American War

by Omar El Akkad

  She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully.

  It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.

  LIKE THEIR OLD HOME by the banks of the Mississippi Sea, the Chestnuts’ tent was sectioned into thirds. Martina’s room occupied the back third, anchored by a steel hospital cot and an old chest of drawers.

  In the middle third of the tent the twins lived in opposing beds. On Dana’s side there were the salvaged trappings of teenage girlhood—a straightening iron; a makeup kit composed of various brands and shades of concealer and blush and lipstick and eye shadow. Near these things lay a stack of dog-eared, yellowing copies of Belle Magazine, a publication out of print for decades.

  On Sarat’s side of the tent there were no posters and few possessions. In a large plastic bowl she kept a potpourri of war seeds—bullet casings and wild-toothed slivers of shrapnel. They were given to her as presents by the sullen grunts charged with scouring the Northern boundary of the camp for land mines. She liked watching the soldiers work, their frames hunchbacked, their ancient metal detectors helplessly beeping.

  In a small space ahead of the girls’ room Martina kept a kitchen. The area between the kitchen and the tent’s front door was Simon’s room. It was a chaotic space, thick with the dank smell of unwashed clothing that sat in a heap at the foot of the boy’s bed. A blanket lay tucked under the bottom of the bed’s mattress, creating a makeshift curtain that hid whatever was stored beneath the bed. On the wall there hung an old poster of pristine Texas desert, unspoiled and unmarked. It was a form of protest. The desert poster became popular among the teenage boys at the camp after the administrators banned posters featuring a particular brand of long-discontinued, fossil-run muscle car. Before that, it was snakes of any kind; and before that, the rebel rattlesnake; and before that—in the beginning—posters bearing the names of any of the rebel groups. Soon the administrators would get around to banning Texas pastorals, and the boys would move on to something else.

  Everywhere in the tent there were piles of accumulated things—hot plates, standing fans, two mini-fridges, half-empty bottles of rubbing alcohol; moisturizer; paperwork from the camp and from the Free Southern State; can openers; first-aid kits; and, more than all of these things, blankets.

  Blankets saturated every aid shipment to Camp Patience, boxes upon boxes of burly fabric that scraped the skin like sandpaper. Even in the deadest of winter there was no need for blankets, so instead the refugees fashioned from them room dividers and tablecloths, foot mats and drawer-lining. Still, there were more blankets than anyone knew what to do with. Folded piles of blankets lay beneath the twins’ beds and above the filing cabinet. They were useless as bartering currency, subject to an inflation even worse than that of the Southern dollar. And yet the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China and the Bouazizi Empire kept sending more. For the life of her, Martina could not imagine what the foreigners thought the weather was like in the Red, but then she couldn’t even imagine the benefactors as people. They existed in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in some vast, indecipherable machine, its only visible output these hulking aid ships full of blankets.

  MARTINA RESTED on her cot. She closed her eyes but could not sleep. The midday heat was building. She sat up and went outside.

  She walked south, away from her tent, into Georgia. She followed the paths between the tents until she reached the place where the woman with the cleft-lipped baby lived. It was one of the newer tents, near the southwestern edge of the camp. The woman was alone, changing her child on the bed.

  He was a pristine baby boy, his skin smooth as alabaster. Even the malformation that split his upper lip looked flawless, as though it were everyone else that was built the wrong way.

  “Mornin’, ” Martina said. “You got a minute?”

  The woman said nothing. She was in her early twenties. She wore an FSS shirt and a plain gray skirt that ran to her ankles.

  “Lara told me you’re not interested in a letter for the camp director anymore,” Martina said.

  “That’s right,” the woman replied.

  “You got some other plan?”

  “We’ll make do.”

  “Look, I don’t know your story, and I don’t care,” Martina said. “But in this place we don’t have the luxury of inventing enemies. Let me write that letter for you. I don’t need any payment.”

  “No. Thank you. We’ll make do,” the woman said. She lay her baby on a small scrap of aid blanket. The child grasped at the air with chubby little limbs.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Martina said. “We’re not even Catholic. That statue belongs to my husband.”

  “So your husband’s Catholic.”

  “My husband’s dead.”

  The woman did not respond. Her baby gurgled and spat and stared transfixed at the ceiling.

  “Fine,” Martina said. “Do what suits you. Just remember that it’s that baby boy who’s paying for your made-up grudges.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” the woman said.

  Martina left the tent. Her anger at the young woman’s stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she’d found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she’d been made to feel alien to some stranger’s expectation of what constituted the right and normal world—the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she’d chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter. And no matter how much she tried to fight it, every now and then it still made her venomous. Stay mean if you want to, you stupid little girl, she thought. Cling to that tiny piece of power you think you have. But I hope every time you see your baby’s ruined lips you think of me.

  She walked back to her own neighborhood in Mississippi. On her way she caught sight of Sarat playing tag with a gaggle of boys a few years younger than she was. They dodged around the tents and under the weighted clotheslines, giggling and screaming. Martina called her daughter over.

  “Stop rolling around in the dirt,” she said. “You look filthy.”

  “We’re just playing,” the girl replied, catching her breath as the rest of the children sprinted onward.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarat said. “Out with the older kids in Missy’s tent, probably.”

  “I thought I told you to keep an eye on her.”

  “They’re not gonna eat her.”

  “How ’bout your brother? I haven’t seen him all morning.”

  “I heard he and Mark and them all snuck out to Muscle Shoals. Don’t tell him I told you, he’ll get mad.”

  “Muscle Shoals? How’d they get out of the camp?”

  “Same way smugglers get in,” Sarat said, pointing east. “Through Sandy Creek on the Alabama side.”

  “How do you know that? You been going out with them?”

  “Like they’d ever let me.”

  “So you just know, then?”

  The girl shrugged. “Everybody knows.”

  Martina brushed some of the dirt off the side of Sarat’s sleeveless summer dress. At twelve years of age she was already wearing hand-me-downs—gifts from the parents of children three years older than she was. And even these seemed to shrink daily around her growing frame. Her growth spurt was so rapid over the last three years that her mother feared it might be the result of some chemical imbalance, a sickness. She was the same height now as her
mother, with a frazzled head of hair made stiff by sweat and dirt.

  “Go find your sister, and then the two of you come home and get cleaned up,” Martina said. “You’ve been out enough for one day. And stay away from the north side.”

  Sarat nodded. “OK, Mama.”

  SARAT WATCHED HER MOTHER retreat into the tent. In the time it had taken mother and daughter to talk, the rest of the children had galloped out of sight, and it seemed pointless now to try to catch them. Sarat returned to the women’s shower tent, on whose moist and mildewing front steps she’d left her sandals so as to run more freely.

  Like the crevices of a body, the shower tents radiated a damp, human-scented heat. This was most evident in the early morning hours when the water was coolest and the showers most bearable, and a trail of groggy-eyed refugees could be seen shuffling like pilgrims in their plastic sandals to the stalls. As they washed, the runoff spilled from the drains into a wastewater trench fifteen feet wide and five feet deep. The trench ran in a circle around the camp and was nicknamed Emerald Creek. In its slow journey to the purification tanks, the brown sludge of human waste produced a stench so overwhelming that the refugees, en masse, refused to live in any tent within fifty feet of it.

  Sarat put her sandals on and walked east into Alabama to find her sister. Deliberately against her mother’s wishes, she veered north and walked along the fenced boundary. It was near this fence where she spent much of her free time, alone and watching the young men charged with de-mining the land between the northern end of the camp and the Tennessee line.

  They were hopeless-looking men, sub-privates by rank, and because they were technically in the employ of the Free Southern State they were not allowed to wear the white vests stamped with the red crescent; those were reserved for the neutral aid workers. Instead they wore yellow cycling jackets and helmets covered with reflective decals, and these they hoped would signal to the Blues across the border a kind of unofficial noncombatant status.

  Even with these uniforms, it was too dangerous to do the work at night, and so the men worked in the daytime. They became friends with the girl watching them, and offered her whatever interesting false positives their detectors uncovered. She was a curiosity to them—a big-limbed, wild-haired girl who’d taken an insatiable interest in their slow, wartime metallurgy.

  In Alabama, Sarat came across a boy playing with a washtub half-full of brown water. By the northerly location of his tent and the rattlesnake on his T-shirt—for which he had not yet been reprimanded—she knew him to be a recent arrival. He had green eyes and light brown hair in a neat part down the middle. He appeared about twelve years old, if a bit runty for his age. But in fact he was two years older than Sarat.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  The boy looked up, startled. “I’m making water clean,” he said. “My father said you can do it with just some plastic wrap and the sun.”

  Without asking, Sarat took a seat in the dirt beside the boy, her curiosity piqued. In the tin washtub the boy had poured a couple of bottles of water and a few handfuls of dirt. In the middle of the tub stood one of the empty water bottles, weighed down with a couple of pebbles. The boy had sealed the tub with a layer of clear wrap, also weighed down at the center with pebbles, such that the wrap dipped just above the mouth of the bottle.

  “The heat’s gonna lift the water, but not the dirt,” the boy said. “And since the clean water can’t get out, it just slides down and falls in the bottle.”

  Sarat inspected the tub. She saw droplets moving slowly down the wrap, the sun fashioning tiny rainbows in their bellies.

  “It’s called heat evaporation,” the boy said.

  “You just moved here?” Sarat asked.

  “Yeah, two days ago,” the boy replied. “We don’t know anybody yet.”

  “My name’s Sarat Chestnut.”

  “My name’s Marcus Exum,” the boy said. “You Alabaman?”

  “No. We’re in the Mississippi slice. Been here six years.”

  “Six years!” Marcus repeated. “My dad says anyone who stays more than a month is gonna die here.”

  “It’s not so bad. Pretty boring most days. They got a schoolroom but they don’t care if you go or not.”

  The children’s attention turned to a nearby tent, from which Marcus’s father emerged. Like many of the men in the camp, he was potbellied and possessed an unruly beard that hid the contours of his neck. And like all the men, he registered as vaguely anomalous in a place inhabited predominantly by women and children. He wore brown overalls and a white undershirt recently washed but to which the old stains still held. The man approached his son.

  “This is Sarat Chestnut,” Marcus said. “She been here six years.”

  Sarat waved hello. The man looked her over, neither warm nor cold.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twelve,” Sarat replied.

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I’m big for my age. Grew five inches last year.”

  “You been here six years, you say?”

  Sarat nodded. The man pointed to the northeast, where the remains of old Highway 25 ran straight into a phalanx of razor wire, guards’ quarters, and bright red signs warning against trespass.

  “You know where that road goes?” the man asked.

  “Sure. It’s the northern gate. Leads up to the Tennessee border. They get real mad if you go anywhere near it. My brother says the Blues got snipers in all the trees right on the other side, and they’ll shoot anyone who crosses, don’t care if it’s kids or women or anybody.”

  The man watched the gate a little longer, squinting in the midday sun. He walked a few feet toward it and then changed his mind and turned south, to where a group of four recent arrivals were arranged around an upturned cardboard box, playing cards.

  Marcus turned to his new friend. “They really got snipers on the other side?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Sarat replied. “You wanna see?”

  Marcus nodded. Sarat led him to a spot along the northern fence where three of the links had broken, leaving a gap just big enough to fit a head through.

  “Look here,” Sarat said. “Up at the tallest tree over there. You see it?”

  Marcus inspected the horizon. Up-field the trees were thin but in one place the foliage thickened. In this small patch of forestland there rose a tree about ten feet higher than the rest.

  “The minesweepers say that’s not a real tree, and that’s not real leaves or anything,” Sarat said. “They call it like a bird’s nest but for snipers. They’re up there all day and all night, just waiting on someone to try to cross. Then they shoot them dead.”

  Marcus watched in silence for a moment.

  “Should we be looking at them like this?” he asked. “Won’t they shoot us?”

  Sarat had never considered this possibility before. As she thought about it, a squirrel jumped somewhere in the trees and the branches shook. The two children nearly jumped out of their skins.

  SARAT FOUND HER SISTER and four of her friends near the camp’s administrative buildings. They were perched on the closed lids of large garbage bins in the narrow alleyway between the cafeteria building and the director’s offices. For much of the day, the alleyway was deserted—at this hour especially, as staff and refugees alike congregated within the camp’s easternmost building, the chapel. No matter the position of the sun, the alleyway was always draped in shade, and on summer days was often ten degrees cooler than any other outdoor space in the camp.

  Dana waved at her sister as she approached. “Hey, beautiful girl,” she said. In the moments before Sarat’s arrival the children had been looking at something on an old tablet, but they covered it now.

  Sarat waved back. She recognized the others as tenth graders: the Mailer girls, who were the only other twins Sarat knew of in the camp; a boy named Avery and another named Bishop, both of whom she knew as friends of Simon and frequent escapees through the badly guarded marina nea
r Sandy Creek.

  In almost every other way, the older children were alien to her—possessed of a dramatic concern for things that seemed inane and devoid of adventure: the color and style of skirts, the arrival of facial hair, the mysterious topology of flesh.

  “Mama says we have to come home now,” Sarat said.

  “Why us?” Dana replied. “Simon’s been out all day and he doesn’t get in trouble for it.”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what she said.”

  “They let boys do whatever they want,” said one of the Mailer twins. A beauty spot on the left cheek distinguished one girl from the other but Sarat could not remember which was which. “Last year Bill and Mark Hernandez tore down half the loudspeakers in Alabama and threw them in the creek, and they didn’t do a thing to them.”

  “Didn’t they get sent home in January?” asked Avery.

  “Yeah, but that was just because their parents had to go,” said the moleless Mailer. “It wasn’t because they were being punished.”

  “It’s easy, really,” Dana said. “All the boys, when they turn fifteen, they give them a gun and send them out the north gate. You have to survive out there one week, and if you come back you can stay.”

  “Why do we have to go?” Bishop said. “We didn’t do anything.”

  “But if you wanted to do anything, you could,” said Dana. “That’s why.”

  “All right, all right, how about this?” Bishop said. “Can I send Sarat in my place?”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” Dana replied.

  “I’ll go,” said Sarat. “I know where the snipers are.”

  At this the boys and the Mailer twins laughed wildly.

  “You hear that?” Bishop said. “Give her a chance. She’ll end the war tomorrow!”

  Dana made a gesture at Bishop that Sarat had been taught by her mother never to make. She stood up. “I’ll see you losers tomorrow,” she said.

  “We’ll be out by the snipers. Bring Sarat,” Bishop replied, to a roar from the Mailers.

  “Screw you, Bishop,” said Dana.