American War

by Omar El Akkad

  When she emerged from the water she found a fresh set of clothes waiting on a rock by the bank. Dana sat by the side of the woodshed.

  There lay a straight razor and a small bowl of eucalyptus cream set atop a stump. Sarat sat by the river and shaved her head clean. She sat for a while watching the river move, savoring the crisp coolness of the cream against her scalp, the air against her skin. Then she stood up and dressed.

  She joined her sister by the woodshed. There was almost a foot of difference in height between them, Sarat pushing six-foot-five and still, a year short of adulthood, not sure if she had another spurt in her.

  She sat by her sister’s side. Dana’s hair smelled of coconuts and jasmine; it curled the way waves curl, tinting the sunlight chocolate. Sarat could already see the boys in Augusta leering.

  “You should go inside and say hello,” Dana said. “Simon’s in a good mood today.”

  “He saying much?” Sarat asked.

  “Echoes what you tell him. But it’s not nothing.”

  Sarat shook her head. “Give me a minute,” she said. “I still got lightning inside me.” She held up her right hand, which shivered like a picked string.

  Dana wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder. Sarat leaned over and curled up like a child with her head on her sister’s lap.

  “Beautiful girl,” said Dana. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  The sisters saw Karina in the garden. They watched her hang clothes out on the line by the riverbank. She pretended not to see them sitting by the woodshed. She sang as she worked: the same old hymn she always sang, playing her own choir, echoing each line—We are we are, climbing climbing.

  “She’s taking good care of him,” Dana said.

  “I don’t trust her,” Sarat replied.

  “What’s she done?”

  “Nothing she’s done, just something about her. I don’t know what she really thinks of us. What she really wants.”

  “What do you care what she thinks of us?” asked Dana. “She’s just working here, nothing more.”

  “She’s in our home, isn’t she? Anyway, she keeps talking to Simon and anyone else who’ll listen about how she doesn’t care who wins, North or South, just as long as there’s no more war. Like she’d be happy if the Blues marched on Atlanta tomorrow. You know her parents live up in the North? Moved there right before the war started.”

  “So? Wouldn’t you, if you had no stake in it?”

  “Nobody has no stake in it,” said Sarat.

  NIGHT FELL. A humid film spread over the air. Sarat awoke from a fitful nap with her sister’s hand still caressing her head. She heard the sound of a motorboat engine in the distance, a rebel skiff from further inland.

  “Why’d you let me sleep?” said Sarat.

  “Wasn’t long,” Dana replied. “You were barely out an hour.”

  As the skiff landed, the sisters went to the woodshed and retrieved the most recent shipment of locked boxes. They carried them to the waiting boat.

  The boy at the helm of the boat, a New Zouave from southern Alabama, thanked them. He took the boxes without checking their contents, knowing the arms promised him would be there, knowing from experience that the Chestnuts were as reliable a conduit as any along the Savannah smugglers’ trail.

  They watched him leave upriver. When he was gone and the grogginess of interrupted sleep had left her, Sarat became aware of the hunger eating at her stomach. The last of the apricot mush she ate in the forest had gone through her. She yearned for okra swimming in oil; pigeon grilled over charcoal; the cinnamon burn of tub-brewed Joyful.

  “Let’s go to Augusta,” she said.

  DURING THE WAR Atlanta was the heart of the South but Augusta supplied the blood. Ever since the storms and rising seas swallowed much of the eastern coast, it was this place that functioned as the Red country’s most vital port. Toward the end of every month, a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast, the foreign shipping vessels arrived from the far side of the world. The ships’ captains waited there for reef pilots to come and guide the hulking freighters around the remains of the submerged coastal cities and into the Augusta docks.

  In anticipation of the ships’ monthly bounty, an assortment of opportunists descended on the city: ship hands, smugglers, rebels, reef pilots, foreign captains and their crews. They were joined by sailors on leave from the impotent Southern navy, whose skeleton fleet had long ago surrendered the ocean to the Blues. For a few days every month, the port’s riverside bars and brothels and boardinghouses hummed.

  At dusk the dockmaster flipped a switch and a string of Christmas lights hung along the boardwalk came to life. The boardwalk sat atop the flattened head of the Reynolds Street levee, which rose twenty feet high. The river-facing side of the levee was sheer, except in the places where stairs led to the reef pilots’ house and the wharf. On the city-facing side, the concrete slope was of a gentle gradient, and it was on this side where, in the early morning, many of the passed-out drunks could be found sleeping.

  BY THE TIME Sarat and Dana arrived in Augusta, the bars overflowed—not only with those waiting on the aid ships but also with tourists from all over the Mag, in town to watch the Yuffsy.

  The sisters went first to the Hotel D’Grub near 12th Street. There was a gaggle of dockhands and Atlanta boys gathered on the lawn of the repurposed Baptist church, drunk and cheerful. In the center of the lawn there stood an ancient Chevy fossil truck, mounted on bricks. The truck was brown with rust, its hood sheared off, a charcoal grill in the place where the engine used to be.

  Billows of smoke rose from the grill. The retired freight captain Isaac, who ran the Hotel D’Grub, stood between the truck’s lightless eye sockets, a palmetto fan in his hand. He was a large man, shirtless, sweaty but serene under his skipper hat despite the barrage of orange embers the truck spat in his direction. The smoke climbed from the blackened trays and made of the redbrick church behind it a distant dream.

  “How are you, old man?” said Sarat.

  The captain turned. “Well now, if it isn’t the only real goddamn men in Augusta. Make way, for Christ’s sake!” he said, kicking at two Atlanta college boys slumped on garden recliners near the grill. “It’s a zoo around this time of the month—you know how it gets when there’s money to be had.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go inside and clean you out anyway. Haven’t had a decent meal in a week.”

  The captain nodded. “Go on in. I’ll send some steak your way.”

  Sarat laughed. “Ain’t nothing like that flying steak you got here. You shoot them down yourself?”

  “I’ll shoot you down, you keep running your mouth. Flying steak’s better than none.”

  The captain pointed to the grand bullethead windows of the church’s street-side facade. The original windows had been smashed long ago in one of the riots following the massacre at Fort Jackson, the insides stripped and looted down to the pews and the floorboards.

  “Your friend Bragg is in there, by the way,” he said.

  “The old one or the young one?” asked Sarat.

  “Ha! The old one can’t get up to take a piss nowadays. It’s the kid. Got his whole entourage with him too.”

  “Christ,” said Sarat. “Well that’s no fun.”

  The captain wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand on the side of his jeans. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know. I’ll go in there and kick his ass—don’t care how united his daddy’s little rebels are.”

  They thanked the old captain and went inside. Beyond the redbrick exterior, there was little left of the original church—only the words AND THEY WENT DOWN BOTH INTO THE WATER, painted in an arch along the wall, and below it a pale hollowness where once there hung a shining cross.

  The captain was a collector of long-dead things, species that had once existed but could not adapt to the planet’s unbreaking fever. Taxidermied heads of caribou and muskoxen and sea lions and white-faced foxes
stared down from the walls with marbles in their eyes.

  The dinner hall was full. The air was heavy with the smell of fryer oil and sawdust on spilled beer. The tables were arranged haphazardly throughout what was once a grand nave. In the rear of the room a frenzied herd of line cooks moved in chaotic ritual around stoves and bubbling pots.

  The twins searched the room for a place to sit. Instantly, Sarat saw the men turn to watch her sister. Dana shifted the room’s orbit, took charge of the air. The boys turned toward her like filings to a magnet’s pole. Sarat waited for one of them to do more than look; secretly she hoped for it.

  They found a table in the back by the kitchen. But before they sat, one of Adam Bragg Jr.’s bodyguards came over and asked them to join his party.

  “We’re good where we are,” said Sarat.

  “We’ll be over in a minute,” said Dana. When the bodyguard was gone she turned to her sister. “Just a couple of minutes,” she said. “Just to make nice.”

  “You know it won’t be a couple of minutes,” said Sarat. “Why we gotta go make nice? We don’t work for him, we haven’t pledged allegiance to no United Rebels or anybody else.”

  “I don’t give a shit ’bout the United Rebels or anybody else. But people like him won’t suddenly stop being important because we ignore them. Better to have him on our side in case we need him or his daddy’s help one day.”

  “Goddammit,” Sarat said, rising. “Can’t even eat proper around them. Let’s get it over with.”

  They found the young man, who on this night was celebrating his twenty-first birthday, seated at a large circular table in a corner of the room. It was the only table in the place covered with cloth, and around it hovered a flock of bodyguards, rebel grunts, well-wishers, and hangers-on.

  Seated at the table were a couple of faces Sarat recognized: a well-known smuggler named Henson; Augusta’s deputy mayor; the head of the reef pilots’ union; and three other men who, by the stiff pull of their ill-fitting suits, were probably government men from Atlanta. The fractured politics of the wartime South dictated that high-ranking members of the United Rebels and the Free Southern State should not be seen socializing, given the diverging tenors of each on the subject of peace. But in Augusta such rules were often temporarily set aside.

  “ ’Evening, ladies,” said Bragg. “A true pleasure to see you. Sit, sit.”

  The sisters sat near their host. He introduced them to the table, loud enough so that the orbiting entourage could also hear.

  “These are Dana and Sarat Chestnut,” he said, “survivors of the Camp Patience massacre and proud patriots of the Southern nation. I’m honored to call them friends.”

  “It’s great to see you two girls,” one of the suits from Atlanta said. Bragg introduced him as the director of the Free Southern State’s media operations for northern Georgia.

  “Aren’t you two the sisters of that boy Simon, the Miracle Boy?”

  “Yeah,” said Sarat, “and whose sister is you?”

  The man looked at his host, the smile fading from his lips.

  “Enough small talk,” said Bragg. “Let’s eat.”

  From the kitchen came a parade of bowls and silver trays: chicken liver; cracklings; rice smothered in redeye gravy; corn chips and Mississippi caviar; beef that was not really beef but pigeon, charred black on the outside and pink within. The table descended into a glutton’s silence, the only sound that of jaws and silverware. In the lull, Bragg leaned over to his guests.

  “I heard you were out in Halfway,” he said. “That true?”

  Sarat said nothing.

  “Well, at least you made it out alive. Not many my father sends out there can say the same.”

  When the guests were done, the plates were cleared and in their place came others: trays of sliced peaches and watermelons and cantaloupes; jugs of ice water and lemonade and artillery punch. Until finally those seated around the table could eat and drink no more.

  Tipsy and slurring his words, one of the Atlanta men rose to make a toast. He started with something about the Southern spirit and the great and noble cause of freedom, but soon he talked himself into a pretzel, until finally Bragg interrupted him: “Let’s just say: To the South, victorious.”

  “To the South, victorious!” echoed the man. The table raised their glasses.

  The men from Atlanta soon left. A few of Bragg’s people took their place at the table. Among them were two of the Salt Lake Boys, Trough and Cornhill.

  There had been six when the rebels first found them: orphans in the battle of Spanish Fork, where the Blues, Mexican troops, and even a few misguided Texas outcasts fought to a standstill near what became the very northwestern edge of the Mexican Protectorate.

  They were rumored to be the brood of Mormons. In the aftermath of the battle, the rebels found them hiding in a piggery on the outskirts of town, and named them after the places they found them. Eventually they were taken back south and drafted into the Bragg family’s bustling orbit.

  The staff cleaned the tables and then brought out cigars and brandy. The cigars were from the old Caribbean islands, expensive and among the last of their kind. The haze that filled the air was sweet and earthy.

  “You know my father sends me out here because he doesn’t trust me,” said Bragg, leaning close to the twins, high on the easy camaraderie of the freshly drunk. “He says it’s to make sure the supplies get past the Blues out on the coast and into the right hands—to keep an eye on things. But I think he just wants me out of Atlanta as much as possible. Afraid I’ll kill him in his sleep, all that palace coup shit old men worry ’bout.”

  Bragg laughed. He was looking at Dana but watching her sister. He carried an effortless charm wielded almost exclusively by those born into comfort or those who rose from nothing to achieve it. He smiled by default, teeth sheathed, eyes like pistol barrels, as though a camera lens stalked constantly on his periphery. He was gifted with a very rare and advantageous talent for seeming to speak intimately, every word a precious secret between old friends.

  Others came to the table, but were turned away: rebels and would-be rebels and the kin of both, all in need of favors; dockhands and laid-off reef pilots looking for smuggling work; refugees wanting a room in the Atlanta slums, refugees wanting out.

  And then there were those men aligned with the groups who’d refused to come under the United Rebels’ umbrella—they watched from tables at the other end of the room, observing the delicate fracture lines of the divided, wartime South.

  To Sarat, it was all nonsense, the petty turf wars of insecure men. Rarely a day passed without news of some fresh dispute between the Free Southern State and the United Rebels and the myriad fringe fighters who controlled swaths of territory in the border battlegrounds—disputes over who should run the schools, collect the taxes; whose dead should place first on the murals. She had seen them do these things both publicly—in defiant, chest-thumping speeches—and privately, pragmatically, in the backrooms of Atlanta and Augusta. She saw them do these things and she was disgusted by it. They were to her nothing more than prideful, opportunistic captains, arguing over the boundaries of long-obsolete star maps as all the while the opposing armada’s cannonballs tore their hull to shreds.

  For Sarat Chestnut, the calculus was simple: the enemy had violated her people, and for that she would violate the enemy. There could be no other way, she knew it. Blood can never be unspilled.

  “Anyway, the old man will be glad to hear you made it out alive from Halfway…” said Bragg.

  “Keep your voice down,” said Sarat. “You want everyone in the place to know?”

  “Don’t worry so much,” replied Bragg. “You’re still new, still a ghost. Only people in this room who understand what you’ve been up to are at this table. And believe me, they’ll have their tongues cut out before they say a word of it to someone who’s not supposed to hear.”

  He turned to the two Salt Lake Boys sitting at his side. “Ain’t that right?”r />
  The boys said nothing. They sat as though encased in wax, no smile or frown on their lips. The elder of the two wore his hair parted down the middle—a child’s haircut that made him look younger than his sibling, who had his hair buzzed close to the scalp.

  “You know their two older brothers are already dead?” said Bragg, speaking as though the boys were not at the table. “One got taken during a FOB raid near Fayetteville—Lord knows what hellhole the Blues are keeping him in now, if they haven’t already killed him. The other strapped on a farmer’s suit and sneaked himself past the wire. Made it all the way up to Kentucky then got himself shot dead outside a checkpoint before he could even get the damn thing to blow.

  “My old man signed off on both too. Neither kid had so much as fired a pistol in his whole life, but he okayed it anyway.”

  Bragg turned to Sarat. “But with you, he wouldn’t hear it. Couldn’t imagine a girl out there fighting. If it wasn’t for Gaines’s pull with him, no way he would have changed his mind. Anyway, he’ll want to see you, so you can plead your case to him. Maybe he’ll give you a second chance.”

  “I don’t plead with no one,” said Sarat. “Your old man is nothing to me. He ain’t my boss, ain’t my father. I don’t need his permission. You got something you need to say to him, go on and say it yourself.”

  “I’d rather just wait for him to die, if I’m being honest,” said Bragg. He waited on the sisters for a reaction and got none. “You know he was fifty-six when he had me? Fifty-six! There’s a goddamn half-century between us—how am I supposed to bridge that? He’s caught up in the old way of doing things, still thinks he’s in the desert, still fighting that old, faraway war. All that tradition he’s saddled with, it’s too late to shake it off. Better just to wait him out and hope they haven’t raised the Blue banner over Atlanta before he finally has the decency to die.”