sam. It hit him in the chest and hot ashes showered on the bed.
    Sam patted out the embers and brushed himself off. "I didn't ask for you to come here. I don't owe the girl anything." But he did owe her. He wasn't sure what for yet, except that she had cut something loose in him. Why couldn't he cut loose the habit of fear?
    Coyote went to the bedroom window and stared out. Without turning he said, "Do you know about the Crows who scouted for General Custer?"
    Sam didn't answer.
    "When they told Custer that ten thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors were waiting for him at the Little Bighorn he called them liars and rode on. The Crow scouts didn't owe Custer anything, but they painted their faces black and said, 'Today is a good day to die.' "
    "The point?" Sam bristled.
    "The point is that you will never know what they knew – that courage is its own reward."
    Sam sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Coyote's back. The red feathers across the buckskin shirt seemed to move on the black surface of Coyote's shirt. Sam wondered if he might not be light-headed from prolonged dog breath inhalation, but then the feathers drew a scene, and in a whirl of images and feathers, Sam was back on the reservation again.
    There were three of them: boys hiding in the sagebrush by the road that led into the Custer Battlefield National Monument. Two were Crow, one Cheyenne. They were there on a dare that had started in ninth-grade gym class. The largest boy, the Cheyenne, was from the Broken Tooth family – descendants of a warrior who fought with Crazy Horse and Red Cloud on this very land.
    "You going to do it?" said Eli Broken Tooth. "Or are you full of shit like all Crows?"
    "I said I'd do it," Samson said. "But I'm not going to be stupid about it."
    "What about you, breed?" Eli asked Billy Two Irons. "You a chickenshit?" Broken Tooth had been taunting Billy about his mixed blood for the whole school year and citing his own "pure Indian" lineage. The fact was that in buffalo