Jamestown (12 page)

We threw open the windows—this is how people with beach houses open their windows, by throwing them—and we brought the damask-covered cushions out to the front porch with the sea view. We unfurled the cushions, we lay on them, we stripped down to our dark underwear, I removed our pipe from its cushion pocket, and we passed an herb-softened bowl of ginger busthead twice between us to take the edge off the ride.

“You wouldn't believe what a day I had,” I said.

“Before you tell me, clean the gutters.”

“Now?”

“They're dirty.”

“They'll still be dirty after I tell you about my day.”

“Do it now.”

“I don't make enough money that you can pay someone?”

‘“I don't make enough money that you can pay someone?'”

To be mocked by Charlene is worse than receiving a blow to the throat with a blunt object administered by her.

“I wish you'd asked me this before we smoked. I'm mellowed out now.”

“I'll get the ladder.”

“‘I'll get the ladder.'”

“Oh good, you get it, and I'll do a little grocery shopping.”

I climbed the ladder till my nostrils had reached the gutters' level. They stank with multiple seasons of clotted leafmeal. What's in there? A stray arrow, desiccated; fossilized fish heads; sand; hardened air poison residue; crushed bird fetus skeletons; dust; hair; a hundred other things that once had names. In the world we failed to inherit I imagine there was a branch of science devoted to extrapolating whole societies from a single rain gutter long uncleaned by a lazy husband. In case we continue to exist and such a science is revived, a lazy husband may leave vital clues for the future of the race. As I completed this thought, Charlene came in low shoulder-first against the ladder. It tipped and I hit the dirt from ten feet up. I tried to breathe and clutched my left foot in pain. As I lay on my back, she slammed her knees down on my hips and swatted at my face and head not lightly but with an open hand. I tasted blood and my nose filled up with it, while my lungs emptied of air. She tore off my shirt and created a freeform lattice of deep scratches on my shoulders, neck, and chest. With her knees she continued to drive my hips into the hard-packed ground while pistoning my kneecaps with the pointed tips of her cowboy boots. She screamed and spit flew from her mouth into mine. I gagged. I hadn't breathed since I hit the ground. She rolled me and forearmed the back of my head till my face and the earth were one. I ate and breathed an acrid mix of blood and dirt. Having yanked and torn my pants, she wedged open my ass and drove something stiff up me till it hit my prostate as the steel ball hits the bell at the he-man booth of a traveling carnival. I yelped and came and spun up and smacked her in the nose. Surprised, she sat with mouth agape and legs splayed, like a little girl who's just seen her father beaten. I squatted, sprang at her forehead fist first, nailed it. She collapsed backward and came up dazed. I grabbed her hair, whirled her down, laid her flat face-up beneath me. I put myself in push-up form, crotch above her mouth. She sucked like a hungry infant till I was stiff enough to penetrate her crotch. We had our sweet and tender missionary sex till she came for her usual minute and a half and I for my millisecond.

“I wonder when those idiots will catch on that English is our language too,” I said, afterward, lying on the ground.

We dragged each other to the porch cushions, collapsed onto them, lit the dreg of busthead there, shared it, quietly dreamt awhile. I saw a gull at the shore drop a clam on a rock, fly down and pick it up, float up and drop it again, and so on, like a yo-yo. Char, from her cushion, half awake, strung a crossbow and shot the gull from the sky so we could nap and not wake up with our eyes plucked out. I woke in early evening to a heavy, fevered face of hardened blood, like a hot raspberry pie filled too full of fruit and baked too long. Char lay to my right, similarly indisposed.

“We're getting too old for this,” I said.

“It's nice once in a while. Did you have a hard day you want to talk about now?”

“The chief's depressed.”

“And?”

“Pocahontas cursed him and he banished her.”

“What'd he say?”

“That he never wanted to see or hear her again.”

“What was her curse?”

“Annihilation of us all.”

“Oh.”

“He's a good strategist but still primarily a man of action. In his mind words cleave to what they're meant to name; the word
hammers
a hammer to him, its purpose is to drive a nail into a piece of wood. So it's hard for him to see his teenage daughter's curse as merely the expression of her profound disappointment in him, her sense that he violated her, her heartbreak and rage.”

“Merely?”

“Yes. Fathers and daughters should be able to bounce back from this kind of thing.”

“He's a fool.”

“He's also a great man.”

“I used to think so.”

“Our lives are easier, thanks to him.”

“We live in a perpetual state of war.”

“That's because he understands the alternative is our death. And that's why his daughter's remark—which she made to him, by the way, in the presence of the entire war council after we'd suffered a humiliating defeat in a battle with these idiots from up north—was unbearable to him.”

“He stole her little gadget that she cherishes for that stupid event you staged today in which all of you pretend you don't speak English and therefore need to communicate through translation software. Do you think the northerners were fooled by it?”

“They're pretty stupid.”

“I mean he sent Joe to steal it. My God, Joe, there's someone who should be killed in battle.”

“How do you know this? Have you spoken to her? Where is she?”

“Her father gave Joe permission to have sex with her.”

“No he didn't.”

“Yes he did.”

“Were you there?”

“Were you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You were there when he instructed Joe to take the device from her?”

“Yes.”

“And did he say anything to Joe about her, I don't know how you people would put this, her status as a woman?”

“No.”

“I don't believe you. He wants them married. He wants the alliance with Joe's people down in Durham. I don't believe you.”

The sun had gone down. We lay on our backs on adjacent cushions, looking at each other's eyes. A breeze had come up, causing gooseflesh to cause my scratched skin to ache. Charlene knew I was lying and knew I knew she knew. This is the sort of event that would have enraged her twenty years ago and now did not. I don't know her well enough to know what my untruth made her feel. Well not an untruth as much as the most honest way I could stay in the conversation and not breach my loyalty oath, an oath which at times in talks with Char requires me to make remarks that bruise her wish that love transcend all else, including politics.

“So Powhatan could barely move today,” I said.

She did not respond.

“He was so depressed. We had to prop him up on a bed in the great hall and pretend that's how he always receives foreign dignitaries.”

“I don't want to hear about this elaborate deception of your opponent.”

“Your opponent too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I'll go start dinner.”

Charlene Kawabata Feingold

Deep in the den of the beach house I abide. Having battered and buggered my husband, during dinner I brooded. My brethren are a botch he's built and bought into. Am I better? Barely—badly. I suffer fools, not gladly, but know no one who isn't one, myself at the top of the list. What can I do? Abrade, make my life a goad of self and world. I try, am beaten down, get up, try again, am beaten down, try again. At a stage in life when bone growth has come to a halt, I stay down to rest awhile, love the rest, hate myself for loving it. All the while I know what stands between myself and doom is my own botched brothers. Our doom's our neighbors' coup, and they're as botched as we. The only proper remedy for all of this is doom of all, which my body's will will not allow; I muddle on.

Who is there to count on here? Sid for love but not for truth. Princess P for outrage but not for programmatic action. She too blithely inhabits the present for the latter, too much enjoys the peaks and troughs of exuberance and melancholy that are the purview of the privileged teen. But I love her the most. She lives a bit like me but without the self-imposed burden of trying to live as if for all. But when I saw her tonight after dinner I saw a different girl. The first menarche tells a secret to a certain kind of girl she can't ignore and can't but act upon. And so she's cursed her dad and run away; but not far away; not away at all, in fact; she runs along the margins of the world she's always known. We met in a hole in the woods beneath the stars. At the bottom of the windless air, we lay close on the ground, which smelled of dirt and blood. I like to lie near her strong young form that I've watched grow from that soft initial mass. Her face is dark and broad, its pocks that night an homage to the sky's stars.

“He hates me.”

“He loves you.”

“You weren't there. I told him that thing I shouldn't have. More than told. I made something happen by telling.”

She cried. I kissed her face and held her close. The ground's gore seeped through our clothes, through our skins, stained our hearts.

“I like your bony arms,” she said.

“Soon all bone, no arm.”

“Wow, you're a downer. What should I do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want advice about what to do.”

“Go to him, talk to him, apologize.”

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can.”

She grabbed and shook me. I think I knew what she meant.

“My advice is inadequate, of course,” I said. “I think you understand that what you really want to know I can't tell you, nor can anyone.”

She kicked my shins. I kicked hers back twice as hard.

“If kicking me is your advice,” she said, “don't bother, I already know that one.”

“Don't trust Stickboy.”

“What?”

“You wanted more advice? There's some.”

“You're out of your mind.”

“I'm in my mind. There's something wrong with him.”

“Who isn't there something wrong with?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“I can't be specific. Just be careful.”

“And how about you? Should I trust you?”

I had an answer to that question that was comforting and I had an answer that was true. Neither was correct.

“You give crap advice.”

“Don't stop loving him. Just don't believe him.”

“That's enough advice. No more advice, please. What happened to your face, anyway?”

A figure emerged from the dark. “Poc, Char,” he said, an old joke of his to which the girl was meant to respond by poking me, but instead lay there. He approached from the side of her I was not touching, sat, took her hand in his. “How are you tonight?”

Her answer was her baleful starlit face.

Stickboy said, “What happened to your face, Char?”

“Seagull. How's your head?”

“I brought you food,” he said to her, produced a parcel of rough cloth, and unfolded it on the balding grass. “Arrow arum patties with a scallion trout paste.”

“No thanks.”

“Drink water, at least.” He brought a skin of water to her lips.

She pushed it away. “Is this rancid?”

“No!”

“How come we gave those guys from New York bad water? Why can't our strategy be kindness and generosity?”

“Why you asking me?”

“I'm not.”

“Then who you asking?”

“The stars.” She took the water from her cousin and drank.

I stood. “I'll leave you two.”

“Watch out for attacking seagulls,” he said, from which I inferred he'd heard me speak of him.

“And you for falling trees, and stars,” I said, and walked away.

And crept back, and lay behind a bush to hear what he would say, and peered between its stems to see what he would do.

“I'm glad that bony witch is gone,” he said.

“I'm not. I have this feeling as if my body extends all the way out to the edge of what I can see, so anyone who walks into my field of vision, or out of it, bursts my skin. All arrivals and departures hurt. I wish everyone would stay put.”

“It's she who's betraying you, not I.”

“Shut up!”

“You need to hear this. She pretends to be your ally—”

“Really, don't say this, I can't take it.”

“She tells Sid what to tell your dad.”

“Are you not listening to me?”

“You need to hear this. Who do you think came up with the idea to steal your communications device?”

“You're awful.”

“And do you know why she did?”

“Don't tell me why.”

“Because—”

She punched him in the head. “I forbid you to tell me this, whatever your motive.”

“All right, I'll let it go.”

“You have to do more than that. Take it back.”

“What good will that do?”

“Take it back.”

“I take it back.”

“Say it wasn't true.”

“It wasn't true.”

“You're a liar.”

“But you—”

“You were right, you can't suck back farts, and rescission is a poor perfume for them. Farts plus perfume smell worse than farts alone. Like when you and Frank were conspiring about something in the woods that day I cursed my dad, and I asked you about it and you said it was nothing and now you can't take that back. Everything everyone says is false. Everything everyone does is false.”