Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Oh other Ship Rock stories. Handed down (he can see them doing it), sung, unsung. Fellows around a fire—probably a painting of it on the motel dining-room wall. Handed down by women too. Do women think about ships, do they make up myths, what freedoms do they take, do they believe what men say? He’s dumb. He doesn’t know. Once there was a New Jersey grandmother who gave news of an Eastern Princess, angry, without appetite, hopeful, palely proud, riding over dry land and deep water on the back of her hungry bird.

  Well, on the way out here on business he must have passed her going the other way, long dead, touring some other latitude of the dead.

  Stories that weren’t hers, quite, but were stuff he carried now on him. The Indians had theirs; he had his. He liked her—his grandmother—and so he took the tales she gave him. Of this Eastern Princess whose "Father-kin" as she called him had shown her all the sights and great deeds of his country which was as far away as the mountains of Manchuria and the noises rumbling at the bottom of the world, and had introduced her to all the young nobles he and his loyal wife could muster, and he’d given her, in that country of theirs far away, an age away from the western Indians, a young and growing bird of a giant kind noted for its traveling powers and its generous appetite for large, moving animals, galloping camels in Egypt, cows in its smoking beak when it came upon them, young elephants curving their trunks back like horns, and she flew past the pyramids, and the long-elbowed mammoth goats beside the hot, lofty waterfalls of Iceland, and she visited the ritual slaughter places of five continents not to mention a healer in the Dark Continent who with a painless razor-thin whisper of a knife parted the skin of a patient’s back from neck to waist to let out the smoke and fat of difficult messages her middle-aged grandson now in contemporary New Mexico daydreamed as a boy in New Jersey that he must speak aloud, not just hand over sealed, because these words and tales he knew in his sleep, how the Eastern Princess went among crystal labyrinths decreed by the chieftains of the Chicago tribes—O.K., that’s got to be the 1893 World’s Fair she visited, but what about the unheard-of flowers growing down out of haunted ceilings that for all her humor and calm may have haunted the Anglo grandmother who once evoked them—but when her stories stretched out to the western Indians, they were other than your authentic tales given from age to age about, well, Ship Rock: if not made up by an ethnologist tape recorder in Albuquerque in collusion with the Indian Agency (stumped by unemployment), handed down to a generation of geologists (some in collusion with the energy interest—though geologists and true) who concluded, who saw, under the moon of September or here under the morning sun of February, that the Rock looks like a sailing ship.

  Its sheets and shrouds hauled full. Its speed a myth unclouded and un-tackled by any measure except here this hypothetical man’s shallow anchor where he stands in front of his rented car in extreme northwest New Mexico watching Ship Rock.

  It’s been there since yesterday, he couldn’t get away from it, getting closer to it, going away, coming back, scale constant, size negotiable, alone, hence receding.

  He’s not sure if no one knows he’s here.

  Across the red slope of beach at the base of Ship Rock about two miles from where he stands, something moved a long time ago. Too fast not to be a vehicle. Then he didn’t see it—and is there a road out there across the Rock’s sandy-looking foundation?

  Who goes there in the February morning? He’s heard from an economist in Farmington thirty, forty miles from here, of lovers with pitons, hammers, climbing boots, who didn’t make it. Who went up there together and came down separately. (Permission needed to climb the Rock.) Or were never seen again, together or separate—drawn into the Rock or into themselves like newlyweds who stand on the plate twenty-some miles west and a bit north where the corners of four states—Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico— meet at one point and you and your lover can celebrate a boundless troth by being in several states at once. In 1906 the people of Arizona vetoed joint statehood with New Mexico. Maybe two stories slide together, the Rock that absorbs, the Ship that transports. The stuff breaks off; it’s volcanic tuff, a lot of it—ash—it crumbles. And people do more damage than the wind. But to themselves too. The lovers got high enough to fall but not to leap. It rises while you climb. Designed to.

  The Rock’s a place itself besides where it is—a place then more three-dimensional than most places. It is its own place, he thinks, and, unaccustomed to such thoughts, he feels a slight exaltation threatened with being exposed or wiped out, knowing what he feels, holding together. And holds on to what he sees—that Ship Rock might be a fistful, a handful—might be terrain grabbed like material, a land grab, some heavy stuff like sandpaper snatched and yanked in one wrench upward where it stays stiffly, nobody’s going to hear the continental crunching sound he makes up, one hand touches the other finding a brown-and-green relief map at school in New Jersey thirty years ago swelling under glass so you wanted to run your hand over the crust of mountains, long before he knew Ship Rock existed, and if so, would it have been visible on that school map under glass?

  This is Ship Rock in front of him. There it’s been since yesterday. It stuck up through its own rust haze at thirty-five miles and could be seen long before the journey to it was begun or thought of.

  But now he is here, silently close.

  Some two miles away, away but practically there, here on the desert-dirt track rutted down off the highway. A mile or so off, and then with a Navajo language talk-show in his ears he gently braked the car as if he’d reached the NASA Press Site for a launch how many moons ago and couldn’t get closer, and there was a white Saturn rocket, three miles away, quite a distance, but you give a monster space.

  Now a rock.

  He’s taken 5,648 (the plateau) away from 7,178 (the top of Ship Rock), figures on a survey map, to get 1,530 feet. Up off the plateau. The great continent of the plateau, that has a tilt, the faithful say, a long tilt as slight as time here was slow. He’ll feel the tilt this morning if he can.

  The economist in Farmington could laugh quietly as if he knew where he was, and probably did, and didn’t seem to weigh his words and didn’t need to, besides some of the figures on coal and water that he handed over on a sheet of paper, also Mother Earth, Father Sky, helpmates in the song like white corn and yellow corn, the frozen reconstituted orange juice that the economist mixed with mescal like the Indian song’s music and words growing together; quoted the idea (not his own, he said) that a country is like a cargo ship where the load isn’t lashed down and when it tilts with the ship the load slips and the ship founders.

  Oldest habitation in America. Desert floor is a phrase you hear. Prior words. He thinks up desert ceiling. And what falls if the ceiling tilts?

  Geologists, of whom he is not one, say Ship Rock came here not across the land and sea but up from below; and the Indians, of whom he is not one, have a tale to match it, about monsters in the depths of the earth—heroic, perhaps memorable conquests of which this mass, once monstrous, is a petrified sign, for the long, miles-long dikes are the congealed blood of the Hero Twins; but he, hypothetical man, he came out to this region on business. Business that’s as visible from here—off to his right, four topless stacks hung from white smoke, twenty-odd miles off—as this Ship Rock was from there yesterday. This ship. From everywhere around here. Its draw is fathomless.

  He’s at Ship Rock and didn’t mean to come. Detour this far, this close. Or has to see that he didn’t mean to come in order to guess that maybe he did.

  Not that he could avoid seeing Ship Rock from where he was yesterday.

  From the power plant and the strip mine beside it that were his job to see.

  While Ship Rock twenty-odd miles west kept coming into sight over the shoulder of a white man in a hard hat showing him the great plant and the so-called Navajo mine. No, not the mine. He went to see the mine for himself, he passed the power plant’s distinct blue lake. "No Fishing, No Waterskiing, Keep Area Clean"—foreground again
st the four white smokes rising into Father Sky. They’ll tell you the strip mine’s a whole ‘nother operation; but it’s right there next to the power plant, stretching for dark hundreds and hundreds of acres beyond its own monopolized horizon.

  The mine’s power plant? Well, it’s a different operation, you don’t have to dig for the mine’s power. The power plant’s mine? Well, sure—the Navajo mine. Electricity for California. Power to the People. But this isn’t California; this here is New Mexico.

  "Ship Rock is distance," he jotted into his head beside some figures. But let’s not get soft-headed about the Rock out there, O.K.? your voice inside you like an inner peace attempts an inner drone.

  But outside you the man’s voice in gear growls pleasantly. The man cites Navajos on the payroll. The question arises, How many, and are they in top jobs at top dollar? And what percent of the good jobs are filled by non-Indians brought in from outside?

  Ship Rock sailed on in the distance like a touring hallucination. But right here Utah International’s got the black coal cars of the Navajo mine railroad hooked up behind a red-and-white-striped black locomotive.

  How he first reached Ship Rock was through a book, a black-and-white glossy shot, and on the facing page an account of this supposed volcanic neck: the Rock photographed from a plane ten miles to the south, maybe more, the Rock sending off like a supermount two lesser chains, the dikes, the reptile tails. (The photograph is, among other places, two thousand miles east of here, near the three scattered members of his immediate family.)

  Volcanic neck. The State of Montana boasts a volcanic neck famous from the proving grounds of New Mexico to the gales of Wyoming, but that volcanic neck doesn’t look like a ship and (courtesy of the geologist’s imagination) it’s missing a head. But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone; the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.

  The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night.

  The volcanic neck in Montana doesn’t seem to be climbing up out of the plateau like Ship Rock. He’s seeing things, he’s a victim of last night, last year, of what he’s read or been told; and he’s sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.

  Prefers? The word weasels between yesterday and this coming afternoon so that they threaten to approach each other like yesterday afternoon’s business and last night at a motel, threaten to jam him between industrial information and, at the bar, boomtown big talk, two engineers from the Four Corners Power Plant, their evening Stetsons low to the eyebrows, both going home later to their ranchhouses along some street, but as for him—on a business trip—going out down the walk to his unit, past the still swimming pool, past two blondes who stopped talking as they passed him—never much on blondes—he was humming a song his first and only wife so long ago sang with a friend of theirs about a drunk husband coming home late to a bunch of wise answers—who couldn’t see or was encouraged to not quite see another man’s hat upon the hat rack—and so the wife sings,

  You old fool, you blind fool,

  Can’t you plainly see

  It’s only an old chamber pot

  My mother gave to me?

  No. He prefers to just look; he’d rather.

  The scraped flanks of dark and brown and ochre rising as if in a state of being set, constantly set to sail. Not set like the storyteller’s sun known as The Setting Sun beyond which was a narrow sea: but yes he would accept the narrow sea the Navajo crossed to land then among an unfriendly people from whom they had then to get away and so the Great Spirit sent a stone ship to help them, and it brought them here. Which was its object. And yet it seems to have been getting ready to move again while this hypothetical man in front of his rented car has been watching.

  Now I’ve traveled this wide world over,

  Ten thousand miles or more,

  But a J. B. Stetson chamber pot

  I never did see before.

  Or was that only the little movement at the base of the Rock, someone’s camper, pickup truck—do Navajos go on picnics on a weekday? For a price the vessel will take your car, you must tell it a story it hasn’t heard.

  He’s looking at the south side, looking north along this car track that runs for a way beside the jagged dike rampart marking a fissure where lava broke out but not with the push that came up at the main vent, the pipe, the throat that Ship Rock finally filled. For the volcano that was once here is here only in the last lavas that came up the pipe, up but not out of the throat, never made it out but hardened. Like a photograph of something you know is moving.

  The volcano having blown slowly away.

  Like brush; like chaff. Like grasses that money over a period of twenty-five years (just begun) will strip away in order to mine low-sulfur "surface" coal that can be turned by the power plant on the far side of the vivid, implausible lake into power for which the cities are hungry.

  Give us a ball-park figure for what this is costing. He’s not a businessman, maybe a cut above, certainly a pay cut below—by chance thrown up separate enough to hope that while he’s no engineer in Thorstein Veblen’s elite crew getting the most out of Machine Process against Businessmen whose profit taking gets the least out of it, he might yet sneak in as a Workman, but in only the wake of what’s become of Veblen’s hope, Veblen’s Process machined to serve survival: well, a divided Workman laboring to grasp and bring together the dynamite loosening the surface, the colossal dragline unveiling the seam, the 375,000-ton shovel that picks up 120 tons of overburden from the coal seams and transfers it to "spoil piles."

  "Overburden," did you say? And is that the Ship Rock over there? And how far away is it?

  As far as tomorrow—thirty-odd miles from this business of first things first, a mine where spoil piles have been graded and regraded by bulldozers into hills whose contours aren’t like white elephants or great flashing birds because they’re dark as dust-dulled licorice, as a dreadful old story, dark as the coal they slice out by accelerated geo-logic—and aren’t like anything except those hills far off where pinon trees grow here and there and two other kinds (two or three). Except that on these spoil piles of overburden you have only the contour, like a dark sea of dunes—say it, a black sea.

  The Tribal Council down in Window Rock couldn’t say no to the royalties—was that it?—even if as yet Utah International (with the collateral end-run of its good will) can’t figure out quite how to re vegetate.

  But the manager on duty did not perhaps read his visitor’s face with its little skeptical twitch any more than the hard hat did who said goodbye and disappeared, while he, hypothetical man (unearthed by converging teams of archaeologists at the site), saw Ship Rock across the blue lake miles beyond the lake across the full shimmer of desert miles; and thinking not that Utah International had sent a plane to collect him (which he is not quite eligible for) but that he’d been asked how he liked his work—traveling so much, etcetera—he thought but did not reply that to tell the truth investigating this operation was a respite from his highly involved personal life ("if you know what I mean," he also would not say).

  But the manager was pointing at the stacks now to their left across the lake and to the left of Ship Rock twenty-odd miles in front of them westward saying did he know that the plume from the Four Corners plant was the one man-made thing the Gemini astronauts had been able to make out from space; to which this hypothetical man, this ad hoc man with a pocket notebook in his pocket replied, What about industrial haze? Wouldn’t they—the tightly sealed Gemini heroes—see the industrial haze?—while he actually thought, Why not Ship Rock—wouldn’t they see the Rock?

  Glad, though, not to utter the words. Thinking also that he’d like to know what collateral Utah International had to put up—if any—to build Four Corne
rs: that is, how the thing was done. But Utah International did not build Four Corners, they put together the package, wrapped up water, coal, tribal acceptance, and the participation of the power companies. And he’d like to know what the Utah stock, preferred or common, is quoted at (if there is any stock), and recalls someone’s words he probably did not finish, that, through the division of labor, the whole of each person’s attention is naturally directed toward some one very simple object.

  Across the plateau, Ship Rock would be a respite from the information he could extract. Respite—for Ship Rock he thought then yesterday gave no answers (though mind you you could never get it to face you) and yet now (having to his surprise come), he sees the Rock rushing imperceptibly through landscape and he is distracted from all other respites and places, because the Rock is close enough now to show him people all over it. Everywhere clinging to the edges of the ship like stowaways whose salvation has been turned inside out. Indians coming from behind the sunset; now you can’t quite see them, they go with the Rock; they seem the picture of some necessary blindness, theirs and the Rock’s working together. Why, is this how the Indians are giving it back to him? (Think you’re funny.) People everywhere cling to handholds, wedged in notches, immigrants nested like blind lookouts or passengers of a ship that has been turned inside out and could not see where it’s going but for the Great Spirit’s knowledge of the route which the Rock feels as its own, which in turn seems to inform the ship’s complement of this event.