A Horse Named Sorrow

  “I know my place. Under you or over you. Heads or tails.”

  Jimmy and his say-nothing smile.

  So, we were back to frottage mostly, which was nice, because we didn’t need any condoms then. He’d rub against me, and I’d rub against him. Maybe that last time was when he was behind me squeezing it off between my butt cheeks, raining white stars across my back—Magellanic clouds. Or perhaps when he’d driven it, each vein in high relief, along my sternum, making love to my heart. I liked it that way best, my heart pulling Jimmy up from the roots. Jimmy throwing rice on the groom of my heart.

  What was the very last time? I couldn’t remember, and it made me panic. It suddenly seemed very important.

  It was in Golden Gate Park, that’s where it was. We were walking. He was never horny anymore, so when it came over him, we’d make sure to make the most of it. We went back in the trees and dropped our pants, our cocks bobbing like kids in a pool, bouncing. And he spilled all over my shirt, which I wore all that day, fingering the hard spots that no one knew the holiness of but him and me.

  “Don’t ever wash it. It’s probably the last batch.” He was kidding, or he wasn’t.

  “I love you, Jimmy.” And I’d leaned over and kissed him across the table at the little Thai place on 9th Avenue we’d gone to after.

  “And who wouldn’t?” he replied sardonically, motioning for the waitress.

  “Can’t think of a soul,” I’d answered him. But by then, he was talking coconut curry, and how hot, and did they have eggplant. And me, I was in over my head.

  He glared up from his noodles five minutes later.

  “Don’t worry, Jimmy. I’m pulling.”

  Where’s that shirt now? Probably went out into the street in one of those boxes. If there were a Jimmy Museum, it’d be in a glass case, the people crowding round, little kids pointing out the stiff parts you could barely make out: “Right there, Mommy, see?” The last batch.

  Eugene wasn’t much of a mechanic, and the clouds were clearing, so he dragged me into a meadow to let Louis handle the engine alone. I walked behind him, holding his hand, watching him, his thin hips and wing-sprouting shoulder blades. And I worried a little that I was looking for Jimmy in Eugene, and that the beast that throbbed at my waist didn’t seem to distinguish all that much. It was faithful alright, in a sort of impartial way.

  But Jimmy and Eugene were nothing alike. Jimmy was all about making me pull, keeping things moving. Eugene, he seemed to be about just watching me and showing me things, staying in one place, even if it was but for a very short time. Like I say, he was no horse, he was a bird. He perched.

  And inhaled.

  He winked—is that why they called us winktes?—and exhaled. Soon we came upon a creek and he showed me dragonflies and water bugs, creamy blue lupine flowers dusted with rain and chartreuse green tufts of dew-clad moss. He found a little frog. And he winked again.

  I sighed, thinking that since the weather was clearing and they’d taken me up the hardest part of the incline, and the truck was once again broken down, it was probably my cue to get back on the bike and go. But I didn’t want to leave Eugene’s side just yet as the two of us wandered further and further across the meadow and away into the woods. Eventually we came to a cliff, where the forest opened up into a huge vista, a river canyon below us. And it was like we were back in Jimmy, the big nowhere that expanded all around us. His whisper way down there far below in the water, humming I don’t know what. A song.

  Eugene turned and our mouths came together, and then the fury of it, the fire lit and he one landscape and me another, and our shirts coming off and our buckles undone, and we were birds flying over each other, his chest like a beautiful orange desert, and me some salt flat, and then we brought them rain.

  We were the earth when we made love—or of the earth. We were with Jimmy when we did it, because he was earth and so it was like we made love in the palm of Jimmy’s hand. I guess I loved Jimmy and Eugene all at once when I made it with Eugene. It sort of confused me, but it also felt just right. A holy trinity three-way: the lost soul, the birdboy, and the holy ghosthorse.

  We loafed back through the forest, me saying “who are you, Eugene?” while he handed me things by way of an answer: a crinkled old leaf, a stick, a granite stone, a horse turd—once a robin’s egg (he winked at the really good ones)—a butterfly’s wing, a curled fern flute, bright orange lichen rubbed together in his hands and poured over my head like dust.

  Multitudes.

  Louis was sitting against the front tire when we made it back across the meadow. “I can’t patch it; we gotta find a new hose somewhere.”

  “I can ride my bike back to the lodge,” I offered.

  “Nah, that’s not necessary. We’re in a national park, and they have rangers to come hassle Indians. They call it road service. They’ll be along anytime now.”

  We all hopped in the cab and waited. And sure enough, Ranger Rick appeared within the half hour. He was the cop kind of ranger; he did it all by the book. The pulling over, the lights, the making us wait, while he probably checked the registration. “Do Indians register their cars?” I asked Louis.

  “Not usually. We’re exempt.” And he ever so slightly lifted one side of his mouth, without averting his gaze from the rearview mirror. I wasn’t sure what he meant, as usual.

  “Hello gentlemen. You got car trouble?”

  “Yeah, a radiator hose. Give us a lift?”

  He looked us over, considering. “I’ll take one of you,” he offered.

  Louis hopped out. “I’m the only one who knows what this rig needs, except for Blue Truck there,” adding as he walked away: “He’s an expert on straight sixes.”

  Eugene and I played cards and smoked pot in the back of the truck while we waited for Louis to get back. He had to teach me all the games, since I never played cards—my mom had liked Yahtzee and dominoes and Scrabble. He’d correct me by replaying the hand for me, or putting out cards all in a row and pointing.

  “What’s my incentive to win?”

  He used his tongue against the inside of his cheek to mimic a blowjob, and grinned flirtatiously.

  Real simple commerce, me and Eugene.

  I liked how he put his hand on my knee to congratulate me, to correct me, or from time to time, to just say hey.

  Cinnamon … Nutmeg … “Don’t take your hand away.”

  He just laughed.

  We sat out there for hours, with the smell of pines and grass wafting on the breeze from the recent rain, fresh and new, and we took deep breaths of it.

  I started humming then, and they were songs from a sad place because that’s where I’d been all morning.

  Humming and playing cards.

  And Eugene started to hum along with me, and I looked at him, thinking, “Well, he can hum. He can moan, he can laugh, and he can hum.”

  He was listening and picking up the tune, then following along with me once he got it.

  So he taught me cards and I taught him songs. He knew most of them already, even if they were old songs, being of our parents’ era. What I was really doing was telling him my story; we were sharing our lost fathers—our mothers too, I suppose. We did “Bobby McGee” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and “Quinn the Eskimo” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Heart of Gold.” And then he hummed some newer ones back at me: Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which made us kiss long and hard because I was on a bike and he was in a blue truck. And then “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which made us both laugh and whistle along.

  I kept winning at cards.

  Then we played a sort of charades where we had to guess the song, so it got a little more obscure. I tried out “Danny Boy” and “Moon River,” neither of which he could get. And I didn’t know the names of any of the dance tunes he hummed, except for “808 Skate.”

  Then Eugene asked me to get the book by holding his hands out like he’d just opened it to read. There was only one book he could have meant.
I didn’t know why he wanted it just then. But I leaned over and dug through the panniers until I found it and, pulling it out, handed it to him. He flipped around until he found the songs, and he hummed them for me. I’d hardly noticed them when I read the book, but it turned out all of them were Sioux. The first was “Prancing They Come,” and it was all about horses. And then he hummed the one about the coming of the buffalo. There was a sad one toward the end of the book called “The Earth Only Endures,” and then one called “In a Sacred Manner I Live.” We sat beside each other, with the book between us, him humming and me trying to sing the Lakota words that were printed among the musical notes, or when he laughed too effusively, the English translations, which I tried to fit to his humming. He kept lifting his hands, trying to get me to sing louder, and we rolled our heads back over the edge of the truck bed and we sang together that way to the clouds (me with words, and he humming), which were now big fluffy white buffalo drifting by one after another like an enormous herd.

  Eventually we stopped singing and just watched.

  Groped around and found each other’s hands.

  We turned and looked at each other, heads rolled back. Smiled.

  Held our hands tight, real tight.

  Thanked each other that way. Shared gratefulness.

  We kissed each other then, like how we always did, like we were ice-cream cones, creamy and dripping: 31 Flavors and then some—multitudes. He went for my waist and what he owed me from playing cards, and I laid back and marveled at his shiny, crow-black hair: licorice, beetles, Nigerians.

  “I wanna stay with you,” I whispered. Crazy shit. In a truck bed in a national park we weren’t allowed to pull over in. Stay where?

  Just with.

  I was humming one last song, which if I’d had the guts to sing it would have sounded like this: Black is the color of my true love’s hair …

  And all the while the sky just lousy with white buffalo, silently lumbering over us.

  54

  A side from a few dirty looks—me being a rule breaker and all with my bike on the BART train at rush hour—it was just another day for most of these people. And yet, was it ever just another day? All of us deep in the middle of some story that can suddenly turn.

  Some of the people on the train looked sad, some looked content, and some appeared completely numb. Fact was, there were good and bad stories running along all around me, threads all. I remembered that last thread Jimmy’d pulled off a seat in one of these trains. Was this the same train? And if so, which seat would it be? I saw a lady doing her makeup in the seat that corresponded to the one we would have sat in that sweet year ago.

  She looked like a clown.

  Then I searched the bike for that thread and found it fast, remembering that Jimmy’d tied it right near where he’d painted Chief Joseph in cheap dime-store paint.

  That thread’s story was us.

  That thread’s story is this story.

  55

  Louis found us sleeping under a blanket. “Hoka hey!” he shouted.

  He clamped the new hose in place in no time while Eugene lit up his pipe. Back on the road, I asked Louis why he kept calling me Blue Truck.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “If I’m Blue Truck, I’d have a bad carburetor,” I protested.

  He arched one eyebrow. “Then you’d be Blue Truck with a Bad Carburetor.”

  “But doesn’t it need to make some kind of sense—like shouldn’t I have asthma or something?”

  “Do ya?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, we’ll just keep it Blue Truck.”

  He looked at me.

  I looked at him.

  He was beginning to sound like one of the eight-year-olds at the Y. “You aren’t making any sense.”

  “No, I’m not. And that’s just the point.”

  The question that was my face. I looked at Eugene, who just grinned and leaned forward to the windshield and looked skyward and did the sign language motion for clouds, my favorite signed word—a roiling, boiling hand-over-hand Chinese tai chi expression of grace.

  “Well, Blue Truck, it makes total sense if you get it.”

  I looked back at him, perplexed.

  “You know, Blue Truck, when you just know something?” (and he pounded his heart with his closed fist).

  I considered it and then I nodded. I knew. Like knowing I needed to bathe Jimmy. Knowing he was a horse and a salmon both. Seeing Eugene in the market, just like a turnip, pulled up out of the soil, and me knowing I needed a turnip. How I knew I needed to tell him everything and didn’t need to talk to him at all.

  “But not if you think about it,” Louis warned me.

  I smiled.

  After a while, Eugene pulled out nail polish and set to painting my fingernails: one yellow; one red; one black; one white; and leaving the thumb unpainted.

  “I’m talking about the spirit world here, and I probably shouldn’t be. Smoke, he’s wiser—he keeps his mouth shut.”

  “Well, we’re all Catholics here, right?”

  He looked at me again. “Are we?”

  “It said so in that book.”

  “Catholic, eh? I wouldn’t really call that the spirit world.”

  “I’m sorta joking.”

  “Sorta?”

  “Well, I like Mary and churches, but I’m more of a Buddhist, I guess.”

  “Nam ramay kyo, all that?”

  “No, not that kind.”

  “That’s good—though I do know a woman in Manderson who got a lot of appliances using that chant. There’s something to it.”

  I held up my hand and Eugene blew on it. Then he started in on his own.

  “Lakota colors you got there, the four directions.” Louis gestured with his head.

  “Do I make a wish?” I was thinking I’d get four instead of the usual three.

  “No.” And he furrowed his brow. “The power is in asking for help, not wishing for it, Blue Truck. That’s what crying for a vision is about.”

  “Crying for a vision?”

  “Well, that’s Indian for asking … like really asking.” And he punched his heart.

  “So then, someone like Crazy Horse asked?”

  “He asked to be shown how he could serve his people.”

  I nodded.

  “But you see, the point is: a vision answers a question. There’s no wishing. It’s about making a decision to serve, asking how, then listening, and then doing it.”

  “So, did Eugene cry for a vision?” And I looked at him, his head now resting in my lap as, holding aloft his hands, he continued painting his nails.

  “Yeah, out there in Oregon, before I met him. Spirit told him to go back home.”

  I looked at Eugene then, considering. “How does it work?”

  “Well, it’s three days, three nights—sometimes four—out in the wilderness alone, fasting, praying for a vision. Asking, Blue Truck; not wishing, but asking. You ask, you get an answer. You wish, well …” And he shrugged.

  I looked out into the forest. Endless stands of pines scattered into the distance, and I could see a meadow out there, and where the grass was thicker, I figured there was a stream. I had an urge to run out into it.

  “So you just sit there, huh? You don’t move around or anything?”

  “There’s a few ways to do it. You can make a circle and sit in it; you can bury yourself in a hole. But pretty much, it’s just calling the four directions, and all your relations. And then just asking with your heart.”

  I looked at my newly painted fingernails.

  “Man, I don’t think I could handle that. All that time sitting still. I’m not good at that at all.” And I thought back on my stillborn Buddhist life, my discarded zafu, committed to the street with everything else, sat on now by that punk girl, unless she’d chucked it too.

  He shrugged. “You’re no different from anyone else, Blue Truck. And sometimes if you don’t go out and cry for a vision, it comes crying for
you. The Great Spirit wants you to live, Blue Truck. You gotta start right there. You’re boyfriend’s dead, but you’re not.”

  I felt my eyes begin to tear up then and, in my embarrassment, simply said, “I know.”

  “It’s okay, Blue Truck—you can cry.”

  And so I did. Which made Eugene sit up and put his arms around me, rocking me and kissing my neck. I rested my head in his lap then, and was getting my breath back when I heard Louis say, “Oh shit!” And the truck swerved.

  We’d been coming around a curve, and when I popped up to look what I saw before us was a deer startled and stopped in the road, its legs every which way, undecided about where to bolt. Louis swerved, but it bolted the same way, then back, and the next thing you knew we collided hard, and the deer deflected off the front bumper, shaking the whole truck, before it was catapulted off into the ditch.

  Eugene exhaled loudly and Louis muttered, “Damn.”

  Louis slowed down, but before he came to a stop, he dropped it in neutral. Then he engaged the parking brake and hopped out, telling Eugene: “Keep the gas coming, I don’t want that carburetor going.”

  Eugene scooted over into the driver’s seat then as Louis reached behind him for his rifle, while I hopped out the passenger side, leaving Eugene to man the accelerator and hopefully prevent the truck from stalling.

  We walked quickly up the shoulder to where the deer lay, struggling in the ditch, trying to pull itself up.

  “Stand back.” Louis aimed his rifle at the deer’s twitching head and fired. I turned, but the shot echoed and came back at us from every which way.

  Doing what needed to be done.

  Dr. Jack No Wind. No ifs. No ands. No buts.

  He stood there a minute, said some prayers or something in Lakota, and then looked at me, saying: “I’d keep it if we weren’t in the park. But we’ve already run into the law once.”