A Horse Named Sorrow

  “Eugene!” I called, uncontrollably smiling, and that asymmetrical grin of his erupted across his face as he recognized me and came running down the yellow line in his clunky army boots and the same black hoodie from our night together in Eugene. I pumped harder on the pedals so as to reach him—and when I did, I nearly spilled myself off the bike, braking abruptly and throwing out my arms. We hugged over the handlebars, Jimmy right at our crotches. And I felt Eugene bleed into me. I didn’t want to let him go; I wanted to tell him about the dream where I saw his eyes and the buffalo and about him on the movie screen and how sorry I was about Custer and all them; actually I wanted to say nothing and just take him over into the ditch and make love there for an hour. Let my body tell him, let my mouth and eyes and hands and feet and arms and legs and cock tell him everything I had to say while he did the same. Not a word.

  I loosened my hold though, considering he wasn’t alone, and I was mystified besides at what he was doing out on this road in a broken-down truck. This was not the way to the Klamath Reservation.

  “Where you goin’, Eugene?” I asked, perplexed. He pointed east down the road, and I smiled then—I guess because we were going the same way. And then he held his medicine bag to his chest, and what that meant I couldn’t say, other than wherever he was going it must be somewhere good and meaningful to him.

  I got off the bike and walked it up to the truck, where I leaned it on the back fender. Eugene grabbed my hand then and took me up to meet the other man, who was just out of sight, working on the engine and obscured by the open hood. I was a little nervous and tried to disengage our hands, not sure who this man might be. But Eugene just clasped my hand tighter—and though skittish, I was glad.

  The man came up from underneath, like from right out of the engine, when we approached, grease on his hands and grease on his forehead. Looked like Ash Wednesday to me, and I had half a mind to ask him if he were Catholic in my nervous wacked way. He looked to be in his forties, clearly an Indian, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, a bit of a paunch, and wearing an old blue T-shirt and Levis.

  “Hi,” was all I permitted myself to say, wondering how to explain to him how I knew Eugene.

  “Who are you?” he said bluntly, with an expressionless demeanor.

  “I met Eugene in Eugene,” I answered, aware as I said it of how stupid it sounded.

  “Good place for it,” he said with a clipped smile. I wanted to add that Eugene and I had fucked each other silly in a frat house, and that I couldn’t get him out of my mind—and that I was awfully sorry for history, and all that—

  “And what are you doing out here?” he interrupted my racing thoughts.

  “On my way to Buffalo.”

  “Ha, ha, ha.” He laughed heartily. “You and me both.” I didn’t get what was obviously a kind of joke—I was more focused on hoping it was true. When I looked at Eugene, he didn’t seem to be in on the joke either and just stared blankly. Then there was a silence, and the man went back to work.

  So I offered: “You need any help?”

  He lifted his head again, and this time, with a bit of surliness, said: “Why, you knowledgeable about Dodge straight sixes?”

  Of course, I hadn’t a clue, and it apparently showed. “Uh, no, not really.”

  “Not really, huh? But a little bit?”

  “Well, actually . . .”

  He finished the sentence for me: “You don’t know shit.” He paused long enough for me to feel insulted. Then he began laughing: “Ha, ha, ha.” He slammed the hood down, brushed by me, and opened the driver-side door. But before hopping into the cab, he paused suddenly and looked intently at my bike, then briefly at me—at first with suspicion and then with a faraway look in his eyes. Then he hopped in and turned the ignition, and after a chee, chee, clump, clump, the engine caught and roared.

  “Hop in, Smoke,” he called to Eugene, and I saw the man’s face framed in the rearview mirror staring at me.

  It was a look of mistrust. And why was he calling Eugene Smoke? What’s Smoke? Is there a town called Smoke around here, and will his name change from place to place? Will he be John Day by the time he reaches the next town? Austin by suppertime? When they call him Buffalo, I guess I’ll know my journey’s done.

  Eugene or Smoke, or whoever he was, kissed me quickly on the lips, grabbed hold of my bike, which was still leaning against the soon-to be-departing truck, and held it out to me. Then he ran quickly around to hop in the passenger side door, as the truck began rolling through the gravel. There was a clunk, a backfire, until finally the engine roared to life again.

  And then it was Eugene’s face in the back window, smiling his crooked smile, getting smaller and smaller. I thought momentarily to hop on my bike and ride like hell to catch up to them. But that would be futile. As it was, they were a portrait: the faded, creamy blue truck on a little rise in the highway under big pink and orange cliffs, with shadows slashing across the road in front of them. Two orange men in a blue truck in an orange world scattered with gravel and dusty little blue and yellow flowers, flat sandy stretches, and a sun bright and searing, the rosy rocks spreading out for miles and forever around them. And those blue-black manes of theirs like two black crows perched on their heads.

  I realized I’d once again obtained no information, was just as unlikely to see Eugene again as the last time. Which made me suddenly angry. Like he was playing with me. But it wasn’t that, and I knew it. He just didn’t say. Plain and simple as that. He was the boy who just didn’t say.

  And I felt pathetic on the side of the road with my dead Jimmy, having been laughed at and mocked and stared down by Eugene’s friend or whoever he was. Maybe it was his boyfriend, and he’d been jealous of me. And now he’d taken Eugene away for good.

  Am I a jilted bride? A jilted widow? Both?

  I’m carrying his baby! I wanted to call out.

  Pull.

  I felt like that dog back in Dayville, but with nowhere to go back to. Or maybe I just hadn’t reached the end of my territory either. That would be Buffalo, thousands of miles beyond.

  Pulling meant moving, and fast. So I rode hard through those canyons, which were heartbreakingly beautiful. They even looked like a broken heart, all orange/red and falling apart, creviced, full of flowers and sometimes little trickling streams. One step ahead of my soup—or one pedal rotation actually. And when I finally got to John Day, I found a café and ate a sandwich, and on my way out of town, picked up two forty-ouncers of Crazy Horse (my brand from here on out) and gulped the first while I pedaled, sans hands, as I headed toward Jimmy’s red hoop, up and over the Blue Mountains, which rose, but not too steeply, over the lonely sagebrush desert ahead. It was unwise to drink, of course, midday in the heat, but I was feeling wacked and unsteady.

  I felt a jumble of emotions about Eugene, hence the drowning measure taken. I was shell-shocked by his sudden appearance, and I wanted to know where he was going; I wanted to spend an hour with him at least, a day, a month. I wanted to make love to him; I wanted to talk to him, but how could I? How had I let him get away? I was mad, excited, sad, surprised, grateful, even frightened. Like I’d conjured him. Or maybe it was just that spirit baby, kicking like mad inside me.

  And into the great empty quarter of America I went. Like a bottle of malt liquor or a boy’s asshole, America is. Sing that, Walt Whitman. My country ‘tis of thee . . . Oh, bountiful.

  Slowed down by the drink and the ruminating, I still pedaled on, eventually coming upon a campground at a place called Unity Lake, just short of Jimmy’s bull’s-eye, which was up the road ten or so miles in a town called Ironside. Good God, must be rusted to hell, I thought. “I couldn’t take that tonight,” I muttered. “Fuck it, I’m staying here.”

  Unity Lake was obviously some kind of reservoir, as it was this enormous flat body of water in the middle of a plain of scrub and sand. The campground was a parking lot surrounded by golf course–like grass, all heavily watered by sprinklers. There were even sol
ar showers. It was like a paved platform in the middle of nowhere (like the 2001 slab again, but this time fallen flat on its face), and it was lousy with geriatrics in Winnebagos.

  I found a spot as close to the lake as I could, which wasn’t very close since the campground was set a good hundred or more yards back from the lakeshore—the green, green grass in between. It must be a drinking water reservoir, I guessed. The lawn looked inviting to sleep on, but the sign said “NO.” I crossed it and sat down along the lakeshore a long time thinking of Eugene and how odd it had been to see him, and wondering if I ever would again. Maybe they’d break down again. It was an old truck, after all.

  I heard the familiar honk of geese and watched a group fly over in their V formation, always one of them straggling or off to one side. It meant an early winter, I vaguely remembered from a TV show or somewhere. It made me a little nervous being that I was traveling by bicycle and still had most of the country ahead of me.

  As the sun dipped, I re-crossed the lawn and looked toward the highway off in the distance. And I’ll be damned, I saw the blue Dodge truck floating there on the horizon, moving east fast. I must have passed them somewhere? I couldn’t believe I’d passed them and not seen them. Where? In John Day? While I was buying my Crazy Horse malt liquor? That’ll teach me not to steal shadows. I was full of a sudden yearning, and a huge disappointment both. All I had left was to watch and see if they’d slow down and turn in here—but they flew right by. My elation sank, considering the idea that it wasn’t likely I’d see them again at all now. If I’d only obeyed Jimmy and his red hoops I’d be up on the highway in Ironside and maybe even having dinner with them. I had half a mind to hop back on Chief Joseph, and with the sound of a U.S. Cavalry trumpet in my ear, pursue them into Idaho and beyond up into Canada.

  Backasswards.

  Pull, Seamus.

  I drank the other Crazy Horse instead, and when I pissed on the lawn in the last rays of the setting sun, it was a stream of blue diamonds over the green.

  “Hoka hey,” I muttered. And to think they’d reduced him to a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. The alchemy of America at work: turning a good man to booze. Product that moves. And how many people purchase these forty-ouncers with just that intention: as good a day as any.

  Eugene was awfully skinny. Maybe he was carrying the acronym too.

  But he was just so orange, nothing peaked about him.

  He looked starved, though. And why was I so attracted to that? That precarious look of being right on the edge between life and death—a weird vitality that seemed to speak against the evidence. They may not be here tomorrow. Skinny boys always got my attention.

  Perhaps I just liked bones. And I thought of Jimmy’s bones, his pronounced clavicles and handsome chin, his brows and cheekbones, his knobby knees and elbows, his long fingers and knuckles, and how he had one rib that stuck out—all of them did in the end, but this one was bent and protruded from the start. He’d told me once as he got thinner that we couldn’t have sex for a while. When I asked him why, he said that we were both so skinny that our bones banged together and he was bruised. “Like two skeletons having sex,” he’d said.

  And what’s a bicycle but a skeleton—this one wrapped like a mummy with untold stories. Shadows.

  That night the stars came out thick in big bands like they had once over Mt. Tamalpais when Jimmy and I had camped out there in the oak trees, drinking beer and reading Baudelaire.

  He was somebody to talk to, Jimmy was, and that’s why I kept on talking to him even after he was gone. I held him in my lap and out loud told him how the hills above Unity Lake looked like black velvet under the starlight and how the lake’s rippling waves were silvery. I told him how cool the grass was now that the sun had gone, and how enormous the sky. I told him how much I loved the night air, how it tasted like his kiss after drinking cold water. Like a promise. I told him I missed him and I told him I thought it had been a good thing to make love to Eugene. That it had made me feel close to him again in the doing of it. That he was right: there were messages in attraction. And spirit babies.

  And then I thought how I’d never see either of them again and how the road is indeed the place for lost souls. And I thought of what a lost lake that was too—lost in place and time. It seemed like it needed someone to help it find its way back home, to where it came from—like Jimmy and that Indian book’s heart. Where did this water come from anyway? Had those geese carried it all drop by drop from some tundric plain up in Canada? Had they inadvertently dropped the whole sorry thing one fall? Maybe the geese would come back for it in the spring, take it back to where it came from, drop by drop. And maybe it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter that things were lost. They’re just as well lost as found—so what? Same difference. Everything’s lost, and everyone too, and that’s as it should be. Jimmy never meant to put me down by calling me a lost soul—he was just saying I was someone with potential. It was a compliment. The only good soul is a lost soul, and only a lost soul can find its own way home.

  And all that night, the geese passed over honking their forlorn call, the lake unable to call back up to them, mute as a boy who doesn’t talk. I counted them like winged black sheep as I lay there, massaging the crook in my neck, unable to sleep—named them even, one by one: James Owen Blake, Jimmy, Eugene, Sam, Julie, Tanya, Lawrence, Ralph and Carl, Karen Blake, Ellen.

  The last thing I did was make shapes out of the stars, which turned into me and Eugene having sex—Orion’s belt unbuckled, Orion’s cock spurting shooting stars like fireworks—until I dozed off and the sparkling heavenly bodies sprouted wings that led to dreams of birds. Not migrating birds, but birds of prey, soaring and diving, landing, silent and watching like hawks, perched on fence posts out in Oregon, the wind ruffling the feathers on their heads ever so slightly. Watching, watching, somehow watching over—in the way of birds.

  I woke up to more birds—sparrows and larks, busying themselves around the campground. The seniors weren’t yet stirring, the curtains on the campers all pulled closed, while beyond them in every direction, emptiness spread until it ran into mountains. Above, a sagebrush sky— the kind of sky where all the clouds are just tiny and clumped and scattered in a random kind of order, going on and on.

  It looked like forever.

  And it felt like Jimmy. Jimmy, who was never forever but made me feel what that was. I opened the bag and ran my hands through his ashes. He’s like an instant universe. Just add a little water, and we’d have a big bang right here.

  I cinched up the string on Jimmy-in-the-bag and gathered up my gear and headed out, warming up as I reached the highway. In no time at all I was in Ironside, where there were screaming kids in a schoolyard on the edge of town, swinging, looking like pendulums or oil pumps, all out of unison, but in some kind of utter harmony. Kid power.

  The town was also loud with wind, and dogs and chickens and birds and kids, their voices blown about and disconnected from them. People raised their voices to shout across streets, and big rigs applied their hydraulic brakes, slowing down as they came into town. A cacophony of strange birds.

  I ate pancakes in a saloon.

  Beyond that town, everything changed. There was suddenly big agriculture: immense green swaths watered by enormous pinwheel-like irrigators, and lots of brown people doing the heavy lifting and picking. Distant water tank trucks lumbered about down the dirt roads among the fields, and I could see that without the water being brought in (and the Mexicans), this place would be absolute desert, as it became, abruptly, at the very point the fields ended. But the sagebrush sky didn’t end, and neither did Jimmy—nor the road. All I had to do was look up, look forward, or remember, and it would all blast outward like a neutron star and take me away.

  The highway connected with another highway, and then things speeded up and crowded up considerably as a big billboard loomed, welcoming me to Idaho. The road became a parade of trucks full of potatoes and onions, and Mexican farm workers in old AMC Hornet
s and Oldsmobile Cutlasses and Chevy Monte Carlos. It felt like California. Even the requisite big houses began to appear on distant hills, high above the shacks that housed the laborers. Then Nampa with its rail yards and thrown-up chain motels, the land plundered, nature pushed aside—you could see the neglect in open, littered lots. It was the usual American scene: once the city comes, nature goes from a glorious and beautiful young creature to an old bag lady or hobo, wholly derelict, neglected and spit upon. Urban gravity sucks everything down, sprouting acronyms and poison in its place. So much for my own private Idaho—this was a public bardo.

  I was suddenly overwhelmed with anger, ranting to myself about how wrong it all looked. Like, no wonder we’re obsessed with child molestation. Maybe the earth’s our daughter, or son, not our mother at all. Not Gaia, but Gai-ita or little Gai-ito—Guyito, a sweet little Mexican kid with pesticide cancer and a whole phalanx of white power-mongers denying him medical benefits while fondling his innocence because his parents are crooks for being illegal even if they are working long hours for low pay so everyone else doesn’t starve. Used up and thrown away. Death isn’t a tragedy necessarily, but a trashcan for a coffin is. My father got a Hefty lawn bag with a zipper, Jimmy got a box, then a jar, and now a velvet bag. The Sioux got a ditch in the freezing snow. Guyito—what’ll he get? He’ll end up some robber baron’s piñata.

  And thank God for my revitalized libido or I would have spiraled into further miseries as my soup roiled and boiled. But all those Mexicans out in the fields were actually making me horny and got me thinking about Eugene. The way they stood around, or looked at me from the backs of pickups, silent, watching—like birds.

  I kept an eye out for the blue truck.

  And trucks there were, long lines of them, bearing down, blasting their warning honks and whooshing by me. I felt like raising a fist— little old Woody of the road. Damn kids!