Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —What’s "essence," Gramma?

  —only, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York, to vanish with a speed given it by the egg or more plausibly taken from a process of relation or transformation the Hermit-Inventor’s friend the Anasazi could explain if he would, that turned that mountain lion looking for deer but introduced to more curious food into the very wolf, the giant wolf with immense, slick, independently breathing internal organs that the bird then taloned, dismembered, and/or gorged as a one-for-the-road farewell since evidently the Princess and the Prince after her were bound elsewhere if not together—

  —and the remaining egg, the remaining egg, atop that volcanic plug? asks the interrogator—

  —I never said anything about a volcanic plug, said Margaret some years later upon what would have been her deathbed if she hadn’t "gotten up to die" on her own terms—

  You’re trying to make us ask how she died, but we will not fall for it, the born-again interrogator recently christened Gatorix nags.

  —Jim in one silent swoop was at his bedroom doorway witnessing what here he was not too late for: his brother Brad reading note pages of Jim’s held off the desk and now returning Jim’s look of blank hate with fear and the sudden inspiration "Your floor needs sweeping, what’s all this grit?"—until moving toward Brad with a hand like a paperweight downstairs, he hit him on the side of the head and Brad said, "She was crying, I remember, she said Gramma had told her a sad story about the Indians." Jim went away downstairs getting the point of that picture that was missing Bob Yard at last, that he and Bob Yard were occupying the same body in that scene and that’s where the missing Bob was. But Jim couldn’t think of anything probably then but what sad story about Indians?—nor did he hear Brad make a sound upstairs, who now knew where Jim had gone two days ago and had a nerve going into Jim’s stuff and had a jaw or cheek or whatever Jim had swatted that was hardly a living thing for Jim he didn’t give a shit and didn’t even feel like calling up Anne-Marie but here today had come home forgetting forgetting forgetting—

  —Hey Jimmy, didn’t you have varsity practice today? came the voice of the chin, the cheek, and he wheeled at Brad, who said he was sorry, he was sorry, he didn’t really see anything, a few words underlined, nothing honestly, and he would of liked to go to Mantoloking with Jim Saturday—

  —Well now you know, so it’s just as if you did go, you fucking little snoop, and if (or words to this effect) you don’t like beach sand in the house why don’t you sweep it out—

  Tough little insect with a life of his own all right.

  People just taking up space. Taking up matter.

  Was it cold? asks a firm voice that wants to know.

  How’d you get down there, Jim? asks the same voice.

  Did you see Missy?

  You didn’t go in the water.

  Did you go barefoot?

  Hey Jim . . . ? asks the same voice, dwindling. Nothing much more to ask.

  The insect might turn into a person one of these days.

  I don’t know why I wrote all that down, but I left it there because it’s my room.

  It was an assignment, didn’t you say? Vm sorry, Jim.

  Just don’t do it. Don’t be sorry.

  Is that what you’re handing in?

  No.

  Good.

  What do you mean, good? I couldn’t hand that crap in.

  That was good about ramming that guy, Jim.

  And, Brad, what story about Indians? Gramma never told those stories to anyone but me.

  Mom said it was a swap. She told Gramma some things, and then Gramma told her some story about an Indian who died.

  Jim was looking long in the refrigerator and when he turned Brad was not there. There’s things probably can’t be said about relations with your family. Margaret told him "the man with the pencil" was an Indian word for "white man."

  Well, had he wished to be at the shore alone or had he wished to find people there? Can’t have it both ways. Isolated incident.

  What’s a . . . volcanic plug? asks Ted (who supposedly knew everything) with some readiness in his voice so Jim heard the joke coming a mile away, or the elements of it, and laughed at once but didn’t stop his friend, nor go on to tell the places where the additions had been his own to his grandmother’s souvenirs, and earlier instructive additions by Jim very young, such as the crevi-chink and the Thunder Dreamer alternative provenance of the Colt pistol, and—source of somewhere both inside and outside him like us because it is us becoming human, a piece of him, or a piece if they came even in pieces (like those Brad "went to" on the following day) of these relations that go from him as he from them—the gigantic timber wolf’s swan song out of lion into the departing bird’s bright-eyed ferocity below the double moon and above the elf owls in their cacti and the People watching both the sky and a clear radiance off the body of the Prince’s apparently dead mother, a working glow—so that when, weeks later, recalling its curious positioning in the detective document that Pearl Myles never saw (but never needed to see), Brad the little insect asked, Hey Jim, what’s the lion’s egg mean?, and Jim considered clouting him again but pointed out that it was the lion that ate the egg and there were two eggs—which then reminded Jim—and Brad said, Gramma says she never said anything about a lion turning into a wolf and being torn up by the bird, Jim felt less betrayed by an unfaithful beloved than in possession of some other adder than his own dumb calculus of daydream that he discounted as being not him, begun then, long before he found himself living and half-returned from the future that in the early sixties the interesting Chilean journalist-woman Mayga accepted (as she perhaps in sympathy could not accept the painful thing Jim’s mother had done for reasons easily invented). So it was "See I didn’t make that stuff up, Braddie" (he heard the voice, his own, and recalled Pearl Myles preaching Synonyms, Synonyms, Synonyms for an increased vocabulary and Success): whereas he would "claim credit" (in the code of later political violence) for additions, hell, to tell his children if not himself—many arising some time after Margaret’s characteristic death: to wit, the vast visitor-bird’s sneaking kinship to our heavy, short-necked sea duck the king eider of northern coasts (now thought, by a curious "lifer" ornithologist doing time within thinking if not striking distance of the Hudson River, to possess a tracking-resolution grid in the predatory wing of its brain enabling it to process both incoming weather and the crabbed configuration of the coastline it patrolled); to wit, too, the fact of the pistol’s having been given the Thunder Dreamer as a dying white Anglo attempt (by, likely, one of that brother-band of dueling Germans in the mid-century American West) to put the whammy on our Plains Indian protest religion of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Yet additions occurred also prior to Margaret’s death: unpro-duced operas by a Chilean woman of the mid- to late-nineteenth century that were part folk, part Italianate—but virtually Verdi!—and part (in the strange case of the Valparaiso Hamletin, according to Mayga, the journalist) late Beethoven chamber music (i.e., in the "This was your husband," cum picture, aria echoed in Ophelia’s Valentine morrow song): addenda also including matter on German settlers in Chile who might design a railway system then retire to keep bees; plus matter such as the desert jackrabbit, his eyes a-watch low and for’ard in their moist head-holes, and other data the authenticity of which James and Margaret very occasionally bickered over and might have even on her deathbed if she had had one. But the Hermit-Sojourner, who to the Anasazi healer’s mind had about invented New York, with its plans for wind-saving mid-air canals above the projected skyscrapers of the city along which would run pneumatic shuttles like the communication capsules future department stores hoped would rattle and whistle their efficiency music up pillar and across ceiling, proved to be a person (Oh stop it, Jim, the ill old lady laughed suddenly, not so old was she yet plummeting into her real age unreally ‘z if she’d been radiated in some fascinating zone), a figure anyhow, whom the grandson was not specially pleased to reinvent: for the Hermit was
among other things multiple, appearing first on Bedloe’s Island in 1885 as the nephew (though this wasn’t known to the twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Margaret) of yet another Hermit-Inventor who had known the Anasazi before Margaret knew the West, and who a generation before had detoured lengthily en route to Anasazi country via that Alabama farm later named (and truly) Whalesville where slaves had turned up the amazing skeleton architecture of that fallen angel (so they thought) which their betters at once christened the reptile Basilosaurus—while at least one new manifestation of this character-scientist seemed to come up in later allusions, all used, both to build to a fine phantom of a continent spanning Margaret’s girlhood and her grandson Jim’s latterly irritable imagination, for the Hermit-Inventor came to visit the Statue of Liberty in pieces the same day Margaret and her father, her daddy, came to cover the event for the Windrow Democrat (a dubious organ—oh stop it, Jim—founded once upon a decade to get behind a President who was haunted not only by the sinister lunacy of a central bank of the United States that might foster adventurers like the American Wheelwright whom Alexander’s grand-cousin shipped to Chile with to build a railway that had been accidentally designed on a restaurant tablecloth, but even more by the possibility that he Andy J. himself, dyspepsia, desire and all, might be inhabited by one or even two of those Red Sticks he had striven to extirpate and scalp from the woods and marshes or send west in one of Our early solutions to the mass transport problem and to that of economizing on Mass itself)—yet a similar figure rises to crags and other lookouts in the western appearances of our Princess of the East Far East who is sometimes Margaret eager, intractable, palpable learner and sometimes an earnest tale told by a place about the Navajo Prince’s mother’s dream songs: until as the references pile ahead powered by the latest cow-catcher-engine fueled by a locoweed even Marcus Jones could not name before we let it die out through inattention as a viable energy source when if used it would have gone on living even after being picked and while being burned (wait, though, wait, wait a ramute! remember the northern bison’s tongue, delicacy amid wasted carcasses, yet) as versatile as the jojoba pod, as thoughtful as the nature gas in Casco Bay Indian seaweed, versatile as winter steam in northern Maine or as that visible relation in certain of the territories between air and earth, and altogether as active as particles of melted, smelted, Indian and Anglo flesh which in rituals in northwestern New York (where the printer Morgan threatened Masonic secrets) and in central Oklahoma (where a curious sect of non-evangelical lay Christians, the "Protestant Franciscans," loved and knew the exile Cherokee without ever laying their religion on them) sometimes mingled in purely symbolic communion whorl upon whorl—and as by definition so much of this current knowledge (read knowhow) keeps clear of James Mayn’s eyes and the working heart he turns upon his work and hours and his humoring pessimism re: the senses history does not much make, and runs only in memories he rides pestered by a past that for cripe’s sake is over and done with until he charmingly lets slip to a friend or two at most that he’s in and is "coming from" the future, the libration-point space settlements, and can describe them and will oblige when that spirit comes upon him maybe get drunk, sozzled, mildly mackereled, pickelooned in (please add also) good company to a point of preferring to believe his future existence is an inebriation best succincted or, failing that paternal tradition of economy, shunted into a nutty past that kids him ‘s much ‘s he it, until occasionally he meets a man or woman he’ll tell things to, a wife, a colleague, maybe a person he knows is primarily overhearing him, but to be so believed as he was by the lady Mayga bugs him so he’ll drop right into someone else’s life which is neither the future relation of strip mining to the deep-steam taps, nor the truncated lunacies of his own (he thinks substantially banal) fambley where you go so far and then shrug your way forward into adult life and he never needed a somewhat wonderful and historically elusive mother (who, well, had the good taste not to get found, having gone too far, too deep) to say to him You will go away where you belong, because cripes he was goin’ anyway—door’s open: yet these private lives that greet him between, on one hand, the relation of chemical warfare (agreements) and the ease of keeping C.W. development secret, to the genuinely civil uses of controlled poisons to seed the atmosphere at many levels with efficiency that’s odorless but almost painterly if you can catch it just before or as dawn arrives, and, on the other hand, the relation between the Prince’s mother getting better when he left (which Margaret claimed she had never told Jim!) or Harflex of Choor waiting patiently but far from passively in the old familiar coastal plain while the Princess eluded the pursuant Prince by being spirited in the shape of a swaying mist into a Statue braced like a tree against the high winds of the harbor it’s a-guarding to the question why Sarah, a mother, for whom people mattered quite a little and who was a good and practicing musician should have turned away into one day’s horizon like some meaningless wind that’s as equal to the matter a descending body becomes as one obstacle yields to another and story to story—yes, the aforesaid private lives that greet him and themselves between all these above relations became nicely complete, modestly revealing—he told someone named Norma about teaching his son to ride a bicycle so he was the one taught, not Andrew, because Norma had told him about a separated woman she knew who was living with another woman and they took the first woman’s twelve-year-old son to an experimental video showing at a small loft theater downtown and in the middle of it a man got up out of his seat with a pistol naming a woman nobody knew who he’s going to kill and people began to get the point and were scared, and Norma’s friend’s son suddenly said out loud to the man with the pistol, "She’s not here and it’s lucky for you she isn’t," and the man collapsed weeping on his folding chair—"She’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here!"—and the gun dropped to the floor and that was more or less that (someone kicked it away from him, he was as they say overpowered or something similar to that happened): and many of these shared lives are chambered where Jim wouldn’t even get at them, knowing that in their disconnected self-containment they make sense like a day’s work let it go at that, like a past that you could get pestered by to the point of having pursued Margaret right to her deathbed—not over a thing like 4 7 never mentioned any eight-thousand-volume Masonic library in Salt Lake City," but over some embarrassing little gap in her life as if it would tell why her daughter Sarah (think of her with white hair, garrulous) permanently absented herself from the town whose name we have been given to use and understand was made up by our grandmother and our grandson between them like founders.

  He even told his Chilean journalist-lobbyist friend Mayga once what he never had told his wife, which is the uncrowned infidelity if you want to explore the continent-size tilt of the well-known guilt-ride where you ride it and it rides you, told Mayga, told Mayga, told Mayga (before she herself disappeared at a point when she might have told him something—disappearing like the apparent converse of an obstacle heaving up again and again) that the day he saw South America move beneath the glass he was leaning on (ah yes, no practice that afternoon because they were excavating the south half of the field laying a pipe, looking for a pipe, it’s no longer clear. Fascinating, Jaime, fascinating. Sure, sure. Don’t lose any sleep over it, as you say—if you could dream, you could economize).

  —he had seen above the glass above that map that if he didn’t move, life would—but no, that wasn’t quite it (another bourbon, Leo . . . Mayga? no? Early flight to Boston tomorrow, New Hampshire)—

  —no, it was that the brother-in-law man sharing with Jimmy a can of tomato clam chowder which Jim discovered at that moment was not his favorite kind, he liked the white New England milk kind, you tasted the clams, tomato roons everything oh it’s the oxalic acid no it’s the red shit, the brother-in-law man on a dull September day at the Jersey shore had said point-blank, "Your mother hasn’t been found"—those words alone—and leaning over his soup Jim said nothing, one of many times he said nothing—nothing unti
l the silence and the soup-spooning changed the subject:

  But that wasn’t it: Mel, who’d written with one of his many soft-lead pencils this stony-brief obituary for his wife, had said, apropos of the "hokey-pokey" ice-cream man who’d praised Sarah, and after (no matter "when") Alexander said some Armenians were gypsies but that most Armenians were Catholics, and Margaret said later that for Catholics suicide was the worst mortal sin, so Jim said (thinking suicide certainly makes you mortal), "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," without knowing how near a joke his remarkable inference was—but surely he meant, Because the hokey-pokey man had said she was a lot to live up to—