Johnny Rolfe

Of my two sub-specializations within the field of communications, no news and bad news, I am far better at the former, but today have been called upon and—despite my distaste for this adventure’s conception, its goals, its trajectory, its management, its personnel, its scope, its methods, its avoidable failures—feel compelled to practice the latter. I look forward to embarking as soon as is feasible upon a career and a life predicated exclusively on no news.

Before discharging my duty I went to visit Pocahontas. She was in Sal Argyle’s truck. How Argyle, who at the wavy border of himself is not so different from the air, so quickly became the leader of this trip I know not.

She said, “How are you?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“How’s the Chickahominy River?”

“Angry.”

“What’s in it?”

“Water.”

“What else?”

“Flotsam.”

“I’ve been in this windowless truck for some unknown number of days and this guy’s trying to make me believe in his god and you haven’t visited and I’m three feet above my homeland but unable to touch it and can’t tell except by gut if it’s day or night so how the hell do you think I am?”

“I think you’re like the Chickahominy River.”

“Goddamn right. What news of my father?”

“A meeting with him was arranged for today at his erstwhile town of Werowocomoco which this truck we’re in is parked a half a mile from.”

“Don’t tell me where this truck is parked. I know where this fucking truck is parked.”

“Let her out of the truck.”

“No.”

“Touch me,” she said.

I did, with Argyle watching, what the hell, I have to touch my girl.

“I’m not your girl.”

“How’d you know I was thinking that?”

“I always know.”

“You haven’t known me long.”

“From here on in I’ll always know.”

“What am I thinking now?”

‘“Why won’t she tell me her secret name? I won’t really die, she just wants to keep a secret from me because she doesn’t trust me. Maybe she’s right not to trust me.’”

“Whoa.”

“You’re cute in a stupid way standing there with your mouth agape but go talk to my dad and tell him…”

“What?”

“Tell him…”

“What?”

“Listen to what he says and answer as I’d answer.”

“So I should talk for you.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“I’m a man and you’re a woman. I’m from the north and you’re from the south. I’m white and you’re not. I’m me and you’re you.”

“What are you staring at?” she said to five stoned guys in the truck who’d turned toward her voice as babies turn toward shiny things when looking out to sea. They turned slowly back to their games of cards or bongs or sandwiches or their companions’ mouths. “You’re not white either.”

“Yes I am.”

“You think you’re the first of your line to be drawn to nonwhite coochie?”

“I still don’t want to talk for you.”

“If you will not be for me, who will?”

“I’ll be for you, not talk for you.”

“How will you be for me?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Stop saying ‘I’ so much.”

“Okay.”

“You know how you can be for me? Leave the door open on your way out. My lungs have memorized every exhaled bong hit in here.”

I lifted the door. “There,” she said, “is a picture of my life right now: the back of a New York truck framing you, the sky, two oak trees, and a disassembled kiosk of my youth.”

“I’ll do my best with your dad.”

“Poor kiosk.”

I leapt from the truck. Sal leapt too. I said, “Keep the truck door open for an hour.” He closed it. I punched what I thought would be his face but was air.

“Many finer men than you have tried and failed to punch me in the face. Sorry.” He grinned and made a picture of my life right now: gray lips and brown nubs of teeth framing the faint glisten of an otherwise black maw.

Martin would not stay back in the corn shack we’ve commandeered for his convalescence. As we enter the great reception hall at Werowocomoco, he hangs down Bucky Breck’s chest in a papooselike sling, balls front, eyes ablaze, tongue held back by clamped-down teeth. Leglessness has taught him statecraft’s secret of restraint. His luminescent alabaster head, made horned by the arrow that transects it, looms more regally than ever before above the rest of his shortened self.

Their same set of men greets us. Powhatan, Find Gold, Frank, a thin and pale and seated Joe, alive, it seems, for now, despite having been run through the gut with a stick of some kind. Fifty archers line the walls in rusted folding chairs. We are Argyle, Martin, Smith, Breck, Buck, me, six potheads with automatic guns, and more dispersed outside among the dampened trees.

Powhatan stands and looks more tired than when lying down, and yet his breathing makes the room itself breathe. “What?” he says.

“Pocahontas is with us,” I say.

“‘Is’?”

“They—uh—we’ve taken her hostage, Sir.”

Distress and secrecy vie for control of his face, and cause a slight rearrangement of the air in the hall. “What do you want?”

“Peace.”

Find Gold and Frank both make as if to object. Their boss quiets them by extending the fingers of his right hand to their full length at his side.

“And if we don’t agree?” he asks.

I can’t make the threat I’ve been instructed to.

Sal Argyle says, “I think you know.”

Powhatan seems not to notice him. “Where’s Newport?” he says to Smith.

“Gone.”

“Smith, you’d kill my girl?”

Smith looks at the floor of the hall, which shines like dulled gold beneath the bright lamplight. What Sal has done to Smith to make him mute I don’t know, and fear. A quiet noise as of something scraping something else comes from a wall to our right where there hangs, ceiling to floor, an arras on which is stitched a well-known scene of a Moor stabbing a malignant and turbaned Turk beneath whom lies a Venetian the Turk has just beaten. Smith and Argyle have evidently heard it too. Smith’s hand centimeters up toward his gun. Argyle undulates. Frank’s eyeballs flick toward the noise. And into my gal’s dad’s neck and head there comes a sad alertness that makes the walls around him sad, and the air, and the floor the air and walls rest on, which is the floor not only of the hall but of the world.

“So, you,” Powhatan says to me, “you’re now the one who speaks to me because—what?—because you’ve—you’ve—”

“Well I wouldn’t say I—”’

“Tell me what you people want.”

“She wants to speak to her father.”

“So you’re also an emissary for her. How confusing for you.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think the man who makes a threat to kill my daughter if I don’t accept his terms can plausibly negotiate a peace between her and me, so why don’t you tell me what exactly your terms are, and I’ll accept them, because I’m beside myself with anguish over my daughter’s safety, and you and she may take my acceptance of your terms as a sign that I value her life.”

“Sir,” Frank says, “with all due respect, your judgment is understandably clouded by your concern for your daughter.”

“My judgment is clarified by my concern for my daughter,” he replies.

“Or,” Sit Knee says to Frank, “to put it another way, shut up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that while our lives are being sold down the river by this softening geezer.”

“You’ll have to,” Sit Knee says, and turns to half a dozen of the archers seated on the edges of their rusted folding chairs. “Please remove Frank and Joe from the hall.”

They don’t budge.

“Please,” Frank says to them, “remove Sit Knee from the hall,” which they do with a struggle, during which the latter’s face remains unreadable by me.

“And now,” Frank says to the ones still seated around the edges of the hall, “train your arrows on that man.” He points to his boss, at whom the two score men dutifully aim arrows. “And now, won’t you all please stick his counterproductive ass with something sharp and let us be done with him?”

No one moves.

“I said now!”

They continue not to shoot and all look scared, as if to aim at him were only play, while to speak or even think of shooting him will bring them great ill luck.

Frank screams, and screams again, and each scream lasts as long as it takes his lungs to empty of air. Now that Powhatan’s attention is turned to the screams, a young man I recognize as my gal’s gentle friend Stickboy is running out from behind the arras. He shoves a knife in her dad’s back—the back of his upper thigh. Powhatan is falling to the dirt floor. Stickboy is running knife-first at Frank. Their bodies seem to crash and I can’t see clearly. Stickboy collapses to the dirt floor, which, I notice, having been packed down and made smooth, does not absorb but holds, for now, these two men’s blood.

“You think when I told you to kill him I didn’t know you’d try to kill me next?” Frank says to Stickboy, who lies curled up as if not yet ready to be born.

“You think I didn’t know you knew?” Stickboy says.

“Yes, I think you didn’t.”

“You’re right, but now I’m better off than you.”

“That’s what the losers always say to the winners to console themselves for their loss, and that’s why losers lose and winners win.”

“Yes, that’s right, you’ve won. You now have power, strength, a chiefdom, the command of an army, what oil there is in these parts, factories to clean the food, even a crude sort of beauty, and the potential to lose each of those things, and you will lose them, one by one or all at once, long before you die, and their loss will cause you exquisite pain, whereas I have and have always had nothing, which I will never lose, even if someday, by an unlikely turn of events, I should have something,” Stickboy has said, and is dead.