Jamestown (26 page)

From: G
REASY
B
OY

To: C
ORN
L
UVR

Subject: What was that?

Dear CornLuvr,

That thing that happened when we saw each other last night is all the more crazy given that I don't know how to spell your name. Do you trust me? I don't trust you. I want to. It's hard to. I've not been bred for trust, and you're quite strange in almost every way.

Please know I'm not one with all the programs, intentions, wishes, and behaviors of the gentlemen I am visiting your region on business with. They're them and I'm me. I'm with them but not of them. I'll supply specific examples of this in the course of what follows. Here's the first example: the induction or “hiring” of your father as vice president of the Manhattan Company, Virginia Branch. Not my idea. A guy observes a lot of the ideas his fellow humans come up with and act on and he despairs; he wonders how the human race survives; evidently not by the frequency or consistency of its good ideas. I believe survival is predicated on unrelenting will plus aggression plus, of course, how very pleasurable God made fucking, and I hope neither pessimism nor the explicit mention of the great pleasure of sex are taboo in your culture as they sometimes are in mine, but I say these things in the interest of total honesty and transparency, anything less than which, I feel, will be an impediment to the fullest possible understanding between us, and I figure if you like me at all, which you seem to despite not having answered my last half dozen IM's, you like my darkness and devotion to pussy.

Guess I'll stop here for now. Let me know if you want to hear my account of what happened that night leading up to and after our encounter. I'll take a breather and hope to hear from you.

Yours truly,

Johnny

From: C
ORN
L
UVR

To: G
REASY
B
OY

Subject: No Subject

Jah Knee

Re Lacks

Paw Cunt Ass

From: G
REASY
B
OY

To: C
ORN
L
UVR

Subject:
RE
: No Subject

Dear P—

I've got a lot of reason to be tense: the fire that wiped out half our town, the rats that ate the corn your father sent to us last week, other things. But it does relax me to write a girl like you and tell her all I think and feel and am up front. I wish you'd know me all at once, with no need for the slow and unreliable advance of time.

As you've seen, we made a bunch of car trips to your place with gifts our CEO sent for the “induction.” I know I said this last time but can we agree the induction was a fuck up? Not least because your dad was not at home when we arrived. And your people's sense of ownership and theft diverges from our own. As our town's officer of talk, I told your dad's VP, Sit Knee Find Gold, what the gifts were meant for as the car made trips back and forth with more and more of them, but that did not make him stop a group of prepubescent boys from spreading out around the growing pile where he seemed to egg them on to pick things up—shoes, clothes, watches, jewels—and run off to the woods with them. We tried to block them from the stuff or chase them down once they had it but they were too fast. A few of my guys kicked their legs and punched their arms and necks as they passed, and when that failed to deter we tried reason, though studies have shown that the male brain does not begin to develop the capacity for reason until the age of fifteen, so our efforts resulted in further theft accompanied by the looks of blank incomprehension that make boys their age so cute. When two of them took buckshot in the thighs, ass, and lower back, that seemed to daunt the rest, but by then they'd denuded us of half the swag we'd meant for your dad.

Sit Knee, who each time I've met him has made me feel I'm a book he's reading a new chapter of through eyes half-covered by their lids, invited us for supper. The acorn-sturgeon salad was humane, the beaver tapenade divine. Your people cook well. We have to come to one of your towns to get a good meal—to get a meal at all, since what we eat at home-away-from-home deserves a name I will not foul this letter with. As laudable as your food is how you clean it, I don't mean gut and skin a squirrel, I mean rid it and all else you eat of the poison that resides in each cell of everything that grows, walks, swims, flies, crawls, or creeps. Such technique should confer greater power than your dad seems to have. It has long been said that who detoxifies the food supply commands the world, or could if he wished, but maybe your dad took a long, hard look at the world and deemed it not worth the bother?

The after-dinner open-air show you know about, having done the mise-en-scène yourself, I'd guess. My guys' response was not as rude as it might have seemed. First, you should know that when we see indistinct figures rush out of the woods at us from all sides shouting and whooping with bows in their hands, we tend to freak out. And I don't know if you caught that exchange of words between Jack Smith and John Martin, but it went something like:

So I would caution you as a fledgling director of environmental theater to be aware of how much more interactive a performance can get than you might have intended when your audience is a group of frightened, half-starved travelers from a land where parody is chiefly used to wound and kill. And I know you were dressed—or not dressed—to look like the men of your town, but beautiful, topless girls running a circle around a group of love-starved men will cause the sort of open-mouthed, drool-lipped catatonia you witnessed, followed by the violent open-armed lunges at you my guys made. All in good fun for you, perhaps, but you really can rattle a group of fellows like that, and may I add on a somewhat different note at this time that your overall physical conditioning seems to me superb, admirable, and worthy of emulation? And physical control as well. The way you and the older woman—the muscular one, whose not-small breasts still float so unusually high on her chest for a woman of her age, if you don't mind this kind of observation made, again, in the name of honesty and full disclosure of all articulable thoughts in my head and heart—the way you and she mimed lugging down the stairs of a bus that large square of wood to be used as an arrow-and-bullet target, as my man Smith and your man Joe did the other day (how did you know about this?) was so precise that none of us was in doubt what event you were both reenacting and making fun of. And women making fun of how men shoot their arrows and guns, my God, if you did that every night after dinner we'd soon find ourselves so funny and stupid we wouldn't be able to shoot any more. Well, I wish we lived in a world where that were true. Nothing since the start of time has stopped men from killing each other. Art, though sometimes nice, has always been perfectly useless against war.

I liked your skits, your misogynistic jokes and japes—the “Dirty Sanchez,” the “Donkey Punch”—though I don't quite understand them. And I very much enjoyed your imitations of us, especially the songs. However, I feel the song sung by “Johnny Rolfe,” played touchingly by you,

is not strictly false so much as insufficiently complex.

And then we met behind that tree, a term I use despite how blurry
behind
and
front
proved moments later to be. And then you disappeared, and I awoke in the tines of a thorny bush, its bright red berries burst upon my sleeve, and then your dad arrived. We were led into the high-ceilinged, torch-smoked room he favors for receiving—do you people not believe in ventilation? Again he reclined immensely on a neck-high platform bed, girl on his left, girl on his right, feather fans to keep the smoke from his nose, dog-size chunks of what looked like tofu brought gently to the chasm of his mouth. Again we were led up the length of your dad, again made to touch our hands to his and say our names.

Sit Knee showed us to the blanket we were meant to sit or kneel on. We did, save the aging captain of our bus, one-armed Chris Newport, who stood nearby and said, “My legs no longer bend that way.”

“State your business to the man,” Sit Knee said.

Ratcliffe, our local chief in name at least, stood. Your dad waved him back down to the floor with his hand, a fan unto itself, and called on Chris instead. And here I must remark on Ratcliffe's bottomless capacity to pout, if only to let you know which man I mean when I say Ratcliffe.

“We'd be honored to confer honorary VP status on you, Sir,” Chris said. He don't make speeches much.

“Veepee,” said your dad, “is a word in your quaint dialect that our language has not yet absorbed. Please translate.”

Smith—whom I gather you've met, I'd like us to discuss that one day soon, fuck you—laughed at the word
translate
.

“Vice president,” Newport said.

“Vice president of what?”

“The Virginia Branch of the Manhattan Company.”

“You want to make me VP of what I'm already P of?”

Ratcliffe rose halfway up again and said, “If I may…”

“You mayn't,” said your dad, and waved him down.

“We want you to be part of our team.”

“I am part of no one's team. I am the team.”

“The job comes with a substantial salary and perks.”

“What's the salary?”

“All due respect, Sir, it's inappropriate to discuss money in public.”

Your dad laughed, as a deforested mountain might laugh. I can't believe I'm dating this guy's daughter.

“And the perks?”

“There's a pile of 'em outside, to start with.”

“All due respect, Sir: I honestly do feel
jackshit
would not be an inappropriate description of the pile of gifts.”

Newport, more as military strategist than subtle social creature, I would guess, did not mention your boys' theft of our gifts to your dad, though your dad, strategist and social creature both, probably knew.

“You haven't seen the bed,” Newport said.

“You brought me a bed? Why?”

“We've only ever seen you in one. We figured you favored them.”

“This? This is no bed, it's a stationary palanquin.”

“Sir, all due respect again, I know when my chain's being yanked.”

“Show me the bed.”

“We'll have to bring it in in parts.” Newport turned to Ratcliffe and signaled him to get the bed. Ratcliffe did not stand, and looked back with eyes wide open. Newport opened his eyes more. A competition of degree of openness of eyes equals umbrage versus umbrage in such a context, where I come from, FYI.

“Oh for Christ's sake,” Smith said, left, and came back with six men who brought the bed in parts, which they started to assemble.

“Stop. Bring me a plank of it.”

A man brought a plank to your dad, which in his hand looked like a chopstick. “Where does this bed come from?”

“New York,” Newport said.

“Where's the wood from, I mean?”

“Don't know.”

“Bullshit. It's from here.”

“How do you know?”

“I recognize the tree this piece of wood was once a part of. I'd know it in any form. I grew up with this tree, and it grew up with me. See the swirl here? See the shape of this knot where a branch was once attached to the trunk?”

“Sir, my sight is dim,” Newport said.

“Yes, it is.”

“If you owned this tree, then I offer my apology on behalf of the Manhattan Company.”

“And if I said I owned all hundred trees you've cut so far and brought back to your boss up in New York, would you then apologize a hundred times? And if you cut a thousand trees near here, will you send me a letter on a sheet of official Manhattan Company stationery made from one of the trees you cut and black with the ink of a thousand apologies? I owned this tree no more than it owned me. After the war, when our forebears came back to this part of the world, they took the grim opportunity annihilation offered to try to live differently than the Americans had. All books on the subject had been burned or lost, all facts were partial, and yet they undertook to reconstruct as best they could the way the Chesapeake's first inhabitants had lived, who'd lived here since the moment man began to measure time, and so we don't own land or anything alive. And so to you and all outsiders we make this promise: if you try to export ownership to these parts you will find in us enthusiastic exporters of deadly arrows.”

“So you're okay with owning arrows.”

“We give them to our enemies for free.”

“So you don't want the bed.”

“I'll take the bed. Better me than you. What else've you got?”

“Have you seen the shot glasses?”

“Show me.”

A guy went out and came back in with a tray of white porcelain shot glasses whose bottoms were made of murky glass. He held the tray up to your dad, who inspected one and looked at Chris Newport as if to say, “So?”

“Pour some water in it.”

The girl to the right of your dad filled the glass.

“Now look inside.”

Your dad looked in and frowned. “There's a naked man in here.”

“Is that objectionable to you?”

“He's facing me.”

“I don't understand.”

“If I were to see a naked girl at the bottom of a glass, I'd want her facing me. A naked man at the bottom of a glass I'd prefer to face the other way.”

“Oh.” The great girth of Newport had begun to deflate under the pressure of this series of embarrassments before your dad. “We would nonetheless like to offer you the honorary office of vice president.”