Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  Sit Knee, who each time I’ve met him has made me feel I’m a book he’s reading a new chapter of through eyes half-covered by their lids, invited us for supper. The acorn-sturgeon salad was humane, the beaver tapenade divine. Your people cook well. We have to come to one of your towns to get a good meal—to get a meal at all, since what we eat at home-away-from-home deserves a name I will not foul this letter with. As laudable as your food is how you clean it, I don’t mean gut and skin a squirrel, I mean rid it and all else you eat of the poison that resides in each cell of everything that grows, walks, swims, flies, crawls, or creeps. Such technique should confer greater power than your dad seems to have. It has long been said that who detoxifies the food supply commands the world, or could if he wished, but maybe your dad took a long, hard look at the world and deemed it not worth the bother?

  The after-dinner open-air show you know about, having done the mise-en-scène yourself, I’d guess. My guys’ response was not as rude as it might have seemed. First, you should know that when we see indistinct figures rush out of the woods at us from all sides shouting and whooping with bows in their hands, we tend to freak out. And I don’t know if you caught that exchange of words between Jack Smith and John Martin, but it went something like:

  MARTIN: They’re gonna slaughter us!

  SMITH: No, no! They’re girls!

  MARTIN: So what? Girls kill too! Shoot them!

  SMITH: Holster your guns! Holster your guns!

  So I would caution you as a fledgling director of environmental theater to be aware of how much more interactive a performance can get than you might have intended when your audience is a group of frightened, half-starved travelers from a land where parody is chiefly used to wound and kill. And I know you were dressed—or not dressed—to look like the men of your town, but beautiful, topless girls running a circle around a group of love-starved men will cause the sort of open-mouthed, drool-lipped catatonia you witnessed, followed by the violent open-armed lunges at you my guys made. All in good fun for you, perhaps, but you really can rattle a group of fellows like that, and may I add on a somewhat different note at this time that your overall physical conditioning seems to me superb, admirable, and worthy of emulation? And physical control as well. The way you and the older woman—the muscular one, whose not-small breasts still float so unusually high on her chest for a woman of her age, if you don’t mind this kind of observation made, again, in the name of honesty and full disclosure of all articulable thoughts in my head and heart—the way you and she mimed lugging down the stairs of a bus that large square of wood to be used as an arrow-and-bullet target, as my man Smith and your man Joe did the other day (how did you know about this?) was so precise that none of us was in doubt what event you were both reenacting and making fun of. And women making fun of how men shoot their arrows and guns, my God, if you did that every night after dinner we’d soon find ourselves so funny and stupid we wouldn’t be able to shoot any more. Well, I wish we lived in a world where that were true. Nothing since the start of time has stopped men from killing each other. Art, though sometimes nice, has always been perfectly useless against war.

  I liked your skits, your misogynistic jokes and japes—the “Dirty Sanchez,” the “Donkey Punch”—though I don’t quite understand them. And I very much enjoyed your imitations of us, especially the songs. However, I feel the song sung by “Johnny Rolfe,” played touchingly by you,

  I’m disdainful

  I’m disdainful

  I’m disdainful

  of you all,

  is not strictly false so much as insufficiently complex.

  And then we met behind that tree, a term I use despite how blurry behind and front proved moments later to be. And then you disappeared, and I awoke in the tines of a thorny bush, its bright red berries burst upon my sleeve, and then your dad arrived. We were led into the high-ceilinged, torch-smoked room he favors for receiving—do you people not believe in ventilation? Again he reclined immensely on a neck-high platform bed, girl on his left, girl on his right, feather fans to keep the smoke from his nose, dog-size chunks of what looked like tofu brought gently to the chasm of his mouth. Again we were led up the length of your dad, again made to touch our hands to his and say our names.

  Sit Knee showed us to the blanket we were meant to sit or kneel on. We did, save the aging captain of our bus, one-armed Chris Newport, who stood nearby and said, “My legs no longer bend that way.”

  “State your business to the man,” Sit Knee said.

  Ratcliffe, our local chief in name at least, stood. Your dad waved him back down to the floor with his hand, a fan unto itself, and called on Chris instead. And here I must remark on Ratcliffe’s bottomless capacity to pout, if only to let you know which man I mean when I say Ratcliffe.

  “We’d be honored to confer honorary VP status on you, Sir,” Chris said. He don’t make speeches much.

  “Veepee,” said your dad, “is a word in your quaint dialect that our language has not yet absorbed. Please translate.”

  Smith—whom I gather you’ve met, I’d like us to discuss that one day soon, fuck you—laughed at the word translate.

  “Vice president,” Newport said.

  “Vice president of what?”

  “The Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company.”

  “You want to make me VP of what I’m already P of?”

  Ratcliffe rose halfway up again and said, “If I may…”

  “You mayn’t,” said your dad, and waved him down.

  “We want you to be part of our team.”

  “I am part of no one’s team. I am the team.”

  “The job comes with a substantial salary and perks.”

  “What’s the salary?”

  “All due respect, Sir, it’s inappropriate to discuss money in public.”

  Your dad laughed, as a deforested mountain might laugh. I can’t believe I’m dating this guy’s daughter.

  “And the perks?”

  “There’s a pile of ’em outside, to start with.”

  “All due respect, Sir: I honestly do feel jackshit would not be an inappropriate description of the pile of gifts.”

  Newport, more as military strategist than subtle social creature, I would guess, did not mention your boys’ theft of our gifts to your dad, though your dad, strategist and social creature both, probably knew.

  “You haven’t seen the bed,” Newport said.

  “You brought me a bed? Why?”

  “We’ve only ever seen you in one. We figured you favored them.”

  “This? This is no bed, it’s a stationary palanquin.”

  “Sir, all due respect again, I know when my chain’s being yanked.”

  “Show me the bed.”

  “We’ll have to bring it in in parts.” Newport turned to Ratcliffe and signaled him to get the bed. Ratcliffe did not stand, and looked back with eyes wide open. Newport opened his eyes more. A competition of degree of openness of eyes equals umbrage versus umbrage in such a context, where I come from, FYI.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Smith said, left, and came back with six men who brought the bed in parts, which they started to assemble.

  “Stop. Bring me a plank of it.”

  A man brought a plank to your dad, which in his hand looked like a chopstick. “Where does this bed come from?”

  “New York,” Newport said.

  “Where’s the wood from, I mean?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. It’s from here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I recognize the tree this piece of wood was once a part of. I’d know it in any form. I grew up with this tree, and it grew up with me. See the swirl here? See the shape of this knot where a branch was once attached to the trunk?”

  “Sir, my sight is dim,” Newport said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “If you owned this tree, then I offer my apology on behalf of the Manhattan Company.”

  “And if I said I o
wned all hundred trees you’ve cut so far and brought back to your boss up in New York, would you then apologize a hundred times? And if you cut a thousand trees near here, will you send me a letter on a sheet of official Manhattan Company stationery made from one of the trees you cut and black with the ink of a thousand apologies? I owned this tree no more than it owned me. After the war, when our forebears came back to this part of the world, they took the grim opportunity annihilation offered to try to live differently than the Americans had. All books on the subject had been burned or lost, all facts were partial, and yet they undertook to reconstruct as best they could the way the Chesapeake’s first inhabitants had lived, who’d lived here since the moment man began to measure time, and so we don’t own land or anything alive. And so to you and all outsiders we make this promise: if you try to export ownership to these parts you will find in us enthusiastic exporters of deadly arrows.”

  “So you’re okay with owning arrows.”

  “We give them to our enemies for free.”

  “So you don’t want the bed.”

  “I’ll take the bed. Better me than you. What else’ve you got?”

  “Have you seen the shot glasses?”

  “Show me.”

  A guy went out and came back in with a tray of white porcelain shot glasses whose bottoms were made of murky glass. He held the tray up to your dad, who inspected one and looked at Chris Newport as if to say, “So?”

  “Pour some water in it.”

  The girl to the right of your dad filled the glass.

  “Now look inside.”

  Your dad looked in and frowned. “There’s a naked man in here.”

  “Is that objectionable to you?”

  “He’s facing me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If I were to see a naked girl at the bottom of a glass, I’d want her facing me. A naked man at the bottom of a glass I’d prefer to face the other way.”

  “Oh.” The great girth of Newport had begun to deflate under the pressure of this series of embarrassments before your dad. “We would nonetheless like to offer you the honorary office of vice president.”

  “Make it president.”

  “Can’t. There’s only one such man and he’s back in New York.”

  “Make it executive vice president.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s him.” Newport pointed at Ratcliffe, glowering on the rug.

  “Come here,” your dad said to Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe looked at him and did not move.

  “Come here!”

  His shout made a corridor of air between himself and Ratcliffe that Ratcliffe, it seemed, could not help but go to him along. He stood glumly beside your dad’s bed, as if chained to it.

  Your dad groaned, pushed himself up off the pillows, swung his legs down over the side of the platform, leapt from it, and landed beside Ratcliffe, whom he loomed above. By inhaling, he grew and made a nimbus of airlessness around himself that Ratcliffe could not escape from and was turning green inside of. “All right, what do I have to do?” he said.

  “What do you mean, what do you have to do?” Ratcliffe whispered back, conserving air.

  “To be veepee.”

  “Accept our gifts.”

  “I accept.”

  “Put on our company blazer.”

  “What’s a blazer?”

  “A jacket, like the one I have on.”

  “I hope the one you have for me is cleaner than yours. Do you not ever launder or bathe?”

  I looked at Ratcliffe’s blazer. It was indeed in the Manhattan houndstooth pattern, made monochrome by dirt. The insignia on the left breast, too, had been effaced. The same man who’d brought the shot glass and plank of wood—his name is Bucky Breck, you may have seen or stroked him, almost your father’s size, his uniform of underwear not unlike what your men sport each day, or what I moved aside on you the other night to make room for my face—Bucky Breck now brought your dad his houndstooth coat, wrinkled but relatively clean.

  “Kneel,” Ratcliffe said.

  “Kneel?”

  “Kneel down, swear an oath of allegiance, we’ll put the coat on you, and then you’ll be VP.”

  “I neither kneel nor swear.”

  “Well then I don’t see how we can—”

  “I’ll promise allegiance, I’ll bend my knees a bit. I’d like a fuller tribute in exchange.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Your wristwatch.”

  “This was a gift from my mother. It’s an antique and an heirloom. The band is made of plated gold and inscribed to me.”

  “Give him the watch,” Newport and Smith both said.

  Ratcliffe’s body then underwent a change more temporal than physical. We all saw creep into his flesh, as he slipped the cherished watch from his wrist, the stark diminishment of time he’s got left to live. Your dad, whose wrist was too thick for the watch’s band, broke the band, tossed it to the dirt, grabbed the houndstooth coat from Breck, put it on, hung the watch sans band from its lapel, and, to seal the deal, enveloped Ratcliffe’s tiny hand in his. The coat did not look right on him—it did not match his long gray hair, bare red chest, or tan skin briefs—and yet he seemed to like it just the same.

  By now the bed had been assembled and in came four men bearing on their necks what seemed to be a snake that had swallowed a hippopotamus but was soon declared a waterbed mattress, a gift directly to your chief from ours, who assumes all chiefs to be gleeful and public swordsmen, as he himself is.

  The men placed the roiling mattress on its frame. “Were you to lie on it now you’d do us an honor, Sir,” Newport said. “Our president has asked us to note your response to the bed and report it to him.”

  Your dad, who seemed to be amused by how embarrassed Newport was, eased himself, in his undies and new houndstooth coat, a small green snake writhing from the hole in the lobe of his ear, down onto the bed, whose liquid bulk fled from his weight. Soon, though, he lay face-up on it, and the waters rearranged themselves somewhat, and rocked him as the waters of a man-made wading pond would rock an ocean liner that had somehow blundered into them.

  And there he lay. The room’s quietness revealed the light, high whine of John Martin’s ongoing laugh, a sound that had become so omnipresent that one mostly failed to notice it, except at night, when it was a torment. This was followed by a low, rumbling noise, a quick “Oh shit” from Smith, and then the loud explosion of the waterbed, which hurled your dad to the ground beside it, soaking him.

  To the ears of your father’s archers stationed outside the reception hall, the pop of the bed was no different from the pop of Chris Newport’s automatic gun, which they’d all heard not too many weeks before, so when they rushed in and saw John Martin standing above your father laughing, that’s whose head a zealous one of them put an arrow through from left to right before he could be stopped, and an explanation of the loud noise made to him.

  Again a silence filled the room as we waited for Martin to fall to the dirt. He did not. Your father sat on the floor and gazed up at him with a look more of wonder than concern. Martin had ceased to laugh and seemed to be engrossed in thought. The arrow had gone in behind his left ear and come out slightly higher in front of his right. He lightly touched its tip and tail. “Christ,” he said, “I mean what the hell?”

  Your dad stood up and clapped him on the back and shook his hand and laughed. The rest of us laughed too, and men from both tribes gathered round to congratulate him. Someone reached to pull it out and Martin slapped his hand away. In a dead tongue, eight of your guys sang a song in four parts I’d guess is your people’s “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” so all in all I think both sides could in subsequent accounts refer to this as a fun induction, except Martin and those of us who had to ride back in the car with him and hear him yammer on about the unfairness of life and his headache, which even so was a relief if you were among those upon whose sleep and nerves
his constant laugh—which the arrow had put an end to—had begun to have a deleterious effect.

  By the way, what did your dad mean about your forebears? Are you not Indians? You all have red skin.

  And as for our post-feast meeting—yours and mine—which began behind that tree after your show and ended in parts unknown to me at I don’t know what hour, I recollect it poorly, so full was my delight, so strange the noise you made, so shocked was I that unnamed body parts of mine could be made to join like that with unnamed body parts of yours; so fleeting the duration, so provocative the incompletion, so novel in style, tone, corporeal positioning, geographical location, and time of day was all that transpired.

  Yours fondly,

  Gianni

  Pocahontas

  “That man does not believe he’ll die one day.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the arrow in his head.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “He’s got an arrow in his head and he’s not dead.”

  “How could he not believe he’ll die? What a dope.”