American War(30)

“You’ve got to stop talking like that,” Dana replied.

“What? You wanna go see? I’ll bet you five bucks.”

“I don’t mean them, I mean like today, with Bishop. Like you’ll believe anything anyone tells you, like you don’t know when the joke’s on you.”

“I don’t do that.”

“?‘I know where the snipers are…’?”

“I do!” Sarat protested. “The minesweepers showed me.”

“You have to grow up, Sarat. You’re not a little girl anymore. Look, just try not to give anybody reason to make fun of you, is all. You’ll make more friends that way.”

The two girls sat in silence. Soon the Tik-Tok returned, missing three of its original passengers but carrying a new one, a vaccination officer from Atlanta. Accompanied by a bored-looking soldier, the volunteer moved from tent to tent, asking for the immunization records of any child under the age of five.

“I made a friend today,” Sarat said. “His name’s Marcus. He lives in Alabama.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mmm-hmm. You can ask him about the sniper, if you don’t believe me. I showed him.”

Dana shook her head and chuckled. She watched the health worker. She was a woman in her early twenties. She was a Northerner, a volunteer with the One Country Coalition, doing her year of service.

“You remember when they gave us that stuff?” Dana asked.

Sarat nodded. “Told them we were too old for it. Probably didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe it did. Maybe we’d be dead if we didn’t take it.”

“Marcus’s dad says anyone who stays in the camp too long is gonna die here,” Sarat said. “You think we’re gonna die here?”

Dana thought for a while. Across the road, the health worker was shooing away a gaggle of children she knew as repeat customers, trying to get their hands on the caramel candies she handed out after every vaccination.

“No,” Dana said. “Well, maybe a hundred years from now. But not, like, tomorrow.”

“All right,” Sarat said. “A hundred years is all right.”

In the face of the children’s pleading, the health worker relented and gave all the candies away. Soon the children began to dissipate, their small jaws mining hard for sugar.

Dana leaned close to her sister, resting her head on Sarat’s arm.

“I’m sorry for saying you should grow up,” she said. “Don’t ever grow up. Don’t ever change, beautiful girl.”



THE HEALTH WORKER PASSED from tent to tent. She asked the children their ages. Some knew and others didn’t. Those who didn’t she asked to raise their right arms over their heads, such that the crease of the elbow rested somewhere near the top of the head, and the fingers dangled around the left ear. The children whose fingers touched their ears she estimated to be older than five years of age, and for them the vaccine would do no good. On this basis the vaccines were administered: a few drops of clear liquid to ward off the viral paralytic that had long ago been defeated but now, riding the saddle of war, returned.



LATE AT NIGHT, when the weather cooled and the camp’s ragged bustle gave way to the hard, graceless sleep of the dispossessed, Martina visited her friend Erica Yarber’s tent for a game of cards. For the better part of five years, this had been a ritual, practiced three or four times a week by Martina, Erica, their friend Lara, and whichever women from the neighboring tents decided to join them on any given night.

It was a large tent, near the border between Alabama and South Carolina, once occupied by Erica, her husband, and her teenage son. But the son had moved west to join the fighting and the husband’s heart gave out one morning and now she lived alone.

Martina arrived with a jar of pickles, red in their Kool-Aid brine. Their taste repulsed Martina, conjuring cherries marinated in sweat, but the other women enjoyed them. The women almost always brought with them something to eat or drink: boiled and dry peanuts, day-old cafeteria bread massaged with oil or bacon grease, sweet ears, kettle chips, a mason jar of corrosive, tent-made Joyful, in addition to whatever else the women managed to acquire that day through serendipity or altruism.

The game was Fight the Landlord. Ten bucks a point, first to a hundred. They used three decks, and in this way the game moved more quickly and opportunities for bombs and rockets were increased. They played by the light of rainbow candles made from melted crayons and shoelace wicks. On a nearby tablet, a Dixie Radio broadcast trickled from the speakers. It was a big-lunged, brass-backed man singing. Young love has made me old, tired, restless, and blue.

“Mag on Mag, nines on eights,” Martina said, laying six cards on the shaky plywood table.

“Nope,” Lara said.

“Nothing,” Erica followed.

Martina swept the hand and set it facedown in a neat pile in front of her. Lara’s Joyful was starting to do its work.

It had become, over the years, the South’s wartime drink. Joyful, a Frankenstein hooch, made from whatever was on hand, no two jugs ever the same. Martina took another swig. She tasted the ingredients of this particular batch: a festering, months-old orange juice, and beneath that an aftertaste of corn and mouthwash. She felt the onset of drunkenness; every once in a while the candle flames stood still and it was the room that flickered.