American War(81)

In the years since the firebombing, the lake had gone dry. But a strong storm had come through the week prior to Sarat’s visit, and on this day the bed was still swollen with rainwater. A film of green algae covered the surface. Thick as carpet, the algae held the water so still that the entire lake bed appeared as emerald-tinted land, sturdy enough to walk on.

Everywhere around the edge of the lake, the waterside houses lay in ruins, the small roads warped, the trees ashen and still. When she reached the lake bed, Sarat walked down a short driveway that led to a small and badly damaged church: a home converted into a place of worship. An ebony cross held firm to the front door.

The house had been cleaved down the middle in the bombing. The ground under the lake-facing half of the home neared collapse. The back rooms—two bedrooms and a study—teetered precariously over the lake bed. The front half stood level on the land.

Sarat climbed through a gap in the side of the house where there had once been a windowsill. The house was dark but for the midday light that dropped through the broken ceiling like a curtain. Inside, the house smelled of old paper. Fine particulate floated in the sunlit shaft.

In the middle of every month she came here to meet Joe. But this was their first meeting since she’d shot the general at Halfway Branch five months earlier. In the time between, the Blue incursions into Southern territory had increased in frequency and severity. So much so that Joe had temporarily suspended their arrangement.

She saw him inside the house, sitting where he always sat, on a wooden kitchen chair just beyond the curtain of sunlight. She recognized him by his outline: thin-framed, his posture neat, his hands clasped and resting on the table.

“Good morning, Sarat,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Mornin’,?” Sarat replied.

“Come in, sit. It’s a beautiful day, no?”

She still liked the sound of his voice, his strange accent. He had a habit of pronouncing Ps as Bs, soft Hs as hard ones. Sometimes when he talked about his home he spoke words in his own language that relied on alien letters, letters made of sighs and careful curls of the tongue.

Sarat sat at the kitchen table. She felt the warmth of flooding sunlight on the back of her neck. Behind Joe, the floor began to slope sharply downward, and through the rear windows she could see the dull green surface of the near-empty lake.

“Finally, I have a chance to congratulate you in person,” said Joe.

“It was nothing,” Sarat replied.

“It was certainly not nothing. The single most significant Southern victory since the beginning of the war. And you did it, Sarat. It is your victory.”

“It’s no victory, it’s one man dead. They got plenty more still living.”

Joe shook his head. “Albert was right about you,” he said.

“Have you seen him?” asked Sarat. “I’ve been trying to reach him for months, but he up and vanished.”

“I haven’t heard from him either,” said Joe.

“You think they picked him up? He’s been known to them a long time.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe if this were thirty, forty years ago, but he’s an old man now, like me, and they don’t care too much about old men. He was like this as a soldier too—he would disappear for days across the border into Ar-Rutbah without telling anyone. That was back when it was not a very good idea to travel carelessly in Iraq. He even brought me with him a few times to translate and drive. At first I thought he was doing something very dangerous, meeting with the enemy, committing treason. But he just wanted to see the land, to meet the people. I believe they eventually tried him for it—he spent a year in military prison. Did he ever tell you that?”

“He told me you saved his life a couple times,” said Sarat.

“I did no such thing. I was just an assistant, what you would call a fixer. The Americans liked having locals around who could speak English and Arabic, who knew the people and the area. It is always better if you can have people from the same country do the work.”

The sound of a twig breaking outside derailed their small talk. Sarat turned to look out the sliver of space where the front wall was cracked open. She watched and waited for footsteps, but none came. She turned back to Joe, who sat undisturbed, his green dress shirt washed white by the sunlight.

“If it had been the Blues, we wouldn’t have had time to worry about it,” he said. “Anyway, let’s get to business. What do you need?”

“Lag’m,” said Sarat, using Joe’s word for the weapon. “Like the kind you brought last year.”

Joe nodded. “All right. Big or small?”

“Both. Same as last time. There’s a convoy coming down near Tennga next week. Got a colonel riding with them. I know the roads they’re taking, I’ll lay the mines down there.”

“Same as last time, understood. Anything else? More rounds for Templestowe? Cash?”

“Just the mines,” said Sarat.

“Consider it done.”

“There’s something else.”

“Of course.”

“I heard there were secret peace talks happening, that the Free Southerners had some of their people up in Columbus a few months ago. There any truth to that?”

“I believe that is correct,” said Joe.