American War(70)

The boy at the helm of the boat, a New Zouave from southern Alabama, thanked them. He took the boxes without checking their contents, knowing the arms promised him would be there, knowing from experience that the Chestnuts were as reliable a conduit as any along the Savannah smugglers’ trail.

They watched him leave upriver. When he was gone and the grogginess of interrupted sleep had left her, Sarat became aware of the hunger eating at her stomach. The last of the apricot mush she ate in the forest had gone through her. She yearned for okra swimming in oil; pigeon grilled over charcoal; the cinnamon burn of tub-brewed Joyful.

“Let’s go to Augusta,” she said.



DURING THE WAR Atlanta was the heart of the South but Augusta supplied the blood. Ever since the storms and rising seas swallowed much of the eastern coast, it was this place that functioned as the Red country’s most vital port. Toward the end of every month, a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast, the foreign shipping vessels arrived from the far side of the world. The ships’ captains waited there for reef pilots to come and guide the hulking freighters around the remains of the submerged coastal cities and into the Augusta docks.

In anticipation of the ships’ monthly bounty, an assortment of opportunists descended on the city: ship hands, smugglers, rebels, reef pilots, foreign captains and their crews. They were joined by sailors on leave from the impotent Southern navy, whose skeleton fleet had long ago surrendered the ocean to the Blues. For a few days every month, the port’s riverside bars and brothels and boardinghouses hummed.

At dusk the dockmaster flipped a switch and a string of Christmas lights hung along the boardwalk came to life. The boardwalk sat atop the flattened head of the Reynolds Street levee, which rose twenty feet high. The river-facing side of the levee was sheer, except in the places where stairs led to the reef pilots’ house and the wharf. On the city-facing side, the concrete slope was of a gentle gradient, and it was on this side where, in the early morning, many of the passed-out drunks could be found sleeping.



BY THE TIME Sarat and Dana arrived in Augusta, the bars overflowed—not only with those waiting on the aid ships but also with tourists from all over the Mag, in town to watch the Yuffsy.

The sisters went first to the Hotel D’Grub near 12th Street. There was a gaggle of dockhands and Atlanta boys gathered on the lawn of the repurposed Baptist church, drunk and cheerful. In the center of the lawn there stood an ancient Chevy fossil truck, mounted on bricks. The truck was brown with rust, its hood sheared off, a charcoal grill in the place where the engine used to be.

Billows of smoke rose from the grill. The retired freight captain Isaac, who ran the Hotel D’Grub, stood between the truck’s lightless eye sockets, a palmetto fan in his hand. He was a large man, shirtless, sweaty but serene under his skipper hat despite the barrage of orange embers the truck spat in his direction. The smoke climbed from the blackened trays and made of the redbrick church behind it a distant dream.

“How are you, old man?” said Sarat.

The captain turned. “Well now, if it isn’t the only real goddamn men in Augusta. Make way, for Christ’s sake!” he said, kicking at two Atlanta college boys slumped on garden recliners near the grill. “It’s a zoo around this time of the month—you know how it gets when there’s money to be had.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go inside and clean you out anyway. Haven’t had a decent meal in a week.”

The captain nodded. “Go on in. I’ll send some steak your way.”

Sarat laughed. “Ain’t nothing like that flying steak you got here. You shoot them down yourself?”

“I’ll shoot you down, you keep running your mouth. Flying steak’s better than none.”

The captain pointed to the grand bullethead windows of the church’s street-side facade. The original windows had been smashed long ago in one of the riots following the massacre at Fort Jackson, the insides stripped and looted down to the pews and the floorboards.

“Your friend Bragg is in there, by the way,” he said.

“The old one or the young one?” asked Sarat.

“Ha! The old one can’t get up to take a piss nowadays. It’s the kid. Got his whole entourage with him too.”

“Christ,” said Sarat. “Well that’s no fun.”

The captain wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand on the side of his jeans. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know. I’ll go in there and kick his ass—don’t care how united his daddy’s little rebels are.”

They thanked the old captain and went inside. Beyond the redbrick exterior, there was little left of the original church—only the words AND THEY WENT DOWN BOTH INTO THE WATER, painted in an arch along the wall, and below it a pale hollowness where once there hung a shining cross.

The captain was a collector of long-dead things, species that had once existed but could not adapt to the planet’s unbreaking fever. Taxidermied heads of caribou and muskoxen and sea lions and white-faced foxes stared down from the walls with marbles in their eyes.

The dinner hall was full. The air was heavy with the smell of fryer oil and sawdust on spilled beer. The tables were arranged haphazardly throughout what was once a grand nave. In the rear of the room a frenzied herd of line cooks moved in chaotic ritual around stoves and bubbling pots.