Women and Men

Mike-Whipped Landscape Specially Flown In

He pulled away from his father’s house, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father, who had never after all died, might be closely related; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch here and there in the house at times so unmindful of a car, a dark blue car he could swear had followed him, that he hardly wondered what was on his mind but recognized that he was content and his father was curious, and he had never been content like this with his father that he could recall.

He pulled away from his father’s voice yet took it with him downcellar, and the still surprisingly crisp voice from the kitchen above him, a square-headed, heavy-headed voice, called down, "Jim, did you turn it right three full turns before you stopped at 12, because you have to do that before you turn right to 11."

He wasn’t going to get into an argument with his father, not on top of the rather happy stuff that had obtained since he’d arrived two hours ago. His father called down, "What did you say? You won’t find them in the closet I’m pretty sure, but look if you want."

The diary volumes weren’t anywhere, so maybe they had been taken by the bookseller who had come looking a week or so ago, but he would not argue with his father on that one either. Mayn dialed left to 28, pulled the lock open and turned it out of its latch loop; he looked into the long, so narrow closet made seemingly out of more space than there had later proved to be, and, by the hanging light bulb behind him, he saw nothing but beautiful bottles, shadowed by their very shapes, the raised imprints dimly deepening or lightening colors that closeted their dust in some widow-web-spread network rigged where time was no object and the blues and purples and browns and greens were subtly preserved beyond eyesight.

He had pulled away from his father’s question "What do you want with those old books?" for his father was bound to ask again, but his father wasn’t asking, Is that why you came for a visit? because the son had answered, "I think they would be of interest to your granddaughter," and he remembered voicing once to a man in jail the considerable truism that the message bearer is never neutral.

It was just a visit to an elderly man who was his father and who appreciated the phone call from Washington; not that Jim wouldn’t call, but it gave Mel something to look forward to, that is, he said, besides the afternoon paper and the television with the news of a prison break (all the essential news of the world, Jim!), just a visit to an elderly man with a heavy, squarish head and magazines on the dining table and homemade cinnamon applesauce by the half-gallon in the refrigerator ("which people seem to call the ‘fridge’ now, Jim"); a slowly sagging, quite old man in a white-buttoned black cardigan sweater once much blacker when visible through the large street window of a modest weekly newspaper office years ago downtown; a man who lived above a dry, cool cellar full of objects including a thousand books that might never have been read even by his late father-in-law, the grandfather Alexander who, when he used to come uncomfortably into this house, would sit uncomfortably in the Windsor chair in the living room which had lately acquired a shiny white cushion advertising the race track.

He would always pull away from his father yet the truth was his father had been the least prying of parents; but this time he did not pull away. He said, "Oh, I miss my family, you know," and was as surprised to say it to this man as to say it at all.

"I know," said his father. "One way or another you miss them, but it’s only for a part of the day, as far as I’m concerned." His father didn’t seem to feel it odd that Jim had spoken so to him after all these years.

"I mean, I would have seen less of them anyway: Flick and Andrew growing up and going to college and Flick with a job and so forth—"

"But you hurried it up a bit by leaving yourself," said the father. "I happen to think it was a constructive thing you did, from what Flick told me — she said she was thinking of changing her name back—’course I never see Andrew—"

"You think I do?"

"He still serious about figure skating?"

"So I hear."

"How are you feeling generally?" his father asked, and Jim thought of the diaries downstairs and knew they weren’t why he was here, and could not help believing that his father thirty years not-too-late had asked him this warmhearted medical-sounding question like you’d ask a contemporary you felt easy with; his father admired his deep bronze tan acquired in six days and maintained by four hours’ talking to a businesswoman at a ski mountain cafe yesterday.

Mayn mentioned the apartment he had moved back into — base-of-operations sort of thing — and his father didn’t tell him it was unwise to go back to where he had lived with his wife and children once, investment or not; Mayn spoke of some nice people he had met, a woman named Norma, whose community volunteer job had suddenly been funded by a foundation so she was suddenly salaried at a crucial time in her life when she wanted a paying job anyhow, wanted more than needed; but want is need, and the outfit proved to be one Mayn knew of—

— coincidence, said his father—

— and Norma’s husband, who wasn’t a friend but he liked him and he bent Jim’s ear one night (so bright he’s scary) talking about changing the weather on Venus and economizing on illness by getting three diseases all at once so you got three immunities for the price of one and came in to have a drink one time and told Mayn all about how he skipped fifth grade but he worked into the story a whole year’s worth of Brooklyn Heights where he was brought up, and the Jews and the Nazis, and the daughter of one of his teachers who was playing on a roof and fell off and was killed, but what Mayn got out of it he wasn’t sure except that this Gordon had taken a voluntary leave of absence from his law firm, wanted to be unemployed for a while, think things through, told me I better get a Medeco lock installed, and I had a feeling through this lengthy story of his life that he kept wanting me as a newspaperman to be full of inside dope, but—

— usually, said his father, it was the other way around, the newspaper people stayed two jumps ahead in conversation.

. . and a college kid named Larry lived in the building, too, and he came in and talked Mayn’s ear off and Mayn took him to a basketball game and once drove up to Connecticut for the jai-alai matches and Larry won fifty dollars. So it was like a new apartment building in some respects. Private life, you know.

His father nodded. Mayn asked if he was still considering the retirement place near Wilmington. His father said it was quite a wait, and he didn’t like the lump-sum entrance payment. But to the best of his knowledge, it was well run.

The Quakers ran it, didn’t they?

Mel nodded.

Perhaps he pulled away from why he was visiting his father; if so, his father seemed to encourage this. You don’t have to have a reason if you have this need. Getting back to New York from Washington, rent a car, stop in New Jersey and see Mel, who was generous enough to call it good sense to fit the one trip into the other. What happened to those windmills in Wyoming? he went out a couple of times, didn’t he? (Mayn discovered his father was proud of him.) Well, if a quarter million people can plug their toasters into a giant windmill — how do those contraptions work? — the horizon will be full of rotors and blades; remember the Hitchcock movie where you were inside one of those old Dutch drainage mills and you would feel you were about to get mangled by all those creaking cogs of the wooden gear-train. (Was it a drainage mill, Dad?) (They turned to each other in blank amusement.)

His father had never heard of the cooperative wind conversion system on a Lower East Side apartment-house roof because his son had never told him, or Mel had never asked. Like a toy airplane on a steel-strut stand thirty-odd feet high, took twenty people four days to raise it — couldn’t afford a helicopter. So the utility-company lines get a cut of the surplus household electricity the people’s windmill generates? Synchronous inverter (looks like and is a solid-state box) turns d.c. from the wind generator into standard-line a.c. voltages. Never thought how a windmill worked but you’re right we don’t have to think. We don’t want to know. Unreportable information? his father asked, and was treated, as they moved from the dining room into the kitchen to an account of how the air crossing the curved upper blade of a windmill has to go farther and faster than the air hitting the flat lower blade, and the higher velocity on the upper blade creates "lift," and this turns the blades about the generator shaft — nothing to it — though the Wyoming operation. . that’s something else.

His father gathered he had seen Flick in Washington, was mildly surprised that she was in New York, and struck by the "irony" that she’d phoned her father at his hotel in Washington the night before; Mel wanted to know what was so interesting about a women’s bank, and speaking of interstate how could Jim’s Argentine boss legally own a string of papers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and so on? even Mel remembered the scandalous rumors of that tycoon’s tycoon-brother’s apparently faked plane crash, and Jim said, Private life. His father said nothing about Flick maybe wanting to be called by her given name.

He didn’t pull away from his father’s hand on the bare skin of his hand asking him to unscrew the kitchen globe and screw in a new light bulb. His father except when he was at work, which was after all much of the time in the old days, had spent years with his hands clenched behind his back or, when he was seated (for after all he was not handcuffed), clenched in front of him. His father below him looking upward as Jim unscrewed the globe, inquired what the prevailing winds in New York City were, and Jim in a low, preoccupied voice as he loosened the holding screws just enough to release the globe, which was a regular fly-trap, thought that the summer winds came mostly from the southwest, the winter definitely northwest, but the arrangement of winds through the city had got so weird because of building configurations that it would take someone who knew relativity to figure out where they went and how fast, and even in a relatively simple operation like that Lower East Side apartment house you need a pointed tower because the surface area at the top — Mel handed a sixty-watt bulb up and his son handed the ceiling globe down — can actually back up winds that are approaching so they don’t get right to the blades but are held up — winds in a holding pattern, chomping at the bit! His father thought there were probably some southeast winds around New York as well, and Jim said he really didn’t know — like a good Buddhist, he really didn’t know. Getting religion in middle age? said his father.

His father wanted to know if he still played water polo at the Athletic Club and was told, in somewhat indirect answer, that his son’s trick knee was acting up under stress and he had limped across against a red light the other day, throwing himself on the mercy of a truck driver who, granted, did not have much in the way of pickup acceleration but was so high-slung you almost thought it would drive over you if steered safely without touching you the way a couple of kids he had seen in a market area of lower Manhattan would not go around an unloading trailer van stuck way out into the street but walk under it. This fellow Gordon had been a City kid, you know. They didn’t ride bikes so much, but of course that was thirty years and more ago, and the bicycle had now become a middle-class adult inner-city vehicle.

Mayn’s father (who notably had not yet expressed the hope that Jim would spend the night, for maybe the old man didn’t especially want him to — you had to allow for that chance) asked if he was going out to the cemetery while he was here — and Jim said actually he had already been — he had in fact come into Throckmorton Street and on the spur of the moment instead of stopping at his father’s house (though, as he did not tell his father, there was that car that started up and moved out as soon as he passed) he decided he would take a look at his grandparents first before calling on Mel.

He told his father the kitchen ceiling fixture might need rewiring and asked if his father had circuit breakers now. His father said he would get a licensed electrician in; and there was a moment of silence for Bob Yard, who had wired his last house or almost, for he had had a stroke and fallen from a ladder and in death had displayed a wonderful dark grin as if… as if.. and Jim said really he could do it for Mel, the hourly rates were a total rip-off.

His father asked again how he had traveled on this quick trip and it was too bad Flick was in New York. Mayn said he couldn’t keep up with her, she was becoming an authority on pollution without actually residing in New York and had written something that was supposed to be in the mail to him but he hadn’t gotten it but hoped it would be waiting for him tonight.

His father wanted to know what it was.

Well, she says it’s like fiction. Probably selling herself short. I guess it’s environmentalist.

He felt he and his father were pulling away from each other, and when he had tightened the three screws around the globe’s circumference, he came down off the stepladder in one stretching step.

No, he had flown from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, hopped to Washington and had rented car on spur of moment thinking to make stop in Philly to make purely speculative inquiry, but drove straight here; car’s not his, could have taken the Metroliner (not here direct, of course), but he’d felt like a car. "You don’t look like a car," his father said, and he could hear twenty-five years ago his father singing when he was a bit nervous or unhappy, though the off-key melody made him always sound like he cared about everyone in the house, which curiously Jim Mayn had never thought before.

He turned to his father as his father turned away and sat down with a grunt. Nowadays, his father observed, a small-town paper gets all the news it can handle from your electronic terminals. That was true, said his son, they carried the machines around in suitcases like astronauts; he wanted to get into something else but it was his trade. Andrew’s college expenses were about it, now.

His father asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He said, Nothing to talk about — well, Andrew didn’t keep in touch; didn’t feel like it — and some curious stuff going on right now but mostly it’s a guy getting into my hair for some reason, probably my fault, involving people I know; turn away from it, it doesn’t exist, almost. His father said he knew, and Mayn told his father he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being pulled into some hard-to-explain activities involving a cluster of other people’s supposings that became something maybe threatening even to a man with as slow a fuse and as low adrenalin as he; but that wasn’t why he had stopped on the way back.

Mel said, "Funny but your life tells you every few years or so—"

"— I don’t believe my life tells me anything."

His father said O.K., O.K., turn it around and put it your way, but—

He asked his father who this bookseller was and his father said to wait a minute—"stock taking was all I meant, I mean your marriage didn’t — I don’t know what went wrong but I didn’t have to ask you about it, you’re a good man and you felt that on balance you had to shift gears—"

The son laughed and ran water in the sink experimentally and then yanked open the icebox door and found a beer.

"— and now a few years later you’re taking stock of how you’re doing: I tried to do that when your mother died, and I didn’t get anyplace except Brad and I got closer, and I started eating better, in fact I developed quite an appetite, and I recognized I liked this town — what was it you and your grandmother named it?"

Mayn said he had left for Hartford and points south the morning they reported the prison escape and hadn’t looked at a New York paper since.

"Well, Adlai Stevenson said, Stick to your profession, whatever else you do."

Maybe that hadn’t been too clear to him, the son observed, and sat down in the other kitchen chair, beginning to sense why he had come to see his father.

"I had a strong feeling in my heart about you that you would survive and you were always there even if you didn’t get in touch, and had wound up by some circuitous route several rungs up but in the family job, and I held myself responsible for your mother, no one else."

This was a longer set of words than the economical obituary he had set up in type for Sarah as if it had never been written by a living soul, and his son told him so.

Mel laughed: was Flick serious about returning to her given name; and what was she doing in New York? Jim said that she was serious about everything; however, the difference between toxic pollution and her boyfriend was that her boyfriend made her laugh. Mel listened deeply, and asked if she was enjoying the old white Cadillac Jim had bought for her.

If you pulled away the parts of Mel that were above his forehead and below the bone of his chin, you would have remaining a man of indeterminate age, eyes you might never have looked at closely to understand that they wanted help in engaging yours — forget their color which was mostly brown with some pale brown threads of orbit targeting a place potentially of pain-free interest far beyond you or behind them.

Mayn kept saying things that weren’t why he had come, yet often these were answers to his father’s genuine questions, which in turn did seem to be why the visitor had come.

Slow going into a tourist’s brief "Story of Geothermal," through some question whether the St. Louis World’s Fair (really just "Fair") was 1903 or 1904 because if ‘04 then Italy could have advertised there its small, virgin dynamo driven by the first steam well. This was at Larderello near where third-century Rome exploited that mysterious steam field: yet had not your Sky lab astronauts—?

— that was Skylab 3, replied the aging son.

Hadn’t he attended the last Moon launch? his father asked.

Yes indeed, and Skylab a few months later.

He hadn’t spoken about Skylab, said his father.

Skylab 3’s same Skylab different crew.

Yes, his father knew that.

They photographed some hot spots in Central America.

Heat-sensing cameras, his father believed (who for the years when Jim would make duty visits with the wife and children would ask Jim’s children before they would go over to their great-grandfather’s to play in the backyard if they could eat two hamburgers apiece and Flick would always say Yes— but had never to Jim’s ear asked Jim like now with an urgency which after all was only a warmth of being curious yet flowed jointly this private afternoon from Jim’s need: which was quietly, inarticulately, to go inside some imaginary polis complete with kitchen and cellar housed amid a warped map of demands waiting far and near, connected by others even if he had declined to do so, and now nearer than New York, for he saw the blue car pass once and imagined correctly that it would be parked by a high, grassy curb down near his grandparents’ house or back near the Baptist Church whose horrendous purple stained-glass window against white Victorian-shingled gingerbread seemed to glow outward at you with some light of determination from inside)— It was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he said, whether that’s 1803 or 1804, because I’ve run on the track at the university there that they built for the Games, I think, because it’s three laps to the mile— Well, the Purchase was ‘03, said his father, who knew a lot about the Civil War. Well, grinned the son, his memory jogged, the Fair was ‘04 because a man Margaret met on her way East hoped to organize a balloon experiment there, or maybe it was the St. Louis Fair itself he hoped to organize. Your grandmother got a lot of mileage out of that trip West, said his father.

His father persisted: where were the main hot spots?. . any chance for New Jersey to—?

Well, the New Zealand area was a regular thermal wonderland, we overtook them in ‘72 and Italy the next year for number one.

What about the Russians?

Well, they’ve got a small unit in Kamchatka.

His father wanted to know how it worked, and he told him, adding how nuclear explosives in the "ploughshare" method could fracture rock, admitting us to the heat that from piped-in water will make steam to be piped out while trapping the radioactivity down around the hot rock level, if you want to believe that.

He and his father rose from the kitchen table and Jim went downcellar looking for the M. H. Mayne diaries he did not find, turning from time to time to address his invisible father who was standing almost directly over him in the kitchen above. ‘To the best of my knowledge," he heard him say for the millionth time.

He kept seeing his father’s mouth open and shut, open as if itself thinking it might be possible to form the word Yes and, upon doubting this possibility, closing it but closing it upon genuine words that were not necessarily No. Mayn looked at the bottles populating the narrow closet. "You sure look in the pink, Jim," he heard dimly from above.

He turned his father’s queries about the future of geothermal and about Jim’s collateral journalistic future in regard to that subject toward the ancient joke relating speech to hot air, but his father persisted; and when they arrived again at Mayn’s interests in weather and missile development which had taken him to four arms-control conferences in a dozen years (and what was the weather on Venus, sort of an outer-space Houston in July? midsummer St. Louee?) Jim told his father he remembered him singing Rodgers and Hammerstein in the bathroom. Offkey, his father added — and Jim couldn’t believe they were having quite this conversation, this mere recollection where details were not in question but the spirit had so changed that his mother wasn’t sleepwalking in Jim’s dreams but just coming slowly up to bed and asking him why he was awake, for he was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked that singing, Jim said quietly. So did I, said his father.

His father asked if Flick was really going to start calling herself Sarah. Seemed so last week, Jim said.

"Why did you name her Sarah?" Mel asked.

"Why did you call my mother ‘Sorry,’ sometimes?" asked the son.

"She was sorry she’d married me — or married at all, maybe. And I was sometimes sorry — not to have more to say to her."

"But it was her name, not yours."

"I felt very bound up with her, we lived in this house in our own separate ways."

"I’m beginning to miss her," said Jim.

His father’s eyes brightened as if he would laugh. "So am I," he said. "Thirty-two years, I mean start missing her again, because I really did miss her at first, though I thought I was relieved."

"I’ve seen that beach at Mantoloking and that boat she supposedly took, a thousand times, and it always slips into my mind out of nowhere, you know like a subway car into a station and suddenly you got this unit in front of you, this package, and then when you look close, you’re back where you were, thinking about a Medeco lock, or this new program contemplated for mapping lightning from above, to check the pattern against storm severity."

"Did Pearl Myles ever get in touch with you?" his father asked. "Do you remember Pearl Myles? She asked for your address."

He could feel the encroachment. He asked his father who the bookseller was who had inspected the cellar shelves. Name was Saint-Smythe, his father thought. Did he leave a card? No card. Carry a bag? Big leather shoulder bag, crazy-looking fellow indeterminate age, hair light or graying (couldn’t tell) and caught up in a rubber band at the back if you can believe that, wearing a fringe jacket; a fringe case but courteous. Came back upstairs with the Jack London Alcoholic Memoirs inscribed to your grandmother just before he went to Vera Cruz with the Marines, you know. He corresponded with Margaret briefly over Wilson’s policy, she loved Woodrow Wilson but disliked the intervention in Mexico and there was our socialist Jack London saying blood would tell and Mexico must be saved from mestizos, but despite their disagreement, he sent Margaret a copy of that Barleycorn confession of his. I told the man he couldn’t have it.

Mayn turned away from his father, who asked if he had ever visited the geothermal installation in northern California (wasn’t it?) called The Geysers. Oh sure: twice. Greeley, Garibaldi, didn’t they go for steam? Jim didn’t know, but did know and conveyed to his father that William Bell Elliott who discovered the area thought he had found the gates of hell. Steam coming out of a canyon for a quarter of a mile. Teddy Roosevelt was interested in steam, said his father.

How was Brother Brad?

All right now, but they took a trip, went to New Hampshire and walked up a mountain and now they’re O.K. Dunno, they’ll never learn to yell at each other. So many don’t, including yours truly. But they sure can take a trip.

"I think I know the guy who came here for those diaries," said Jim.

"Well, then you can find out whether he walked off with them," said his father, who had paused at the dining-room table to open a magazine for a glance. "Did you ever run into that man again who burned down his own house and heard voices?"

"At a ballgame in Detroit, that’s right."

"A Yankee game," Mel said, "and you got into a shoving match as I recall, and made friends afterward."

"You remember that," said the son, who had never wanted to hug his father and didn’t now. "We wound up on an island in Lake Superior out near the old copper mines, the guy was some Norwegian and we stopped to talk with a friend of his at the Ojibway fire tower who was high on foxes: half-cat, half-dog, little bastards know what they’re doing."

"You never mentioned that," said Mel.

The son would like to tell the father he too had failed to live in marriage to another person; but what if that peculiar marriage of his father’s had been not so bad, and why speak for his father? A crowd of unknown voices were sounding off as if they belonged to him, he to them, and why did that Grace Kimball get under his skin when he had never met her?

Mayn asked his father if he had ever looked at the diaries in question.

Never.

"Isn’t it amazing that some people who weren’t at all involved might think Sarah didn’t commit suicide?"

"You mean Pearl Myles," his father said.

"Looking for damn knows what in life."

"Well, how old would she be now?" said his father, and they faced each other.

He pulled away from his father’s house in Windrow, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father might be friends; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch out of the kitchen with the big wooden table where his father and the half-brother Brad had discovered wonderful love that transcended blood by using blood, and step by step through the parlor-dining room where Trenton and New York papers and old copies of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were arranged here and there like placemats in addition to the two that were permanently set and a pamphlet entitled Personal Memoirs of James Shields; and step by step (Mel now talking steadily) through the now unhistoric precincts of the sofas and fine ladderback straight chairs and the Windsor chair his grandfather Alexander had sat in uncomfortably when he came that had now a shiny white cushion advertising the race track, and step by step past three drop-leaf tables made by early nineteenth-century ancestors, not to mention the nondescript leather chair that needed to be resprung there in the corner with a lamp beside it and a gray metal magazine rack; step by step to the front hall with the music-room door closed and the mahogany table and the giant paperweight with newsprint embedded in glass myopically reflecting the mirror above it. Then, the door and the porch, where his father in black cardigan sweater from the days of the newspaper stood with a hand on a white porch post and waved and waved again to his son, who started the car and waved back, but then his father held up his hand and came down the porch steps and to the curb and Jim reached to roll down the passenger-side window and his father said, "Let me know if the weather on Venus is changing," and Jim replied, "Do you think I’m interested in that fellow’s wife?" and his father, surprised, replied, "Not really." Jim had turned off the ignition and Mel heard the phone far away in the house—"I’ll never make it" — and waved as he straightened up, so Jim saw only the hand at the window, and started the car as his father made tracks back to the porch — must be seventy-three, seventy-four? And Jim made a U-turn and headed out of town toward the clover-leaf, passing the blue New York car parked, now facing the opposite direction from him, halfway up the block near his grandparents’, a car that with some provincial lack of concern he had thought might be following him. And at the next corner he found a tall man with a medium-size red backpack hanging from his hand hitching, and a fur tail hanging out of the pack. And he stopped to pick the man up — he knew he was going to New York — and in the rear-view mirror, so he didn’t have to turn around, he saw the blue car behind him complete its U-turn and slow down, waiting.

He pulled away from the curb wanting to phone his father whose memory seemed better than ever, to thank him, to tell him, "Good; good." And he heard meanwhile the tough-skinned man in suede windbreaker and ironed bluejeans tell him, "Shouldn’t pick people up" (which Mayn agreed with)— for when the man had leaned into the rented car and swung his pack into the back seat, Mayn had reached back on instinct to slide it down flat on the seat and had seen the butt of a revolver with a loop of leather over it just showing from a side pocket.

"Well, this is my day," Mayn said. "So I’m figuring all you want is a ride to the city." The man reached in back and obtained from his pack a box of cough drops and a small spiral notebook which he opened to a page half full of notes in violet ink.

Leaving town, Mayn eyed the blue car following. He looked at the man next to him who was staring thoughtfully out at the road ahead; he had acne pits along the cheekbone and the uneven stubble was dark and silvery. "Do you always leave the butt of that pistol showing?" he asked the man.

"No, I usually make sure it’s out of sight," the man said. "It doesn’t belong to me but I’ve had it awhile and I’m beginning to think maybe it does belong to me."

"Ever been held up by a motorist?" said Mayn.

"No, not by a motorist," said the man; "you?"

"Haven’t hitched in years; generally fly."

"Suppose you just get out," said the man, "and I drive back down the road and come back here and you put out your thumb and we’ll see what it feels like," said the man.

"It wouldn’t feel real," said Mayn; "it would be like middle-class wild-game hunting." He had picked the man up on the chance that he was with the big guy driving the blue car.

At the rotary they passed the road to the shore and the Trenton road and found themselves on the connecting road to the turnpike, the same blue car two or three back that had accompanied Mayn to the cemetery, driven on, and followed him back to Throckmorton Street.

Mayn pulled off the road and nearly sideswiped the phone booth he parked by, in front of a small yellow house with a tarpaper roof. A person in a black-and-yellow-striped garment watched at the window. Mayn took the car keys with him. The blue car ran by, looking violet in the passing lane parallel with a red van. Then it fell back and to the right and a quarter of a mile or more downrange stopped at a low block-like edifice which was a suburban insurance branch. His father answered as if facing slightly away from him, and Jim said, "I just wanted to thank you, Dad; I was amazed you remembered all that nonsense. By the way, you used to dream of owning a white Hispano-Suiza. Remember?"

"Yes, and it was a real dream at night," his father said as if interrupting himself; "your mother told everyone."

"I remember," said Mayn.

"Flick phoned," said Mel. "She wanted to speak to you. She had guessed you were here. I asked if everything was all right. She sounded puzzled. She asked if you had spoken about a typescript she sent you and I said yes, and she said, Good, good, that’s all she wanted to know, and thanked me — then asked me of all people how well you knew someone called Grace Kimball because you were involved with a women’s bank that a friend of the Kimball woman does P.R. for — is that right? Then she said she had to go. I heard voices behind her, and someone said a word or name twice that sounded like ‘Afraid’ or Trying,’ I mean like frying eggs. That’s all I have to report, Jim."

Mayn thanked his father and with a chill like a blush of shock knew (and should say to someone now) that through Norma and not only Norma he could have described to his father the brother of this woman Grace whom he had never known, lying on the front walk in the middle of the continent, with blood on him, and with terrible sympathy and ardor flowing, yes flowing, from the body and eyes of his sister above him in the house, on a porch, somewhere that didn’t matter so much as that Mayn was back there like a colonist of the compacted future unobtrusively regrasping the century his civilization had left so that even if he had no blood-sister, he felt like Grace Kimball nonetheless and could have faked an entire double-column obit of information—"shared," as she said; consigned to print, as he would say, and eternally retrievable.

The hitch-hiker was doing something with the dashboard.

"Dad, did you ever think my mother was alive?"

His father might have been thinking for a moment. "Where would she have gone?" he said. "But more to the point, who’s this man you think borrowed those old diaries?"

"Oh, he’s one of these people that don’t really matter, Dad, but you turn around and find them there and you want to strangle them."

He pulled away into the right lane, having gotten no answer at the number Flick could be reached at, and knowing he had picked up this middle-aged hitch-hiker to use him or include him the way the engine seemed to build the radio right into it, both starting because his passenger had turned the knob while the ignition was off.

Twice during their conversation the news reported the kidnapping of the escaped man’s child and in their listening pause Mayn knew so well that Spence had drawn him into the picture by assuming he was already deep in it that if Spence had sent him a bulletin out of this car-radio speaker that generated the car’s horizontal gravity—"Wherever you are, Mayn" — he could not have felt more surely a violent imprint to come somewhere like change of weight or future species on the bones of his face, nor more exactly and wordlessly the anger of a dark Hispanic woman ahead in New York wildly, silently searching a noisy police stationhouse for her child: what was she doing there? why would they expose her to a microphone? how could Mayn make up so well and truly that scene with the City flowing in and out of it — so who would say for sure which was margin and which was the cash-up-front center? while what was in the way proved more important than what we had been bound for yet we had been bound for what was in the way, but only for now but don’t ask the people in a precinct stationhouse — a large, green plant on a metal typewriter stand near a dispatcher’s desk, a mobile video unit somehow allowed in there and right by Mayn’s shoulder when he had nothing to do with those people except that if interrogated he wouldn’t even be protecting sources were he to deny knowledge of the man known to Efrain (released) and to Foley (inside), and to the Chilean economist, who had visited the man, who had himself escaped less than seventy-two hours ago and was now said to have abducted his young son.

The blue car had maintained its relative immobility in relation to Mayn’s rented vehicle, and he had sensed that the driver was confused and should be somewhere else.

The hitch-hiker, who shared two Russian cigarettes with Mayn, observed that in his experience there would always be people who didn’t approve of your domestic arrangements and maybe neither did you, but we couldn’t all live in the same way: he himself rejected bus and train travel, preferred driving but did not own a car: ergo, hitch-hike, where there’s waste in the direction of uncertainty and sometimes scheduling but how do you measure time, by clock or by what happens? and getting there’s what matters; and when hitchhiking the man was always sure to join up with people he didn’t know, which was dispersive in one way but collective in another, and which was O.K. when in a less abstract era he was a redneck kid visiting his starving cousins out there beyond the cemetery road — and was all right now that he had been inspired by—

— "I know you from somewhere," Mayn said, as the blue car passed a red van and swung back in line.

— inspired, the man said, by a man aliased Santee Sioux (no Indian he), who had indirectly caused the hitch-hiker’s father a fatal heart seizure, and by a halfbreed he had hardly seen since they were kids, to revisit that very cemetery he had often passed and apply this little power he was known by Santee to possess to detect a unique strain of radioactivity in the human body: that is, at a certain place there in the graveyard, maybe two side-by-side places: on the possibility that whoever was buried there (two women, he said) had in them this unique strain of residue that, when found in the human body, sometimes wasn’t waste but an opposite, or so some western Indians still said, who according to Santee—

"Didn’t I pick you up once before?" Mayn asked quietly as if from his steady, intent eyes.

The man didn’t think so, unless Mayn had looked different.

They pulled in at a turnpike "gas world" planned with a long approach configuration offering a variety of services. Mayn phoned Flick at Lincoln’s, got no reply, phoned his own place, then tried Flick again; now guessed that he was on the final curve of a collective that was being daydreamt by those incapable of other dream modes Mayn flashed the Hispanic mother about to enter a police stationhouse somewhere in Manhattan north (future? or right now?).

The blue car had passed them again and had stopped in the emergency lane a quarter of a mile down glowing violet now in the twilight; a patrol car pulled over behind the car, the hitch-hiker stopped talking for a second, Mayn pulled out onto the road again, having forgotten to get gas. A state trooper sauntered up to greet the driver of the violet car, whom Mayn half-recognized as they drove by, a heavy, burnished young man in a large pale hat and steely-reflecting aviator sunglasses.

The hitch-hiker was explaining that Santee was an alias for a man who had sold to a New Hampshire paper a photograph of the hitch-hiker and a friend blindfolded apparently before a Cuban firing squad (certainly, despite the hat on one apparently female member, it wasn’t a firing squad composed of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball players), when it was two photos not one, but, alas, his father had recognized his T-shirt and his left ear — Mayn would never forget the pleasant cactus-green double-lobe — and that had done it for the father, and the strange thing was that Santee’s compensation to the busy hitchhiker who had felt inclined to kill him was to give him a job to do — no money guarantee, just the chance to try his gift on peculiar ground: for—

"You said," said Mayn, "that the cemetery in question was on the outskirts of the town where I picked you up."

The hitch-hiker had not said; but this was true: for the halfbreed in this town that Santee gave a code name to had known him in the old days as a "Trace Window" — some weighty notion left with a Creek tribe by one of the halfbreed’s great-great relations though this relation was a Natchay, a unique survivor having by glad suicidal rite accompanied his king the Sun King to his funeral but then curiously and scandalously survived a treble dose of the tobacco hypnotic ritually designed to render unconscious such loyal followers so they could then be painlessly strangled. Those running the funeral did not know what to do with him; they were afraid, and so they used the potent future-dreams he subsequently began to have as an excuse to run him out of their chiefdom — which was just before the French came in again and wiped out the Natchay, which this drug-proof Indian had dreamed, while that ritual suicide he had entered and lived through left him not only with these dreams and other dreams of turning but with powers he never used except that of living a long time upon joining the Creeks to the north soon afterward. He arrived on foot with a bag of bear ribs and a limitlessly self-renewing supply of root jelly, but he left such ideas with them as that some women and men could receive, like windows, light in beam-waves or sun-shadows from people who had in their bodies an alloy mineral, radiant, potential; and this halfbreed—

"What was the code name?"

"You wouldn’t ask like that if you didn’t know," said the gaunt man beside Mayn, "if you didn’t know a’ready." Mayn in the corner of his eye felt the man eye-cornering him.

"Ira Lee is no halfbreed," said Mayn, and stepped on the gas. His companion seemed not to notice that they were exiting too soon, not the New York City exit; he wanted to make a point, he was batonning his finger at the windshield. It was no ordinary homogeneous solid solution, that alloy, not Chilean copper and Bolivian tin woven atom for atom reciprocally in each other’s interstices; it was radioactive but open-ended so the contagion or thrust of it was up for grabs. So this Ira Lee, once twice three times approached Santee, recalled the "Trace Window" kid, grown now to be Mayn’s present company, heretofore held up in an open-air restaurant near Minneapolis with a fishing friend, both blindfolded if not smothered with their napkins while one of the thieves removed his stocking mask because it inflamed an abcess in his forehead and a snapshot taken of the two men in their college T-shirts, spare ribs held hidden behind their backs, found its way into the hands of Santee—

— "also a code name," Mayn added with a weight of miles and miles of historic small talk from this itinerant specialist—

— then or in its later splice with the Cuban squad, and then indirectly the hitch-hiker had been drawn into Santee’s employ to apply his gift to some "Windrow" grave or graves whether "Trace Window" received ordinary garden-variety radioactive message or that residual potentiality now at rest, now dangerously creative — detectible originally among certain southwestern ancients who arrived thirstily among the proto-Natchay of Tennessippi and might kill or cure with the mineral concentration they periodically mustered of which, some generations later, the one Natchay who survived his own loyal funeral to join the Creeks and be ancestor to the halfbreed Ira Lee—

"Perhaps he was a halfbreed," said Mayn, feeling as if he had slipped into another form, feeling the city and the twilight nearer; "we sure called him that, among ourselves—"

— this great-great relation bequeathed the knowledge to perhaps a grand-nephew who found it once in the mid-nineties uniquely duplicated in emanations from a proud, hungry western Indian passing through Pennsylvania as if seeking in the wrong direction his boat or his clan and living on an afterlife of nonetheless fertile if strong-tasting crocodile gums not to mention a mask of mosquito bites targeted around his bright eyes—

"I think I have to drop you off here," said Mayn, but had to laugh at the man’s calmness in the face of interruption, who then said he couldn’t see why, and offered to pay for a tank of premium but was not accepted.

They pulled out of a gas station and reacquired the turnpike pulse; they laughed, they had had a true emergency, for the tank had taken three or four gallons more than the gauge said it had any right to, and Mayn felt he pulled closer and closer to the spirit in which his father had, as he had flatly said, "Come full circle only nobody’s here."

"You have it," said the man, and if Mayn did not know how the hitchhiker had come to be known as a Trace Window, he understood that the man was receiving some trace alloy from him.

And as the tunnel distantly approached upon one curve of twilight and he thought he needed to drop the man this side of the river, the man identified now the emanations from that noble Indian adrift in Pennsylvania in ‘94 or ‘95, bearing a tremendous though dried bison tongue with but one bite out of it showing in the cutaway section live sleeping rootlets of the tongue’s normally soft valve needles which might be where the potential energy came from that this now horseless wanderer studied with his hand in his lion-skin bag around the tongue thinking the miles away maybe unconscious that in his body, spiced or not by the patient force untapped quite yet by hand and mind, he bore the original alloy recently identified to the hitch-hiker as deposits of alloy unique in that their solid solution occurred in nature—

"Do you know what happened to that blue car?" Mayn asked his passenger evenly.

"This is a blue car," said the man who seemed weary from these ancient travels but bent upon bearing out to the end his account of why he had been where Mayn had found him: yet first the alloy, the natural alloy — it had been created way back when by a rare corridor of weather from Canada lofting south (in the spiral forms of future hailstones to be precipitated eventually into one of the morphic mountains of the Southern Rockies said to be fed by the compacted flesh and blood of climbers quick-sucked by the killer sky-blue worm or tiny Pressure Snake) elements of a northern ore gray-greenish and in luster horny but radioactive with mysteriously forked potentiality through, at the northern source, a bind with the spiral forms of hailstone structure and, at the southern end, a bind with flesh and blood of mountaineers so recently sucked and Pressure-Snake-processed into that steep ground that their extreme compression had not yet unriddled its energies into the dispersed dreams or thoughts (depending on which authority you fall for) peculiar to these mountains, and then and only then was the now-or-never moment of alloy.

"Why ‘forked,’ " said Mayn, "because I know this story" — or some of it, he felt; and he asked the hitch-hiker to find a map in the glove compartment, while Mayn reached his right arm between the seats and was able to draw out the heavyish pistol, put it in his lap, change steering hands, and, feeling in the operation able to drive without thinking, transfer the pistol down between his seat and the door, first ascertaining that the revolver was at least partially loaded.

"Forked," went on the hitch-hiker, his eyes closed, the mapless glove compartment shut again, ‘‘because the particle runoff might kill, like your regular radioactive waste, though this was probably crypto-thorium and in those days might cause breaks in skin, in flesh, a hole in your head no less, Ray; or it might—" the hitch-hiker-historian-comedian-dowser-genius yawned—"might yield you energies, some as unthinkable as half the future of the planet was getting the name ‘unthinkable’ ‘‘—but being a Trace Window kept one on the move not just employment-wise but staying away from these contracts which can be tough, witness this afternoon’s consultancy which was now history in the little notebook, info to be passed to alias Santee — that’s right, Alias is his first name! — whose interest in those graves was almost as odd as the driver kind enough to pick up this ol’ Trace Window whatever prearranged coincidence this hitch was due to.

He pulled out to pass a red van and caught sight of his burnished forehead in the mirror. He pulled away and knew he did not increase the distance from his father for he could make it anything he wanted as if he could re-grid his land by what he knew was true in his skull and hands and chest, and was behind his eyes.

"You said I have it?" he said to the dreaming, thinking, resting man.

"Yes, and what you have feels like the vein of it I found coming up in that graveyard today single and double but more odd than really double, it feels like the real original, it makes me feel like a three-dimensional window and then some. But don’t credit me with wisdom. I just have this thing I can do, O.K.?"

"Which graves?" said Mayn, and held back so sternly the jolting guesswork he had just done that he felt news pass from one window to the other and back the news he now heard.

"Two ladies named Mayn. One with an e—you know them? do you come from that town? I guess I know you do, because the traces I registered at Sarah’s grave (died 1945) and at Margaret’s (died in the fifties) had the very same cycle, except the force from one was a lot greater than the force from the other."

Mayn laughed. "I hope it was the second one that was stronger, because there’s no body in the 1945 grave."

The tunnel pulled the line of cars in. His distance from his father had not altered and it pulled away from the son until what stood between was not distance but what they had talked about, which was about half of it garbage but obstacle only to the son’s departure, and so he had stayed for upwards of three hours, forgetting for minutes and minutes the M. H. Mayne diaries once upon a time in the cellar, once upon a time in his grandfather’s hands, who had exclaimed about a diagram in volume two, while the energy questions Jim and Mel had "dealt with" this afternoon kept the northern bison tongue’s thunderous future where it belonged, much less the hand around it of a hungry Navajo traveler once content to observe and describe the cloudy messages of moist air columned up to mushroom out at the top telling a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, a Prince content to record a noctilucent cloud so low that he smelled seared metal and some flesh’s welcome of fresh-ground cornmeal mush, a hunter’s breakfast just out of reach for an eastbound Prince bearing alloy of hailstone-spiraled crypto-thorium and the blue-worm-compacted, mountain-injected lives of those climber-heroes Anglo and Indian whom Indians west and east would seem to have immortalized in traces windowed alike in white skin and red skin and borne not just in red but in the white of Margaret, whose active residue now named radioactive proved less so than the void of Jersey ground below for Pete’s sake her daughter’s earlier marker! So that Mayn, rejecting the passenger’s offer of toll money, had to ask if the man really knew what he was talking about and whence came his credentials.

Why, Uncle Willy. And the year was ‘45. Nobody asks to be a Trace

Window, but it was the afternoon of a fall day and walking out of town along the Negro section parallel with the Jersey Central tracks, he had been yelled at by Ira from his porch and had detoured in that direction not without some amiable hostility only to be transfixed on the first of the three wooden steps leading to the low porch by Uncle Willy, who was Ira’s mother’s uncle and a full-blooded Creek by repute though he gave no support to this idea, identifying himself as descendant of a Natchez who had married into a Creek community. Don’t come any further he said — what do you feel?

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.

He pulled away up the trough of the tunnel exit and woke his passenger with thanks in his humorous heart for all the lore that had not so much stood in their way from Windrow to New York as been it. He asked the gaunt, weathered man if on this professional occasion the contract was not just the graves in Windrow but the driver-host coincidentally met; and the man assured him that O.K. the universe ran on cause-effect but, through some frame of curve he didn’t really understand, it held to a convergence law that he grasped no better than he grasped his Trace-Windowhood, the margin was always turning us to it like a perfectly serviceable center.

"You haven’t foreseen everything that’s going to happen now, have you?" said the man with respectful intimacy as he reached back for his pack.

"I keep getting hit on the cheekbone," said Mayn. "I’ve got to do something about it."

The hitch-hiker told him a phone number. Mayn said he thought he knew it; the hitch-hiker smiled: "Live long enough," he said, and Mayn feared for his daughter while haunted by unknown pages written by her for his eyes, waiting for him when he got home he felt sure, promising him some responsibility he had missed somewhere.

It caught him under the eye before he could pull away bang on the cheekbone, and the imprint rang right into next week and the days ahead, until he thought others had always been able to hear this sound in his body. This sound in your body like thought control, though whose thought? For one day waking up in an apartment you hadn’t lived in in years, the thing that was going to hit you came like a day dreamt memory. Her hand. Your cheekbone.

But wait. The hand that struck didn’t touch the cheekbone.

The microphone came in between and had no business being in that place.

Men and women cops in and out of uniform have been coming and going in the official hallway, a broad-shouldered blonde in jeans sitting on a desk so she’s distinct in every way from the black women laughing at their typewriters, smoking on the phone. Efrain, whose absence from his sister’s when Mayn phoned seemed filled by the address of the stationhouse the sister was willing to give Mayn, isn’t here either. Mayn’s met one of the detectives at a law-school dinner he got invited to by a tennis partner and later Mayn gave the detective two tickets to a hockey game, no a basketball game, no reason to expect to run into him here tonight, which both of them take for granted, the man with a beard now, classier glasses, the same measured manner of a much bigger man than he physically is, lighting a pipe and talking to no one.

Then the woman, Puerto Rican, no, Cuban, rushes in from the street and all the cops and the two women cops, the blonde and a Hispanic who’s in uniform, seem stopped and you feel the width of the hall, the check-in table before you get to the high counter, the width of the place more than its length, and the noise widening as the man with the video unit turns and turns and targets. The woman, the mother of the lost boy, has a young red-haired cop with her, a step behind her, a young, mustachioed, happy-type-of-fellow. And a step behind him and a head shorter comes another Hispanic who’s with her — square-browed, stubble-jawed, slender, tired relative, her brother, brother-in-law, cousin, friend in the night.

So here’s the TV newsman next to you with that nose and skin — Indian? Eskimo? — pushing a mike at her and nobody stopping him, and she’s trying to get through the hallway to the end. To what’s the end on the other side of the glass-paneled door. Blindly you recall your own children climated by the places you used to provide for them, your son the day you lost him on the subway, he was five — you shake hands with the detective, as he comes by, but you don’t mention your son. And here’s the TV newsman — man made of news — pushing a mike at the Cuban woman and her wide eyes are fixed on the far end of this official hallway but jump to this mike with a speed like the speed of — landscape. Which is what flies into mind as a shadow flies at you, at Mayn. But you brought the landscape with you and you didn’t fly, you came by hired car, hardly stopping to phone, and you didn’t go home first, you drove here so it felt like coming past traffic lights and more traffic lights on foot, not flying.

This dark, round-ended thing under her nose is prodding at her.

She opens her mouth to it, the TV reporter is not being stopped, he has cheeks that talk as fast as his dark lips, he’s got on a muscular T-shirt with the date on it, 1977, not today’s exact date but good enough, he’s asking about her kids, does she have other kids at home. The mouth opens wider to cry and Mayn might feel nearer and nearer while not moving, and will she take a bite out of the mike, the eyes in agony. But then she doesn’t care what this thing thrust under her nose can do to her. And before the cop can say, "Let her through," why you get hit.

Bludgeon against the cheekbone, it hits you under the eye, the left.

It’s the mike, not her hand. Her hand was what swiped the mike, swept it to one side because it occupied a position already taken up by her intent. Knocked the mike practically out of the Eskimo, no, Indian newsman’s hand.

But before she could do this you’d leaned to catch her muttered words, and you got jostled, and you asked, "Is he headed for Santiago?"

Got jostled from behind. Which tipped you into the mike’s path. And you were taking up position already occupied by the mike when it slammed your cheekbone. It struck so hard you felt the metal mesh stick in you for an instant as short as the ending of a life — as short as your life. And you remember a phone number, only the numbers a man vouchsafed to you half an hour ago, and the landscape flown in bulges up off its grid so that for the moment of the mother’s frightened, angry words, you know that the bulge was always there and the grid as snug as abstract can be upon the sphere, the sphere, where that landscape lies.

"He ain’t going to come here," the woman said, but in the split-flash before she batted the mike out of the park, her eye knew Mayn.

She is rushed away by the space in front of her toward the glass-paneled area and she doesn’t toss her head at Mayn: but him she was answering, and not the man asking, "Do you know where your husband is? Did you have any advance warning that he would escape? Is he involved in a plot against Castro, is he headed for Florida? Has anyone contacted you about your little boy? When were you told that your daughters were being brought here for safety?" Your hand’s on your cheekbone, a smile on the rest of your face asking Harry — that’s the detective’s name — if a guy name of Ray Spence has been around, looks like a fairly well-dressed drifter, sometimes a fringe jacket, boots, pretty good clothes but he’ll never make it as a person, pony tail and maybe some suspicion of beard. No one like that in evidence here to Harry’s knowledge. What’s Mayn doing here? Couple of cons, one outside, one inside, both knew the Cuban. What’s the chance he’s not anti-Castro at all? Good chance, Harry answers, as if it doesn’t matter. Routine break maybe — but they’re all political nowadays to hear these guys tell it. But when did the kid disappear — before the break, like they said? Light from a ceiling lamp crash-lands onto Harry’s large, muscle-boned face lifted up in fatigue and some not convincing profession of exasperated who-the-hell-knows, and for a reason Mayn wouldn’t claim to know but it seems to be drawn from the man by Mayn, drawn in trust or as if into a fine, irresistible gap of unknown shared experience, Harry takes his light, bright-checked sport jacket off a chair and tells Mayn with the most direct quietness in the midst of the noise that’s out of place at eight in the evening when nothing’s ordinarily happening, "They didn’t give out the news of the break for eight, ten hours; the kid was taken right about the time of the break, it couldn’t have been the father and what would he want with the kid anyway?"

Mayn thanked Harry, and the landscape moved in again, rented or priceless who cared, it was not just arriving, it was on the move, steady, and Mayn knew this as surely as he knew he was on the move, no stopping, and — no sweat — a way’s been found for rest to come between him and the landscape, which is composite anyhow, though American all the way — wide as hell but with that lengthwise aim, and it arrived and could not get round him and was slowed by him. Harry came back and told him the blonde policewoman Mary had had a call for James Mayn a while back, they didn’t take calls for newspapermen, she’d said, but the name lingered. A woman calling, was all she knew.

"You got something for us?" Harry asked, looking like he was leaving.

"Nothing together."

"So shovel it over to me, I’ll take it as is."

"Any clandestine movements of nuclear waste into the Northeast?"

"Sure, sure, I can see it in my mind’s eye," said Harry, and they emerged from the stationhouse under the arc of a football thrown from streetlight to streetlight.

"What’s one more anti-Castro exile?" Mayn said, and the phone number in his head came back with landscape.

"Do you ever hear from an inmate named Foley?"

"George and his economic plan for creativity in the prison of the future."

"He mentioned you in a letter."

"He’s written me one or two."

"He mentioned our Cuban fugitive and a visitor he had."

"In a letter to me?"

"Maybe you’re not opening all your mail."

"Maybe I have help."

"You met the visitor in question in Florida, where some Cubans are not anti-Castro."

"But only seem so," said Mayn. "Foley is a dreamer and a scientist, not political."

"He expressed an opinion about the unconscious of our fugitive after a heated discussion in which they switched opinions several times on the subject of worker control of factories and prisoner control of prisons."

Mayn said he didn’t recall receiving that letter, and Harry laughed. Harry asked him where he was headed, but did not ask for a ride. Mayn pulled away from the curb wondering why he had not looked Harry up, and why, too, he had left the Chilean economist unencountered for so long except through the information received from Amy. Though from Norma, too — about the wife, Clara. He had liked the man, been put off by his knowing Spence, kept him in mind, in reserve — potential.

The city went with him down below the entrance to FDR Drive, which he did not take, down Second Avenue into richer lights of East Side restaurant territory where under sidewalk awning, hard by latest enriched newsstand, fruit-and-vegetable immigrants raise right out of sidewalk plots of blue broccoli and well-priced green grapes, mealy tomatoes and hydroponic watercress plus those spongy basketed ivory-colored squares lurking in water which some future between here and Moon he used to be stuck in is racing against time to create more cheaply, and he had decided not to tell Harry to check his Chilean connections in Manhattan and Washington because Spence had already been advertising rumors into facts.

The mike had been bare, the mesh’s grid still with him, the way it stayed with him in the stationhouse. "Tough mother," the blonde had said, her hair drawn back against her temples by two steel combs. The bruise on Mayn’s face, isn’t there a law saying she had to get equal treatment? Dark warps of hair, tight-slanted down her forehead, made her eyes look closer together. Rican rouge, dark sunsets. Behind the gleaming lips of her mouth, white teeth, gaps of silver; gold, too, from eating the surplus carrots from your old wives’ tale that carrots give you gold teeth (even if you didn’t want them). Her kids were on the other side of a milk-glass-paneled door at the end of that muddled hallway. Who knows what she sees? Them dead, sprawled. Left arm, right leg, put back together the wrong way, like a lake of sand, a mountain of fluid, a household inadvertently launched by Congress. She lives half her life for others. Which half is surplus and to whom does her value belong, maybe her husband, two or three times visited by the Chilean economist, whom Spence, as if inspired by Mayn’s absences, will draw further in, until the cultured, austere, somewhat exiled, somewhat tragic economist won’t be jogging in the park any more.

The woman’s face is seen and not heard. It is with Mayn, as it was before he saw her. The flesh and bones have got fixed inside his own face. The opposite of his own son’s flesh and bones the day they got fixed outside his; it scared Mayn more than a bomb or that deep vapor of a dying man’s breath. The day this boy named Andrew was five. The subway platform between the Brooklyn-bound and Manhattan-bound tracks, the curved white walls of tile inlaid with green and brown and blue tiles for the name of the station, the curve making the tunnel a tube that you — Mayn — once as a child imagined was a tunnel endlessly of these glimmering white tiles like the Holland Tunnel between New York and Holland — the vending machines — for a second your five-year-old son wasn’t there, and then for more than a second. People pushed past to board the train. For the train had come in. He had had some money in his hand, his father looked around for him there on the IRT platform, and then the door began to slide — the two doors in the days when both doors functioned — and the father turned from the mirror of the vending machine— for where was Andy? — and the doors weren’t in motion any more, except in the car where they were fixed. And Andy’s face was on the other side of the streaked glass in another city that seemed the only city moving. Children no hedge against inflation: for look at the figures: a private foundation where the young woman Amy works with the Chilean economist in order to survive in a manner that cannot but allure Larry toward the experience of loving her too much for her to give it back makes public that in one year sixty-eight New York children under sixteen were murdered, and of these thirty-six were under seven, half were black, a third more were Puerto Rican. The Cuban mother’s hedge against inflation is knowing what comes next now. You have your bruise, and she is far away, surging down the hallway through Spanish and English. She knows what comes next. She’s got to get to her kids. To get her kids. They are not overhead in the laboratory of an orbiting kitchen, nor in a tin ashtray beside a Press Pool telephone shouldered to your ear while a known child, who is in the mind before it gets transformed to frequency and wired home to form a report, is sweeping up a mine in the next field before they plant. So his mother searches elsewhere as if she isn’t looking for unexploded devices but just lacks the eyesight to see her son off to one side here, whom she’s really looking for, that is if he’s not under the soil like a coin you run your metal finder over in the dark while the friendly dogs chase each other back and forth between you and others. Stare out the moving window at the landscape that gets flown in from assignment to assignment, and you be fixed. Stare out a window at a steep green and white and brown valleyscape of shacks brightly rising from the edge of a city full of foreign sun. Caracas. Brazil. South.

How could the wife Joy react to his losing their son on the subway, when the son had been found at the next stop in conversation with a small elderly black man in an army jacket and a pith helmet and spurious ribbons? Joy reacted by walking around the living room as if it were tipping the way it was for her husband. As if she wanted to call the police now. And then she was crying at his side, but not in relief.

The landscape travels with him, throw in a Statue on a movable island, he doesn’t return the car tonight, he enters his building with the hitch-hiker’s phone number on his mind, cracked and peeling walls as if the charts on them get revealed as the walls disintegrate; the simultaneous reincarnation his young friend Larry will explain soon turns Mayn’s heart again to some ludicrously ancient threat which the statute of limitations exempts Mayn from, so the threat is inherited by Larry, and the doorman Manuel is standing in his way speaking Spanish, which Mayn returns.

It is a heavy nine-by-twelve envelope containing what Flick said was coming.

"Thanks. Thanks."

"I figure it’s important."

"You didn’t leave it lying around the mailroom. Thanks. When was it delivered?"

Manuel hesitates. "This evening. Two hours ago. I signed for it."

"Special delivery? Couldn’t be."

"Some guy. I signed for it."

"It was the post office."

"No. Just a piece of paper. I signed for you."

"Thank you."

The manila envelope has been sliced open and scotch-taped back. He needs a hot shower, and while he pictures Norma picking up his mail while he was away and visiting those plants, and he imagines where Flick is and what he is responsible for, he sees his own last name, no more, on the return address, upper left, and draws the sheaf of pages, forty or more, up out of the envelope and sees that his daughter has given herself back her given name, as (he recalls in a sweat his own words) "perpetrator of an amazing load of verbiage, Daddy."

It is about something called Effluent Pollution Reciprocal Involving Both Water and Air, and it is by Sarah Mayn, and he almost fails to get off at his floor, he’s electrified but because a wilderness of feeling hugs him like painless chest pains in the factual, explanatory lines. She could use a blue pencil, but he is frightened by the prospect of some form of truth, its real weight in his daughter’s grown life more than this other unpleasant business of how and why it was intercepted and then, this evening, returned. The envelope is coming into this old apartment of his for the second time, not the first. He finds on the last page gas chambers and gas ovens and wonders by what steps she got there; but he wants to get there himself the right way, he’s skimmed so many books, half-finished them. But sweat along the bridge of his nose swells in the corner of an eye and he is looking for his keys and thinking about his divorced wife Joy and feeling someone wants him to explain why it came apart, why it didn’t work out, if that’s a fair way to say it — and he can’t, he can’t explain, he can’t explain, entering the apartment — that is, he doesn’t know why he isn’t with her — he’s looking at his adored daughter’s typed lines, and he can see only between them for God’s sake, all that space between them: for God’s sake he hears some voice say in his brain, for God’s sake so sentimentally empty he could vomit.

He can’t explain why it fell apart. How’s that for maturity?’