A Horse Named Sorrow (23 page)

I just smiled. “You seen this shirt before?”

She glared, but didn't answer me.

Inside the meeting room were tables and a countertop with a coffee-maker, foam cups, creamer, a stapler, some scotch tape, and assorted coffee mugs—and bingo, a sink. The room was decorated like a classroom, with the usual Christian art: 1970s-era macramé, children's drawings, paper construction, lots of nature calendars with innocent scenes of butterflies and rabbits, and sometimes children with butterflies and rabbits—and crucifixes of course.

The lady looked at me and said: “You can lean your bike on the counter there and sleep here.”

I rolled my bike across the linoleum-tiled floor and leaned it up against the counter before asking her, “May I see the chapel?” She looked at me as if to say
what for?
Then, overcoming her hesitation, she led me through a darkened doorway into the shadowy little church with its tall, column-like stained glass windows on either side. Three wishes coming right up. But would they count in a Presbyterian church?

Same difference.

“You got the Lord?”

It sounded like another disease, in which case it should be rendered in all caps, with periods in between: L.O.R.D.: the acronym. I wanted to say I got Jesus-Jimmy-in-the-bag.

“I was raised Catholic,” I answered. Trying to pass. But Catholicism isn't much better than Satanism to some Christians, and I suspected too late that that might be the case with her. She just stared, and led me back out of the chapel.

“You been born again?”

“I was raised Catholic.” Not taking the bait, not going to be bullied. I could go sleep outside, down by the river where Satan was blind and snapping like the rattlesnakes of Redmond.

I took a deep breath.

“You oughta read the Bible,” she said, pulling one out of the drawer and placing it next to the coffee machine. “Gotta get right with God.”

I inhaled again and held my tongue. She was putting me up (or rather the church was), so I'd cork it until she left. C.H.R.I.S.T.I.A.N.I.T.Y.: it's not so much the thing itself, but the side effects that kill you—the opportunistic infections of misinterpretation and politics—and the parasites that come with it.

She kept right on looking at me, and that's when I thought that maybe she was mentally slow. “I'm glad you found something that helps you,” I feebly answered.

“Helps me?—I'm saved,” she exclaimed confidently.

“Well, I'm doing my forty days and forty nights,” I answered her.

“You read the Good Book there. It'll help you.” On a whim, I pulled out
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
.

“You ever read this book?”

“I only read the Good Book.”

“This is a good book,” I insisted. She looked at it perfunctorily. “This is a book about faith too. Faith in the U.S. government.”

“Well, we all suffer for our faith,” she said dismissively. At least she got my meaning.

“Well, we suffer with or without it,” I added.

“And no point in suffering for nothing,” she replied. “For the faithful, there's a reward.”

“Didn't work that way for the Indians.”

“They had faith in the wrong thing.” True that. And she pointed to the Bible again. “That's the word of God, not your silly Indian book.”

“Well, I like history.”

“The Bible's got history in it.”

“But it's not mine.”

“It's everyone's history.”

“Not the Indians'.” And I wanted to add: “not the queers', either.”

“Sure it is. God's story is everyone's story.”

“Well, now, that we can agree on.” I smiled and thanked her and turned toward my bike, hoping she'd get the hint that the formalities were over.

“You have a good rest,” she concluded, looking severe. She then headed back over to her little house nearby, sheltered by a clump of trees, looking back frequently. But I felt lucky I didn't look like Jimmy—his tattoos and piercings, the dark eyes and dyed hair. I wasn't clean-shaven, but I hardly even had a beard—and though I smelled carnal, and the shirt was a bit disturbing, I was just not a scary-looking person.

I resolved that I had to sleep in the church, just had to. So I pulled my sleeping bag off my bike rack and took it into the chapel, where I laid it boldly out on the altar like a picnic blanket. That's when I spied the minister's vestments hung up in a closet half-opened in the far corner of the chapel. As I neared it, I noticed a single gold thread hanging off the bottom of the black one, and I went to pull it. But I stopped and thought I'd check the bike first and see if Jimmy'd already done so— and if so, I'd know that he'd been here.

I went back out into the meeting room and searched the bike frantically, and after a few minutes, sure enough, there it was! On the center column, under the seat. He was here! He'd grabbed a thread off that very vestment. I'm sure she remembers the shirt! I'm the second coming. Full circle. A closed loop. Jesus Jimmy.

I heard a knock at the door then. Quickly, I gathered up my sleeping bag, hauled it out of the chapel, threw it down near my bike, and ran to see who was there. But it wasn't the little lady, as I'd feared. Instead, an old man stood at the door, with a long beard, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap with crystals and precious stones sewn into it, forming a sort of shimmering garland around his head.

“Hello,” I said. The question that was my face.

“You on a bicycle?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah . . . the, uh, lady said I could stay here.” But he pushed past me into the rectory before I could finish.

“Let me show you something,” he said earnestly.

“Okay,” I answered, at a loss.

“My name is Woody.” And he quickly sat down at the biggest table, opened his backpack, and pulled out a box of gemstones and Indian arrowheads.

“I'm Seamus.” But he didn't seem to care about that. He was a man on a mission.

“Sit down here,” he ordered me. He explained, as he dug through the box, that he was a prospector by trade. He proceeded to tell me story after story involving old mines he'd unearthed, crystals he'd come upon, Indian burial grounds he'd discovered—secret places no one knew about except him. And now me. And—I was beginning to suspect—all the other thousands of bikers who came through this town.

He gave me three buffalo-bone arrowheads, and then he stood up. “Don't lose these.” And he held my hand in both of his. “They will protect you. Why, if it weren't for these arrowheads,” referring now to the whole box, “I'd be a dead man. There's kids around here who shoot at me. They always miss, of course, thanks to the arrowheads.”

I didn't know if he was talking crazy, but I had a sense it was all at least
based
on fact. He was eccentric enough to be one of those old-time prospectors, and kids did run around with guns out here (my count of gun racks had surpassed my trip-long pancake count in one afternoon). Having been a kid, I could immediately see the reason why kids would harass a man like Woody. He had that outsider-freak-homeless look that kids, in their own insecure way, liked to make fun of, as if to test the powers of their success at human mediocrity. Likely, they used BB guns, but who knows? I wanted to tell him that I was crazy too—that it's okay, I understand. But what was it that Tolstoy could have said, but didn't?
All sane people are the same; all crazy people are crazy in their own unique way.

He let go of my hand, wished me luck, and slipped out as fast as he'd come.

I looked at the arrowheads, remembering Eugene's medicine bag, and the mural he'd drawn under the bridge. I wished then that I had a little bag to hang around
my
neck. Well, I had Jimmy-in-the-bag, best luck I ever had—but way too big to hang around my neck.

I put the arrowheads in there with his ashes—
good luck charms from Woody and Eugene for the both of us, Jimmy. Good luck on day forty-one in the bardo.

Then I thought about him here in this room as I pulled off my shirt and filled the sink to rinse it and wring it out. Thought of him sitting at that table, looking at Woody's crystals with his big brown eyes, his brow furrowed with interest.

I hung the shirt over the back of a chair and took my sleeping bag back into the church and spread it out on the altar again and crawled in. And I wished I could hold him; I wished he had a body still. My hands grasped longingly at the velvet bag. And I thought suddenly how morbid it was to be arriving in all these places where Jimmy'd been—with him but not
with him
, separated by time and space . . .
the mirrors still busy with his presence
. ...

Disembodied. A ghost.

I thought of Eugene then, who did have a body. Indeed. And it made me feel guilty, but I wished I could hold his; I wished I could hold somebody. As full of people as it is, the road's an awfully lonely place.

I dozed off, but when I awoke in the middle of the night, that church was solid black, not a smidgen of light anywhere. So dark, I wondered i fI'd gone blind. I fell back to sleep and dreamed I was in a confessional. “Bless me father . . .” And then I recognized the silhouette through the screen. “Jimmy?—I'm sorry, Jimmy; I'm sorry for letting you down.” He pulled back the screen—looked hot in that collar—and blessed me in Latin:
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
And for penance?
Better luck next time
.

I woke with a start, and it must have been getting close to sunrise, because I could see the inside of the church emerging from shadow all around me, the stained glass coming to colorful life. When I looked up at the cross, I saw Jimmy was on it. I sort of startled then and got up to make sure it was Jesus on the cross and not Jimmy. Upon closer inspection, the long shoulder-length hair gave him away. But I got up on my toes and kissed his feet anyway.

I heard the church lady at the door then, and I hurried to get my things out of the chapel as I heard the lock click. She'll think it a sacrilege for sure that I'd slept on the altar.

We met as I entered from the chapel and she from the door.

“Where'd you sleep?” She eyed me suspiciously.

I cannot tell a lie. “Uh, in the church.” I fished for words. “It was warmer in there—I mean cooler.” She stared at me suspiciously, and then past me toward the darker recesses of the chapel. I almost wanted to share with her how I'd seen a beautiful boy named Jimmy hanging from the cross. But it was so ironically difficult to share a Christian moment with a Christian that I just sighed.

I was still shirtless and felt obscene, so I grabbed my T-shirt and yanked it over my head, disappointed it hadn't completely dried.

“Hope that Woody didn't keep ya up.” She kept looking past me toward the chapel—expecting what? The refuse of my satanic rituals? The burnt offering was right there in the bag.

“I should have warned you,” she went on, “he always comes around when there's people staying here.”

“It's okay, he's a nice man, and I enjoyed talking to him. He gave me some arrowheads.”

“Poor soul,” she stated.

He'll be inheriting the earth, I wanted to tell her, but I wasn't going to get back into all that. She was already glaring at the unopened Bible as I tied my shoelaces. My cue to say adieu. So I thanked her and wished her all the best and got out of there. And she stood with her hands on her hips as I pulled out of the gravel drive on my bike, calling after me, “The town of John Day's just over that next hill there.” She pointed, adding, “God bless.”

So Jimmy'd been wrong about Dayville. It must have been named after this John Day character. But perhaps he too was named after time. Like most places, as it turned out, Dayville was named for just another john. The earth's a whore and the conquerors are all johns—sounds like something someone once said, but I don't know who. Me perhaps.

I wondered then if there were a town named Jimmy or Seamus somewhere. There certainly was a Eugene.

I went for pancakes at Ellen's and made small talk about the church.

“You meet Woody?”

I nodded.

“Poor soul.”

Et tu, Ellen?

She looked off into the middle distance. “He lost his wife, and his mind went with her. Used to be a regular guy.”

Death will do that, I wanted to say. I thought of the arrowheads then—gifts from a crazy brother. Three bones, three wishes—I'd never need the services of a church again. And I thought of Jimmy then too, up on that cross—winced at how it turned me on. I contemplated how he'd look and I enjoyed seeing his body in my mind: the limestone-green paleness of him, the dark hair in his open armpits and at his waist, the vulnerability of his nipples, his torso stretched. I thought of how I got turned on to a crucified Jesus once in a church and had asked my mother why he was so scantily clad up there.

“Well honey, it's hot in Israel . . . and it was a different time, they wore different clothes . . . and they'd been beating him, so even if he had a robe or something, it would have fallen off.”

“Don't you think that his loincloth probably fell off too, and that he was probably really naked when they crucified him?” I persisted.

“Well, I don't think so, honey. You shouldn't think about such things. God doesn't walk around nude.”

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
I gobbled my trinity of pancakes, gulped my coffee, and listened to Ellen talk about all the other bikers she'd met while she stared absently out the window as if waiting for some half-ton that would never come. “Church groups, family reunions, biking clubs, people raising money for cancer . . .”

. . . lost souls?

I asked Ellen then: “Where's the Klamath Reservation?”

She motioned with her head. “Out by the coast. They're salmon people.” Et tu, Klamath? This was getting weird.