“No.”
“Of course you’re not, but listen. It can happen—and this is what you want to happen—that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That’s why you’re giving this back to me.”
“Just write your girlfriend a letter, Rolfe, Jesus Christ.”
“I will. Thank you for giving this back to me.”
“Good night.”
Now everyone’s asleep but me. No moon or stars light the sky. My hand’s in front of my face and I can’t see it. The Indians were supposed to have arrived by noon to take the trinkets and guns I promised in exchange for their corn. They could be just beyond my hand for all I know. I’d get my flashlight but it would only serve to light their way to me. If they want to kill us in our sleep they will. Except for me. Me they’ll have to kill while I’m awake.
Stickboy
“I can’t believe they call this place a town.”
“If ten men call a sack of shit a pot of gold it makes it one in name alone.”
Spoken by Joe and Frank, who used to be the boys I grew up with, nor has the change improved them: they’re worse: their schemes and games, which once harmed only other boys—and sometimes girls, cats, and trees—now harm all, or could. But I need none as I need them, so I must try to think of them as good—like trying to fit the dick of a man with an infant’s foreskin hood.
We ran through the woods. The always imperfect air, of which there’s not enough in any single breath, rushed in and out of my mouth. My friends—I’ll call them that for now; to call them by a truer name would take breath I still can’t spare—chatted while I gasped. Their skin was dry and mine was damp with sweat. What a curse to have been born Stickboy, though had Frank or Joe been born Stickboy and I Frank or Joe, Stickboy would then be the name of someone cunning, swift, and strong; a man can purge himself of his name but not his body of its theme nor his life of its fate.
“I still can’t take these guys seriously, they’re so pathetic,” Joe said. “They don’t seem to know anything.”
Frank said, “We don’t want what they know, or are, we want what they have.”
“Then we should kill them, take it, and be done.”
“If we wait we’ll get more.”
“Oh, all right, Powhatan.”
“I think you know the difference between him and me.”
“Yeah, you’re the one who’d slip a knife in your best friend’s back if you think it would get you ‘more,’” I said.
“No,” Frank said, “I’d tell you to do it, and you would.”
This conditional prediction, like a little snake, slipped into my ear and bit my brain, numbing out the band of brainflesh that constitutes the border of what I know and what I’ll do. If a man can’t purge his life of its fate, he also can’t foresee it. I became afraid. Fear is foresight written in the code of mood, but break the code and you break the message too.
We arrived at “Jamestown” an hour after dawn. Their small, tough redhead, Jacks Myth, at the lazy hole in their fortification, awaited us looking like a stone statue with burning coals for eyes. He hadn’t slept all night, I thought. He too felt fear but wouldn’t let it show. He’s their side’s Frank and Joe rolled into one, with Joe’s big strength in compact form and Frank’s cunning and speed, the strategist and foot soldier of their army of one. But he has something Frank and Joe lack: compassion, or so I detect, but maybe just enough to harness to his cunning—that is, no more than is useful. But compassion’s best beyond use; its true form is surfeit. In that way it resembles thought, whose true form is surfeit too. The gods invented thought in man not to make him better than the beasts but to drive him to his doom, to be stopped only by its halt cohort, compassion. In other words, the mind of man’s the gods’ cruel game that now has almost run its course.
“Our guns?” Joe said instead of “Hello,” mistaking tactlessness for expediency.
“Come have breakfast,” Jacks Myth said, and led us through the wet and sleeping camp or town past a thrown-together shack to an open-air table whose smooth wood top smelled freshly hewn.
“You just make this yourself?” Frank said.
“Yes.”
“Nice.”
“Thanks.”
Myth spooned some nasty-looking corn slop onto four plates of specious cleanliness and put them down in front of us.
Joe said, “Why you feeding us our own food?”
“So you won’t shoot us with our own guns.”
We’d brought our own dried deer meat but tried to be polite, even Joe, by eating this affront to food. It was hard.
“Joe, now I know what the northerners came down here for.”
“What’s that, Frank?”
“Cooking lessons.”
“So you two speak English.”
“What was your first clue?”
“All of you speak English.”
“Pretty much.”
“You lying bastards.” Myth smiled, his slightly green teeth’s testament to somehow not having been punched out of his mouth all these years, though one sensed many had tried.
A few of his tribe wandered toward us one by one, each a thin and brittle pillar of odor. I sensed Joe think, “I could punch each once in the heart and kill them all in less than a minute.” That’s why he’ll never be king.
Their king, who shouldn’t be, was the only plump one of the lot, but even he had changed. The flesh of his face, which had used to billow out from the bone like a pink cumulus cloud, now was gray and subject, like a rag, to Earth’s gravitational pull. “So,” he said, “you’ve come for the guns we promised you,” and as the flesh of his face hung loosely from the skull it clung to, so this remark of his hung loosely from the truth, though as with ample flesh that covers bone, his words hid the exact shape of what lay beneath them.
“Where are they?” Joe said.
“Turns out they speak English, Rat Cliff,” Myth said to his boss.
“You call that English? This way, gentlemen, through the gate.”
“It’s true, our English differs from yours,” Frank said. “For instance, we wouldn’t call that a gate, we’d call it the place where you gave up working on the fence.”
Rat Cliff’s face grew red from below; the soft folds of skin seemed to tremble as the blood entered them. We walked through the fence and out of their town to a spot of hard ground where their armored bus stood next to the small, open car Myth had driven away from our town in.
“Did a tree jump in front of your car on the way home?” Joe said.
“There they are.” Jacks Myth indicated two huge guns mounted on the roof of their bus, and turned back to us, his eyes open wide and sending out a mix of pleasure and defiance.
“We’ll need your car to transport them.”
“They won’t fit in the car.”
“We’ll take them one by one then.”
“Still won’t fit.”
“We’ll dismantle them.”
“Do you know how?”
“You’ll show us.”
“Do you know how to use them?”
“You’ll show us that too.”
“I don’t recall agreeing to that with your boss.”
“You’ve shown us how to use the guns, you’ve shown us that quite amply, and for that we thank you. You’ve also demonstrated that using guns is just about all you know how to do, and if there’s anything else you’d like to do, like stay alive, you’ll need our help, or at least you’ll need us not to interfere with you.”
“And, hypothetically, what do you suppose would stop us from interfering with you and your two friends right now?”
“The promise you mad
e to my boss.”
Myth moved his hands to his hips as if to say “That’s all?”
“And your own interest in this region, which you have not been straightforward about.”
Myth still did not seem convinced.
“And this.”
At that, fifty of Frank’s best friends stepped from behind local oak and hickory trees and half-gone walls of erstwhile office parks. Each one held his bow down at his waist as if he’d forgotten it was there. Since, coincidentally, none of the towns we’ve conquered have been armed with guns, and no men who’ve passed this way have wanted to trade for them, we’ve perforce learned to pass an arrow through the eye of a needle from a hundred yards away.
“So you’ll give us a demonstration of your guns,” Frank said, “and that way we’ll know you’re not selling us crap.”
Jacks Myth smiled again, not as he had smiled before—these northerners have a facial expression for each mood, and their moods are many and varied, with sometimes only the finest shade of difference between one and the next, such that I’m tempted to impute nearly full human intelligence to them. His mouth stayed closed this time; the smile, which did not completely conceal a sense of savage contentment, implied he’d hoped we’d ask him to show us how to use the guns.
“All right. I suppose we’ll need a target. I’d hate to destroy another tree,” he said, and looked at me, or, to be precise, at the last trace of the wound on my head caused by the branch the one-armed man shot off the tree I happened to be sitting under at the time his friends were skirmishing with mine. “I know something we can use. You, the big fellow, I’ll need your strength, come with me.”
Joe looked at Frank, who by his stillness gave assent. Each of ten thousand moments like this in the course of a life are what make Frank a leader of men and Joe a led man, despite the latter’s fierce mind and great mass. And what makes me neither leader nor quite led may take more time to know than I have.
Joe went up inside the bus ahead of Jacks. Time went by and he came back down straining, ass-first. The edge of a brown, large, flat, square thing he was carrying with both hands seemed also to be stuck to his mouth, and pressed down on it. His foot hit the dirt. He stepped back away from the bus. The big brown thing pursued and bore down on him, mainly on his mouth. Jacks appeared on the bottom step of the bus, walking forward, pressing on the back end of the large brown square, four feet or so in width and length, which he appeared to be force-feeding to Joe. Jacks leapt off the last step; the square jolted forward into Joe’s face. A small and oblong blob of blood squirted from Joe’s upper lip or gum and landed on the narrow top edge of the square while a few drops darkened the deep brown field of the square’s planed side. Jacks advanced while Joe unwillingly retreated, but only in the way a breach-born baby’s feet could be said to retreat from the womb, its head advance, as if feet and head were not the front and back of one thing struggling to be born. By means of the square, Jacks backed Joe up to a bitternut hickory twenty yards from the right flank of the bus. Joe swung right and out to the side of the tree. He and Jacks lowered the large square to the ground, leaned it on the tree, and one thing again became three.
Joe stood with flecks of blood on his top lip, which with the bottom one made a tight seal of his mouth. He seemed to want to lunge at Jacks, but stood as if pinned to the spot by a four-foot square of air. To leap on Jacks and tear his face, as Joe’s eyes said he wished to do, would have been to admit he’d been beaten in the moving of the square, which the code of pride of the men of my town precludes, which means I’m not a man, since I’d rather admit nothing more, and nothing would bring me more relief, than defeat.
“Here’s the target,” Myth said, pointed at the square, and waited.
“So shoot it with your guns,” Frank said. When Myth or any member of his crew makes a face or a move I must guess what it means he feels, but Frank might stand stock still and I could read what he feels by how his skin and hair abut the air, and now his stillness—which could mean many things in a body that likes and needs to move as much as Frank’s does—concealed bemusement at how adroitly Myth turned the moving of an object into a strategic victory over Joe, and, in amounts calibrated to each other, wariness and respect. “You’re waiting for what?” he added after a time.
“This square of wood has been treated with a substance only recently developed by our scientists, expensive to produce, manufactured in extremely limited quantities as of yet, and still in its beta phase.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The substance this piece of wood has been specially treated with.”
“And?”
“Applied in liquid form, it hardens into armor.”
More voluminously meaningful stillness from Frank. Joe spat blood at the dirt. Rat Cliff looked quickly at the small, oblong blob of blood in the dirt, at Joe’s face, at Frank’s, at Myth’s, scowled, and watched a nearby squirrel leap from the thin branch of one tree to the thin branch of the next, scramble up the second branch as it arced downward under the squirrel’s weight, and disappear from all our lives, at least for now. The two other men of Myth’s tribe let the flank of the bus hold up as much of their weight as they could while remaining on their feet.
“Is this some kind of bullshit to make us think it’s great that the bullets from these guns you’re selling us can penetrate this ordinary piece of wood? Or, worse yet, to explain in advance why they won’t?” Frank said.
“Oh, they can,” Myth said, “but I’m hoping you’ll see how worthwhile it would be to buy the liquid armor from us—a small quantity of it anyway, which is all you’ll need. Not that we have any to sell you right now, but we’re expecting a shipment soon.”
“There remains the obvious question of how to know everything you’ve just said isn’t bullshit.”
“We can make a little test of sorts.”
“Talk to me.”
“Well, we’ve learned the hard way that you people can shoot your arrows at great speeds, that they pierce and shatter hard objects we’d want them to bounce off of, like human bone. So why don’t you shoot a few arrows at our treated target here, see how it holds up, and then we’ll shoot the target with our guns and compare. I think you’ll find your arrows won’t penetrate and our guns will.”
If Frank feared he was being outmaneuvered he concealed it even from me. He gave a sign to Joe to stand by the bus and shoot at the square. Joe marched toward the bus. The two thin men who leaned there moved away in undisguised fear. Joe discharged another blob of spit and blood, strung an arrow, shot it, strung another, shot it, and so on till he’d shot five, all of which pierced the square of wood and stuck halfway out its back, and were grouped within a radius of an inch. Joe, reliably, announced by how he stared at Jacks that he had his pride back. Jacks in turn gripped the top of the bus door and swung himself up onto its roof. Frank seemed to take the roof in one quick leap. They stood side by side on the roof of the bus under a tree, chatting inaudibly as they ministered to one of the guns, like friends who’d joined to pet a lion’s head. Jacks held a long sash of thick, horizontally conjoined bullets out to his side with his left arm while with his right hand he did something—pulled the gun’s trigger, I suppose—that caused a louder noise than I’d ever heard, twice as loud as the noise of the gun his one-armed friend had used to shoot the tree that landed on my skull. The noise stopped. All of us but Myth stared in wonder at the gun. We looked at what he was looking at, which was the wooden square with Joe’s arrows in it, or what was left of arrows and square, which was small and medium-sized splinters of wood.
“Well,” Frank said, the strain of shame in his voice, “that’s a fine gun, and we’ll take it from you now, and leave you to the many other accomplishments—in addition, I mean, to having destroyed a piece of wood—that you no doubt have planned for the time between now and when the sun goes down.”
“It’s all yours, as is a car and driver we’ll provide for you.”
“We’
ll drive it ourselves.”
“How do I know you’ll bring the car back?”
“Because I say we will.”
“We’ll provide a driver, no offense.”
“We’ll need some tools to unbolt the guns from the top of your bus.”
“You didn’t bring any?”
“How would we have known they’d be bolted to the bus?”
“They have to be bolted to something.”
“May we borrow your unbolting tools?”
“We don’t have any.”
“Why not?”
“As you’ve pointed out, we’re ill equipped.”
“You’re telling me you have no tools?”
“That’s correct.”
“You expected us to bring our own tools for this purpose?”
“I neither expected nor didn’t expect, but the guns do need to be unbolted to be moved.”
“Let’s look at that stack of tools I saw in that shack you keep your food in.”
“None of those will work.”
“Let’s look.”
“It’ll be a wasted trip.”
“Joe, he thinks a walk to his toolshed will be a wasted trip.”
“We wouldn’t want to waste a trip,” Joe said.
Frank said, “We wouldn’t want to waste a trip by walking to your tool-shed. Goodbye.”
Myth said, “I’m sorry how this turned out. Come on back to our town any time with the proper tools and you can have our guns.”
“Well I was just kidding about not walking to your toolshed. We’ll take the chance of a wasted trip.”
Jamestown Page 18