Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  “He didn’t mean to love, and loved, and lost? Poor guy.”

  I hear him back there moaning; I hear the light, high whine of the motor of the truck; I hear the moan of the wind in the trees; I hear the soft, grim wail of each tree rise up and fall back as we go by; I hear the sound of all the men a hundred miles back as they breathe, talk, yell, sigh, groan, sneeze, come, die and decay; and each sound I hear I become, and cannot unbecome until every atom of this truck returns to its home in air, earth, sea, or star. Here we go on our great northern adventure!

  “You crying?” he says with a hand on my knee. “Don’t get dehydrated. Here, have some water from this plastic tube. All plastic comes from animals, you know.”

  I wept, erstwhile animal in my limp grip, and said, after all, “Shawneekwa.”

  “What?”

  “My secret name.”

  “What?”

  “My secret name is Shawneekwa.”

  “Shaneequa?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s your secret name?”

  “That’s your response?”

  “And I’ll die from hearing this?”

  Now I really, really cry, can’t tell why, not yet.

  He stomps on the brake and my ribs hit the dash while a shriek from the back of the truck hits the back of my head. I have occasion at this time, my face smooshed against the glass, to gaze down and out at the cracked and clotted road, gray, windswept, encroached upon by all that it is not: my future and the path to it in one.

  “I love you, Shaniekway,” he says.

  “I think I broke a rib.”

  “I love you so much.”

  “You’re a funny one.”

  Johnny Rolfe

  “Love is nice and all,” she said, “but we’ll make lousy time to New York if you slam on the brakes every hour to tell me you love me and shatter my ribs. Who shrieked, do you think?”

  “John Martin, I’d guess.”

  “Just one shriek from him?”

  “Yes. I think the thump against the front of the back of the truck that came just before the shriek was also him. He’s quiet, compared to how he was on the ride down, doesn’t need to let you know he’s there each moment of the day.”

  “He seems almost restrained, almost thoughtful, almost courteous, almost decent, almost human.”

  “His diminution leaves him more exposed to threat, which has taught him to dissemble.”

  “Shut up and drive.”

  I drove along what little road there was. The land’s indifferent to all roads, it makes them become itself and not the other way around. I drove and felt my nerves extend down to the wheels, each wheel became an honorary foot or hand or face, and pressing up against them was the earth and its age-old wish to encroach, to take back everything it once was and only for a time was not. How dumb of me to say all plastic had once been animals when each of us has been each, and all of us have been everything, and everything been us. And all of us and everything were once a single dot of stuff that was the world before there was a world, a dot Dick Buck would give the name of God, a God who could not stand to be alone or less than everything, and now that God is everything He’s still alone. I drove and, driving, felt I chose a future for myself.

  A break in the drive and we stood at what we figured was the side of the road. The sun had not yet left the sky, it seemed to wait for us to have our break and get back in the truck, that’s what we will our sun to do and kid ourselves that it complies, and so successful have we been in this that even since the time of that communications pioneer Galileo Galilei, and despite his gift to our knowledge of the world, we give the name of Nature to our self-deceit.

  Trees nearly bereft of their leaves; brown and sodden grass; wind that came from somewhere, chilled us, went somewhere, turned to nothing in our thoughts; illegible former edifices—a wall, a caved-in roof, a porch, a post, a beam, a crumbled shack or store, a desiccated privet hedge; the brown-gray fog; the dirt; the sun we didn’t want to leave the sky: that was our world at that time on the side of the road, or the road. Smith, Martin, Buck, Breck, Poc, me: that was our mobile nation-state.

  “I’m cold, let’s go,” the Martin who had legs would have said. The legless one shivered and said nil, his face a hard red rock. That he now did not say or show his thoughts and moods kept us all on edge. Each of us hoped not to wake in the dark to find Martin astride our throats and cracking our jaws with what remained of his thighs. While the rest of us stood on the floor of the earth, he sat, fists shoved down into unforgiving gravel. The sun’s slant rays hit the side of his head and seemed to set his welded-looking left half-ear ablaze, but did not penetrate his dark and matted hair. One had to concede his had become a dignified head against steep odds. “He’s really come into his own,” Dick Buck remarked, and Smith replied, “Or would if it were anatomically possible.”

  Smith no longer moved through the world like a virgin. Like the rest of the adults I know, he had been imbued with the melancholy that follows intense pleasure as winter follows summer. His beard was thinner now. Its new crooked, thin gray lines made it resemble less those nostalgic still lifes of wildflower bouquets Manhattan Company artists are paid to paint to narcotize a beauty-craving populace than like the leached fields of muck it is the purpose of the wildflower art to distract us from. The facial scars and cuts Smith had accrued since our trip began had lost their lustrous redness and turned dim and brown. I leaned awhile beside him up against the truck. Why, if a man’s not got a fresh wound of his own, must he probe his friend’s?

  “Did Sal wake up before we left?” I said.

  “I guess having his wrists and ankles bound with rope to his cot woke him up, yes.”

  “I thought the drug was meant to make him sleep.”

  “Turns out not all drugs you pay too much for on the Chesapeake black market work as advertised. Made him shit at least as much as it made him sleep.”

  “He would’ve brought us all down.”

  “Shut up.”

  “He would’ve brought us all down.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It’s okay to feel something for someone that’s not hatred or gruff bonhomie, Jack. You’ve said in several ways that I’m the aesthete and you’re the man of action but I don’t think men’s temperaments are so neatly defined.”

  I decided not to broach this theme again once he got done choking me hard and long enough to make me fall to the ground.

  My neck being sore, Smith drove the next leg with Martin by his side. Poc and I and Bucky Breck and Richard Buck occupied the back, in which we could see nothing go by and wondered where we were. I wonder if ever before so much brooding had been contained in a such a small space. Probably yes, and often, and far more brooding than this, in rooms of lesser size.

  “How’s your God today?” said Poc to Dick Buck.

  “Stern today, I’d guess, but I don’t know.”

  I was struck, as I had often been before, by the gray delicacy of his features, the parchment skin and scalp that covered up what seemed to me an extra-thin skull, a hen’s egg shell to guard, but not so well, the bright yolk of his thoughts.

  “Do you ever know?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “Right.”

  “Then how do you believe?”

  “That’s what faith is.”

  “Faith, sure, faith I get. But you have ideas, as I recall your brief but scintillating religious instruction of me, about the, um, personality of your God, that he is at times judgmental, at times merciful, and at many other times different shades of both. How do you know all this about this god you don’t know?”

  Buck looked away from her and seemed to want to look, as we all did, out a window that didn’t exist. With the palm of his hand, he shoved back at her what she’d just asked and said, “Not now, not now, not now.” He stood and slipped behind the sackcloth cu
rtain that hid our chamber pot. Some of what was inside him now came out, and not as prayer.

  He emerged, wan and drawn, and lay on his side on a stained thin foam mat. The fuel the lamps burned impinged upon our alveoli and seemed to eat into my recently attacked throat.

  “What is the soul?” she said.

  “Now you’re the catechist?” Dick Buck, shivering, said.

  “I’m a girl who wants to know what the soul is. Here, put this on you.” She draped a smelly skin on him.

  “Thanks, I think I caught a bug.”

  “What is the soul?”

  “Don’t think I can answer now. Got to ride the bug.”

  “Ride the what?”

  “Don’t feel so good,” he said, bent, unbent, and loosed a thin string of acrid puke from his mouth.

  “I think the soul is a passenger in a truck,” she said as she mopped his modest pool of puke with a rag and put her grimy, gentle hand to his brow. “I think the soul is a rider shut up in the back of a truck on its way northward, toward safety, toward a life of reduced suffering.”

  “No suffering,” Buck said between a violent shiver and a great antiperistaltic, spittle-producing heave. “Carry on with your analogy.”

  “Reduced suffering,” she said. “My young pragmatic mind, carried lo these months in a girl on the lam, can’t conceive it otherwise.”

  “Reduced then, you’re already wrong, go on.”

  “I see the soul as a soul in a windowless truck heading north toward a place where the back door of the truck will open on a nicer world. A windowless truck, Father Buck, out of which the soul can’t see, nor can it be seen from the outside, it’s just in there, all holed up, all sealed off, wanting to get out of the truck but patient, too, for the end of the trip. And it must put its trust in the one behind the wheel, who steers the truck toward its northern destination. And the driver knows the temptation of sleep: the hours are long, the night is dark, the road is rough, the back is sore, the eyelids droop, the driver sleeps, the truck veers toward a great, hard, sheer rock bigger than itself, the truck hits the rock, the driver’s hurt but not dead. The driver descends from the cab, screams, flaps about for a spell by the rock in the dark at the side of the road, remembers the soul, runs to it, undoes the lock on the back door of the truck. There stands the soul, bruised, shaken, a gash on her cheek, a gash on her knee. She descends from the back of the truck with the driver’s helping hand. She takes deep breaths, she looks at the sky, the pitch-black sky in which no stars shine, she looks at the pocked and unsteady earth and she does not know in her eyes and her breast which is earth and which is sky. The driver screams, she slaps his face, he calms down. They whisper now, they need to whisper back and forth, who knows what they say, soft words spoke so gentle now, makes the journey easier to bear. By the light of a torch they look at the wound the rock made in the front of the truck, one headlight gone, the trip dimmer now by half in the night hours, the trip harder in the night hours for the driver to bear, the driver fears for his mind and his life, can he stand to go on? He cries, the soul puts her lips to his tears, puts her lips to his lips, her tongue to his tongue, the soul and mind kiss while the body looks on with one eye gone. Go on back up there now, go on back up to the cab, you must, back the truck up away from the rock, that’s a good driver now, put that truck back on that rough and pitted road, that road that is sometimes no more road than the sky is road, now halt that truck while I get back in that windowless place, for put my trust in you I must, for I am the rider and you are the driver and this truck is our imperfect vessel, this bad road our only path, the only way we may ever get to that slightly better life than the one we have never left and are always leaving.

  “Well, that’s my analogy of the soul. What do y’all think of it?”

  No one answered her, for Buck was asleep, and Breck was asleep, and so was I.

  The scream woke me. Breck, whose scream it was, sat up, and Poc came in to hug him from the right. He threw her off with his right arm, which was thick as her head. He trembled and groaned. She came in to hug him again and told him it was all right, it was all right, it was all right, it was all right, a lie, since none of it was right. He took her hug this time. She talked to him and left a hand on his arm, and one on the top of his head. To watch her touch him caused a twinge in me I knew was murder’s seed, a tiny thing. But I know the best of women give comfort promiscuously; that this fine impulse should have its counterpoint in male rage argues for a God whose chief trait is neither mercy nor judgment but caprice.

  “What was it? Tell us. Telling helps,” she said, another lie. Breck wept. Each of us, it seems, will weep in turn, or all at once.

  Thinned though he was, Breck remained impressive nonetheless. His dark straight hair; his pale, unblemished skin; the sheer muscularity of him, now encased in cotton neck to foot for fall: his form, in short, contained within itself a note of hope. Inside of me, past envy, past jealousy, past dread, past my time-tested understanding of my own inadequacy, was this certain knowledge, caused by Breck: beauty exists. He wailed, shuddered, sighed, was silent for a time. Poc kept her hand on him. “Come on, Breck, tell us, tell it, tell.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Tell us anything you’d like. Talk to us. Tell about your life. Tell about something nice, a warm memory.”

  He looked at her as if she’d spoke in tongues. She encouraged him some more. He softened. What was going on here? What was she robbing him of? A guy like that needs not to think of his warm memories, needs not to have them. Memories confuse. Look at me with mine.

  “It was Ratcliffe,” he said, brought his knees to his chest on a skin on the floor of this windowless truck, hugged them, stared at the dim and fuggy air a foot in front of his face.

  “You dreamt of Ratcliffe.”

  “He was a poor leader but a decent guy,” Breck said. “My mom was his mom’s pedicurist. She walked down from the Bronx to the Upper East Side one morning a week to do his mom’s feet and sometimes I came with. That scared, purple Ratcliffe face at the second-floor window. He was ten and I was eight. He opened the window and hurled the keys down at my head. They stung when I caught them in my hand. We went up to their living room on the second floor of their brownstone and all four sat there breathing in the perfumed air. Mom and Mrs. R. gave each other looks I didn’t understand. Little Ratcliffe sat with his slicked-down hair on the edge of a chair made just for him in his dark blue suit with short pants and gold buttons. Everything about him was fake and scared. He sat up straight cause he thought he should but he didn’t know how. His hands were composed in his lap the way he thought a boy’s hands should be who was better than the person he was staring at. Light, soft, curly-boy hair disguised with pomade as normal-boy hair. Head tilted to say ‘I’m the head of a dignified boy’ when there can be no dignity for a boy of ten, and his was the head of a boy who would freely piss his pants if you made to spit at him. Mom said, ‘Go play, boys.’ Why do mothers say that no matter who you’re with? Rabid dog on a chair across from you and your mom’d say, ‘Go play, boys.’ I guess that’s what they say when they want you dead. Not dead, I mean, but not alive. ‘Wish I hadn’t met or fucked your dad, suck you back inside and unconceive you.’ Mom loved me and raised me good, but still she sometimes said, ‘Go play, boys.’

  “So Ratcliffe took me to his room, which was huge and yellow with a rocking horse and clown posters, and said, ‘I’d like to see you crawl around and bark like a dog’—not because he wanted me to but cause he thought he should want me to or thought I should want to, which I wasn’t having any of, so we stared at each other, him lying on his bed, me standing by the door. That happened for a while and then he rolled onto his belly and read a book that was under his pillow—rich boys have books—or pretended to read it but in truth lay there sensing my location in the room with his back. I left the room, walked down the hall, opened a door, saw Mom and Mrs. R. hugging each other naked, and the next week when we went to the Ratcliffes’ Jo
hn and I were told, ‘Go play outside,’ despite how deadly that could be for small boys.

  “Mom was a country girl from Yonkers who got pregnant by a drunk at age sixteen. He died on a trip to Ohio before I was born. If she liked to hug a lady in the nude she did it simply like a country girl. No thinking about it, no complications, no manipulations, no lying, no pretending you were doing something else, no power structure, no money changing hands, no shame. I take that back, there’s always all those things, especially when the poor hug the rich in the nude. I played outside with Ratcliffe cause Mom liked the sex and needed the job, though my mind didn’t say that to itself like that at that time. How hard it was for any man, woman, or child not to go out of their way to hurt Ratcliffe! You have to admire how high he rose, given how most people could barely stop themselves from breaking his teeth with their fist all day long his whole life. We went out to the street and he was swarmed at once by every available eight- and nine-year-old. I pulled them off him and we went back inside, him with bloody nose and gums and arms and sad white knees below his short pants.

  “I guess the moms had loved each other fast that day, or not at all, were finishing the pedicure, Mrs. R’s foot lotioned up on my mother’s lap. ‘He beat me up,’ Ratcliffe said, of course. ‘He hit me while my back was turned and threw me on the ground and stomped me.’ Didn’t cry, got to like the gumption, fuckhead Ratcliffe, ass. Mom smacked me with her lotioned hand, more than one good thing for her at risk here, smacked me again, lotion on my cheek, and again. Mrs. R. stopped her—’Martha, these are lovely boys.’ I ran outside and stood on the corner. She tried to hug me when she came down, I wouldn’t let her. Tried to lift me in her arms, wouldn’t let her. We walked the grim hour back to the Bronx and stopped for ice cream: a counter in the ice cream store that we leaned on looking down. I hated her. How awful that I hated Mom even for an hour! ‘Martha, these are lovely boys,’ she said in the Penny Ratcliffe rich-lady sex voice. I laughed and my ice cream came back out of my mouth and I went, ‘Martha, these are lovely boys’ and Mom laughed. We made pouty lips at each other going, ‘Martha, these are lovely boys,’ and Mom let the ice cream run across the backs of her fingers, which taking care of other women’s feet had made red and hard. Mom died a long time ago. Ratcliffe was not a nice kid, nothing was right about him as a kid or a man, he put me in harm’s way all our lives and got my boyfriend killed and now his death’s on my head.”