American War(55)

“Maybe once back in Louisiana,” said Sarat. “Never had it here.”

“Those pigs eat it every single night,” said Eli.

He leaned down and cut a piece of the steak. It was dense with fat and severed easily under the blade of his bowie knife. He handed it to Sarat. She chewed it slowly, savoring the warmth and the way the marbled flesh both gave and resisted against her teeth. The taste of wood smoke was thick in the charred exterior, the meat beneath it pink and tender.

How could it ever be, thought Sarat, that a person could eat this well every day and not die from the very shame of it—when just a few miles away there lived so many subsisting on so little.

“You gotta be careful,” said Sarat. “They smell that in the camp, they’ll come running.”

“Oh we got some for them too,” said Eli, pointing at the crates along the bank. “We can’t go around handing it out like it’s Christmas or nothing, but we’ll get it to them. God knows they deserve it.”

Eli pierced the steaks with his knife and turned them over; the fire hissed and set its curled fingers upward. He leaned close to Sarat over the flame.

“Hey, are those Southern State boys they sent up here after the storm still around?” he asked.

“Nah,” Sarat replied. “Soon as the rain stopped they were gone.”

“That’s good,” Eli said. “Goddamned if they’re gonna get any of this. Let them go back to Atlanta. They get fed well enough there.”

“So did you steal this, or what?” Sarat asked.

The smile momentarily left Eli’s lips. He was a scrawny boy—all the rebels seemed to either be scrawny or muscle-bound, never regular-set—and the orange glow of the fire put dark shadows in the hollows beneath his jaw.

“Didn’t steal nothing,” he said. “We fought them for it and we won. You’ve been watching too many of their shows, reading too much of their news. They have you thinking they can’t ever be beat. Well they can. Take away their tanks and their Birds and all those toys they hide behind like cowards, make it so it’s just us and them eye-to-eye, and they can be beat.”

“Calm down,” Sarat said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

Eli’s smile returned. “I know you didn’t, girl. Hell, I heard you’re learning from Gaines now.” He laughed. “And he loves you. Says you got more balls than most men out here.”

Eli sliced one of the steaks width-wise. “Here,” he said. “Take half of mine.”

Sarat thanked him. She walked to where her brother sat at the creek-side.

A couple of rebels sat nearby on a felled log, playing guitar and singing an old folk song whose popularity had recently been revived by some firebrand folk star in Atlanta, who set the old music to new lyrics. The boys, drunk on Joyful, slurred the words and cackled at their own musical ineptitude. The one playing guitar stumbled through four open chords with uncoordinated fingers, muting half the strings.

Mama take this flag from me

Ain’t my country anymore…



Sarat sat on the sand beside her brother.

“Hey, lady,” he said. He had a goofy grin on his face, a half-empty jug of Joyful beside him. The drink’s reek hung over the beach: a honeyed perfume of fruits left to rot, old bread, creek water, and whatever else the boys could find to give the dark juice muscle—from antifreeze to turpentine to ground-up painkillers.

“You’re celebrating something, I hear,” Sarat said.

“You could say that,” her brother replied.

“I don’t mean to put a damper on it, but Mama’s mad at you.”

“What’s she mad at me for? Didn’t that stuff we sprayed on her tent work?”

“Yeah, but she thinks you should have sprayed it on everybody’s tent. Thinks her neighbors are all looking at her funny because all their tents collapsed but hers looks good as new.”

Simon chuckled and spat. “What’s she think? We got time to spray everybody’s tent down? Anyway, tell her we’re coming around tomorrow to help all those folks fix the place up. Just couldn’t be there when the Free Southern State soldiers were there, or else we’d have to put those government boys in their place. And then the Blue reporters would have a field day saying, Look how the South’s fighting itself.”

Simon poured a capful of hooch from his jug and offered it to Sarat. When she reached for it he swooped it into his own mouth and smiled.

“Very funny,” said Sarat. “That stuff will make you blind, anyway.”

“If it’s any good, it will,” said Simon.

He dug his heels into the sand and watched the boys singing on the log nearby. He’d grown in the last year; not taller—she still had three inches on him—but bulkier. In the rebel camps out by the banks of the Tennessee, he and some of the Cavaliers passed the time curling milk jugs full of sand; he had biceps on him now like rolling hills.

Sarat envied the malleability of boys’ bodies, the way they could, while still boys, cast their physical shapes forward into adulthood like reconnaissance scouts. All her life she’d had little interest in the working of boys’ minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things. But she longed to have such a malleable, predictable body—one that could grow big and strong and yet not raise a single stranger’s eyebrow.