Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Not to the Hermit’s knowledge, but the "snowdevils" he had once doubted had now been seen in the north of New York State, he replied, tracks skimmed off a field of snow by a whirlwind much like the whirlwinds out in these territories but at the base of its vortex stirring cold crystals (while, as a matter of fact, New Jersey and New York are states still seeking to be territories but they may be disappointed).

And for the two days Jim later could not remember his Gramma being away, he reflected coolly on that poor jerk of a hermit being tolerated, politely and humorously, by the Anasazi who would have discussed much else or nothing, but for the Hermit’s endless queries, oratings, floatings upon weather so that some might have found the subject an obstacle that just got in the way of closeness and the boy did not much know what was happening except he was so in love that he must have said to Marie in the moonlit golf course alongside the cemetery that they could wait for sunrise and if it was cold enough see a real sun pillar which the sky used to rest on until it figured out that the pillar dissolved in daytime and the sky would still stand (because it basically knew the pillar was made largely of ice crystals and it knew the shape and size of them). But he knew that she did what she never had done before because it had been in both their minds and had again driven out a strange potential fact he nearly could not think about — but he had been reluctant to ask her though he tried to make her see it in his horny mind, and then afterward she rose up like a tender power in front of him blocking the windshield on the passenger side where he was glad to be, when he was not driving, and then blocking his face, then the windshield:

until an hour later, it seemed, they began to kiss every other second and in the very far right corner of his eye on the cemetery side he found a bright bob of light which he knew was not just him, and turning his cheek to Marie ("Anne-Marie’s") bare sweaterless shoulder he knew the light was approaching from exactly — no, come on, roughly —where his family’s burial place should have been and he remembered not some other things from the last two days but knew and would always remember knowing that it was his grandmother in the cemetery walking toward the town electrician’s borrowed-with-his-actually-illegal-permission pickup truck and Marie read his heart if not the abstruse information behind the skin of his forehead and so much took what he had been offering that he felt at that moment of crying a plume of returning heat root his very spine-hole hilariously in the sky, both ends up (whatever that meant), as the Moon came out from back of some old cloud so he saw the living pattern of four moles on her left shoulder or at least knew they were there and said to his grandmother, "Was she pregnant, is that why?" and felt the rush to weep but gasped Marie’s smells instead and chuckled at their love as the light got closer and he was glad he hadn’t said those words out loud nor pursued the shivery potential of such facts as that Sarah might have wanted Mel to think he was the father-to-be and would then have had to prepare his belief, which in turn gave him a picture of his mother riding a man’s torso in the breakers of the sea and loving it and calling out to the private darkness— but Marie used foam, which he didn’t ask about but saw the tube in her empty Pennsylvania tennis-ball can one afternoon which made her sit on her bed to smile a long time like laughing so if he had asked her she certainly would have explained how it was all done.

But the Moon found another cloud, if not, by some shift, the same one, and the windshield darkened the way a storm will slow a driver down, and his happiness with Marie, who murmured that she had laid an egg as she rose off him and he slid halfway left and toward the gear shift to give her room in this compact bed which reminded him for the future that the bed of the truck was the place — but where, too, that eerie piner kid who seemed so alien and knowing and stole Bob Yard’s property had opened Jim up wide so he didn’t give a damn — and now, later, with Marie, must have brought almost too near the truck the bearer of the light who stopped by a tree across the low wall of stones dividing the golf course from the cemetery, and the flashlight found his grandmother’s face large-eyed with the white hair pale in the night two miles from home doubtless recognizing the truck but he could swear not him and Marie. But then she did not turn away but got on the wall and swung herself around and over and bravely approached Bob Yard’s pickup truck; well, Jim’s mother, drowned amazingly in the so mysterious sea of her troubles so that mystery might attract the cleverness of hearts otherwise hammered to sleep in a corner, had said, Who the devil cared what who felt when and where ten years ago?—O.K., she’d been sick for a year with anemia the doctor sometimes called it, and she didn’t get along with Jim’s father (though never left him) and, though it was not generally known around town (or was it?), her second son was not her husband’s though closer to him now than his own — and she went to a concert or opera in Manhattan once in a blue moon or to an old brick house in a street in Brooklyn called Garden Place where chamber music was played on a late Sunday afternoon Jim heard from his little brother Brad while boys and girls played stickball under the trees outside, interrupted by the tallest boy in the world rollerskating through the game like a man solitary on ice — while also once in a blue moon, though not the same moon, she visited a doctor who was also interested in the music of the last century, and once to Jim’s knowledge asked a singer from Panama to dinner — a very loud-voiced would-be opera singer she reported who did not come and phoned during the excellent, vividly colored dinner Jim’s mother (this time herself) devised, which they began to taste tentatively stopping to listen to what was mostly silence at Sarah’s end of the line in the hall ended by her saying, "Well, damn you" and hanging up to return grinning (as if incredulously) and shaking her head, more intimate with him and his father, if not with Braddie, than ever, it seemed, to say, "Well, we will all take turns singing after dinner and the best man even if he can’t carry a tune might win the extra strawberry rum parfait" (striped in its tall glass) — no failure there, unless the event were committed to memory mistaking memory for the past—

— but all Jim "knew" on the night which was their third or second out here but this time not in the cemetery but on the other side of the wall in the then nine-hole golf course next to it along the fairway pointing toward the ninth green (so he had recognized the sound of a very deep, thick graveled drive his grandmother had crossed all alone) was that his grandmother came close to the cab and before she could say one thing and think another he had said not only Who was she looking for, but something about the West that went away into the night into his memory together with her response which years later when he had his own kids he phoned Anne-Marie in California to ask about one night on a restaurant pier in New York from a pay phone exposed beside the men’s room and his grandmother he always remembered greeted Marie (Anne-Marie) cheerfully, inquired if they had seen any grave robbers, was asked by Marie what she was doing all alone out here, told the two of them in the truck that she had thought it was Bob Yard’s truck but honestly had come out because she had heard a rumor that her grandson came to the cemetery with his girlfriend and she wanted to see if it was true — that was "all" — and could "they" give her a lift home? — and of course (?) Bob Yard knew Jimmy was using his pickup truck? (no mention of the license he did not possess) — Yes, Gramma—