Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But whose horse was it if not a communal or common horse that paid with its hence ground-up life for being in the ongoing plane of the exit path of the giant bird that had already gobbled its one-for-the-road wolf, that moonlit bite of Navajo horse? How the extended grandson at fifteen felt a lot like a man without seeming to have passed through normal induction or initiation processing turns to further questions, to wit his sage if fugitive or half-sane njt-picking foresight that two or more questions had better have one same answer because he’s so harried from behind by one of them while dealing with another that, hell’s bells, he plans to get him gone from this town soon’s he decently can. Paired questions such as (a) What were his grandmother’s tears made of the night not so long after his mother’s disappearance into the sea when he accidentally found his grandmother under his surveillance from the backyard? — and, on the other hand (b) By what process was the Navajo Prince’s mother returned to life, assuming this really did occur and occurred almost as soon as her son departed in pursuit of the alien beloved?; or another pair, (a) Was the rotational storm tornadoing its great business that night of the double moon in fact the wake of or the very presence of the Princess’s former bird that, when the Princess departed that Navajo settlement, itself departed in its own Choorish direction? and (b) the question on the other hand, Why had it been at the juncture of downcoming and upgoing weathers or their vouchsafing by the grandmother (who was helping him with his French) and subsequent exploration in subsequent talk about these weathers that he had reached a moment not only when he had to ask about his mother (but what? pirce-quoia?) but a moment intolerable because he couldn’t — that is, ask why his Gramma had been crying that night he’d spied on her, was it straight grief? and what she had seemed to say one day at the cemetery actually was there underground where everybody knew that his drowned mother was not —at the same time asking again if the great day when all the atmospheric clefts lined up and one light-year-long slot or slit parted for cosms of the sun to suck up the life of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head, had been made up by the Hermit-Inventor or brought on by the Anasazi healer’s sense that something should happen to get them all off the hook including the mad mother herself who that very night, upon the sliding forth of the double Moon and the departure of her son hotly abandoning his studies of the power still untouched in the northern bison’s tongue (that can be dried and reused up to twenty months later), had come back to life and limb, which left a faithful imprint ever afterward upon each downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts even though in later days the Anasazi healer had passed into high-flying noctilucent cloudhood doubtless turning to use some of those cosms that (themselves infinitesimal power parcels holding immense unused energies) would have sucked the lady’s life away on a permanent basis.

Until one day, wondering if he himself was cloud-and-rain, mist-and-snow, temperature-and-wind expert hermited within himself re fleshing that skinny old geezer who (Jim had been privately told by his grandfather Alexander) was sick but still breathing loudly somewhere in New York

Jim happened to say to his grandfather on the porch one idle hour of a subtly sad weekend this dumb-ass thing about wishing at least two or three questions that came at you all at once had one same answer, it would make life easier, ‘stead of keeping it all up — and Alexander guffawed in his own white-wicker world only to break off almost tearing a seriousness from his eruption to say, "Jimmy, that’s what the great ones understand they have to do. History is a knacker’s yard and the trick is to specialize in one use for all your ground-up bones. It’s why Grant told Sheridan to remove General Warren who foresaw every damn danger except the delay occasioned in acting to forestall every damn danger." (What’s a knacker, Granddad?) "It’s the secret of scientific genius and of any great military strategist, although it is not why Grant declined to join Lincoln at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14th but took the New York train instead, wishing to see his children in Philadelphia."

Then grandfather Alexander guffawed again with a touch of unease. Jim nodded sagely. Alexander confided in his grandson as they rocked and gazed out over Throckmorton Street at two highish, narrow white Victorian houses out of which then came Leonardo Hugo, the blond, parchment-tanned oculist, from his and his mother’s, and Miss Amyabel Larsen, the pleasant over-the-counter clerk in the post office who had surprisingly large breasts when they were looked at, from her and her mother’s house, "Why that crazy friend of your grandmother’s, interesting old bum that he is — and was! — told me about a tornado he saw in ‘84, the year before his ill-fated meeting with Margaret at Bedloe’s Island that was absolutely symmetrical, straight up and no bulges in the wrong places to speak of, a cylinder of sorts which went on in one spot like a dervish for two hours." "Oh yeah, you told me, Granddad," said Jim who thereupon recalled that when he had told Margaret that she had told him about this tornado and she had said she certainly had not and he had thought how had he known? — and at the same time remembered his late mother saying there were things he had in him now that he would know later, and he had not put two and two together because he was suspicious of that method yet recalled her telling him to go away where he belonged whereas she had gone, at least for the time being, so he had concluded that he was in the future therefore like someone shocked by a terrible event into a sleep — got it? — yet now could see that he had heard Alexander say it.

But that fine, broad, ever-bald, ever-well-shod gentleman grandfather quickly within the regular tempo of his rocking said, No no, he had never passed on to anybody that little tidbit, and went on muttering and rocking while Jim was busy knowing both that he would like to touch if possible Marie Vandevere’s longish neck with his fingertips and follow each softened point of her arching strong spine downward because she liked it, and (knowing) that he would someday be in a position to recall this important talk with his grandfather as if many streams had made their way toward each other steaming over heavy, jagged rocks but as in a hill-and-valley rural model of Washington, D.C., where he had twice been, where streets meet sometimes like spokes or these streams were a liquefied city he had daydreamt of where parallel avenues and such would melt into one another and meet while being preserved parallel by the dreamer’s will itself: and magic of a loving kind seemed then added to the importantness of this talk with his grandfather because as both rocked and watched the single pair across the street turn away from each other in opposite directions, Leonardo toward town, Amyabel the other way toward what we might today term the cemetery-golf-course-race-track complex, though as anyone could predict she would call for a girlfriend en route and they would vkit the unprecedented greenhouse on the highway to study how the vast new rose operation was run, Jim tried to frame a question for Alexander, which was about what Margaret’s tears had been made of that night and how (or by what process) the Navajo Prince’s mother had returned to life as a result of her son’s having run off after his alien girlfriend: but Alexander had arrived at a point of being audible to his grandson, who now heard him say, 44Oh she’s responsible, she’s a very responsible person and sometimes takes her responsibilities too far — some events just happen, you know — and even at this moment she thinks she might have saved. . well you of all people, Jim. .it’s like thinking that you might be back there a few weeks ago the way it was, but having more foresight, you know what I’m saying — I mean Margaret knew your mother was generally unhappy, and worse."