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  A Horse Named Sorrow

  Trebor Healey

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  The author wishes to thank the Morris Graves Foundation for their generous support in providing a writing residency where much of this story first emerged.

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

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  Copyright © 2012

  The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Healey, Trebor, 1962-

  A horse named Sorrow / Trebor Healey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-299-28970-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-28973-7 (e-book)

  1. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E24H67 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2012009961

  Parts of this book have been published in earlier versions. An initial short draft first appeared online as “The Mercy Seat” in Blithe House Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Spring 2004). Chapters 28 and 30 first appeared as “Boy Who Don’t Talk” in Blithe House Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Summer 1999). Chapter 3 first appeared as “Jimmy in the Bath” in Quickies 3, edited by James C. Johnstone (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Chapter 43 first appeared as “St. Andy” in Big Trips, edited by Raphael Kadushin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

  For

  Alex Nowik

  Daniel Kopyc

  Ezequiel Yedro

  Contents

  Cover

  Imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Horse Named Sorrow

  Prologue: Rusty

  A Horse Named Sorrow

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  And the carny had a horse, all skin and bone … that he named Sorrow

  Nick Cave, “The Carny Song”

  A Horse Named Sorrow

  “Yellowdog, where does sorrow go?”

  He held his heart. “Lives here, in each of us.”

  “So why was it running around in that horse?”

  “Sometimes it does that. I’ve seen fear do that, and once I saw hate do that in a pack of stray dogs. When there’s too much of something in one place, it runs around.” He motioned with his hand. “Once I saw a whole buffalo herd named Sorrow. It happens. Now, put your story in the fire.”

  Prologue: Rusty

  I’m a clown. And I don’t mean that in the sense of being a fool either—although I’ve been that too. I mean, I’m an actual clown—as in I wear face paint (an exaggerated frown, of course), a big red nose, balloon pants, and giant orange shoes. I juggle; I fall; I’m a fool for hire now instead of just doing it pro bono. I’m not so different from any other clown except for my prosthetic leg, which I use to great effect. I’ve got my clown pants put together in such a way that I can knock it out from under me. Then I’m able to use it as a prop: putting it back on upside down, or carrying it around under my arm while I hop about; I shake it at children; toss it sometimes into the audience if the kids are old enough to catch. They either howl with laughter or are reduced to utter silence. The two most important things in the world right there in the same place.

  Imagine that.

  They call me Rusty.

  And I don’t speak. Ever.

  So I guess you could say I’m a mime too. That’s on account of Jimmy, who always told me I talked too much, and Eugene, who showed me how not to.

  The hardest part is not singing, of course.

  But I do hum and laugh and groan and make all the animal noises.

  I became a clown for the usual reasons—because things didn’t work out. On a grand scale. That’s the cliché of clown stories, I know. Yet I didn’t go bankrupt or lose my family in a tornado or anything like that. I just lost Jimmy, which amounted to the same thing, and then some.

  Because it was like a tornado, the way it came, leaving nothing behind but dust and ruination— and Jimmy’s voice as he grabbed hard ahold of my wrist with what strength he had left, his big hollow dark eyes looking at me: “Don’t forget to take me back the way I came, Seamus . . . road’s the place for lost souls.”

  The question that was my face.

  “Promise?”

  I nodded. Then I kissedg him on the forehead and sat holding his hand, listening to the rhythm of his breathing— and humming along with it—as he made his way toward sleep.

  Jimmy was a song, see? And the song’s over. Let me tell you the story. You read and I’ll hum.

  A Horse Named Sorrow

  1

  Jimmy came from Buffalo, New York, and he had the acronym with him on the train platform the day I met him. Along with everything else: the bicycle he’d named Chief Joseph, the pannier bags, the tattoo of the Chinese character for “good” etched where his right sideburn should have been and the little bull’s-eye tattoo smack dab between his eyes (he’d later tell me it was his third), the four thousand dollars in cash tucked inside that book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and his made-up mind. Made me close shut what I’d been reading: Useless Facts & Other Fauna.

  He looked cute and interesting, and I stared at him and studied him, waiting to see if he’d look back my way for too long or not. His hair was a grown-out dye-blond, black as engine grease underneath, and he was wearing old green army fa
tigue cutoffs that hung loose around his insubstantial waist. He had a waif ‘s long bony chest and knobby shoulders under his black long-sleeved T-shirt with the big red asterisk/ mandala symbol of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on it.

  I’d been wallowing for hours in one of my dark moods, meandering around Oakland so as to avoid seeing anyone I knew, taking a break from San Francisco, making my rounds of the sacred places of my own lesser mythology—the museum, the lake, coffee shops under the forlorn, all-is-vanity flashing of the big neon sign at the Grand Lake movie theater—and wondering and pleading with each for a sign, a finger pointing to where I should go with my stalled-out little life, as if these landmarks were great cromlechs or Easter Island stone heads imbued with wisdom.

  And then Jimmy: a handsome stranger from faraway, and with a mystical steed too because there were strings tied all over his bike—so many, you couldn’t even tell what color it was underneath.

  And, sure enough, when I raised my eyes, his were looking back at me. And for the briefest of moments we stared. His perfect chin and scruff, his wide mouth, his cheekbones. Then he looked away, and there followed the nonchalant slow return—and me doing the same—and round in circles it goes: the timeless dance of the sugar plum faeries.

  A lit match.

  And I was tow. Because despondency always made me feel epically horny. Maybe it was just my low-intensity suicidal thoughts—the last stand of my gonads? One last statement before oblivion? Or perhaps my body just knew it was the only way to get me to stick around and thus roused me from my stupor with that old standby lust, promising connection and reminding me there were things here otherworldly and transcendent already—that “little death” that beat all swan dives off the Golden Gate.

  Consequently, any boy who appeared at such a time was bound to carry a certain weight, a sort of saving grace, a fateful kind of gravity. Which perked me up like no monthly five-minute appointment with yawning, obese Dr. Pinski at County Mental Health ever could. Pinski, who couldn’t have spotted a suicide if the malcontent’s errant bullet ricocheted off his desk and grazed him with a flesh wound. And chances are it would be a flesh wound, because he was packing. Flesh. Lots of it, too. Pinski, who, just last week, after cursorily poking around my psyche, quickly wrote me a prescription for the latest antidepressant, in the middle of which he pulled back his sleeve to check his watch, tearing the scrip from his little pad, proffering it, and impatiently blurting out: “Call me if there are side effects. See you next time.”

  “What kind of side effects?” I furrowed my brow, looking at the latest ominous drug name with its characteristic z’s and x’s.

  “Ask the pharmacist; nothing major—vertigo, dry mouth, seizures,” he’d snapped, as he’d hefted his substantial girth onto its feet and reached across the desk one more time to shake my hand, grinning like a car salesman.

  Therapy, the lemon.

  But the drugs were all free: Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft—like some sick pantheon of old gods who sounded anything but cheerful.

  Happy as a clam.

  I gobbled up Pinski’s SSRIs—but sure as the stranger standing on the train platform fifteen feet in front of me, I knew in my bones only a boy could heal me.

  The sweet junk of him filled my veins. Endorphin, Andy Orphan, Orphan Andy. Because San Francisco was a refugee camp of orphans, and he looked far from home and unkempt. Fate, sure thing.

  And I was feeling grateful for it just then, full of a familiar greed to hear his voice. A crowded train arrived. People poured on and off. And he just kept on looking about and then right back at me. For too long. And it wasn’t just the look in his case. Everything about him was long: his long torso and the long knobby legs and arms; his long journey and his long nose; his long face, and later his long dick and his long, long story. A horseboy, that’s what he was.

  Pawing the pavement.

  “I think you gotta wait,” I said loudly across the now deserted platform so he’d hear me. He looked up at the dusty, grimed clock to see it was 5:03. “Rush hour; no bikes till six,” I sighed.

  “And who are you—the station master?” he flirted.

  “Me? I’m just a whelp—I got no authority.”

  “A whelp?”

  “A baby tiger.” And I strolled over and showed him my book of useless facts with its long lists that were suddenly useful.

  “You look full-grown to me.”

  “Trust me, I’m half-baked.”

  “Why a tiger?”

  “A whelp.”

  “Well, why a whelp then?”

  “I just like the word. I could as well be a pullet. That’s a baby hen. Shoat’s a baby pig. Elver’s a baby eel.” (And I began to read compulsively, masking my nerves—or not.) But I soon grew afraid of being a bore, so I shifted to questioning him. “Where’d you come from?” I queried, looking at the bike and its strings—me, a nervous pullet of chatter.

  “Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo. Let’s see—” (consulting my book) “that’d be a calf.” I looked at him regretfully. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize, I hate the place. Besides, I’m all grown up.” And he grinned again.

  I smiled back. “Did you ride this bike all the way from Buffalo?”

  He nodded, arching his brows.

  The passion: a dye-blond crown of thorns.

  My emotions were like a crowd. Give ’em what they want. Barabbas or the J-man. There’s gonna be a crucifixion. Well, more or less. Because if you ask me, purveyor of useless facts, the promise of sex with someone you’re starting to like puts you smack dab in the center of time, history, and the universe itself. Right there in West Oakland no less. The birth of a new religion, and all the madness that ensues.

  I smiled and held out my hand. “I’m Seamus.”

  He paused and looked at my hand before taking it, reminding me what a distancing a handshake always was. A safe distance. Gay people don’t generally shake hands, not when they’ve already traversed the distance of acknowledging who and what they are. But it was too early for a hug or a kiss. Instead, he surprised me, grabbing my outstretched hand by the wrist, bending forward and pulling it to his lips, kissing it with a smack like some fairy-tale prince. “Seamus, the whelp,” he said triumphantly.

  “The pullet,” I blushed, disarmed.

  “I’m Jimmy.”

  “You’re no calf.”

  “No? What am I?”

  I could have said a lost puppy, on account of those big brown eyes, or a bantam rooster, with that spiked crest of bleached hair, but I opened the book instead, flipping madly, thinking: I better pick the right one. But I already knew he was a colt. I just didn’t want to give myself away. “You’ve traveled a great distance; you must be a smolt.”

  “What’s a smolt?”

  “Baby salmon.”

  “That doesn’t follow, Seamus.”

  “Why not?”

  “The baby hasn’t been anywhere. I’m an old salmon; the trip’s over.” He looked away momentarily, a hint of sadness in his voice, and being that it was 1990 and he was a young gay man, I knew what he meant straightaway.

  “This book doesn’t have the old ones,” I offered, at a loss.

  He shook his head back and forth, as if he knew that.

  “Ex-smolt?” I offered, arching my brows, chancing a smile. He grinned. “Wanna go somewhere ’til six?” He raised his brows. “Like food, beer, something like that?” I persisted.

  He hesitated. Then: “Sure.”

  And off we went, bike in tow. Bike like a horse. Jimmy too. With his long face and big-lashed dark brown eyes; the long slender nose. Strong and free and just a tad startled. Worn-out by miles too. Half salmon and half Pony Express. Some kind of mythic animal that hadn’t even been thought up yet.

  But he looked nothing like a fish, of course. The fish was inside, in the river of him.

  And, truth be told, I didn’t look anything like a whelp either. That was lost somewhere way inside of me too. I was no tiger—if I
could have mustered a feline at all, it’d just be a little stray kitten. Unselfconfident and somewhat befuddled by life, I had a wide-open, disarming face that made me look like I was always in the middle of asking a question, or perhaps just waiting for an answer, question posed or no. My hair was just brown then, its normal color; kind of long, curly, always messy—a right when you have curls. My eyes were gray like slate, but they turned blue when I was unsure. They were blue almost all the time then.

  “What do I look like, Jimmy?” I asked him after he’d negotiated the exit gate. He gave me that one arched brow of his. “I mean—like which animal?”

  “I don’t know, Seamus. A dog, I guess. A lost dog. A mutt.” I frowned. “Friendly,” he said with a smile.

  “Loyal, a good companion,” I added.

  And then we were on the sidewalk, in the afternoon sun.

  “So what’s with the strings?” I inquired, looking more closely at the bike and its adornment in every color of thread and twine.

  “Each one’s a poem. I hope.” He laughed. “I just collect ’em as I go, and when I have the time, I’ll tell their story.”

  “Looks like a long friggin’ story.”

  He sighed. And we stood there and smiled, gazing at his threads.

  I didn’t actually know a place to go around there. It was a rough neighborhood, West Oakland: an old-style ghetto, houses always burning down. Beautiful old burnt-down houses from high above, out the windows of the BART train. Lots of liquor stores and wide empty avenues, crowded street corners with all number of children and teenagers swatting each other. A place most people only passed through—or over, actually—admiring the public sculpture of incinerated domiciles.

  We ended up sharing a forty-ouncer. On the curb, in a brown paper bag, a block from the station.

  “Where you goin’ now, Jimmy?”

  “This is it, man. This is my destination.”

  “This street corner?”

  He grinned. “San Francisco.”