Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  I never, you know, said that, said his grandmother, I couldn’t have— but she did ride east or southeast (fast and quite carefree, considering) to the dry orange valley of the Zuni who were learning beautiful silverwork and turquoise then (not centuries before, in case you wondered, it was an employment project—late nineteenth century) and when she came to a house a woman was piling clothes and a pipe and what looked like a naturally grown toothbrush outside her door and the East Far Eastern Princess (—come on, Gramma!)—the Princess asked a man the way who loitered outside and he said he would go with her to show her and when, alive to the niceties of reciprocation, she said, But don’t you live here, he said, Up until five minutes ago. And he picked up the pile of ejected belongings on the doorstep—but anyway, who ever wove with lightning?, it’s too hard to handle, said the boy—

  What is lightning anyway? said his own daughter Flick years later, and by then he knew, or anyway could say)—couldn’t you, said the boy, carry lightning around in you and when you opened your mouth—

  —No, said the man years later, you don’t hold the charge; naturally you get burned, etcetera, but you don’t hold the charge—

  —so what brought the boy to that moment setting in motion the Princess’s departure, hence the Navajo Prince’s, hence, foreign to all we are supposed to know, his mother’s recovery to life and legend right there without moving an inch and where she had been dead, although the demons did come back although they found her Indian head healed of its hole, and could but canter about among the follicles of her supple scalp for the first time getting to know each other ‘stead of being all business—

  —and it was not until another time that he and his grandmother went into the matter of downcoming and upgoing weather, when they seemed to reach an intolerable moment when he had to speak of his mother to her and almost did not—

  because he heard his mother’s voice saying what he had, however, heard her say once already: "I am waiting for it to come to me. I know it’s going to. It’s inside me." Oh she was smart, that’s why she got herself into these spots to get out in one piece: he heard that, too, like some thought she had had when he was inside her but we don’t believe any of that crap, it’s in the same league as reincarnation. She was asked if she hoped it was a girl this time around—oh God I just hope it can walk as soon as possible!—well it’s not a horse (a foal) feeling for its stirrup out in the darkness of the unknown world!—until, knowing the awful word because Sam’s mother had known somebody who had one, he asked his father, Did she really want to have Brad? (the little spoiled bastard) and his father for once in a lifetime backhanded him across the bridge of the nose, a point hard but sensitive to pressure, only then to ask him what he thought he was saying. And the boy who felt like a man but enough to honor his father’s stupid pain and not strike back, replied, Just did she want to go through with it?—so his father stumbled out of the room and the boy knew the man didn’t know how to say I’m sorry I hit you, and the boy thought correctly that he would despise the man for many a year.

  Yet forget though we may that long ago in terms of American continental space-time the Indians had horses that were midnight blue from Mexico—the hoofbeats go on along the parallel tracks that cross at will in memory as if they were underground upside down by our angle and we were in the ground not they—we already remember a beeg difference between the levity that itself can be seen visibly coming out of the collected mouths of those concerned, and the real wounds appearing on the surface of the long-mentioned and long-suffering victims’ form as he or she is bent to her task of recalling what the interrogator has or had asked, including how the Hermit was entitled to the title "Inventor." We, as his and others’ relations have spoken for Mayn, who havee power but dinna want ooze same, and in speaking for him suggested that while subject may be encouraged, nay gladly prodded, to find in recollection a future of sorts, and truly the past recollected the person in such a way as to concoct a future, a parallel to turn to or on, parallels meet, which they do on these new spherical drawing boards plus in the horse latitudes though strictly speaking it’s horses there who meet.

  When the Hermit-Inventor in need of a breather and fresh from his New York exploits though unable to sell the real world of commercial architecture on his theory of wind shadows told the Anasazi ancient that the horse latitudes were so cold because horses were thrown overboard in those oceans, the Anasazi explained that this in turn was because sea and land were joined like earth and sky and once ships had been able to sail right through the land and horses galloped the waters, but horses had forgotten all this and it was cruel to just throw them into the sea. We didn’t hear them any more. But after all these tapeworm tracks and evolution of self to new limited senses of the worm, the not-hearing of those horses kept up till we had to admit in the absence of interrogation that we saw the horses we had heard, there’s a number of us, so a number of them, while admitting as well that a man James Mayn (not always to be identified with the boy who looked out of his grandmother’s house into massed leaves mysteriously withholding their trees or with the fratri-being who left the other house, his own, second every morning for school) saw them (horses) like a (dreamlike?) recollection (reported wifeward, who herself would always say, in the days when she was near enough by to be heard, Oh you always have them, you don’t remember them) the horses were racing, two dark brownies left to right, two paler incompleties below the first two but racing (or, better said, frisking, left to right) yet from the right came two others going the other way like a market or the optical illusion a wagerer has that the horses he has bet are running in the wrong direction and will reach the finish line too soon; but, Mayn finds in the (day?) dream some horse that grew long mountain horns and a one-line body no less abstract than the two mere lines of long horns (long arcs) and two that are identical but legs, directed downward in case gravity evolved in the body drawing it toward where gravity go; except that to his wife in the morning as one day in the future to another who isn’t his wife but some of the same things get said like was, horse, you, antler, laughing, water, new, though it can’t all be reincarnate-new until he said, oh of course it was that postcard—which postcard? asks the lady from beside him, and with fatal charm adds, I don’t know anything about any postcard . . . !

  —Postcard a fellow sent me, French guy, we talked about Polaris subs in a cab going to the airport, or was it the other way around?, the card was the famous caves with the drawings twenty, thirty thousand years ago, better than I could do.

  —Let’s go see them, she says, but what did you mean the other way around?

  —Oh it may just have been Polaris cabs we were talking about in a sub going to the airport.

  —Airports are on dry land.

  —Anyway only five people can see the caves at a time.

  —There’s just the two of us.

  —But it’s the humidity, the chemistry; open the cave and the humidity erases all the drawings. You have to be a scientist, a scholar.

  —Scientists don’t hold their humidity?

  —That’s more or less the idea.

  —Oh Christ what time is it?

  —Too early. Am I being interrogated again?

  —No, just haunted. Well, I wasn’t asking you. You’re not here.

  —Thank goodness I’m not. I don’t have to listen to you nag.

  —I take full responsibility.

  —You would.

  —Look, there’s a river running in the middle of the air between the halves of canyon, I mean it’s just optical, but—

  —It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Europe. We ought to be in the American desert.

  He heard horses’ hooves from the cemetery, which we some of us recall lay between the golf course and the race track, each of these tracts farmland more recently than this other field where bodies planted in time might yield lettered stone and eminent urns of granite flowers. Facts arose that you could arrive at in later years for a living, arose from the c
emetery moment when he decided to close down his grandmother’s stories. Yet arose is not just arose —and didn’t he call a halt to those tales upon surmising that the stories were not so much like what had really happened to the East Far Eastern Princess as (uh oh) really were what had happened? At the intolerable moment between grandson and grandmother when they were discussing downcoming and up-going weather and he had to—had to—speak to her of his mother departed, what was to be asked? asks an interrogator so internalized it could be I or they across that sexually shared ocean. Was she perhaps sick and tired? Why did a woman glimpsed in one of Margaret’s tales pound her belly with stones and eat ground-up horses’ bones for a late-afternoon snack? It wasn’t the common cold she had, or the measles, or what Indians hither and yon were likewise curiously unimmune to, to wit Eurasiatic tuberculosis, which the Anasazi healer may have had for two hundred years or more since he wheezed like that three-hundred-pound old bullet-riddled General Winfield Scott so President Lincoln could hear him coming in the next room. On the other hand, the Anasazi grew widely bald down his center part-line—and baldness is more rare than gray hair among Indians. How do you remember all that? When did that happen Gramma? Who was the woman pounding her belly?—It was a woman called Tall Salt, a widow, and she did the asking of the person who had interrupted her. Jim felt very much like a man at fifteen. So what? So plenty, even allowing for silly dialect jokes he and Sam told—Jewish, Negro, foreigner, farmer’s daughter. Felt then like a man why? Was it because he looked in at his widower father pyjama’d amidst more surplus man-hours of sleep than Jim needed? Was it that in sotto voce discussion with his friend Sam at the drugstore soda fountain about to order a second chocolate Coke, he answered Sam’s "It ain’t exactly a hole" with "It’s an opening; but it’s not quite open ... it’s .. ." Was it because with less parent to go around Jim was victim to what, later in the dying century, came one inclement year to be called "parentifuckation"? Or was it that he had early experienced as vicarious future that mode of murder called by the same (Latin family) as that given and ahead-thrown generation later, to the effect on an arriving missile of the thermonuclear explosion set off by the preceding target-happy missile so that he felt he had foreseen such usage of the term in question, "fratricide." This was more like it, for if he seldom or never felt his strange presence in the future as his responsibility to himself, he did early think (ahead), "I’m getting out of this," unlike his brother, who sat around the kitchen table with Mel, who’s supposed to be their father, and planned never to leave that town and was reassured by Mel and in turn reassured him that the lady of the house was not returning from the dead or from whatever matter she was with them and their mad memories—or the matter.

  But whose horse was it if not a communal or common horse that paid with its hence ground-up life for being in the ongoing plane of the exit path of the giant bird that had already gobbled its one-for-the-road wolf, that moonlit bite of Navajo horse? How the extended grandson at fifteen felt a lot like a man without seeming to have passed through normal induction or initiation processing turns to further questions, to wit his sage if fugitive or half-sane njt-picking foresight that two or more questions had better have one same answer because he’s so harried from behind by one of them while dealing with another that, hell’s bells, he plans to get him gone from this town soon’s he decently can. Paired questions such as (a) What were his grandmother’s tears made of the night not so long after his mother’s disappearance into the sea when he accidentally found his grandmother under his surveillance from the backyard?—and, on the other hand (b) By what process was the Navajo Prince’s mother returned to life, assuming this really did occur and occurred almost as soon as her son departed in pursuit of the alien beloved?; or another pair, (a) Was the rotational storm tornadoing its great business that night of the double moon in fact the wake of or the very presence of the Princess’s former bird that, when the Princess departed that Navajo settlement, itself departed in its own Choorish direction? and (b) the question on the other hand, Why had it been at the juncture of downcoming and upgoing weathers or their vouchsafing by the grandmother (who was helping him with his French) and subsequent exploration in subsequent talk about these weathers that he had reached a moment not only when he had to ask about his mother (but what? pirce-quoia?) but a moment intolerable because he couldn’t—that is, ask why his Gramma had been crying that night he’d spied on her, was it straight grief? and what she had seemed to say one day at the cemetery actually was there underground where everybody knew that his drowned mother was not—at the same time asking again if the great day when all the atmospheric clefts lined up and one light-year-long slot or slit parted for cosms of the sun to suck up the life of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head, had been made up by the Hermit-Inventor or brought on by the Anasazi healer’s sense that something should happen to get them all off the hook including the mad mother herself who that very night, upon the sliding forth of the double Moon and the departure of her son hotly abandoning his studies of the power still untouched in the northern bison’s tongue (that can be dried and reused up to twenty months later), had come back to life and limb, which left a faithful imprint ever afterward upon each downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts even though in later days the Anasazi healer had passed into high-flying noctilucent cloudhood doubtless turning to use some of those cosms that (themselves infinitesimal power parcels holding immense unused energies) would have sucked the lady’s life away on a permanent basis.

  Until one day, wondering if he himself was cloud-and-rain, mist-and-snow, temperature-and-wind expert hermited within himself re fleshing that skinny old geezer who (Jim had been privately told by his grandfather Alexander) was sick but still breathing loudly somewhere in New York

  Jim happened to say to his grandfather on the porch one idle hour of a subtly sad weekend this dumb-ass thing about wishing at least two or three questions that came at you all at once had one same answer, it would make life easier, ‘stead of keeping it all up—and Alexander guffawed in his own white-wicker world only to break off almost tearing a seriousness from his eruption to say, "Jimmy, that’s what the great ones understand they have to do. History is a knacker’s yard and the trick is to specialize in one use for all your ground-up bones. It’s why Grant told Sheridan to remove General Warren who foresaw every damn danger except the delay occasioned in acting to forestall every damn danger." (What’s a knacker, Granddad?) "It’s the secret of scientific genius and of any great military strategist, although it is not why Grant declined to join Lincoln at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14th but took the New York train instead, wishing to see his children in Philadelphia."

  Then grandfather Alexander guffawed again with a touch of unease. Jim nodded sagely. Alexander confided in his grandson as they rocked and gazed out over Throckmorton Street at two highish, narrow white Victorian houses out of which then came Leonardo Hugo, the blond, parchment-tanned oculist, from his and his mother’s, and Miss Amyabel Larsen, the pleasant over-the-counter clerk in the post office who had surprisingly large breasts when they were looked at, from her and her mother’s house, "Why that crazy friend of your grandmother’s, interesting old bum that he is—and was!—told me about a tornado he saw in ‘84, the year before his ill-fated meeting with Margaret at Bedloe’s Island that was absolutely symmetrical, straight up and no bulges in the wrong places to speak of, a cylinder of sorts which went on in one spot like a dervish for two hours." "Oh yeah, you told me, Granddad," said Jim who thereupon recalled that when he had told Margaret that she had told him about this tornado and she had said she certainly had not and he had thought how had he known?—and at the same time remembered his late mother saying there were things he had in him now that he would know later, and he had not put two and two together because he was suspicious of that method yet recalled her telling him to go away where he belonged whereas she had gone, at least for the time being, so he had concluded that he was in the future therefore like someone s
hocked by a terrible event into a sleep—got it?—yet now could see that he had heard Alexander say it.

  But that fine, broad, ever-bald, ever-well-shod gentleman grandfather quickly within the regular tempo of his rocking said, No no, he had never passed on to anybody that little tidbit, and went on muttering and rocking while Jim was busy knowing both that he would like to touch if possible Marie Vandevere’s longish neck with his fingertips and follow each softened point of her arching strong spine downward because she liked it, and (knowing) that he would someday be in a position to recall this important talk with his grandfather as if many streams had made their way toward each other steaming over heavy, jagged rocks but as in a hill-and-valley rural model of Washington, D.C., where he had twice been, where streets meet sometimes like spokes or these streams were a liquefied city he had daydreamt of where parallel avenues and such would melt into one another and meet while being preserved parallel by the dreamer’s will itself: and magic of a loving kind seemed then added to the importantness of this talk with his grandfather because as both rocked and watched the single pair across the street turn away from each other in opposite directions, Leonardo toward town, Amyabel the other way toward what we might today term the cemetery-golf-course-race-track complex, though as anyone could predict she would call for a girlfriend en route and they would vkit the unprecedented greenhouse on the highway to study how the vast new rose operation was run, Jim tried to frame a question for Alexander, which was about what Margaret’s tears had been made of that night and how (or by what process) the Navajo Prince’s mother had returned to life as a result of her son’s having run off after his alien girlfriend: but Alexander had arrived at a point of being audible to his grandson, who now heard him say, 44Oh she’s responsible, she’s a very responsible person and sometimes takes her responsibilities too far—some events just happen, you know—and even at this moment she thinks she might have saved . . . well you of all people, Jim . . .it’s like thinking that you might be back there a few weeks ago the way it was, but having more foresight, you know what I’m saying—I mean Margaret knew your mother was generally unhappy, and worse."