Jamestown (17 page)

“Are you kidding me?”

“That brackish water the Indians gave us in exchange for that non-working motorcycle is not agreeing with me and it might be nice to clean this infected arrow wound in the thing that was my hand before this big and purple and amorphous mass replaced it. Not that one can blame the Indians. Imagine how sore we'd be if they were to arrive unannounced in New York in a large armored vehicle and park it at 42nd and Broadway.”

“My wounded knee sympathizes with your wounded hand.”

“Yes, I've seen your knee. Dreadful.”

“COULD ANYONE SPARE ANY CLEAN WATER? DON'T FORGET US SICKIES, WE'RE HUMAN TOO!”

“That was decent of you. I've always liked you.”

“Same.”

“Same.”

“Same.”

“Where did Jack Smith go? I feel better when he's around, not that I think he can save us but he seems less likely to get us all killed than the other gentlemen in whose hands our fate rests.”

“He left on
an expedition of trading and reconnaissance
, as he said, after giving John Ratcliffe crap vis-à-vis building our fort here on this swamp and, in fact, starting to build it at all, since, as he said, if we were to wait a few days for the Indians to give us permission to build, it would then appear as if we were building because they'd permitted it rather than simply because we wanted to, which is the real reason we're building it, but perception is reality, as he says, or some other boldly pragmatic catch phrase, I do like his phraseology and bearded grin. I wish he were here too. He went off with, among others, the communications officer, Johnny Rolfe. Not that Rolfe's not a decent-enough fellow, but one doesn't ever know what he's really thinking despite the sort of earnest face he presents to the world; it's the
communications officer
aspect of Rolfe I find comical I guess I mean to say. In any case, he and Smith and three others have assembled our remaining all-terrain vehicles and have gone off to
investigate the area and its impact on our options
or some other admirably utilitarian phrase from the mouth of Smith, whom I trust and will trust a whole lot more if he comes back with clean water.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Would you repeat what you just said?”

“Which part?”

“The whole thing.”

“Dude, my mouth was next to your head when I said it. Where were you?”

“Oh dude, I must have faded out.”

“That's all right, I don't feel in tip-top shape myself. At this point I wouldn't mind if someone were to come and move us out of the sun. I feel my skin is melting off.”

“WOULD SOMEONE MIND MOVING US OUT OF THE SUN? OUR SKIN IS MELTING OFF!”

“Very kind but I'm not sure anyone heard you. I barely heard you myself.”

“And yet it sounded so loud inside my head.”

“I'm angry, I confess.”

“About what?”

“Dying here.”

“I got an awful feeling in my stomach when you said that.”

“How can you distinguish between that awful feeling and the awful feeling given to your stomach by the rancid food and water, or any of the terrible events that have happened since we left New York?”

“I don't know.”

“I know it does no good to repeat it but I'm pretty angry about dying here.”

“Would dying elsewhere be better?”

“Yes!”

“Where?”

“New York.”

“Why?”

“My mother.”

“She's alive?”

“Yes.”

“Is she nice?”

“She would kill for me.”

“That
is
nice.”

“Did kill.”

“Who?”

“A few fellows.”

“What for?”

“Meaning me harm.”

“Meaning or doing?”

“Meaning with intent to do. Mother. Mother, though, has not lost her softness in hard times. She would treat you nice.”

“Would treat
me
nice?”

“Would treat you
very
nice.”

“I'd love to meet her.”

“She's an excellent cook, can do a lot with a little in the kitchen. I'd love for you to meet her. You and I eating a meal with Mother that she had just prepared. It makes me angry to think it won't happen.”

“Don't dwell on the anger.”

“Hard not to.”

“Hard not to.”

Jack Smith

We came up the bank of this creek with a dirt bike and a crude car made from a kit. We'd hauled the car and bike down from New York on the top of the bus and it's paid off, especially now that those asses back at the camp can't even get it together to forage for food. Have to do it all myself. Bastards are good enough at having a guy locked up in chains and punched in the face but don't know food unless some poor idiot in livery brings them a mound of it on a gleaming platter, for the privilege of doing which he's sold his soul and that of his mother. Reminds me of the time I was captured by the president of Pittsburgh, who would have cut off my head had his wife not stopped him. Later she helped me escape from jail, and wished to return to New York with me, and took my refusal with admirable grace, but prevailed upon me in a nightlong swiving that, to judge by her cries, pleased her greatly, but left me cold as swiving always does. By which I mean the act left me cold but not the tender heart of that lady. That most of my sex will sell out their friends and beliefs to soak their dicks I am by no means the first to observe. And though some ladies I know will do the same, on the whole they're a finer lot than the men—and since the urge in me for sex is scant or nil, the fineness of which I speak is of the mind and not the flesh. I don't think that ladies have fewer vile thoughts than men, only that they've learned to inhibit them for the sake of the good, which they've taken pains to let take root in their minds, and for which the minds of most men make rocky soil at best. I sometimes think I glimpse a lady's mind in Johnny Rolfe, a mental fineness, I mean, which I am drawn to and creeped out by in equal measure, and can't afford to think about right now.

Up the bank of the creek we went to trade for food and drink and find the tit of oil we hope is in these parts, else why go to the trouble. Tit of oil and, it would seem, food and water purification technologies, since they seem to eat dead animals and plants and not drop dead themselves. In addition to the booze long since poured into the earth north of here due to Mangold's death, a great strategic loss—the booze, I mean—I'd procured some trinkets from those tough nuts I punked up there in Delaware, and when we parked our dirt bike and car by the creek to make camp before the sun set, and a group of local kids came timidly out from behind trees and concrete half-walls to investigate the strangers and their marvelous machines while their dads hid ready to arrow us in the knees if we got cute with their kids, I took out some colored beads and mottled marbles and copper coins and sundry things and passed them out among the little ones, who laughed and liked them and wanted more, and I gave them more and they scattered along the wooded bank to play and fight among themselves and furtively watch these strange new men who came down from the north with trinkets and a car. It's good to get a strange town's kids to like you as a means to entice its grownups to, unless the grownups think you're out to harm their kids, in which case they'd as soon rip your arm from its socket. But here it worked and the kids' dads crept from behind the trees, bows down, arrows at rest in their quivers. Not that I wouldn't have shot one in the hand with my gun if he'd gone for his bow, but a guy wants not to shoot a potential partner in trade until not to do so would bring about the guy's own death or the death of one of his men.

The dads met us at the bank of the creek, a half a dozen of them. I held up another sack of trinkets and with body English showed I wished to trade it for food and water. They laughed with what I hoped was glee, as jolly savages are said to laugh by some who've met them and some who've not, though I myself have not met anyone, savage or not, who is jolly. One of them took from a small sack around his neck a short stick of bread, which he broke in two and half of which he popped into his mouth. The other half he broke in half again and let one of those halves drop to the hard dirt path we'd been riding on, and pressed it with his foot until it cracked. The last half of a half of a stick of bread he held out to me while he raised his brow and smiled and laughed. This was a lean, red man—all of them are red—with no shirt and the barest apron covering his genitals, which were large, which, I've noticed in passing, most of these Indian guys' genitals seem to be. It burns a man's gut to be mocked when he's not had more than one good meal in a month and a half. Like some of them, this guy had a small green snake that hung down from a hole in his ear on the left side of his head, the side with the hair, and I took out my gun and shot his snake in two as if to say
You're not the only one who can make jokes about halving things
, the sort of joke that isn't meant to make its hearer laugh, though I sensed he understood its meaning.

Of the men who were with me—Rolfe, Lohengrin, Mankiewicz, Gosnold—two, Rolfe and Lohengrin, had guns, and I hoped the Indians didn't calculate the odds of our three guns against their six bows as I did, and evidently they did not, or did and felt pride and bread not worth dying for, and when thirty more red men stepped from behind trees with straw baskets of corn and bread I understood the six we'd seen had been at least half messing with us the whole time, and with body Indian they said they'd give us all the bread and corn for a gun, and with body English I said no way but how about a few hatchets I also happened to have, and classy beads I hadn't shown the kids, and they subtracted a basket each of bread and corn for the deal and said they'd need at least to
try
a gun and I said as long as you promise to give it right back, which they did, and they did, and we sat on the bare earth and all ate bread and meaninglessly looked each other up and down since body language is hard to conduct idle dinner chat in and we needed to save our oomph for the rest of our trip up the bank of the creek and they needed to save theirs for whatever they needed to save theirs for—though I'd also add fuck them because I think they can speak English anyway—but all in all I said to my guys as the sun went down and the red men built a fire that I thought the first day of our trip up the creek was not too bad a day, but I should have known that that is not the sort of thing a man should ever say.

Eventually, and thanks to Rolfe, we did get down to talk, or body talk, and though the body's talk is coarse and inexact, we guessed the red men we dined with that night said the big man on the bed, the sad man in the smoke filled n-shaped hall we went to for the talk-by-machine, the one who seemed to be the king or chief or president, runs a lot of towns in these parts but not all—not theirs—but with him around they have to watch their backs. These guys gave us what we wanted because we've got what they want and by this I mean not just knives and beads but guns that they think if they play their cards right they could count on us to use against the chief and his men next time they try to mess with these guys we ate with, and since these guys seemed to like thinking that, who would I have been not to let them? They live in a town called, if I'm not wrong, Kickotown. The Kickotown guys said not to let our guard down up the creek, since not all people in these parts are happy to see out-of-towners; in fact a lot of them would rather see us die or leave than stay, and if they get to choose between the first two they choose a bit of both. And so with that in mind, and after six rough hours of one-eye-open sleep, we hit the bank of the creek again on day two of this little side trip about which not enough bad can be said.

Half a mile before we stopped for sundown we saw a sight too wondrous to be good. Despite the car and bike we don't go fast since the path along the creek is strewn with roots and beds of soft mud in which a bike or car could get stuck. So we had a lot of time to take in that sight on a spot across the creek—little dumb show no doubt staged for our delectation—nude young ladies bathing. And not just bathing but slowly soaping up their own and one another's skin, and if their soft purrs and ululations were a sign, really liking getting clean. They dumped buckets of cold water on one another's heads and shrieked as they did, and you could almost see the gooseflesh stand up on their skin and you could see their purple nipples come erect, and then they started soaping up again. You could not fault them for carelessness with dirt. More scrupulous bathing in all the world I defy anyone to find, a rigorous honoring of the virtues of soap. Not that I notice such things but all the guys in my group achieved instantaneous wood.

“Jack, let's take a rest here,” Happy Lohengrin said.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“I haven't had a bath in a month,” he said.

“Nor have I” and “Me neither” and “So very dirty,” said the others.

I said, “Are you guys out of your minds? Do you not know a setup when you see one?”

“What setup?”

“We're witnessing good old-fashioned wholesome cleanliness.”

“Unselfconscious native ladies getting clean the old-fashioned way.”

“Wholesome, honest cleaning.”

“What could be more innocent?”

“A stab in the throat with a sharp stick could be more innocent,” I said.

“What if I cross the creek on that little log bridge there,” Happy said, “and investigate what they're up to with great delicacy, using every skill of diplomacy at my disposal, and you three can stay on this bank with your guns trained on the young ladies, who I think you'd have to agree would be very talented indeed if they were concealing weapons right now.”

“I've seen women keep surprising things in that sheath,” I said.