Jamestown (18 page)

Happy, who'd used sex to get Chris to stop the bus and let the men drink booze, wandered over and casually draped himself on my arm—he really is a genius of physical comfort—and said, “‘That sheath,' Smith, you're very cute. Really, Jack, this is exactly the kind of situation I'm good in. Don't tell me I wasn't brought on this trip for just this circumstance.”

Happy's always up for sex and certain of his skill-set in that field, as well he should be given his prodigious accomplishment with even someone as priggish and married as Chris, and despite my own lack of interest in sex, to tell the truth I've sometimes pictured slipping him one, a smooth and pleasant-featured boy with a calming, easy way. But what he seemed not to want to get was that if a woman's hard-won goodness flees her mind, or if she's one of those in whom it never put down roots, and if she then gets bent on murdering a man, he can please her more intensely than she's ever been pleased in her life—four or five or six times if his means to give her love are as great as hers to take it—but that will not change her mind about her task, whose joy may be most profound if it's done at the peak of her pleasure and his, at least that's what I know of humans' double wish to fuck and kill, which when combined make an alloy stronger than either of its simple component parts.

“No,” I said.

“Why?”

“I already said why. It's written all over their—you know—everything.”

Gosnold said, “Wouldn't be a bad way to go.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

“I have an idea,” he said and glanced, as did we all, at the front of his pants, a pyramid on its side.

“I forbid it.”

“And what are you gonna do if we—”

Before he could end the thought the tip of my gun was in his mouth and the hammer drawn back. “Okay, okay,” he said around the gun, and gagged and spat when I pulled it out. “Jesus. What the—” He shut up when I made as if to put it back in.

“No, guys, we have to respect Smith, he may very well know whereof he speaks,” Happy said, and winked at me. It's hard not to be sympathetic to Happy. Fucksack he may be but he's got a fundamental decency, no pun meant.

“Take one last long loving look at the lathering ladies, lads.” That was Johnny Rolfe, who you never know quite what plane he's moving toward you on but I think he kids more than you'd think from out of a sad face that looks as if it wouldn't ever want to kid, or “employs rhetorical devices” as he would say from out of a face that looks too tired to use any device but a toothpick to prop up each eyelid. Rolfe alone among our men said not a word to try to make me think we should cross the creek to soap up with the girls, though he too was sporting substantive wood, nor did his throat fail to make the same moist sound as the throats of his compatriots, as if those low and mournful sounds were iron shards, the glistening skin of those girls the strongest lodestone in the world. I like that Rolfe. It's good to have someone to like in a time and place in which nature whispers to your heart,
Like nothing, care for nothing, respect nothing believe in nothing, attach yourself to nothing but the wish to live
. But my liking of Rolfe I'm wary of since what good can it lead to? I'd slit even his throat if I felt I had to though I hope I don't ever feel I have to.

And so we rode our bike and car out of sight of the gals and carried on up the creek toward who knew what, while tears of erotic frustration sprang from the eyes of a few of our guys, fell through the unfamiliar air, and disappeared into the new ground into which we've chosen to press our feet and tires, and on which we brace each day for who knows what. We made camp a half a mile hence and broke our bread and boiled our corn in our water and saved the water after boiling it because we don't have a lot and can't waste a drop. Corn, Jesus. Its sweetness, its unique mouthfeel and palate ride, who knew? Corn is huge. Me, I'd sooner spring to wood for corn than girls.

The night was dark and cool, the woods made noise, and we wondered who or what watched us from beyond the demi-orb of light our fire made. We slept in shifts. Rolfe and I stayed up for the first three hours, Lohengrin and Mankiewicz for the next. So tired was I that sleep encased me like a tomb. And so the scream I heard, though it came from far away, was sharp enough to penetrate my deathlike sleep. Neither Mankiewicz nor Lohengrin was in camp. I heard two repeated screams, a greater and a lesser, but both so far beyond all other uses of the human voice I could not tell which belonged to whom. I grabbed one of our flashlights, told Rolfe and Gosnold—who'd also been awakened and were scared—to stay and watch the bike and car, and ran back down the creek bank toward the screams. I dreaded what was causing them and had to work against the urge not to run toward their awful sound. The thick, insistent dark ceded little to my weak light. I stumbled, fell, got up, ran; stumbled, fell, got up, ran in a daze of fear. Both screams grew louder as I ran, one more quickly than the other. I came around a bend and hit Lohengrin hard in the face with my face but didn't know it was his. We yelled, fell back, got up. I stuck my gun in his neck and he held his knife to mine. We saw each other's faces and the knife and gun came down.

I pointed my light at his face. Each of us was bleeding from the brow. His mouth was open wide and his lips fluttered irregularly. He wheezed and uttered sounds that approximated speech. His eyes were all fogged up. He pointed down the trail from where he'd come. “Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz.”

“What about him?”

“They got him.”

“Who?”

“The girls.”

More inarticulate sounds and waves of movement in his face; wheezing and weeping. Another howl reached us from what must still have been Mankiewicz. “Where are the girls? Same spot?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Don't know.”

“What happened?”

“Don't know.”

I slapped him and he fell down and wept. I picked him up by his shirt and made him look at me. “Lohengrin, you have to tell me what you know because I have to go get Mankiewicz and I have to know what I'm up against. Now!”

“I talked him into going back down the trail to the girls. We took one of the lights and a gun and when we got there we saw one of the girls sitting alone at the foot of the log bridge in nothing but a pair of panties. Look, we've been on the road a month and a half and you get tired of yanking it or having Mankiewicz do it with his mouth, so—”

“Tell me what happened!”

“We crossed the log bridge to where the girl was. Mankiewicz went first and she held her arms out to him. Oh my God, she looked amazing and I could smell her, and—” Mankiewicz howled again and I felt my balls inch up into my thorax. “Save him, Smith!”

“What else happened, fast, tell me!”

“Then something hit me behind the ear, then I ran back across the bridge and kept running.”

“Where's the gun?”

“I don't know.”

“Go back to camp and come back here with Rolfe and Gosnold and don't leave the bike and car behind.”

I ran for three or four minutes and heard no more howls. When I got to the log bridge the first light was up in the east, downstream. I smelled roasting meat. I shone my light across the creek and saw faint flames lick up behind a human form that must have been Mankiewicz. He was tied to two poles stuck in the ground, left hand and foot to one, right hand foot to one. I couldn't see well but I knew he was dead. His head hung down. He was nude, and in the dim green light of dawn his skin looked darker than it should but I didn't yet know why. The weak light made his belly look like a jagged black hole. I saw no one but him, and the fire behind him continued to cook whatever meat it touched. I hid behind a tree along the bank and called to him, I guess I was confused. I stepped from behind the tree and when I heard a gunshot I also heard its bullet hit the leaves above my head. The gun was a six-shooter and damn it if I hadn't asked Lohengrin if he'd brought extra bullets and if they'd been taken along with the gun. I came out from behind the tree to try to make them shoot at me again. Nothing. I leaned against the tree with my gun in my hand till Rolfe, Gosnold, and Lohengrin arrived.

With our guns out we eased ourselves across the creek. The sun was in the sky behind the trees now and warmed us up a bit. Mankiewicz's fingers were gone, the skin of his arms and legs had been scraped off, the dilapidated shell of bone and skin that had been his torso was now filled up with air and blood. Crusted black shriveled shapes the size of disused socks lay in the dying fire. These must have been his guts, lungs, and heart. Sharpened mussel shells to whose edges clung soft and wet red clumps of scraped-off skin lay on the ground around the tied-up corpse. We put the guts back in, cut it down, and hauled it back across the creek. No one shot at us.

In the car we had a mediocre shovel the Indians had given us to bury Matt Bernard. By trading off we took an hour to dig a hole for Mankiewicz twenty yards back from the creek in a sparse stand of trees. We put him in the hole as gently as we could and looked at him and looked away in turn. I told Rolfe to pray for him before we put the dirt back in and he said, “Why me?” and I said, “Because you're the communications officer,” and he said, “God has imposed a communications blackout in case you haven't noticed,” and I told him to say a damn prayer.

“Lord, keep us from your thoughts, and you from ours,” Rolfe said. He stared at me. I don't think Lohengrin or Gosnold heard a word he said.

Johnny Rolfe

We're fleeing down the creek at breakneck speed while Smith continues on alone—well not alone but with an Indian for a guide. Lohengrin and Mankiewicz are dead. Lohengrin was dead before he died. I'm still alive as far as I can tell. I admire Smith insofar as he seems not to long for love and sex as we do, and the absence of desire for another human's flesh, or soul, seems to redouble his acumen in the preservation of himself and even of his kind—his kind being, for now, the fools he took this trip with, i.e., us. But if the penalty for a yearning heart is to have it cut out of your body and fed to a fire, the penalty for the use Smith puts his heart to is to continue to put it to that use.

As I put the last shovelful of dirt on the mound above what had been Mankiewicz, four Indians walked out of the woods. Smith pressed the muzzle of his gun to the nose of one of them before he recognized him as the guy from Kickotown who gave us bread and corn. The four of them were good enough not to mime
I told you so
regarding Lohengrin's death. Instead they pressed their heads to the mound to show their sympathy or grief. Smith said by hugging their necks that he was glad they'd arrived when they did because he needed them. The one whose nose still bore the impression of Smith's welcome said something I freely translate from the language of gesture as “You have a funny way of showing gladness.” Smith apologized and offered them his gun to hold and, he said, in the future, have. In exchange for what, they asked. Someone to guide us through these woods for the rest of the trip up this creek, about a week, Smith said.

The crossed arms of distrust, the raised eyebrows of incredulity, the stamped feet of indignation—in short, a mini-lexicon of cross-cultural resistance and outrage—preceded the moment when, shoved toward us wearing a scowl of odium and fear, a young man from Kickotown whose name seemed to be All-Burnt became our guide. After uttering an angry goodbye to his neighbors, the first thing he did in our midst was to wave his hand in front of his nose and pinch his nostrils with his fingers, a sign we understood, inured though we were to our own smell. He brought us to the creek, jumped in, rubbed his head, face, arms, pits, chest, and crotch with force, and beckoned us to do the same. We demurred, having come from an island whose surrounding waters eat away the human skin.

None of us but Smith wanted to continue the side trip up the creek. Smith came to each of us in turn to hug the backs of our necks tightly with his pythonlike arm and whisper words whose characteristically Smithean ratio of collegiality and brute force was persuasive. The one of us he had most trouble talking into the rest of the trip was Lohengrin, whose neck, having turned to goo with the rest of him, kept slipping out of Smith's arm's embrace. Lohengrin, as I said, was in a sense already dead. He died when what he lived for—the pleasure of loving—had its guts scooped out while it watched and heard its own screams. And so the wire that connected Lohengrin to the future was cut, and he was stranded in the present.

All-Burnt, hygienic savage amid putrescent civilized men, led us back up the creek till darkness came. We ate, and he agreed to stay awake through the night while we slept. I woke up at dawn to find Smith and All-Burnt gone, no doubt to show the early bird gets the oil reserves, the point of this trip up the creek and of the larger trip down south, I think, is it? I forget. Gosnold was asleep, and Lohengrin lay apart from us, eyes catatonically open. I happened to be looking right at him when it began. It was as if the seeds of twenty arrows had been planted beneath the skin of his legs, belly, chest, arms, and neck, and now all sprang up to a height of a foot and a half in the time it takes a man to sneeze and be blessed. And so the life of his body ended not long after that of his mind. By the time I finished watching Lohengrin's death, Gosnold was on the bike and hauling ass down the creek. I leapt on behind him. Smith with his oil and Lohengrin with his new non-Lohengrin-ness would have to understand.

Albert

How did he do this to me and how did I let him? He did it with elastic wristbands and a will to live that obliterates consideration. And I let him insofar as my chief skill in life has been to let. At my urging, my friends and I came back to the sad little band of Northerners after the scoundrels of Chickahominy lured one of them across the creek with sex and disemboweled him. I'm known for placing empathy over caution in the affective chain of command; if after I die I'm thought of for having said anything worthwhile, it'll be “How are you?” I accommodate, therefore I am but briefly.