Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He pulled away from the curb wanting to phone his father whose memory seemed better than ever, to thank him, to tell him, "Good; good." And he heard meanwhile the tough-skinned man in suede windbreaker and ironed bluejeans tell him, "Shouldn’t pick people up" (which Mayn agreed with)— for when the man had leaned into the rented car and swung his pack into the back seat, Mayn had reached back on instinct to slide it down flat on the seat and had seen the butt of a revolver with a loop of leather over it just showing from a side pocket.

  "Well, this is my day," Mayn said. "So I’m figuring all you want is a ride to the city." The man reached in back and obtained from his pack a box of cough drops and a small spiral notebook which he opened to a page half full of notes in violet ink.

  Leaving town, Mayn eyed the blue car following. He looked at the man next to him who was staring thoughtfully out at the road ahead; he had acne pits along the cheekbone and the uneven stubble was dark and silvery. "Do you always leave the butt of that pistol showing?" he asked the man.

  "No, I usually make sure it’s out of sight," the man said. "It doesn’t belong to me but I’ve had it awhile and I’m beginning to think maybe it does belong to me."

  "Ever been held up by a motorist?" said Mayn.

  "No, not by a motorist," said the man; "you?"

  "Haven’t hitched in years; generally fly."

  "Suppose you just get out," said the man, "and I drive back down the road and come back here and you put out your thumb and we’ll see what it feels like," said the man.

  "It wouldn’t feel real," said Mayn; "it would be like middle-class wild-game hunting." He had picked the man up on the chance that he was with the big guy driving the blue car.

  At the rotary they passed the road to the shore and the Trenton road and found themselves on the connecting road to the turnpike, the same blue car two or three back that had accompanied Mayn to the cemetery, driven on, and followed him back to Throckmorton Street.

  Mayn pulled off the road and nearly sideswiped the phone booth he parked by, in front of a small yellow house with a tarpaper roof. A person in a black-and-yellow-striped garment watched at the window. Mayn took the car keys with him. The blue car ran by, looking violet in the passing lane parallel with a red van. Then it fell back and to the right and a quarter of a mile or more downrange stopped at a low block-like edifice which was a suburban insurance branch. His father answered as if facing slightly away from him, and Jim said, "I just wanted to thank you, Dad; I was amazed you remembered all that nonsense. By the way, you used to dream of owning a white Hispano-Suiza. Remember?"

  "Yes, and it was a real dream at night," his father said as if interrupting himself; "your mother told everyone."

  "I remember," said Mayn.

  "Flick phoned," said Mel. "She wanted to speak to you. She had guessed you were here. I asked if everything was all right. She sounded puzzled. She asked if you had spoken about a typescript she sent you and I said yes, and she said, Good, good, that’s all she wanted to know, and thanked me—then asked me of all people how well you knew someone called Grace Kimball because you were involved with a women’s bank that a friend of the Kimball woman does P.R. for—is that right? Then she said she had to go. I heard voices behind her, and someone said a word or name twice that sounded like ‘Afraid’ or Trying,’ I mean like frying eggs. That’s all I have to report, Jim."

  Mayn thanked his father and with a chill like a blush of shock knew (and should say to someone now) that through Norma and not only Norma he could have described to his father the brother of this woman Grace whom he had never known, lying on the front walk in the middle of the continent, with blood on him, and with terrible sympathy and ardor flowing, yes flowing, from the body and eyes of his sister above him in the house, on a porch, somewhere that didn’t matter so much as that Mayn was back there like a colonist of the compacted future unobtrusively regrasping the century his civilization had left so that even if he had no blood-sister, he felt like Grace Kimball nonetheless and could have faked an entire double-column obit of information—"shared," as she said; consigned to print, as he would say, and eternally retrievable.

  The hitch-hiker was doing something with the dashboard.

  "Dad, did you ever think my mother was alive?"

  His father might have been thinking for a moment. "Where would she have gone?" he said. "But more to the point, who’s this man you think borrowed those old diaries?"

  "Oh, he’s one of these people that don’t really matter, Dad, but you turn around and find them there and you want to strangle them."

  He pulled away into the right lane, having gotten no answer at the number Flick could be reached at, and knowing he had picked up this middle-aged hitch-hiker to use him or include him the way the engine seemed to build the radio right into it, both starting because his passenger had turned the knob while the ignition was off.

  Twice during their conversation the news reported the kidnapping of the escaped man’s child and in their listening pause Mayn knew so well that Spence had drawn him into the picture by assuming he was already deep in it that if Spence had sent him a bulletin out of this car-radio speaker that generated the car’s horizontal gravity—"Wherever you are, Mayn"—he could not have felt more surely a violent imprint to come somewhere like change of weight or future species on the bones of his face, nor more exactly and wordlessly the anger of a dark Hispanic woman ahead in New York wildly, silently searching a noisy police stationhouse for her child: what was she doing there? why would they expose her to a microphone? how could Mayn make up so well and truly that scene with the City flowing in and out of it—so who would say for sure which was margin and which was the cash-up-front center?, while what was in the way proved more important than what we had been bound for yet we had been bound for what was in the way, but only for now but don’t ask the people in a precinct stationhouse—a large, green plant on a metal typewriter stand near a dispatcher’s desk, a mobile video unit somehow allowed in there and right by Mayn’s shoulder when he had nothing to do with those people except that if interrogated he wouldn’t even be protecting sources were he to deny knowledge of the man known to Efrain (released) and to Foley (inside), and to the Chilean economist, who had visited the man, who had himself escaped less than seventy-two hours ago and was now said to have abducted his young son.

  The blue car had maintained its relative immobility in relation to Mayn’s rented vehicle, and he had sensed that the driver was confused and should be somewhere else.

  The hitch-hiker, who shared two Russian cigarettes with Mayn, observed that in his experience there would always be people who didn’t approve of your domestic arrangements and maybe neither did you, but we couldn’t all live in the same way: he himself rejected bus and train travel, preferred driving but did not own a car: ergo, hitch-hike, where there’s waste in the direction of uncertainty and sometimes scheduling but how do you measure time, by clock or by what happens?, and getting there’s what matters; and when hitchhiking the man was always sure to join up with people he didn’t know, which was dispersive in one way but collective in another, and which was O.K. when in a less abstract era he was a redneck kid visiting his starving cousins out there beyond the cemetery road—and was all right now that he had been inspired by—

  —"I know you from somewhere," Mayn said, as the blue car passed a red van and swung back in line.

  —inspired, the man said, by a man aliased Santee Sioux (no Indian he), who had indirectly caused the hitch-hiker’s father a fatal heart seizure, and by a halfbreed he had hardly seen since they were kids, to revisit that very cemetery he had often passed and apply this little power he was known by Santee to possess to detect a unique strain of radioactivity in the human body: that is, at a certain place there in the graveyard, maybe two side-by-side places: on the possibility that whoever was buried there (two women, he said) had in them this unique strain of residue that, when found in the human body, sometimes wasn’t waste but an opposite, or so some western In
dians still said, who according to Santee—

  "Didn’t I pick you up once before?" Mayn asked quietly as if from his steady, intent eyes.

  The man didn’t think so, unless Mayn had looked different.

  They pulled in at a turnpike "gas world" planned with a long approach configuration offering a variety of services. Mayn phoned Flick at Lincoln’s, got no reply, phoned his own place, then tried Flick again; now guessed that he was on the final curve of a collective that was being daydreamt by those incapable of other dream modes Mayn flashed the Hispanic mother about to enter a police stationhouse somewhere in Manhattan north (future? or right now?).

  The blue car had passed them again and had stopped in the emergency lane a quarter of a mile down glowing violet now in the twilight; a patrol car pulled over behind the car, the hitch-hiker stopped talking for a second, Mayn pulled out onto the road again, having forgotten to get gas. A state trooper sauntered up to greet the driver of the violet car, whom Mayn half-recognized as they drove by, a heavy, burnished young man in a large pale hat and steely-reflecting aviator sunglasses.

  The hitch-hiker was explaining that Santee was an alias for a man who had sold to a New Hampshire paper a photograph of the hitch-hiker and a friend blindfolded apparently before a Cuban firing squad (certainly, despite the hat on one apparently female member, it wasn’t a firing squad composed of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball players), when it was two photos not one, but, alas, his father had recognized his T-shirt and his left ear—Mayn would never forget the pleasant cactus-green double-lobe—and that had done it for the father, and the strange thing was that Santee’s compensation to the busy hitchhiker who had felt inclined to kill him was to give him a job to do—no money guarantee, just the chance to try his gift on peculiar ground: for—

  "You said," said Mayn, "that the cemetery in question was on the outskirts of the town where I picked you up."

  The hitch-hiker had not said; but this was true: for the halfbreed in this town that Santee gave a code name to had known him in the old days as a "Trace Window"—some weighty notion left with a Creek tribe by one of the halfbreed’s great-great relations though this relation was a Natchay, a unique survivor having by glad suicidal rite accompanied his king the Sun King to his funeral but then curiously and scandalously survived a treble dose of the tobacco hypnotic ritually designed to render unconscious such loyal followers so they could then be painlessly strangled. Those running the funeral did not know what to do with him; they were afraid, and so they used the potent future-dreams he subsequently began to have as an excuse to run him out of their chiefdom—which was just before the French came in again and wiped out the Natchay, which this drug-proof Indian had dreamed, while that ritual suicide he had entered and lived through left him not only with these dreams and other dreams of turning but with powers he never used except that of living a long time upon joining the Creeks to the north soon afterward. He arrived on foot with a bag of bear ribs and a limitlessly self-renewing supply of root jelly, but he left such ideas with them as that some women and men could receive, like windows, light in beam-waves or sun-shadows from people who had in their bodies an alloy mineral, radiant, potential; and this halfbreed—

  "What was the code name?"

  "You wouldn’t ask like that if you didn’t know," said the gaunt man beside Mayn, "if you didn’t know a’ready." Mayn in the corner of his eye felt the man eye-cornering him.

  "Ira Lee is no halfbreed," said Mayn, and stepped on the gas. His companion seemed not to notice that they were exiting too soon, not the New York City exit; he wanted to make a point, he was batonning his finger at the windshield. It was no ordinary homogeneous solid solution, that alloy, not Chilean copper and Bolivian tin woven atom for atom reciprocally in each other’s interstices; it was radioactive but open-ended so the contagion or thrust of it was up for grabs. So this Ira Lee, once twice three times approached Santee, recalled the "Trace Window" kid, grown now to be Mayn’s present company, heretofore held up in an open-air restaurant near Minneapolis with a fishing friend, both blindfolded if not smothered with their napkins while one of the thieves removed his stocking mask because it inflamed an abcess in his forehead and a snapshot taken of the two men in their college T-shirts, spare ribs held hidden behind their backs, found its way into the hands of Santee—

  —"also a code name," Mayn added with a weight of miles and miles of historic small talk from this itinerant specialist—

  —then or in its later splice with the Cuban squad, and then indirectly the hitch-hiker had been drawn into Santee’s employ to apply his gift to some "Windrow" grave or graves whether "Trace Window" received ordinary garden-variety radioactive message or that residual potentiality now at rest, now dangerously creative—detectible originally among certain southwestern ancients who arrived thirstily among the proto-Natchay of Tennessippi and might kill or cure with the mineral concentration they periodically mustered of which, some generations later, the one Natchay who survived his own loyal funeral to join the Creeks and be ancestor to the halfbreed Ira Lee—

  "Perhaps he was a halfbreed," said Mayn, feeling as if he had slipped into another form, feeling the city and the twilight nearer; "we sure called him that, among ourselves—"

  —this great-great relation bequeathed the knowledge to perhaps a grand-nephew who found it once in the mid-nineties uniquely duplicated in emanations from a proud, hungry western Indian passing through Pennsylvania as if seeking in the wrong direction his boat or his clan and living on an afterlife of nonetheless fertile if strong-tasting crocodile gums not to mention a mask of mosquito bites targeted around his bright eyes—

  "I think I have to drop you off here," said Mayn, but had to laugh at the man’s calmness in the face of interruption, who then said he couldn’t see why, and offered to pay for a tank of premium but was not accepted.

  They pulled out of a gas station and reacquired the turnpike pulse; they laughed, they had had a true emergency, for the tank had taken three or four gallons more than the gauge said it had any right to, and Mayn felt he pulled closer and closer to the spirit in which his father had, as he had flatly said, "Come full circle only nobody’s here."

  "You have it," said the man, and if Mayn did not know how the hitchhiker had come to be known as a Trace Window, he understood that the man was receiving some trace alloy from him.

  And as the tunnel distantly approached upon one curve of twilight and he thought he needed to drop the man this side of the river, the man identified now the emanations from that noble Indian adrift in Pennsylvania in ‘94 or ‘95, bearing a tremendous though dried bison tongue with but one bite out of it showing in the cutaway section live sleeping rootlets of the tongue’s normally soft valve needles which might be where the potential energy came from that this now horseless wanderer studied with his hand in his lion-skin bag around the tongue thinking the miles away maybe unconscious that in his body, spiced or not by the patient force untapped quite yet by hand and mind, he bore the original alloy recently identified to the hitch-hiker as deposits of alloy unique in that their solid solution occurred in nature—

  "Do you know what happened to that blue car?" Mayn asked his passenger evenly.

  "This is a blue car," said the man who seemed weary from these ancient travels but bent upon bearing out to the end his account of why he had been where Mayn had found him: yet first the alloy, the natural alloy—it had been created way back when by a rare corridor of weather from Canada lofting south (in the spiral forms of future hailstones to be precipitated eventually into one of the morphic mountains of the Southern Rockies said to be fed by the compacted flesh and blood of climbers quick-sucked by the killer sky-blue worm or tiny Pressure Snake) elements of a northern ore gray-greenish and in luster horny but radioactive with mysteriously forked potentiality through, at the northern source, a bind with the spiral forms of hailstone structure and, at the southern end, a bind with flesh and blood of mountaineers so recently sucked and Pressure-Snake-processed into tha
t steep ground that their extreme compression had not yet unriddled its energies into the dispersed dreams or thoughts (depending on which authority you fall for) peculiar to these mountains, and then and only then was the now-or-never moment of alloy.

  "Why ‘forked,’ " said Mayn, "because I know this story"—or some of it, he felt; and he asked the hitch-hiker to find a map in the glove compartment, while Mayn reached his right arm between the seats and was able to draw out the heavyish pistol, put it in his lap, change steering hands, and, feeling in the operation able to drive without thinking, transfer the pistol down between his seat and the door, first ascertaining that the revolver was at least partially loaded.

  "Forked," went on the hitch-hiker, his eyes closed, the mapless glove compartment shut again, ‘‘because the particle runoff might kill, like your regular radioactive waste, though this was probably crypto-thorium and in those days might cause breaks in skin, in flesh, a hole in your head no less, Ray; or it might—" the hitch-hiker-historian-comedian-dowser-genius yawned—"might yield you energies, some as unthinkable as half the future of the planet was getting the name ‘unthinkable’ ‘‘—but being a Trace Window kept one on the move not just employment-wise but staying away from these contracts which can be tough, witness this afternoon’s consultancy which was now history in the little notebook, info to be passed to alias Santee—that’s right, Alias is his first name!—whose interest in those graves was almost as odd as the driver kind enough to pick up this ol’ Trace Window whatever prearranged coincidence this hitch was due to.