Women and Men (120 page)

"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"

Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away—it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.

He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did
you
hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"

Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later—as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which
we are
and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly—Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack
and
without a license
and
with a passenger he didn’t mention but later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—

Did you ever see that boy again?

Who knows?

But the screwdrivers however casually left near a tool box and near probably some rags and usually a gasoline can with a neck on it not where Bob had left them were really gone: so the kid—

You expect us to believe you never told your wife?

Scout’s honor.

Did you belong to the Boy Scouts?

Well . . .

You brought it up.

Officially, yes.

So your word is worth only the paper it is written on.

He could live with that; sure.

Jim looked at his father’s bowed head and his half-brother eating a sandwich and as if through the munching of Brad, the mouth work and prospect of digesting, Jim smelled peanut butter, so it wasn’t one of Margaret’s sandwiches. He saw why people got drunk. He had looked out Bob’s windshield and his breath was taken away and when he looked back into the truck bed the kid was gone. As he had been to begin with.

Well, why hadn’t he told about it? Not even Sam, his friend, whose long face would look like a bloodhound’s in twenty years, Jim saw it exactly. Sam, with his leather boots on a hot September Sunday, who was always ready to go someplace but you had to give him the idea first, and then he would take over and see the sky through the trees, a beaver dam along a junky old stream, faint depressions across pine needles, tracks of an unknown creature coming out of nowhere, and suddenly remember hearing beavers smacking their tails on the flat water at night.

And then Jim thought he had seen that same piner kid of the truck ride a month before at the movies. You really knew it when you got near a piner kid in an enclosed space, not that they had the money for a ticket to the movie, even though they probably watered their bodies in the lake from time to time. Didn’t that kid go to school? Jim had seen a woman with hair flat on her narrow head washing clothes, and there was a little shoreline of foam like Mantoloking seafoam—but with mud and roots. But it probably wasn’t the screwdriver kid, that day in the movies so soon after Sarah’s death. After Brad’s Day Jim saw the kid’s face and the back of his head several times, but it wasn’t him. It was in Sam’s long backyard where they played touch football that was practically tackle and Jim left the game and ran up past the beautiful old red brick house to the picket fence but it wasn’t the kid slowly hiking a bit surly along the sidewalk; or it was coming out of the soda fountain and looking across the street at the window full of overalls and there was the kid with a dirty sailor cap but after getting practically hit in the middle of the street by two cars passing each other, Jim saw it wasn’t the same kid, this one was taller, without the rangy shoulders; or it was the jungle in Guadalcanal, hand to hand, get him before he even has a chance to pick his weapon up, his father and Alexander had been reading a book about Guadalcanal, man to man, you didn’t have time to ask questions, you’d heaved your last grenade back on the other island, Iwo Jima, Guam, one of them, launched it with all you had, which was your discus arm if it didn’t get sucked away by the same grenade it was propelling by the slinging mode—so that that hand without time to ask questions felt like the future but the War was just over, and Bob Yard didn’t talk much about it any more, his brother-in-law came home intact, his niece elected to stay in the WAVES for three more years having become an expert typist with a better chance to travel now than during the War, and Jim’s father who seemed to be developing a bulbous chin dragged out the deal to unload the paper until one night in Jim’s senior year Mel asked Jim if he himself would have considered hanging on to the paper, all other things being equal, and Jim said he wanted no part of it (which alas was only part of what he had had or had meant to say) and his father shrugged and said what he maybe hadn’t meant to say but might well have felt, since he had already been left once, to wit that that’s a big reason he decided to sell out. To which Jim quickly said, "Oh thanks, Mel, thanks, that puts me in my place, I had that coming, sure I did." (The first time he had called his dad
Mel.)

No newspapers for him, not that the
Democrat
(whatever they said about Jackson and the bank) was a real newspaper; it had social notes on relatives who came to spend a week or a friend from New York or Reading, Pennsylvania, though not Margaret’s funny-looking old tramp of a man whom Jim first saw on the beach at Mantoloking the day Bob Yard had come and had that unsuccessful conversation with Jim’s mother more or less one-way where, on that black towel of hers, she lay irritated and still, but the old guy would talk and talk in the car and stayed with Margaret and Alexander a couple of days at least but Alexander kicked him out because he upset Margaret after Mel wanted to run a note in the paper but Margaret preferred not to and the man was known to Jim as that Inventor from New York though Jim never asked him his real name, and he wasn’t quite the same as the Hermit-Inventor from 1893-4, but was his decrepit nephew carrying on the good work, Margaret said, because you had to, and Jim asked him what he did: It remained to be seen, he said; it was partly just living, but it was unpredictable—he had invented a smallish machine that randomly invented new shapes there was motion for, but no formula yet, and he had carried on his forebears’ work which was beginning to look like learning not just to control the weather but in a new way to live with it, partly through seeing its relation to the interior activity of the land, even mountains far away, and so he was moving toward maybe a new weather, which made him practically unemployable but he had a small "competence" descended to him from an "ancestor’s" patent royalty which enabled him to maintain the "family railroad flat" in a city that—but Jim sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, wasn’t sure what he recalled and what inferred—so that the piner kid was maybe one-quarter made-up, and had forced him to share the pickup truck he had, briefly stolen the afternoon of Brad’s Day; and he was pretty sure he recalled the Hermit-Inventor of New York saying he had been given what equipment and training—mostly self-education—he needed so if he lost the struggle he could only blame himself—the very words, almost, that Mel said, the day of the final and crucial football game when Windrow was definitely the underdog as Jim pointed out to Brad, whereupon Mel said all that about having enough training and equipment so if they lost the game it was their own fault ("equipment" a crazy word), the already semi-retired father saying the sentence like words he had been given and was bound to say, so that at the time of another war in which Jim did not participate he knew he would hear those words if only because automatic packaged phrases are future phrases, a thought that Mayn passed on to his unlucky and largely unknown though loved friend Mayga, the Chilean woman—passed it on and passed it off as no thought at all but she asked him please not to dismiss it as a thought, but he could count on her to take seriously a lot of what he found to tell that he would only very occasionally get soused about—that is, drunk and loud, though not
fighting
mad, for if you tear someone limb from limb you might hurt that someone, he said, and although once during his married years he did in fact go for the jugular (‘‘after the jug?" said Ted, who was readier to believe Jim than some layer of his brain gook could accept). Well, to the late Mayga, and perhaps once to his journalist-colleague Ted, who was with UPI for years and knew everything (which was what
he
said about Jim), he explained that this type of evening’s undertaking (that is, to get thoroughly drunk) marked an effort to prove that some of these other thoughts which would persist actually then more strongly though less coherently were dependent on an inebriated state of mind and were dumb and a delusion.

But he couldn’t have told Ted as he did Mayga about his position
in
the future, because he liked Ted, knew Ted knew he wasn’t the type to go on like that; wouldn’t believe him, or worse would think something permanently (not odd but) wrong with him. Which future are you going to worry about anyhow?—the upcoming election or the state of the dollar four or five years from now? You control the immediate future by reducing unemployment by not slapping controls on.

The recently bereaved boy Jim Mayn took to dropping in on two old (in fact late middle-aged) ladies who stopped being surprised when this boy who had mowed their lawn until he lost the job when he went to work on a farm the preceding summer came in and sat with them. They had hardly known his mother. Their piano was out of tune; he tried a chord and was asked to play and couldn’t; they talked horses, they would argue whether a gigantic trotter named Native Hanover who’s with all the other champions on the wall outside the bar of the hotel downtown had done in fact all the things they each thought they recalled, or were they remembering two or
three
horses; they knew times fantastically, and once Jim asked how long they had been living together, he’d forgotten for a second they were sisters, but he might have asked that dumb question because he had felt that they wanted him to go—their bathroom had a crocheted-or-something thick pink cover over the toilet seat and smelled perfumed. He visited—always unannounced—a doctor who lived over by the military school, who played the organ at the Baptist Church accompanying himself in a heady tenor when he didn’t, he said, even believe in God most Sundays; a couple of times when Jim showed up he had a feeling that he had interrupted the doctor and his wife and their daughter who was a year younger than Jim—the son was away at boarding school in Pennsylvania: "Let the Quakers see if they can do anything with Hank"—in the midst of discussing perhaps some rotten thing they had all done or the doctor had (because his family seemed so nice, though Jim liked
him)
—and he got up and went out of the room saying he needed a drink. He was the first grownup to ever offer Jim a beer, when he was still fifteen. And Jim took to dropping in also on the Bob Yards, and she would ask little questions about his grandmother going in to New York to look at material at Schumacher’s and had they gotten tired of Brad’s cooking yet? She was better arguing with Bob and laughing at his exaggerated stories from downtown: there was a dimmer switch on the market like the lights in the movie house and someday you would go away for a wild weekend in the city and your house would light up in the evening and turn all but one of its lights out at, say, midnight, and look like it was being lived in, even project two moving figures up next to the window ("Doin’ what?"), while you were dancing the night away or attending the horse show. Bob was practically the first to have a television set in Windrow and Jim thought the Notre Dame-Army football players looked like squat dolls or soldiers but you knew it was real, and it was a fascinating trick that had been put over on that whole scene that you felt could—or should—only be told about by the announcer. Nobody asked Jim something he couldn’t spell out himself.