you, Mary. I hope I’m not trying to push you into anything.”
“Those are the best boots I’ve ever seen. I won’t be able
to stand it now if I don’t get them. How much do you think
they’ll cost?”
He shrugged. “Six hundred?”
“Sweet Jesus.”
Jesse crossed his arms, gave me a look. “Now you’re
starting to sound like The Original. You’re twenty-seven, so
figure you can wear them till you’re seventy-seven. That’s
fifty years, times twelve months, and that’s how much it will
cost you per month for those boots. ”
“How much?”
“You don’t expect me to do the math in my head, do
you?”
We drove in silence for a while. He was leaned all the
way back, the bucket seat reclined, and had one boot up on
his knee, wiping off the dust.
“Jesse, I’m sorry about Sadie.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. “She was my little pet,
my baby. I used to dress her up and carry her around in my
wagon. She always had those red curls, and I must have
fixed her hair a million times. But she was never strong. It
was like her backbone was made out of paper. One strong
wind, she was laying on the ground at somebody’s feet.” He
rubbed both hands down over his face. “I’m talking about
her in the past tense. God. She came to San Francisco
because I was there, and….”
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His voice dropped off, and he stared out the window.
“We got one more Bathtub Mary to visit. The one down in
Santa Elena Canyon. You up for a little more? I can drive if
you get tired.”
“I’m okay for now. Maybe I’ll turn the wheel over to you
on the way home. We should have got some bottles of water
in Lajitas. Just driving through the desert makes me
parched.”
“We can stop in Terlingua, get some sodas or some tea
or something.”
“Cookies. A burger. That was a lovely salad we had for
lunch, but I’m about ready to run into the desert and wrestle
a longhorn to the ground.”
“How’d you like that steak for supper last night?”
“Oo-rah.”
“That’s what I thought. Is it true Marine Corps
testosterone is a stronger vintage of testosterone than the
rest of us mortals have?”
“You bet.”
We stopped in Terlingua, and I ate a burger and fries
and a beer, and Jesse had a pot of Earl Grey. He held out his
hand when we were done, and I gave him the keys and
settled myself in the passenger seat for a nap.
He woke me when we were close to Santa Elena Canyon.
The air was cooler here, with a hint of moisture in the air.
“Are we near the river?”
“Close,” he said. “We’ve got a bit of a hike to see this.
Not too far.”
He parked the truck, and we climbed up a little trail
until we crested a hill. “It’s right down there,” he said,
pointing. From the hill, it looked like the first one we’d seen,
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tiny and handmade. When we got closer, I could see this one
had been made by children. The Virgin was plaster, worn by
the rain, about a foot tall with pale blue robes, her arms out
and her eyes raised to heaven. The pictures surrounding her
were all of older people, and the notes and prayers had been
written in crayon or pencil, by young hands.
Jesse reached down, cleaned the sand around the
shrine. “I came here when my grandmother died,” he said. “I
was about seven, I think. Maybe six. We put her picture
inside, and a prayer card, and I lit a candle and prayed that
the Virgin would make sure my grandmother got into
heaven, even though she had spanked my butt the night
before she died, and kept me from those cookies.”
That was the moment, watching Jesse pick dead leaves
from the shrine, that I fell in love with him.
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Chapter Seven
THERE was a slow roll in my chest, like some strange,
distant planets had suddenly come into alignment. I rubbed
the scars on my chest, remembered the split second after the
bomb fell when I didn’t realize I’d been hit, and I stood up to
go help my buddies, and then I saw the smoking pieces of
black metal sticking out of my chest. My stomach had
dropped, and something, my heart, I thought, had done a
slow roll. So what did it mean, that the way I felt when I
realized I had fallen in love was the exact same way I’d felt
when I nearly died from exploding shrapnel?
I closed my eyes. Tried to force the entire idea out of my
head, because if it was in my mind, it would be bound to
come out of my mouth, and Jesse, he was not going to say
I
love you
back at me. And when that happened, things would
change between us. I looked at him, kneeling in the sand,
his hair curling in the heat around his beautiful tiny ear. Too
late, too late, things had already changed. Shit. Shitshitshit.
Jesse drove home in the dusk, the orange and purple
sky darkening around us. I stared out the window,
wondering what to do. My natural inclination in the face of
disorder was to start organizing, cleaning up, so to speak,
throwing away the trash and cleaning out the drawers and
putting things back in some semblance of workable order.
You couldn’t really do that, though, when the source of the
chaos was unexpected love.
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I knew what I had come down here for. It was something
that belonged to me, and was going to rise or fall on my hard
work. I was starting to feel a real affection for that old man
who had reached out to me, offered a hand to get me started.
I didn’t want to do anything to make him sorry he’d made
that gesture. And I wanted Devil Dog to succeed. I wanted to
do work that meant something to me. But it felt like my head
and my heart and my belly and my balls were full of Jesse—
the way he smelled, the way his honey-corn-silk hair curled
over his collar. The stormy blue of his eyes, with their humor
and intelligence. His mind. Oh, God, I was so in love with his
mind. And his flirty gay-boy come-on in red shoes. And the
way he dragged a couple of green velvet Victorian couches
into the studio, called it Paris on the Rio Grande, stripped
down and gave me a blow job with all the joy of a kid licking
an ice cream cone in July.
I wanted him. I wanted him all for my own, his heart
and his mind. I wanted us to be partners. Real partners,
forever and ever, amen. I wanted us to ascend to heaven on
the same cloud, a couple of cowboy angels in handmade
boots. But somehow I didn’t get the feeling he took me as
seriously as I took him. Well, we didn’t know each other that
well yet. He didn’t have a clue how strong I was, or how hard
I’d worked my whole life. The way you made it, growing up in
Navajo country, was never allowing for the possibility of
defeat or failure. It was just not an option. So I was going to
win him, and we were going to live and love happily together
for our entire lives and make beautiful art, and there was
just no room for failure. I sat up, stretched. Okay, that was
settled.
He was grinning over at me. “So what’s up with you?”
“Just thinking.”
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“About your comic? Are you gonna keep the same
name?”
“Probably.” I rubbed my chin. “I thought about changing
it to
Devil Dogs at War
, but I don’t know. I like
Devil Dogs
.”
“So tell me about it. Why
Devil Dogs at War
?”
“That’s what I’ve decided on using as the framework. A
comic strip with a couple of narrative threads and a platoon
of Marines at war. An unnamed, continuous war.”
“Why unnamed?”
“You give something a name, you give it power. That’s
what the Navajo think. War is a shitstorm of screwups and
greed and laziness and broken promises. It doesn’t deserve a
name.”
Jesse thought about this for a bit. “So the narrative
threads are going to be about the people in the platoons. You
aren’t going to comment specifically on current events.”
“I don’t think so, though I may be really tempted. I think
it would be easy, but would weaken the strip over time. I
don’t want to find myself boot-deep in some political
cesspool.”
“Not wearing handmade crocodile boots with original art
by JC3.”
“Not at a dollar a month for fifty years.”
“What?”
“Fifty times twelve is six hundred, knucklehead.”
“I think your dick just grew an inch!”
“Can you convert that to centimeters?”
It was after midnight when we rolled into Marathon, and
The Original had left the porch light on for us. I walked down
to my room, and Jesse stopped in to his grandfather’s room
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to tell him we were back safe. Then he leaned against my
bedroom door frame. “I had fun today.”
“Yeah, me too. What are you gonna do tomorrow? Start
work on the angels?”
Jesse nodded. “I think so. I’m gonna get up early. I need
to get to work.”
“I’ll see you in the studio, then.” I pulled off my T-shirt,
threw it on top of the duffel bag on the floor, skinned out of
my jeans. Jesse took a good long look, then he sighed, blew
me a kiss, and went down the hall to his bedroom. No way
were we fooling around in his granddad’s house, with the old
man sleeping across the hall.
I slept hard, then something woke me a couple of hours
later. My head was full of strange dreams, all murky pictures
of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her pale-blue robes, looking
down at me. She was as big as the sky, and I wrote her a
note, telling her how much I loved Jesse. She spoke, though
her plaster mouth never moved, and the compassion in her
eyes was strong. “You may be in over your head, Lorenzo
Maryboy.”
Then I was sitting at the kitchen table with The Original,
and I was crying, and he was stroking my hair. “Child, don’t
tear your heart out with desire. Nothing lasts forever, not
even love. You know the words?
As
for man, his days are like
grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; then the wind
blows over it and it is gone….”
I stared at the painted wooden ceiling. Maybe I was in
over my head. Maybe nothing, not even love, lasted forever.
“You’re going to have to prove that to me,” I said, wondering
if the Virgin was still listening to me, or if she’d said her
piece and moved on to less hardheaded men.
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I was wide awake. I looked at my watch. Three thirty
a.m. I got up, pulled on my shorts and the dirty T-shirt I’d
worn on our field trip. Then I carried my shoes and socks to
the kitchen, put them on, and slipped out the front door.
The air was cool and sweet, and most of the houses had
their porch lights on. I wondered who they were waiting up
for, sons and daughters who had moved away? Strangers
looking for a home? The low, lonesome sound of the train
whistle cut the night silence. Several of the town dogs ran
with me, keeping me friendly company, and I saw Eden, who
owned the bakery, flipping the lights on, yawning. She
looked startled for a moment when I ran by with my group of
dogs, then she recognized me and gave a friendly wave.
I ran for an hour, let the musty clouds of the dream
blow out of my head. I didn’t want to wake everyone up, so I
hosed off my face and chest out in the yard, took a drink,
and went into the studio to work.
I wanted to work on the cartoon I’d thought of in the
truck, my funny, obscene cartoon of me and Jesse. I
sketched us out—he was on his knees in front of me, my
dick in his mouth, and I was scooping his brains out of the
top of his head and shoveling them into my mouth. Then I
had another image, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, so I gave
myself some fur and paws and wolf ears, and let Jesse’s red
cape fall back from his head and puddle on the ground at his
feet. His lips were pink and lush, and the brown cock in his
mouth was considerably bigger than my own, but I knew it
would make him laugh. I made the background the desert