Coyote Pete was making love to a bored housewife in an hourly motel when the fire alarm went off. The legend says that he never heard the alarm or smelled the smoke because he’s just too much into fucking. The legend also says that while the woman ran out while she still could, Coyote Pete simply put on his snakeskin hat, pulled on his boots, and lit up a smoke. Because he knew it was his time. Maybe he knew a lifetime of breaking hearts and raising hell in this town would finally catch up to him, and if the fire didn’t get him, something else would. Probably an angry husband, gunned down on a hot summer night, left to die on the street like a low class dog.
Or maybe, just maybe, he knew it was better to just burn up, like a star. He had a couple of good years left before things got sad, and nobody wants to see that, especially Coyote Pete. But that fire, paradoxically, gave him the chance to live forever. Now he lives wherever you see a lonely trucker’s wife. Now he lives in the saggy mattresses of the motels on the edge of town, with the bed bugs and the polyester carpets.
Coyote Pete. He’s a ghost now, and he haunts our tawdry hearts.
