Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He went down the green street to his grandmother’s house one early June evening and she was not where he expected to find her, reading the Trenton Times or Newark Star-Ledger or poetry on the front porch waiting for the American ice-cream man with his wagon and his horse; Jim pushed in the front door, the figures of the brass handle firm-printed against his hand and the slight sticking of the wood against the jamb, and did not find his grandfather in the radio room smoking a cigar; he passed beyond the Oriental (which his grandmother said wasn’t really Oriental) rug’d mahogany dining room, the corner window thick with leaves, and found only the odor of chicken in the kitchen, the glistening skin traced in the surface of the pan-gravy on the stove, and a mouth-watering rhubarb smell containing like the gas refrigerator he almost pulled open gobs of dark-specked vanilla ice cream but went to the porch where the top deck of the old wooden icebox was open, and through the silk evening of the screen he saw his grandparents inaudibly talking off by the flower bed where he and Ira had fought.

Margaret not so tall next to Alexander, kept gently raking the earth pushing away along the surface lightly pulling the iron back, continuing because she was having a talk with Alexander who stood so timelessly beside her in a way Jim had often seen the two of them here or in the kitchen: she talked low and Jim felt repetition in her shoulders till Alexander said, "Stop it," and she turned directly to him as if to show her profile to her grandson behind the porch screen and she said quite low, "Don’t you tell me" and Alexander said something Jim didn’t hear and Margaret hooted and went back to raking; then she looked around her, everywhere but where Jim was, at the two cherry trees he climbed in and at the hedges, and she turned abruptly to Alexander saying something Jim didn’t hear except the name "Ira," the sound then suddenly receding as her mouth pivoted and without looking at Alexander patted him on the back several times until he turned this into a hug, each looking over the other’s shoulder.

Jim’s mother and father seemed far away, then. And he knew he could get away from here when he wanted, and as he felt this he felt a breeze entering subtly through the screen called not by what he felt but felt because of what he felt, for it had been touching him already. Then Alexander lightly patted Jim’s grandmother on her backside. Jim, she had said, had the same gray eyes gold-flecked that the Anasazi seemed to have.

Well even that old pilgrim cloud he became for his post-mortem tour of the continent watching over the itinerant Navajo Prince, some said seeing America, others said aiming for some stream in New England where he might at long last see those delicate if frozen foam volcanoes that the Hermit-Inventor thought only mythical, though the Anasazi had understood that in the East summer was winter and so he was doomed to go looking for the foam voles at the wrong season or in the wrong direction, South America being a better bet at that time of year. Less man- than machine-made are those contrails of hot, instantly-cool-condensed plane exhausts we already remember having mistaken for a growing cover of cirrus stripes multiplying with each jet passage across mid-American air-space until post-War Illinois observes a steady decrease in the number of rain-generating thunderstorms and a narrowing of the temperature range. Yet on the other hand Mayn quotes a university climatol-ogist qualifying the bad news with good: "A blanket of high clouds could seed a layer of lower clouds with ice crystals and cause precipitation."

His son looked up at him on a subway platform one Sunday a month or so before they lost each other in a subway crowd on the same platform and Andrew boarded a train just ahead of the prematurely closing door to find a door becoming a window through which he saw his distraught father suddenly moving with the entire platform of people, and asked how that old Indian turned into a cloud. Mayn remembered. And this was a thing the Hermit-Inventor wouldn’t have known about the Anasazi’s death — the How. Unless the Anasazi med’einer had described it in advance to the Hermit, who, well, Jimmy also was: yet this was so important as to be discoverable only in its own doing, and while you can’t always try it to know it, though Jim could have "killed" that worm Spence in later years who treated investigative reporting as a proof that other people’s lives were as sleazy as his own — killed him at a bar in Washington and at a launch in Florida — the murderer’s existential knowledge was still more overrated than seeing a murderer executed in the flesh, seeing him walked into the chamber and sat down — like having a haircut, said a UPI colleague fresh from the state capital, that’s all there is to it — to learn that a spark, a precious spark? may jump from one foot(-gear) to t’other, oh ignorance is sometimes knowledge, as knowledge is often only ignorance with between the twain the chance that the spark was basic speech between two discrete incarnalities of the condemned. But Mayn was usually a lazy guy on the surface where it counted, so one day when he heard an eighteen-year-old kid who was living with his father in Mayn’s building spell out a theory of Obstacle Geometry and recalled how his own dad, Mel, always misunderstood the effect he had when he told someone, "Why hell that’s what I’ve been thinking and saying for donkey’s years," Jim recognized the hu-manness of the shape (whatever sex) left buried in his vague daydream (he did not have night dreams by and large) and heard talking back to him now and then and reversed the process unwittingly and tossed Larry’s way the clinker that while there was no reincarnation except if you were a gene, there was something else. And Larry looked long into Mayn’s eyes as if he made sure Mayn was the bearer of a message he had been looking for, and Mayn was happy to oblige the kid, he was a nice kid and he would take him to a basketball game, and he was very bright, and freaked out about his parents’ split: he had some ideas, all right, and Mayn was happy to give him for his own use whatever he had in the way of disassembled information, name drops, and oh stories like the man who had remarried and named his daughter the same name as that of his other daughter by his first marriage because he had forgotten that was her name or maybe wanted to flatter his new wife who wanted nothing to do with his prior life — until Larry responded unexpectedly one evening, it was the evening, and a young woman was present named Amy who worked at a foundation as assistant to an exile-economist, and Mayn recounted how a Nez Perce Indian known to Mayn’s grandmother had traveled from Idaho across the plains to St. Louis in the 1830s with returning fur traders to get missionaries to come out because the Indians believed the white man had contracted curiously profitable relations with the supernatural—

— But this was true! said Amy, irritated, look how well the Quakers did!—

— But wait a minute, said Larry, the Quakers are anti-war, look at them in Vietnam — but (he interrupted himself on the threshold of a documentary discourse Mayn’s certain) — it’s like contaminated money — I mean can money itself be polluted? — I mean, my mother took her money out of Chase because it was male-operated/war-oriented — I mean she says she can actually feel what it’s like to be the man at the bank who told her friend she was not to eat like raw garlic any more if she expected to keep her job there—

— And who knows where your money comes from? Mayn said to Amy, meaning the outfit where Amy’s an assistant research coordinator with, in fact, part-time, the Allende economist, studying some of the time how the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) which aimed at a national proletariat got lost in the male-run AFL–CIO.