Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore Page A

together, shovels in hand, to turn over their squirming horn of plenty, but shovel after shovel turned up empty. Into the third bed they began to panic and were wildly slinging shit in the air when Harlan pulled up.
    "Digging for horses?" he asked.
    "Worms," Pokey shouted, lifting the veil of secrecy with a single word.
    "Where did you get the manure?"
    "Around," Pokey said.
    "Around where?"
    "The ranches on the res."
    Harlan began to laugh and Samson was afraid for a moment that Pokey would brain him with the shovel. "You were trying to grow worms?"
    "Old Man Coyote told us to," Samson said defensively.
    "We let go a thousand worms in here to breed so we could sell 'em to fishermen."
    "I guess Old Man Coyote didn't tell you that cattle ranchers put a wormer in their cattle feed, huh?"
    "Wormer?" Pokey said.
    "That manure was poison to your worms. They were probably dead ten minutes after you put them in there."
    Samson and Pokey looked at each other forlornly, the boy's lower lip swelling with disappointment, the man's temples throbbing with pain.
    Some people believe that hard work is its own reward and a job well done is a tribute to a man's character; fortunately, none of those people were around or they would have been ducking shovel blows. Pokey and Samson decided to get drunk. Harlan stayed on to coach the boy through his first hangover and run interference with Grandma, who would have skinned the two men had she known they were giving liquor to a twelve-year-old.
    It was the end of summer, a summer spent in sulking and speculating, before Pokey brought home the goats. He'd obtained the pair, a male and a female, from a dubious source in a Hardin bar by winning a bet that had something to do with a pineapple, a throwing knife, and a waitress named Debbie. Samson had difficulty putting the story together from Pokey's drunken ravings, but he gathered that because Debbie had survived, and the pineapple had not, Pokey had two goats on his hands.
    "We could breed 'em and sell 'em for meat," Pokey said. "But I got a better idea. Them lawyers and doctors are flying into Montana from the city and paying a thousand bucks a head to shoot bighorn sheep. I say we go to the airport in Billings and wait for one of them to get off a plane, then tell 'em they can come to the res and shoot one for two – three hundred. I can be the faithful Indian guide and lead them all over hell and back, and you can take the goats up into the mountains and tie them up where they can shoot 'em."
    Despite Samson's objections that even a city lawyer might know the difference between a bighorn sheep and a nanny goat, Pokey insisted that come morning they would be on the road to riches. Come morning, however, when Samson went outside to look at the goats he found them lying on their backs, legs shot stiff to the sky with rigor mortis, dead as stones. In his excitement Pokey had tied the goats next to a patch of hemlock, and the goats, perhaps sensing what was planned for them, munched their last meal and joined the ranks of Socrates.
    Not all of Pokey's quests for spiritual capitalism were complete failures. He and Samson made a little money with the "authentic" Indian fry-bread taco stand they set up outside of the Custer Battlefield National Monument, until the health department objected to the presence of marmot and raccoon meat in their all-beef tacos. And they did make forty dollars selling eagle feathers to tourists (actually the feathers of two buzzards that had dined on tainted goat carcass), which they used to buy marijuana seeds that produced a respectable crop of grape-sized casaba melons. (Harlan referred to this as the magic beans incident.) And finally, while Samson was busy with school and basketball and a developing obsession with girls, Pokey turned to prostitution and made five bucks from the owner of the Hardin 7-Eleven who paid the shaman to take his sandwich sign and go stand somewhere else.
    Samson was fifteen by the time Pokey