A Horse Named Sorrow (24 page)

I pulled out my wallet then, but Ellen shook her head. “Carl's already out on a job, but he wanted to get this for you.”

I nodded. “Please thank him for me.” Her sad smile.

A dog followed me out of Dayville. I shooed her, but she wouldn't let up, and after I'd left the town a half-mile behind me and nearly reached the river, I stopped and tried to send her back home. Not that I knew where that was, but I figured she must live in town. Who knows how big a dog's territory or wanderings got out here. But she just wagged her tail, having made up her mind she was going with me. So be it, I thought, and told her I thought she was acting like a dumb dog, disgrace to her species, all that. When I reached the river, she stopped and stared at me as I crossed the little bridge, and then I felt bad for scolding her. She'd known where her stopping point was all along. I left her there, and she watched me for a long time. And I wondered if she recognized the bike, the shirt, wondered if maybe she'd remembered the scent of Jimmy.

If it was time for goodbyes, then I owed the kids at the Y a visit too. I'd neglected them, which is a rotten thing to do to little kids. I hadn't even explained, and kids don't sit around surmising on death and taxes, so they probably just thought I didn't like them anymore.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

There'd been calls of course from Mandy, the coordinator of the Afterschool Program, when I'd stopped showing up. None of which I'd answered. I simply listened to her messages and then waited to call back at 3:00 a.m. a week later when I knew she wouldn't answer.

“My boyfriend died, Mandy. I can't deal with the kids right now. Sorry. I'll give you a call in a while.”

I hadn't heard back from her, until the very day I decided to go visit. On my way out of the house, I checked my mail, and there was the envelope in Eustacia's perfect script. Inside, condolences on some cheesy dime-store card decorated with white flowers. All the kids had signed the thing, which read something like “In your time of grief, know that you are in our hearts . . . yadda, yadda, yadda.” There was Eustacia's beautiful script again, Ivan's name misspelled “Ovan” for old time's sake; Miguel's scrawl; Win's frustrated
W
and
I
connection in cursive; Mo's enormous (each letter of a different scale), moniker with first, middle, and last name, taking up half the card.

Why'd you go and do that, Mandy?

I had to go back upstairs. On the floor, back to the wall, my knee up, face in my hands between my legs.
Pull.

But there was no way I could go visit after that card.

I didn't dare.

Sorry kiddies. Better luck next time.

Carl was right. It was the most beautiful place on earth. All morning I rode through rolling hills with big orange rocky cliffs off in the distance, the sun bright and rising toward noon. I'd lucked onto a good road with little traffic, and the pancakes and coffee and warmth had cheered my mood, so it was just me and Jimmy and the world waking up, bleeding out into the endless empty places that stretched so far in every direction around me, I'd get dizzy in the looking. But something sad trailed in my wake too—my mind on how these were all places Jimmy had passed through and left behind, never to see again. I was running back across it all, erasing them for good, like some old words left behind on the blackboard of Jimmy.

I thought about him, looking down at my legs and feet as I pedaled: his dark hairy shins, dirtied with grease from the bike chain making these same motions. He saw all the same beautiful places, smelled the same sage and juniper, felt the same sun, heard the same hawks crying out in the sky. I felt then he'd given me this. This whole world out here, like a parting gift.

Two hours later, I was pumping up a rise, having reached the high red cliffs I'd been watching in the distance, when ahead I saw a blue pickup on the shoulder, with its hood up. Stalled, I supposed. As I got closer I could see a long-haired man working on the engine. And then—I couldn't believe my eyes: what looked like Eugene came spilling out of the passenger door with a wrench in his hand.

“No way!” I said out loud to myself, stopping my bike abruptly a hundred yards away. It can't be him—that would be like Jimmy smoke rising right out of the bag like a genie. Genies, like churches, who offered three wishes: Eugene, Eugene, Eugene.

I coasted forward toward the truck, like a wary dog, my heart banging around like how it had the day I first set eyes on him. He didn't see me at first, as he'd hopped around front to give the wrench to the man working on the engine. But then his head popped up, and looking like a dog himself that could see movement in the distance, he walked out into the road eyeing me as I slowly approached, still nearly a hundred yards down the road.

“Eugene!” I called, uncontrollably smiling, and that asymmetrical grin of his erupted across his face as he recognized me and came running down the yellow line in his clunky army boots and the same black hoodie from our night together in Eugene. I pumped harder on the pedals so as to reach him—and when I did, I nearly spilled myself off the bike, braking abruptly and throwing out my arms. We hugged over the handlebars, Jimmy right at our crotches. And I felt Eugene bleed into me. I didn't want to let him go; I wanted to tell him about the dream where I saw his eyes and the buffalo and about him on the movie screen and how sorry I was about Custer and all them; actually I wanted to say nothing and just take him over into the ditch and make love there for an hour. Let my body tell him, let my mouth and eyes and hands and feet and arms and legs and cock tell him everything I had to say while he did the same. Not a word.

I loosened my hold though, considering he wasn't alone, and I was mystified besides at what he was doing out on this road in a broken-down truck. This was
not
the way to the Klamath Reservation.

“Where you goin', Eugene?” I asked, perplexed. He pointed east down the road, and I smiled then—I guess because we were going the same way. And then he held his medicine bag to his chest, and what that meant I couldn't say, other than wherever he was going it must be somewhere good and meaningful to him.

I got off the bike and walked it up to the truck, where I leaned it on the back fender. Eugene grabbed my hand then and took me up to meet the other man, who was just out of sight, working on the engine and obscured by the open hood. I was a little nervous and tried to disengage our hands, not sure who this man might be. But Eugene just clasped my hand tighter—and though skittish, I was glad.

The man came up from underneath, like from right out of the engine, when we approached, grease on his hands and grease on his forehead. Looked like Ash Wednesday to me, and I had half a mind to ask him if he were Catholic in my nervous wacked way. He looked to be in his forties, clearly an Indian, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, a bit of a paunch, and wearing an old blue T-shirt and Levis.

“Hi,” was all I permitted myself to say, wondering how to explain to him how I knew Eugene.

“Who are you?” he said bluntly, with an expressionless demeanor.

“I met Eugene in Eugene,” I answered, aware as I said it of how stupid it sounded.

“Good place for it,” he said with a clipped smile. I wanted to add that Eugene and I had fucked each other silly in a frat house, and that I couldn't get him out of my mind—and that I was awfully sorry for history, and all that—

“And what are you doing out here?” he interrupted my racing thoughts.

“On my way to Buffalo.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” He laughed heartily. “You and me both.” I didn't get what was obviously a kind of joke—I was more focused on hoping it was true. When I looked at Eugene, he didn't seem to be in on the joke either and just stared blankly. Then there was a silence, and the man went back to work.

So I offered: “You need any help?”

He lifted his head again, and this time, with a bit of surliness, said: “Why, you knowledgeable about Dodge straight sixes?”

Of course, I hadn't a clue, and it apparently showed. “Uh, no, not really.”

“Not really, huh? But a little bit?”

“Well, actually . . .”

He finished the sentence for me: “You don't know shit.” He paused long enough for me to feel insulted. Then he began laughing: “Ha, ha, ha.” He slammed the hood down, brushed by me, and opened the driver-side door. But before hopping into the cab, he paused suddenly and looked intently at my bike, then briefly at me—at first with suspicion and then with a faraway look in his eyes. Then he hopped in and turned the ignition, and after a
chee, chee, clump, clump
, the engine caught and roared.

“Hop in, Smoke,” he called to Eugene, and I saw the man's face framed in the rearview mirror staring at me.

It was a look of mistrust. And why was he calling Eugene Smoke? What's Smoke? Is there a town called Smoke around here, and will his name change from place to place? Will he be John Day by the time he reaches the next town? Austin by suppertime? When they call him Buffalo, I guess I'll know my journey's done.

Eugene or Smoke, or whoever he was, kissed me quickly on the lips, grabbed hold of my bike, which was still leaning against the soon-to be-departing truck, and held it out to me. Then he ran quickly around to hop in the passenger side door, as the truck began rolling through the gravel. There was a clunk, a backfire, until finally the engine roared to life again.

And then it was Eugene's face in the back window, smiling his crooked smile, getting smaller and smaller. I thought momentarily to hop on my bike and ride like hell to catch up to them. But that would be futile. As it was, they were a portrait: the faded, creamy blue truck on a little rise in the highway under big pink and orange cliffs, with shadows slashing across the road in front of them. Two orange men in a blue truck in an orange world scattered with gravel and dusty little blue and yellow flowers, flat sandy stretches, and a sun bright and searing, the rosy rocks spreading out for miles and forever around them. And those blue-black manes of theirs like two black crows perched on their heads.

I realized I'd once again obtained no information, was just as unlikely to see Eugene again as the last time. Which made me suddenly angry. Like he was playing with me. But it wasn't that, and I knew it. He just didn't say. Plain and simple as that. He was the boy who just didn't say.

And I felt pathetic on the side of the road with my dead Jimmy, having been laughed at and mocked and stared down by Eugene's friend or whoever he was. Maybe it was his boyfriend, and he'd been jealous of me. And now he'd taken Eugene away for good.

Am I a jilted bride? A jilted widow? Both?

I'm carrying his baby!
I wanted to call out.

Pull.

I felt like that dog back in Dayville, but with nowhere to go back to. Or maybe I just hadn't reached the end of my territory either. That would be Buffalo, thousands of miles beyond.

Pulling meant moving, and fast. So I rode hard through those canyons, which were heartbreakingly beautiful. They even looked like a broken heart, all orange/red and falling apart, creviced, full of flowers and sometimes little trickling streams. One step ahead of my soup—or one pedal rotation actually. And when I finally got to John Day, I found a café and ate a sandwich, and on my way out of town, picked up two forty-ouncers of Crazy Horse (my brand from here on out) and gulped the first while I pedaled, sans hands, as I headed toward Jimmy's red hoop, up and over the Blue Mountains, which rose, but not too steeply, over the lonely sagebrush desert ahead. It was unwise to drink, of course, midday in the heat, but I was feeling wacked and unsteady.

I felt a jumble of emotions about Eugene, hence the drowning measure taken. I was shell-shocked by his sudden appearance, and I wanted to know where he was going; I wanted to spend an hour with him at least, a day, a month. I wanted to make love to him; I wanted to talk to him, but how could I? How had I let him get away? I was mad, excited, sad, surprised, grateful, even frightened. Like I'd conjured him. Or maybe it was just that spirit baby, kicking like mad inside me.

And into the great empty quarter of America I went. Like a bottle of malt liquor or a boy's asshole, America is. Sing that, Walt Whitman.
My country ‘tis of thee . . . Oh, bountiful
.

Slowed down by the drink and the ruminating, I still pedaled on, eventually coming upon a campground at a place called Unity Lake, just short of Jimmy's bull's-eye, which was up the road ten or so miles in a town called Ironside. Good God, must be rusted to hell, I thought. “I couldn't take that tonight,” I muttered. “Fuck it, I'm staying here.”

Unity Lake was obviously some kind of reservoir, as it was this enormous flat body of water in the middle of a plain of scrub and sand. The campground was a parking lot surrounded by golf course–like grass, all heavily watered by sprinklers. There were even solar showers. It was like a paved platform in the middle of nowhere (like the
2001
slab again, but this time fallen flat on its face), and it was lousy with geriatrics in Winnebagos.

I found a spot as close to the lake as I could, which wasn't very close since the campground was set a good hundred or more yards back from the lakeshore—the green, green grass in between. It must be a drinking water reservoir, I guessed. The lawn looked inviting to sleep on, but the sign said “NO.” I crossed it and sat down along the lakeshore a long time thinking of Eugene and how odd it had been to see him, and wondering if I ever would again. Maybe they'd break down again. It was an old truck, after all.

I heard the familiar honk of geese and watched a group fly over in their V formation, always one of them straggling or off to one side. It meant an early winter, I vaguely remembered from a TV show or somewhere. It made me a little nervous being that I was traveling by bicycle and still had most of the country ahead of me.