A Horse Named Sorrow

  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.

  39

  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.

  And I sat there for two or more hours, on the curb, in the shade of a little tree, reading about the Sioux, about the broken treaties, the subterfuge, the greed for gold, and the killing of the buffalo. It had the makings of a seriously tragic opera from the start, with a final aria by Custer, or Crazy Horse, or Sitting Bull, or all three. The Sioux were nobody’s fools, and over a series of years they won not just battles but an actual war against the acronym, burning down all the Amer
ican forts in the Powder River country and forcing the acronym’s army to retreat and even sue for peace. And here I thought Vietnam was the first war they lost.

  The Lakota’s (the Sioux’s real name in their own language) world seemed to be the greatest expression of freedom—a way of life that was in no way limited or confined by others. In battle they counted coup. It wasn’t about murder or annihilation or genocide so much as making a hit (coup) or getting the enemy’s horses and women. Almost like a kind of sport, but a lethal game. And even the bluecoats acknowledged they were the best horsemen they’d ever seen.

  And then Custer came. In the nick of time. So as to ruin everything once and for all. A sort of backasswards Jimmy, complete with blond dye job. Because after he died, it really came down on the Lakota, and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and all the rest of them were on the run and eventually killed or corralled onto reservations, which led to starvation and, of course, Christianity. Same difference. A people who’d only hunted buffalo and gathered berries and talked to the sky were told to farm and go to church. Red Cloud even tried to be conciliatory, but in so doing his people soon became victims of propaganda in the press, the greed of agents and politicians, and the needs of the disinherited from all over Europe. (To think that these people had everything in common, and they killed each other anyway. Pawns in someone else’s game. Same as it ever was.)

  And then the appearance of the ghost dance from a Paiute who came from out west, and how the dance spread like a crazy religion: paint yourself white and dance, and the white men will vanish and the ancestors will return—and what’s more, while you’re dancing, you’ll be invincible and no one will be able to kill you. All of it ending in a ditch in the snow, the white men gunning the ghost dancers down. That place was Wounded Knee, and they say that’s where Crazy Horse’s heart is buried in an unmarked grave.

  What happened to the Indians sounded a lot like what had been happening in San Francisco. And the grandfather in Washington—yet another—with all his hosts of acronyms, and not a one of them cared. Let ’em eat ketchup; let ’em eat pills; let ’em live in the Badlands (no matter whether it’s a not-very-interesting gay bar in San Francisco or an uncultivatable South Dakota desert of clay, rock, and sandstone—and not a buffalo in sight). And all those gay clubs—just a ghost dance.

  I next read the story of Chief Joseph, who was Nez Perce. A once upon a time: the quiet little valley and the peace-loving people, the ugly fag medicine man who scared the whites, and the whites getting all hot and telling them to move away from their ancestral home, and the Nez Perce saying no, and the whites getting threatening, and the noble Chief Joseph saying, “Okay then, we’ll go.” And the soldiers saying “you got ten minutes” or something ridiculous, and it wasn’t enough time, and so the people hurried, but the soldiers attacked them anyway—and then the long thousand-mile, three-month pursuit and all the clever maneuvering by Joseph, and finally the speech in the snow: Chief Joseph said, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

  I crossed the street to a minimart for a forty-ounce bottle of Crazy Horse malt liquor—a gesture of respect in my strange backasswards way. But I looked twice at the twenty I handed across the counter: the face of a man who spent a good deal of his time killing Indians—including the one who had saved his life—glared back at me.

  Blood money.

  I jammed the forty into my left pannier and unfolded my map, hoping for a campground, my mind on the Sioux and Eugene and Jimmy and Crazy Horse, all of them mixed up in the muddled opera of my head—the soup of it.

  The book had said Crazy Horse held out till the bitter end (not even a photo), for in his vision this world was a dream, and in it he could endure anything. And I remembered then what Jimmy had said when I’d asked him how he got interested in Buddhism.

  “Crazy Horse.”

  I’d thought it another of his enigmatic answers then. Which it was. Some things you gotta figure out for yourself, Shame.

  Well, I figured out this much—Edward Curtis would have done Jimmy justice. Handsome motherfucker. We needed an Edward Curtis for death by acronym. The San Francisco Bay Area Reporter’s little passport obit photos just didn’t cut it.

  And something else too: I knew where Wounded Knee was now, and when I looked at the map, I saw I was heading straight for it.

  40

  I hadn’t the heart to tell my mother Jimmy was dead or even that I was leaving. The last time I’d visited, she’d made us Russian tea and snicker doodles. Comfort food. All wrapped up in paper and bows, sitting on her little entry table, where she’d always put my sack lunch when I was a little kid.

  “Mom, he can’t keep this stuff down. He’ll throw them across the room just like last time.”

  She looked slighted. But she’d never even met Jimmy; she wasn’t “ready,” she’d told me. And not because of the acronym, she assured me. No. It was about him being my queer lover. White lie.

  “And when will you be ready?”

  “Oh honey, think of your father.” And she’d reached to uncork a bottle of Chardonnay.

  “What about him? Was he homophobic too?”

  “No one’s homophobic,” she’d snapped.

  And she wasn’t. I knew that. Thing was, Jimmy was “short.” And she’d done short. She wasn’t doing short again. That was the reason; I knew that was the real reason. But she couldn’t say it.

  When Jimmy had been hospitalized with pneumonia—he’d said plenty and how he’d moaned. “This sucks. I don’t want to do this hospital thing.” Horses are supposed to be shot, after all. Jimmy was right to be mad at me; horses shouldn’t have to shoot themselves.

  “Seamus,” he muttered, “I wanna go home; take me home.”

  “No can do, Jimmy. Not just yet. Soon, Jimmy, soon.” And he’d already fallen asleep by the time I’d finished speaking. And there I was in an ugly white, antiseptic room with its plastic and its steel and its utter emptiness and un-hominess—like some public bathroom or a BART station. That’s when it first hit me that I felt abandoned by my mother. My mother didn’t do sorrow—not this kind; not again. She just put on a face, smothered by a sorrow that didn’t even have its teeth anymore. All bottled up—pun intended—signed, sealed, delivered. Soldier’s wife. I could have used a friend then, but she’d have none of it. I was forever a kid to her. That was final too. And kids don’t have adult problems. It occurred to me that if my mother called while I was in that hospital, her message might have been something like: All done, honey? Like Jimmy was my steak and potatoes or something.

  Yeah, I’m done alright. And I’d cried then in earnest, and that attracted a nurse, and God bless her—the nametag said “Jill”—she did what was needed. And she took me down for a cup of coffee and we didn’t say much—just small, sad smiles. Blanche Dubois can say what she will about strangers, but it’s the kindness of nurses and political activists and small children that I counted on.

  “Where are you going?” Jill asked.

  “I’m gonna go home.”

  “Is someone there?”

  “Oh yeah, lots of people.” And I faked a smile, because it was a white lie. There were only our spirit children at home: Little Joseph, Elmer, Genevieve, and Victoria. And the acacia tree, of course, the buckled sidewalk, the golden light at the corner liquor store, the screech of the little twins, the rattle of the window when the bus passed, the emptiness of the fire escape in the big bay window, and Chief Joseph sparkling in Christmas lights.

  41

  It was already dusk when I finally left Prineville; I couldn’t stay there. In the book, Indians had called paper “talking leaves,” and something about that image and Andrew Jackson on the twenty and all those books was nightmarish. I watched the loosed golden leaves of cottonwoods blow across the road in front of me, whispering, creepy—an old, old song.

  There wasn’t a car in sight, in either direction. And eventually, five or so miles down the road, I came upon an old drive-in movie the
ater, the pavement all turned up and full of weeds and brush. A ruin. I bet they’d shown some westerns there. The speakers still stood like skeletal parking meters, and the screen too, enormous and singular in the fat surrounding landscape of sagebrush and yellow clumpy flowers. It was peeling, and looked to me like a great unnoticed and unrecognized portal to some other world—like that big black rectangle in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because other than it, there was nothing but silence, and just a small breeze playing in the weeds among those scattered speakers, now and again rippling the big white screen. An ideal place to camp. It looked like any world but the one I just came from.

  I leaned my bike against a speaker and laid my sleeping bag down where the pavement had deteriorated to dirt but was still nice and fat. I sat there, holding Jimmy, propped up against another speaker, and looked up at that old tattered screen, wondering if it had anything left to say while I nursed my bottle of Crazy Horse like a self-satisfied infant. Enormous in its silence, white as a ghost, the wind made it dance to a hollow, forlorn song. I looked at it until I was nearly blinded by its blankness and sleep both, and that’s when Jimmy’s face, like a mirage, filled the screen in those moments between wakefulness and slumber. Vivid he was too with the big brown eyes and say-nothing smile, the dark scattered chin scruff, the Adam’s apple and turned-up nose, the tattoo for good in front of his ear, the third eye and the golden angel’s hair. And then Jimmy morphed into crow-black-haired Eugene, and then Eugene into sighing stoic Chief Joseph, and from there all the rest of those chiefs from the book: Red Cloud and American Horse, beautiful with their mouths set and their chests bejeweled with shells (I’d seen men like that—Jimmy, his chest covered in pearls); Dull Knife and Sitting Bull; Spotted Tail and Hump, with their set, dignified frowns. And all of them with Cherrie Kee’s hawk nose and Eugene’s penetrating eyes.