American War(40)

Beyond them, and beyond the tent in the distance, the soft white lights of the camp’s main gate burned. And beyond those gates the great Southern world, its cratered cities and salt-eaten coasts and parched, blistered gut, lay waiting. It was a world that for Sarat now existed only in the fiery sermons of radio preachers and the lyrics of war songs and the bucolic pastorals of Free Southern State propaganda. It was an abstraction, an idea, nothing more.

The blond boy, when he saw Sarat approach, sprang from the mandarin-crate box on which he was seated.

“What do you want?” he said, approaching.

“I’m looking for Leonard,” Sarat replied. “Got a letter for him.”

“This ain’t your place. Leave.”

The boy was pale, as though he’d spent no time under the Southern sun. A pink streak ran from the left side of his neck down to near his belly button; Sarat could not tell whether it was a rash or some natural imperfection or the remains of burned skin. He was three or four inches shorter than she was, and at least thirty pounds lighter, his hip bones like the blades of cleavers.

“I’ll leave after I give this to Leonard,” Sarat said, holding out the letter.

“You deaf?” the boy replied. “I said get out, now.”

He came to push her, his hands landing in the space between her shoulders and her breasts. It was then that something deep within her snapped. She felt a searing inflammation, a fire in the cavities behind her eyes.

With a guttural roar she leaped for the boy, palms turned to vises around his throat. He tumbled back onto the ground and she jumped on him, his arms pinned beneath the thick planks of her shins. Her first punch landed square; the boy’s nose cracked. Sarat threw another, and another, until her limbs felt as though they were not her own. With each punch she exhaled and the exhales soon turned to screams. In the wide, blood-splattered eyes of the wiry Carolina boy she caught, for an instant, her own rabid reflection.

A moment later she was lifted, her limbs still moving but her body caught by a pair of handless arms. She was set down on the dirt by a man nearly seven feet tall and wide enough to momentarily eclipse her view of the retreating boy. She tried to scramble around the man’s legs but he held her firm, his stumps hard against her shoulders.

“Enough,” the man said. “Stay.”

Sarat tried to break from the man’s hold but could not. She turned to see his face. It was ruined, the lips gone and in their place thin slivers of brown-crusted skin, the cheeks wrinkled and charred. She saw the cavernous aperture where his right eye once was and she was hypnotized by it.

“What’s this about?” the man said.

Sarat held out the envelope. “I have to give this to Leonard,” she said.

The man took the envelope, pinned it between his wrists. “You’ve done it,” he said. “All right?”

“All right.”

She saw the boy standing behind the man, blood still running from his shifted nose. There was a wild fear in his eyes but it was not the girl he was looking at, it was the man.

“You tell Gaines something for me,” Leonard told Sarat. “Tell him there’s two families that got no one to provide for them no more.” He held up the envelope. “And this alone don’t make that right.”

“Fine,” Sarat said. She turned to leave.

“Hold on,” Leonard said. He turned to the boy.

“Did I raise a coward?” he asked.

“No sir,” the boy replied, his voice hushed and mechanical, his eyes lowered.

“Sure looks like it right now. Apologize.”

The boy stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Sarat said nothing.

“It’s all right,” Leonard said. “You don’t have to accept it—he just has to say it.”



WHEN SHE RETURNED to the administrative buildings Sarat found Albert Gaines seated on a bench by the central office. He was reading an old paper book whose cover bore the curled scribblings of a language Sarat recognized but did not understand. There was no illustration on the cover, only a geometric pattern and swooping, saber-curved lines. The writing resembled a more elaborate version of the same script Sarat had seen a thousand times before, on the sides of the food and water containers, the aid packages, and the Red Crescent vans. The language of foreigners.

“Leonard says to tell you this don’t make up for the other two families who got nobody to provide for them,” Sarat said.

Gaines looked up from his book and smiled. “Leonard has earned his fictitious chivalry, I suppose.”

He pulled a bill from his wallet and held it out to Sarat. “As we agreed,” he said.

Sarat stared at the money. It was a Northern twenty, a genuine greenback stamped with the portrait of some long-dead president. The bill’s holograms were of an ancient, granite-columned mausoleum, its contours shimmering in the light.

“Go on, take it,” Gaines said. “I know, I know, it’s Blue money, right? Well, remember this: there’s no sin in using what’s theirs against them.”

As she reached for the bill Gaines held her wrist. She saw he was looking at the reddened, blood-marked knuckles.

“Well, I assume it wasn’t Leonard,” he said. “His boy?”

“He pushed me,” Sarat replied.