She was starting to look like I’d run the limits of her compassionate largesse. She got up. “He ain’t goin’ anywhere, once he gets there. Not until the power of attorney decides otherwise. So, you need to talk to them.”
“Okay, thanks Monique.” She gave me a wan smile.
Jimmy’s family. What did I know about Jimmy’s family? Well, plenty actually, from the poems, and his late-night, book-on-the-lap reminiscences.
Jimmy was twenty-nine when he died. But he’d left home a long time ago. He only went skulking back to Buffalo when he learned that his mother was dying of a long, drawn-out illness: lung cancer. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left, which was ten years or more. She chastised him when he walked into her hospital room, and he looked at the floor and he took it.
“She said awful things to me. Called me all sorts of names. She’d always been tough just like I used to be—we respected each other for that. But it wouldn’t have been fair to fight back with her there fat on her back. We were tough, but we fought fair. Which is to say we were proud.” Sighing Jimmy. “So I just endured it, tried to tell myself to just go the distance. I hadn’t cried in ten years either, but after three days of her insults—and while my two born-again sisters sat by sniffing silently and with satisfaction—I broke and finally yelled back at her: ‘Stop it, stop it, you bitch.’ We yelled at each other back and forth for maybe ten minutes while my sisters lowly wailed in prayer from the corner. Somewhere in there I’d begun crying, bawling through my hurled words, and she had too—you have to understand, we never cried, ever.” He huffed a big exhale of a sigh then. “I climbed into the little bed with her then, and you know what she said? ‘I bore you . . .’ She was right, but it seemed a strange thing to say, until she finished and it made sense. ‘I bore you . . . you are my fruit.’ And she fucking wailed, and I knew then we were the same. She died two days later, spent, but more like horrifically resigned, not so much to death as to regret.”
Jimmy didn’t cry then. He came close though, I could see. He shook his head out like a wet dog.
“Are you full of regret, Jimmy?”
“No. We’re the same, me and my ma, but I don’t gotta end the same.”
“Tell me the story, Jimmy—what happened next?” I insisted.
Jimmy thought to do what anyone in Buffalo would do in terms of getting a new start. He went to California. “But I didn’t just go; I couldn’t just go, like I used to—I don’t know. I had to go in a certain way. The railroads and airplanes and cars—they all travel in circles, and I’d end up back where I started. No sooner would I set out for St. Louis than I’d end up in New Jersey. Once I went to Texas, and by the time three months had passed, I was in Florida. I actually headed for California twice before, but never made it past Denver. And then I was in Minneapolis. It was weird; it was like I was attached to some kind of tether. Maybe I slept wrong, in the shape of a boomerang or something.”
“Maybe you loved your mom.” The question that was my face.
He rolled his eyes.
“Maybe…well, of course… but I think it’s more the circle of things.”
“A closed loop. I know all about it, Jimmy,” I said with my nods of assent.
“I got tested in that hospital. I’d walked by the sign for it three or four times and the day she died, I bit the bullet since I’d been avoiding it for years. After that…well, something was over, you know? I had to leave and never look back. At first I thought I should walk, but I knew I’d never make it. I’d end up hitching a ride or a train, and then I’d be right back in the old pattern, looping all over the continent like some pinball. I thought of walking because I knew I had to make it hard. I had to earn my passage somehow. I had to climb here. Climb out of something, get born, you know?”
I know now.
I called information, searching for his father, who he’d said had left them all years ago, but was still lurking around town somewhere. I didn’t dare call the born-agains.
“Keane. Jack Keane.” There were three J. Keanes listed in Buffalo.
“Hi, I’m a friend of your son’s.” But the first one had no son. Or was he just saying that, since it was the common response of so many fathers of gay sons? The second number was disconnected. I breathed deep for the third, but got an answering machine. “This is Jack, leave a message.” That’s when it occurred to me that Jimmy’s voice was still on our machine. That seemed tacky, having a dead guy’s voice taking messages from people who didn’t even know he was dead yet. Tacky, macabre, cruel even. But there was no way I would erase it, because it was Jimmy’s voice. That being the case, I decided against leaving our number for the final Jack.
Instead, I started going down to the corner liquor store and calling Jimmy.
“Hi, this is Jimmy and Seamus. We’re not here.” Beep. Music to my ears. In a Buffalo twang. Mr. Understatement. Jimmy.
The twins started watching me, wondering, pointing. Once they came over. “You don’t got any phone anymore?”
“No, it’s not that. Listen.” And I handed Michael the phone. Arched brows. At which Marcus became overexcited, jumping up and down for his turn, so I had to dig for more quarters and dial again so they’d both get it. They got it. Big smiles and nods—they knew who it was. “Diarrhea boy!”
“He died,” I told them. But I think they knew; they’d seen him fading for months. Their faces dropped all the same to get the news. But then they wanted to listen some more.
They’d run over whenever they spotted me there after that. To listen to the dead.
I think they had some idea that the message would change. That he’d say something—like what it was like on the other side.
“It never changes,” Michael said despondently to Marcus.
“No, it never changes,” I concurred.
That was the last time they ran over. Their mother had already taken to screaming at them in Chinese, something, I guessed, to the effect that they shouldn’t be bothering me or running across the street. I had no idea which. I only knew she smiled at me when I looked at her, indicating that I wasn’t the problem, in her insular, non confrontational way.
32
The frat had a pay phone, and it was as good a place as any to call my mom. I made a point to call her at home instead of at her office, so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. All she wanted was to know I wasn’t dead anyway. What was the point of talking? Which made me feel sad, until I remembered that just last night I’d realized it was sharing silence with her that was best. Silence and a song.
I ought a just call her and sing. No more talking.
I heard the beep, and her faux-cheerful voice. “Hi. This is Karen Blake. Leave a message at the beep and I’ll call you back.”
“Hi, Mom. It’s me, Seamus. Everything’s great. I’m in Eugene” (and he’s in me). “Today I head east. Don’t worry—I’m great.” Then I sang to her: “La, la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la, la, la, Bobby McGee… ” I kept humming the rest of it till I ran out of breath and then signed off—”Love ya, Mom. Bye.”
I gathered up my things and, after throwing a perfunctory thanks at a few of the frat boys (one of whom looked at me askance, having witnessed the impromptu telephonic serenade as well as my kitchen query), I set out, determined not to go anywhere near the organic co-op.
But the morning was all misty and I got turned around, and the only way I knew to get reoriented was to find the river, and doing that, I ended up right back at the market like I was living out some Greek play. I couldn’t not go in. But I hesitated.
A kid out front, straddling his little stingray bicycle, watched me curiously. I like kids and I hate being stared at, so I made up my mind and dismounted.
“How you doing there, partner?” I said to the kid.
“Okay,” he said rather seriously, like a little man.
“Glad to hear it. Will you watch my bike?”
“Sure,” he answered, as if to say why wouldn’t I?
And t
hrough the door I went. I needed something to eat anyway. And I figured if he were there, I’d say thank you and goodbye, but not with words. I’d kiss him on the forehead and give him benediction because what we’d shared was holy.
As it turned out he wasn’t there, but the stock girl was, and she said: “You’re back looking for Eugene?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you just missed him,” she blurted as she hefted a box of canned beans onto her cart.
“Is he working today?”
“Eugene? Nah. Yesterday was his last day,” she said as she ran a razorblade around the edge of the box. “He came shopping first thing this morning.”
“His last day? He quit?” I must have looked a bit alarmed.
“Yeah, he left town.”
My face a question. “Where’d he go?”
She stopped and looked at me. “I think to some Indian reservation. I don’t know. Like I said yesterday, he doesn’t say much—bein’ mute and all,” she wisecracked. Then she reconsidered, probably remembering my fragile state from yesterday and seeing it now returning to my face. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”
“Yeah,” I said, a bit startled and thinking to ask her where the Klamath Reservation was, remembering Cherrie Kee’s mentioning it yesterday.
“How was the date?” she said coyly then, but I just looked at her. “Good, huh?” And she gave me that sweet, sad smile again from yesterday. “You gay guys put yourselves through way too much.” And she shook her head back and forth. Then she patted my shoulder. “Wait here.”
She came back with a bag of scones and muffins. “Here, these are day-old; you can have ’em.”
“Thanks,” I said, stupefied. There was something about that store: the kindness of its strangers, and the fact that I’d been there three times and eaten each time and only paid once. She put her hand on my shoulder: “You take care of yourself, okay?” She must have thought me one fragile flower. I nodded decisively—my A-OK—and she returned to her boxes of canned beans, one of which she proceeded to boldly eviscerate with the box-cutter. And that was that.
I went out the door, still in a daze, clutching Jimmy and the bag of food. And there was the kid on the bike who made me think of one of Jimmy’s poems:
Kids like dogs
Watching and waiting for big news
Periscoping from a blissful sea of ignorance
Give them news while it still means something.
I thanked him for watching my bike and said, “You wanna see a dead guy?” And I opened Jimmy-in-the-bag. “Right here, all burnt up, this is a dead guy. Name was Jimmy.” He peered in and then looked up at me with a “no shit” drop jaw.
“You got a mom and dad, and brothers, sisters, friends?”
“Yeah, I got all those.” Again, the why wouldn’t I? look.
“Be nice to ’em, K?”
“Okay then,” the little man said.
And I rode away, leaving him one story the richer.
That made two of us.
A little more than a story in my case. Because it occurred to me then, with Jimmy and Eugene both on my mind, that I’d been knocked up and I knew right then what a spirit baby was. And I laughed . . . Ha, ha, Jimmy. Some things you gotta figure out for yourself. Okay then.
Go east, young man”—backasswards—but that’s just what I did. Over the bridge, and the whispering river, and out of Eugene, into neighboring sulfur-stinking Springfield, where, for the first time, I balked at pancakes (since I had scones and muffins from the market) and pulled into a donut shop, where I ordered a big, bland, highly caffeinated Styrofoam cup of tired, burnt coffee. I found a plastic table in the corner at the window where I could watch my bike, and I began to sip and nosh my scones. There was a little girl two tables over who I smiled at because she’d been watching me from her hot chocolate and slouched jelly donut. She’d watched me pull up, watched me come in, and watched me order, sit, stir coffee, and eat my scones while her mother, pensive, stared out the window at traffic. It occurred to me that if that little girl had asked me what I was doing, I wouldn’t have known what to say. But I knew if I showed her Jimmy, she’d understand. So I just smiled at her as I got up to leave, and when I was back out at the bike, I held Jimmy up in his velvet purple bag, and shook him around, and kissed him, and did a little jig, and the little girl smiled like a madwoman, giggling and squirming in her seat before her mother turned and glared.
33
I climbed up and over the Cascades—out the 126, which just happened to be the steepest route across those mountains. Well, I’d promised.
And then the mist turned to rain again. So I pulled over and put my ball cap on—that was Jimmy’s too: Buffalo Freight & Salvage—and draped the nylon poncho over my shoulders. I tucked Jimmy up inside the zipper of my windbreaker, up against my belly—carried him like a child, I did. In the pocket of me, like a marsupial. All the way up that winding snake of steep highway, in the rain, cars tailing me around the curves, stinking of wet metal and rubber, all mixed up with the smell of dripping fir trees and drenched grasses because around us was just endless forest, great hunks of bouldered stone, an occasional cabin or Forest Service shed, and the gray churning sky over forlorn, lonely meadows.
Up near the pass, the sun came back out and the birds all made a racket the way they do after rain, and the meadows weren’t sad anymore. They were all pixie-giddy in fact, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see little bands of faeries marching about celebrating the ceasing of the rain. The whole scene filled me with energy, and taking a deep breath of all the steaming fresh greenness, I stood up on Chief Joseph and, pumping hard on the pedals, made a final sprint for the top.
And when I reached it, it opened like a big picture book to a vast, weird landscape—a trio of black volcanic cones called the Three Sisters (I made a wish on each of them) shimmered in the after-rain way out across a blasted-clean, almost-empty wilderness of black lava. As if the whole world had turned to ash. Only it was full of tourists wandering about like people lost on Mars, way out there in the rocks, looking around, having abandoned their Winnebagos like spent lunar modules.
I was starving after the long ride and thought of begging snacks from the space travelers, but I wasn’t feeling too social. I was hungry all the same and there weren’t any stores—hungry enough to eat ash. Mystical mad enough to eat my dead lover for sustenance. Jimmy’d said once in a poem: I ate the road, mile by mile, like a snake swallowing its tail.
Hot damn Jimmy and the silences he wrought. The timbre of his voice.
I lolled along, getting my breath back, and spied two apples lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road. Manzana from heaven or some such. I pulled over immediately to pick them up, and as I bit hungrily into them—the sweet juice quenching my hunger and thirst both and running down my chin—I thought I understood Adam and Eve and the whole sorry mess, and I couldn’t blame them. Would have done the same. If I were God, it’d be a whole different story, dropping fruit at will. Let them eat apples.
I dispensed with my poncho, tied Jimmy back onto the handlebars and remounted, having boldly sinned, and with renewed vigor, I pedaled onward across the burnt wasteland, half-expecting to see Von Trapp children, cartoon-burnt in their gamboling, singing sad opera arias. But there were only dazed tourists discussing Armageddon and looking for flowers amid just a smattering of plants—withered trees of knowledge.
Jimmy.
Soon I was flying, the wind at my face, the looming yellow sign ahead greeting me with its black truck poised on the hypotenuse of a triangle, reading “6% grade” and warning the big rigs. Might as well have said “Grace” for me. An invitation. To fight. The place for lost souls. Yippee!
Down through the wind I went, shifting into high gear and pedaling long slow strokes as I peeled away the miles, coming upon and passing those forewarned trucks and keeping up with a good number of cars as well. I zoomed down arcing arms of pavement under great tunnels
made by towering forests, whizzed by pastures that opened so wide I got dizzy watching the torporous cattle who, upon seeing me, startled and bolted away from the road, looking like flocks of birds, all in unison running. Made me whistle it did, made me sing: laughed like a brook.
What had taken me hours to climb dumped me down its other side in forty-five blissful minutes. The slippery slope of surrender. Down into the town of Sisters eventually, which I half-suspected was a lesbian settlement, but which turned out instead to be a jackpot of rangy young men, slinging pizzas, gasoline, and burgers—or shirtless, painting houses and carrying planks, lolling about on corners. Eugene had done something to me alright, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted all that back. Hot damn. I went for pizza—and afterward, stuffed and lethargic, I considered finding a motel, but being that there were still several hours of daylight left and trouble brewing in my loins, I headed out of town, hoping to reach the Deschutes River, fifteen miles up the road, where I’d been told by the pizza waiter (man, he had a sweet Adam’s apple) that the red circle on my map was actually a state park I could camp in.
I tried to forget the Adam’s apple, tried not to think about Eugene, who had a fine one of those himself, along with his other attributes. And Jimmy’s—I’d licked it often like the salt lick that it was. In my elation that afternoon, I so wanted to kiss him, to feel his scruffy chin against mine.
And speaking of which, that’s what eastern Oregon was once I headed out of Sisters—scruff, sagebrush, stony, and only occasionally dotted with pines and solitary clumps of cottonwoods down in the creek beds. So my imagined idea of a river campsite in a forest dell was clearly delusional, so much so that when I did reach the Deschutes River, and stopped midspan on the bridge to view it, what I saw made me wonder if I wasn’t right back in California: a red rock canyon chiseled into the fat landscape around it, dry and dusty other than the ribbon of water, and with just a single cottonwood tree and a few picnic tables. There was a chained-up gate to the right on the other side of the bridge and it was blocking the road that led down to the river, so I guessed that was the state park, which was obviously closed. I rode the rest of the way across the bridge anyway and then up to the chain-link fence, intending to climb over it and have a look around. I leaned the bike against the fence, but just as I began to climb, I heard a woman shout: “Hey, you there!” When I turned, I saw her at the screen door of a small house that sat up on the bluff overlooking the road, and she called out: “You can’t sleep by the river tonight. The rattler are shedding, blind and snapping.” I paused, poised on the fence like a cat or a thief, mulling over what she’d just imparted.
A Horse Named Sorrow Page 14