She realized then that she hadn’t agreed beforehand with Michael what stepping into the creek really meant. However deep she went, he’d argue she should have gone deeper.
Her feet found solid footing on a polished rock when she was knee-deep in the waste. It was shallower than she’d expected. Gently she eased her backside off the bank and stood upright. She turned to face the boy who’d dared her. Michael stood at the edge of the creek. He had the same smug smile plastered on his face but behind it she could see a tightly reined astonishment, a disbelief that she’d actually gone and done it.
Satisfied she’d met the terms of the wager, Sarat eased herself back against the embankment, this time facing forward, her hands braced against the dirt. As she pushed herself up, she heard a muted crack beneath the surface. The rock on which she stood came loose. Suddenly she was sinking.
In an instant the brown water swallowed her. Instinctively she closed her eyes and in the darkness felt the warmth of it in her hair and on her face. For a moment she believed she was drowning. A panic reflex unlike anything she’d ever felt before took hold of her muscles.
Before her eyes were open she was clawing at the bank, her nails scraping against the rocks and dirt. Like a cornered animal she thrashed wildly, the fear alive inside her.
She climbed back out of the creek, her arms and legs slick with brown muck. It was on her now, the stink. She could smell nothing else. She saw the children laughing at her, the boys most of all. Michael made a big show of it, keeling over, pretending he couldn’t breathe from laughing so hard. It was his way of showing he’d won; the smart-ass girl who’d shown all of them up with her little fishing line was now covered in shit.
Sarat climbed up on hands and knees until she was back on the flat ground.
“I did it,” she said. “Give me my money.”
Michael backed away as she approached. He tossed the bill in her direction. It landed in the dirt at Sarat’s feet.
“Jesus Christ,” Michael said, still laughing. “You stink.”
Sarat picked up the money. She walked past the children, who parted to let her through. A few of them hovered in her periphery as she walked back to her tent. Others, like forward scouts, ran ahead of her to tell their parents and siblings what had happened.
The filth stuck to her legs, drops of it trailing behind her in the dirt. She felt something in her hair, moving like tiny insects.
When she reached her tent she found that the news beat her there. Her mother stood outside, waiting.
“What did you do to yourself?” Martina said.
“Nothing,” Sarat replied. It was an instinctual reply—the word came out of her mouth before she knew she’d said it. And as soon as she’d said it her mother stepped forward and slapped her across the face.
“You think we don’t have enough problems?” she said. “You think it’s not enough that we’re stuck here in this hell, killers all around us? You think I don’t have enough to deal with, you gotta go make an embarrassment of your family, make them all laugh at us too?”
Sarat shook her head. Tears welled in her eyes. Most of the children who’d followed her home had left, and now the remaining few were also leaving. Whatever novelty there was to be had in the spectacle of her had suddenly dried up.
“You’re not coming in here covered in shit,” Martina said. “You did this to yourself, you go get yourself cleaned up. Nobody fixing your messes from here on in but you.”
“Fine,” Sarat said. “I didn’t ask you to fix anything.”
She turned and walked away. She walked east. Dusk settled over the camp. Some of the men who’d slept through the hot middle of the day were now emerging from their tents to sit on their box-crates and drink and play cards. Sarat walked past them and although the breeze carried her smell ahead of her, the men did not notice or seem to care.
Near the northern edge of Alabama, she saw a group of about half a dozen men seated around an old folding table. Upon the table sat a tablet connected to a small speaker.
The men were watching a recording of the previous week’s Yuffsy. It was a title fight at the Citadel in Augusta, one of the better ones in recent memory. All twelve fighters had managed to stay on their feet for the first seven and a half minutes before one was finally knocked out.
One of the men watching said there had been a boy from Patience who came close to making the undercard, but lost a fight two nights earlier in the qualifiers.
“It was one of the Carolina boys, a kid named Taylor,” the man said. “Mean as hell, they say.”
“Yeah, but I bet you the whole time he was busy being mean, the other guys were busy fighting,” another replied. “Mean don’t mean nothing.”
Marcus Exum stood on the periphery of the men’s viewing circle. He was perched on an upturned laundry basket, craning for a look at the screen. When he saw Sarat he jumped down and ran to her.
“Hey, hey,” he said, tapping her on the elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t touch me,” Sarat said. Marcus recoiled. She saw in his eyes a sudden burst of confusion and hurt.
“I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “I’m covered in shit. I stink.”
“So what?” Marcus said. “Take a shower, then.”
“Got no clothes to change into. My mom won’t let me in the tent. Says I embarrassed her.”
“I bet if you go say you’re sorry she’ll—”
“I’m not sorry,” Sarat said, loud enough that a couple of the men watching the fight looked up. “I’m not sorry and none of them can make me sorry. They’re liars and cowards, all of them. They pretend like this is normal, like it’s normal to live this way. But it’s not normal. Your dad’s right. We’re just waiting to die, waiting for the Blues to come up over that fence one day and kill every last one of us. I’m not sorry. I’m not the one who’s wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re wrong,” Marcus said. “I’ve never thought you were wrong. Go to the shower trailer. I’ll get you some clothes from our tent. My dad’s not that much bigger than you anyway.”
Sarat walked up the dirt path to the northernmost shower trailer in the Alabama slice. It was a rusted metal and vinyl shack on blocks. Inside, it smelled of mildew and the candy-cardamom scent of the cleansing lotion packets that arrived by the boxload every month from the Augusta docks. They were small clear packets like the kind condiments come in. They littered the ground, caught in the drains, and stuck to the undersides of feet. All but the most well-connected of Camp Patience’s residents used the packets to wash their hair and skin, and yet none of the residents ever smelled like the slimy amber liquid, only the shower trailers did.
Sarat entered the trailer and stripped down. She piled her clothes on the ground under the showerhead in one of the three stalls and turned the hot water tap. In a minute, steam began to churn about the room. The water melted the crust of filth from the clothes, and a briny, sulfuric smell filled the trailer.
Sarat stepped into the adjacent stall. She turned the tap. The water was cold; her skin erupted in goose bumps and the fine hairs on her forearms rose.
She stood with her head bowed, watching the milky-brown water swirl around the drain. On the back of the stall door there was all manner of graffiti: symbols of the Southern militias, genitals drawn cartoonish and grotesque, addresses of tents in which lived the whores and thieves and traitors. Soon the water ran clear.
Sarat heard the trailer door open. She heard Marcus walk inside, his footsteps almost indecipherable under the rush of water and squealing pipes. She heard him set the clothes on the bench by the wash basin, and then she heard the squeak of the trailer door once again opening and closing.
But when the sound was gone she knew Marcus had not left. She knew he was still standing inside the room, and through the tiny sliver where the door hinges met the stall, she could feel his eyes on her.
With her head still lowered she saw what he saw. The topography of her body: the shoulders wide and t
hick; the breasts that on any other girl her age would have stood as mounds but on her frame were modest; the hips in line with the shoulders, in line with the thighs, the body big and uncurved. A brick of a girl. And to his eyes she knew the strangest prize was the place between the lines, the place that had in this last year turned against her in a way so sudden she thought at first she was dying. The place that in an instant made her a stranger to herself.
And she knew that if she were simply to look up and catch his stare, the boy would flee, would not even beg forgiveness later but instead would die right there of shame. For the first time in her life she owned a pair of eyes other than her own, and with her head bowed she kept them locked upon her. In the thick sweat of steam both boy and girl for a moment were entranced by the same skin.
The flow of water began to weaken and the pipes let out a rumbling whistle. Sarat shut the tap. As the water died she heard Marcus scurry from the trailer.
Outside the stall she found an Alibaba shirt and a pair of slouch jeans worn white at the knees. The shirt fit her well enough but the pants were loose around her hips. She picked her old shirt from the soaked pile on the floor and tore it apart. She took one half of the ruined fabric and braided it; wringing the water out as she did. Then she ran it through the belt loops and tied it tight.
When she stepped out of the shower trailer she found Marcus seated on the bottom step, his arms hugging his shins. She sat beside him.
In the early nighttime hours the camp was alive with chatter and wandering flashlights and the fungal sweat of cooking. The sounds of the Free Southern Radio came high and tinny through portable speakers.
She looked at Marcus but he looked at his feet. She sensed that between her and her friend one wall had come crumbling down but another, different one had taken its place. And although she couldn’t define it, she knew what it was. She knew it to be a cousin of that low-lit language her sister spoke so well. It lived in that strange fevered place between curiosity and desire.
And it thrilled her—not the sex of it but the newness, the realization that she could not only manipulate these feelings within herself but also without; that she could turn the gears inside another so forcefully.
Finally he spoke: “My dad, when he falls asleep, nothing can wake him.”
“I’m not staying in your tent,” Sarat said.
“Then where are you gonna stay?”
“I’ll go bunk in the pen with Cherylene and that rat of yours, if she hasn’t eaten him already. Plenty of room there.”
Marcus turned and held Sarat by the forearm. “Please don’t stay up there. You know it’s not safe. My dad says the Blue militias are going to tear through that fence any night now.”
“And I believe him, but what are the odds it’ll be tonight?”
“What if it is tonight?”
“Then we’ll all be dead anyway. Where you want me to stay, then?”
“Go down to the sick building,” Marcus said. “Tell them you got the flu or something—they’ll let you stay the night there.”
“The sick building hasn’t been open since last Christmas,” said Sarat.
“They still got a couple of bunks in there. Nobody’s using them for anything.”
They were jolted from their conversation by a crack of gunfire, a single shot ringing in the air somewhere to their north. It was a sound they’d heard a million times before, a sound unanchored and without destination.
“Please don’t stay up there tonight,” Marcus said.
“All right,” Sarat replied.
The two friends sat together at the foot of the stairs and watched an old woman patch a square hole in her tent with some thread and a piece of blanket. Sarat squirmed.
“What’s the matter?” Marcus asked.
“My hair’s itchy,” Sarat said.
“Didn’t you wash it?”
“Yeah.” She scraped her nails against her scalp until she worried it would bleed. Still, trails of invisible ants marched through the fuzzy corkscrews of her hair.
“Your dad have clippers?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Go get them.”
Marcus sprung up and ran back to his tent. Soon he returned with an old electric clipper and three attachments.
Sarat fit one of the attachments and turned on the clipper. It buzzed and vibrated in her hand. Cautiously she set it just above her forehead and for a moment she felt nothing. Then came a slight tug at the roots and soon she saw the rough strands float gently past her to the ground.
She moved the clipper slowly, in part out of caution but also to prolong the act; the shearing felt good against her skin. Soon the clipper glided along smoothly, and no more hair fell.
“Did I miss anywhere?” she asked. Marcus shook his head.
Sarat set the clipper on the stairs, its teeth still clogged. She rubbed her hand against the felt of her scalp. She stood.
“You’re a good friend,” she told Marcus, and then she left.
SHE WALKED to the administrative buildings. She sat by the infirmary’s back door and waited. Across the nearby walking path she saw the southernmost of the Alabama tents. Among them was one whose entire east-facing side had long ago been torn beyond repair. In its place the old woman living there had tied down a large flag of the Free Southern State. In time the flag had faded, the red bars made ghostly pink, the three black stars barely visible.
Sarat observed the flag. She’d seen it a million times, decorating the tents and strung high on poles and etched into a currency whose worth eroded by the day. But she’d never paid much attention to it. It had always seemed to her that the South was the governing ground of two different powers—the official Free Southern State government, headquartered in Atlanta, whose soldiers did almost no fighting, and the vast array of rebel groups, who did nothing but fight.
She knew the three stars on the flag represented the three states of the Mag, and she knew if South Carolina hadn’t been turned into a forest of living dead, there would be a fourth.
Looking at the flag, Sarat noticed the black stars were slightly asymmetric. The right-pointing sides were longer than the others. She recalled hearing one of the older refugees say that in Atlanta, in the first year after declaring independence, the Free Southerners scrambled to create a flag and compose an anthem. In their panic they botched the stars, and never could agree on an anthem. And so in his address at the revealing ceremony, President Kershaw made up the famous line about how the pained wail of the South’s anguished people was the state’s only song, and never mentioned the misdrawn stars.
Sarat thought about how easy it would be to fix the mistake, to simply redraw the stars properly. But she knew that even broken history is history. The stars, cast wrong, must remain that way. It would be more wrong to change them.
She fell asleep thinking about it, seated against the wall, curled up like a cashew with her knees for pillows. When she woke it was well past midnight, and the camp was quiet.
She walked around the infirmary building to where a large waste disposal bin sat below a small window. She climbed up and stood at the window. The pane made a square barely big enough to accommodate her circumference, and she worried that even if she managed to slide the glass open, she would get stuck trying to climb inside.
The lights overhead glanced sharply off the window. Sarat saw her reflection in the glass.
With her hair shaved, her face looked fuller, rounded in a way that unveiled its symmetry. There was a smoothness in how the jaw became the skull, and the skull an almost polished half-mirror to the light.
Sarat observed her new face a long time. In the back of her mind swirled all manner of looming irritations—her mother’s wrath, the ceaseless teasing of the children who’d seen or by now heard what she’d done. But in this moment, alone with her reflection, she felt new and impossibly light.
The pane was of a flimsy plastic and gave slightly when Sarat pushed on it. But in the groove on the other side there wa
s a thick wood block, and it prevented the window from sliding open. She tried to dig her fingers in and lift the pane out entirely. She became so caught up in this task that she didn’t notice the shadow climbing up the wall, a shadow in the shape of a man who now stood behind her.
“Whatever it is you’re looking for,” he said, “I doubt you’ll find it here.”
Sarat jumped and stumbled back, nearly falling off the waste bin. She turned to see a man of about sixty, dressed in a black prewar suit lined with white thin stripes. She’d never seen him before.
He was short, a half-foot shorter than Sarat, even aided by the thick heels of his polished dress shoes. He wore a stiff black homburg. Its brim kept the overhead lights from illuminating his face.
“I’m not stealing,” Sarat said. “Are you gonna tell?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Sarat.”
“Hello, Sarat. My name is Albert Gaines.” He had a slightly low, even voice with a sliver of Mississippi drawl, one wide vowel cozying up to the next. It reminded Sarat of the announcer on the Peachtree Variety Hour her mother liked to listen to on Friday nights: a soothing, familiar voice.
“How old are you, Sarat?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“And why are you dressed in someone else’s clothes?”
The question caught her off-guard, and for a moment she wondered if the old man had been watching when she went in the creek. But she knew he hadn’t. Every face that watched her was etched in her memory now; she’d remember every single one, every smile, every snicker, forever.
“I jumped into Emerald Creek.”
“And why would you do that?”
“A dare.”
Gaines smiled. Along the skin between the ends of his lips and the dark crescents beneath his eyes Sarat saw small craters, markers of time and damage.
“Come down from there,” he said. “I have a business proposition for you.”
American War Page 12