If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near
and so forth, words once recited by their mother to his younger brother Brad while Jim stood outside the music-room door listening and when there was silence looked through the wormhole. Which, with us probably in it, was flushed out after the diva’s doctor left and before her South American officer returned seeking not only her flesh but, as she, an anxious daughter, well knew, further information. The worm’s gone, and we’re behind the news because the diva has already sung another role and all we know, feeling about opera (grand, bel, comique, or other) as Grace Kimball and Jim Mayn do, is that at the crunch the priestess, torn as she was between love and anger, didn’t kill her two kids but instead disappeared into flame conveniently offstage.
We ask no more of her, and she’s followed by applause we hear without being told—not followed by the silence in Windrow, New Jersey, the silence in the next room, the music room, which made Jim secretly in the hall outside bend down and see what he could see through the keyhole because his mother had been sort of sick really months now but he saw only her bare elbow pleasantly at its inner angle puffed and creasy and then as she went on reciting or reading again her elbow moved out of sight and was instantaneously replaced on the chair arm by the fingers of Jim’s brother, the fingers were all he saw. Not long after that their mother’s death by drowning was reported in the Windrow Democrat. The report was incomplete, omitting reference to a suicide note one report said had been left impaled on a beach umbrella strut at Mantoloking, and as the days went on—and a day came when Margaret took Jim to the cemetery for the laying of a stone—he recognized that he did not want the body to come ashore because he would want to see it.
And so the weather and the sea made a secret familiar cover for the powers that be and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who disappeared where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap where, after that old silence, her voice would sometimes resume: "When me they fly, I am the wings." So she would pick up perhaps the vague memory of Emerson from her mother Margaret, if not the love of verse, which she had on her own.
And through this gap a future would always come, as she did not: except a breathing wind that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day. And hearing this wind, her long-lost son Jim found obstacles for it.
Ship Rock
From any distance it is all by itself. But he is not thirty-five miles away now. But what is he?
Risen alone off the dry plateau, this rock or mountain of a rock has seemed as alive as it is dead. Now nothing stands between him and it. Upwards of fifteen hundred feet of ancient gross height, it is as much before him now as the great morning is all around him.
Look, he’s not a landscape man, and here the Indians have given this thing back to him.
Ship Rock: he doesn’t know what he feels—he feels that much and more. And then knows that if now nothing stands between him and it, nothing ever did.
There’s a word for it, there always is, he thinks, for the Rock all by itself. It is all by itself—is this the huge thing about it?—as grand as its name, Ship Rock.
From far off, it is like a mountain let go by some landscape it once belonged to. But close up, two miles away now, two and a quarter, it has him all to himself. (Well, now you got it, how you gon’ move it?) What was moving out there on the Rock? An eye that swept through him unseeing, leaving him what he is. He’s what he is, no more.
Ship Rock is great and natural, a mount freaked out of nowhere so you can see it from anywhere, that shows a rock can be greater than a mountain. It’s doing something he can’t get away from. Stately monster-craft bound always in some direction other than his, as if it has no memory of prey, has only his memory.
Look, he’s not a landscape man, he didn’t plan to be here. Yet having stopped, he feels how long he’s been going. And so he looks and looks, and for several minutes doesn’t look into other spaces of this New Mexico morning. As if he’s made a discovery. Though he and discoveries are as much beyond each other as the curls of taste in his mouth are too close for contemplation if not comfort. But they’re not the taste, the touch, of raised numerals on credit cards but of cigarette smoke, of bacon, buttered toast, yolk of fried eggs, last night’s booze at a motel he’s checked out of that’s thirty, forty miles away, coffee with all the creamy chemicals that went into it to give you a send-off where you stayed seated at a breakfast table that comes with all the furniture on top of it in front of him that makes you love America, a table chosen for the window it is near, your shoes on the carpet, thumb and finger on the cup handle, waiting for the—smiling toward the—waitress in her cowgirl outfit far away across the motel’s sparsely populated dining room. There’s a painting of Ship Rock by this window that looks out on the aquamarine swimming pool. But it wasn’t the painting by the window that brought him to where he is now. And where is that?
The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos call it—the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting towards two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event.
What is?
Is it his desire to change?
To be going nowhere for a change? But he has been.
His desire is to be here—that’s it.
But he already is.
But he would like nothing to witness. Not here in the stillness of the morning wind. Not Sandia Man crossing the strait from Asia twenty-five thousand years before they thought of Christ.
Yet what is moving? Something is moving.
For him the Rock and where it is are also an aerial photograph, black and white, in a friend’s complete book two thousand miles east of this great morning of the plateau. The picture shows Ship Rock and two reptile tails running out from it south and west like low ranges. They’re called dikes.
In the lower half of that black-and-white page the gods filled in the scene ages ago. An authoritative drawing of vast layers of sedimentary terrain. Layers like colored sand. Erosion centuries deep turned into height in the cutaway segment, so the former plateau lies like a dammed sea hundreds of feet above the floor he’s standing on and, dwarfed in the towering corner made by the cutaway walls, a familiar shape haunts itself, a complete mountain unborn within the Earth, not a ship yet, while behind it the corner’s beveled geometry fans back upward like a slide upholstered in concrete—the cutaway restoration of the old volcano’s inner cone descending to the place where magma came burning up out of its underworld of pressure and bored its vent.
Ship Rock, then, if you believe the geologists, is not half what the whole scene was.
The volcano cools and becomes inactive. Last lavas inside the cone harden. Centuries of weather sweep the land. Wind wears down the plateau, the volcano has vanished.
But not what hardened inside; not the cloaked shape, the Rock down inside the now vanished cone. Shielded from the wind. Hidden inside a disappearing volcano.
Ship Rock, then, was not visible; it was inside a volcano that is not here now, a volcano visible now only to geologists with their cutaway restorations. All this is easier to believe with the discrete drawing in his friend’s book in front of him than here.
She’d looked at the drawing when he held her book out to her
, and she’d said very softly, "Oh of course."
The Indians, too, speak of a time when Ship Rock was nowhere to be seen. Or are supposed to speak; or will if you can get them to.
A hundred years ago a governor proclaimed that Navajos caught off the reservation would be treated as outlaws. Well, look at how the Navajos not to mention the Apaches raided the Pueblo Indians in what is now northeastern New Mexico.
Navajos don’t talk much.
He believes them also when they say nothing.
And he tries to think where he is now. He listens to the cooler, stronger wind in that photograph two thousand miles from here, the Rock in front of him fifteen hundred feet high and rising. And it is there because it rose. In another form, if you listen to the geologists. Another life. An economist who’s lived here off and on for thirty years differs: he says as far as he knows the Rock is fourteen hundred feet high. So maybe it is settling.
Again, there’s movement, maybe it belongs to the beholder.
But while the southward dike is in the corner of his moving eye here on his left twenty or thirty feet high running beside the car track and in a minute he could climb the boulder-strewn rampart of the dike to the brittle-looking crest (and look back down to where he is or was and see only an empty car), still he is watching only the Rock, for there’s movement somewhere there.
From here the Rock is a gigantic, partly slumped thing, a sacred thing he might have to admit, until he thinks about it. Set adrift by its terrain, it’s no less on the endless Navajo reservation, and he has no plans to give it back to them, they don’t need it, but it’s theirs anyway, and not his to give, even at this hour of the February morning.
And what isn’t on the Navajo reservation? Just about everything except New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Reservation ends when you get near the suburbs of a prosperous town with banks and bars. (The Indian women want no liquor stores on the reservation, they’ll trade the booze away, as far away as distance can contain the land, and in return they’ll take their men’s chances with car accidents.)
Did the Indians come here like him across the broad morning, watching the wind touch the dry land? When the Indians came here, they looked at this fifteen-hundred-and-thirty-foot-high berg of solidified lava shot through with hunks of sedimentary rock and granite torn from maybe nine thousand feet below and also from the volcano’s throat, and they told a story of how this deep-keeled Rock had brought them. As if it had not been here until they were. So they’re still at least tied for first.
He got off a better story than that last night in the motel bar. Multinational executive sent abroad to the wrong city and no one noticed. But other stories he’s not telling; some he doesn’t know; some he could tell without instinctively understanding.
Now moving goods he can follow—from electric power to paper products, from suds to spuds, white bread to natural gas. But funds traveling from phone to phone? from one nocturnal continent to another? from agribusiness through the congressional pocket via NASA to weather business, from insurance to war and back, the moneys finding their way into a faraway bank like a corporate thought confound him more than he ever needs to say in a report or in transcontinental gossip in a midnight saloon with a jukebox where he found he would not mention Ship Rock, didn’t want to, couldn’t.
(Well now you got it, how you gon’ move it?
Oh jes Chippeway at it.)
Not that he knew the Ship Rock stories in depth. Whose depth are they out of? his? theirs? What are those stories to him? A use the Indians put the Rock to. You can’t take that away from them. Not that the Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque guarding once-renewable land and water resources spend their time holding on to those myths. The Indians called this thing in front of him "the rock with wings."
Well, he can see wings all right.
Sort of folded.
If he’s looking at the right side.
But viewed from the west the Rock also has a prow—viewed from over there to his left toward Arizona, which is twenty-odd miles west of here. Seeing the prow, the Indians called the Rock a ship, and so its wings are also sails.
He flies to and from Ship Rock for a long moment on business, dividing himself between—well this rock has possibilities!—but such that he is one of them and is content to be hypothetical, a hypothetical man, if that’s not too safe. (Cochise Man began harvesting maize almost six thousand years ago; come on, make it an even six thousand!) He could rent a helicopter for two hundred bucks an hour.
But was he awake back in Farmington when he phoned from the motel and found he could rent one for two hundred an hour? Farmington—thirty, forty miles east of here, booming from the power plant and strip mine nearby in Fruitland. He believed the name but never found the town, didn’t look for it, found only what he was looking for, which was the plant, the mine.
Two hundred an hour to rent a chopper, fly over Four Corners Power Plant (think of flying under it), divide the labor, the chopper’s blind, throw in Ship Rock a few minutes west. And welcomes into his head now in front of Ship Rock a helicopter landing a girl on a craggy top to do an aftershave commercial, Indians don’t themselves shave, or do they?—a Hopi girl, Zuni, Pueblo, Ute, what’s it matter so long as she’s alone? to face the beast of height, be pumiced on the rough tip of rhino hide until the monster, its fading irritation pounding in its skull as the retreating aircraft sinks to the far corner of one eye, senses at last in its own renewable teeth the human gift perched riding it.
No headache took the place of that chopper, no pain the place of the girl—he saved her. He woke high and dry. The height of Ship Rock isn’t to be eroded by choppers dropping wrinkled yellow-and-black tape measures or taking soundings with a frequency that might erode the magnetic heart of the thing.
A sailing ship shrouded in power to the nomad Navajo in those generations before the plateau got to be more like desert, a wind that drew the elements together, and the earth was the earth and a supership could sail through it in those days. For was the earth not softer, subtler? has since become scrambled like the matter and/or energy of sample people two at a time standing single-file on a metal plate waiting to be turned/transformed/transported, drawn perchance (per couple) consolidated and economized into one person, a future nightmare of his (drop the mare, it’s a whole night) that only he has seen through, though he has asked if it may not be a dream while his question is a struggle floating upon a deeper struggle, which is to decide if the dream is bad or not.
Two thousand miles east and north a red convertible appeared between a blighted elm and a wide green maple. Two thousand miles east and north but at a minutely altered angle from where the friend’s book with the black-and-white photo lies. Angle of six months from the photo; six months/two hundred miles. A red convertible with flared sides—pontoons like the old running boards his father in a formal coat and top hat was photographed riding on from church to hotel at the wedding of a best friend. Pontoons now, not running boards. And the red car—the red car left the dirt road, rolled down the grassy bank into a lake and, honking at a small sailing craft, a Sunfish, that his own sun-dark daughter and son in bathing suits and only one life preserver were just coming about in, the car crossed to the far point of land and slowly went behind it honking, low in the waters of a New Hampshire lake doing eight knots instead of eighty miles an hour, the state where you’re in the shadow of Mount Monadnock which is no special respecter of the increasing complexity of family moving from the sub-Ur-father’s role as mere fertilizer (to be ploughed right in), to civilization, where the father spent much more time with his family.
Six months gets him to August, but what’s his direction? But this is also maybe six years ago. Time travel isn’t all magic; it can be hard overland work, minutes into hours into worm-geared days of a long division of labor as strung-out as a string of mistakes and as specialized as the stone of which the Ship Rock ship was made to hold together.
For a great stone ship was what the Indian
s observed Ship Rock to be, long before concrete hulls. The Great Spirit had sent such a ship to carry them. A vessel which he has no plans to give back to the Indians, for this is their ground anyway, all twenty-five thousand square miles of authentic Navajo desert, as full of mystery for some itinerant folklorist as for a farmer told to go ahead and plough, harrow, sow, and reap here. And here the ship is, supposedly.
Well, if it’s a ship, what does it draw?
From the west it is a weathered prow made partly of the seas through which it has come: but from here, from the south side, it’s a dark berg, gray-brown, relieved by sun to a dun ochre here and there. Which is very different (as someone importantly says, very different) from the far side, the opposite or north but not necessarily dark side, from which the Rock is a detached Alp but redder than on this south side; and on that north side high up a trough of snow with distant brevity runs down like a valley tilted vertical, and it leads down to a sheer face.
He tried to come at it from that side; didn’t get closer than about three miles, steering some cross-country dream into a gully, scraping the gas tank, the muffler—he hasn’t looked, the car’s not losing fuel, just burning it unleaden into Father Sky—but yes, smoother sailing in some early daydream he had before an alarm got him up in the motel this morning; he’ll get back to it, it’s in some limitlessly fueled motion inside a familial voice; Mother Earth’s? or an Anglo grandmother’s American voyaging in her grandson’s mind, her tales of the East Far Eastern Princess who flew over the deep land and the long waters to visit the Indians of another century—but now here on the south side looking roughly north he sees Ship Rock furled and unfurled, and slumped left-to-right down from the profiled prow. And its motion if you dig it in the faint rush of a mild wind and against a jukebox song in a motel lounge thirty-odd miles away about a "hy-po-thet-i-cal"—man, he thought—(half-heard last night beyond his own voice and others telling stories, two others, two big hats as if on one face, two voices he was with)—yes, the motion, Ship Rock’s, the motion of the ship, is all the more marked by the absence of motion in the sky, no clouds.
Women and Men Page 32
