American War

by Omar El Akkad

  Near the ever-growing slums stood the electronics sweatshops and the shirt factories and the vertical farms. These were huge structures, wider than they were tall. The sweatshops and the factories were made of red brick and the farms were encased in thick glass. The glass was impenetrable to the eye, lacquered from the inside with condensation. Only the reek of manure escaped the walls and clung to the outskirts of the city like a coat of paint. Every dawn and dusk a bleak procession marched from the slums to the sprawling workhouses, and from the workhouses to the slums.

  Closer to the heart of the city, the bureaucracy of the Free Southern State—a set of gray, identical buildings—acted as a moat around the innermost core. In the center was the Southern State Capitol; the residences of President Kershaw and of the senior secretaries; as well as the gaudy, gated mansions of the South’s neo-grandees, who owned the sweatshops and the factories and the farms.

  Attic drove slowly through the slums. The air smelled of smog and the exhaust of a thousand humming generators. A small group of children ran aside the old fossil car, knowing through instinct that the driver of such a thing must reside above the masses in the hierarchy of the Red. They tapped on the windows and asked for change. An old man limped from one car to the next, selling tissue boxes for five dollars apiece. Lone Star flags hung limp from the balconies overhead as the car inched through the alleys of Little Houston.

  It took two hours to get from Sarat’s home in Lincolnton to Atlanta, and another two to get from the outskirts of the city to the core. At the edge of the United Rebels’ compound, the car stopped at a wire-fenced gate manned by a couple of boys in old jungle fatigues. The guards eyed Attic’s passenger with vague disdain. They opened the gate and waved the car through.

  It was a simple compound, made up of three squat buildings huddled under a highway overpass. The buildings bore no signage, and at the steps of each sat a few men and boys in plastic chairs, rifles by their sides.

  Two of these men ushered Sarat and Attic to the second floor of the middle building. There they sat in a large room that resembled a living area. They waited for half an hour before Bragg Sr. arrived. He was wheeled in by his son and joined by three assistants. Even as Atlanta sweltered, the old man wore a buttoned shirt and a sweater vest, and yet didn’t break a sweat, as though his pores had hardened and dried with time.

  His son wheeled him close to Attic and Sarat, and then took a seat in a corner of the room.

  Bragg Sr. waved his hand in Attic’s direction, and quickly the boy stood up and left. Then he looked Sarat over from head to toe, a vague, strained look on his face, as though he were reading a book written in a language other than his own.

  Finally, he turned to his son. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t really.” His son said nothing.

  He turned back to his guest. “So you’re the girl who caused all that mess,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

  “Sarat Chestnut.”

  “Sarat Chestnut,” Bragg Sr. repeated. “You from the Montgomery Chestnuts? Good people, those. Had a boy named Paul, fought and died in Beaumont early on in the war.”

  “No,” said Sarat.

  “Her people are from Louisiana,” said Bragg Jr., “down by the Mississippi Sea near Old Orleans.”

  “Christ Almighty, she ain’t even from the Red!” said the old man. “The child of swamp people, out on the front firing a gun. Is that what we’ve come to?”

  He inched closer to Sarat. “You know, when Albert first told me about you, I thought he was playing games. That’s what he’s always been like, trying to rile everyone up with new things, recruiting more girls than boys. Every few weeks, another pet project.”

  Sarat winced. She had always known there were others; every time news came of some homicide bomber sneaking into the Blue country and turning one of their city squares to rubble, she always wondered if it wasn’t Gaines who’d eased the farmer’s suit onto the martyr’s frame. But in another compartment of her mind she secretly harbored the notion that perhaps she was the only one—that, having found her, he had no reason to recruit anyone else to the cause. She knew it wasn’t true—of course it wasn’t true—but that was no hindrance to believing it.

  “Ah, but still, I got a soft spot for that Gaines,” the elder Bragg continued. “He’s worked hard for the cause. Used to fight for the Northerners once, back when that Bouazizi was just a bunch of tribes tearing each other apart. But that was before all this, and I don’t hold it against him…”

  Sarat felt Bragg’s ashtray breath on her face. It amazed her, the length at which old men could talk. She wondered if it wasn’t the sound of his own voice, rather than the words themselves, that pleased him. He had small dull eyes and the only time they lit up was when he was speaking.

  Suddenly he stopped. He turned to one of his assistants. “Get us some water, Noah,” he said. “And get the boys to move the fans in from the office. It’s hotter than hell in here.”

  The assistant left the room and soon a couple of young men entered with electric fans in hand. They set them up on opposite ends of the room, such that their crosswinds met where Sarat and the old man sat.

  “And where’s that sister of yours, anyway?” asked Bragg Sr. “I told them I wanted to see both of you.”

  “She’s not a part of this,” said Sarat.

  “Darling, we’re all a part of this.”

  The assistant returned with two glasses on a tray. The old man drank as though it were his first time seeing water.

  “It’s that goddamn Gaines,” he said, wiping his mouth. “He does this to all his little kids, makes them think it’s all about them—that the whole damn war turns on how they feel, what they lost, how they’re hurting. But it doesn’t. There’s a whole great world out there, little girl…”

  “Don’t call me little girl,” said Sarat.

  “A whole great world, more than can fit in the eye of your Templestowe.”

  He smiled when Sarat’s brows furrowed at the mention of her rifle’s name. “That’s right, we know secrets here too. But we’re your friends, and a lot of them out there ain’t.”

  He pointed toward a half-open window, through which a sliver of downtown Atlanta sizzled in the heat and grime. “Just down the street, there’s FSS men who’d hand you over to the Blues tomorrow if they thought it’d buy them a little more favor with Columbus, or give them better odds of pushing forward that white flag they call a peace plan. There’s cowards, there’s rats, and now you’re food for all of them.”

  “And you gonna save me, is that right?” Sarat said. “You and those little boys of yours? That kid Attic who got took by some of his own? The other one, couldn’t even get his farmer’s suit to blow before the Blues killed him? Look at this place—you’re living in a goddamn cave under the highway, talking talk while those FSS cowards sell out the whole of the Red. Hell, you should be asking me for help, not the other way round.”

  Bragg Sr. laughed, his black gums showing. He turned to his aides. “She’s dumb the way we used to be dumb,” he said. “It don’t ever change, don’t ever change.”

  Facing Sarat again, he said, “Darling, don’t you understand? You’re here because I like you. There’s not one of my men as man as you, none that managed to do what you did—a general! The biggest goddamn get since President Daniel Ki!—that’s why you’re here. I would like to keep you around, keep you from falling into their hands. Because, believe me, now that they got the son of the man you killed running the Southern offensive, he’ll burn down whole cities trying to find out who did it. And if he finds out it was you, he’ll string you up.”

  “So let him,” Sarat said. “I’m not afraid to die.”

  “That’s because you’re young and you think dying’s quick,” Bragg Sr. said. “But they got ways to make dying take just as long as living.”

  “So what do you want me to do, then? Crawl in a hole and wait?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty well it. Go on back t
o that nice little charity house you have by the river and stay there. Don’t go anywhere near Halfway, don’t go whoring around with that barkeeper’s daughter in Augusta.” He paused and smiled. “Yeah, we know about that too—and make sure your sister stays there with you, your brother, the whole damn family. Wait till the fire dies out from Junior’s blood up there in Columbus, and then I promise we’ll help you put a bullet in his head too, if that’s what you want.”

  “You done?” Sarat said.

  “Yeah, darling,” the old man replied. “I’m done.”

  Sarat stood. “Thanks for the advice,” she said, and left.

  THE RESIDUE of the conversation lingered with her as Attic drove her home. She felt emboldened by having stood up to the man whose whims turned the currents of the Southern rebellion. She shifted in the passenger seat of the old sedan, leaned her head out the window. Even the saline Atlanta smog felt like a mountain breeze.

  “Let’s stop in the Floordeelee for a drink,” she said. “I know they don’t pay you shit; I’ll buy.”

  “I have to take you home,” Attic said.

  “What, they hire you by the hour or something? It’s just a drink—won’t take much time.”

  Attic shook his head. “They don’t like me over there,” he mumbled. “Not my place.”

  For a moment she thought he was talking about Bragg and his men, then she realized he meant something else altogether.

  “Christ, are you serious?” she said. “So you got no fear about picking up a gun and going to the Tennessee line, but you’re too scared to go into your own people’s neighborhood because they got different skin?”

  Her words seemed to shame him into acquiescence; soon they drove into the New Fourth Ward. It was a cramped mass of towers on the east side of the city, adjacent to the grounds of a sprawling electronics factory from which a steady high-pitched din emanated at all hours.

  The housing complexes, high and gray, were barely an arm’s length apart—such that, between them, the buildings formed a narrow labyrinth of alleys. The cramped streets were lined with shirt vendors and stalls full of produce smuggled from the vertical farms, as well as money-movers and Tik-Tok mechanics and Just-A-RedBuck Stores.

  They parked on the outskirts of the neighborhood and walked in, traversing the narrow inlets of asphalt between the buildings. Power lines ran down from the solar panels that covered all the roofs and from one building to another, creating a latticework overhead. Some of the old men and women sitting in the street watched Sarat and Attic as they passed, but it was the tall, bald girl that caught their interest, not the thin Utah boy who walked with his head lowered behind her.

  The Floordeelee was a brick shack. It stood at the end of a narrow peninsula penned in on three sides by residential towers. Outside, there was an open space littered with old card tables and folding chairs. At all hours of the day and night the tables were full or nearly full.

  Sarat and Attic bought a couple of drinks and sat at one of the tables. She drank a Kingway and he nursed a Coke.

  “So you’re indebted to the old man for life now, huh?” said Sarat. “Since he pulled some strings and got you out of that mess you were in?”

  “I was indebted to him before then,” said Attic. “He saved me and my brothers in Utah. Without him we’d all be dead.”

  “So what ever happened to ya’ll in Utah anyway? You just hide out in that farm the whole time? I heard they found one of your brothers in a pile of pig shit or something.”

  Attic said nothing. She tried to get him to talk about his life before the Red, but he wouldn’t. In time she did manage to shame him into having a couple of beers. Soon his shoulders seemed to loosen. As dusk rolled over the city, both he and Sarat were pleasantly drunk.

  “See, the problem with men like Bragg is they think it’s their right to run the place,” said Sarat, slurring the words but adamant in her conviction. “They never known what it’s like not to run the place, think they can just tell you what to do and you gotta listen like you got no say, like you got no thoughts, like you ain’t even alive.”

  Attic seemed to look past her, at a group of small children running barefoot through the alley, playing tag.

  “See, it’s like what Albert Gaines told me once—you ever met Gaines?”

  “No,” said Attic.

  “You should. He’s got this whole war figured out—he ain’t like them other old idiots. He told me once, he said, Listen, because I’m about to tell you the gist of every opinion that’s ever been had.”

  Sarat leaned forward, as though imparting a great secret. “All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it’ll never be like that again, and they’ll never be young again, no matter what they do. And it’s not just ours that do it. It’s theirs too. Imagine if the North had just let us be. Imagine if they didn’t fight us tooth and nail, kill all those innocent people, just to keep us from having a country of our own and doing things our own way—would it really have been so bad? No, of course it wouldn’t. But it wasn’t that way when all those old people that run everything were young, so they can’t let it be. But you and I”—she pointed at the children playing on the street behind her—“and them too: we’re young, and we ain’t bound by what they bound by. We’re gonna pull the power from their hands, because when it comes down to it, they don’t really care ’bout the Red. Only thing they ever cared ’bout was themselves. But us, we’re of this place. We…”

  “I’m not of this place,” said Attic.

  “But you care about it. About the Southern cause.”

  “I don’t.”

  Sarat sat back in her chair, surprised by the nothingness in his voice. “Then why were you fighting for it, then?” she asked. “Why’d you pick up a gun and risk being torn to shreds by the Blues if you don’t care for the cause?”

  “I wanted to be something,” said Attic. He looked past Sarat to where the smiling children played. “I just wanted to be something.”

  IT WAS NIGHTTIME when they finally got back to her home. He was new to drunkenness and after a half-hour of swerving badly along the highways, she made him pull over and she took the wheel.

  The old fossil car was not nearly as nimble as the sun-powered Tik-Toks, but it carried within it a beast of a motor. Every now and then Sarat pushed her foot against the pedal just to hear the ancient thing roar.

  When she got home she found Karina and Simon in the backyard. Simon sat on a kitchen chair facing the river, wearing a silver bowl for a hat. Carefully, Karina sheared the hairs protruding from beneath the bowl. She’d hung paper lanterns between the trees. Their candlelight spilled through cutouts in the shape of snowflakes. Simon was laughing, squirming in his seat as Karina brushed the fresh skin on the back of his neck with the cold handles of her scissors.

  “Where’s my sister?” said Sarat, startling them both. The smile disappeared from Karina’s face and in its place came something more neutral.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Left with her friend the reef pilot this afternoon. Gone to Augusta, I guess.”

  Sarat waved the maid inside. “Go fix him some dinner.”

  “All right,” said Karina. “Soon as I finish cutting his hair.”

  “No. Do it now.”

  Karina set her scissors down. Sarat could see a trickle of venom in the way the maid looked at her, and she met it with the same. As Karina left, Simon looked back at her. “Don’t worry, baby boy,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When there was nothing else left to look at, Simon turned to his sister. He seemed ridiculous to her, sitting in the yard with a silver bowl on his head like a little boy playing spaceman.

  “She’s trying to make you like a child,” said Sarat, tossing the bowl aside. “She’s treating you like a little baby. But you like it, don’t you?”

  Simon said nothing. She turned his head to face the river and started cutting his hair. She tried to undo the bowl cut, but Karina had already done too
much damage, and she had no choice but to finish it.

  “She’s not family, you know,” she whispered into her brother’s ear. “She might treat you nice, but she’s not family. She’s a stranger, and you know full well what strangers can do.”

  As she leaned in to talk to her brother she breathed in the new smell of him, the smell he’d taken on since Patience. It was to her a sour, nauseating scent—the smell of curdling milk. She tried to remember what he smelled like before, back in the camp.

  She recalled sometimes he’d come home drunk from one of his rebel excursions and she’d catch the Joyful on him, but that was a temporary thing, a costume for his breath. Had there ever been another? Did he ever smell the way she smelled, the way Dana smelled? She couldn’t remember, and in her struggle to recall what her brother had been like before he was stripped of himself, she discovered she was angry at him. She was angry at him for not dying in Patience. Had he simply done what all the other men on the execution line had done, she would have forever known him as a martyr, not a marionette—a dumbstruck plaything for doting housekeepers and idiot widows. What was left now was a hollow stencil of the brother she once knew, his very existence polluting her memories of him, burying and displacing the fine, brave boy that was. He should have died.

  Caught up in these thoughts, she failed to notice that Simon was crying. He made no sound, looked straight ahead, but she could see the tears in the lanterns’ weak snowflake light.

  “What is it,” she said, “your own sister not good enough for you? You trust a stranger more? You happier with some woman you know nothing about?” As she spoke she could hear her voice rising, and she knew it would carry inside the house, but she did not care. “She ain’t even from the Red. Her mother and father, they live up there in the North, with the Blues. The same Blues that did this to you, that killed our father and our mother, the Blues that kill and humiliate our people every single day. And you like her better? You like her better than your own blood?”