Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Which still was fact, and people saw it happen, saw him seated "running" away when he had not known how to drive, he had only seen others do it.

He loved his grandmother more than his mother. But no he didn’t. And shit, if it was true in these stories that delayed and delayed, that the fingertips of the East Far Eastern Princess when they were met almost exactly by those of her beloved, inquiring Navajo Prince printed a sound so beautiful to her she had to show it to him but it spun slicingly upon the membranes of his sick mother’s mind so she yelled and hurt so badly the elders declared the music of the original source of the painfully uncomfortable hole in her head was a punishment for wandering into the mountain when she was with child — why then Jim would one day find out for a fact that the Princess, whose father, like an early gubernor of New Neitherland personally known to an earlier manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York, claimed that his people had taken scalps (because smaller and easier to handle than skulls) for ages before the Indians got the idea: which they must have borrowed, shall we say, from Choor — the Princess, to continue, had whorls on her fingertips while the Prince had a high percentage of arches which when joined to hers created cascades of sweetest friction — so the breathing Hermit-Inventor would have written down the tones had he not been most agreeably disputing with the fast-fading old Anasazi healer the relation of breath to wind and flesh to cloud, taken so much further on his own by the otherwise skeptical newsman James Mayn, who could not trust but could not abandon Margaret’s "histories," that once upon a time reporting these histories in a future world which encompassed his own timely children, boy and girl, at one warp and, at another, a libration-point space town free of weather and conveniently reached from Earth by Matter-Frequency Modulus doubling up two persons into one, Mayn could not tell if the tribal medical society specializing in removing bullets were Zuni, in the Zuni region where the Princess, with the Prince pursuing her, passed to the south soon after they left the Navajo outcrops and dry sheep grasses and bands of horses. Later the pursuit placed its hopes in some known river such as the Susquehanna or Juniata, above which (unprecedentedly low in the sky) one night early in 1894 the Navajo Prince, the Colt revolver he would give away when the time came loaded but no protection against his having lost again the trail of the woman he followed and whose dreams he had shared up to but not including her last three before leaving the site of the Long Afternoon, saw, smelt, and even, like his brother’s grandson Michael whom he never knew who in 1943 carried coded on his person in the words of his own curiously exact Navajo tongue an American radio message which saved a thousand lives, heard the sough and song and veritable humor of a low night-cloud the Prince identified at once as having been the Anasazi medicine man or a goodly part of him, knowing then, too, if only for a riddling instant, that, whether he was a giver or taker, if he did not turn and pass back across the land to his own people he would be childless like a woman.

But it was Brad who proved childless, though only in the Interrogator’s genetic sense, for Brad and his wife his high school beloved who was possessed of the faintest dark down in a curve of the small of her back, adopted three children before they were through, and were at once adopted by them. Brad, who on the day he was revealed to Jim as only his half-brother and grieved from nine in the morning to nearly three that afternoon for the mother whose death he accepted, jumped through this strangely overdone act of grief in Jim’s mind from subhuman occupant of same-home space to full-brothered divider of such commemorative labor between the two as had never been spelled out and never was again, except in James’s very life.

As not even he much knew except in flashes of past connection meaningless as that between the Navajo Prince’s sudden departure and his mother’s miraculously coming back to life, unless it was the young Princess’s clandestine prior flight that did the trick.

Did Jim grudge his newfound brother Brad nothing after that? He would surprisingly pitch in unasked and help Brad build a backdrop for a school Shakespeare play when Brad fell behind and his friends Bernard and Mark forgot and didn’t show up; Jim — while Brad frowned like a bloodhound puppy — would help him with math before Brad had a chance to speak to 4 ‘their father," who was going to invest sixty-some thousand dollars in General Electric after the sale of the paper whenever that came true, and lived, indeed day to day, to see value enhanced; and Jim, transcending fact, would tell Brad how on Brad’s Day he had taught himself almost without thinking to drive along the weedy shoulder of the blacktop playing it by ear and only once funnybone-jamming the indestructible transmission of Bob Yard’s surprised pickup truck which felt like a very wide bed behind you as you swung and rambled rattling down the road that passed the garden of the dead where he sometimes imagined his mother’s ashes, in lieu of her moldering body — ashes in a cylinder he had heard, and in his daydream inserted at night so the grass sod hardly blinked — till one day he saw the standard container, and it was a regular oblong box not any golf-hole-type cylinder or whatever the time capsule was that they buried at the World’s Fair with a picture or was it a lock of hair of Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl with a beautiful smile and a fast answer.

It was a fact that, the year after Mayn’s friend Mayga, back home in Chile, lost her life (whether or not taken by one of her two male companions along a cliff path above Valparaiso harbor, but almost certainly not given by Mayga), a minor State Department functionary named Karl wore an automatic pistol under his jacket during the emergency "Hot Line" discussions in Geneva; and a fact that an annex to the agreement called for two duplex circuits, one a tele-wire telegraph, the other a radio telegraph, plus two terminal points with telegraph teleprinter — though Mayn’s daughter Flick who heard about Karl many times but never met him doubted that he would have gotten into that room in Geneva armed.

Mayn was not brilliant and was perhaps barely average in math (which had less than nothing to do with his encouraging his wife to do the income tax with AP pencils he brought home); but he found himself nonetheless or all the more fascinated by such mysteries of ballistic deflection as the path of a shell fired nine thousand yards by a capital ship in World War Two that missed by a hundred yards to the right, even after all the obvious allowances had been made. He did (over a drink) plot the curved course of a projectile to be fired out of a totally collapsible and degradably exportable little ‘‘ system" from a roof in a tree-lined residential street of northwest Washington, D.C., where he shared an apartment for a time on Kalorama Road, to a target area on the White House lawn, and wondered why it had not been tried.

He was less fascinated than fond of that nuclear incident in which one weapon, through blast or radiation or heat or what have you, is "totaled" (we were later to say) or neutralized by another weapon belonging to the same country. (Ted and Jim were having a good laugh at the Defense Department name "Fratricide" for this type of incident one night at dinner when they received almost simultaneously long-distance calls, Mayn from his wife five hundred and more miles north who was moved by a luminous sunset across a lake and had brought the phone out to the screen porch to prolong what she saw and share it with Jim — Ted, a call from his former wife to tell him his two daughters had driven the car into an urban ravine the night before — the night before! might as well say "last month" — and one of them had lost her little finger—"Fratricide" was the official name they were laughing about and playing variations upon when first the waiter came to inform Jim, then the owner of the restaurant came and said Ted had a call.