Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  Darkness has arrived. I’m reclining on my bunk on the starboard side of the bus, caressing the small, soft qwerty keys of my wireless device. Diagonally across from me, lit by candlelight, the forlorn-faced, bloody-foreheaded Martin runs the front of his wounded fingers lightly over the set of brass balls even an adversary must admire.

  “What are you staring at?” he says.

  “I’m not your enemy, Martin.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What?”

  “What do you want out of this trip?”

  “Same as everyone: live long, get rich.”

  “At any cost?”

  He doesn’t answer me, the question is evidently too stupid.

  “What about ensuring the survival of the community?” I say.

  “That’s a little grandiose for me, let me think about it.”

  I’ve observed that if I beat a man in a fight in the afternoon, he will give my ideas serious consideration in the evening.

  “Well,” he says, “I haven’t killed you yet and you haven’t killed me yet.”

  “I think a civil society means you can go to sleep not having to be actively thankful no one’s killed you since you woke up.”

  “What the hell are you typing?”

  “Our conversation.”

  “Type this: fuck you.”

  “Thanks, I just did. Do you love anyone, Martin?”

  “What?”

  “Is there anyone you love?”

  “You cripple me and ask me that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. I love a few people. But I already know them. I don’t see the point of loving anyone new. All new people are just variables, stand-ins for each other, it doesn’t matter who they are or how you treat them.”

  “That sounds like a recipe for unhappiness.”

  “Like you’re so happy, Rolfe. Hope you don’t get murdered in your sleep. Good night. Up yours.”

  “Where do you think Smith is?”

  “Also up yours, I would guess.”

  Pocahontas

  Dear person who by reading these words will know me deeply and truly, Hi, I’ve had another interesting day! I gathered wild rice and acorns in the morning. Just roasted and ate a turtle for dinner, it was yummy! The sky is now the color of a day-old bruise. I have a tumult in my ovaries. That’s what our family doctor, Sidney Feingold, says: “You have a tumult in your ovaries.” He’s a funny man, our family doctor, not funny-laughing but funny-sighing, he’s like a figure in a bad painting who wishes it was in a better painting. I’d like to tell you all about our family doctor but there are other things I need to tell you first, about my ovaries, and again I face the problem of the delicious slowness of English. In the supersonic tongue of my mentally agile people you’d already know about our family doctor and about my ovaries, and Joe, and Stickboy, and my desires, and the sexual mores of this town. If I were writing to you in my people’s language that moves faster than time itself, you’d know about things that haven’t happened yet.

  “You have a tumult in your ovaries” is another way of saying I’m nineteen and don’t have my period yet.

  Blood oh blood oh careless blood

  Come flooding down me if you would

  That’s a rough translation of a song girls in my town sing while skipping rope. You can’t get married till you bleed in these parts. Not that I’m in a rush to get married but I am in a rush to fuck. I’m nineteen and god I’d really like to fuck someone. I could fuck someone—premenstrual, unmarried—if I didn’t mind being shunned, but, being the chief’s only and favorite girl, I’d mind being shunned more than I mind not fucking, at least for now. If I were shunned I’d have to leave this town that’s surrounded for hundreds of miles on all sides by forests, rapists, murderers, thieves, brokedown highways and quondam strip malls, mutant beasts whose skin is made of stuff that if it touches you, your own skin will turn black, crumble, and fall off your body.

  And not only would it suck to be shunned, but the chief’s daughter’s recalcitrant ovaries are delaying a potentially important political alliance. You see I’ve got this other, dad-approved suitor named Joe. Stickboy is weak, Joe is strong. Oh Stickboy. When I think of Stickboy a sweet sadness fills my belly and spreads out like a light invisible gas inside me. I’d gladly fuck Stickboy. We’d be like two clouds who slowly collide. We’d burst and rain on the earth.

  To appease Dad, I take walks with Joe a few times a week. Joe is heroic and, like I said, strong, if you like that kind of thing, ugh! “How are you?” he usually starts our walks off with. There are a hundred ways to say “How are you?” in the language of my empathetic people, and the way he chooses literally means “How is your digestive tract?” but everyone knows it really means “What is the status of your reproductive system since last I saw you?”

  “From the nutritious lining of my womb / To the wallpaper of your baby’s room,” I chant at him, and slap his face hard and run a circle around him. At the start of my walks with Joe, I treat him as I treat the other pompous men I know: with insouciance and aggression. I say things I hope will upset him, I don’t listen, I wander off, I interrupt him, I slap him and spit at him and knee him in the groin. But after ten minutes of walking with Joe I give up; most of what I know about the world and what’s good about myself retreats deep into the interior, far from the surface of my body, so far in I can’t see it or feel it; I don’t hear from it for hours, sometimes days, and I begin to doubt it’s still alive. Sure, I’m the irreverent scamp, “Pocahontas,” and I’m the girl with the secret, killer name, but I and all the girls of my town were also given an inaudible name at birth, a synonym for girl, really, “she who’ll be shunned if she fucks before she bleeds.” So there you are: my inaudible name, my corresponding silence.

  I have a recurring dream in which everyone I know is gathered in the town square, all their heads craned back. They are looking at two small, delicate ruby earrings, my ovaries, dangling from the top of a thirty-foot-tall white pole. Down the side of the pole the word EXPECTANCY is written in enormous letters with menstrual blood. Well, really, I’ve never had that dream. But I feel like I could.

  I took a walk with Joe today, in case you couldn’t tell by the gloom that pervades this letter to you! He didn’t even walk me through the woods, he walked me around town, in plain view of all the women out in front of their n-shaped houses making stews or baskets or sewing winter clothes or shaving the right side of their men’s heads.

  On our walk, Joe kept putting me on his left side, and I kept moving to his right. The women in the lives of the men of my town shave the right side of their men’s heads so their hair won’t interfere with the shooting of their arrows. The hair on the left side of the men’s heads grows long. Some men have their women braid trophies into their hair. Joe gets his mom to. His latest is the desiccated hand of a guy from a town a few miles up the road, a guy I dated when I was thirteen which makes it extra creepy and sad. So I tried to walk on Joe’s right side, which affords a perfect view of Joe’s soft, tawny ear wax, black scalp stubble, and pale, flaky scalp skin—gross but not as gross as that guy’s hand—but Joe, strong, agile, quick, maneuvered me repeatedly to his left.

  “The look on his face when I killed him was a shame,” he said, apropos of the hand in his hair. “I’ve trained for twenty years so that if I should be in a position where I’m about to be killed by my enemy—and I’m not saying that would happen I’m just saying if—I wouldn’t cry and beg. I’ve had nightmares since that raid though. Damn it, why do you keep moving to that side? Get over here—ow! Cut that out. My point being by the time a man turns twenty, he should be in control of his own face.”

  “Which do you prefer,” I asked, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes? The blackbird singing, or just after?”

  “What? You’re changing the subject.”

  “Which do you prefer, steel or intimation?”

  “Well I�
��ve been having these nightmares about killing that guy, only in the nightmares I look down at his face, which is full of tears and snot and fear, and my stomach goes all queasy cuz it’s not his face, it’s mine! What do you think that means? Never mind, I don’t want to know. I’m going hunting with your dad tomorrow, so that’s cool. Did I tell you what he said to me after I killed that guy?”

  And that’s when I disappeared into myself, stopped trying to change the subject or kick him or maneuver to his right side so I wouldn’t have the dead hand in my face. I continued to be unhappy but did nothing about it. To know and not to act is not to know.

  Want to know something awful? I’d like to fuck Joe. His body’s tall and hard like a big erect penis. I want to throw it down on the ground and climb on it and go at it. That’s disgusting, I know, the worst, so wrong, and yet the part of me that wants to fuck is not a student of ethics. I’d fuck Stickboy, I’d fuck Joe, I’d fuck a dozen other guys in town. My dad’d be pretty bummed if he found this diary. That’s why I write it out in this corn shack in the middle of this cornfield under the twilit sky that looks like a day-old bruise on the thigh of a woman whose body is five hundred times bigger than the world. I write it all down on this wireless device, keep no copy, send it off to the ether, from whence it goes directly to your mind.

  Now the sky is black. I like to be out in a cornfield under the black sky, invisible to everyone I know. This place and time let me come back to myself after fleeing on a walk with Joe. Here I am! There I are! I hug myself and give myself a long, soft, gentle kiss, missed you, love you.

  Johnny Rolfe

  Dear air:

  That night I dreamed a dog lay in the road at the edge of a wood. The road was like the real road this bus is rolling down: hot, bright, cracked, dry, dead. The wood the dog lay at the edge of was soft, green, dark, and smelled good. The dog lay half in each world, its head and upper self in ours, the rest in the dark wood. We walked toward it, a few of my bus brothers and I. It looked at us. Its eyes were clear, its tail wagged, a healthy, happy-looking dog, but something was wrong. Someone’s ill health or bad luck lurked in the dream. A few men walked toward us from beyond the dog’s tail, inside the shadows of the wood. They were forms more than men. Their intentions weren’t clear, though they didn’t seem to mean us harm. Then came a light, high whine, from the dog, I guessed, but not from his mouth, which was closed. Then came my first glimpse of the faces of the men from the other world. They seemed eager, though eager for what I did not know. The rhythmic insistence of the light, high whine that came from inside the dog seemed to amplify the feeling that produced the look of what I thought was eagerness on the faces of these men who, I realized, in the dream, came from where our bus was taking us. We gathered round the dog, and then I saw it, the source of the light, high whine: the dog’s slick and bright pink penis, standing up from its lower thorax, hard and gorged with blood. As if sated, or drunk, the dog smiled, and from the slender hole at the tip of its cock came the gooey wet pups, about an inch apiece, one after another, ten seconds apart, eyes closed, two, three, four, five, six pups, seven pups, eight, ten, thirteen, a small, blind army of baby dogs. All the faces looked bewildered now. The weapons all came out at once, as if we all had guessed we’d have to kill someone to exit from this dream alive. I came up into waking life in time to see red-haired Jack Smith, a gash on his head, drag his whiny-wheeled red wagon down the wide aisle of the bus.

  The wagon was loaded with bottles of booze. Smith stopped in front of my bunk. The new, wide, red, vertical scooped-out area of his forehead was level with my eyes. It’s poignant to see a fresh wound in the head of someone you’re beginning to care about. My heart went out to the wound and the stoic face of Smith below it, over which blood slid not alarmingly but steadily, and mixed with the coarse red hair of his beard.

  “The trade was not made under the best conditions and I didn’t get exactly what I wanted,” he whispered. The sun was not yet up and most of the men were still asleep, though I saw our driver, Chris Newport, ease his wide girth out of his bunk at the front of the bus. “I’d have preferred food, water, tools, knives, guns, and, you know, fuel. No one wants what we have. Whose idea was it to bring jewels and gadgets?”

  “No one’s idea.”

  “You get laughed at when you bring bracelets and walkie-talkies to a trading post around here, and then you get punched, and then you get stabbed—at least you get one guy stabbing your forehead and you don’t want to hurt him too bad but you do have to make an example of him by hitting him hard with the sharp edge of the walkie-talkie you happen to have in your hand because you’d just been trying to show his friends how sleek and effective it was so they would give you food or fuel or guns, but they weren’t buying it, so you end up hitting this guy with it till he’s out and then you hit him some more so at least his friends who don’t want your walkie-talkie or your pearl drop earrings and are annoyed enough to kill you for showing up with nothing better will sit back for a minute and think about what to do next so you have time to lift the gun off the guy you’ve smashed and point it at his friends and kind of ease a wagonful of their booze out the door of their sad little concrete kiosk and on down the road. Like I said I’d’ve rather had water but I can see where booze could be a language I could talk to these guys in, but a language I don’t want to say anything to them in yet is this.” From his belt he pulled out the pistol he’d taken from the gentleman and threw it on my stomach. “You hold onto that and just remember once you start talking with it you may be committing yourself to parlez-vous twenty-four-seven, vingt-quatre-sept if you get my meaning.”

  I was about to object to the gun on the top of my shirt when the first few bullets hit the back window of the bus. As our friends woke up, Chris Newport ignited the engine and the bus began to groan down the road, or what was left of the road. Bullets continued to hit the bullet-resistant back window while angry men rode the door and tried to break it down. Soon they fell off, and a plume of exhaust enveloped our pursuers, and the bus eluded them while they continued to express their frustration by shouting and firing their guns.

  Moments later two big men—an army twice the size of Smith’s—appeared on either side of him and grabbed his arms. I don’t know their names. They’re among the fifty percent of men on this trip in the Early Release Convict Program, two tall muscle men in white underwear with no meanness in their faces, just tired and dutiful stares, big men doing a skilled job—put the cuffs on Smith’s thick wrists, the ordinary business of physical force and restraint.

  Smith did not resist. A man named John Ratcliffe, who, like John Martin, belonged to the executive class, stood up from his bunk fully clothed and told Newport to stop the bus. “I’m placing Jack Smith under arrest for bringing unapproved contraband on board.”

  “I’m not stopping this shit with a bunch of guys back there ready to kill us. I put thirty miles between us and the guys with the guns before I even think of stopping.”

  “Fuck you,” Ratcliffe said, the universal epithet of impotence. His plum-colored blood ascended his peach face from neck to hairline. Ratcliffe is a soft and petulant man. He’s not old, but the skin of his face has already begun to loosen from the bone in preparation for the kind of oldness it is his ambition to acquire—the one that comes with a cook, a valet, a bodyguard, and well-defended water, food, and fuel supplies. His mother being the concubine of the Manhattan Company’s CEO, he’s a contender for succession, despite his lack of skill at anything.

  I watched Ratcliffe scan the bus to see whom he might call on to outrank Newport. His eyes brushed past John Martin, whose knee I’d undone. I saw Martin give Ratcliffe a not-now headshake that bespoke an alliance I hadn’t known about, just as I hadn’t known Ratcliffe controlled Jack Smith’s underwear-wearing jailers. I also didn’t see anyone object to Smith’s arrest, a passivity that may not have been engineered by anyone, though it can also happen on this bus—and elsewhere—that man wakes man in the night and offers
him something he wants or can’t say no to: food, drugs, strength, will, loyalty, friendship, threat, sex. The political landscape of the bus is as volatile as the physical landscape of the town we saw swallow its tallest building a few days ago, an event I described in a previous entry in this venue, which you may not remember since you don’t exist.

  It has been our custom in the morning to throw open the windows and deboard, to let oxygen and smoky earth-scent replace the air of this close space that is dense with the smell of men who eat bad food and don’t bathe. But now, gunmen behind us, we rode on in the thick stink through the gloom of a damp day. Smith stood stock still in the aisle, as did the men who’d cuffed him and continued to pin his arms. Most men stayed in their bunks and dreamed or did nothing. A few sat in chairs and ate gruel. No one talked.

  Newport stopped after noon. We got off and stood beneath a semi-tent of trees that didn’t quite keep the stinging rain off our necks while the two big boys brought Smith to the cargo trailer attached to the back of the bus by a steel armature. It surprised me that Smith didn’t fight but I assume his quiescence was strategic. He and I exchanged a wordless set of looks in which I asked if I should try to free him with the gun—the only firearm on the bus, as far as I know—and he said no, thank Christ, so he was set down on a hard chair inside the trailer, his legs shackled to its, his hands still cuffed behind him. His big wagon of bottles of booze was also placed in the crammed trailer, also shackled. We reboarded and rode on. Over the course of this day I’ve made my first ally and he’s been imprisoned.

  Pocahontas

  Dear special person out there getting to know me:

  Nothing much “happened” today, so I guess here for your delectation is a typical day in the life of Pocahontas aka Not Telling Or You’ll Die.