American War(26)
“I’m surprised the rebels haven’t strung him up for it.”
Lara shrugged. “He’s the kind can make friends with anyone, and he’s got a lot of them,” she said. “It’ll catch up to him one day, but at least he’s working toward something, not like the rest of us, sitting still day after day till they bury us here.”
Lara stood. “You sure you don’t wanna come to the service?” she asked. “They have a reception afterward where they serve that orange juice that tastes like oranges.”
“You go on,” Martina said. “I’ll catch you at the game tonight.”
Lara shook her head. “Nothing as sad as a lapsed Catholic,” she said.
AFTER HER FRIEND LEFT, Martina opened her tablet and set to finishing the letter of appeal she’d been commissioned to write. But the words wouldn’t come. She set the tablet down and retreated to her bed in the back of the tent. She lay on her cot, the metal springs squeaking under her weight.
She’d written hundreds of these letters over the years—leniency requests; admissions of petty guilt; appeals by growing families for bigger and better-situated tents; letters to the editors of faraway papers; Northern travel permits; love letters; eulogies.
Other than the eulogies, most of what she wrote proved useless; perhaps one out of every twenty achieved what it was intended to achieve. These successful letters, the demonstrable fruits of her work, she printed out and stored in a small filing cabinet by her bed. It was those letters that marked her place in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the camp—alongside the likes of the man in the Alabama sector who could move any sum of money anywhere in the country in four days or less, or the grandmother in Georgia whose fortuitous real estate allowed her to leach a wireless connection from the administrative offices. Work provided purpose, a sense of place, a sense of agency.
In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact.
She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully.
It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.
LIKE THEIR OLD HOME by the banks of the Mississippi Sea, the Chestnuts’ tent was sectioned into thirds. Martina’s room occupied the back third, anchored by a steel hospital cot and an old chest of drawers.
In the middle third of the tent the twins lived in opposing beds. On Dana’s side there were the salvaged trappings of teenage girlhood—a straightening iron; a makeup kit composed of various brands and shades of concealer and blush and lipstick and eye shadow. Near these things lay a stack of dog-eared, yellowing copies of Belle Magazine, a publication out of print for decades.
On Sarat’s side of the tent there were no posters and few possessions. In a large plastic bowl she kept a potpourri of war seeds—bullet casings and wild-toothed slivers of shrapnel. They were given to her as presents by the sullen grunts charged with scouring the Northern boundary of the camp for land mines. She liked watching the soldiers work, their frames hunchbacked, their ancient metal detectors helplessly beeping.
In a small space ahead of the girls’ room Martina kept a kitchen. The area between the kitchen and the tent’s front door was Simon’s room. It was a chaotic space, thick with the dank smell of unwashed clothing that sat in a heap at the foot of the boy’s bed. A blanket lay tucked under the bottom of the bed’s mattress, creating a makeshift curtain that hid whatever was stored beneath the bed. On the wall there hung an old poster of pristine Texas desert, unspoiled and unmarked. It was a form of protest. The desert poster became popular among the teenage boys at the camp after the administrators banned posters featuring a particular brand of long-discontinued, fossil-run muscle car. Before that, it was snakes of any kind; and before that, the rebel rattlesnake; and before that—in the beginning—posters bearing the names of any of the rebel groups. Soon the administrators would get around to banning Texas pastorals, and the boys would move on to something else.
Everywhere in the tent there were piles of accumulated things—hot plates, standing fans, two mini-fridges, half-empty bottles of rubbing alcohol; moisturizer; paperwork from the camp and from the Free Southern State; can openers; first-aid kits; and, more than all of these things, blankets.
Blankets saturated every aid shipment to Camp Patience, boxes upon boxes of burly fabric that scraped the skin like sandpaper. Even in the deadest of winter there was no need for blankets, so instead the refugees fashioned from them room dividers and tablecloths, foot mats and drawer-lining. Still, there were more blankets than anyone knew what to do with. Folded piles of blankets lay beneath the twins’ beds and above the filing cabinet. They were useless as bartering currency, subject to an inflation even worse than that of the Southern dollar. And yet the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China and the Bouazizi Empire kept sending more. For the life of her, Martina could not imagine what the foreigners thought the weather was like in the Red, but then she couldn’t even imagine the benefactors as people. They existed in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in some vast, indecipherable machine, its only visible output these hulking aid ships full of blankets.