A Horse Named Sorrow

  But I was more interested in the stars, looking for Jimmy and Eugene and the pie shop nebula where this black rock must have been long ago hurled from.

  It wasn’t until morning—the birds singing me awake—that I saw the blue truck. Up above, parked at an angle, up on a dirt patch full of shrubs and flowers, right in the middle of that chunk of black stone. I couldn’t believe it. And I thought that must be some shitty truck if I’m keeping up with it.

  I sat and stared at it for a long time, anxious to spot Eugene. But I was hesitant to approach on account of the other guy. So I watched and waited, and finally I scurried up the hillside to their camp, where I found only the remnants of a fire in a pit full of ash. Neither of them were in sight anywhere, but I could see the dirt roads now that led to the other little brush and dirt campsites among the rocks, and my eyes followed them, searching. I climbed up a nearby butte to get a view and still I saw neither of them. It occurred to me it might be someone else with the same truck. But how many blue '64 Dodges are on the road? It had to be them. So I sat and waited, trying to warm myself in the sunrise, thinking how Jimmy’s hair was as black as this rock when he died, the blond all grown out and shorn away.

  I looked around and saw flowers—brilliant yellow and white against the black. All flowers for Jimmy that I’d never pick—and wouldn’t need to either as the world was Jimmy now, and he already had them growing all over him like his own private cosmic platinum dye job.

  I don’t know where he came from, but suddenly there he was, right next to me. Like a bird. It was his shadow I saw first.

  “Eugene!” I turned. His crooked smile. And then he crouched down and he kissed me. And he took me by the hand, hurrying me along, up over some nearby rocks and down a gully that led to more rocks and more gullies, far back into the scab of earth and down inside of it to where there was an actual stream that disappeared into a cave. And before it did, there was a big sandbar of a beach along the stream with a black rock jutting over it like an awning, hiding it from view, and it was there that he stopped and turned and he pulled off his dirty white T-shirt and then his boots and dusty blue jeans, his baggy checkered boxer shorts, and holey socks. And smiling then, he pulled me close and his tongue was so hungry, his penis so eager and straight up like a dog barking for a walk or dinner. He tore at my clothes and I helped him rid me of them. And I understood completely in that moment why people destroy families, ruin friendships, and generally make a mess of their lives for sex. But I’d consider that later.

  “God, you’re starved, Eugene. Me too. It’s so good to see you.” And we accosted each other through our grins (his threatening to tear his whole face apart, which was so thin, it could barely make room for it). And thank God for our tongues. If we didn’t have them, we’d have used our teeth and torn each other to pieces. As it was, we gulped at each other’s bodies, using all of our mouths, except for our teeth. Hungry and thirsty both.

  I guess it was pheromones—or was it grief ? I knew so little about him, and he so little about me. We only knew we needed to be inside each other with such urgency, as if our cum belonged to the other and we had to get the book returned to the library and fast. Could love be late? Nah, just imminent, and always in the nick of time.

  We wrestled, groaned, and ached, guided by our penises and our hearts, and once we looked directly into each other’s eyes, and without saying anything, acknowledged we weren’t doing this really: it was happening; we were riding it. It was like the road that way. We were guests, the two chosen special guests, two blessed lost souls.

  And also like the road, I had a sense I’d never see him again. We were a time and a place. In passing. How I liked it best. Or so I’d told myself. But not with Eugene. No, Eugene made me want to stop and stay forever. Right on a giant black scab in nowhere Idaho. Center of the universe. We splayed our bodies out like stars, our spidering limbs everywhere and all of us inside out—armpits open, the undersides of our cocks and scrotums turned toward the light of each other as we came together—atoms splitting—at the center. A backasswards big bang as we vanished into absolute zero. Before space and time. An original moment.

  Our seed then everywhere, flying all over, splattering the black sand with little white flowers.

  And then it all came rushing back: the big bang on speeded-up film, right up to that giant splat of black lava, sizzling and pulsing in Pleistocene Idaho, and then cooling and cooling. And it kept cooling. And it was cold by the time the universe caught up with September 15, 1991. Naked, we had to hug each other close as the goose pimples rose on our skin.

  We said nothing because Eugene never did. I hardly talked at all anymore myself, come to think of it. All these “rides,” they just talked at me. And I only talked to myself now mostly, or to Jimmy.

  I looked around at the black, black stone of the cave we were sitting in, huddled together on a sandbar of dark gray sand, soft and bracingly cold. I heard him strike a match, and before long he was inhaling. When he coughed, it echoed, and he hopped up then, and putting out his hand, pulled me up. We kissed some more because whatever it was between us, it was that rare thing that keeps spilling long after the spilling is done. A river.

  We climbed into our clothes: his left foot got caught in his boxer shorts on its way through and he hopped and laughed, its echo filling the cave. And then I laughed too, and the place boomed with us. Him and me, and how big the thing between us was.

  He indicated he had to go with his hands pointing, so I followed him out of the cave, along the stream, over the black rock and through the gullies, and up back toward the truck, where the hood was once again open and the other guy under it.

  Which made me momentarily nervous. I hesitated, and Eugene looked at me inquisitively just as his buddy’s head popped up, having heard our approach. The guy looked at me for a minute, and then he said, “Painted Horse.” And he eyed me suspiciously. I looked at Eugene for an explanation. He motioned with his arms and legs like he was riding a bicycle.

  I looked back at his buddy and answered: “Blue Truck.”

  He gave me a small, quick smile that indicated friendliness, but also that he didn’t completely trust me. Then he bent down to pick up a wrench from his battered red toolbox. “You learn anything more about straight-sixes since we last saw you?”

  “Sorry, no,” I smiled shyly.

  And then Eugene did something funny on my account. He stepped away from his friend and did a little cheerleading routine and spelled out L-O-U-I-S, like an acronym.

  “Louis,” I said.

  Louis was smiling, and so was Eugene, and so was I. And Louis had a good hearty laugh, looking at Eugene fondly. And I could see he loved him in how he looked at him. Which made me wanna cry—because the last time I’d seen that look on a man’s face was when it was James Damon Keane’s and it was aimed straight at me. Something brotherly.

  I felt uncomfortable and emotional—all happy and sad at the same time. I sort of wanted to leave, but I also wanted to stay—because I felt close to Eugene again, and because his friend Louis seemed nicer this time, even if he was a bit brusque and I couldn’t quite figure him out, nor the nature of their relationship. Eugene headed over to some scrawny brush to piss, and I asked Louis, “Where you guys going?”

  “Home,” he replied.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Pine Ridge.”

  “Isn’t that where Wounded Knee is?”

  “Yup. You know about that?” And he looked at me directly.

  “Yeah, I read a book about it.”

  “A book, eh?” He nodded his head slowly; then he dipped back under the hood.

  “What’s wrong with the truck?”

  “Carburetor problem. But I think I can jerry-rig it and get us to Idaho Falls.” Jimmy’s next red hoop.

  Eugene returned and I looked at him, half hoping for an invitation, but I also suddenly felt the need to flee. “Maybe I’ll see you guys there,” I said. But Louis wasn’t listening anymore, worki
ng his wrench, contorting his face in the effort. Eugene just smiled. I kissed him quickly, just a peck, and I hurried back down across the rocks to my camp below. When I got to my bike, I looked back up the rocky slope and there he was watching me. He lifted his hand in a forlorn wave.

  Ask for nothing back, Jimmy said.

  I needed to pull. I wanted to be with Jimmy then. Gone-Jimmy, who I still didn’t want to go.

  I looked up to wave again once I’d gotten on the bike and moving, but Eugene was no longer in sight. Hoped he’d understand. I thought then if I rode hard today, I could pass Idaho Falls and cut south on a smaller road and I could be rid of them.

  Because Eugene was going to take Jimmy away. Don’t go, Jimmy. Not just yet ...

  I headed down the empty road, back into the sagebrush, distracting myself with spices, wracking my brain (spice-racking?) for the right one that would describe him. The essential spice. Something orange: turmeric, cayenne, cinnamon. Another name for Eugene. He who had many; he who had none. The same engine-grease black hair as Jimmy too, but with a hint of blue. On account of the big sky over my head, perhaps? The big sky with its snotty clouds or its endless sagebrush, or today, its high, remote cirrus like eagle feathers, like what Eugene had drawn on the underpass way back in the city named for him.

  He wasn’t a horseboy: not with that nose; not with those shoulder blades like truncated wings. Eugene was a birdboy. Horses that run and birds that fly. I loved the fleeing things, I suppose. The going things. I was just a mangy lost dog, loping through an empty lot.

  A green highway sign said “Arco 2 miles.” Wasn’t that a gas station or an antidepressant or a boy’s name back in California? In the thicker growth of sage and willow-choked creeks on the road leading into town, I scared up pheasants and a couple of antelope, who bounded off away from me into the brush, white butts upended—gayer than geese, which would likely fly over any time now.

  And then I entered Arco, and there wasn’t a car on any street I could see, or a person out anywhere. It was like a ghost town at the end of the world. Like that town in The Andromeda Strain. All the buildings were whitewashed wood in high WW2 style. It had a big welcome sign, calling itself the first atomic city, having been completely powered by nuclear energy before any other place on earth, or so the sign said. I didn’t get it at first, but as I entered town I saw more and more signs (but still no people) commemorating the milestone. Eventually I found a large information kiosk in front of city hall with all the details: A complete timeline of the development of the “peaceful” use of nuclear power and the numerous experimental reactors that were built in the desert east of town in what is called INEL (Idaho Nuclear Experimentation Laboratory). Great, another acronym.

  I continued along the main drag until I found a place for pancakes. I sat in the window, but with my back turned purposely to it, in case any blue trucks drifted past. Other than the waitress, who was ghoulishly pale, I was the only one in the place, my imagination conjuring up all manner of horror about how her bed must glow, and about the unseen townsfolk, shut-ins all, in various stages of radioactive decay.

  I looked at Jimmy perched next to the ketchup where’d I’d put him, already vaporized to nothing, post-nuclear, with nothing to fear from Arco and its radiation. How’s the bardo today, Jimmy? Day forty-five.

  No answer.

  I looked out the window then and craned my neck down the road, wanting to see one thing: the blue pickup. Wanting to, not wanting to. Not wanting to.

  50

  It was 6:00 a.m., so Guerrero Street was more or less empty, fog-enshrouded—all the better to make my escape. But so beautiful too. San Francisco was a maddening city, hard to leave, a place where nostalgia could set in thirty seconds on the back of an image. Every place else took years, but San Francisco was beautiful like a curse. It wouldn’t let you go. “Left my heart” and all that. Platitudes with an iron grip.

  I pulled, took a deep breath, and reminded myself that despite all evidence to the contrary, I was in reality. San Francisco may be covered with Victorian sugar, but the biscuit under the frosting is the same as anywhere else. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself of that. Otherwise it’s the city of promises never quite delivered. And that could be anything from a sunny day to the fabled Oz of homosexuality, which was chipping away like old paint as so many of us died.

  Sometimes I plain hated San Francisco, the way it dissembled and seduced.

  The acronym closed in on Jimmy just as soon as he arrived. He was sick within two months, after having been asymptomatic until he reached our fair city—our fair, enchanted city, shadowed by the angel of death that no one sees until it’s hovering over you like the fog and you can’t get out from under it. Trickster city. Black widow with a pretty Victorian hourglass on its belly, and we’re all crawling around clueless as fools on its web.

  And it wants your heart, so don’t doubt it’ll ask.

  51

  I rode out of Arco, and into the sagebrush nowhere, as empty as I was. One hundred miles of INEL, which just goes to show you how deceptive a short little acronym can be. This particular acronym looked like the rest of the grass and sagebrush high desert of the Great Basin, other than the occasional cement bunker in the distance and a lot of fences protecting—from what I could tell—pretty much nothing. And the sound of gunfire, of course. I’d soon learn it was coming from gunnery ranges far away, as apparently the sound of a gunshot will travel hundreds of miles if there’s no sound to drown it out, or nothing else to obstruct its travel. And there wasn’t. Just like grief that way. I kept an eye on my tires.

  The place had a hugeness that overwhelmed me. There was one rest stop, twenty miles inside, chock full of seniors who, I ventured a guess, were just in from Unity Lake. Geese.

  I pulled in for a drink of water and to rest my left knee, which had grown stiff and was starting to swell. The place was fenced heavily and plastered with signs warning NO TRESPASSING, $5010 FINES, US MILITARY RESERVATION (Is that for Indian veterans?), HIGH SECURITY AREA, and all kinds of things like that. There were military vehicles there as well and one stereotypical U.S. Marine in flight glasses and a crew cut who walked right up to me and asked me what I was doing riding a bicycle out here. He said it with the kind of arrogant self-confidence that deserved a punch in the nose for good measure. But I was a fag and he looked official, so that wasn’t going to happen on two counts.

  “Just passing through,” I answered him.

  “Not a good choice, soldier. You can’t stop and camp here. You have to ride the whole thing today. You won’t be allowed in here after dark.” He had his sleeves rolled up and was clearly not any kind of guard or MP. He was just flexing his bantamness.

  “I see. Well, okay then. How far across is it?”

  “One hundred clams, soldier.”

  “Clams?”

  “Backflips, footsteps, jump ropes, hop-skips, pancakes—miles, pardner.”

  Pancakes? “I see. So what’s the big deal out here? Why is it so high security?”

  “You bet it is. The fuel rods from Three Mile Island are out here.” He grinned like a Cheshire cat.

  I wanted to say, Whoopee, you learn something new every day, or You don’t say, or … So what? Something about him annoyed me, the way he smiled about something like that. It was that “you’re gonna die, sucker” smile. He looked like the kind of guy who would really enjoy something like Three Mile Island, would want to get in on the action. I wondered what his euphemisms for fuel rods might be: dildoes, fannywackers, chopsticks, bones?

  “But the security, I mean. After all, we’re in the middle of Idaho. What are they afraid of ?”

  He explained that there were four hundred and fifty—and he’d didn’t say “about” or “approximately”—known nuclear terrorists in the world. “You never know when Colonel Qaddafi might ride out here on his white horse.” He winked, and laughed.

  Or Crazy Horse or Red Cloud, I thought. I got on my bike then. I wanted to get it over
with. I winced as my knee throbbed, but once I got going the pain seemed to ease.

  Cars passed now and again, but it was an empty highway generally, until someone pulled up right behind me and slowed down. I didn’t look, but pretty soon they were pulling up alongside me, and I prepared myself for more Halls of Montezuma lectures when I saw instead his orange arm on the open window of the door, and then his green eyes and his blue-black hair: Eugene, leaning out the window, smiling big as ever. I could pretend I didn’t see them, mind my own business, whistle, look off into the sagebrush nowhere.

  “Would you like a ride out of this evil place?” Louis called out, leaning forward and looking across Eugene from the driver’s side.

  It was windy and there was no food or drink for a hundred miles, my knee hurt, and in my rush to escape the Marine back at the rest stop I hadn’t filled up my water bottles besides. And, and … I’m not asking for anything back, Jimmy, see? But they’re offering.

  But I reconsidered. No, I’m not going to be able to sit next to him for a hundred miles, and then be able to say goodbye again. No sirree. I must have looked morose because Eugene smiled and looked at me with a pleading-teasing look.

  I relented, sighed right back at him, and watched the truck pull past me and brake into the gravel. When I reached them, I followed, waiting for them to stop, but they never quite did. Louis leaned out the window and called back to me: “We can’t take a chance on stopping, the engine might die. You gotta get the bike in there somehow while I’m moving.”

  My last chance to wave them off.

  Eugene hopped out the passenger side door then and came to help me. I quickly untied the velvet bag and tied it to my belt and then we lifted the bike together and ran after the truck, tossing the bike into the truck bed with a bit of a crash, which made me wince and Eugene laugh. Then I followed him as he grabbed the door and hopped in, with me close on his heels, my perineum aching as I ran, and my knee too. I shut the door once inside and off we zoomed, looking over my shoulder to make sure nothing had been lost on the road when we’d tossed the bike truckward.