American War(21)

The guard slung his rifle around his shoulder and walked to the back of the bus.

“All right, all right,” Lara said. “Calm down, hold on a second.” But quickly the fighter grabbed her by the arm and dragged her forward. She cursed him and grasped at the backs of the seats, but was easily dislodged. When he reached the front of the bus, the guard pulled the door lever with his free hand and then shoved the woman outside. She landed unbalanced and fell on the sidewalk. Then he turned to the young boy, who’d been tugging at his shirt screaming for him to let go of his mother, and threw him out too. Before any of the church volunteers had a chance to object, he’d tossed their rucksacks as well. He closed the doors and turned to the passengers.

“Anyone else got something to say?” he asked. The passengers said nothing. The guard turned to the driver.

“Go,” he said. The driver obeyed.

Soon the bus was back on the highway, headed west, back in the direction of Mississippi. A mile after the highway crossed the wash of Little Yellow Creek, the driver turned northward, navigating by memory a labyrinth of one-lane country roads. The roads meandered around dry beds that once bore the offshoots of the Tennessee River.

Holly turned once more to Martina.

“Don’t worry ’bout Lara,” she said. “She ain’t been the same since she lost her youngest boy to the Birds last winter.”

“I didn’t know,” Martina said. “I didn’t know about any of this.”

Holly raised her hand over the back of her seat and introduced herself and shook Martina’s hand. “Where you from, anyway?” she asked.

“St. James.”

“Never heard of it.”

“South of Baton Rouge, on the Mississippi.”

Holly’s brows furrowed. “That’s Blue country,” she said. “Purple, anyway. What did you do to end up here?”

“The fighting moved east from Texas.”

“Sweetheart, you think the Texas fighting is bad? You ain’t seen the border towns round here. You should have gone up north when you had the chance. They got an office in Baton Rouge where you can get yourself a work permit.”

Martina looked over at her children to see if they’d been following the conversation. They appeared otherwise occupied—Dana asleep, Sarat entranced by the strange new country, Simon talking to Holly’s boy, who shared with him a plastic toy alligator he’d brought with him.

“Anyway—what am I saying?—you’ll be just fine,” Holly continued. “They got good people running Patience. The Red Crescent. That’s the best one of those aid groups, you know, the one they send to all the biggest wars. Don’t get me wrong, it ain’t no hotel, but at least it’s big enough that the Blues got no excuse to fire on it by accident the way they sometimes do. And anyway, President Kershaw’s people in Atlanta say we’ll have peace by Christmas and everybody will get on back to their homes, or what’s left of them. He says they might even make the Blues pay to rebuild the border towns, but I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Martina looked out the window. She saw four old fossil trucks parked by the side of the road. A group of about ten Free Southern State soldiers were standing near the trucks. One of them waved the bus down.

“What do they want now?” Martina said.

“Ain’t nothing,” Holly replied. “They just can’t have armed rebels bringing folks in. It makes the Red Crescent people nervous.”

The bus stopped. The rebel fighter traded places with one of the soldiers. The soldier wore the same red uniform as the guards who manned the Louisiana border crossing, his cap folded and pinned under his shoulder mark.

“Mornin’,?” he said to the passengers. A few nodded and returned the greeting.

“Real upbeat crowd you got here,” the soldier said to the driver. “Go on, get us to the gate.”

The driver pulled forward. A couple of miles up the road, in a burn-cleared woodland not far from where three states met in the Tennessee River, the bus passed a set of speed bumps. A billboard bore the same crescent illustration that had marked the vests of the church volunteers in Huntsville. The sign said: “Camp Patience Refugee Facility—Neutral Ground.”



THE REFUGEES SHUFFLED OUT into the Mississippi dusk. The Chestnuts, their legs numb from the daylong drive, were the last to exit. They had barely a moment to regard their new surroundings—an endless expanse of thick canvas tents, teeming with displaced life—before they were ushered by a camp worker into the administrative building.

There they waited in a large intake room, seated on plastic schoolroom chairs. Others, tired of sitting, took blankets from their sacks and spread them on the ground and lay on them and closed their eyes. In parts of the room large standing fans whirred. Many of the incoming refugees congregated near these fans. A couple of aid workers walked around the room, handing out bottled water from a cooler.

“Where are we, Mama?” Sarat asked.

“It’s just a place to spend the night, baby,” her mother replied.

“It smells funny.”

“I know, baby. Just wait a little while longer.”

A half-hour after she entered the intake room, Martina heard her name called out by one of the aid workers. She and her children once again picked up their belongings and followed the worker to an office where a man sat behind a cluttered schoolteacher’s desk, a pile of intake forms before him.