Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Oh he wanted to have it both ways! his grandmother laughed.

And probably when winds meet, they not only join each other and flow together, but they might spin each other or they might—

"Why, this is our Anasazi medicine man talking all over again, Jim, don’t you remember?"

"But, Gramma, it was the Hermit who talked about the frontier where the breath of the reptile met the breath of the food needles the cactus was tossing out."

"But the inside wind being part of the outside wind, twining spiral and all that, if you recall, that’s our old Anasazi, who by the way had one big lung instead of our two; an earlier lung."

"But he said the spirals got set off in the four corners or something inside us, the four corners facing outward from one another."

"Well, maybe you’ve started a new weather on your own."

But Jim didn’t know.

She said, "Not upcoming or downgoing, but ongoing."

He shrugged slightly and thought of getting away, remembering guiltily how he had needed her. O.K. Gramma, O.K. maybe I’m the Anasazi. He beat reincarnation, and I don’t believe in reincarnation.

Exactly my sentiments.

Right after his mother’s suicide he had to hate his grandmother. How else could he have worked toward this spring victory? He was sort of riding out of town swung toward the future as his mother had once quirkily decreed for him. He would rather be the Anasazi, he told his own daughter years of bedtimes later — because the Anasazi managed for himself a post-mortem cruise in the form of a cloud in order to check if there were foam volcanoes in the eastern states. (And Jim was able some nights to tell his beloved daughter after his equally beloved son had risen above them by formula to the ceiling of the room in sleep, things he knew there was no danger of her believing, and in any case she was more interested in the pistol, what happened to the pistol the Navajo Prince had on him when he pursued the Princess (than in how it had come into the Anasazi’s hands), and interested in what ground-up horse bones etcetera were used for internally — the father didn’t tell her.)

"You can be both Anasazi and Hermit," Margaret told him; for he had gotten up and was going, and all that had been said, like some power that would be there if it were not here, had left unsaid what had upset Margaret to call him rude, rude! as if to have the power you had to take it from somebody else the way the mestizo spy who had wanted to unload the (later) Mayn family pistol nonetheless used it as a mid-journey deterrent somewhere in the Sonora desert between the Mexican War and the Gold Rush when an unknown but someday-to-be-legendary Alsatian mathematician threatened to withhold specie from his pocket together with a large folded sheet of foolscap evidently valuable, upon which when the mestizo took it from the footsore foreigner he found a numbered design with curved lines radiating outward of varying length dotted or broken, yet with identical maths and figures that all came down one way or another to the number 5—11.125 (she recalled) minus either 3.125 and 3 (successively) or 6.125 equaling, along all these lines of varying length, the number 5 she thought — but here in early 1946, Take the power, Jim, from who? But he knew, he knew — he did, he did — a clamor dividing in him and dividing (when some song his Gramma sang said, "I have nothing to divide"); and he delegated the knowledge, just as he kept a new irritating presence to himself in politely asking, "Did that really happen, with the mountain lion becoming a wolf and the great bird flying away?"

"I had left by then," said Margaret, her hands in her lap.

"Had the Princess?"

"I can’t quite tell," his grandmother said and laughed with a slight wit of unease — she was witty, snooty, democratic; tall, loving, crazy punster, very smart; self-depreciating re: her family having settled the town even before Washington hospitalized his wounded in a church out by the railroad tracks, and she also until after she got sick "went" to the bathroom with magical speed, he could never see how she could do it that fast, so the water was flushing almost as the door was being locked. "Yes," said Margaret; "she, too."

"Did you love the Navajo Prince?" he remembered asking, with Anne-Marie on his mind, in his body.

"Yes I did. A prince only to the princess. They wouldn’t use such words. They use ‘princess’ among the Seattle Indians, I seem to recall."

"Did my mother know?" came the question more indelible than any answer to it.

"Very little. She felt I talked too much and was a busybody at the Historical Association and raising money for those poor old Split Wood Del-awares in upper New York State, and the Indian women in Pennsylvania with their family problems and good sense."

"What did you and the Prince talk about?" (while "Why don’t I ask you things?" his own weirdly memorable words, unvoiced, probed outward like a worm whose blindness was the unlikely staying power in his recollection of what he did not understand, such as Why "Split Wood"?).

"Not the weather. Difference between us, their whole extra family of aunts and cousins, for example; everyone moderately in touch with everyone else; using each other. Only one stargazer, and I let him know the pictures I saw at night, the constellations, when we sometimes lay full-length on our horses — but he tolerated me only as a nice visitor, which I was."

"What language did you speak."

"My own, though I learned some of his in secret so I could say in their tongue to myself what they said to me in English — like ‘Walk in beauty,’ which was quite a thing for them to say of me."

"You are beautiful, Gramma."

"They meant all living — living with the land and its animals and plants, as the land lived with the air and the heavens. They dry-farmed in the plateau and they did irrigated farming in the canyon. Peaches and grapes in the canyon when they were lucky."

But the mestizo spy?

He gave the piece of stolen foolscap to the Anasazi with the pistol and was later turned inside out by two Thunder Dreamers and left to dry on a saguaro cactus.

But years later when Jim Mayn’s daughter’s words had evoked "Holy hell what there is in people" and she had fallen asleep where she was in her quilted bunk — not like her little brother afloat near a ceiling lamp fixture snoring more subtly than a grandfather’s nasal short-circuit potent as the memory of it — he made his wife quietly mad by calling Anne-Marie Vandevere in California who, after sixteen average years of silence, informed him at once that that time in the cemetery-golf-course "complex" (she’d been funny sixteen years ago, too) his grandmother had been in New York for two days because an old friend had died and his apartment had been taken over at once by-

— oh was it that time!

— a nephew who looked just like him and understood all the charts on the chipped plaster walls and had brought his own and wouldn’t discuss things with Jim’s grandmother, he told her he wouldn’t want to risk giving her the wrong scoop and said little if anything and she came back to hear that Jim had had as Jim must remember a horrible fight with that three-quarter breed Creek-Sakonnet Indian Ira Lee (your rival on the football team) in Grandma’s flower bed, didn’t he recall? because the day after Anne-Marie’s brother was detached with Jim’s powerful help from the tree in which he had fallen, Ira, the half-Creek left halfback, had called to Jim, who was on the screen porch, that he understood Jim’s grandmother had gone off to New York to see her boyfriend.

But what had gotten into Jim in advance across the backyard’s spongy turf of late winter asking what Ira had said, what had he said — and before Alexander could hurl unmagical words through the screen of the porch past the grand-girthed maple’s trunk to a point fifty feet beyond it, Jim had raked Ira’s dark cheek red and they were rolling on the earth and Ira had stuffed some of it down Jim’s mouth so that all Alexander heard was Jim’s original repetition "What about my grandmother’s boyfriend?" — but "You broke that Indian’s ear, you know," Anne-Marie refreshed him and behind her Jim heard a man’s voice and a child’s as if entering her house out of nowhere, "split the cartilage right back" — and heard himself strangling Ira who didn’t have to rely on Jim’s bein’ a Christian to save "his neck" for he got so mad at being called "Isty Semole" that he kneed Jim sideways in the balls so it felt like fifty balls or more like only one.