Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —Revegetated? asks an environmentalist, setting up obstacles where none exist to a reasonable settlement.

  That’s a promise, politicks the trained interrogator "brought in from Outside" who likes it so much he thinks he gon’ come back ever’ year with his growing family so long as there are at least the traditional mirages of water to support the summer swimming rites so common to his people.

  A promise? That’s what you say to all your people prior to torturing them with doubts.

  —re vegetated for sure over the long haul, avers the interrogator speaking English with a vengeance: but first we need to know what the journalist Mayn thought he was doing that February day in northern New Mexico, first trying to get a helicopter to fly him o’er Ship Rock and the Four Corners Power Plant, later rendezvou’ing at the Roc’ with one Raymond Vigil, an Indian known to regard Mayn as a useful publicist, even powerful, and a radical environmentalist-woman Dina with whom Mayn abruptly departed leaving his rented car to be returned to the agency in Farmington by the portly young energy-conscious Vigil while Mayn himself vanished south in the direction of Albuquerque, the voice of Vigil pursuing him like a back-seat driver.

  The question is hard to believe; it asks so much and gives so little . . .

  ... but it is not done with: for the daughter of Mayn not many months later arrived at Utah International’s doorstep asking similar questions about strip mining the Indians, re vegetating the injured sky, and ascending the treacherously softish rock of the thirty-mile-adjacent ship to find out if, from there, one could see the ground-level lovers’ plate marking the intersection of four states, or so the unexpected postcard to the dusty correspondent-woman Lincoln, enrolled in one of Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops, revealed —though to someone who herself was of more interest to the multiple interrogator than Mayn’s daughter’s friendly acquaintance with the poignant woman Lincoln could ever be.

  Like Mayn, whom he resembles at some angles though possessed of a killer talent which Mayn never acquired perhaps because he has had a will to no power during the formative years, unlike Grace Kimball, who had the will to power ("originally from," and envisioning Manhattan from, much further away than New Jersey), but never any interest in killing her fellow man, the interrogator has lately had to rely on the dreams of others, which if he can’t get them to vouchsafe to the next room’s acoustics, he has obtained a scan of, through surprisingly old surplus equipment captured from authentic media geniuses of earlier basal-research ilk whose mind-and-heart sensors got shunted off into projects for handicapped (which viewers of the century in question became anyway), shelved just like those secretly launched odd-lot orbital platforms, for the duration.

  And it doesn’t check out.

  Yet while we, the interrogator’s momentarily stoned trusties, have checked it out, the whole Wide Load kept moving, accompanied by its monster night; it won’t pull over just while we take time to reflect upon the obstacle it is until too soon it’s gone, damn damn damn. Yet we already remember, in whatever order, the things animate and admineral and postvegetal in that Wide Load passing in-and-with its own privately operated night, that is there’s a real unit being hauled and at least someone in it going through the motions.

  The interrogator has his uses. He notes lies extracted by, well, pain. Like that the Princess had two dreams consequent upon the afternoon of the sunset-on-hold (the dream in which the council said she was to cause the Prince’s death yet migration soul-wise and the dream about the grave) when a third also was betrayed, the one she told the Anasazi healer and he ascribed to his radically younger colleague Owl Woman just before his death with its aural aftermath, in which she’s hastening to get to the place where she is to see something at dawn but dawn comes too soon, and her wad is shot. The interrogator also comes up with insights in the field of the comparatively social: such that we have found in countries with coasts an extreme reluctance on the part of the populace to accept the death of family members, much less their disappearance.

  Yet Jim did not cry and carry on. And Brad had his "Day." Yet that is not what we mean. Brad did cry and carry on, and inconsolably, but, as the interrogator missed, Brad and Mel Mayn both accepted the death of Sarah: she wasn’t coming back; she had followed the strains of her violin conceivably, if you call that music waves.

  Whereas the Anasazi medicine man left his thing behind him (if you call those words ‘bout "darkness rattling" thing) when he went on in largely powder form, or, more precisely, honest particle form, having, as the interrogator quickly and emptily notes, been for the longest time beyond life or death.

  But on a day when Jim was just standing at the edge of the goddamn music room watching Brad cry and groan and swim and wound the air having saved up all this shit for a month during which Jim would wake early in his own room and stand up still asleep and look out the window then go at once to Brad’s room (which had the dormer let into it and, by the bed, a part of the ceiling came slanted down low) and wake him by touching his shoulder at the same moment as he spoke his name (he wore red-and-white pyjamas, Jim a T-shirt and jockeys), Jim was as able as the interrogator to pick up inconsistencies. But he had reached a time in his friendship with his grandmother when he wasn’t sure any more; and what happened to the Navajo mother when the Prince and Princess separately left, he after her, looked like some weird balancing-out that was like See what the future brings.

  But his mother had been the one to say Go away where you belong, etcetera—hadn’t she said that? (yes, in the extreme quiet of her bedroom he had heard it)—yet she was the one who wasn’t here. He was falling, he knew, but he could not hit the floor like Brad. He fell forward, and maybe as much for both of them as Brad did this tragic bit for both of them when Jim couldn’t cry—why would he?—but this wasn’t all he couldn’t do.

  He couldn’t ask Margaret any more stuff like what about that other egg, the shell splashed with the rainbow albumen of the first egg the lion ate before turning into the wolf whose entrails flared upon the sky. Anyway, Margaret was mad, because when Alexander said Lake Rompanemus was probably still warm and she said the wind was not, and Alexander agreed with her to keep her happy, she replied, And it’ll be hailing by sunset.

  One thing: the Princess had felt the future that day: takes a while to digest, like Ira Lee the Indian halfback said in the huddle, she swallowed a pin when she was only nine but didn’t feel the prick till she was nineteen—

  the day the Sun wouldn’t set and she knew she would leave: that was fact, to be believed; and so was the Prince’s mother coming back to life three days later and scaring the other, more administrative son half to death, on top of his brother having left pursuant of the foreign Princess who was traveling on her gift horse, not the at times unreal giant bird that ate horses and had left for Choor in the middle of the night.

  But there’s an egg unaccounted for, except in that dream’s grave where the People, against the everlasting cannon, in the trench, in the trees, in the sky that is itself orbiting, express their sympathetic solidarity by resolving into a fluid neither cold nor warm pouring in, pouring in—sing it—which they wouldn’t do for Andrew Jackson in their Seminole forms in the Florida caper, getting shot, getting shot like the "red sticks" Andrew Jackson called them (and they were) and as ignorant of civilized football as were the skulls which Jim and Brad’s cereal box during summer, ‘45, said Indians kicked around inventing soccer. Until Jim, one day long after he had gone into facts with a vengeance delicate enough to be kept by him from himself though it’s just a job as the fact-oriented interrogator once slyly, ruefully said, dividing his chaired, nay tabled interrogatee-like data extracted from it into dead ends or rock bottom and further possibility, found the egg one day, did Jim, and didn’t know who’d made it up, him or Margaret. Except he did know that, before the afternoon of Brad’s Day ended upon the continuing cadence of Brad’s grieving breath, Bob Yard sounded off at last, after being subdued for an hour and a half, his shifty eyes moving
soberly under the dark-chalked blazons of his eyebrows (but Hold it, offers the interrogator: Sarah, the mother in absentia, was possibly about to be found out, nicht wahr?, and so—)

  No! No! howls a voice in the next room, there were those who knew about Brad and where he came from, and didn’t talk, and most others didn’t know including the brothers themselves, though Jim guessed. Not, however, that day at the beach when he wanted to throttle his brother but didn’t know why (read how).

  Yes, cool and subdued for a long time as if the presence of death they were in was Brad’s, who nonetheless moved—Bob Yard at last angrily entered a dispute. Alexander had returned to report that the hurricane was not developing after all, although the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms rattled as if the whole house were being moved; and Pearl W. Myles, who had sat long-legged on a straight chair looking from person to person until Margaret, having cleared away and washed up, returned to inquire what was happening to Pearl’s classes at the high school today, said factually that she had felt the low pressure in this vicinity since early morning when she was having orange juice. Alexander said there were whole belts of pressure and Margaret, who was still peeved with him, said she didn’t believe a word of it, and Bob Yard in that abruptly deep, grating voice said, "That’s why air travels horizontal."

  In the silence that followed this sound, Brad turned over and sat up and stared at Bob, who was his father but didn’t act it and the boy didn’t know. "You know what she said to me?" said Bob, with that brief power of news from beyond the grave: "She said the wind would just go straight ahead, straight out in a line, except the world is always turning, that’s what she said to me, and that’s why," said Bob—

  —but Jim as suddenly (hearing Mel ask "Where’d she ever say a thing like that?") left the room and shut the door hearing Bob’s reaction to him and knowing that his own face was full and he wanted to stand alone in the hall, though Pearl W. Myles, with unimaginable presumption, at once followed him into the front hall and, in what order he didn’t know, put her hand on his arm or spoke or picked up the huge paperweight of heavy glass with newsprint embedded in it that wasn’t ever doing anything on the mahogany hall table with the mirror above it which she looked in because Jim caught her eyes widening at herself, then him—and at once he told her he didn’t know what she’s doing here and he went back in the music room in time to hear Bob say to Mel, Margaret, Brad, and posterity: "But I said to her ‘What a lot of stuff—they ain’t curved.’ "

  And ever afterward Jim recalled, like the recovery of the Navajo matron with the demon-hole in her head, the blank breathless look of hate in Brad’s eyes that could not quite turn away, that is from the man he didn’t know was his father. And worth remembering, because Margaret left as suddenly as Jim had, and the front door blew closed behind her so one expected to hear her black shoes pounding the lawn, the walk, and a while later when Mel Mayn who seemed to care for Brad was sitting alone with him at the kitchen table having a drink, having let the paper take care of itself all day—most of the day—jim rode his bicycle up into West Main Street past the tall brown Presbyterian Church and out to the intersection with the highway leading in one direction to the shore and in the other past the race track to the gray capital city of Trenton and when he had continued pedaling freely south a mile, he turned in on the gravel of the cemetery where it was a challenge to ride and he would not cross the grass. And it wasn’t long before he saw his grandmother, as if the sound of his balloon tires on the loose stones had found her out, but if she looked sad, here in the place where she had put in place almost with her own hands a granite marker for the lost body of her strange daughter, she was engaged in such conversation with Eukie Yard, who had inherited the caretaker’s position from his cousin all too long ago, that Jim pretended to ignore them and passed among the neighborhoods of this place to the Mayn plot and his mother’s stone whose gray brightness said she was not quite there and whose newness needed the weather to fade it back into the realness of the other stones.

  He was not sure what he smelled. It wasn’t cooking but it seemed like some simple food. He did not know what kept him from behaving like Brad. He could not believe what his mother had done. And also she had left her violin. Not to mention (he smiled to himself, literally smiled out loud) the kid insect all wiry and like a pampered kid when he never had been, lying on his stomach today with the violin on the rug beyond his head. God! There wasn’t any good reason Jim could see for her to have done this silent thing.

  The marker showed she was either forty or thirty-nine; he was giving her for her birthday a necklace made of pale blue beads and little hollow silver bells, that Ira Lee’s large-eyed, tall, round-shouldered, lip-licking, single-minded, and unconsciously beautiful sister had made, because she had a book that showed different crafts and she was Indian and had visited a reservation in New York, and one in Pennsylvania where Margaret was interested in the women; Jim hadn’t paid for the necklace but he was going to get it anyhow. The breeze had blown away the rain which was on his wet knees, because he was kneeling with nothing to say.

  He knew his mother shouldn’t have done what she did, but he couldn’t do any more than put his head on the wet grass and have nothing to say— not even Shit. It was hers, not his, the deed. He was going to miss varsity practice; he was J.V. age but heavy enough and he had run right through Feingold the senior guard whose father was a lawyer who commuted to Newark and who was (that is the son) supposed to make All-State this year if he kept his grades up. Feingold had a flat, splayed nose, not a Jewish nose (according to George the old man soda jerk), and liked bad weather; he really dug in and Jim had almost without thinking what he was doing run right through Feingold yesterday and a moment afterward didn’t know what he had been doing, except going for some point beyond the opposing backfield; and he was missing scrimmage today, wet helmets and somebody’s elbow numbing your lip—but thinking, always thinking; blowing on his fingers before a play to let Feingold think this was a surprise pass when Ira Lee was the regular passer.

  Jim didn’t know how sick his mother’d been, and he knew other husbands and wives like the Bob Yards who yelled at each other. She had written a poem to President Truman about the atomic bombs but she showed it to Alexander who gave it to Mel without telling Sarah, and Mel was going to run it in the paper, print it as a surprise. But Brad told Sarah and she went downtown. Jim heard she ran all the way—and took it off Mrs. Many’s desk and left without a word to Mel who was at the far end of the shop keeping calm beside a press probably, and maybe nothing was said about it.

  "Would you like a cup of—" tea, you’d think it was, but he had a blank, and in the blank rose and spread a substance beyond words— "and some cinnamon toast?" she asked him one afternoon when he had come into the shady house, heard nothing, and passed to the kitchen, sat down at the kitchen table. He heard his mother moving slowly like an old person or a naturally quiet person, woman maybe, slightly methodical, knowing though that Jim was where he was: and when she stood there in the kitchen doorway, selfish but not bad; dark, her eyebrows beautiful, soft warm curves—and sharp about the mouth as if she was keeping words inside, he realized that those words she did say weren’t words she got much chance to because he was out on his bike or at his grandmother’s.—"Eating grass or washing your face?" Margaret’s voice came out of the sky practically and he didn’t care if he was getting his khakis damp and rubbing his nose in the cemetery sod, he wasn’t crying (she knew that) and he wasn’t carrying on like his Brad today, and his grandmother, who had evidently finished her animated, probably administrative, conversation with the little fat man with the crew cut, Eukie Yard the caretaker, wasn’t talking to Jim like Mel did to Brad: and Jim stood up with rain from the grass on his face knowing she had been crude and sadly harsh, and he said: "I keep thinking maybe she’s here, but she’s not."

  "You can be sure of that."

  He wanted to say something awful, like "If they find her, this is where they’ll p
ut her," or dumb, like "Least there’s a stone waiting for her." He said. "But it’s like there’s somebody here. You know?"

  She seemed to. She knew he wasn’t one of the Sunday types.

  Who could tell what he was feeling—that is, how far—which is—O.K. (he thought, and knew she thought)—just what’s the matter with all this pedestrian provincial background. But, observes the interrogator, who cares to guess at feelings? they are like dreams of surplus equipment. No, we answer, they’re thoughts that pretend to be stronger than the words we try them in.