Women and Men (141 page)

And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?

Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend—a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it—and any other females, the more the merrier, why not?, the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour—the program people—and you among them but not of them, Jim.

Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs—no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper)—start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read—and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you
want
to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk—but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise—about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son—taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?

I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up old city bus, which he can do but I don’t want to talk about it—and about the crazed Hispanic off-islanders now attending big-league baseball games in our shared city (the Jews are better at picking up Spanish, he says, and he’s right, than the Irish—all of which explains how well I know the distance between that school and my second home, my girl’s).

And she was my beautiful, wise girl who took individualized driver training from me and was my girl from junior high until I left and later so did she, my future, though didn’t leave the tenement itself with a row of galvanized cans her intensely white-haired father the super—Jewish—get all info into lead!—kept always in their place so random Venusian descending via sun-fueled greenhouse-ship saw, through the deteriorating cement of the building’s brick, a sometime vacant "railroad" we might make better use of for an hour and a half, he saw his cans there on the sidewalk as field batteries, standing reserve, ammo. Accessories in my head long after the fact. I can feel for him, Jim, right down to the red nick on his jaw twice a week, and I am thirty and counting, and—as my esteemed substitute teacher once pointed out it would be painfully different for a childless
female
long-term con—wonder if I will have a daughter to protect, or just
have
one. You knew something because you said after me
She is your future,
getting it straight (your only child?).

So you can see where I am coming from. Neither of us dark to the other as I guess you’ve thought, driving up here or then with that one hard kernel of corn between your fingers looking at it and then Juan and back to that tooth of corn—do you have it, still, do you know where you can lay your hand on it?

And where is this here intrinsic continuum of message being (smile) devoured, by the way? In your hand? Your head? growing in your ear? Does it raise a blister in your fingerprint? Does it make you mad? Or, more like, make real the billions of millimeters between mind particles each with one interface exactly met by the other, and if you cheat the world’s jailed jailer of its substitutes, maybe you see further than you’ve a right to. If you go in for rights, I don’t, I go beyond.

But if the future is bent on some path, the latest in communications out of an electronic suitcase you mentioned that might go off or speak in words of two syllables, linking Vermont, New Mexico, Chile, and this prison-redoubt where I send out myself honeycombed with light, where I have transcended the passerby who carelessly strikes off the head of the sunflower, this sev-enteen-hundred-toilet redoubt ringed by hills full of white farmhouse roofs and fenceposts topped by talking crows and the glint of earless mobile homes like truck-stop diners in the trees—Oh I know they’re there—hills groaning full of firearms and tax deductions and howling with loose-skinned hounds— no, a hookup you don’t hang up on, a new path communicating between here and there, man and man—O.K., then, so what’s the economics if with all this new communication system there is nothing to communicate?

This was the point that our sometime substitute in the old days, Ruth Heard, have I described her?, fresh from England, would make; and if she wasn’t looking at you with the blue eyes and the brown curls sticking way out all around, you knew she would be in a second. So much for economics, Jim, the vein of my opening cover for scanners of outgoing transmissions but secretly in its very openness for you too, Jim, and for others outside, if, and I give you leave, you have shown this mish-mash of news. Isn’t there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you’re still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.

You’ve been in South America, but didn’t see anything, you claim: like,
I
have been
here!
But remember the grasshopper? I bet you do. Alighted upon the biologist’s ship three hundred seventy miles from land, what had that grasshopper in mind? Through what air did it make that jump? what vein? I am without a lab here except the darkroom. Photography’s the program here, since C.U. can’t be taught or learned but only known, and there are some guys here who take unique pictures, Jim. No sunsets maybe, for orange dust smidgens don’t glow on the man-made horizon of our walls. But these men will photograph a shadow; a halo, in my opinion; a face; perspective looking down a cell block; or bars from inside or out on the gallery half over-, half under-exposed so the series locks into your head remember those flickering parkway guard-rail posts controlling thought? And my old sciencer sees weather control one day altering times of twilight, angles of seasons, rains albeit through radiation-parametering focus spoutwise down to flush up lung-blood from the avenues, leftover power toxins to be rethought. I knew my mother would not see the future in the photo I developed and arrested the development of soon after I was transferred here from Auburn; she shook her head—the future? she said, but look at the valid driver’s license she now carries due to me, hidden in her plastic cigarette case, good for years while Jackie who got me
in
the photography program will never agree with me what he can do: these men can photograph our finest particles, Jim, if they only knew what is there to be seen in the enlargements of faces, and yet is this a point?—that the taker always sees? Your face last night showed in the seams under the eyes the search and what-not of a life—like the noted substitute teacher Ruth Heard, even to the stories told. But while you are a man whose eyelids have doubted many a dawn, don’t be so sure you’ve lived all the way between your time out there and ours in here. Oh I could have been a doctor; I knew too late. I know another lab, though; and it’s here. You’re getting away from me, Foley, you said.

Well, that kernel was handed to you between thumb and forefinger by a (says-him) Marxist name of strong-man Juan, who was the other person present before the guys trooped into the room ahead of you; and then there you were.

On the threshold, you looked at Juan, the muscle-man with eyestrain pink across the furious, friendly eyes, who studies the abridged
Kapital
half the night as if his all-night light is the always switched-on bulb of Death Row, and you seemed to see nothing else but the old corn kernel he had picked up in the yard that only I and he and you—the three of us—were aware of, though more than three now occupied the room, and you asked what it was, and Juan held it up—a tooth? you asked—and give it to you and you had it in your right hand for a long time and forgot about it.

And I see that what I have been trying to say, Jim, if I can call you Jim once more, is that at 6:20
P.M.
you came into Room Number Four of what we call the South Forty in this Stressed Concrete Castle our contemporary home (smile), you formerly of the Associated Press (was
almost
all I knew of the messenger), now associated with a gallery of criminal types.

You said you didn’t know why you were here. How come your act’s together, then?

But Jim, you did know.

Don’t know why he’s here; going to fit right in, Efrain said. Which brought a laugh and it was yours; but Smitty, who shuts his eyes tight, talks till he’s ready to open them, then shuts up, said that you were here with a bunch of . . . you heard me before. And I as a friend of Smitty’s had heard of you and knew what you brought for me.

I the new man in this pocket of potential waste (new-type potential energy) here long enough to be relocated again, where they might tell you the night before or an hour before, and suddenly you’re not here, you’re up on the Canadian border (polluted beef, don’t you worry they won’t let you in), but you’re thinking up a new life, new territory, redcoat horsemen at outposts, great fish full of history diving out of rivers into lakes, wriggling airborne clear from the great long-head Norseman’s Wisconsin and Minnesota, land to be had, Sino-Russian reconnaissance reflector-planes slipping between dew point and early-warning layer, lunatic wing orbiting the top of the country: point, though, is you got through, Jim; and I spoke and said some of the guys were really into journalism, and you asked if there was some good copy around, and they wanted to know about yours. Oh, you said, it made you think of newsprint like wrapping paper and you said you could wrap the state of Vermont or New Hampshire in a year’s newsprint.

Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you about: I told him what you said."

Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal?—I’m thinking and will come up with it.

Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too—(I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who
gets
them? First come first serve?

Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what
you
were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories—and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record
this.
(You still there, Jim?)

Now you said—and I’m reporting, if not briefly—that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for—oh this hit me so hard—and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs—this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.

Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.