“Yes.”
“I don't think the man who makes a threat to kill my daughter if I don't accept his terms can plausibly negotiate a peace between her and me, so why don't you tell me what exactly your terms are, and I'll accept them,
because I'm beside myself with anguish over my daughter's safety
, and you and she may take my acceptance of your terms as a sign that I value her life.”
“Sir,” Frank says, “with all due respect, your judgment is understandably clouded by your concern for your daughter.”
“My judgment is clarified by my concern for my daughter,” he replies.
“Or,” Sit Knee says to Frank, “to put it another way, shut up.”
“I'm afraid I can't do that while our lives are being sold down the river by this softening geezer.”
“You'll have to,” Sit Knee says, and turns to half a dozen of the archers seated on the edges of their rusted folding chairs. “Please remove Frank and Joe from the hall.”
They don't budge.
“Please,” Frank says to them, “remove Sit Knee from the hall,” which they do with a struggle, during which the latter's face remains unreadable by me.
“And now,” Frank says to the ones still seated around the edges of the hall, “train your arrows on that man.” He points to his boss, at whom the two score men dutifully aim arrows. “And now, won't you all please stick his counterproductive ass with something sharp and let us be done with him?”
No one moves.
“I said
now
!”
They continue not to shoot and all look scared, as if to aim at him were only play, while to speak or even think of shooting him will bring them great ill luck.
Frank screams, and screams again, and each scream lasts as long as it takes his lungs to empty of air. Now that Powhatan's attention is turned to the screams, a young man I recognize as my gal's gentle friend Stickboy is running out from behind the arras. He shoves a knife in her dad's backâthe back of his upper thigh. Powhatan is falling to the dirt floor. Stickboy is running knife-first at Frank. Their bodies seem to crash and I can't see clearly. Stickboy collapses to the dirt floor, which, I notice, having been packed down and made smooth, does not absorb but holds, for now, these two men's blood.
“You think when I told you to kill him I didn't know you'd try to kill me next?” Frank says to Stickboy, who lies curled up as if not yet ready to be born.
“You think I didn't know you knew?” Stickboy says.
“Yes, I think you didn't.”
“You're right, but now I'm better off than you.”
“That's what the losers always say to the winners to console themselves for their loss, and that's why losers lose and winners win.”
“Yes, that's right, you've won. You now have power, strength, a chiefdom, the command of an army, what oil there is in these parts, factories to clean the food, even a crude sort of beauty, and the potential to lose each of those things, and you will lose them, one by one or all at once, long before you die, and their loss will cause you exquisite pain, whereas I have and have always had nothing, which I will never lose, even if someday, by an unlikely turn of events, I should have something,” Stickboy has said, and is dead.
Pocahontas
Ah kin
not
make mah brain say what it jess hoid. Mah brain it kin not say what it jess hoid. Hoid mah daddy jess got stabbed in he ass. Whea he ass at now? Whea mah ass at now? My ass is still in the truck which belongs to the peculiar motherfuckers of New York but it feels as if it's on a cliff with angry rocks down below which have already been made red with the blood of the sad fools I know have been pushed off of the cliff or have jumped off of it. There is a lock on the door of the truck of the aforementioned motherfuckers and there is the immobilization of my ass on this mattress an ah have come tuh feel that histry ain't nuthin but uh long and uh desolate corridor uh time that lead up to thuh present and ain't got no uhmergency exit. Seems like nothing ever comes to no good out on Chickahominy Creek because that's where my used-to-be-best friend stabbed my father in his ass cheek and then he himself was stabbed and died and that is just some of what I cannot make my brain know or feel or say or do
nuthin
bout. You stupid man I love so bad, why none of this make you feel sad? And wherefore do thy lips so readily drip with the words of interposition and nullification? Howl, howl, howl! O y'all a man uh stone! If ah had yo tongue an eyes, ah'd use um so thuh ska would poe it black ink down onto thuh erf an thuh sea dump iss fish up into thuh ska and thuh ska dump iss fish it jess got from thuh sea back down on thuh heads uh the mens be walkin round on two legs down beneaf it like they know what thuh
fuck
they doin. Muthuhfuckuh you got to take me to mah daddy now.
“Okay.”
“Okay
, you bess say okay, punk-ass bitch.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Why ahm talking like this? Why you a punk-ass, bitch-ass, greasy-hair, bad-breff-havin, bony-ass, doan-know-how-to-cook-corn, âJamestown,' white-ass New York muthuhfuckuh?”
“I don't know.”
“Ah talk like this cuz sometime this how ah feel like talkin.”
“Wish I'd brought my dictionary.”
“Mah daddy jess got stab and you talkin bout wish I brought my dictionary,
fuck
you.”
“Why do you always speak to me so harshly?”
“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
Pocahontas
There he is, my huge and screwed-up dad. My brain can see him all too clearly now. He just lies there almost as he does on state occasions except he's on his side and not his back, on a cot and not a chief-size bed, low not high, in a small n-shaped hut not a great n-shaped hall, naked not clothed, asleep not awake, wounded not whole. It could be that a daughter shouldn't think this when her father's going to die, but my, what a murderously large penis you have, Daddy. How not so very different its natural color is from the color of your wounded purple leg. I'm breathing through my mouth but still can feel the maggoty apple smell of your wound at the back of my throat. Your wound itself I feel right here, right here, right here. “Father Buck, give me that blanket, please. Is this the cleanest blanket you have? Now scram, if you don't mind, Father. Great, thanks, bottom of my foot to your rosy Anglo backside.” What was that sandy-haired, bespectacled trick moping in here for anyway, more religious instruction? Hope to make my father want his New York God as he expires? These people ruin what's left to be ruined. Wonder what
that
guy's penis looks like. Wonder what all those guys' penises look like lined up in a row. Oh no wait I already saw thatâkind of sweet and sad, like the men they hang from, oh what a cockeyed optimist am I. Lemme put this moldy blanket on your rotten-apple-smelling self, Daddy. Oh, I see, you throw it off, that's why they've got you lying naked here. Now come on, just hold your arm still so I can put this blanket on your big shivering gore-encrusted ass. I said hold your arm still! Massive arm like fifteen eggplants all in one. My father is dying, my father is dying. You awake or you just chuck this blanket on the ground like a soiled hanky in your sleep? Always liked your hairânot the grim white spikes that shoot up on the shaven side of your head so hair don't get caught in your bow but the long, coarse, silver curls, mmm, they feel good in my nose and mouth, block out the shit-and-rancid-watermelon smell of your infected behind. Let's say this gorgeous, musk-rich hair is the loving dad and chief, while the gashed ass is the stupid mean guy who acceded to my would-be rape and banished me. My lips on your hot brow now: let their saliva'd-up selves be balm to your sad head. And hey come on so wake up so we can get this reconciliation over with so I can get on with my life instead of being all neurotic and yelling at my boyfriend every day from now on because I didn't work things out with my dad. “Come on!”
“What the⦔
“You awake?”
“Who are you and why are you kissing me?”
“Oh well I'm your daughter Pocahontas and I'm kissing you in case restoration hang its medicine on my lips, my kiss repair those violent harms a dozen things done messed you up with.”
“When did you die?”
“Die? Watchu talkin bout?”
“Where have I been? Where am I? I will not swear this is my leg. Let's see, I feel this prick.”
“Um, Daddy, let's not have this get all weird. You may be suffering from dementia but stop touching yourself in the presence of your daughter.”
“I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”
“Perspicacious as always.”
“All the skill I have remembers not this smelly blanket nor the cheap construction materials of this hut. Where am I?”
“I don't know, some hut somewhere. One of the lesser huts of your kingdom.”
“Do not laugh at me, for as I am a man I think this lady to be my child Pocahontas.”
“Right, that's what I'm saying.”
“Be your tears wet?”
“No, they're fake, plastic tears, duh.” (I make my jibes real tenderly, okay?)
“I know you do not love me.”
“I love you so much! Daddy! I love you!”
“Don't cry, my dear. I've been so awful to you.”
“That may be but I've been a world-class cunt so let's just call it even. Hey, no, don't try to get down on your knees because it'd be too odd and your leg's all messed up and you'll make it worse.
“I can't feel my leg, how bad is it?”
“Well if you can't feel it that can't be a very good sign, can it?”
“I don't know, don't ask me hard questions, I'm all confused. Where am I again? New York?”
“I'd say hallucinationville.”
“Hallucinationville, ha! You've always been my favorite.”
“You've always been my only.”
“Well so we've made up. Now what should we talk about?”
“Do you have, I don't know, retrospective thoughts?”
“How much better not to have been chief.”
“What would you prefer to have been?”
“A fisherman, a food service worker, a germ.”
“Do germs have chiefs?”
“If germs have chiefs and minds, their chief's mind is doubled as my own. Hard to be a chief and germ or chief and man at once. The chief's a god, the man's a beast. The chief, like a beast, wants war. The man, like a god, wants peace.”
“What about girls?”
“Girls keep men and chiefs in check.”
“Hardly.”
“Without you and Char grumbling at me every day I'd have been worse, made more war, felt less for the sick and weak.”
“That's dumb, Dad, to make girls do the dirty work of feeling.”
“What would you have done had you been me?”
“I'd have felt, all day every day.”
“Is that what you do as you?”
“I guess.”
“And how is that for you?”
“Hard.”
“One cannot be chief and feel to that degree.”
“Seems like lots of things you can't do and be chief. Does chiefdom limit you to be a jerk, or what?”
“You're being tough on your wounded father.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it's all right. I'll try, I'll try with my remaining time on earth to feel more real, even though I'm not a chief no more.” He closed his eyes.
“What you doing?”
“Getting in touch with my feelings.”
“You're being funny.”
A tear came to each of his eyes, and several more. He cried.
“Oh, Daddy, it's okay, I don't want you to be sad.”
“I want to be. I have to be to say goodbye to the world. That's what I want to do in my final time here with you.”
“Do what, just hang out here and feel the most?”
“At least until your dad gives up his ghost.”
Pocahontas
“He's surviving his big trip, don't know if I'll survive mine,” I say to my worried Aunt and Uncle, Char and Sid, who link arms by the shotgun door of the cab of the truck I'll ride up north in away from all I know.
“You sure you trust this schnook?” Sid says.
“No.”
“Then why go?”
“Why stay?” Char says.
“To fight Frank,” he says.
She looks at him as if to say “Don't be a fool,” and he looks back at her with drooping eyes beneath each of which a slender supine crescent moon of red inner eyelid becomes a tiny model of the fifty years of blood and gore the eyes above them have borne witness to. And she looks back at him and he looks back at her, and back and forth a dozen times between each blink of eye cuz such a loving pair they are that bitter spousal bickering is done with looks words are far too slow to parse.
“What will you do?” I say.
Char says, “My Uncle Croatan lives on a little island down the coast. We'll winter with him.”
“Regroup to take on Frank,” Sid says.
“That you'll have to do alone,” Char says as if saying “You spend too much time in the basement making origami instead of helping out with the housework.”
“I'll miss you both so much,” I say. At that, the kohl Char draws around her eyes to make her look less tired is made liquid by her tears and drops from the stark cliffs of her cheeks, which makes Sid and me cry too. Up runs my guy, and like a man eager to hit the road at the end of a long stay with the in-laws, says, “We don't go now, we won't get out alive.”
I'm in the truck, the door is shut, he starts it up, it lurches toward New York, while Sid and Char, feet on the dirt of my hometown, link arms. She waves her left, he waves his right, in unison like a single, unhappy, self-loving beast, or like a wistful mom and dad, bye guys, don't die.
“Whew!” my boyfriend says as we roll up the east coast of what was once known as North America. What a dumb time to say “Whew!” I picture the cuboid of the back of the truck, which contains my new friend the redhead Jack Shit and his beard and his wound. Yes, he, like everyone, is wounded now, on the inside I guess, since no marks show on his skin except that little flesh wound on his arm that don't account for his moldering mood.