Women and Men (221 page)

T.W. likewise as a matter of fact, yessirree, on the incline all day, thanks to—

Spence too—

Don’t want to talk about it except waking up this morning a flame of daylight except not quite a flame windowed simultaneously outside and inside T.W.’s, well, thinking; and he went with it and knew he was more than a Trace Window, he was a Trace, and could have known years ago if he had talked to that halfbreed kid Ira Lee then instead of yesterday—

Spence didn’t want to hear about it, and T. W. said he knew—and Spence said it was all like something some relative had never told him—yet T.W. held Spence by the elbow so Spence felt it might go off like a pistol, yes Ira had thought T.W. was after that old double-breed Natchay-Creek Indian Uncle Willy’s
things,
specially the hunk of blue-red glass which curved anything you could see through it there on the porch in the black section of town with the old guy’s always-full pitcher of ice water, curved even the other "things" of Uncle Willy’s that Ira liked, the jawbone of the huge flying fish found over a thousand feet high (and dry) on a desert lookout crag cradling like a gateway or the mothering mouth of a tender tabby cat the figurine of a woman s’posedly famous who under the blue-red of the glass not only curved but sang of how far she had come to see the land—

Spence disengaged his elbow and T.W. seemed to lean away, far away, but still talking: Ira Lee therefore had never told T.W. that Uncle Willy wanted to see him and T.W. hated old folks in those days because of an old piner who scared him by jumping ten or fifteen feet right up into an old dead tree at will and took others with him, but if T.W. had really troubled to talk to Ira, T.W. now said he would have learned from Ira that that old double-breed Uncle Willy had known the redneck boy who’d been visiting his piner relations in Rompanemus Swamp to be a Trace Window because Uncle Willy, himself a Trace Window, had felt the womanculus start to vibrate to the boy’s trace waves as he approached, meaning that the boy whom he had seen once before without event must have become that ultra-rare
"personal-contact"
Trace through having been locked in conflict
with
a Trace who was under some mortal pressure from either burial grounds (and of course the cemetery was out near Rompanemus Swamp) or from demands made on him or her by another Trace afflicted with one of the original radioactive abscesses in forehead or fontanel forked in potential and spiral in spirit from origins in both Canadian-border hailstone cores and the exponential esophagus of that southern-Rockies sky-blue Pressure Snake in actuality also alternatively insect-fleshed (hence the spiral thread of the throat)—

I didn’t want to hear this, I don’t need it any more, Spence was saying, I am going to find my brother. He pressed the date button on his watch.

—if you have a brother, you have a mother, said Spence’s gauntly agitated belaborer—and so at dangerous dawn this morning came the near flame (the "flam"!) of day, a light infinitesimally cleaving the head so it felt it lined it up with many other heads, T.W. had stopped dream-hiking major arteries into endlessly hitched future and had seen that that client who had indirectly (in theory) caused T.W.’s father’s death could have been telling the truth; and seeing this, T.W. had ‘‘seen" coming out of the jean pocket of the greater Minneapolis restaurant robber with the inflamed abscess (or other) in his forehead, a highly compact black case that could have been an instant camera—

But Spence didn’t care now, he said,
who
had taken the picture or—

But
T.W.
cared, because—

You didn’t
let
me tell you, you wouldn’t listen to where I got the picture and your father wasn’t alive to say whether in fact he did die because of seeing you s’posedly in front of a Cuban—

Don’t get me mad, said T.W., but Spence was pointing into a moving crowd—and don’t try to distract me, said T.W.

The woman in the picture, said Spence, the woman with the cap.

Vigil, called T.W. to Spence, who had moved away—you know Vigil you used him; well, Vigil says "Wide Load" is code name for—

The Cuban woman with the baseball cap, shouted Spence but could only, now, stare at T.W.—who with scarcely an interruption was saying,—for a mountain, a mountain, and only Mayn and his daughter—

—She’s gone around the corner of that bank building, called Spence and a limousine backed onto the curb just missing him—

—and only Mayn and his daughter and maybe
you
know, and it’s some national mountain that moves and Vigil said "N.T.M." like I would know but he wouldn’t elaborate.

She’s there again, called Spence, stepping further back, his hand on the rear fender of the long black car.

But all I know is, said T.W., that the day I got to be what I am Jim Mayn was at crisis and they were at the burial ground but the mother wasn’t there, as everybody knew, because she was out in the ocean somewhere or lying on a beach or on a three-day train west for all anyone could be certain—and the grandmother wasn’t dead yet but someone was resting there, I know that as sure as I know that someone is going to get killed.

What do you mean you talked to Ira yesterday? said Spence, and a firetruck was on top of them suddenly and as suddenly gone, whistling up the avenue as if the avenue were a building tuning the city, so Spence moved closer—a thing was speaking through him and he was alone, and it was not a thing. What do you mean? did you go back to Windrow?

The fire siren rammed its curve onward away down the City and T.W. seemed to bend for his shoelace but he had boots on and was kneeling, the engines of all vehicles drew away from him and from Spence, drawing Spence close to what he had moments before thought to go around in order to pursue his way toward an apartment building where he now knew at least four apartments though he had been inside but two; and T.W. was on his side resting against the fixed pillow of his backpack, people stepping deftly, almost stopping deftly, over him, his head then arching a bit back to see Spence/Santee, who was suddenly with him, feeling the simple blood on T.W.’s bruised cheek, catching his latest words like finest advice: Go with it. You warned me. The gal in the cap, baseball cap. Her name is ... I think it’s
Nos- .
. .
Nos-
. . . I did a trace, you know, on the guy in prison. Mayn knows, because I told him driving back from New Jersey. She shot me.

Spence found the dark mark on the suede windbreaker. Am I a Trace?

No, the wounded man said. You’re not a Trace. That’s O.K.

Is Brad a Trace, then?

T.W. seemed to shrug an inch or two along the pavement, and a cop appeared. Brad? murmured T.W., Brad?

He’s been shot in the back, said Spence. The cop began talking into his box.

But what was the "flam"? said Spence.
That’s
what it was, said T.W.,
SL
flam;
why didn’t I think of that? Specialist. Got drawn in . . . but into what? Yes, said Spence:
what?
Yes, brother, said T.W., what did
I
care about that family, what did
I
care about a Wide Load with its own built-in . . .

Built-in
what?
asked Spence, torn, saddened, receiving bodily what he would as soon sling away far down to the sound of the engines down the avenue though it was a mysterious
shape-like
"nothing"
in
that sound.

National . . . technical . . .

Means? asked Spence.

. . . music. What’s
in
the way
makes
it. Mean a warehouseful, wonderful, store a Nazi symphony for a generation, what energy . . .

The cop was asking Spence who T.W. was. A black boy in a tweed overcoat knelt down to watch. He wore new thick white sneakers, and he straw-sipped from a can of soda in a brown paper bag.

Nazi? said the boy.

Means anti-Nazi, ‘xcuse, murmured T.W. He took my gun, said T.W.
Who
took your gun? said the cop, and looked at the boy and at Spence.

Pull the fur tail, said T. W., I want you to see the . . . the light’s changing, said T.W. That’s right, said the boy. It threw me a curve, said T.W. Right, said the boy. T.W. grinned: I’m already on it; see me out there?

You’re right here, said Spence.

Let’s get outa here, said T.W.

Right, said the boy.

Portland.

Right.

Don’t leave just yet, said T.W.

Spence remembered his hand on T.W.’s shoulder. National technical . . .
music?
said Spence, as blood appeared on T.W.’s upper lip slanting into the corner of his mouth.

Nose is bleeding, said the boy. They heard the clatter and static on the cop’s box. I’m dying, said T.W. I’m flush up against it.

A smell of scent came down and an elderly woman with chapped, rouged lips bent down: You’re
not
going to die, she said.

It’s only way I could see what was going on, said T.W. Such a waste. Made trouble for myself. Pull the fur tail.

The black boy reached for it and the cop told him Don’t touch it.

What waste? asked Spence.

We’re the same, said T.W. wearily.

Same what? said Spence looking back over his shoulder.

People, Santee, people. You’re out there someplace, aren’t you?

Yeah. That’s it. Are you the one who found the new reincarnation?

Up against it. Asked for it. Flush up against it. Drew me in so I can be just this one person, but drew me in so I buzzed right through it. Or around it, too: I can’t tell.

Who is the Chinese woman? said Spence.

She got the kid.

What’s his name? said the cop, and Spence looked up and said, T.W.; and T.W. murmured methodically, Thomas Winwooley. Of the Mayo Win-wooleys.

And where’s the mountain? said Spence; does Mayn know?

Can’t imagine being anyone else no more. Oh the load on top of the mountain might just be a lost anchor.

The mountain? said Spence, sorry for himself. He looked back across the intersection and saw a familiar broad-shouldered man with thick gray hair watching from across the intersection and rose and took a step or two and raised his hand. A cab came by, over there, scarcely stopping, and when it passed on, still seemingly empty (though the light turned its inside opaque), the man was gone. Maybe Mayn was still going to be at his apartment, but Spence did not check the date again, he had lost a day somewhere along the line.

What
did he say? said Spence, turning back.

Mega death, said the cop, who had a mustache. Mega death. Do you know what that is? Do you know him? Do you know what he was talking about?
Mega?
What’s
mega?

Spence reached and pulled the fur tail. T.W. seemed out of it. The cop told Spence, Don’t . . . but the fur tail came all the way and attached to the end was a figurine of a woman. She had an owl face and she looked whittled, as if the wood had gone to stone. Spence gripped it. We’re buddies, he said to the cop. This thing belongs to both of us.

The boy looked up at the cop and back at Spence.

A cab pulled up in front of Mayn’s apartment building and Mayn came out with a young woman with thick, dark hair who had on a sailor’s peajacket and bluejeans. Mayn reached for the cab door and opened it, but the woman was talking to him; he answered her, throwing out his hand in some gesture; she grabbed his arm and went close to him, talking fiercely; she got into the cab and could not pull the door shut because he was holding the handle; he got into the cab and closed the door, and the cab pulled away from the curb and stopped at once. The door opened and Mayn’s arm could be seen and then his trousered leg, but his shoe never reached the street. He withdrew his leg and the door closed, and the cab accelerated to make the light, and as the cab passed him, Spence raised his arm and by coincidence or kindred force, the familiar man in the cab turned away from his evidently intense conversation and caught Spence’s eye, and Spence continued in the direction of Mayn’s building.

The knot of his mother Sue’s Knuckle (he knew it was her fine knuckle as if he could see it miles away) on the phone instrument at her end of the line spoke to the Eye so newly established in Larry’s shoulder-to-neck field. It had been established by reciprocal Weak Force slung out of another context yesterday though it seemed only half an hour ago, a context out there that he hated to think might be a coordinate system. And slung from distances so meaninglessly much greater (equal to these other distances, say from here to Long Island or to Donald Dooley’s girlfriend’s apartment find or Amy’s foundation, etcetera, or the place from which the Chilean guy who’s friend to Mayn possibly had phoned, equal distances all, like light in theory) that Larry half wearily yet sniffing some change knew would be tied in with the other discovered systems and forces, and he was determined to either make these discoveries go from him or make himself go from them. Meanwhile, she was telling him she loved him, his mother was, and he was seeing so clearly, against the sporadic down-the-hall, next-room voice of Donald as if D.D. thought Lar’ was still there, his mother and her friend
(her
mother? her daughter?) massaging each other and talking late into the night, and he was just bottomline bored with all that, and here she was seriously wondering what it would be like to come back to him and Marv. Marv, Lar’ knew, thought he didn’t want that any more, and Larry tried to find words to speak that would be between saying nothing and saying something and only succeeded in knowing that, parallel to her out-loud words, this messaging of her Knuckle to his Eye (though an earlike Eye) newly situated in his shoulder-to-neck field, proved again the Differential Telepathy whereby, even against Lar’s determined refusal of a future in it and other recent discoveries, voiceless communication over no matter what size area between
unlike body-parts
(as from shoulder blade to instep, or heart to hand, or ear to intestine or thigh, or, here, knuckle to eye) joined the two persons via the most extreme experience of each body part or organ in question so the memory became the power, i.e., of being winged or of so mutually taking one another’s life that a new one arose elsewhere or of caring to hear another’s circulation poured into your own without knowing if’t be ichor or terminal toxin. And while, on this phone with new friend D.D. now pausing in his speech in next room, Larry had his mother down his ear, up his brain, congruizing his personal body-envelope like that plode-plast invented in one of his bad dreams that’s tucked like a rubber into a wallet and when set off by hostile touch of mugger-thief as he takes your wallet blows up into plode-plastic head-and-torso-hugger to neutralize the mugger thus encased and threatened with suffocation—until he was able to not only be joined to his mother by mutual memory of friendly fisticuffs at bedtime when he was eight, with mutual heartfelt bloody noses, but could thus separate from her and say, "Try going with it, Mom, I don’t know how I feel about your coming back and I can’t speak for Marv, y’know," while simultaneously seeing that sure he wanted her back but in an earlier time that he had access to only in dreams and not at this present spiraling end of conversations bridging two days with D.D. and girlfriend who had come and gone and might come back and conversations that in an almost sexual way felt like negotiations in the real world plus being in the best cool sense warm. "Darling, I said some things to you I shouldn’t have." "I know, Mom, but I wasn’t a virgin, then, and that wasn’t what I was threatened by." "You weren’t?" "I can’t explain. I’m still going through it." "If you need someone to talk to, darling." "I’ve got some people." He had to say goodbye and said he was sorry in order to get off the line and also away from this uselessly intense Differential Telepathy he’d as soon forget about much less take credit for discovering when no doubt the guy Mayn knew in prison and half a dozen other transponders around the infinite network clinging to the Earth’s made-to-measure finite sphere-cozy of a surface had already figured out what anyway Lar’ would leave even to his well-after-all-pretty-down-to-earth older friend Mayn and/or Mayn’s smart, young if science-oriented girlfriend in favor of being more real, via new friends, via regular existence, even not too economical if need be, and via, too, that Chinese woman sitting on three old phone books knitting (or was she sewing?) in the Chinese shop after hours, so ordinary and routine she might be a youngish grandmother, she was Just There, thinking about the work she’s doing, planning on a snack before bed, on some television, on whatever small matters mattered to her and that Larry loved without knowing.