Crowe and Coyote

Crowe and Coyote IV

Thelonius Crowe punched the wall.

When the wall, made of carbon-steel alloy harder than his knuckles and yet cheaper looking than formica, refused to cave, he punched it again.

He continued punching until he was no longer sure what was the sound of knuckles hitting wall and what was the reverberation, in his head, of a single name long buried but never forgotten.

"Moll," he whispered, leaning his cheek against the wall. His knuckles bled, the resultant spatter on the floor the only bright thing in the saferoom.

"Moll."

"Moll."

The salt on his face could have come from the ceiling, a faint dusting of crust left by ages of sour black air. It could have been sweat, leftover from his heart-pumping run back to the saferoom. It could have even, in a cosmically funny way, simply have been how he tasted, after spending so long in this corrosive fucking deathbed of a city.

But it wasn't, and he knew it. Crowe took a deep breath, folded himself in upon himself in the Gestalt Mantra taught to all disciples of his order. He let his mind kaliedescope, let the bands of his awareness cross and mingle and fraction themselves like a circular piece of lace.

"They are tears," he said finally, the muffled words blowing a faint bubble of steam against the wall. "They are tears."

And it was so.

Moll.

He let the idea of it--that his tears were tears, the totality of it--fracture inside of him. He examined each of the shining pieces. One--her hair, her beautiful red hair. Shorn. Two--a billboard flashing above them, green and black, the stylized sprout logo of the Soyful Noise Neo-Christian Soy Company. Three--her nails, bitten to the quick, jagged and rimmed in black. Four, the smell of alcohol on her breath.

Alcohol.

She had been drunk. These days, unless one was exceptionally good with an at-home distillery, one could only get that way in a bar.

Some bar in the immediate area (his brain, clicking the pieces into and out of place, specified ten miles for him as an utmost radial limit) had been frequented by her, by his Moll, who wouldn't have touched a drop of alcohol in the old days.

Some bartender somewhere knew her. Hopefully, knew her well.

Knew her well enough, maybe, to know where she lived.

His fingers curled. It wasn't much, but it was a start. People said the God Gestalt was gentle, was the binding force of love and togetherness that made a thing whole, that breathed life and concept into what would otherwise be heaps of parts, broken memories, fragmentation.

These people, for the most part, had not met Crowe.

Crowe was about to become decidedly ungentle, for as long as it took.