Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

From Changing Woman, Mr. Mayn, explained the Albuquerque environmentalist lady Dina, sure I’ll have another Manhattan, but we should eat and I have to call my husband—

So here came the Hero Twins to do the job, but go way back before the power of this Earth we saw today began to suffer erosion, before breaking sound barriers had to be noisy instead of just a slipping through between, if you see, and we find First Man and First Woman who I think must have created the universe together, but the Navajo don’t say so though what they think is anybody’s guess and might be something else.

No, lady, we think First Man did the job. But don’t sell First Woman short, Mr. Mayn, for she was right there behind him like a shadow that wheels off the south corner of Ship Rock even much later when Earth Surface People learn how to tap the oil, the vanadium, knock power out of a rock, and if I can’t give you this blue-green silk shirt off my back may I buy you a beer? — you know what they say about drunken Indians, and now it’s the anthropological chemists.

But Blessing Way, Mr. Mayn, you might be interested in coming here when they have the ceremonials. Blessing Way is the one that recalls the meeting organized by Changing Woman at which Earth Surface People most of them created by Changing Woman learned about horse and gila, yucca and the storms in the sky and how to use the wind without building magic carpets that carry their own vacuum cleaners you can’t switch off if your husband is a TV sports commentator, Mr. Mayn, with his own plane and I should call him.

But Jean here on Election Day in New York knows stories — the same ones — our Indian heritage inspiring internal decor plus thought about native American history when natural resources become unnatural by excluding Us — and there’s Changing Woman, they say in the ceremonial that Changing Woman is young and beautiful, Miss Universe, and she has this fantastic home on the Western Waters, which is a prophecy of the coming of the Geothermal Spirit—

— Now you’re being facetious, Jeanie.

And since, Mr. Mayn, we are stopping (Dina of New Mexico had said), you can learn the word for gas— chidi bi to (‘‘car’s water"), they speak the language more than write it.

But, Dina, where did First Woman and First Man come from? That is, just to get my facts straight, did they sail in on Ship Rock? this would have been when it was active. I can’t keep all this from getting practical.

First Woman and First Man were transformed from two ears of corn, it’s what the Navajo say and it’s easier for an Anglo to believe, a white ear, and a yellow ear, white for woman.

But if I am to cover this story I have to know for sure beyond a tincture of doubt who was the father of Changing Woman’s Hero Twins.

What’s the matter? (a nearer voice asks like a pillow) did you hear something? Do you want the answer before brunch, old man?

Raymond Vigil, portly, young, beamingly serious busybody, and Dina West, cool, kind, healthy, melancholy, Anglo environmentalist lady speak at the same time in the void of your head: I am no Mattie Grinnell who at a hundred and one went to Washington on the Poor People’s Crusade and was the last full-blood of her tribe but her Indian name also meant Many Roads, and what’s around now is a new type that sees the land not only as what the treaties took away with only promises to pay but what lies under the land and does not only lie but shifts its energy and is in turbulence.

God I’m sick of energy.

My grandfather got mixed up with that march of the unemployed in 1894 when he went out looking for my grandmother who was only twenty and wasn’t even his fiancée yet. There was at least one Indian on that march.

Well, there is something in that story you know that the great She lay upon the Earth in anger, scratched it with her nails until the minerals, the coal, the mica, silver, gold, and vanadium were heated up into her by a process whose secret has been lost but was fed by all the desire of the Holy People Left-Behind-Underground, who raised such an upward pressure of passion for her which came together by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost that new coordinate shafts of magma dikes formed so she grew hard with minerals radiating into her which came together yet by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost fell apart in her, giving off two fields of flesh which grew to be the Hero Twins.

Sure, Mr. Mayn, if I could speak I’d say we could drive all day all night in my late-model Dart into the sky, my husband has his Thunderbird—

Wait, Jim: no one interrupted you; go on, what are you waiting for, your breakfast? What about an organic Bloody Mary for Election Day?

My ex-wife’s dad drank dry Manhattans.

Wilhelm Reich drank Manhattans.

I think church organists drink Manhattans.

Maybe they like something special.

My wife’s father played the piano, I’m told.

Nonsense to all this mineral cookery. Changing Woman conceived those Twins by the mere advent of puberty. What traffic needed she with a male? What mere equality?

I hope you will do something with the airport question, Mr. Mayn, local though it is, yet readers in the East could put it together with their own priorities.

We hope you will do something with the joint geothermal technology-sharing project possibility, Mr. Mayn. Did the car rental take your credit card?

Nonsense, Jimmy — the true story — but what about your grandmother? She went out to the Chicago Fair and came back with Coxey’s Army marching on Washington?

Not "Jimmy," please… no, she knew Coxey and met the reincarnation man Carl Browne and some blood-medicine seller from Chicago, who was called the Great Unknown but so far as we know she wasn’t on the march, she was back home in New Jersey long since. I think she said the march was at least one-third correspondents.

O.K. If not "Jimmy," then not Jeanie. The true story is that Changing Woman was impregnated by the rays of the Sun and by a shower of water: I’ve been out there. I have a silver and turquoise buckle.

Well, I been down to Ecuador on my way.

"Scrambled eggs are up!"

On my way where?

Something special. An onion for sure, and the dark mushroom oiling a touch of sweet invisible as a spice’s membrane.

You couldn’t get out of your head the bones removed of sacred enemies, and what they did then. But you reported mainly business so you would not get into what they did then (with the bodies).

"I scrambled six big ones."

Well, two or three bodies anyway, dried to perfection in hot hot sand, then smoked. Get a new slant on yourself, one’s body. In the forests of Oriente in Ecuador. No other white man has seen it! Indian bodies softened up and then remolded. By hand.

Hand around the empty, red-filmed glass, while thumps speak against the front door.

"I juiced the tomatoes. You want another Bloody Mary?" She’s realistic.

"I want one just like the first."

"You shall have it."

"Now we’re getting somewhere."

"I thought so, Jim. But I’m trying to find that Bolivian beach we’re sunbathing on. I think of you letting fly in the shower grinning up into the water with your eyes closed."

"I thought I had my back to you."

"Maybe I imagined it. I was daydreaming like crazy. It’s the overflow the last few hours."

"Shower power to the middle class. You’ve got a good shower there. That means you got a good landlord."

"It works better on two bodies. It’s very reliable almost all the time except at eight in the morning Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday."

"Hey, you mean you were daydreaming in the shower?"

"Only because it was so great being there."