Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  Smith poked me again. I ignored him.

  Sit Knee seemed to speak my query to the king, along whose foreshortened torso a ripple of dismay ascended.

  “The young woman at this time is indisposed,” Sit Knee typed.

  “We are an advanced society facing a shortage of key resources, chiefly food, water, and fuel. We would like to engage in a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas, information, and goods,” I typed.

  His reply: “It is our habit, around all exterior-to-control-towners of, which with us demand congress, to perform a series of examinations physical and moral.”

  “Where?”

  “In my office.”

  “Only if we can examine your people in the same way,” Smith told me to say.

  “I’m the communications officer so stop telling me what to type, and if you poke me one more time with whatever you’ve been poking me with I shut down the machine and walk out of here.”

  Smith sighed. “I think it would be judicious,” he said as if speaking to a child, “to require of them what they require of us, for the purposes of both information gathering and negotiations equity. What do you think, Rolfe?”

  “I think we should be ready to ask for something else if they say no.”

  “There’s a boy, Rolfe. I didn’t think you had it in you.” He lightly slapped and pinched my cheek. I felt and feel if anyone can save us it’s him. Whether the world will be a better place with us saved or dead the biological imperative prevents me from considering too deeply.

  Across the hall’s congealing air I floated Smith’s reply. I could barely breathe by now, and had brought up and swallowed several tablespoonsful of bile since we’d arrived.

  “No,” was Sit Knee’s reply.

  “Why’s he have to type that one?” Ratcliffe wanted to know. “Why doesn’t he just shake his head?”

  I typed, “Then we’ll hold one of your best archers until the examination is complete.”

  “All right,” he typed.

  Negotiation ensued regarding where and how to make the exchange. I explained to them what a handshake was, and suggested we meet between the tables to perform one. Sit Knee tactfully encouraged us to improve our cleanliness and smell. Smith, Ratcliffe, and I walked toward the center of the room, as did Sit Knee Find Gold and two other officials, or guards, or thugs, or friends. Each of us shook a hand of each of theirs. For reasons I cannot enumerate, I surprised Sit Knee with a hug. “Bring the young woman tomorrow,” I whispered. He pushed me away in disgust. His eyes watered. He retched and puked at my feet, which, since vomit needs no translator, caused me to puke. Ratcliffe, also sick, ran for the door but puked instead on Bucky’s feet. Bucky ran to the woods but only got as far as Newport, at whose side he puked. Newport leaned over the nearest bush and inadvertently puked on the head of John Martin, who was crouching behind it. Martin puked on himself, and the sight and stench of all the puke caused Happy Lohengrin, on the branch of his tree, to let hurl his, which also fell on Martin’s head. A brook of puke whose source was Gosnold’s mouth flowed along the runnel of his hollow log, and drowned the spider and the gnat, whose last acts on earth were to puke on God, who is everywhere, and on whom creatures great and small have therefore unremittingly puked since the fateful hour he’d created a man in his image and a woman from the man’s rib.

  Sidney Feingold

  An hour on the bike and here we are at our pied à terre with light pouring in through the windows and a relatively fresh breeze blowing in off the Atlantic. Charlene rides shotgun and fends off predators with a blowtorch and throwing knives. Her dexterity keeps the marriage exciting, a woman no longer in the full flush of youth who can hit a leaping coon in the eye, though she gives me endless grief about my poor bike-riding technique too, remarks that are of course at this point in our relationship mostly by way of kibitzing—repetitions, as farce, of the near-tragic fights of the early post-connubial period. How many times, in the early years, did I not know whether a fight with Charlene would end in murder or in the fiercely athletic lovemaking that was more like killing and being killed than any but those activities? Whether the scratches I often bore on my face and neck in that dozen-year period resulted from the fights or the sex I was in a state of ongoing uncertainty about.

  With someone like Charlene on the team, too, an aging couple gets a surprising variety of tasks accomplished with a blowtorch. Nor is your typical Algonquian schoolchild trained in the use of the blowtorch; few such instruments exist; use of them is thought profligate, what with the energy crisis. We have one and can fuel it and use it whenever we wish because we are the chief’s kid sister and his chief advisor, respectively. The blowtorch and smidgeon of fuel a week are perks, the bike’s a perk, the beach house is a perk, the inner place I can arrive at at the beach house where the violent, headache-producing thoughts stop coming quite so fast and hard is a hard-won perk, and of course the peace-of-mind-enabling fresh—in relative terms—air is a massive perk, in the sense that something of almost no mass can be said to be massive.

  I love the quiet of the beach house. I hear hardly a peep from the neighbors, Japanese folks, fishermen and hunters, throwbacks, really, to a gentler time. (A gentler time: a constant myth since man began to prey upon the earth; nostalgia is optimism in reverse chronology.) The ocean’s one big toxic vat of death, aquatic life has dwindled down to almost nil, yet season in and season out they pull from freshet, pond, and sea robust fauna girdled in tasty meat. They do the same with beasts that roam on solid ground or hover in the air, and with plants that spring up against the odds from the earth’s infected soil. You’ve got to give the Japanese their due: they know something we don’t. They have processes to draw the poison from meat and stem alike. From the quiet of their town you’d never guess their central role in the greater Chesapeake economy. They supply and purify our food, Powhatan distributes it and protects them and their way of life.

  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 m
y 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 inade
quate, 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.