Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"You are pretty hard on that little shit," said Ted of Spence one evening in 1965 (probably), "and you don’t know much about him," Ted added, pushing some cigarette change toward the barkeep.

Mayn would grant this, but not that Spence carried especial violence or energy around with him except as an alertness for profit. What Mayn (and, to the amusement pretty much of both of them, Ted) did know about the worm Spence was at least three things: that through alerting the relevant parents— one pair split and remarried, though not to each other — Spence had sold to a New Hampshire newspaper for $4,300 a photo of two evidently male Americans blindfolded with bandannas and wearing major-university T-shirts facing very close-up an allegedly Cuban all-male firing squad (cheeks crushed against rifle stocks, berets tilted except for one potentially-female member wearing an identifiably Pittsburgh Pirates cap); second, that Spence had sold for a greater sum an underwater photo of a free-lance salvage diver on vacation embracing two luminously dark and universal daughters of a Bolivian general against priceless ceramic tiles of (at the diving-board end) the deepest privately owned swimming pool in our hemisphere; and for a bargain-low barely-five-figures unloaded a dossier (he had first ingeniously "rented" overnight to a foreign "buyer") documenting a blackmail-and-(party-)favors network extending through uranium options on Indian lands, embezzlement of tribal funds, sexual action by civil-rights coordinators ("red" and "black") with pictures involving entrapped foreign acting students and a safely incredible pilot "map" (read project enterprise) to recycle mystery wastes on scales of such "load" and "breadth" and "profit" that its susceptibility to seeming in general "good for America" plus its emergence less than six months after (and thus in competition with) the killing of a President (on the birthday of Spence!) not to mention a tragic twin-miscarriage suffered by a prominent microbiologist right in her lab, caused the whole dossier both with and without its powerful abstractions to fall back into a regularized dump of history to be of a significance as uncertain as were the views of this moral orphan Ray Spence sometimes confusable at will with a part-Sioux part-Ojibway entrepreneur whose name after it was given him by accident he deliberately adopted under stress as noted by clients who may never have bothered to find out about each other, assuming such basics, nonetheless, as that they had been mothered and fathered and come from real places, demonstrable places, whereas Mayn (who amused a woman friend who pointed out that, his humor notwithstanding, she personally had nothing to go on except his testimony) had inferred Spence’s origins as "something else," a message not certainly aimed at eventual re-constitution in human language (read terms).

But if this was all Mayn troubled to actually know about the despised Spence, the rest of it could seem to know Mayn, or be borne by him unknowingly recalled like things he hadn’t understood but recalled and recalled, the dreamlike late night when he opened his mother’s music-room door till he could see her and he had a message for her sort of dumb-in-the-head ‘cause it could be gotten by her not given by him.

But what was this "something else" Spence was coming from? the long silently present young woman Jean (or to her parents Barbara-]tan) asks— who once four years ago in her half sleep heard her motel-mate Jim Mayn mention Ray Spence, a Chilean economist, some "choor" or other until she was awake and he, this mid-life athlete next to her, was the one half asleep — counts down through Spence, Chile, Choor (born into it?), and a long, white mountain that had thoughts if unable, at the drop of a fracture zone or the pivot of a scissor fault, to turn thought into dream: so maybe marry the two, yet she could have sworn they were born into each other.

Now it’s four years later. She doesn’t — he knows — know what their relation is, it’s as deep as friends for sure.

He backed off sheepishly: "Have to think Spence was a snake in a previous life and didn’t make it so they demoted him to a human snake— except there’s no ‘they,’ is there? I’ll say one thing for him: he has the stick-to-it-iveness of a good journalist: he listens and he goes looking."

"For what?"

He knew she didn’t get it, but in his own behalf he could at least claim not to have read the book though he’d had its meager theory digested for him by his friend Ted; but they went into the movie theater they had been slowly approaching, as it them, with its potential images at rest in the money in their pockets, then in the tickets rolled out onto metal by the box-office attendant, images including one at the start that made you think was it mist or was it fog the East Far Eastern Princess got turned to by her friend and adorer the Hermit-Inventor of New York? For mist — whatever its uses in the vigilance of precise umbrellists or poets or measurers in Oregon and Scotland who name it, as a hundred winds are named, for their place — is essentially distinct droplets; and fog is a cloud of condensed moisture as close to the ground as the Great Spirit’s Four-Cornered Ear, oft free enough of wind to hang, yet if wind-moved enough, apt to gather more air to be cooled by the cold, cold ground as if the Earth were the sea.

Spence persisted from talk he had heard, through hearsay he had not, as if infected by the future of jojoba as a fantastically superior dry-land reincarnation of the vanishing sperm whale’s oil, yielding from that plant’s durable bush such motor coolants, human foods, shampoos, commercial hopes for endless other transformations as might explain why (per quoit) an English furniture maker whom Margaret Mayne met on the slopes of Salt Lake City could excite her so with tales of the Japanese-speaking American inventor whose interior wound had been healed in the desert with jojoba balm only so that he might be murdered for having seen the connection between that bush bean’s pod-oil and the (in fact) mw-sperm whales with which a group of Californians tried to stock the Great Salt Lake: and altogether did explain why Spence’s nose for profit led beyond the venerable jojoba bush and its lucrative basic-research future of remedying the particular acne if not spleen damage or excess gravity in the lower limbs and spinoffs of the chemical from which is derived dioxin of Vietnam fame to the woman Manuel who had healed the ill-fated Japanese-speaking Mason in Utah, had herself shampooed with the jojoba oil for years, and had so applied it to the riven scalp of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the lovely sounds that came from her small cranial crater as well as her demon-hassled voice’s mouth foretold if they did not cause that legendary comeback from death usually attributed to her son’s hasty departure. Spence had heard some of this firsthand through Mayn, but some of what Mayn heard from at least two people, whom Spence now in 1977 insinuatingly contacted, seemed almost as far from Mayn as it had unquestionably not been overheard spoken by Mayn in a Washington bar in the old days in or not in the presence of Mayga, the beloved South American woman-friend, at Cape Kennedy before and soon after the liquidation of Dr. Allende’s government in Chile or at one or two other times when their professional paths crossed, Mayn’s and Spence’s. Yet indisputable it was that the Navajo matron upon revival had spoken in the voice of Owl Woman and Owl Woman’s name had been Manuel; indisputable that Spence had heard through Mayn of Marcus Jones, and anyone but Spence would have settled for this — not reached, instead, his fifty-foot extensible arm-hand out of the wiry plastique of his western-wear-clothed body to ferret out the fact that the American printing magnate Morgen, who had been strolling with Mayga when she fell to her death, no one else’s (the ultimate breather), from the breezy cliffs of Valparaiso harbor, was brother to a left-wing job-printer Morgen in Philadelphia — all intensely suggestive to Spence, who though Mayn figured Spence cared not even a fuck for the journalist Mayga noted that in the late fifties/early sixties her husband had helped run the national airline and that Mayga’s work in the States was covering copper mostly and talking up Frei’s next run for the Presidency of Chile — work just ended by her departure for home summoned by husband, now ended with her life.