Jamestown (34 page)

Thinned though he was, Breck remained impressive nonetheless. His dark straight hair; his pale, unblemished skin; the sheer muscularity of him, now encased in cotton neck to foot for fall: his form, in short, contained within itself a note of hope. Inside of me, past envy, past jealousy, past dread, past my time-tested understanding of my own inadequacy, was this certain knowledge, caused by Breck: beauty exists. He wailed, shuddered, sighed, was silent for a time. Poc kept her hand on him. “Come on, Breck, tell us, tell it, tell.”

“I can't.”

“Tell us anything you'd like. Talk to us. Tell about your life. Tell about something nice, a warm memory.”

He looked at her as if she'd spoke in tongues. She encouraged him some more. He softened. What was going on here? What was she robbing him of? A guy like that needs not to think of his warm memories, needs not to have them. Memories confuse. Look at me with mine.

“It was Ratcliffe,” he said, brought his knees to his chest on a skin on the floor of this windowless truck, hugged them, stared at the dim and fuggy air a foot in front of his face.

“You dreamt of Ratcliffe.”

“He was a poor leader but a decent guy,” Breck said. “My mom was his mom's pedicurist. She walked down from the Bronx to the Upper East Side one morning a week to do his mom's feet and sometimes I came with. That scared, purple Ratcliffe face at the second-floor window. He was ten and I was eight. He opened the window and hurled the keys down at my head. They stung when I caught them in my hand. We went up to their living room on the second floor of their brownstone and all four sat there breathing in the perfumed air. Mom and Mrs. R. gave each other looks I didn't understand. Little Ratcliffe sat with his slicked-down hair on the edge of a chair made just for him in his dark blue suit with short pants and gold buttons. Everything about him was fake and scared. He sat up straight cause he thought he should but he didn't know how. His hands were composed in his lap the way he thought a boy's hands should be who was better than the person he was staring at. Light, soft, curly-boy hair disguised with pomade as normal-boy hair. Head tilted to say ‘I'm the head of a dignified boy' when there can be no dignity for a boy of ten, and his was the head of a boy who would freely piss his pants if you made to spit at him. Mom said, ‘Go play, boys.' Why do mothers say that no matter who you're with? Rabid dog on a chair across from you and your mom'd say, ‘Go play, boys.' I guess that's what they say when they want you dead. Not dead, I mean, but not alive. ‘Wish I hadn't met or fucked your dad, suck you back inside and unconceive you.' Mom loved me and raised me good, but still she sometimes said, ‘Go play, boys.'

“So Ratcliffe took me to his room, which was huge and yellow with a rocking horse and clown posters, and said, ‘I'd like to see you crawl around and bark like a dog'—not because he wanted me to but cause he thought he should want me to or thought I should want to, which I wasn't having any of, so we stared at each other, him lying on his bed, me standing by the door. That happened for a while and then he rolled onto his belly and read a book that was under his pillow—rich boys have books—or pretended to read it but in truth lay there sensing my location in the room with his back. I left the room, walked down the hall, opened a door, saw Mom and Mrs. R. hugging each other naked, and the next week when we went to the Ratcliffes' John and I were told, ‘Go play outside,' despite how deadly that could be for small boys.

“Mom was a country girl from Yonkers who got pregnant by a drunk at age sixteen. He died on a trip to Ohio before I was born. If she liked to hug a lady in the nude she did it simply like a country girl. No thinking about it, no complications, no manipulations, no lying, no pretending you were doing something else, no power structure, no money changing hands, no shame. I take that back, there's always all those things, especially when the poor hug the rich in the nude. I played outside with Ratcliffe cause Mom liked the sex and needed the job, though my mind didn't say that to itself like that at that time. How hard it was for any man, woman, or child not to go out of their way to hurt Ratcliffe! You have to admire how high he rose, given how most people could barely stop themselves from breaking his teeth with their fist all day long his whole life. We went out to the street and he was swarmed at once by every available eight- and nine-year-old. I pulled them off him and we went back inside, him with bloody nose and gums and arms and sad white knees below his short pants.

“I guess the moms had loved each other fast that day, or not at all, were finishing the pedicure, Mrs. R's foot lotioned up on my mother's lap. ‘He beat me up,' Ratcliffe said, of course. ‘He hit me while my back was turned and threw me on the ground and stomped me.' Didn't cry, got to like the gumption, fuckhead Ratcliffe, ass. Mom smacked me with her lotioned hand, more than one good thing for her at risk here, smacked me again, lotion on my cheek, and again. Mrs. R. stopped her—'Martha, these are lovely boys.' I ran outside and stood on the corner. She tried to hug me when she came down, I wouldn't let her. Tried to lift me in her arms, wouldn't let her. We walked the grim hour back to the Bronx and stopped for ice cream: a counter in the ice cream store that we leaned on looking down. I hated her. How awful that I hated Mom even for an hour! ‘Martha, these are lovely boys,' she said in the Penny Ratcliffe rich-lady sex voice. I laughed and my ice cream came back out of my mouth and I went, ‘Martha, these are lovely boys' and Mom laughed. We made pouty lips at each other going, ‘Martha, these are lovely boys,' and Mom let the ice cream run across the backs of her fingers, which taking care of other women's feet had made red and hard. Mom died a long time ago. Ratcliffe was not a nice kid, nothing was right about him as a kid or a man, he put me in harm's way all our lives and got my boyfriend killed and now his death's on my head.”

He wept a little more but not as bad as before. I guess his boyfriend was Bill, the one we all thought was his brother. Mention of the boyfriend made me less scared of how Poc touched his arm, which she continued to do, but not that much less scared. He fell asleep soon after that. His beauty still consoled, in spite of all. And Poc's singular ugliness did more and better than console. She came and put her legs on me, hands, mouth, in silence. We fell asleep right afterwards, or at least I did.

Father Buck got better and Poc got sick. She had the shakes, the trots, redrimmed nostrils. Love moves the place where you end and not-you starts. I know this because when Poc got sick I got sick too. When she was sad I was sad. When she stubbed her toe I felt it in my thumb. When she thought of yellow I said
sun
. When she came I cried out. I began to crave this undoing of me: when we were apart and I couldn't be sure what state she was in I sneezed, cried, ached, thought, and came again and again to make sure I was still her and vice versa.

The truck stopped. Smith opened our door. Martin sat on his hands on the cold road. Dick Buck and Bucky Breck climbed down. I carried Poc out for her first taste of New Jersey. A green and faded sign said Union City, the name of a place long since dead. Naming inaugurates nostalgia.

We breathed this air that wasn't used to being breathed. We were all a little stunned, by being in New Jersey, by the continued existence of New Jersey and ourselves, by myriad other things. “So this is New Jersey,” Pocahontas or Shineequai said.

We looked across the river at Manhattan. The Chrysler Building continued to be gone. Since leaving, I hadn't thought of the earthquake we'd left in the middle of.

“How will we get there?” I said.

“Let's try the Lincoln Tunnel,” Smith said. “If it's flooded then we'll have to find a boat. Let me drive, but take Martin, he's creeping me out. I'll take Rolfe and the Indian girl.”

We looked at Martin in profile as he gazed, mouth shut, at New York. The wind swept across his voluminous and dignified brow and sawed-off arrow ends. He walked toward the truck on his hands, stopped, pulled himself up into its back, walked toward the cab along its metal floor, spun around, and stared at us. Since he didn't talk this was like watching some highly intelligent trained brute perform a stunt. How had his arms and abs grown so strong in so short a time? We agreed, out of earshot of Martin—unless his ears, too, had grown preternaturally strong—that the Martin who said nothing posed a greater threat than the one who voiced each complaint.

But for debris the tunnel was clear. We were stopped coming out of its mouth by armed Company guards. They knew who we were. One of them climbed the metal stair on the driver's side and signaled Smith to roll down his window.

“Where's Argyle?” he asked.

“Didn't make it back,” Smith said.

“Who's in the rear?”

“Father Buck, Bucky Breck, John Martin.”

“Who's that?”

“Indian girl.”

“What kind of Indian girl?”

“Princess. Daughter of their chief.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Let's see her credentials.”

“And, oh, who the fuck might you be?”

The guard contemplated his own identity awhile. “Follow us,” he said. He climbed down. He and his pal mounted a pair of bikes and pedaled them ahead of us through town.

“Why didn't the earthquake wreck the tunnel?” I said.

“What earthquake?”

“When we left.”

“That wasn't an earthquake, that was a bomb.”

“Who's got a bomb like that?”

“Who do you think?”

“Brooklyn? How do we know they haven't already staged a hostile takeover?”

“Because that's not their plan. How could it be? Brooklyn can't afford to annex Manhattan any more than Manhattan can afford to annex Brooklyn. Everyone's strained to the brink. They don't want to own us, they want to destroy us.”

“How do we know they haven't already destroyed us?”

He punched me in the arm, friendly but hard. “That's how.”

Pocahontas

I don't feel so good, I don't feel so good. This place where I will start my new life—some new life, ha—great new group of guys I'm with—strong one, lame one, holy one, crafty one, one who thinks he's me, love them all, love them all—this place where I will start my new life is dilapidated and forbidding. I don't feel good I gotta cold and am smooshed against the car door by my boyfriend's bony ass and am expelling gruelly poop once an hour and my eyes are red and my nose is red or so say the sideview glass. O gruelly poop I love you so, sad to see you go. “Lemme sip some uh that watuh from that erstwhile animal you got in yo lap, playuh, whilst we led through thuh ugly streets uh this town by those two dudes on bikes. Hey how come ain't no buildings here in thuh shape of uh lowuh-case n, n-e-weigh?”

There sure are a lot of enormous houses here that aren't houses anymore. It seems eight of nine of these is so crumbled and fallen-down and vacant-looking and grim that can't nobody possibly live in them or use them but for scrap or a place to crap. And then you've got that one of nine, it too in disrepair, browned by bad air, windows thick with smudged dirt. Making homes of trees as we do where I'm from is what puts the texture in archi-texture. Each twig of your home has a grain, a name, a past, a slant, a tree that was its mom or dad, a mark or set of marks that makes it not its neighbor twig. But when you use, uh, “What's this stuff called again?”

“Concrete.”

“And this?”

“Steel.”

When you use concrete and steel and it falls down it becomes nothing. But that ain't even what happened here cuz they ain't even
fell
down all the way cuz if they fell down all the
way
they'd be a lot uh nothing all around us and a body likes to have a lot uh nothing to roam around in, good to roam around for hours a day in nothing when you growing up to make you feel you free even though you not free, make you feel like you got control over where you go and what you do even though you ain't got it, really, much. But I don't like the half-fall-down state of this whole town, whose canyons trap the air that grays your skin as you wander through them on your bike or in your truck. This here is way too much ugly not-nothing to be bumping up against all the time with no remit. Shesus no wonder all these dudes who grew up here is turned out like they is. Daddy build the building and the building turn around and build the son.

“Are we there yet?”

“Almost.”

“Where we going?”

“Don't know.”

“What's your guess?”

“Office of the Chief.”

“Who dat?”

“Jimmy Stuart.”

“What's he like?”

“Priapic.”

“What else?”

“Narcissistic.”

“What else?”

“Unkind.”

“What else?”

“Clever.”

“What else?”

“Warlike.”

“What else?”

“Charismatic.”

“What else?”

“Generous.”

“What else?”

“High-minded.”

“What else?”

“Poetical.”

“What else?”

“Cultural.”

“What else?”

“Devout.”

“How should I act?”

“Be yourself.”

“Who dat?”

“Me.”

“I don't feel so good.”

“Me too.”

“What is that enormous pile of debris, stretched as far as the eyes can see?”

“I don't know. Smith, what is that?”

“That is what I think we once would have called the Chrysler Building.”

“It is black.”

“It is covered in ash.”

“It is ash.”

“Chunks of blackened brick and steel and concrete.”

“It stinks.”

“Smells bad too.”

“It seems to smoke.”