American War Page 6

  “This isn’t only about secession anymore,” said a representative of a South Carolina citizens’ group. “This is about avenging our dead.”

  By Wednesday evening, federal president Henley had yet to issue an official statement on the killings. The Department of Defense’s official press site, which has not been updated since Monday, continued to feature a terse statement stating that military officials believe the Marines at Fort Jackson are “acting with utmost restraint.”

  Gov. Brown, who had previously called for all Northern sympathizers in South Carolina to leave the state, repeated that call on Wednesday, and asked for his citizens’ help in the cause of resistance.

  “The wholesale slaughter of our people is not something to be negotiated. It is not the subject of concessions or compromise,” said Gov. Brown.

  “From what has been done today in Fort Jackson, there is no going back.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Under the fractured shade of palm trees, the Chestnuts waited. In crossing the water, they had been pulled two miles downriver. They walked back along the country road that ran near the river, covering this distance and another mile more. The road was cracked deep in places, as though tilled. The remains of the yellow dividing line were now almost completely gone; there seemed to be no separation between the coming and the going.

  They walked until they reached a bend in the road where there was a dirt pull-off and, growing there, a bush of anemic palms. The plants’ green, sharp stalks grew and leaned back toward the river, away from the rising sun. At the feet of the trees there were a few variegated yuccas, their machete leaves tinted green and white. This was the place where the man said the bus would be.

  “The river’s going to take it,” Simon complained. He looked smaller under the weight of his backpack, which was full of clothes, comic books, a snorkeling mask, a hand-sharpened stick knife, and boxes of Benjamin Chestnut’s unfiltered Yuxis.

  The Yuxis, thin and made with weak tobacco, were one of the very few vices the boy’s father had maintained. He kept them hidden from his wife behind a loose board in the outhouse. This secrecy was in fact unnecessary, as both son and wife knew of Benjamin’s smoking habit. But to maintain an unspoken dignity, they said nothing.

  “The river won’t take it,” Martina said.

  “We didn’t pull it far enough up the bank. Soon as it rains next, the river’s going to rise and it’ll float off to sea.”

  “If it does, I’ll make you a new raft.”

  “You’re just saying that because you know we’re not coming back.”

  “Enough.”

  The family set their belongings down in the clearing and waited for the bus to arrive. Dana, exhausted, fell back asleep on the ground with her backpack for a pillow.

  Sarat wandered nearby, foraging around the bushes, inspecting the yuccas. They were resilient-looking things, their leaves flat and rigid. Of the few plants that still grew in the parched Southern earth, the yuccas grew best.

  Sarat ran her finger along the leaves. The skin felt dry and its texture resembled that of sandpaper. But it was also rubbery, with some give to its flesh. She pressed her finger against the needle at the end of the leaf, feeling her own skin compress. The needle ends were brown and rigid, immune to sun and storm.

  The day grew warmer. The Chestnuts waited but no bus came. Soon, Martina began to wonder if they’d missed it entirely, and if she might soon have to decide whether to take the family eastward by foot.

  “What is this, Mama?” Sarat asked, pointing to the yucca.

  “It’s a plant, honey.”

  “What kind of plant?”

  “A cactus. Don’t get too close, you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Cactus,” Sarat repeated, letting her tongue whip every syllable. “Cac-tus.”

  Martina heard the sound of wheels against the road. The bus turned the corner, coming from the south. It was a yellow, prewar school bus, retrofitted with solar panels along the roof. On either side of the bus, where once there would have been stenciled the name of some high school, instead was written, in block letters, CIVILIAN TRANSPORT.

  The bus moved slowly, its panels still soaking up sunlight. The driver came to a stop at the clearing. The door folded open.

  Martina herded the children to the other side of the road. She peered inside the bus. A driver of about thirty sat at the wheel. He was a chubby man, the sweat beaded on his skin.

  Behind the driver sat another man, much taller and broader. He wore a plain white shirt and blue jeans and by his side rested, barrel-up, an old Type-95. It was a cheap and cheaply built rifle, popular with the rebels because it rarely jammed or broke down, and because it could be smuggled with relative ease in the aid ships. The man with the rifle watched Martina, expressionless.

  “We’re the Chestnuts,” Martina told the driver. She realized then that she’d never learned the name of the man who’d promised to grant her passage. “The rebel commander said we’d be allowed to ride to Patience.”

  The driver chuckled. “The rebel commander said that, did he? Well we can’t go upsetting him.” The smirk disappeared from his lips. “A hundred each.”

  Martina shook her head. “He said we’d be allowed on. He said—”

  “Lady, you speak English? A hundred a head.”

  Martina shuffled through her baggage for the tin of money. “I’ve only got three hundred,” she said, “in LAEs.”

  “Did I say LAEs?” the driver replied. “They don’t even accept that joke currency in Louisiana no more.”

  “That’s all I got.”

  The driver shrugged. He pulled a lever by the wheel and the door unfolded shut, knocking Martina back. The bus began to move.

  Martina pulled her children from the path of the wheels. She ran alongside the bus and banged on the door with a fistful of dollars. The driver slowed to a stop once more.

  “Well won’t you look at that?” he said to the man with the rifle. “Guess she just misplaced it is all.”

  Martina paid the fare and ushered her children onto the bus. Simon hopped on and the twins followed, Sarat still carrying the statue of the Virgin. As he walked, Simon stared at the man with the rifle, hypnotized.

  The family shuffled to the back of the bus. An old man, the only other passenger, sat in the second-to-last row. Martina and her children sat behind him on a bench in the very back. They set their bags and belongings on and under the bench, and sat close together on one side, opposite the old man. With a tinny groan, the bus lurched forward once more, its suspension singing to the tune of the cracked country road.

  “They sent me all the way down here for this?” the driver asked the guard, who said nothing. “Waste of goddamn time. Why are we even picking up throwaways from outside the Mag? They sided with Columbus, let Columbus deal with them. We got our hands full with our own.”

  The guard adjusted the banana clip on his rifle. He turned and looked out the window, ignoring the driver.

  The driver turned to his passengers. “Well, you best settle the hell in,” he said. “Got a full long day ahead of you.”

  The driver’s voice woke the old man, who until then had been asleep, his hat pinned between the window and the side of his head. He wiped a thin line of spittle from his mouth. Martina watched him. He was in his eighties, perhaps even older, a child of the previous millennium. Years of untempered sun had tanned the skin of his face and arms to leather, pocked in places with black spots. He wore a white prewar suit, accented with a red silk handkerchief whose top peered from the breast pocket. The suit jacket and pants were graying in the places where they stretched over the knees and elbows, but elsewhere they retained their whiteness. In its totality the suit gave the man an old-world appearance, an air of dignity. He seemed to Martina a creature not only of a different time but of a divergent one, born to an America that long ago turned along its own dark meridian and left the likes of him behind.

  The old man punched the top back into his flattene
d fedora and set it on his lap. He looked around the bus as though he had no idea how he’d ended up on it. He came to Martina. He stared at her awhile.

  Finally, he said, “You from Blind River?”

  “No.”

  “Know anyone from Blind River?”

  “Never heard of it,” Martina said.

  The man quieted and faced forward again.

  “My husband’s got some cousins out near these parts,” Martina said.

  He perked up. “Blind River’s about thirty miles west of here, give or take. Used to be you’d see signs for it if you were coming up from New Orleans, but that’s all gone now.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “I lived there fifty-one years,” the old man said, a weak pride in his voice. “Lived through Anna in ’43 and Michael in ’51. Michael spun right through my living room, tore up all the houses for ten blocks every which way, but mine was the only one it couldn’t crush. They took a photo of it from the air, ran it on the front page of the Courier.”

  He stood up and walked over to the Chestnuts’ side of the bus. He inspected the children, each in turn—Simon, still transfixed with the rebel and his rifle; the girls, sitting window-side, looking out at the brown remains of farmland and the utility poles, their lines limp and dead.

  Sarat sat closest to the window, up on her knees atop the bench, nose pressed close to the glass. Under the warm light of the sun, the land shone clear. Its enormity overwhelmed her.

  Dana sat felinelike between her sister and her mother, working tiny braids into Sarat’s frazzled hair. When she was done with each braid she set it loose and watched it slowly start to come undone, and then she started braiding another.

  “How old are they?” the old man asked.

  “Simon’s nine, the twins are six,” Martina said.

  “Twins! They don’t look a thing alike.”

  “Guess they don’t.”

  The old man looked Dana over. “Well aren’t you a cute one,” he said, and turned back to the mother. “Had a granddaughter just like her. Must be closer to your age now than hers. Her parents took her west to California just before the third Silicon bubble burst in ’44. Haven’t heard from them since. Probably down in Mexican territory now if they’re anywhere.”

  “You know anything about the camp where they’re taking us?” Martina asked. “Is it safe there?”

  “They didn’t tell me nothing about that,” the old man said. “They just showed up and said they needed my land to dock their ships coming in and out of the Mississippi. Gun-runners, all of them, I know it. And there’s nobody left there but me, the houses down that way are all at the bottom of the sea now. The boy in charge said if I was younger they’d just toss me in the water. But I guess they got a sense of charity to them, so they gave me ten minutes to pack and they set me off. Ten minutes! To pack up fifty-six years!”

  “But at the camp, are they gonna feed us? Are they gonna give us a place to stay? We don’t have much money…”

  “…But you know, before I left, I said to that boy, if I was younger, it’d be you tossed into the water…”

  Martina let the old man talk. He spoke for the better part of an hour about his old life in Blind River, adrift on the currents of his memory. In the front she could hear the bus driver talking too. He told the man with the rifle about how his uncle had lined up a good job for him in the vertical farms outside Atlanta. He said all a man had to do to make shift supervisor was keep from falling asleep or pissing in the planting stations, and in six months he’d be promoted to a real suit-and-tie job.

  “See, most of these boys’ problem is they’re too dumb to realize you gotta eat a little shit to get ahead,” the driver said. “They get it in one hand and spend it with the other. They got no discipline. But I got discipline. Yes sir, I got discipline.”

  The guard stared out the window.

  Slowly the bus moved alongside the river, traversing the last shredded remnants of lower Louisiana.

  Here was where the water finally won. For decades, the governments of the state and the country spent billions trying to save lower Louisiana from the encroaching seas—building hundreds of miles of seawalls, levees, raised causeways, and even, toward the end, floating towns. It was still early days then, and the oceans had not yet devoured the optimistic notion that with enough concrete and dirt and pride and money the low country could be saved.

  That was then. All that remained now were the entrails of that long-subsumed world and the futile efforts to preserve it: thin strips of asphalt that disappeared at high tide, ghost towns propped on man-made hills, crumbling bridges that nosedived into the water. Scattered among the islands that remained, these things stood as ruins and like all ruins were in their own way grotesque, a transgression against the passage of time.

  THE BUS LEFT the riverside and turned onto Interstate 55, headed north. In prewar days, the highway ran under the same number all the way to Chicago. Now it ended in a barricade of razor wire and guard towers ten miles south of Memphis—a checkpoint in the new wartime border.

  There were blue signs on the side of the road. They listed the amenities available at every exit. The logos of the gas stations had been blacked out, but atop many of these black squares someone had redrawn the logos in crude graffiti. Thin trees lined the highway. They carried no leaves, only barren branches. Everywhere, the roadside architecture showed the telltale signs of plunder: poles stripped of their wires; cars gutted; factory facades of which only cracked concrete and rebar remained.

  In the quietude of the long highway drive, Martina thought about all the things she had forgotten to do in her rush to escape the night before. She’d packed canned food but no can opener; she’d held the shipping container doors shut with a lock whose combination she’d forgotten long ago. She hadn’t raised the tarp over the solar panels, or drained the rainwater tank. The chickens remained locked in their coop.

  TWO HOURS LATER, the bus reached the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Here a drab, prefabricated building stood at the center of a network of guard posts and concrete chicanes. All vehicles were slowly ushered through this bottleneck. A smattering of armed guards—some of them Louisiana Reservists, others bearing the red, three-starred insignia of the Free Southern State—milled about on either side of the border.

  The bus slowed to a crawl as it slalomed between the chicanes. A white minivan made the same journey a few feet ahead. The minivan’s roof was marked up with lines of black electrical tape that spelled out the word PRESS. At every third chicane the path straightened for a few feet and the vehicles crossed a set of tire shredders aligned northward. An FSS soldier looked on from a nearby guard tower, indifferent.

  The bus idled, waiting on the guards to inspect the minivan ahead in line. The soldiers ushered a group of four men out of the vehicle and then stepped inside. Two of the soldiers began removing equipment from the back of the minivan—cameras, tripods, satellite phones, bright green flak vests, and helmets. A third guard stood nearby, inspecting a few sheets of paper given to him by one of the minivan’s occupants. He flipped through the pages with no discernible interest in their contents or the various notarized seals upon them. Occasionally the man who’d handed the papers over tried to interject, but was told to keep quiet. More soldiers began to congregate around the minivan, gawking at the equipment now strewn on the ground. Eventually the soldier reading the papers folded them up and placed them in his pocket and ordered the vehicle, its passengers, and contents moved to a small building off to the side of the road. The passengers protested, but to no avail.

  Another soldier waved the bus forward. The driver inched closer until he was ordered to stop. The driver opened the door and the soldier came inside.

  “Good morning, sir,” the driver said. “Just making the run up to Patience. Gonna stay north till Grenada then cut northeast to the border towns. Got my permit from Atlanta right here…”

  The soldier ignored the driver. He nodded in the direction of the rebel
fighter.

  The soldier inspected the bus and its five occupants. He was just as spindly as the fighters Martina had seen in Eliza Polk’s house. His red Mag uniform, with its gaudy overabundance of copper buttons and stars, hung loosely on his frame. He wore a box military cap with a flat visor that shadowed his eyes. He looked like a child.

  “Ain’t supposed to bring any in from the Purple country,” he said.

  “They’re the only ones, sir,” the driver said, fumbling through his stack of permits. “Just a couple folks displaced by the fighting out near the Texas border. We got an approval order right here from the Mag rep in Baton Rouge, if you’ll take a look…”

  The rebel fighter motioned for the driver to stop talking.

  “It’s all right,” he told the soldier. “They’re Red.”

  The soldier nodded. He took the permits from the driver and walked out of the bus. “Go on,” he said.

  The driver closed the door and the bus crawled forward toward the gatepost. One of the soldiers untied the post from its moor. The concrete counterweight at the other end dipped and the gatepost opened. The bus passed into the clearing and for a moment it transited through the silent gray suture between two worlds.

  Soon they were on the other side. Martina saw out the west-facing windows the mass of refugees packed against the southbound crossing, held back by a small army of Louisiana Reservists. The bus moved forward, gaining speed, and soon the border crossing disappeared.

  “Welcome to the Mag,” the driver said to his passengers. “The last real set of balls in the whole of God’s green earth.”