American War Read online

  THEY MOVED NORTHWARD. Sarat looked out the window. The water that inundated so much of southern Louisiana was gone, but in other ways the land looked the same. The fields they passed were empty and browning, the trees limp and bare. Curls of blown-out tires littered the ditches by the side of the road.

  But there were different sights too, things she’d never seen before—craters ten feet in diameter splitting the highway open, covered over in places with haste: sometimes with concrete, other times with crude wheel bridges made of wood and steel planks. An old, fossil-powered muscle car screamed past the bus, its hood decorated with a stylized rattlesnake.

  There were strange billboards on the side of the road. They bore images of destruction and carnage: city blocks reduced to rubble; the dust-lacquered corpses of children; soldiers from the Free Southern State assisting the destitute families who lived in the border towns. Affixed to all these images were no words except: Nehemiah 4:14.

  Near Jackson, the driver steered the bus eastward. Soon they were in Alabama, and once again headed north. When they reached Huntsville, not far from Alabama’s wartime border with the Blues, the driver slowed and turned into town.

  “This the North, Mama?” Sarat asked.

  “Not yet, baby,” her mother replied. “Soon.”

  The driver squinted, looking ahead at the town from the peak of the highway turnoff. “Christ,” he said. “I can see them already, crawling all over one another like rats.”

  The bus stopped near the doors of a proud brown-brick church. A human swarm blanketed the courtyard: women and their children huddled around sacks and suitcases, men hobbled by age or amputation slumped in their wheelchairs. Volunteers tended to them with cling-wrapped sandwiches and fruit juice cups. Some of the volunteers were priests, clad in their clerical blacks, but all wore white vests on which were stamped, large and readily visible, the symbol of the Red Crescent.

  Seeing the bus, the crowd began to fidget. A few volunteers held them at bay behind the black iron gate that marked the church grounds. A priest emerged from the horde and came to the bus. The driver opened the door.

  “ ’Afternoon, Father,” the driver said. “You look set to be trampled by your own flock, don’t you?”

  “They shelled Hazel Green Saturday night,” the priest said. “God knows who they were after, but it sent the whole town running. You got ninety for me, right?”

  “Eighty-five.”

  The priest looked at a manifest attached to a clipboard in his hand. “Says here ninety. I already told them ninety would get to leave.”

  “Don’t worry, Father. I bet by now these folks are used to being told all kinds of things that turn out not to be true. Eighty-five, no more.”

  The priest rubbed his temple. “Fine, wait, just wait a while. And keep the doors closed; when I tell them they might come for your throat.”

  “Whatever you say, Father.”

  The priest returned to address part of the crowd in the courtyard, and soon the murmur in the crowd rose, and the priest was shouted down from all directions. Martina listened through a sliver of open window.

  “It’s my turn, you said it yesterday,” a woman said. “You swore it.”

  “I have no say in the matter,” the priest replied.

  “The hell you don’t,” a man leaning on crutches said.

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.”

  “There is no one man, and you know it,” the priest said. “There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.”

  The priest huddled with the other volunteers to decide which five would stay. Preemptively, people in the crowd began yelling reasons why they should not be made to wait one more day. They shouted of their ailments, of festering wounds that required urgent care; they shouted the number of their dead and the names of their children. The priest and his advisers looked at the manifest and crossed and uncrossed and crossed the names again.

  “Goddamn Anglicans,” the bus driver said. “Never could make up their minds.”

  Finally it was agreed that four men and one teenage boy would remain at the church. The other eighty-five refugees, all but two of them women and children, were made to form a line that snaked back and forth from the courtyard to the sidewalk. The bus driver opened the door and, one by one, they boarded.

  It was a sullen, dead-eyed procession. The women filled the seats with mechanical indifference, their children ahead of them, their belongings stuffed in backpacks or suitcases or laundry baskets. They wore track pants and T-shirts and tank tops soiled with food stains and emblazoned with the names and logos of restaurants and hotels and companies that no longer existed. More than a few of the women wore the same cheap polyester T-shirts. On the front of these shirts was drawn the undulating flag of the Free Southern State: three hollow black stars, aligned horizontally, upon a white horizontal bar. The white split evenly an otherwise red background. On the back, the shirts were stamped in bold font with the date October 1, 2074—Southern Independence Day.

  Martina shifted close to her children, protecting her corner of the bench. Slowly the bus filled to capacity with its human cargo. The bodies brought with them their warmth; the air within the bus began to turn stale and humid with the pickled acidity of sweat and unbathed skin. Three women filled the rest of the available space on the back bench, their children and belongings piled high upon their laps. One woman, who looked to be in her late twenties and dragged behind her a boy not much younger than Simon, approached Martina.

  “You’re taking up too much room,” she said, pointing at the Chestnuts’ belongings. “Get rid of all that shit.”

  “We’re taking up as much room as anyone else,” Martina replied.

  The woman looked with contempt at the statue of the Virgin, which rested on the bench next to Sarat. “They’re keeping my husband another day in that hellhole so you can bring a goddamn statue with you? That ain’t fair.”

  “I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you know. Throw it out.”

  A woman occupying the seat next to the old man from Blind River turned around. “Just sit down, Lara,” she said. “Stop pestering the poor woman.”

  “Shut up, Holly. You ain’t in charge of nothing.”

  At the front of the bus, the rebel guard stood. “Shut your mouth and sit down,” he said.

  “It ain’t fair, it ain’t fair!” Lara replied. “Why’d they get to bring every damn thing they own when my husband doesn’t even get the seat he was promised?”

  The guard slung his rifle around his shoulder and walked to the back of the bus.

  “All right, all right,” Lara said. “Calm down, hold on a second.” But quickly the fighter grabbed her by the arm and dragged her forward. She cursed him and grasped at the backs of the seats, but was easily dislodged. When he reached the front of the bus, the guard pulled the door lever with his free hand and then shoved the woman outside. She landed unbalanced and fell on the sidewalk. Then he turned to the young boy, who’d been tugging at his shirt screaming for him to let go of his mother, and threw him out too. Before any of the church volunteers had a chance to object, he’d tossed their rucksacks as well. He closed the doors and turned to the passengers.

  “Anyone else got something to say?” he asked. The passengers said nothing. The guard turned to the driver.

  “Go,” he said. The driver obeyed.

  Soon the bus was back on the highway, headed west, back in the direction of Mississippi. A mile after the highway crossed the wash of Little Yellow Creek, the driver turned northward, navigating by memory a labyrinth of one-lane country roads. The roads meandered around dry beds that once bore the offshoots of the Tennessee River.

  Holly turned once more to Martina.

  “Don’t worry ’bout Lara,” she said. “She ain’t been the same since she lost her youngest boy to the Birds
last winter.”

  “I didn’t know,” Martina said. “I didn’t know about any of this.”

  Holly raised her hand over the back of her seat and introduced herself and shook Martina’s hand. “Where you from, anyway?” she asked.

  “St. James.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “South of Baton Rouge, on the Mississippi.”

  Holly’s brows furrowed. “That’s Blue country,” she said. “Purple, anyway. What did you do to end up here?”

  “The fighting moved east from Texas.”

  “Sweetheart, you think the Texas fighting is bad? You ain’t seen the border towns round here. You should have gone up north when you had the chance. They got an office in Baton Rouge where you can get yourself a work permit.”

  Martina looked over at her children to see if they’d been following the conversation. They appeared otherwise occupied—Dana asleep, Sarat entranced by the strange new country, Simon talking to Holly’s boy, who shared with him a plastic toy alligator he’d brought with him.

  “Anyway—what am I saying?—you’ll be just fine,” Holly continued. “They got good people running Patience. The Red Crescent. That’s the best one of those aid groups, you know, the one they send to all the biggest wars. Don’t get me wrong, it ain’t no hotel, but at least it’s big enough that the Blues got no excuse to fire on it by accident the way they sometimes do. And anyway, President Kershaw’s people in Atlanta say we’ll have peace by Christmas and everybody will get on back to their homes, or what’s left of them. He says they might even make the Blues pay to rebuild the border towns, but I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Martina looked out the window. She saw four old fossil trucks parked by the side of the road. A group of about ten Free Southern State soldiers were standing near the trucks. One of them waved the bus down.

  “What do they want now?” Martina said.

  “Ain’t nothing,” Holly replied. “They just can’t have armed rebels bringing folks in. It makes the Red Crescent people nervous.”

  The bus stopped. The rebel fighter traded places with one of the soldiers. The soldier wore the same red uniform as the guards who manned the Louisiana border crossing, his cap folded and pinned under his shoulder mark.

  “Mornin’, ” he said to the passengers. A few nodded and returned the greeting.

  “Real upbeat crowd you got here,” the soldier said to the driver. “Go on, get us to the gate.”

  The driver pulled forward. A couple of miles up the road, in a burn-cleared woodland not far from where three states met in the Tennessee River, the bus passed a set of speed bumps. A billboard bore the same crescent illustration that had marked the vests of the church volunteers in Huntsville. The sign said: “Camp Patience Refugee Facility—Neutral Ground.”

  THE REFUGEES SHUFFLED OUT into the Mississippi dusk. The Chestnuts, their legs numb from the daylong drive, were the last to exit. They had barely a moment to regard their new surroundings—an endless expanse of thick canvas tents, teeming with displaced life—before they were ushered by a camp worker into the administrative building.

  There they waited in a large intake room, seated on plastic schoolroom chairs. Others, tired of sitting, took blankets from their sacks and spread them on the ground and lay on them and closed their eyes. In parts of the room large standing fans whirred. Many of the incoming refugees congregated near these fans. A couple of aid workers walked around the room, handing out bottled water from a cooler.

  “Where are we, Mama?” Sarat asked.

  “It’s just a place to spend the night, baby,” her mother replied.

  “It smells funny.”

  “I know, baby. Just wait a little while longer.”

  A half-hour after she entered the intake room, Martina heard her name called out by one of the aid workers. She and her children once again picked up their belongings and followed the worker to an office where a man sat behind a cluttered schoolteacher’s desk, a pile of intake forms before him.

  “Chestnut?” he said.

  “That’s us,” Martina replied.

  “Four?”

  “Yes.”

  The man looked over the forms on the desk in front of him a while longer. His thin eyes were circled with the dark shadows of insufficient sleep.

  “You’re not from the Free Southern State territories,” he said.

  Martina did not respond. The man flipped through the intake form again.

  “Do you have…any authorization documents from the FSS consulate…” the man started, then paused. “Did anyone give you papers? This is a camp for internally displaced persons of the Free Southern State, yes? You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I got no papers,” Martina said.

  The man set the intake forms down on the desk and scratched his scalp. He sighed and retrieved from another drawer a pink form. He began filling it, asking Martina questions without looking up.

  “What is your date of birth?”

  “March 21, 2036.”

  “The boy’s name and date of birth?”

  “Simon Chestnut. January 1, 2066.”

  “The girls’…”

  “Sara Chestnut, December 30, 2068. Dana Chestnut. Same.”

  “Are they immunized?”

  “What?”

  “Do they have their shots? Measles, mumps rubella, you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Are they sick? Do they have any communicable diseases? Coughing, fever, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  The man shook his head and struck out several lines on the form. He read over the rest of the sheet and then scratched the bottom half of the page out entirely. He stamped the sheet with the Red Crescent seal and placed it together with the other intake forms in a folder.

  “You came here on the bus with the Hazel Green refugees, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, for administrative purposes, that is where we will say you are from. If anyone asks you—and sometimes we have members of the media in these facilities—this is where you will say you are from. It’s very important, you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  The man called in his assistant, who led the Chestnuts out of the administrative building.

  “We’re filled up in the Alabama slice right now, so you’re going to Mississippi. Row thirty-six, tent fourteen,” the assistant said. “Remember that—it’s your address now.”

  In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre, serve as their city of refuge.

  Excerpted from:

  AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: VOLUME II, 2074–2080

  Q: How many men were on your side?

  A: About five hundred where I was, north of Kilgore. Maybe three times that number in the places between Longview and Gladewater, and up to East Mountain. There were fighters all over that side of Texas back then. This was right around the time the Southern State declared independence, and everybody was still excited for a fight.

  Q: Can you describe some of the men in your regiment at Kilgore? Their background, where they came from.

  A: There was no regiment, just a bunch of men with guns who didn’t know they were being led to slaughter. They were Texans, most of them. Or at least, they had ancestry in Texas, family from back when it was a real state. Some of them had experience as soldiers in the National Guard or the Blue military back before Southern independence. You could tell from the beginning they looked down on the rest of us. They had themselves real uniforms, fresh from Austin, and new guns same as the Blues had. The rest of us carried Type-95s from the boats, or old hunting rifles or even handguns and such. A couple of boys from Mississippi came lugging these old rusted broadswords, like it was King Arthur’s Court or something. Could barely lift them off the ground.

  Q: What motivated the men from outside Texas to come to the oil fields?

  A: The ones who came
from the purple states—Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee—they were either broke or jobless or on the lam back home, so they were looking for three squares a day and any kind of soldier’s wages, or they were genuinely angry that their home states went along with Columbus and the fuel prohibition, so they were looking for a fight.

  The ones from the Mag were for the most part members of the rebel groups—the Palmetto Guns, the New Zouaves, the Mississippi Sovereigns, and about a dozen smaller ones with maybe ten members each, maybe even less. Those ones, any chance they got, they’d talk your ear off about the righteousness of the Southern cause. I think some of them really believed they were doing the Lord’s work out there in East Texas.

  Then you had the South Carolina men, and they were a different bag altogether. This was before Columbus put that whole state to sleep, but even then the Carolina fighters were the meanest sons of bitches on the front. I’ve been to that state in peacetime, and didn’t meet a single inhospitable soul. But from the first day of the war they didn’t talk to no one, didn’t smile or shake hands or none of that. You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.

  Then there were some men just sort of showed up—no affiliation, no nothing. Hell, I’d bet some of them were Blues by birth, never left New York state till the week before. I guess they just wanted some excitement, to see the fighting up close, to taste rebellion. Most of the Texans and the rebels hated that kind, called them tourists or spies. But once you got over that sort of thing, there was something comforting about having Northerners wanting to fight on your side. It made you feel your cause was just in an absolute kind of way.

  Q: Can you describe what you saw when you first reached the front?

  A: When we got to the place, it looked just like farmland you’d see anywhere else, but no crops were growing. They had us set up in and around five abandoned farmhouses. There was one, maybe two miles of space between each house, and that land was overgrown with this sharp brown grass. I don’t know what it was, but it itched like hell to walk through it, and no matter what you did to it it wouldn’t die. I saw a guy out there with a machete trying to clear a path from one of the houses to a shotgun shack not a hundred feet away. He slashed for the better part of an hour and didn’t make a dent in it. When he came back he looked like he’d gone swimming in a jellyfish pond.