Read Online A Horse Named Sorrow by Trebor Healey - Free Book Online Page A

and at least deserved justice in return.
    â€œI’ll find someone, don’t you worry.” But my only friends were six-year-olds at the YMCA. Or boys I’d hooked up with. And contacting them—which likely would entail bodily contact—was no longer an option now that Jimmy was in the picture.
    I certainly couldn’t afford paying rent in two places, even though Jimmy said I didn’t have to pay rent the first month. But, as it turned out, Tanya found someone through ACT UP and I was off the hook. I was glad she’d found someone because then she wouldn’t blame me if my choice turned out to be a fuck-up, which was about 75 percent likely.
    Where’d you get the money for this place, and how’d you get it without a job?” I asked Jimmy, hefting a box up the long stairwell from the sidewalk where my pile of boxes sat post-cab ride. The cabbie had even agreed to take the bike, though we’d had to hang it out the back of the trunk. Just then, Jimmy carried it up the stairs before me on his shoulder.
    â€œI gave him six months, up front.”
    I did a quick calculation. That had to be three thousand dollars, give or take. A lot of money. And Jimmy didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who would have that kind of money.
    â€œWhere’d you get the money?” I looked at him, incredulous, as we reached the landing.
    â€œI found it.” He gave me a quick smile over his shoulder, but by the time I registered the oddity of that response, he’d vanished through the door and into the apartment, where he placed the bike carefully in front of the fireplace.
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œIn Eugene,” he answered, without turning around.
    â€œHow do you find that kind of money?” I asked suspiciously.
    He turned and laughed and said: “By reading books.”
    â€œWhat?” I felt like I was talking to Ivan.
    â€œUh-huh,” he said and changed the subject before I could ask where. “Let’s go get that mattress.”
    Of course we had to carry the mattress and box springs ourselves, on top of our heads, as no cab could accommodate their dimensions. But it wasn’t more than twelve blocks anyway, so like ants with our prized sugar we set off—for what lovemaking would soon sprout like flowers upon our holy platform, and feed us all the short days of our betrothal. We were a psalm. And it was right to hold the bed high like a king and carry it above our heads across town, intermittently laughing as we pumped it up and down to prevent our muscles from stiffening.
    Arriving at Jimmy’s door, we met the twins. They’d peeked out previously when we’d unloaded all the boxes from the cab, a wind of ginger, garlic, and sesame oil at their backs. But they’d quickly slammed the door when we got with in five steps of the landing. When we’d showed up with the mattress, however, they’d gotten up the nerve to come out—perhaps emboldened by the fact that our limbs were all occupied with the mattress and we were clearly compromised as predators. Dressed in identical Taiwanese sweat suits, with the small-billed caps to match, they couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.
    As we maneuvered this way and that, they not only came out and watched us get it stuck in the downstairs doorway but went so far as to direct us the minute we got through and up the first few steps.
    â€œOh, oh, no this way. … No, it’s hitting the wall!”
    â€œThe light!”
    â€œNo, up this way—wait!” And like little mice they ran up and down the stairs, under the mattress and in between us, laughing, shouting, and throttling each other.
    â€œHey, you guys aren’t helping,” Jimmy gruffly announced. “Besides, it’s a mattress; it doesn’t matter if it hits the walls!”
    â€œLet’s drop it on them, Jimmy,” I threatened playfully.
    They howled then, and went careening