“Who are you?”
“I am Joe. The day I was born a dark cloud split in two and the sun shone between. Seven mothers gave birth that day and all their children died but me.”
Joe then recounted the salientâi.e., valorousâi.e., violentâacts of his life, which I'm too bored by to duplicate here. Vigorous applause. Next warrior, Frank, friend and co-conspirator of Joe, the brains of the Joe-and-Frank operationânot a hard-won accomplishmentâshorter and more sinewy, does not stomp the rhythm of the drums into the dust, as Joe does, but wedges himself between the beats with his head and shoulders and hips, comes up into the rhythm from beneath it as if tunneling up into water from beneath the ocean floor.
“Who are you?”
“I am Frank. When I was born, lightning hit my house, which burst into flame,” etcetera, and then all the other hunting guys went, and then my sweet and thin friend Stickboy jumped up and did his bobbleheaded crazy-leg dance that makes him look as if his bones are long chains of paperclips, and though no one asked him, he said, “I am Stickboy, also known as Poor Common Bill, Colicky Baby Bill, Bill with the Footspeed of a Cock, Bill with the Cock of a Gnat, Depressed Bill, Weakened Billâ”
“Get him out of there!”
“When I was born, a cur whimpered and curled up in the corner to sleep. I was one of the six babies to die the day Joe was born. When I was fifteen a spider wove a web of cares in me. We will be defeated on the hunt and I will cower.”
Joe and Frank lifted Stickboy by the arms and threw him out of the circle. The drumming increased in volume and speed. The people of my town lined up in two rows that faced each other. Each warrior, starting with Joe, ran wailing down the line. When Joe passed Stickboy, who stood in the line, he hawked and let fly a thick wad of spit in his face. Frank was next, and spat on Stickboy too. No one made a move to stop them, not even my dad. When the next man came down the line and was about to spit on Stickboy, I leapt up and stood between them. The man looked at me, and looked at Stickboy, and looked over at my dad, who watched all this from his fancy chair, and after a long pause gave his head a little shake as if to say, “Don't spit on him,” so off went the guy, and all the other guys, one by one; none stopped to spit on my friend.
I know I put my dad in the awkward position of having to defend Stickboy and me in front of the whole town, but if a girl's called Pocahontas you just got to expect certain shit to happen.
As for Stickboy's performance being first allowed, then criticized in the unequivocal language of spittle: I suppose that is our town government's way of regulating dissent. Our town government is a meritocracy in which one important form of merit is who you were conceived by, and other forms include success in battle and compliance with the sanctified rites of official power. Merits that accrue no political capital include satirizing the sanctified rites of official power, loving well, being humble, giving expression to useless but beautiful thoughts. I wonder if there's a town on earth where such acts and qualities confer authority on one who performs or possesses them.
Johnny Rolfe
To You, to whom I tell this, if indeed there is a You to tell, an I to do the telling, a This to tell about, and a Telling to bring You, I, and This together in the mystic wedding of communication:
After we buried the bottles of booze with the Mangold body in hopes he'd get the drink in death he could not have in life, Ratcliffe, the would-be executive, made the two muscle men beat Smith's face and ribs and shackle him again. Several days have passed since then, and many things have happened, most of which I won't describe because I'm tired and don't feel like it.
I'm tired and don't feel like it
has itself become a tired phrase in my life, it can keep its eyelids up hardly better than I.
Newport stopped the bus today and said we'd soon arrive. Shall I describe the dread I felt when hearing this? I shall not; dreads these days are a dime a dozen, a dozen a day. To describe it is to have it twice; to endure it once is quite enough. We all, except for Smith, got off the bus. Chris, the driver, brought out the black box that contained the names of our board of directors and president, that is, the five men who would govern the rest of us, or so it was supposed to go. He blushed and said he'd forgotten the combination to the box's lock. The air was musty and cool. The ubiquitous greenish cloud or fog hovered above us, reducing the height of the sky and making all the world seem to be a low-domed arena built for the purpose of bloodsport.
Ratcliffe tried the box. Martin tried it. A few guys tried to wedge it open with knives, screwdrivers, hammers. The two big men, Bucky and Bill, their names turn out to be, took a crack at it with a crowbar. It was suggested Chris Newport run over the box with the bus. Newport said the bus's tank treads were designed to demolish any three-dimensional thing they rode over, that they would break the box and rip the paper in the box to shreds. It was then suggested the box be run over with just the bar car, on the grounds that if it alone was enough to break open the body of Mangold but not smash up his bones too bad, the box might break, the paper might be spared. So that was tried, and failed, and Chris, sensing the kind of impatience that precedes mutiny, ran the bus over the box, which broke open, a lot.
The four legible names were John Ratcliffe (President), Chris Newport, Father Richard Buck, and Jack Smith; the bus had chewed the fifth. Ratcliffe's first act as president was reluctantly to order Bucky and Bill to unshackle Smith. His second was to hold the chewed-up paper to the light and claim to see John Martin's name on it.
Smith, cracking the dried blood in his red beard with his fingers, stepped toward Ratcliffe and suggested that it was a bad idea for him to begin his tenure as president of this little group of guys out in the middle of nowhere by shoehorning his own guy onto the board with the ridiculous lie that he could somehow read his name on a piece of paper that had been violently sandwiched between a jagged stretch of road and however many tons of bus. Smith then put forward my name as board member five. “So let's all discuss this like gentlemen, Ratcliffe, and choose the fifth man the decent way, the fair way, the democratic way, via civil fucking discussion.”
Ratcliffe's face bore the trace of a brief skirmish in his heartâor whichever body part ambition commandeers for its home officeâbetween conciliation and force. The latter won. Ratcliffe sicced his two guys on Smith again. Six or so of us, bolstered by the shred of paper from the broken box, surrounded Bill and Bucky such that they'd have to dispense with us before they could get to Smith. Ratcliffe, purple billows ascending the flesh of his face, said “You
idiots
, I'll
ruin
you if you don't do what I tell you
now
.” Bill and Bucky looked at the six hungry, exhausted guys surrounding them, looked back at Ratcliffe, shrugged, gave him the finger, stood down. And then I must have missed Ratcliffe's cue, but saw and heard the guns Martin and a half a dozen other guys produced, cocked, and aimed at the six of us who'd defied Ratcliffe. I felt the hard tube of “my” gun along my thigh, and let it stay there. Apparently I'd been wrong about possessing the only firearm on the bus, and there's a fitting epitaph for me: A
PPARENTLY
HE'D
BEEN
WRONG
.
Martin,
it was then decided
, would be sworn in as the fifth man on the board, and was. Toward the end of the swearing in, I saw a bit of worrisome rustling in the high grasses we were standing near, but said nothing. As we readied to board the bus again, a raccoon leapt from the field and attached itself to the ear of John Martin, who, you may recall, if you exist, was already cut in the head by Smith and inconvenienced in the knee by me. Since I was nearest him, I removed my bodkin from my sock and stabbed the coon. It died, and was then pried, with some difficulty, from the ear, a piece of which it had succeeded in disconnecting from his head with its teeth. Martin seemed saddened. I should have tried harder not to laugh.
On the bus, Smith dressed Martin's wound. Later, an hour ago, I told Smith he's a good man.
“What makes you say that?”
“You bandaged Martin.”
“So? If I hadn't, someone else would have.”
“But you did, and not for expediency but because it was the right thing to do. That's the difference between you and Ratcliffe. That's why I don't like him.”
“Who cares who you like and don't like? Not liking Ratcliffe is babyish and pointless. It accomplishes nothing. And you don't know him enough not to like him.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Bullshit. You use the same thimbleful of knowing on everyone and everything you see.”
“Why the attack on me? What did I do?”
“Nothing.”
Pocahontas
Dear fellow grown-up:
My life has undergone a drastic change that I can't wait to tell you about! On this cool spring day when all the men in town who hunt were gone, I sat in a shack in my favorite field extracting last night's corn from my teeth with a poplar toothpick and reveling in the company of my own animated thoughts when who should happen to wander by but our family physician and my father's chief advisor, Dr. Sidney Feingold, my uncle by habit if not by blood.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Yes.”
He climbed into the shack on stilts and banged his head on a beam. “How do youâow!âHow do youâDo you see that raccoon over there?”
“No.”
“How do you know it won't attack you?”
“Do you really want to know how I know or are you going to use my answer to evaluate my state of mind?”
“A man can't inquire about a girl's raccoon knowledge to make sure she's not going to get a toe bitten off while out here picking her teeth in the middle of a cornfield?”
“I've been coming here alone since I was five. Why the sudden concern?”
“I've always been concerned, just been shy about expressing it.”
In the relative dark of the corn shack he looked at me with eyes half hooded by thick and heavy lids. I feel permeable when I'm with Uncle Sid, like without touching me he's bypassed the border of my hair and teeth and skin, he's used his eyes, which hide behind those lids, to pry open my soul. But I trust him. Want to know why? Because he's sad.
“Don't pretend to be stupid and harmless and avuncular,” I said.
“Who's pretending?”
“I'll tell you something about yourselfâ”
“Okay.”
“Shut up. I'll tell you something about yourself, and this evening when you're in your easy chair
chez toi
enjoying a little pipe of sweet tobacco and busthead, and Aunt Charlene or one of your nubile servant girls is massaging your feet, or whatever type of total catering to Feingold goes on
chez
Feingold, you can idly reflect on how my description of you earlier today out there in the cornfield with the toothpick bobbling at the edge of my mouth was really more of a reflection on my own mental state than on anything having to do with you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Shut up. See, I think you were very ambitious when you were young. You had good leg speed and you were a good hand-to-hand fighter and an above-average bowman, but you figured out early on that your physical skills, good as they were, were not commensurate with your ambition, and you also found, to your chagrin, perhaps, that you really didn't like fighting that much, you didn't like being in that position where if you don't immediately kill an opponent you've rendered helpless, you may have to spend the next six hours suffering the humiliation and unimaginable agony of being tied to two trees while watching chicks from a town up the road scrape all your skin off with sharpened mussel shells. But you also noticed that you had a keen intellect, not only in terms of sucking up book learning and making sense of it and developing your own original ideas that didn't come from any book, but also in terms of being able to read people as well as you read books, to perform the same operations in your people-reading as in your book-reading, namely, to read into the person, read beyond the person, know things about the person that the person not only does not tell you but that everything about the person's seemingly straightforward presentation of herself to the world and to herself is very elaborately trying to cover up. So there you are, there's young, ambitious Sidney Feingold, strong young Sidney Feingold back when he had a full head of lustrous brown hair, with his pretty good physical skill and his very good scholastic skill and his
singular
skill at seeing through the shell of the person not just to the person's intentions but to all the wishes and fears and memories and stray thoughts and unfelt feelings that inform the person's intentions without the person even knowing they're informing them, and I thinkâyou know what I think?âshut upâI think you got so turned on by your own skills and your own ambition that you did the most obvious and stupid thing with them and didn't even stop to consider what else you might have done with them. Now don't evenâI know what you want to know, you want to know what I think you might have done with your skills and ambitions besides use them stupidly to become what you are today, and the answer is nothing, have you ever thought of that one? Maybe doing nothing with your wondrous abilities except having them and reveling in their intrinsic beauty and taking them out for long, leisurely, peaceful, pointless frolics in the forests and meadows each day would've been the most worthwhile thing. The moment you discovered your excellent intellect is the moment you betrayed it, began monstrously to deform it, and here's another thing I think. I think at a certain point, I don't know when, exactly, not long ago, I suspect, you woke up to the fact of the wholesale betrayal of yourself by yourself, a treason against the self for which the penalty is death, and what's going to be really horrifyingly interesting is how you, the only person in all of Feingoldia authorized to do so, mete out the punishment.”