Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Whatever the sequence, Marcus could believe the Anasazi’s reported quandary as if he were himself the pistol that had been suddenly struck by the double moon’s effects — the double moon, we already recall for it was ours to explain — to wit, a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties (as the multiple cum melancholy child-in-residence in next room will corroborate). So that before Mena the zoologist had reared her head and shoulders upon him-and-his, he was telling her, whoe’er she was, that the pistol in question had gathered into itself its alternative sources. It might have come to him some years after "the Mexican business" from a mestizo information peddler with a rare thirteen fingers and one in every wind so that he no longer sported quite the fingers he’d been born with. And this man the night before the battle of Chapultepec had promised a nearly albino Englishman {el Nord ) that he would recover his speech if he would risk his interesting Colt revolver in a blind game (both players hooded) known among condemned mestizo prisoners as Magnet but played here with a loaded deck. The information peddler in question had wound up with the young Nord’s pistol, the Nord with his voice back; and the winner (who learned he was taking a chance on condition his voiceless but not uninformed companion took a chance himself) wound up with the information that he must never "unload" the pistol (i.e., divest himself of it) on anyone except a dark-skinned healer at least two centuries old. However, the other possible source for the pistol double-shadowed by the zoologist-assisted presence of the double moon, slanted with a virtual momentum and doubly east and west down the minds whose idea it touched, was, as the Navajo Prince learned when the pistol became his in the early nineties, that a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer, one of that clown elite who used to act out (like static messengers agitating in a storefront window) their lousiest nightmares and their most threatening daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out, had been given the pistol as a deathbed donation to this Thunder Dreamer’s dream art but, too, as an Anglo charm to stall that tragic Indian religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Which in turn seemed to us (as one of our prisoners-of-the-month was heard to tap— upon, in fact, the INside of an endless rusty pipe) information we might tell the interrogator that would be true but would not hurt any of our living-or-dead fellow prisoners about whom the interrogator wished damaging revela- tions. At all events, the aforementioned settler, dying among the wind grasses of a southern Dakota plain, at length offered the pistol to the Thunder Dreamer dancing all the while, as if he felt that if it was not better to give than to get, it was better to quit than be fired, and he was about to die. Mysteriously, however: or so the Indians said who stripped him of his curiously made oaten trousers and leaf-quilt planting jacket: for like his angry warning that the Indians did not know how God meant the land to be used coupled with his soft-cheeked sadness, as he lay looking upward out of the wind grasses as down from a firmament of gray-green rain, that a race he seemed to think himself kin with (and, as his undertakers felt, doubtless in some root way the white race) had had to wage war in order to find victims to sacrifice yet must likewise sacrifice in order to wage war — he seemed as crusty across his strangely divided genitals as an old hand, yet he had the beardless cheek and clear thigh of the youngest, tenderest brave of all and could not say what he had farmed and had no land he could speak of and, passing the pistol to the dream-news-dancing Thunder Dreamer, reputedly spoke of his conception the night before the Battle of Chapultepec as if it explained something, though hardly his willed and causeless death:

oh he wanted to die and passed on to the dancing Thunder Dreamer perhaps a prayer coded in that Hartford-hewn shape of a Colt pistol, but the dying words of the strange old-young settler who gave the pistol (the same pistol? a double of the other?) to the Thunder Dreamer who gave it one day to the Anasazi healer in his cliff far away were more interesting than prophetic, for he was said to have murmured at the end (though already as dead as the grasses sang and breathed) that his father had taken his mother for a boy and never forgot the moment he came upon her in Chapultepec dressed like a young correspondent on a bench in the zocalo surrounded by flowers and the old-fashioned disaster of "the Mexican business" like our backfirings of a later age, and by the less-clear hubbub of an unjust war writing out of a bottle of brown ink memoirs of President Jackson in New York and Washington; and knew that they spoke the same language, though not that this boy-creature was a woman, much less that at the age of whatever she was at the time of the Battle of Chapultepec she had miraculously never menstruated — and was never to.

And so, later, when the six-hundred-year-old medicine man, his personal insight beams divided by the truly double moon conveyed along the rising presence of the Chilean zoologist Mena on her antique Apache scaling ladder, heard her recite Owl Woman’s remedy for an unpregnant woman who had stopped menstruating, he recalled the Thunder Dreamer with the large eye sockets and small, receding eyes leaving the pistol with him to remove from it a curse that made it hold heat as if constantly being fired when in reality it was the tongue of the sun that cut through clouds and clothes to the very breechclout and through time itself, to "fire" that Colt near to melting point. But it did so by a wind of the sun known only to one person beyond the Anasazi healer living in his receding cliff which was the high stage for his audiences while he himself was audience for stages of a longer, greater event. On this he and his counter-seer the Hermit-Inventor of the East didn’t quite agree — that is, beyond knowing that the direction the wind came-from and went-toward proved at some hours of the day to hold the very same force, as if the breathtaking leverage in the swing of the bird’s wings powering the East Far Eastern Princess away from her father the King’s long white-lit mountain ten years later were not only bone-and-ball-joint dynamics but even the very urge behind that mechanics of flying, and to find food that that bird had never known, if dreamed of, and devour it right down to the still-cantering hoof, with gracious abandon savoring that first close whiff of terrified muscle under fleetest Navajo horsehide though not the sight itself — the sight of itself, the descending bird, some fine-nesting hugeness at the moment that it reached the frantic stallion.

That sight belonged to the Hermit-Inventor who, unknown to the crag-high Navajo Prince mounted upon his blue Mexican mare observing only an alien wing (and not its Princess passenger) impinge in the plane of men and animals, had from his own cliff-horizon above the running bulge of that world witnessed proof-possible of his colleague Anasazi’s claim that the wind took an elastic body or that time found sudden chances out here in continental space to spirit itself forth from its own further reaches. Yet the visiting bird, even with a flash of human hand and long, dark hair near the root of its vast wing, resembled a giant king eider, that heavy, short-necked sea duck seen along northern coasts (though here on a scale of its own) if not bred in Other space so it hardly evoked a prior evolutionary stage, though still some "unevolved past," yet thought the Hermit-Inventor, and was pleased with the scientific prospect of a past of cloud coasts that had not met the erosion of winds, or a past of winds that, whether or not velocity mattered, had found no work to do at the times slotted for them and had run on indefinitely loosed like beautiful child-villains without a home: but, like the window of his finest theory, he had seen the flash of other flesh over the huge bird-steed’s bright limb — drake or past-gender, less pied than our diving eider spreading its wings like an underwater plane — and the Hermit wondered if these periodic westward vacations in time that he took from his often meteorological work and meditations in the East were not catching up with him dividing him through some rough-hewn shape beyond power or its prospect — like advice he remembered giving a young girl, say, in the presence of a huge, dismembered statue in, what was it? 1885 or so.