American War(85)

“See, it’s like what Albert Gaines told me once—you ever met Gaines?”

“No,” said Attic.

“You should. He’s got this whole war figured out—he ain’t like them other old idiots. He told me once, he said, Listen, because I’m about to tell you the gist of every opinion that’s ever been had.”

Sarat leaned forward, as though imparting a great secret. “All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it’ll never be like that again, and they’ll never be young again, no matter what they do. And it’s not just ours that do it. It’s theirs too. Imagine if the North had just let us be. Imagine if they didn’t fight us tooth and nail, kill all those innocent people, just to keep us from having a country of our own and doing things our own way—would it really have been so bad? No, of course it wouldn’t. But it wasn’t that way when all those old people that run everything were young, so they can’t let it be. But you and I”—she pointed at the children playing on the street behind her—“and them too: we’re young, and we ain’t bound by what they bound by. We’re gonna pull the power from their hands, because when it comes down to it, they don’t really care ’bout the Red. Only thing they ever cared ’bout was themselves. But us, we’re of this place. We…”

“I’m not of this place,” said Attic.

“But you care about it. About the Southern cause.”

“I don’t.”

Sarat sat back in her chair, surprised by the nothingness in his voice. “Then why were you fighting for it, then?” she asked. “Why’d you pick up a gun and risk being torn to shreds by the Blues if you don’t care for the cause?”

“I wanted to be something,” said Attic. He looked past Sarat to where the smiling children played. “I just wanted to be something.”



IT WAS NIGHTTIME when they finally got back to her home. He was new to drunkenness and after a half-hour of swerving badly along the highways, she made him pull over and she took the wheel.

The old fossil car was not nearly as nimble as the sun-powered Tik-Toks, but it carried within it a beast of a motor. Every now and then Sarat pushed her foot against the pedal just to hear the ancient thing roar.

When she got home she found Karina and Simon in the backyard. Simon sat on a kitchen chair facing the river, wearing a silver bowl for a hat. Carefully, Karina sheared the hairs protruding from beneath the bowl. She’d hung paper lanterns between the trees. Their candlelight spilled through cutouts in the shape of snowflakes. Simon was laughing, squirming in his seat as Karina brushed the fresh skin on the back of his neck with the cold handles of her scissors.

“Where’s my sister?” said Sarat, startling them both. The smile disappeared from Karina’s face and in its place came something more neutral.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Left with her friend the reef pilot this afternoon. Gone to Augusta, I guess.”

Sarat waved the maid inside. “Go fix him some dinner.”

“All right,” said Karina. “Soon as I finish cutting his hair.”

“No. Do it now.”

Karina set her scissors down. Sarat could see a trickle of venom in the way the maid looked at her, and she met it with the same. As Karina left, Simon looked back at her. “Don’t worry, baby boy,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

When there was nothing else left to look at, Simon turned to his sister. He seemed ridiculous to her, sitting in the yard with a silver bowl on his head like a little boy playing spaceman.

“She’s trying to make you like a child,” said Sarat, tossing the bowl aside. “She’s treating you like a little baby. But you like it, don’t you?”

Simon said nothing. She turned his head to face the river and started cutting his hair. She tried to undo the bowl cut, but Karina had already done too much damage, and she had no choice but to finish it.

“She’s not family, you know,” she whispered into her brother’s ear. “She might treat you nice, but she’s not family. She’s a stranger, and you know full well what strangers can do.”

As she leaned in to talk to her brother she breathed in the new smell of him, the smell he’d taken on since Patience. It was to her a sour, nauseating scent—the smell of curdling milk. She tried to remember what he smelled like before, back in the camp.

She recalled sometimes he’d come home drunk from one of his rebel excursions and she’d catch the Joyful on him, but that was a temporary thing, a costume for his breath. Had there ever been another? Did he ever smell the way she smelled, the way Dana smelled? She couldn’t remember, and in her struggle to recall what her brother had been like before he was stripped of himself, she discovered she was angry at him. She was angry at him for not dying in Patience. Had he simply done what all the other men on the execution line had done, she would have forever known him as a martyr, not a marionette—a dumbstruck plaything for doting housekeepers and idiot widows. What was left now was a hollow stencil of the brother she once knew, his very existence polluting her memories of him, burying and displacing the fine, brave boy that was. He should have died.

Caught up in these thoughts, she failed to notice that Simon was crying. He made no sound, looked straight ahead, but she could see the tears in the lanterns’ weak snowflake light.