A Horse Named Sorrow (33 page)

“Jimmy,” I muttered.

But he wasn't there, and all the white towels turned to snow and then a big white sheet on the rickety bed on Guerrero Street, and I was with Jimmy, naked, and he held his finger to his lips and pointed at the ceiling. And a movie of our whole life together played there. There he was on the platform as the movie began, and me finding him. We rode the train to San Francisco and Chief Joseph was sitting on the BART train a few seats down. He held his finger to his lips as well. I watched our life in silence—stern looks from Tanya, sweet smiles from the twins, the many embraces of James Damon Keane. The sun rose and fell quickly over San Francisco and Mount Tamalpais, the fog rolled in and out, and Jimmy grew thinner and more peaked, and I grew sadder. And then I turned my gaze from the ceiling screen to look at Jimmy naked next to me and he was a skeleton. I woke with a start and it was night and the cottonwood was a green Virgin Mary and it told me to go back to sleep, and I did.

And Jimmy wasn't there.

Then I was on a gray-white horse riding across what looked like a vast salt plain. I rode faster and faster until it was hard to move and the salt thickened, first to white mud and then to white stones and finally, it was bones—bones two or three feet deep. And it hurt as they rose around me and nicked my shins, and the horse could barely move through them, the bones pressing against us, dense and sharp and unforgiving. The horse was snorting and struggling and sinking as if in a current that was too strong. And all the while that mahjong sound of bones rattling and spilling everywhere.

And then I saw a huge shadow approaching across the endless horizon of bleached white bones, and something came down from the shadow and seized me and pulled me up, up. And I strained to look up and see, and there was Eugene, who had sprouted huge black wings from his shoulder blades, and he was smiling his kind, crooked smile, and I whispered his name as we rose.

I tried to ask him where he was taking me, but the words came slow like a record at the wrong speed. I wanted to say it didn't matter, that I'd go, no matter where it was. I was lost and I'd go.

But it was hot, so hot, and then I saw the sun—the sweet sun—and called out to it by its name:
Jimmy!

And I was blinded by it. And then Eugene let me go.

And I fell.

Hot and blind and shedding and snapping.

And falling.

And I awoke again to the sun in my eyes, my forehead on fire.

After a while I slept again, and I was a burning thing flying through the sky, through cloud herds of buffalo, intent on the earth. I was a meteor, a mass of lava, sweating and throbbing and hot and heavy as stone. And I looked down and below me was Idaho and I was coming down, and all I could see was the sagebrush desert with a blue truck in the middle of it and Louis under the hood. I was the blackberry pie in the sky falling to create the Craters of the Moon! I tried to yell a warning to Louis but no words emerged.
Bam!
—and I hit the earth hard.
Bam!
—and it felt like those doors that I'd passed yesterday, like interplanetary kidney stones.

I awoke to dusk and strained my head to see my throbbing leg, purple and burning like a mass of lava. And then I slept again and I was a bird flying above the lava—a bird on unsure wings. And the lava cooled and was Craters of the Moon again, but something more. It wasn't lava now, but a thing that once lived and was now dead—an enormous buffalo, on its side, a stream of blood, like a river—a river from underground, the very one Eugene and I had made love alongside in the cave—flowing crimson into the sagebrush nowhere that was scattered with bones. And the river flowed through them, soaking them red, inundating and running through them as they piled up, clacking in the babbling stream—and I could see the gray streak of Jimmy's ashes in the bloodwater, and I followed it.

Jimmy
.

And then the blood river ran faster and the bones piled up into cataracts, and pretty soon there were larger things in the riverbed—white metal wreckage: washing machines and refrigerators, dryers, ovens, and then there were cars, all bone-white as ghosts: Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Dakotas, Winnebagos, Impalas, Mustangs, Pintos, Falcons. And there were people struggling to get out of them as they filled with blood. They were the Edward Curtis chiefs from the book: Red Cloud and Dull Knife, Sitting Bull and American Horse—and another in the shadows I couldn't quite see—shaking the door handles, banging on the windshields. Like horses that have fallen and can't get up.

All submerged in the red tide.

And the water filled with all sorts of things, and when I tried to make them out, they all turned into salmon. And we were on the crest of a great wave, some of the salmon flying out in front. Into sagebrush nowhere. And then out in the distance I saw hundreds of
2001
monoliths in a long snaking line, which as I got closer I saw were dominoes, thousands and thousands of dominoes, receding into the sagebrush forever ahead of us. And on the white circles of the dominoes were the faces of my queer brothers, ashen, emaciated, some covered in lesions, some peaceful, some raging, some demented, oblivious, asleep: Kyle and Vance, Gavin and Josh, Mark and Henry, half the boys I'd just seen in the sauna, ACT UP people and legions of others I'd never known, but who I'd seen on the streets of San Francisco. Even Thomas and Franco, my brothers for the love of Jimmy.

The salmon flung themselves ahead of the bloody tide, hitting the first domino, and when it fell and went under, the next and the next, and so on. All of those faces falling. And then there were butterflies and birds slamming into them, locusts and grasshoppers, flies and frogs. All of those faces and all of those dominoes swallowed by the red wave. The din of them falling, so fast and heavy, pounding—like wild horses, buffalo, rain, drums, clacking mahjong pieces.

I covered my ears, closed my eyes.

Then the river of blood no longer flowed, but was like a great sea and it was rising all around me, boiling and rising. And I had to tread water or I'd drown. But I couldn't keep my head up. Something was pulling me, pulling me by my left leg, pulling me under, back down. I struggled, flailed with my arms, swallowing great gulps of blood, my tears gray and ashen, muddying the bloody flood.

And then in the distance I saw a shore: green grass, RVs, geese in formation in the distance coming toward me. It was Unity Lake, and all my relations, there they were again, in their white towels, sweating in the hot sun. I swam with all my might toward them, pulled and pulled to get away from whatever held me. But I was moving so slowly, and the birds were coming so fast. The formation of geese grew into a huge black cloud of birds, cawing—a murder of crows and vultures that dove like pelicans into the red lake of blood, scooping it up in their craws that then dripped like those skull cups held by wrathful deities in Tibetan tankas.

I thought of the bardo then, and figured I must be dead.
None of it's real
, Jimmy'd read to me—
just the illusions of your own mind
. Beyond hope and fear.

And then the red water roiled and boiled, and from it rose a great white Buddha, enormous and fat, laughing, with blood running off his body from surfacing, and a big red clown's nose and a giant red smile painted on his face. A black crow perched on one of his shoulders, the wind rustling its feathers, and he was seated on a giant lotus flower where kneeled the twins in their little towels like altar boys, both with holy jars of Best Foods Mayonnaise, full and overflowing with diarrhea. And all my relations on the shore grinning crooked like Eugene does, with a sigh, and then a big hearty laugh.

And something pulling my leg.

“
Tell all the people that you see
… ,” the laughing Buddha sang out, quaking. It was Jim Morrison's voice from that song me and my mom would sing to evoke my father.

“
Tell all the people that you see
…” And he just kept laughing, he could barely get the words out—and then he sprouted ten thousand arms and they all swung out like “cut it,” and there was a huge clap, and then black stillness.

My eyes opened to red sirens in total silence. There were cottonwood leaves all around me, like I was up in the tree. The light of day, but overcast.

Then the sound came … voices, radio dispatch, boots in gravel, and snapping branches.

Some man's voice: “I saw smoke, figured a car had gone off the road … so I stopped … but there wasn't any car …”

I winced. I was being put in one of those aluminum stretchers on ropes. There were two men, one on each side of me guiding the basket through the cracking branches and leaves, as the ropes began to pull me up. I wasn't dead, and I smiled at them.

My relations.

One smiled back: “You're gonna make it, buddy, you hang in there.” A horseboy.

It was raining lightly, and I opened my mouth and I drank of it, closing my eyes, and as I did I saw Jimmy, in full health, dye-blond and scruffy, his big brown eyes and his say-nothing smile. He held one finger to his mouth, and with the other hand he reached out a wet finger to place on my tongue like a eucharist, and then he blessed me:
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
And I knew then that I was forgiven, … and Jimmy … it must be day forty-nine … Jimmy's being born.

Somewhere near the top I heard the man's voice again:

“That lightning bolt musta split that tree right in half, and covered him over … only reason I went down was because I saw something sparkling. … I'm a scavenger … steep though … but I've found a lot of things on the side of the road—once a whole Coleman stove, umbrellas, flashlights, shoes …”

I opened my eyes to see him, talking to a fireman, next to his F-150. The Frogman of Wyoming … one last greeting from Jimmy …

And into the ambulance I was trundled; the doors closed, the siren sang, and they took me to Buffalo.