“Tell Mama what?”
“You know what. About you and me going away. About Atlanta.”
Sarat sighed. When she had first told her sister her ambition to one day travel to the Southern capital and work with the government of the Free Southern State, Dana had chuckled at the thought. What use do you think they have down there for a refugee girl from Louisiana? she’d said; you gonna run for president too? But as the months passed and the camp continued to fill well beyond its capacity, its occupants subjected daily to new and varied indignities, the idea of running to the city began to appeal more and more to Dana. She started boasting to her friends about it, until Sarat regretted ever having told her anything about Atlanta.
“We’re not just leaving our mother here and running away,” Sarat said. “Who’s gonna take care of her?”
“Simon’s been taking care of her just fine,” Dana said, pointing at the box under Sarat’s bed.
“Simon doesn’t spend more than one night a month in this tent—you know that.”
“So, what, we’re just gonna live the rest of our lives in this place? Wait for another storm to come and wipe the whole place away, or the Birds to come by and bomb it to hell? I thought you had all these plans about working for the government, letting the world know what the North’s been doing to us, all that stuff. You keep talking about how you’re gonna change things. You can’t change a damn thing living in Patience.”
“We’re gonna go, Dana, I promise. But we gotta think about our people too.”
Dana snorted. “Our people? In this camp, are you kidding me? You think if it weren’t for everyone knowing Simon was with the rebels and you now being Albert Gaines’s pet, they wouldn’t have come through here and stolen every damn thing we got? Ain’t nobody in this camp our people. Only thing we got in common is we all on the losing side of the same war.”
“We’re not losing the war,” Sarat said. “And I’m not Gaines’s pet.”
“C’mon, girl. You spend every damn night with him, he’s got you reading all those books and running all those errands. You know well as I do he’s just an errand boy for all them rebel groups. Comes to places like this looking for anyone dumb enough to strap on a farmer’s suit and blow themselves up outside some Northern checkpoint. Won’t be long before he tries to put a farmer’s suit on you too.”
“He’s a teacher,” Sarat said. “Nothing more.”
Sarat stood up. She lifted her messenger bag off a hook on the wall and slung it over her shoulder.
“I’m gonna go look for Simon out by the creek,” she said. “It’s getting ’round sundown—they should be coming in. Don’t tell Mama nothing about Atlanta, and don’t take any of those pills.”
THE AIR SMELLED of mildew. Everywhere there were signs of damage from the storm, but also signs of recovery. With nowhere else to turn to, the refugees began to rally around the rain-damaged tents like antibodies to an infection.
On her way to the northeastern end of Alabama, Sarat passed countless lines of clothes and sheets and flags and blankets, all drying in the wind; tablets and radios and phones planted like seeds in bags of rice. The sky was a matte purple. Another warm, dry evening was coming over the Mag. The puddles began to dry.
She walked through the northern tents, where there were some signs of damage but no signs of life. She passed the tent in which her pet turtle lived and reminded herself to check on the animal later.
When she approached the remains of Highway 25, she saw a man and a boy, both hunchbacked with heavy baggage, walking north toward the ruined bridge and the gate to the Blue country. She approached and saw that it was Marcus Exum and his father.
The two carried overstuffed packs on their backs and grocery bags in their hands, and the father wore around his neck a pair of birding binoculars. Sarat watched them for a minute as they approached the place where the road once crossed low over the creek.
Before the war, the road ran straight into Tennessee, but now the only things visible above the waterline were two slim concrete barriers that once marked the edges of the highway. They peered just above the surface like stone tightropes. In the distance, beyond a series of large red signs prohibiting passage, the razor-wired fences and tree-camouflaged snipers’ towers marked the beginning of the Blue country.
Sarat approached Marcus and his father. When the man saw her he turned hurriedly to see if there were others watching, and when he saw none he motioned for the girl to leave.
“What are you doing?” Sarat asked.
“It doesn’t matter to you what we’re doing,” he said. “Go on now, this doesn’t concern you.”
“It’s all right, Dad,” Marcus said, setting his grocery bags down. “Let me just say goodbye.”
“No time,” his father said. “They’ll be back at the gates soon.”
“Just one minute, promise.”
Marcus eased his backpack from his shoulders. He’d grown a little in the last year, but still stood only as high as Sarat’s chest. He put his hand on her arm. “We’re leaving, Sarat,” he said. “We’re going to the North tonight. We’re not coming back.”
“Are you crazy?” Sarat said. “You go anywhere near that gate, they’ll shoot you dead.”
Marcus shook his head. “Dad’s been watching. There hasn’t been a single guard at the gate in the last two days. Not one Blue soldier anywhere along the fence. I don’t know where they’ve gone, but they’ve gone.”
Sarat looked out at the gate in the distance. The foliage-covered towers and the old chicanes looked the same as they always did.
“Something’s going to happen,” Marcus’s father said. “They’re getting ready to storm the fence—they’re getting ready to finally come through here.”
“You’ve been saying that for years,” Sarat said.
“They’ve been getting ready for years.”
Sarat turned to Marcus. “You were just gonna go like that? Without even saying goodbye?”
“I knew you were busy with what you’ve been doing,” Marcus said. “We haven’t really talked much in the last little while. I didn’t wanna bother you.”
“But you’re my best friend,” Sarat said.
Marcus turned from her gaze, his eyes to the ground.
“Pick your bags up,” Marcus’s father said. “We got no time to stand around.”
She watched Marcus pick up his belongings. One of the grocery bags was weighed down with ration packs and a water thermos and a couple pairs of underwear; the other had a headlamp and a small camping stove.
“You’ll take care of Cherylene, right?” Marcus said.
Sarat nodded.
“Don’t tell nobody,” Marcus’s father said. “They’ll come back and kill us all if everybody starts trying to get through.”
She watched the man and his son as they traversed the concrete tightrope to the forbidden country. The path jutted only a few inches above the waterline and was a little more than a foot’s width across. They walked carefully, their arms occasionally rising from their sides in an effort to keep balance. As she watched them pass the warning signs, Sarat waited for the snipers’ rifles to ring out, for the man and his son to fall dead in the river. But no shots came.
Soon they crossed past the chicanes and disappeared into the brush. Sarat stood for a long time after they were gone, watching the unmoving land on the other side of the water.
She tried to imagine where her friend and his father would go. Perhaps beyond the brown and scrubby ridge there lay bustling Northern towns brilliant with electric light. Or vast fragrant rows of farmland full of oranges and mandarins and exotic Blue-grown fruit of which she’d never even heard. Perhaps the two pilgrims would find refuge working in one such farm, or maybe their accents and sun-cracked skin would give them away and they’d be shot dead at the gates of the very first town.
And as she imagined these possibilities, Sarat thought of something else: of desertion, of treason against one’s own. But what the man and his son
had done didn’t feel to her like treason, only the grim work of the hopeless. As she’d learned from Albert Gaines about her people’s history of mistreatment at the hands of the North, Sarat had grown to loathe the enemy nation beyond the Tennessee line. But in this moment, as she watched her closest friend disappear into that alien land, she wished only that he be safe there. That he live, that he simply live.
AFTER MARCUS and his father disappeared behind the distant foliage, Sarat walked east in the direction of Chalk Hollow.
The rebels were at the edge of the creek. She heard them before she saw them, a cackle of singing and laughing and loud conversation. Usually they were quiet when they came in across the creek at dusk but this evening they made no effort to hide their presence.
They were Simon’s clan, the Virginia Cavaliers. But in reality there was nothing much to distinguish them from the Mississippi Sovereigns or the New Zouaves or any of the other rebel groups. They were simply boys with guns, fanned out across the border, picking fights with Northerners.
She found them, about a dozen in all, at a clearing a few hundred feet past the broken highway. They had come over on three Sea-Toks and a larger fossil-powered skiff, all of which were docked now in the sandy beachfront, partially hidden among the sweetgum trees. Beside the boats the men were unloading box-crates sealed shut with nails.
“Hey, Sarat!” yelled a half-drunk Cavalier named Eli, a boy of about nineteen who’d come to the camp from Dalton four years earlier. “Hey, Simon, your sister’s here.”
“Yell a little louder,” said Simon, lying on the sand with his back against the black-painted hull, the lapping creek water at his feet. “They didn’t hear you in Tennessee.”
Eli was perched over a small bonfire, grilling. A set of thick steaks sat atop the fire on a charred cookie tray, the flames licking at its underside. The juice of fat and blood set the fire dancing; the tinder crackled and burst.
“Where did you get that meat?” Sarat asked.
“One of their generals was kind enough to hand it over,” said Eli, a wide smile across his face. He was missing one of his upper incisors; his hair was unwashed and matted across his forehead in an oily wave. Like the others he went days without cleaning himself but on this evening the reek of him was overwhelmed by the warm sweetness of the fire and the intoxicating scent of grilling meat.
“You know those pigs up there, they eat like this every night,” said Eli. “Girl, tell me, when did you last eat steak like this?”
“Maybe once back in Louisiana,” said Sarat. “Never had it here.”
“Those pigs eat it every single night,” said Eli.
He leaned down and cut a piece of the steak. It was dense with fat and severed easily under the blade of his bowie knife. He handed it to Sarat. She chewed it slowly, savoring the warmth and the way the marbled flesh both gave and resisted against her teeth. The taste of wood smoke was thick in the charred exterior, the meat beneath it pink and tender.
How could it ever be, thought Sarat, that a person could eat this well every day and not die from the very shame of it—when just a few miles away there lived so many subsisting on so little.
“You gotta be careful,” said Sarat. “They smell that in the camp, they’ll come running.”
“Oh we got some for them too,” said Eli, pointing at the crates along the bank. “We can’t go around handing it out like it’s Christmas or nothing, but we’ll get it to them. God knows they deserve it.”
Eli pierced the steaks with his knife and turned them over; the fire hissed and set its curled fingers upward. He leaned close to Sarat over the flame.
“Hey, are those Southern State boys they sent up here after the storm still around?” he asked.
“Nah,” Sarat replied. “Soon as the rain stopped they were gone.”
“That’s good,” Eli said. “Goddamned if they’re gonna get any of this. Let them go back to Atlanta. They get fed well enough there.”
“So did you steal this, or what?” Sarat asked.
The smile momentarily left Eli’s lips. He was a scrawny boy—all the rebels seemed to either be scrawny or muscle-bound, never regular-set—and the orange glow of the fire put dark shadows in the hollows beneath his jaw.
“Didn’t steal nothing,” he said. “We fought them for it and we won. You’ve been watching too many of their shows, reading too much of their news. They have you thinking they can’t ever be beat. Well they can. Take away their tanks and their Birds and all those toys they hide behind like cowards, make it so it’s just us and them eye-to-eye, and they can be beat.”
“Calm down,” Sarat said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Eli’s smile returned. “I know you didn’t, girl. Hell, I heard you’re learning from Gaines now.” He laughed. “And he loves you. Says you got more balls than most men out here.”
Eli sliced one of the steaks width-wise. “Here,” he said. “Take half of mine.”
Sarat thanked him. She walked to where her brother sat at the creek-side.
A couple of rebels sat nearby on a felled log, playing guitar and singing an old folk song whose popularity had recently been revived by some firebrand folk star in Atlanta, who set the old music to new lyrics. The boys, drunk on Joyful, slurred the words and cackled at their own musical ineptitude. The one playing guitar stumbled through four open chords with uncoordinated fingers, muting half the strings.
Mama take this flag from me
Ain’t my country anymore…
Sarat sat on the sand beside her brother.
“Hey, lady,” he said. He had a goofy grin on his face, a half-empty jug of Joyful beside him. The drink’s reek hung over the beach: a honeyed perfume of fruits left to rot, old bread, creek water, and whatever else the boys could find to give the dark juice muscle—from antifreeze to turpentine to ground-up painkillers.
“You’re celebrating something, I hear,” Sarat said.
“You could say that,” her brother replied.
“I don’t mean to put a damper on it, but Mama’s mad at you.”
“What’s she mad at me for? Didn’t that stuff we sprayed on her tent work?”
“Yeah, but she thinks you should have sprayed it on everybody’s tent. Thinks her neighbors are all looking at her funny because all their tents collapsed but hers looks good as new.”
Simon chuckled and spat. “What’s she think? We got time to spray everybody’s tent down? Anyway, tell her we’re coming around tomorrow to help all those folks fix the place up. Just couldn’t be there when the Free Southern State soldiers were there, or else we’d have to put those government boys in their place. And then the Blue reporters would have a field day saying, Look how the South’s fighting itself.”
Simon poured a capful of hooch from his jug and offered it to Sarat. When she reached for it he swooped it into his own mouth and smiled.
“Very funny,” said Sarat. “That stuff will make you blind, anyway.”
“If it’s any good, it will,” said Simon.
He dug his heels into the sand and watched the boys singing on the log nearby. He’d grown in the last year; not taller—she still had three inches on him—but bulkier. In the rebel camps out by the banks of the Tennessee, he and some of the Cavaliers passed the time curling milk jugs full of sand; he had biceps on him now like rolling hills.
Sarat envied the malleability of boys’ bodies, the way they could, while still boys, cast their physical shapes forward into adulthood like reconnaissance scouts. All her life she’d had little interest in the working of boys’ minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things. But she longed to have such a malleable, predictable body—one that could grow big and strong and yet not raise a single stranger’s eyebrow.
In the amber glow of firelight the boys sang drunkenly. Simon turned to his sister. “We got one of them yesterday, Sarat,” he said. “We got a big one.”
“Who?” Sarat asked.
“A guy named Pearson,” said Simon. “A general, commander of half the troops along the Tennessee line.”
“Jesus. How?”
“We were out in the forest, all the way out east, past Chattanooga. We’d been there for days, camped out by a path the Blues had been using to run supplies in and out of Big Frog. Eli set a trap, a big mine deep in the ground, a little mine just above it. The big mines don’t go off under the weight of a man, but the little ones do, so you make it so that one sets off the other. Then we lay a tree trunk across the path and we just waited. Waited for three days till finally this convoy comes rolling through. Usually they run in fours but this time it was just two LAVs. We thought it was just grunts rotating through the forward base at Halfway Branch. But when they came out to take a look at the log, well, Eli’s looking through the binoculars and he says, ‘One of them got stars on his shoulders.’ And we’re watching as he walks out ahead of all of them, like he’s making a big show of leading, and he steps right on it. The little mine sets off the big mine and takes all but two of them out right there. We came running down there soon as it went off, and in the back of these LAVs were nothing but crates of supplies. So many, we couldn’t even carry them all.”
Simon pointed to the sky. “I’m telling you, He was watching over us, Sarat. He was watching over us, I know it.”
“Simon, you can’t be out here celebrating,” said Sarat. “You gotta hide. They’ll come after you.”
Simon laughed. “Who are they gonna come after? They don’t know nothing. All they know how to do is build walls and send the Birds to do their dirty work for them.”
“You gonna keep all this stuff in the camp?”
“Most of it is just food,” said Simon. “We’re gonna keep some of it up north in the empty tents, but most of it we’ll just give out. People deserve to eat.”
“They’ll know,” said Sarat. “Word will get out. You can’t have a whole camp eating steak and nobody hears about it.”
“It’ll be all right,” Simon said. He put his arm around his sister and pulled her close to him, her smooth-shaved head resting against his shoulder. “Christ, lady, when did you get so nervous? What happened to the girl who jumped into Shit Lake on a dare?”
American War Page 17
