American War(56)

In the amber glow of firelight the boys sang drunkenly. Simon turned to his sister. “We got one of them yesterday, Sarat,” he said. “We got a big one.”

“Who?” Sarat asked.

“A guy named Pearson,” said Simon. “A general, commander of half the troops along the Tennessee line.”

“Jesus. How?”

“We were out in the forest, all the way out east, past Chattanooga. We’d been there for days, camped out by a path the Blues had been using to run supplies in and out of Big Frog. Eli set a trap, a big mine deep in the ground, a little mine just above it. The big mines don’t go off under the weight of a man, but the little ones do, so you make it so that one sets off the other. Then we lay a tree trunk across the path and we just waited. Waited for three days till finally this convoy comes rolling through. Usually they run in fours but this time it was just two LAVs. We thought it was just grunts rotating through the forward base at Halfway Branch. But when they came out to take a look at the log, well, Eli’s looking through the binoculars and he says, ‘One of them got stars on his shoulders.’ And we’re watching as he walks out ahead of all of them, like he’s making a big show of leading, and he steps right on it. The little mine sets off the big mine and takes all but two of them out right there. We came running down there soon as it went off, and in the back of these LAVs were nothing but crates of supplies. So many, we couldn’t even carry them all.”

Simon pointed to the sky. “I’m telling you, He was watching over us, Sarat. He was watching over us, I know it.”

“Simon, you can’t be out here celebrating,” said Sarat. “You gotta hide. They’ll come after you.”

Simon laughed. “Who are they gonna come after? They don’t know nothing. All they know how to do is build walls and send the Birds to do their dirty work for them.”

“You gonna keep all this stuff in the camp?”

“Most of it is just food,” said Simon. “We’re gonna keep some of it up north in the empty tents, but most of it we’ll just give out. People deserve to eat.”

“They’ll know,” said Sarat. “Word will get out. You can’t have a whole camp eating steak and nobody hears about it.”

“It’ll be all right,” Simon said. He put his arm around his sister and pulled her close to him, her smooth-shaved head resting against his shoulder. “Christ, lady, when did you get so nervous? What happened to the girl who jumped into Shit Lake on a dare?”

“Just be careful.”

“We got one of theirs, Sarat,” said Simon. “Every day they get a hundred of ours, but this time we got one of theirs.”



SARAT RETURNED to the center of the camp. She entered the administrative building through the side door that led to Albert Gaines’s office.

On this night she found him leaning over the table, placing delicate spoonfuls of something black and glistening on a plate. He was dressed as she’d always seen him dressed: his single-breasted suit unblemished by wrinkles. He wore a double-Windsored tie of matte gray decorated with a crest of three stars atop an armored knight’s head and a red-striped shield. His hat lay on the table.

“Come in, come in!” he said, smiling. “I have something special for you.”

Sarat inspected the small flat canister on the table. Its tin lid had been pried open and inside lay a clump of small black balls. The writing on the side of the canister was foreign: letters similar to English but oddly misshapen, as though mutated somehow. The logo on the label was of a fish and a king’s crown.

“In Columbus the Northerners pay more than you would ever believe for pale imitations of this,” Gaines said. “Tonight you get the real thing for free.”

Sarat poked it with her pinky finger. The amount on her plate seemed impossibly small for a meal, and she wondered if it wasn’t some kind of vitamin pill, like the ones that came in the aid shipments.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Try it first. I don’t want you to be disgusted beforehand.”

“I won’t be.”

“It’s caviar,” Gaines said. “Fish eggs.”

“Hmm.”

Sarat tasted the caviar. It whispered to her tongue an awful, briny secret. It spoke of something very far away, fruit of alien trees. Instantly she loved it.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“The Russian Union,” Gaines said. “The other side of the world. A present from our friend Joe.”

He walked to the office’s small kitchenette. Sarat heard the tick-tick-tick of the toaster oven, and soon he returned with her favorite, honey on toast. He sat beside her and watched her eat. He seemed to have an endless capacity for watching.

“I have a new book for you,” he said. He went to the bookshelves and returned with a hardback. Sarat inspected the book. It was brand new, as though it had been published that day. The book was called A Northern Soldier’s Education in War and Peace. It had a picture of a handsome man on the cover. Most of the books Gaines had given her to read until then had nothing on their covers but the names of the authors and the names of the books. But on this one, the image of the man dominated the cover, as though his face itself were the subject of the book. The portrait of the man was cropped at his chest; Sarat saw the medals and marks of a military uniform on him.