American War(9)

Polk touched Martina’s shoulder. “Of course, of course, and there’s no shame in going, either. I know you want to do what’s best for your children, and it’s safer up there, no doubt; they don’t have to go through what we go through. But you’re not of them. There’s no sin in making a safer life for your children—and maybe when they’re old enough to make decisions for themselves they can come back to their own country—but you’re not of them. You’re still Southerners in your bones, you’re still Southerners in your blood. That won’t ever change.”

“We’re a family,” Martina said, her eyes set on the bend to the north, beyond which it was impossible to see any further upriver. “We’re nothing else.”

From beyond the bend a sound carried ahead of its source. It was not the gurgling noise of Smith’s fossil skiff, but something that cut smoother through the water, a bigger boat. For a moment Martina thought it was one of the rebels’ smuggling ships, out earlier in the evening than usual. She yelled for her children to come back to shore, and they did, hustling up the slippery bank with their feet caked in mud. But when the boat came around the bend its spotlights cast sharp circles on the black water; Martina knew rebel ships run dark.

It was a state river monitor, a twenty-foot launch operated out of Baton Rouge. Nominally, it was supposed to help keep the rebels from running arms across the river to and from the Texas oil fields and the Mexican Protectorate. It moved slow and conspicuous, with glowing solar panels extending out from port and starboard like butterfly wings. The panels were intended to power the boat; only in emergencies was the backup diesel motor to be used. But in practice the officers quickly tired of the panels and their anemic batteries, and out on the water they used, almost exclusively, the fuel whose prohibition they were supposed to enforce.

Martina knew the kind of men who worked on these boats. They were Southerners, all of them, employed by the Mississippi River Protection Agency or the Department of Emergency Security or a dozen other state bureaucracies that were state-run in name only—conceived solely to fulfill Northern wartime objectives. The officers went by the nickname Blue Badges and in rebel parlance these men were said to owe money to the madam. Once or twice a month, a Blue Badge would go missing somewhere along the Mississippi border. His body was usually found a few days later hanging from the twisted branch of a curling catalpa, the lining cut from his pants pockets and stuffed in his mouth. Such were the fortunes of accused traitors—not only in the secessionist country, but in neighboring states whose populace sympathized with the rebels even as their governments sided with the North.

“It’s Benjamin,” said Martina, watching the boat change its trajectory, shifting in the direction of the Chestnuts’ place. “Something’s happened to him. Blue Badges don’t come out here this late at night if they can help it.”

“Just calm down, don’t start getting all those ideas,” Polk said. “It’s probably nothing.” But Martina was already out of her chair and headed for the bank. Midway she met her children coming back from the river. They walked with their heads turned back, fixated on the incoming boat.

“Go on inside,” Martina said. The girls did as they were told but Simon did not.

“They’re going to say something about Dad, aren’t they? I’m not a baby, I’m old enough to know.”

Without speaking, Martina turned and slapped her son across the face. The boy, stung and reddened, was left speechless. So lengthy were the intervals between those moments when his mother’s innate hard strength showed itself that the boy was often lulled into forgetting it existed at all.

“Go inside,” Martina repeated to her son, in whose eyes tears of shock and anger had already begun to well. His face hardened with spite, but this time he complied.

The boat docked against the clay bank and two men in drab brown uniforms came ashore. Their clothes resembled sheriff’s uniforms; pinned to their breasts were stumpy, plastic-looking badges.

One man was tall and thickset. His hair was buzzed close enough to show the pink of his scalp, and even without seeing, Martina could tell there were small rolls of fat on the back of his neck. The shorter man was of slim build, and appeared to be about ten years older than his partner, who himself could not have been more than twenty-one. The shorter man carried with him a slim paper folder, whose contents he repeatedly consulted by the light of his flashlight.

“Are you Martina Chestnut?” he asked finally.

“What happened to him?” Martina replied.

“Wife of Benjamin Chestnut?”

“Tell me what happened to him.”

The officer spoke in a deadened monotone, refusing to look up from the notes in his folder. “Miss Chestnut, at one-seventeen in the afternoon on April first, 2075, an insurrectionist detonated a homicide bomb in the lobby of the Federal Services Building in Baton Rouge…”

The rest of the officer’s speech floated by Martina, unheard. Her vision darkened and narrowed, such that the men’s outline faded into the black river behind them. Vaguely she felt a hot, sharp sickness in the pit of her stomach. Polk’s hand was on her shoulder again, and this roused her from her stupor long enough to interrupt the man talking.

“Take me to him,” she said. “I want to see my husband.”

“Ma’am…” the officer started.