American War(38)

When she stepped out of the shower trailer she found Marcus seated on the bottom step, his arms hugging his shins. She sat beside him.

In the early nighttime hours the camp was alive with chatter and wandering flashlights and the fungal sweat of cooking. The sounds of the Free Southern Radio came high and tinny through portable speakers.

She looked at Marcus but he looked at his feet. She sensed that between her and her friend one wall had come crumbling down but another, different one had taken its place. And although she couldn’t define it, she knew what it was. She knew it to be a cousin of that low-lit language her sister spoke so well. It lived in that strange fevered place between curiosity and desire.

And it thrilled her—not the sex of it but the newness, the realization that she could not only manipulate these feelings within herself but also without; that she could turn the gears inside another so forcefully.

Finally he spoke: “My dad, when he falls asleep, nothing can wake him.”

“I’m not staying in your tent,” Sarat said.

“Then where are you gonna stay?”

“I’ll go bunk in the pen with Cherylene and that rat of yours, if she hasn’t eaten him already. Plenty of room there.”

Marcus turned and held Sarat by the forearm. “Please don’t stay up there. You know it’s not safe. My dad says the Blue militias are going to tear through that fence any night now.”

“And I believe him, but what are the odds it’ll be tonight?”

“What if it is tonight?”

“Then we’ll all be dead anyway. Where you want me to stay, then?”

“Go down to the sick building,” Marcus said. “Tell them you got the flu or something—they’ll let you stay the night there.”

“The sick building hasn’t been open since last Christmas,” said Sarat.

“They still got a couple of bunks in there. Nobody’s using them for anything.”

They were jolted from their conversation by a crack of gunfire, a single shot ringing in the air somewhere to their north. It was a sound they’d heard a million times before, a sound unanchored and without destination.

“Please don’t stay up there tonight,” Marcus said.

“All right,” Sarat replied.

The two friends sat together at the foot of the stairs and watched an old woman patch a square hole in her tent with some thread and a piece of blanket. Sarat squirmed.

“What’s the matter?” Marcus asked.

“My hair’s itchy,” Sarat said.

“Didn’t you wash it?”

“Yeah.” She scraped her nails against her scalp until she worried it would bleed. Still, trails of invisible ants marched through the fuzzy corkscrews of her hair.

“Your dad have clippers?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Go get them.”

Marcus sprung up and ran back to his tent. Soon he returned with an old electric clipper and three attachments.

Sarat fit one of the attachments and turned on the clipper. It buzzed and vibrated in her hand. Cautiously she set it just above her forehead and for a moment she felt nothing. Then came a slight tug at the roots and soon she saw the rough strands float gently past her to the ground.

She moved the clipper slowly, in part out of caution but also to prolong the act; the shearing felt good against her skin. Soon the clipper glided along smoothly, and no more hair fell.

“Did I miss anywhere?” she asked. Marcus shook his head.

Sarat set the clipper on the stairs, its teeth still clogged. She rubbed her hand against the felt of her scalp. She stood.

“You’re a good friend,” she told Marcus, and then she left.



SHE WALKED to the administrative buildings. She sat by the infirmary’s back door and waited. Across the nearby walking path she saw the southernmost of the Alabama tents. Among them was one whose entire east-facing side had long ago been torn beyond repair. In its place the old woman living there had tied down a large flag of the Free Southern State. In time the flag had faded, the red bars made ghostly pink, the three black stars barely visible.

Sarat observed the flag. She’d seen it a million times, decorating the tents and strung high on poles and etched into a currency whose worth eroded by the day. But she’d never paid much attention to it. It had always seemed to her that the South was the governing ground of two different powers—the official Free Southern State government, headquartered in Atlanta, whose soldiers did almost no fighting, and the vast array of rebel groups, who did nothing but fight.

She knew the three stars on the flag represented the three states of the Mag, and she knew if South Carolina hadn’t been turned into a forest of living dead, there would be a fourth.

Looking at the flag, Sarat noticed the black stars were slightly asymmetric. The right-pointing sides were longer than the others. She recalled hearing one of the older refugees say that in Atlanta, in the first year after declaring independence, the Free Southerners scrambled to create a flag and compose an anthem. In their panic they botched the stars, and never could agree on an anthem. And so in his address at the revealing ceremony, President Kershaw made up the famous line about how the pained wail of the South’s anguished people was the state’s only song, and never mentioned the misdrawn stars.

Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.