Coyote blue by Christopher Moore Page A

had already slashed the ecumenical apron strings and Mom was left to hopscotching religions on her own. Currently she lived in an ashram in Oregon where she acted as the spirit channel for a four-thousand-year-old, superenlightened entity named Babar (no relation to the elephant).
    As a child exposed to so many religions, Calliope had developed a malleability of faith that stayed with her into adulthood. Through the assimilation of many spiritual beliefs, without science or cynicism to balance them, Calliope was able to define everything in her world, accept the highs and lows of life with resolve, and never be burdened by the need to understand. Why understand when you can believe? For Calliope, every event was mystical and every moment magical; a flat tire could be a manifestation of karma, or a lizard might be Jimi Hendrix. If she fell in love too easily and got hurt too often it wasn't bad judgment, it was just faith.
    She was humming "Castles Made of Sand" to the lizard when Sam's Mercedes pulled up to the curb. She looked up and smiled at him, not the least bit concerned that he was thirty minutes late. It had never occurred to her that he might not show. No man had ever stood her up.
    She ran to the car and tapped on the passenger window. Sam pushed the button and it whirred down. "Hang on a second, I have to do something," she said.
    She went around to the front of the car and searched the grille until she found a moth that had met its end with minimal damage. She plucked the moth from the grille, took it to the planter box, and wiggled it in front of the lizard while singing a few bars of Hendrix's "Little Wing." The lizard snapped at the moth halfheartedly and slithered away under the geraniums to sulk. Calliope had been correct in guessing that this particular lizard had, indeed, been a rock star in a previous life, and if she had sung a chorus of "L.A. Woman" or "Light My Fire" the lizard would have been delighted, but how could she have known?
    She dropped the moth into the planter box and returned to the car.
    "Sorry I'm late," Sam said.
    "It's only time," she said. "I'm always late."
    "I had them fix your car." He was trying not to look at her. He'd just gotten enough control of his nerves to drive and he wasn't ready to be rattled by the girl again, but he wouldn't have thought of not picking her up. During the whole debacle at the condo, the urgency to see her again had hovered in the background of his mind and finally snapped him out of his confusion over the Coyote medicine. Was she connected to the Indian?
    "That's sweet of you," she said. "Did you look at the car?"
    "Look at it? No. I just had the garage come down."
    "It's a great car," Calliope said. "It has over three hundred horsepower, a six-pack of Weber carburetors, competition suspension and gearing – it'll do over a hundred and eighty on a straightaway. I can blow most Porsches off the road."
    Sam didn't know what to say, so he said, "That's nice."
    "I know that women aren't supposed to care about things like that. My mother says that I'm obsessed with vehicles because I was conceived in the back of a VW microbus and spent most of my childhood in one. We moved around a lot."
    "Where does she live?" Sam asked. He would ask her about the Indian, really, when the time was right.
    "Oregon. I didn't build the car myself. I used to live with this sculptor in Sedona, Arizona, who built it for midnight drives in the desert. One day I was telling him that I thought that cars had replaced guns as phallic symbols for American men, and I thought it was interesting that he had one that was so small and fast. The next day he gave me the Datsun and went out and bought a Lincoln. It was very sweet."
    "Very sweet," Sam echoed. Now or never, he thought. "Calliope – that is your name, right?"
    "Yes," the girl said.
    Sam put on his salesman's this is a serious matter voice. "Calliope, do you know who the -"
    "My name wasn't always Calliope," she interrupted.