Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But later, when Bob Yard came round to Throckmorton Street to see about another matter, Bob told him he had understood just how he felt and for a moment laughed when Jim went looking for the kid the following Sunday; he wanted to find out if he really had taken the two screwdrivers Bob had left in the pickup truck, and settle the matter with him. "You just went down the road and came back, eh?" said Bob, but listening as he must have been he might have heard Jim stop the truck even without turning off the ignition.

He went around the lake one spring afternoon with his friend Sam, and a woman was screaming and groaning in a shack. This was before they had much in the way of trailers for settled living. She was crying out at intervals and a tiny child opened the door above the two steps and peeked around. Screams got as fast as breathing. Jim said they should get a doctor. Sam said she didn’t need one, she was probably having a baby and they better get out of there.

Jim went to Bob about it, not his own father. Did they have rooms in those shacks?

Bob said, Just one, but they didn’t have to pay anything, but sooner or later the town would clear them out.

Margaret got in touch with Pearl Myles and got angry when Miss Myles said she shared Margaret’s sorrow for her daughter Sarah. Jim felt drunk again when he got out of the pickup truck at the cemetery. He never, to his knowledge, asked Margaret how the cosms of the sun gave the East Far Eastern Princess her future, during that afternoon the sun didn’t go down and didn’t, and didn’t, but if that wasn’t prophecy, what was? And somewhere along the line he figured, yes, Margaret did have powers, though maybe it was to keep stuff to herself, though he was pretty much past all that: certainly she didn’t volunteer more story stuff though she knew many facts and often told him about the actual places and how the Navajos, with originally twenty-four thousand acres of land (which multiplied astronomically) were lucky they had no gold or silver near the surface and smart enough to turn their timber into board and not sell it just as logs, but this was long after Margaret was there. Young Margaret lived with them, did some weaving and rode a horse, learned some Spanish and was never taught Navajo. For years Jim hardly read a line of those old dispatches she sent on ahead of her (or, at first, behind her) to the Democrat and the pieces she wrote when she got home — some at breakneck speed, she hardly knew how; some, she said, slowly and painfully, one about a time when, in the dead of winter, she had swapped a lesson in herb healing and a public talk at the Browning Club on the Navajo ceremonial "Blessing Way" which helped to keep wind and lightning and so forth in harmony with other forces, in return for train fare from Cincinnati, but she wound up in Massillon interviewing over tea a self-made populist businessman who had literally dreamt up a solution to the Municipal Improvement Problem, to wit non-interest-bearing bonds to the extent of half the assessed value of the property within the municipal limits — bonds (all of this in a dream!) then to be deposited with the Department of the Treasury (significantly including since i860 the Secret Service) as security for a loan of legal-tender notes — the man none other than Jacob Coxey, whose sandstone quarry supplied steel and glass works, who bred blooded racehorses in Kentucky, whose daughter was christened Legal Tender, and who, a few weeks later, set off with an army of unemployed to march on Washington.

The Democrat was hardly a well-known newspaper. In the 1870s but-tonmakers plundered Indian burial grounds. Margaret saw a locomotive literally stalled by the squashed corpses of locusts. You could feel it. Hundreds of jackrabbits like giant unwinged bugs racing each other out of town ahead of a dust storm. Mayn had to ask a lot of questions in his line of work if you could call it that. Maybe a third at least of our known reserves of uranium are in Indian lands in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. Navajos emphasize what happened more than when, but do not kid yourself, they know the sequence where it counts. Which came first, the well or the sewer? The day the world ends will be the day the Navajo lose their land, or is it the other way around? It’s the other way around. There are plants in the desert, in New Mexico and Africa, that get nibbled all year long; so they grow spines and brew poison juice. "The new policy is self-determination without termination." "Say that again?" requests the girl on the beach. "President Nixon to Congress. The policy was to terminate tribal control over resources and phase out federal protection of Indian control of Indian resources." "Say that again?"

"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"

Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away — it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.

He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did you hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"

Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later — as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which we are and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly — Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack and without a license and with a passenger he didn’t mention but later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—