Women and Men (130 page)

She had help, came a voice from bar’s end—

—She left the suicide note to the owner of the boat, for crying out loud?

—But you didn’t stay angry at your grandmother Margaret . . . (for Mayga didn’t ask why he’d been angry)

Oh no, said Jim, shaking his head humorously, we were pals, and I was going far to see the land, as Owl Woman, remember her?, said, while back in my house (what was it?—no takers even from bar’s end) the songs are intermingling (he laughed open-heartedly), and Margaret pointed out how I was doing some of the intermingling, I remember because later before she died we had a similar reckoning up—I can hear her on Brad’s Day walking all the way back with me from the cemetery saying
I
never told you anything about a second origin of that pistol, the first one was perfectly satisfactory, or you found it so when you were a little boy—for Jim had asked if it was
true
that the Princess’s prospective mother-in-law got better when the Prince and Princess cleared out, and the resurrection led back to the Prince’s pistol which really belonged to a lot of people for even Harflex of Choor had had it in his hand and after saying cruelly and angrily, Why did she have to go telling him all that stuff?, he added the Thunder Dreamer’s connection with the pistol and Margaret said with equal irritation,
I
never told you that—

And it would have gone further but, shaking his fifteen-year-old fists out to sea, and roaring and screaming, hurting his throat, he never remembered
what
into the wind or winds that blew some damp self into his dry eyes, his mother gone, leaving not a crumb of ice-cream cone, that nice woman, and taking nothing with her not even that half a humid pickle in its paper on the thwart of an everlastingly damned dory which should have arched its gunwales and told her No, don’t do this, don’t do this, lady—a man’s voice from behind Jim called and he turned to see the brother-in-law fisherman beckoning and he went sheepishly but when he got to the red-slatted sand-drift fence in front of that beach house, the man said,
Aren’t you the Mayn boy?
asking a fact that Jim wrote down in his notebook verbatim that night.
Aren’t you the Mayn boy?
(as we ghosted him prolixly, to be in the very difficulty of what it is to be) but giving what Jim ever after knew was almost love, from a stranger, a stranger with no hole in his head and no double moon in his brown eye and cheek stubble, inquiring if Jim would join him in a cup of canned Manhattan clam chowder, but who asked Jim what he knew he’d been asking to be asked—so that it wasn’t until he got into the front hall at home in Windrow two days later, and stared at his new raincoat that had been hanging there since he got home from the beach almost two days before, that his daydream of a near-naked mother (never turning around yet turning and turning and turning in the sea like just a body) returned together with, again, the absence of Bob Yard and the emptiness of this house especially where he went, seeing the panties, the spinal line, the shoulder not now bent to the ear as when she played the violin, the fiddle, but straight and lost, waiting, waiting, while Jim took the stairs and slowed waiting to hear something was waiting up there so it’s too little to think about coupled with too much, like twenty lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s
Snowbound
he had to memorize by next week (not only memorize but remember!) when he didn’t like poetry
period:
So that when he heard a rustling upstairs so that he might tell the fine drift of its air, a window open, an opening when all the layers of the atmosphere lined up each its slit, crevice, or chink which explained that cleft Margaret had told him of, when cosms of the sun (and apparently the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Anasazi ancient agreed on this) ran instantly down but what they did had not been clear, or not as clear as in retrospect the next day the news of the Normandy landings had been clear in words and on the map in the Newark paper and then the
New York Times
with headlines and paper and ink all as authoritative and packed and soft as a Christmas present, the map Jim had (on the page it was printed on) snatched from under the nose of Brad who wasn’t touching it with any part of his body
(You
ain’t readin’ that): yet was the rare atmospheric cleft (now successfully explained as Jim went softly up the stairs of his home some two days after his detective round-trip to Man-toloking) an opening for the cosms to draw up the life of the Navajo matron with the hole-in-her-head? or to prepare for that
night
of the day when the sun itself would not and would not go down until at last in darkness the double moon came to reveal the Princess’s sometime bird rising and hovering, as only the Hermit-Inventor of the East witnessed and told later to Margaret, to attack the lion drawn by the future’s odor in the eggs of the bird’s strictly diamond-shaped nest but lost both its quarry the mountain lion and the lion’s prey the egg or the matter inside it sucked by that speechless cat at the long instant when it knew its own inner essence to be that of the egg—

—What’s "essence," Gramma?

—only, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York, to vanish with a speed given it by the egg or more plausibly taken from a process of relation or transformation the Hermit-Inventor’s friend the Anasazi could explain if he would, that turned that mountain lion looking for deer but introduced to more curious food into the very wolf, the giant wolf with immense, slick, independently breathing internal organs that the bird then taloned, dismembered, and/or gorged as a one-for-the-road farewell since evidently the Princess and the Prince after her were bound elsewhere if not together—

—and the remaining egg, the remaining egg, atop that volcanic plug? asks the interrogator—

—I never said anything about a volcanic plug, said Margaret some years later upon what would have been her deathbed if she hadn’t "gotten up to die" on her own terms—

You’re trying to make us ask how she died, but we will not fall for it, the born-again interrogator recently christened Gatorix nags.

—Jim in one silent swoop was at his bedroom doorway witnessing what here he was not too late for: his brother Brad reading note pages of Jim’s held off the desk and now returning Jim’s look of blank hate with fear and the sudden inspiration "Your floor needs sweeping, what’s all this grit?"—until moving toward Brad with a hand like a paperweight downstairs, he hit him on the side of the head and Brad said, "She was crying, I remember, she said Gramma had told her a sad story about the Indians." Jim went away downstairs getting the point of that picture that was missing Bob Yard at last, that he and Bob Yard were occupying the same body in that scene and that’s where the missing Bob was. But Jim couldn’t think of anything probably then but
what
sad story about Indians?—nor did he hear Brad make a sound upstairs, who now knew where Jim had gone two days ago and had a nerve going into Jim’s stuff and had a jaw or cheek or whatever Jim had swatted that was hardly a living thing for Jim he didn’t give a shit and didn’t even feel like calling up Anne-Marie but here today had come home forgetting forgetting forgetting—

—Hey Jimmy, didn’t you have varsity practice today? came the voice of the chin, the cheek, and he wheeled at Brad, who said he was sorry, he was sorry, he didn’t really see anything, a few words underlined, nothing honestly, and he would of liked to go to Mantoloking
with
Jim Saturday—

—Well now you know, so it’s just as if you
did
go, you fucking little snoop, and if (or words to this effect) you don’t like beach sand in the house why don’t you sweep it out—

Tough little insect with a life of his own all right.

People just taking up space. Taking up matter.

Was it cold? asks a firm voice that wants to know.

How’d you get down there, Jim? asks the same voice.

Did you see Missy?

You didn’t go in the water.

Did you go barefoot?

Hey
Jim
. . . ? asks the same voice, dwindling. Nothing much more to ask.

The insect might turn into a person one of these days.

I don’t know why I wrote all that down, but I left it there because it’s my room.

It was an assignment, didn’t you say?
Vm
sorry, Jim.

Just don’t do it. Don’t be sorry.

Is that what you’re handing in?

No.

Good.

What do you mean, good? I couldn’t hand that crap in.

That was good about ramming that guy, Jim.

And, Brad,
what
story about Indians? Gramma never told those stories to anyone but me.

Mom said it was a swap. She told
Gramma
some things, and then Gramma told
her
some story about an Indian who died.

Jim was looking long in the refrigerator and when he turned Brad was not there. There’s things probably can’t be said about relations with your family. Margaret told him "the man with the pencil" was an Indian word for "white man."

Well, had he wished to be at the shore alone or had he wished to find people there? Can’t have it both ways. Isolated incident.

What’s a . . . volcanic plug? asks Ted (who supposedly knew everything) with some readiness in his voice so Jim heard the joke coming a mile away, or the elements of it, and laughed at once but didn’t stop his friend, nor go on to tell the places where the additions had been his own to his grandmother’s souvenirs, and earlier instructive additions by Jim very young, such as the crevi-chink and the Thunder Dreamer alternative provenance of the Colt pistol, and—source of somewhere both inside and outside him like us because it
is
us becoming human, a piece of him, or a piece if they
came
even in pieces (like those Brad "went to" on the following day) of these relations that go from him as he from them—the gigantic timber wolf’s swan song out of lion into the departing bird’s bright-eyed ferocity below the double moon and above the elf owls in their cacti and the People watching both the sky and a clear radiance off the body of the Prince’s apparently dead mother, a working glow—so that when, weeks later, recalling its curious positioning in the detective document that Pearl Myles never saw (but never
needed
to see), Brad the little insect asked, Hey Jim, what’s the lion’s egg mean?, and Jim considered clouting him again but pointed out that it was the lion that
ate
the egg and there were two eggs—which then reminded
Jim
—and Brad said, Gramma says she never said anything about a lion turning into a wolf and being torn up by the bird, Jim felt less betrayed by an unfaithful beloved than in possession of some other adder than his own dumb calculus of daydream that he discounted as being not him, begun then, long before he found himself living and half-returned from the future that in the early sixties the interesting Chilean journalist-woman Mayga accepted (as she perhaps in sympathy could not accept the painful thing Jim’s mother had done for reasons easily invented). So it was "See I didn’t make that stuff
up,
Braddie" (he heard the voice, his own, and recalled Pearl Myles preaching Synonyms, Synonyms, Synonyms for an increased vocabulary and Success): whereas he would "claim credit" (in the code of later political violence) for additions, hell, to tell his children if not himself—many arising some time after Margaret’s characteristic death: to wit, the vast visitor-bird’s sneaking kinship to our heavy, short-necked sea duck the king eider of northern coasts (now thought, by a curious "lifer" ornithologist doing time within thinking if not striking distance of the Hudson River, to possess a tracking-resolution grid in the predatory wing of its brain enabling it to process both incoming weather and the crabbed configuration of the coastline it patrolled); to wit, too, the fact of the pistol’s having been given the Thunder Dreamer as a dying white Anglo attempt (by, likely, one of that brother-band of dueling Germans in the mid-century American West) to put the whammy on our Plains Indian protest religion of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Yet additions occurred also
prior
to Margaret’s death: unpro-duced operas by a Chilean woman of the mid- to late-nineteenth century that were part folk, part Italianate—but virtually
Verdi!
—and part (in the strange case of the Valparaiso
Hamletin,
according to Mayga, the journalist) late Beethoven chamber music (i.e., in the "This was your husband," cum picture, aria echoed in Ophelia’s Valentine morrow song): addenda also including matter on German settlers in Chile who might design a railway system then retire to keep bees; plus matter such as the desert jackrabbit, his eyes a-watch low and for’ard in their moist head-holes, and other data the authenticity of which James and Margaret very occasionally bickered over and might have even on her deathbed if she had had one. But the Hermit-Sojourner, who to the Anasazi healer’s mind had about invented New York, with its plans for wind-saving mid-air canals above the projected skyscrapers of the city along which would run pneumatic shuttles like the communication capsules future department stores hoped would rattle and whistle their efficiency music up pillar and across ceiling, proved to be a person (Oh stop it, Jim, the ill old lady laughed suddenly, not
so
old was she yet plummeting into her real age unreally ‘z if she’d been radiated in some fascinating zone), a figure anyhow, whom the grandson was not specially pleased to reinvent: for the Hermit was among other things multiple, appearing first on Bedloe’s Island in 1885 as the nephew (though this wasn’t known to the twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Margaret) of yet another Hermit-Inventor who had known the Anasazi before Margaret knew the West, and who a generation before had detoured lengthily en route to Anasazi country via that Alabama farm later named (and truly) Whalesville where slaves had turned up the amazing skeleton architecture of that fallen angel (so they thought) which their betters at once christened the reptile Basilosaurus—while at least one
new
manifestation of this character-scientist seemed to come up in later allusions, all used, both to build to a fine phantom of a continent spanning Margaret’s girlhood and her grandson Jim’s latterly irritable imagination, for the Hermit-Inventor came to visit the Statue of Liberty in pieces the same day Margaret and her father, her daddy, came to cover the event for the Windrow
Democrat
(a dubious organ—oh stop it, Jim—founded once upon a decade to get behind a President who was haunted not
only
by the sinister lunacy of a central bank of the United States that might foster adventurers like the American Wheelwright whom Alexander’s grand-cousin shipped to Chile with to build a railway that had been accidentally designed on a restaurant tablecloth, but even
more
by the possibility that he Andy J. himself, dyspepsia, desire and all, might be inhabited by one or even two of those Red Sticks he had striven to extirpate and scalp from the woods and marshes or send west in one of Our early solutions to the mass transport problem and to that of economizing on Mass itself)—yet a similar figure rises to crags and other lookouts in the western appearances of our Princess of the East Far East who is sometimes Margaret eager, intractable, palpable learner and sometimes an earnest tale told by a place about the Navajo Prince’s mother’s dream songs: until as the references pile ahead powered by the latest cow-catcher-engine fueled by a locoweed even Marcus Jones could not name before we let it die out through inattention as a viable energy source when if used it would have gone on living even after being picked and while being burned (wait, though, wait,
wait
a ramute! remember the northern bison’s tongue, delicacy amid wasted carcasses, yet) as versatile as the jojoba pod, as thoughtful as the nature gas in Casco Bay Indian seaweed, versatile as winter steam in northern Maine or as that visible relation in certain of the territories between air and earth, and altogether as active as particles of melted, smelted, Indian and Anglo flesh which in rituals in northwestern New York (where the printer Morgan threatened Masonic secrets) and in central Oklahoma (where a curious sect of non-evangelical lay Christians, the "Protestant Franciscans," loved and knew the exile Cherokee without ever laying their religion on them) sometimes mingled in purely symbolic communion whorl upon whorl—and as by definition so much of this current knowledge (read
knowhow)
keeps clear of James Mayn’s eyes and the working heart he turns upon his work and hours and his humoring pessimism re: the senses history does not much make, and runs only in memories he rides pestered by a past that for cripe’s sake is over and done with until he charmingly lets slip to a friend or two at most that he’s in and is "coming from" the future, the libration-point space settlements, and can describe them and will oblige when that spirit comes upon him maybe get drunk, sozzled, mildly mackereled, pickelooned in (please add
also)
good company to a point of preferring to believe his future existence is an inebriation best succincted or, failing that paternal tradition of economy, shunted into a nutty past that kids him ‘s much ‘s he it, until occasionally he meets a man or woman he’ll tell things to, a wife, a colleague, maybe a person he knows is primarily overhearing him, but to be so believed as he was by the lady Mayga bugs him so he’ll drop right into someone else’s life which is neither the future relation of strip mining to the deep-steam taps, nor the truncated lunacies of his own (he thinks substantially banal) fambley where you go so far and then shrug your way forward into adult life and he never needed a somewhat wonderful and historically elusive mother (who, well, had the good taste not to get found, having gone too far, too deep) to say to him You will go away where you belong, because cripes he was goin’ anyway—door’s open: yet these private lives that greet him between, on one hand, the relation of chemical warfare (agreements) and the ease of keeping C.W. development secret, to the genuinely civil uses of controlled poisons to seed the atmosphere at many levels with efficiency that’s odorless but almost painterly if you can catch it just before or
as
dawn arrives, and, on the other hand, the relation between the Prince’s mother getting better when he left (which Margaret claimed
she
had never told Jim!) or Harflex of Choor waiting patiently but far from passively in the old familiar coastal plain while the Princess eluded the pursuant Prince by being spirited in the shape of a swaying mist into a Statue braced like a tree against the high winds of the harbor it’s a-guarding
to
the question why Sarah, a mother, for whom people mattered quite a little and who was a good and practicing musician should have turned away into one day’s horizon like some meaningless wind that’s as equal to the matter a descending body becomes as one obstacle yields to another and story to story—yes, the aforesaid private lives that greet him and themselves between all these above relations became nicely complete, modestly revealing—he told someone named Norma about teaching his son to ride a bicycle so he was the one taught, not Andrew, because
Norma
had told
him
about a separated woman she knew who was living with another woman and they took the first woman’s twelve-year-old son to an experimental video showing at a small loft theater downtown and in the middle of it a man got up out of his seat with a pistol naming a woman nobody knew who he’s going to kill and people began to get the point and were scared, and Norma’s friend’s son suddenly said out loud to the man with the pistol, "She’s not here and it’s lucky for you she isn’t," and the man collapsed weeping on his folding chair—"She’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here!"—and the gun dropped to the floor and
that
was more or less
that
(someone kicked it away from him, he was as they say overpowered or something similar to that happened): and many of these shared lives are chambered where Jim wouldn’t even get at them, knowing that in their disconnected self-containment they make sense like a day’s work let it go at that, like a past that you could get pestered by to the point of having pursued Margaret right to her deathbed—not over a thing like 4 7 never mentioned any eight-thousand-volume Masonic library in Salt Lake City," but over some embarrassing little gap in her life as if it would tell why her daughter Sarah (think of her with white hair, garrulous) permanently absented herself from the town whose name we have been given to use and understand was made up by our grandmother and our grandson between them like founders.