Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"We"? we ask.

Who cares, the interrogator unquestioningly goes on, when we have proof of certain facts: "certain" not in the dubious American sense of an unspecified "some" but in the sense of particular certainties (he flicks his whole head toward the next room, but not as if there’s only one, and when we look back he looks like he would like to pick that nose of his but that’s our prejudice against political terrorism and its quiet linguistic routines) — facts (he goes on) such as that the Indian mother came back to life after her son the Navajo Prince departed armed for self-defense and magic but to give away when the time came with the very gun that the late Anasazi medicine man came into possession of through a spy who the night before the key battle of Chapultepec had won it by dubious play in a game of chance off a young Englishman who thereby regained his speech that had been lost when he had been questioned shortly before about an elusive German traveler’s map or abstract by Marion Hugo Mayne whose western diaries years later came into a distant nephew Alexander’s careful hands; not to mention, continues the interrogator exactly half obsessed by a new role he’s had thrust upon him (yet from him as certain as a shadow), a second fact that this Alexander is the still extant though now for many years widower grandfather of a man who, if it is the same James Mayn, on a bright day near the harbor when he lunched (where he often lunched) with two red-bearded, hungry, and distinguished economists, introduced a friend he happened to meet, a Wall Street oil analyst, to another accidentally encountered friend, a physician who was "in town" to discuss his accidentally deceased wife’s affairs with their lawyer, an intro which led like a suddenly slowed or detoured ray of light to a therapeutic contract between the oil analyst and the Westchester medicine man, who one day told a tale, guilty in its brevity, of a gambler who wagered in her absence his widowed, red-haired sister-in-law as if she were his wife and not his brother’s, and in the event won a powerboat in that card game which he then unloaded in a hurry in order to give up the tables and marry the lady; not to mention, continues the interrogator (being very slightly charming pacing simultaneously this and the next room which has ne’er been done before — with the rolling gait of a sailor), fact number three: it was only after her father had departed the Four Corners area that his daughter Flick entered it to extend her energy inquiries beyond that perfect Asia poison (Vietnam-related) dioxin in Michigan on a river that connects with Minnesota’s Mille Lacs where at an elevation of i,249 feet above sea level another New York doctor’s Ojibway guide practices his tradition of apprehending tapeworms in order to fly them in the bodies of walleyed pike to opera singers who desire a dramatic weight loss, to the New Mexico power plant and Navajo Mine (so-called) featuring low-sulfur coal stripped from the nonetheless now not appreciably paler landscape to be turned into natural gas; and it was only after he had visited that Four Corners region — complete with as-yet-unexplained rendezvous with two very-differ-ent-as-to-sex-and-color /n-staters — that the correspondent-woman Lincoln grew interested in Mayn, and only after she grew interested in him that she joined an energy workshop also called Body-Self where by chance or design she encountered in the nude a woman who flatly asserted all men should always wear condoms yet herself gave only the illusion of being open with the other women about her husband — a husband whose sanctuarial foundation is set up to fund future finds in geothermal research, weather control without prejudice as to purpose, and many other areas such as Navajo and other Indian water-and territory-conservation legal strategy that doesn’t exclude inter-American (read even Castroist) advisory assistance.

How far need we bother going? asks the interrogator (meaning not "I" but "we," yet not only because he speaks in a higher voice having been replaced by his relief) — how far with feelings such as the boy’s or the grandmother’s or the bibulous grave tender Eukie Yard’s, when we have these other assembled facts already.

But Jim didn’t accept — i.e., live with — his mother’s suicide, while knowing that, on his knees or on his feet looking past Margaret at the glint of Eukie’s pint of applejack, he didn’t think her absenting herself right or wrong. She’d been sick with something, infections and fatigue, and she had never much talked to his father. Which Jim had sort of always accepted.

"I think there’s something here, you know," he said to his grandmother, resisting tears primed not by rain on his face from the grass but by traces of panic and relief in him that responded to the ground. And resisted "ending it all" by hugging her: her brown silk blouse, the black skirt, the medium-low-heeled black shoes (he can specify years later through memory that did not need to function then)—

— hugging her shoes, murmurs the interrogator in a now deeper voice whose sotto murmur is as from some partitioned distance which, by the ancient and modern modulus for translating terms of one problem into terms of another, accidentally rediscovered by Larry Shearson in (from his view) his hotel-like apartment house, sounds pretty intense because you don’t ask even the wonderful Amy to walk all over you (assumin’ she’ll even come near) nor even if you’re biking among a flood of pedestri- (read pederastri-, no paparasby-) terian traders horse-sucking you bike ‘n all like your own built-in vacuum, that feels (but only feels) irresistible, like the Mayn-to-Lar’-over-’n-out-por-trayed moonless Lake Rompanemus at night, off a familiar, rough-planked dock your feet alone see, or the next room’s door that wasn’t suppose to be open tonight)—

"There is something here," she said, her feet then so truly on the ground that Jim knew she didn’t go in for God while to be sure singling gods out of her memories and humor but never the whole ballgame as if youse gon’ make one sense of it all including—

— Let us say, adds our soft-soprano- (no, sobrani-) voiced interrogator, that a mother drowning herself on a windy day because she lacks the socialized sinew to remain useful to those who need her, who commits self-destruction through over-emphasis on happiness or sexual frustration or guilt, through a willingness to entertain rather than encounter the void of human—

"What do you mean, Gramma?" demanded Jim, "spooks?" — just as we, we, slow on the intake, say the same to the interrogator minus "spooks" and plus "Cuba infiltrating certain American Indian reservations through Anglo sympathizers intellectually bent upon not just understanding the Indian but keeping their culture pure (pronounced in the endemic Spanish, pooro), for do not Castroist advisers in desert powerboats have to be preceded by advance persons who are at least native American and know the "terrain"?

He looked at her across the specific blank, wet grass where his mother’s small ledge of headstone was. Margaret’s eyes grayer and grayer, and the light behind her like the sound of the announcer bringing the trotters up to the starting mark took her away from him but he couldn’t follow, and, to boot, she turned to look somewhere as if she heard the approach of what would finish here and everywhere a privacy she and he had always had. Though this was nonsense, for they could always laugh — for years afterward they could laugh — the Prince and Princess junk was behind ‘em; or they could laugh for a few years anyhow. And she said, Funny how Brad and your father accept it.

And then, so Jim dented the earth with the side of his hand, the sides of his hammer fists, he didn’t know what to call out or how; he hammered on the Earth hammering himself or someone else who might as well have been inside him back in or into shape and never said a word, while stupidly feeling that some drumming came up out of the earth at his summons and traced its smoke through him, employing him, ignoring him, maybe proving through this material experiment to have been so insubstantial that there’s nothing holding his mind back, falling forward then over the grave only to find that like a sprinter or a lineman he was leaning too far forward but the ball wasn’t snapped, the gun didn’t go off — but he didn’t fall forward except in mind.