Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He pulled away from the curb wanting to phone his father whose memory seemed better than ever, to thank him, to tell him, "Good; good." And he heard meanwhile the tough-skinned man in suede windbreaker and ironed bluejeans tell him, "Shouldn’t pick people up" (which Mayn agreed with)— for when the man had leaned into the rented car and swung his pack into the back seat, Mayn had reached back on instinct to slide it down flat on the seat and had seen the butt of a revolver with a loop of leather over it just showing from a side pocket.

"Well, this is my day," Mayn said. "So I’m figuring all you want is a ride to the city." The man reached in back and obtained from his pack a box of cough drops and a small spiral notebook which he opened to a page half full of notes in violet ink.

Leaving town, Mayn eyed the blue car following. He looked at the man next to him who was staring thoughtfully out at the road ahead; he had acne pits along the cheekbone and the uneven stubble was dark and silvery. "Do you always leave the butt of that pistol showing?" he asked the man.

"No, I usually make sure it’s out of sight," the man said. "It doesn’t belong to me but I’ve had it awhile and I’m beginning to think maybe it does belong to me."

"Ever been held up by a motorist?" said Mayn.

"No, not by a motorist," said the man; "you?"

"Haven’t hitched in years; generally fly."

"Suppose you just get out," said the man, "and I drive back down the road and come back here and you put out your thumb and we’ll see what it feels like," said the man.

"It wouldn’t feel real," said Mayn; "it would be like middle-class wild-game hunting." He had picked the man up on the chance that he was with the big guy driving the blue car.

At the rotary they passed the road to the shore and the Trenton road and found themselves on the connecting road to the turnpike, the same blue car two or three back that had accompanied Mayn to the cemetery, driven on, and followed him back to Throckmorton Street.

Mayn pulled off the road and nearly sideswiped the phone booth he parked by, in front of a small yellow house with a tarpaper roof. A person in a black-and-yellow-striped garment watched at the window. Mayn took the car keys with him. The blue car ran by, looking violet in the passing lane parallel with a red van. Then it fell back and to the right and a quarter of a mile or more downrange stopped at a low block-like edifice which was a suburban insurance branch. His father answered as if facing slightly away from him, and Jim said, "I just wanted to thank you, Dad; I was amazed you remembered all that nonsense. By the way, you used to dream of owning a white Hispano-Suiza. Remember?"

"Yes, and it was a real dream at night," his father said as if interrupting himself; "your mother told everyone."

"I remember," said Mayn.

"Flick phoned," said Mel. "She wanted to speak to you. She had guessed you were here. I asked if everything was all right. She sounded puzzled. She asked if you had spoken about a typescript she sent you and I said yes, and she said, Good, good, that’s all she wanted to know, and thanked me — then asked me of all people how well you knew someone called Grace Kimball because you were involved with a women’s bank that a friend of the Kimball woman does P.R. for — is that right? Then she said she had to go. I heard voices behind her, and someone said a word or name twice that sounded like ‘Afraid’ or Trying,’ I mean like frying eggs. That’s all I have to report, Jim."

Mayn thanked his father and with a chill like a blush of shock knew (and should say to someone now) that through Norma and not only Norma he could have described to his father the brother of this woman Grace whom he had never known, lying on the front walk in the middle of the continent, with blood on him, and with terrible sympathy and ardor flowing, yes flowing, from the body and eyes of his sister above him in the house, on a porch, somewhere that didn’t matter so much as that Mayn was back there like a colonist of the compacted future unobtrusively regrasping the century his civilization had left so that even if he had no blood-sister, he felt like Grace Kimball nonetheless and could have faked an entire double-column obit of information—"shared," as she said; consigned to print, as he would say, and eternally retrievable.

The hitch-hiker was doing something with the dashboard.

"Dad, did you ever think my mother was alive?"

His father might have been thinking for a moment. "Where would she have gone?" he said. "But more to the point, who’s this man you think borrowed those old diaries?"

"Oh, he’s one of these people that don’t really matter, Dad, but you turn around and find them there and you want to strangle them."

He pulled away into the right lane, having gotten no answer at the number Flick could be reached at, and knowing he had picked up this middle-aged hitch-hiker to use him or include him the way the engine seemed to build the radio right into it, both starting because his passenger had turned the knob while the ignition was off.

Twice during their conversation the news reported the kidnapping of the escaped man’s child and in their listening pause Mayn knew so well that Spence had drawn him into the picture by assuming he was already deep in it that if Spence had sent him a bulletin out of this car-radio speaker that generated the car’s horizontal gravity—"Wherever you are, Mayn" — he could not have felt more surely a violent imprint to come somewhere like change of weight or future species on the bones of his face, nor more exactly and wordlessly the anger of a dark Hispanic woman ahead in New York wildly, silently searching a noisy police stationhouse for her child: what was she doing there? why would they expose her to a microphone? how could Mayn make up so well and truly that scene with the City flowing in and out of it — so who would say for sure which was margin and which was the cash-up-front center? while what was in the way proved more important than what we had been bound for yet we had been bound for what was in the way, but only for now but don’t ask the people in a precinct stationhouse — a large, green plant on a metal typewriter stand near a dispatcher’s desk, a mobile video unit somehow allowed in there and right by Mayn’s shoulder when he had nothing to do with those people except that if interrogated he wouldn’t even be protecting sources were he to deny knowledge of the man known to Efrain (released) and to Foley (inside), and to the Chilean economist, who had visited the man, who had himself escaped less than seventy-two hours ago and was now said to have abducted his young son.

The blue car had maintained its relative immobility in relation to Mayn’s rented vehicle, and he had sensed that the driver was confused and should be somewhere else.

The hitch-hiker, who shared two Russian cigarettes with Mayn, observed that in his experience there would always be people who didn’t approve of your domestic arrangements and maybe neither did you, but we couldn’t all live in the same way: he himself rejected bus and train travel, preferred driving but did not own a car: ergo, hitch-hike, where there’s waste in the direction of uncertainty and sometimes scheduling but how do you measure time, by clock or by what happens? and getting there’s what matters; and when hitchhiking the man was always sure to join up with people he didn’t know, which was dispersive in one way but collective in another, and which was O.K. when in a less abstract era he was a redneck kid visiting his starving cousins out there beyond the cemetery road — and was all right now that he had been inspired by—

— "I know you from somewhere," Mayn said, as the blue car passed a red van and swung back in line.