Jamestown (2 page)

I walked with Stickboy out into the woods. I want to write a fabulous description of the woods for you in the exciting language of English, but it's going to be hard. I don't know the English names of woodsy things. There's a kind of moss that's soft and green and smells like the neck of my mom, who died when I was one. I guess I'll call this moss mom's neck. Mom's neck drips or droops from the branches of the trees. The branches have leaves that fall off in autumn and grow back in spring. The leaves in the spring are green and round or spear-shaped or heart-shaped or radiant. The air in the woods this time of year is wet and green. When I open my mouth in the woods it fills with green. When I speak in the woods my words come out green. If I think of someone I love, my thoughts are green. The woods also have the remnants of a defunct civilization that thrived on this very spot, so for every couple dozen trees there'll be a brokedown edifice of years gone by. The woods have deadly creatures too but I'll not say their names right now.

Deeper and deeper into the forest went Stickboy and I. “I think we will not marry after all,” he said, which stopped me in mid-stride.

“What?”

“I think we will not marry after all.”

“What will prevent us?”

“The future.”

“Why, whenever you talk about the future, do you sound as if you're describing a country where only sad people live?”

“To counteract the nostalgia for the future that you and everyone else around here seem to feel. To counteract the naïve idea that what makes the future good is that it's the future.”

Well it hit me pretty hard when he said that about him and me not getting married, an event we'd been planning since we met at birth. I think he's right but I don't know why. Maybe he's right because he said it. Does that ever happen in English, where saying something makes it true? That happens in my language all the time so people have to be careful what they say but no one ever is, enough.

Then some time passed in the woods that I don't remember anything about, a little wedge of life that's disappeared. And then he said one more thing to me, a single word that caused a single feeling in my breast. The feeling I remember well, but not the word that was its maker. Ugh, I wish I hadn't written this. Too late now.

Johnny Rolfe

To the one whose existence I doubt:

We parallel the river's southward course. Our progress is glacial. Long swathes of the old road are gone. Often we know we're on what used to be the road only by the signs that remain on what used to be its side:
FARMLAND-FRESH
PRODUCE,
BUMPER-TO-BUMPER
AUTO
PARTS,
FRIENDLY
MOTEL,
MOOSE
LODGE,
CHRISTIANA
CHICKEN
SHACK,
SHAFT
OX
CHIROPRACTIC,
OASIS
CAR
WASH,
MIRACLE
DELIVERANCE
TABERNACLE,
SPEED
LIMIT
ENFORCED
BY
AIRCRAFT,
DRUG-FREE
SCHOOL
ZONE
: linguistic detritus of history, voices from a past we hope to reclaim, lonely notes our forebears wrote in code to tell us how to find them.
WHISPERING
PINES
MOTEL,
MASON-DIXON
SPORTS
COMPLEX,
CRAFT
EMPORIUM,
SELF-EMPLOYED
HEALTH
INSURANCE,
OTHELLO,
BAIT
AND
TACKLE,
TEMPERANCE,
WILDLIFE
REFUGE,
FREE
WATERFRONT
CATALOGUE
7000
FEET
.

We passed another trading post today. Everyone but Jack Smith, the red-haired mechanic, who'd had to slice John Martin's face, shunned this one. We stopped for lunch; Smith removed a red wagon full of paltry trinkets from the trailer of supplies behind the bus and went to the post alone on foot. I gazed through the scuffed-up glass at the most compelling sign of all:

I would have risked my life to find who made that sign, but the house it stood before and described had become a house-shaped square of ash, so I stayed put.

An hour later Martin, whose face there was a little less of now, said, “Let's leave without Smith.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” the driver said.

Others said:

“Let's wait an hour, then go after him.”

“Let's wait an hour, then leave.”

“Let's kill him when he gets back, if he isn't already dead.”

“Let's go after him now, he's been gone long enough, something bad's happened.” (That was me.)

“Let's send you in after him alone,” Martin said.

I said, “I know it stings to get punked by someone of a lower social station, Martin.”

He came at me along the bus's wide central aisle, a blur of bandages deep brown with dried blood. I removed from my pocket the very handheld device on which I'm now describing this and jammed it in his knee. He howled and fell and howled. He wouldn't walk again for hours at least, and thus I'd saved him from a dozen fights, a munificent gesture, almost as if I'd used this thing to communicate something of value.

Against my own best sense, I want to know John Martin—not know him tactically to know what he'll do next so I can do it to him first, I mean I want to know him in the useless way people know. He's small and pale, fine-boned and quick, a meticulous dresser and a dirty fighter with a high, elegant forehead. With his speed and size, his wont to bite and scratch, he fights well in a cramped space. The syllogism of his inclusion on this trip: he's good at number crunching, he'll bite off the finger of his assailant, let's include him on this trip. And Martin's a born executive—one of that class of men who make or know the secrets that define the contour of our lives without our knowledge, secrets one hundred molecules of which the rest of us inhale with every breath. You can tell he's one of them by how he wears his suit. Even when it's soiled and scuffed, stained with blood, and stinks of fear and rage, Martin's suit attends his body as the air attends an eagle's wing.

We on this bus are brothers by default. We breathe each other's breaths, fumes, and farts. That a flake of Martin's shed skin, while riding the currents of the bus's inner wind, should land on my lunchmeat is a likelihood too great not to make my peace with. The enmity of my neighbor is rent I pay for life on earth. I love the man who hates me and I know that if what I need badly enough can be obtained in no other way I'll kill him for it.

Darkness has arrived. I'm reclining on my bunk on the starboard side of the bus, caressing the small, soft qwerty keys of my wireless device. Diagonally across from me, lit by candlelight, the forlorn-faced, bloody-foreheaded Martin runs the front of his wounded fingers lightly over the set of brass balls even an adversary must admire.

“What are you staring at?” he says.

“I'm not your enemy, Martin.”

“Yes you are.”

“What do you want?”

“What?”

“What do you want out of this trip?”

“Same as everyone: live long, get rich.”

“At any cost?”

He doesn't answer me, the question is evidently too stupid.

“What about ensuring the survival of the community?” I say.

“That's a little grandiose for me, let me think about it.”

I've observed that if I beat a man in a fight in the afternoon, he will give my ideas serious consideration in the evening.

“Well,” he says, “I haven't killed you yet and you haven't killed me yet.”

“I think a civil society means you can go to sleep not having to be actively thankful no one's killed you since you woke up.”

“What the hell are you typing?”

“Our conversation.”

“Type this: fuck you.”

“Thanks, I just did. Do you love anyone, Martin?”

“What?”

“Is there anyone you love?”

“You cripple me and ask me that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I love a few people. But I already know them. I don't see the point of loving anyone new. All new people are just variables, stand-ins for each other, it doesn't matter who they are or how you treat them.”

“That sounds like a recipe for unhappiness.”

“Like you're so happy, Rolfe. Hope you don't get murdered in your sleep. Good night. Up yours.”

“Where do you think Smith is?”

“Also up yours, I would guess.”

Pocahontas

Dear person who by reading these words will know me deeply and truly, Hi, I've had another interesting day! I gathered wild rice and acorns in the morning. Just roasted and ate a turtle for dinner, it was yummy! The sky is now the color of a day-old bruise. I have a tumult in my ovaries. That's what our family doctor, Sidney Feingold, says: “You have a tumult in your ovaries.” He's a funny man, our family doctor, not funny-laughing but funny-sighing, he's like a figure in a bad painting who wishes it was in a better painting. I'd like to tell you all about our family doctor but there are other things I need to tell you first, about my ovaries, and again I face the problem of the delicious slowness of English. In the supersonic tongue of my mentally agile people you'd already know about our family doctor and about my ovaries, and Joe, and Stickboy, and my desires, and the sexual mores of this town. If I were writing to you in my people's language that moves faster than time itself, you'd know about things that haven't happened yet.

“You have a tumult in your ovaries” is another way of saying I'm nineteen and don't have my period yet.

That's a rough translation of a song girls in my town sing while skipping rope. You can't get married till you bleed in these parts. Not that I'm in a rush to get married but I am in a rush to fuck. I'm nineteen and god I'd really like to fuck someone. I
could
fuck someone—premenstrual, unmarried—if I didn't mind being shunned, but, being the chief's only and favorite girl, I'd mind being shunned more than I mind not fucking, at least for now. If I were shunned I'd have to leave this town that's surrounded for hundreds of miles on all sides by forests, rapists, murderers, thieves, brokedown highways and quondam strip malls, mutant beasts whose skin is made of stuff that if it touches you, your own skin will turn black, crumble, and fall off your body.

And not only would it suck to be shunned, but the chief's daughter's recalcitrant ovaries are delaying a potentially important political alliance. You see I've got this other, dad-approved suitor named Joe. Stickboy is weak, Joe is strong. Oh Stickboy. When I think of Stickboy a sweet sadness fills my belly and spreads out like a light invisible gas inside me. I'd gladly fuck Stickboy. We'd be like two clouds who slowly collide. We'd burst and rain on the earth.

To appease Dad, I take walks with Joe a few times a week. Joe is heroic and, like I said, strong, if you like that kind of thing, ugh! “How are you?” he usually starts our walks off with. There are a hundred ways to say “How are you?” in the language of my empathetic people, and the way he chooses literally means “How is your digestive tract?” but everyone knows it really means “What is the status of your reproductive system since last I saw you?”

“From the nutritious lining of my womb / To the wallpaper of your baby's room,” I chant at him, and slap his face hard and run a circle around him. At the start of my walks with Joe, I treat him as I treat the other pompous men I know: with insouciance and aggression. I say things I hope will upset him, I don't listen, I wander off, I interrupt him, I slap him and spit at him and knee him in the groin. But after ten minutes of walking with Joe I give up; most of what I know about the world and what's good about myself retreats deep into the interior, far from the surface of my body, so far in I can't see it or feel it; I don't hear from it for hours, sometimes days, and I begin to doubt it's still alive. Sure, I'm the irreverent scamp, “Pocahontas,” and I'm the girl with the secret, killer name, but I and all the girls of my town were also given an inaudible name at birth, a synonym for
girl
, really, “she who'll be shunned if she fucks before she bleeds.” So there you are: my inaudible name, my corresponding silence.

I have a recurring dream in which everyone I know is gathered in the town square, all their heads craned back. They are looking at two small, delicate ruby earrings, my ovaries, dangling from the top of a thirty-foot-tall white pole. Down the side of the pole the word
EXPECTANCY
is written in enormous letters with menstrual blood. Well, really, I've never had that dream. But I feel like I could.