Women and Men (166 page)

All things being equal, it was up to him, to Jim, to decide about things, about people. So that, responsible as he mysteriously was for anything or everything—including his exit as soon as possible after high school graduation from this town which contained these stories but not him—he would find an outside sanction to go away in the command of his mother whose own example he was swollen with and yet could set apart, that is of leaving
him first:
which were, whatever their dark or convergent, (or non-) connection, undeniable facts that
would
not go away, though he would rather make his getaway without seeking information, rather take a sea voyage—yay, sea voyage!—even a Coast Guard weather patrol, the ship was not at all the mere tinder bomb that war films Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights made you think ships basically were, where explosives all this time were what he knew he should study, namely the explosives that science was coming up with along with a glassless beer bottle. Yet this glassless beer bottle might be explained several ways and absorb all the explanations—might be an electric field, or a plastic substitute, or an inventive description of a bottle served without a glass. The last inspired by the presence some very late afternoons in the early sixties of a sleazily momentum’d collaterally professional slew-handed, sometime information dealer who sat at the end of the bar of a Washington hotel like a western visitor hoping to be mistaken for something—as if to overhear what Jim Mayn and a colleague (say
friend)
or two might be discussing. And once there he was, taking an interest not in some fact of Mayn’s past that was small-talk till it entered this perpetual one of Nature’s eavesdroppers’ ears to glint then left-handedly in his sickeningly interested eyes, but in a curious left-handed discovery, through near-disaster, of Jim Mayn as accidental scientist —not that his formula, framed at a moment when the pilot of his light charter plane making a descent for a landing lost "lift" and stalled them into the briefest of dives, would change the history of wind, and the formula had in any event already been arrived at independently of Mayn.

Nor was it much of a formula—kinetic power of wind equals (but here he didn’t know how he had arrived at) mass (which he had seldom understood) times windspeed squared, except that the turbulence layer their small-businessman’s Cessna hit was so like a landing strip undergoing an earthquake and thick enough to immerse the plane, disintegrating the smooth flow of air the plane’s elevator surfaces were plotted to play and be played by, grasp and be grasped, that this frictional boundary with a life of its own (though made provenly real by the presence of this light aircraft) seemed to multiply wind by wind, like some airs don’t mix, to make the energy splashed in among the controls some personal spirit he had been waiting for to make of him a conclusion; but the rollercoaster leveled and the pilot called back to him, Are you still there?, laughing as they got down to fifty feet above the tarmac when the wings went—no, God they fluttered vividly, and the plane, in a scale of motion so slow they had all week to watch, flipped one "arm" half-over so that Mayn, within the body of the plane whose wing this was, bruised his rib cage, daring the vehicle to go right over upside down to prove
(extra-vehic-
ularly) the difference between
flying
and
landing.
But their descent to touchdown jibed exactly with the roll-back into level so that the Earth, which was after all, Mayn saw for the first time, always one prime boundary to winds, seemed to draw them toward its magnet against the double whirl-wake that had been crazily waiting two or three minutes for them in the absence of the airliner that had started them spinning and departed; and he knew he had a grinning formula for this too—what the pilot not so casually stammered was turbulence tunnels caused by wing-tip vortices that kept whirling sometimes for several minutes—"Can you believe it?" the pilot called—"Sure, now that I’ve had my frontal lobotomy!" his occasionally suicidal passenger said unwarily and so enjoyed his remark that he let himself for the hundredth time fall short of the Anasazi’s high standards of non-repetitive conversation and possibly silence (the line between which one might be moved by yet never understand): lost, however, on Spence in his leather fringes at the curving end of the monumentally lengthy bar but who upon hearing the name of airline correctly identified the time of Mayn’s landing (was Spence lookin’ out the back window?) as being that of his own departure from the same surface on that very commercial carrier whose turbulent wake spinning air off its wingtips had doubled and redoubled the hazard for Mayn’s small plane returning from a business powwow with three sewage-disposal companies in Delaware on a day marked by a band of clouds with some embedded showers and thunderstorms.

Spence then fell so silent he was actually a moment later not there, no doubt calling long-distance from all the lobby pay phones at once; but he returned with his beer to inquire if Mayn was still interested in NASA’s "overt weather operations" (joke). Mayn’s nod was not curt cordiality. How do you nod to a worm? (Now a snake ... a cobra that can carry a tune und reise to an occasion!)

"Ah was
on
thet plane," Spence mimicked; "ah was on mah way ta Arizone."

The men didn’t give a hoot; Mayn heard Spence murmur names of other western states—"made a fire out of mesquite roots middle of nowhere forty-eight hours ago, small business conference, might’s well a been blindfolded, in the middle of some desert, man named Santee Sioux—ever been on a forty-eight-hour pass, Mayn?"—which sounded like "Ever know a man named . . . ?"

"You know damn well I’ve been on a forty-eight-hour pass!" but Mayn had never told Spence such a thing, and Mayn’s words told both of them that Spence had an interest in Mayn but it was probably no news because some years previous—the eve of the U-2 press conference when we learned how we had sown the atmosphere known as Russia’s airspace and they in turn had seeded our seeding so that a pilot named Powers was precipitated from the issue of whose weather it was that NASA was examining—Mayn had been restrained by his friend Ted, the skinny, obnoxious Spence would defend himself with a weapon you felt sure.

Why—
spor-quoia
—did it stick in his head or his grandmother’s (who would get to the point at once if he demanded it but showed her care for him by making him, like his living life, wait for the upshot of a tale maybe somewhat like his brain, maybe a tale that proved always to get into tangles that emerged as having started earlier though he hadn’t seen it, so he knew she had loved having him in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t at all like teaching him to whistle while they lay in bed when he was six years old, and you do it or you don’t, you summon the exact wind and supple crevice for it and then of all things
forget
what you’re doing in order to do it, but—)

Why did
what
stick? Why, this long-lived, half-dead couple of guys: do we mean . . . ? Yes; the Anasazi (semi-retired) medicine man (who was uniquely invulnerable to reincarnation) and the Hermit-Inventor who seems to have existed in three manifestations at least (the great great uncle three decades before the meeting with the girl Margaret in ‘85 "at" the Statue of Liberty (if you call those scattered large-scale units one statue) and then much later in the mid-twentieth of centuries an unfrocked weather thinker who lived almost as remotely in his own drab Greenwich Village street as he did in the lost feelings of a man called Mayn who would inexplicably imagine not primarily what this old specialist geezer had gone through but the galaxies of people who had known him and looked at him—to which we have to add the immediate, more amused and optimistic, yet shorter feelings of a woman on the street named Grace Kimball, star-quality possessor of a bicycle, great giver of instructions and sympathy to other women—who saw the most recent manifestation of (unbeknownst to her) the Hermit across the street one day escorting an old lady both beautiful and baffled, entertained and confused (in this loosely articulated Manhattan capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale lives) but if confused, also beyond transition.

Now, the Anasazi medicine man lived high up in a honeycombed cliff because his ancient people, of whom he was the ultimate survivor by centuries, had traditionally inhabited such apartment structures or multiple dwellings; but his real reason was that, given the name of Changing Grandchild after one of the four mythic or directional sons, he had been
unable
himself to "change" for a good part of his life, sitting in his desert basement as a distinguished adolescent thinker, maintaining for over a century an alarming reputation as a healer of seductive tranquilizing powers (who could have foreseen but, by self-definition, not reincarnate in a Presque Isle, Maine, obstetrician long after to whom many-times-miscarried woman traveled hundreds of miles to receive his magic) and when the Anasazi had changed his life during his second century, he chose to live high-celled and inaccessible in the canyon wall. He betrayed strange likenesses: between his noctilucent teeth and gums and the specialist Mena’s javelina-like lips; also between (a) his capacity to recreate outside him, from their origins in his bodily organs and circulatory precipitations and heart-light, such weather phenomena as warm sleet (whence?) or the fan of shadow-rays across the pre-sunrise sky, and (b) the capacity in his friend the Hermit of New York to take such phenomena from outside
inside
—to "internalize" them, we already remember saying in a later language—and explain them in the poetry of science; also, the penetrating humor in the Anasazi’s stark, light, truth-reflecting
or
-inventing voice seemed a less dense otherwise identical imprint of the Navajo Prince’s, for instance on the day when the Anasazi yielded him the pistol which had belonged to the Thunder Dreamer (the very day when the Prince’s mother refused to consult the Anasazi about the aperture in her head which a voice on the winds of a storm seeming to be the voice of the healer himself had ascribed to weather of foreign origin falling into a mountain in the vicinity precipitating forces
like
weather then falling "out" of the mountain to target selected human receptors). The likenesses aforementioned hinted to Margaret and her grandson that the Anasazi’s future non-reincarnality had been made up for by some simultaneous dispersion of his being among his contemporaries. Jim did not think it through at fifteen, though always knew that
he
was not scheduled for reincarnation. Enough could happen in this life. Enough for what? for whom? But when, years later, at the end of a night on a Bermuda beach with his wife, Jim saw shadow-rays over the ocean knowing they were not really fanned out but parallel and they shot out from an irregular horizon profile of tradewind cumulus, this he remembered was pretty much what Margaret had said the vacationing colleague from the East had told the Anasazi, who had seen the phenomenon though never the ocean except the ocean of the desert, and the Anasazi had been glad for once to agree because what had emanated from him via the back of the eyeball observing the confluence of seas, mountains, irrigation ditches, and the crepuscular cactuses that while you’re not looking fly away (in exactly as threatening a manner as the prehistoric Texas pterodactyls with thirty-five-foot wingspread flew
at
their prey), had reappeared in the Hermit-Inventor’s science refreshed in its turn by each summer’s breather westward.

Could weather precipitate from the ground upward? The two colleagues agreed it could—"At least once in a Double Moon," chafed the gaunt New-yorkondo. But the semi-retired medicine man, whose way of seeing things the Anglo did not pretend to see as an insider, and who looked too fragile to smile, much less shake his head, blew a polite negative upon the rosy sand map on the cell floor before him. Double Moon was Double Moon. Ground-upward clouds were something else; likewise, hail growing in the great planted fields like the old black-and-white "bullet" melons, then to be sucked upward by passing "chimneys" of thunder so the Anglos could have harnessed this downside-up hail against one another. The Hermit-Inventor of New York asked if the Double Moon that had fallen upon the pistol Mena had brought to this cell had turned it into two pistols or only roused rumors of two
origins
for
one.
The Anasazi recommended he stick to the subject. The Hermit said that his great-great uncle, the only short man of all that singular line, had once in London stood upon a sunny hill Christmas morning to see hundreds of feet of ground-upward weather. He had taken a photograph upon a large oblong of card treated with a layer of fresh bodies of the tiny marine carnivore the comb jelly plus a film of glassy "shite" from the French marbled newt. It showed a sulfur-gray gulf of ground-cloud packing the city with an effluent known a century earlier to put a fur and crust upon silver plate. But the Anasazi and his eastern visitor saw weather-from-the-ground-up differently. The old one had never seen a city but could imagine it sunk two hundred feet deep in its own poisonous fog; and he knew that the sole source, the earth itself, had turned the temperature upside down so that ground-level stays cold even after sun-up and the sun cannot lure the ground-level airs upward. The Hermit felt this upcoming weather derived from circulations within the Earth that upon reaching the cool pre-dawn surface mixed with airs already too well breathed by men and women and chemically redestined by the feelings and leftover dreams their bodies impregnated those airs with. The Anasazi blew upon the sand-patterns and simultaneously laughed: he saw no real difference between these views, unless he and his guest should wish to have a wrestling bout over it.

Jim’s grandmother was avidly reading a love-story book about a whaler one day he came back from football practice. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and he asked why she had never returned to the West. "I had responsibilities here," she said. She went on reading but stopped, and she looked right at him in her way. But he left her and went over to Marie’s house where for some reason she was neither peeling carrots and turnips for her mother nor reading Sinclair Lewis upstairs, she was sitting on the porch staring ahead irritated, and some absence of halo round her up there on the porch where he joined her made him think upon a strange potential fact, and this was hard so he thought instead of her breathing body and the friendly scent of her under her sweater like a whole air even more than a smell and coming from her when she breathed in as well. He sat down next to her and was glad to think a thing or two through, which was the last time on this score, which might have seemed unsettled between him and his grandma, while he now made a discovery. But when, in the midst of it, the familiar girl in her plaid skirt and short-sleeved angora and bobby sox testily rocking said, "Looks like rain," he knew it wasn’t really him she was mad at, if him at all. Anyway he had seen that between the steamily upgoing weathers and the resolute downcoming weathers, between that observed and that created, between the weathers of presence and of absence, and of leaving and arriving and most strangely of inside and outside, and all these always divided up so you could practically see them out of that time when people really cared
why
a luminous night cloud came widely low to the continent in subtle motion each day as if the continent were turning westward and the cloud hung waiting for places to come under it, the grandmother had always been out to entertain him at a fairly high level but had been led into history she herself cared to keep if not create; likewise she had told some pretty fair horse and cactus tales to pass their time as if there would have been nothing otherwise, but in doing so she had covered up things that had happened so the coverings became queer to the eye approaching, say, that mother with a hole in the head or a tornado that rumbled off like the made-up pterodactyl bird it really was, that is when Margaret turned into a Princess, which was really another person in her that he didn’t ask about, but she was two persons, both the young woman who saw slaughterhouses in Nebraska and dry farming among the Indians—