American War(84)

Bragg Sr. laughed, his black gums showing. He turned to his aides. “She’s dumb the way we used to be dumb,” he said. “It don’t ever change, don’t ever change.”

Facing Sarat again, he said, “Darling, don’t you understand? You’re here because I like you. There’s not one of my men as man as you, none that managed to do what you did—a general! The biggest goddamn get since President Daniel Ki!—that’s why you’re here. I would like to keep you around, keep you from falling into their hands. Because, believe me, now that they got the son of the man you killed running the Southern offensive, he’ll burn down whole cities trying to find out who did it. And if he finds out it was you, he’ll string you up.”

“So let him,” Sarat said. “I’m not afraid to die.”

“That’s because you’re young and you think dying’s quick,” Bragg Sr. said. “But they got ways to make dying take just as long as living.”

“So what do you want me to do, then? Crawl in a hole and wait?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty well it. Go on back to that nice little charity house you have by the river and stay there. Don’t go anywhere near Halfway, don’t go whoring around with that barkeeper’s daughter in Augusta.” He paused and smiled. “Yeah, we know about that too—and make sure your sister stays there with you, your brother, the whole damn family. Wait till the fire dies out from Junior’s blood up there in Columbus, and then I promise we’ll help you put a bullet in his head too, if that’s what you want.”

“You done?” Sarat said.

“Yeah, darling,” the old man replied. “I’m done.”

Sarat stood. “Thanks for the advice,” she said, and left.



THE RESIDUE of the conversation lingered with her as Attic drove her home. She felt emboldened by having stood up to the man whose whims turned the currents of the Southern rebellion. She shifted in the passenger seat of the old sedan, leaned her head out the window. Even the saline Atlanta smog felt like a mountain breeze.

“Let’s stop in the Floordeelee for a drink,” she said. “I know they don’t pay you shit; I’ll buy.”

“I have to take you home,” Attic said.

“What, they hire you by the hour or something? It’s just a drink—won’t take much time.”

Attic shook his head. “They don’t like me over there,” he mumbled. “Not my place.”

For a moment she thought he was talking about Bragg and his men, then she realized he meant something else altogether.

“Christ, are you serious?” she said. “So you got no fear about picking up a gun and going to the Tennessee line, but you’re too scared to go into your own people’s neighborhood because they got different skin?”

Her words seemed to shame him into acquiescence; soon they drove into the New Fourth Ward. It was a cramped mass of towers on the east side of the city, adjacent to the grounds of a sprawling electronics factory from which a steady high-pitched din emanated at all hours.

The housing complexes, high and gray, were barely an arm’s length apart—such that, between them, the buildings formed a narrow labyrinth of alleys. The cramped streets were lined with shirt vendors and stalls full of produce smuggled from the vertical farms, as well as money-movers and Tik-Tok mechanics and Just-A-RedBuck Stores.

They parked on the outskirts of the neighborhood and walked in, traversing the narrow inlets of asphalt between the buildings. Power lines ran down from the solar panels that covered all the roofs and from one building to another, creating a latticework overhead. Some of the old men and women sitting in the street watched Sarat and Attic as they passed, but it was the tall, bald girl that caught their interest, not the thin Utah boy who walked with his head lowered behind her.

The Floordeelee was a brick shack. It stood at the end of a narrow peninsula penned in on three sides by residential towers. Outside, there was an open space littered with old card tables and folding chairs. At all hours of the day and night the tables were full or nearly full.

Sarat and Attic bought a couple of drinks and sat at one of the tables. She drank a Kingway and he nursed a Coke.

“So you’re indebted to the old man for life now, huh?” said Sarat. “Since he pulled some strings and got you out of that mess you were in?”

“I was indebted to him before then,” said Attic. “He saved me and my brothers in Utah. Without him we’d all be dead.”

“So what ever happened to ya’ll in Utah anyway? You just hide out in that farm the whole time? I heard they found one of your brothers in a pile of pig shit or something.”

Attic said nothing. She tried to get him to talk about his life before the Red, but he wouldn’t. In time she did manage to shame him into having a couple of beers. Soon his shoulders seemed to loosen. As dusk rolled over the city, both he and Sarat were pleasantly drunk.

“See, the problem with men like Bragg is they think it’s their right to run the place,” said Sarat, slurring the words but adamant in her conviction. “They never known what it’s like not to run the place, think they can just tell you what to do and you gotta listen like you got no say, like you got no thoughts, like you ain’t even alive.”

Attic seemed to look past her, at a group of small children running barefoot through the alley, playing tag.