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

out the door and into the street.
    When we finally achieved the threshold and got the mattress in the door, we went back down to get the box spring that we’d left leaning on the wall outside.
    And there they were bouncing themselves off it.
    â€œHey!” Jimmy barked and down the street they ran, yipping and clipping at each other.
    â€œAntidepressants,” I commented in a deadpan to Jimmy.
    He rolled his eyes. “You like kids?”
    I nodded enthusiastically. “I even tutor them, down at the Y.”
    â€œTutor them in what?”
    â€œWhatever. It’s like study hall.” I didn’t go on to explain that I went to be tutored by them more than the other way around. They were far better therapy than Pinski, serotonin reuptake- inhibitoraderos all. Or maybe they just made me try a little harder, since having nervous breakdowns around small children was just not kosher.
    Jimmy stood and looked at me for a few frozen minutes.
    â€œI don’t know. I don’t like kids, but I like people who do.”
    â€œWell, then you like me,” I said triumphantly.
    He grabbed me. “You ever read Burroughs?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œ Wild Boys ?” His face was full of mischief. “Wanna go make a spirit baby, Shame?”
    I nodded emphatically.
    Up the stairs with the box springs. We threw the bed together like a giant sandwich, and then I guess you could say we ate it. Or made the mayonnaise to moisten it up. Same difference. Garnished each other with kisses.
    Lying there spent and naked, up on his elbows, with his cock rakishly splayed across his left thigh, Jimmy winked at me. And then he jumped up and went and gathered strings like berries off his bike, untying several.
    Then Jimmy sat down Indian-style in the middle of the bed, saying, “Let me show you something”—and he tied a yellow string around my wrist and told me: “That one came from a rag that was blowing in the wind, caught on a barbed-wire fence near Gillette, Wyoming. It’s for you.” I nodded a respectful thanks, though I couldn’t imagine why he gave me that one. But I kept listening because there was a whole load of such stories tied all up and down that bike and I wanted to hear them. He stretched out a blue string that he could only remember was somehow about time—”from either Dayville, Oregon, or Ten Sleep, Wyoming, I can’t remember which.” There was a red thread he said belonged to a gay priest in Preston, Iowa, who’d asked but hadn’t received on account of Jimmy wasn’t interested in anything but a place to lay his sleeping bag in the rectory.
    â€œThis one”—and he held up a dingy dark blue-green thread—“I yanked off the blood pressure Velcro thingy the day I found out.”

16
    Up in Sonoma County someone had painted that Katmandu Buddha on a barn and it made me think of Jimmy’s third-eye tattoo.
    â€œIt was very cool once,” he’d said as we lolled on the bed, “but so were a lot of things. I wanna get rid of it.” I agreed with him, it was sort of ridiculous, especially compared with the beautiful Chinese one etched on his sideburn that reminded me of his goodness. Yet after a while the third-eye tattoo seemed so sweet. Jimmy’s mistake. Jimmy’d get shy when I’d run my finger around it. It was a black circle with a red dot in the center, more a bull’s-eye than a human eye.
    â€œThe third eye is the bull’s-eye, silly,” he’d razzed me when I’d mentioned it looked more like a dartboard than an ophthalmological specimen.
    â€œHow ’bout adding a tear?” I said animatedly.
    â€œI never killed anybody. Shut up,” he said, furrowing his brow.
    â€œSo, the real third eye—is it open, Jimmy?”
    â€œI found you, didn’t I? Must be.” He winked.
    â€œAh, Jimmy, I’m not third-eye stuff. Hell, I wouldn’t even wanna know