American War

by Omar El Akkad

  “Thank you kindly, but we’re already late. Come on, Ben. Blues don’t like waiting.”

  Benjamin kissed his wife and children goodbye and stepped inside to kiss the feet of the ceramic Virgin. He descended to the river with great care so as to keep from slipping in the clay and dirtying his good pants. He carried with him his old leather briefcase and the half-ladder. His wife watched from the edge of the flat land.

  “Dock south and walk into the city,” she told the men. “Don’t let any government people see that boat.”

  Smith laughed and started the motor. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “This time next week you’ll be halfway to Chicago.”

  “Just be good,” Martina said. “Be careful, I mean.”

  The men pushed the skiff from the mud and pointed the hull north in the direction of Baton Rouge. The boat rumbled into the narrowing heart of the great brown river, twin spines of water rising and spreading in its wake.

  Excerpted from:

  FEDERAL SYLLABUS GUIDELINES—HISTORY, MODULE EIGHT: THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  MODULE SUMMARY:

  The Second American Civil War took place between the years of 2074 and 2095. The war was fought between the Union and the secessionist states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina (as well as Texas, prior to the Mexican annexation). The primary cause of the war was Southern resistance to the Sustainable Future Act, a bill prohibiting the use of fossil fuels anywhere in the United States. The bill, championed by President Daniel Ki, was in part a response to decades of adverse climate effects, the waning economic importance of fossil fuels, and a deadly oil train derailment in Williston, North Dakota, in 2069.

  The war’s key precipitating events include the assassination of President Ki by secessionist suicide bomber Julia Templestowe in Jackson, Mississippi, in December of 2073, and the deaths of Southern protesters in a shooting outside the Fort Jackson, South Carolina, military base in March of 2074.

  The secessionist states (unified under the banner of “The Free Southern State”) declared independence on October 1, 2074, the date often considered to mark the formal start of the war. Following a series of decisive Union military victories in the first five years of the war—primarily in East Texas and along the northern borders of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (“The Mag”)—the fighting largely subsided. However, rebel insurrectionist groups continued to engage in sporadic guerrilla violence for another half decade, aided in part by foreign agents and anti-American saboteurs. After a drawn-out negotiation process that was settled largely in the Union’s favor, the war was set to formally conclude with the Reunification Day Ceremony in the federal capital of Columbus, Ohio, on July 3, 2095. On that day, a secessionist terrorist managed to cross the border into Northern territory and release a biological agent (“The Reunification Plague”) that resulted in a nationwide epidemic. The effects of the plague, which claimed an estimated 110 million lives, were felt throughout much of the country for the next ten years. The identity of the terrorist responsible remains unknown.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On the porch railing the Chestnuts kept a bowl lined with oil to trap mosquitoes. Lured by the glistening liquid, the insects landed and became ensnared.

  Sarat stood on the porch, the sun hot on her forehead. She watched the mosquitoes squirm. They were heavy black dots, plump as grapes. She picked one between her thumb and forefinger. She held it close to her eye. It showed no signs of what the little girl associated with living things; it said nothing, made no sound, unlike the chirping crickets or the chickens when they were worked into a frenzy. But she knew, nonetheless, that the thing between her fingers was alive.

  Sarat pressed her fingers together and the mosquito burst under the pressure, leaving behind a black stain.

  “What are you doing?” Dana asked, her approach from within the house unnoticed by her twin.

  Sarat startled. “Nothing,” she said.

  Dana inspected her sister’s fingers. “That’s gross,” she said finally, and walked away.

  Sarat wiped her fingers on the rough denim of her overalls. They were hand-me-downs from her brother, their copper buttons turned black with age. She wore them plain with nothing underneath. When the weather was very warm, she undid the straps and tied them around her waist as a kind of belt, where they held at most for a few minutes before coming loose and dragging in the dirt.

  She couldn’t understand why her sister derived no fascination from exploring the tiny living worlds all around them—worlds whose myriad secrets lay ripe for the taking: the flying balls of blood trapped in the bowl; the eyes of the pine floorboards laced with honey; worms picked by her father’s hand and impaled on hooks to teach the children a ritual from the days when the river still carried fish. Dana found such things tedious or repulsive, but to Sarat they were the veins and arteries through which life’s magic flowed.

  MARTINA CHESTNUT stood on the grass between her home and the sorghum field. She hung wet clothes on a line drawn between a hook in one of the porch beams and the remains of a beach umbrella wedged into the dirt. Like the tarp that covered the roof panels, the beach umbrella had washed up on the shore a couple of years earlier and was immediately put to use.

  Martina folded each garment over the line, pinching the clothes in place with pegs. Droplets fell from the cuffs of the pants and the ends of the shirts; here, under the line, the grass grew a little greener.

  The clothes were plain, inoffensive: white and beige of varying shades. After so much use, many of the garments had taken on a ghostly translucence. In some parts of the Mag, where the rebels held most sway, there were families who dyed their denim red to avoid trouble. But to the sleepy Louisiana coast, such concerns had yet to come.

  A thousand miles away, out by the eastern seaboard, there were newer clothes to be had, unloaded monthly from the aid ships that arrived from distant empires: cheap robes and polo shirts and track suits and baseball caps, many of them bearing the logos of the Golden Bulls or Al Ahly or the other popular sports clubs. But these were invariably snatched as soon as they reached the Georgia docks—and were, at least on paper, illegal to sell or transfer anywhere outside the three secessionist states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Of course this rule was routinely flouted, but by the time the garments made their way as far as Louisiana or Arkansas or west to the Mexican Protectorate, they’d already gone through multiple middlemen and were, for most residents, unaffordable.

  Since the earliest days of the civil war, the secessionist states survived on the charity of foreign superpowers. Once, fossil fuels were a worthwhile currency, valuable enough to keep the Louisiana ports and Texas refineries economically viable, even if not flush with cash like in the previous century. But as the rest of the world learned to live off the sun and the wind and the splitting and crashing of atoms, the old fuel became archaic and nearly worthless. The refineries were shuttered and the drills were abandoned, even as the rebel states chose open warfare over prohibition. Now, with the South on the losing end of the conflict and its resources running dry, its people came to rely more and more on the massive ships that arrived every month from the other side of the planet stocked with food, clothing, and other human necessities.

  The ships came from the newborn superpowers: China and the Bouazizi Empire, the latter of which, only a few decades earlier, was nothing more than a collection of failed and failing nations spread across the Middle East and North Africa. But that was before the Fifth Spring revolution finally toppled the old regimes. Now in place of those old broken states was a single entity stretching from the Gibraltar Pass in the state of Morocco all the way to the edges of the Black and Caspian Seas.

  AT DUSK, when the heat died down, Eliza Polk came over for dinner. She lived a mile north along the riverbank and through the grain field, and was the Chestnuts’ closest neighbor. The summer previous she had lost her husband and both teenage sons in one of the battles in East Texas. On account of her fevered, months-long mourning
and her refusal to wear anything but plain black dresses every day since, the Chestnut children called her Santa Muerte behind her back. It was a phrase they picked up from their father.

  She was forty-eight years old but looked a decade older, made so by her stooped posture and the brittle shiver of her voice. In the year since her family’s obliteration in the battlefields of East Texas, she lived simply on a widow’s pension from one of the rebel groups. In addition to her pension, she received assistance in other ways. Every few weeks, a Mississippi Sovereigns’ boat could be seen coming across the river. Upon arrival, two or three unsmiling young men would go about trimming the yard and cleaning the house and providing the diminutive widow more food and clothing than she could ever eat or wear. Polk handed much of the excess provisions over to the Chestnuts—her part of an unspoken agreement that the family, in return, provide the lonely woman some company to pass the hot, interminable days.

  When she arrived Polk hugged her neighbor tightly and asked if she’d heard from her husband. Martina said she had not.

  “He’s safe, honey, don’t you worry,” Polk said. “The Lord watches over him, I know it in my heart.”

  Polk brought with her a mud pie. She set it on the porch railing. She stepped around the house and said hello to Simon, who was perched on the amputated ladder, struggling to hoist himself onto the roof, prohibited by pride from asking his mother for help. She sat down on one of the hickory chairs and wiped the sweat away from her forehead and called for the twins. Dana, who was busy playing house, did not emerge, but Sarat did.

  “Well hello, darling, don’t you look pretty today,” Polk said, kissing Sarat on the cheek and trying, as she often did, to slick back her fuzzy, upturned hair.

  “Hi, Santa,” Sarat said. As always, the woman assumed she’d earned this nickname as a result of all the gifts she’d given the family.

  When she was finished hanging the laundry, Martina walked to the porch and sat beside her guest. The two women sipped on sweet tea and as the daylight faded they watched the children play.

  At the riverbank, Simon kept a simple raft tethered to a stump. The raft was made of a plywood sheet on empty oil drums, and in its center stood a crucifix mast of sanded branches on which was draped a bedsheet sail. Even in the best of winds the sail did nothing, but was decorated in black marker with a crude Jolly Roger, and was kept in place to strike fear into the hearts of passing craft, or so Simon hoped.

  When the water was calm, Simon was allowed to take the raft on his own as far as the midpoint of the river, rowing madly with a scoop shovel. But if the girls were with him, he had to stay close to the shore. And at all times, he had to keep the boat tethered.

  “I’m sure the boys are fine, Martina,” Polk said again. “You know how those government offices are, probably told them it’d take a day or two to get the paperwork sorted. They’re probably staying overnight so they don’t have to go upriver a second time. Probably having the time of their lives at the Home and Away, I bet.”

  Martina shook her head. “He’d come home. If there were three hours to kill he’d come home.”

  Polk sipped her tea and retreated into the past, where she spent most of her mind’s days. “You know, when the rebels sent news about Henry and the boys, I told them to bury me with them. Bury me in the same grave because I can’t go on alone. Life’s not worth living alone.

  “But you know when I saw them, just before they lay them down in the martyrs’ grave out by the Mexican border with the rest of those brave men, they looked as calm and clean as I’d ever seen them. Even the bullet wounds weren’t like you see in the pictures, all a mess like that—they were just little holes. You’d see them and think, how could something so little end a life? I was so scared before I saw them, I thought that they’d look bad, ruined. But they didn’t, they didn’t at all. They looked peaceful. Martina, they looked happy.”

  “I thought you said my husband’s going to be fine,” Martina said.

  “Of course, honey, of course he will be,” Polk said. She paused for a moment and then continued, softly, “But all I’m saying is, if—God forbid—if something were to have happened, if the Blues were to have done something to him, there would be no shame in it. We’d remember him as a proud Southern patriot, no different than my boys.”

  Martina tossed the last of the sweet tea from her glass on the dirt. “We ain’t patriots of the South or anyplace else. We were trying…we are trying to get out. We’re going to the North. We ain’t patriots and we ain’t got any martyrs.”

  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 interval
s 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.

  “I’ve got a right to see the body of my husband. I’ve got a right. You take me to him and then you bring us back home. He don’t rest in some morgue, he rests in his own land.”