American War(67)
In the months that followed, after Dana’s nightmares subsided and the storm of attention surrounding the Camp Patience massacre was over and the journalists and politicians moved on, Sarat turned her attention to the only thing that still mattered: revenge, the unsettled score.
For weeks at a time she went out to the forest in Talladega, where Albert Gaines kept a ramshackle cabin. There he taught her to shoot. At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers. It didn’t scare her to consider it, but the thought of abandoning Dana, of leaving her alone to care for what remained of their brother, was too much for her conscience to bear. Yet she wanted to kill. So Gaines pulled his ancient hunting rifle from its rack and set her to sniping soda cans on fence posts.
At first nothing he taught her stuck—not only because the weapon itself barely functioned, its sight cross-eyed, its trigger unreliable, but also because the memory of what she’d seen was still too vivid. Onto the tin cans her mind painted the faces of those Northerners that night in Patience, and at the hallucinated sight of them she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who’d ruined her. Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
The hardest thing to learn was stillness. Even after she finally started hitting the cans and graduated to sniping rats, she struggled most with Gaines’s order that she learn to stay in place for hours at a time. Sometimes he had her sleep where she lay, the forest insects crawling over her. He said the most important part about this kind of hunting was fusing yourself to your surroundings, becoming the earth. But she wanted to move, she wanted desperately to move.
One day Joe came to the cabin. In all her time there, Sarat had never seen Gaines receive visitors, but Joe appeared as though he’d been to the cabin many times, as though it belonged as much to him as it did to Gaines.
“I have a gift for you,” he told Sarat. “Something to help you in your work.”
The rifle he gave her was a fine weapon, a QBU-20 smuggled in on the charity ships, packed into a sack of rice. What Gaines’s old gun saw wrongly it pinned with surgeon’s precision.
She learned to strip it, reassemble it, gauge its temperament. She painted little check marks in red fingernail polish on the black shoulder stock, immortalizing the times when the soul of the gun and the soul of its shooter aligned, even if all that died as a result was a helpless rat.
She named her weapon Templestowe, after the first true rebel of the Second Civil War, the girl who’d killed the crooked Union president in Jackson.
“These are the ways in which I can help,” said Joe. “In the end, it’s up to you what you do with such assistance. The guns are ours but the blood is yours.”
Finally she understood what he meant.
SARAT LAY MOTIONLESS at the flat peak of a hill, hidden in a skin of brush and reeds. Behind her the hill rolled gently down to the Georgia border, the land etched with a network of rebels’ tunnels. A mile ahead of her stood the southern wall of Halfway Branch, the largest Northern operating base on the Tennessee line, and beyond it the dusk-burned sides of the Smoky Mountains.
It had taken her the better part of a week to draw this close, shuffling slowly through the flint tunnels—listening for the footfall of passing patrols—and then the brush. She moved by night amidst the hickories. When she finally arrived at the spot atop the hill, she waited another three days, living off dry rations, burying her waste in the dirt. For three days she set her sights upon the southern gate of Halfway Branch and waited.
She put the rifle down and cast her binoculars upon the horizon. The hastily asphalted road leading to the gate sent upward a heat mirage, and in its untilted rise there were no signs of wind. She scanned the forest between her and the base, looking for the same things the soldiers in the towers looked for: unnatural shadows, straight lines, the glimmer of a shiny black nickel in the brush.
Gaines had trained her to see these things. In his cabin he laid out a table of items—books, cutlery, a flywheel, a packet of cards fanned out. Every time the items were different and differently arranged. He covered the table with a bedsheet and brought Sarat into the room. He uncovered the table for ten seconds and covered it again. Then he asked her to describe everything under the table to the most granular detail: the order of the fanned cards, the number of holes on the flywheel.
The sun set behind the mountains. Halfway Branch lay seared in the dying light, a box fortress of shipping containers and long-drawn tents. The soldiers milled about in their guard towers.
Sarat lay still. There was a residual dampness in her pants from when she’d urinated without moving, and now that dampness cooled and hardened. She felt it in the hairs of her legs, down to where her bare ankles rubbed against the earth.
Four soldiers ascended the guard tower. She recognized two of them as muscle, bodyguards watching over the third man. He was older than the others, his hair silver and smoothly parted. He wore the same uniform as the men who surrounded him but he was not of them; there was a calmness in the way he carried himself, the way he nodded as the fourth man and the guard tower grunt pointed out markers on the horizon.
Sarat knew the soldiers were pointing to the places from where the martyrs came—men and women who walked out from among the black gum trees with the makings of hellfire strapped to their chests. Rarely did they get to within a hundred feet of the gates before they were shot down. And when they came with rocket launchers on their shoulders, the Blues had turrets that gauged the trajectory of those rockets in midair—before the projectiles landed, the ones who’d fired them were already dead. The rebels knew these things, knew the futility of their assaults, and yet every few days another walking weapon emerged from among the black gum trees.