Women and Men (195 page)

—"I know you from somewhere," Mayn said, as the blue car passed a red van and swung back in line.

—inspired, the man said, by a man aliased Santee Sioux (no Indian he), who had indirectly caused the hitch-hiker’s father a fatal heart seizure, and by a halfbreed he had hardly seen since they were kids, to revisit that very cemetery he had often passed and apply this little power he was known by Santee to possess to detect a unique strain of radioactivity in the human body: that is, at a certain place there in the graveyard, maybe two side-by-side places: on the possibility that whoever was buried there (two women, he said) had in them this unique strain of residue that, when found in the human body, sometimes wasn’t waste but an opposite, or so some western Indians still said, who according to Santee—

"Didn’t I pick you up once before?" Mayn asked quietly as if from his steady, intent eyes.

The man didn’t think so, unless Mayn had looked different.

They pulled in at a turnpike "gas world" planned with a long approach configuration offering a variety of services. Mayn phoned Flick at Lincoln’s, got no reply, phoned his own place, then tried Flick again; now guessed that he was on the final curve of a collective that was being daydreamt by those incapable of other dream modes Mayn flashed the Hispanic mother about to enter a police stationhouse somewhere in Manhattan north (future? or right now?).

The blue car had passed them again and had stopped in the emergency lane a quarter of a mile down glowing violet now in the twilight; a patrol car pulled over behind the car, the hitch-hiker stopped talking for a second, Mayn pulled out onto the road again, having forgotten to get gas. A state trooper sauntered up to greet the driver of the violet car, whom Mayn half-recognized as they drove by, a heavy, burnished young man in a large pale hat and steely-reflecting aviator sunglasses.

The hitch-hiker was explaining that Santee was an alias for a man who had sold to a New Hampshire paper a photograph of the hitch-hiker and a friend blindfolded apparently before a Cuban firing squad (certainly, despite the hat on one apparently female member, it wasn’t a firing squad composed of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball players), when it was two photos not one, but, alas, his father had recognized his T-shirt and his left ear—Mayn would never forget the pleasant cactus-green double-lobe—and that had done it for the father, and the strange thing was that Santee’s compensation to the busy hitchhiker who had felt inclined to kill him was to give him a job to do—no money guarantee, just the chance to try his gift on peculiar ground: for—

"You said," said Mayn, "that the cemetery in question was on the outskirts of the town where I picked you up."

The hitch-hiker had not said; but this was true: for the halfbreed in this town that Santee gave a code name to had known him in the old days as a "Trace Window"—some weighty notion left with a Creek tribe by one of the halfbreed’s great-great relations though this relation was a Natchay, a unique survivor having by glad suicidal rite accompanied his king the Sun King to his funeral but then curiously and scandalously survived a treble dose of the tobacco hypnotic ritually designed to render unconscious such loyal followers so they could then be painlessly strangled. Those running the funeral did not know what to do with him; they were afraid, and so they used the potent future-dreams he subsequently began to have as an excuse to run him out of their chiefdom—which was just before the French came in again and wiped out the Natchay, which this drug-proof Indian had dreamed, while that ritual suicide he had entered and lived through left him not only with these dreams and other dreams of turning but with powers he never used except that of living a long time upon joining the Creeks to the north soon afterward. He arrived on foot with a bag of bear ribs and a limitlessly self-renewing supply of root jelly, but he left such ideas with them as that some women and men could receive, like windows, light in beam-waves or sun-shadows from people who had in their bodies an alloy mineral, radiant, potential; and this halfbreed—

"What was the code name?"

"You wouldn’t ask like that if you didn’t know," said the gaunt man beside Mayn, "if you didn’t know a’ready." Mayn in the corner of
his
eye felt the man eye-cornering
him.

"Ira Lee is no halfbreed," said Mayn, and stepped on the gas. His companion seemed not to notice that they were exiting too soon, not the New York City exit; he wanted to make a point, he was batonning his finger at the windshield. It was no ordinary homogeneous solid solution, that alloy, not Chilean copper and Bolivian tin woven atom for atom reciprocally in each other’s interstices; it was radioactive but open-ended so the contagion or thrust of it was up for grabs. So this Ira Lee, once twice three times approached Santee, recalled the "Trace Window" kid, grown now to be Mayn’s present company, heretofore held up in an open-air restaurant near Minneapolis with a fishing friend, both blindfolded if not smothered with their napkins while one of the thieves removed his stocking mask because it inflamed an abcess in his forehead and a snapshot taken of the two men in their college T-shirts, spare ribs held hidden behind their backs, found its way into the hands of Santee—

—"also a code name," Mayn added with a weight of miles and miles of historic small talk from this itinerant specialist—

—then or in its later splice with the Cuban squad, and then indirectly the hitch-hiker had been drawn into Santee’s employ to apply his gift to some "Windrow" grave or graves whether "Trace Window" received ordinary garden-variety radioactive message or that residual potentiality now at rest, now dangerously creative—detectible originally among certain southwestern ancients who arrived thirstily among the proto-Natchay of Tennessippi and might kill or cure with the mineral concentration they periodically mustered of which, some generations later, the one Natchay who survived his own loyal funeral to join the Creeks and be ancestor to the halfbreed Ira Lee—

"Perhaps he
was
a halfbreed," said Mayn, feeling as if he had slipped into another form, feeling the city and the twilight nearer; "we sure
called
him that, among ourselves—"

—this great-great relation bequeathed the knowledge to perhaps a grand-nephew who found it once in the mid-nineties uniquely duplicated in emanations from a proud, hungry western Indian passing through Pennsylvania as if seeking in the wrong direction his boat or his clan and living on an afterlife of nonetheless fertile if strong-tasting crocodile gums not to mention a mask of mosquito bites targeted around his bright eyes—

"I think I have to drop you off here," said Mayn, but had to laugh at the man’s calmness in the face of interruption, who then said he couldn’t see why, and offered to pay for a tank of premium but was not accepted.

They pulled out of a gas station and reacquired the turnpike pulse; they laughed, they had had a true emergency, for the tank had taken three or four gallons more than the gauge said it had any right to, and Mayn felt he pulled closer and closer to the spirit in which his father had, as he had flatly said, "Come full circle only nobody’s here."

"You
have it," said the man, and if Mayn did not know how the hitchhiker had come to be known as a Trace Window, he understood that the man was receiving some trace alloy from
him.

And as the tunnel distantly approached upon one curve of twilight and he thought he needed to drop the man this side of the river, the man identified now the emanations from that noble Indian adrift in Pennsylvania in ‘94 or ‘95, bearing a tremendous though dried bison tongue with but one bite out of it showing in the cutaway section live sleeping rootlets of the tongue’s normally soft valve needles which might be where the potential energy came from that this now horseless wanderer studied with his hand in his lion-skin bag around the tongue thinking the miles away maybe unconscious that in his body, spiced or not by the patient force untapped quite yet by hand and mind, he bore the original alloy recently identified to the hitch-hiker as deposits of alloy unique in that their solid solution occurred in
nature
—

"Do you know what happened to that blue car?" Mayn asked his passenger evenly.

"This
is a blue car," said the man who seemed weary from these ancient travels but bent upon bearing out to the end his account of why he had been where Mayn had found him: yet first the alloy, the natural alloy—it had been created way back when by a rare corridor of weather from Canada lofting south (in the spiral forms of future hailstones to be precipitated eventually into one of the morphic mountains of the Southern Rockies said to be fed by the compacted flesh and blood of climbers quick-sucked by the killer sky-blue worm or tiny Pressure Snake) elements of a northern ore gray-greenish and in luster horny but radioactive with mysteriously forked potentiality through, at the northern source, a bind with the spiral forms of hailstone structure and, at the southern end, a bind with flesh and blood of mountaineers so recently sucked and Pressure-Snake-processed into that steep ground that their extreme compression had not yet unriddled its energies into the dispersed dreams or thoughts (depending on which authority you fall for) peculiar to these mountains, and then and only then was the now-or-never moment of alloy.

"Why ‘forked,’ " said Mayn, "because I know this story"—or some of it, he felt; and he asked the hitch-hiker to find a map in the glove compartment, while Mayn reached his right arm between the seats and was able to draw out the heavyish pistol, put it in his lap, change steering hands, and, feeling in the operation able to drive without thinking, transfer the pistol down between his seat and the door, first ascertaining that the revolver was at least partially loaded.

"Forked," went on the hitch-hiker, his eyes closed, the mapless glove compartment shut again, ‘‘because the particle runoff might
kill,
like your regular radioactive waste, though this was probably crypto-thorium and in those days might cause breaks in skin, in flesh, a hole in your head no less, Ray; or it might—" the hitch-hiker-historian-comedian-dowser-genius yawned—"might yield you
energies,
some as unthinkable as half the future of the planet was getting the name ‘unthinkable’ ‘‘—but being a Trace Window kept one on the move not just employment-wise but staying away from these contracts which can be tough, witness this afternoon’s consultancy which was now history in the little notebook, info to be passed to alias Santee—that’s right, Alias is his first name!—whose interest in those graves was almost as odd as the driver kind enough to pick up this ol’ Trace Window whatever prearranged coincidence this hitch was due to.

He pulled out to pass a red van and caught sight of his burnished forehead in the mirror. He pulled away and knew he did not increase the distance from his father for he could make it anything he wanted as if he could re-grid his land by what he knew was true in his skull and hands and chest, and was behind his eyes.

"You said
I
have it?" he said to the dreaming, thinking, resting man.

"Yes, and what you have feels like the vein of it I found coming up in that graveyard today single and double but more odd than really double, it feels like the real original, it makes me feel like a three-dimensional window and then some. But don’t credit me with wisdom. I just have this thing I can do, O.K.?"

"Which graves?" said Mayn, and held back so sternly the jolting guesswork he had just done that he felt news pass from one window to the other and back the news he now heard.

"Two ladies named Mayn. One with an
e
—you know them? do you come from that town? I guess I know you do, because the traces I registered at Sarah’s grave (died 1945) and at Margaret’s (died in the fifties) had the very same cycle, except the force from one was a lot greater than the force from the other."

Mayn laughed. "I hope it was the second one that was stronger, because there’s no body
in
the 1945 grave."

The tunnel pulled the line of cars in. His distance from his father had not altered and it pulled away from the son until what stood between was not distance but what they had talked about, which was about half of it garbage but obstacle only to the son’s departure, and so he had stayed for upwards of three hours, forgetting for minutes and minutes the M. H. Mayne diaries once upon a time in the cellar, once upon a time in his grandfather’s hands, who had exclaimed about a diagram in volume two, while the energy questions Jim and Mel had "dealt with" this afternoon kept the northern bison tongue’s thunderous future where it belonged, much less the hand around it of a hungry Navajo traveler once content to observe and describe the cloudy messages of moist air columned up to mushroom out at the top telling a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, a Prince content to record a noctilucent cloud so low that he smelled seared metal and some flesh’s welcome of fresh-ground cornmeal mush, a hunter’s breakfast just out of reach for an eastbound Prince bearing alloy of hailstone-spiraled crypto-thorium and the blue-worm-compacted, mountain-injected lives of those climber-heroes Anglo and Indian whom Indians west and east would seem to have immortalized in traces windowed alike in white skin and red skin and borne not just in red but in the white of Margaret, whose active residue now named radioactive proved less so than the void of Jersey ground below for Pete’s sake her
daughter’s earlier
marker! So that Mayn, rejecting the passenger’s offer of toll money, had to ask if the man really knew what he was talking about and whence came his credentials.

Why, Uncle Willy. And the year was ‘45. Nobody asks to be a Trace

Window, but it was the afternoon of a fall day and walking out of town along the Negro section parallel with the Jersey Central tracks, he had been yelled at by Ira from his porch and had detoured in that direction not without some amiable hostility only to be transfixed on the first of the three wooden steps leading to the low porch by Uncle Willy, who was Ira’s mother’s uncle and a full-blooded Creek by repute though he gave no support to this idea, identifying himself as descendant of a Natchez who had married into a Creek community. Don’t come any further he said—what do you feel?