Me an' Reb's Jesus

Me ‘n Reb’s Jesus

They told me Rebel was half thoroughbred
but all I ever saw in him was quarter horse
and he was walking
that quarter horse walk now.
Clomping along, neck out,
head down, just like me,
neck out, head down,
we were quite a pair that day.
We were riding the ditch rider’s road
which didn’t really go nowhere
which was good
because that’s where we were going.
I could here the trickle of the little ditch
we were riding
and if it had been blue
instead of muddy brown things would have been perfect.
Because Rebel and me were blue.
You see Rebel and me had lost our best childhood friend today
and even though we hadn’t seen him
for going on four years we were still as blue as blue could be.
He’d changed a lot. He’d grew his hair and dropped out
and punched them damn needles in his arm until this morning
when they say he screamed Jesus! and his heart gave out
he was so high.
I have a feeling it wasn’t the same Jesus me and Reb talk to.
I heard a familiar sound and Rebel clomped to a stop
and I looked around at a place that should have been familiar.
But it wasn’t at first but then I remembered that hollow sound
I’d just heard and the weeds
that were a lot taller then
or so it seemed and yes,
this was the bridge over the canal on that last day
that we were best friends that last wonderful,
stupid day, four years ago.
Reb was four and I was thirteen
and Daniel said he was fourteen
but everybody knew he was fifteen
on account of getting kicked out of fourth grade
and having to repeat.
He was smallish, compact and solid and lithe
and there was not anything he could not do.
He was to prove that this day.
We were just messing around in the canal with Reb,
riding bareback in the three and a half foot deep water
and diving off his back and riding
up the side and sliding down his back
into the water when Daniel
got this gleam in his eye and looked at the bridge.
“You wait here,” he said
in a voice that was already half way
to completing some glorious stunt.
He took Rebel and disappeared for a minute
and then I heard Reb’s only smooth gait,
a ground-gobbling canter
that I loved in the evening
when the cool breeze caught my face.
As the pair topped the rise,
Daniel was just steadying himself on two feet
standing just ahead of Reb’s hind quarters
as he neared the bridge and with a slightly muffled,
“Geronimo!” he did a perfect cannonball
into the center of the pool on the
down stream side of the bridge.
A few feet to either side and
he’s dead meat on boulders,
too far out and he’s strained through gravel.
He pops up with a whoop and I nonchalantly say,
“Yeah, but can you catch the horse?”
“You know as well as I do, Marco Polo,
that that horse is too dumb to run away,”
and he just looked me in the eye grinning
and God knows I tried to keep a straight face
and I tried to stay cool but, but,...
I broke down. “Damn!” I finally exploded.
“That has got to be the bitchinest thing
I have ever seen in my life! I can’t believe it, it was perfect, and the Geronimo thing...Perfect!” “Ain’t it though! Damn that was good” Just then Rebel came up and nudged my elbow, “and you, you looked like Trigger or Traveler or Silver or something. Its like I hardly know my two best friends all of a sudden.” This was a bit of a faux paux in my social circle as one never actually admitted to having a best friend, it was too intimate a term. We blushed past the moment and then he said, “Your turn.”
I looked him straight in the eye and said “I wouldn’t do that on a tricycle, let alone a horse. You’ve got me on this one.” The rest of the day past mostly in awed reflection on the jump. He seemed to stay there all day, too, never come down.
He finally looked at me and said, “You’re never gonna make that jump, are you?”
“ I didn’t say that, matter of fact I probably will but I’m gonna practice the ride up first and work out the jump timing, you gotta remember, I’m younger, things come a little slower to me.”
“Its not that I’ve got some great power you don’t or that you’re afraid, is it?”
“I’d say mostly no on both though I am a little scared and you are a little awesome, man.”
“It was like, from the second I decided to do it, no from the second I thought of it, I knew it would be perfect, its like sometimes I get this power and its like, I can do anything.”
“I know, I see it in your eyes sometimes, usually its something crazy.”
“No, its something real, its something that I feel with my whole body and soul, like I’m on fire man.”
“Look, Daniel, this jump was really cool, and like, I’m gonna try it myself but its not like its some kind of religious experience, man. Its just an adrenaline rush, you’re a good athlete, high on adrenaline, its not some higher calling to be like Super Stunt man or a crash test dummy or something. Besides, you scare me, a few feet either way and you’d be jellyfish, man.”
“You just don’t understand!”
“ No, I think its you who don’t understand! You’re gonna mess around and get yourself killed and I’m gonna be stuck in this stinking town without you!”
Those were the last words we spoke as friends.
All there was after that were Howdy’s and ’cuse me’s.
I don’t think he ever cut his hair again
or bathed for that matter.
School was only an occasional pastime
and the drugs took over
when the adrenaline couldn’t do it any more.
I thought it my fault for a long time.
All of it, the broken friendship, the drugs, the diein’...
I looked up and saw that Rebel
Had again taken me where I needed to go.
The old woman’s house not far from the canal.
She had watched sixty years worth
of boys grow up from her laced windows,
though not many stopped and talked as I did.
The cookies were out and the ice tea in the glass
as I let myself in the back door.
She’d long since told me just to knock
and wait a few and come as she didn’t get about
like she used to.
Its my fault, you know, all of it.
ever since the jump in the pool.
It seems you are suddenly a very powerful person
especially for one so young.
No child, he made his own choices.
He was headed down that road anyway
It was you kept him off it for a long time
and offered him a better way to go
that he very well could have taken,
had he had the courage.
No it wasn’t your fault,
I knew his father and his father’s father
and wasn’t a fine bone in their bodies
and this one was looking the same until he met you.
Oh he was still wild but he wasn’t bad
and he wasn’t cruel and stayed away from the bottle.
For three full years I saw that boy grow
and I thunk just maybe he’d make it.
But when I saw you alone for so many days
I knew he had found a way
to excuse himself from your influence.
No child, Its not your fault he’s dead
matter of fact, you damn near saved him,
and maybe, just maybe you did.
Maybe it was you and Reb’s Jesus
he was screaming for this morning,
when his heart gave out.