Jamestown (22 page)

“Smith was about to drive back to New York by himself with all this food,” Ratcliffe said, “but we stopped him.”

“If you stopped him, Ratcliffe, why's he holding a gun on you?” Johnny, thin as the rest, said.

“Because we stopped him.”

“Some of the blood from the wounds on their heads you'll find on the dash of the car,” I said.

Ratcliffe said, “That doesn't prove a thing. What's a little blood from my own head on the steering wheel of a car compared to the blood of Happy Lohengrin and Gerald Mankiewicz that Smith has on his hands? He's guilty not only of treason but of murder, too. I say we execute him by firing squad.”

Martin said, “I say we preserve our limited number of bullets and hang him instead.”

“Have none of you picked up on how fat Ratcliffe is? Only guy I know who's put on weight on this trip. Any of you wonder at all how that came to pass? If you're going to kill anyone, kill him, but not before he tells you where he hides his private store of food.”

Father Richard Buck moved out from behind the thin twig that had hidden him and said, “At the best of times our decisions as to whom to punish by death are imperfect, since none of us has the all-seeing wisdom of God. At this moment we're all too weakened and demented by hunger to take the life of a man and be certain we've done so justly, laying aside for now the larger question of whether it is ever just to do so. I say we eat a big breakfast first and then decide whose life we'd like to end.”

I don't know whether to admire or be amused by this man who regularly tries to talk to and live as if overseen by a blind and deaf and nonexistent god even when he himself is nearly dead from lack of food, but he's another one on this trip I like.

I told them not to cook a whole pot of corn since more than half would go bad before we could get it down our throats. They cooked a whole pot. Nor had the corn completely cooked when in eagerness they took it off the fire, so the meal we ate this hot and humid day, in chairs that tipped or fell when you sat, on tables rickety and splintered, was a hot thin gruel that featured corn so undercooked ten men broke their weakened teeth on it.

Still it was breakfast enough that almost all who ate it then tottered and farted back to bed—bed in this case the damp and beaten-down roll of foam and cloth each found when he crawled in through the weary lip of his one-or two- or four-man tent, what a man can expect for a bed when he signs up for a trip down south and then splits town when the earth starts to shake.

Ratcliffe and Martin were among those whom eating caused to fall asleep, so for the first time in my life I wasn't beaten and bound to a chair with rope after a meal and could move about the grounds without more than the usual fear of being mortally attacked. Dick Buck and Johnny Rolfe, though sleepy, came with—Buck kept awake by love of God and Rolfe, I'd guess, by love of girl. While I was gone they'd named this place Jamestown after our CEO. That they dared make
town
of this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step bespoke the glorious and yearning bullshit of men's souls. And as for
James
, it's just as well he'll never come and see what mud his name was given to.

As we walked, dodging tree stumps and tent poles, and inspected the three structures they'd put up, or semi-up—the mess, Ratcliffe's house, and a meeting hall or hallway—I gave an account of my time away, starting with “Oh and by the way, Rolfe, thanks for leaving me out in the woods with a savage as my only friend when the going got rough.”

“And how'd your
friend
make it through, okay?”

I like the way he won't take crap from me, can't stay mad at him long. “So anyway, Rolfe, I got up early in the morning after the night I last saw you, and took this savage guy All-Burnt out into the woods with me to have a look around.”

‘“Have a look around'?”

I like how insistently he listens but that can get tired. “Okay we get it, Rolfe, you've been wronged and you're justifiably indignant so shut up. So we're out there, All-Burnt and I, decent kid, at the time when the sun lights the sky but isn't up yet, fresh air, as fresh as it gets in these parts these days, morning coolness, some comradely joking which I knew was All-Burnt's way of saying ‘Hey, I know you saw your guy with his skin flayed off and his guts scooped out the other night and I feel for you, man,' so he's doing some pretty hilarious squirrel imitations and things when
wham!
I get an arrow in my thigh and
wham! he
gets one in his arm, but neither arrow goes in all that deep, these weren't really death arrows but more like arrows to say ‘Hi, how ya doing, we could kill you if we want but won't quite yet,' but still an arrow shot from twenty yards takes a bite out of your thigh, and then
hello
, a hundred guys step out from behind fifty trees so that's
that
situation. Given how Mankiewicz ended up I figured they weren't killing me yet because they wanted to kill me like they'd killed him, so I bound All-Burnt to me by slipping my wristbands over his wrists so I could use him as a human shield or not shield so much as ‘Hi, this is one of your fellow savages and if you try to shoot me you shoot him so don't,' but I guess that's not how they saw it because they killed him with arrows. So then I'm shooting at them from behind this dead guy I've got strapped to me, and that's got me distracted enough that I don't see I'm backing into a four-foot-deep puddle in the middle of the woods which I dropped my gun into and then they had me.

“They stripped off all my clothes, tied me up in a hammock-type thing, and paraded me from town to town, where the audience tended to be young ladies who seemed to find the sight of All-Burnt wounded to death and me forcibly inserted into a hammock with no clothes on humorous. We stop a night here, a night there, and I have to say all this time they're feeding me excellent food, gamey and weirdly spiced but not drugged or poisoned, not yet anyway. By the way, that's the core of what they have that we want: untainted food, real food that comes from things that walk on two or four legs or swim in the sea or fly in the air or grow from the ground, real fucking food, it's genius, worth killing and dying for, food, the staff of life, make a note of it, you peacenik dimwits.

“We finally get to the town where we had that e-sit-down with their main guy, Pa-What-Ann, more of a lie-down for him, and he was lying down again this time, I guess this is how the savage CEO greets guests: on his back, with young half-naked ladies all around fanning and feeding him. Even on his back you sense a full alertness in this guy, and massive strength, like if he fell down he'd make a hole in the earth. But I didn't get to see him till they'd roped and locked me in a room a dozen days, thinking I guess that that wasn't practically a form of relaxation for me by now. Oh and Johnny, guess who comes to visit me every day in my little savage jail made of local trees? Don't want to guess? Don't even want to have a facial expression right now, you sullen guy, you? I'll tell you who, Johnny. Poke-a-Huntress, that's who, the girl who made you come in your pants the day we arrived in this place. Remember? You did that beautiful improvised greeting dance for her and then you hugged her and you came? Well that is one flirtatious young woman, let me tell you. That is a woman who likes to come into a man's hot little jail cell with no top on and be demonstratively comfortable with her weirdly but appealingly tattooed young body and just chatter on about all kinds of things she thinks might be of interest to a man from up north who thinks he might get pretty grimly killed at any time, charming young woman who you don't quite know if she's putting you on or what, hard to read the kid or any of them.”

The three of us stood at one end of the semi-open-air meeting hall that none of us leaned on the wall of lest the whole thing fall down. The sun had not yet cleared the trees
and maybe won't today
, I thought.

“By the way,” I said, “no supply shed?”

“No supplies,” Rolfe said.

“Each man keeps his tiny little bit of crap to himself,” Buck said. “Bunch of jackals won't see the end of summer.”

I said, “Newport's due back with a busload of stuff this week.”

“Finish your little story,” Rolfe said.

“I know what you like about my story, Johnny.”

The face he looked at me with had been made obscure by a chain of disappointments in which there was no weak link.

“So the girl and I bond each day in my cell, nice girl, strong bond grows between her and me, cross-cultural bond that transcends age and sex and geography and skin color and basic assumptions about the world—really sweet girl who seemed drawn to me somehow, and then one day there I am removed from my cell and staring up the nostrils of the big guy on his back, who turns out to be her dad. He sits up a bit with the aid of pillows stuffed under him by a couple of the nubile half-naked women there seems to be an endless supply of in these parts, and I was given some pillows too, and each pillow's embroidered with a little story, like in one the big guy is stabbing some other guy in the heart with a spear, while in another he shakes hands with another big guy across a river, while in yet a third a baby covered in precisely embroidered blood and slime comes out from between the legs of a naked girl while the big guy stands in the background with a fatherly grin on his puss.

“So my hands are untied and I'm low to the ground on these pillows outside the front door of the big room we had the e-sit-down in, with the big guy across from me on his massive indoor-outdoor bed, and we start eating what I hope was deer meat plus a lot of dishes with corn: corn chowder, corn stew, corn pone, corn bread, fried corn, corn grilled without having been removed from the little airy stick it grows on. I guess a group of folks can get pretty inventive with corn if they need to. I eat till I feel it all coming back up my throat and then Mr. Big says something in his native tongue I'd translate roughly as ‘Well it's been fun and now you die.'

“He moved his hands and ten guys came out of nowhere with a rock the size of a car. They put the rock on the ground and two of the guys tied my hands back up with ropes and laid my left cheek on the rock. Then they picked up baseball bats and—”

“Baseball bats?”

“—and swung them up above my head and I'm lying there seeing the beautiful face of my mother in the air beside the rock my head's about to get crushed into when suddenly I feel this soft pressure on my right cheek which turns out to be the pretty young Poke-a-Huntress rubbing the stubble of the side of her shaved head against my cheek and shouting what I can only imagine is the savage equivalent of ‘Daddy, please, don't! It wasn't his fault! He means so much to me!' I don't know but I guess the girl has the hots for me.”

Rolfe's face now looked like a stone at the bottom of the sea.

“Then there's this very long-ass pause in which I can't see or hear shit what with one ear and eye pressed into the jagged rock and the other covered by the ear and thick black hair of the dusky maid whose breasts my back was covered by and who'd jammed her twat against my ass—a touching rescue if it worked, and it did. The big man said something I could barely hear, and down went the clubs, and up went the girl. They untied me, and the upshot is all this corn, which I traded for some guns a couple of their guys are on their way over here to pick up, plus some gas for the bike we gave them before, which can't bode well for the oil-getting part of our trip unless that's their bluff but I don't think it is, though as I said, given the feasts they have over there I'd say we struck oil as far as food goes.

“As for the girl,” I said, angling my words directly down Rolfe's earhole, “she wants to see me again real soon but before that I should send her a love letter, from what I can tell from what she jabbered at me in her own weird tongue.”

“She speaks English,” Rolfe said.

“Didn't sound like English to me. Maybe it's the language of love. But communication's your field, Rolfe, and so's being lover boy, I've got no time or talent for it, so why don't I give you her email address and your wireless back and you write her a mash note and pretend you're me?”

“Or, alternatively,” he said with sleep in his voice, “you could shove both so far up your ass they come out your mouth mixed with all the other effluvia that comes out of there”—only Rolfe would say “effluvia”—and then he, too, slept for an hour, as did Buck, which left me with time on my hands and volts in my veins, since on the tour of our “town” we'd also looked at the ten pathetic ovoid mounds of turned-up dirt with sticks on top—graves of men who'd died of arrows, microbes, or despair since I'd left for my upriver trip—and while some men respond with sleep to grief, I respond with none at all. If a bed is a practice grave, my body insists it will know what to do when the real time comes and can therefore skip the rehearsals.

In my town's post-breakfast sleepytime I took apart three chairs they'd made, re-cut each leg to match the other three, planed and sanded all the parts, and nailed them to each other once again.

By then Ratcliffe was awake enough to have me arrested, assigning the task as before to the big underwear-wearing twins Bill and Bucky Breck, whose muscled limbs the air had encroached upon a bit since I saw them last but not enough to let me break their grip.

“Have you not arrested him often enough to make you happy?” Dick Buck said.

“He's committed murder and sedition.”

“How so?”

“He killed Lohengrin and Mankiewicz and gave guns to the Indians.”

“You wouldn't have had breakfast today if it weren't for him,” Buck said.

I said, “I haven't given them a thing. They'll be here any minute now to take what I promised them and if they see us fighting with ourselves they'll know we're that much easier to kill in case that's what they want to do.”