House
? I want to double-check the colors.” I typed “Freida”
and “blue house” into the search engine. Jesse held up his
paper, covered in blue paint samples, compared them with
the pictures. “Look at this painting,” he said, pointing to the
screen. It was a self-portrait, and the area behind Freida’s
head was blue, Bathtub Mary blue, and around this, like a
frame, were colorful parrots, pink and orange and yellow and
green. “See what she did?”
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“Yeah. She used those icon colors. Is that what you’re
going to do with the cowboy angels?”
“I think so, but one color for each of the paintings.” He
chewed on his lip. “I’m thinking of them as a group, and I
really need to not do that. They sell one at a time, maybe to
different people. Nobody’s going to buy all eight. So if I make
them being together a criterion for the work to be successful,
it will only work if they don’t sell.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or just talking to
himself in my near vicinity. “So what’s your plan?”
“Don’t know yet.” He went back to his side of the studio,
then turned around, came back, and kissed me, a lingering,
sweet kiss that tasted like the lemon drop he had been
sucking on.
Back to work. I was going to be the platoon leader. Or
my alter ego, Devil Dog, was going to be platoon leader. I
sketched him on the whiteboard. Now I needed my Jesse, my
DADT boy. “Jesse. You mind if I put your face on a cartoon
character? I need a gay character.”
“And I’m the only gay boy you know?”
“No, you’re just the prettiest.”
“Of course you can, zo-zo. Images in art, they’re
symbols, you know? They don’t represent real people.”
I had my doubts about this. That may have been the
intention of the artist, to use symbols, but people were very
interested in other people. They wanted the details of who
Picasso had slept with, and drawn. People were still debating
the identity of the
Mona Lisa
, though I suspected Leonardo
would echo Jesse: images of people are just symbols. I
hesitated, my marker in my hand. How likely was it someone
would see a resemblance to Jesse’s face and ask him about
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it? I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, and I didn’t want
him to be known as a gay character in a comic strip. He was
too complex and beautiful for that. No, that wouldn’t work.
I’d have to find somebody else’s face.
What had he said about orange shoes, orange high-
tops? I couldn’t remember now. I sketched in a character,
slender, with delicate hands and a face like Peter Frampton
on the cover of
Frampton Comes Alive
, pretty as an angel. I
gave him orange high-top sneakers. And a large rifle. This
was my gay marksman.
Who else? I wasn’t going to have a token dumb fuck. I’d
never seen that, not in my years in the Corps. The quiet ones
always seemed to get labeled as big and dumb, but in my
experience, they were actually just quiet. When they did talk,
they had usually seen something from an angle everyone else
had missed. We needed a cowboy, a shit-kicker who always
had his hands sliding up somebody’s skirt. Then we’d have
Sir, though we’d never see him. He was always going to be a
voice on the radio or the phone, telling us where we were
going next, giving us our mission. I leaned back, stared at
the board. I had my platoon.
I stuck my head on Jesse’s side of the studio. “You want
a Coke?”
“Diet,” he said, frowning at his easel. He was still mixing
and testing colors. “It looks like cantaloupe that’s been left
out in the sun too long.” He tore the paper off the pad and
threw it in the trash can in disgust. The can behind him was
nearly full. “Fuck. How the fuck difficult is dusty fucking
terra cotta? I can’t mix colors worth shit.” His voice sounded
a bit fragile, so I left quietly, got us a couple of sodas, and
put his on his desk without saying another word.
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He worked through the afternoon, into the evening, and
I sat on the porch with a book, listening to The Original and
Uncle George talk over what was happening in the world. I
went into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on, and I could
see the light in the studio going off, then on, then off again. I
watched for a bit, wondering if this was some sort of artist
Morse code, S-O-S. Then the light went out and stayed out.
But no Jesse. When the coffee was done, I took cups to the
old men on the porch, then walked back to the studio to see
what was happening. It wasn’t dark inside, but dim. Jesse
had the small desk lamp on, which cast a puddle of golden
light through his half of the studio.
I stuck my head through the scarves. “Hey. Can I come
in?”
“Sure.” He was lying on his couch and looked utterly
exhausted, dark gray under his eyes.
“I saw the lights going on and off. I thought you were
signaling you needed me to come rescue you.”
He grinned at that, and I pulled up a desk chair.
“I was looking at the paint colors under different lights.
Making sure I had what I wanted.” I looked around the
studio. He had color swatches on a piece of raw canvas, and
their formulas were written below the samples. There was a
Bathtub Mary Blue, bright pink, a pale muted orange color
that I thought was probably the hard-won dusty terra cotta,
and a bright, creamy yellow. “I finally got the pink right. I
looked at pictures of some scarves woven by women in
Bolivia.” He must have seen the look on my face, because he
grinned tiredly up at me. “It’s worth it, I promise.”
There was a CD playing I’d never heard before, Western
music, and the guy singing had a thin, beautiful voice. Jesse
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started singing along “
…out here with the truckers and the
kickers and the cowboy angels….
”
“I don’t know this music.” He reached over, handed me
the CD case. Gram Parsons,
Grievous Angel
.
“That’s where I first got the idea for the paintings, from
this song. It’s real cowboy music, beautiful and so self-
destructive it nearly goes up in flames. He did this album
with Emmy Lou Harris.” He gestured to the canvases. “I
think I’m going to do them one at a time, make sure they can
stand alone, and not only as a group. This first one is going
to be the Grievous Angel.”
“It sounds powerful, but I don’t really understand what
it means.”
He closed his eyes. “You’ll understand when you see the
painting. Cowboys, we’re born into these Western mountains
and deserts, and we get brave and strong, because that’s
what the land is asking us to be. They tell us we need to
fight, to defend our country and our freedom, and we send
our very best, the strongest and most beautiful of all of us.
Maybe they come back broken, or with scars, and later no
one can even remember why we asked them to go. The
strong men who’re left? We use them to sell pickup trucks
and cigarettes. It’s not the land doing this. The land loves us
like our mothers. But we have to go out into the world. This
first cowboy angel, the Grievous Angel, he’s you. He’s been
sent off to war. Your war, your continuous, anonymous war.”
I didn’t think he meant the Grievous Angel was really
me. I was just one of his symbols. I scooted him over, lay
down on the couch with him, and rolled him over into my
arms. “You’re tired. Close your eyes, put your head on my
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chest, and I’ll hold you for a while.” His voice sounded full of
tears.
He slid a hand over my chest until it settled over the
shrapnel scar. “What artists do, their job in the world, is to
see clearly. To lift up the blinders of money and greed and
apathy, and then force everyone else to see what they see.”
He curled against me. “Yeah, I am tired.”
It was funny, but I’d never thought of anyone but people
like me fighting for America. We put on the uniforms, we
picked up our guns, we went off and threw ourselves down
between right and wrong. Back home, everyone was dancing
in the streets and having picnics in the park, sitting happy
and safe on their red-checked tablecloths. But people like
Jesse, the artists, they were working on America too. The
folks at the ACLU who were working for GLBT rights, they
were working for America. It wasn’t just the Devil Dogs,
keeping the Huns from the gate. It made me feel better,
somehow, thinking that all these brilliant, beautiful minds
were hard at work to make America as good as it could be.
Jesse settled his head over my chest. “I can hear your
heart beating. It sounds strong.” He sighed. “Tomorrow I’m
going to start.”
“You haven’t already started?”
“No. This was just getting ready. Getting things clear in
my head. The real work starts in the morning.”
“I won’t bug you.”
“Bug me all you want. How did your work go today?”
“I got my crew. Tomorrow their names, backstory, then
I’m gonna send them off to war.”
“Is Uncle George still here?”
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“Yep. He’s drinking coffee on the front porch. Only
Navajo people and Marathon cowboys drink coffee right
before they go to bed.”
“Are they sitting there, not talking?”
“I heard maybe four or five words. They aren’t up in the
double digits, yet. Course, they might have just been waiting
for me to leave.”
“No, they’re always like that. He say anything about
Sadie?”
“Not when I was around.”
“She hasn’t called me. They let you call in those rehab
places, right?”
I shook my head. “I think some of them, they have a
blackout period. A week, a month, I’m not sure. Some time
when you can’t call out, and don’t have any visitors.”
“So you won’t beg your cousin to come and take you
away?”
“Probably.”
JESSE was already in the studio when I went out for my run
the next morning, and it wasn’t even six yet. We worked all
day without talking, and I listened to the music from his side
of the studio—Marty Robbins first,
Gunfighter Ballads and
Trail Songs
, over and over, until late afternoon. Then he
switched to Gram Parsons, and I could hear him over on his
side, warbling with Gram’s sweet voice, singing about
cowboy angels. I wondered if the music was some part of the
way he painted. I’d never heard anyone keep music on a
continuous loop like this. The second day he’d moved on to
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The Highwaymen, and by the third morning, Los Lonely
Boys. The Original went out to the studio to drag him into
the house for breakfast. We both stared at him. His eyes
were crazy bright, and he looked like he’d dropped five
pounds he couldn’t afford to lose.
I slid a couple of sunny-side-up eggs onto his plate.
“Okay, listen up. Here’s what we need to do. You need to eat
at least two meals a day, and if you do that, I won’t cut the
cord on your CD player.”
He looked from me to The Original. “I’ve been eating.”
His grandfather shook his head. “No, son, I don’t believe
you have.”
He looked at me. “What do you mean, cut my cord?”
“Fond as I am of Marty Robbins, I don’t believe I care to
listen to his music for seven hours straight.”
“It’s okay, don’t worry. We’re nearly ready for Santana.”
“Jesse….” I stared at him. He looked clueless, slightly
deranged. I looked over at the old man for help.
He held up his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you,
son. He’s not right in his mind, not when he gets going like
this. It’s always been his way.”
“Jesse, you want to take a break and ride with me back
to Lajitas? Get the boots?”
“Oh, I can’t stop now.”
I looked at The Original. “Would you like to take a ride?”
He shook his head. “You’ve been concentrating hard on
Devil Dogs
. Why don’t you get out of here for a bit? Go get