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.

Happy, who’d used sex to get Chris to stop the bus and let the men drink booze, wandered over and casually draped himself on my arm—he really is a genius of physical comfort—and said, “‘That sheath,’ Smith, you’re very cute. Really, Jack, this is exactly the kind of situation I’m good in. Don’t tell me I wasn’t brought on this trip for just this circumstance.”

Happy’s always up for sex and certain of his skill-set in that field, as well he should be given his prodigious accomplishment with even someone as priggish and married as Chris, and despite my own lack of interest in sex, to tell the truth I’ve sometimes pictured slipping him one, a smooth and pleasant-featured boy with a calming, easy way. But what he seemed not to want to get was that if a woman’s hard-won goodness flees her mind, or if she’s one of those in whom it never put down roots, and if she then gets bent on murdering a man, he can please her more intensely than she’s ever been pleased in her life—four or five or six times if his means to give her love are as great as hers to take it—but that will not change her mind about her task, whose joy may be most profound if it’s done at the peak of her pleasure and his, at least that’s what I know of humans’ double wish to fuck and kill, which when combined make an alloy stronger than either of its simple component parts.

“No,” I said.

“Why?”

“I already said why. It’s written all over their—you know—everything.”

Gosnold said, “Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

“I have an idea,” he said and glanced, as did we all, at the front of his pants, a pyramid on its side.

“I forbid it.”

“And what are you gonna do if we—”

Before he could end the thought the tip of my gun was in his mouth and the hammer drawn back. “Okay, okay,” he said around the gun, and gagged and spat when I pulled it out. “Jesus. What the—” He shut up when I made as if to put it back in.

“No, guys, we have to respect Smith, he may very well know whereof he speaks,” Happy said, and winked at me. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to Happy. Fucksack he may be but he’s got a fundamental decency, no pun meant.

“Take one last long loving look at the lathering ladies, lads.” That was Johnny Rolfe, who you never know quite what plane he’s moving toward you on but I think he kids more than you’d think from out of a sad face that looks as if it wouldn’t ever want to kid, or “employs rhetorical devices” as he would say from out of a face that looks too tired to use any device but a toothpick to prop up each eyelid. Rolfe alone among our men said not a word to try to make me think we should cross the creek to soap up with the girls, though he too was sporting substantive wood, nor did his throat fail to make the same moist sound as the throats of his compatriots, as if those low and mournful sounds were iron shards, the glistening skin of those girls the strongest lodestone in the world. I like that Rolfe. It’s good to have someone to like in a time and place in which nature whispers to your heart, Like nothing, care for nothing, respect nothing believe in nothing, attach yourself to nothing but the wish to live. But my liking of Rolfe I’m wary of since what good can it lead to? I’d slit even his throat if I felt I had to though I hope I don’t ever feel I have to.

And so we rode our bike and car out of sight of the gals and carried on up the creek toward who knew what, while tears of erotic frustration sprang from the eyes of a few of our guys, fell through the unfamiliar air, and disappeared into the new ground into which we’ve chosen to press our feet and tires, and on which we brace each day for who knows what. We made camp a half a mile hence and broke our bread and boiled our corn in our water and saved the water after boiling it because we don’t have a lot and can’t waste a drop. Corn, Jesus. Its sweetness, its unique mouthfeel and palate ride, who knew? Corn is huge. Me, I’d sooner spring to wood for corn than girls.

The night was dark and cool, the woods made noise, and we wondered who or what watched us from beyond the demi-orb of light our fire made. We slept in shifts. Rolfe and I stayed up for the first three hours, Lohengrin and Mankiewicz for the next. So tired was I that sleep encased me like a tomb. And so the scream I heard, though it came from far away, was sharp enough to penetrate my deathlike sleep. Neither Mankiewicz nor Lohengrin was in camp. I heard two repeated screams, a greater and a lesser, but both so far beyond all other uses of the human voice I could not tell which belonged to whom. I grabbed one of our flashlights, told Rolfe and Gosnold—who’d also been awakened and were scared—to stay and watch the bike and car, and ran back down the creek bank toward the screams. I dreaded what was causing them and had to work against the urge not to run toward their awful sound. The thick, insistent dark ceded little to my weak light. I stumbled, fell, got up, ran; stumbled, fell, got up, ran in a daze of fear. Both screams grew louder as I ran, one more quickly than the other. I came around a bend and hit Lohengrin hard in the face with my face but didn’t know it was his. We yelled, fell back, got up. I stuck my gun in his neck and he held his knife to mine. We saw each other’s faces and the knife and gun came down.

I pointed my light at his face. Each of us was bleeding from the brow. His mouth was open wide and his lips fluttered irregularly. He wheezed and uttered sounds that approximated speech. His eyes were all fogged up. He pointed down the trail from where he’d come. “Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz.”

“What about him?”

“They got him.”

“Who?”

“The girls.”

More inarticulate sounds and waves of movement in his face; wheezing and weeping. Another howl reached us from what must still have been Mankiewicz. “Where are the girls? Same spot?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know.”

I slapped him and he fell down and wept. I picked him up by his shirt and made him look at me. “Lohengrin, you have to tell me what you know because I have to go get Mankiewicz and I have to know what I’m up against. Now!”

“I talked him into going back down the trail to the girls. We took one of the lights and a gun and when we got there we saw one of the girls sitting alone at the foot of the log bridge in nothing but a pair of panties. Look, we’ve been on the road a month and a half and you get tired of yanking it or having Mankiewicz do it with his mouth, so—”

“Tell me what happened!”

“We crossed the log bridge to where the girl was. Mankiewicz went first and she held her arms out to him. Oh my God, she looked amazing and I could smell her, and—” Mankiewicz howled again and I felt my balls inch up into my thorax. “Save him, Smith!”

“What else happened, fast, tell me!”

“Then something hit me behind the ear, then I ran back across the bridge and kept running.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go back to camp and come back here with Rolfe and Gosnold and don’t leave the bike and car behind.”

I ran for three or four minutes and heard no more howls. When I got to the log bridge the first light was up in the east, downstream. I smelled roasting meat. I shone my light across the creek and saw faint flames lick up behind a human form that must have been Mankiewicz. He was tied to two poles stuck in the ground, left hand and foot to one, right hand foot to one. I couldn’t see well but I knew he was dead. His head hung down. He was nude, and in the dim green light of dawn his skin looked darker than it should but I didn’t yet know why. The weak light made his belly look like a jagged black hole. I saw no one but him, and the fire behind him continued to cook whatever meat it touched. I hid behind a tree along the bank and called to him, I guess I was confused. I stepped from behind the tree and when I heard a gunshot I also heard its bullet hit the leaves above my head. The gun was a six-shooter and damn it if I hadn’t asked Lohengrin if he’d brought extra bullets and if they’d been taken along with the gun. I came out from behind the tree to try to make them shoot at me again. Nothing. I leaned against the tree with my gun in my hand till Rolfe, Gosnold, and Lohengrin arrived.

With our guns out we eased ourselves across the creek. The sun was in the sky behind the trees now and warmed us up a bit. Mankiewicz’s fingers were gone, the skin of his arms and legs had been scraped off, the dilapidated shell of bone and skin that had been his torso was now filled up with air and blood. Crusted black shriveled shapes the size of disused socks lay in the dying fire. These must have been his guts, lungs, and heart. Sharpened mussel shells to whose edges clung soft and wet red clumps of scraped-off skin lay on the ground around the tied-up corpse. We put the guts back in, cut it down, and hauled it back across the creek. No one shot at us.

In the car we had a mediocre shovel the Indians had given us to bury Matt Bernard. By trading off we took an hour to dig a hole for Mankiewicz twenty yards back from the creek in a sparse stand of trees. We put him in the hole as gently as we could and looked at him and looked away in turn. I told Rolfe to pray for him before we put the dirt back in and he said, “Why me?” and I said, “Because you’re the communications officer,” and he said, “God has imposed a communications blackout in case you haven’t noticed,” and I told him to say a damn prayer.

“Lord, keep us from your thoughts, and you from ours,” Rolfe said. He stared at me. I don’t think Lohengrin or Gosnold heard a word he said.