American War(5)

Sarat returned to the scene of her morning experiment, poking at the congealed honey thick in the knots of the wood, enthralled by the amber liquid’s viscosity. It fascinated her, how the thing so readily took the shape of its vessel. With her pinky she cracked the crust and tasted a dollop. She expected the honey to taste like wood, but it still tasted like itself.

Benjamin sat on a hickory chair, the weaves of its backrest frayed and peeling. He looked out at the brown, barren river and waited on his patron to arrive.

“Do you know what you’re going to say to them, at the permit place?” Martina asked. “Have you thought it through?”

“I’ll answer what they ask.”

“You got your papers ready?”

“I got my papers ready.”

Martina shook her head and cast an eye out for signs of an incoming boat. “Probably there won’t even be any permits,” she said. “Probably they’ll do what they always do and turn us back. That’s their way, don’t give a damn about nobody south of the Mag line. It’s like we aren’t human, aren’t animal even, like we’re something else entirely. They’ll just turn you back, I know it.”

Benjamin shrugged. “Do you want me to go or not?”

“You know I do.”

When she was done wiping the lipstick, Martina set to braiding Dana’s hair. It came down in long, smooth strands of the deepest black, unlike Sarat’s, which although the same color, was unruly and revolted to fuzz in the humidity.

“You girls know what the best thing about the North is?” she asked.

“What?” Sarat replied.

“Well, you know how at night here it gets so hot you just can’t take it, and you wake up with your sheets all damp with sweat?”

“I hate that,” Dana said.

“Well when you get far enough north, it never gets hot that way. And in the winter, if you go really far north, they don’t even have rain—they have little balls of ice that drop from the sky, and the ground gets all thick with it till you can’t see the roads anymore, and the rivers get so cold they turn to solid rock you can walk on.”

“That’s silly,” Dana said. In her mind, these were more of her parents’ elaborate fairy tales, the hardening rivers and falling ice no different than the fish with whiskers that her father said once swam in great schools through the lifeless Mississippi back when it was just a river, or the ancient lizards buried in the deserts to the west, whose remains once powered the world. Dana didn’t believe any of it.

But Sarat did. Sarat believed every word.

“It’s true,” Martina said. “Cool in the summer, cool in the winter. Temperate, they call it. And safe too. Kids out in the streets playing till late at night; you’ll make friends your first day there.”

Simon shook his head quietly. He knew that even as she talked to the twins, his mother was really addressing him. With everyone else she spoke directly, with no sentimentality or euphemism. But to her only son, whose inner mental workings she feared she would never learn to decipher, she passed messages through intermediaries in weak, obvious code. Simon hated it. Why couldn’t she be like his father? he wondered. Why couldn’t she simply say what she meant?



BY MID-MORNING, Benjamin’s ride had yet to appear. Soon Martina began to believe her husband had been forgotten. Or perhaps Benjamin’s acquaintance had finally been caught in that old fossil-powered boat of his and had been arrested. It was true that the states surrounding the rebel Red—a cocoon formed by Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—were deeply sympathetic to the cause of the Free Southern State. And even though residents of these states still required a permit to move north to the real heart of the Blue country, the states were officially members of the Union nonetheless, and a man caught using fossil fuel in these parts was still an outlaw.

She thought about how much easier it would be for everyone if all these would-be statelets were simply allowed to break free from the Union, to form their own miniature nations along the fault lines of region or creed or race or ideology. Everyone knew there had always been fissures: in the Northwest they were constantly threatening to declare the independence of the proud, pacifist Cascadia; south of Cascadia so much of California, Nevada, Arizona, and West Texas was already under the informal control of the Mexican forces, the map of that corner of the continent slowly reverting to what it was hundreds of years ago. In the Midwest the old-stock nativists harbored a barely restrained animosity toward the millions of coastal refugees who descended onto the middle of the country to escape rising seas and severe storms. And here, in the South, an entire region decided to wage war again, to sever itself from the Union rather than stop using that illicit fuel responsible for so much of the country’s misfortune.

Sometimes it seemed to Martina that there had never been a Union at all, that long ago some disinterested or opportunistic party had drawn lines on a map where previously there were none, and in the process created a single country fashioned from many different countries. How bad would it really be, she wondered, if the federal government in Columbus simply stopped wasting so much money and blood trying to hold the fractured continent together? Let the Southerners keep their outdated fuel, she thought, until they’ve pulled every last drop of it from the beaten ground.

Martina watched the river and waited for the boat to come. She saw Sarat near the water, inspecting a discarded shrimp net that had washed up onshore a few months earlier; the children had made from it a makeshift trap for river debris. The net collected all manner of strange treasure: an iron cross, a neck-rest from a barber’s chair, a laminated picture of a long-shuttered leper colony, a small sign that read, “Please No Profanity In The Canteen.”