Jamestown (4 page)

“I'm good,” I said. “How are you?”

“I'm good.” You're probably going, “Why's she telling us they said how are you I'm good to each other?” but you have to understand how every little thing my dad does is always at least a little bit awesome, this enormous guy, king of all he looks at, Dad, so much more different from the air that surrounds him than are most people, who walk down the street and allow the air that's in front of them to become them, even as the air in back of them ceases to be them. My dad is so not the air; it parts for him. Whatever he is standing near—sky, trees, houses, people—seems to organize itself in space around his body.

“Well, I'm maybe not so good,” he said.

My dad is not so good! Remember just now when I said how enormous my dad is? Well sometimes he's so enormous that it's like I'm inside him, which means that when he's not so good, I'm not so good. “What's the matter?”

“I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired of the hunt,” said Dad. “Can it all amount to something good?”

“It could.”

“Are you answering me in rhyme now?”

“Are you really asking me the question?”

“Yes. I don't know. No. I'm tired. Another hunt. More running, throwing, shooting, stabbing, carrying, running.”

“Why don't you ride a bike instead of running?”

“I'm
emotionally
tired, is what I meant. Something bad is going to happen. Not on this hunt, maybe, but soon. We should be saving our strength for what's coming but we can't, we have to go on the hunt. The hunt is inevitable. What will follow the hunt is inevitable. Our fatigue and unpreparedness for what follows the hunt are inevitable. We are free to choose what to do, and our freedom is real, and our destiny is open and free, and each decision we make is inevitable.”

“Want a neck massage?” I went to my dad and stood on a stool beside him and massaged his giant, hard neck, which was like massaging a cliff. “You smell sweet, like lavender,” I said.

“You smell like dead squirrel meat,” he said.

My dad's chief advisor, Dr. Sidney Feingold, the one who I know you remember I told you said I have a tumult in my ovaries, and reminds me of a guy in a bad painting who wants to be in a better painting—that guy—entered the pantry.

“Lots of big important men in the pantry now,” I said.

He winked at me in a somewhat creepy but mostly avuncular way, and said to my dad, “Time to meet with Frank and Joe.”

“Thank you for listening,” my dad said to me.

“Dad,” I said soberly.

“Yes?”

“I'd like to change my name to Tiffany.”

He laughed. It must be hard to have fun when you're commander in chief of an army that kills lots of people. “Sing me a song,” he said.

“Oh powerful Powhatan, I'm sad to see you sad. / You'll always be my daddy, you'll always be my dad.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Do great and powerful men where you're from say they're sad and use words like
emotionally
only when talking to women? I mean I love my dad and everything but what was that visit to the pantry about, anyway? What did he mean to tell me? Does he think I'm a receptacle for his delicate girly feelings? I ain't no receptacle.

Johnny Rolfe

Hello again, in a sense—

In my mind I watch each word of this hurtle upward, bounce off one of earth's half-atrophied prosthetic moons, fall back down, hit my crown, and break into its constituent letters, which slide down my neck and arms, through the bus floor, and are crushed by its tank treads into the earth, where each then merges with the genetic material of the single-celled organisms those pre-annihilation Cassandras warned would be earth's sole post-annihilation forms of life.

There is a window at the front of the supply trailer behind the bus, made, I think, for folks like us who like to see their stuff while hauling it from place to place, and a window at the bus's back, so people on the bus who wanted to could keep an eye on the air that touched the window that touched the air that touched the window that touched the air that touched the redoubtable body of Jack Smith, shackled to a chair, and his liquor, trapped in glass. The two underwear-wearing men who'd grabbed Smith sat in the back seat facing the trailer, erect in their bespoke suits of taut muscle, their unrelenting vigil on Smith controlled by what form of payment the soft and petulant Ratcliffe had convinced them they'd receive. How, then, did Smith do it? How'd he undo the chains, open a bottle of booze, take a nip, close it, arrange the boxes in the trailer to resemble a bar, find glasses in the boxes, arrange them on the “bar” in a come-hither style, return to the hard chair he'd been chained to, and put his feet up to mimic what a bartender might look like? Half the bus was at that back window by the time Smith was recumbent.

“Who would it hurt to have a drink?” someone said.

The mass of purple blood billowed up inside the silky face of Jack Smith's keeper, the mean, ambitious, talentless John Ratcliffe, when one after another of my travel companions shouted, “I'm thirsty!” and, “I need a stiff one!” and, “It's whiskey o'clock!” Chris Newport didn't stop the bus, at least not at first. Ratcliffe was grateful to him for that, though I doubt Chris drove to please Ratcliffe. I know nothing of Chris but that he's older than the rest of us, lost an arm in a fight, and has a wife who makes up for the arm—such at least is my idealized view of wedlock. Another thing I know about him now: he has a thing for young and handsome men. I know because we have a man like that aboard our bus, a fun and tireless piece of ass, or so I've heard: Happy Lohengrin, whom I've seen exert his will as guile to get his way. So once he sat down side-saddle on Chris's lap while he drove, and explained to him roughly how much fun a drink would be, Chris hit the brakes and we got out. The two big men who'd shackled Smith turned to Ratcliffe, cocked their heads, and shrugged, a three-second ballet of abdication that Ratcliffe joined by empurpling from sole to crown. And so seems to go the trip and the world: one man's relief's another's pain.

We drank, sang, and wept. The driver and his friend went off and fucked. We slept and drank and slept. Ratcliffe made the muscle men shackle Smith back up. We started on our way.

In the best of times, if there is such a thing, a certain kind of man will not be content with a drunk that lasts a day or two. In times like these, if there are times like these, no one will be content with anything. Chris Newport, for one, was not content to let his shame remain within his breast, but had to distribute it over the population of the bus, which he did by driving as fast as he could, without letup, while the men yelled at him to stop for another drink. And red-haired Jack Smith was not content to stay bound a second time, nor was he content not to put on a second show for the crowd of men at the back of the bus, in which he drank a double shot of rotgut and pantomimed contentment by laughing, smiling, hugging himself, swaying side to side, and opening his mouth in the shape of the word “Ahh.” And one man was not content to let a moving bus not let him reach the booze of which he'd not yet had enough.

That man was Happy Lohengrin, who'd used and cast off Chris—though, a ventriloquist of agency, he made Chris feel
he'd
done the casting off. The back window being sealed, Happy slipped out the port side and onto the bus's warm metal roof. He climbed down the back and tightroped along the steel armature by which we were hitched to what had become the bar car. When he was midway across, Chris—a man whose great, grizzled, one-armed body easily converted shame to rage—braked hard. Happy lost his balance, and would have plunged beneath the bar car's wheels had he not dived for and caught a rope hanging from the bus's stern. The men who watched made a noise in awe of his valor and skill.

Happy climbed to the roof of the bar car. Smith swung open the door at its back. Happy, supple as quicksilver, slid off the roof and into the arms of red-haired Smith, whom he tried to french. Smith shoved him away, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, cocked his head at Happy, and shook a shame-on-you finger at him. Happy threw his head back and laughed, Smith poured, they clinked and downed their shots, Smith poured, they clinked and drank again, Happy tried to cuddle Smith, Smith shoved him away, they drank and laughed again, the two performers angling toward the window that framed them and was framed by our window, which in turn was framed by our eyes.

There followed several days on which Chris drove the bus in a nonstop snit from dawn to dusk and a man who wanted a drink in that time had to take the Happy route out the port, over the roof, down the stern, across the armature, over the trailer, and into Smith's waiting arms. Chris begrudged this silently, Ratcliffe did so noisily, Smith enjoyed it cannily; the other men were men, who'll slake their simple thirst by drastic means if nothing else will do.

A man called Herb went over, or tried. He was called Herb for the hydroponic crop of weed he grew and sold in jail, being another of the early-release convicts who constitute half the population of the bus. While we'll be paid—if we survive—in water, food, and fuel, the convicts, for the trouble of taking this trip, receive the trouble of taking this trip. Nor has it been lost on Herb and his mates that this bus differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse, and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies. Herb climbed to the roof, down the stern, and was crossing the fast-moving space between bus and bar car when Chris braked for a crack in a road that's more crack than road. Herb dove for the rope Happy had dived for, missed, and was crushed beneath the bar car's tires.

If you're past the age of two these days you've seen somebody die before his time, if time may be said to belong to the living. Herb, unlike Happy, or Smith, had no attributes, physical, mental, sexual, or otherwise that any of us felt we needed, so his death on his quest for a drink met with little interest. Still, none of us liked removing from the trailer's tires and wheel wells the bits of Herb we'd all have rather seen remain a part of Herb, nor did we enjoy interring as much of him as we could manage in the roadside's bone-dry dirt that was so obdurate against our efforts to make a Herb-shaped hole in it. We made an epitaph for him, and since we didn't know his surname we gave him one that did for his current incarnation what his first name had done for the previous: H
ERE
LIES
H
ERB
M
ANGOLD,
WHO
WANTED
A
DRINK
.

Pocahontas

Dear fellow human:

On this evening's menu is me telling you about the pre-hunt pep rally that just happened and that always happens around a fire in the center of town on the night before all the guys in town—most of the guys in town—the popular guys in town—the physically strong guys in town—the aggressive guys in town—the normal guys in town go on the hunt.

The enormous fire gets built by the women, and many excellent dishes of food get prepared by the women, and the sun goes down, and everyone in town sits on the ground in a haphazard circle just beyond a dozen ceremonial state-sponsored log sculptures that surround the fire. The sculptures are about eight feet high and made of unsculpted logs except at the top, where a hunting-type face has been carved. Each face is different from the others and means something, since people here don't only say things in words, we say things in faces, too, and now I will translate each log sculpture from face language into English. 1. The one with meanly slanted brows, nose so sharp you'd cut your eyeballs just to look at it, thin lips, sharp teeth, and wicked smile is the sculpture of
vengeance. 2
. The one with a face lax and devoid of expression, eyes open wide, nostrils unflared, lips closed and sensual (our current state-sponsored sculptor-in-residence knows that the mouth is a place on the human body where sex is both longed for and spoken of and I, who am nineteen and have not yet had my period, know this too) is the sculpture of
marksmanship
. 3. The one with semi-closed eyelids, red flared nostrils, parted lips, scratches on its flushed face, and tousled hair damp with perspiration is the sculpture of
just made love to the wife of my enemy in the dirt against her will while her husband lay freshly murdered not ten feet away
. I'm probably editorializing on that one because of what happened to Stickboy at the pre-hunt banquet earlier tonight that I'm about to describe as I sit here alone in this cornfield's small thatched shack on stilts. Anyway I'm sick of log sculpture descriptions, so in the waning light of the dusk that precedes the day of the hunt, the people of my town gathered in small groups, laid their hempen pallets on the ground, and ate their turtle stews. There was a feeling of boisterousness in the air, while beneath it in the ground there was a feeling of receptivity to human blood. Boisterousness, receptivity, doom of birth, dessert was served, women bussed the plates. Everyone who was not a wise old man or a strong young man—women, girls, sick people, weak people, fools—gathered round the logs, whereupon the huntsmen rushed in shouting toward the fire.

Three old men hit their drums each in a different rhythmic pattern. The hunters, inside the ring of logs, across the fire from the drummers, danced, arms on one another's shoulders. They kicked their legs up high: all those bare, muscular, oiled legs pumping up and down in a long arc in the firelit night like a row of synchronized penises, a machine made for the frequent and varied sexual initiation of an eager novice.

The hunters stepped back and formed a semicircle along the inner perimeter of the logs, stopped dancing, clapped and swayed. The men then stepped forth one at a time, did a brief solo dance, and answered a question posed, as in olden times, or so they'd like to think, by the old men. First up was my buddy Joe, who, if a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, would resemble that man.