Mayn was not brilliant and was perhaps barely average in math (which had less than nothing to do with his encouraging his wife to do the income tax with AP pencils he brought home); but he found himself nonetheless or all the more fascinated by such mysteries of ballistic deflection as the path of a shell fired nine thousand yards by a capital ship in World War Two that missed by a hundred yards to the right, even after all the obvious allowances had been made. He did (over a drink) plot the curved course of a projectile to be fired out of a totally collapsible and degradably exportable little ‘‘ system" from a roof in a tree-lined residential street of northwest Washington, D.C., where he shared an apartment for a time on Kalorama Road, to a target area on the White House lawn, and wondered why it had not been tried.
He was less fascinated than fond of that nuclear incident in which one weapon, through blast or radiation or heat or what have you, is "totaled" (we were later to say) or neutralized by another weapon belonging to the same country. (Ted and Jim were having a good laugh at the Defense Department name "Fratricide" for this type of incident one night at dinner when they received almost simultaneously long-distance calls, Mayn from his wife five hundred and more miles north who was moved by a luminous sunset across a lake and had brought the phone out to the screen porch to prolong what she saw and share it with Jim—Ted, a call from his former wife to tell him his two daughters had driven the car into an urban ravine the night before—the night before!, might as well say "last month"—and one of them had lost her little finger—"Fratricide" was the official name they were laughing about and playing variations upon when first the waiter came to inform Jim, then the owner of the restaurant came and said Ted had a call.
I need to be alone, abruptly retorts the interrogator (read aborts) glad his "interlocutor" (electrical jargon) is wired to the chair in the next room, not this; you can (his retort continues) lose touch with your feelings, engorged with fact like a mosquito or a penis con came (that is, with blood, in Spanish, he adds, instinctively testing us to see if we’ll admit we know that came means not blood but flesh as in "fleshed out."
. . . boring, as boring as family life yet not so moving, not so rich; for the current events of fam-life are richer than a lump of uranium; interesting because boring, which is not a paradox to wake the Interrogator, such as, that the reasonings which are our history’s twin valve for keeping abreast of itself concluded at the pointed end of the ABM decade that anti-ballistic missile systems for defense of city and family would step up the arms race, whereas ABM for defense of military strategic bases wouldn’t at all escalate us.
Wake? did we say—as if a part of us woke up, or didn’t. A part of us that if it were not there would have to be encountered. Gibberish, softly calls the Interrogator from sleep, but dreams two pistols with one source not one with two. He is being watched by many in his and their sleep. A singer, for one, who has to think off of both sides of her tongue and knows she has been seduced yet maybe to be a new Judith to this mufti warrior finely furnishing her king-sized bed; he is half-covered, up just to his knee, and she passes her mind’s hand over that knee and becomes that knee so that unknown to this sometime interrogating lover of hers who is a fellow national (though strictly she carries a Swiss passport), she looks back at herself from that knee and can’t believe what her ribs and fingers and mouth and blood have done, she sees her life all summed up in one damned minute (but which one?) and, back in herself again, leaving the knee where it is, she sees through the skin of this Chilean naval intelligence, and though she hears us of whom she is a part whisper Holofemes, hollow furnishing, hollow furnace, she knows he is quite real and is possessed of myriad tissues too fine each in itself to allow space for hollowness.
And while he sleeps on, her father is surely awake under house arrest thousands of miles from here controlled by the system this lover represents here in New York where he has asked her more questions than she wants to answer yet has given her more attention than would her potential executioner, and she believes he loves her and does not think her a traitor (but is he right?), and she wonders if she could interrupt this life of his as he apparently might interrupt the life of a friend of hers though exactly why may remain unclear except that the friend, an economist who was in the previous government and was living very quietly here with his wife who is still more a friend of hers, never stopped analyzing the fascist regime, or being the man he is has not stopped thinking. Has she stopped thinking, a famous singer highly visible?
Singing can seem an alternative to everything else, to thinking and to consuming life; and an alternative to (in the guise of) love. And yet to have been your lover’s knee for a brief breath of time recalls what we, even we, can’t quite bring ourselves to think upon while inertly we too move among self-righting, self-wronging systems, themselves often non-inertial.
"Interrupt? Interrupt?" murmurs the Interrogator, from his inertial sleep system. "Do not think our old-fashioned electricity couldn’t, if we told it to, attack both sides of our mouth that you speak out of: your words interrupt a life might mean break into—into a house or other sealed container or broadcast—or mean stop, as in thief or time, or heart-beat breath-flow (as we say in strategic forces training). So what is it going to be?"
It looked like the dumbest joyride there in the cemetery to take Bob Yard’s pickup truck and interrupt Brad’s Falling-Apart, or interrupt its conclusion (which was Brad-Together-Again, at graveside); but Jim turned right at the stone gate to his surprise, and heard the motor whine upward to be shifted and at that instant he nearly ran down someone’s collie itself spinning round and round at the edge of the road ready to race him, and by the time he was past the dog he found he had stepped on the worn-through metal of the clutch pedal and shifted gears.
And a mile down past the golf course and a brown field of strewn corn stalks and a two-horse trailer all by itself and a couple of narrow frame houses, he decided without warning and without checking behind him to turn around, and he needed to shift down after he stepped on the brake but, upon swinging grandly round from shoulder to shoulder so he felt in his buttocks just that first shadow of tipping, he found in his mirror if not in some new weight that a boy about his age had jumped out of nowhere into the back, a stocky boy without a shirt or (Jim later thought) shoes who’d been working in the sun all summer and had a prickle of stubble around his chin and on his upper lip, maybe the son of some indigent piners back in the woods around the lake (that the Democrat ran a piece on "the problem of" about once a year); and as Jim skidded his rear wheels completing the U-turn so he’s headed back toward the cemetery, he found he had shifted down without thinking.
And when the stocky kid, his hands braced upon the side of the truckbed where he sat, looked comfortably back down the road at their dust like he didn’t care where they were going, Jim without thinking leaned the wheel to turn again, reaching the brink of the ditch this time so he scraped gravel and dirt into it from the shoulder and this time thought about shifting down but didn’t kick the clutch pedal quick enough and the transmission screamed; but by then he was turning again and by the time he was ready to shift up, he looked in the mirror and the kid wasn’t in back any more, Jim had shifted O.K., but a little too soon. The kid wasn’t in the road or anywhere to be seen.
Jim braked. He looked back through the cab’s rear window while opening his door with the stuck handle. He stood on the running board surveying the ditches and fields and the woods a half mile beyond: but the kid was gone as if Jim’s violent maneuvers had thrown him away into the air.
But he slowly turned the truck again to head it back the way he had come, toward the cemetery, toward town, his first driving ever and never taught, and then he did see his fugitive passenger. He was striking across a field behind a little yellow frame house and Jim waited to watch him go through the fence at the far end and enter the woods without once looking back. He wore dungarees with side pockets down the leg, and his shoulders surged as he went along. Sure he wou
ld have taken a ride to town but, swung off the truck’s turning circle, he found himself aimed toward the woods, which was O.K. also. Jim tasted applejack in his throat. An old school bus passed him, shading the white line, four or five kids inside, farm kids. Jim wondered how his grandmother had gotten out to the cemetery. They were all waiting when he carefully shifted down like he’d been driving for years and turned left, in through the gate, and rode the clutch to the exact spot where Bob had parked parallel to a low curb half-obscured by grass. They were crazy, standing there as if they would always be there.
And when his beloved grandmother said from her distance, "Jim! What’s the meaning of this? What did you think you were doing? You could have—" he found words come out of him that he enjoyed more later than now because he could not believe he had said them . . . "Sorry, I forgot the body."
You can hardly, says the now-ruminant Interrogator, expect belief in a tale like that about Jim driving not so much licenseless as without any practice—unless we had here a heroic episode?—have you an epic in New Jersey, all worthwhile states yield at least one, and Jersey is no exception.
But later, when Bob Yard came round to Throckmorton Street to see about another matter, Bob told him he had understood just how he felt and for a moment laughed when Jim went looking for the kid the following Sunday; he wanted to find out if he really had taken the two screwdrivers Bob had left in the pickup truck, and settle the matter with him. "You just went down the road and came back, eh?" said Bob, but listening as he must have been he might have heard Jim stop the truck even without turning off the ignition.
He went around the lake one spring afternoon with his friend Sam, and a woman was screaming and groaning in a shack. This was before they had much in the way of trailers for settled living. She was crying out at intervals and a tiny child opened the door above the two steps and peeked around. Screams got as fast as breathing. Jim said they should get a doctor. Sam said she didn’t need one, she was probably having a baby and they better get out of there.
Jim went to Bob about it, not his own father. Did they have rooms in those shacks?
Bob said, Just one, but they didn’t have to pay anything, but sooner or later the town would clear them out.
Margaret got in touch with Pearl Myles and got angry when Miss Myles said she shared Margaret’s sorrow for her daughter Sarah. Jim felt drunk again when he got out of the pickup truck at the cemetery. He never, to his knowledge, asked Margaret how the cosms of the sun gave the East Far Eastern Princess her future, during that afternoon the sun didn’t go down and didn’t, and didn’t, but if that wasn’t prophecy, what was? And somewhere along the line he figured, yes, Margaret did have powers, though maybe it was to keep stuff to herself, though he was pretty much past all that: certainly she didn’t volunteer more story stuff though she knew many facts and often told him about the actual places and how the Navajos, with originally twenty-four thousand acres of land (which multiplied astronomically) were lucky they had no gold or silver near the surface and smart enough to turn their timber into board and not sell it just as logs, but this was long after Margaret was there. Young Margaret lived with them, did some weaving and rode a horse, learned some Spanish and was never taught Navajo. For years Jim hardly read a line of those old dispatches she sent on ahead of her (or, at first, behind her) to the Democrat and the pieces she wrote when she got home—some at breakneck speed, she hardly knew how; some, she said, slowly and painfully, one about a time when, in the dead of winter, she had swapped a lesson in herb healing and a public talk at the Browning Club on the Navajo ceremonial "Blessing Way" which helped to keep wind and lightning and so forth in harmony with other forces, in return for train fare from Cincinnati, but she wound up in Massillon interviewing over tea a self-made populist businessman who had literally dreamt up a solution to the Municipal Improvement Problem, to wit non-interest-bearing bonds to the extent of half the assessed value of the property within the municipal limits—bonds (all of this in a dream!) then to be deposited with the Department of the Treasury (significantly including since i860 the Secret Service) as security for a loan of legal-tender notes—the man none other than Jacob Coxey, whose sandstone quarry supplied steel and glass works, who bred blooded racehorses in Kentucky, whose daughter was christened Legal Tender, and who, a few weeks later, set off with an army of unemployed to march on Washington.
The Democrat was hardly a well-known newspaper. In the 1870s but-tonmakers plundered Indian burial grounds. Margaret saw a locomotive literally stalled by the squashed corpses of locusts. You could feel it. Hundreds of jackrabbits like giant unwinged bugs racing each other out of town ahead of a dust storm. Mayn had to ask a lot of questions in his line of work if you could call it that. Maybe a third at least of our known reserves of uranium are in Indian lands in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. Navajos emphasize what happened more than when, but do not kid yourself, they know the sequence where it counts. Which came first, the well or the sewer? The day the world ends will be the day the Navajo lose their land, or is it the other way around? It’s the other way around. There are plants in the desert, in New Mexico and Africa, that get nibbled all year long; so they grow spines and brew poison juice. "The new policy is self-determination without termination." "Say that again?" requests the girl on the beach. "President Nixon to Congress. The policy was to terminate tribal control over resources and phase out federal protection of Indian control of Indian resources." "Say that again?"
"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"
Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away—it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.
He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did you hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"
Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later—as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which we are and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly—Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack and without a license and with a passenger he didn’t mention b
ut later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—
Did you ever see that boy again?
Who knows?
But the screwdrivers however casually left near a tool box and near probably some rags and usually a gasoline can with a neck on it not where Bob had left them were really gone: so the kid—
You expect us to believe you never told your wife?
Scout’s honor.
Did you belong to the Boy Scouts?
Well . . .
You brought it up.
Officially, yes.
So your word is worth only the paper it is written on.
He could live with that; sure.
Jim looked at his father’s bowed head and his half-brother eating a sandwich and as if through the munching of Brad, the mouth work and prospect of digesting, Jim smelled peanut butter, so it wasn’t one of Margaret’s sandwiches. He saw why people got drunk. He had looked out Bob’s windshield and his breath was taken away and when he looked back into the truck bed the kid was gone. As he had been to begin with.
Well, why hadn’t he told about it? Not even Sam, his friend, whose long face would look like a bloodhound’s in twenty years, Jim saw it exactly. Sam, with his leather boots on a hot September Sunday, who was always ready to go someplace but you had to give him the idea first, and then he would take over and see the sky through the trees, a beaver dam along a junky old stream, faint depressions across pine needles, tracks of an unknown creature coming out of nowhere, and suddenly remember hearing beavers smacking their tails on the flat water at night.
Women and Men Page 94
