Jamestown (7 page)

With this girl's teeth and gums in mind I crouched into a ball and made myself become a kind of dull and ugly tooth. I allowed my fingers to flutter up behind my back like waving dendrites. I was at a disadvantage for not having seen the dance the girl and man had done nor having ever seen or done a dance like this. I sensed I'd had a bad start by imitating a bad tooth. I pondered what our greeting should represent about us and our intentions: that we were an open people eager to make friends; that we were pragmatic, tough, hard-headed, couldn't be provoked or taken advantage of or victimized or fooled; that our indomitability had not entailed a sacrifice of thorough self-knowledge, nor an unceasing awareness of and striving for the loftiest potentialities of the human spirit. Meantime I remained crouched like a bad tooth. With one eye open, I peered up at the ugly girl, who peered down at me with one eye open, laughing. I laughed too, which made my body shake. I still was in a lot of pain, and drenched in sweat. My body resisted my attempts to control it. I feared I'd puke or pee or crap. I tried to become an ice-cold mountain stream of clear water running over smoothed and rounded pebbles. I stretched out in the dirt at the feet of our potential hosts and let the unwilled trembling of my muscles make of me a continuous series of rushing waves, and wondered if I didn't look more like a beached and dying fish than the happy body of water it had stupidly leapt out of. I shook on the ground till I was exhausted. I knew I couldn't just lie there on the ground like a corpse because that, too, might send the wrong message. I stood and closed my eyes and gathered my strength. I felt myself swaying back and forth and nearly fell over several times. I opened my eyes and found myself standing an inch from the girl. Without meaning to, I touched her hair with my hands. The red hills and planes of her unappealing face were inches from my eyes; pockmarks troubled the landscape. I had entered the atmosphere of the body of this alien girl and discovered there a medley of unexpected smells from home—varnish, chocolate, gasoline, bubblegum. Her arms and neck were taut and scuffed and soft. I circled her in my arms and pulled her toward me. She screamed and I came. Then the old guy's surprisingly strong hands were around my sore neck and I broke his grip by slamming my elbows into his wrists. He pulled a knife. Jack stepped in and took the knife from him. The girl looked at me as if I'd just murdered her father.

Smith exhorted all of us to calm down. He gave the old man back his knife, removed a flask from his coat, and gave him a sip. The guy nodded his head in approval and whispered something to the girl, who then invited us to her town in oddly accented English, and issued this warning unaccompanied by words: she reached out to one of the man-high bulbous stalks that grew everywhere around us, broke it off, and held it up above her head; a small arrow, which had evidently been shot from a concealed location, seemed to materialize inside it.

Smith dragged the rest of the men down off the bus. The girl signaled us to walk behind her through the woods to the south of the field. I hadn't ever been in woods and didn't want to go in these today. Today I didn't want to do or be. A temporary hiatus from doing and being would have been my preferred way to spend the afternoon but you can't have everything—you can't have anything—and here was this peculiar-looking, smelly girl who'd made me come for the first time in a year, two years, five, ever, a savory blottoing of consciousness to be grateful for. The romance of being beckoned by her into a dark wood was not lost on me, so I followed her, as did my thirty companions.

She frolicked through the woods, running back and forth across the trail. She ducked behind trees and re-emerged. She shouted—in English, her own tongue, both, or gibberish I could not say. She came to me and whispered in my ear what sounded like, “When on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, I think of you and come,” and then she disappeared.

An hour later, we arrived at a clearing in the woods, where, as if in a dream or porn film, a group of almost naked young women awaited us, carrying huge steaming platters. Less like a porn film and more like a dream, all the women were ugly, with lumpy faces, pocked and cratered dark red skin, and hairy arms and legs. The men let out a loud group moan.

Night had come. No moon shone. We found ourselves in a meadow whose upper half was made of stars. Torches burned and gave off thick and soporific smoke. I wished to sleep, or weep, or die. Beyond the fire I saw large, dark mounds that must have been their homes. The platters the girls held were piled with steaming towels. “Towel? Towel? Towel?” the girls all said, like giant, stupid, landbound, rust-hued birds. None of us had been offered a platter of towels before and we didn't know what we were meant to do so we just stood there. The girl who'd done the dance I didn't see peeled a towel off a pile and placed it on her face. As if to see the stars, she tipped back her head, but let the towel lie across her eyes. Hot water dripped down her tawny, muscled neck. “Mmm,” she said, “mmm, mmmmm.” The men plucked towels from the piles and looked up at the stars and draped the towels on their mugs and said, “Mmm, mmm, mmmmm.” The girl took the towel off her face and showed us how to clean our hands with it. The men of course did not see this because they were standing there, skinny and filthy and dumb, in the clearing of an alien forest, in the dark, humming or moaning in voluntary blindfolds, necks exposed, waiting to let their throats get slit, though somehow, as you may have gathered—you to whom I call out from the depths—we seem not to have been slaughtered yet, for here we are now, as I write this, returned to the bus again, thank the lord, sliding back into our greasy beds for another excellent night's sleep than which only death itself could be more restful.

But earlier tonight, in that strange meadow, with signs and grunts, the foreign girls coached our brilliant guys to wash their hands and sat them down on folding chairs arranged around circular wooden tables. There seemed to be a girl per man, and now each girl fetched a bowl of stew from a big vat and tried to fork-feed her assigned man its contents. A lot of us didn't take well to the pointed tines of forks, held by aggressively smiling foreign girls, coming at our heads, stew or no. What was with these girls' glee? These were some very glad girls, sitting on our laps with few clothes and sharp forks, happy hostesses who shrieked and had acne and tough, manlike arms and legs and bare, soiled feet. Thirty fork-centered wrestling matches ensued. The girls were strong, and we were weak. They pinned us to our chairs and jammed stew in our mouths. The stew seemed to contain real flesh, which none of us had ever had, since non-human flesh is hardly to be found up north, and if it's found it's likely to be sick or sickening. Some of us puked, others wept and acquiesced. A few resisted. Several tried to kiss their girls and were slapped in the lips. Most of the men—not Smith, not I—were docile when they led them to their baths, scrubbed them, dried them, oiled them, jerked them off, swaddled them in hempen shirts and pants, and then sent all of us back to the bus sans shoes in total darkness. If those are that town's girls, I'm not so sure I'm keen to meet its boys.

Pocahontas

Dear??

First thing I did as a woman was the dishes. Oh no wait, that's not true. First thing I did was watch two boys fight, and try to break them up, and fail.

Last night, after I told you about the advent of the menarche, I kind of went into a swoon and passed out in the corn shack and woke up at dawn with a killer backache. I eased my red ass down out the back flap of the shack so as not to be seen by the guys on the bus, in case they were awake, and I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones. “Hello, you glorious young woman,” they said to me. Corn loves me. Plants in general love me. Soil, rich with human blood, loves me. Clouds love me. The sky loves me, though I know she wouldn't hesitate to crush me dead. So anyway I'm trying to skip and frolic through the field but I've got this wicked backache—welcome to womanhood, Pocahontas; thanks a lot, womanhood—so I'm sort of half-frolicking, half-hobbling through the field, stumbling now and then upon a half-dead block of concrete of days of yore. When I got to the edge of town, I saw two things. First, I saw the girls hadn't done the dishes, strange, dirty dishes and stewpots everywhere, big tables still unfolded with scraps of meat and soggy crackers on their damp tops, sick and scary coons and rats gnawing at the meat. People here never leave food out. I leave town for a few hours, become a woman, return, and things don't make no sense no more, as if that little bit of blood that leaked down my legs was knowledge, and every month from now on I'll lose a little more of what I know, and ten years hence, when I am in the full flower of my womanhood, I will have attained, through no effort of my own, a supreme state of idiocy.

I threw rocks at the rats and coons and they dispersed. As I walked toward the mess, I saw two boys; the first sat on top of the second, who lay face-up beneath him. The first was punching the second repeatedly. They both seemed calm, nonchalant, bored, two boys doing boywork, no choice in this, it's what you do if you're them, you get down in the dirt at dawn amid the vermin and the uncleaned mess of the feast and you go at it for much longer than some woman walking by thinks you ought to or need to, punch, punch, punch, chest, throat, chin, mouth, nose, eyes, ears, skull. Getting tired? Take a quick break; bottom boy, roll over and get clobbered in the spine awhile. The boys were both my cousins, by the way, Opechancanough and Steve, ten years old. Opechancanough is big and strong, Steve is thin and weak. Neither seemed to notice I was there. Punch, punch, yawn, sigh.

“Get off him already,” I said.

“Yeah, get
off me,”
Steve said, mechanically, more, it seemed, as if the line were in some unseen script than because he wished for that outcome.

More punching plus invisibility of me in Opechancanough's little world of total domination of his cousin.

“I said get off him.'”

“She said get
off me.”

“He stole my lollipop.”

“So? One lollipop, one punch. Not one lollipop, five hundred punches.”

“He stole my
last
lollipop.”

“Get off him.”

“Get
off me.”

A
few casual punches, pace slowing. More punches, pace picking up.

“Get the fuck off him, now.”

“Ooh, ‘Get the fuck off him.'” Punch, punch.

I could've kicked him in the head but would've sort of undermined my point. I grabbed him by the hair instead. He came up when I yanked. Steve lay there pee-oh'd, like a man whose plate has been removed before he's done eating.

“I think he knows now not to steal your lollipop.”

“Get off me,” Opechancanough said to me.

“You're done.”

“If I stop now, he'll steal again. You don't know him.”

I twisted his head around by the hair so my face was in his. I admonishingly held my forefinger up to his nose. He tried to swipe it away but I pulled it back and replaced it as soon as he'd finished his swipe. He swiped again, I dodged it, he swiped again. I was in this thing now too, whatever it was: not stopping it, not changing it, just in it, as ineluctably as Opechancanough and Steve. I felt the boredom, too, of the player of the violence game that none of us couldn't not play just then. I let my mind float away, and watched my body put its finger in my cousin's face, and him swipe at it, and so on. Finally, I tossed him back down on his cousin, whereupon he resumed punching, and his cousin being punched, and all was set aright. A year ago, a day ago, this would have happened differently. What power I had over boys had evidently retreated to my uterus. Onward to the dishes.

Johnny Rolfe

To the one I hope receives this, though I'm not sending it:

Sarcastic hope is a mask made in the shape of the hopeful man's face before the lead pipe of experience fashioned him a new one. My wireless device is gone. I'm composing this by hand on humankind's flimsiest and least likely invention, paper. Hope of reaching you I've never had. Some other type of hope I still must have, I guess, or else I wouldn't make these notes at all, and now I'm going to let this hope alone: scrutiny's corrosive effect on hope has been demonstrated down the ages on folks who started out with far more hope than I.

We're on this bus again against our will, a bunch of guys on a non-moving house-sized bus in the middle of a dark, alien field. The bus we thought would take us to our new home may turn out to be our new home. This stinking, fetid, airless bus may well be where we spend our final days, which may well be tomorrow.

We woke up in a good mood, collectively. I suppose a hot meal and even the sort of swift and businesslike erotics most of us underwent had had a healthful impact, moodwise. So a lot of us were thinking what an excellent idea it had been to take an interminable bus trip that had almost killed us, if it meant ending up in this beautiful new land where people eat real meat, and which we would soon lay claim to. And everyone was eager to start scouting for food and a worthy place to build a provisional town.

We all got off the bus and stretched and shook our limbs, and were dazedly taking in the singular and vivid
hereness
of the place—the warmth of the clime, the less-intensely greenish tone of sky, the field of
corn
, I think she said it's called, and other things I can't describe. Some guys slapped each other on the back, some guys laughed, some guys talked about looking for water and food, and then, in a sense, we met the local men.

A guy named Matthew Bernard—nice young guy, good guy to have around for his cheerfulness, and who cares if he's a little stupid?—felt what he first thought was a stomach cramp, and looked down to find the back half of a short arrow sticking out of his lower abdomen. I think the wisdom on these things is that you're not supposed to yank them out. Would you have remembered that if you were him? He yanked it out and moaned and said, “Oh no.”