Johnny Rolfe

I’m just sitting and thinning by this prickly thorn bush. Ow, a spider bit my ass. I wonder if this is the end, just like all those other times I wondered if it was the end, and those other other times when it was the end. I borrowed the car. Hope she likes the car. Wanna get her in the car and drive her out somewhere far away and show her the sky as if it were mine. How stupid, to want to pretend to own the sky. Wanna drive her out somewhere far away and cower with her in my arms beneath the sky that would crush us to death. Yeah! Love those pits in her face where the pocks used to be. List of things in her I love: 1. those pits in her face; 2. she’s cross-eyed and ugly; 3. rough high cheekbones; 4. big bony calloused feet against my ears; 5. she does not, like New York girls, go “Aaahhh” or “Oooooh” or even “Ohhhh,” but “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Here comes that clutch of scary boys, the ones who’d spit on me as soon as pull the legs off a spider and pop its writhing thorax in their mouths. But I’m not what they’re after now. Among themselves they toss that three-inch hard rubber ball which if whipped against your thigh would raise a welt. They play a game with it I’ve seen them play before that might be described as a marriage of handball and chess, though into the gap between one English word and the next disappears this game they play: swift, slow; swathe of silent thought, knee to groin. Twenty yards from the thorn bush beneath which I sit and wait for my girl, they bounce the ball off what once must have been the side of an office building or parking garage. But I’ve got my trusty car I drove in on. Here she comes running from deep in the woods. 6. Hairy arms. Swiftly do my filthy pants rise. Must not touch her, as she asked. How I regret the filth of my pants. The closer she gets, the more I regret.

“Hey.”

“I’d kiss you but you said not to.”

“What’s in your pants?”

“I borrowed the car.”

“You people need that much food?”

“We’re starving.”

“You’re stupid. Nice car.”

“Let’s go for a drive.”

“Let’s go for a drive.”

“What’s that game those boys are playing?”

“Handball.”

“What’s the ball made of?”

“New Yorker testicles.”

“I like you a lot.”

She punched my arm. My dick went down. She kissed my cheek. My dick went up again.

“Please say your name so I know how to say it.”

“Pocahontas.”

“Poe car haunt as.”

“That’s my nickname, not my real name.”

“What’s your real name?”

“If I tell you, you’ll die.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense of starting not to be alive and staying that way.”

“How?”

“Sunburn, heart attack, emphysema, poison, gunshot wound…”

“I mean how will saying—”

“It’s cursed.”

“What is?”

“My name.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Anyone who hears it will die.”

“Right away?”

“Soon.”

“We’ll all die soon.”

“You pick the wrong thing to mock.”

“That’s magical thinking.”

“I don’t care. Thoughts can kill. So can names. Hang a right.”

“Here?”

“No, back there.”

“But there wasn’t any—”

“You have to squeeze between that oak tree and that quondam savings bank.”

“You mean that bombed-out hole in the ground?”

“We’ll swing by and pick up some sacks of corn and dried fish, then we’ll go for a swim, then we’ll deliver the food to those poor schmucks your friends, then you’ll take me home.”

“A swim? Where?”

“The Chickahominy River.”

“That’s where Mankiewicz got killed.”

“You won’t get killed if you’re with me.”

“Okay but I’m concerned you’ll see my boner.”

“I see it right now.”

“Don’t look at it.”

“Stop.”

“I can’t.”

“No I mean stop the car. We’ve arrived at the food.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s buried underground in a special protective container which don’t even bother to come back here and try to find it because they move it every day.”

We got the food and swam nude in the river where I unexpectedly pronged her from behind and not only did she not resist but (7. hairy thighs; 8. muscular everything) she backed up and backed up and backed up and I came so hard I had to crawl up on the bank and faint. Next I knew she was on me going “Oh! Oh!” I can’t stand the feeling of loving her, I want to die, I’ll soon get my wish.

We’re driving to Jamestown. To continue to insist on calling this a town is to stand on the precipice of hope and stare into the abyss of idiocy, story of my life.

“By the way, when I said those boys took buckshot in their backs I wasn’t being cute.”

“You’ll never be cute.”

Midafternoon. Driving with Pocahontas in the open-air car through a series of unintentionally reforested strip malls, air so fresh it stings your nose and burns your eyes. Mint jelly sky. Early autumn sun lasers our napes, bores into our spines. A rabid seagull flies at us, she swats it down, it dies.

Jamestown is a fright. When they hear the sound of the car at the gate, anatomical skeletons—men not long ago, birthnames clinging loosely to their skin like hardened mud—stand up from their homes, tents, and would-be graves to greet us. Some don’t stand: they have fresh holes in them.

John Martin skulks by a fire in his slimy three-piece suit. He’s shaved his big head and filed the arrow in it to rough nubs on both ends. He turns the crank on a spit of lean meat whose smoke makes my salivary glands open up so fast my tongue aches. The spit itself seems to be the rusted antenna of an antebellum car.

“What happened?”

“Why’d you bring that twat to camp?” he says.

“She got us food and shut up before I put another arrow in your head. What’s that meat?”

I look away from the meat and hereby stop myself from guessing what it is.

“Where’s Jack?”

“Stealing food from twats like her.”

I’d punch him if it didn’t bring me closer to the meat.

“What happened?”

“What do you think? We got attacked.”

“By who?”

“Bunch of savages.”

“Which ones?”

“Don’t know. They came here just after dawn with hoods on their heads like cowards and shot the coffee mugs from our hands, then shot our hands, then our guts.”

“Where’s Ratcliffe?”

“Crying in a tent somewhere.”

“Where’s Newport?”

“Duh, do you see the bus anywhere? He left this afternoon. Says he’ll come back with food, weapons, supplies, and men but I’m not holding my breath.”

“I thought we all came to an understanding at the induction. Why’d they do this?”

“Maybe because you’re predatory, amoral, and rude,” she says.

Martin says, “So are you.”

“Less than you.”

“Like degree matters.”

“Degree is all there is.”

“How many of us are left?” I ask.

“Twenty, eighteen, maybe.”

“What should we do?”

“My plan is to start an all-out assault on them that won’t let up till the bus gets back: slaughter a hundred a day, take what we can get our hands on, meet the bus on its way back into town, climb aboard, leave this place full up with savage blood, don’t come back.”

She runs at him and hits him in the mouth. He hits her back and she hits him and by now my knees are on his chest and dirt and blood mingle at the back of his head. My position gives me too good a view of the meat on the spit. I look at him and look back at it. “Martin!”

“Oh like I’m gonna observe your little niceties and starve to death.”

“We brought food so get it off there and bury it. Is Dick Buck alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Get him to pray for it.”

“Look who suddenly has a qualm. Hypocrite.”

He’s got a point but I can’t cop to it in front of the lady I love, whom I must lie to about this and a few other things till she figures out the truth.

But, “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t do the same if it was that or die,” she says to me. “We all would. We’re made to. Let’s just get out front of that in the interest of honesty and full disclosure.”

I leave Martin on the ground and take Poc to find Dick Buck.

“I can’t,” Ratcliffe says and weeps as we enter the tent, Dick Buck’s hand on his back. Can’t what, I don’t know; everything, I guess. “I’ve failed and will fail again. I’ve let us be destroyed and could have stopped it. I’ll step down now and will no doubt fail in that too.”

Ratcliffe and Buck look up. “Who’s that? Get her out of here. She’s got a bodkin in her purse.”

“Easy, Ratcliffe. Let’s just assume for now you’re wrong in everything you say and do. No bodkin, no purse. She brought us food.”

“Why?”

“Trust her, John,” Dick says. “Trusting her will help your heart to heal.”

“Nothing will. I’m lost.”

“You know what Martin’s doing out there?” I ask Dick.

“Must I?”

“Smell that.”

“Christ.”

“In a sense, yes.”

“I name Martin my successor,” Ratcliffe says.

“We won’t let you do that,” I say.

“I’ll do what I want.”

“If you want to save your soul, you won’t,” Dick says.

“I can’t believe you talk like that. Do you know what a fool you sound like?”

“John, you brought me on this trip to talk like that. I’ve risked my life to talk like that and act like that and try to see that you do too, unlikely as that is.”

“Why bother?”

“Because God exists.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’re insane.”

“And you.”

We eat dried fish from a cloth sack as the sun goes down. Poc completes her lightly spiced corn stew at midnight and we eat it and go to bed groaning. On the way there I ask her to come to New York. She shakes her head. I ask her why. She looks at the sky.

“That wasn’t my dad,” she says.

“What wasn’t your dad?”

“Who attacked.”

“How do you know?”

“He said they wore hoods. My dad wouldn’t wear a hood or let his men wear them. As your friend said, it’s considered cowardly.”

“Who was it then?”

“My guess: Frank and Joe.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means your enemy is two enemies, one unreasonably aggressive, the other more so.”

The muck we built on sucks the town down half an inch each night, and if you’re one of those who sleep in tents—which I am since our houses have been built by filing clerks—you wake up with half a cup of swamp between your cheek and gum.

Poc is gone. Smith comes back in the other car with corn and dried deer meat. “Fair trade enhancement device,” he says, pointing to his gun. He’s got a long and dripping gash up his left arm as from a knife.

“What’s that?”

“Bird bit me. What the hell happened here?”

Dick Buck tells him. The life has gone out of Ratcliffe. He hands executive vice presidency to Smith without complaint. Martin’s loud complaints are quelled by all the rest of us with the net loss of a tooth for him.

Smith says, “We’ll eat for a week, get back our strength, and attack.”

“Why don’t we just leave?” I say.

He looks at me as if I’ve said Why don’t we just die? “We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You want to leave? Go. Take this car.” He knows I also can’t.

“There must be something we can do besides kill them.”

“Like what?”

“Talk with them.”

“Pray with them,” Dick says.

“We talked with them, we sang with them, we ate with them, we swapped with them, and some of us have even slept with them. If we don’t show them we’re strong now they’ll wipe us out.”

Some of the worst plans in the world get acted on when those who contest them get tired. Some of the second-worst plans in the world get acted on when those whose plans are even worse get tired. So it went with Smith’s plan to attack, Dick’s and mine not to.

And so we ate and slept and strategized. A bad storm came up. Wind blew down our walls. Wound in plastic sheaths, wedged one by one in local shrubs, self-fed from small bags of malodorous fish held against our flesh, we weathered it for three days. And then we had no fort, no walls, no town, no bus: snails sans shells; slow meat. Wet and full of dread, we moved on them.