American War

by Omar El Akkad

  Good thing about the grass, though, was it was high. You dropped to your knees in that brush and you became invisible. So the Texans stationed most of us in the fields. We wrapped old towels around our faces to keep from itching.

  Q: Can you talk about the night of the attack?

  A: In our part of the field they had us lined up every hundred feet or so, two men to a spot. My partner was a guy from Montgomery named…hell, I can’t remember anymore. The whole night we whispered back and forth—You see anything? No, you? Nothing.

  At around three in the morning I heard something like a—like when you turn the numbers on those old combination locks that suitcases used to have. Just a click-click-click. It wasn’t too loud but it was out of place. I remember one of the old Texas army veterans once said nature doesn’t do straight lines or straight sounds. This was a straight sound. But before I had a chance to say anything, the ranch house down the way had been blown to bits. It was a bright orange burst and this sound like a metal balloon popping, and then there was nothing left but a lick of fire and a big cloud of black smoke.

  That’s when all hell broke loose. You could hear men in the fields cursing and giving out commands to fire, but none of them knew what they were firing at. A couple of the fighters had these night vision rigs with them, and everyone around them kept asking what they saw, but they didn’t see nothing either. Then there was another click-click-click, and everyone knew now to duck and cover their ears like we’d been taught, and then the ranch house to our left was gone.

  I felt the blast like a punch in the gut. When I got the air back in my lungs I called out to my partner to see if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. It wasn’t till morning that I saw how he was killed. Those bombs they dropped on us had all these tiny darts in them, and his entire left side was torn to shreds. If it’d been me to his left instead of him to mine, he’d have lived and I’d have died. But it didn’t happen that way.

  When they were done with the houses they bombed the fields. After a while I just lay facedown in the dirt and I said a prayer and I waited.

  After the bombs stopped I heard the sound of helicopters overhead. There were still a few men who’d survived the shelling and now they were being mowed down from the air. By then everything sounded distant. I had this awful ringing in my ears. But I could feel the earth shaking all around me.

  Then the helicopters flew low, and after a few passes some of them landed. I could feel the soldiers near me but I couldn’t see or hear them. They walked in lines up and down the fields. I lay as still as if I was dead. Once they came as close to me as I am to you right now. I don’t know if they took me for dead already or if they didn’t care or if they wanted me to live and tell, but they just kept walking. An hour later they were gone, but I didn’t move till the sun came up.

  Q: What did you see in the morning?

  A: I saw the dead in the fields, and the houses turned to dust.

  Q: Did you see any federal troops, or the bodies of any federal troops?

  A: It was like they were never there.

  Q: Were you injured?

  A: I didn’t feel a thing.

  Q: What did you do then?

  A: First I thought I’d go south back to Kilgore. I thought that’s where the others would have gone. I didn’t know then that there were no others. Then I thought better of it. I figured next thing the Blues would do is go into Kilgore and all the nearby towns and kill all the enemy that didn’t fight.

  Q: There were fighters who deserted?

  A: No.

  Q: They just didn’t go in the first place?

  A: No, they were never fighters in the first place, but they were the enemy to the Blues. More of an enemy than any of us who had guns.

  I don’t expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.

  If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.

  Now for most of people, just knowing wasn’t enough to make them take up arms—not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp. But damned if it didn’t make you want to do something.

  So you gave alms to certain churches, knowing where that money would end up. Or when the Blues raided your town looking for those insurrectionists they were always talking about, even if you knew exactly where they was hiding, you kept your mouth shut and let the Marines tear your home apart until they got frustrated and left. And whenever news came of some—What do you call it up there? Incendiary homicide attack?—that left a few dead anywhere north of the Tennessee line, you didn’t say nothing, but inside you were pleased. You were pleased because they up there got a little taste of what it’s like for us down here. It didn’t even the score, not by a long shot, but it gave them a little taste.

  That’s what you Northerners will never understand. The real insurrectionists never fired a single shot.

  Q: Did you fight any other battles during the course of the war?

  A: No. I hiked east two days, hitched a ride near Cross Lake and ended up back in my hometown in southern Alabama. Waited out the rest of the war there, and the plague that followed. By the time it was all done, most everyone I’d ever known was dead.

  Q: Do you feel any lasting resentment, bitterness, or ill will toward the Union or the Northern states?

  A: [Laughter].

  II

  July, 2081

  Iuka, Mississippi

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The layout of Camp Patience resembled that of a circle drawn into quarters. The Mississippi slice occupied the northwest quadrant, Georgia the southwest, Alabama the northeast, and South Carolina the southeast. Refugees were assigned tents according to their native state. The Chestnuts, interlopers, had lived in the Mississippi quadrant since they first arrived, six years ago.

  The camp’s four sectors met at a focus composed of administrative offices: the camp intake, the school, the chapel, the medical clinic, and the cafeteria hall. Outward from the buildings, a centrifugal flare of tents blanketed the land.

  To the west, Camp Patience bordered the blistered remains of the Tishomingo County Game Refuge. To the north, beyond the highest, most daunting fences, lay Tennessee. On a clear winter’s day the occupants of the northernmost tents could make out the vague tree-camouflaged towers of the Blues in their forward operating bases, and at night hear the taunts and curses of the Union-aligned militias, stalking from the brush, hunting those who dared make a break for the North.

  Some tried anyway, and were shot down. Others came and went, opting instead to take their chances in the city slums surrounding the Southern capital of Atlanta. The only exceptions were the refugees from South Carolina, who made something akin to a permanent life in Patience. South Carolinians had no hope of ever going home, because the South Carolina they knew was no more. Infected by Union agents with a stunting virus early on in the war, part of an effort to quell the fierce secessionist uprising in that state, it was now a walled hospice. The sick remained, imprisoned behind the quarantine wall, and the healthy could never go home again.

  MARTINA’S NEIGHBOR Lara knocked on the door of the Chestnuts’ tent and stepped inside. She found Martina where she usually was, seated at a salvaged plastic patio table. The table anchored the makeshift office in which Martina spent most of her days typing letters of appeal and myriad requests on behalf of illiterate refugees.

  “How did the interview go?” Martina asked.

  “Same,” Lara replied. “You know those journalists from the Blue, they always ask the same questions. Insurrectionists this, secessionists that. Made a few bucks for the cantina, though. Can’t complain about that.”

  “Come, sit a while,” Marti
na said. “Get some water in you, it’s burning up out there.”

  Lara opened the small refrigerator by Martina’s desk and took from it two bottles of water. The water bottles arrived in boxfuls on the tenth of every month, a few days after the aid ships docked in Augusta. Their crumpled remains were the most ubiquitous form of litter in the camp.

  “What is it this time?” Lara asked, taking a seat on a folding chair beside Martina and looking over her shoulder at the screen of an old, barely functional tablet.

  “New girl in Alabama 36:12 wants to ask Atlanta to let her husband out of jail a year early,” Martina replied. “Says he was recruited to the Copperheads at gunpoint, never fired a weapon his whole life.”

  “You trying to time it with Independence Day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it going to work?”

  “Of course not. But she offered a whole pack of Yuxis for it, I ain’t gonna say no.”

  “That reminds me,” Lara said. “That girl Madison I told you about in the Georgia slice, turns out she changed her mind about getting you to write that appeal to Mr. Sharif.”

  “She find some other way to get her boy’s cleft lip fixed?”

  “Nah. She said she came around here looking for you the other day and saw that thing.” Lara pointed to the cracked statue of the Virgin that rested on a couple of water bottle boxes near the front of the tent.

  “What about it?” Martina asked.

  “Guess she don’t like Catholics.”

  “You kidding?”

  “No ma’am.”

  Martina shook her head. “Some people,” she said. “Fine by me. Let her get that snake-kisser from Birmingham to fix her son, if she’s so devout.”

  Lara laughed. “They don’t let him in here no more. Too hot for their taste. Got some soft-boiled Baptist from Atlanta instead. You know the kind—God’s heavenly plan this, God’s heavenly plan that.” Lara checked the time on Martina’s tablet. “That reminds me,” she said. “You coming to the service?”

  “No time,” Martina said. “Gotta finish this one then get started on the Buckhorns’ one.”

  “The hell the Buckhorns want now?”

  “Guess the fighting’s died down in east Georgia along the border. Atlanta declared their town safe again.”

  “They want a ride out there or something?”

  “No, they’re asking to stay here.”

  “That’s a new one,” said Lara.

  “Can’t say I blame them. They’ve been here longer than us. Probably nothing waiting for them back there but a big old hole in the ground.”

  The conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. Lenny, a seventeen-year-old who was the camp’s most well-connected fixer, entered, a wad of cash in his hand.

  “Mornin’ ladies,” he said. “Now, don’t you say you ain’t glad to see me, for I know it not to be true.”

  “Glad to see what you’re holding, anyway,” Lara said. “How much did you get out of him?”

  “You’ll be pleased to know, Mrs. Boswell, that I got the standard rate,” Lenny said. He counted three hundred dollars from his roll of bills and placed it on the table. “And this despite the frankly shameful way you treated our guest this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to sing and dance for them now too?”

  “You ain’t supposed to curse them, for a start.”

  “I didn’t curse nobody.”

  “You called him a liar,” Lenny said. “To a fancy Northern journalist, that’s worse than cursing.”

  Martina put her hand out. “What about my girl’s cut?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t huh me—turn your good side this way.”

  “All my sides is good sides,” Lenny said. He handed Martina two hundred dollars.

  “That it?” Martina said. “They filmed her for damn near an hour.”

  “That’s it for now. But don’t you worry, that Dana Chestnut gonna be a star. Foreign hacks will pay all kinds of money to film themselves a pretty little Southern refugee girl, and you got the prettiest little refugee girl anyone’s ever seen.”

  “We’re not making a habit of this,” Martina said.

  “Your call, but they will be back for more, I know it.” Lenny knelt by the Chestnuts’ fridge and emerged with a bottle of water. He sat at the table with the two women and wiped the sweat from his face.

  “I think you’re wrong about that Blue reporter,” he said to Lara. “I think he might just use some of what you told him, even though God knows you were rambling and incoherent half the time.”

  “What do I care what he uses?” Lara said. “There somebody left up there doesn’t know there’s a war happening?”

  Lenny chuckled. “You know he keeps asking me to take him to the Carolina slice. I told him they’ll cut your throat the minute they see you, but he’s convinced they’re gonna—what’d he say? That’s right, they’re gonna recognize his neutrality.”

  “Oh, they’ll recognize something,” Lara said. “They’ll recognize real quick.”

  Lenny finished the bottle in two quick gulps and set it on the table. He was short and skinny in a way that suggested stunted growth. Through years of practice he had committed to muscle memory a slight dip of the shoulder and shift of the body, such that the devastated half of his face, where the skin lay molten and the ear curled in on itself, was always partially shielded from view. He wore, almost exclusively, faded QQ T-shirts and hiker’s pants in whose various pockets he kept notebooks full of names and addresses, as well as three of the only working phones in Camp Patience.

  “A pleasure as always, ladies,” he said, rising. “I’ll be seeing you both again shortly, I’m sure. Stay well south of the fence, much as you can. My guy says the militias up north are getting riled up again.”

  When he was gone Martina put her tablet to sleep and sat back in her chair. In six years she’d developed a sense to prognosticate the weather; another dust storm was coming. There was a familiar aridity, an accretion of invisible weight in the air. In the next day or two a gradient of bronze fog would once again take the sky, and for a week afterward the cantina would be fully sold out of air canisters and wet wipes.

  “How long’s that boy been fixing?” she asked Lara.

  “Lenny? Since he was ten or eleven, at least. Started out running cigarettes for Blue grunts stationed near the border, figured nobody would shoot a kid that small, and got lucky I guess because nobody did. From there he started working with journalists. That’s how he lost half his face. Guess one of those reporters wanted to see up north of Corinth where the rebels killed all those Blues with car bombs, so he takes him up there, and wouldn’t you know it…”

  “You saw all those bills?” Martina said. “Boy must be sitting on a small fortune by now.”

  “Doesn’t spend none of it, either. He’s got plans. Every time he does a job for a Northern reporter or one of the Blue soldiers he asks them to write him a reference letter so he can apply for a permit to get the hell out of the Red. They all say they will but hardly any do. He doesn’t even use his real name with them. Got a whole other identity just for his dealings with Northerners. They think his name’s Christian something.”

  “He still does work for the Blue soldiers?”

  “Yeah. Guess they figured a while back if you’re going to barge into a Southern town and you want the locals to cooperate, it’s best to have a Southerner there with you.”

  “I’m surprised the rebels haven’t strung him up for it.”

  Lara shrugged. “He’s the kind can make friends with anyone, and he’s got a lot of them,” she said. “It’ll catch up to him one day, but at least he’s working toward something, not like the rest of us, sitting still day after day till they bury us here.”

  Lara stood. “You sure you don’t wanna come to the service?” she asked. “They have a reception afterward where they serve that orange juice that tastes like oranges.”

  “You go on,” Ma
rtina said. “I’ll catch you at the game tonight.”

  Lara shook her head. “Nothing as sad as a lapsed Catholic,” she said.

  AFTER HER FRIEND LEFT, Martina opened her tablet and set to finishing the letter of appeal she’d been commissioned to write. But the words wouldn’t come. She set the tablet down and retreated to her bed in the back of the tent. She lay on her cot, the metal springs squeaking under her weight.

  She’d written hundreds of these letters over the years—leniency requests; admissions of petty guilt; appeals by growing families for bigger and better-situated tents; letters to the editors of faraway papers; Northern travel permits; love letters; eulogies.

  Other than the eulogies, most of what she wrote proved useless; perhaps one out of every twenty achieved what it was intended to achieve. These successful letters, the demonstrable fruits of her work, she printed out and stored in a small filing cabinet by her bed. It was those letters that marked her place in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the camp—alongside the likes of the man in the Alabama sector who could move any sum of money anywhere in the country in four days or less, or the grandmother in Georgia whose fortuitous real estate allowed her to leach a wireless connection from the administrative offices. Work provided purpose, a sense of place, a sense of agency.

  In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact.