Women and Men (35 page)

Upon which—like the wind—he was not there. A boy propelled by what? By boydom. Propelled like Mercury, like Andrew Jackson horsing through woodland or Raritan brave returning through woods to his hidden canoe already as clear in his mind’s eye as the birch branch his eye missed by an inch— propelled through the kitchen threshold’s doorway to the back porch, but— hold it! thunders the interrogator, do you mean
Andrew
was propelled like an Indian? Where’s he headed?, past the apples all but the two which he takes in one hand, the leafed stems hard in the fork of his fingers, out over his grandparents’ back steps—Yea, me!—touching always the same two, propelled by where he’s going, not to be winded for years and years, if then, nor to know that if he’s running like the wind home or downtown or between, he is making his own breeze until someday he comes right up to one of these receding obstacles and beyond it a wind more real: runs down Main Street during a world war and is, he knows, seen by his somewhat unloved father from the newspaper office and Jim’s hard breathing holds in the body of its heartbeaten deep gasps the future sounds of words working underground un-sequenced in his mind.

I know what’s going on, the diva’s personal doctor refrained from saying, hearing again the coughing going on nearby. The coughing, locally quite ordinary but more largely odd, was either the multiple child from some earlier hope (breakfasting here, being born there; building, explaining; crawling toward glassen screens at either end of an apartment; leaning against a smoking grownup; doing its Rotation homework), calling out the window (or’d we say
falling?), or
the coughing was our late, if central, century’s very air going the signal Indians one better and thickening its own devolution so far and away as to precipitate the very throats without which it could not
be
coughed. The coughing as heard by the doctor with its way of acquiring in his mind heads of hair, chins, narrowed mustachioed eyes with each successful cough (if we understand aright) is yet so hard to hear that, is someone
else
doing the hearing? and the physician’s personal current has got crossed with that other actual experience?

—
which?
asks the interrogator in a next room—

—why, of a child somewhere at night, a contemporary child in its sleep with a contact hack caused by too much prescribed breathing.

He knows he almost knew himself on waking in the early morning and oh! if and when you had a body (to use the grandmother’s word) to tell that to at once, you didn’t have to tell yourself at times that you’re taking yourself too seriously (yet he doesn’t need an intimate to tell him, oh guess he’s really asking for it) when he’s strangely huffy and doesn’t think why except that the more beckoning feels the reckless anger of woe, of huffy mumbler, the less he reckons and the closer-up he comes to the wall but never the door of that next room where he is known for what he is. And sometimes at his moments of early-morning waking much alone taking the bait of another day he doesn’t go on with what he’s found waiting for him, the daydream, taking it from there, a horde of folk but there’s just one of him, at most two, two sons while we’re at it, for the horde aren’t him but are all others that he’s like, and waking he finds them waiting and knows how he’s like them, yet he does have a brother elsewhere in the house—

—two sons, two sons of
a
bitch, was what Jim for one heard his father through walls and years slowly say to Jim’s mother Sarah in the middle of the New Jersey night, meaning—what? to go right up to her? or meaning what he had said into the office phone one day when Jim was leaving with a printing job: "she’s everything to me"—yet

who are we bespeaking of? demands our late-century all-purpose interrogator in a second language, ours, turning away while quick-whipping us with the end of his unseen plated tail which refuses to fall off, while our adopted language if it gets away from him can’t go far in this next room where the door is somewhere closeted in the wall and we have no time for breaks except those clean breaks with self when light leaves us shed from us into the waters of other lives till those relations we see tongue-in-wing and mercurial mirror that we reflect, return us to a curve of angels or a prospect whose mere form we are.

But answer the first question: who we bespeaking of? And then: what’s meant by
our adopted language?
is it ours thrown quoit by quoit on the wing at moving necks and reaching hands—is it our tongue transplanted by the interrogator? or a language adopted by us on getting up first thing in the morning?

He saw it two ways, and turned back and forth. (Wait—who is this He you are implicating? inquires the interrogator with patience in some deadly proportion or, we almost remember, inverse width to whatever he is doing behind us—and breathes in our direction, from all over the room we could swear though even he knows he could never be all things to us, though from his kind we hope and know it couldn’t be one of the eight sacred genres of breathing the no longer dusty correspondent-woman, we already recall, will study long after she tape-recorded a load of slow-burning Buddhist monk and we now know came from that scene in Southeast Asia direct to Grace Kimball’s loosely structured workshop in New York, but the one kind of breathing that they say can be felt everywhere in the room—because by this cool specialist it couldn’t be—although we have only heard, or heard of, these eight special breathings and can we prorate them over, say, five earning years?, we’ve now got the hardware to do it with)—as we sit literally riveted to a chair brass-anchored to a deck, while on twin screens, miles separate from each other but overlapping, we can conceive of the cosm our brass anchors float in.

He saw it two ways, and later these were enough apart that if he had gone to a tennis stadium instead of an opera he’d have been like a fan following the ball during a women’s match, the court-length ground strokes woven for a minute at a time (read
woven gracefully)
(read
artfully)
cat’s cradle where if you look down from above each wondrous taut drive threads baseline to baseline
(walloped nurturingly, nurturing the moment’s nature,
read) to fade like a radar blip not instantly, across a tropical storm’s heavens that seem possible. Yes, two ways he saw it, looking there, then back to here, and so on, following; but now was different; he stayed at his grandmother Margaret’s down the street. Years, a few short years passed in the night; and he woke and soon reported to her some fully illustrated idea he had in his head but now he was too old to go into the next room and jump into her bed where he had once learned to whistle, so he listened to the gray doves until, still one-third asleep, it came to him that they were the doves he always listened to, and listened if it was a Sunday to red-round-faced Mr. Barcalow’s trotter pass down the wide street, the sandy roll of the high wheels of the sulky and no doubt a flash of a white carnation in the brown velvet tab of his checked sport jacket’s lapel; and Jim didn’t know how he leaned into his future, certainly that he (as we who contain him by being held inside him hardly know) one day might stand outdoors among thousands (he never minded crowds, didn’t have to stand out among them) and listen to the black man King who had a dream he called out into the amplified air of the nation’s capital, that he had a dream, hear the noise, quick, it went right through you: similarly with Margaret’s senior grandson, as, inclining through a dream that made the talk of liquid doves bubbling under the roof at dawn and within his body seem to have borne his daydream across the whole of the night when he’d in reality started "doing" it (as we later came to say) as he woke up—in this waking dream he’d seen into the narrow barrel of a Colt revolver, early Colt (early as Hartford but not Paterson), held and looked at so long he could identify the spiraling dark inside the barrel, that belonged "by inheritance" to his grandmother ("But it’s not
really
mine") down the wrong end of which, we greedily conceive (yet
is
it the wrong end?), to a capsuled space thirty years later than this boyhood dream beyond Alaska over the Straits if you want to go that route where many men looked down at the papers and numbers before them, acknowledging that the numbers were on the papers and thus the two could be held in the mind together, and, whatever their legs independently arrived at under the table, these men were able above the table, sometimes fulminating but on paper, to agree on some Upper Limits—boundaries as credible as the bound our Rotating, home working, testable child knew to be that Earthly halo the tropopause where the temperature stops falling, jet winds hollo by at 200 MPH, and the new Everests that have cast off from Earth and have grown like the aftermath of explosion reach their limits which are not your mountain-type peaks but broad mesas in the sky, and, upwards of eight miles from Earth one may pass, masked and well, into these mesas downward like a force aimed at discharging from these cumulo-nimbus clouds mountainous rainstorms which Earth takes in return and not personally.

And finding himself inside the blued barrel’s bore spiraled by its rifling, the boy had rather look at the Colt
outside
—this is the pistol he knows—that works effectively for God’s sake mside but is a magic weight built of metal like rock and, lying personal in the open palm, was so made for the living hand it seems a growth evolved by the evolved choice of the armed hand in which it has appeared not down a sleeve but from necessities of war— that’s it!

And this "growth" in the hand is, in the mood of some foresight that threatens memory, never absolutely unloaded (his memory told him, as it went beyond his grandfather and grandmother’s warning about loaded guns thrill-ingly to see that between your last look at the chamber and now, a minute or a second later, it might have got loaded again) while at the same time he recalled checking out each chamber, never (a voice in the daydream said) for
sure
empty as soon as the cylinder had turned that next chamber up into firing alignment. How many guns did his grandfather Alexander mean? This one? Two guns? All guns?

Did he dream one night? He’s sleeping downstreet at his grandmother and grandfather’s and his dream doesn’t matter, might’s well be the Saturday afternoon, as it soon will be, the screen of the Walter Reade theater downtown, a good Indian saying with craft at the corners of the eyes, "Me Jim"—don’t matter partly because he always had this core feeling that he
didn’t
dream— that is, asleep at night—and his grandmother said it was all right not to— though she had never known an Indian who didn’t and it did help you to know what you wanted to do, but if Jim didn’t, he didn’t—and it’s what the dream leads to in the morning first thing that matters.

Yet before his grandmother Margaret, her gray hair down her back in a loose plait, her eyes soft and aged with sleep, takes inspiration for a story she tells him while they get breakfast on the table that he never thinks of as, you know, competition on top of the dream (early-day dream likely, or
daybreak
but non-sleep), there was once upon a time in the lighted dark
his
(whatever it was) dream that
provides
the inspiration for her story he guesses was made up and thirty years later as late as 1970 and later that old dream came back maintained by the one of her stories it apparently inspired. In the long barrel of the night the boy Jim was ahead of the horse he gripped, a horse sort of made headless by the dark heavens and the mesa of the western night though unquestionably there with him, like a wild friend sharing in no language but that of intense speed some aim of the boy’s to get away to another place which was a place of rescue without losing the place between which he and the heart-lunging horse were leaving miles that no one knew about and you would never prove in the grandfather’s travel books, which were
South
American anyhow
{Tschijfely’s Ride
skimmed from half-finished chapter to chapter, from up here clear down to the big turtles with backs like original blank face masks facing down the sky’s blank fiesta, the dust jacket picturing Mr. Tschiffely atop his horse), and miles unprovable principally because you couldn’t isolate where you’d started from—until he and the stolen pony (it was always stolen) were running with their own speed yet, too, of light from the fires glittering all around them smelting the desert mesa with unheard talk where an internecine conference was in progress, and awaited them in a shore of campfires he had to take one by one, wouldn’t he?, except he was being held where he was so all he could see was all of them around him, a great circle, see?, or horseshoe, what they would do, but being the center he and the pony wouldn’t know where to go among these lights and had the impression that they need not run run run because by now the ground under them and the sky over them were their wings and they were the hinge. But the hinge, then, for a circling voice—he had words for it later but not then at thirteen that came at him from the campfires, in Indian that he knew he understood, but what were the American words that said the same thing?, he had heard them often at home but knew them only by memory, as he did in later years when memory told him he never dreamt.

His grandmother, who no longer read to him, knew how to appreciate what happened next, all that was going on, she really saw it. "Why, that’s
almost
what happened to the Far East
Princess"
—Margaret looked up from the steaming frying pan into the ventilator over the range and gave a laugh as if she couldn’t help it till it began to come out: and in those days, she said— as if Jim’s maybe just waking daydream was of that time too—it got dark faster than the bird with its lunchtime horse tasty and warm under its wing could fly, though urged on by the Eastern Princess whom the bird would not land until they had reached the flower-shaped mountain which her father the king of the Long White Country thousands of air miles away (since his daughter was determined to travel anyway) had asked them to make an inspection tour of in order to learn all there was to know about the Indian way of doing things. So the great bird went without the lunch held captive under its wing and partly because it already held in its beak another horse, the white-and-black pony the Navajo Prince from a cliff, a crag, far ahead had called out to the Eastern Princess up in the sky on her bird was hers as a gift from all the fast ponies in the pack of wild, royal, and vanishing horses that traveled with him this day that a great sing was to be held, the ceremonial Night Way to heal a hole in the head of the Prince’s mother who sang her own song saying she would let the hole in her head be while, visible to others, spirits of many shapes flew in and out of this demon den in the upper middle of her forehead and her son the Prince had gone away to consult a Sioux cousin in the Northeast, get his thinking on the subject since he had twenty daughters and the Prince had been coming back over the plains and among the sheer canyons when he had seen the giant bird and the Eastern Princess, and, seeing the bird dive and take one horse under its wing and aim at another that was swinging wildly off back to the pack, the fastest and most beautiful, had called out over the miles from his lonely crag that that horse was hers, upon which the bird, swooping again, perhaps concerned that its mistress would find a new steed and desert the bird of the Long White Country, took the gift horse in its beak and flew on: which is all background to the twilight arrival at the flower-shaped mountain as preparations went on for the Night Sing to heal the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head where as night came you could see some of the demons settling down in there, not moving around any more, they liked it there. So when the Eastern Princess flew in on her giant pale-colored bird she was accepted as a harbinger of some change the Night Way chants might bring. And when asked if she saw the demons with winged heads and fat cheeks passing in and out of the Prince’s mother’s hole-in-the-head said only that she did not—but that she did find herself seeing into the thoughts of the young, handsome Indian Prince whom she had met on the way and who pointed to her now as an event he had brought to his people.