Covered Wagons

I went to see Tommy, who’d had been admitted to the AIDS ward with KS and toxoplasmosis. He’d become manic at home and now, on the unit, he’d created a country western theme for his room. He’d cut out photos of horses and taped them to the walls, had someone bring him his cowboy hat from home, blared square dance music from a boom box and spoke to everyone in an exaggerated Texas drawl.

“Well thank you little darlin’ for them thar pills,” he’d say. “Yah-hoo!”

The staff were amused until he announced that only people wearing cowboy boots could enter his room and a psych consult was ordered and his medication regimen changed.

As he was calming down and drifting off to sleep he told me he knew how the early pioneers must have felt, fearing what was ahead of them, and that his bed was like a covered wagon, and all the other patients on the unit were part of a wagon train helping each other in their time of need, and I nodded and said that certainly made sense to me.

I watched his eyelids slowly open and close.

I’d told him I’d always been fascinated with stories about wagon trains heading west, how they always circled safely at day’s end, how they saw signs of others who’d travelled on before them: broken wheels, barrel staves, rock piles, cow skulls bleached white in the sun.

When he finally fell asleep I continued to sit there, imagining what it would be like, traveling with him on a covered wagon across hostile territories, sitting up all night when his gut wouldn’t sleep, stopping to camp in the cottonwoods when his lungs wore out, pitching camp beside a river that his eyes couldn’t see. If he asked me to leave him there with a canteen and a blanket and continue on without him I’d say I couldn’t; too long, too far we’d travelled together just to leave him there alone.

I’d help him back into the canvas shell that was our home and travel on.

I knew the highest peaks still lay ahead and our team was so tired, our food and water low, but we had to trust that we could get as far as we had to go.

I knew that off in the distance, across the miles and the dark empty plains, there was a place where I would help him down one last time and do what I could: some shade, some water, a rolled up blanket, a song about the country we’d travelled through, and when he was gone, get the shovel we’d been carrying all along.

Afterwards, I would take only what I needed. I would torch the wagon and set the team free. I would head off across the miles that were left, looking for signs of others who were traveling on, like me.

I would only camp in high places where I could see mountains and rivers. I would lie down with nothing above but night sky and endless space all around.

I would lie down and dream. Dreams of him and dreams of me.