American War(11)

Simon steadied his feet on the top rung. “One, two, three!” he cried, and jumped as high as he could. With his hands still clamped on the edge of the container he rose, his chest level with the roof. For a moment he was weightless, suspended in air. He tried to pull himself over the top, but like a seesaw unevenly weighted, he leaned a little forward and then tumbled back. He landed with a fat thud, neck-first in the soft earth.

The twins yelped and backed away from the ladder. Sarat watched her brother lie on the ground, mesmerized by the violence of his collision, the way his impact made the earth spit itself up. Dana screamed at the mud stains that suddenly covered her dress.

Simon lay still for the better part of a minute, the wind knocked out of him. Finally he groaned and began to lift himself.

“Never mind,” he told his sisters. “You’re holding it all wrong.”

“Oh my God, just wait for Daddy to come do it,” Dana said. “You got mud everywhere.” She stormed into the house to change. Simon followed.

Sarat remained outside, looking at the place where Simon had fallen. She knelt to the ground and dug with her hands a small trench in the dirt from the edge of the shower stall to the indentation Simon’s fall had made in the earth. Then she turned the tap and let the water flow from the showerhead. Slowly the runoff trickled into the trench. From there it flowed as a miniature river and filled the void of Simon’s crater, a newborn sea in the shape of a boy.

“Turn that off,” Simon said, reemerging from the house in clean clothes. “You’re wasting water.”



NIGHT FELL. The children ate dinner alone, their mother still at Polk’s place across the field. They ate sandwiches of stale bread and preserved pork that came in tin cans labeled in a language they could not understand—an import from the aid ships, given to them by Santa Muerte. In recent days, their neighbor had started coming over more frequently and with more gifts: food of higher quality, better clothes.

The canned meat had the texture of soaked erasers, rubbery against the teeth. When they were finished, the children ate the last of Polk’s mud pie, its cream cheese frosting cracked and hard after two days in the refrigerator.

Sarat watched the river. All day she had seen more boats than usual coming across from the eastern banks, and now in the darkness the traffic intensified. She heard the sound of muffled fossil motors about a mile upriver, and occasionally could even make out the voices of unseen men barking commands.

“Is that Daddy?” Dana asked.

“No,” Simon replied. “It’s the rebels.”

“Who are the rebels?”

“Fighters.” Simon looked at his sister to see if she comprehended the word. “They’re on our side in the war against the North.”

“Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go see him there.”

“Mama’s lying,” Simon said.

Dana turned to her twin, incredulous. “He called Mama a liar!” She turned back to her brother. “I’m telling.”

“You think Dad would just take off for the North without us?” Simon said. “He didn’t take nothing but a couple of papers with him. Didn’t even take a change of clothes. Something bad happened and Mama won’t tell us what.”

Dana shook her head. “Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” she repeated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”



THE BOATS the children heard were rebel ships, moving soldiers and supplies to the oil fields on the western front. They docked near Eliza Polk’s house, where they set up a temporary encampment, and where Martina Chestnut came at her neighbor’s invitation to talk to a rebel commander about sanctuary.

The Polks’ house was made of four trailer homes laid in a square. They were prefabricated blocks with vinyl siding and sloped tin roofing.

Normally quiet, Eliza Polk’s land was chaotic with the turbulence of incoming rebels. Martina emerged from the sorghum field to find dozens of men, almost all of them teenagers, moving about the home. In a chain of passing hands they hauled wooden crates and burlap sacks from the unlit boats to the trailers. The rebels carried small portable radios that crackled with orders to prepare for the arrival of more incoming ships. By the riverfront, a boy sat flashing a standing light in sharp bursts to the vessels passing through the dark water.

They wore tattered uniforms of no consistent color or style, composed of whatever was available to them—black jeans, cargo vests, duck hunter’s camouflage, fatigues from foreign armies smuggled aboard the aid ships at the request of the rebel leaders. Their weapons were also smuggled in, or else salvaged from the attics and basements of parents and grandparents—the guns often older than the boys who carried them. They were, to a man, untrained and ill-equipped, and ahead of them to the west lay certain death at the hands of a superior army. But behind them, in the dead-end towns where they were born, lay a slower kind of death—death at the hands of poverty and boredom and decay.

Martina stood at the edge of the field, watching them. In the central garden, they had set up a makeshift command table. On the table lay a large contour map of the Louisiana-Texas border. A few of the older men were assembled around the table, marking the map with various pins and highlighters. Occasionally, they looked up to address the younger fighters, who went about hauling crates and erecting tents. One boy, who could not have been more than seventeen, scaled the Polks’ river-facing trailer and attempted to fly the rattlesnake flag of the United Rebels from the roof, but was ordered down by an older, more discreet superior.