Oh remember the "pre-sound" of the Anasazi’s last words posthumously conveyed a mile or more to the Hermit direct by breath from the heart of the Anasazi’s materially dissolving mind which slowly peeled and delayered, in fragilest fossil-like blades or leaflets?
But do you remember adding that the Anasazi and the Hermit might have been in another life one person not two (because except for the Indian’s laughing at him and the Hermit’s getting friendly-mad, they often mingled their sciences of shared and territorial? Mind you, if a cloud stops over your country and sheds water that gets all the way to the mouth of the ground (for this had come to the boy-man descending the stairs hearing his mother suddenly break off her piano playing)—you have it, it’s on your territory unless you’ve gotten to be a state ({he grandmother laughed at her grandson’s historic wit), but so what, it might help the corn, especially right after it was planted, you don’t give that cloud away; and point number two, if a tornado comes along with a lot of people’s horses and houses and someone’s gun and a couple of half-busted chairs from another territory, who the heck wants to share a tornado?—which ain’t the same as between weather that just happens and weather that is caused, or between colored weather and black and white—or the Hermit looking into a box he had for measuring, and the Anasazi turning ninety degrees, then turning again, and so on.
Margaret was upset in the spring of ‘46. The Hermit her old friend was very ill, though she never saw him much—some friends you don’t need to see—and the day before she was going to New York to see him after he had told her not to, and he got mad and had his phone disconnected and when he hung up his lung collapsed; he died, and a nephew of his sprang out of nowhere talking fast on a pay telephone, and she went in to the city and she came back two days later—
—don’t remember that—
—well she fretted over him; we do make people into things, and she actually would rather not see that old scamp who never had a decent pair of shoes in his lifetime—
—not even in the West?—
—I bet he wore his moccasins all the way out and all the way back—
—who invented a thing around the turn of the century . . .
—yessirree, it predicted weather according to the exact configuration of coastline but they needed machines they didn’t have then in order to utilize this thing, today it’s called . . .
—a baroclinometer, comes back to Mayn in ‘60 or ‘65 in the presence of Alexander, but he doesn’t know from how far back, not far, did Margaret use such language?, it was ahead of its time, it could predict fronts and pressure zones from the way the coastline was cut and from densities of people and flora correlations between color and rate of C02 discharge—
—sounds like a tall order—
Well, it isn’t the way a modern baroclinometer works—I don’t know where that coastline stuff came from.
Somewhere.
Perhaps. But the words were different when Margaret told it—
So sometimes Jimmy, according to his grandfather, added to what he was told (which is sometimes necessary to make sense, though Alexander opined that a doctor might need to subtract from what he was told as when women working with felt went crazy and to get to the heart of the matter which was mercury you had to discount various answers that seemed likelier) as to the Anasazi’s distinction between night clouds that are young and, near the moon, show colored rings, blue yellow red, etcetera, and night clouds that are old and have less brightly colored haloes because their old gray blood is thinner if it hasn’t in fact become air, for they take their transformations more lightly and with less fuss, Jim pointed out that the Hermit had said the same thing in another way, the color all depended on the pulverized rock out of which the water was made that produced the droplets that the light was bent into shape by, that in turn became the given cloud—and since she had never actually met the Anasazi—
—but the Princess met him one day when she rode alone away from the Navajo Prince and had a bellyache which we call stomach ague-qua and he told her to find some wwpulverized rock and stare at it until it—
—what would she want with rock?
Well, stones.
Oh.
He must have been a very gentle type of healer, the grandmother suggested, as if the boy-man might know what she did not.
You mean because he didn’t tell her to pound the stones into her?
It came back some nights when he told humorously a rather technical-type story to a daughter and a son—and didn’t know who had invented what, or why (no, how) for years he had all but forgotten this stuff especially the "hard" weather of that period apparently ‘45~’46, probably he was in shock from his mother’s suicide though why didn’t he feel so?
His friend Sam came running up to the house and, first greeting Margaret—being more polite than his older brother, the fat one who didn’t look more than flabby but drove like a racing driver and could fist you paralyzing muscle shots deep inside your arm whether you were defending or not—told Jim that Anne-Marie’s brother had probably broken his back and was stuck in the lower level of a tree in the Vandevere backyard where he’d fallen from an upper perch, and Jim jumped up and without thinking said his own mother had just plain left, hadn’t she!—and she’d told him to go away where he belonged and it was amazing what there was in people and what they were able to do, he had just said to Margaret while Sam stood surprised: upon which Margaret, feeling the boys move to go, retorted that there was no connection between his mother and the old talk about weather as given Jim in these stories because the stories started after Jim was born, and Jim, in turn not knowing what was in him, though feeling that some stories had to be started and started and started again and again, said for Sam’s benefit, Was she pregnant? like the night at the ballfield when Sam called to his father, "Out tomcatting around again, Dad?" when his father didn’t do things "like" that and absolutely wouldn’t—but something got across, some possibility?, some true force expressible only against the father?, and his father docked Sam two weeks’ allowance at a crucial period when there were three birthdays including one birthday party—but never "laid" a hand on his son. "What’s that got to do with the weather or the price of eggs?" retorted Margaret, but Jim said, "All that weather stuff is crazy" (taking the four porch steps at one weightless fall) only to hear his beloved grandmother say so clearly she might never have uttered the words except in his own being, "Why the Anasazi medicine man went on with it just to give that lonely Hermit some friendship, who didn’t know how to talk to him standing on that ladder high up against the cliff peering into the dark cell or for that matter sitting in there with him, sucking corn."
What a great friendship! (scornfully tossed over the shoulder running away with Sam to the stranded brother of Anne-Marie whose own neck flowered in the dark to the sounds of their breathing and palms upon cloth and all morning with gentle languorous tension within the steel frame of a borrowed pickup truck unwilling still to forget). The spectacle of the Hermit-Inventor of New York come for a summer sojourn to the West-Southwest calling at once on the narrow ancient of whose shadows in this cell he was the original shadow of watchfulness, smiling with tolerance as the Hermit’s head appeared like a greeting which then took word form: "We were talking about the weather of presence and of absence when I left: now what in your view has that to do with spiral winds?" "Possibly nothing," replied the voice from the grain-scented dark, "yet that would be strange. For presence and absence—the long sky of morning or the thunderhead of late summer afternoon—unite in containing the change that weather always is, and the tiny Pressure Snake that sucks a man’s flesh into that mountain that may someday begin to move eastward once was a creature that worked with the cactus to make spiral winds which in turn can be of use, and that snake could return to that prior shape, for what is prior?, but the mountain moving toward the coasts you study might fill up the sea or make it rise." "Something must be done," said the Hermit; "there must be prayers one can pe
rform." The Anasazi caught his breath, and the Hermit knew someone was outside looking up at the cell in the cliff. It was a white man in a sombrero. "He is studying the Anasazi," the old man whispered. "And have you proved yet that those frozen foam volcanoes back home do not exist?"
Not to the Hermit’s knowledge, but the "snowdevils" he had once doubted had now been seen in the north of New York State, he replied, tracks skimmed off a field of snow by a whirlwind much like the whirlwinds out in these territories but at the base of its vortex stirring cold crystals (while, as a matter of fact, New Jersey and New York are states still seeking to be territories but they may be disappointed).
And for the two days Jim later could not remember his Gramma being away, he reflected coolly on that poor jerk of a hermit being tolerated, politely and humorously, by the Anasazi who would have discussed much else or nothing, but for the Hermit’s endless queries, oratings, floatings upon weather so that some might have found the subject an obstacle that just got in the way of closeness and the boy did not much know what was happening except he was so in love that he must have said to Marie in the moonlit golf course alongside the cemetery that they could wait for sunrise and if it was cold enough see a real sun pillar which the sky used to rest on until it figured out that the pillar dissolved in daytime and the sky would still stand (because it basically knew the pillar was made largely of ice crystals and it knew the shape and size of them). But he knew that she did what she never had done before because it had been in both their minds and had again driven out a strange potential fact he nearly could not think about—but he had been reluctant to ask her though he tried to make her see it in his horny mind, and then afterward she rose up like a tender power in front of him blocking the windshield on the passenger side where he was glad to be, when he was not driving, and then blocking his face, then the windshield:
until an hour later, it seemed, they began to kiss every other second and in the very far right corner of his eye on the cemetery side he found a bright bob of light which he knew was not just him, and turning his cheek to Marie ("Anne-Marie’s") bare sweaterless shoulder he knew the light was approaching from exactly—no, come on, roughly—where his family’s burial place should have been and he remembered not some other things from the last two days but knew and would always remember knowing that it was his grandmother in the cemetery walking toward the town electrician’s borrowed-with-his-actually-illegal-permission pickup truck and Marie read his heart if not the abstruse information behind the skin of his forehead and so much took what he had been offering that he felt at that moment of crying a plume of returning heat root his very spine-hole hilariously in the sky, both ends up (whatever that meant), as the Moon came out from back of some old cloud so he saw the living pattern of four moles on her left shoulder or at least knew they were there and said to his grandmother, "Was she pregnant, is that why?" and felt the rush to weep but gasped Marie’s smells instead and chuckled at their love as the light got closer and he was glad he hadn’t said those words out loud nor pursued the shivery potential of such facts as that Sarah might have wanted Mel to think he was the father-to-be and would then have had to prepare his belief, which in turn gave him a picture of his mother riding a man’s torso in the breakers of the sea and loving it and calling out to the private darkness— but Marie used foam, which he didn’t ask about but saw the tube in her empty Pennsylvania tennis-ball can one afternoon which made her sit on her bed to smile a long time like laughing so if he had asked her she certainly would have explained how it was all done.
But the Moon found another cloud, if not, by some shift, the same one, and the windshield darkened the way a storm will slow a driver down, and his happiness with Marie, who murmured that she had laid an egg as she rose off him and he slid halfway left and toward the gear shift to give her room in this compact bed which reminded him for the future that the bed of the truck was the place—but where, too, that eerie piner kid who seemed so alien and knowing and stole Bob Yard’s property had opened Jim up wide so he didn’t give a damn—and now, later, with Marie, must have brought almost too near the truck the bearer of the light who stopped by a tree across the low wall of stones dividing the golf course from the cemetery, and the flashlight found his grandmother’s face large-eyed with the white hair pale in the night two miles from home doubtless recognizing the truck but he could swear not him and Marie. But then she did not turn away but got on the wall and swung herself around and over and bravely approached Bob Yard’s pickup truck; well, Jim’s mother, drowned amazingly in the so mysterious sea of her troubles so that mystery might attract the cleverness of hearts otherwise hammered to sleep in a corner, had said, Who the devil cared what who felt when and where ten years ago?—O.K., she’d been sick for a year with anemia the doctor sometimes called it, and she didn’t get along with Jim’s father (though never left him) and, though it was not generally known around town (or was it?), her second son was not her husband’s though closer to him now than his own—and she went to a concert or opera in Manhattan once in a blue moon or to an old brick house in a street in Brooklyn called Garden Place where chamber music was played on a late Sunday afternoon Jim heard from his little brother Brad while boys and girls played stickball under the trees outside, interrupted by the tallest boy in the world rollerskating through the game like a man solitary on ice—while also once in a blue moon, though not the same moon, she visited a doctor who was also interested in the music of the last century, and once to Jim’s knowledge asked a singer from Panama to dinner—a very loud-voiced would-be opera singer she reported who did not come and phoned during the excellent, vividly colored dinner Jim’s mother (this time herself) devised, which they began to taste tentatively stopping to listen to what was mostly silence at Sarah’s end of the line in the hall ended by her saying, "Well, damn you" and hanging up to return grinning (as if incredulously) and shaking her head, more intimate with him and his father, if not with Braddie, than ever, it seemed, to say, "Well, we will all take turns singing after dinner and the best man even if he can’t carry a tune might win the extra strawberry rum parfait" (striped in its tall glass)—no failure there, unless the event were committed to memory mistaking memory for the past—
—but all Jim "knew" on the night which was their third or second out here but this time not in the cemetery but on the other side of the wall in the then nine-hole golf course next to it along the fairway pointing toward the ninth green (so he had recognized the sound of a very deep, thick graveled drive his grandmother had crossed all alone) was that his grandmother came close to the cab and before she could say one thing and think another he had said not only Who was she looking for, but something about the West that went away into the night into his memory together with her response which years later when he had his own kids he phoned Anne-Marie in California to ask about one night on a restaurant pier in New York from a pay phone exposed beside the men’s room and his grandmother he always remembered greeted Marie (Anne-Marie) cheerfully, inquired if they had seen any grave robbers, was asked by Marie what she was doing all alone out here, told the two of them in the truck that she had thought it was Bob Yard’s truck but honestly had come out because she had heard a rumor that her grandson came to the cemetery with his girlfriend and she wanted to see if it was true—that was "all"—and could "they" give her a lift home?—and of course (?) Bob Yard knew Jimmy was using his pickup truck? (no mention of the license he did not possess)—Yes, Gramma—
—wondering, with the two females in the right-side seat conversing about the night air and the Moon and the clouds, if Margaret smelt or felt the juice of their whole love in this cab, until with a shock that made him take his right hand off the wheel out of the night or no place, Sam’s brother’s legal Ford jalopy (in those days before inspection) came screaming across the intersection of Throckmorton and Brinkerhoff on an arc that aspired to be a ninety-degree corner and whose abandoned wake was a wheeling, faintly glittering hub cap sprung loose by the laughing, crowded car
—
Why Bob Yard had been Jim’s own mother’s (he wondered if open) secret—he did not quite know the word "lover" (that is, to use) and he did not say or think "fuck" though in the next week he could use it in thinking about his girl though never in speech to his friend Sam—and only in the past few months had Jim known him to be the father of his own brother, which had made Bob, in turn, to Jim the lender of transportation in which Margaret might feel Jim would kill himself and Jim might feel he would power his way through the dilemma of whether to kill Bob or not (what a laugh!) (for what if Bob knew where Jim’s mother "was"?) and in which Margaret, his real grandmother and the mother of his own unfaithful mother, was riding home at this moment before he dropped her at her front walk which had been his front walk now turned into intimate, guilty mere nostalgia by going all the way with Marie, but only for the moment while Margaret strode away straight-backed toward the porch light blistering the ivy at one-thirty in the morning when, whatever she thought about the truck’s owner, she was exhausted (and said so, and mentioned that she had had two hard days in the city—where was her husband?), and had, incidentally, not told Jim and Marie they shouldn’t be out there. So the way she fit right into their sex life took him away from the circumstance of her two-day sojourn in New York, he almost persuaded Marie to let him spend the rest of that night in her bedroom with her entire family at home (but her father still up) which would have lost whatever had been given or gained this night—after which that strong girl remarked that she guessed they were not going to see the sunrise sun pillars he had mentioned which he then told her was "just" something his gramma had told him, while he wondered if his mother had made love with Mel so he would think if need be that he was Brad’s father—
Women and Men Page 135
