A Horse Named Sorrow

  All the way into Boise like that, haunted by Jimmy and Eugene both, as the farms turned to houses in rows, and then into boulevards of strip malls and motels, not seen in such profusion since California.

  I found a liquor store, a pizza parlor, and a Motel 6, and with my bike on my shoulder, hefted my gear up the stairs to room 206, showered and shaved, turned on the TV, and then climbed into clean, cool sheets and belted back my Crazy Horse while jawing on a pizza, wishing Jimmy was in that bed with me, or that Eugene would knock on my door and we could fuck away the emptiness and forlorn loneliness that all highway motels are so swollen with you can see why murders and suicides favor them.

  I dozed with the pizza box full of crusts sliding off my lap, and I dreamed of those AMC Hornets and Monte Carlos out on the road. I’d come up on them and pass them and look inside, and one would be full up with Edward Curtis Indian Chiefs from the book: Red Cloud and American Horse and Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, all wearing baseball caps and work clothes, crammed in together, off to find work in the fields. And one guy way over in the corner, his face shrouded by a sweatshirt hood—Crazy Horse, sure thing. The next car would be bursting with boys I’d slept with: Alejandro and Tran, Lawrence and Sage. Then a Cutlass riding so low to the ground, there were sparks. And inside that one: Eugene and Ralph, Jimmy and my mother. When I looked in the rearview mirror I saw my father’s face and startled awake.

  It was 5:00 a.m., too early to start out, so I sat and watched the highway for a while from my window like my mom and I used to do while waiting for the bus or someone to come and take me somewhere. She used to tell me: “Just listen to it, Seamus:

  Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, vroom, rattle, whoosh, buzz, vroom, buzz, whoosh, whoosh.

  “Sometimes you can hear a song, Seamus. If you listen real close, there’s a song in there.”

  46

  I put Jimmy in the purple velvet bag, hammering on the bottom of the second mayonnaise jar to get him all out. Then I tied him to the handlebars upfront where I could watch him—and of course, talk to him.

  Jimmy masthead, like the prow of my ship.

  I’d been slowly giving the furniture away, but there was still a bookshelf and a dresser full of clothes, which I lugged piece by piece to the curb. Our little world sure went fast, Jimmy—and I had to wipe a tear.

  I kept just the clothes I’d need, and I wadded them up to cram them in the panniers—half of them Jimmy’s, including the baggy shorts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt he was wearing the day I met him. Because what I needed was Jimmy, or to be clothed in him anyway. Jimmy fit me, and I fit him.

  Clearing the mantel, I came upon the envelope with the pictures in it of Thomas and Franco. I looked at them again with young, black-haired Jimmy. I thought of Jimmy having sex with them, what it would look like. They’d touched his beautiful body, they’d held him, caressed him, kissed him. They’d known what I’d known, and so I thought then that they were my brothers. And those were the only pictures I had of Jimmy besides, so into a pannier the old stained envelope went.

  47

  I owed her a call. So after pancakes and a good dose of seven or eight cups of overcaffeinated Denny’s coffee to give me courage, I dialed my mother at home, where I knew she wouldn’t be. Some courage.

  “Hi. This is Karen Blake. Leave a message at the beep and I’ll call you back.”

  Every time I tried to tell you … all the words just came out wrong … so I’ll have to say I love you in a song … “Boise, Mom. All is well.”

  Click.

  I’m sure I was irritating her, but at least I was checking in.

  Lying too, because Boise was a terrible place for a bicycle, as are most cities. And it had the added distinction of having only one highway out of town heading east. An interstate, which after two miles and a flat tire, I decided was something I’d never attempt again. The shoulder was a mess of broken glass and litter, chunks of truck tires and car parts, because the speed of the interstate produces a shrapnel all its own. Garbage, but no flowers. And if the wake of wind behind a truck is bad at fifty miles an hour, it’s plain unnerving at seventy or eighty. I pulled off at the first exit and set myself up to hitchhike at the on-ramp.

  A wheat farmer in a spanking new red and silver Ford F-150 picked me up not long after. He talked about the Basques in the area and how he “dickered” with them in selling his wheat.

  “Dickered?” My imagination ran wild.

  “Yeah, with whiskey. Means negotiating a price.” I’d done that. Dickered with the spirit of life (that’s what whiskey means. I’d learned that in Health Ed.—some old Scottish word, I think).

  “What are Basques doing way out here in Idaho? Aren’t they from Spain?”

  “Not if you heard them tell it. They got a whole nationalistic thing going. I believe they consider themselves the first Europeans or something like that. Their skulls are shaped like Neanderthals or some nonsense. I can’t follow it. Anyway, they know their wheat.”

  I looked at him a little suspiciously.

  “First Europeans, eh?—like the Indians of Europe?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  There was silence for a while and then I asked him: “Isn’t Chief Joseph from around here somewhere?”

  “Not actually, no. Nez Perce are from Washington originally, but they’ve got a reservation up north” (and he gestured with his head) “… near uh … Lewiston, Moscow—up that way. And there are a couple reservations east of here.” He looked tired in the telling, but also like the kind of guy who liked to be thorough.

  “What are they like?”

  “Poor.”

  “It’s tragic, isn’t it?” Two white guys talking.

  “They played their cards wrong, as I see it.”

  “In terms of dickering?”

  He grinned. “They didn’t dicker very well. They were better at fighting.”

  “Well, what about all those treaties? No one dickered fair with them.”

  “Don’t start in on all that. Where are you from?”

  I knew saying California was an admission of guilt, so I pulled one out of the hat: “South Dakota.”

  “The Dakotas, eh? Good wheat country.”

  “Yup.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Uh, Rapid City.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t start asking for details.

  “Then you know all about Indians. You got them Sioux out there.” Shaking his head with bitterness, he was.

  I just looked at him, my face a big question.

  “I used to work for the bureau years back.”

  “FBI?”

  “No, BIA.” Here we go again, as our moronic ex-president liked to say. The dance of the acronyms. I hummed Tchaikovsky to myself while they flowed like water from his mouth: AIM, USFM, GOONs, DOI.

  Holy acronyms: Sorrow and grief seem to follow in their wake. He was at Wounded Knee II, not to be confused with Wounded Knee I, which I’d read about. He filled me in on the second one: the occupation of the historic site by the American Indian Movement in 1973.

  “Didn’t they kill the ghost dancers there?” He just looked at me. I tried again: “What’s a GOON?”

  “Guardians of the Oglala Nation. They were on our side. So don’t get me wrong—I like plenty of Indians. It’s like how Sherman said” (and he smiled with self-satisfaction), “‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian.’ Well, let’s qualify that: the only good Indian is a Christianized, proud-to-be-an-American, probably a veteran …” (dramatic pause here) “Indian.”

  Oh brother. “How long did it go on for?”

  “Months. An Indian finally got shot—two actually—and one of ours. They eventually called the whole thing off. Mostly it was about starving them out. Just like how they killed all the buffalo last time.”

  I knew about that from the book. They declared open season on the buffalo and people shot them from trains. Dead buffalo scattering the plains so there’d be no herds for the Lakota t
o hunt.

  I turned and looked out the window. All that ugly talk amid all that beauty, the landscape big and flat, spud-brown and gold. Green fields appeared out of nowhere just like near Unity Lake, like carpet laid out and up to the distant mountains, rocky and mottled gray. Jimmy was beautiful like that too, even when he was mottled gray. The only good faggot …

  “It’s gonna be an early winter,” the farmer said. He pointed out a cow, saying, “You can tell from how heavy the fur is on their backside.”

  I nodded, and as soon as there was a fork onto a smaller highway, I asked him to let me off.

  “Thanks.”

  “Be careful,” he barked and waved goodbye.

  All kinds of people and all kinds of skies. Today, the clouds were like snot smeared across the horizon. But I was blessed with another empty road, and it filled me with elation. Off I went. Just me and Jimmy forever in every direction. No Christians, no BIA, no interstate truck wind and car shrapnel. Idaho opened up, and it was as if there was music in the silence of it. Sweeter, vaster music than I’d ever known, opening like a multidimensional funnel that pulled me wider and wider out into it.

  In time, the green fields gave way to hay fields, all harvested now, with big giant bread loaf–looking haystacks dotting the stubbled fields. Beyond the hayfields was grazing land and cattle wandering about. Those close to the road would stop, chewing their cud, and watch me pass. A bovine nation.

  Then there was just grass and rock all around in a deep stillness, and the highway rolled along softly like a big wave far out at sea, just rolling along, over each little hill, each of which made me sweat going up and then cool off in the breeze as I coasted down the other side.

  Then up ahead, I saw something all scattered in the road. I couldn’t make it out at first—I thought maybe it was clothes or some kind of freight that had fallen off a truck. It was vaguely red and black and brown. When I got up to it, I was shocked to recognize it was meat, flesh. And it was spread for about two or three hundred yards, in chunks. A massacre? My throat caught. Then I saw a hoof. A friggin’ cow. Or it had been at one time. The biggest roadkill I’d ever seen, and it wasn’t pretty. I had to dodge, slalom through it, the chunks were so big. Any one of them could have knocked me off my bike. I recognized a shin, a shoulder. When I got to what was left of the head, my stomach turned. An eye stared at me. Someone had hit this thing and then others kept hitting it, I guess, or maybe a truck dragged it to pieces. I just couldn’t imagine it would get so chewed up before someone stopped and dragged it off. Though it was too late for that now. It didn’t seem right just leaving him there, but it’d be a mighty big job cleaning him up at this stage of the game.

  That’s when I saw the vultures. Watching from some rocks. There were flies too. A lot of them. Filling the silence suddenly. A different kind of music. A different vastness. A regular charnel ground. That was some big death. Too big even for the vultures and flies. The way it looked to me, it was going to just get ground right into the pavement by cars and trucks or be carried on tires going who knows where, until the body of this cow would literally be spread like mustard all the way across the country and there’d only be grease spots left here. In the meantime, it’d be feasted on by flies or end up in the craws of vultures, brought to their young, the next generation feeding on death.

  At the end of it, on a rise, I stopped and stared a good long time back down that long gray line of road through the golden hills of grass, under the distant mountains, the meat sculpture all spread down the length of it. Sublime. And me with a bag of death on my handlebars. And the beauty of that place was just suddenly so profoundly sad, time dragging it at the speed of light, all of it blooming and vanishing on speeded-up film, like the seed of death ripening. That Eugene holds and me too, and even the twins back on Guerrero Street, and the farmer and the waitresses in Denny’s—and Jimmy is the flower of it all. The grief just came right out of the road and whacked me with its pavement palm. Ouch. Grief bleeding out of the landscape in colorful images of mountain and stream, pickup and gun rack, plowed field and fallow field, green mountain and gray, dead cow and living—and under it all the bones of Indians and soldiers and pioneers and buffalo and God knows what else. Squashed flowers. The grief, spinning out of everything everywhere all the time, fast and sure as the spokes on my wheels because I was suddenly pedaling madly, not so much to run away as to ride the grief wave, to spend the feeling, to spill it, move it, give it its due. Because you couldn’t stand still for sadness. I knew that from my endless walks. Couldn’t frame that landscape and put it on your TV. You had to ride it. You had to bark, or wear down your knuckles. Maybe that cow was the flesh of God’s knuckles that he’d run down the road, wacked as a mad faggot.

  I rode fast for miles like that, all the way past the interchange to Ketchum and Sun Valley, where Hemingway blew his brains out.

  I’d done another hundred-mile day, caught up with Jimmy’s red hoops, which indicated tonight’s destination as a campground just beyond Carey, Idaho. Carey had looked like a small town from the map, and it was, but the place was anything but quiet. It was Friday night, and kids were caravanning down the main drag in pickups and jeeps, hooting and hollering, with pennants waving and red, white, and blue jerseys on their backs. Some kind of big football game. Everyone was in on it, and not just the kids and the cheerleaders who sped by in an old Mustang, squealing around the corner. Even outsiders and posing tough guys loitered smoking on street corners, watching.

  It almost seemed strange, seeing people in groups suddenly. I hadn’t seen any more than a couple people together since Boise—and even then, there was the loneliness of urban anonymity. Before that, through Oregon and now Idaho, mostly I’d seen lone individuals in empty places or the strange hollering zombies of Ironside, the invisible geriatrics behind their curtains at Unity Lake, or just silhouettes speeding by in cars, not really people at all. Shadows. They all could have been shades—the dead—for all I knew. Weaving their way back and forth across the country, sewing a great death shawl or mask over the bones beneath. And the trucks, like great lumbering animals, herds of them like buffalo (they killed the buffalo, only to reinvent them in their own image), migrating, back and forth, crisscrossing the country with the fungus of commerce that makes of the land, slowly but surely, a foul moldy bread.

  How many of these same trucks, waitresses, service stations, and tough guys loitering, Carls and Christian ladies, and shadows and weavers, had seen Jimmy? And none of them ever knowing that the ghost of him had returned, passing through again like a dusty wind.

  48

  My last night in San Francisco, I snuggled up in the sleeping bag and put a candle in each of Jimmy’s mayonnaise jars so as to burn up whatever was left of him and wish him well. They burned all night, and in the morning I tossed the jars out the window to shatter for the twins to find and marvel at—a deadman’s glass bones.

  I was gonna miss that sad little bay-windowed apartment, with the bad paint in the halls, the grimy gum-pocked stoop, the sidewalk where those twins were always up to something. I remembered them from a morning last winter under darkening skies, Jimmy in the hospital with pneumonia. Their father was loading his truck and they were standing shoulder to shoulder, their heads cocked back and their mouths wide open, catching the first drops of rain.

  Little pullets.

  I could’ve stopped. Part of me wanted to.

  I didn’t dare.

  I hoisted Chief Joseph up on my shoulder and down the stairs I went.

  I saw the broken mayonnaise jars on the sidewalk, the labels holding some of the broken glass together. “Best”—and he was. I’d held him here when he fell into me in his old army coat—so, so thin—the day before he died. I kicked the glass off the sidewalk and into the gutter. Sorry, Jimmy, but it’s probably not safe for the twins.

  Doing what needed to be done.

  49

  From the map, I knew that Craters of the Moon National Monument was twenty m
iles further on, and in the setting sun I decided to press on through the chaparral to reach Jimmy’s red hoop, knowing there’d be camping there. I left Carey to its lively American reveries—no place for the dead, or a wacked faggot.

  Though I knew there were both everywhere. And I looked for them. The dead were fairly easy to spot, lined up in rows in cemeteries—and I’d read in a book by Balzac once that something like the top twelve inches of all the dirt on earth was basically just the dead: animal, plant, and other. But queers were a little trickier to spot—the living ones, that is. More of a game. Like spot the ghost, because like ghosts, only some people could see them. That guy at the service station loitering, for instance—he hadn’t quite fit, had he? A tad too James Dean. And he thinks the bullets can’t get him if he paints himself “straight,” strikes that pose and dances “straight.”

  The sun went fast and the shadows lengthened out big and ominous below gnarled juniper trees, twisted and forlorn—and even below the squat sagebrush and chaparral. I pushed on because there was clearly nothing between Carey and the park. Then the black scar of it appeared on the horizon, like a big splat of burnt blackberry from some enormous pie. A pie in the sky that had finally fallen.

  Before long, I was winding through one of the strangest places I’d ever seen, though it was so black I could barely see it as dusk rolled into night. It was just a solid scab of lava, miles in every direction, with a gray road running through it like a gray stripe on a black rock (good for wishing, as I recall). There were little sections where grass grew, a few bushes, even squat trees near the bathroom, which was nothing more than a glorified concrete outhouse, but substantial all the same because it was the only building anywhere in sight.

  I pulled in at the restroom, as it was the entrance to the campground, and plopped my bike and gear down when I found a flat patch of dirt. It was warm out still, so I dug around for my flashlight and climbed among the rough black rocks to see if I could get up high and see a view. Eventually, I reached a little promontory and was able to see the road and the running lights of trucks way off in the distance, and even Carey, a faint glow on the horizon.