A Horse Named Sorrow (20 page)

Listen o nobly born
...

I watched out the window as the sun rose and the town's shadows headed for cover. I was happy to be in a warm place after that ride this morning that woke me with its chill like no amount of caffeine ever could. Out on the street, I could see the old men in their pickups holding their coffee cups, looking cozy, lolling down the main street at 10 mph. There was dew-soaked sage growing in the lot past the parking lot and bright-eyed green signal lights over the intersection, swinging in the morning high-desert wind. I'd been delinquent about pancakes, so I ordered two plates of them to make up for yesterday. The father, the son, the holy ghost, plus Ralph, Eugene, and the spirit baby—a pantheon of male love.

I left the waitress a three-dollar tip, imagining she was the woman by the river who'd put me up for the night and saved me from the snakes. And I headed out of town past a couple more big cottonwoods and through the sagebrush, scrub, and sand-diamond-sparkling-something in the pavement on the shoulder of the road.
The garbage and the flowers
. Looking ahead into nothing because the sun was blinding me. I could just see a gradual rise in the road, a gray strip leading into sagebrush nowhere, smelling of Jimmy. I heard a truck bearing down the grade before me, but I couldn't see a thing, just a blotch in front of the bright ball of the sun. I knew that soon enough I'd hear the chugging wind-down of the hydraulic brakes as he slowed down to enter the town, huge and blind as the future, carrying a full load of whatever was in store.

Jimmy came to California.

I went to visit Jimmy, but they wouldn't let me in. I gave the flowers to the security guard, who sort of held them out in front of him like a soiled diaper.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“They're for Jimmy, the guy in there.” I motioned with my head.

“This is a morgue, sir.”

“Well, you can give them to your girlfriend if you want.” Hot potato. I wasn't carrying them home.

I assume he threw them in the trash, as marigolds aren't romantic enough for your girlfriend. She might think you're dumping her.

So all I really had was the pay phone.

Other than those hourly phone calls, I just stayed in bed, staring at Jimmy's bike. Or rather, it stared at me.

I'd promised, but I stalled, stayed in bed, grief-frozen. Waiting. Waiting for Jimmy. To tell me what to do. Even though he already had. Though the last thing he'd asked of me I hadn't done. I hadn't killed the man I loved.

Jimmy's father never called, of course, but Monique finally did.

“Mr. Blake, I have some news for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, Mr. Keane—your friend James—?”

“Yeah?”

“He actually did the paperwork. You don't need to call his family. He's got it all taken care of. He filed all this six months ago.” And she read: “‘In the event of my death, I hereby request my body be disposed of by cremation.' And he paid the fee.” Doing what needs to be done.

“How much?”

“Eight hundred dollars, Neptune Society.”

“When you gonna do it?”

“It's done.”

“What?”

“Don't worry. Day four. I held it up for you.” Dear Monique and her sweet subterfuge of the big ugly acronyms of county government.

“Oh, thank you, thank you . . .” And I kept thanking her to stave off the tears.

I hung up before she shattered me with the sweet honey of her voice.

Monday I had to go get him, the dust of him.

Jesus Jimmy, to dust you have returned.

You didn't take me with you, Jimmy, but I can still take you with me.
Chattering away, my soup and me on the bus with Jimmy in a cardboard box on my lap, like the sweet baby Jesus.

I sat in the bay window on Guerrero Street with that box in my lap for a long time, looking out at the pay phone, the corner liquor store with its comforting, constant golden light at night and in the rain, and at the acacia tree next to it, buckling the sidewalk. Too big, and I knew one day they'd come for it. They—like the collective God in Genesis— and their giveth-ing and taketh-ing away. They got Jimmy, and they're gonna want the tree and the liquor store one day too—and they'll come for the twins, who'll soon get big, fearful, and opinionated; and they'll come for this big bay window on Guerrero Street like they'll come for me.

I reached the Ochoco Mountains within an hour, rising up east of town into pine forests. So much for my dream or delusion of sagebrush forever after my previous delusion of Douglas fir forever. One delusion leading into the next like Biblical begetting.

It had gotten warm, almost too warm, and fast. But I felt a breeze as the pines thickened and the elevation increased, and I looked at them as if I were passing cattle or milling people and I wondered about them and what the future held. They might end up as baseball diamond benches that only really bad players get to know, or as coffins, forging a lonely intimacy with some stranger. I hoped that they appreciated that we didn't put Jimmy in a pine box. Which got me wondering about the fuel they used for the incinerator. Probably gasoline, not pine planks. Jimmy, my Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Imagine if all those downed by the acronym burned themselves like monks in the street. A new kind of Gay Pride parade. Floats of burning monks. Even Ronald Reagan would have had to have said
something
. But the acronym is forever a symbol of how the kindness—let alone the attention—of strangers is a rare and special thing indeed.

The pines thinned out in time, just like my friends had done. And my father's friends before us. And back into the rocky desert I went, with its post piles of orange stone, deep canyons cutting into the fat plain, clefts of shadow, and those ubiquitous yellow flowers growing in the gravelly silver and pink dirt. Hardly anyone on the road but me and the bugs. And it was warm and quiet and very empty, and sometimes—a lot of times actually—in the middle of all those sad musings, in all that vastness, I felt strangely happy or peaceful or something.

You were right, Jimmy—
road's the place
.…

Looking over at Jimmy-in-the-jar on the mantle, I realized I needed to find something to put him in for the journey. I remembered he had a velvet sack, Jimmy did—purple as I recalled—and I rooted around for it. He'd kept his drug paraphernalia in there: a bong, roach clips, pipes, papers, rollers, all that. I had an inkling it was big enough to hold Jimmy.

But I couldn't find it, and I was knocking over boxes in the closet, which was filled with all our junk. Even though Jimmy and I had almost nothing in the way of possessions, we had boxes of crap: papers, art supplies, books, I don't know what—clothes. The past. I knew that bag was in the closet somewhere, in a box. Buried. There really wasn't anywhere else it could be. It was a studio after all: one big room and one big window and a fire escape. Otherwise, we just had a mattress and box springs up on cinder blocks, scavenged bookshelves, my folded-up easel in the corner, a stained round table and reject café chairs with missing legs from dumpsters (Jimmy hammered on two-by-fours and got them to stand). All our kitchen stuff was from thrift stores: random knives, spoons and forks, bowls and tumblers, mismatched pepper and salt shakers. Our clothes lay in piles.

Because the closet was full of boxes.

Frustrated, I ended up with my back to the wall, my knees up, face in my hands between my legs, about to lose it.

Pull
.

I gave up on the velvet bag, and went out to get a cup of coffee. Where I ran into Lawrence.

“Hey, Seamus.” Lawrence's gratuitous hug. “How's Jimmy?” The faux sincerity, eliciting my passive-aggressive response.

“Dead.”

“Wow, I'm sorry.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“No thanks,” I offered, as nicely as possible, before turning and ordering a coffee from the cashier.

But Lawrence insisted: “You gotta make it into art, Shame.”

“Nah, Jimmy's too big for that,” I said, handing over my money.

He looked at me, vexed: “I'm serious, Shame.” I didn't respond, walking over to cream my coffee. I knew he meant well. He believed in art as the solution to everything. But I'd never painted Jimmy; I'd never photographed him. Jimmy'd always been uncontainable—he'd gotten loose in my life like a toxic cloud, bled through the window casings between my dreams and waking life, between thoughts of him and thoughts of every mundane thing from peanut butter to a bar of soap. Jimmy'd put Cristo to shame because Jimmy was art on the scale of creation, and that's why I had to take him back and out on the road. He was an unfolding story still, an ongoing dynamic event between my psyche and the world it called home: a genie out of the bottle. I had to go find him. What could I say?
I'm taking Jimmy on a trip. He's taking me. We're going off traveling together
.

By now Lawrence was pulling the front of his pants down a bit so I could see his underwear's elastic band:
Wouldn't You Really Rather Have a Buick?

I didn't smile. “You being careful, Lawrence?”

He nodded impatiently, too quickly.

“Be careful, Lawrence.” I hugged him.

“I'm having a show …,” he informed me. But it trailed off as I barked, “call me,” knowing I'd long since stopped answering the phone, interested only in the message machine's refrain. Of course
he had a show
, of course he likely wouldn't call anyway, of course none of it mattered. San Francisco was over.

I went home and decided to clean, which meant all those boxes—and my remaining Marie Antoinette paintings—ended up on the fire escape. And after I'd gotten them all out there and the coast was clear, I dropped them one by one onto the sidewalk, knowing that in San Francisco it would all be rifled through and scavenged within the hour. The last box hit a previous box, lurched, and completely spilled its contents onto the street. And out popped the purple bag.

“Jimmy!” I shouted, and down the stairs I ran.

I was almost too late. There was a punk girl pilfering already as I careened out the gate and bounded down the three steps. Even the twins had emerged.

“Don't touch the velvet bag!” I shouted.

The twins stood back, excited at my urgency, while the punk girl just looked up at me, mid-rife, holding my zafu against her chest like an algebra book as I hopped over and grabbed the bag out of the box she'd been scrounging in. I emptied it of its drug paraphernalia, which clattered onto the sidewalk. But something big wouldn't fall out as I shook it, and when I reached in, I found a hardback book:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
.

Strange title, like it was talking to me.
But where's Wounded Knee? And why are you asking me?
And then I thought of Tony Bennett and how he left his here. Where was Jimmy's heart? Upstairs in a mayonnaise jar. Now that I'd found the bag, maybe I could cremate the book too and take them both?

I opened it then and all crammed in among the pages were Jimmy's maps—the ones he'd shown me that first night together—with their red highlighter squiggles marking his route and circles for where he'd stayed. And something else too. There was a hole in the book, shaped like a dollar bill that went all the way through it so that it was as if … as if … someone had already taken its heart and replaced it with—money?

But the money was gone.

Where'd you get the money, Jimmy?

Riddle solved.

“What is it, what is it? Let us see,” screamed the twins, hopping up and down like rabbits.

“It's a treasure map, boys.”

And I headed back upstairs with the book and maps, the twins hot on my heels, pleading, “Can we come? Where's the treasure? We'll get a shovel.” Silenced to muffles by the slammed door.

Eventually, I reached a small town called Prineville, and I was back in sagebrush high desert with its grasses and occasional pines. I found a diner, and while scarfing a burger and fries, I noticed a banner across the street announcing that the Prineville Public Library was having its annual sale. As I always liked to walk around a bit after eating, I headed over to look around.

It was pretty much what I'd expected: bin after bin of cheap trade paper backs and best-seller-caliber hardbacks with glossy jackets: Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and Jackie Collins. What a world.

Then I saw something I didn't expect: face out, once again as if talking to me, was that book that had asked me back in San Francisco to bury its heart. I'd never considered reading it, and couldn't besides with that big hole in the middle of it, so I'd ended up burning it in the fireplace and had put it in a little stuff sack and packed it, with the vague notion of granting its wish if I ever came upon Wounded Knee.

I picked up the book and flipped through the table of contents, and it was like Dorothy waking from the dream of Oz. There was Chief Joseph and Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull and the Sioux and the Klamath that Cherrie Kee had mentioned in reference to Eugene. I bought it for fifty cents.

And I sat down on the curb next to my bike and started to read.
Listen O nobly born to what I tell you now
… Yet another book of the dead.

I'd never been particularly interested in Indians. I didn't like those old movies. The Indians were always running around too much, chasing people and making annoying war whoops. They made me nervous. Of course, I knew vaguely they'd been screwed royally by a Manifest Destiny–obsessed acronym that I was a member of—but I'd never been curious about the details. Like my mom that way. She didn't know a thing about ‘Nam or what the father of her child died for. Better not to consider what God and country were capable of.

I leafed through the Edward Curtis photographs. Wow, those Sioux were hot; I mean they had some presence. A bunch of dandies with a lot of confidence. Fabulous outfits, with seashells for armor and lots of feathers. They even called themselves birds, and they called themselves something else too … a horse people, a horse nation.