Jamestown (6 page)

“You seem angry.”

“Really? What gave that away?”

“Do you really think that's an accurate description of me?”

“No.”

“Then why'd you say it?”

“Because it's an accurate description of you.”

“You're mad about last night.”

“Duh.”

“I do not think your description of me is accurate. I think it's an adolescent fantasy of how adults have ruined the world.”

“Adults
have
ruined the world.”

“What would you do differently?”

“I wouldn't jog up the street every month or so to kill, rape, kidnap, and pillage.”

“That's not all we do.”

“It's the worst thing you do and you do it often.”

“And what would you recommend, sit around and wait to be killed, raped, kidnapped, and pillaged?”

“Are those the only two choices?”

“You'd be surprised.”

“How about talking? How about economic and cultural exchange?”

“You know we do those things too.”

“Badly.”

I saw a nasty little movement in his face as if a bat had bit his cheek.

“Oh,” I said. “I get it.
You're
the one who's angry at
me
. Why, because I stopped the guys from spitting on Stickboy?”

“Why did you?”

“He's my friend.”

“And loyalty to your friend supercedes loyalty to your dad?”

“That depends. In cases where my dad so obviously has his head up his ass and my friend hasn't done anything wrong? Yes.”

“Your friend disrupted and mocked a state occasion.”

“The state shouldn't have such occasions.”

“The state needs them to survive.”

“Then the state shouldn't survive.”

“Fine, the state shouldn't survive. What about your friends and family? Should they survive?”

“Is me making sure Stickboy doesn't get coated with too much of the saliva of my friends and family going to kill them?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you not see how fucked that is? I was just protecting my friend.”

“Social relations can be enormously complicated and sometimes require difficult sacrifices from individuals.”

And then the strangers came to town. One minute I'm lounging carefree in the corn shack shooting the breeze with Sid on this and that topic, the next these guys roll down from the north in a massive golden armored freak machine, which five of them climbed down out of one by one looking and smelling, sorry to say, somewhat less nice than dog poop. The five of them stood blinking in the sun. Who else was in there? We didn't know. Here was us, young girl and old man alone in a field, confronted by a rolling petroleum-run thing the size of a blue whale, all the fighting men in town gone for days. We leaned back in the shadowed recess of our stilted shack, slid our hands back along its rough, uneven floor, and let them rest lightly on the bows and arrows all such shacks contain. We did not know what they meant to do, but we knew that in a half a minute we could put an arrow in an eye of each of the five, tumble out the shack's back hatch, and be lost among the tall stalks.

We waited. They stood blinded by the nothing that hung between the sun and their eyes. A gentle late-spring breeze carried their grim scent to our nostrils. Nearest us stood a rounded, petulant man with silken, purplish face; next to him, a little man who seemed mean, with tall forehead and part of one ear chewed by a coon, I'd guess; a mild-looking glasses-wearing man in a suit of black but for a square of white at his throat; a short fireplug with a thick red beard with bits of dried blood caked in it; the biggest guy, in underwear, muscled, dumb, the requisite big dumb guy in the greeting party, not the guy you use your first arrow on.

More waiting. Silk-faced man raised a hand, palm toward us, and said, in (you're not going to believe this!) English, “Hello. Do you speak English?”

“NO!” I said.

Sid looked at me wide-eyed and whispered, “Let's not assume the foreigners will understand your bilingual sarcasm.”

“Judging by the crudeness of them, I'd say they'll understand little.”

The one with the silken face had a quick talk with his four boys and they all raised both hands to head height, palms toward us. Their fingers went up and down, like flowers quickly opening and closing. I think that meant they wanted us to think they bore no arms.

I stuck my scuffed bare foot into the sunlight beyond the shack door and, sole toward the strangers, mocked the movement of their fingers with my toes.

“Uh, do you speak
any
English?” Silky said.

I giggled. They heard me and seemed to relax. Sid and I exchanged
what the hell
glances, and slid down out of the corn shack to greet them. We've got a number of standard ceremonial greetings of strangers and the one we decided on was the Friendly Greeting with Understated Caveat. It's a synchronized step-to-the-right, step-to-the-right, slide, twirl, step-to-the-left, step-to-the-left, slide, twirl, arc-with-the-left-toe, arc-with-the-right-toe, I-fake-a-roundhouse-kick-to-Sid's-chin-and-he-blocks-it, vice versa, a few more like moves, and then we hugged each one of them—despite their stench—a warm embrace, quick weapons check, and initial assessment of each one's potential in hand-to-hand combat.

They looked confused. The short, stocky one, who not only had blood in his beard but looked as if he'd been punched in the face, whispered something to the silk-faced one, climbed into the vehicle, and climbed back down a minute later with a new, tall and willowy guy, dark-haired, the first one of them to be remotely handsome, though he had sallow skin, was bone-thin, and smelled like poop. And something was amiss about his face, as if fear and sadness had long done the work meant for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. I was surprised, then, at what he did next, watching Sid and me all the while. He put his arms over his head and swayed slowly from ankles to fingers like an oak tree in a strong wind. He fluttered from place to place on tiptoe. He became small and dense and round and seemed to float back along the hard-packed dirt. He balanced on his head and spun around, slowed himself by extending his arms, sped up by retracting them. He stood again, held his arms out, and went into a kind of my-hands-are-oak-leaves-shimmering-in-the-sunlight-near-a-fast-running-brook tableau. Then he hugged Sid Feingold. Then he hugged me, and when he did, something in me broke. It hurt like hell. I made a noise, a gasp or shout. I tried to comprehend what he'd done, where I was hurt, what part of my body he'd injured and how, but I couldn't localize the pain. And it wasn't pain. Sid had him by the throat. The guy raised up his arms, drew his elbows together, and jammed them down on Sid's wrists to make him break the grip on his neck. The guy kicked Sid in the chest. Sid fell down and came up with a knife in his hand. I rushed between them and told them to stop. The guy gave me a queer look, maybe something strange had happened in him too. A flicker passed across his face, the shadow of a seagull's wing, an escapee, perhaps, from the place in him where all the moods were jailed.

“How many more guys you got in your, um, thing?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Tell 'em to come out.”

Some signals passed among them and a grim bunch of guys descended from the thing.

Silken man said to me, “Do all of you here speak English?”

“No, just me,” I said. “Come to town with us and we'll give y'all some stew and definitely a bath, you stink.”

While Sid walked them to town the long way, I ran ahead and told my girlfriends of their arrival. We prepared for them.

Hospitality, as you may know, is an intoxication of the senses, so by the time the bedraggled foreigners arrived, bright damask cloths had been laid atop the folding tables in our town's central square; mosquito-repelling torches, soaked in mint and busthead paste, had been driven into the ground and lit; two man-sized vats of deer stew cooked on open fires; my nubile homegirls were oiled, scented, painted, polished, pomaded, and loosely wrapped in few thin skins. What man after a long, hard journey on a bus could take all this in and not feel his body's loveblood drawn down to his dick?

The men sat at tables and were served a big bowl of stew apiece, which they devoured, and were given a second, which they devoured. Most ate too fast, or weren't used to stew, and puked. The less couth among them puked in place, which signaled the end of the meal.

As is custom in my country, thank god, ovarian retardation kept me from joining in the next hospitable activity, the bathing of the strangers. So I watched from afar as the stinking men were disrobed by my galpals while their penises stood up straight in the cool moonlit air. Some girls carried the men's nasty clothes to the laundry house. Others led the men to large, open-air bathtubs. Clothes and men were shoved in vats of hot soapy water and held beneath its surface till the first bits of dirt, dried sweat, dried blood, and congealed grease broke apart and floated from their hosts. The girls scrubbed the men, rinsed them, helped them from their baths, dried them, oiled their naked skins, and slowly stroked their dicks until they came. Three men demurred from this capstone: the fat, old, one-armed, bearded one; the short red-haired one who'd been punched in the face; and, glad to say—not sure why—the one who broke that thing in me.

The foreign men, dazed, glazed, and amazed, were helped into fresh, shapeless hempen gowns and led to n-shaped houses, where we meant to let them sleep.

“No,” the silk-faced man said. “You've been kind to us but we have to sleep somewhere fortified, company rules. We'll return in the morning for our clothes and we'll bring you gifts.”

And so the men tiptoed off into the woods, crying out in pain when their bare and tender feet touched something sharp. We bid them adieu with jeers: “Smelly out-of-towners!” “Little-penis men who won't sleep over!” “Ejaculate and split, thanks a lot!” We didn't really mean it, just having fun as is our wont with men who spurned our offer of a bed.

Well, one more thing to tell you. Can you guess? I'm really sleepy now, I think I'm anemic. Now can you guess? So I came out here to my lonely little corn shack to contemplate and tell you all these things about my day, and I felt something itchy-tacky, you know,
down there
, in the tippy-top-of-the-thigh-type place, and I casually reached down to give a scratch, I withdrew my hand, found it wet and sticky, I looked at it, and the darkness of the corn-shack notwithstanding, there's no doubt but that's blood on my hand, so either I'm hemorrhaging to death through my pussy or—yes, beloved English speaker—I'm having my period! Which is also the word y'all use when you want to show you've come to the end of what you have to say, for now.

Johnny Rolfe

To nothing that is not there and the nothing that is:

The road dead-ended in a field. That was it. We'd arrived. The only thing worse than the journey is the destination. I looked out the window at the tall bulbous stalks we were surrounded by. Beyond them lay dark woods like the ones in my dream of the dog. The predatory sun devoured the field and had begun to eat my eyes, so I turned my head, bent down in my seat, pressed my knees into my eyes, and tried to let myself be soothed by the black behind my lids. I vaguely sensed the bus door open and the men who represented us step down to what awaited them. Maybe they'd be killed. I often think that death would bring relief but, fearing change, haven't sought it out.

I sat in the brown, foul air of our armored container while time passed on its hands and knees. Someone punched my shoulder. It was Smith. “We need you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Don't be a baby. You're the communications officer and we've got a communications situation. There's two people out there, a girl and an old guy, and they just did some kind of ceremonial greeting, and we haven't got squat, and this could be a make-or-break moment for the mission, you know, a greeting test, so get out there.”

“I'm shy.”

He grabbed me by the hair and lifted me. That was interesting. I got in a couple hard shots to his solar plexus before he grabbed my fist with his stubby fingers and squeezed it so hard tears came to my eyes.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Give them our ceremonial greeting.”

“We don't have one.”

“Make one up.”

“Do they have weapons?”

“Don't know.”

“This is idiotic.”

“No one made you come on this trip. Now you're here. Greet them.”

He still had ahold of my hair. I jammed my left heel down on his right foot as hard as I could. He released my hair and drove his fist into my throat. He was kind enough to wait till I could take a breath. We limped off the bus arm in arm.

The sunlight was killing. I felt faint. I breathed poorly and my throat hurt and my arm was sore and my hand was sore and my hair was sore. The sweet, hot smell of rotting vegetation made me want to puke. A girl and old man stood by a wooden shack on stilts. You don't see much wood or many trees where I come from. The man was lean and had a pointed face with semi-hooded eyes, like a buzzard's. The girl was spectacularly ugly. She was short and thin and of an unnaturally reddish hue. Her face was wide as it was long, with big, thick cheekbones and pockmarked skin. Her black hair came halfway down her arms in two dense, gobbed-up plaits that looked like a pair of large, dead rodents hung in the sun by their tails from the top of her head to cure their meat. The need to stare at her I felt as a force my eyes succumbed to while the rest of me looked on in dread. She laughed at me. Her teeth were yellow stubs. She had a smile that showed more gum than teeth, and the only part of her face less nice to look at than her teeth were her gums, which were soft, pulpy, red, and seemed designed to show us we were making a mistake. I closed my eyes and felt something hard and sharp—Jack Smith's finger—jab me in the ass. “Do a nice greeting dance,” he said.