by Sarah Black
A week later I pulled my camper up to the Chisos Mountain Basin and found some new trails to run. I almost thought I was getting worse, the longing for Jesse so strong in my chest, I started waking up in the night, my heart racing and the breath wheezing out of my throat. This had happened just after I’d been hurt in Iraq, too, and the counselor had said, panic attacks, nothing to worry about, they’ll go away. I was doing everything I could think of not to turn into some head case, but Jesse was still pounding through my veins like an infection in my blood, and I thought more than once how easy it would be to just go to sleep and not wake up. That would be peaceful, quiet, and the pain would be gone. There were lots of ways to kill a man, lots of ways for a man to die. When I’d spent too much time dwelling on that and scared myself, I went down to the camp store and called The Original.
“Sir. I’m just calling to check in. Is everything okay there in Marathon?”
“No, son. No, it’s not. Jesse’s gone. He tore up his canvases, left them all in a pile for the trashman. Then he kissed me good-bye and got a ride out of here, and I haven’t heard from him since.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Three days. He got word about this magazine cover, and he was happy. Then he put his head down on the table and cried, said you’d never forgive him now.”
“What….”
“The painting. It’s gonna be on the cover of Time Magazine. They’re doing some article about if the country is letting down the vets coming home, and somebody saw the painting up in New York.”
“Jesus! The paint is hardly dry on that thing!”
“You’ve been gone more than a month, Lorenzo. Come on back now, okay?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m scaring myself,” I admitted. “I’m not right. I can’t sleep….”
“Son… please. I would take it as a personal favor if you would find your way back here. I miss having you around. I’m afraid for Jesse. I know it’s not your problem, or your fault, but I’ve never seen him like this. Maybe it’s time for both of you to just settle down a bit and….”
“Okay.” I could hear the worry in his voice, and I hated to think some of that was my fault. “I’ll come in the morning. If Jesse calls, you can tell him I’m coming back, and I’m….”
“Thank you, Lorenzo. I don’t know what he’ll do, if you can’t find it in your heart to forgive him.”
Chapter Twelve
I WENT back to The Original’s house, and we tried to get back to work. After a week of drawing crap, we both gave it up. Jesse’s absence felt like a gaping wound. I ran too long every morning, and the old man started sleeping late, and evenings, we sat together on the porch, and it was all we could do not to cry. I thought about giving it up, going back into the USMC. At least there I knew the rules. At least there I was too busy to stare out into the desert, watch my dreams blow down the street like tumbleweeds.
The old man got an envelope in the mail when I’d been back two weeks, and inside was a drawing and a letter. The drawing was colored pencil, of The Original, Uncle George, and me, sitting on the porch. I remembered the night Jesse had hung around with his camera, taking pictures. Across the bottom, he wrote, this is a picture of the three men I love.
I set it up on the kitchen table, propped up between the napkin holder shaped like a chicken and the salt and pepper shakers. The old man read the letter, then he sighed and studied the picture. “He’s okay. He’s in New York, doing some crap for the museum. He says he’s going to that big peace rally that’s being held in Washington in a couple of weeks. He’s speaking the day after the Time cover comes out. He asked me to let you know.”
“It’s that fuckhead Sam who’s arranging all this?”
“I think so, but he didn’t say. I don’t know how much of it’s the museum, asking him to do things. He was supposed to be working on the rest of the paintings. I got the feeling they bought the first one, with a rider they could have all of them. They’re probably asking him when he’s gonna get back to work.”
I had been out to the studio. It looked forlorn, abandoned, and the pile of his ripped and torn canvas had been hauled off by the trash men before I’d pulled my Bambi behind the house and parked it.
The Million Man March for Peace was being sponsored by a couple of the vets’ groups, as well as the usual doves. The plan was for a rally on the Mall in Washington, and there were three days’ worth of speakers. Jesse was scheduled to speak about his painting on the first morning. He called The Original, told him about it. I stayed out on the porch, and he must not have asked to speak to me, because the old man was off the phone when he came out to sit with me. “He says he wants you to watch when he talks, Lorenzo. He has something to say he needs you to hear. They’re gonna show a copy of the painting. He wanted me to tell you. He says as far as he knows, no one has identified you as the man in the painting, but he doesn’t know how long that’s gonna last.”
“I’ll watch it with you.”
“It’s gonna be on CNN.”
We both got up early, had our bacon and fried egg sandwiches in front of the TV. It was the only time I remembered the TV being turned on since I’d been there. He turned the channel to CNN, and we watched footage of the National Mall filling up with men. There was a stadium set up at one end, shaped like a clamshell, with the Washington Monument as a backdrop, and a big screen for video. Oh, God. It must have been forty feet high. There was a broadcast message from the President, then a retired general came onto the stage and spoke about how peace starts in the home. Jesse came next.
He was dressed in his brown jeans and boots, with a silk shirt the color of his eyes, stormy blue-gray. He had been to the barber, and his hair was cut short. He looked tough, with none of his usual silly gay boy. He looked out over the audience and spoke into the microphone. “My name is Jesse Clayton, and I’m from Marathon, Texas.” A big cheer went up from the crowd, and the camera panned to a group that was heavy on the cowboy hats and Lone-Star belt buckles. They cut back to Jesse. “I want to tell you a little bit about my family.” A picture flashed up on the screen behind him, of a young man in jungle fatigues, the backdrop unmistakably the jungles of Vietnam. “This is my grandfather, Staff Sergeant Jesse Clayton. He served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1968 with the Third Marine Regiment. In Khe Sanh, for those of you who remember, and know what that means.” A new picture came up, a handsome man in a flight suit, with Jesse’s blue eyes, leaning against the door of a SAR helicopter somewhere in the desert. “This is my father, Captain Jesse Clayton. He was killed in Iraq in 1990.”
I remembered telling him he didn’t understand what the uniform meant, that he didn’t know what it meant to serve. The old man reached over and took my hand, and the screen behind Jesse filled with an image of Death of a Grievous Angel. As I feared, it was forty foot tall, and even more shocking than it had been the first time I had seen it. The crowd was stunned into silence. Jesse waited for a moment, then he spoke again. “My name is Jesse Clayton. I painted Death of a Grievous Angel. Like my father and grandfather before me, I serve the cause of peace….” He made a sound like a hiccup, then he put his hand up over his chest, like he was touching one of my shrapnel scars. The old man next to me had his head down, and he didn’t look up until the pressure of my fingers on his hand got painful. Jesse coughed, and blood was leaking between his fingers, dripping down the front of his beautiful silk shirt. He swayed, then dropped to his knees, and somebody started screaming, and the image of the painting on the screen never moved.
I WAS driving hell-bent for leather toward Odessa. The Original had a map and a phone open against his ear. “Get the plane fueled up, son. We need to leave soon as we get there.” He listened, then, “No. No stops. Just do what you have to do, and get me the fuck to Washington DC, understand? You can call anybody you need to call once we’re in the air. Right. Now step on it, boy.” I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the pilot, but we were already pushing ninet
y. “Okay, Lorenzo. Once we get into Odessa, we’ll follow the signs for the airfield. I know where to go. You just drive.”
“You got the fuckhead’s number? He might know what’s going on.”
The Original flipped through the pages of a tiny address book he’d stuck in the breast pocket of his shirt. He dialed, listened. “It’s going to voice mail.”
“Tell him to call us, okay?”
“I got a better idea.” He dialed again. “I’ll call Jesse’s number.” He waited for a moment, and I pushed the truck a little faster. I thought I could smell something burning from under the hood. “Yeah, Sam? This is Jesse Clayton. Where is he, son?” He listened for a couple of minutes. “Okay. You stay with him. Don’t leave him there alone. We’ll be there as soon as I can get a plane. Yes, we. Me and Lorenzo Maryboy, who the fuck do you think? You tell Jesse that we’re coming, you hear me? You tell him hang on till we get there.” He closed the phone and looked over at me. “He’s alive, in the trauma unit at Washington Hospital Center. He’s going into surgery as soon as they get some blood in him and get his blood pressure stabilized.” He reached over and patted my thigh. “He’s not going to die knowing you’re coming, Lorenzo. Don’t you know how hardheaded that boy is?”
We got to Odessa without the highway patrol running us in, which I thought was a miracle, and the plane was ready to take off as soon as we got to the airport. We couldn’t get any news while we were in the air, but I just assumed the old man was right, and Jesse would not dare die when he knew we were coming.
The airport in DC was crawling with men in uniform, and they ran us through metal detectors and shoved paperwork at us before The Original lost his cool and started shouting. Jesse was alive. That was the first thing they told us. I don’t know what branch of the government it was who eventually put us in the back of a black sedan and took us to the hospital, but I got a couple of careful looks from the men driving. The Original gave me an elbow. “They were probably staring at that picture of you for ten minutes before somebody thought to shut it off. It’s been on continuous loop on CNN for eight hours, Lorenzo. I would say at this point every person in America will be able to identify you without your clothes, if you happen to be wearing boots and a cowboy hat, and hanging from a cross.”
“I estimate that projection made my dick seven and a half to eight feet long.”
“Yep. You may be right. I would say that’s some false advertising, son.”
We had to look out the windows to keep from falling over in hysterics. The Original got back on the phone. “We’re in DC, on the way to the hospital.” He listened, then, “We’ll be there in a few minutes. You can talk to him then.” He looked over at me, tucked the phone into his shirt pocket. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah? I want to kick his sorry ass back to San Francisco. What did he say about Jesse?”
The Original had tears in his eyes. “He’s out of surgery. He’s in the intensive care unit.”
“Okay,” I said, taking his hand. “Okay, that’s all we need. He’s alive. Just give him a chance.”
I WAS standing outside the glass door of Jesse’s room, watching the equipment that was breathing for him. He had a plastic tube down his throat, and some machine was pushing breaths of air down the tube. I started breathing with the machine, like I could keep all those monitors quiet and running, if I could breathe for him. The Original was standing next to me.
“You make sure somebody’s got his boots. He is going to be so pissed off if somebody makes off with those boots.”
“I’ll take care of it.” He put his hand on my shoulder. Sam was in the waiting room behind us, giving updates to the reporters who were calling. He kept staring at the back of my neck. I turned around, looked back long enough so he knew I was thinking of ripping his throat out with my teeth. A nurse came around the corner, wearing blue scrubs, her face tired. “Okay, when we go in, you’ve got just a couple of minutes. He may be able to hear you. You can touch him, hold his hand. Who do we have? Grandfather, and who’s his partner?”
Sam stood up, and I snarled at him before I could stop myself. “You can sit the fuck back down.” I turned to the nurse. “I’m his partner.”
She looked at me for a moment, then her face cleared. “Oh, right! I saw the painting. Death of a Grievous Angel. Brilliant.”
His eyes were closed, the tape holding the tube in place obscuring the lower half of his face. There was a smear of dried blood on his forehead. I couldn’t make myself look below his neck. The Original took his hand. “Hey, Jesse. Me and Lorenzo are here with you, son. We’re gonna stay with you, then you come on back down to Marathon with us when you get out of the hospital. We’re lonely for you, Jesse. We want you to come home.” Then the old man had his head lowered and was weeping silently, still holding Jesse’s hand.
I found a wet wipe on the bedside table, scrubbed the blood off his forehead. He had a little monitor on his fingertip, and I saw it move. I watched it, and it moved again, so I took his hand. There was dried blood on the palm, and I scrubbed at it. I couldn’t stand to see this, him lying there with blood on his hands, blood on his chest. After I had his hand clean, I reached up and pulled the sheet down just a bit, until we could see the bandage on his chest. There was a thick tube coming out from under the gauze, and it was draining blood into a bubbling plastic box hanging next to the bed. “He’s got a chest tube,” I told The Original. “I had one when I got the shrapnel in my chest. They hurt like a bitch.” I studied the bandage, but I couldn’t see anything else, and when I looked back up to his face, his eyes were open.
I didn’t know if he could see me. He looked scared, confused. I leaned over until my face was over his. “Jesse.” He blinked, and I waited till the machine had delivered its next breath. “You’re in the hospital. You’re okay. Nothing to worry about.” I reached for his hand, and he squeezed my fingers just a bit. “I’m here, Jesse. I’m not going anywhere.”
And he was seeing me, then. I could see the change in his eyes, hearing what I was saying, and the tears slipped out of the corners of his eyes and slid down toward his ears. I leaned closer. “I’ll never leave you. I love you too much. I tried not to, but you were too strong for me.”
And the nurse stuck her head inside the door. “That’s good for now. Let’s give him a rest.”
We got to sit in the waiting room with the fuckhead, who appeared to me to be enjoying his role of keeper of the floodgates. “I want you to do something for Jesse,” he said, snapping his phone shut. I waited. “You probably didn’t see the news, since you were on the plane, but everybody’s waiting to see if he’s okay. It will mean a lot to this peace march if he makes it.”
“If he makes it? Isn’t that nice. It will mean something for a lot of people if he makes it.”
“This was important to him.” Sam looked exhausted suddenly, his face an unhealthy gray. “Look, you can think whatever you want about me. But he wasn’t doing this for the money. He had something to say. He wanted to say it with his painting, and he wanted to say it with this peace march. Now, are you gonna help him or not?”
The Original stood up next to me.
“What is it you want me to do?”
“I want you to go on the stage at the rally and tell everyone that Jesse is going to live.”
“And by any chance, will there be a video projection of Death of a Grievous Angel behind me, when I say this?”
“Yes. And I want you to pull your shirt open, let everybody see your chest, before you say anything.”
“Excuse me?”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Let them see he was telling the truth. Let them see your scars, so they’ll know his painting was telling the truth. You let everybody get a good look. Then you tell them he’s going to live.”
I stared at him. He was right. Let them see he was telling the truth. I didn’t think that painting needed corroboration. But it would be a fine piece of TV. It occurred to me that he might be the most manipu
lative person ever to walk the face of the earth. If he was a bug, I would have squashed him under my heel without a second thought.
“I’ll do this. And then you’re out of his life. You take your commission, and you make whatever arrangements you need to make with the money, and then you let him go, you understand me?”
He started to protest, and I stood up, reached for the hem of my T-shirt, and pulled it over my head. He looked hard at the scars on my chest and the muscles across my shoulders. “Fuck. Yeah, fine, cowboy. You take him. He’s yours.”
The Original tugged me back and spoke to Sam. “Son, you look tired. Why don’t you take a break? Get some rest? You can come get Lorenzo when you want him for your dog and pony show.”
Sam wouldn’t look at me, and I pulled my T-shirt back on. “Fine. Where’s he gonna be?”
I just shook my head, heard the gentle irony in The Original’s voice. “He’s gonna be here, with Jesse.”
I waited outside the glass box for my five minutes every hour, and after a while, The Original and I took turns sleeping, so someone was always awake in case he wanted us. In the morning, the nurse showed me where the shower was, and I went downstairs to the barber shop and got my hair cut in a USMC regulation high and tight. I wanted to look good if I was going to strip for CNN. The Original was looking tired, old and frail, and I tried to talk him into going to a hotel to sleep, but he wouldn’t leave.
They took the breathing tube out early on the third morning, and I could hear Jesse cry out in pain when he coughed. His throat was full of fluid, but when he coughed, it hurt his chest so much he was crying. I went into the room with the nurse, lifted him up and bent him over, held my hand over his chest wound while he coughed. “That’s right,” the nurse said, grabbing a basin. “You’ve done this before.”
When he could breathe again, I brought the little toothbrush and paste I’d bought downstairs and brushed his teeth. He took a sip of water, swished, and spit the toothpaste out in the basin. Then I wiped his face with a wet wipe, scrubbed the last remains of the adhesive from his chin. He lay back against the pillows, exhausted. He opened his eyes, watched me, and I leaned over and kissed his lips. “Minty and fresh,” I said, kissing him again. He looked at me, and I watched his eyes fill up with tears, spill over. “None of that,” I said, kissing his eyes, his nose, kissing his mouth again. “Jesus, Jesse, I just kissed you ten times, and your heart rate didn’t go up enough to alert the nurse. I’ll have to do better next time.”