Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

It doesn’t matter, she said, at a distance from both boy and man, we’re free to find what we want — like the woman whose husband wouldn’t ride the subway with her because she’s got a job and taking classes and she got robbed coming home.

Mayn remarked that sixty years ago his grandmother spent days and weeks lobbying against the wages-and-hours argument that women were more prone to disease than men, and he thought there had been considerable hilarity at a collateral meeting on her own home ground of Windrow-town when she described the wrist-drop disease of house painters vulnerable to lead but primarily to demonstrate how the labor market’s alleged weaker sex in fact had called attention to all the occupational diseases, whereupon on being taunted by of all people an Indian carpenter whom people were afraid of, she fell into a faint — shock, we would call it — with all the symptoms of an unusual poisoning reported in an Italian woman who was a skilled brancher and buncher of artificial yellow muslin roses.

But Larry, who was deeply interested in Amy and could not but show it, wanted to know how Margaret had gotten out to the Indians all alone — if she had — and more about her friendship at a key juncture in her life in ‘94 with a St. Louis woman and Catholic convert who was the niece of the beautiful Narcissa Whitman who with her star-struck, long-traveling husband Marcus had taken Presbyterian Christianity to the Pierced Nose people who seldom if ever gave the United States any trouble until the 1877 rebellion of Chief Joseph who, when he surrendered his rifle near the Canadian border and with it his campaign to salvage the lost Indian culture, said to the generals, "My people ask me for food… It is cold, and we have no blankets. . Where is my little daughter? I do not know…" having flummoxed the vastly superior white army for months in the Rocky Mountains, in order then to be betrayed by the conquerors first into exile in malaria country where six of Joseph’s children died and thereafter to what would, but a few short wars later, be known as survival training, here permission to walk fifteen hundred miles in winter without provisions.

Provisions? ask Larry and Amy.

To a reservation way up in northern Washington.

At least they had a reservation, says Larry, who’s half with Mayn, half with Amy, half elsewhere.

So that only primitive witchcraft saved them, smiles Mayn, reaching for a cigarette and not finding one — that is, they were seen leaving the malarial bottomlands and not again till they materialized at their new reservation, their numbers magically reduced by two to one, ‘case anyone was seeking history’s convective links.

(Mayn and Larry were now standing, just the two of them, outside Larry’s apartment but his father was not home, and Mayn would meet him another time, angry almost, though not at Larry, at the hooting and singing in the apartment down the hall of this floor, the door half opening upon approaching voices apparently fighting some silly battle between song and talk—"It’s the opera singer still moving out," says Larry — neither talk nor song particularly inspired)… of the Columbia River "Dreamers," Smohalla, who learned religion from missionaries, had a bloody one-on-one by a river with the rival Indian miracle maker "Moses," died and disappeared only to be provisionally resurrected downstream by a white farmer, vanished on foot only to materialize much later: he had talked during his death so clearly with the Great Spirit that when he found his true mission and preached the native Indian religion with its four joined, outward-facing coigns, against the White Man’s faith, his listeners followed him even to the ends of a cosmos composed of trance fragments as equal in their order as his history made peoples here emigrating from the Creator’s hand unequal since ranked according to their arrival time, Indians, French, priests, Americans, and Negroes, in that order, which meant the Earth belonged to those first Indians — who if asked to cut grass, make hay, and sell to be rich like whites, answer, "How dare I cut my mother’s hair?"

But did Mayn have to know how reincarnation worked in order to believe in it, Larry asked from a midtown pay booth. Mayn laughed: no, not in either case. Either case? Yes: regular and special reincarnation. Oh, "special" is the "something else" you mentioned the other day. Right, Mayn laughed and Larry didn’t, and Mayn said Larry might take him too seriously. "Did anyone ever tell you that?" Mayn was asked and said, Well, yes — once upon a time his grandmother. "Well," said Larry, "some people feel a lot older than they are, maybe hundreds of years older." Both men found this amusing and upon checking each other out found that getting out of shape had occurred to both of them, Larry thinking of his father who complained about not having time to work out, Mayn of himself, and Larry of Mayn, who was in hard if heavyish shape if he didn’t ponder or talk about it overly, and worked out. Mayn heard himself say: "I guess I had to first believe in an old medicine man’s turning into a cloud when his time came, in order to then figure out how he did it." "He had a reason you said — he wanted to make that trip." "That post-mortem junket," said Mayn, shaking his head. "So what age was the cloud he turned into?" asked Larry, as if the answer might yield data for further steps. "Have to figure it was a newly formed cloud," said Mayn, reckoning not uncomfortably that he was out of his depth, but remembering, then, with a wrench (or a rake and a half! or a shot of sheer void — the waste and pomp of the thank God unvoiced inside-the-mind travel!), a fact he then had only the shape of: "so travel keeps you young, kid." "But," said Larry, "he changed before he went away on his trip."

Which gave them both pause, and Mayn heard the doorbell go and said he had to hang up — but Oh one other thing, Larry — but was it from Anasazi or from Hermit or straight from Margaret, through whom the others came down to him? and pondering this irrelevancy, he lost the thing about light again, but it was about light. . "had it and lost it, Larry — got a visitor ringing the doorbell." "From outer space," said Lar’ like he believed it in theory, and laughed somehow convincingly, and Mayn knew he worried about the boy, about Larry; and at that instant he felt he was saying the words that Larry said to him, "I’ll tell you about special reincarnation someday, Jim." "Thanks, kid — what I couldn’t quite recall was about light being associated with weather masses just as much as temperature which we all know causes things to get moving." "But Jim I always think you know more than you’re saying." "Thanks," said Mayn, "that’s a power I have no control over; I often had that feeling about the Anasazi medicine man." "But he’s dead, I gather." "That’s what I liked about him — none of that regular reincarnation business for him." Mayn told Larry to take care of himself. Larry thanked him as the dime ran out into a recorded voice like the average of mortality itself and Mayn thought that he loved Larry — as a son, a friend, and some further way that brought to mind a separation between the astronaut and his traveling salesman’s life-support overnight case. He thought of Dickens — he had once read David Copperfield and remembering the sea in that book with all the light that must have gone into it lidded away from our eyes at some point of death in the book — who died? — and almost immediately upon opening his front door commenced talking about it.

Well, he Jim unlike the Anasazi Healer warn’t especially wise — let a goodish marriage go — were a but-average dad and left his own son on subway one Sunday who turned up identical and eirdly unworried on platform of next station — yet like the Anasazi, Jim wasn’t specially watchful for here’s a limit even among the most official of vigilantes to how much contrail (read control, too) you can lay on the falling sphere of the world, yours, ours. Yet one hour later, by some token (read totem, too) falling controlled downward to ground zero of multiple dwelling (read dwelling-quoia) with wonderful scientist girl movie fanatic who holds her humidity and dryness in seductive suspension when they have to interrupt a quick, passionate discussion of two-week-Europe-package-for-two, for they enter elevator already occupied by two western-rawboned ladies powerfully enthused having come from a group session elsewhere-san in building ("She gives you hope" — "She lets you give it to yourself’ ‘—"I’m not sure about the masturbation; I mean" — "What it does to your expectations—" "No, it’s really pretty boring, isn’t it? But she’s very funny" — "How we look for subjugation—" "But are carbohydrates really the same as romantic love?" — "She didn’t say they were" "She’s so alive, she probably gets mad but when she does she puts her hand on your wrist, I mean Maureen got her mad once I think and she turned to her and put her hand on her wrist, body contact, eye contact, and said whatever