A Horse Named Sorrow (18 page)

Jimmy didn't cry then. He came close though, I could see. He shook his head out like a wet dog.

“Are you full of regret, Jimmy?”

“No. We're the same, me and my ma, but I don't gotta end the same.”

“Tell me the story, Jimmy—what happened next?” I insisted.

Jimmy thought to do what anyone in Buffalo would do in terms of getting a new start. He went to California. “But I didn't just go; I couldn't just go, like I used to—I don't know. I had to go in a certain way. The railroads and airplanes and cars—they all travel in circles, and I'd end up back where I started. No sooner would I set out for St. Louis than I'd end up in New Jersey. Once I went to Texas, and by the time three months had passed, I was in Florida. I actually headed for California twice before, but never made it past Denver. And then I was in Minneapolis. It was weird; it was like I was attached to some kind of tether. Maybe I slept wrong, in the shape of a boomerang or something.”

“Maybe you loved your mom.” The question that was my face.

He rolled his eyes.

“Maybe…well, of course… but I think it's more the circle of things.”

“A closed loop. I know all about it, Jimmy,” I said with my nods of assent.

“I got tested in that hospital. I'd walked by the sign for it three or four times and the day she died, I bit the bullet since I'd been avoiding it for years. After that…well, something was over, you know? I had to leave and never look back. At first I thought I should walk, but I knew I'd never make it. I'd end up hitching a ride or a train, and then I'd be right back in the old pattern, looping all over the continent like some pinball. I thought of walking because I knew I had to make it hard. I had to earn my passage somehow. I had to climb here. Climb out of something, get born, you know?”

I know now.

I called information, searching for his father, who he'd said had left them all years ago, but was still lurking around town somewhere. I didn't dare call the born-agains.

“Keane. Jack Keane.” There were three J. Keanes listed in Buffalo.

“Hi, I'm a friend of your son's.” But the first one had no son. Or was he just saying that, since it was the common response of so many fathers of gay sons? The second number was disconnected. I breathed deep for the third, but got an answering machine. “This is Jack, leave a message.” That's when it occurred to me that Jimmy's voice was still on our machine. That seemed tacky, having a dead guy's voice taking messages from people who didn't even know he was dead yet. Tacky, macabre, cruel even. But there was no way I would erase it, because it was Jimmy's voice. That being the case, I decided against leaving our number for the final Jack.

Instead, I started going down to the corner liquor store and calling Jimmy.

“Hi, this is Jimmy and Seamus. We're not here.”
Beep.
Music to my ears. In a Buffalo twang. Mr. Understatement. Jimmy.

The twins started watching me, wondering, pointing. Once they came over. “You don't got any phone anymore?”

“No, it's not that. Listen.” And I handed Michael the phone. Arched brows. At which Marcus became overexcited, jumping up and down for his turn, so I had to dig for more quarters and dial again so they'd both get it. They got it. Big smiles and nods—they knew who it was. “Diarrhea boy!”

“He died,” I told them. But I think they knew; they'd seen him fading for months. Their faces dropped all the same to get the news. But then they wanted to listen some more.

They'd run over whenever they spotted me there after that. To listen to the dead.

I think they had some idea that the message would change. That he'd say something—like what it was like on the other side.

“It never changes,” Michael said despondently to Marcus.

“No, it never changes,” I concurred.

That was the last time they ran over. Their mother had already taken to screaming at them in Chinese, something, I guessed, to the effect that they shouldn't be bothering me or running across the street. I had no idea which. I only knew she smiled at me when I looked at her, indicating that I wasn't the problem, in her insular, non confrontational way.

The frat had a pay phone, and it was as good a place as any to call my mom. I made a point to call her at home instead of at her office, so I wouldn't have to talk to her. All she wanted was to know I wasn't dead anyway. What was the point of talking? Which made me feel sad, until I remembered that just last night I'd realized it was sharing silence with her that was best. Silence and a song.

I ought a just call her and sing. No more talking.

I heard the beep, and her faux-cheerful voice. “Hi. This is Karen Blake. Leave a message at the beep and I'll call you back.”

“Hi, Mom. It's me, Seamus. Everything's great. I'm in Eugene” (and he's in me). “Today I head east. Don't worry—I'm great.” Then I sang to her: “
La, la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la, la, la, Bobby McGee
… ” I kept humming the rest of it till I ran out of breath and then signed off—”Love ya, Mom. Bye.”

I gathered up my things and, after throwing a perfunctory thanks at a few of the frat boys (one of whom looked at me askance, having witnessed the impromptu telephonic serenade as well as my kitchen query), I set out, determined not to go anywhere near the organic co-op.

But the morning was all misty and I got turned around, and the only way I knew to get reoriented was to find the river, and doing that, I ended up right back at the market like I was living out some Greek play. I couldn't not go in. But I hesitated.

A kid out front, straddling his little stingray bicycle, watched me curiously. I like kids and I hate being stared at, so I made up my mind and dismounted.

“How you doing there, partner?” I said to the kid.

“Okay,” he said rather seriously, like a little man.

“Glad to hear it. Will you watch my bike?”

“Sure,” he answered, as if to say
why wouldn't I?

And through the door I went. I needed something to eat anyway. And I figured if he were there, I'd say thank you and goodbye, but not with words. I'd kiss him on the forehead and give him benediction because what we'd shared was holy.

As it turned out he wasn't there, but the stock girl was, and she said: “You're back looking for Eugene?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you just missed him,” she blurted as she hefted a box of canned beans onto her cart.

“Is he working today?”

“Eugene? Nah. Yesterday was his last day,” she said as she ran a razorblade around the edge of the box. “He came shopping first thing this morning.”

“His last day? He quit?” I must have looked a bit alarmed.

“Yeah, he left town.”

My face a question. “Where'd he go?”

She stopped and looked at me. “I think to some Indian reservation. I don't know. Like I said yesterday, he doesn't say much—bein' mute and all,” she wisecracked. Then she reconsidered, probably remembering my fragile state from yesterday and seeing it now returning to my face. “I'm sorry, that was rude. I wish I knew, but I don't.”

“Yeah,” I said, a bit startled and thinking to ask her where the Klamath Reservation was, remembering Cherrie Kee's mentioning it yesterday.

“How was the date?” she said coyly then, but I just looked at her. “Good, huh?” And she gave me that sweet, sad smile again from yesterday. “You gay guys put yourselves through way too much.” And she shook her head back and forth. Then she patted my shoulder. “Wait here.”

She came back with a bag of scones and muffins. “Here, these are day-old; you can have 'em.”

“Thanks,” I said, stupefied. There was something about that store: the kindness of its strangers, and the fact that I'd been there three times and eaten each time and only paid once. She put her hand on my shoulder: “You take care of yourself, okay?” She must have thought me one fragile flower. I nodded decisively—my A-OK—and she returned to her boxes of canned beans, one of which she proceeded to boldly eviscerate with the box-cutter. And that was that.

I went out the door, still in a daze, clutching Jimmy and the bag of food. And there was the kid on the bike who made me think of one of Jimmy's poems:

I thanked him for watching my bike and said, “You wanna see a dead guy?” And I opened Jimmy-in-the-bag. “Right here, all burnt up, this is a dead guy. Name was Jimmy.” He peered in and then looked up at me with a “no shit” drop jaw.

“You got a mom and dad, and brothers, sisters, friends?”

“Yeah, I got all those.” Again, the
why wouldn't I?
look.

“Be nice to 'em, K?”

“Okay then,” the little man said.

And I rode away, leaving him one story the richer.

That made two of us.

A little more than a story in my case. Because it occurred to me then, with Jimmy and Eugene both on my mind, that I'd been knocked up and I knew right then what a spirit baby was. And I laughed . . .
Ha, ha, Jimmy
.
Some things you gotta figure out for yourself.
Okay then.

Go east, young man”—backasswards—but that's just what I did. Over the bridge, and the whispering river, and out of Eugene, into neighboring sulfur-stinking Springfield, where, for the first time, I balked at pancakes (since I had scones and muffins from the market) and pulled into a donut shop, where I ordered a big, bland, highly caffeinated Styrofoam cup of tired, burnt coffee. I found a plastic table in the corner at the window where I could watch my bike, and I began to sip and nosh my scones. There was a little girl two tables over who I smiled at because she'd been watching me from her hot chocolate and slouched jelly donut. She'd watched me pull up, watched me come in, and watched me order, sit, stir coffee, and eat my scones while her mother, pensive, stared out the window at traffic. It occurred to me that if that little girl had asked me what I was doing, I wouldn't have known what to say. But I knew if I showed her Jimmy, she'd understand. So I just smiled at her as I got up to leave, and when I was back out at the bike, I held Jimmy up in his velvet purple bag, and shook him around, and kissed him, and did a little jig, and the little girl smiled like a madwoman, giggling and squirming in her seat before her mother turned and glared.

I climbed up and over the Cascades—out the 126, which just happened to be the steepest route across those mountains. Well, I'd promised.

And then the mist turned to rain again. So I pulled over and put my ball cap on—that was Jimmy's too: Buffalo Freight & Salvage—and draped the nylon poncho over my shoulders. I tucked Jimmy up inside the zipper of my windbreaker, up against my belly—carried him like a child, I did. In the pocket of me, like a marsupial. All the way up that winding snake of steep highway, in the rain, cars tailing me around the curves, stinking of wet metal and rubber, all mixed up with the smell of dripping fir trees and drenched grasses because around us was just endless forest, great hunks of bouldered stone, an occasional cabin or Forest Service shed, and the gray churning sky over forlorn, lonely meadows.

Up near the pass, the sun came back out and the birds all made a racket the way they do after rain, and the meadows weren't sad anymore. They were all pixie-giddy in fact, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see little bands of faeries marching about celebrating the ceasing of the rain. The whole scene filled me with energy, and taking a deep breath of all the steaming fresh greenness, I stood up on
Chief Joseph
and, pumping hard on the pedals, made a final sprint for the top.

And when I reached it, it opened like a big picture book to a vast, weird landscape—a trio of black volcanic cones called the Three Sisters (I made a wish on each of them) shimmered in the after-rain way out across a blasted-clean, almost-empty wilderness of black lava. As if the whole world had turned to ash. Only it was full of tourists wandering about like people lost on Mars, way out there in the rocks, looking around, having abandoned their Winnebagos like spent lunar modules.

I was starving after the long ride and thought of begging snacks from the space travelers, but I wasn't feeling too social. I was hungry all the same and there weren't any stores—hungry enough to eat ash. Mystical mad enough to eat my dead lover for sustenance. Jimmy'd said once in a poem:
I ate the road, mile by mile, like a snake swallowing its tail
.

Hot damn Jimmy and the silences he wrought. The timbre of his voice.

I lolled along, getting my breath back, and spied two apples lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road.
Manzana
from heaven or some such. I pulled over immediately to pick them up, and as I bit hungrily into them—the sweet juice quenching my hunger and thirst both and running down my chin—I thought I understood Adam and Eve and the whole sorry mess, and I couldn't blame them. Would have done the same. If I were God, it'd be a whole different story, dropping fruit at will. Let them eat apples.

I dispensed with my poncho, tied Jimmy back onto the handlebars and remounted, having boldly sinned, and with renewed vigor, I pedaled onward across the burnt wasteland, half-expecting to see Von Trapp children, cartoon-burnt in their gamboling, singing sad opera arias. But there were only dazed tourists discussing Armageddon and looking for flowers amid just a smattering of plants—withered trees of knowledge.

Jimmy.

Soon I was flying, the wind at my face, the looming yellow sign ahead greeting me with its black truck poised on the hypotenuse of a triangle, reading “6% grade” and warning the big rigs. Might as well have said “Grace” for me. An invitation. To fight. The place for lost souls. Yippee!