Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"No," said the passenger, "I don’t say I know who is or are under that stone marker with Sarah Mayn on it if you say no one’s under there and you seem to know; but I know there’s someone under there and if they’re not very close to the surface, then there’s an even stronger charge of the alloy coming from them."

The City, as dry and shored-up as the tunnel with its reckless domestic glare, pulled him toward it, let alone the hitch-hiker. Mayn accepted the suspension of all these bits of news in one dumb bottle and felt it was too late to start all over again being an apprentice mind, much less an apprentice reporter, and hoped he had been a middling good father.

"By the way, you said ‘Ray,’ didn’t you? I’m not Ray Spence in case you’re wondering."

"Ray Vigil. In a blue car coming out of that town. You don’t have the hair of an Indian and not quite the nose either, but. ."

"I thought he looked familiar when we passed him and the state cop," said Mayn, knowing in his chest structure in retrospect a measurable pull toward those objects that was maybe just a quickening all around. The hitchhiker didn’t react. "And why did you take those screwdrivers belonging to Bob Yard?"

"They were rattling around there," said Mayn’s passenger, "and you were running on your own power. I once stayed under water for half an hour without needing to breathe because of being near a creature with Trace, and I once heard what I took to be voices but later found they came from a mountain out West twenty miles from where I stood, and I discovered I had their words. And once not long ago I went to see a man in jail in order to get a reading on him and I regretted it because I recognized that before I reached the corridor that led to the hall that led to the two sets of steel-barred gates that separated me from the meeting room where you could sit around at Formica tables and plug the junk-food machines for cake and sandwiches and cigarettes, I had the power to divide myself and pass through those bars."

"Why did you regret it?" said Mayn, who was so close to the City’s window of complex light, so close to catching up with some attention or laughter he had uneasily left here when he went away, that he asked his question without thinking.

"Because here the power I had was entirely due to this dangerous person I was making a visit to on another pretext, yet had neither use for it nor knew I was using him, though there’s evidence that sometimes a person with Trace gains power through it when it is registered in a Trace Window."

Mayn laughed, but knew that wherever the man known to Efrain, Foley, and the Chilean economist if not to Amy had escaped to, and whenever and however the Chilean economist would want to spend time visiting an anti-Castro Cuban in prison, and whatever the bearing on all this political or nonpolitical question was of his little son’s abduction, Flick was or had been associated with the economist’s wife Clara in a Grace-Kimball Body-Self Workshop and was on Spence’s information list along with the environmentalist-woman Dina West whom Mayn had not had breakfast with before leaving New York but who was expecting Ray Vigil, whom the hitch-hiker might have mistaken Mayn for but who Mayn now knew without question had been the man in the blue or violet car trailing Mayn toward the cemetery and later waiting for him while he explored with his long-found, endlessly Windrow-bound father Mel the warmest of expendable trivia; then behind Mayn and the hitch-hiker leaving town and on the connecting road, then ahead of them while Mayn phoned, then stalled by a trooper behind them again, then alone on the turnpike when they were off, ahead of them when they got back on, though unbeknownst to the Indian Vigil who would be as lost as you could be on a turnpike you cannot take wing from like the wind. "Power?" Mayn said; "I’ve noticed that while I am particularly preoccupied with the safety of my family and the question of why Spence sent you, I’ve been able to drive almost without handling the wheel or thinking how to do it but I don’t mean second nature — it’s like—"

"Yes I do remember you," said the hitch-hiker. "I think you were crazy that day, but the alloy had been in you a long time."

Mayn tried to pull away from why anyone would bring his mother back to Windrow and secretly bury her at her stone. He had decided that the hitchhiker, who now reminded him of some other lone man or men, was kind. He would have to be woken up into the window of interestingly unclean light the City proved to be. Easier to change the subject when there’s no one awake to talk to. Let Jean or Barbara-Jean drive, let her call him an erratic but upon his next step into rock-bottom though knowledgeable ignorance hear her say not to change the subject: so her geological stroke had had some woman’s curve to it — yet he would tell her that this sleeping hitch-hiker who seemed not to care that his pistol had been appropriated had identified Mayn as an interesting person: which, damn her, she would remind him had always been her position, in the shower, at the breakfast table, at the Press Site (as if those dumb viewers and surmisers of the Saturn launches and so forth were at a dig); at a polling place on an election day; on election day the following year indeed, for repetition helps, and he asked her to repeat information because he liked to hear her say it, which she got mad about, yet knowing he was coming from a long way back: from further back than a portly Navajo telling the difference between tribal uranium rights for sale and, on the other hand (a chubby hand), month-by-month real jobs abstractly available to Indians at a plant that reworks what’s gouged up from crusts of Earth as if Earth hurt — yes, hurt, and he believes Earth really did and will again; oh Mayn would rather listen to her talk moraines and all the stuff that a man named Spence might once have admitted ignorance of in the smug surety that Earth had little gossip value even up the ladder to glib homicide, prison intrigue, political plan, the blackmail of kidnap where you figure that if the son aged four or five is abducted the father will surface in anguish and you can haul him in: which by now Spence probably does know something about, since he has passed along a story of some lunatic mountain heading secretly eastward to be deposited for some reason if only to prove that the operation is feasible: run into Spence used to be semiannually, say, in some hotel saloon, Washington, Houston, airport San Francisco where he knew already you’re visiting Ames Air Force Base to see how Venus is doing prior to visiting the weather institute in Colorado all in a week’s airborne work: whereas the young woman Barbara-Jean (B.J.) could tell him on election eve only how the glacier deposited all this rock matter before even the Bible writers got going setting down what they already remembered if they had not actually experienced: but she drove him out onto Long Island and they talked so beautifully, while she cut through (as if her car blinkered them past) similar and equal consumer communities (that he thought he had already foreseen in some voice of a teenage economist he will meet who with delirious precision is observing America) to find then (Jean took her left hand off the wheel to point through the thick late-autumn air) striking eminences that were real moraines, eminences (Christ, they were real like the life you discovered years later you had been living, and as you discovered this, it moved!) that marked the end of an ancient valley glacier, one of these moraines named nothing more than Harbor Hill (he once knew a man named Moraine who owned a gigantic service station in Jersey), another moraine with an Indian name (a lake, too) that sounded like a rock that called to you until you started (Ronkonkoma) listening instead of hearing, and then its music went back inside the imaginary rock, an eminent moraine that (she said) disappeared beneath Long Island Sound and yonder Atlantic waters only (as they say) to reappear as the island of Martha’s Vineyard he had once taken his new wife to in the fall of a presidential election when they had a beach to themselves, white and (the one disappointment) shell-less.