Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

‘Cause you build up credit with guys in here, nobody tells you that you were loyal, you didn’t give a guard more data than he could handle (smile), you didn’t pay a little bit too much attention to a guy who knew you knew what was going on with him, nobody tells you your credit rating is good, but you know. Yet Juan did not know he was working for me, in what happened soon afterward; look, he was working for himself too but not as if he knew the work he had done for me, and was destined to help still more, months later, the night before a test he never took but would in my opinion not have failed.

But you, Jim, who were you working for?

I think yourself. Do we all? No, we do not, said Ruth Heard, who told us to figure what we were getting out of every hour we worked, which was confusing to kids, but I found it’s confusing to others, too.

But doubts remain. Why don’t I know even now if the contact we made through the South American gentleman was by chance, or you meant it? He wrote to me, then he didn’t, then he did, then after Efrain got out the letters stopped again. I have told you how the South American gentleman, the Chilean economist, and I met diagonally across the counter in the Visiting Room one day late in ‘72 when my mother went over to the sandwich machine and my father didn’t know what to say to me — can’t blame him — and was looking over at Smitty who had his eyes closed talking and his wife was leaning on her elbows and nodding her head, but on my other side this guy who was getting out the next month was talking to this well-dressed bald gentleman with a mustache who spoke with an accent and he had come with this guy who looked like some street dealer but outdoors-looking not in the city way in a brown leather coat, heavy slick hair, more like long black high Hawaiian, but it wasn’t black, it was like blondish brown toxic-tinted with your "dirty" look, and this guy, our mutual contact the South American economist, listened by looking off into space but at that moment toward me. Then he said, "We are of one mind there, but this company agent you know so much about was my friend whatever his political aim may be," and the slick guy in leather and with hands that might have belonged to someone else, they fitted him, they seemed discolored or speckled — when he interrupted, the bald, well-dressed man seemed to not hear and he nodded in a friendly way at me because I was looking his way, and he said that whatever it was was more than a matter of scrambling funds, it was how the parent company filtered rewards among subsidiaries and the way this changed local taxes, and he mentioned the word "Marxian" but suddenly he and I were talking and I, to say something, asked if he was a Marxian and he smiled; but before he and the other guy with the hands and the high, sort-of-throaty voice got up to go, the South American gentleman asked what Marx I had read, and we exchanged names and addresses, it was great, the guard standing below the dais where the desk is came over and told me not to mix up my visitors, though my dad was still there so I had an excuse to be there, and my mother came back with two sandwiches and asked what it was about and my dad told her, or thought he did, they all love rules, you know.

I have told you this, and you have told me you ran into this guy at Cape K. — coincidence, his zig your zag! — and later learned he was an economist in the Allende government which I knew. But since then he didn’t ever refer to you when I mentioned you in my letters, and once I detected a colloidal settling to the effect that you wanted the address for him that I was in possession of.

But it was always me who brought him up and I don’t know which of us was getting the information, Jim.

Except you’re still here. I mean coming. Like a once in a while letter from the old weather sciencer who takes care of an old lady friend who thinks she’s in New Jersey half the time.

And the information you’re getting — think of it! About inconspicuous photography, hidden work, Foley Plan for 5-20-yr development of this retirement compound, garbage bail-out into a Puerto Rican festival inside these walls leaving the Cessna to level an abandoned barn that had been recklessly commandeered by two lovers; the blue of the sky witnessed above the Yard, if I could only put it down, the stars and comet tracks that are always there, seen or not; the slow, sandy rasp of a super’s shoes (of Life Experience for college credit), Miriam’s father’s soles heard making the swollen-footed ascent to the For Rent apartment he prided himself on not permitting her to clean out after the last tenants in case of rats; and you’ve been getting multinational jokes, and the unknown soldiers cited at Cape Kennedy that impressed our mutual acquaintance from the Southern Hemisphere so he said "vacuum-packed for burial in space" as if he quoted from some store of learning; and speeches through the fence; and why the color of Miriam’s eyes looked like it did when she turned away from everyone else on Earth to me, the late winter sun in her teeth, our feet in the salt soft sand beside a driveway back of a beach house, for we’d kept going all the way out to Westhampton and we were going to enter this beach house and it’s a week before St. Patrick’s Day and counting, and we were too far out from the City to rely on public transit to get us home, but what to do with this visiting Volkswagen, green but at the edges muddy whose New Hampshire plates I had turned to a single New Mexico plate, and I desired to return this VW to a legal spot near where I’d just managed to ease it out of an illegal space from where it could have been towed at owner’s expense plus fine, and I even took good care of the finish out there swept by the Atlantic salt of Long Island’s South Shore, for when we got up the side stairs to the door and Miriam kept saying, Are you sure it’s all right and I said the friend who usually had the use of the place had told me just how to get in, I went down through the house to the garage, slid up the door from the inside, and pushed the VW in as easy as starting it, but all the time suspended in all my mind’s eyes was the color of Miriam’s itself due to the more narrowly physical side of this colloid mystery we have spoken of).

This a cover? you asked.

But speeches through the fence? You didn’t understand about them? On-the-job training for leadership. The little store with the newsstand outside is within earshot, and Mrs. Erhard moves from behind her counter to come outside and watch.

Hear the basketball smack. The one-on-ones have occupied the playground playing half a court going six-on-six making all the moves; and me, I’ve got a crowd on the sidewalk side of the high fence maybe five, six, seven kids taken up position (got there first) watching the game and listening to me, so then the speaker himself, me, talking as always Issues, turns to the fence and addresses those deaf geniuses making all the moves — did I say jungle training school? — charging, double-dribbling, traveling, hooking up toward the hoop but hitting the hard rim like a stoop so the ball kicks twenty feet out beyond them, it’s as if without the cord of the net the rim has that extra power and they’re all chasing the ball but each other, so the elbow’s connected to the neckbone, kneebone to pelvic area, and our famous High Kool with his great semi-albino hands, six-five at age fifteen, stops short transfixed, Jim, for he hears me say, "What is the southernmost state of the Union?" Big man is in a trance, he’s outside the game now transfixed, while two lesser talents colliding with him where he stands (occupying position having gotten there first) fall away from him stunned, bruised, maimed; for in the middle of my critiquing of the Los Angeles police not letting the Russian strongman Premier Khrushchev visit Disneyland and of K. himself who said to us and our system, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," I had asked out of the blue which was the southernmost state in the Union.