American War(27)

MARTINA RESTED on her cot. She closed her eyes but could not sleep. The midday heat was building. She sat up and went outside.

She walked south, away from her tent, into Georgia. She followed the paths between the tents until she reached the place where the woman with the cleft-lipped baby lived. It was one of the newer tents, near the southwestern edge of the camp. The woman was alone, changing her child on the bed.

He was a pristine baby boy, his skin smooth as alabaster. Even the malformation that split his upper lip looked flawless, as though it were everyone else that was built the wrong way.

“Mornin’,?” Martina said. “You got a minute?”

The woman said nothing. She was in her early twenties. She wore an FSS shirt and a plain gray skirt that ran to her ankles.

“Lara told me you’re not interested in a letter for the camp director anymore,” Martina said.

“That’s right,” the woman replied.

“You got some other plan?”

“We’ll make do.”

“Look, I don’t know your story, and I don’t care,” Martina said. “But in this place we don’t have the luxury of inventing enemies. Let me write that letter for you. I don’t need any payment.”

“No. Thank you. We’ll make do,” the woman said. She lay her baby on a small scrap of aid blanket. The child grasped at the air with chubby little limbs.

“For Christ’s sake,” Martina said. “We’re not even Catholic. That statue belongs to my husband.”

“So your husband’s Catholic.”

“My husband’s dead.”

The woman did not respond. Her baby gurgled and spat and stared transfixed at the ceiling.

“Fine,” Martina said. “Do what suits you. Just remember that it’s that baby boy who’s paying for your made-up grudges.”

“Thank you for your concern,” the woman said.

Martina left the tent. Her anger at the young woman’s stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she’d found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she’d been made to feel alien to some stranger’s expectation of what constituted the right and normal world—the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she’d chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter. And no matter how much she tried to fight it, every now and then it still made her venomous. Stay mean if you want to, you stupid little girl, she thought. Cling to that tiny piece of power you think you have. But I hope every time you see your baby’s ruined lips you think of me.

She walked back to her own neighborhood in Mississippi. On her way she caught sight of Sarat playing tag with a gaggle of boys a few years younger than she was. They dodged around the tents and under the weighted clotheslines, giggling and screaming. Martina called her daughter over.

“Stop rolling around in the dirt,” she said. “You look filthy.”

“We’re just playing,” the girl replied, catching her breath as the rest of the children sprinted onward.

“Where’s your sister?”

“I don’t know,” Sarat said. “Out with the older kids in Missy’s tent, probably.”

“I thought I told you to keep an eye on her.”

“They’re not gonna eat her.”

“How ’bout your brother? I haven’t seen him all morning.”

“I heard he and Mark and them all snuck out to Muscle Shoals. Don’t tell him I told you, he’ll get mad.”

“Muscle Shoals? How’d they get out of the camp?”

“Same way smugglers get in,” Sarat said, pointing east. “Through Sandy Creek on the Alabama side.”

“How do you know that? You been going out with them?”

“Like they’d ever let me.”

“So you just know, then?”

The girl shrugged. “Everybody knows.”

Martina brushed some of the dirt off the side of Sarat’s sleeveless summer dress. At twelve years of age she was already wearing hand-me-downs—gifts from the parents of children three years older than she was. And even these seemed to shrink daily around her growing frame. Her growth spurt was so rapid over the last three years that her mother feared it might be the result of some chemical imbalance, a sickness. She was the same height now as her mother, with a frazzled head of hair made stiff by sweat and dirt.

“Go find your sister, and then the two of you come home and get cleaned up,” Martina said. “You’ve been out enough for one day. And stay away from the north side.”

Sarat nodded. “OK, Mama.”



SARAT WATCHED HER MOTHER retreat into the tent. In the time it had taken mother and daughter to talk, the rest of the children had galloped out of sight, and it seemed pointless now to try to catch them. Sarat returned to the women’s shower tent, on whose moist and mildewing front steps she’d left her sandals so as to run more freely.

Like the crevices of a body, the shower tents radiated a damp, human-scented heat. This was most evident in the early morning hours when the water was coolest and the showers most bearable, and a trail of groggy-eyed refugees could be seen shuffling like pilgrims in their plastic sandals to the stalls. As they washed, the runoff spilled from the drains into a wastewater trench fifteen feet wide and five feet deep. The trench ran in a circle around the camp and was nicknamed Emerald Creek. In its slow journey to the purification tanks, the brown sludge of human waste produced a stench so overwhelming that the refugees, en masse, refused to live in any tent within fifty feet of it.