Women and Men (196 page)

And the white boy, who could travel a hundred miles and never know it, knew he felt, and already that day when he had almost fallen out of a careering truck along the cemetery road and had been saved, he knew, by two magic screwdrivers, had felt a fine charge coming from Uncle Willy such that some iron or magnetic message therein cannot be worded but only be the bearer, while the sense of it then and of its having come to him earlier that afternoon out near the cemetery made him sick to his liver, as his own father said, and Uncle Willy came down off the porch and made him drink from the jug of water he drank unchanging all day long and then to the boy’s amazement Willy gave him one of the clay figures that he kept by him among other valuables such as a jawbone of a desert fish, a polished rattlesnake tail, and a hunk of glittering blue-red glass; and the figure was of a woman from two hundred years before, and Willy told him he was a Trace Window, and what it was; and weeks later when he came to Windrow to see his piner relations in the swamps of Lake Rompanemus, he would run into Ira, who had a very short crew cut, and Ira would remind him he was a Trace Window and he must never neglect that power but not to come near Uncle Willy any more.

"I knew I knew you," said Mayn; "but were you saying before that I am a Trace Window or that I
carry
this forked radioactivity that you as a Trace Window
register?"

"I know only the second for sure," the hitch-hiker said. His eyes stared peacefully into the tunnel, so Mayn heard his own father say he liked hearing all Jim’s news and wondered how the Argentine could legally own a string of papers here or at least in three states. Mel seemed to have been enabled by Jim’s workaday interest to actually see those windmills in Wyoming as Jim now heard the tunnel come to life in a small boy’s words, Mayn driving, What if the tunnel leaks?, for the voice is his son, while with his hand on the pistol that his hitch-hiker seems not to care that he is in possession of Mayn knows they might as well see themselves heading through some cross-glomerate of west-tilted schist, submarine pebble, sediment thrust up ten miles into the throat of one’s tropopause which was and is supposed to be a spherical envelope beyond weather. Meanwhile what they call
till
is your glacial drift just erratically dropped—dumped (you say) without benefit of the sorting and the layering that only water can rework such matter into, let alone the lime spring recalled from the refraction of some unknown acquaintance’s experience that turns wood to stone if you remember: and all this is beautiful and reliable as the knowledge that he seldom had much in common with his father today or any day, and the fair-isolate fact from a young woman named Jean or Barbara-Jean that an "erratic" is a glacial boulder that doesn’t belong with the rock it finds itself resting on, yet cruising this crabbed, coved coast— coast! what coast?—between sea and hinterland, but more—he recalled when she spoke that he had known this "erratic" all along: like the future colony of couple-compacted individuals out in familiar Earth-Moon space: or like Larry’s one-man secret-society/overcharged brain-dump transformer compensating for shit going down in mother’s world/father’s world by a unified-fieldwork when-in-doubt-step-back-a-hundred-paces-and-punt world, force-fed till Lar’ had Mayn himself now "doing" in his own mind how Obstacle Geometry worked to map our turns down to the smallest rotation among each other but also (O.G.) embraced S.R. (Simultaneous Reincarnation) somewhat as Tensor Calculus the multi-mathmouth sculpted and positioned General Relativity’s events in plural coordinate systems, but . . . until, as if the hitchhiker had wanted to slug him, Mayn felt the City ahead catch him under the eye bing on the cheekbone, while the imprint rang into the week to come and its days, and some sound in his body was like thought control, and he knew that one morning not long ago waking up in a space (as they now so easily said) lived in years ago
(for
years), that was too big now for a
pied-a-terre
(which in turn measured a sadness so terrific well you’d just have to find the strength on its other side), he had also felt that jolt upon his cheekbone: and he said, "It’s true, I wanted to throw you out of that truck, but what I want to know is—"

"No," said the passenger, "I don’t say I know who is or are under that stone marker with Sarah Mayn on it if you say no one’s under there and you seem to know; but I know there’s someone under there and if they’re not very close to the surface, then there’s an even stronger charge of the alloy coming from them."

The City, as dry and shored-up as the tunnel with its reckless domestic glare, pulled him toward it, let alone the hitch-hiker. Mayn accepted the suspension of all these bits of news in one dumb bottle and felt it was too late to start all over again being an apprentice mind, much less an apprentice reporter, and hoped he had been a middling good father.

"By the way, you said ‘Ray,’ didn’t you? I’m not Ray Spence in case you’re wondering."

"Ray Vigil. In a blue car coming out of that town. You don’t have the hair of an Indian and not quite the nose either, but . . ."

"I
thought
he looked familiar when we passed him and the state cop," said Mayn, knowing in his chest structure in retrospect a measurable pull toward those objects that was maybe just a quickening all around. The hitchhiker didn’t react. "And why did you take those screwdrivers belonging to Bob Yard?"

"They were rattling around there," said Mayn’s passenger, "and you were running on your own power. I once stayed under water for half an hour without needing to breathe because of being near a creature with Trace, and I once heard what I took to be voices but later found they came from a mountain out West twenty miles from where I stood, and I discovered I had their words. And once not long ago I went to see a man in jail in order to get a reading on him and I regretted it because I recognized that before I reached the corridor that led to the hall that led to the two sets of steel-barred gates that separated me from the meeting room where you could sit around at Formica tables and plug the junk-food machines for cake and sandwiches and cigarettes, I had the power to divide myself and pass through those bars."

"Why did you regret it?" said Mayn, who was so close to the City’s window of complex light, so close to catching up with some attention or laughter he had uneasily left here when he went away, that he asked his question without thinking.

"Because here the power I had was entirely due to this dangerous person I was making a visit to on another pretext, yet had neither use for it nor knew I was using him, though there’s evidence that sometimes a person with Trace gains power through it when it is registered in a Trace Window."

Mayn laughed, but knew that wherever the man known to Efrain, Foley, and the Chilean economist if not to Amy had escaped to, and whenever and however the Chilean economist would want to spend time visiting an anti-Castro Cuban in prison, and whatever the bearing on all this political or nonpolitical question was of his little son’s abduction, Flick was or had been associated with the economist’s wife Clara in a Grace-Kimball Body-Self Workshop and was on Spence’s information list along with the environmentalist-woman Dina West whom Mayn had not had breakfast with before leaving New York but who was expecting Ray Vigil, whom the hitch-hiker might have mistaken Mayn for but who Mayn now knew without question had been the man in the blue or violet car trailing Mayn toward the cemetery and later waiting for him while he explored with his long-found, endlessly Windrow-bound father Mel the warmest of expendable trivia; then behind Mayn and the hitch-hiker leaving town and on the connecting road, then ahead of them while Mayn phoned, then stalled by a trooper behind them again, then alone on the turnpike when they were off, ahead of them when they got back on, though unbeknownst to the Indian Vigil who would be as lost as you could be on a turnpike you cannot take wing from like the wind. "Power?" Mayn said; "I’ve noticed that while I am particularly preoccupied with the safety of my family and the question of why Spence sent you, I’ve been able to drive almost without handling the wheel or thinking how to do it but I don’t mean second nature—it’s like—"

"Yes I do remember you," said the hitch-hiker. "I think you were crazy that day, but the alloy had been in you a long time."

Mayn tried to pull away from why anyone would bring his mother back to Windrow and secretly bury her at her stone. He had decided that the hitchhiker, who now reminded him of some other lone man or men, was kind. He would have to be woken up into the window of interestingly unclean light the City proved to be. Easier to change the subject when there’s no one awake to talk to. Let Jean or Barbara-Jean drive, let her call him an
erratic
but upon his next step into rock-bottom though knowledgeable ignorance hear her say not to change the subject: so her geological stroke had had some woman’s curve to it—yet he would tell her that this sleeping hitch-hiker who seemed not to care that his pistol had been appropriated had identified Mayn as an interesting person: which, damn her, she would remind him had always been her position, in the shower, at the breakfast table, at the Press Site (as if those dumb viewers and surmisers of the Saturn launches and so forth were at a dig); at a polling place on an election day; on election day the following year indeed, for repetition helps, and he asked her to repeat information because he liked to hear her say it, which she got mad about, yet knowing he was coming from a long way back: from further back than a portly Navajo telling the difference between tribal uranium rights for sale and, on the other hand (a chubby hand), month-by-month real jobs abstractly available to Indians at a plant that reworks what’s gouged up from crusts of Earth as if Earth hurt —yes, hurt, and he believes Earth really did and will again; oh Mayn would rather listen to her talk
moraines
and all the stuff that a man named Spence might once have admitted ignorance of in the smug surety that Earth had little gossip value even up the ladder to glib homicide, prison intrigue, political plan, the blackmail of kidnap where you figure that if the son aged four or five is abducted the father will surface in anguish and you can haul him in: which by now Spence probably does know something about, since he has passed along a story of some lunatic mountain heading secretly eastward to be deposited for some reason if only to prove that the operation is feasible: run into Spence used to be semiannually, say, in some hotel saloon, Washington, Houston, airport San Francisco where he knew already you’re visiting Ames Air Force Base to see how Venus is doing prior to visiting the weather institute in Colorado all in a week’s airborne work: whereas the young woman Barbara-Jean (B.J.) could tell him on election eve only how the glacier deposited all this rock matter before even the Bible writers got going setting down what they already remembered if they had not actually experienced: but she drove him out onto Long Island and they talked so beautifully, while she cut through (as if her car blinkered them past) similar and equal consumer communities (that he thought he had already foreseen in some voice of a teenage economist he will meet who with delirious precision is observing America) to find then (Jean took her left hand off the wheel to point through the thick late-autumn air) striking eminences that were real moraines, eminences (Christ, they were real like the life you discovered years later you had been living, and as you discovered this, it moved!) that marked the end of an ancient valley glacier, one of these moraines named nothing more than Harbor Hill (he once knew a man named Moraine who owned a gigantic service station in Jersey), another moraine with an Indian name (a lake, too) that sounded like a rock that called to you until you started (Ronkonkoma) listening instead of hearing, and then its music went back inside the imaginary rock, an eminent moraine that (she said) disappeared beneath Long Island Sound and yonder Atlantic waters
only
(as they say) to reappear as the island of Martha’s Vineyard he had once taken his new wife to in the fall of a presidential election when they had a beach to themselves, white and (the one disappointment) shell-less.

If you are moving (you take on faith) but apparently not forward (as into the sea) and not backward (like the hairy man on the rubberized, banked running track at the gym who jogs backward half a mile for every mile forward), maybe you are moving sideways, for if life is an education it must be to find out what you are already doing because can’t
avoid
in some way Doing. Lateral transfer? he echoed his daughter in the nation’s capital last month: why "lateral transfer" used to be what the other wire service did a lot of, and now (for how did she, his daughter, know the term?) seems ancient and empty (but why is ancient empty?) like going back into an apartment once lived in and trying it and moving out again for many months and then trying it as a pied a terre and then at last moving in.

The rented drive up from Washington into New Jersey to visit the proverbial parent, drive capped now by that amplified flight through the tunnel, bright, night-tiled tunnel cutting itself not so transparently as his daydream (his only type of dream) through the stripes of mud and continental drift and subsiding sedimental trough—terms, terms, terms—he knows where to find them when that’s where his inquiry into big dollars and cents takes him: through structure created (they say of the Appalachians west) by drainage patterns— but that last run through the tunnel after layers of foreboding recollection compacted into the pavement his tires knew in advance (and they’re not his tires, they’re rented) from Washington to Windrow to New York, from Washington to Windrow where he stopped to visit his father and go through a turpentine-insulated library of books in the basement, and felt followed by a waiting automobile that made him feel he should make some other stop/visit in Windrow before leaving, that is, so the car could follow him there, for how can you be followed if you are not moving? (easy, easy)—but the car disappeared into an intersection as if reminded of the tangle of intrigue waiting like potential for him or anyone in New York where he had been yesterday, left for Connecticut, flew to Pennsylvania then to the nation’s capital thence equally to Windrow thence here to a tunnel bound toward New York where his daughter, who worked in Washington but had been in New York the night before last and to whom he had written a letter that had later been stolen from the wastebasket in his apartment that had once been the apartment he and she and her mother and her brother had lived in, had said unless the mails as usual had screwed up a work of writing awaited him composed to get stuff out of her system but she would be interested to know, you know, what he thought of it and don’t take it too seriously though she hadn’t taken many liberties with the facts, which he now felt were what he drove through in order to at last act as if the threatening system a man named Spence could not take entire credit for would have to be granted a force if not a reality he might be able to take some blame for while inclined to conspire on behalf of—while granting that even if the life of earning a living and totting corporate profit and marital division leading to new lives capable of being imagined parallel and a women’s bank attracting considerable deposits from a male insurance company and the death of babies through marketable toxins as viable as the warmth of mother love and the practical importance of harnessing (read for God’s sake some fresher word, like
utilizing)
so-called passive wind power across the pampas of America and other solid (routine if not always reportable) facts of the here-and-now didn’t answer satisfactorily whether conspiratorial sabotage stripped the insulation from a wire to cause the Apollo i capsule to go up (ouch) in flames—still, he knew in the sudden midst of "needing" (as if carsick or bladder-full) to stop right here in the tunnel to phone his father "Emergency" (but no phones here except for authorities so phone him in your head, you can do it if you’ll just remember what that voice or two he sure hopes we all share can tell him he already remembers) and thank his father for the afternoon they had because he and his father haven’t been exactly close for (literally) all these years.