A Horse Named Sorrow (22 page)

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too. Be careful, Seamus.”

And off she walked to the BART train to disappear under the bay. I watched her in her gray overcoat. The booze had aged her. To think she
was a sixties girl once. Oh well, she'd survived. I wondered if I would. Jimmy hadn't. My dad hadn't. Lots of people didn't.

If my life had been a music video, I would have belted out a tune from 1969 . . .
Take it . . . take another little piece of my heart, now baby
... We could have sung it as a duet.

But my life wasn't a music video.

She was so hard to reach. And I couldn't do what she'd done. No way, no how. She'd put her whole youth away when my father died. Boxed it up—literally—and put him in a frame and mythologized him, went back to church, became a mother, and settled in for the long haul. She'd held on to only the music. Well, that was something. That I could understand and appreciate, even though my mom and I hadn't sung to each other since that fateful thirteenth year.

As for me, I had no church to go back to; and I had only dolls for babies—no, what had been born in me called me away, not home. And Jimmy wouldn't let me make him into anything but what he was. He wasn't a war hero or Chief Joseph—he was a nobody like me. He wasn't a myth—he hadn't died for anything or anybody.

Jimmy was just a promise now.

But I could sing for him, sing of him. Like my father, he too was a song:

I've seen fire and I've seen rain
...

The next day I saw Jimmy crucified in a church in a town named Dayville. It was dark in there, and I mistook the J-man for sweet Jimmy up on the cross. One more skinny, put-upon man, out to save my soul.

Dayville was a swell ruin of a town in every way, in a little glen of cottonwoods where the road jogged up and over a small hillock before twisting down into the one-street burg, past a defunct and oversized Odd Fellows Hall, and a couple of four-story brick former banks or hotels, much too grand considering the town's size. But more important, there were those giant bough-heavy cottonwoods, splattering shade all over the road, and promising the little river that flowed somewhere beyond. I knew Jimmy'd been here because he'd circled it in red on the map and written a poem about it too called “Places Named for Time”:

Not a where, but a when.

The sweat cooled on my face as I hit the shady spots because Eastern Oregon was all sun in September—three days running of cool mornings and blasted hot afternoons.

I ate at Ellen's Diner coming in and going out. In passing. Through. Where I tripped the bell that hung from the top of the door as I entered that hot afternoon of my arrival, jonesing for pancakes, which I was now eating for dinner as well—albeit with Coke instead of coffee on account of the heat. There was a counter and stools and four or five tables lined up on the opposite wall. The single customer, a husky man in his midforties, was drinking coffee on one of the stools. He put his cup down and said, “Howdy there,” while a woman I presumed was Ellen said, “Good afternoon,” expertly produced a full smile, and thrust a menu across the counter at me where I'd decided to seat myself, two stools down from the man, who then barked, “Where you from?”

I had that sinking feeling that he was going to be one of those small-town characters intent on getting the skinny on me as if that were his and everybody's business. I didn't mind so much, but he wasn't giving me a ride, and I was tired and had a bad shoulder ache that day and a crook in my neck. I took a deep breath and answered that I was from California, which was almost as shameful as being queer to some of the Oregonians I'd overheard in the past few days.

“I was in Sacramento once and Frisco too, back when I was in the service.” I looked at him to gauge his age, so as to place him in whatever particular war before responding. He looked to be my father's age.

“Were you in Vietnam?”

“Yup. You ride that bike all the way from California?”

“Yup.”

“What are you doing a fool thing like that for?”

I wanted to answer that I
was
a fool so it was in character, but I restrained myself, saying instead, “It's the best way to travel—not too fast, not too slow.”

“Not too slow?” he raised his brows incredulously. Then he craned his neck to look out at my bike parked at the plate glass window under Ellen's arcing red name. It arced the opposite way that her smile did when she looked at you, and I wondered suddenly if she were a sad woman. “How fast can that thing go?” he persisted, again incredulously.

“Fifteen miles per hour max, I'd say. I move along at about ten or twelve most of the time, so in a ten-hour day I can cover just about a hundred miles.”

“That's a fair distance, but no competition for trains and trucks and airplanes, and . . . you know—whatnot,” he guffawed, before taking a sip of his coffee. He turned to Ellen then. “Ellen, would you agree this boy is crazy? Ha, ha, ha.” He laughed heartily, in a friendly way. If he only knew.

“Yes, Carl, I'd agree,” she said with a clipped, uninterested smile, as she wiped the countertop and asked me, with just a hint of sarcasm at Carl's expense: “So what will our crazy California man have for supper?”

I smiled and ordered pancakes. She raised her brows, and I smiled.

Carl turned toward me again and asked: “Why are you having pancakes for dinner, and why do people do these fool things?” But before I could answer he went on to say that Ellen made great burgers and that he saw no reason to leave home. He'd left Dayville once. “Just once,” he lifted his finger, “to go to war. That's when I was in Frisco and all that. After my tour, I came right back here and haven't left since. I don't understand why people don't just stay home.”

I felt it would have been presumptuous to answer him really, and it was all rhetorical besides. But he looked at me then, and I formulated an answer, which I didn't give him:
I'm more or less crazy, I'm a homo and Jimmy died, and I promised him
. Instead, I nonchalantly answered that I guess I just liked to travel.

“You ever been to Vietnam? That'll kill the travel bug. Hot and humid, bugs, damn fungus and disease everywhere, cold in the mountains—lot of people don't know that—and all around, just plain unpleasant. And ugly as hell,” he guffawed again. “Maybe I'm just lucky to be born in the most beautiful place on earth. Wouldn't you agree, Ellen?” He raised his voice since she'd already disappeared into the kitchen.

“What's that, Carl?”

“Dayville's the most beautiful place on earth!” He smiled at me as he said it loud enough for her to hear.

She came out with my Coke. “It's beautiful here, yes.” She seemed tired. And I wondered what she really thought; what her dreams were; where would she rather be? I felt for her that she had to tolerate his banter. Not that he was a bad or rude guy. I was even sort of enjoying his chatter—once I'd gauged it was really more about him than me. But
Ellen had probably gotten tired of his manly bullshit months, years— even decades—ago. What was pleasant for a morning cup of coffee at Ellen's, knowing you were moving on, was just not the same thing day after day over a long period of time. Then again, this was a small town, so I supposed people had to put up with each other somehow.

She raised her eyebrows. “Refill?” I'd just quaffed the giant plastic bucket of crushed ice and Coke in two or three gulps. And after I nodded, she added, “Pancakes'll be up in just a sec.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, my cheeks filling with air as I subdued what would have been a resounding, even echoing, belch.

There was a lag in the conversation, which naturally caused Carl to look again outside at my bicycle.

“You rode that thing all the way from California?”

I nodded sighfully. “Yup, and I'm going all the way to Buffalo, New York.”

He whistled. “Just for the heck of it? What's in that bag?” He looked at it lying on the counter next to me.

I sipped my Coke and sat back. He really wanted to know? Maybe I
was
hitchhiking, since this was Carl's diner on some level—his town— and I was gonna have to pay in chitchat to sit in it. I'm only a white liar, and I didn't want to bring up Jimmy, so I stuck to death instead.

“My dad died in ‘Nam,” I said, with some reticence, dumping the conversation back in his lap. It was always risky to bring this up, especially with a vet, as the ones I'd met either felt very protective of me on account of my dad, or else they'd go off on fucking gooks and tell endless tales of macho prowess. Either that or they were traumatized, in which case they'd not say another word. I could have told him I was a lost soul and that I was transporting the dead. I could have told him I had no idea what else to do and my heart was broken. Instead I dodged him with my dead daddy. And I immediately felt guilty for it.

“I'm sorry to hear that, son,” he said quietly, respectfully, sitting up straighter. “It was hell over there.” Now, he got thoughtful. “I got lucky, spent most of my tour in supply. Where'd they get your daddy?”

“Some place in Quang Tri Province,” I answered.

“Jesus Christ. That place was hell. I'm real sorry, son—Ellen, I'm gonna pick this up.” And with that he yanked out his wallet. Say what you will about Oregonians' dislike of Californians, I was being given a lot of free food there. I thanked him. And he quickly changed the subject.

“Well, what did you do before you got on this bike?” And he indicated it with a gesture of his head.

Who are you, and what were you before?

I wasn't about to tell him I took lousy photographs, painted irreverent Marie Antoinettes, fucked a lot of boys, met and took care of Jimmy until he died, and tutored small children—between visits to my shrink and slinging coffee. “You know, the usual stuff.”

“What line of work you in?”

“Uh, . . . teaching.”

“What age?”

“Little kids,” I said softly.

He nodded, “Well, I'm a handyman myself. I can fix just about anything, and I'm still as strong as a young man. My back's in good shape. I'm lucky. That's my Chevy half-ton out there. Just got it a few months ago. A beautiful vehicle.”

“It's nice,” I muttered, peering out into the street at it (big and beige and typical).

“So you're gonna ride that bike all the way to the east coast? That's amazing. I don't get it. Ain't you got a girl or something back there in California?”

“Or something.” Would my mother count? Jimmy-in-the-bag?

“Ah ha, so that's it!” And he laughed, leaning back on his stool. “You're trying to mend your broken heart out here.”

I just smiled. You don't know the half of it, Carl, and I can't tell you for fear you'd run me down with that half-ton of yours, dead daddy or no. Either that, or he'd be one of those small-town queers, or not-queers as the case may be, as he took me home and plowed me with expletives through the night in his doublewide trailer. My next question would answer that.

“Is there a campground around here?”

Carl started describing some place by the river (relief )—a jumble of “left at the mailbox, then right past the old barn . . .”

But Ellen interrupted him and said, “You can stay at the church—they always put the bikers up there. We're on the route, ya know.”

“Well . . . ,” and he shrugged, surrendering his effort to answer my question, and looking husbandly put-upon as she proceeded to go into detail about how to find it, and who to talk to once there.

I had an urge to ask her if she remembered seeing Jimmy last year on his way through here. I was wearing his clothes after all—the same Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt, the same army cut-offs and hightop shoes. And I wondered if he'd stayed at the church. I tried to remember the poem and what it mentioned:
Dayville, Weekville, Monthville, Year/Gravity, Einstein, I'm a queer
(or was that just my doctoring and Seussing of it?).

Ellen continued, rousing me from my poetic reverie. “Dayville is on the Bikecentennial route. We get bikers every single summer.”

“Bikecentennial?”

“It started in '76 as a bicentennial celebration, and it's kept up since. ‘Course the season's pretty much over.” And she smiled, adding, “You're a straggler.” Sure am, I thought, grinning at her. I could have hugged her.

Didn't dare.

I thanked Carl again for picking up the check as he said, “See you in the morning.” Was that an invitation? Then I picked up Jimmy like a purse and went outside and walked the bike down the street to where Ellen told me to, spying the small steepled chapel on a hillside above the road, surrounded by trees—elms and alders, and those ubiquitous cottonwoods. As I walked my bike up the gravel drive, a short, thick little lady came out, with a
what-do-you-want?
scowl on her face. I told her Ellen had mentioned that bikers sometimes stayed nights at the church and asked whether that was true. She nodded her head suspiciously, sizing me up, and turned around to lead me toward the church, without a word. Christian charity, I thought. Thank God for it or a person like her would never help me out.

She started pointing things out along the way: “That's a mulberry tree; that's the cesspool valve; that . . .” And then she turned, and looked at me sternly. “What's that on your shirt?”

“Uh, . . . it's a cross. Of sorts.” But she wasn't gonna buy that. “A rock and roll band,” I admitted sheepishly. She shook her head, clearly disgusted. I thought about how bad it smelled too and hoped she hadn't caught a whiff and that the church had a sink to wash it out in.

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church was a small white A-frame with a blue slate roof. Next to the church, connected to the side of it, was a meeting room, where we now headed. When she got to the door, she pulled out her keys and, putting one in the lock, turned to look at me again, suspiciously, as if I'd transgressed somehow.