Jamestown (27 page)

“Make it president.”

“Can't. There's only one such man and he's back in New York.”

“Make it executive vice president.”

“Can't.”

“Why not?”

“That's him.” Newport pointed at Ratcliffe, glowering on the rug.

“Come here,” your dad said to Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe looked at him and did not move.

“Come here!”

His shout made a corridor of air between himself and Ratcliffe that Ratcliffe, it seemed, could not help but go to him along. He stood glumly beside your dad's bed, as if chained to it.

Your dad groaned, pushed himself up off the pillows, swung his legs down over the side of the platform, leapt from it, and landed beside Ratcliffe, whom he loomed above. By inhaling, he grew and made a nimbus of airlessness around himself that Ratcliffe could not escape from and was turning green inside of. “All right, what do I have to do?” he said.

“What do you mean, what do you have to do?” Ratcliffe whispered back, conserving air.

“To be veepee.”

“Accept our gifts.”

“I accept.”

“Put on our company blazer.”

“What's a blazer?”

“A jacket, like the one I have on.”

“I hope the one you have for me is cleaner than yours. Do you not ever launder or bathe?”

I looked at Ratcliffe's blazer. It was indeed in the Manhattan houndstooth pattern, made monochrome by dirt. The insignia on the left breast, too, had been effaced. The same man who'd brought the shot glass and plank of wood—his name is Bucky Breck, you may have seen or stroked him, almost your father's size, his uniform of underwear not unlike what your men sport each day, or what I moved aside on you the other night to make room for my face—Bucky Breck now brought your dad his houndstooth coat, wrinkled but relatively clean.

“Kneel,” Ratcliffe said.

“Kneel?”

“Kneel down, swear an oath of allegiance, we'll put the coat on you, and then you'll be VP.”

“I neither kneel nor swear.”

“Well then I don't see how we can—”

“I'll promise allegiance, I'll bend my knees a bit. I'd like a fuller tribute in exchange.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Your wristwatch.”

“This was a gift from my mother. It's an antique and an heirloom. The band is made of plated gold and inscribed to me.”

“Give him the watch,” Newport and Smith both said.

Ratcliffe's body then underwent a change more temporal than physical. We all saw creep into his flesh, as he slipped the cherished watch from his wrist, the stark diminishment of time he's got left to live. Your dad, whose wrist was too thick for the watch's band, broke the band, tossed it to the dirt, grabbed the houndstooth coat from Breck, put it on, hung the watch sans band from its lapel, and, to seal the deal, enveloped Ratcliffe's tiny hand in his. The coat did not look right on him—it did not match his long gray hair, bare red chest, or tan skin briefs—and yet he seemed to like it just the same.

By now the bed had been assembled and in came four men bearing on their necks what seemed to be a snake that had swallowed a hippopotamus but was soon declared a waterbed mattress, a gift directly to your chief from ours, who assumes all chiefs to be gleeful and public swordsmen, as he himself is.

The men placed the roiling mattress on its frame. “Were you to lie on it now you'd do us an honor, Sir,” Newport said. “Our president has asked us to note your response to the bed and report it to him.”

Your dad, who seemed to be amused by how embarrassed Newport was, eased himself, in his undies and new houndstooth coat, a small green snake writhing from the hole in the lobe of his ear, down onto the bed, whose liquid bulk fled from his weight. Soon, though, he lay face-up on it, and the waters rearranged themselves somewhat, and rocked him as the waters of a man-made wading pond would rock an ocean liner that had somehow blundered into them.

And there he lay. The room's quietness revealed the light, high whine of John Martin's ongoing laugh, a sound that had become so omnipresent that one mostly failed to notice it, except at night, when it was a torment. This was followed by a low, rumbling noise, a quick “Oh shit” from Smith, and then the loud explosion of the waterbed, which hurled your dad to the ground beside it, soaking him.

To the ears of your father's archers stationed outside the reception hall, the pop of the bed was no different from the pop of Chris Newport's automatic gun, which they'd all heard not too many weeks before, so when they rushed in and saw John Martin standing above your father laughing, that's whose head a zealous one of them put an arrow through from left to right before he could be stopped, and an explanation of the loud noise made to him.

Again a silence filled the room as we waited for Martin to fall to the dirt. He did not. Your father sat on the floor and gazed up at him with a look more of wonder than concern. Martin had ceased to laugh and seemed to be engrossed in thought. The arrow had gone in behind his left ear and come out slightly higher in front of his right. He lightly touched its tip and tail. “Christ,” he said, “I mean what the hell?”

Your dad stood up and clapped him on the back and shook his hand and laughed. The rest of us laughed too, and men from both tribes gathered round to congratulate him. Someone reached to pull it out and Martin slapped his hand away. In a dead tongue, eight of your guys sang a song in four parts I'd guess is your people's “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow,” so all in all I think both sides could in subsequent accounts refer to this as a fun induction, except Martin and those of us who had to ride back in the car with him and hear him yammer on about the unfairness of life and his headache, which even so was a relief if you were among those upon whose sleep and nerves his constant laugh—which the arrow had put an end to—had begun to have a deleterious effect.

By the way, what did your dad mean about your forebears? Are you not Indians? You all have red skin.

And as for our post-feast meeting—yours and mine—which began behind that tree after your show and ended in parts unknown to me at I don't know what hour, I recollect it poorly, so full was my delight, so strange the noise you made, so shocked was I that unnamed body parts of mine could be made to join like that with unnamed body parts of yours; so fleeting the duration, so provocative the incompletion, so novel in style, tone, corporeal positioning, geographical location, and time of day was all that transpired.

Yours fondly,

Gianni

Pocahontas

“That man does not believe he'll die one day.”

“Which one?”

“The one with the arrow in his head.”

“How can you tell?”

“He's got an arrow in his head and he's not dead.”

“How could he not believe he'll die? What a dope.”

“He's not a dope, he's smart and strong, in spite of how he looks and acts and what he says. His unbelief in his own death protects him. His unbelief in his own death is an attack on death that death is flummoxed by. And by the way, you, too, don't believe you'll die.”

“I? I know I'll die. I think about it all the time.”

“You know and think but don't believe.”

“And will my unbelief protect me?”

“There are those whose unbelief protects them and those whose unbelief opens them to ambush, just as there are those who, by practicing for death every day, learn to dodge its spearpoint, while others practice for death only to make themselves readier to receive it.”

“Which am I? Wait, don't answer that.”

But she'd already answered with her eyes. Oh Aunt Charlene, Aunt Charlene, why'd you answer with your eyes? What sort of auntie behavior is that sort of eye answer and what's a girl of niecely impressionability do to with it and why am I in love with a guy like that who would write a letter like that?

Charlene said, “Write to him” and returned to her mate and rival, Sid, whom she loves and hates more than all the rest combined, even me. Adulthood is complex. I am alone. I am alone in one of the shacks that are and aren't my home post-breakup with my dad. My life is so messed up right now and will be till I die, or that's the way it feels. What consolation is there for living and dying alone, spurned and aggrieved? To live nobly and die for a noble cause? I know no noble cause unalloyed. To feel pleasure?
He
makes me feel pleasure. He made me feel some just the other night. We didn't
do it
or anything, though at one point I was upside down and not keeping precise track of all things going on
up there
, one of which may have been
it
, for all I know. Still, the most intense pleasure's but a splinter of ice on the gallons of lava that gush from my cracked heart.

“Write to him,” the ghost of the not-dead Charlene said in my head: the living haunt the banished girl.

“What?”

“Write to him. He's your ticket out of here.”

“Don't you think where he's from's worse?”

“That's not the point.”

“What is?”

“To love him.”

“Like you love Sid?”

The ghost of the living Charlene stared at me worse than Charlene and wouldn't say a mumbling word. Even the spirits of the air sometimes shun the banished girl. It's strange to live alone at age nineteen. Thing that won't go in my next letter to him: since pleasure's no consolation for life, is love? Can love of such a fragile man console? Is any man not fragile? Is any love not fragile? Is any consolation not fragile? Is any life not fragile?

“Write to him!” That again was the ghost of the not-yet-dead Charlene, or maybe the ghost of the not-yet-dead me.

From: C
ORN
L
UVR

To: G
REASY
B
OY

Subject: No Subject

>the fire that wiped out half our town, the

>rats that ate the corn your father sent to us last week

Oh no!:(  I know where food is and can show you and help you carry it back to your “town” if you want but don't touch me cuz our whole thing began with touch and we have to make sure it don't stop with touch too cuz in our contemporary political climate plus our
climate
climate one or both of us could get badly wounded and/or disfigured making sex impossible and/or disgusting so I gotta know you don't just want me for the sex and if you look back at your letter it put a heavy emphasis on sex don't be a typical boy don't be a typical boy

>your people's sense of ownership and theft diverges

>from our own.

What you call ownership I call theft. Who do you think was using the place your “town” is located before you? And what's this “your people”? I don't own them any more than they own the ground they put their houses on. The philosophy of ownership is inseparable from the philosophy of “your people” vs. “my people,” which is inseparable from war, which leads to the kind of disfigurement that makes a person unfit for sex so please give “town” and “ownership” a rethink at the request of the person who right now would like to continue to be touched by you as long as she is not too wounded or dead to do so.

>When

>two of them took buckshot

Took buckshot like they took the gifts?
Un petit jeu de mots
, Gianni? I don't like those boys. They're dirty, they smell bad, they torture mice and girls, they have no morals, and if they grow up they'll be worse than the men they're instructed by. But don't make puns about their pain. Respect pain. If we could truly imagine pain we don't feel, we would not survive a day, so we don't imagine it, we can't, and that indispensable glitch in the human machine is also ironically what lets us inflict pain on others at little cost to a good night's rest. So though you can't feel the pain of those boys you shot in the ass, you must honor it by not making puns.

>and the

>older woman—the muscular one, whose not-small breasts still float so

>unusually high on her chest for a woman of her age, if you don't mind this

>kind of observation made, again, in the name of honesty and full disclosure

As with ownership, please give “honesty and full disclosure” a re-think, and the woman you speak of is my Aunt Charlene so, you know, eew.

>and then your dad arrived

My dad and I are not on speaking terms, he banished me—will tell you all about it when I see you next—so when you mention him just know that what you say is news to me. And be advised that if you've shown me warmth toward the end of a strategic alliance between “your people” and “mine” you're barking up the wrong tree. But you don't seem the type. Not sophisticated enough. And by sophisticated I mean conniving, and by conniving I mean crass, and by crass I mean unsophisticated.

>fuck you

A strange, nonsensical phrase used frequently by people from New York, who I've noticed also use words to make things fuck that can't, unless where you're from shit can fuck, in which case please don't ever take me there.

>A competition of degree of openness of

>eyes equals umbrage versus umbrage in such a context, where I come from, FYI.

What?! Speak English, fer chrissakes.

> Ratcliffe,

>whom he loomed above

I love my father's massiveness and strength, yet your man Ratcliffe's smallness makes me feel so sad. He seems to be a walking advertisement for noble ambition encased in an impenetrable shell of bullshit; every good impulse in him is met with the irresistible force of his own weakness. He and my dad standing next to each other, as you describe them, kind of equal one person, or humankind in general. I don't know what I'm saying. I can't believe I'm saying these things to you when I barely know you. Fuck you.

>In a dead tongue, eight of your guys sang a song in

>four parts I'd guess is your people's “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow,”