Jamestown (23 page)

“He didn't kill those guys,” Rolfe said. “Mankiewicz died by disobeying Smith's order and Lohengrin died in an ambush.”

“That's not the way it looked to me,” Gosnold said, and was the first to draw his gun, though all the guns came out so fast I can't say whose was first. Gosnold's was pointed at Rolfe, Rolfe's was pointed at Ratcliffe, Ratcliffe's was pointed at Buck, Buck's was pointed at Martin, Martin's was pointed at me.

I think we'd all have died had Newport not come rumbling up the road in the bus right then, back down here from New York. He eased his big and grizzled self down the stairs, followed by ten more men in little better shape than the ones on or in the ground.

“Nice trip?” I said with the barrel of Martin's gun in my face and the Breck twins' four hands on my arms.

“What the hell's the matter with you guys? Put your guns away.” All obeyed. “Get your hands off him.” The Brecks let go.

“What'd you bring us?” I said.

“These men and a month's worth of food. Ten gallons of water. Some pistols, rifles, and machine guns, five power generators, the gas to run them five hours each, saws, axes, farm equipment. Beads and pearls and silver coins to trade with. A few walkie-talkies. Some other crap. Not much. Jimmy Stuart offered squat, not a huge fan of our little project, says it gives Brooklyn another thing to be belligerent about and hasn't shown itself worth doing so.”

“Any communications devices besides the walkie-talkies?”

“No.”

“Hell.”

“Which would you guys rather do, unload the bus or kill each other?”

“Can't we do both?” Martin said.

“Come here, Martin.” Martin went. Newport kissed his high, banged-up forehead. “Now be a man and get up on that bus and haul things down.” As Martin climbed the stairs, Newport slapped him on the ass and Martin giggled, a sound to chill a brave man's heart.

We had so little food that what little equipment we had fit next to it beneath the mess hall's roof. The few of us who had the will and strength to work spent the afternoon putting walls on the mess. The rest languished under trees and overdrank the water Chris had brought with him from New York. When evening came we heated up the corn we'd cooked that day. It had a sour taste and two more men got sick than were by now.

When all the men slept I crept in the dark to Martin's tent and eased my hand down inside his bedroll.

“Come to give me hand release?” he said.

“Some other time.”

“Be a sport.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Come on.”

It wouldn't have been the worst thing. Martin's got a nice set of brass balls, admired by all, and smooth and creamy skin on his hips and thighs, but knowing him, his dick'd break off in my hand and I didn't want that on my mind. I found the device by his right knee and pulled it out of his bag.

“You're taking that?”

“Yep.”

“What for?”

“For us to live instead of die.”

“Bring it back?”

“Sure.”

“Sure you won't, ah…?”

“Martin, is that really you?”

“Yeah.”

“Why you acting like this?”

“Like what?”

“Nice.”

“I just dig you, I just dig you.”

“Is this a dream of yours I'm in?”

“Mm.”

I guess he was asleep, a state in which niceness could descend on even him. If only he would sleep more often, or always.

Next I found the tent Rolfe slept in, and woke him.

“Give me your hand,” I said.

“You gonna put it down your pants?”

“Not right now.”

I gave him the wireless device. “Why you doing this?” he said.

“I want you to write a love note to the savage princess and sign it with my name.”

“Can you please drop the bullshit now?”

“You mean the ‘effluvia'?”

“Yeah, the effluvia.”

“You like her and she likes you, and that's the story of, that's the glory of love.”

“All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song of love, and by the way don't ever sing. And move your mouth away from mine, your breath is foul, it's hot in here. You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death. You with me so far, Smith?”

“No.”

“Of course you're not, but listen. It can happen—and this is what
you
want to happen—that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That's why you're giving this back to me.”

“Just write your girlfriend a letter, Rolfe, Jesus Christ.”

“I will. Thank you for giving this back to me.”

“Good night.”

Now everyone's asleep but me. No moon or stars light the sky. My hand's in front of my face and I can't see it. The Indians were supposed to have arrived by noon to take the trinkets and guns I promised in exchange for their corn. They could be just beyond my hand for all I know. I'd get my flashlight but it would only serve to light their way to me. If they want to kill us in our sleep they will. Except for me. Me they'll have to kill while I'm awake.

Stickboy

“I can't believe they call this place a town.”

“If ten men call a sack of shit a pot of gold it makes it one in name alone.”

Spoken by Joe and Frank, who used to be the boys I grew up with, nor has the change improved them: they're worse: their schemes and games, which once harmed only other boys—and sometimes girls, cats, and trees—now harm all, or could. But I need none as I need them, so I must try to think of them as good—like trying to fit the dick of a man with an infant's foreskin hood.

We ran through the woods. The always imperfect air, of which there's not enough in any single breath, rushed in and out of my mouth. My friends—I'll call them that for now; to call them by a truer name would take breath I still can't spare—chatted while I gasped. Their skin was dry and mine was damp with sweat. What a curse to have been born Stickboy, though had Frank or Joe been born Stickboy and I Frank or Joe, Stickboy would then be the name of someone cunning, swift, and strong; a man can purge himself of his name but not his body of its theme nor his life of its fate.

“I still can't take these guys seriously, they're so pathetic,” Joe said. “They don't seem to know anything.”

Frank said, “We don't want what they know, or are, we want what they have.”

“Then we should kill them, take it, and be done.”

“If we wait we'll get more.”

“Oh, all right, Powhatan.”

“I think you know the difference between him and me.”

“Yeah, you're the one who'd slip a knife in your best friend's back if you think it would get you ‘more,'” I said.

“No,” Frank said, “I'd tell
you
to do it, and you would.”

This conditional prediction, like a little snake, slipped into my ear and bit my brain, numbing out the band of brainflesh that constitutes the border of what I know and what I'll do. If a man can't purge his life of its fate, he also can't foresee it. I became afraid. Fear is foresight written in the code of mood, but break the code and you break the message too.

We arrived at “Jamestown” an hour after dawn. Their small, tough redhead, Jacks Myth, at the lazy hole in their fortification, awaited us looking like a stone statue with burning coals for eyes. He hadn't slept all night, I thought. He too felt fear but wouldn't let it show. He's their side's Frank and Joe rolled into one, with Joe's big strength in compact form and Frank's cunning and speed, the strategist and foot soldier of their army of one. But he has something Frank and Joe lack: compassion, or so I detect, but maybe just enough to harness to his cunning—that is, no more than is useful. But compassion's best beyond use; its true form is surfeit. In that way it resembles thought, whose true form is surfeit too. The gods invented thought in man not to make him better than the beasts but to drive him to his doom, to be stopped only by its halt cohort, compassion. In other words, the mind of man's the gods' cruel game that now has almost run its course.

“Our guns?” Joe said instead of “Hello,” mistaking tactlessness for expediency.

“Come have breakfast,” Jacks Myth said, and led us through the wet and sleeping camp or town past a thrown-together shack to an open-air table whose smooth wood top smelled freshly hewn.

“You just make this yourself?” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

Myth spooned some nasty-looking corn slop onto four plates of specious cleanliness and put them down in front of us.

Joe said, “Why you feeding us our own food?”

“So you won't shoot us with our own guns.”

We'd brought our own dried deer meat but tried to be polite, even Joe, by eating this affront to food. It was hard.

“Joe, now I know what the northerners came down here for.”

“What's that, Frank?”

“Cooking lessons.”

“So you two speak English.”

“What was your first clue?”

“All of you speak English.”

“Pretty much.”

“You lying bastards.” Myth smiled, his slightly green teeth's testament to somehow not having been punched out of his mouth all these years, though one sensed many had tried.

A few of his tribe wandered toward us one by one, each a thin and brittle pillar of odor. I sensed Joe think, “I could punch each once in the heart and kill them all in less than a minute.” That's why he'll never be king.

Their king, who shouldn't be, was the only plump one of the lot, but even he had changed. The flesh of his face, which had used to billow out from the bone like a pink cumulus cloud, now was gray and subject, like a rag, to Earth's gravitational pull. “So,” he said, “you've come for the guns we promised you,” and as the flesh of his face hung loosely from the skull it clung to, so this remark of his hung loosely from the truth, though as with ample flesh that covers bone, his words hid the exact shape of what lay beneath them.

“Where are they?” Joe said.

“Turns out they speak English, Rat Cliff,” Myth said to his boss.

“You call that English? This way, gentlemen, through the gate.”

“It's true, our English differs from yours,” Frank said. “For instance, we wouldn't call that a gate, we'd call it the place where you gave up working on the fence.”

Rat Cliff's face grew red from below; the soft folds of skin seemed to tremble as the blood entered them. We walked through the fence and out of their town to a spot of hard ground where their armored bus stood next to the small, open car Myth had driven away from our town in.

“Did a tree jump in front of your car on the way home?” Joe said.

“There they are.” Jacks Myth indicated two huge guns mounted on the roof of their bus, and turned back to us, his eyes open wide and sending out a mix of pleasure and defiance.

“We'll need your car to transport them.”

“They won't fit in the car.”

“We'll take them one by one then.”

“Still won't fit.”

“We'll dismantle them.”

“Do you know how?”

“You'll show us.”

“Do you know how to use them?”

“You'll show us that too.”

“I don't recall agreeing to that with your boss.”

“You've shown us how to use the guns, you've shown us that quite amply, and for that we thank you. You've also demonstrated that using guns is just about all you know how to do, and if there's anything else you'd like to do, like stay alive, you'll need our help, or at least you'll need us not to interfere with you.”

“And, hypothetically, what do you suppose would stop us from
interfering
with you and your two friends right now?”

“The promise you made to my boss.”

Myth moved his hands to his hips as if to say “That's all?”

“And your own interest in this region, which you have not been straightforward about.”

Myth still did not seem convinced.

“And this.”

At that, fifty of Frank's best friends stepped from behind local oak and hickory trees and half-gone walls of erstwhile office parks. Each one held his bow down at his waist as if he'd forgotten it was there. Since, coincidentally, none of the towns we've conquered have been armed with guns, and no men who've passed this way have wanted to trade for them, we've perforce learned to pass an arrow through the eye of a needle from a hundred yards away.

“So you'll give us a demonstration of your guns,” Frank said, “and that way we'll know you're not selling us crap.”