Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Do you know what happened to that blue car?" Mayn asked his passenger evenly.

"This is a blue car," said the man who seemed weary from these ancient travels but bent upon bearing out to the end his account of why he had been where Mayn had found him: yet first the alloy, the natural alloy — it had been created way back when by a rare corridor of weather from Canada lofting south (in the spiral forms of future hailstones to be precipitated eventually into one of the morphic mountains of the Southern Rockies said to be fed by the compacted flesh and blood of climbers quick-sucked by the killer sky-blue worm or tiny Pressure Snake) elements of a northern ore gray-greenish and in luster horny but radioactive with mysteriously forked potentiality through, at the northern source, a bind with the spiral forms of hailstone structure and, at the southern end, a bind with flesh and blood of mountaineers so recently sucked and Pressure-Snake-processed into that steep ground that their extreme compression had not yet unriddled its energies into the dispersed dreams or thoughts (depending on which authority you fall for) peculiar to these mountains, and then and only then was the now-or-never moment of alloy.

"Why ‘forked,’ " said Mayn, "because I know this story" — or some of it, he felt; and he asked the hitch-hiker to find a map in the glove compartment, while Mayn reached his right arm between the seats and was able to draw out the heavyish pistol, put it in his lap, change steering hands, and, feeling in the operation able to drive without thinking, transfer the pistol down between his seat and the door, first ascertaining that the revolver was at least partially loaded.

"Forked," went on the hitch-hiker, his eyes closed, the mapless glove compartment shut again, ‘‘because the particle runoff might kill, like your regular radioactive waste, though this was probably crypto-thorium and in those days might cause breaks in skin, in flesh, a hole in your head no less, Ray; or it might—" the hitch-hiker-historian-comedian-dowser-genius yawned—"might yield you energies, some as unthinkable as half the future of the planet was getting the name ‘unthinkable’ ‘‘—but being a Trace Window kept one on the move not just employment-wise but staying away from these contracts which can be tough, witness this afternoon’s consultancy which was now history in the little notebook, info to be passed to alias Santee — that’s right, Alias is his first name! — whose interest in those graves was almost as odd as the driver kind enough to pick up this ol’ Trace Window whatever prearranged coincidence this hitch was due to.

He pulled out to pass a red van and caught sight of his burnished forehead in the mirror. He pulled away and knew he did not increase the distance from his father for he could make it anything he wanted as if he could re-grid his land by what he knew was true in his skull and hands and chest, and was behind his eyes.

"You said I have it?" he said to the dreaming, thinking, resting man.

"Yes, and what you have feels like the vein of it I found coming up in that graveyard today single and double but more odd than really double, it feels like the real original, it makes me feel like a three-dimensional window and then some. But don’t credit me with wisdom. I just have this thing I can do, O.K.?"

"Which graves?" said Mayn, and held back so sternly the jolting guesswork he had just done that he felt news pass from one window to the other and back the news he now heard.

"Two ladies named Mayn. One with an e —you know them? do you come from that town? I guess I know you do, because the traces I registered at Sarah’s grave (died 1945) and at Margaret’s (died in the fifties) had the very same cycle, except the force from one was a lot greater than the force from the other."

Mayn laughed. "I hope it was the second one that was stronger, because there’s no body in the 1945 grave."

The tunnel pulled the line of cars in. His distance from his father had not altered and it pulled away from the son until what stood between was not distance but what they had talked about, which was about half of it garbage but obstacle only to the son’s departure, and so he had stayed for upwards of three hours, forgetting for minutes and minutes the M. H. Mayne diaries once upon a time in the cellar, once upon a time in his grandfather’s hands, who had exclaimed about a diagram in volume two, while the energy questions Jim and Mel had "dealt with" this afternoon kept the northern bison tongue’s thunderous future where it belonged, much less the hand around it of a hungry Navajo traveler once content to observe and describe the cloudy messages of moist air columned up to mushroom out at the top telling a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, a Prince content to record a noctilucent cloud so low that he smelled seared metal and some flesh’s welcome of fresh-ground cornmeal mush, a hunter’s breakfast just out of reach for an eastbound Prince bearing alloy of hailstone-spiraled crypto-thorium and the blue-worm-compacted, mountain-injected lives of those climber-heroes Anglo and Indian whom Indians west and east would seem to have immortalized in traces windowed alike in white skin and red skin and borne not just in red but in the white of Margaret, whose active residue now named radioactive proved less so than the void of Jersey ground below for Pete’s sake her daughter’s earlier marker! So that Mayn, rejecting the passenger’s offer of toll money, had to ask if the man really knew what he was talking about and whence came his credentials.

Why, Uncle Willy. And the year was ‘45. Nobody asks to be a Trace

Window, but it was the afternoon of a fall day and walking out of town along the Negro section parallel with the Jersey Central tracks, he had been yelled at by Ira from his porch and had detoured in that direction not without some amiable hostility only to be transfixed on the first of the three wooden steps leading to the low porch by Uncle Willy, who was Ira’s mother’s uncle and a full-blooded Creek by repute though he gave no support to this idea, identifying himself as descendant of a Natchez who had married into a Creek community. Don’t come any further he said — what do you feel?

And the white boy, who could travel a hundred miles and never know it, knew he felt, and already that day when he had almost fallen out of a careering truck along the cemetery road and had been saved, he knew, by two magic screwdrivers, had felt a fine charge coming from Uncle Willy such that some iron or magnetic message therein cannot be worded but only be the bearer, while the sense of it then and of its having come to him earlier that afternoon out near the cemetery made him sick to his liver, as his own father said, and Uncle Willy came down off the porch and made him drink from the jug of water he drank unchanging all day long and then to the boy’s amazement Willy gave him one of the clay figures that he kept by him among other valuables such as a jawbone of a desert fish, a polished rattlesnake tail, and a hunk of glittering blue-red glass; and the figure was of a woman from two hundred years before, and Willy told him he was a Trace Window, and what it was; and weeks later when he came to Windrow to see his piner relations in the swamps of Lake Rompanemus, he would run into Ira, who had a very short crew cut, and Ira would remind him he was a Trace Window and he must never neglect that power but not to come near Uncle Willy any more.

"I knew I knew you," said Mayn; "but were you saying before that I am a Trace Window or that I carry this forked radioactivity that you as a Trace Window register?"

"I know only the second for sure," the hitch-hiker said. His eyes stared peacefully into the tunnel, so Mayn heard his own father say he liked hearing all Jim’s news and wondered how the Argentine could legally own a string of papers here or at least in three states. Mel seemed to have been enabled by Jim’s workaday interest to actually see those windmills in Wyoming as Jim now heard the tunnel come to life in a small boy’s words, Mayn driving, What if the tunnel leaks? for the voice is his son, while with his hand on the pistol that his hitch-hiker seems not to care that he is in possession of Mayn knows they might as well see themselves heading through some cross-glomerate of west-tilted schist, submarine pebble, sediment thrust up ten miles into the throat of one’s tropopause which was and is supposed to be a spherical envelope beyond weather. Meanwhile what they call till is your glacial drift just erratically dropped — dumped (you say) without benefit of the sorting and the layering that only water can rework such matter into, let alone the lime spring recalled from the refraction of some unknown acquaintance’s experience that turns wood to stone if you remember: and all this is beautiful and reliable as the knowledge that he seldom had much in common with his father today or any day, and the fair-isolate fact from a young woman named Jean or Barbara-Jean that an "erratic" is a glacial boulder that doesn’t belong with the rock it finds itself resting on, yet cruising this crabbed, coved coast— coast! what coast? — between sea and hinterland, but more — he recalled when she spoke that he had known this "erratic" all along: like the future colony of couple-compacted individuals out in familiar Earth-Moon space: or like Larry’s one-man secret-society/overcharged brain-dump transformer compensating for shit going down in mother’s world/father’s world by a unified-fieldwork when-in-doubt-step-back-a-hundred-paces-and-punt world, force-fed till Lar’ had Mayn himself now "doing" in his own mind how Obstacle Geometry worked to map our turns down to the smallest rotation among each other but also (O.G.) embraced S.R. (Simultaneous Reincarnation) somewhat as Tensor Calculus the multi-mathmouth sculpted and positioned General Relativity’s events in plural coordinate systems, but. . until, as if the hitchhiker had wanted to slug him, Mayn felt the City ahead catch him under the eye bing on the cheekbone, while the imprint rang into the week to come and its days, and some sound in his body was like thought control, and he knew that one morning not long ago waking up in a space (as they now so easily said) lived in years ago (for years), that was too big now for a pied-a-terre (which in turn measured a sadness so terrific well you’d just have to find the strength on its other side), he had also felt that jolt upon his cheekbone: and he said, "It’s true, I wanted to throw you out of that truck, but what I want to know is—"