Women and Men (13 page)

"The final Moon launch," the girl said, nodding fast.

"The first
night
Moon launch," he said, not owlishly but maybe as if there was more where that came from than this love he’s feeling.

This girl with a hand on his arm, this girl he sat down next to today in the grandstand at the Press Site three miles from the launch pad—Mayn has told her only that he was twice with the Associated Press but got into something better. Spaced his words for some funny effect of more point than his thought claimed, not that AP was ever bad; the old UP was worse before UPI, but that was before even his time and they had such skinflints at UP that their newsmen were said to belong to the Downhold Expenses Club (she smiled). He didn’t know why he told her that, it was like someone else’s divorce story. He did have credentials in pocket and he was a fair listener when it came to Skylab housekeeping, but this trip was a hunch-gamble on the Chilean economist, no more to do with space green stamps than with—he heard it speak in him—a much-chewed place name—say
Choor
—some incomplete place out of those accounts of Margaret’s that proved his as well—for instance, when she allowed as how monsters had been there all the time (Where? in the mountains? At
least)
she was appropriating
his
idea, he reminded her. Why, so it was, she said and laughed a little hoot of hers (brief as a thought more than a piece of a laugh; but, in a family way, the counterpart of the grandfather’s
Haw).
But then Jim heard her say a thing he learned from, though he stored the learning away (and resolutely could not use it when a time soon came for it when he had a falling out with his grandmother), and what she said was that maybe the monsters couldn’t appear
until
the Princess of those stories had left Choor. Well, that
killed
him! It was some surprise freedom of mind.

What will he tell the person here in the tavern whose fingers he feels on his arm? It’s a question. Why? What has she come in on? She spoke first today, she noted four youngsters, three boys and a very flaxen girl who was doing all the talking down in front of the grandstand: high-school award winners, designers of experiments to be carried out in Skylab’s orbiting blender, and one of these smart kids who didn’t win came down anyway. Here at night in the tavern he feels the fingers let go of him there above his trick elbow. The two owners of the arms before him that narrowed the space but now widen it are turning. Today Mayn and the girl sat in the Press Site grandstand watching the white rocket three miles away at the edge of the sea as if it would go at last when they were ready, its sides steaming and the red gantry holding it at arm’s length; and the flat sea was as flat as the land. A blonde girl down in front of the grandstand suddenly looked away from the three in glasses and short-sleeved shirts with their laminated cards pinned to the pocket and searched the grandstand so intently that Mayn felt he missed a point; the blonde girl opened a giant sketch pad and showed the boys, looking at each of them, and made marks on her pad like writing, not drawing; and Mayn kept looking around for the man who was in his mind all the time from December—the South American gentleman—man from Chile whose words telescoped with some unformulable acceleration less to connect Mayn with Chile than, later, to mean he had to catch up irrationally with the Chilean (that’s not right) before his own life changed unrecognizably: so the Chilean was why Mayn came down for another launch, having already tried in vain to get in touch with a Hispanic Voice of America reporter to find out who, what, and where the Chilean was.

Mayn looked behind the young artist along the grandstand and she was leaning forward, her arms across her knees, and where at the small of her back the beltless top of her jeans stuck stiffly out he saw down to the parting and there a sheen of downy shadow, not a stitch.

A dark swim is what’s called for, the water close, the grand night missing on both burners thus far, so that with his monstrous immunity to dreaming he will bring in the night himself; as in great hollow daylight Mayn had tried to bring on that night with that maverick’s new meteorology that he didn’t understand because he needed to check out coastline-atmosphere-chance theory professionally catastrophic for the old maverick meteorologist who did not care (nor gave written handouts because it’s only human interest to a newsman if that; and the chain of papers Mayn’s with has him do really important dull stuff, and yet the novel weather back there in that railroad apartment in the city holds his mind at bay and he will say it’s unique, no more)—so he could leave his San Antonio trousers and his Boston sport jacket on the wide beach and mysteriously ease his way out a hundred, two hundred yards and lie on his back looking up through the two or three constellations he will identify if given the chance, looking through them at imponderable speed.

For a long time he has been marked to die quite soon unless the event in whatever space it came to got shifted to one other person. How do you know a thing like that? But how do you feel? Little, apparently.

Alone, sunny side down in your motel Breakfast World, he got the speeding up and slowing down like a compact future-pill in the snowy grain of hominy slid in an inertial mass before him by maple-sugar high-school arms and legs.

A slow slow drawl either male or female is heard saying, "If I knew for sure, I’d take every penny out of the bank and bet it on the nose." The speeding and slowing, the rubber soul falling, he’s tried to step outside it. But this evening all he did, after a first course that turned out to be his dinner of a glutton’s dozen (= 2 dozen) slick, cloudy-cupped oysters, was do what he didn’t much want to do—leave a good fish place on a quiet, breezy pier when he needed another orbit of oysters—open and swimming at him. Yet, after a meal leisurely as a swim, though bothered by a skydiving FLNC Cuban bragging in Spanish at a nearby table, Mayn was racing in a rented car to get himself and the young woman to the ominous briefing at Canaveral, laughing with her at the grandmotherly waitress’s words (in a little apron), "Have a nice day tonight"—and now, after the smoke, the surprising letdown of a briefing where he looked again for the Chilean, he walks into a tavern over in Cocoa to feel, in those separated arms and the broad back on the right, that a position has been taken up in advance of his coming. Here first. The light is infra-reddish and the neck here first could be Native American.

He and the young woman have still only just come into the roadhouse. In less than a second a lot can happen, not his fault. Why does he know that she wants to ask for more about his son and daughter? He has already said he doesn’t know much about his son right now. Newspaper people who act as if they have seen it all. Is whatever you say a cover for something else? He could ask this girl. Why is she more a young girl tonight for having stepped out of her jeans and slipped down over her a sleeveless black dress? So light or smooth she seems to have nothing under. Which is halfway to the truth. He looks for anyone he knows. The stodgy gypsies of the press are not here, he thinks.

In this light only the girl. She’s taken off the badge that told him who she was with when they picked each other up this afternoon, going easy on each other, letting the
National Geographic
guy with the cardboard tub of fried chicken behind them explore women-in-space, a month is a long time, she’s a token woman but she doesn’t get just a token orbit. "Token of what?" the girl turned around and said, and while she had a mole under her ear like a magically hung trinket, she was her hair, as she turned: "There’s a lot of interesting non-sex feasible if you know about it," she said awkwardly—and in the short dark curls he found a quick silk of rusty orange that was only light maybe. So Mayn saw all the different hair around in the grandstand and saw that he appreciated his own gray hair, never wear anything on your head, give the follicles a chance to see—see what? what’s left out—of a chunk of information reported like a taxable sum in the submitted copy, dispatch from Geneva (New York?), Delaware Water Gap development, history’s parts of a mechanical being conceived but not yet invented by us all, so given a chance at the light, the hair follicles see both ways, curling outways yet double-ended to tickle used brain cells so the brain can dream they’re growing friendly through skull and
dura mater
to touch the void. So the
National Geographic
photographer didn’t handle the girl’s challenge, and he said, "
I
don’t want to know what they do up there." Mayn was touched by the girl and heard her words before they were spoken: "Soon, in a few years, people won’t be into sex so much, it’s getting toward the end of this kind of dopy thing." When the
National Geo
man said low and fast, "Let’s have a little eye contact when you say that," Mayn declined to deal with the guy.

Tonight all changed. At the press conference tonight the new problem called forth the old challenge. An official who at another point through the smoke introduced a voice from Texas said on the contrary the damage sustained by Skylab during launch into orbit today is exactly the kind of thing an
un
manned operation is insufficiently adaptable to counteract. Heat shield torn off. One wing of solar cells undeployed, maybe torn off. Have to guess what’s gone. Tomorrow’s launch scrubbed. Before they launch the crew, they need to work out how to erect an improvised heat shield to replace the one ripped off today, time to think up a parasol.

Ballpoints through the smoke adapt to a director’s language picking up that it is a canned answer. Like an exec’s at a chemical-waste-disposal conference Mayn covered. Or sporting goods, all-weather, good-down-to-sixteen-degrees sleeping bags—gauge the impact on sleeping bags of NASA’s Mylar insulation (light, cheap)—don’t flirt with business, either get into it, make your million and get out—or stay out to begin with. Which isn’t the same thing as spending on insulation now so you’ll have it even if you theoretically haven’t got the money, it’s worth spending to install, say, that "cap" of insulation in the attic. The girl casts her eyes restlessly so that she radiates some subtle trouble. He’s not bright; he’s just looking. He couldn’t place her until their eyes crossed going opposite ways and she was the one with the sketch pad who had been taken by Mayn’s companion for one of the students, and there’s still a point about her he missed.

Hours later now he is touched by the rented car outside the tavern like a familiar object from elsewhere. All because of talking to this smart young woman he likes—who objected to the word
girl
even when he said that he would be glad to be called a boy, hell; and she added, You’re white.

In the car they discussed the heat shield and the parasol; the lack of resistance in space—no air—the solar cells that, like color TV, neither of them would claim to be able to explain.

And now, he listens to the girl and she to herself, "Do you think they’ll get a new heat shield up?" and when he smiles at her they both know that apart from her knowing more than he, the peaceful awkwardness of her saying again what she’s just—they’ve just—been saying in the car is, well, shy and warm. He is waiting for her to give point to the evening and the day. O.K., it’s about time for the rednecks to have completed turning. Say
redneck:
the light speeds into orange and hangs. A short man standing close up behind a woman in white pants with his hands on her stomach raises and lowers his thumbs and she gives him the elbow and he steps out from behind her, both of them laughing. Mayn turns back to the gap in front.

See the neck on the right, above the T-shirt, below the crewcut hair. Hair light like straw (waiting for a match); light in weight; not thick: thinning, they used to say: balding, isn’t that what they say? You don’t have to do anything here, but the angle’s arms are multiplying and you aren’t all here, it’s only the extreme vividness of what’s here that makes you here. Rather than where? Somewhere—not a word for a news story—charted to the fourth-warped, foot-minute future-past, two hundred miles out in an orbit Mayn’s not up to saying he understands, a home awaits entry, a house waits to be held, an experiment in living, the eye of a compartmented lab will scan scars in Earth. Yes, this life of his coming up on the meg that he’s telling himself his own story of wouldn’t be shapely like that household overhead underfoot. Aren’t you talking to this girl all this time the words might seem to an outsider only inside you? He loves her maybe. The he that is you. That home could house an orbital bomb but is not itself a re-entry vehicle. Go back to the motel and get your brown Skylab press manual on the unmade bed under a sky-blue buttondown shirt you wish they would just take away and wash, though you never said that to your one-time loved now lost wife whose messages or auroral emissions you go on picking up though the bang-up in a vacuum of near silence is now years and years away so the distance hits you and waits the way the future stands ready. The one here called you recycled. You get the manual, get it into your hands and speak with authority. Say it slow this time; you’ve no story to file, no pressure to fire it off. You’d do it fast—like brushing up on the stuff. But you needn’t. It’s being written, phoned in, taped, computed on the AP computers—stories assembled by others all around you, though you trust not here in this highway tavern where you’re looking at the back of a neck in low light. Why have you slowed down and separated every word? To breathe? To laugh yourself out of getting a one-night crush?

Slowly it comes out.
Red neck.
The red back of a neck. Creased more hard than deep. Creased with a wildness and object-deep finality like scars that some writer maybe of fiction’lized journalism dive-bombs like he knows the entire infra-fraction of your American infra-redneck. Scars of what America was? Yeah, scars; that is, just scars. Say
redneck.
It means a blue-collar male American likely rural often southern maybe farm, who works pretty hard if he’s got work and ready for any outsider who happens to come along carrying his light instead of his bushel. Wait: say
redneck:
order yourself one: but here are two rednecks, turning on their two stools between which is the vacant stool, the one in the T-shirt very broad, the other in a red-and-white bandanna and attached to it in front a big red-and-white-and-blue leather medallion that looks like an eye with a hole in it.