A Horse Named Sorrow

  “What a waste, huh?”

  “Nah, the vultures and flies and all them will get some of him before the rangers do. Hell, they might not even find him, in which case he’ll get eaten up proper. Nothing wasteful about it.”

  We walked back toward the truck, and Eugene revved it for us, smiling.

  “Now, that—that’s wasteful.”

  “Did he mess up the front end, you think?”

  We went around front and checked.

  “Doesn’t appear so. Just a dent or two. To go with the rest of ’em.” He flicked his eyebrows up. Then he looked underneath and around where the deer had made contact. “These old cars are tough, and we only caught him as he was pulling away from us besides.” He banged the hood, as if he were patting an old beast of burden.

  “It didn’t even stall this time.”

  Eugene revved the engine again, his big crooked grin filling the windshield.

  “Don’t waste my gas, Rupert, or I’ll have to rename you Smoke That Went Out the Back End and Didn’t Come Back!”

  We both hopped in and off we went down the highway.

  Louis looked at me with sadness in his eyes then. “How you doing, Blue Truck?”

  It made me start, for it sounded somehow like he was saying goodbye without saying it. I just nodded.

  We drove on to Cody, past signs for the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum.

  “Sitting Bull was in that Wild West Show of his, wasn’t he?” I commented.

  “And Black Elk, and a whole bunch of people.”

  “Pretty strange.”

  “Buffalo Bill—he must be from Buffalo, huh? You must be getting close.”

  Used to his jokes by now, I grinned and said nothing, watching the landscape returning back to sagebrush nowhere at the lower elevations, and all of it turning purple in the setting sun. I thought how I had let myself just fall into Eugene and Louis, had gotten comfortable, enjoying the feeling that this could all go on forever. And I looked at Eugene then, dozing against my shoulder, his mouth slightly open. If I had a eucharist on me, I’d have given him communion. In the name of the father of my child, the son of our love, and the holy spirit baby that grew between us.

  Some things you gotta figure out for yourself. A new way of seeing, and that’s what a spirit baby was, growing in you, a gift from one man to the next.

  Eugene got me pregnant with what is seen and unspoken. He’d filled me with a growing silence.

  Eugene lurched forward as we rounded another curve, rousing me from my reverie as his head slid down my chest, right past my heart and into my lap, where he found the perfect pillow in Jimmy.

  “How far you going tonight, Louis?”

  “Well, I got this new hose and I just sort of feel like going until something else blows, you know?”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “You wanna be left off somewhere?”

  I didn’t, and only said, “I don’t know.”

  He slowed down.

  “I can’t stop, as you know, but I can slow way down.” He raised his voice then: “Smoke, you’re on! Hoka hey!” Eugene lifted himself, and his eyes flickered. He looked around dazed as Louis pulled into the gravel.

  I must have looked surprised. I couldn’t beg. Ask for nothing back.

  “Walk in beauty,” Louis said then.

  I looked at him, and thought, but didn’t say: “But I’m on a bike; how can I do that?”

  He looked back at me as if to say: “Ask how.”

  We hopped out, and Eugene, still sleepy, didn’t get his footing and fell onto his knees in the gravel, splaying his arms out. I helped him up.

  “You okay?” But he was already brushing himself off, smiling to reassure me he wasn’t hurt.

  We quickly maneuvered to near the moving truck, pulled the bike out, and it bounced on the shoulder’s pavement. I wanted to kiss him goodbye, and he even hesitated for a microsecond, our eyes meeting, but the truck was moving and he had to catch up. Couldn’t Louis drive up and circle, let us say goodbye?

  It all happened so fast.

  Sleepy Eugene, back in the cab, waving goodbye.

  He’d pulled a Jimmy, Louis had. Too soon. I saw the one brake light of the truck flash, and though a faint glimmer of hope arced like a shooting star across the empty purple sky of my weary Great Basin of a heart, I wasn’t surprised to see the car veer left and then head down another highway heading north. Into more sagebrush nowhere.

  The sky was deepening to indigo, but I stood there in the gravel holding the bike and watching that one red light get smaller and smaller, until it disappeared for good around a hill.

  Two old crows, birds of prey, flown off into the night.

  I mounted my skinny nag then and rode off into the approaching darkness. Did what I do when I don’t know what to do. I pulled. Took everything I had not to turn up that same road and follow them. I rode right past that turnoff, and I knew as I did that I’d never see them again; we weren’t on the same road anymore.

  No brick walls here for me either—God’s knuckles were already a blessed, bloody mess way back in Idaho besides, soon to be shrouded in the glove of night. And I was no longer vocal enough to bark. So I just hummed and sang inside myself, finding once again a song—a lullaby really, to carry the feeling along until it fell away:

  … we never did too much talking anyway, don’t think twice, it’s alright. ...

  I was a little in love with both of them. The man’s words and the boy’s silence. The man’s distance and the boy’s thigh so near mine. The man’s jokes and the boy’s smiles. The man’s sarcasm and the boy’s sighs. Louis’s mind and Eugene’s body.

  And all of it held in Jimmy’s cupped hands.

  56

  On the BART train there were a dozen people buried in the newspaper, so thick with stories you’d see people fold it up and put it down with a sigh. There were babies, who didn’t know what they were in for, kids starting to notice that nothing’s as it seems, and a whole bunch of adults wrapped up like packages in their business suits and dresses. I looked out the window at the flashing lights that once again reminded me of deep-sea fish with organic lightbulbs on their heads, and I thought about salmon, and dogs, and little pullets catching rain … whelps, calves, smolts, and shoats. Two seats to my left, a boy was drawing a horse on his sketchpad.

  And then up we galloped into the rising sun, the hulking port cranes standing around like grazing dinosaurs. What’s a baby crane? A chick?

  57

  I reached Greybull and found a campground. In the morning, I went looking for breakfast and saw the town was on a river.

  “What river is that?” I asked my waiter at the diner as he delivered my pancakes.

  “That’s the Big Horn River.”

  “As in Custer?”

  “No. That’s the Little Big Horn you’re referring to. That’s north of here a spell.”

  “So is there like an even bigger big horn or a middlin’-size big horn?”

  “They come in all sizes, son.” And he walked away, as if he’d heard that joke one too many times. Or maybe he was serious?

  I dug around in my bags for my map, to chart the day’s course—and maybe even get a straight answer to my smartass question. I realized in doing so that I hadn’t looked at a map since Idaho Falls; I had just let Louis guide me eastward.

  When I found the maps, there were other papers folded up with them I didn’t recognize at first. But when I opened them up I saw they were drawings Eugene had done. They were sexual drawings of us fucking and sucking, and yet they weren’t nasty at all. They were full of spiritual symbols: mandalas or medicine wheels, with cherubic-looking thunderbirds shooting thunderbolts while we did the same from our cocks in the very center. There was another of our two mouths open, our tongues tangled as great snakes, with buffalo, horses, birds, and stones pouring out. In that picture, my eyes were cerulean blue and his were black as lava. Some were blue truck drawings. I could tell from the lines being shorter—e
xcept for when he drew my hair, which, since it was a curly mess, was unimpeded in the rendering by blue trucks or anything else. That made me laugh.

  Better not laugh too hard, or I might cry.

  Pull.

  I tucked them away for later, and unfolded Jimmy’s map to chart the day’s course. I’d be heading south to Worland, then east over the Big Horn Mountains. I put the map away when the waiter returned with the coffee pot, and I asked for the bill. He didn’t look at me, just kept looking out the window into the middle distance. In the bathroom before I left, I looked in the mirror. My eyes were bluer than I’d ever seen them.

  The sink looked like the one Jimmy and I’d first made love on back on Shotwell Street. I splashed water in my face, and looked at my eyes and my cheekbones and my scruffy chin, trying to conjure up his. I kissed the mirror, but I couldn’t see or feel him. There was just the promise left: Take me back the way I came … road’s the place for lost souls.

  58

  The BART train finally slowed down to the platform, and then the doors slid open. I hesitated—the platform like a question. He’s not there when I roll out. And I didn’t look down toward the end where I first saw him as I followed the hurrying crowd to the exit. But after I got onto the elevator I turned around and waved to where he’d been as the doors closed like a final curtain.

  59

  I headed south (what color was that? And I looked at my fingernails: red). I followed the Big Horn River, through a town called Basin and past mountains that looked like heaps of ice cream.

  Kissing Eugene.

  He too, disappearing and yet expanding into everything just like Jimmy.

  I pressed on, singing pop songs in order to pull … Carefree Highway, let me slip away, slip away on you … and hearing Eugene humming those Indian songs. All the way to Worland, where a big green highway sign got my attention. It read: “Buffalo 97 miles.”

  “Huh?”

  I took a left and headed for it.

  Almost made it too.

  Miles and miles I rode, right through a town called Ten Sleep— named for time, a lady in a minimart who I bought a bottle of Crazy Horse from told me: “Number of nights between one Indian camp and another.” But there were no Indians out on that highway—just big-rig trucks, and lots of them. I white-knuckled my handlebars, clenched my jaw, gnawed on my tongue—like a hand it was, running down the brick wall of my teeth. Too many trucks. Buffalo herds of them. Me running, running hard like a horse, hearing the deafening sound of an enormous migration, like drums, and then voices, like birds—crows cawing, finches whistling, and finally geese honking loud right behind me—and I was pulled into the song of it all—I sprouted wings, great black wings—and I flew. …

  Oh shit,” in the immortal words of Louis No Wind. But I was the deer this time, airborne and on my way into the ditch on the side of the road. Which, as I flew outward over it, I realized was more than a ditch. More like a whole creek bed, deep and sloping down, down, down. A beautiful cottonwood, like a great green flower, sat in the vase of the little canyon, and it whispered a koan: Hoka hey.

  I let go of the bike and leaned back, strangely calm, time arrested. We separated like a rocket from its booster. Me the booster, left to fall away, while the bike continued on into the great green, silvery blossom of Venus, undulating in the breeze.

  I landed hard on my butt, toward my left side, and as I did, I felt a terrible pain stab through my left leg. I slid through stone and brush, grabbing for anything I could get my hands on, trying to slow down, my leg now throbbing, sending shooting arrows of pain into my brain, as a dusty brown cloud rose around me. In the distance I heard a crash and knew that that was the bike. It had reached the base of the tree and the water next to it, as I’d heard a splash among the sounds, which were crashing and metallic, cacophonous with bouncing rubber, the thrown-sack thud of the panniers, rocks and dirt and brush disturbed.

  I waited for everything to stop—for the silence—to assess the wreck. I waited until the cloud of dust floated above me through the branches of the cottonwood, where I heard the birds again. They flew in and out of its branches, which spread out over and above me. There was the wind too, and grasshoppers, bees, flies, the water babbling—and all along the creek bed, chokecherry and willow.

  Eden, the sequel.

  And then the pain, like a stone, an enormous heavy glowing hot stone right in the center of my left thigh. Flat on my back, I didn’t want to look. Instead I rolled my head back and looked up behind me, from where I’d come. The road. Dear lost road. It was at least twenty feet above me, and it was a steep culvert, full of brush and rocks the size of human heads or bigger. One, not far above me, had blood on it.

  I got up on my elbows slowly, carefully, wincing, and looked down, spitting out grass and gravel as I did so. There was my bike, bent and twisted, having hit the tree before it could reach the creek.

  And then I saw something worse—Jimmy!

  The purple bag had opened, still hanging from the handlebars of the bike, and falling like sand in an hourglass, in a steady thin stream, was Jimmy, down into the piled stone, over the little flowers in their crevices, the weeds and the dirt, and on through them all into the creek, bleeding a final stream of gray blood to flow away off to who knows where.

  “Jimmy! Fuck, Jimmy.” I attempted to roll to the right and move toward him. The pain arrested me, excruciating and possessing all of my senses in its suddenness: like a hot wave, smelling of burnt sage and dust, tasting of stone, flushing me crimson and causing my eyes to spin dizzily, the cottonwood kaleidoscoping above me. Not a sound at all, because the pain was so loud a blast that it was everything and nothing all at once—a deafening roar, like being sucked under an ocean wave.

  I surfaced, breathing heavily, flat on my back, looking into the sky, the great white buffalo clouds floating merrily along east, leaving me here, horseless.

  I bent my head, my chin pressed into my neck, finally mustering the courage to inspect my leg. It was bleeding all up the side of my thigh, turning the drab green of Jimmy’s old shorts a deep, dark purple. And something was sticking out, poking the pants outward, tenting the fabric—and it sure wasn’t a hard-on. I guessed—no, dreaded—it was bone and that I probably had a compound fracture, because the pain was making me chew on my tongue again, grit my teeth.

  Oh my God.

  I was in some kind of trouble.

  “Forgive me, Jimmy,” I whimpered. And then it all came down. How I didn’t kill him when he asked, and now how I’d failed once more—to get him back home to Buffalo. A ridiculous screwup.

  I was mad and cursed the truck that had clipped me. And I cursed my stupid life, and my backasswards idiot idea of ever even coming out here. And I owed my poor mother a phone call too. I wished I’d just stayed home, or not let Louis and Eugene throw me back out on the road. And then I remembered what Louis had said: “Asking, Blue Truck; not wishing, but asking … the Great Spirit wants you to live.”

  “Great Spirit, whoever you are, please help me!”

  It gave me a left hook.

  I don’t know if it was shock—I’d never been in any situation like that before—but I passed out as the pain passed through me again. When I woke up it was already dusk.

  I knew it was time to do something, that I had to get out of there.

  I inspected my leg again and the purple stain was growing. I had to stop that. I found a way to sit up and get my shirt off, wincing every time I twisted one way or the other. I wrapped it around the top of my leg for a splint, hoping to stop the bleeding, and realizing as I did so that I’d now likely freeze to death as night was approaching—one sorry-ass Boy Scout.

  I looked around. Bees, birds, and bats were flying in and out of the tree. I looked up at it: a big BVM. Three wishes and they’re all the same: get me the fuck out of here alive.

  Wisher.

  I put out both arms and tried to see if I could drag myself backwards up the slope, but when I moved but an
inch on my butt, the pain slammed into me like a wall that then proceeded through me and out the other side (a deep bass wave-like sound, looking sort of Rothko as I closed my eyes, close hot heat like in the sauna at the YMCA). I gasped: Fuck.

  I craned my neck around again and looked up, and I knew I’d never be going up there. So I rested. Maybe someone will come. If ever there was a time I needed to run into Louis and Eugene again, this was it. I thought of them, imagined them, tried to will them up that road.

  Wisher.

  I’ll be here for a while most likely, I realized then. Probably through the night—and then some. Probably the rest of my life, which wasn’t looking long at all. Short.

  However long it was going to be, I’d need to get my sleeping bag to stay warm. I leaned up again on my elbows, breathing deeply through the pain, and scanned the wreckage for it.

  “Motherfucker!” I cursed; I’d heard him honking. They always honked, those trucks. Like mooing cows. I took it as a warning, like always, stayed as far right on the shoulder of the road as I could. But he kept honking, and then I was airborne. He must have clipped me. There must have been someone coming the other way. I tried to re-imagine the shoulder, how much room there’d been. It was a curve, definitely a curve, so a truck would play it safe, swing wide outside. One man’s safety is another man’s danger. How Vietnam of him.

  Oh, what did it matter? The only thing that mattered was that he was somewhere getting help. Fat chance. It must have been midday when he hit me, if that. And it’s got to be going on seven or eight—the sun’s setting. They’d have come by now.

  Of course I didn’t get his plates! And what would it matter? Why am I asking myself stupid questions?!

  I located my sleeping bag, right where it should be. I always carried it on the rack that extended over the back wheel of the bike, and it was still attached by the bungee cords I’d used to secure it. A big blue ripe piece of fruit, just out of reach.