Jamestown (30 page)

“Where'd they go?” I say.

“Orapax.”

“Lousy neighborhood. Why there?”

“Hard to get to, easy to defend.” His face says he means the new me and not the new town. He tries to kiss me and I stop him. We both cry. Poor, sad, sodden, piece-of-shit Pocahontas and Stickboy, to whom nothing good will happen.

The lintel of the doorway cracks in two with a shocking noise. They're here. Stickboy runs and falls down in the mud and gets up and runs. I step out into the middle of the pond and hold my arms above my head and hope to die and feel I won't just yet. Holding guns, they—including my boyfriend—encircle me.

“Where'd they all go?” the red-bearded Jackshit says.

“I don't know nothin.” The water is up to my waist. “Lower your guns, bitches,” I say to try to be a guy, though to be a guy may hurt more than not.

They lower them. It's dinnertime. They've brought food but can't start a fire when the wood's all wet. I show them a special Indian trick for starting a fire after a rain, which is you go to the woodshed and get the stash of dry wood wrapped in plastic. They didn't seal their food up well before the storm and it's maggoty. I take my boyfriend to my childhood room and have sex with him in there on the wet mattress and it's kind of weird but nice, I like how he seems to be saying “Awe, awe, awe, awe.”

The air is dark in this room I grew up in. I hear his loud and snarling voice. I nudge and then shake him.

“What?”

“You were yelling.”

“Was I asleep?”

“I hope you weren't awake.”

“Why, what did I say?”

“I think your exact words were ‘Fuck you, you cunt!'”

“Really?”

“Ya, and I'd like to reiterate that those are all nice things—
fuck, you
, and
cunt—
and yet, again, you didn't mean them in a nice way. Your tone of voice was really harsh. Were you cursing me?”

“I think I was cursing me.”

“As a sexually active vagina?”

“You make a good point. I'll have to think about that.”

“Don't strain yourself.”

We hear the loud noise of a voice far worse than the one my beau used in his sleep, and run outside. Four thin men—the New York night watch—lie face-down in the shallow pond that used to be the middle of our town. We can see them by a fire that burns beyond the pond between two n-shaped homes. Beyond the fire and facing it, tied to two stakes four feet apart, is sad Ratcliffe, whose guys called him chief, now call him man, and soon will call him neither one except in past tense. New York, who meant to ambush my hometown, has instead been ambushed by it.

The man beside Ratcliffe, whose knife has not yet touched the latter's skin, is not a man at all but the same boy, Opechancanough, whom not too long ago I couldn't stop from beating up his friend, and now, I'd guess, is being offered this premature ceremony of graduation to mortal violence in recompense for a backful of New York buckshot. Jackshit comes charging gun-up from a nearby house. Joe shoots him with a gun he must have got from a face-down dead night watchman. Jackshit leaps into a bush and is gone, don't know if he got shot, don't know nothing, all that's being done is done too fast for looking to see it and much too fast for thinking to believe it and as for knowing, knowing hobbles miles behind on broken feet. The other guns of New York's dead night watch are held by Frank and Dad and Sid. Sid's got his gun to Johnny's skull. No one cares enough to hold a gun or knife to me, I guess.

“I'm John Ratcliffe!” Ratcliffe says with an indignation that suggests being tied to a stake soon to be flayed alive is one step worse than a fly in his soup. “Do you know who I am? I'm John Ratcliffe! My mother is Penelope Ratcliffe. My father-in-law is James Stuart, Chief Executive Officer of the Manhattan Company.”

Daddy, who ignores or doesn't see me, says, “Your own names must taste good to you because you always have them in your mouths and, to judge by your thinness, seem to prefer them to food. But names lose their flavor if you keep them in your mouth too long, and if you swallow them they go down hard and make you sick. Would you like to spit yours out now or die with it in your mouth?”

The tied-up man's eyes widen. Pee goes down his leg. I scream at my dad. He looks at me, looks away, nods to Opechancanough, who moves toward Ratcliffe. I jump on my cousin's back—not for love of Ratcliffe—and am peeled and thrown from him and hit the wet ground hard, my own familiar town a sleepy blur to me of ground and sky. I hear a wail where Ratcliffe is and turn to see the wail is colored red. A small man seems to float down through the air from the top of a nearby tree and impale Joe on a long and shining pole. Joe looks scared and sad and starts to cry as in a dream he once described to me. My dad, with an ax, as if in a hurry to get through his chores, chops at the legs of the man from the sky as he would wood for a fire. And now my eyes can see no more, my mind think no more, no one in here know no more.

Johnny Rolfe

We're on a thing that once was called Route 5. The autumn storms are fierce down here. We've put the rag top up on the jeep but it leaks. I'm driving north without the girl I love. Martin lies across the bloodied back seat and since he now takes up so little room Dick Buck can sit by him and cauterize his wounds. In the shotgun seat, Smith contemplatively holds his own injured left arm with his uninjured right arm. Who among us isn't almost Martin now: woozy, incredulous, legless, enraged? “Who the hell'd you think you were, Tarzan?” Dick Buck says to him—or me—cackles unhappily, zips the back flap up, and turns again to Martin, who is hardly Martin any more, and yet more Martin than before. Bucky Breck drives our other car with four more hobbled or terrified men. Ratcliffe's dead, to say the least. The bikes we threw in the creek. It's done.

High, bright headlights coming toward us blind me through the rain. Behind them I can dimly see a long gray box on wheels. “Who the hell is that?” I say.

Smith says, “That's a New York truck.”

“How do you know?”

“How many New York trucks are there? Don't drive past them.”

I brake and so does the truck. Out of the truck steps a pimp and layabout—who among us isn't both?—called Sal Argyle in a black rainsuit and matching broadbrimmed hat. I knew him vaguely in New York and may with lots of luck know him only vaguely someday there again. He walks up to the jeep and opens the flap a crack.

“You guys look like crap.”

Smith leans over me and says, “Where the hell you been?”

“Got a flat in Dover.”

“For a month?”

“They had good weed.”

“You have arms?”

“Some.”

“Supplies?”

“Some.”

“What does ‘some' mean?”

“It means I traded some for weed.”

The rain that came in through the crack in the flap has soaked me by now and lightly burns my skin. Argyle, tall and thin, clings to the frame of the jeep so as not to be blown down the road by the wind. Smith jumps out. I thought he'd flatten Argyle but he evidently doesn't want to waste the time. They walk back to the truck and seem to be climbing into it. On the back seat, Martin lets out a long moan. Dick Buck and I don't talk but I think we both know what a grim turn of events for us this truck is. He murmurs what I guess are prayers for Martin's erstwhile hacked-off legs. Every prayer has its wound. God made even those of us who give up on Him in our youth hope our wounds will make our likeness to Christ more than skin-deep, but I doubt even Dick harbors such a hope in Martin's case.

Argyle climbs back into the cab of his truck and Smith returns to the jeep. “We're turning around.”

“No,” I say.

“We have an opportunity.”

“The opportunity to lie face-down in a ditch?”

“The savages may not have fuel but they do have food processing technology we need, and somewhere around here they must have a big facility we just haven't found yet. Argyle has twenty men in the back of his truck and weaponry enough to subdue the savages.”

“So let him subdue them.”

“He's too subdued himself.”

“Then let Stuart send down reinforcements. We tried our best.”

“We tried our worst.”

“Same thing.”

“Stuart won't send anyone else. He doesn't care enough about this. If he did he wouldn't have sent a weed-smoking pimp to rescue us.”

“He's right not to care. Caring's overrated.”

“Not
caring is your bullshit paper-thin shield against disappointment. You lost the girl you love and you don't want to go back because you're scared you'll lose her again.”

“No, I don't want to go back because I'd be going back for your reasons, not mine. You think we deserve to have what they have at their expense. Please tell me what's so good about
us
surviving instead of
them.”

Against my right temple Smith presses the barrel of the gun he gave me on our way down here, a tender reminder. “I still love you,” he says, “but let's have this nice conversation about values and beliefs someday in a dry place in New York over a stuffed pheasant.”

I put the car in gear and turn it. Martin says, “We're going back?”

“Yes.”

“Good, I want to slaughter them,” he dreamily mumbles.

“Tell me you won't be glad to see your girl again,” Smith says.

“I don't know if she's alive.”

“Don't be ruled by fear, pussycat. When you see her next, sock a seed in there to make you want to stay alive. We need folks like you to balance out folks like him,” he says, indicating Martin.

“And who'll balance out folks like you?”

He laughs and taps the side of my head affectionately with the barrel of his gun. No doubt if he were driving I'd put a gun to his head and tell him to go the other way, which supports my belief that who prevails is who has the better strategy or weaponry, a formula for success which virtue not only has no part in but is an impediment to, since virtuous thoughts drain time and force from strategic ones.

There's no town to go back to so we stop the two jeeps and the truck for the night on hard high ground. Smith and I walk through the tapering rain to retrieve a few guns from the back of the truck. He must know I won't try a one-man coup against his one-man rule. The air in the back of the truck is ten percent oxygen, ninety percent marijuana smoke. Hurricane lamps make a dim light. The twenty men jammed in this oblong box recline or sit or stand. Some talk, some play cards, some make love, some oil their guns, some do more than one of these activities at once. They've managed to transport intact their own two thousand cubic feet of New York across state lines, their means and end both being oblivion. I think I‘ll stay with them tonight, have found a vacant spot, have smoked a bone, and now am thinking this to you. Are you there?

Pocahontas

I'm waiting for my man, twenty-six heartbeats in my hand. The birds have stopped singing, the crickets have stopped chirping, the squirrels have stopped hissing, the leaves have stopped rustling, the rain has stopped need need needling the sodden earth it impinges upon. There is about the forest today a sweetly sad post-annihilation feel, as if I were a smaller version of its heart. Feeling sick and dirty, huh, I'm waiting for my man. Hey white boy, what are you doing by this log? Hey white boy, how come you treat me like a dog? Hey white prince, what if you really are a frog? I apostrophize him in case he's sick or sad or hurt or dead or fled or imaginary. White bitch, I do get weary in my shaggy dress. When I get weary, try a little tenderness. Hold me, squeeze me, don't ever leave me, got to got to now now now, try a little—huh—

“Hey, move away from that log before that caterpillar bites your leg off” is all's he can say when he finally shows.

“Thank you for saving me from the vicious caterpillar.”

“No problem.”

“Problem.”

“Yeah, problem.”

“Squeeze me.”

“Unh?”

“Squeeze me right here.”

“Oh. Watch that puddle.”