Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She wants to know about geothermal energy, what he knows about, just like a woman — tapping the Earth. Mayn remembers her all over again from Cape Kennedy, she has conviction. Oh she’s in a gap, she’s free, sharp, charitable, in place; will travel when she has to for her magazine and when she wants to, and she wants to know if the geothermal Navajo is in private business and has he dropped all the names he must have acquired — Spanish, European, Christian nicknames, and a secret war name (traditional) — she has a brilliant Bolivian cape, eats Japanese and vegetarian though is into brain parasites lately and may sometimes throw back (all these details of not-yet-knowing-her) the raw fish though they’re pretty when they’re served curled and nestled like white rose petals with beads of quince-colored roe in the middle like a bloom; shares the check but won’t make a fuss if she gets taken; plays squash; does the Plough but not the Headstand; studied physics and banking; broad forehead; plays Rolling Stones and the B-Minor Mass without being well-balanced. How is she so gentle, so accurate? She has avoided losing out. She’d know what to do in a Baptist church, hymnal in hand, or in a high church Whiskopalian. Or when a male neighbor’s thumping on her front door twice in an hour. She has nonetheless just let a second set of keys just appear on the pigskin knuckles of some gloves. How can she be so finely unconscious, naked here? His problem, not hers.

But if (she’s thinking) — look — fine if you’ve got a magma chamber a mile or two down full of molten rock swelling up through a break in the crust, even granting you could have when these sites are inactive volcanoes — and granted hot water under pressure way down there will stay liquid at much hotter than a hundred centigrade, maybe double that; and granted if you bring it up to the surface it’ll flash into steam which you can harness: still, what if there’s no water to work on? And where exactly were they planning (hoping, figuring, fixing) to drill?

He nears — no; hears —the Albuquerque environmentalist lady but in Mayn’s own words retelling to the Barbara-Jean girl in New York some sentimental passion for Zuni grandmas belied by efficiency and the long, taxing drive down through Gallup and its glittering pawnshops full of Indian silver and to Albuquerque. Oh I hear it in our wonderful air out here, Mr. Mayn, another airport poisons the air, wrecks the ears, and what of the Earth itself, Mr. Mayn? — "what of"? she is sounding Indian for God’s sake — I felt the Earth alive right there on my front seat this morning so I want to reach way down. My hands know. And I’m not especially religious, any more than selling time for TV-radio is my religion either, a woman has to have a job — I think we need gas — but the Earth is the Lord’s and the Earth is alive, so how can it listen to us if its drums are busted? Spider Man told the Earth Surface People a ringing in the ear signals death or disaster, and the Earth is one great ear that hears more than what you say; it hears what you mean. I don’t mean you yourself. Ray Vigil tells some of this: you’d be surprised. Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

There’s a second, indefatigable wind the plateau ignores that passes through Ship Rock and Window Rock and crumbled (two centuries’ worth in two minutes) the stone ladder so three Pueblo women got stranded up on Enchanted Mesa when the men were out hunting, close to but not quite the story Ray’s father told him and he told Dina who told it to Mayn — who finds that Jean knows it already, even in his version simplified and alloyed with a certain hydrostatic compulsion: story of the Holy People below the Earth who once upon a time down there were driven by flood and that’s how they came up onto the surface. Like Spider Man and Spider Woman who taught Earth Surface People to weave, but many other Holy People do not speak, and many are not always friendly to Earth Surface People and must be given songs and dances, the Wind People and the Thunder People and Fringed Mouth and Coyote (listen a witch once impersonated Coyote so my own father fell off his horse that everyone told him not to herd sheep on and he wound up in Ship Rock hospital with concussion and delirium); and we cannot forget in terms of our growth potential that the Hero Twins did not kill off all the monsters, so the blood of the dead ones that is dried up into the lava you stand on is not all the blood of the monsters; likewise while the Holy People up here travel on the echoes of the flood and on the Big Screen of the Rainbow, and on the Superwatts of the reldmpago which is lightning in the language of Coronado who came seeking the Seven Cities that were gone by his time but held under the Earth for the future, and the Holy People as they move about now among the Earth Surface People that they created are helpful or dangerous for life is dangerous for it bends into other life, though full of natural resources which matter to the future of Navajo people, these spirits — these Holy People — travel on also shafts of the sun like the wind, you better believe it, for this is not just their speed, it is how they keep in touch with the Holy People who stayed below, yes, oh the professors down in Albuquerque and Tempe think they believe this, anyway some Holy People stayed below through the terrible flood while most of the Holy People rose to Earth Surface through a reed that soon became clogged with viscous, sandy noise, Jean, for the fear of death — there goes the door again — seeped down from above, and Spider Man taught that noise in the windpipe is one of the four signs of disaster—

— You’re not the type to tell this, but there’s a reason you’re into it and it’s not culture and it’s not hobby and it’s probably not insanity and it’s not copy you’re turning out — wait, there’s the door.

Well, those that rose became spirits, and those below have heated that ancient flood with elements given by the Sun, elements like, hell, why not electro-magnetism? until the time when a Navajo will come with a business sense and with vision and with roots deep enough below the dried blood of the monsters and will tap that energy source and bring all those stranded but worth-watching Holy People up to the surface so we’ll have more Spirit and a new time of gratitude between Earth Surface People and the Holy People and the Sun and Moon that ask one death each per day, and above all we will have a Navajo geothermal power source.

Navajo-Ute — get facts straight; think you can lean on the man at the other end of your wire to pick you up? so it’s Navajo-Ute, you said yourself, didn’t you? Something for everyone. Male and female at the dividing line concentrating to keep the Earth from cracking, one knee, one thumb, one jawbone’s like another, even one tail if you don’t get down too close to the bone, but here she comes again like an intelligence orbiting you or you it, she with her knowledge, though knowing her only from our brief docking and recovery at Kennedy Space Center, I’m not inspired to pick an argument which is how the sexes got separated if not created according to Void’s Book of New Navajo — Is it that you’re Divorced Man who confused this with history like secretly getting religion? No, that’s not it. You were created after a geothermal super spat under the Earth so the sexes ceremonially separated. Then the females of the Holy People bore a series of monsters whom it thus became necessary to murder, lynch, subject to a "rolphing" — which the erstwhile editor of the Democrat tells his son meant lynching in 1934 when it was not Indians as a century before but Negroes — eliminate, waste, blow them away, or, as an interested party, ask for their death. So here came the Hero Twins to do the job with a minimum of words and a maximum of lava stamping so hard the plates down deep in Earth’s crust came apart and magma from Earth’s mantle gurgled, welled, bent upward. But where did those old twins come from?