Marathon Cowboys (13 page)

House
? I want to double-check the colors.” I typed “Freida”

and “blue house” into the search engine. Jesse held up his

paper, covered in blue paint samples, compared them with

the pictures. “Look at this painting,” he said, pointing to the

screen. It was a self-portrait, and the area behind Freida’s

head was blue, Bathtub Mary blue, and around this, like a

frame, were colorful parrots, pink and orange and yellow and

green. “See what she did?”

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“Yeah. She used those icon colors. Is that what you’re

going to do with the cowboy angels?”

“I think so, but one color for each of the paintings.” He

chewed on his lip. “I’m thinking of them as a group, and I

really need to not do that. They sell one at a time, maybe to

different people. Nobody’s going to buy all eight. So if I make

them being together a criterion for the work to be successful,

it will only work if they don’t sell.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or just talking to

himself in my near vicinity. “So what’s your plan?”

“Don’t know yet.” He went back to his side of the studio,

then turned around, came back, and kissed me, a lingering,

sweet kiss that tasted like the lemon drop he had been

sucking on.

Back to work. I was going to be the platoon leader. Or

my alter ego, Devil Dog, was going to be platoon leader. I

sketched him on the whiteboard. Now I needed my Jesse, my

DADT boy. “Jesse. You mind if I put your face on a cartoon

character? I need a gay character.”

“And I’m the only gay boy you know?”

“No, you’re just the prettiest.”

“Of course you can, zo-zo. Images in art, they’re

symbols, you know? They don’t represent real people.”

I had my doubts about this. That may have been the

intention of the artist, to use symbols, but people were very

interested in other people. They wanted the details of who

Picasso had slept with, and drawn. People were still debating

the identity of the
Mona Lisa
, though I suspected Leonardo

would echo Jesse: images of people are just symbols. I

hesitated, my marker in my hand. How likely was it someone

would see a resemblance to Jesse’s face and ask him about

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it? I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, and I didn’t want

him to be known as a gay character in a comic strip. He was

too complex and beautiful for that. No, that wouldn’t work.

I’d have to find somebody else’s face.

What had he said about orange shoes, orange high-

tops? I couldn’t remember now. I sketched in a character,

slender, with delicate hands and a face like Peter Frampton

on the cover of
Frampton Comes Alive
, pretty as an angel. I

gave him orange high-top sneakers. And a large rifle. This

was my gay marksman.

Who else? I wasn’t going to have a token dumb fuck. I’d

never seen that, not in my years in the Corps. The quiet ones

always seemed to get labeled as big and dumb, but in my

experience, they were actually just quiet. When they did talk,

they had usually seen something from an angle everyone else

had missed. We needed a cowboy, a shit-kicker who always

had his hands sliding up somebody’s skirt. Then we’d have

Sir, though we’d never see him. He was always going to be a

voice on the radio or the phone, telling us where we were

going next, giving us our mission. I leaned back, stared at

the board. I had my platoon.

I stuck my head on Jesse’s side of the studio. “You want

a Coke?”

“Diet,” he said, frowning at his easel. He was still mixing

and testing colors. “It looks like cantaloupe that’s been left

out in the sun too long.” He tore the paper off the pad and

threw it in the trash can in disgust. The can behind him was

nearly full. “Fuck. How the fuck difficult is dusty fucking

terra cotta? I can’t mix colors worth shit.” His voice sounded

a bit fragile, so I left quietly, got us a couple of sodas, and

put his on his desk without saying another word.

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He worked through the afternoon, into the evening, and

I sat on the porch with a book, listening to The Original and

Uncle George talk over what was happening in the world. I

went into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on, and I could

see the light in the studio going off, then on, then off again. I

watched for a bit, wondering if this was some sort of artist

Morse code, S-O-S. Then the light went out and stayed out.

But no Jesse. When the coffee was done, I took cups to the

old men on the porch, then walked back to the studio to see

what was happening. It wasn’t dark inside, but dim. Jesse

had the small desk lamp on, which cast a puddle of golden

light through his half of the studio.

I stuck my head through the scarves. “Hey. Can I come

in?”

“Sure.” He was lying on his couch and looked utterly

exhausted, dark gray under his eyes.

“I saw the lights going on and off. I thought you were

signaling you needed me to come rescue you.”

He grinned at that, and I pulled up a desk chair.

“I was looking at the paint colors under different lights.

Making sure I had what I wanted.” I looked around the

studio. He had color swatches on a piece of raw canvas, and

their formulas were written below the samples. There was a

Bathtub Mary Blue, bright pink, a pale muted orange color

that I thought was probably the hard-won dusty terra cotta,

and a bright, creamy yellow. “I finally got the pink right. I

looked at pictures of some scarves woven by women in

Bolivia.” He must have seen the look on my face, because he

grinned tiredly up at me. “It’s worth it, I promise.”

There was a CD playing I’d never heard before, Western

music, and the guy singing had a thin, beautiful voice. Jesse

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started singing along “
…out here with the truckers and the

kickers and the cowboy angels….
”

“I don’t know this music.” He reached over, handed me

the CD case. Gram Parsons,
Grievous Angel
.

“That’s where I first got the idea for the paintings, from

this song. It’s real cowboy music, beautiful and so self-

destructive it nearly goes up in flames. He did this album

with Emmy Lou Harris.” He gestured to the canvases. “I

think I’m going to do them one at a time, make sure they can

stand alone, and not only as a group. This first one is going

to be the Grievous Angel.”

“It sounds powerful, but I don’t really understand what

it means.”

He closed his eyes. “You’ll understand when you see the

painting. Cowboys, we’re born into these Western mountains

and deserts, and we get brave and strong, because that’s

what the land is asking us to be. They tell us we need to

fight, to defend our country and our freedom, and we send

our very best, the strongest and most beautiful of all of us.

Maybe they come back broken, or with scars, and later no

one can even remember why we asked them to go. The

strong men who’re left? We use them to sell pickup trucks

and cigarettes. It’s not the land doing this. The land loves us

like our mothers. But we have to go out into the world. This

first cowboy angel, the Grievous Angel, he’s you. He’s been

sent off to war. Your war, your continuous, anonymous war.”

I didn’t think he meant the Grievous Angel was really

me. I was just one of his symbols. I scooted him over, lay

down on the couch with him, and rolled him over into my

arms. “You’re tired. Close your eyes, put your head on my

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chest, and I’ll hold you for a while.” His voice sounded full of

tears.

He slid a hand over my chest until it settled over the

shrapnel scar. “What artists do, their job in the world, is to

see clearly. To lift up the blinders of money and greed and

apathy, and then force everyone else to see what they see.”

He curled against me. “Yeah, I am tired.”

It was funny, but I’d never thought of anyone but people

like me fighting for America. We put on the uniforms, we

picked up our guns, we went off and threw ourselves down

between right and wrong. Back home, everyone was dancing

in the streets and having picnics in the park, sitting happy

and safe on their red-checked tablecloths. But people like

Jesse, the artists, they were working on America too. The

folks at the ACLU who were working for GLBT rights, they

were working for America. It wasn’t just the Devil Dogs,

keeping the Huns from the gate. It made me feel better,

somehow, thinking that all these brilliant, beautiful minds

were hard at work to make America as good as it could be.

Jesse settled his head over my chest. “I can hear your

heart beating. It sounds strong.” He sighed. “Tomorrow I’m

going to start.”

“You haven’t already started?”

“No. This was just getting ready. Getting things clear in

my head. The real work starts in the morning.”

“I won’t bug you.”

“Bug me all you want. How did your work go today?”

“I got my crew. Tomorrow their names, backstory, then

I’m gonna send them off to war.”

“Is Uncle George still here?”

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“Yep. He’s drinking coffee on the front porch. Only

Navajo people and Marathon cowboys drink coffee right

before they go to bed.”

“Are they sitting there, not talking?”

“I heard maybe four or five words. They aren’t up in the

double digits, yet. Course, they might have just been waiting

for me to leave.”

“No, they’re always like that. He say anything about

Sadie?”

“Not when I was around.”

“She hasn’t called me. They let you call in those rehab

places, right?”

I shook my head. “I think some of them, they have a

blackout period. A week, a month, I’m not sure. Some time

when you can’t call out, and don’t have any visitors.”

“So you won’t beg your cousin to come and take you

away?”

“Probably.”

JESSE was already in the studio when I went out for my run

the next morning, and it wasn’t even six yet. We worked all

day without talking, and I listened to the music from his side

of the studio—Marty Robbins first,
Gunfighter Ballads and

Trail Songs
, over and over, until late afternoon. Then he

switched to Gram Parsons, and I could hear him over on his

side, warbling with Gram’s sweet voice, singing about

cowboy angels. I wondered if the music was some part of the

way he painted. I’d never heard anyone keep music on a

continuous loop like this. The second day he’d moved on to

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The Highwaymen, and by the third morning, Los Lonely

Boys. The Original went out to the studio to drag him into

the house for breakfast. We both stared at him. His eyes

were crazy bright, and he looked like he’d dropped five

pounds he couldn’t afford to lose.

I slid a couple of sunny-side-up eggs onto his plate.

“Okay, listen up. Here’s what we need to do. You need to eat

at least two meals a day, and if you do that, I won’t cut the

cord on your CD player.”

He looked from me to The Original. “I’ve been eating.”

His grandfather shook his head. “No, son, I don’t believe

you have.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean, cut my cord?”

“Fond as I am of Marty Robbins, I don’t believe I care to

listen to his music for seven hours straight.”

“It’s okay, don’t worry. We’re nearly ready for Santana.”

“Jesse….” I stared at him. He looked clueless, slightly

deranged. I looked over at the old man for help.

He held up his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you,

son. He’s not right in his mind, not when he gets going like

this. It’s always been his way.”

“Jesse, you want to take a break and ride with me back

to Lajitas? Get the boots?”

“Oh, I can’t stop now.”

I looked at The Original. “Would you like to take a ride?”

He shook his head. “You’ve been concentrating hard on

Devil Dogs
. Why don’t you get out of here for a bit? Go get