Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Gossip and theory on a train commuting New York into Washington down the fine-toothed density of the coast, but now in the love and steam of a shower recalling Ship Rock and a week before it Los Alamos, the name or two you knew of people who were here ahead of you and maybe hacks no less than you that an information officer mentions in passing under the Los Alamos sun toward the high library, for instance, the buckskin photo-info agent Spence, whose high husky words are in your daydreaming ear a week later at Ship Rock along the breath of the Navajo Ray Vigil who mentioned Spence, and a year or more later in the truest showerbath of the decade— Spence lapses out of sight, then, until you hear your own name, and on his mouth or teeth talking still earlier in Florida when you first met this girl: and who was he ever to adopt that ponytail tone so fucking quiet and friendly its alertness is saying some hustling thing to you, but what? (Acts like there’s something on anybody you want to name, and if on you, what’s he want?) His name is Ray Spence, you wouldn’t want to know him though would say not even that to information officer signing you up for a p.m. tour of the hot-rock drilling, who tells you Spence actually asked after you — had you been to Los Alamos recently? — following you maybe like you knew something no one else knew when, ‘far’s you could tell, the opposite was the case — thus following you by preceding you as he did months-into-years-now ago to absorb the attention of the Chilean economist at Cape Kennedy who turned up in New York soon after his scholarly friend Allende went down in history: but maybe this Spence expected you to have gone to Los Alamos, or had been thinking of you — you never gave it the thought it no doubt in any event did not merit. Spence was out for a buck. But at Los Alamos? Nothing happening on the Indian geothermal employment front lately you told this young woman who is in the shower with you who knows twice what you know about it anyway, and hasn’t been there. Spence’s name mentioned at Ship Rock too, preceding you there, if not in Ray Vigil’s affections.

All of which means nothing but that you are boneless on this Election Day and not even in the happiness of the shower that window through which somebody else might trace an information or curve of face, your job — except now you recall your grandmother reporting (as if it was her job) that a young woman who was your mother said she knew nothing about Indians except they were the last Americans with a native sense of design. People been at Los Alamos thirty years; design a bomb like that one, the only way after it is in. Some of the same folk enclosed by their Los Alamos classical-music station are working on geotherm, fast forward, the radio didn’t hold the band — car slips over the white line, what a radio will do to you. Why Gods your future (a voice homes on the billowing straight road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe) — which train you on, brother, the radio voice rises, you’re with the others, ain’t ya, in the rear car looking back at the speeding landscape while the engineer ain’t up front in the locomotive no more and you feel this but you don’t want to ask, right? just a train (they’ll probably take it off service presently) just another train loose down the track with you and all the rest looking out the rear window of the rear car with enough supplies of fast grub and cardboard-soft cans of beer so we’ll never run out, that is before we hit bottom ‘cause God could be your future, you let him aboard, but this morning he ain’t.

Not here beneath a reverse geyser on Election Day massaging two slippery Manhattan selves nor there in her dry bedroom with a regular rug of a towel, a soft bedroom and two sets of keys on the bureau this morning where hadn’t she set down one last night when they came in from late dinner? geothermal feels clean but hot and in the miles of downward piping maybe the jobs aren’t so many for Anglos or Skins.

"Maybe you’re thinking I mean the old volcano that was here at the Rock, these dikes out here for miles, lava once, heat underneath — but," Vigil had gone on, "forget that and think of the magma chambers simmered down centuries ago but maybe below all that is an ocean, an ocean of power on the bottom line."

Who, then, has first rights to Lower Space? The wind across the bright plateau, listen to it come. And against the sudden grid of agreements in fine print shadowed by gasification lobbyists lurking within grainier shadows of strip-mine futures, shadow grids of revenue-sharing partnership statistics floated/buffered/spaced-out with the figured factor of good will, you say, "O.K., O.K., just a second — let me have a look at this," where you stand two miles away from Ship Rock, which rises solitary fourteen hundred feet up off the floor of the mesa, where desert is a memory of wind and quiets the two voices, male and female sounds behind you, so you feel them scarcely more than the three points of your shoulder blades which with the small of your back hold in place the late-model car parked behind the three of you, so you wonder not where you are but why you listen to the two different things that the two people behind you are asking, and of you, as if you could give what they want — the talking Navajo, the Albuquerque businesswoman Dina and her passion-like commitment.

"It’s gonna happen," Raymond Vigil insists, less certainly; "you can help us."

"I’m not a lobbyist, Ray, but what’s going on over there at the plant’s worth reporting."

Stand on a lava flow gazing at a fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot-high throat, a volcanic neck that gagged once upon a time and you stare until the material it was made of stirs as if to rise like wind in the alleged ship’s soul looking for a sea, the stuff once molten inside the pipe of the volcano that hardened before it could get out and now is all that’s left because the conduit / pipe / cone / actual volcano / outside slope has been worked away / blown away by continents of wind. It isn’t hard to explain, is it? What’s left is Ship Rock, hugely visible from the Four Corners Power Plant thirty miles away as the plant is from the Rock.

"Look, I’ve been up to my ears in gasification this past week," you hear drawling out of you—"let me just look. . look at this thing. Can one get up there?" Your fingertips feel the rock turn to sand.

Albuquerque woman Dina swaps a story about the Rock with the Indian Raymond yet then they’re arguing — and stories about stories, free location for TV westerns, or do you pay rent by the hour for using landscape? or by the mile? Your eyes, meanwhile, want to reverse the flow and give back the blast of fiery froth that bombed down to become so viscous it didn’t get out.

But stepping back under the shower’s waterfall, Jean’s now saying — not the blonde, middle-thirties, clean-tanned Albuquerque businesslady Dina West but the Jean whose New York place this is is saying—"I just saw you all over again."

Dance-like she cocks one leg out to the side, soaps herself, and you find the other cake which is thin and bends, but around what? And you reach through the steamy water and soap her moving arms, which stop moving.

"We’ve hardly met," you say.

"Because you’re condescending. You’re a funny kind of condescender and if I were you I still wouldn’t be able to know just how you condescend to me, and it doesn’t matter much now."

"I said," you threaten, "we’ve hardly met."

"You do a job but don’t know why," she says as if water weren’t cascading screening you both from the times and from dryness. Lecturing: "You’re O.K. at your job. But why were you at Skylab? You were mumbling in my head and I was half asleep and I know it had to do with why you were at Skylab but it wasn’t your job and I woke up the next morning feeling like you’d let me sit in your home but I didn’t take advantage of it — and Skylab wasn’t your job but it might have been. You know? And why you were at Skylab is like the other part of why you’re here with me. Is there something going on? I’ve seen you four times in three years, Jim."