American War

by Omar El Akkad

  A rebel skiff approached. Karina recognized the young man at the helm as Henry the Alabaman, a former Cavalier. In the last six months, the United Rebels in Atlanta had managed to bring most of the insurrectionist groups under a single banner, but some of the men still held fast to their old affiliations, and as a form of protest had taken on their states of birth as family names.

  Henry steered into the muddy bank near where Karina stood and threw the anchor down.

  “Morning, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Good morning, Henry,” Karina replied. “You’re late again.”

  “What, you having a bad day or something? It ain’t even an hour.”

  Karina pulled her skirt up to her knees and stepped into the river. She sidestepped Henry and picked up a large grocery bag of supplies. The rebel followed with three more.

  “Set them here,” Karina said, pointing to the ground near her vegetable garden.

  “I’ll take them inside for ya, no trouble.”

  “Here’s fine.”

  Henry put the bags down. He returned to the boat and retrieved two locked steel boxes. He set them carefully by the bags. Then he and Karina offloaded a diesel drum from the skiff and carried it to the storm shelter by the side of the house. Karina removed the padlock and the two of them descended the stairs.

  Here the Chestnuts kept the croaking generator hidden. The room, dark and dank, smelled overwhelmingly of that sweet bile, that old fossil fuel smell. The scent always jump-started ancient memories in Karina’s mind, memories from a childhood spent on the other side of the world: army jeeps refueling, well fires wild and unquenchable, wounds tended to by the light of headlamps. To her, the smell of any old-world fuel was invariably the smell of war.

  They returned to the riverbank. Henry stood for a while, eying Karina. He smiled.

  “So you gonna come back with me or what?” he said.

  “Go on home, Henry,” said Karina.

  “Just come out to Augusta for a couple days, just one time,” he pleaded. “Let me show you around the boardwalk. They know me in all those bars. You’ll have a good time, I promise.”

  “How about we see how this war shakes out first,” Karina said. “I don’t want to end up going with someone from the losing side.”

  “Christ, the boys were right,” Henry said. “You really are too old to have fun.”

  Karina smiled. “Thanks for the groceries, Henry. I’ll make sure to tell Miss Sarat you dropped by.”

  The impish grin disappeared from his face. He slunk back to the skiff and waded into the river’s middle and soon he was gone.

  Karina carried the steel boxes to the edge of the yard, where a woodshop cabin stood, its doors hanging on rust-bitten hinges. The doors were held closed with a crowbar through the loops.

  The cabin had been there a long time, longer than the house, longer than the trees, even—from a time well before the sea ate the coastal cities and the river ran roughshod over its old banks. The boards that formed the cabin’s exterior were of pale, knotted wood and stained with streaks of reddish brown, as though the wood itself had rusted.

  Karina loosed the crowbar; the doors sagged open. She carried the steel boxes inside and set them down on a workbench, as she’d been instructed to do. But for the workbench, the cabin was empty—the shelves barren, the windows covered up with old charity blankets. Soon Miss Sarat would return, unlock the boxes and take their contents to someplace far away, and the cabin would be empty once more. Until then, Karina was instructed to leave the boxes untouched and replace the crowbar with a combination lock. Otherwise, she was never to set foot in the cabin, nor let Simon wander near there whenever she took him for his daily walks.

  She knew what the contents of the boxes were. And in a vague, unspoken way, she knew what Miss Sarat was. Many people did, although none would ever talk about it. In Lincolnton the Chestnuts walked around town hallowed as saints: survivors of the massacre and champions of the Southern cause. In Atlanta, politicians wrote them letters of solidarity. In Augusta, there wasn’t a dockhand that didn’t know their names or a bar owner who’d take their money.

  Karina knew. But unlike everyone else, she didn’t admire Miss Sarat or hold her in some reverent esteem. The girl was still a child—at seventeen, less than half Karina’s age. She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early. And she knew from the news and from townie gossip what the girls had been through. And because she knew, she understood. But that didn’t mean she had to admire it.

  Karina carried the bags into the kitchen. They were full of esoteric supplies, things she couldn’t get from town: Oolong tea; shrimpshell bandages; the painkiller they called Bonesetters; anticonvulsants for Simon; caviar from the Russian Union.

  Karina made breakfast. Simon would only eat his eggs scrambled and runny, without salt or butter. At noon, when his eyelids began to droop, she made him a sandwich of chocolate spread and apricot gel. He inhaled it and for a couple of hours afterward was ebullient and electric.

  In these hours, after the weeping pilgrims who came to see him had been ushered away, she took him for walks through the forest. Many days, when Miss Sarat was gone to her secret places and Miss Dana was off in the docks in Augusta, it was just the two of them alone, walking hand in hand.

  He delighted in the curling wakes of the barges and the crackle of dead leaves underfoot and the way the sunlight felt on the place near the back of his head where the hair no longer grew.

  Sometimes he saw purple and orange flowers in the ground—strange life that grew in spite of the heat and the frequent storms. Sometimes he pointed at the flowers, and Karina, who did not know their names, would invent names for them: Bigwics, Morning Hallows, Laviolas, Southern Laviolas.

  After she finished making breakfast, Karina woke Simon. Like the rest of the house, his room was barren. There was only a nightstand, a closet, and the bed he slept in. Miss Sarat had a rule about decorations in the house: there were to be none. No paintings or photographs on the wall, no flower vases in the living room, not even a welcome mat on the porch. There had once been an iron weather vane on the roof, a rooster atop a spinning arrow—the day after the Chestnuts moved in, Miss Sarat climbed up and tore it down.

  The only exception to the rule was an ugly ceramic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which sat on Simon’s nightstand. The statue was cracked in a million places and seemed to accumulate dust faster than any other surface in the house. But Miss Sarat ordered Karina never to touch it.

  Simon woke to her smell before the rest of her entered the room—an oversweet lavender and vanilla perfume she knew he loved. He woke smiling, reaching for her. She wore the colors he liked. Warm, bright colors—reds and yellows, a sunflower print on her flowing skirt. She knelt by his bedside and instantly his hands took hers. He leaned up and kissed her on the cheek, a sloppy kiss, the spittle of sleep still wet on his lips. It was progress—a step she’d kept hidden from the twins. They knew he’d started to remember names and return greetings and they thought he’d started to dress himself, but they didn’t know he’d gained a sense of affection.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning,” Simon replied, echoing her cadence, her inflection.

  She helped Simon out of his pajamas and into a fresh white T-shirt and a pair of track pants that stretched around his growing waist. She took his recent weight gain and the new wheel of fat around his gut as more signs of healing. In the first few weeks following his arrival at the house, he had taken in nothing but milk and mashed apple paste. And on one ugly morning, the family discovered that he’d developed a crippling fear triggered by the smell of cooked meat. Now he was eating—picky and tedious as a toddler, but he was eating.

  She guided Simon to a chair at the kitchen table. Then she went back to his room and made the bed. The bed was dressed with fine, rebel-smuggled sheets of the best Bouazizi cotton.

  AT NOON the wom
en came to see him. They arrived a few minutes early. Karina saw them from the living room window, idling at the small gate at the end of the road. She let them wait—she knew if she allowed them in just a few minutes early, soon they would start arriving to their appointments even earlier, and others would learn of it and start doing the same, until the schedule Karina worked so hard to maintain would be rendered irrelevant.

  At noon exactly she walked the length of the dirt driveway and met the women. They were sweltering, packed into their Tik-Tok: the driver was a woman whose first name was Kristin but who demanded everyone call her the Widow Bentley. Her daughter, Leslie, sat beside her, and her mother, Eleanor, sat in the back.

  Karina opened the gate. For a moment the Tik-Tok’s tires spun impotently in the dirt. Then the car fumbled along toward the house. Karina followed. She took her time walking back. When she got there, the Widow Bentley and her daughter were helping the widow’s mother exit the carlet. The eldest woman, Eleanor, was hollow with a cancer of the lungs, and, although her daughter and granddaughter took pains to constantly assail her with hope, she seemed resigned to the fact she was dying.

  The Widow Bentley had taken to wearing black, long-sleeved blouses and black skirts since her husband died a year earlier in the botched rebel raid on East Ridge. She’d forced her mother and daughter to do the same; the clothes hung limp on the eldest woman’s wasting frame, still and slack as a waterlogged flag.

  Karina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.

  Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflicting on others the very same carnage once inflicted upon them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again—she knew them only as the Widow This or the Widow That—but she’d never met a Widower Anything.

  She had lived more than half her life in the South and yet often she still felt like a foreigner. She was the daughter of doctors—analytic, razor-minded natives of the Bangladeshi Isles who overcame great poverty and strife and had no time or patience for sentimental things. From a young age her parents had seen the worst of war—the northward death marches in retreat from the rising seas; the Arunachal Massacre; the four failed Springs—and had dedicated themselves to alleviating that suffering wherever they found it.

  Karina’s earliest memories were of field hospitals and blood-caked bedsheets, the great thundering barrel of war. She witnessed the last of the Russian Expansion, the wars of conquest at the furthest edges of the Bouazizi. She stitched her first suture at fourteen, tied her first tourniquet at fifteen. She knew war, knew it better even than these delusional, totem-grasping widows.

  And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.

  SHE LED THE WOMEN into the living room. “Something to drink?” she asked.

  “Water,” Leslie said. The teenage girl slumped on the couch on the end furthest from where her mother and grandmother sat. She stared out the window at the moving river.

  “We’re just happy to see Simon, sweetheart,” the Widow Bentley said. “You can bring him in now.”

  Karina left the women and went outside to the backyard. She found Simon sitting at the muddy landing where the rebel skiffs docked, tossing broken branches into the current.

  “You know I told you not to sit this close,” Karina said. He looked up at her and smiled. He had chubby, hairless cheeks and when he smiled the smile displaced them in a way that made him look awestruck.

  “You got guests,” she said, helping him to his feet and brushing the wet mud from the back of his pants. “Paying guests.”

  “Paying guests,” Simon said.

  She led him back into the house. When he entered the living room, the Widow Bentley nearly jumped from her seat to touch him.

  “Hello, Simon,” she said

  “Hello, Ms. Bentley,” Karina told Simon.

  “Hello, Ms. Bentley,” he mimicked.

  The Widow Bentley put her hand on Simon’s face. “How are you feeling today, honey?”

  “He’s doing real well,” Karina said. She knew the Widow Bentley hated it when she interjected, so she did it as much as possible.

  “Karina, sweetheart, could you make Mama and I some tea?” the Widow Bentley said. “She’s had a bad throat all morning.”

  Karina left the women with Simon and went to the kitchen. She set the water to boil and took a couple of bags of Mississippi Breakfast from the pantry; she had no intention of wasting the good Chinese stuff on the visitors. In the living room, the Widow Bentley continued to stroke Simon’s cheek.

  “How did you sleep, honey?” she asked. “Did you sleep all right?”

  “Like a baby!” Karina yelled from the kitchen.

  When she returned to the living room, the women were already engaged in the ritual. The Widow Bentley, a Bible on her lap, took her mother’s hand in her own and placed her other hand on Simon’s forehead. Together the three of them resembled the centerpiece of some spasmodic faith healer’s sermon, the evil cast out, out from the soul.

  Karina set the teacups on the table but the women ignored them. The Widow Bentley recited the same prayer she recited every time she came to visit, the psalms she knew by heart:

  For you will command your angels concerning me to guard me in all my ways;

  They will lift me up in their hands, so that I will not strike my foot against a stone…

  The Widow Bentley closed her eyes as she spoke and her hands shook and her voice quivered. Her mother looked on with resigned tolerance; her daughter stared out the window at the moving river.

  When they were done, the Widow Bentley wiped her eyes and, gripped by a deep, post-cathartic ennui, sought to remain as long as possible in Simon’s company. But the time she’d paid for had run out.

  Karina walked the three women to their car. Before she left, the Widow Bentley paid the visitation fee: five hundred Redbacks. Karina took the money and thanked her.

  “There’s one more thing,” the Widow Bentley said. “A favor we wanted to ask.”

  The woman reached under the Tik-Tok’s backseat cushion and retrieved a shoebox. She opened it for Karina. Inside were rolls upon rolls of Red currency—a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more.

  “We took it all out of First Southern this morning,” she said. “Bank manager put up one hell of a fight, but we said, It’s our money, you can’t hold it hostage.”

  “What do you want me to do with this?” Karina asked.

  “Just keep it for us, is all,” the Widow Bentley said. “Ever since what happened at Patience, things have gotten bad again. In Atlanta you got the Free Southern State and the United Rebels fighting over who’s gonna run the country, but neither of them got much control over anything no more. The fighting’s gotten real bad and everybody’s just waiting on the Blues to push south past Tennessee. Then you know there’s gonna be a run on the banks and President Kershaw’s gonna lock us out to keep the whole Mag from goi
ng broke. All we want you to do is keep it for us—just keep it where the boy is. That’s all. Don’t think we won’t pay you for it.”

  The woman put the shoebox in Karina’s hands. From the corner of her eye, the helper could see the look of disdain on the widow’s daughter’s face.

  “He’s just a boy, Kristin,” Karina said. “He’s not a bank. He’s doesn’t pay interest or buy stocks or anything else. He’s just a boy.”

  The Widow Bentley pulled out another five-hundred-dollar bill from her wallet. “We don’t need no interest, we don’t need no stocks. We just need it to be where he is, that’s all. What watches over him is enough.”

  Karina watched the women leave along the dirt road. At times she despised people like the Widow Bentley for believing so fiercely in their prayer bead gymnastics and credulous supplications. But most of all she despised them because, in the years she’d spent tending to their ranks, she’d come to believe in similar things—in superstitions: invocations meant to ward off the wrath of the Birds and the sickness of the walled Carolinians; the flight paths of ghosts through the sorghum.

  When the three women were gone she went back inside the house. Simon was curled up on the couch with his knees pressed to his chest, asleep.

  For a while she wondered what to do with the money. If she had any interest in honoring the widow’s wishes, she’d slip it under Simon’s bed, next to the Bible and the drying leaves. Otherwise she could hide it in the storm shelter next to the fuel drums. But in all these places, Karina worried Miss Sarat would inevitably find the money. And then she would berate Karina, in that charcoal, humorless voice of hers, about taking liberties that were not hers to take. Or, worse, she would say nothing, and one day the money would simply be gone, given as alms to the cause of glorious Southern rebellion.

  As she thought it over, she saw through the kitchen window a black shadow reflected on the river. Instinctively she knelt down under the kitchen counter, waiting for the Bird to pass. She knew they rained down death at random, and that if today was the day they chose this place, she’d already be dead—and yet she ducked under the counter anyway, a survival reflex.