American War(59)

The sound of men approaching from behind the far corner of the wall shook her from her paralysis. She knew from the soft thud of their boots and from their voices that they were militiamen. She heard one of them say: “They said there’s no rules before sunrise. It’s all ours till then.”

She knew that when they turned the corner they’d see her. Without thinking, she fell to the ground. She wriggled into the mass of dead men, camouflaged herself within it. The heat that had touched her body now wrapped itself around her, sunk into her pores. She lay among the blood and sweat and shit and piss of the murdered. She thought nothing of the fluid that seeped into her clothes, or of the odor or of anything except her small desperate prayer: Please God, don’t let them see me. Don’t let them kill me.

She held her breath. The boot steps grew nearer.

She waited, unmoving as the dead that surrounded her. The men passed.

In the stillness that followed she heard another sound, close by in the tents across the road. It was the sound of guttural heaving, the crack of bone on bone. When that sound subsided there was another scream cut in half.

From a sliver of sight between the limbs of the dead, Sarat saw a man leave the tent across the road. He wore black jeans and a black shirt untucked. His balaclava hung limp from his pants pocket.

She saw his face. He looked no different than the men who lived in the camp. He looked no different than anyone Sarat had ever seen. He was of the same species, the same breed.

She lay frozen in place and watched the man walk in the direction of Georgia, where there was now another pyre aflame. When he was gone and she heard no more boot steps, Sarat rose and ran in the direction of the tent from which the man had just emerged.

Inside she saw a woman named Sabrina, a refugee from Mississippi, a survivor of the firebombing of Hopewell. She recognized her despite the bloody, swollen pulp of her face. The woman’s jaw had been shifted violently to the right, the skin around her eyes made puffy and purple. She lay on the floor of her tent with her skirt hiked high and her stomach butterflied open. Her chest moved.

When the woman caught sight of Sarat she raised her hand and beckoned her to come close. Sarat took the woman’s hand and sat beside her. The canvas beneath her was soaked. The woman moaned and said a word Sarat could not understand. She took it as a pleading for comfort and, not knowing what else to do, Sarat reached for a nearby charity blanket and covered the woman’s gaping stomach. The woman muttered the same word a few more times and then fell silent.

Sarat remained inside the tent. She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.

When the boot steps had passed and there was only the distant crackling of fires, Sarat peered out the tent’s front door. She saw the wall where the pile of bodies lay.

Then came a straggler, a young militiaman with his rifle slung loose over his shoulder. As he passed the dead men he stopped and faced the wall and unzipped his pants and began to urinate.

Sarat watched. She pulled her knife from her pocket and unfolded it. She walked outside, toward the man, who had his back to her. She was no longer afraid. She moved as a wraith, a cold conflagration in the skin of a girl. She approached the man and when she was upon him she reached around his neck and slashed open his throat.

The man reached for her arm and caught it. She pushed him against the wall. They both fell, she on top of him, he on top of the corpses. A cascade of blood erupted from where she’d cut him open. She pinned him down and kept slashing, the neck slippery now with blood. Soon the man stopped fighting, but she kept moving the knife back and forth, back and forth, until she hit something deep within the body she could not sever. She screamed. She stabbed at the back of his head and when the knife hit the hard bone of the skull it held. Sarat’s left hand slipped from the bloody handle and slid down the blade, cutting a deep gash across her palm. The pain was anesthetic. The heat of life left the man but this time Sarat did not feel it.



THE FREE SOUTHERNERS ARRIVED at dawn: a convoy of soldiers dispatched from Atlanta. They rumbled through the gates and into the camp. Behind them came trucks and aid buses bearing the symbol of the Red Crescent, and behind those came a couple of journalists.

The soldiers disembarked from their trucks. They were boys and young men, many of them having never seen a day of fighting. They walked among the corpses and the pyres, dumbfounded, their weapons drawn at phantoms. Quietly, the foreign observers and the journalists began to count and document the dead.

The sun rose over Patience. The survivors, some mutilated, others dumb with shock, crawled from their hiding places and the places where they’d been discarded. The staff who’d hidden in the administrative building emerged holding the flag of the Red Crescent above them, screaming their affiliation.

Sarat walked around the building and when the Reds saw her they raised their weapons and told her not to move. One of the soldiers ordered her to get down on her knees. Sarat stood, soaked in blood.

When one of the camp’s staff saw her she told the soldiers to lower their weapons.

“She’s one of the refugees, she’s one of the refugees,” the woman said, rushing toward the girl.

“Sarat, honey, put that knife down,” the woman said. “It’s done. It’s over.”