The Oil Change

The Coyote had some guns. Biceps on a lean frame.

     He was standing at the counter of the Quick-Lube when I came in, tan, wearing aviator sunglasses, navy blue muscle-T and a vented five-panel cap that read: Diesel Dan’s.   

     I circled around the counter and sat in one of the plastic chairs at his back.

       
     You assume a fella goes by the name of Coyote, if it’s tooled into the leather of his belt, which it was, in a darkened Saloon-Style font, all upper-case and framed in leafy paisley swirls. I wondered how he pronounced it— the Western way, Mid-western, Southern, or the Border way, the way of a man who had cramp hollows built into the recesses of his vehicle. It's all in the E.

     The Coyote’s hair fell straight out and down from his cap, an inky, and possibly regretful black, unnatural at any age. The cut of it lent to making his neck appear to be a length of wetted stovepipe, protruding from between his shoulder blades.

     Beneath the muscle-T, the Coyote wore shorts of a stonewashed denim, tall white tube socks and black sandals. The shorts he had pulled up and held by the belt in a position that somehow made his upper torso appear oddly diminished. Legs and arms were correct in relation to the head, but the torso ... the torso was all chest, no abdomen, nothing below the ribs it seemed, but a swivel of sorts on which he turned and looked at me.
       
     I nodded. A single dipping of my head. Hey.

   The Coyote did nothing, unless his acknowledgment was hidden behind the dark lenses of his Aviators, which I doubted. The Coyote is coy that way.

     He gathered his keys and left.