A Horse Named Sorrow (16 page)

Turned out to be an on-ramp onto the 5. Place for lost souls.

Et tu, Roseburg?

Off in the distance, there were mountains with firs so dark, they looked like they led somewhere you could never return from. There were big evergreens in town too—they looked out of place next to fast-food joints—and they were the dark green of zombies, with trunks as black as Jimmy's roots. Not like the Trinity Alps, and Shasta, blasted as those places were with California sunlight and covered with pines, which were emptier trees than these dense firs, of a lighter green, with orange/red trunks—Kodachromic cheer. Because whatever California is, it sure is hopeful—sometimes annoyingly so. Even the redwoods, lurking in silvery gray mists, are the red of Chinese happiness and the green of good luck and everything's-okay suburban lawns. But these firs of Oregon, they were plain foreboding, gothic with darkness.

Then, as I rode whistling down the drying blacktop an hour north of town, there were suddenly big madrones everywhere with their barkless, smooth, orange naked wood—smooth and creamy as Jimmy's neck and belly and ass, sure thing. Only difference was that Jimmy wasn't orange. Jimmy was never orange; he was white-green from the Sicilian half of him, like lime.

I finally heard the door click and there was Eugene grinning orange as a jack-o'-lantern.

First thing he did was grab my hand and take me around to the back of the store where there were some cardboard boxes full of fruit past its shelf life, and he grabbed some apples and oranges and put them in his backpack, where he already had past-its-date tofu and yogurt. Then he motioned with his head for me to follow him out across the old, pot-holed, broken-glassed parking lot, rimmed with weeds. He led me into some trees by a little path that went down through maples and madrones to the river and the big cottonwoods along its banks. There was a lot of garbage lying around—cigarette butts, aluminum cans, used condoms draped like Christmas decorations over weed stalks—like any wild place within a city. We sat on a log and ate the fruit, watching the river, sometimes him pointing to things: leaves floating, a tree across the bank, a turtle rolling itself off a log, a fish jumping, strider bugs. It took me back to Ricky's oak groves in the hills, the creek beds on Mt. Tamalpais with Jimmy.

And I reached out with my hand to touch Eugene's shoulder, and he smiled and took my hand in his.

He pointed at me with the other hand, but he stopped when he saw I looked confused. Then he began to draw on the ground. First a stick figure of himself, distinguished by an
E
above it, then one of me with a
?
over its head. He wrote “where?” next to it.
To or from
I wondered. So I told him both: How I'd come from San Francisco and I was riding my bicycle across the country, just passing through—whens, wheres, whats, and hows, but no
whys
. He smiled with a sigh that pointed straight at that omission.

“I should probably get goin',” I announced. “I'm pretty tired and I gotta get up and go early, and, and …” But he just looked at me, and I heard the river, and me lonely—and the next thing you knew we were kissing hard and hungry.

We kept kissing—it was like thirst in the desert, like hunger and the food you craved most—tempeh. We gulped each other like starved puppies at a tit. Then we stopped and looked at each other, and I could see he wasn't afraid of my vague sorrow and its spilling. In his eyes I saw that he was somehow lost too, and something there said: “I want to hear your story, and I want to tell you mine.”

Eugene pulled out the rest of the food then and we ate the yogurt, and big wet chunks of tofu, damp and cold as Jimmy's lips in the San Francisco fog. We laughed in the eating of it.

Then he urged me up, anxious to show me around. And off we went down the river path, among the deathless damp fora of Oregon, the golden and brown loam of leaves thicker than any carpet. He hugged a tree; he kicked a stone; he found a little dead mole.

I watched the way he moved, how he looked around—hooded now in his black sweatshirt—the way he noticed birds, insects, the wind.

The way he'd watch me move and look. I didn't need to say anything, and soon I realized that silence was just part of how you talked to him. It even started to feel rude and sort of rough when I said yes or no, so I just nodded or shook my head. The river was our voice—well, along with the wind and the traffic, I suppose. And maybe we were talking with our feet too—in where we went, how we stood. And his eyes, enormous and green-gold, were a kind of voice as well—in a way bashful, and yet piercing and direct: when they looked, they really looked, and they spoke in the looking.

Pretty soon we saw a green steel bridge arcing over the river and Eugene led me right under it, where he showed me some graffiti art, shadowed by the bridge—and then he pointed to his chest and smiled, proud of his work.

I raised my eyebrows, and then I climbed up the rocks piled there to get a closer look.

It was a very involved Hieronymus Bosch allegorical kind of thing with people crawling around on the pavement, drunks in doorways, twisted trailer homes—and in the big empty sky above the miserable scene were a few stringy clouds, along with big vertical eagle feathers. And underneath everything too, lying near some bum's dropped wine bottle, and under the cinder blocks of teetering trailers, were broken arrowheads and buffalo skulls.

“It's beautiful, Eugene.” But it was more than that. It suggested something I couldn't quite put my finger on—something unknowable, something Jimmy. It was colorful, shadowy, pretty, sad, dark, light, everything all at once. Sublime is what it was. I grabbed his hand and squeezed while I looked at it, the rhythmic thumping of cars above us making it seem almost as if the picture were alive and beating like a heart.

I pointed to the feathers and arrowheads and buffalo, and he pulled out what I learned later was his medicine bag, which he wore on a string around his neck, and he held it then in his fist with a firm kind of strong smile on his face. He touched it to my forehead and put it back under his sweatshirt, and I wished then I'd brought Jimmy-in-the-bag to share with Eugene the same way.

“Hey, hey, Eugene.” And I held his shoulders and couldn't not kiss him with everything I had.

Invigorated, he pulled me along, over the riprap stones abutting the underside of the bridge as we made our way further down the river, the big cottonwood boughs rolling like waves in the sea of the sunset sky, which was streaked with long drawn-out clouds, all purple, orange, and golden, dappling the trail with sepia light. I breathed deep the dusty-leaves-scentedlatesummerair,andIwonderedaboutEugene,andabout my own heart's strength. I figured he was either desperately lonely, or he really liked me. True for so many gay encounters, I'd given up ever knowing which it was, or if there was even a difference. But I hoped Eugene was just lonely. Be a lonely boy, Eugene. My heart's too full up and scarred for anything more.

I threw my arm around his shoulder. My buddy. And Eugene, he sort of became his own red line after that, and I stopped all my ruminating and just followed it; I followed him along that river, as he pointed out moss on stones; three-foot-high dandelions in tiny meadows between firs and maples; huckleberries, blackberries, salmonberries like red hoops. Which he fed me.

He found a salamander that moved like a baby walking, its eyes locked on us as intensely as Eugene and I looked at each other right before we kissed. And Eugene grinned big and crooked.

He took me up to Skinner Butte. The hillside going up was dense with undergrowth and fir, but at the top it opened up into California, all dead golden grass and oak trees. There was a sign at the top and Eugene placed his hand over the
r
and the last
e
. “Skinny butt,” I read out loud, and patted his.

I thought of Jimmy then on Mt. Tamalpais, where he'd once read me Rilke poems:

…
And sometimes in a shop, the mirrors were still busy with your presence
…

Actually the whole world was. I satisfied a tear.

Eugene took off across the grass then, running for the overlook. And I ran after him all the way to the edge, where, breathing heavily, we looked out over the whole town, heard and saw the train whistling down by the river, passing the big grain elevator (is that where all the bulk-bin couscous, amaranth, and spelt comes from?), and out beyond it the freeway with the people on it always going, going; circling, circling.

I kissed him while my chest still heaved, wanting to breathe his air, and him mine.

There were squirrels in the oaks that made me want to play, and I kissed Eugene more passionately and groped him, but I kept pulling back the minute I started. And he seemed to understand, and again grabbed my hand and onward we went—down the other side, through the smell of wood and dirt and the sour milky scent of just-cut blackberry stickers.

Then Eugene showed me the whole town—for hours we walked—never saying a word, either of us. He was expert in gesture and smile and eye. He made me see the shapes of things. He showed me more green bridges and pointed out the lumber mills stinking of sulfur and sawdust.

Near the university, there were coffee shops full of students amid somebody's idea of wisdom—always gothic towers and big elm trees. And there were strip malls that didn't bother looking smart; they were completely unselfconscious in fact, downright ugly and undignified as if to assert: commerce is stupid. There were gas stations and their machine thirst; bars and neon hunger; cement walls with names of juvenile delinquents and Fortune 500 companies all over them; markets full of the humility of vegetables—poorly shaped sweet potatoes, knobby squash, deformed carrots and turnips—and other things trapped in their tiresome sales pitches of packaging. We walked past chain stores lit up brighter when closed; saw cop cars and semis, eyes heavy-lidded in lizard-sleep behind the bowling alley; there were lost-looking high-rises scattered about, and little houses rotting in the rust and mold of decay. Eugene was like any small American city, only a darker green, full of the stains and residues of puddles never quite dried; the earth's face puffy from crying and whimpering—like the grief of America, un scabbed-over, an ulcer that never completely heals and can't dissolve and dry up like it would in California, where the sun erases everything.

Cremation's for California
, I thought. This place wants the body, the soil.
What if we'd spent our year of love in Eugene, Jimmy?
I'd have had to lug the whole body back from where it came, in a shroud—in a little trailer behind the bike, I suppose.

It grew late in Eugene, where the days do not disappear but pile up like timber to rot or grow fungus—or maybe just remember. And it began to rain again, though only lightly. And we kept on walking— even though we were dog-tired—because we were a kind of river by then. Eugene pulled up his sweatshirt hood, wraith-like, and then we found a boarded-up shop and we sat there on the sidewalk under its awning, watching the rain and the darkness commence. He sat as close to me as he could, pressed up against me, and I heard him hum. Just like that, saying nothing, humming and looking out into the rain. Then he rooted around in his pocket and pulled out a little wooden pipe, packed it, and in the Oregon rain, we got stoned.

Eventually he took me out of the rain and into a drag show at some little gay club. It was funny and entertaining in the way men are when they have nothing to prove. There were tired, beat-up blonds, whose hands were way too big, singing Abba songs—“Dancing Queen” and “The Winner Takes It All”—and overweight brunettes with puffy hairdos attempting to mimic Madonna or Kate Smith, or both. The freedom of nothing left to lose.

One of the drag queens came up to us. She had an enormous hawk like nose, and with her cheap banged-up heels, stood well over six feet. “Ooooooh, child, you got yourself a little white boy again,” she chided.

Eugene and I both smiled embarrassed, and then the drag queen turned to me and said: “You know Sioux means ‘little snake,' and his a in't, so I guess he is n't. Ha, ha, ha, ha, …” Then she disappeared into her bitchy reverie of laughter, preparing for her act, while I tried to square the riddle of what she'd said.

Then thin, gangly Eugene put his arm around me, and I felt that special high school date feeling I'd never known but always longed for as we watched Cherrie Kee lip-synch “I Will Survive” (with all its heartbreaking dramatic pauses)—adding, when the music faded out: “—in spite of the white man!”

Eugene gave me a little kiss as the crowd scattered toward the bar and tables. And then he put his finger up to signal for me to wait as he went off to the bathroom. I headed over to the bar to get a beer and was tapped on the shoulder from behind by Cherrie Kee. “Hi,” she said with a big smile. “Where are you from? Don't get me wrong with all that white-boy stuff—I'm a performer.” She smiled coyly.

I was always cheered at the sight of a drag queen, and I grinned like a chimp. I complimented her on her act and then told her I was up from San Francisco. She asked me if I'd met Eugene at the market, and I said I had, and then she asked me if I knew he was only nineteen and shouldn't even be in this bar.

“People feel sorry for him because he doesn't talk, and not talking he hasn't offended anybody yet. Unlike me,” she added sardonically. “We're both from the reservation. I've been taking him up here since his father died when he was fifteen. A mean, motherfucking Klamath alcoholic who used to beat the shit out of him.” Ow. I felt a pang that made me wince. I lit Cherrie Kee's cigarette, acting the gay Bogart, and she puffed quickly, continuing: “Wasn't actually his father though, it turned out. Long story. He was a real prick.” She laughed. “Me and Eugene used to fuck around back when we were just kids, and his stepfather caught us once. I can laugh now: 69ing in the back of his pickup truck. Ha, ha, ha.” She glanced over her shoulder and saw Eugene coming. “Anyway,” she hurriedly continued, “be careful. He's a heartbreaker, honey. He lives in his own world, always has, always will. There was a time when he even talked. As a little kid. Don't get caught up in him.” And she looked at me with a mournful sigh, like she knew it was more than I could handle, but that it was probably going to happen anyway. She communicated all this in a microsecond, as Eugene was soon upon us.