Jamestown (3 page)

I took a walk with Joe today, in case you couldn't tell by the gloom that pervades this letter to you! He didn't even walk me through the woods, he walked me around town, in plain view of all the women out in front of their n-shaped houses making stews or baskets or sewing winter clothes or shaving the right side of their men's heads.

On our walk, Joe kept putting me on his left side, and I kept moving to his right. The women in the lives of the men of my town shave the right side of their men's heads so their hair won't interfere with the shooting of their arrows. The hair on the left side of the men's heads grows long. Some men have their women braid trophies into their hair. Joe gets his mom to. His latest is the desiccated hand of a guy from a town a few miles up the road, a guy I dated when I was thirteen which makes it extra creepy and sad. So I tried to walk on Joe's right side, which affords a perfect view of Joe's soft, tawny ear wax, black scalp stubble, and pale, flaky scalp skin—gross but not as gross as that guy's hand—but Joe, strong, agile, quick, maneuvered me repeatedly to his left.

“The look on his face when I killed him was a shame,” he said, apropos of the hand in his hair. “I've trained for twenty years so that if I should be in a position where I'm about to be killed by my enemy—and I'm not saying that would happen I'm just saying
if—I
wouldn't cry and beg. I've had nightmares since that raid though.
Damn
it, why do you keep moving to that side? Get over here—ow! Cut that out. My point being by the time a man turns twenty, he should be in control of his own face.”

“Which do you prefer,” I asked, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes? The blackbird singing, or just after?”

“What? You're changing the subject.”

“Which do you prefer, steel or intimation?”

“Well I've been having these nightmares about killing that guy, only in the nightmares I look down at his face, which is full of tears and snot and fear, and my stomach goes all queasy cuz it's not his face, it's mine! What do you think that means? Never mind, I don't want to know. I'm going hunting with your dad tomorrow, so that's cool. Did I tell you what he said to me after I killed that guy?”

And that's when I disappeared into myself, stopped trying to change the subject or kick him or maneuver to his right side so I wouldn't have the dead hand in my face. I continued to be unhappy but did nothing about it. To know and not to act is not to know.

Want to know something awful? I'd like to fuck Joe. His body's tall and hard like a big erect penis. I want to throw it down on the ground and climb on it and go at it. That's disgusting, I know, the worst, so wrong, and yet the part of me that wants to fuck is not a student of ethics. I'd fuck Stickboy, I'd fuck Joe, I'd fuck a dozen other guys in town. My dad'd be pretty bummed if he found this diary. That's why I write it out in this corn shack in the middle of this cornfield under the twilit sky that looks like a day-old bruise on the thigh of a woman whose body is five hundred times bigger than the world. I write it all down on this wireless device, keep no copy, send it off to the ether, from whence it goes directly to your mind.

Now the sky is black. I like to be out in a cornfield under the black sky, invisible to everyone I know. This place and time let me come back to myself after fleeing on a walk with Joe. Here I am! There I are! I hug myself and give myself a long, soft, gentle kiss, missed you, love you.

Johnny Rolfe

Dear air:

That night I dreamed a dog lay in the road at the edge of a wood. The road was like the real road this bus is rolling down: hot, bright, cracked, dry, dead. The wood the dog lay at the edge of was soft, green, dark, and smelled good. The dog lay half in each world, its head and upper self in ours, the rest in the dark wood. We walked toward it, a few of my bus brothers and I. It looked at us. Its eyes were clear, its tail wagged, a healthy, happy-looking dog, but something was wrong. Someone's ill health or bad luck lurked in the dream. A few men walked toward us from beyond the dog's tail, inside the shadows of the wood. They were forms more than men. Their intentions weren't clear, though they didn't seem to mean us harm. Then came a light, high whine, from the dog, I guessed, but not from his mouth, which was closed. Then came my first glimpse of the faces of the men from the other world. They seemed eager, though eager for what I did not know. The rhythmic insistence of the light, high whine that came from inside the dog seemed to amplify the feeling that produced the look of what I thought was eagerness on the faces of these men who, I realized, in the dream, came from where our bus was taking us. We gathered round the dog, and then I saw it, the source of the light, high whine: the dog's slick and bright pink penis, standing up from its lower thorax, hard and gorged with blood. As if sated, or drunk, the dog smiled, and from the slender hole at the tip of its cock came the gooey wet pups, about an inch apiece, one after another, ten seconds apart, eyes closed, two, three, four, five, six pups, seven pups, eight, ten, thirteen, a small, blind army of baby dogs. All the faces looked bewildered now. The weapons all came out at once, as if we all had guessed we'd have to kill someone to exit from this dream alive. I came up into waking life in time to see red-haired Jack Smith, a gash on his head, drag his whiny-wheeled red wagon down the wide aisle of the bus.

The wagon was loaded with bottles of booze. Smith stopped in front of my bunk. The new, wide, red, vertical scooped-out area of his forehead was level with my eyes. It's poignant to see a fresh wound in the head of someone you're beginning to care about. My heart went out to the wound and the stoic face of Smith below it, over which blood slid not alarmingly but steadily, and mixed with the coarse red hair of his beard.

“The trade was not made under the best conditions and I didn't get exactly what I wanted,” he whispered. The sun was not yet up and most of the men were still asleep, though I saw our driver, Chris Newport, ease his wide girth out of his bunk at the front of the bus. “I'd have preferred food, water, tools, knives, guns, and, you know,
fuel
. No one wants what we have. Whose idea was it to bring jewels and gadgets?”

“No one's idea.”

“You get laughed at when you bring bracelets and walkie-talkies to a trading post around here, and then you get punched, and then you get stabbed—at least you get one guy stabbing your forehead and you don't want to hurt him too bad but you do have to make an example of him by hitting him hard with the sharp edge of the walkie-talkie you happen to have in your hand because you'd just been trying to show his friends how sleek and effective it was so they would give you food or fuel or guns, but they weren't buying it, so you end up hitting
this
guy with it till he's out and then you hit him some more so at least his friends who don't want your walkie-talkie or your pearl drop earrings and are annoyed enough to kill you for showing up with nothing better will sit back for a minute and think about what to do next so you have time to lift the gun off the guy you've smashed and point it at his friends and kind of ease a wagonful of their booze out the door of their sad little concrete kiosk and on down the road. Like I said I'd've rather had water but I can see where booze could be a language I could talk to these guys in, but a language I
don't
want to say anything to them in yet is this.” From his belt he pulled out the pistol he'd taken from the gentleman and threw it on my stomach. “You hold onto that and just remember once you start talking with it you may be committing yourself to
parlez-vous
twenty-four-seven,
vingt-quatre-sept
if you get my meaning.”

I was about to object to the gun on the top of my shirt when the first few bullets hit the back window of the bus. As our friends woke up, Chris Newport ignited the engine and the bus began to groan down the road, or what was left of the road. Bullets continued to hit the bullet-resistant back window while angry men rode the door and tried to break it down. Soon they fell off, and a plume of exhaust enveloped our pursuers, and the bus eluded them while they continued to express their frustration by shouting and firing their guns.

Moments later two big men—an army twice the size of Smith's—appeared on either side of him and grabbed his arms. I don't know their names. They're among the fifty percent of men on this trip in the Early Release Convict Program, two tall muscle men in white underwear with no meanness in their faces, just tired and dutiful stares, big men doing a skilled job—put the cuffs on Smith's thick wrists, the ordinary business of physical force and restraint.

Smith did not resist. A man named John Ratcliffe, who, like John Martin, belonged to the executive class, stood up from his bunk fully clothed and told Newport to stop the bus. “I'm placing Jack Smith under arrest for bringing unapproved contraband on board.”

“I'm not stopping this shit with a bunch of guys back there ready to kill us. I put thirty miles between us and the guys with the guns before I even think of stopping.”

“Fuck you,” Ratcliffe said, the universal epithet of impotence. His plum-colored blood ascended his peach face from neck to hairline. Ratcliffe is a soft and petulant man. He's not old, but the skin of his face has already begun to loosen from the bone in preparation for the kind of oldness it is his ambition to acquire—the one that comes with a cook, a valet, a bodyguard, and well-defended water, food, and fuel supplies. His mother being the concubine of the Manhattan Company's CEO, he's a contender for succession, despite his lack of skill at anything.

I watched Ratcliffe scan the bus to see whom he might call on to outrank Newport. His eyes brushed past John Martin, whose knee I'd undone. I saw Martin give Ratcliffe a
not-now
headshake that bespoke an alliance I hadn't known about, just as I hadn't known Ratcliffe controlled Jack Smith's underwear-wearing jailers. I also didn't see anyone object to Smith's arrest, a passivity that may not have been engineered by anyone, though it can also happen on this bus—and elsewhere—that man wakes man in the night and offers him something he wants or can't say no to: food, drugs, strength, will, loyalty, friendship, threat, sex. The political landscape of the bus is as volatile as the physical landscape of the town we saw swallow its tallest building a few days ago, an event I described in a previous entry in this venue, which you may not remember since you don't exist.

It has been our custom in the morning to throw open the windows and deboard, to let oxygen and smoky earth-scent replace the air of this close space that is dense with the smell of men who eat bad food and don't bathe. But now, gunmen behind us, we rode on in the thick stink through the gloom of a damp day. Smith stood stock still in the aisle, as did the men who'd cuffed him and continued to pin his arms. Most men stayed in their bunks and dreamed or did nothing. A few sat in chairs and ate gruel. No one talked.

Newport stopped after noon. We got off and stood beneath a semi-tent of trees that didn't quite keep the stinging rain off our necks while the two big boys brought Smith to the cargo trailer attached to the back of the bus by a steel armature. It surprised me that Smith didn't fight but I assume his quiescence was strategic. He and I exchanged a wordless set of looks in which I asked if I should try to free him with the gun—the only firearm on the bus, as far as I know—and he said no, thank Christ, so he was set down on a hard chair inside the trailer, his legs shackled to its, his hands still cuffed behind him. His big wagon of bottles of booze was also placed in the crammed trailer, also shackled. We reboarded and rode on. Over the course of this day I've made my first ally and he's been imprisoned.

Pocahontas

Dear special person out there getting to know me:

Nothing much “happened” today, so I guess here for your delectation is a typical day in the life of Pocahontas aka Not Telling Or You'll Die.

I'm out in the cornfield again. It's really late, way past midnight. Air's pretty cold. I've got a blanket but I'm shivering enough that my fingers hit the wrong keys on this tiny thing and I have to go back and erase the words I got wrong and re-type them. I live to shiver, it makes me feel so alive! No I'm just kidding. I said “It makes me feel so alive!” for a goof because I think it's so dumb when people say that something that feels bad makes them feel alive. “I like stubbing my toe because it makes me feel so alive!” “Please punch me in the face because it makes me feel alive!” “Joe, walk me around the town with your dead hand in my face and silence me with your long, aggressive, boring monologues because of how alive it makes me feel!”

I tell you this because I feel like I can be honest with you and because I feel like if I were to lie or dissemble in English you would know right away because every English sentence goes by so slowly that you have all this time to examine it and decide if it's true. I used to always speak my mind in my language too but that's getting harder the older I get. I guess holding your tongue is kind of built into my language what with that business of secret names and that other business of being a girl. So anyway I'm going through this real confused period (but not
period
period—if I were going through
that
I wouldn't be here writing to you now, I'd be under Joe, who'd be driving down into me like a madman, what fun! Can't wait! Woo-hoo! Just kidding!)

No but here's why I like to shiver: goosebumps. I stick my arm outside the blanket and my arm goes from calm lake to choppy sea. To me that means you can become different very fast. So whenever I feel stuck in my life or myself, I try to shiver or remember shivering.

Everyone in town is asleep now but me, out here in this little shack on stilts where the cornfield meets the world, my own special private place at night. Oh, I know something that happened today. I was in the pantry alone in the late afternoon, separating the skin of a squirrel from its meat for a squirrel custard for the big pre-hunt banquet tomorrow night, which I will tell you more about later, when who should walk in but the Big Cheese or Chief, my father. “Daddy!” I said, and flung my arms around his neck. Though we're both too old for it, he encircled my upper arms with his massive hands and swung me around the pantry. My feet swept three skinned squirrels to the pantry's dirt floor. “Daddy, precious, could you do your Pocahontas a favor and fill the squirrel-rinsing bucket with fresh water?” He gave me a look that said, “I'm the commander in chief of an army of five hundred men.” I gave him a look that said, “I know, but it'd be really sweet if you would, it'd make me feel special.” He gave me a look that said, “It's already a compromise for me to visit you in a pantry.” I gave him a look that said, “Pretty, pretty please?” He filled the bucket. I rinsed the squirrels. He said, “How are you?” I told you there are a million ways to say
How are you?
in the phatic language of my people, and yet my father chose your basic bland
How are you?
to signal he wasn't there to put pressure on my ovaries, though why he
was
there I didn't know, and still don't.