Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But the double Moon? What meant the double Moon upon the old medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince got his pistol? comes a voice or a unison of voices from the next room as a divider partition explodes lightly in the laughter unseen onlookers give either the reappearance of half a couch moving back into its apartment or Larry reflecting after a long, deflected bike ride.

Mayn recalled more than he told Ted his steady-eyed elder colleague, though the info-dealer-hunter Spence (who came to mind with some sheen of mold on his face) was not present and would not have heard; and besides, Jim liked Ted, yet before he got through telling what little he told, and remembering the larger thing of which the telling was a part while being told by a part of himself out ahead, not telling the larger matter affected the memory of it in a way quite different from a fact that he had withheld that night in 1969 just because the Spence character-sleazy-watchman-photo-journalist was present and he didn’t like the guy: to wit that in ‘33 a couple of researchers discovered that that desert seed oil bore amazing similarities to the legendary oil of the sperm whale whose sea-acres of flow could never have been thought expendable until now sperm whale oil twenty-five years afterward had been slapped with an import ban.

Call it an uncaused event, he heard himself say into his old-fashioned-glass low-ball to deep-jawed Ted smoking quietly beside him who had praised surprisingly (for humdrum work) his series of three articles on the Delaware River engineering, and from there they had digressed to family pistol which Ted said could seem like more than one, the way Jim outlined its provenances — and digressed to the State of New Jersey and what could and couldn’t be done taxwise, and to whales that were still to be seen from the Jersey shore, which had gotten ugly since his own late childhood much less since his grandmother Margaret’s day when they had a cottage in Mantoloking long since sold which brought them to the beach where you let yourself go, with your fishing pier and the long breakwater all on the sea side and a bright hilly beach where took place the phenomenon that belongs maybe not to the history of junior pickup baseball but of sand or angular gravity; and, come to think, it was several figures in the bright day walking, running, standing literally (we think) rooted, and one lying eyes closed though not silently. And the non-causal event—

— You mean "miracle"? the friend said, whose voice was sometimes in recall what Mayn got but not the face, with its deep jaw and its cigarette.

Yes, like Cleopatra’s Nose — arose from the well-known primarily beach game called "Bases" where two basemen throw the ball back and forth trying to tag the base runner who runs back and forth keeping away from the ball — and in which Jim was engaged with his friend Sammy who’d come with them that day from Windrow — and another guy who wore a green sateen racing-type bathing suit — Sammy and Jim thirteen, Sammy a bit tiltingly taller with a longer reach which he wouldn’t use on Jim because Jim would outshove him but could sometimes kick Sammy in sideways preview of the import of eastern modes of violent aggression a generation later, which made our western combat almost overnight more meditated — while Jim saved for the wintertime when they had their parkas on a punishing hook to the ribs which he had thrown maybe three or four times — and the guy in the sateen jockstrap-type bathing suit was running back and forth low to the ground between the "bases" and Jim, who could run, and Sammy, who could take a throw and run, were trying to get the kid out but he would skip sideways between them, and the ball would wing past his head and Sammy get it right back to Jim who’d run up to within a few feet of the guy and toss it to Sammy before the guy was safe and the guy would slide under Sammy’s tag or jump and go the other way and be past Jim before Jim got the ball back in his hand — a tennis ball, an old one, long before the yellows, and so napless and smooth you couldn’t tell if it had been the Pennsylvania ball belonging to a girlfriend of Jim’s who played tennis, and you could curve it.

But in the middle of all this, with Jim’s grandma Margaret walking down the beach and Jim’s half-pint brother over digging near their mother, who lay face up on a black towel with her arms exactly at her sides (ready to be launched elsewhere) and her very dark but sometimes very faintly (in memory) auburn hair still up and wearing a flowered but very dark bathing suit with a skirt — the guy in the middle stopped and walked away, didn’t seem to hear Sammy, who said, "You’re out, you went outside the baselines." And Brad, with the deep-socketed eyes as if he were digesting a great deal that he had recently learned, turned suddenly, small-shouldered, from what he had seriously been doing and yelled, ‘There are no baselines on the beach," and Jim said, "For Christ’s sake," as the guy in the green sateen suit walked obliviously up the beach — had someone summoned him?

So they had to use Brad, who had been trickling sand over his mother’s instep and had been piling sand in earnest over her shins.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice but for that moment not Sarah his mother’s, for she was as she had been, rigidly receiving the sun (if non-looks could kill) no doubt thinking her way through a sonata until a few notes of it came humming out of her, but how did you hear the sound with her mouth closed? — answer: through the nose (try humming, mouth closed, and just stop up your nostrils — then it’s out your ears or through your eyes)—

What are you looking at? came a voice again but now like little brother Brad’s but Jim was looking now off a hundred yards downbeach at his grandmother Margaret in conversation with a sort of old geezer, not decrepit but an oldster, who had materialized in beachcomber’s khakis and a white shirt, dark, dark glasses, and a white sailor hat opened out like an inverted bowl; but a familiar bawling greeting came from nearer by and, beyond his mother, who was now leaning back on her elbows and staring at Jim, Jim saw the fully clothed figure of Bob Yard the electrical contractor — evidently having driven over to the shore from Windrow — and then Brad came running over to run the bases, and Jim and Sammy lobbed the ball back and forth high enough so Brad scampered all the way to the other base, sliding in, though he didn’t have to, Jim told him.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice which we know Jim was correct to believe he heard as if down the road a future comment on Brad’s preliminary trans-mater excavation concepts were not being given grounds for utterance: ‘stead of digging down, youse cover the thing up; then level off and keep at it a few ages and my goodness you’ve d/seroded th’ Earth surface as much as several inches all around, which renews resources if anything.

What are you staring at? distinctly came Jim’s voice the eve of the U-2 press conference. But the strong hand on his arm counseling him not to bother about the Spence character who’s as good as lost at the end of the bar silenced him — or his voice — while his long-time colleague-friend Ted’s actual voice went armlessly on quoting the famed pilot of the Yankees in response to his interrogator right here in Washington a couple of years back:

… I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D. Class C ball, Class A ball.

How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?