Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— inspired, the man said, by a man aliased Santee Sioux (no Indian he), who had indirectly caused the hitch-hiker’s father a fatal heart seizure, and by a halfbreed he had hardly seen since they were kids, to revisit that very cemetery he had often passed and apply this little power he was known by Santee to possess to detect a unique strain of radioactivity in the human body: that is, at a certain place there in the graveyard, maybe two side-by-side places: on the possibility that whoever was buried there (two women, he said) had in them this unique strain of residue that, when found in the human body, sometimes wasn’t waste but an opposite, or so some western Indians still said, who according to Santee—

"Didn’t I pick you up once before?" Mayn asked quietly as if from his steady, intent eyes.

The man didn’t think so, unless Mayn had looked different.

They pulled in at a turnpike "gas world" planned with a long approach configuration offering a variety of services. Mayn phoned Flick at Lincoln’s, got no reply, phoned his own place, then tried Flick again; now guessed that he was on the final curve of a collective that was being daydreamt by those incapable of other dream modes Mayn flashed the Hispanic mother about to enter a police stationhouse somewhere in Manhattan north (future? or right now?).

The blue car had passed them again and had stopped in the emergency lane a quarter of a mile down glowing violet now in the twilight; a patrol car pulled over behind the car, the hitch-hiker stopped talking for a second, Mayn pulled out onto the road again, having forgotten to get gas. A state trooper sauntered up to greet the driver of the violet car, whom Mayn half-recognized as they drove by, a heavy, burnished young man in a large pale hat and steely-reflecting aviator sunglasses.

The hitch-hiker was explaining that Santee was an alias for a man who had sold to a New Hampshire paper a photograph of the hitch-hiker and a friend blindfolded apparently before a Cuban firing squad (certainly, despite the hat on one apparently female member, it wasn’t a firing squad composed of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball players), when it was two photos not one, but, alas, his father had recognized his T-shirt and his left ear — Mayn would never forget the pleasant cactus-green double-lobe — and that had done it for the father, and the strange thing was that Santee’s compensation to the busy hitchhiker who had felt inclined to kill him was to give him a job to do — no money guarantee, just the chance to try his gift on peculiar ground: for—

"You said," said Mayn, "that the cemetery in question was on the outskirts of the town where I picked you up."

The hitch-hiker had not said; but this was true: for the halfbreed in this town that Santee gave a code name to had known him in the old days as a "Trace Window" — some weighty notion left with a Creek tribe by one of the halfbreed’s great-great relations though this relation was a Natchay, a unique survivor having by glad suicidal rite accompanied his king the Sun King to his funeral but then curiously and scandalously survived a treble dose of the tobacco hypnotic ritually designed to render unconscious such loyal followers so they could then be painlessly strangled. Those running the funeral did not know what to do with him; they were afraid, and so they used the potent future-dreams he subsequently began to have as an excuse to run him out of their chiefdom — which was just before the French came in again and wiped out the Natchay, which this drug-proof Indian had dreamed, while that ritual suicide he had entered and lived through left him not only with these dreams and other dreams of turning but with powers he never used except that of living a long time upon joining the Creeks to the north soon afterward. He arrived on foot with a bag of bear ribs and a limitlessly self-renewing supply of root jelly, but he left such ideas with them as that some women and men could receive, like windows, light in beam-waves or sun-shadows from people who had in their bodies an alloy mineral, radiant, potential; and this halfbreed—

"What was the code name?"

"You wouldn’t ask like that if you didn’t know," said the gaunt man beside Mayn, "if you didn’t know a’ready." Mayn in the corner of his eye felt the man eye-cornering him.

"Ira Lee is no halfbreed," said Mayn, and stepped on the gas. His companion seemed not to notice that they were exiting too soon, not the New York City exit; he wanted to make a point, he was batonning his finger at the windshield. It was no ordinary homogeneous solid solution, that alloy, not Chilean copper and Bolivian tin woven atom for atom reciprocally in each other’s interstices; it was radioactive but open-ended so the contagion or thrust of it was up for grabs. So this Ira Lee, once twice three times approached Santee, recalled the "Trace Window" kid, grown now to be Mayn’s present company, heretofore held up in an open-air restaurant near Minneapolis with a fishing friend, both blindfolded if not smothered with their napkins while one of the thieves removed his stocking mask because it inflamed an abcess in his forehead and a snapshot taken of the two men in their college T-shirts, spare ribs held hidden behind their backs, found its way into the hands of Santee—

— "also a code name," Mayn added with a weight of miles and miles of historic small talk from this itinerant specialist—

— then or in its later splice with the Cuban squad, and then indirectly the hitch-hiker had been drawn into Santee’s employ to apply his gift to some "Windrow" grave or graves whether "Trace Window" received ordinary garden-variety radioactive message or that residual potentiality now at rest, now dangerously creative — detectible originally among certain southwestern ancients who arrived thirstily among the proto-Natchay of Tennessippi and might kill or cure with the mineral concentration they periodically mustered of which, some generations later, the one Natchay who survived his own loyal funeral to join the Creeks and be ancestor to the halfbreed Ira Lee—

"Perhaps he was a halfbreed," said Mayn, feeling as if he had slipped into another form, feeling the city and the twilight nearer; "we sure called him that, among ourselves—"

— this great-great relation bequeathed the knowledge to perhaps a grand-nephew who found it once in the mid-nineties uniquely duplicated in emanations from a proud, hungry western Indian passing through Pennsylvania as if seeking in the wrong direction his boat or his clan and living on an afterlife of nonetheless fertile if strong-tasting crocodile gums not to mention a mask of mosquito bites targeted around his bright eyes—

"I think I have to drop you off here," said Mayn, but had to laugh at the man’s calmness in the face of interruption, who then said he couldn’t see why, and offered to pay for a tank of premium but was not accepted.

They pulled out of a gas station and reacquired the turnpike pulse; they laughed, they had had a true emergency, for the tank had taken three or four gallons more than the gauge said it had any right to, and Mayn felt he pulled closer and closer to the spirit in which his father had, as he had flatly said, "Come full circle only nobody’s here."

"You have it," said the man, and if Mayn did not know how the hitchhiker had come to be known as a Trace Window, he understood that the man was receiving some trace alloy from him.

And as the tunnel distantly approached upon one curve of twilight and he thought he needed to drop the man this side of the river, the man identified now the emanations from that noble Indian adrift in Pennsylvania in ‘94 or ‘95, bearing a tremendous though dried bison tongue with but one bite out of it showing in the cutaway section live sleeping rootlets of the tongue’s normally soft valve needles which might be where the potential energy came from that this now horseless wanderer studied with his hand in his lion-skin bag around the tongue thinking the miles away maybe unconscious that in his body, spiced or not by the patient force untapped quite yet by hand and mind, he bore the original alloy recently identified to the hitch-hiker as deposits of alloy unique in that their solid solution occurred in nature —