Coyote Goes to College

by Gregory Frost

One time Coyote decided he should go to college. It wasn't because he needed to learn anything. In fact, teaching Coyote would have been difficult for anyone to do, because he never listened or learned until it was too late. No, as usual, Coyote decided to go to college because he wanted something he didn't have.

Coyote was the inventor of the consumer society. He always wanted what he didn't have, and always talked himself into reasons for needing it. Most of the time, this involved women, because that's what Coyote had the least experience with. Had anyone consulted the women Coyote had approached over the millennia, they would have said it was because he always lied to them. Coyote would have countered that they wouldn't have anything to do with him otherwise. It's just possible that both observations were true — however, as Coyote always lies, we'll never know.

One warm afternoon in the early fall, Coyote wandered across a college campus. More than a dozen girls were sitting and lying about on the grass, and they were wearing shorts and had kicked their shoes off, and arranged their bodies the way cats do, languorous and lazy and content, and Coyote couldn't help himself, he fell in love with every one of them.

He walked through their midst but they didn't see him. Not one of them looked over her sunglasses at him, smiled at him, or acknowledged him. They talked about matters irrelevant to him — about grades and boyfriends and television shows. Most of it made no sense to Coyote. "They don't appreciate me," he told himself, "because they can tell I don't belong here. I have to change that." So for a while he followed some of the male students around, listened and imitated until he understood what he had to do. He snatched some books and some notepads, and swiped a backpack that someone had left hanging off the seat of their bike while they went into a coffee shop. He didn't care much for the clothes the boys were wearing this year — for one thing, they all dressed alike — but he knew that if he didn't wear their clothes, the girls wouldn't see him as one of their kind. Although the world had transformed so much that they could never recognize him for what he really was, they still might not pay him any attention. There was always trouble when Coyote was ignored.

Now, some of the boys he followed mentioned that they had pledged a fraternity house and some made lewd comments about what such a house would do for their sex life, and Coyote concluded that a fraternity would be a good place to learn more about how to impress those women. When the pledges went to the house, he followed them inside. Nobody knew him, but it was early in the semester and no one was sure who the pledges were anyway. Coyote had about him the air of someone who is older if no wiser than a pledge, and this worked well for him in the fraternity, where wisdom was an infrequent visitor. The pledges assumed he was a member and the members took him for a likely candidate. "I should have joined one of these long ago," he thought.

That night was a hazing, though not a very intimidating one. The fraternities had gotten into trouble because of more perilous hazing, and now the worst they could do was to make their pledges drink a whole pitcher of beer. When Coyote found out the nature of the "punishment," he worked his way to the front of the line as quickly as possible, and studied with great interest while someone pumped a keg and then filled a pitcher. They handed him the pitcher and a plastic cup, but he gave the cup back, saying, "I'll show you how this is done. I've been doing this forever." He then drank the contents of the pitcher without stopping. It looked like a magic trick, and when he finished and set down the pitcher, no one spoke. They stood amazed. Coyote grinned and said, "That was refreshing. Do you think I could have another?" The room exploded with cheering and hooting and other noises that males make when they have no chance of attracting a mate.

The pitcher was refilled. Coyote wiggled his hips, stuck a finger out at the pitcher and in his best Elvis Presley voice (he had learned to imitate Elvis in the 1960s as a way to attract women, although he'd had no luck with it), said, "Thank you very much." This pitcher vanished in much the same manner as the previous one.

Now the room went wild. Hazing as such was forgotten. The boys were flinging plastic cups at each other and screaming — some so high that Coyote thought maybe some girls had shown up after all. He was a little dismayed that none had — given the boys he'd followed had been discussing how the fraternity would make it easy for them to get laid. Such a prospect seemed unlikely if no women showed up. He wanted to ask about that, but someone handed him another pitcher, and he instinctively drained it.

Coyote loved to drink. He maintained that it held no sway upon him. The beer coming out of the keg was nothing compared to brews he'd drunk his entire life. Contemplating the many occasions when he'd enjoyed himself, he slapped his leg and laughed. "One time," he declaimed, "Bear challenged me to a drinking match. And he was so big that he knew he could win, and I knew that, too. For every drink I had, he could drink twelve. And that was very powerful stuff, not like this . . .cat pee–pee here!" That struck him as funny and he had to stop and laugh again. "So I sat on one side of a fire and he sat on the other, and whenever I took a drink, I spit it on the fire, and the flame jumped up so high that Bear couldn't see me, and I poured out the contents of the jug behind the log I was sitting on. After many hours, Bear proclaimed that he had to quit before he got sick."

"So, like, you won, then," said one of the pledges, while Coyote downed another pitcher.

"I should have, but Bear cheated. He insisted we drink one more time, and this time he came around the fire and handed me his jug. I knew I could drink it, because I hadn't really drunk anything yet. So I started to drink, but he had filled the jug to the brim, and I had to make believe that I had done the same, so pretty soon the drink was running from the sides of my mouth, and down my body and down my foot, and it ran right into the fire."

"What happened?" asked the captive audience.

"Well, I was sitting by then on a pond of Bear's favorite potion — everything I'd poured out — so when the fire caught that little stream, it chased it right to my log. The flames sprang up as high as the trees."

"Wow, like, how did you survive?"

"Oh, I didn't. That time I was burned to a crisp and Bear won. I know he cheated by filling his jug so full, but nobody listens to me."

Coyote set down the pitcher. The audience stared in something passing awe as he took the nozzle from the keg itself and opened his mouth and sprayed a stream of beer in with one hand while he pumped and pumped with the other. This went on for a very long time because nobody could believe what they were seeing nor move to stop him.

When he'd drunk his fill, Coyote set down the nozzle. He rocked unsteadily on his feet. His belly had swollen hugely. He gave them all a great grin, then opened his jaws wide and let out a belch that flung pledges across the room, overturned furniture, and blew out a window.

Cackling majestically at his handiwork, he took one step and fell flat on his face, unconscious.

When he woke up, he was lying in grass and the sun had risen. He had no idea how he'd gotten there. "Maybe the fraternity house was a wizard's illusion. It's not as if that's never happened to me before. The brew was much stronger than it seemed. I'm sure there was trickery in it." He would have looked to see if it were still there, but it hurt to open his eyes; his head seemed to have swollen up as if all that beer had flowed into it. At least the dew smelled fresh.

Eventually, he did manage to raise his head, only to find that he was lying on the front lawn of the fraternity. With great effort, he staggered to his feet and wove his way to the door. He was about to knock, but decided that would make too much noise — a rare moment of prudence for him. He rang the doorbell instead.

After a moment, two of the fraternity members opened the door.

"I seem to have wandered out of the party," Coyote said.

"No, you didn't," came the reply. "We threw you out. You can't come back in either. Ever."

"Why not?"

"Because you drank up all our beer. The whole keg. Nobody else got to have any and we still have to pay for it." They closed the door in his face before he had a chance to explain that he could fill that keg back up if they wanted him to. In fact, he was quite capable of filling a moat around the fraternity house, and that's exactly what he did.

Afterward, he thought, "Well, maybe I don't want to belong to this group. After all, for all their bragging, there were no women here. It's going to be very boring if I just live in a house with boys. All they do is belch and fart, and that's not funny every night. I'll have to think about this." So he picked up his pack and headed in toward the campus.

Since following the boys hadn't done him any good, he decided to follow the girls he'd seen on the lawn. It was a nice day, and soon enough they were back, stretched out on blankets, reading books, and chatting on tiny phones or with each other.

He sat on a bench and pretended to be reading one of the books he'd found in his pack. A woman sat down beside him. She said, "You must have Michaelson, too."

Coyote had no idea what this meant, so he just nodded sagely.

"I love history," she continued. "I'd have done anything to get in his section."

 

Still unable to make sense of her talk — for instance, what was a section and could he coax her into his if he had one? — he continued to nod at everything she said. She went on about crusades and nights and someone named Saladin, but he'd never met that person, and he couldn't grasp how one could enclose a night with armor, though the idea sounded intriguing and certainly worth trying some other time. Finally, when she elicited no sensible response from him, the woman got up and left. He watched her join some of the women on their blankets, and when they left, he followed them.

They walked away from the campus, and he thought, "Maybe they're going to the fraternity house after all." Instead they went to another house on the same street. Like the fraternity, it had strange symbols above the door. He hung back and watched from across the street. More women entered that house, and only women.

"This is just like the fraternity," he told himself, "except it's women. This is where I need to go."

He walked up to the door and knocked on it. One of the women he'd followed opened it. She stared at him with obvious surprise. "Can I help you?" she asked.

He remembered how to speak from the previous night. "I would like to pledge," he said.

"Don't be ridiculous," came her reply and she slammed the door in his face.

"Well, that's clearly not the way." He walked back across the street, where he sat and pondered the dilemma, but nothing came to him. Finally, he had to relieve himself and crept into the bushes. When he'd finished, he crouched down beside his excrement and asked "How do I get into this women's fraternity?" One turd immediately rolled away from the rest, crying out, "He'll never learn! Don't help him!" But the others ignored the objection and replied, "You have to become someone else. They won't accept Coyote into their midst. They know what you want. And if you don't do something about your penis, he'll stand up and sing and then they'll know you for sure."

"But they won't," he argued. "They don't know me, and in this world anymore, even I wouldn't know one of the true People."

The turds sighed. "Well, we tried, didn't we?" they said to one another, and after that they wouldn't speak to him.

Later in the evening, two women came out and passed by him. They didn't notice when Coyote followed them. The women went to a large building that was brightly lit. There was a desk inside, and they each pulled out a card and pushed it through a slot at the side of the desk, then walked through a turnstile. Coyote dug around in his bag and found a card like theirs, then went in. He pushed the card into the slot and tried to walk through the turnstile, but it didn't budge and instead he clutched himself in pain. A boy behind the desk said, "That must have hurt."

Coyote agreed that it had.

The boy said, "You had your card backwards. Stripe goes on the inside. Your first time in the gym?"

"Yes," hissed Coyote.

"Well, the guys' gyms and courts are to the right, and the locker room's after that. Pool's on the far side of the locker room."

"Thank you," Coyote said. He ran the card through the slot, and noticed this time that a small light on it turned green. He pushed the turnstile and it rotated freely. How marvelous.

All sorts of activities were going on in this building. He saw people with rackets and others with large rubber balls that they somehow managed to throw at the floor so that the ball came back at them, and rooms where people seemed to be attacking machinery, which looked like far too much work to him. Near the end of the hall were two doors, one labeled "Men's Lockers" and the other, opposite it, labeled "Women's Lockers."

Coyote stood and contemplated what "lockers" might mean; he wasn't certain, but he thought the door belonging to the women had to be where he wanted to go. Finally, he used his magic to make himself invisible, and walked inside. He could stay invisible for a little while if he didnt get distracted.

There was a woman right inside with her back to him, and she had most of her clothes off. Coyote got excited looking at her, and he became visible again. He hurried farther into the room, and tried to cover his eyes with his hands; but everywhere the women were undressing and putting on special clothes — swimming suits and gym outfits. Their regular clothes hung in the lockers, which were just what he needed, but the only way he could remain in here was with his eyes closed. He barked his shins against a bench and ran into a bank of lockers before he figured that if he kept his head low and squinted narrowly at the floor ahead, he could navigate fairly well. In this clumsy way, he reached a deserted aisle.

He located a locker full of clothing, and he hurriedly dressed in the clothes hanging there. Remembering the turds' warning, he removed his penis and put it into his backpack. It complained angrily until he zipped the pack shut. Then he looked himself over in a mirror. "I still look too much like me," he said, and rummaged in the bottom of the locker, where he found some discarded gym socks. He stuffed them into his bra. It didn't take him long to finish the transformation — he had disguised himself this way many times before. He swept back his long hair and put a barrette in it. In the mirror now he looked just like one of the women — at least, he thought so and he headed quickly out of the locker room and right across campus to the sorority house.

It was all lit up, much as the fraternity had been the night before. He stepped up to the front door and was about to knock, when the door opened. A woman with jet black hair and glasses looked him over and said, "Pledge?" She was as dark as he, and he was immediately attracted to her.

He nodded, wary to have the door slammed on him again; but she welcomed him into the house. "We're looking especially," she began, "for girls who can help us raise the house GPA this year. What's your GPA?"

"Um," said Coyote. He had no idea what the right answer was. He tried to recall what the girls on the lawn had said — he remembered them talking about this GPA thing — but he didn't know what answer was expected. He knew they'd said some numbers. The answer could be four or it could be forty, and he had to say something. Carefully, he pronounced, "fourrrr," holding the last of it until he had some sense of her response. She interrupted with "You have a four average?" There was such excitement in the question that he lowered his head as if shyly and said, "Well, I don't want to brag."

"No, you should! A four–oh. What's your major?"

He thought wildly, then said, "Michaelson."

"History major, wow, that's excellent! I began in history, too. Michaelson is the best professor in the department. All the women here love him!"

"Really?" Coyote relaxed now. At last he understood what a Michaelson was. He seemed to be doing pretty well. The woman looked him over with new appreciation, but then sniffed the air. "What's that odor?" she asked.

Uneasily, Coyote said, "I just came from the gym."

She said, "In a hurry to pledge, huh?" It didn't seem to bother her beyond that, because she turned and led him into another room, where dozens more women were gathered, including the ones he'd followed earlier in the afternoon. He could hardly contain himself. It was a good thing he'd put his penis away. The shit had been reliable.

Many of the women were standing in line, and his guide indicated that he should get into the line, too. Then she went over to another cluster and spoke to them, clearly about him, as she kept pointing in his direction.

At the end of the line was a large bowl and a woman was ladling from the bowl into cups. "Punch?" she asked, and he nodded, beaming. She filled his cup, but at the same time wrinkled her nose and gave him a queer look.

He sipped the cup. It was very sweet, quite pleasant, and he downed it all in one gulp. The woman with the ladle continued to eye him strangely, but she refilled his cup when he held it out. He would have downed that one, too, but someone came up and tapped his shoulder. He turned to find the cluster of women gathered before him. "Pauline tells us you have a four average and you're majoring in history."

He nodded, sipping the punch. It was very like honey, for which he had a particular weakness.

"We'd need to see some proof, of course."

"Of course," he agreed. He would have agreed to anything at that point. He hoped they didn't notice the same smell, and that they didn't expect to see the proof tonight.

"And, you know, we need to talk with you, to find out why you want to pledge here. What sort of life you're looking for on campus. We're fairly, well, conservative compared to some of the others. It's not a party house here, which isn't to say we don't have fun."

For a blissful moment his mind filled with images of fun in this house.

"Are there any other houses looking at you?" asked one of the group.

He couldn't imagine how a house could look at him, but just to be safe, he said, "Maybe."

"Hmm," the woman replied. "We sure don't want to lose someone with a four–oh average. Would you like a tour?"

 

He downed the rest of the punch in his cup and nodded vigorously.

"Pauline?" she said, and the black–haired woman came up again.

Coyote turned back to the punch bowl and held out his cup another time. The ladler blinked at him with some concern but finally refilled the cup.

He turned back to Pauline. She said, "You want to be careful with that. It's pretty potent."

"Oh, I've had much stronger," he replied. "Bear's brew — now, that was powerful."

She tilted her head and looked at him over her glasses. "Really?" she asked.

"Strongest I ever had. I was just telling someone last night about a contest I had with Bear."

"Well, you'll have to tell me about it, too. Come on." She took him back to the foyer and up the staircase there. More women ran up and down the stairs. His heart fluttered at the sight of them and he couldn't help twisting around to watch them bounce all the way to the bottom.

As Pauline spoke, he wandered along the hall, hearing only some of what she said, too engrossed in what he saw: room after room of women, chatting, studying, some of them in pajamas, one in a towel. This was a vast improvement upon the place the night before.

Abruptly, he found Pauline considering him thoughtfully. He wondered if he had said something aloud to give away his disguise. Women could make him lose track of things.

"Yes," she said, as if they'd been discussing it, "I've heard about Bear's brew and about that drinking contest. It's kind of famous."

Coyote liked the sound of that — so he was known to these women after all. He was careful to remain demure. "Is that so? How famous?" he asked, and sipped at his punch.

"Well," the girl began, "it's an old, old story, been told for centuries, how Bear challenged Rabbit to a drinking contest."

Coyote choked on punch. "What?" he said. "That's not the story at all!"

Pauline replied, "I don't know what you mean. That's the only one I heard."

"It wasn't Rabbit at all! Rabbit wasn't even there."

"Oh, and I suppose you were?"

"Of course I was, of course I was," he said, "how else would I know?"

"As I heard it, there were just two people on hand. Bear and Ra–"

"Not Rabbit! Never Rabbit!"

Pauline took the cup from his fingers. "You know, I said that I began as a history major, but that was a long time ago." She drank the rest of the punch. "Ná jiní ma'ii," she muttered.

"What?" Surely, he hadn't heard that correctly. It had sounded like the language of the People. Coyote thought that perhaps it was time for him to go.

"Well, let's forget about Rabbit. My favorite stories are all about Coyote, anyway, and I've often wondered what he would be like if he were still around. He played a lot of tricks on people. Particularly on women. I wonder if he still does the trick where he dresses up as a woman to invade the women's tent."

"It's very late, isn't it?" He tried to edge around her, but Pauline kept moving steadily, forcing him backward along the hall.

"There was Tingling Maiden, and Changes–into–a–Bear Maiden, and many more besides. Of course, if one overlooks his boundless capacity for self–indulgence, Coyote had a number of interesting traits. He was clever at disguise. Of course, back then there weren't gym socks so he couldn't appreciate just how badly those stink." She snatched the barrette from his hair and it cascaded to its normal fall.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Oh, indulging my curiosity. I think there's a Skin beneath that outfit. I've always wondered about Coyote. But he always avoided me." She poked a finger into his bosom. "Spongy socks."

"Quit it," he said. She had him boxed in now. There was a doorway at his back and he jumped through it and tried to close the door but she got in somehow faster than he could slam it, and instead of locking her out, he locked himself in with her.

She set down the empty cup. "This, by the way, is my room."

He looked around himself, at the webs on the ceiling, in the corners. He looked back at her. She had removed her glasses, and he saw the steely look of her true eyes. "Spider?" he said with growing recognition and growing fear. "Is that really you, nashjé'ii asdzáá?"

"I'll thank you not to call me 'old,' old man Coyote. The trouble with you is that, after all the millennia, while the true People have grown and advanced and moved out into the world among the Earth Surface People, you still wander aimlessly, and play the same games and tricks, like a child who never grows up. That's what you are, I suppose, and we must all live with it. I've wondered forever if you would live up to expectations. Or should I say down? I never thought you'd come here to the maidens' house." She walked him deeper into the room before throwing her arms around him. All of them. They held him fast. When she bent over him, her venom proved more potent even than Bear's brew.

 

 

In the morning, the girls were sitting around and discussing the prospects they'd interviewed the night before. One of them asked about the history major with the four–oh average. Dark Pauline, barefoot, in a turtleneck and jeans, shook her head and said, "I'm afraid she wasn't really our sort."

"That's a shame. She seemed to have a lot of promise."

"I thought she smelled kind of ripe," said another. "Like, I don't think she'd bathed."

The one who had served the punch added, "I think she had a drinking problem."

"Oh, definitely," Pauline agreed. "'And orientation issues, too." She winked at Tingling Maiden, who shook her head in agreement.

"You think?"

"Oh, I do. Just as I'm sure that one's going to be back. Aadóó shíí dah náá'diidza jiní, like it says in the stories."

"Oh, Pauline, you and your folklore. We don't know those stories."

"Of course not," she replied, and smiled. The other maidens, hidden amongst the Earth Surface Girls, smiled back.

 

 

Coyote, wrapped for a piece of eternity in the web strung between worlds, thought to himself, "That Spider was too smart for me. I won't visit her when I come back to life. Still, I suppose she had a point. I need to change my habits and learn and improve myself. So no more gym socks or trying to dress like them. When I come back next time, I'm going to disguise myself as a professor."

About the Author:
Gregory Frost is the author of numerous works of speculative fiction. His novel Fitcher's Brides, an adult re–telling of the Bluebeard fairy tale, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award; his novelette ''Madonna of the Maquiladora'' was on the SFWA Nebula Award preliminary ballot, and his story ''How Meersh the Bedeviler Lost His Toes'' was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In addition to writing, he is also an anthology editor, film researcher, and teacher. For more information, please visit his Endicott bio page, and his website.

''Coyote Goes to College'' copyright © 2006 by Gregory Frost. This story may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express permission.