Jamestown (19 page)

I'd meant for us to stay just long enough to press our heads against the mound of dirt they'd put their murdered man in, to let them know their grief was not lost on us. I hadn't thought Jacksmith, who has since caused what soon will be my death, would ask for one of us to “guide” him. But he did, and I was the obvious choice, and so he and I rode up the creek on these men's car and bike, whose ill-suitedness for this land boded well for mirth if not for life, and whose loud sounds cracked each cubic foot of air they entered into.

All day, in fealty to the people of my town, I kept my English tongue inside my head. That we don't speak English is a ruse my people think both necessary and hilarious, a hundred years' supply of laughs squeezed from one small, hard joke. At dusk, when we stopped and ate, the northerners looked so grim and tired I told them with signs I'd stay awake all night while they slept. Hours later, when the sky turned from black to deep green, Smith awoke, called me “All-Burnt,” and said with signs he wanted me to push on with him into the woods. I said we couldn't go till we could see. He took out a small electric torch and yanked me by the arm. Though I didn't want to, I obliged, and as I lie across the shoulders of two men I don't know, who are bringing me to a town near mine but not mine, I reflect again that this has been my life's main work: to oblige another's wish against my own.

A mile into the woods, Jacksmith and I were besieged by men from Werowocomoco, Powhatan's town. I heard their feet and breath moments before I felt their arrows move the air beside my head. None hit their mark, not because of our footspeed, or the dark sky, or thickly planted trees, but because the men meant to take him alive, which makes my death another grim if somewhat modest joke. Jacksmith, not knowing he was surrounded and already caught, slipped the two tight, dirt-browned elastic sweatbands he wore on his right wrist around my right wrist without first detaching them from his, and, as I tried to get loose, he tried to place me between himself and the arrows, which, as I said, were meant at most to graze. The arrows' shooters did not anticipate a target that was doubled, and flailed, and so an arrow pierced me in the neck, another in the chest, another in the gut, another in the groin, another in the knee.

Jacksmith saw what he thought was a hole in the wide ring of men and, holding me, ducked through it. That was when we fell into the swamp. The swamp embraced us and wouldn't let go. Jacksmith squirmed and I squirmed beneath him. My lungs, against their best hope, sucked swamp water even as the pressure of his body on mine drove the arrows deeper into me. By the time more air reached my lungs I was somewhat more dead than I'd ever been, and in the strong hands of Powhatan's men. As they bound Jacksmith's arms and legs with rope, they laid me on dry land, pulled their arrows out of me, replaced them with salves, but I could see by their eyes and feel by the mood of my wounds that I wouldn't recover.

These—the wounds—are the next-to-last gifts I'll ever be given, the salves the last. The salves, as gifts, are of use in the economy not of healing but of feeling, the wounds of use in the economy of dying. The front of me, where the arrows went in, now faces the branches of the trees and the sky, to which I say goodbye by touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight, through my new wounds and through the old intrinsic ones—mouth, nose, eyes, ears, skin. Two men I don't know are carrying me face-up toward their town and my doom, and if I want to see one final time a few last landmarks I know before I leave for a place, if place it is, whose landmarks I suspect I won't know—unless the punishment for life is more life—I'll have to arch my neck and see them upside down, which makes my neck's new hole stretch, which hurts, and so I see these last familiar sights through an added veil of pain. But because part of what makes pain hurt is knowing it will continue over time, mine doesn't hurt that bad.

We now pass the spot where I killed my first deer, whom, exemplifying how poor a warrior I have always been, I sentimentally named Thomas before he died, and so his name remained as I carried him back to my town—as these men now carry me back to theirs, or maybe mine, since all this looks so known to me—and Thomas he was when I skinned him, when my mother and sister chopped his flesh and stewed it with spices and corn, when we ate him, when we shat him into a hole in the ground, and Thomas he continued to be in the flies that ate the shit and are long dead now too and part of the earth and the air, and Thomas he is to this very hour in me, who am dying, and causing him to die again, but he'll live on in, for one, the sassafras tree that thrives in the spot on the forest floor that once was the hole we shat my first dead deer out of ourselves into.

And there's where I had my first kiss—I wish I had it still, I wished it had been on the mouth of the girl whose neck it was on, I wished her neck had liked the kiss as much as my lips did, I wished her cunt had liked it as much as my dick did. Whose kiss was it anyway? Whose lips, dick, deer, and shit? Not mine, I've rented or borrowed them, am moments from giving them back.

And there on the bark of that tree is the stain of the tears I shed when the girl that I kissed kissed someone else, and beside it the stain of the blood that I shed from the cut I made on my arm to try to get the pain of not being kissed back outside my body, where it had threatened a coup against my brain's rule of law.

And there is the place I was killed by my Uncle Al, not really killed but we called it killed—killed as a boy to become a man, one of the ancient folkways we've tried to adopt from people whose bloodline was cut long before we were born, people whose bloodline we do not continue but whose folkways we try to, though we know them only in fragments and some of them make no sense in the present, as for example the symbolic death of a boy who is then reborn as a man. If you're going to kill a boy don't screw around with symbolic death, do it for real, all but a few of us boys should have died for good back then, save a town a lot of grief, so many adult males competing for extremely limited resources on a blighted land, which leads to perpetual war or constant and vigilant work to avoid it, who wants that? Death and rebirth minus the rebirth: now there's a coming-of-age rite that would wake up a teenager, but this may just be one of the many holes in me talking, though whether mouth, ass, or arrow wound I cannot say. Is there even a me any more, or am I a mere mind being jostled at shoulder height past key sylvan landmarks, defunct farms, disused and crumbling interstate highways and county roads, fallen-down condos and malls, dead pathways and venues I resemble more and more? Death and rebirth? Death and death to all boys who won't take a vow not to kill.

And there's the spot where I killed my first man—look, a drop of his blood on that leaf over there—one of the scoundrels of Chickahominy, they've got metal knives but they favor the sharpened mussel shell and the murder styles of many years past, a touch of nostalgia for good honest old-fashioned violence and death. I was out in the woods looking for berries or my own happiness, a boy with a care and a good eye for wild fruit, when this Chickahominy asshole jumped me with mussel-shell knuckles and tried to gouge out my eyes. He knocked me down and leapt on me screaming. While he was midleap I unsheathed my bodkin and held it straight up. He saw it coming toward him as he fell but by then he couldn't unstick his fate from the planet's gravity field.

And there is the spot where I rushed to my mother's arms with the blood of the dead Chickahominy boy still fresh on my clothes. She slapped me, I fell down, I stood up, she slapped me again, but more softly this time, and hugged me, held me against her breast for a long time, complicated woman, how complicated and difficult to be a woman in these times, and maybe these new holes in my body help me know what it's like to be female; no child will enter the world through any one of them, but they seem to be birthing new thoughts.

And there is the face of the girl whom I finally kissed on the mouth, my wife, nice girl, whose belly's as big as a corn shack with our son, whom I'll never lay eyes on except in outline—bye, Albert Junior, or All-Burnt Junior, or whatever your name will be, I hope you'll be less accommodating than I of rivals, strangers, neighbors, friends, and your own wish to be kind.

And look, there's the spot where I encouraged my unborn son not to be kind, great legacy, thank you, world, for letting me be for as long as I was, peace out.

Pocahontas

“Excuse me, Sir, are you the northern aggressor who ordered the hamburger?”

I said that, about two seconds ago, through a hole in a wall of the n-shaped room where my father put the captured man from the bus who looks impregnable to arrows, knives, and doubt.

“Who's talking to me? Where are you?” He stands with his back to the wall through whose one dot of not-wall I speak to him. He is short, and so my mouth, whose height the wall's hole is at, addresses the small, sad spot of scalp around which his manly red mane swirls. I spied him through a side window a moment ago, his legs slightly bent at the knee, arms not quite touching his sides, never unready for an attack on his life though his feet be tied to the floor.

“You want a side with that? The chef would also like to recommend her delicious turtle-meat bruschetta, at no extra cost.”

“How many of you speak English?”

“How many of me do you imagine there are?”

“Who are you?”

“Your conscience.”

“Come on.”

“Call me the voice of the hole in the wall.”

“You're the girl we met the day we arrived, you were sitting in a corn field with that old guy, you did that dance, you led us back to that town where all those girls were.”

“Those weren't girls, Sir, those were ladies.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

“We're here on vacation. Where are you?”

“Will knowing where I am help you tell me why you're here?”

“Yes.”

“I'm behind and above you.”

He turns—I think, though I can't see him well since his head blocks my view—to look at me as best he can, given the disposition of his feet, and sees, I'd guess, a dark hole, since where I am behind the wall is in the shade, and this is what I am to him for now, a dark hole, as he's a large and darkened head to me.

“How'd you get back there?” he says. “Am I not being guarded?”

“I bribed the guard.”

“Is this some kind of psychological torture? What are your plans for me?”

“What would you like my plans for you to be?”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously? First fatten you up, then eat you. A soup and salad comes with your meal. I'd recommend the corn chowder and the caprese with tomato, basil, and coon's milk mozzarella.”

He's breathing deeply now, I think. He's taking long, slow breaths to dissipate his fear with air. I'm messing with his head, though that's not what I came here to do. What did I come here to do? I came here to know. Know what? I don't know, but I came at peril of my freedom, if freedom only to run from corn shack to corn shack in the margins of night and day. If Harry Parahunt—the muscle at the front of the jail who loved me as a child and spit in my hair to prove that he did—were to find me now, I'd end up like the redhead here, I think: in a darkened room, bound to the floor, or worse.

“Who are you, anyway?” he says.

“I'm the clouds in the trees, I'm the screech of the owl who flees from the sun, I'm the breast of a young man slain by a gun, I'm a drop of menstrual blood, I'm an egg.”

“Ah for crap's sake,” he says, and adds, softly, as if not for me to hear, “this is like talking to Johnny Rolfe, if he had a sense of humor.”

At the sound of the name of the man who broke that thing in me whose breakage maybe made me start to bleed, a little something broke in me again, though it didn't hurt as bad or good this time; more like the slamming open of a door, though door from what to what I know not.

“You still there, princess? I say something struck you dumb?”

That little redhaired bitch, he said the name of the man to get to me, I'll make him suffer if I can. I can't. I won't. The girl who values niceness gets shoved back down my throat each day by bitches like the redhead here, why must they exist? They must exist to test my niceness creed, I guess. I must not let niceness lose, though right now I feel something want to take its place in me that I can't name.

“So let's get back to why all you funny-looking men are here, okay?” I ask the dark back of his head through the hole in the wall.

“Are you asking in an official capacity?”

“Nope, this is just me, the independent-minded little princess, asking in an unofficial capacity and even a kind of illicit capacity.”

“If you're here illicitly, what happened to that guy at the door with the knife and the bow?”

“I drugged the guard.”

“Look, princess, uh, what shall I call you?”

“Pocahontas.”

“Look, Poke-hunt-ass, I want something from you, you want something from me, let's see if we can both get what we want.”

“Look, Captured Man—what shall I call you?”

“Jack Smith.”

“Look, Jackshit, why don't you start by telling me what you want.”

“I want to know why I was captured and why I'm being held in this room with my feet tied to the floor. And you want to know about your sweetheart, Johnny Rolfe, am I right? He wouldn't ever say this to me but I think he's pretty gone on you.”

“No, you're not right.”

“So what do you want to know then?”

Ooh, I regret having revealed to this man that I like that man, just as I regret having inadvertently revealed to those other men—my father, his advisor, and his young warriors who rise up from the ground with penile stiffness—that I had a wireless communications device and a period. I didn't know that I liked that man but the burning I feel in my face right now tells me I do. How do I end up revealing these things I don't know I have or feel? And why must the knowledge of my liking that man come to me from the violent little mouth of this one? Note to self: Learn how to reveal nothing to men. Corollary note to self: Reveal everything about us to me before conversing with a man or other threatening entity. Self's response: But some self-knowledge comes only through engagement with others; you cannot truly know me if you devote all your resources to defending me against potential threats, for in so doing you also foreclose the possibility of knowing me; you must allow the world to touch you and penetrate you and know you; only then will you be able to know me and protect me from harm. Response to self's response: I wasn't expecting you to talk back. Self: This is what I mean, no communication is one way, how dense are you? Pocahontas: No need to be insolent. Self: I'm just saying. Pocahontas: Am I not, by opening you to the world in order to know you, exposing us to the very sort of danger I hope to prevent by knowing you? Self: Yes. Pocahontas: This is confusing. Self: Tough corn nubs. Pocahontas: Tough corn nubs, that's your answer? Self: Yes.