Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But when Jim hung up and his wife Joy narrowed her eyes half-sleepy, half-upset-about-nothing sitting back in a warmly lighted low, soft easy chair in the cushiony light of a reading lamp, and he laughed and shrugged off her reaction which was based on no prior information about Anne-Marie, not even high-school sweetheart, he needed to call Alexander but he was actually by now dead — but recalled then his dumb challenge to Margaret in front of Sam: Was she pregnant? — more a challenge to himself, but to do what? — to simultaneously pass it over to Margaret who’d about given up the long trek or its tale by the spring of ‘46 but came back with New York and Windrow on her mind — did a woman kill herself because she was pregnant? ("Sure, sure!" comes a breezy, angry, warm voice, "if you’re gonna do it, you’ll find any handy excuse, honey," a voice of later years compounded of friends, orators, scenes seen with objective intimacy displacing the worded facts of his job); would a woman in ‘46 so avoid an abortion as to double the deed? ("That’s abstract bullshit, baby, ‘double the deed’ my ass, if she’s that high on being low, sure she’ll do it, sure she will, she’s got other problems inside her besides a gray pink white work that’s still like coming from nowhere"); but what if she wasnt pregnant? we don’t know, you know— and once more, What if she really and truly was?

Holy hell, what is in people?

Margaret hadn’t mentioned the fight with Ira when she got into the pickup truck, but a day or two or three later she half-unmeaningly got into Jim what she had perhaps thought to get out of him, that Ira’s mother’s uncle (a supposed full-blooded Creek with a lonely background all the more curious) had known of the old scamp, windbag, and geezer in New York from the turn of the century and before and he it was, an "Isty Semole," who had identified Margaret’s deceased ally as her "boyfriend," more devoted than boyfriend, more friend than I still can quite be sure (her face pallid and afraid— afraid!).

But Jim did not tell Margaret that Ira, black crewcut bristling with brain and some bad day of his own, had already mentioned this about his Uncle Willy informally prior to going underground as if seeking some derelict winter bulbs with nose and teeth and had suffered a split lip in addition to a broken-ear and slit-cheek ceremony in a face which for the moment (except for the black eyes) was much like Jim’s own earth-colored face, that would ever afterward respect Ira and refrain from. . well, it wasn’t him but Uncle Willy, drinking gallon jars of ice water all day on his rickety porch, who’d been tagged an "Isty Semole" ("wild men" hunters who didn’t "agricult" and were regarded as runaways from the Creeks), hence Seminoles, which Willy and Ira declared they were not and would never become.

And when the rain came powering down into the backyard like a simoom bringing its torrential horizon in with it, Margaret blamed the boys for not leaving the flower bed as they’d found it after their fight. The irrigation souped and dissolved and ponded the flower beds so that giant dogs could be seen to have rooted deep—

— for what, Gramma?

Oh I don’t know (she was upset) — dogbane roots, ground horse bones.

For what?

The leaves of yarrow, Indian women made a special tea out of it.

What was special about it?

Oh you’re the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York all rolled up into one: you tell me.

So he thought he should know if he could find, inside this-at-least-double "him," the information — maybe future predictions! he thought, and got faintly depressed — that is, faintly only in his knowing — that is, what was going on in him.

Holy hell what had been in his mother. Well, he had once been. And his little bastard brother Brad had been, although the town’s normality caused this to seem ever incredible. He didn’t probably resent Brad’s having been in his mother, because it made Braddie her son O.K., although in later years an earth-colored brown old uncircumcised prick came soaring into his mind— what did that old nose look like hard? — and it was a later understanding or it was his real rage and interest seeing Bob Yard, a year and a day after Jim’s mother’s suicide, strip himself at Lake Rompanemus at midnight and Jim, who was not especially watchful strip with him for a comradely swim after bowling at the Best People on Earth alley and drinking two bottles of beer each, there, and one more apiece in the pickup truck going out of town with Bob of course as present owner doing the driving — and telling Jim how he wouldn’t know what to do without his wife.

Jim worked it out and then forgot till one time he told his daughter that the Anasazi—

— and we all know that that’s you, Daddy—

— had said that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation.

That lets you out, Daddy.

Lucky for me because that young person was supposed to be doomed, as I recall: but I’m not the Anasazi; I couldn’t be, because neither of us reincarnates.

But he recalled on the day of the ludicrous U-2 briefing that, yes, he had been inspired (how didn’t matter) to figure out how the Anasazi at his moment of mortal dispersal could become (at will) a distinct cloud and it had happened during Pearly Myles’s Journalism Circle. (This was a real advanced elective in a Jersey high school in ‘46, though she soon got herself removed from the school by Principal Fulkerand ostensibly for objecting to the course’s removal as an non-essential course.) He is sick of his grandmother this afternoon, sitting in class, though exactly why he doesn’t know: it is in him and can’t get out, his back and arms are going ahead on their own, he sees it all making decisions to go ahead, to raise a little finger to go out of sight and dig in an ear and he is inclined to see, in the midst of a circle with pointers of varying length drawn on a blackboard at the start of the hour by an oddly tearful Miss Myles, geometries and quick and sundry switches of rain rivers falling at the longest possible earthward angles (years later conceived as minimum condensation altitude; years later, when his new though routine weather interest came out of the U-2 fiasco so he thought) so the rain was over one territory but irrigating another, or the fires from the Hermit’s theoretical lightning sprang far and wide from their sky source yet, since shared, ran back to the territory over which those neon-shorted swastika javelins were bent across the sliding sky, and the problem of how to settle what’s shared and what not, like causing someone else’s death-by-forest-fire through weathers caused by poisoned and unnaturally heated breath departures from adjacent people who in the end might not care what they did to their neighbors. And, with these shifts and smoky cloakings and uncloakings, he saw the indescribable non-reincarnal recomposing of the six-hundred-and-(now)-one-year-oldster for a moment gray or faint gold or (sickly?) greenish, then visible no more and found himself with only words to describe, yes, how the Anasazi retired medicine man "did it"(!): one thing was sure, the Anasazi knew cloud formation; he had been seer, shepherd, farmer, hermit, husband, father, and all these things doubled by vicarious interview with others possessed of these problems; the elder had had much experience and had long ago forgotten quite how to worry about it: the Anasazi had known that his body was but a flaky weightless compost so crumbly the air in his cell might decide his end for him except the breath inside him was still just as human as when his body was in better shape: so that on the day when he decided to come to an end, he saw what he had known always but not bothered to tell, that his breath was what kept him in his familiar shape, it was his flesh and his blood-essence and he had always wanted to see his friend’s East before he died, so that, having given a real medical consultation the day before for the first time in generations and feeling therefore pleased with himself to be of use to the eloquent visiting Princess born in a place called Choor where they made many statues and confused them through making them in parts, who might be on the point of betrothing herself to the Navajo Prince who had already given himself in love to her, the Anasazi thought he would not leave the decision of his death only to the harmonies without, and, in an act that was its own thought he slowly breathed all his breath out from within its veil, and as he saw leaving at that moment every thought, he listened for the crumblings of his body which to him waxed noisy as a mountain coming to life so that, emptying, he saw that through the volcanic air he had lived on for centuries in this area his flesh was part volcanic — and, hearing these sounds, he inhaled for the last time his own and other mingled breath so that though Margaret (whose voice he heard calling, "Jim, Jim") had claimed that the brain flakes had settled onto the floor as a last cover for the most recent weather map in colored sands, Jim knew that every flake and feather of that old body had been breathed back in at just the moment when it was turning to its atoms and motes — so that it could have disappeared into its own last gasp filling the still quite moist lung at the moment that said lung dissolved in a manner that so pressed upon its crumbling contents (a man breathing his whole person in) that a bubble (shaped from that smile that was the anchor for the final words already kited out to the Hermit and others in the area if they would but hear) rose forward like a message and, narrowly making the cell door, sucked after it the wild-flower-colored sands of the healer’s last weather map like a wake too valued to be left like other wakes behind, no matter how wonderful the world in which it happened, no matter if, there, a bird became a wind or a drowning human found enough oxygen in the sea to make the transition to a new form possible: while some voice of the future in the boy-man said realistically that we were gonna run out of reservoirs before we ran out of mines to ruin ‘em.