Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  “He’s not a dope, he’s smart and strong, in spite of how he looks and acts and what he says. His unbelief in his own death protects him. His unbelief in his own death is an attack on death that death is flummoxed by. And by the way, you, too, don’t believe you’ll die.”

  “I? I know I’ll die. I think about it all the time.”

  “You know and think but don’t believe.”

  “And will my unbelief protect me?”

  “There are those whose unbelief protects them and those whose unbelief opens them to ambush, just as there are those who, by practicing for death every day, learn to dodge its spearpoint, while others practice for death only to make themselves readier to receive it.”

  “Which am I? Wait, don’t answer that.”

  But she’d already answered with her eyes. Oh Aunt Charlene, Aunt Charlene, why’d you answer with your eyes? What sort of auntie behavior is that sort of eye answer and what’s a girl of niecely impressionability do to with it and why am I in love with a guy like that who would write a letter like that?

  Charlene said, “Write to him” and returned to her mate and rival, Sid, whom she loves and hates more than all the rest combined, even me. Adulthood is complex. I am alone. I am alone in one of the shacks that are and aren’t my home post-breakup with my dad. My life is so messed up right now and will be till I die, or that’s the way it feels. What consolation is there for living and dying alone, spurned and aggrieved? To live nobly and die for a noble cause? I know no noble cause unalloyed. To feel pleasure? He makes me feel pleasure. He made me feel some just the other night. We didn’t do it or anything, though at one point I was upside down and not keeping precise track of all things going on up there, one of which may have been it, for all I know. Still, the most intense pleasure’s but a splinter of ice on the gallons of lava that gush from my cracked heart.

  “Write to him,” the ghost of the not-dead Charlene said in my head: the living haunt the banished girl.

  “What?”

  “Write to him. He’s your ticket out of here.”

  “Don’t you think where he’s from’s worse?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “To love him.”

  “Like you love Sid?”

  The ghost of the living Charlene stared at me worse than Charlene and wouldn’t say a mumbling word. Even the spirits of the air sometimes shun the banished girl. It’s strange to live alone at age nineteen. Thing that won’t go in my next letter to him: since pleasure’s no consolation for life, is love? Can love of such a fragile man console? Is any man not fragile? Is any love not fragile? Is any consolation not fragile? Is any life not fragile?

  “Write to him!” That again was the ghost of the not-yet-dead Charlene, or maybe the ghost of the not-yet-dead me.

  From: CORNLUVR

  To: GREASYBOY

  Subject: No Subject

  >the fire that wiped out half our town, the

  >rats that ate the corn your father sent to us last week

  Oh no!:( I know where food is and can show you and help you carry it back to your “town” if you want but don’t touch me cuz our whole thing began with touch and we have to make sure it don’t stop with touch too cuz in our contemporary political climate plus our climate climate one or both of us could get badly wounded and/or disfigured making sex impossible and/or disgusting so I gotta know you don’t just want me for the sex and if you look back at your letter it put a heavy emphasis on sex don’t be a typical boy don’t be a typical boy

  >your people’s sense of ownership and theft diverges

  >from our own.

  What you call ownership I call theft. Who do you think was using the place your “town” is located before you? And what’s this “your people”? I don’t own them any more than they own the ground they put their houses on. The philosophy of ownership is inseparable from the philosophy of “your people” vs. “my people,” which is inseparable from war, which leads to the kind of disfigurement that makes a person unfit for sex so please give “town” and “ownership” a rethink at the request of the person who right now would like to continue to be touched by you as long as she is not too wounded or dead to do so.

  >When

  >two of them took buckshot

  Took buckshot like they took the gifts? Un petit jeu de mots, Gianni? I don’t like those boys. They’re dirty, they smell bad, they torture mice and girls, they have no morals, and if they grow up they’ll be worse than the men they’re instructed by. But don’t make puns about their pain. Respect pain. If we could truly imagine pain we don’t feel, we would not survive a day, so we don’t imagine it, we can’t, and that indispensable glitch in the human machine is also ironically what lets us inflict pain on others at little cost to a good night’s rest. So though you can’t feel the pain of those boys you shot in the ass, you must honor it by not making puns.

  >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

  As with ownership, please give “honesty and full disclosure” a re-think, and the woman you speak of is my Aunt Charlene so, you know, eew.

  >and then your dad arrived

  My dad and I are not on speaking terms, he banished me—will tell you all about it when I see you next—so when you mention him just know that what you say is news to me. And be advised that if you’ve shown me warmth toward the end of a strategic alliance between “your people” and “mine” you’re barking up the wrong tree. But you don’t seem the type. Not sophisticated enough. And by sophisticated I mean conniving, and by conniving I mean crass, and by crass I mean unsophisticated.

  >fuck you

  A strange, nonsensical phrase used frequently by people from New York, who I’ve noticed also use words to make things fuck that can’t, unless where you’re from shit can fuck, in which case please don’t ever take me there.

  >A competition of degree of openness of

  >eyes equals umbrage versus umbrage in such a context, where I come from, FYI.

  What?! Speak English, fer chrissakes.

  > Ratcliffe,

  >whom he loomed above

  I love my father’s massiveness and strength, yet your man Ratcliffe’s smallness makes me feel so sad. He seems to be a walking advertisement for noble ambition encased in an impenetrable shell of bullshit; every good impulse in him is met with the irresistible force of his own weakness. He and my dad standing next to each other, as you describe them, kind of equal one person, or humankind in general. I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t believe I’m saying these things to you when I barely know you. Fuck you.

  >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,”

  Don’t forget, when people laugh they bare their teeth. And that wasn’t no dead tongue, that was a parody of y’all’s crude pronunciation of the language we both speak. We have a cadre of songwriters whose job is to make up humorous songs about current events. The one they sang to you that day goes

  You come to us on your rude bus

  You starve and fart and steal our land

  You say you mean no harm to us

  But now we’ve drawn a line of sand

  We hope you’re not too blind to see

  How very close you all have come

  To making us your enemy

  Your strength won’t save you if you’re dumb

  and is not called “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” but “Fuck You, New York Shits.” The topical songwriters of the Chesapeake are guys and gals too weak to fight and farm, respectively, which, as you can see, is no guarantee they’ll write good songs, especially songs of the top-down variety wherein the leadership says to them, “Put this dire warning in song form,
” but they do make their point, however crudely, which you might want to pass on to the New York leadership, in case they, too, hasn’t understood the words.

  >Are you not

  >Indians? You all have red skin.

  You know who I am. What Indians were on this land the Europeans’ microbes killed; and who was left the Europeans’ microbes’ hosts killed; and who was left after that the bombs killed. We’re red cuz we smear ourselves each day with SPF 90 red goop to stop the sun from burning us alive, but take a closer look, Mister. You know who I am. I’m the etcetera and the so forth. I’m just an Irish Negro Jewish Italian French and English Spanish Russian Chinese Polish Scotch Hungarian Litvak Swedish Finnish Canadian Greek and Czech and Turk and Injun Injun Injun. My dad’s more black than red, my aunt’s more yellow than red, my uncle’s more tan than red, Frank’s more brown than red, Joe’s more white than red, I’m more bled than red, y’all are green and not well fed, and some of y’all are almost dead.

  Meet me by the thing today at thing o’clock. Big kiss and a hug and fuck you every day in every way,

  Poc

  23:19:47

  Knock-Knock from: Internet user GREASYBOY

  GREASYBOY has sent you an Instant Message not bound by your Terms of Service Agreement. Would you like to accept the Instant Message from GreasyBoy?

  Yes

  No

  GREASYBOY: What you doing right now?

  CORNLUVR: Scouring pots with my friends.

  GREASYBOY: I thought you were banished.

  CORNLUVR: Girl still got to help her sisters do the dishes.

  GREASYBOY: Does your father know you’re there?

  CORNLUVR: No.

  GREASYBOY: So all the girls you’re scouring pots with are acting in defiance of your dad?

  CORNLUVR: Girls value the community above the individual.

  GREASYBOY: Have they told him so?

  CORNLUVR: That would be counterproductive. They’d have to start a war with him to get him to listen to them and girls don’t start wars, though often they participate in them. They just welcome me when I come around, and we farm or build a house or cook or wash dishes or fold clothes or put on skits or babysit the little boys and girls.

  GREASYBOY: The little boys and girls don’t tell on you?

  CORNLUVR: The little girls know not to tell because they’re girls. The little boys know because they haven’t yet learned to be the sort of louts whose asses you filled with buckshot, nor the sort of louts who’d fill boys’ asses with buckshot.

  GREASYBOY: What if you’re found out?

  CORNLUVR: Every time a man comes near, a girl will stop him in his path, do a sexy dance, tell him to meet her in an hour by a certain tree. Usually he goes off right away to wait by the tree, a tree of his own sprouting all the while in his crotch. If that don’t work she’ll suck his dick on the spot, he’ll come and fall asleep. Sometimes by the end of a dishwashing session five or six men will be asleep in a pile on the path outside the kitchen door.

  GREASYBOY: Speaking of waiting by things, I waited for you today by the thing and you didn’t show.

  CORNLUVR: I waited for you by the thing.

  GREASYBOY: Which thing?

  CORNLUVR: Fallen log.

  GREASYBOY: I thought you meant thorn bush. I missed you so bad it hurt.

  CORNLUVR: Don’t get sentimental on me.

  GREASYBOY: I’m not. Sentimentality is when you give more tenderness to a thing than God gives to it.

  CORNLUVR: You monotheists, man.

  GREASYBOY: So you disagree with the definition?

  CORNLUVR: Right.

  GREASYBOY: Why?

  CORNLUVR: Let’s say you’re God.

  GREASYBOY: Never happen—I’ve got poor management skills.

  CORNLUVR: Then let’s say the truth, which is that there’s not one God, there are many gods, each with its own temperament, so one god will give a lot of tenderness to a thing to which another god may give none. But that is not the whole substance of my disagreement.

  GREASYBOY: What else?

  CORNLUVR: Can’t articulate it in your meager language.

  GREASYBOY: Blow me.

  CORNLUVR: Gods aside, I believe the essence of human emotion is excess.

  GREASYBOY: What does that mean?

  CORNLUVR: It means that it is in the nature of the feeling of sadness, for example, to be in excess of whatever in the world is causing the sad person to feel sad.

  GREASYBOY: How can you know this?

  CORNLUVR: I know it by feeling it.

  GREASYBOY: But you just got done saying feeling is excessive by nature.

  CORNLUVR: Ya, and that’s what makes it the truest form of knowing, since knowing is excessive too, and awful, and if you don’t believe me, believe your own myth of the world’s first couple and their life-ruining encounter with knowledge.

  GREASYBOY: What do you scour the pots with?

  CORNLUVR: Sponges.

  GREASYBOY: Where do they come from?

  CORNLUVR: Where do what come from?

  GREASYBOY: The sponges.

  CORNLUVR: How should I know?

  GREASYBOY: And soap?

  CORNLUVR: What about it?

  GREASYBOY: You use it?

  CORNLUVR: We use soap!

  GREASYBOY: Does it smell like anything?

  CORNLUVR: Lemon, sometimes mint.

  GREASYBOY: So, fragranced soap.

  CORNLUVR: The miracle of dish soap.

  GREASYBOY: And do you know where your soap comes from?

  CORNLUVR: This is very deep and all.

  GREASYBOY: Which do you think is an index of the more advanced civilization, knowing where the soap comes from, or not knowing?

  CORNLUVR: Meet me tomorrow by the thorn bush at thorn bush o’clock. Bye!

  Johnny Rolfe

  I’m just sitting and thinning by this prickly thorn bush. Ow, a spider bit my ass. I wonder if this is the end, just like all those other times I wondered if it was the end, and those other other times when it was the end. I borrowed the car. Hope she likes the car. Wanna get her in the car and drive her out somewhere far away and show her the sky as if it were mine. How stupid, to want to pretend to own the sky. Wanna drive her out somewhere far away and cower with her in my arms beneath the sky that would crush us to death. Yeah! Love those pits in her face where the pocks used to be. List of things in her I love: 1. those pits in her face; 2. she’s cross-eyed and ugly; 3. rough high cheekbones; 4. big bony calloused feet against my ears; 5. she does not, like New York girls, go “Aaahhh” or “Oooooh” or even “Ohhhh,” but “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Here comes that clutch of scary boys, the ones who’d spit on me as soon as pull the legs off a spider and pop its writhing thorax in their mouths. But I’m not what they’re after now. Among themselves they toss that three-inch hard rubber ball which if whipped against your thigh would raise a welt. They play a game with it I’ve seen them play before that might be described as a marriage of handball and chess, though into the gap between one English word and the next disappears this game they play: swift, slow; swathe of silent thought, knee to groin. Twenty yards from the thorn bush beneath which I sit and wait for my girl, they bounce the ball off what once must have been the side of an office building or parking garage. But I’ve got my trusty car I drove in on. Here she comes running from deep in the woods. 6. Hairy arms. Swiftly do my filthy pants rise. Must not touch her, as she asked. How I regret the filth of my pants. The closer she gets, the more I regret.

  “Hey.”

  “I’d kiss you but you said not to.”

  “What’s in your pants?”

  “I borrowed the car.”

  “You people need that much food?”

  “We’re starving.”

  “You’re stupid. Nice car.”

  “Let’s go for a drive.”

  “Let’s go for a drive.”

  “What’s that game those boys are playing?”

  “Handball.”

&nbs
p; “What’s the ball made of?”

  “New Yorker testicles.”

  “I like you a lot.”

  She punched my arm. My dick went down. She kissed my cheek. My dick went up again.

  “Please say your name so I know how to say it.”

  “Pocahontas.”

  “Poe car haunt as.”

  “That’s my nickname, not my real name.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll die.”

  “In what sense?”

  “In the sense of starting not to be alive and staying that way.”

  “How?”

  “Sunburn, heart attack, emphysema, poison, gunshot wound…”

  “I mean how will saying—”

  “It’s cursed.”

  “What is?”

  “My name.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Anyone who hears it will die.”

  “Right away?”

  “Soon.”

  “We’ll all die soon.”

  “You pick the wrong thing to mock.”

  “That’s magical thinking.”

  “I don’t care. Thoughts can kill. So can names. Hang a right.”

  “Here?”

  “No, back there.”

  “But there wasn’t any—”

  “You have to squeeze between that oak tree and that quondam savings bank.”

  “You mean that bombed-out hole in the ground?”

  “We’ll swing by and pick up some sacks of corn and dried fish, then we’ll go for a swim, then we’ll deliver the food to those poor schmucks your friends, then you’ll take me home.”

  “A swim? Where?”

  “The Chickahominy River.”

  “That’s where Mankiewicz got killed.”

  “You won’t get killed if you’re with me.”

  “Okay but I’m concerned you’ll see my boner.”

  “I see it right now.”

  “Don’t look at it.”

  “Stop.”

  “I can’t.”

  “No I mean stop the car. We’ve arrived at the food.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s buried underground in a special protective container which don’t even bother to come back here and try to find it because they move it every day.”