Jamestown (9 page)

I spit in his face. People of my culture spit in one another's faces to communicate contempt, English-language speaker to whom I am now telling, I hope, all the worst things I'll ever know.

Joe yanked my hair back, forcing me back down to the divan. Oh divan, what horrors you've known. He used the shard to cut apart my dress, and in so doing he cut into the flesh of the arm of the person who is now telling you he cut into the flesh of her arm. I kicked him in the balls and he didn't react so I kicked him in the balls and then kicked him in the balls and did it again and then again. He stood up slowly and looked sad again, and moped toward the door. I didn't pity him this time. Well maybe a little. Not much. Not at all. A tiny bit. Unwise as it may have been to do so, I entered this world with a promiscuous heart in my chest which, acknowledging its owner as one of the lowly, ugly, pitiable creatures of the earth, compels her to seek out others of like constitution and mix with them.

“You'll die,” I said to his back as he left, to let him know I cared. “You'll die, you'll die, you'll die, you'll die, you'll die.”

I lay in the dim light and looked at the black mark on the brown wall where the glass had been. I thought of the death of Joe. I thought of the death of my dad, the death of all the men my dad commands, the death of Feingold and Stickboy, the death of my mom, the death of my aunts, cousins, and friends; we'll make a fine, high hill of corpses, weeds growing skyward from our eyes, cunts, and mouths. I got up and went to look for my dad.

The bright light of the sky dazed me. Blood still ran from the place where Joe had sliced my arm. I guess I walked along the forest path with a torn dress and a gash in my arm. Now don't go all porno on me, dirty-minded English-speaker, my breasts were not exposed, and even if they were you mustn't think of them right now, you must think of how it feels to have a cut. Think of how it feels to walk among the trees of the woods with the egregious inconvenience of a fairly deep cut in your arm that you got from a guy who sliced you with a piece of a mirror he'd broken while trying to rape you—a guy, I might add, sent by your own dad to steal something precious from you, a guy your dad may even have pimped you out to a little bit, no doubt with the best of intentions, by implying it was okay to fuck you now that you're bleeding from your vagina or whatever.

On I walked in the afternoon sun, dizzy, confused, sad, mad, surrounded by trees and concrete quondam walls and dangerous wild animals, until I came to a clearing where I saw a thin man with a wound in his head. That man was Stickboy, if you'll pardon the contradictory nomenclature. Other men surrounded him, the same men who'd just hunted and who, before the hunt, had mocked him and would have spit on him had I not stopped them. They convened on the ground in this grassy place for the post-hunt sit-down, future corpses of the Chesapeake. My dad sat above them on a time-smoothed tree stump or partial tree corpse.

I stood in the woods with a tree in my eye and listened to all that was said. And I bled, and smelled the blood of dead men on the live men on whom I spied. And the sun, which one day will explode, dried up all the blood on the skin of the men in the grass, while my blood, on and under my skin, in the dark of the trees' shade, remained wet.

“What happened?” my dad said to Stickboy.

“I don't know. I was sitting there and a tree fell on my head.”

My dad sighed.

“I saw it,” said Frank, the man my dad says is the best tactician in the group, a cunning man one hundred percent smarter and two or maybe three percent more likeable than Joe. “It happened after that one-armed guy used his machine gun to try to kill everything—corn, trees, insects, us. He killed an ash tree by slicing through its trunk with bullets. The top half fell over and landed on Stickboy's head. But, Stickboy, what were you doing near the foreigners' vehicle just when we happened to be attacking them?”

Stickboy answered Frank as my dad and Sid had answered me when I tried to start a conversation from my place of weakness on the divan, forever ago: with silence. It seems my dad and his men had meant to strike fear into the foreigners and got struck themselves by a big and unexpected gun. The men surrounding Stickboy on the grass responded to his silence with a silence of their own, and it seems twelve silences obliterate the single silence they oppose. Or perhaps, in silence, kind and not number is what determines strength, and each time a man kills another man, the killer absorbs into himself the eternal silence he's caused in the man he's killed, and can then use it to win a conversation, as Frank and my dad and Sid and their men now did with Stickboy. Stickboy, too, has killed, but only rabbits and deer, and the silence of a dead deer is as nothing to the silence of a dead man.

“Get out of here now,” Frank said to Stickboy. Stickboy neither spoke nor moved.

“Go!” my dad said, and extended his arm toward the head of the trail that led back to town.

Stickboy stood up slowly. His knees and eyelids wavered and he sat back down. The other men looked at Stickboy with
go!
in their eyes. He stood again and swayed, just as the trees around him now swayed in the wind that had just arrived from the north and was cooling off the air.

My dad was about to speak again, and even though it's hard to think kind thoughts about him now that what was then about to come to pass has passed, I don't think he would have made Stickboy walk back to town alone. But I will never know because I stepped from behind the tree that had been hiding me and said, “Can't you see he's hurt?”

Dad, on his throny stump, leaned down to Sid in the grass on his left and whispered something to him—“Get her out of here” would be my guess, but I'll die before I know what men say when they know girls can't hear them.

Sid came toward me. I tried and failed to punch him.

“Easy now, sweetheart. Your cousin got hurt and I want to ask you to help him back to town so he can lie down and heal.”

“Now
you talk to me? Move aside so I can talk to my dad.” I shoved him in the chest and he grabbed my arm but I shook it loose but it was my same arm that Joe had cut so now I had a cut that stung my upper arm and a bruise rising to the surface of the skin above my wrist in the shape of the strong and bony grip of Sid.

Again my father's mouth was like a line. Tired, he looked, and what else? Ashamed of how he'd behaved toward me that day? Of having let Joe know I was now a woman, if he did? Of his daughter's disobedience? Or not ashamed at all, but some sentiment I'll never know or comprehend. Do other daughters know their fathers more than I? To hate one's dad's to know him not at all.

Well. Well, here's what I said to him, forgetting and remembering that talking is the mirror of life: “The guys from the north will rise up against your pitiful little army. They'll outnumber you, they'll outarm you, they'll outwit you, they'll outmaneuver you, they'll defeat you, they'll reduce your dominion to nothing, they'll rule over you, and slowly, over years, they'll kill every last one of us, till we're nothing but a story passed from the mouths of parents to the ears of children, and then not even that.”

My dad's head became gray ash. His chest and limbs turned to ash and fell upon the thronelike stump he continued to sit on in human form. The wind that swayed the trees and cooled the earth swept the pile of ash that was my dad into the air. The dad of mine who hadn't turned to ash looked at me and said, “You'll go now, and not let me see or hear you again as long as I live.”

Did I say talking is the mirror of life? Talking
is
life, and death. Why must people talk? I opened my mouth and Frank shoved a slab of wood in it and held the slab there with the palm of his hand, and continued to hold it as two other men carried me a hundred yards into the woods. And two more men carried Stickboy. They placed us next to one another on our feet, draped his arm across my shoulders, shoved us down the path toward town, and barred our way back to the clearing where my dad and his ashes still were. And then I saw a look pass between Frank and Stickboy that seemed to signal understanding and complicity, a look that caused a germ of thought I can't give voice to yet to settle in my brain.

The sky, which the leaves of the trees in the thick woods broke apart, had been late-afternoon chartreuse, but now was made gray by the dense ash of my dad blown by the stiff wind. I spat Frank's slab of wood to the ground, invited him to fuck himself, slung Stickboy's arm across my back, and waded toward the town through ash, which grew upon the ground like snow. A clump of ash in the shape of an eye stuck to a nearby tree and stared at me. A mouth of ash entered my mouth and fell down my throat. I gagged and spat and resumed the limp homeward with my friend.

“What
were
you doing out there?”

“Out where?”

“Out by where my dad was making war.”

“Guy can't walk in the woods without a reason?”

“What were you doing?”

“What were
you
doing?”

“Just now?”

“Mm.”

“How's your head?”

“It hurts.”

“I'll make you a busthead-cayenne-arrowroot poultice when we get back.”

“There is no back, there's only forward now.”

“Crap.”

“So what were you doing?” he said.

“I asked you first.”

“What were you doing?”

“I came to curse my dad.”

“What did he do to deserve it?”

“Nothing.”

“So, for no reason—”

“No, not for no reason. I had a reason but it was wrong. I shouldn't have done what I just did.”

“You can't suck back a fart.”

“Shut up.” I shrugged out of Stickboy's arm and he fell down. I sat by him on a rock and took his hand and pulled him up next to me.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I can't believe what I just did. I opened my mouth and changed the world. I didn't understand. I didn't understand.”

We sat on the rock in the woods while my dad's ashes swam around our shins. I cried, and ceased to cry, and felt myself become more like the rock on which I sat. “He sent Joe after me,” I said. “He sent Joe to defile me and take away my…”

“What?”

“I don't know, maybe he didn't send him to—but I had a—I had…” Stickboy quickly looked away from me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“I had a wireless device that I was writing in and Joe commandeered it.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

He paused in such a way as to make that germ of thought grow in me, though it's still too small to see. “I overheard them discussing it,” he said.

“What was that look between you and Frank?”

“What look?”

“You know what look.”

“There was no look.”

“So why were you out there where that tree fell on your head?”

We were sitting side by side on that rock and my bony friend turned to look into my eyes. Did I tell you Stickboy has the saddest eyes in the world, a superlative for which there is considerable competition among the people of my melancholy race, and that that is one of the reasons I love him with an intensity I sometimes find unbearable? The red of his wrapped forehead wound brought out the red in his sad eyes.

“They were returning,” he said, “from the hunt. It had gone badly. Kills on both sides. No spoils. Conquest in doubt. And who should they run into on the way home but that golden tank with the men inside whose faces look like swarms of ants. Your dad and his men shot at them, not to try to wipe them out but to let them know that setting up shop in this area would be inconvenient for them. They might have killed a few, I don't know, I saw one get hit in the knee, one in the hand, one between the navel and the cock.”

“Stickboy?”

“Yes, Princess?”

“What are you not telling me?”

“Nothing.”

“No. I've asked you a question several times that you haven't answered.”

“What?”

“What were you doing in that place at that time?”

“Nothing.”

“I don't believe you.”

“What's to believe? I was there because I was there.”

I understood I was asking him the wrong question. The right question has not yet taken form in me. But I know there is one because I saw the meat flicker in the very small red dots at the inner corners of his eyes, one small entry in the body's voluminous lexicon of revelation that thwarts its owner's efforts to conceal.

“Please tell me.”

And this was his response: the sound of the wind on the land, the same wind that blew the ash that clogged my ears. A friend who won't respond to what a friend can't ask is like a looking glass in which you cannot see yourself.

Two

John Ratcliffe

Dear President Stuart:

Please allow me to begin by letting you know how honored I am by the confidence you have expressed by appointing me Executive Vice President of the Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company. I will do my best to execute your intentions, to the extent I understand them.

We have arrived safely, and have begun scouting the area for a suitable location on which to begin construction of regional headquarters. As surely you must know, our departure took place under less than ideal circumstances due to the unanticipated urban infarction of which you were also no doubt a recipient. (I trust you have found safe ground, Sir, and are prospering!) We are therefore somewhat less than adequately equipped as regards certain basic items such as food, water, weaponry and munitions, tools, building supplies, spare automotive parts, and fuel, to name but an incomplete list. If all goes as per planned, as I am confident it will under my leadership and with the cooperation of the group of fine men which you have handpicked in your wisdom, Chris Newport will, after a several weeks' exploratory excursion into various of our neighboring territories in these Southern Parts, return to you on the Autobus Godspeed and will—after sufficient debriefing as you see fit, and rest—in a slower and more deliberate manner than the hasty and haphazard manner in which we made our first departure for the city, re-depart for the Southern Region fully stocked with aforementioned supplies of which we are now in exceedingly short supply.