American War

by Omar El Akkad

  She picked at the bowl of frickles. Layla, who swore up and down that nobody could tell the difference, made them with cricket flour. But Sarat swore she could. There was a stale aftertaste to it, a dishwater echo on the tongue.

  Layla called on her daughter to bring over a carafe of Joyful. The girl poured Sarat a cup.

  “How are those boys doing?” asked the mother, pointing to the reef rats at the corner of the bar.

  “They’re asking if they can start a tab on next month’s ships, if these ones end up turning around.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “You know what I told them.”

  “Good girl.”

  Layla Jr. walked back to the other end of the bar. Sarat watched her. She had her hair in a thick, braided ponytail. Behind it, on the back of her neck, lay a small tattoo of the state of Georgia that her mother had yet to discover.

  “How’s your family?” asked Layla Sr.

  “They’re all right,” said Sarat. “Gaines’s friend Dr. Heller came by again last month, talking about how they’re working on a program with the Red Crescent where they send injured Southerners up to the good hospitals in Pittsburgh. I told him I’d rather Simon die.”

  “What’s the harm in it? It’s not like you’re turning on your people. What if they got something up there in those hospitals can fix him?”

  “Unless they got a time machine in those hospitals, they ain’t fixing him.”

  Layla sighed. She poured herself a glass of Joyful. “How about the letters? Gaines said you’ve been sending them back.”

  “We don’t need donations,” said Sarat. “Every week they come in from all over the Red. People I’ve never met before—some of them I know don’t even have a pot to piss in, and they still send us envelopes stuffed with cash, like we’re a church or something. Well we ain’t a church—we don’t need their charity.”

  Layla laughed. “Oh honey I know that. Knew it the minute Gaines first introduced us. But what you need to know is, it isn’t about you. It’s about them. You really think those folks are too dumb to know they’re poor? Of course they know. And they send you that money anyway, because it means that much to them to be connected to you.”

  “What do they know about us?” Sarat replied. “What they read in the papers? What those FSS politicians said in those rallies? For all they know, they’re mailing their cash to a hole in the ground.”

  “The only thing they need to know is you’re clean,” said Layla. “You and your sister and your brother. Especially your brother. You’re clean because of what was done to you at Patience. All the politicians and the rebels and even the preachers, they might say the right things, but they haven’t been made clean like you. That’s why they send you money, that’s why they write you those letters saying you’re in their prayers. Because you’re clean.”

  “That’s not true,” said Sarat.

  “Oh it’s true. It might not be reasonable, it might not be fair. But it’s true.”

  “If they want to be clean so bad, why are they sitting in their homes writing letters? Why aren’t they out fighting, or even saying they’re proud of the South, proud of their own side? Every time I read the J-Con or any other one of those Southern newspapers, they’ve got some article about a new poll showing more and more people in favor of those cowards at the FSS and their phony peace plan—a plan that don’t ask for nothing but free movement over our own land. If they’re so worried about being clean, whatever that means, they’d hang those cowards in Atlanta with their pocket linings stuffed in their mouths.”

  A cheer erupted from the other corner of the bar. At first Sarat thought the river workers had been listening to what she said, but it was the movement of the ships they were cheering. The red dot that had been stalled atop Hutchinson Reef finally turned green, and to the east the waiting freighters began to move upriver. The month’s parade of gift ships was under way.

  “Won’t be needing that credit after all, sweetheart,” said one of the dockhands as he raced from the bar.

  “Wasn’t gonna be getting it anyway,” said Layla Jr.

  The dockhand blew her a kiss as he left, and she returned it with a finger.

  Soon the bar was quiet save for the murmuring of the war pensioners. The men—a half-dozen on this night—were between ten and twenty years older than Sarat, but looked older. She knew them only vaguely: the one missing his legs was Nathan Something. The one next to him was named Jeb, and was paralyzed on his left side. Others who drank in the Belle Rebelle’s dark corners on this and other nights were broken in other ways, some cracks visible, some not.

  Layla Sr. pointed to the men. “You want people who’ll never stop supporting the war? Talk to them over there. The war will never be over for them. The people who’re sending you those letters, I bet you most of them aren’t yet damaged that way. Maybe they’ve been touched by it, lost a friend or heard about some massacre, but it’s not the same. The truth is, they’re on the other side of the river from where you are, they haven’t been through what you’ve been through. And they don’t want to. They’re not young like you; most of them are old enough to remember when it wasn’t like this, when there was peace. And if you’d known that, you’d want it back too.”

  “It ain’t coming back,” said Sarat. “If they wanna dream, that’s their choice.”

  Layla cupped her hands on Sarat’s. There was a warmth to her palms that seemed to emanate from her eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But let me ask you this, and be honest: if they did have a time machine up in that Northern hospital, and you had a chance to go back—back to a time when none of what happened to you happened, a different world altogether where there had never been any war—wouldn’t you take it?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Sarat. “They can’t ever make that happen.”

  “But if they could…”

  “They can’t.”

  The bar owner smiled. It was a sad smile, and behind it Sarat suspected something akin to pity. “It’s getting late,” she said. “They’re gonna be out on the docks unloading all night, and then tomorrow the shirt factory dealers are gonna join them, and it’ll be a carnival for three days straight.”

  She passed a set of room keys to Sarat. “Get some sleep while you can,” she said. “Room’s all set up how you like it.”

  Sarat thanked her. They hugged and Layla retired to her own home, which stood about ten blocks south of the boardwalk, insulated from the riverside cacophony.

  Layla Jr. rang the bell: Last call. Sarat finished off the Joyful in her cup and she stumbled off her chair. She climbed the stairs near where the pensioners were getting ready to leave for the dime-bag motels and the VFWs, repurposed now as VDWs. As she climbed the stairs, she leered at Layla Jr., who caught her eyes but said nothing.

  The bedroom upstairs was small. The bed was made of a steel bunk salvaged from a ruined Southern destroyer. The bunk bed’s frames had been severed from each other and reset side by side to make a crude double bed. A lamp lit the room, its light sinking into the brown-painted walls. A ceiling fan spun, its bamboo arms warped and wobbling. A small window overlooked the boardwalk and the docks and the river.

  Sarat smelled the sheets. They’d been recently washed and they smelled of jasmine. It was the first thing she did whenever she stayed at the Belle Rebelle; the scent of other people on the sheets disgusted her. If she ever detected it—even the slightest remains of another body’s signature—she stripped the sheets from the bed and slept on the naked mattress, or on the floor, where the dust tempered all other scents.

  On the nightstand there was an old music-player, the kind that carried songs in its own memory instead of fetching them from the clouds. It had once belonged to Layla’s mother, and had reached that useless middle age between novelty and antique—it was simply old.

  Sarat searched it for a song she’d heard before, a slow number she liked. The player had a little display on its face but that had long ago stopped worki
ng. Instead she listened, and skipped past song after song until she found the one she wanted. From the speakers came the sound of bourbon-clouded piano keys. A shredded nightgown of a song. You moved like honey, in my dream last night.

  Sarat undressed. She set her shirt over the lamp shade, and the soft light turned from amber to blood. The shirt depicted the flag of South Carolina, drawn against a red background instead of blue.

  Sarat listened. Layla Jr.’s footsteps were light against the stairs outside. She opened the door. With her apron off she appeared even smaller, a milk-skinned apparition under Sarat’s looming shadow. She closed the door behind her.

  “Come here,” said Sarat.

  “Say it nicer,” Layla replied.

  “No.”

  Sarat smiled. She wanted Layla to stand her ground, and Layla knew Sarat wanted it. Because it made what came next sweeter, made the roughness sweeter. And it was the roughness Sarat craved. She wanted not love itself but the taking and giving of it; the parched hardness of her tongue scraping along Layla’s skin, a harvest of goose bumps in its wake. She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.

  The sound of them seeped through the brittle bedroom window and was drowned by the bustle of the docks. Outside, the river rats worked the cranes and the trucks, readying to relieve the gift ships of their contents. Soon the freight ships would arrive and their cargo of rations and tent materials and charity blankets would be moved throughout the Red. Then in the days that followed the ships would be loaded with their reward in the great barter: crate upon crate of clothing from the Southern shirt factories; cheap electronics from the sweatshops along the Alabama coast; fruits and vegetables from Atlanta’s vertical farms. Then the ships would depart, and Augusta would grow quiet once more, the giving and taking complete.

  Layla’s heartbeat echoed in the springs. Sarat rolled away. The fan turned slow, easy circles overhead.

  She felt Layla’s finger on her back, tracing a wound. The cut was thin and long, running from the top of her left shoulder to the middle of her back.

  “How did you get this?” asked Layla.

  “Don’t know,” said Sarat.

  “Yeah you do. You just don’t want to tell me.”

  “That’s right.”

  Layla sat up in bed. She leaned over and picked her shirt off the floor and put it on. It was stretched out a little around the collar from when Sarat had pulled it off her. Outside on the boardwalk, there shone a great blinking lantern. A sliver of its light came in through the bedroom window. It cast Layla momentarily in a wash of white, and in this moment the places where her skin was red and flush were made porcelain and clean, the newness of her restored.

  “This is my last year in this place,” she said. “Come January, I’m gone.”

  “And where exactly you gonna go to?” asked Sarat, her back still turned.

  “South to Valdosta, where my mother grew up. All her people are still there.”

  Sarat chuckled. “Everybody trying to get the hell out the south coast, and you’re going back?”

  “Better there than here,” said the girl. “I’m not gonna wait on drunk river rats and clean up puke for the rest of my life. Wake up one day find out now I’m the Old Layla. At least down there I don’t have to worry every day about whether this’ll be the night the Blues finally come down from Tennessee, burn the whole place to the ground.”

  “Only reason Blues won’t come all the way down to Valdosta is because there’s nothing down there worth burning,” said Sarat. “What are you gonna do, work in one of the farm slums? The shirt mills?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Sarat shook her head. “Christ,” she said. “You still so young.”

  “Like you ain’t?”

  Sarat faced her. “Turn around,” she said.

  Layla complied. Sarat brushed aside her ponytail and kissed the place where Georgia’s outline lay inked upon her neck. “Run off wherever you like,” she said. “You mine tonight, though.”

  “I ain’t nobody’s,” Layla replied. But she lay a while longer under the slow-turning fan.

  Then she was gone, and Sarat slept. She dreamed of Patience, and of the knife coming loose from her hand too soon. In the dream the Blues bound her and took her north, to a place in the forest. They dug for her a prison well deep into the ground, a dark earthen hollow from which she could not climb. It was always the same. Every night she closed her eyes and was confined to the empty well, powerless and blind and alone.

  She woke with the residue of the nightmare in her pores. For a moment she scratched at the mattress, but a warm hand patted her head, and a voice said: It’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right.

  She let her sister’s breathing calm her, and smelled the skin of her thigh. She let the lullaby wash over her—it’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right, beautiful girl. But she held her own eyes closed because she knew that the voice and smell and touch of her sister were not real. They were only imagined things, concocted by her mind to cleanse the aftertaste of the nightmare. When she finally opened her eyes, her sister would not be there.

  OUTSIDE, the docks rattled with the movement of commerce. All morning, the crews unloaded the boxes. By noon, when Sarat could no longer keep her eyes closed, the opposite process was under way.

  Sarat walked to the window. The room was dank, despite the fan’s slow circling. Still naked, she lifted the window open and leaned out to catch a little of the Savannah breeze. The boardwalk looked old and weathered in the clear light of day. A couple of drunks lay asleep in their vomit. A freight ship blocked the view of the river but Sarat could still see, on the other bank, the great martyrs’ mural.

  It was painted onto a stretch of the Carolina quarantine wall, about ten blocks long. Here the wall was covered with a collage of the South’s unjustly killed. Not an inch of concrete was visible behind a mass of drawings and photographs. Almost daily, the survivors of Northern assaults were ferried on skiffs across the river and given a chance to paste or draw their loved ones’ images on the wall.

  Only the dead were allowed to grace the wall. In time, the ritual became so popular that the kids who ran the skiffs started mounting ladders to their boats to reach the topmost edges. The Red soldiers looked on from their guard towers, and no matter how close the mourners came to falling over into the Slow country of South Carolina, they did not intervene. Eventually, the center of the quarantine wall in Augusta was saturated entirely, and the mural began to spread up and downriver.

  Only very special circumstances, such as the massacre at Camp Patience, allowed for the pasting of new martyrs on the old part of the mural in Augusta. But the very center of the mural, it was understood by all, was never to be touched. In that sacred place was painted a large portrait of Julia Templestowe.

  A tipsy, whistling dockhand stumbled down the boardwalk, shirtless. He was a rookie, fresh off celebrating his first shift on the docks. He wore a child’s toy Viking’s hat, its plastic horns bright green. As he passed the Belle Rebelle he looked up and saw Sarat standing naked at the window. He stopped and stared, uncertain. Finally Sarat snapped forward as though to lunge at him. He flinched and fell back, nearly tumbling off the boardwalk and onto the wharf below. Sarat winked at the jolted dockhand. She closed the window.

  She dressed and went downstairs. The bar was empty. She fixed herself a drink and ate the stale leftover frickles, and then she left.

  The waterfront was as busy now as it was the night before, but it was a different kind of traffic. This was the busyness of work. By nightfall, when the month’s business was done and the gift ships were moving back to the Atlantic, Augusta would once again be consumed in revelry, the temporarily flush dockworkers burning through their cash. Then it would grow quieter and quieter, until by the th
ird week of the month half the bars wouldn’t bother opening their doors at all.

  She hitched a ride east to the coast on one of the trucks that ran back and forth along the Savannah highway, shuttling dockhands, foreign crew members, and packages to and from Augusta.

  She arrived at Garden Sound in the late afternoon. The mouth of the river where it met the ocean was a desolate place, but beautiful in its own way. Great looming wharfs lined the edge of the land. It was here where many of the freight companies kept offices, and where the last remaining salvage divers set sail to search for bounty in the undersea heart of sunken Savannah.

  In the distance, six miles outland, a line of glowing buoys marked the boundary beyond which the Blues controlled the water. Their coastal vessels circled, and whenever a gift ship arrived, they escorted it to a large floating customs platform, where the soldiers searched it.

  At the very edge of the Red, near the light ships that provided guidance to the mouth of the river, another, smaller platform stood. A tiny building of welded shipping containers sat atop the platform.

  It was a coffee shop, run by a man named Prince Wendell who was nearing his hundredth birthday and had lived on the Georgia coast his entire life. He was known as the very last holdout of the great Inland Exodus, the one man left who remained on his land even when it ceased being land.

  For the better part of eighty years he had run this business. Mostly blind now but unwilling to retire to the dry world, he opened the coffee shop for business only on the first three days of every month. During those days, his customers were reef pilots, foreign crews, and Northern soldiers with the circling customs fleet.

  Any other Southerner would have been strung up for serving Blues, but Prince Wendell was old and stubborn enough to be grandfathered into the peace of his youth, and the tiny confines of his floating coffee shop stood as the only place in the wartime country where the North and South maintained an unspoken truce.

  In one of the warehouses near the shore, Albert Gaines kept a Sea-Tok docked in Wharf Twenty-one. Sarat took the tiny vessel out into the ocean.