A Horse Named Sorrow (25 page)

As the sun dipped, I re-crossed the lawn and looked toward the highway off in the distance. And I'll be damned, I saw the blue Dodge truck floating there on the horizon, moving east fast. I must have passed them somewhere? I couldn't believe I'd passed them and not seen them. Where? In John Day? While I was buying my Crazy Horse malt liquor? That'll teach me not to steal shadows. I was full of a sudden yearning, and a huge disappointment both. All I had left was to watch and see if they'd slow down and turn in here—but they flew right by. My elation sank, considering the idea that it wasn't likely I'd see them again at all now. If I'd only obeyed Jimmy and his red hoops I'd be up on the highway in Ironside and maybe even having dinner with them. I had half a mind to hop back on
Chief Joseph
, and with the sound of a U.S. Cavalry trumpet in my ear, pursue them into Idaho and beyond up into Canada.

Backasswards.

Pull, Seamus.

I drank the other Crazy Horse instead, and when I pissed on the lawn in the last rays of the setting sun, it was a stream of blue diamonds over the green.

“Hoka hey,” I muttered. And to think they'd reduced him to a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. The alchemy of America at work: turning a good man to booze. Product that moves. And how many people purchase these forty-ouncers with just that intention:
as good a day as any.

Eugene was awfully skinny. Maybe he was carrying the acronym too.

But he was just so orange, nothing peaked about him.

He looked starved, though. And why was I so attracted to that? That precarious look of being right on the edge between life and death—a weird vitality that seemed to speak against the evidence. They may not be here tomorrow. Skinny boys always got my attention.

Perhaps I just liked bones. And I thought of Jimmy's bones, his pronounced clavicles and handsome chin, his brows and cheekbones, his knobby knees and elbows, his long fingers and knuckles, and how he had one rib that stuck out—all of them did in the end, but this one was bent and protruded from the start. He'd told me once as he got thinner that we couldn't have sex for a while. When I asked him why, he said that we were both so skinny that our bones banged together and he was bruised. “Like two skeletons having sex,” he'd said.

And what's a bicycle but a skeleton—this one wrapped like a mummy with untold stories. Shadows.

That night the stars came out thick in big bands like they had once over Mt. Tamalpais when Jimmy and I had camped out there in the oak trees, drinking beer and reading Baudelaire.

He was somebody to talk to, Jimmy was, and that's why I kept on talking to him even after he was gone. I held him in my lap and out loud told him how the hills above Unity Lake looked like black velvet under the starlight and how the lake's rippling waves were silvery. I told him how cool the grass was now that the sun had gone, and how enormous the sky. I told him how much I loved the night air, how it tasted like his kiss after drinking cold water. Like a promise. I told him I missed him and I told him I thought it had been a good thing to make love to Eugene. That it had made me feel close to him again in the doing of it. That he was right: there were messages in attraction. And spirit babies.

And then I thought how I'd never see either of them again and how the road is indeed the place for lost souls. And I thought of what a lost lake that was too—lost in place and time. It seemed like it needed someone to help it find its way back home, to where it came from—like Jimmy and that Indian book's heart. Where
did
this water come from anyway? Had those geese carried it all drop by drop from some tundric plain up in Canada? Had they inadvertently dropped the whole sorry thing one fall? Maybe the geese would come back for it in the spring, take it back to where it came from, drop by drop. And maybe it didn't matter. Didn't matter that things were lost. They're just as well lost as found—so what? Same difference. Everything's lost, and everyone too, and that's as it should be. Jimmy never meant to put me down by calling me a lost soul—he was just saying I was someone with potential. It was a compliment. The only good soul is a lost soul, and only a lost soul can find its own way home.

And all that night, the geese passed over honking their forlorn call, the lake unable to call back up to them, mute as a boy who doesn't talk. I counted them like winged black sheep as I lay there, massaging the crook in my neck, unable to sleep—named them even, one by one: James Owen Blake, Jimmy, Eugene, Sam, Julie, Tanya, Lawrence, Ralph and Carl, Karen Blake, Ellen.

The last thing I did was make shapes out of the stars, which turned into me and Eugene having sex—Orion's belt unbuckled, Orion's cock spurting shooting stars like fireworks—until I dozed off and the sparkling heavenly bodies sprouted wings that led to dreams of birds. Not migrating birds, but birds of prey, soaring and diving, landing, silent and watching like hawks, perched on fence posts out in Oregon, the wind ruffling the feathers on their heads ever so slightly. Watching, watching, somehow watching over—in the way of birds.

I woke up to more birds—sparrows and larks, busying themselves around the campground. The seniors weren't yet stirring, the curtains on the campers all pulled closed, while beyond them in every direction, emptiness spread until it ran into mountains. Above, a sagebrush sky— the kind of sky where all the clouds are just tiny and clumped and scattered in a random kind of order, going on and on.

It looked like forever.

And it felt like Jimmy. Jimmy, who was never forever but made me feel what that was. I opened the bag and ran my hands through his ashes. He's like an instant universe. Just add a little water, and we'd have a big bang right here.

I cinched up the string on Jimmy-in-the-bag and gathered up my gear and headed out, warming up as I reached the highway. In no time at all I was in Ironside, where there were screaming kids in a schoolyard on the edge of town, swinging, looking like pendulums or oil pumps, all out of unison, but in some kind of utter harmony. Kid power.

The town was also loud with wind, and dogs and chickens and birds and kids, their voices blown about and disconnected from them. People raised their voices to shout across streets, and big rigs applied their hydraulic brakes, slowing down as they came into town. A cacophony of strange birds.

I ate pancakes in a saloon.

Beyond that town, everything changed. There was suddenly big agriculture: immense green swaths watered by enormous pinwheel-like irrigators, and lots of brown people doing the heavy lifting and picking. Distant water tank trucks lumbered about down the dirt roads among the fields, and I could see that without the water being brought in (and the Mexicans), this place would be absolute desert, as it became, abruptly, at the very point the fields ended. But the sagebrush sky didn't end, and neither did Jimmy—nor the road. All I had to do was look up, look forward, or remember, and it would all blast outward like a neutron star and take me away.

The highway connected with another highway, and then things speeded up and crowded up considerably as a big billboard loomed, welcoming me to Idaho. The road became a parade of trucks full of potatoes and onions, and Mexican farm workers in old AMC Hornets and Oldsmobile Cutlasses and Chevy Monte Carlos. It felt like California. Even the requisite big houses began to appear on distant hills, high above the shacks that housed the laborers. Then Nampa with its rail yards and thrown-up chain motels, the land plundered, nature pushed aside—you could see the neglect in open, littered lots. It was the usual American scene: once the city comes, nature goes from a glorious and beautiful young creature to an old bag lady or hobo, wholly derelict, neglected and spit upon. Urban gravity sucks everything down, sprouting acronyms and poison in its place. So much for my own private Idaho—this was a public bardo.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with anger, ranting to myself about how wrong it all looked. Like, no wonder we're obsessed with child molestation. Maybe the earth's our daughter, or son, not our mother at all. Not Gaia, but Gai-ita or little Gai-ito—Guyito, a sweet little Mexican kid with pesticide cancer and a whole phalanx of white power-mongers denying him medical benefits while fondling his innocence because his parents are crooks for being illegal even if they are working long hours for low pay so everyone else doesn't starve. Used up and thrown away. Death isn't a tragedy necessarily, but a trashcan for a coffin is. My father got a Hefty lawn bag with a zipper, Jimmy got a box, then a jar, and now a velvet bag. The Sioux got a ditch in the freezing snow. Guyito—what'll he get? He'll end up some robber baron's piñata.

And thank God for my revitalized libido or I would have spiraled into further miseries as my soup roiled and boiled. But all those Mexicans out in the fields were actually making me horny and got me thinking about Eugene. The way they stood around, or looked at me from the backs of pickups, silent, watching—like birds.

I kept an eye out for the blue truck.

And trucks there were, long lines of them, bearing down, blasting their warning honks and whooshing by me. I felt like raising a fist— little old Woody of the road. Damn kids!

All the way into Boise like that, haunted by Jimmy and Eugene both, as the farms turned to houses in rows, and then into boulevards of strip malls and motels, not seen in such profusion since California.

I found a liquor store, a pizza parlor, and a Motel 6, and with my bike on my shoulder, hefted my gear up the stairs to room 206, showered and shaved, turned on the TV, and then climbed into clean, cool sheets and belted back my Crazy Horse while jawing on a pizza, wishing Jimmy was in that bed with me, or that Eugene would knock on my door and we could fuck away the emptiness and forlorn loneliness that all highway motels are so swollen with you can see why murders and suicides favor them.

I dozed with the pizza box full of crusts sliding off my lap, and I dreamed of those AMC Hornets and Monte Carlos out on the road. I'd come up on them and pass them and look inside, and one would be full up with Edward Curtis Indian Chiefs from the book: Red Cloud and American Horse and Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, all wearing baseball caps and work clothes, crammed in together, off to find work in the fields. And one guy way over in the corner, his face shrouded by a sweatshirt hood—Crazy Horse, sure thing. The next car would be bursting with boys I'd slept with: Alejandro and Tran, Lawrence and Sage. Then a Cutlass riding so low to the ground, there were sparks. And inside that one: Eugene and Ralph, Jimmy and my mother. When I looked in the rearview mirror I saw my father's face and startled awake.

It was 5:00 a.m., too early to start out, so I sat and watched the highway for a while from my window like my mom and I used to do while waiting for the bus or someone to come and take me somewhere. She used to tell me: “Just listen to it, Seamus:

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, vroom, rattle, whoosh, buzz, vroom, buzz, whoosh, whoosh
.

“Sometimes you can hear a song, Seamus. If you listen real close, there's a song in there.”

I put Jimmy in the purple velvet bag, hammering on the bottom of the second mayonnaise jar to get him all out. Then I tied him to the handlebars upfront where I could watch him—and of course, talk to him.

Jimmy masthead, like the prow of my ship.

I'd been slowly giving the furniture away, but there was still a bookshelf and a dresser full of clothes, which I lugged piece by piece to the curb.
Our little world sure went fast, Jimmy
—and I had to wipe a tear.

I kept just the clothes I'd need, and I wadded them up to cram them in the panniers—half of them Jimmy's, including the baggy shorts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt he was wearing the day I met him. Because what I needed was Jimmy, or to be clothed in him anyway. Jimmy fit me, and I fit him.

Clearing the mantel, I came upon the envelope with the pictures in it of Thomas and Franco. I looked at them again with young, black-haired Jimmy. I thought of Jimmy having sex with them, what it would look like. They'd touched his beautiful body, they'd held him, caressed him, kissed him. They'd known what I'd known, and so I thought then that they were my brothers. And those were the only pictures I had of Jimmy besides, so into a pannier the old stained envelope went.

I owed her a call. So after pancakes and a good dose of seven or eight cups of overcaffeinated Denny's coffee to give me courage, I dialed my mother at home, where I knew she wouldn't be. Some courage.

“Hi. This is Karen Blake. Leave a message at the beep and I'll call you back.”

Every time I tried to tell you … all the words just came out wrong … so I'll have to say I love you in a song
… “Boise, Mom. All is well.”

Click.

I'm sure I was irritating her, but at least I was checking in.

Lying too, because Boise was a terrible place for a bicycle, as are most cities. And it had the added distinction of having only one highway out of town heading east. An interstate, which after two miles and a flat tire, I decided was something I'd never attempt again. The shoulder was a mess of broken glass and litter, chunks of truck tires and car parts, because the speed of the interstate produces a shrapnel all its own. Garbage, but no flowers. And if the wake of wind behind a truck is bad at fifty miles an hour, it's plain unnerving at seventy or eighty. I pulled off at the first exit and set myself up to hitchhike at the on-ramp.

A wheat farmer in a spanking new red and silver Ford F-150 picked me up not long after. He talked about the Basques in the area and how he “dickered” with them in selling his wheat.

“Dickered?” My imagination ran wild.

“Yeah, with whiskey. Means negotiating a price.” I'd done that. Dickered with the spirit of life (that's what whiskey means. I'd learned that in Health Ed.—some old Scottish word, I think).

“What are Basques doing way out here in Idaho? Aren't they from Spain?”