A Horse Named Sorrow

  Eugene was still scooting over to the middle of the seat to give me room. He was in a real good mood, it seemed. He put his hand on my thigh and smiled big. He was happy to see me. And it felt good to be crammed in next to him, our thighs flush. I wanted to drop my sadness like a stone and just kiss him. I wanted to watch my bike slide right out the back end of the truck and bounce itself into screws and bolts, scattered clothing, and a book that told a story you couldn’t bury anyway—one more piece of roadkill. I clenched Jimmy-in-the-bag, resting in my lap, the one thing I wouldn’t wanna lose.

  “Sorry about that,” Louis said, pulling back onto the road, his eyes in the side mirror.

  “No problem. Thanks for the lift.”

  Nobody said anything for the next several minutes while I absorbed the hot lava of Eugene through my thigh, making my frown warble and begin to rise. Then Eugene grabbed my hand and I tensed.

  “It’s okay, Blue Truck. You’re winkte, I know,” Louis mentioned with a clipped smile, his neck back, eyes in the rearview mirror.

  I looked at him, my face a question, not knowing what a winkte was, or why he called me Blue Truck.

  “Uh, what’s winkte?”

  “Two spirit.”

  I nodded and arched my eyebrows.

  I’d heard the term before somewhere in San Francisco. Some artist friend of Lawrence’s used to do these scrotum portraits and each ball had a different inlaid photographic face: one a man, one a woman, and always 1950s people, like Ward and June Cleaver, with titles like “Two Spirits Have Twice the Fun” or “Two, Two, Two Spirits in One.” And long explanations in the program about how Native Americans believe gay people have two spirits, which is what makes them queer. Which meant there were five of us in the cab of that truck if you did the math— maybe even six.

  “So who are you?” I asked him. “Are you like …”

  “I’m his uncle.”

  “Oh.”

  “You thought I was his lover?” And he laughed. “Ha, ha, eh Smoke? You and me. Ha, ha, ha.”

  Eugene grinned.

  “Isn’t his name Eugene?”

  “Nah, he’s not Eugene. His name’s Rupert No Wind. And I’m Louis No Wind.”

  “Rupert?”

  “Yeah—you wouldn’t use it either, would ya?” And he winked.

  I looked from Louis to Eugene, and he shrugged shyly, a little embarrassed at the exposure of his geeky name.

  “So what’s Smoke?”

  “Another name for him. Smoke That Came Back to the Lodge. That’s a vision name.”

  “Vision?” He looked at me like I was stupid, which I was, considering. “I don’t really know about stuff like that.”

  “But you know about Wounded Knee? I thought you said you read books? Didn’t you read about Crazy Horse in that book of yours?”

  I nodded.

  “You remember what his vision was?”

  I racked my mind and remembered something about it. “Well, he … uh … couldn’t be killed except by his own people? And his horse was sort of like his medicine or whatever?”

  “That’s it. Painted horse. A warrior … he served his people that way. Vision is about how to serve.”

  I nodded.

  “Smoke’s winkte; he serves in a different way. Everybody has a place.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought about that for a while. Everybody with a place. I sure didn’t feel I had a place … road’s the place … I guess I could see how a lot of fags found a kind of gay place: hair-dressing, florists,fashiondesign,nursing,thatkindofthing.Butitwasn’tmyplace and I doubted it was Eugene’s. San Francisco had been a place once.

  “What exactly is the place of a winkie?”

  “Wink-te,” he corrected me. “Well, being a two-spirit person is powerful medicine. Depends, but it’s usually a ceremonial role. Or you become a medicine man, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds cool.” I nodded again.

  “It’s more about service, Blue Truck, than cool.”

  “Oh. Well, I just meant it’s nice to hear that, because I’ve never heard anyone say much nice about being queer.”

  He gave me an understanding look then. “I’m just learning about it myself really. Most Indians don’t treat the winkte any better than white people do after all that’s gone down. So many traditions are lost or barely alive.” And he looked off to the mountains. Then he patted Eugene’s thigh. “Maybe Smoke can bring some of that back.”

  After a few moments, he turned to me and said: “So tell me again where you’re going and why.”

  “Well …” And I looked at Jimmy in my lap. “My boyfriend died … this is Jimmy, here, in this bag.” I held him up. “And I’m taking him home.”

  He looked me in the eye. “Buffalo?”

  “Yeah, Buffalo.”

  He looked at me again. “And where’d you come from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “A lot of people dying there I guess.”

  “Yeah, a lot. Lots of uh … wink … ,” and I hesitated, stumbling on the word.

  “Winktes. Well, I’m taking him home.” And he patted Eugene’s thigh again. “Eugene’s mother died,” he continued. I looked at Eugene then, who’d taken out a sketchpad and was drawing with a black pastel crayon. He looked up and sighed. “But that was a year ago, and they buried her back there in Oregon.” And Louis told me the whole story, while I watched Eugene draw a face in black charcoal. It emerged along with the story. How she’d been sick for a while, and how after she’d died, Louis had decided to come out to find his nephew.

  “I’d never known him. He’s my brother’s kid and my brother died in ’Nam.”

  I perked up and he looked at me. “So did my dad.”

  “He an Indian?”

  “Oh no, I’m Irish.” Chance for a choice white lie lost. But that would have been just too white of a lie, pardon the pun.

  “Well, Rupert’s mom hadn’t been on the rez for years. She’d been dead set on getting off the rez since she was a kid. Well, that’s what Frank told me anyway. He’d always liked her. So much so that he went looking for her. Her and her sister had gone to Seattle—through the relocation program. They used to pay Indians to leave the rez. It didn’t work out. Usually doesn’t.” And he sighed. “But they weren’t about to turn tail and head home. They fell in with the local Indians up there. Got involved with men—you know, the usual. Somewhere along the line she reconnected with my brother. Before he shipped out I guess.” He took a breath and looked out across the sagebrush before continuing. “In all the confusion, with his body coming back and everything else, and none of us really knowing what he’d been up to, we never heard nothing about her. She married someone else, a Klamath guy, and that’s where Eugene grew up. She sent me a letter a year or so ago right before she died. I didn’t even know I had a nephew.” And he chuckled.

  “How’d she find you?”

  “On the rez. It’s easy, man. You just send it general delivery, Wind Clan. It finds you. I was just getting cleaned up. Used to drink a lot. I figured I’d go out and meet my nephew, try to do right by him.”

  “What did she die of ?”

  “Lung cancer. Smoking killed her.”

  He stopped talking then.

  We were all three silent then for a long time. There was just the wind, the emptiness, the distant bunkers like forgotten mausoleums.

  Stories as yet untold. The road was made of stories, and there was no escaping stories, even if you wanted to. I thought then that what drew me to Eugene was that he couldn’t tell a story. Or, rather, he told it in a different way. Without words. With his eyes, with his body and his hunger, with his smiles and sighs, with his seed.

  Eugene pulled out his pipe and his lighter. Louis gave him a disapproving look but started talking about the acronym we were crossing instead, and how, contrary to popular belief that no one had ever died in a nuclear accident, there were in fact three Army guys who were lost right out here in an experiment gone awry b
ack in the early 1960s. “It was a meltdown basically, but since the reactor they were working with was about the size of a toaster and they were servicemen, there was no need to tell anybody and no danger of it becoming a public disaster. But it killed three guys all the same, and they buried them in drums. The families wanted their kin, but the government said it was too dangerous. Shut ’em up with money, no doubt. They put the guys in those drums and left them out here and then they encased the blown reactor in concrete and put a fence around it a mile in each direction.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I just listen. There ain’t no secrets. It’s just no one’s ever listening.”

  The wind buffeted the truck in a gust. Stone silent Jimmy, maybe he whispered now on the wind. Or maybe it was those Army guys talking.

  “I met a guy on my way out here when the truck broke down. He worked quality control. He told me a whole lot of stories—Enrico Fermi, where they almost lost Detroit. Someone wrote a song about it.” He looked over at me. “Does it surprise you?”

  “No, I guess not. I’m just surprised I hadn’t heard it before.” He looked at me again and I thought of Wounded Knee. Heard it all a hundred years too late like everybody else. “And what do you do once you know?” I ventured.

  He looked at me then. “Not a lot you can do. Remember it. Tell everyone you see.”

  I thought about ACT UP then. We were having two different conversations, or we weren’t. “So it won’t happen again?”

  “Oh, it’ll happen again. It happens all the time; it’s happening somewhere right now, you can bet on it.” Oh yes. Well, maybe it was three conversations now, heading toward four, five, one hundred.

  I thought of Sarajevo. “You don’t think it’ll ever stop, eh?”

  He looked at me directly, and said nothing.

  Eugene nudged me to show me what he’d drawn, and Louis looked over too. I assumed it was his mother’s face, a mass of choppy, short lines, lots of shading. I couldn’t tell if she were smiling or frowning, alive or dead. Her face was emerging from, or receding into, stone.

  “Don’t know how he draws in this rig,” Louis piped up, “rattlin’ and shakin’. These look different than the other ones.” And he looked off the other way. “I call them Blue Truck drawings.”

  52

  And sure enough, San Francisco made one last play for my heart, as once down in the station I encountered the same problem Jimmy had had when I’d first found him on the platform in West Oakland: NO BIKES ALLOWED DURING MORNING RUSH HOUR. Even though I was going the opposite way. Backasswards. And I had a sudden fear that I couldn’t escape, that the Venus flytrap of San Francisco had me good, that I’d have to head back upstairs and wait for three hours in a coffee shop at 16th and Mission like some dumb fly on a web, and who knew where that black widow was.

  Close. I marched down to the end of the platform where the first car always stops, and I figured I’d just plead with every train engineer. The first engineer I begged gestured me on without a fight, and I thanked him profusely until he tired of me and shut the window.

  53

  We drove the rest of the way to Idaho Falls in silence. Where I got us a motel room. Two double beds. I didn’t know how that was going to work out until Louis climbed into one of them and said, “Do what you gotta do, but don’t make too much noise.” And he guffawed and vanished under the covers, turning his head to the far wall.

  Eugene hit the lights and then sidled up to me and grabbed the hem of my Red Hot Chili Pepper (the garment, not the metaphor) T-shirt, and over my head it went. In no time, I was smothered in the silk of him. What the hell’s a winkte? I remember thinking—somebody who winks? It sure feels good whatever it is.

  He cupped his hand over my mouth at the crucial moment of meltdown.

  And I spent the night holding Eugene, and dreaming that I was gathering up a parachute, folding and folding the silk of it, having flown and wanting to fly again.

  I woke up early, to Louis’s snoring and the whisper of Eugene’s breath and the peace of his uncontorted face. We’d carried my bike up the stairs and into the room and it leaned against a dresser, all packed up and ready to go.

  These men had been good to me. Some white kid, probably with ancestors who’d blasted away at buffalo and into that ditch at Wounded Knee Creek. Ask for nothing back. A bit late for that. My turn to vanish, Eugene.

  It wasn’t later than six and cold, and I had to pile on Jimmy’s old ratty green sweater for warmth, his red windbreaker over that, and his long johns to boot. I yanked a string off the polyester bedspread and tied it onto the bike, and then I quietly rolled out the door. I fumbled with the map out on the street and found my way to the highway that led into Wyoming. I didn’t even stop for pancakes—just wolfed down some god-awful sweet rolls at a minimart.

  By the time I hit the Snake River, clouds had gathered and it started to rain. I pulled off and got out Jimmy’s poncho, tucked him up inside the windbreaker, and got back on the road. They found me that way, pedaling along in the rain, a rooster tail of water behind me as the tires hummed their wet, revolving song—the bicycle waltz: one, two, three. This time they didn’t bother asking, just slowed down, the taillights glowing red (one of them anyway). And out hopped Eugene. And the same routine as before got my bike into the truck bed and me up front, hand in his hand, thigh against his thigh.

  They said nothing. Just the windshield wipers and their forlorn little squeaks speaking woe. We drove all the way up the Snake River like that, past pastureland and hillsides of beautiful chartreuse quaking aspen, on through the horror of Jackson Hole and its boutiques and faux out-west décor. Up through the Grand Tetons (they really are purple mountain majesty, but only Ray Charles knows how to sing that song with joy and sorrow) and on into Yellowstone, where we stopped at a big yellow lodge that was almost empty, scaling back services as the summer season had already waned.

  I bought them gas, and while the tank guzzled it up and Eugene found a bathroom, Louis stared at the sky and its light, intermittent rain.

  “Let’s hope the thunderbeings aren’t out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they might make you dream about them, and after that you’ll have to do everything backwards.”

  I didn’t recall dreaming of them, but that’s how I did everything already.

  “Really?”

  “You become heyoka, a clown.”

  I looked at him, and he went on: “Because it all ends up funny. Like if I felt cold, I’d have to say I was hot. If something was serious, I’d have to laugh. Or, if I had a story I really needed to tell, I wouldn’t say a thing.”

  “Are you talking about Rupert?” And I topped off the tank and replaced the nozzle in its holder.

  “No,” he said abruptly.

  “Louis?”

  He looked at me.

  “How do you feel about white people?”

  “There sure are a lot of ’em.” He winked.

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Well, I’ve never met any Indians before, and after reading that book, I feel kind of bad about even being in this country at all.”

  “You didn’t kill anybody, did ya, Blue Truck?”

  “No, sir.” In fact that was my problem. I hadn’t killed the one person who’d asked me to kill him.

  “Being Indian’s a state of mind, Blue Truck. So is being white. Just don’t be a wasicu.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Means ‘takes the fat,’ like those people down in Jackson Hole. More than they need. Way more.”

  The three of us went into the lodge for lunch, and other than a distant table with a geriatric couple eating, we were the only ones there. And while we sat there at the big picture window looking out across a huge meadow, the sun came back out and a mist began to rise. And way out there in the mist, we saw a buffalo grazing.

  “Your destination.” Louis pointed with a French fry.

  I smiled.

  Eugene and Lo
uis were eating and both staring at me then. I sort of smiled back. It felt like they were having a conversation about me, but they weren’t talking and they weren’t even looking at each other. But it was like I’d just come back from the bathroom or something and it felt like they’d been talking.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  “Thanks for the room,” Louis replied, “—and gas, and lunch,” he added, pushing the check my way.

  “This one’s on Jimmy,” I announced, pulling out my roll.

  American bison,” Louis joked as we passed a park sign on our way back to the truck, warning park visitors not to hoist their infants onto buffalo heads to sit between their horns for photo ops. An honest mistake?

  Twenty minutes later, we hadn’t seen any more buffalo (if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. Advice well taken by the white man a hundred years ago), but a wrathful jet of steam came bellowing out of the hood.

  “Damn—Old Faithful,” Louis reported dryly as he pulled over.

  “Jimmy,” I thought to myself, smiling. “He’s everywhere.” And I thought of his lovely member—how many times it had spouted like a factory steam whistle, signaling the end of the work day, or like the earth itself, putting forth crops and water, rain and river. Old Faithful. Osiris and the life-giving river, and the sky is our mother. I looked up and saw the Virgin’s blue mantle, enveloping us. The earth, he’s just a boy. And I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the life hop out of Jimmy like that. Like a spring rabbit.

  He didn’t want to stick it in me anymore toward the end. “I’m not that motivated,” he’d quipped, “and besides, this thing” (holding his half-hard horsedick by its belly, as if it were a cat) “is lethal now.” And then, admonitorily, when I’d frown with disappointment, “You ain’t coming with me, Seamus. Place for you …”