American War(79)

She arrived at Garden Sound in the late afternoon. The mouth of the river where it met the ocean was a desolate place, but beautiful in its own way. Great looming wharfs lined the edge of the land. It was here where many of the freight companies kept offices, and where the last remaining salvage divers set sail to search for bounty in the undersea heart of sunken Savannah.

In the distance, six miles outland, a line of glowing buoys marked the boundary beyond which the Blues controlled the water. Their coastal vessels circled, and whenever a gift ship arrived, they escorted it to a large floating customs platform, where the soldiers searched it.

At the very edge of the Red, near the light ships that provided guidance to the mouth of the river, another, smaller platform stood. A tiny building of welded shipping containers sat atop the platform.

It was a coffee shop, run by a man named Prince Wendell who was nearing his hundredth birthday and had lived on the Georgia coast his entire life. He was known as the very last holdout of the great Inland Exodus, the one man left who remained on his land even when it ceased being land.

For the better part of eighty years he had run this business. Mostly blind now but unwilling to retire to the dry world, he opened the coffee shop for business only on the first three days of every month. During those days, his customers were reef pilots, foreign crews, and Northern soldiers with the circling customs fleet.

Any other Southerner would have been strung up for serving Blues, but Prince Wendell was old and stubborn enough to be grandfathered into the peace of his youth, and the tiny confines of his floating coffee shop stood as the only place in the wartime country where the North and South maintained an unspoken truce.

In one of the warehouses near the shore, Albert Gaines kept a Sea-Tok docked in Wharf Twenty-one. Sarat took the tiny vessel out into the ocean.

It was a slow trip to Prince Wendell’s coffee shop. She had chosen this place and this time to meet her informant because it coincided with a lull in the traffic at the mouth of the river. By nightfall the first of the gift ships would begin the crossing back to the other side of the world, and the coastline would once again become congested as the Blues searched the freighters for stowaways. But in these few hours the sea was clear.

Sarat docked at the foot of the platform and climbed the ladder to the deck. A neon “Open” sign buzzed on the door. Inside, the coffee shop was decorated with pictures of the old city of Savannah and of Prince Wendell’s childhood home.

Sarat had seen many walls decorated with pictures like these—pictures treated by their bearers with ritualistic reverence, as though the memory of a thing, showered with enough devotion, could resurrect the thing itself.

Prince Wendell sat at the counter. For a while he stared at the door, trying to make out his customer. When Sarat was close enough for him to see, he smiled.

“Julia!” he said. “Good to see you again!”

Sarat hugged the old man, one of many acquaintances in and around Augusta to whom she had given a fake name. “How you feeling, boss?”

“Can’t complain,” said Prince Wendell. “Good month, this one. Storm just missed us. Last month though, Christ, that was a bad one.”

He continued describing the previous month’s storm as he walked to the kitchen to fetch his customer a cup of coffee. Sarat sat at the table nearest the counter and waited. Soon she heard another skiff docking at the base of the platform. A Blue soldier climbed the ladder.

No matter how many times they met, the sight of her informant’s uniform up close slipped a primal switch deep within Sarat’s gut.

The soldier walked inside. He greeted Prince Wendell and soon the old man was back in the kitchen, preparing the soldier’s usual order.

The soldier sat at Sarat’s table. Every month, they met this way, briefly, no more than a couple of minutes. And every month she marveled at the sight of him—the way he had grown into a man seemingly overnight, even as his frame remained stunted. He had survived, he had lived; it was the only thing that mattered.

“You got him,” said Marcus Exum. “Every damn one of them is talking about it. Highest-ranking Blue casualty since they killed the president in Jackson.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you,” said Sarat.

Marcus looked over Sarat’s shoulder at the door.

“You got someone joining you on this coffee run?” asked Sarat.

“No. But you never know who else might come by.”

Marcus slid a cigarette across the table. “Only intel I could get this month. It’s a convoy, four LAVs. They’ll be passing near the Tennessee line at Russell Cave. Supposed to have some deputy secretary from the War Office onboard, getting a tour of the front.”

Sarat looked at the cigarette—she could see the outline of words and a simple map drawn on the inside of the wrapping paper. “Thank you,” she said.

“Can I ask you a favor?” said Marcus.

“Sure.”

“Lay low a while. There’s talk they’re going to retaliate for what happened at Halfway. They’re going to put the old man’s son in charge of the War Office, everyone’s sure of it. And he’s going to tear the whole front apart. I don’t know how or when, but I promise you he will.”

Sarat touched her friend’s shoulder. She felt the bars on his uniform, markers of his place in the hierarchy of what was once the most powerful force in the world, the military of her enemy.