Jamestown

by Matthew Sharpe

  How exciting to take a trip on the sea! Well not sea but river. Well not river but narrow, goopy mass of wet brown stuff that stinks and burps and barely flows, and barely separates two groups of men who keenly wish each other harm. And here we are at the barge, about which even I want to say Is that all there is? though I hope if I am ever remembered, described, or accused, it won’t be as an Is-that-all-there-is? girl, I’m sure the past is burdened with enough of those. Another splashguard-saddled gangway brings us from small boat to flat and drab and worn-down barge, which makes up in bigness for what it lacks in ornament.

  O brave new barge that has such people on it! There’s Manhattan’s chief, Jimmy Stuart—so gracious about his prized tuba in which I evidently shit, if not about anything else—peeling off his skintight white wetsuit to reveal a skintight white polyester shirt-and-pants ensemble; has ever one man decked himself more ostentatiously in petroleum byproduct? And there’s his grieving concubine, Penny Ratcliffe, the mother of the small, inept, and frightened man who nominally led Manhattan’s expedition to the territories of my dad (to make those two words in my mind—my dad—is to jab my own heart twice with the bodkin of sorrow, to feel my own death spread into my limbs from this oft-gored heart, for what is death but sorrow multiplied beyond the body’s modest capacity?) and died there by all-too-tiny increments. What a beautiful and burdened girl this Penny Ratcliffe is with her puffed-up and slightly livid top and bottom eyelids, her regal and gravely erect head. That head don’t swivel much at all on that neck but yet the stony, devastated eyes roam about and take in all; she is even in her saddened state a lover of the look of the world. And despite how draped she is in loose black cloth, I, even with my dimming sight, also see, as must anyone with eyes, what a absototalfuckinglutely rocking female form she’s got beneath the drapes, and so it’s no surprise so many heads of state and other major cheeses of the temporal world have yearned so fiercely to be all up in that.

  And there’s the admirable fiend John Martin, who’s made his wounds his armor and his arms. The hardness and angularity of that massive, permanently blood-reddened head, one feels, makes a perfect shield, ram, cannonball, or bomb. Indeed, his brain seems always just about to blow, and who would want a tooth of that mouth or splinter of that weather-tempered cheek or jowl or brow lodged as shrapnel in one’s own soft self? No wetsuit wrapped around his impermeable form, he cantilevers down the gangway on his brownish-purple knuckles and plants himself in the center of the barge’s large white main room, whose glass walls let in light that makes the room seem green. That shortened, squattened man is made of stuff so dense he should by rights fall through the white wooden floor of the barge, through its black and river-seasoned hull, through the deadly depths below, through the river’s toxic silt and sand, through the earth’s crust, through its mantle to its molten core, whose heat would make him shoot like a rocket back up the vertical tunnel his dense mass just made, up and up into the depths of space above the sky, where in a blinding flash he would explode, and each hate-packed molecule of him would mix with air and turn to downy flakes of love, float down, hit us gently on the hair and nose: a little dot of hate in human form made salutary to his race by the forces of the physical world.

  And there’s his dad, Philip “Brooklyn Phil” Habsburg, who resembles him as fathers often feel they must. Dad lacks his son’s advantage of a lack of legs, but compensates with bullet shape that can only have been forged hour by hour down the years in those twin munitions factories of his head and heart, each belching smoke day and night on opposite banks of the river of his neck. He’s got his son’s funereally martial bearing and big grim red head. That he may have had to kill an assailant with his hands while eating a breakfast of mashed-up oats and rocks is written in the tautness of his neck and arms and chest and legs and rock-hard ass, all concealed beneath crisp, rectilinear gray garb designed and made no doubt by him for speed and force. Gun or spearpoint hurt his hip; he walks with a smoothened, shiny stick; the stick could be a club or spear or sword: Philip Habsburg, man of war, on the barge to do to his sin-sick rival with words what bombs could not get done, or so his eyes and fist in pocket say.

  And there’s Phil’s foot-and-mouthman, Peter Zuñiga, whose letters to his boss, shown to me last night by the solicitous but essentially repulsive Jim, bear the mark of a man whose talk has taken the shape and place of his soul; here’s someone who without his talk dissolves, and whom the air of threat of this green day on this drab barge has consequently made a puddle of. Silent puddle, he oozes along beside the man whose head his talk is meant to make an obfuscating bubble around, but that ain’t happening, so a girl has to wonder what use the great man keeps him on for, but she won’t waste too much time wondering since what transpires between any great man and the pusillanimous toady he shouldn’t love but loves is known, if known at all, only to them so whatever.

  And that’s it for folks on the barge itself. Not on the barge but on the two boats, one on either side, are all of each side’s thugs, whose multiple arms make up for their lack of faces.

  Oh and me—here’s me, Shania Hickway, sickened Princess, having been carried down the gangway on a palanquin by my man and the man who I can see will be his man when I’m gone, i.e., Johnny Rolfe and Jack Schitt, two peas soon to cohabitate a pod, description of whom I let my brain elide right now cuz it got to keep its strength up for the hard knowing that remains its final task. Summit meeting here we go!

  There are seven of us seated at a round white table now. Thugs have scoped the barge from prow to stern and disappeared into the boats of their respective teams. John Martin and his father, Phil, at the table’s four and twelve o’clock, strain toward each other in their chairs as if they’d smash it with their heads, wade through its debris, and son smash dad and dad smash son, two rock-faced men’s heads colliding again and again, and each would crumble, neither bleed. Jimmy Stuart, taut and relaxed at six o’clock, is angled right to left in his white chair and curved at the top, a pose that asks, Will you regret that?

  “Why’s the Indian princess turning green?” Phil says.

  “Seasick,” Jimmy says.

  “She doesn’t have a mouth?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Why you green?”

  “Why you red?”

  The total lack of movement of his leaden countenance says he likes my insouciance. He can blow me if he dare.

  “You’ll suffer less if you surrender now,” Phil says to Jim.

  Jim laughs. He seems to have recovered from the grief his girlfriend communicated directly into his body several days ago, though I think my boyfriend’s right to say that what awful sentiment the attentive lover’s loved one feels the lover also feels with only marginal decrease in intensity, so, to judge by Penny Ratcliffe’s face right now, Jim’s must be the merest shell to encase the meat of his grief. “I thought we were here to make nice,” he says.

  “I am making nice by telling you with words instead of guns that you’re done.”

  “I mean I thought we were here to make a truce.”

  “The truce is you capitulate, hand over your properties, treasury, resources, branch offices (he looked at me), step down as chief, and walk into a clean, comfortable, and well-guarded prison cell, where you’ll spend the rest of your life without the heavy burden of corporate governance and beyond the reach of its potential harms.”

  “I could tell you to do the same.”

  “Have you not noticed how much we kill you every day?”

  “I thought you were a more alert and knowledgeable strategist than this. You have a slight advantage in the field right now, and either you are genuinely stupid enough not to see that it won’t last, or you’re making a bluff whose fatuity is equal to that of the confidence it pretends to be.”

  “All right, I see your pride is important to you,” Phil says with exaggerated weariness, “so let’s say I’m stupid or bluffing or whatever you just said, and if that means spending an extra half hour on t
his barge to play that game because you’d like to believe you won’t be waddling back to shore with my dick all the way up your ass, I’ll accept that as a reasonable expenditure of time.”

  High-level talks, I’ve always known they’d be like this! I’m intoxicated by them and/or by the disease that’s killing me awfully fast right now, I feel its hand constrict my heart. I think I’m supposed to know at least one more thing before I die, what could that be?

  “Please allow me to enlarge my description of the current state of affairs,” Jim says and makes that sound dirty. “The increased violence and frequency of your recent attacks is a sign of your desperation. You need to win now or you’ll never win. I’m here, as you imply, because I am indeed burdened and worried by all this fighting. It’s unnecessary. I’d like to convince you to stop it. If you do we might even be able to coexist in peace, but we won’t know if we can do that if you keep attacking. If you keep attacking Manhattan we will surely suffer grave losses, but we will also patiently endure, whereas you will exhaust yourselves and spend everything you have and be left inert, depleted, with nothing to sustain you. Then it will require almost no effort for us to annex you peacefully, if your self-inflicted decimation and defeat can be said to be a kind of peace for you.”

  “This limitless patience and these bottomless resources of yours, they come from where?”

  “As you know, we’ve lately made some expeditions to the south.” Jimmy indicates me with a slight movement of his head. I roll my eyes, it’s all I have the strength to do.

  Phil says, “Her eyes would seem to refute your implication of a southern alliance.”

  I stick out my tongue at him.

  “A greener tongue I’ve never seen,” he says.

  My skin and tongue are getting green? I must be turning into air.

  When Martin loudly asks, “May I speak?” Jim jumps, and Phil sees him do it.

  “He’s a scary little kid, I’ll give you that,” Phil says, and stares at his son, and if eyes were rocket launchers Martin wouldn’t have a head. “Speak,” he says, “right, Jim?”

  Martin’s on the table now. My eyesight’s growing dim, but Martin’s body seems to stretch from table’s edge to edge, its one hand reaches out to its dad’s throat, its other to its chief’s, and then great gobs of red blood pour from holes below the two chiefs’ chins, flood the table, now not white, and make the two men’s necks slack; their heads roll down, their shoulders then, and soon they’re but a group of body parts attached to one another, it seems, only to allow an observer to remember these murdered corpses were once men.

  “Man, I hate talk,” Martin says, still atop the table, a small knife in each hand, his thighs asplatter with the bright arterial blood of two men; well, we all are, and their blood is joined by my puke. He throws the knives across the floor, where the blood they’ve loosed follows them, making knife-shaped trails on the floor’s white boards. “Anyone wants to pick those up and try to kill me, go ahead.”

  No one moves, that I can see: not Johnny, not Jack, not Penny, not Pete, not the dim and thuggish forms that line the rails of the two boats, one on either side of the barge.

  “Well then I’m Brooklyn and Manhattan now,” Martin says with a certainty that is not a sign of vanity but of the future it seems we all felt coming in our bones, though only now has it arrived in our eyes, noses, mouths, ears, skins, and brains.

  I don’t know what or whom to look at now. The air is still; those of us alive in here are still, all retreated from the table now, while the dead, still seated at it, still pump blood from their wounds, though less avidly than before. I see and smell I’m not the only one who’s puked. No one speaks. What do Jack and Johnny think, their eyes and faces blank? What does Penny Ratcliffe think? Martin sidles up to her and seems about to speak directly to her thighs. “Get the hell away from me, you lump of foul deformity,” she says quietly. He does not answer her in words, but through the black cloth of grief that enshrouds her thighs, he tries to nuzzle them with his asymmetrically positioned wooden antlers, two ends of a stick that’s displaced a slender stick-shaped horizontal column of his brain, a stick whose effects on that singular organ can be seen, I think, all over this room.

  While she seems stuck to a relatively un-blood-besmirched spot on the white floor, he circles her, leaning now and then to scratch the fabric of her black skirt with the prosthetic antler.

  She puts her palm on his forehead and gives a good hard downward shove. That monumental head of his hits the floor with a loud thwack.

  “Wow, your angel anger is fantastic.” He rights himself with leglike arms. “I know you loved both these men, maybe even at the same time, but I belong at the helm of their companies more than they.”

  “You belong at the helm of hell.”

  “Actually, there’s someplace else where I belong.”

  “Prison.”

  “Your bed.”

  “I’d sooner die.”

  “Sleep with me a thousand nights and die the little death a thousand times. I’ll make a better lover than either of them ever could.”

  “You wouldn’t even make a better corpse,” she says, “though I’d like to see you try.”

  “If I were to make a corpse of myself—”

  “I thought you said you hated talk, so shut up.”

  “I don’t love talk but I love you, and if I have to talk to let you know why you should love me back—”

  “Don’t waste your breath, unless that results in your death.”

  “As I was saying, if I were to make a corpse of myself—”

  “Looking for ideas? Throw yourself into this river.”

  “—then that would make—”

  “Attach a pair of pliers to one end of the arrow in your head—”

  “—then that would make three—”

  “—and yank it hard.”

  “—then that would make three corpses that you’ve made this afternoon.”

  “Take a gun from the holster of any of the men on either of the boats, put its barrel in your mouth, and fire. ‘Made’?”

  “Your beauty caused me to love you, which caused me to kill those two.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You think I don’t love you?”

  “That’s not why you killed them.”

  “Then you admit I love you.”

  “So much the worse for both of us if you do.”

  “I’d kill the world itself to spend an hour in bed with you.”

  “Have you not noticed it’s already dead? And you’re the maggot that feeds on its rotting carcass.”

  “A better, stronger maggot, then, than either maggot I just squashed, a maggot who can mine the corpse’s best meat.”

  “I’d squash you if I could, you disgust me, you horrify me!”

  He swings his bulk along the levers of his arms till he arrives at one of the small knives whose blade’s still wet and red with blood. He brings it back and gives it to her handle first. He rolls his head back on his neck. His throat is skyward now, and as it strains to hold that molten rock, his head, in place, its veins and tendons pop up to the surface of its skin. She need but make one shallow slice to end his life. She holds the knife a half an inch from it. She holds the knife and keeps on holding it. “I can’t. I won’t.”

  He swings his head back up and nestles it between her legs. He lets first one sawed-off arrow end and then the other roughly rub each inner thigh. “I love you.”

  “You want me.”

  “I want you.”

  “I don’t want you.”

  “You do.”

  “I want—”

  “What?”

  She weeps. He’s won. I can’t believe my eyes and ears, and wish I never could.

  Johnny Rolfe

  I touched her thick and scuffed-up neck as is my wont and barely felt a heartbeat there. I sat and trembled for an hour by her bed in the La Belle Sauvage suite of the Plaza Hotel, in which she was meant to convalesce but wa
sn’t convalescing.

  She woke and took a couple rasping breaths and sucked synthetic milk from a sponge at the end of a stick I held to her lips.

  “Nice milk,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  ‘“Where do your sponges come from?’ Remember that one?”

  “No.”

  “You said it.”

  “I did?”

  “Some bullshit like that. Fucking where do your sponges come from? Good times. Reminds me of a song:

  Oh my

  Father is dead and my

  Mother is dead and my

  Cousin is dead and my

  Brother is dead and my

  Brother is dead and my

  Brother is dead and my

  Boyfriend’s a schmuck and his

  Chief has no legs.”

  “Nice song.”

  “It’s one my people have sung down the years, all the more beautiful now that it’s true.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “As if there’ll be no tomorrow.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Too late.”

  Lacking strength to sit on her own, she was propped on a bunch of depleted pillows on the tired bed in the hotel suite.

  “I always thought a New York hotel would have more pizzazz than this. You know your civilization’s finished when your best hotel’s a careworn fleabag.”

  “You seem in a good mood.”

  “Won’t you be in a good mood when you’re soon to depart this slaving meatwheel? Please don’t wince every time I mention my death. Stop kidding yourself and help me face it.”

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  “Oh, Mr. Johnny, I ain’t aworried much. If the Lord is ready, ’tain’t for me to hesitate.”

  “Why don’t you want to live?”

  “Why don’t you want to die?”