A Horse Named Sorrow (28 page)

“Just passing through,” I answered him.

“Not a good choice, soldier. You can't stop and camp here. You have to ride the whole thing today. You won't be allowed in here after dark.” He had his sleeves rolled up and was clearly not any kind of guard or MP. He was just flexing his bantamness.

“I see. Well, okay then. How far across is it?”

“One hundred clams, soldier.”

“Clams?”

“Backflips, footsteps, jump ropes, hop-skips, pancakes—miles, pardner.”

Pancakes? “I see. So what's the big deal out here? Why is it so high security?”

“You bet it is. The fuel rods from Three Mile Island are out here.” He grinned like a Cheshire cat.

I wanted to say,
Whoopee, you learn something new every day
, or
You don't say
, or …
So what?
Something about him annoyed me, the way he smiled about something like that. It was that “you're gonna die, sucker” smile. He looked like the kind of guy who would really enjoy something like Three Mile Island, would want to get in on the action. I wondered what his euphemisms for fuel rods might be: dildoes, fannywackers, chopsticks, bones?

“But the security, I mean. After all, we're in the middle of Idaho. What are they afraid of ?”

He explained that there were four hundred and fifty—and he'd didn't say “about” or “approximately”—known nuclear terrorists in the world. “You never know when Colonel Qaddafi might ride out here on his white horse.” He winked, and laughed.

Or Crazy Horse or Red Cloud, I thought. I got on my bike then. I wanted to get it over with. I winced as my knee throbbed, but once I got going the pain seemed to ease.

Cars passed now and again, but it was an empty highway generally, until someone pulled up right behind me and slowed down. I didn't look, but pretty soon they were pulling up alongside me, and I prepared myself for more Halls of Montezuma lectures when I saw instead his orange arm on the open window of the door, and then his green eyes and his blue-black hair: Eugene, leaning out the window, smiling big as ever. I could pretend I didn't see them, mind my own business, whistle, look off into the sagebrush nowhere.

“Would you like a ride out of this evil place?” Louis called out, leaning forward and looking across Eugene from the driver's side.

It was windy and there was no food or drink for a hundred miles, my knee hurt, and in my rush to escape the Marine back at the rest stop I hadn't filled up my water bottles besides. And, and …
I'm not asking for anything back, Jimmy, see? But they're offering.

But I reconsidered. No, I'm not going to be able to sit next to him for a hundred miles, and then be able to say goodbye again. No sirree. I must have looked morose because Eugene smiled and looked at me with a pleading-teasing look.

I relented, sighed right back at him, and watched the truck pull past me and brake into the gravel. When I reached them, I followed, waiting for them to stop, but they never quite did. Louis leaned out the window and called back to me: “We can't take a chance on stopping, the engine might die. You gotta get the bike in there somehow while I'm moving.”

My last chance to wave them off.

Eugene hopped out the passenger side door then and came to help me. I quickly untied the velvet bag and tied it to my belt and then we lifted the bike together and ran after the truck, tossing the bike into the truck bed with a bit of a crash, which made me wince and Eugene laugh. Then I followed him as he grabbed the door and hopped in, with me close on his heels, my perineum aching as I ran, and my knee too. I shut the door once inside and off we zoomed, looking over my shoulder to make sure nothing had been lost on the road when we'd tossed the bike truckward.

Eugene was still scooting over to the middle of the seat to give me room. He was in a real good mood, it seemed. He put his hand on my thigh and smiled big. He was happy to see me. And it felt good to be crammed in next to him, our thighs flush. I wanted to drop my sadness like a stone and just kiss him. I wanted to watch my bike slide right out the back end of the truck and bounce itself into screws and bolts, scattered clothing, and a book that told a story you couldn't bury anyway—one more piece of roadkill. I clenched Jimmy-in-the-bag, resting in my lap, the one thing I wouldn't wanna lose.

“Sorry about that,” Louis said, pulling back onto the road, his eyes in the side mirror.

“No problem. Thanks for the lift.”

Nobody said anything for the next several minutes while I absorbed the hot lava of Eugene through my thigh, making my frown warble and begin to rise. Then Eugene grabbed my hand and I tensed.

“It's okay, Blue Truck. You're winkte, I know,” Louis mentioned with a clipped smile, his neck back, eyes in the rearview mirror.

I looked at him, my face a question, not knowing what a winkte was, or why he called
me
Blue Truck.

“Uh, what's winkte?”

“Two spirit.”

I nodded and arched my eyebrows.

I'd heard the term before somewhere in San Francisco. Some artist friend of Lawrence's used to do these scrotum portraits and each ball had a different inlaid photographic face: one a man, one a woman, and always 1950s people, like Ward and June Cleaver, with titles like “Two Spirits Have Twice the Fun” or “Two, Two, Two Spirits in One.” And long explanations in the program about how Native Americans believe gay people have two spirits, which is what makes them queer. Which meant there were five of us in the cab of that truck if you did the math— maybe even six.

“So who are you?” I asked him. “Are you like …”

“I'm his uncle.”

“Oh.”

“You thought I was his lover?” And he laughed. “Ha, ha, eh Smoke? You and me. Ha, ha, ha.”

Eugene grinned.

“Isn't his name Eugene?”

“Nah, he's not Eugene. His name's Rupert No Wind. And I'm Louis No Wind.”

“Rupert?”

“Yeah—you wouldn't use it either, would ya?” And he winked.

I looked from Louis to Eugene, and he shrugged shyly, a little embarrassed at the exposure of his geeky name.

“So what's Smoke?”

“Another name for him. Smoke That Came Back to the Lodge. That's a vision name.”

“Vision?” He looked at me like I was stupid, which I was, considering. “I don't really know about stuff like that.”

“But you know about Wounded Knee? I thought you said you read books? Didn't you read about Crazy Horse in that book of yours?”

I nodded.

“You remember what his vision was?”

I racked my mind and remembered something about it. “Well, he … uh … couldn't be killed except by his own people? And his horse was sort of like his medicine or whatever?”

“That's it. Painted horse. A warrior … he served his people that way. Vision is about how to serve.”

I nodded.

“Smoke's winkte; he serves in a different way. Everybody has a place.”

I didn't say anything, but I thought about that for a while. Everybody with a place. I sure didn't feel I had a place …
road's the place
… I guess I could see how a lot of fags found a kind of gay place: hair-dressing, florists,fashiondesign,nursing,thatkindofthing.Butitwasn'tmyplace and I doubted it was Eugene's. San Francisco had been a place once.

“What exactly is the place of a winkie?”

“Wink-
te
,” he corrected me. “Well, being a two-spirit person is powerful medicine. Depends, but it's usually a ceremonial role. Or you become a medicine man, that kind of thing.”

“Sounds cool.” I nodded again.

“It's more about service, Blue Truck, than cool.”

“Oh. Well, I just meant it's nice to hear that, because I've never heard anyone say much nice about being queer.”

He gave me an understanding look then. “I'm just learning about it myself really. Most Indians don't treat the winkte any better than white people do after all that's gone down. So many traditions are lost or barely alive.” And he looked off to the mountains. Then he patted Eugene's thigh. “Maybe Smoke can bring some of that back.”

After a few moments, he turned to me and said: “So tell me again where you're going and why.”

“Well …” And I looked at Jimmy in my lap. “My boyfriend died … this is Jimmy, here, in this bag.” I held him up. “And I'm taking him home.”

He looked me in the eye. “Buffalo?”

“Yeah, Buffalo.”

He looked at me again. “And where'd you come from?”

“San Francisco.”

“A lot of people dying there I guess.”

“Yeah, a lot. Lots of uh … wink … ,” and I hesitated, stumbling on the word.

“Winktes. Well, I'm taking
him
home.” And he patted Eugene's thigh again. “Eugene's mother died,” he continued. I looked at Eugene then, who'd taken out a sketchpad and was drawing with a black pastel crayon. He looked up and sighed. “But that was a year ago, and they buried her back there in Oregon.” And Louis told me the whole story, while I watched Eugene draw a face in black charcoal. It emerged along with the story. How she'd been sick for a while, and how after she'd died, Louis had decided to come out to find his nephew.

“I'd never known him. He's my brother's kid and my brother died in 'Nam.”

I perked up and he looked at me. “So did my dad.”

“He an Indian?”

“Oh no, I'm Irish.” Chance for a choice white lie lost. But that would have been just too white of a lie, pardon the pun.

“Well, Rupert's mom hadn't been on the rez for years. She'd been dead set on getting off the rez since she was a kid. Well, that's what Frank told me anyway. He'd always liked her. So much so that he went looking for her. Her and her sister had gone to Seattle—through the relocation program. They used to pay Indians to leave the rez. It didn't work out. Usually doesn't.” And he sighed. “But they weren't about to turn tail and head home. They fell in with the local Indians up there. Got involved with men—you know, the usual. Somewhere along the line she reconnected with my brother. Before he shipped out I guess.” He took a breath and looked out across the sagebrush before continuing. “In all the confusion, with his body coming back and everything else, and none of us really knowing what he'd been up to, we never heard nothing about her. She married someone else, a Klamath guy, and that's where Eugene grew up. She sent me a letter a year or so ago right before she died. I didn't even know I had a nephew.” And he chuckled.

“How'd she find you?”

“On the rez. It's easy, man. You just send it general delivery, Wind Clan. It finds you. I was just getting cleaned up. Used to drink a lot. I figured I'd go out and meet my nephew, try to do right by him.”

“What did she die of ?”

“Lung cancer. Smoking killed her.”

He stopped talking then.

We were all three silent then for a long time. There was just the wind, the emptiness, the distant bunkers like forgotten mausoleums.

Stories as yet untold. The road was made of stories, and there was no escaping stories, even if you wanted to. I thought then that what drew me to Eugene was that he couldn't tell a story. Or, rather, he told it in a different way. Without words. With his eyes, with his body and his hunger, with his smiles and sighs, with his seed.

Eugene pulled out his pipe and his lighter. Louis gave him a disapproving look but started talking about the acronym we were crossing instead, and how, contrary to popular belief that no one had ever died in a nuclear accident, there were in fact three Army guys who were lost right out here in an experiment gone awry back in the early 1960s. “It was a meltdown basically, but since the reactor they were working with was about the size of a toaster and they were servicemen, there was no need to tell anybody and no danger of it becoming a public disaster. But it killed three guys all the same, and they buried them in drums. The families wanted their kin, but the government said it was too dangerous. Shut 'em up with money, no doubt. They put the guys in those drums and left them out here and then they encased the blown reactor in concrete and put a fence around it a mile in each direction.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I just listen. There ain't no secrets. It's just no one's ever listening.”

The wind buffeted the truck in a gust. Stone silent Jimmy, maybe he whispered now on the wind. Or maybe it was those Army guys talking.

“I met a guy on my way out here when the truck broke down. He worked quality control. He told me a whole lot of stories—Enrico Fermi, where they almost lost Detroit. Someone wrote a song about it.” He looked over at me. “Does it surprise you?”

“No, I guess not. I'm just surprised I hadn't heard it before.” He looked at me again and I thought of Wounded Knee. Heard it all a hundred years too late like everybody else. “And what do you do once you know?” I ventured.

He looked at me then. “Not a lot you can do. Remember it. Tell everyone you see.”

I thought about ACT UP then. We were having two different conversations, or we weren't. “So it won't happen again?”

“Oh, it'll happen again. It happens all the time; it's happening somewhere right now, you can bet on it.” Oh yes. Well, maybe it was three conversations now, heading toward four, five, one hundred.

I thought of Sarajevo. “You don't think it'll ever stop, eh?”

He looked at me directly, and said nothing.

Eugene nudged me to show me what he'd drawn, and Louis looked over too. I assumed it was his mother's face, a mass of choppy, short lines, lots of shading. I couldn't tell if she were smiling or frowning, alive or dead. Her face was emerging from, or receding into, stone.

“Don't know how he draws in this rig,” Louis piped up, “rattlin' and shakin'. These look different than the other ones.” And he looked off the other way. “I call them Blue Truck drawings.”