I Loved You More (27 page)

It all goes by in a blur. Ephraim shows me how to always walk to the left, where to sit. I sit and he picks up his long pipe with gold threading on it. Ephraim takes a whittled piece of stick, puts it in the fire, lights the end of the stick, then brings the fire to his pipe and lights it. Smoke pours out of the pipe, out of his mouth and nose as he offers the pipe to the four directions. The whole time he's whispering prayers in Shoshone. When his prayers are finished, Ephraim hands the pipe to me. The pipe to me is like any tool when it's in my hands. It doesn't work. A lot like my dick. But I am trying with the pipe and I smoke the pipe and move it around in the four directions in some kind of way like Ephraim did and I guess I'm praying, too. After I hand him back the pipe, we share a cup of tea. A special herbal tea.

Then: “Are you ready for this?” he says.

Ephraim's eyes have a slant that makes you think of Cleopatra and the Egyptians. Dark brown, a touch of copper. Long black hair down to his shoulders. A curl in that hair, the French in him. That day his hair is braided and he's dressed in his finery. Beaded moccasins, leggings, porcupine breastplate, turquoise necklace, turquoise bracelet, silver hanging on him everywhere. More French in the shape of his smooth nose. How his lips fold out longer than you think they should. The way how they point up in the center like a Kewpie doll's.

“We're going to make a promise now,” he says. “In blood.”

Ephraim and I, we could talk about just about anything. Art history, Walt Whitman, Vietnam, Carl Jung. Fort Hall and the reservation where he was raised. Tyhee, where I was raised. Him an Indian kid on the reservation on one side of the boundary. Me a tybo, a white boy growing up on the other. Not more than ten miles apart our whole lives. We talked about our fathers, our mothers, and most especially, the history of the West and the story of his people. Racism. I really loved it the way he put up with all my dumb white-guy questions. But what we were really talking about, we couldn't talk about. Neither one of us had the words. And if we did, our lips just couldn't form them.

Over the years, Ephraim and I've had some good laughs over them green corduroy pants. How they looked, what they meant. The way we were innocent like we'll never be again.

Blood brothers. No way we could do that these days. Body fluids are different now.

THE PROMISE. IT
took us a while and a bunch of cigarettes to decide what we wanted to promise each other. I had some trouble with the word love but I figured I was just a white guy and needed to get over it.

What we came up with was this:
no matter what happens, I will keep you with love in my heart. I'll help you out whenever I can. I will be kind. I'll respect you and the choices you make. If I don't agree with you, I may tell you I disagree, but I won't stop loving you. This sharing of blood marks this promise and makes it real. I'll keep this promise until I die
.

Propinquity. It takes everything I have. I let this big Indian chief guy take hold of my right hand. He lays my hand wrist up onto his knee. He picks up the bowie knife, pulls the knife out of its sheath, lays the shiny silver blade across my wrist.

That's when things start to change. He starts to giggle.

“I've never done anything like this before,” he says.

It was his gay nerves, that was his problem. But of course we weren't gay yet.

Plus his bowie knife was dull. Maybe it's the herbal tea spirit, but it ain't long and Ephraim and I, a couple of misplaced Idaho boys, we get to laughing so hard, we can't hold still long enough to get the knife anywhere near a wrist. Laughing around inside the tipi that day's when I first fall in love with him, my blood brother, Ephraim. Never knew I could laugh like that 'til then.

Must have taken us hours, but finally, my wrist looking like a hand saw had been to it, raggedy pieces of skin sticking up and shit. One clear line of blood bubbling up, and Ephraim's wrist, how I finally couldn't stand it and leaned into the knife hard,
maybe a little too hard, the yelp out of me when I saw the pain in Ephraim's eyes, finally. Finally we each had a proper line of red blood and we pressed our wrists together, blood flowing into blood, and we promised.

To hold each other in our hearts.

To help each other when we can.

To be kind.

To agree to disagree.

With blood.

With love.

INSIDE THE SWEAT
lodge, forever it's only dark, only hot, smoky, and there is no air. Inside the pressure cooker there is no breath. No sound. Nothing moves. Not my belly or my hand or my legs. My mouth is full of sand. I wonder if my eyes are open, then I've forgotten how to open them, or what open eyes are like. Finally a glow, something shiny, deep, and alive.

From where my head is on the ground, the fire pit is a huge mountain of lava glowing red. The whole world is red and is on fire.

Something then that creeps over me, or out of me. It's a sensation from down low, although how my body is, inside or out, up or down, I don't know. It's when it comes up over my back, crosses my shoulders, that it's in my head.

Fear is no longer a word that can say it. Not panic, not claustrophobia.

I am the Most Miserable of All, the cockless man at the bottom of hell. I've always been in hell. Was born in hell. Raised in hell. I've always been alone down here in hell. Where there is no hope and the Catholic Fuckers in heaven are laughing. I'm crying, and I've always been crying. It's the only way I know how to gather myself up into a self, to be.

So much hope in a hard-on.

So far from grace.

Terror like this can go on forever.

Out of the dark a hand grabs a hold of mine. Ephraim's
across the fire pit, so it has to be Hank's. As if that hand can see in the dark it slaps flat palm to palm into mine. Holds my hand in a death grip. I squeeze back.

Fuck is this ever going to end.

There's a loud sound and a bright light and the bright light is the sun and the flap is open and there is breath. The way that moment is dramatic. The fresh air and the sun rushing in. I take a big deep breath of that air, then look over close at Ephraim. At first he's just part of the bright, then his eyes. They're scared a way I've never seen them. And his lips, how he doesn't know what to do with them. Sweat coming off him in buckets, chest going up and down. And Hank. There it is, Hank's hand still sucked onto mine. He's leapt up onto his knees. His face pushing out into the open air.

“Something is really going on,” Ephraim says. “It ain't ever got this hot before!”

I'm slow slow to breathe again, and when I do, I feel the scorch. Another breath and the mountain of lava is gone and I'm not that guy in the bottom of hell. I'm me, Ben Grunewald, the luckiest guy. Another breath and I'm still me and the world starts to move again. Relief or love, fresh air in my lungs, whatever it is that feels so good. Outside there's a killdeer bird. Gusts of Idaho wind through the open flap.

Breathe and listen to what you can hear. The water on the rocks. The steam. It makes me smile that I can hear the steam. The rocks in the fire pit so red they're pink or purple, or some new color altogether.

The Most Miserable at the Bottom of Hell is gone.

Breathe and the world's right there for you to see. The terror's gone that covers it up. In front of my eyes, dirt real and flesh and my eyes can't get enough.

My brother Ephraim. His dark eyes with the lick of copper in them, the Asian lids exotic Cleopatra. The two hundred pounds of him. The sweat on his skin. His sunburnt muddy arms. His red neck. My
Indin
brother's a redneck.

Hank's hand in mine is still a vise grip. He looks over at me a look. Mud on his face, in his hair. For a tiny moment, all in the world there is worth seeing is burnt into those black eyes. He squeezes my hand even more, then lets go. Lays his head down on his muddy towel. He wraps his body into a ball, his back to me, his eyes looking up at the sky and the sun. All flesh and muscle, the long black curls of his hair, the way in marble Michelangelo did hair. Skin white as marble. The slant of sun across his shoulder, mud on his shoulder, mud on his back, his ass. Drips of sweat making pools on the earth. The slow way air comes in and out of his chest.

We keep the flap open the rest of the afternoon. Something unheard of, really. That a sweat lodge can be that hot. Breath and then breath and then breath, one long sweaty afternoon inside a cave looking out, watching the sun go down. Ephraim and Hank and me. The wind, the killdeer bird, breath and breath and breath. Cramped and naked coming out the other end.

LATER, FRESH AND
new, cleansed by fire, we're showered and dressed. I'm sitting in a blown-out blue-green lawn chair next to a sagebrush as big as the Ford Pinto. There's a tall cool drink of water in my fist. I'm wondering where fear goes when it leaves. My eyes look for it, the way terror lays on things, hides behind, but I don't look for long. I know where terror goes, somewhere inside your breath, so I take a long drink of cool water, swallow. When I take a deep breath, I'm safe and the sun is in my eyes so I have to squint and I don't even remember terror anymore, and really what's the big deal about some Catholic nightmare version of me.

Hank pulls up a stump next to me. He's sitting lower than me and I have to look down. Hank leans forward on his haunches, breathes in deep the sagebrush and the sunset. Once more there he goes again, he slaps his hand into mine, holds my hand tight. I set my glass of water down.

His face in the low gold sun. I think maybe he wants me to
look at his face in the sun, so I do. His hair combed back off his forehead, his cheeks burnt red from sweat lodge heat. Under that, his skin a color I've never seen in Manhattan. Moments go by and I'm all of a sudden not sure what's going on and maybe there's something I should do. That's when I get it. Hank's trying to get his mouth to work right. I look away then, because it's too much, what I can see, but Hank pulls my hand in close.

“That's someplace I've never been to,” Hank says. “Thought I'd been everywhere.”

Hank makes a point of looking his eyes full on into mine. It never ceased to startle me the way Hank and I could look at each other. That golden sun making his face glow. Too long he looks, but I don't look away. He's still trying to talk.

Finally: “I don't know how to thank you.”

“Thank Ephraim,” I say.

“I will,” Hank says, “but still, you brought me here.”

“You'll never be able to repay me,” I say.

That jumps Hank's chest up. He's laughing now or so I think. That's when he does something, then I don't know what the fuck to do. He takes my hand and places my hand on his shirt, above his heart. Laughing or crying, really it's hard to tell. Whatever it is, Hank can't talk.

After a while I figure I'll talk.

“What was it?” I ask. “That was so new?”

Hank just keeps holding my hand on his heart. Under his T-shirt, his marble skin, his chest hair, his nipple. I'm trying to keep thinking about his heart.

“Right now,” Hank says, “I don't know how to say. But I'm working on it.”

ON THE PICNIC
table under the Chinese Elm, the feast Ephraim's mother and grandmother have made. Fry bread. Roast beef stew with potatoes and onions and tomatoes. Corn on the cob. Coleslaw. A big pitcher of purple Kool-Aid. White paper napkins and silverware on a red checkered tablecloth. The shadows going
long. The dogs at our feet. Grandma's put her teeth in and her crazy little pet monkey Charlie Brown's on her shoulder eating fry bread. Ephraim's mom. How his face is hers. Two copies of my book, two of Hank's, on the table, signed, to Rose, and to Granny. We're brushing away the summer flies. Mosquitoes at sunset.

GOT TO GO
pal
.

Over the past thirty-six years, I've said
got to go pal
to Ephraim a couple of times. And he's said it to me. We've been through some tough times, him and me. My divorce, our sexuality, coming out, blood brothers, and for a while there we thought, maybe even another kind of brother as well. And then there was the new gay designer disease that everybody was freaking out on.

But we're together. We've always had our promise. The ritual of that promise. And we've always come back. And we always will.

Hank and I never made a promise like that. By the time it got to us, 1988, cutting our wrists and sharing blood, all hope was gone and it wasn't safe.

Maybe even if we couldn't have shared the blood, we could've still shared the words. Maybe that evening after the sweat lodge, just before supper, when Hank pulled the stump up next to my lawn chair. In those moments, in that gold piece of sunlight, the world smelling of sagebrush and fry bread, terror nowhere around, Hank holding my hand onto his heart, I could have risked it and spoke in my clear voice the words that were true in my heart.

Hey, Hank, while we're here let's promise each other the way Ephraim and I have promised
.

We could've that day. We were that close. We could have done it easy. Looked in each other's eyes and promised love. If only I'd spoken the words.