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  In the middle of it all is Coyote. His eyes are flashing wavy stripes like an Op Art display. A joint hangs from his mouth.

  The hippies crowd around him, saying:

  "Coyote, please fuck me!"

  "Coyote, y'know where we can get some of that peyote stuff or some magic mushrooms?"

  "Could you come live in our commune?"

  "Could we come live with you?"

  "Why don't you change the universe again?"

Coyote screams long and loud, ending in a supersonic howl.

  A well-dressed hippie with a tape recorder hands Coyote a recording contract. "Sign this, Coyote. You'll go platinum, and we'll all be rich."

  Coyote tears up the contract and throws it in the air.

  "Right on, Coyote!" say hippies dancing under the pieces of the contract. "Don't sell out, man!"

  "Can we make a movie about you?"

  "Could you, like, stop the war?"

  Coyote leaps to a high, thin mesa and says, "I can't stand this anymore! I gotta do something to stop all this!"

  "Yeah, stop the war, Coyote!"

  "Yeah, you crazy white kids keep saying that all this is about the war in Vietnam. Maybe if I could end that war, you'll all go home and leave me alone; but how can I do that?"

  "Go to Washington, Coyote!"

  "Talk to the President, man!"

  "Coyote for President!"

  "Yeah," says Coyote. "I'll go to Washington and talk to the President!" And he changes into a multicolor Day-Glo ICBM and flies off, leaving a psychedelic vapor trail.

  "Far out," say the hippies.

  Above the White House, Coyote changes back into himself, crawls into a window, and goes looking for the President.

  "Will the President talk to a Coyote?" he wonders, so he changes into a cartoon version of the President.

  In the Oval Office, he bumps into the real President, who turns and screams.

  "First my reflection starts looking like all those caricatures of me," says the President, "my jowl's getting heavier, my fiveo'clock shadow showing up fifteen minutes after I shave, my nose looking like a limp dick with an ass at the end of it – now I'm seeing myself!"

  Coyote changes back into himself.

  "Oh no," says the President, "I'm turning into a werewolf!"

  "Don't be stupid," says Coyote. "I just disguised myself as you so I could get in to see you."

"What are you?" The President looks Coyote over.

  "I am Coyote. One of the important native spirits of this continent."

  "A spirit! A ghost! They've finally done it! Some damned hippies slipped me some LSD!"

  "I'm not a hallucination! I am Coyote!" He howls and gets bigger and uglier, his fangs and claws long and sharp.

  "No, please! I can't help it; being the President drives you insane! I thought it would make me powerful, but I'm helpless – I'm beginning to want to quit politics, and just write books and give interviews. There's good money in that media stuff – but right now it's as if I'm totally controlled by unseen forces!"

  "I am one of those unseen forces!" Coyote snarls. He picks up the President by the throat. "If you don't do what I say, I'll make myself look like you again, and I'll go all over America, making you look like the biggest asshole that ever lived!"

  The President shudders. "I'll do anything – just tell me."

  "End the war."

  The President laughs. Coyote puts him down.

  "Is that all you want? Sure, I'll do that. I was planning on bringing our troops home anyway. It's not working. Not even the bombing. I don't even think the Bomb would help. I don't know what went wrong – it seems that the whole world's gone crazy!"

  "I sure know that. The hippies keep coming to me, bothering me."

  "You too? Is that why you want the war stopped; you want to make a deal or something?"

  "I am Coyote. I have the power to change things. If I can get you to stop the war, not only will the hippies stop bothering me, but they will change."

  "Change? How?"

  "That's easy for me. I have my power, and they have their heads so full of mass-produced spirits and gods that they can't help but change with just a little prodding from me."

  "Mass-produced spirits and gods? I don't get it."

  "What you call the media – television and all that stuff."

  The President runs a hand over his heavy stubble. "Yeah, the media, television has power. I know it."

"So do we have a deal?"

  "Yeah," the President sticks out his hand; Coyote slaps it with his paw.

  Dissolve back to me looking puzzled on the bus.

  "You mean Coyote ended the war in Vietnam?"

  "That's what I told you," says the Indian.

  "And what happened to the hippies – the yuppies – was also Coyote's doing?"

  "Yeah, you know how it is when Coyote changes things; it gets out of control and the unexpected happens."

  I shake my head. This is all too weird to believe. "So what's Coyote done lately?"

  "Well, haven't you been following the news? There's been a hell of a lot of change going on in the last few years. The world is getting stranger and stranger. Hey, they elected a movie star President, didn't they? Then there was that President who acted like a movie star! Hollywood is taking over the world. And the Internet is really screwing things around. And because things work that way, it all came back to Coyote."

  (My mind makes like a TV set jammed between channels, then . . .)

  Dissolve to a slick contemporary-style cartoon backdrop of a desert road. A car that looks like all the other foreign and American cars do these days – except it's too big – cruises down the road to the sound of techno music. There is no one driving it. It heads for Coyote's house, which has a brand-new satellite dish next to it.

  Cut to inside Coyote's house. Coyote is seated before a stateof-the-art home entertainment system, using his remote control to flick through all broadcast channels and cable networks that his satellite dish can access. He can't find anything he wants to watch, just keeps switching channels.

  "Maybe it wasn't such a good idea trading in my antique pickup truck for all this shit," he says.

  The
beep-beep
of an amplified electronic car horn blasts.

  Coyote goes outside to see what it is. There's the too-big generic contemporary car, idling with no driver, or passengers.

"A car that drives itself," Coyote says. "It figures."

  The car makes some metallic squawks and parts of it unfold and separate until it transforms into five Japanese-style robots each with built-in calculators, document processors, and briefcases.

  "Excuse me, sir," says Robot #1 in a pure Hollywood accent. "Are you Coyote?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  "Very good. My associates and I have been scanning for you a long time."

  Cameras, microphones, and radar antenna sprout out of Robots #2 through 5, wiggle around, making beeping noises, and retract.

  "Uh, yeah. What do you want with me?"

  Robots #2 through 5 circle around Coyote, who turns around, looking suspiciously at them.

  "We represent a Large Multinational Corporation," says Robot #1. "And would like to discuss business with you."

  All the robots extend their arms with the built-in briefcases and rotate them to horizontal positions. The briefcases open revealing portable computer terminals inside. The screens light up and start flashing diagrams.

  "Our Corporation has holdings of many different kinds, all over the planet and, hopefully soon, beyond," says Robot #1. "Among these are real estate, mining, construction, high-tech industries . . . and entertainment."

  "Uh-oh," says Coyote.

  "Primarily, we would like to negotiate with you on behalf of a holding of ours that produces animated cartoons."

  Coyote shakes his head. "No way. Tried to make a deal years ago; it didn't work out. Ask the Mouse."

  "We own the Mouse. We have for years. He is the one who told us about you."

  "Hope he didn't tell you any lies."

  "No. What he said made a lot of sense. About your ability to cause change, about your mythic connection to this most important continent . . ."

  "What about why the studio wouldn't have anything to do with me?"

  "Ah, Coyote, times have changed. This is the twenty-first century. Communications technologies are more varied. And that is part of our problem."

  "Problem?"

  "Yes, Coyote. Modern mass media, the Net, and the Web have not only sped up communication but also the process of mythmaking. As we go about our business, creating products, we create new mythologies, new gods, new realities. It can be very disruptive. It cuts into our profit margins."

  "And you think I can do something about that?"

  "That power to change that the Mouse told us of, you could use it to edit out realities that we find disruptive."

  Coyote laughs. All the robots extend sensing devices and rows of question marks fill their computer screens.

  "What's so funny?" asks Robot #1.

  "It don't work that way," Coyote says, holding his sides to keep from laughing. "Every time I change something, it triggers the unexpected. I can't control it. Nothing can."

  "Our R&D departments will get to work on it, Coyote. That glitch can be solved."

  Coyote laughs more.

  "Please, listen to us. We not only can offer you money but can also make you part of some of the biggest deals in history. Just look at our screens."

  Coyote gets dizzy spinning around trying to look at all five screens at once. Image after image flashes on them: storyboards for Coyote cartoon shows, Coyote dolls, Coyote designer underwear, Coyote theme parks, Coyote condominiums, Coyote shopping malls . . .

  "Stop! Stop!" says Coyote, staggering around as if he were drunk. "What is all this stuff?"

  "Things that could result from your association with us."

  "Wait a minute! The amusement parks, condos, and shopping malls – where are you gonna put all that?"

  "Why, right here. Through you we are going to obtain the rights to all this undeveloped land. There's so much we could do here and lots of raw materials – some even radioactive – and it disturbs us to see all this land going unused and not generating any profits."

"Get out of here!" says Coyote.

"But we are willing to let you have a share of the profits!"

  "I've heard all of this before, and it always ends the same way – with me getting taken for more and more of what I've got!"

  "So you refuse to even negotiate with us?"

  "You betcha."

  Robots #2 through 5 make some beeping noises.

  "Yes," Robot #1 says. "We have no choice but to implement plan B."

  "Plan B?" asks Coyote.

  The robots refold themselves into new shapes, then link up into one giant Megarobot.

  "Plan B," says the Megarobot in a booming, amplified voice, "provides for us to take you and your property by force. This is all vital to maintaining our profit margins and saving the world economy. We have no choice."

  "Same old story," says Coyote.

  The Megarobot raises its arms, retracting its hands and firing missiles into the sky. Lasers shoot out of its eyes and barely miss Coyote. Then it vomits napalm all over the place.

  "No!" roars Coyote, as he summons his power of change and conjures up a thunderstorm and tornado that are both several times larger than the Megarobot.

  The storm and tornado converge on the Megarobot, knocking it down, shorting out its circuits with water and lightning, sandblasting through its armor, and, with the help of traces of radioactive elements in the flying dust and mud, causing the Megarobot to fuse into a great robot-shaped rock formation.

  Dissolve to me and the Indian on the Greyhound.

  "So, is that it?" I ask, fascinated, but barely able to stay awake. "The Coyote stories brought up to date. Is Coyote retired now?"

  The Indian laughs. "Hell no. Coyote is alive and well and . . ."

  I fall asleep.

  Dissolve to a dream. I am waiting at a bus stop in the middle of a desert that is drawn in the style of my own Coyote cartoons. Coyote comes up, carrying a big suitcase, sits next to me.

  "You Coyote?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says.

"So what happened after you defeated the Megarobot?"

  "Well, I got to thinking about what they, it – whatever – said about mass media and the Internet speeding up the making of myths and gods and realities. I realized that this
is
my business. Of course, I couldn't do it on their, or anybody else's terms, but it is what I should do, only
my
way."

  "Y
our
way?"

  "Yeah, with me doing my usual trickster game of changing things around and letting the unexpected happen, with nobody to try and control it."

  "How are you planning on doing that?"

  "Easy, kid! I'm going to plug into corporations that own the communications and entertainment industries through the World Wide Web! Start my own mythology/god/reality business."

  "Wow! That'll r
eally
change the world! So where you heading?"

  "Where else? Hollywood."

  Dissolve to me waking up on the bus. The Indian is gone. The only thing left on his seat is some animal fur.

  The bus pulls into the Hollywood Greyhound station that, for all its mythic reputation, is small and unimpressive. I stagger out dazed, squinting at the blinding Southern California daylight. I can barely see and don't know where to go or what to do next.

  For a while I think I see a coyote crossing the street.