Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  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 finish
ed 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.

  I’d meant for us to stay just long enough to press our heads against the mound of dirt they’d put their murdered man in, to let them know their grief was not lost on us. I hadn’t thought Jacksmith, who has since caused what soon will be my death, would ask for one of us to “guide” him. But he did, and I was the obvious choice, and so he and I rode up the creek on these men’s car and bike, whose ill-suitedness for this land boded well for mirth if not for life, and whose loud sounds cracked each cubic foot of air they entered into.

  All day, in fealty to the people of my town, I kept my English tongue inside my head. That we don’t speak English is a ruse my people think both necessary and hilarious, a hundred years’ supply of laughs squeezed from one small, hard joke. At dusk, when we stopped and ate, the northerners looked so grim and tired I told them with signs I’d stay awake all night while they slept. Hours later, when the sky turned from black to deep green, Smith awoke, called me “All-Burnt,” and said with signs he wanted me to push on with him into the woods. I said we couldn’t go till we could see. He took out a small electric torch and yanked me by the arm. Though I didn’t want to, I obliged, and as I lie across the shoulders of two men I don’t know, who are bringing me to a town near mine but not mine, I reflect again that this has been my life’s main work: to oblige another’s wish against my own.

  A mile into the woods, Jacksmith and I were besieged by men from Werowocomoco, Powhatan’s town. I heard their feet and breath moments before I felt their arrows move the air beside my head. None hit their mark, not because of our footspeed, or the dark sky, or thickly planted trees, but because the men meant to take him alive, which makes my death another grim if somewhat modest joke. Jacksmith, not knowing he was surrounded and already caught, slipped the two tight, dirt-browned elastic sweatbands he wore on his right wrist around my right wrist without first detaching them from his, and, as I tried to get loose, he tried to place me between himself and the arrows, which, as I said, were meant at most to graze. The arrows’ shooters did not anticipate a target that was doubled, and flailed, and so an arrow pierced me in the neck, another in the chest, another in the gut, another in the groin, another in the knee.

  Jacksmith saw what he thought was a hole in the wide ring of men and, holding me, ducked through it. That was when we fell into the swamp. The swamp embraced us and wouldn’t let go. Jacksmith squirmed and I squirmed beneath him. My lungs, against their best hope, sucked swamp water even as the pressure of his body on mine drove the arrows deeper into me. By the time more air reached my lungs I was somewhat more dead than I’d ever been, and in the strong hands of Powhatan’s men. As they bound Jacksmith’s arms and legs with rope, they laid me on dry land, pulled their arrows out of me, replaced them with salves, but I could see by their eyes and feel by the mood of my wounds that I wouldn’t recover.

  These—the wounds—are the next-to-last gifts I’ll ever be given, the salves the last. The salves, as gifts, are of use in the economy not of healing but of feeling, the wounds of use in the economy of dying. The front of me, where the arrows went in, now faces the branches of the trees and the sky, to which I say goodbye by touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight, through my new wounds and through the old intrinsic ones—mouth, nose, eyes, ears, skin. Two men I don’t know are carrying me face-up toward their town and my doom, and if I want to see one final time a few last landmarks I know before I leave for a place, if place it is, whose landmarks I suspect I won’t know—unless the punishment for life is more life—I’ll have to arch my neck and see them upside down, which makes my neck’s new hole stretch, which hurts, and so I see these last familiar sights through an added veil of pain. But because part of what makes pain hurt is knowing it will continue over time, mine doesn’t hurt that bad.

  We now pass the spot where I killed my first deer, whom, exemplifying how poor a warrior I have always been, I sentimentally named Thomas before he died, and so his name remained as I carried him back to my town—as these men now carry me back to theirs, or maybe mine, since all this looks so known to me—and Thomas he was when I skinned him, when my mother and sister chopped his flesh and stewed it with spices and corn, when we ate him, when we shat him into a hole in the ground, and Thomas he continued to be in the flies that ate the shit and are long dead now too and part of the earth and the air, and Thomas he is to this very hour in me, who am dying, and causing him to die again, but he’ll live on in, for one, the sassafras tree that thrives in the spot on the forest floor that once was the hole we shat my first dead deer out of ourselves into.

  And there’s where I had my first kiss—I wish I had it still, I wished it had been on the mouth of the girl whose neck it was on, I wished her neck had liked the kiss as much as my lips did, I wished her cunt had liked it as much as my dick did. Whose kiss was it anyway? Whose lips, dick, deer, and shit? Not mine, I’ve rented or borrowed them, am moments from giving them back.

  And there on the bark of that tree is the stain of the tears I shed when the girl that I kissed kissed someone else, and beside it the stain of the blood that I shed from the cut I made on my arm to try to get the pain of not being kissed back outside my body, where it had threatened a coup against my brain’s rule of law.

  And there is the place I was killed by my Uncle Al, not really killed but we called it killed—killed as a boy to become a man, one of the ancient folkways we’ve tried to adopt from people whose bloodline was cut long before we were born, people whose bloodline we do not continue but whose folkways we try to, though we know them only in fragments and some of them make no sense in the present, as for example the symbolic death of a boy who is then reborn as a man. If you’re going to kill a boy don’t screw around with symbolic death, do it for real, all but a few of us boys should have died for good back then, save a town a lot of grief, so many adult males competing for extremely limited resources on a blighted land, which leads to perpetual war or constant and vigilant work to avoid it, who wants that? Death and rebirth minus the rebirth: now there’s a coming-of-age rite that would wake up a teenager, but this may just be one of the many holes in me talking, though whether mouth, ass, or arrow wound I cannot say. Is there even a me any more, or am I a mere mind being jostled at shoulder height past key sylvan landmarks, defunct farms, disused and crumbling interstate highways and county roads, fallen-down condos and malls, dead pathways and venues I resemble more and more? Death and rebirth? Death and death to all boys who won’t take a vow not to kill.

  And there’s the spot where I killed my first man—look, a drop of his blood on that leaf over there—one of the scoundrels of Chickahominy, they’ve got metal knives but they favor the sharpened mussel shell and the murder styles of many years past, a touch of nostalgia for good honest old-fashioned violence and death. I was out in the woods looking for berries or my own happiness, a boy with a care and a good eye for wild fruit, when this Chickahominy asshole jumped me with mussel-shell knuckles and tried to gouge out my eyes. He knocked me down and leapt on me screaming. While he was midleap I unsheathed my bodkin and held it straight up. He saw it coming toward him as he fell but by then he couldn’t unstick his fate from the planet’s gravity field.

  And there is the spot where I rushed to my mother’s arms with the bloo
d of the dead Chickahominy boy still fresh on my clothes. She slapped me, I fell down, I stood up, she slapped me again, but more softly this time, and hugged me, held me against her breast for a long time, complicated woman, how complicated and difficult to be a woman in these times, and maybe these new holes in my body help me know what it’s like to be female; no child will enter the world through any one of them, but they seem to be birthing new thoughts.

  And there is the face of the girl whom I finally kissed on the mouth, my wife, nice girl, whose belly’s as big as a corn shack with our son, whom I’ll never lay eyes on except in outline—bye, Albert Junior, or All-Burnt Junior, or whatever your name will be, I hope you’ll be less accommodating than I of rivals, strangers, neighbors, friends, and your own wish to be kind.

  And look, there’s the spot where I encouraged my unborn son not to be kind, great legacy, thank you, world, for letting me be for as long as I was, peace out.