Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  “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.

  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 o
f 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.