Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Jim got a hard-on but his new raincoat covered it. She never asked what he was doing hitching down to the shore on a rainy September day, or what his name was, but they laughed at a billboard and five Burma Shave signs that made up a sentence, and his hard-on had gone down all by itself as warm, though, now as before, and a boy and girl happily huddled in the jouncy back of a pickup truck they passed; the woman drove Jim an extra eleven and four-tenths miles and though she wasn’t old her nose looked tired, like some stuff or material or other, while her cheek was soft and tan; and when she shook hands with him when he got out he liked her tits filling her yellow silk blouse and after she made her U-turn they waved. No one need ever know he’d come to Mantoloking, and then he got mad, being alone, and wondered if he could get in a few good jabs at least at Bob if they had it out. You could call it hate, and he cut off around and through to the small road, and up through to the beach that was bright without the light of brightness. Jim wanted to swing at somebody (maybe just play catch). Then he saw that it was the future, this decision to investigate the place where he suspected there was nothing, nothing to be found. A man was fishing. He knew the man. The woman would not have waved had she thought Jim was a detective. The cottages back on the bay side were many of them still not boarded up. The man turned about, with his eye on the end of his rod like it’s alive, and came suddenly through but slowly and methodically hurling his line far out, beyond the second swell back of the first breaker—"comber," Mel his father had called it, and somehow Jim always remembered remembering his father who did not swim calling it that (though he could, undoubtedly, swim).

You might have an accident if you lived alone and you’d rot in your room and you became luminous. The man was a brother-in-law of the man who owned the gray dory that needed a bottom coat in August and probably still did. Jim knew this so well. Jim didn’t know the man to speak to and figured the man didn’t know him and had no reason to change his judgment in this regard. The man was built like Jim, or like Jim was going to be — that is, broad, stocky though not less than more or less medium height. Jim had not wished to listen to the subject of their eventually finding Sarah much less go and ask Lester Coombes, the jowly, long-legged chief of police down at the Courthouse. His mother was here in the sand.

She was on a towel in the sun and he saw her fingers, her hand thrashing as she threatened him with his name as if she would actually do anything if he fell upon Brad, and, moving toward the man who now cast again as rain again fell, but the man passed the least additional second aware of the other person approaching, though from the direction a mile from here of the bend and the breakwater and the pier down came two, three walkers slowly as if they might never get here — Jim passed over the exact place where he had stuck like a pole at an angle in the sand though he would never have hurt or anyway murdered his little brother, who would have his day beyond all this feeling after Sarah’s going, a feeling that could well be the crap about eternity the minister "put into words" (as Barcalow Brandy wine in a black suit with this time a tie like one of his horse- or Indian-blanket sport jackets, done in a Windsor knot—"He surely put it into words") — so it must have been there and might be "Still out there?" he said to the man in boots and olive-green slicker reeling his line. "All winter if you got the circulation for it," the man said and at his voice some dumb gulls yelled against the breeze, and an image of his mother went away, but he’d been getting this foreign one with panties and bare back and Bob Yard went away with her — where? over to get clams or ice cream at Mantoloking pier? clear down the coast hugging it as far’s you could go? but he thought they had never done that kind of thing together, at least she played badminton a few times with Mel who moved well and had a wicked wrist. Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, look out, you’d get in there and go so deep you’d never stop falling, long’s your rate of descent was controlled. A swarthy man walked near them out of nowhere, dark, "darkened by some centuries-old desert," Jim one day recalled the scene for Mayga, who was made uncomfortable by this particular (circa-VJ-Day) slice of the small-town Mayns, and he knew it and later felt that he had guessed why fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) years before knowing Mayga whose conversation, occasional as these drinks together actually were, might get him feeling unfaithful, and her discomfort made him secretly mad this time quite a while after the U-2 but Spence was at the end of the bar, one of the few actual times Spence was there, when Mayn said what the boy (a smaller shape of him, or was he, the grownup, the smaller? they were in each other for good and sure and goddamn sure) said to the man fishing, who each time Jim looked at his face seemed to look back at Jim though he didn’t, "Did you ever know anyone who drowned out at sea?" — "And never washed ashore?" said the man, and bobbed his rod and kept reeling. Yes, had the man ever known anyone that that happened to? but he said, No, not known, though he thought it wasn’t as bad as many deaths, and, as if changing the subject, the man said, "Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that." And Jim, abandoning private detection though glad of his raincoat because of the wind even rainless, asked if a body would sink and later rise, or what, and if the man had seen bodies come ashore, and the man half turned to speak, then turned to look at Jim (or like a silent version of when Mel was saying to Jeanette Many, "It was a mistake" — "A terrible one," added Jeanette so quiet you had only faith that you’d heard her—"She didn’t die, she didn’t die, Jeanette, she didn’t do that" (Jeanette’s long and amazingly narrow hand on his wrist) when Margaret entered and said gently, "You mean maybe she didn’t know what she was doing; but remember, she did it, not you," so that Mel looked up in surprise, the editor of the Democrat, crying again, and said, "Do what?" — that is, the brother-in-law of "the boat" Sarah had in some fashion used was saying, by not saying, You’ll live with whatever it is; and you can.

So that after passing back down the bay-bungalow road up to the pier and breakwater and asking nonchalantly if the police had ever questionedpeople about the woman who committed suicide and the man had laughed, a commercial fisherman, and said there was things that matter more and wasn’t the boat found a ways down Barnegat from here? owner was lucky it wound up on that spit — police found a note in an airmail envelope (man laughed but) — people are people, the boy flared back and the man in sudden defense of what he probably did not know stepped forward, and Jim thought of stepping back, but the man said, "What’s the matter kid, eh?" and although Jim did not know a good answer he knew what to do, without knowing.

"You bastard," Jim shoved the man in the chest so he moved, and Jim ran, he didn’t recall even turning to run. I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people it seems. The man had boots on. In motion, it was no contest, except much depended on the man’s unwillingness to go beyond a boundary that was in Jim’s mind, and it was a measure of the man’s rock-bottom interest in the event. But Jim felt the same even when the man gave up and Jim wasn’t hearing the great whishing silences between when one boot hit the ground stride for stride and when the next. But Jim ran like the halfback he was, because detectives didn’t run, they stepped behind something. (Ted: He ran like a Seminole through the woods with Andy Jackson whooping after him. Mayga: He ran because he wanted to get somewhere else! Spence, end of bar: Ran like your little brother trying to keep from getting beat up. What’s it to you, Spence? Oh, man tells me his story. Other people’s families, you know. Stick to your own. Wish I knew where they were. Breaking my heart, Spence. You ain’t got a heart, Mayn.)