Jamestown (24 page)

Jacks Myth smiled again, not as he had smiled before—these northerners have a facial expression for each mood, and their moods are many and varied, with sometimes only the finest shade of difference between one and the next, such that I'm tempted to impute nearly full human intelligence to them. His mouth stayed closed this time; the smile, which did not completely conceal a sense of savage contentment, implied he'd hoped we'd ask him to show us how to use the guns.

“All right. I suppose we'll need a target. I'd hate to destroy another tree,” he said, and looked at me, or, to be precise, at the last trace of the wound on my head caused by the branch the one-armed man shot off the tree I happened to be sitting under at the time his friends were skirmishing with mine. “I know something we can use. You, the big fellow, I'll need your strength, come with me.”

Joe looked at Frank, who by his stillness gave assent. Each of ten thousand moments like this in the course of a life are what make Frank a leader of men and Joe a led man, despite the latter's fierce mind and great mass. And what makes me neither leader nor quite led may take more time to know than I have.

Joe went up inside the bus ahead of Jacks. Time went by and he came back down straining, ass-first. The edge of a brown, large, flat, square thing he was carrying with both hands seemed also to be stuck to his mouth, and pressed down on it. His foot hit the dirt. He stepped back away from the bus. The big brown thing pursued and bore down on him, mainly on his mouth. Jacks appeared on the bottom step of the bus, walking forward, pressing on the back end of the large brown square, four feet or so in width and length, which he appeared to be force-feeding to Joe. Jacks leapt off the last step; the square jolted forward into Joe's face. A small and oblong blob of blood squirted from Joe's upper lip or gum and landed on the narrow top edge of the square while a few drops darkened the deep brown field of the square's planed side. Jacks advanced while Joe unwillingly retreated, but only in the way a breach-born baby's feet could be said to retreat from the womb, its head advance, as if feet and head were not the front and back of one thing struggling to be born. By means of the square, Jacks backed Joe up to a bitternut hickory twenty yards from the right flank of the bus. Joe swung right and out to the side of the tree. He and Jacks lowered the large square to the ground, leaned it on the tree, and one thing again became three.

Joe stood with flecks of blood on his top lip, which with the bottom one made a tight seal of his mouth. He seemed to want to lunge at Jacks, but stood as if pinned to the spot by a four-foot square of air. To leap on Jacks and tear his face, as Joe's eyes said he wished to do, would have been to admit he'd been beaten in the moving of the square, which the code of pride of the men of my town precludes, which means I'm not a man, since I'd rather admit nothing more, and nothing would bring me more relief, than defeat.

“Here's the target,” Myth said, pointed at the square, and waited.

“So shoot it with your guns,” Frank said. When Myth or any member of his crew makes a face or a move I must guess what it means he feels, but Frank might stand stock still and I could read what he feels by how his skin and hair abut the air, and now his stillness—which could mean many things in a body that likes and needs to move as much as Frank's does—concealed bemusement at how adroitly Myth turned the moving of an object into a strategic victory over Joe, and, in amounts calibrated to each other, wariness and respect. “You're waiting for what?” he added after a time.

“This square of wood has been treated with a substance only recently developed by our scientists, expensive to produce, manufactured in extremely limited quantities as of yet, and still in its beta phase.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The substance this piece of wood has been specially treated with.”

“And?”

“Applied in liquid form, it hardens into armor.”

More voluminously meaningful stillness from Frank. Joe spat blood at the dirt. Rat Cliff looked quickly at the small, oblong blob of blood in the dirt, at Joe's face, at Frank's, at Myth's, scowled, and watched a nearby squirrel leap from the thin branch of one tree to the thin branch of the next, scramble up the second branch as it arced downward under the squirrel's weight, and disappear from all our lives, at least for now. The two other men of Myth's tribe let the flank of the bus hold up as much of their weight as they could while remaining on their feet.

“Is this some kind of bullshit to make us think it's great that the bullets from these guns you're selling us can penetrate this ordinary piece of wood? Or, worse yet, to explain in advance why they won't?” Frank said.

“Oh, they can,” Myth said, “but I'm hoping you'll see how worthwhile it would be to buy the liquid armor from us—a small quantity of it anyway, which is all you'll need. Not that we have any to sell you right now, but we're expecting a shipment soon.”

“There remains the obvious question of how to know everything you've just said isn't bullshit.”

“We can make a little test of sorts.”

“Talk to me.”

“Well, we've learned the hard way that you people can shoot your arrows at great speeds, that they pierce and shatter hard objects we'd want them to bounce off of, like human bone. So why don't you shoot a few arrows at our treated target here, see how it holds up, and then we'll shoot the target with our guns and compare. I think you'll find your arrows won't penetrate and our guns will.”

If Frank feared he was being outmaneuvered he concealed it even from me. He gave a sign to Joe to stand by the bus and shoot at the square. Joe marched toward the bus. The two thin men who leaned there moved away in undisguised fear. Joe discharged another blob of spit and blood, strung an arrow, shot it, strung another, shot it, and so on till he'd shot five, all of which pierced the square of wood and stuck halfway out its back, and were grouped within a radius of an inch. Joe, reliably, announced by how he stared at Jacks that he had his pride back. Jacks in turn gripped the top of the bus door and swung himself up onto its roof. Frank seemed to take the roof in one quick leap. They stood side by side on the roof of the bus under a tree, chatting inaudibly as they ministered to one of the guns, like friends who'd joined to pet a lion's head. Jacks held a long sash of thick, horizontally conjoined bullets out to his side with his left arm while with his right hand he did something—pulled the gun's trigger, I suppose—that caused a louder noise than I'd ever heard, twice as loud as the noise of the gun his one-armed friend had used to shoot the tree that landed on my skull. The noise stopped. All of us but Myth stared in wonder at the gun. We looked at what he was looking at, which was the wooden square with Joe's arrows in it, or what was left of arrows and square, which was small and medium-sized splinters of wood.

“Well,” Frank said, the strain of shame in his voice, “that's a fine gun, and we'll take it from you now, and leave you to the many other accomplishments—in addition, I mean, to having destroyed a piece of wood—that you no doubt have planned for the time between now and when the sun goes down.”

“It's all yours, as is a car and driver we'll provide for you.”

“We'll drive it ourselves.”

“How do I know you'll bring the car back?”

“Because I say we will.”

“We'll provide a driver, no offense.”

“We'll need some tools to unbolt the guns from the top of your bus.”

“You didn't bring any?”

“How would we have known they'd be bolted to the bus?”

“They have to be bolted to something.”

“May we borrow your unbolting tools?”

“We don't have any.”

“Why not?”

“As you've pointed out, we're ill equipped.”

“You're telling me you have no tools?”

“That's correct.”

“You expected us to bring our own tools for this purpose?”

“I neither expected nor didn't expect, but the guns do need to be unbolted to be moved.”

“Let's look at that stack of tools I saw in that shack you keep your food in.”

“None of those will work.”

“Let's look.”

“It'll be a wasted trip.”

“Joe, he thinks a walk to his toolshed will be a wasted trip.”

“We wouldn't want to waste a trip,” Joe said.

Frank said, “We wouldn't want to waste a trip by walking to your tool-shed. Goodbye.”

Myth said, “I'm sorry how this turned out. Come on back to our town any time with the proper tools and you can have our guns.”

“Well I was just kidding about not walking to your toolshed. We'll take the chance of a wasted trip.”

“You won't find what you need.”

“We'll try. We'd love to try. Give us the chance to see your town once more and its toolshed.”

Myth shrugged. We walked back through the hole, or gate. Twenty of our fifty hidden men emerged from the dark sides of their respective trees and filled the space where fence did not meet fence, bows at ease on fingertips like fingernails or waves of air.

“Have your men stand down,” Myth said.

“Can't.”

“Why?”

“They're here on orders from my boss.”

“They're making my men nervous.”

“No need for nerves unless you plan to do us harm.”

“We don't.”

“Or cheat us.”

“If cheating were a capital offense we'd already have killed you for giving us the so-called fresh water that made us sick.”

“And we'd have killed you for giving us an incomplete disassembled motorbike.”

“Exactly.”

“They're on Powhatan's orders to be here, but mine to shoot or not to shoot.”

“So you won't mind,” the plump one, the boss, Rat Cliff said, “if a few of our guys train their guns on you and your bowmen.”

“Well, they already have.”

It was true, they had. From the gaps in some of their tents, I saw the tips of narrow metal cylinders protrude. Before the last big war, or so I've read, situations such as this were called mutually assured destruction, a phrase used to describe a set of conditions wherein all sides in a cold conflict were considered safe if each had arms enough to annihilate the other no matter who attacked whom first, a sweetly hopeful use of the subjunctive mood which has since been proved naïve.

Frank and Joe and I entered their small shed, the early morning sun ceased to shine on the backs of our necks, and we strolled around the stacks of stuff they called supplies. In the dim light I saw blank CDs, scissors, shears, saws, machetes, boxcutters, utility blades, awls, picks, a hoe, mousetraps and rattraps, staplers, paper, double-ledger accounting books bound in recycled vinyl, wire, wirecutters, matches, planes, hammers, files, portable fans, a box of dusty partial books whose titles were obscured, walkie-talkies, alarm clocks.

“No wrenches or pliers,” Frank said.

“Told you.”

“Do these work?” Frank held up a walkie-talkie.

“Put that back.”

“How much distance can you use these over?”

“Put it down.”

He tossed one to Joe. “Head out into the woods and talk to me on this.”

Myth made a move to block Joe but he was already out the door.

We went to the door and watched, through a gap in the fence, Joe's large, rectangular ass dart among the trees and diminish in size, while his voice, clung to by clumps of static, came through the little plastic box in Frank's hand. “Frank. Frank. Can you read me.
Can
you read me. Over.”

“Roger that, big Joe. How far are you from the gate, over.”

“Fifty yards. Fifty-five yards, sixty yards,
can
you read me, over.”

“Roger that I can and do big Joe. How's the weather where you are, over.”

“Heavy snow. Over. How many more of these do they have, over.”

“Roger that question, Big Daddy Joe. Am reconnoitering an accurate response at the present time, over—I mean, how far out are you now, over.”

“Hundred yards, one fifty, two, quarter mile, over, the sea, over, Europe, over, the moon, over.”

“Ten. Over.”

“What. Over.”

“They have ten walkie-talkies, over.”

“Take them, over.”

“I am, over.”

“What. Over.”

“I am. Over.”

“What are you putting them in. Over.”

“A bag. Over.”

“A what. Over.”

“A bag. Over.”

“Oh, a
bag
. Over. I thought you said a
leg
, over.”

“Where are you now. Over.”

“The sun. Over.”

“Hey these walkie-talkies are good,” Frank said to Myth.

“And if you think you're walking out of here with them, you're wrong.”

Frank tilted his head a half inch toward the door of the shed. Myth looked. There stood cousins Rawhunt and Parahunt, arrows in their bows aimed at Myth's ear.

“If they shoot me they'll get shot in the back.”

“Not if first the guys who'd shoot them in the back get shot in the back.”

“Don't take the walkie-talkies and no one will get shot.”

“We won't take them all.”

“How many?”

“Six.”

“Four, and we keep six.”

“How 'bout five each?”

“That makes no sense.”

“We'll use the fifth to contact you.”

“You're not so stupid after all.”

Frank put four walkie-talkies in the canvas bag he'd brought inside his quiver. He added paper, pens, a stapler, some bandages, a portable fan.

“Now you're acting stupid again.”

“Don't forget you screwed us over on the guns.”

“Did you really think I'd let you have the guns?”

“Did you really think I wouldn't take as much crap as will fit in my bag and still hold a grudge about the guns?”