Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

“You guys look like crap.”

  Smith leans over me and says, “Where the hell you been?”

  “Got a flat in Dover.”

  “For a month?”

  “They had good weed.”

  “You have arms?”

  “Some.”

  “Supplies?”

  “Some.”

  “What does ‘some’ mean?”

  “It means I traded some for weed.”

  The rain that came in through the crack in the flap has soaked me by now and lightly burns my skin. Argyle, tall and thin, clings to the frame of the jeep so as not to be blown down the road by the wind. Smith jumps out. I thought he’d flatten Argyle but he evidently doesn’t want to waste the time. They walk back to the truck and seem to be climbing into it. On the back seat, Martin lets out a long moan. Dick Buck and I don’t talk but I think we both know what a grim turn of events for us this truck is. He murmurs what I guess are prayers for Martin’s erstwhile hacked-off legs. Every prayer has its wound. God made even those of us who give up on Him in our youth hope our wounds will make our likeness to Christ more than skin-deep, but I doubt even Dick harbors such a hope in Martin’s case.

  Argyle climbs back into the cab of his truck and Smith returns to the jeep. “We’re turning around.”

  “No,” I say.

  “We have an opportunity.”

  “The opportunity to lie face-down in a ditch?”

  “The savages may not have fuel but they do have food processing technology we need, and somewhere around here they must have a big facility we just haven’t found yet. Argyle has twenty men in the back of his truck and weaponry enough to subdue the savages.”

  “So let him subdue them.”

  “He’s too subdued himself.”

  “Then let Stuart send down reinforcements. We tried our best.”

  “We tried our worst.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Stuart won’t send anyone else. He doesn’t care enough about this. If he did he wouldn’t have sent a weed-smoking pimp to rescue us.”

  “He’s right not to care. Caring’s overrated.”

  “Not caring is your bullshit paper-thin shield against disappointment. You lost the girl you love and you don’t want to go back because you’re scared you’ll lose her again.”

  “No, I don’t want to go back because I’d be going back for your reasons, not mine. You think we deserve to have what they have at their expense. Please tell me what’s so good about us surviving instead of them.”

  Against my right temple Smith presses the barrel of the gun he gave me on our way down here, a tender reminder. “I still love you,” he says, “but let’s have this nice conversation about values and beliefs someday in a dry place in New York over a stuffed pheasant.”

  I put the car in gear and turn it. Martin says, “We’re going back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, I want to slaughter them,” he dreamily mumbles.

  “Tell me you won’t be glad to see your girl again,” Smith says.

  “I don’t know if she’s alive.”

  “Don’t be ruled by fear, pussycat. When you see her next, sock a seed in there to make you want to stay alive. We need folks like you to balance out folks like him,” he says, indicating Martin.

  “And who’ll balance out folks like you?”

  He laughs and taps the side of my head affectionately with the barrel of his gun. No doubt if he were driving I’d put a gun to his head and tell him to go the other way, which supports my belief that who prevails is who has the better strategy or weaponry, a formula for success which virtue not only has no part in but is an impediment to, since virtuous thoughts drain time and force from strategic ones.

  There’s no town to go back to so we stop the two jeeps and the truck for the night on hard high ground. Smith and I walk through the tapering rain to retrieve a few guns from the back of the truck. He must know I won’t try a one-man coup against his one-man rule. The air in the back of the truck is ten percent oxygen, ninety percent marijuana smoke. Hurricane lamps make a dim light. The twenty men jammed in this oblong box recline or sit or stand. Some talk, some play cards, some make love, some oil their guns, some do more than one of these activities at once. They’ve managed to transport intact their own two thousand cubic feet of New York across state lines, their means and end both being oblivion. I think I‘ll stay with them tonight, have found a vacant spot, have smoked a bone, and now am thinking this to you. Are you there?

  CORNLUVR: I‘m here.

  GREASYBOY: Where?

  CORNLUVR: Don’t know.

  GREASYBOY: But I didn’t even type my message to you, I just thought it.

  CORNLUVR: And yet I read the whole thing. So you’re back?

  GREASYBOY: I guess.

  CORNLUVR: What for?

  GREASYBOY: To take.

  CORNLUVR: Take what?

  GREASYBOY: What’ve you got?

  CORNLUVR: Nothing.

  GREASYBOY: Nothing—especially nothing—nothing above all else—is worth dying for.

  CORNLUVR: Meet me tomorrow at tomorrow o’clock by the puddle.

  GREASYBOY: Okay.

  CORNLUVR: Bye.

  GREASYBOY: Don’t say that.

  Pocahontas

  I’m waiting for my man, twenty-six heartbeats in my hand. The birds have stopped singing, the crickets have stopped chirping, the squirrels have stopped hissing, the leaves have stopped rustling, the rain has stopped need need needling the sodden earth it impinges upon. There is about the forest today a sweetly sad post-annihilation feel, as if I were a smaller version of its heart. Feeling sick and dirty, huh, I’m waiting for my man. Hey white boy, what are you doing by this log? Hey white boy, how come you treat me like a dog? Hey white prince, what if you really are a frog? I apostrophize him in case he’s sick or sad or hurt or dead or fled or imaginary. White bitch, I do get weary in my shaggy dress. When I get weary, try a little tenderness. Hold me, squeeze me, don’t ever leave me, got to got to now now now, try a little—huh—

  “Hey, move away from that log before that caterpillar bites your leg off” is all’s he can say when he finally shows.

  “Thank you for saving me from the vicious caterpillar.”

  “No problem.”

  “Problem.”

  “Yeah, problem.”

  “Squeeze me.”

  “Unh?”

  “Squeeze me right here.”

  “Oh. Watch that puddle.”

  “Watch that puddle.”

  On a half inch of dry ground we are squozen each to each and each watch a puddle. My puddle is a pretty rainbow of microbes. Somewhere over the rainbow, up my ass.

  “Joe’s dead,” I say.

  “So are most people. Your dad chopped off Martin’s legs.”

  “Is he dead too?”

  “No, he’s taking it in stride.”

  “Hey, I said no pain jokes. Did you tell anyone you were meeting me here?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is three of your mens behind that tree over there?”

  “Which tree?”

  “The one by that puddle.”

  “That one?”

  “No, that one. And three more behind that one and three more behind that one.”

  “Oh crap.”

  A man I haven’t seen before, someone clean for once, with faded, grayish skin and clouded eyes, emerges from behind oak tree number two in a zebra-striped sharkskin suit saying, “Dude, I hope you don’t mind I followed you. You bicker a lot but I sense you really dig each other and that makes spying on you an exalted experience so thanks.”

  My sweetheart, Johnny, seems, even in his stillness, to descend vertically into the rain-defeated earth, like an obelisk built above a sealed-off mine shaft. He stares at me as if he wants to cry. At moments such as this I wish he’d be the commanding, belligerent asshole my father is, and punch or kill or remove the legs of this guy. No I don’t really wish that. I always have conflict
ing feelings when something bad’s about to happen to me, and something is, else why would all these guys be here? How unpleasant and interesting it is to be alive! A bomb of love exploding in my head for my guy! I leap on him and press his flesh to mine. He falls and I fall on him. The ground is soft and wet and cold and so am I. Oh Johnny, oh I love your rough and gaunt and sallow skin. Above my head, the sickening clicks of guns being made ready to fire. We may now die—who knows why?—and so I dig my lips and teeth into his cheek, this skinny, dirty man who is my doom. What on earth has made me love my doom so much? What gives? I give—the only way to make my bad life good. But of course I never give enough. I always don’t give enough. And since talk and deeds are but the runty brood of thoughts, I’m trying—right now!—to make of my cloven brain a device for the composition and transmission of thoughts and thoughts alone, and send them out to you, Johnny Rolfe, who have and have not earned my trust; to you, Charlene Kawabata Feingold, intermittent docent of my life so far, distracted as you are at every moment by the heroic struggle to have a good life despite being the willing prisoner of a woman’s body and a marriage to a man; to you, unknown corporeal interlocutor who I hope is just kind of out there somehow knowing my thoughts and undertaking your own heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth; and to you, Pocahontas, most unknowable of all and yet so eerily finite. How y’all doin?

  “What are you doing?” Johnny—you—says—say.

  “Making out with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz you’re cute?”

  “But we’re surrounded by men who are pointing guns at us.”

  “So? They’d be pointing guns at us if we weren’t kissing, and kissing is better than not kissing.”

  Well, guess what, everyone I’m transmitting my thoughts and feelings to, including you, he’s kissing me back! His soft and acrid tongue is in my mouth right now! I knew he was a good egg, a good quail egg with a tired poor huddled baby quail in it yearning to breathe free of its shell.

  “On your feet, lovebirds,” this new grayish-hued person says. He’s bossy for a guy who’s barely there.

  “I don’t like the new guy,” I whisper to Johnny.

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Pimp and a pothead.”

  “He’s dressed inappropriately for local conditions.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Why’s he doing the talking and holding a gun while Jackshit’s just standing there with his thumb up his ass and an inscrutable expression on his face?”

  “Good point. Hey Smith, why you being so weirdly passive?”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “Kidnapping her was my idea,” says the gentleman whose skin is the color of the air. “Hey, it’s cold in this forest, does anyone have a windbreaker?”

  “This guy won’t shoot me so I’m going to stomp off into the forest if you don’t mind,” I whisper to my boyfriend and before he can whisper back I stomp off into the forest and here come some guys with some guns and I feel myself being lifted to the top of a tree and my thoughts now inconveniently flee.

  My thoughts are back, hi, I’m on their truck. I think I been here a while but who the fuck knows, shit is happening all the time ain’t never happened before. This truck is like an n-shaped house except it’s rectangular and cold and damp and made of tin and on wheels and I’m surrounded by idiot white men none of whom’s my guy. Their priest, Dick Buck, who thinks I really ought to love his god, says, “Who made the world?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who is God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is man’s likeness to God in the body or the soul?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How is the soul like to God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did God make you?”

  “I’m not so sure he did.”

  “Of which must we take more care, our soul or our body?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What must we do to save our souls?”

  “This question I don’t readily see the value of looking to you for instruction in.”

  “Is this indoctrination working?”

  “No.”

  “Shall we forget it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love Johnny Rolfe?”

  “Well I don’t, like, love love him, but I love him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “Eew, no, we’re just dating.”

  “Would you marry him if you knew doing so would put an end to this bloodshed?”

  “Only if you could guarantee an end to bloodshed worldwide till the end of time.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Could you convince my dad to talk to me again, and not just once, but from now on?”

  “If I could, would you marry Rolfe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Do you have any questions for me?”

  “Can you get me off this fucking truck?”

  “No.”

  “If your god has any control over what passes for human activity, what sort of god is he?”

  “All the more reason to keep him in our thoughts and prayers and conversations and hearts.”

  “Who made your skinny ass?”

  “God made my ass. Man made it skinny.”

  “At least you have a sense of humor.”

  “Who’s joking?”

  “God, I’d guess.”

  Johnny Rolfe

  Of my two sub-specializations within the field of communications, no news and bad news, I am far better at the former, but today have been called upon and—despite my distaste for this adventure’s conception, its goals, its trajectory, its management, its personnel, its scope, its methods, its avoidable failures—feel compelled to practice the latter. I look forward to embarking as soon as is feasible upon a career and a life predicated exclusively on no news.

  Before discharging my duty I went to visit Pocahontas. She was in Sal Argyle’s truck. How Argyle, who at the wavy border of himself is not so different from the air, so quickly became the leader of this trip I know not.

  She said, “How are you?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “How’s the Chickahominy River?”

  “Angry.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Water.”

  “What else?”

  “Flotsam.”

  “I’ve been in this windowless truck for some unknown number of days and this guy’s trying to make me believe in his god and you haven’t visited and I’m three feet above my homeland but unable to touch it and can’t tell except by gut if it’s day or night so how the hell do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re like the Chickahominy River.”

  “Goddamn right. What news of my father?”

  “A meeting with him was arranged for today at his erstwhile town of Werowocomoco which this truck we’re in is parked a half a mile from.”

  “Don’t tell me where this truck is parked. I know where this fucking truck is parked.”

  “Let her out of the truck.”

  “No.”

  “Touch me,” she said.

  I did, with Argyle watching, what the hell, I have to touch my girl.

  “I’m not your girl.”

  “How’d you know I was thinking that?”

  “I always know.”

  “You haven’t known me long.”

  “From here on in I’ll always know.”

  “What am I thinking now?”

  ‘“Why won’t she tell me her secret name? I won’t really die, she just wants to keep a secret from me because she doesn’t trust me. Maybe she’s right not to trust me.’”

  “Whoa.�
��

  “You’re cute in a stupid way standing there with your mouth agape but go talk to my dad and tell him…”

  “What?”

  “Tell him…”

  “What?”

  “Listen to what he says and answer as I’d answer.”

  “So I should talk for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a man and you’re a woman. I’m from the north and you’re from the south. I’m white and you’re not. I’m me and you’re you.”

  “What are you staring at?” she said to five stoned guys in the truck who’d turned toward her voice as babies turn toward shiny things when looking out to sea. They turned slowly back to their games of cards or bongs or sandwiches or their companions’ mouths. “You’re not white either.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “You think you’re the first of your line to be drawn to nonwhite coochie?”

  “I still don’t want to talk for you.”

  “If you will not be for me, who will?”

  “I’ll be for you, not talk for you.”

  “How will you be for me?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Stop saying ‘I’ so much.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know how you can be for me? Leave the door open on your way out. My lungs have memorized every exhaled bong hit in here.”

  I lifted the door. “There,” she said, “is a picture of my life right now: the back of a New York truck framing you, the sky, two oak trees, and a disassembled kiosk of my youth.”

  “I’ll do my best with your dad.”

  “Poor kiosk.”

  I leapt from the truck. Sal leapt too. I said, “Keep the truck door open for an hour.” He closed it. I punched what I thought would be his face but was air.

  “Many finer men than you have tried and failed to punch me in the face. Sorry.” He grinned and made a picture of my life right now: gray lips and brown nubs of teeth framing the faint glisten of an otherwise black maw.

  Martin would not stay back in the corn shack we’ve commandeered for his convalescence. As we enter the great reception hall at Werowocomoco, he hangs down Bucky Breck’s chest in a papooselike sling, balls front, eyes ablaze, tongue held back by clamped-down teeth. Leglessness has taught him statecraft’s secret of restraint. His luminescent alabaster head, made horned by the arrow that transects it, looms more regally than ever before above the rest of his shortened self.