A Horse Named Sorrow (21 page)

And I sat there for two or more hours, on the curb, in the shade of a little tree, reading about the Sioux, about the broken treaties, the subterfuge, the greed for gold, and the killing of the buffalo. It had the makings of a seriously tragic opera from the start, with a final aria by Custer, or Crazy Horse, or Sitting Bull, or all three. The Sioux were nobody's fools, and over a series of years they won not just battles but an actual war against the acronym, burning down all the American forts in the Powder River country and forcing the acronym's army to retreat and even sue for peace. And here I thought Vietnam was the first war they lost.

The Lakota's (the Sioux's real name in their own language) world seemed to be the greatest expression of freedom—a way of life that was in no way limited or confined by others. In battle they counted coup. It wasn't about murder or annihilation or genocide so much as making a hit (coup) or getting the enemy's horses and women. Almost like a kind of sport, but a lethal game. And even the bluecoats acknowledged they were the best horsemen they'd ever seen.

And then Custer came. In the nick of time. So as to ruin everything once and for all. A sort of backasswards Jimmy, complete with blond dye job. Because after he died, it really came down on the Lakota, and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and all the rest of them were on the run and eventually killed or corralled onto reservations, which led to starvation and, of course, Christianity. Same difference. A people who'd only hunted buffalo and gathered berries and talked to the sky were told to farm and go to church. Red Cloud even tried to be conciliatory, but in so doing his people soon became victims of propaganda in the press, the greed of agents and politicians, and the needs of the disinherited from all over Europe. (To think that these people had everything in common, and they killed each other anyway. Pawns in someone else's game. Same as it ever was.)

And then the appearance of the ghost dance from a Paiute who came from out west, and how the dance spread like a crazy religion: paint yourself white and dance, and the white men will vanish and the ancestors will return—and what's more, while you're dancing, you'll be invincible and no one will be able to kill you. All of it ending in a ditch in the snow, the white men gunning the ghost dancers down. That place was Wounded Knee, and they say that's where Crazy Horse's heart is buried in an unmarked grave.

What happened to the Indians sounded a lot like what had been happening in San Francisco. And the grandfather in Washington—yet another—with all his hosts of acronyms, and not a one of them cared. Let 'em eat ketchup; let 'em eat pills; let 'em live in the Badlands (no matter whether it's a not-very-interesting gay bar in San Francisco or an uncultivatable South Dakota desert of clay, rock, and sandstone—and not a buffalo in sight). And all those gay clubs—just a ghost dance.

I next read the story of Chief Joseph, who was Nez Perce. A once upon a time: the quiet little valley and the peace-loving people, the ugly fag medicine man who scared the whites, and the whites getting all hot and telling them to move away from their ancestral home, and the Nez Perce saying no, and the whites getting threatening, and the noble Chief Joseph saying, “Okay then, we'll go.” And the soldiers saying “you got ten minutes” or something ridiculous, and it wasn't enough time, and so the people hurried, but the soldiers attacked them anyway—and then the long thousand-mile, three-month pursuit and all the clever maneuvering by Joseph, and finally the speech in the snow: Chief Joseph said, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

I crossed the street to a minimart for a forty-ounce bottle of Crazy Horse malt liquor—a gesture of respect in my strange backasswards way. But I looked twice at the twenty I handed across the counter: the face of a man who spent a good deal of his time killing Indians—including the one who had saved his life—glared back at me.

Blood money.

I jammed the forty into my left pannier and unfolded my map, hoping for a campground, my mind on the Sioux and Eugene and Jimmy and Crazy Horse, all of them mixed up in the muddled opera of my head—the soup of it.

The book had said Crazy Horse held out till the bitter end (not even a photo), for in his vision this world was a dream, and in it he could endure anything. And I remembered then what Jimmy had said when I'd asked him how he got interested in Buddhism.

“Crazy Horse.”

I'd thought it another of his enigmatic answers then. Which it was.
Some things you gotta figure out for yourself, Shame.

Well, I figured out this much—Edward Curtis would have done Jimmy justice. Handsome motherfucker. We needed an Edward Curtis for death by acronym. The San Francisco
Bay Area Reporter
's little passport obit photos just didn't cut it.

And something else too: I knew where Wounded Knee was now, and when I looked at the map, I saw I was heading straight for it.

I hadn't the heart to tell my mother Jimmy was dead or even that I was leaving. The last time I'd visited, she'd made us Russian tea and snicker doodles. Comfort food. All wrapped up in paper and bows, sitting on her little entry table, where she'd always put my sack lunch when I was a little kid.

“Mom, he can't keep this stuff down. He'll throw them across the room just like last time.”

She looked slighted. But she'd never even met Jimmy; she wasn't “ready,” she'd told me. And not because of the acronym, she assured me. No. It was about him being my queer lover. White lie.

“And when will you be ready?”

“Oh honey, think of your father.” And she'd reached to uncork a bottle of Chardonnay.

“What about him? Was he homophobic too?”

“No one's homophobic,” she'd snapped.

And she wasn't. I knew that. Thing was, Jimmy was “short.” And she'd done short. She wasn't doing short again. That was the reason; I knew that was the real reason. But she couldn't say it.

When Jimmy had been hospitalized with pneumonia—
he'd
said plenty and how he'd moaned. “This sucks. I don't want to do this hospital thing.” Horses are supposed to be shot, after all. Jimmy was right to be mad at me; horses shouldn't have to shoot themselves.

“Seamus,” he muttered, “I wanna go home; take me home.”

“No can do, Jimmy. Not just yet. Soon, Jimmy, soon.” And he'd already fallen asleep by the time I'd finished speaking. And there I was in an ugly white, antiseptic room with its plastic and its steel and its utter emptiness and un-hominess—like some public bathroom or a BART station. That's when it first hit me that I felt abandoned by my mother. My mother didn't do sorrow—not this kind; not again. She just put on a face, smothered by a sorrow that didn't even have its teeth anymore. All bottled up—pun intended—signed, sealed, delivered. Soldier's wife. I could have used a friend then, but she'd have none of it. I was forever a kid to her. That was final too. And kids don't have adult problems. It occurred to me that if my mother called while I was in that hospital, her message might have been something like:
All done, honey?
Like Jimmy was my steak and potatoes or something.

Yeah, I'm done alright
. And I'd cried then in earnest, and that attracted a nurse, and God bless her—the nametag said “Jill”—she did what was needed. And she took me down for a cup of coffee and we didn't say much—just small, sad smiles. Blanche Dubois can say what she will about strangers, but it's the kindness of nurses and political activists and small children that I counted on.

“Where are you going?” Jill asked.

“I'm gonna go home.”

“Is someone there?”

“Oh yeah, lots of people.” And I faked a smile, because it was a white lie. There were only our spirit children at home: Little Joseph, Elmer, Genevieve, and Victoria. And the acacia tree, of course, the buckled sidewalk, the golden light at the corner liquor store, the screech of the little twins, the rattle of the window when the bus passed, the emptiness of the fire escape in the big bay window, and
Chief Joseph
sparkling in Christmas lights.

It was already dusk when I finally left Prineville; I couldn't stay there. In the book, Indians had called paper “talking leaves,” and something about that image and Andrew Jackson on the twenty and all those books was nightmarish. I watched the loosed golden leaves of cottonwoods blow across the road in front of me, whispering, creepy—an old, old song.

There wasn't a car in sight, in either direction. And eventually, five or so miles down the road, I came upon an old drive-in movie theater, the pavement all turned up and full of weeds and brush. A ruin. I bet they'd shown some westerns there. The speakers still stood like skeletal parking meters, and the screen too, enormous and singular in the fat surrounding landscape of sagebrush and yellow clumpy flowers. It was peeling, and looked to me like a great unnoticed and unrecognized portal to some other world—like that big black rectangle in
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Because other than it, there was nothing but silence, and just a small breeze playing in the weeds among those scattered speakers, now and again rippling the big white screen. An ideal place to camp. It looked like any world but the one I just came from.

I leaned my bike against a speaker and laid my sleeping bag down where the pavement had deteriorated to dirt but was still nice and fat. I sat there, holding Jimmy, propped up against another speaker, and looked up at that old tattered screen, wondering if it had anything left to say while I nursed my bottle of Crazy Horse like a self-satisfied infant. Enormous in its silence, white as a ghost, the wind made it dance to a hollow, forlorn song. I looked at it until I was nearly blinded by its blankness and sleep both, and that's when Jimmy's face, like a mirage, filled the screen in those moments between wakefulness and slumber. Vivid he was too with the big brown eyes and say-nothing smile, the dark scattered chin scruff, the Adam's apple and turned-up nose, the tattoo for good in front of his ear, the third eye and the golden angel's hair. And then Jimmy morphed into crow-black-haired Eugene, and then Eugene into sighing stoic Chief Joseph, and from there all the rest of those chiefs from the book: Red Cloud and American Horse, beautiful with their mouths set and their chests bejeweled with shells (I'd seen men like that—Jimmy, his chest covered in pearls); Dull Knife and Sitting Bull; Spotted Tail and Hump, with their set, dignified frowns. And all of them with Cherrie Kee's hawk nose and Eugene's penetrating eyes.

Finally, a painted horse came flying off the screen in 3-D and I startled awake, knocking over my forty-ouncer, knowing then I'd come to Crazy Horse—the screen a blank because he never allowed anyone to take his picture.

I got up and climbed into my bag, and when I fell back to sleep I dreamed the monolith was an enormous tree with white leaves, moving in the wind. Talking. But I couldn't make out a word.

Next morning, I couldn't ignore it as I packed up. Kept my eye on it, I did. Riding away too, looking back over my shoulder—kept my eye on it like I had the Campanile Tower at U.C. Berkeley and Mt. Shasta. A pillar of salt. The truth and the past looming and leaning down over me, the heavens on bended knee—God wants to make love, the old lech.

Or is it death who's horny?

Well whoever or whatever God is, he gets his man. Every time. Same difference.

The holy ghost.

—dance.

My mom and I went out for lunch and I told her I was leaving. She gulped a rather substantial swig of her Chardonnay, picked up her napkin, and dabbed her lips before responding.

“Is that a good idea right now?”

“He asked me to, Mom.”

“He asked you to leave?” She looked perplexed, but in fact she just wasn't listening or was arguing in that odd way she had of turning everything she wanted to challenge into a question.

“He asked me to take his ashes back home.”

“Is that reasonable?”

I took a deep breath. “It's not about reason, Mom.”

She sighed and gave me an annoyed look. “Well, Seamus, it should be. You're a man now, you're not a boy.”

“Actually . . .” But I wasn't going to take the bait. I had brought her here to tell her, not to ask her, not to explain even—and not to argue about everything else. It was a courtesy as I saw it. I was still mad at her for never having bothered to meet Jimmy, for failing me as a friend. “Yes, Mom, I'm a man and can make my own decisions.”

“Do you have the money for the fight?”

I didn't need to tell her I'd lost my job. Fortunately, I'd be getting Jimmy's deposit back for the apartment or I'd have been too short to go at all. “I'm not flying.”

The question of her face is not the question of my face. Hers is more of a vexed and suspicious, almost fearful,
what-are-you-talking-about?
face.

“I'm taking his bike.”

“His bike?”

“He asked me to.”

And she said carefully, looking at her salad, “Well, honey, he may not have been in his right mind.”

“His mind was very right, all the time. He was never demented. And you'd know that if . . .” I stopped myself.

She didn't take the bait either. “Oh, well I just think that's an awfully complicated way to do it.”

I wasn't going to say the road's the place for lost souls. “Well, I'm complicated, right?” Then, seeing she was in no way reassured, I smiled and reached out my hand to touch her arm. “I'll be careful, Mom, don't worry.” I'd always done what I wanted to do. She knew that about me. “I'll call you every few days.”

“I would like that.”

I smiled and she gave me a clipped smile back. And then I chanced it. “What did you do when Dad died?”

She inhaled and then drained her wine glass. “I was pregnant. . . . I couldn't really think about it. . . . It was probably good you came along. I had something to take care of.” She gave me her small clipped smile again, which meant “enough.” Okay then. We paid the bill and stepped outside, where I hugged her goodbye, tried to give her a Jimmy squeeze, but she cut our hug short. She'd raised me is what she'd done. Doing what needed to be done. Like Jimmy that way, I suppose. Never thought I'd see them as in any way alike.