American War(18)

The old man punched the top back into his flattened fedora and set it on his lap. He looked around the bus as though he had no idea how he’d ended up on it. He came to Martina. He stared at her awhile.

Finally, he said, “You from Blind River?”

“No.”

“Know anyone from Blind River?”

“Never heard of it,” Martina said.

The man quieted and faced forward again.

“My husband’s got some cousins out near these parts,” Martina said.

He perked up. “Blind River’s about thirty miles west of here, give or take. Used to be you’d see signs for it if you were coming up from New Orleans, but that’s all gone now.”

“Mhmm.”

“I lived there fifty-one years,” the old man said, a weak pride in his voice. “Lived through Anna in ’43 and Michael in ’51. Michael spun right through my living room, tore up all the houses for ten blocks every which way, but mine was the only one it couldn’t crush. They took a photo of it from the air, ran it on the front page of the Courier.”

He stood up and walked over to the Chestnuts’ side of the bus. He inspected the children, each in turn—Simon, still transfixed with the rebel and his rifle; the girls, sitting window-side, looking out at the brown remains of farmland and the utility poles, their lines limp and dead.

Sarat sat closest to the window, up on her knees atop the bench, nose pressed close to the glass. Under the warm light of the sun, the land shone clear. Its enormity overwhelmed her.

Dana sat felinelike between her sister and her mother, working tiny braids into Sarat’s frazzled hair. When she was done with each braid she set it loose and watched it slowly start to come undone, and then she started braiding another.

“How old are they?” the old man asked.

“Simon’s nine, the twins are six,” Martina said.

“Twins! They don’t look a thing alike.”

“Guess they don’t.”

The old man looked Dana over. “Well aren’t you a cute one,” he said, and turned back to the mother. “Had a granddaughter just like her. Must be closer to your age now than hers. Her parents took her west to California just before the third Silicon bubble burst in ’44. Haven’t heard from them since. Probably down in Mexican territory now if they’re anywhere.”

“You know anything about the camp where they’re taking us?” Martina asked. “Is it safe there?”

“They didn’t tell me nothing about that,” the old man said. “They just showed up and said they needed my land to dock their ships coming in and out of the Mississippi. Gun-runners, all of them, I know it. And there’s nobody left there but me, the houses down that way are all at the bottom of the sea now. The boy in charge said if I was younger they’d just toss me in the water. But I guess they got a sense of charity to them, so they gave me ten minutes to pack and they set me off. Ten minutes! To pack up fifty-six years!”

“But at the camp, are they gonna feed us? Are they gonna give us a place to stay? We don’t have much money…”

“…But you know, before I left, I said to that boy, if I was younger, it’d be you tossed into the water…”

Martina let the old man talk. He spoke for the better part of an hour about his old life in Blind River, adrift on the currents of his memory. In the front she could hear the bus driver talking too. He told the man with the rifle about how his uncle had lined up a good job for him in the vertical farms outside Atlanta. He said all a man had to do to make shift supervisor was keep from falling asleep or pissing in the planting stations, and in six months he’d be promoted to a real suit-and-tie job.

“See, most of these boys’ problem is they’re too dumb to realize you gotta eat a little shit to get ahead,” the driver said. “They get it in one hand and spend it with the other. They got no discipline. But I got discipline. Yes sir, I got discipline.”

The guard stared out the window.

Slowly the bus moved alongside the river, traversing the last shredded remnants of lower Louisiana.

Here was where the water finally won. For decades, the governments of the state and the country spent billions trying to save lower Louisiana from the encroaching seas—building hundreds of miles of seawalls, levees, raised causeways, and even, toward the end, floating towns. It was still early days then, and the oceans had not yet devoured the optimistic notion that with enough concrete and dirt and pride and money the low country could be saved.

That was then. All that remained now were the entrails of that long-subsumed world and the futile efforts to preserve it: thin strips of asphalt that disappeared at high tide, ghost towns propped on man-made hills, crumbling bridges that nosedived into the water. Scattered among the islands that remained, these things stood as ruins and like all ruins were in their own way grotesque, a transgression against the passage of time.



THE BUS LEFT the riverside and turned onto Interstate 55, headed north. In prewar days, the highway ran under the same number all the way to Chicago. Now it ended in a barricade of razor wire and guard towers ten miles south of Memphis—a checkpoint in the new wartime border.

There were blue signs on the side of the road. They listed the amenities available at every exit. The logos of the gas stations had been blacked out, but atop many of these black squares someone had redrawn the logos in crude graffiti. Thin trees lined the highway. They carried no leaves, only barren branches. Everywhere, the roadside architecture showed the telltale signs of plunder: poles stripped of their wires; cars gutted; factory facades of which only cracked concrete and rebar remained.