American War

by Omar El Akkad

  “It’s not sleep I’m worried about. How do you know she hasn’t”—my mother caught sight of me on the steps—“how do you know she hasn’t done something?”

  My father stood and kissed my mother on the forehead. I knew she hated when he did that during their arguments, as though it were some kind of counterpoint to whatever she had to say.

  “It’s going to take a long time,” he said.

  “Fine,” my mother replied. “But I’m not cooking a second breakfast. She wakes up now, she wakes up at midnight, she gets this.”

  A plate sat on the kitchen counter, piled with fried eggs fresh from the coop my mother kept near the rows of our numbered greenhouses, as well as asparagus from House Six and strips of real Virginia bacon.

  “Fair enough,” my father said. “I’m not asking you to wait on her. Just treat her as if she was your family.”

  “That’s not fair.” I could see my mother getting angry. She had a habit of digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers when her patience stretched. “I married you, didn’t I? She is my family.”

  My father recoiled a little, surprised that my mother had taken offense. He was least clouded at the start of the day, least likely to forget or repeat himself, but most often he suffered from an inability to predict how the things he said sounded to ears other than his own.

  “I’ll take it to her,” I said, stepping into the kitchen.

  My parents looked at me, and then each other.

  “Sure, why not?” said my father. “She’s your aunt—go ahead.”

  Triumphant, I took the plate. The kitchen counter was a buttercream marble veined with black, and I had just that year grown tall enough to reach it. On my way out I took an oatmeal cookie from the jar on the table and set it on the plate. It seemed incomprehensible to me that so little food could possibly satisfy a body so big.

  At the shed I found the doors slightly ajar. I wedged my hips between them and budged them open. Inside, the old prewar bulb was still on—I could feel the heat of it—even though sunlight seeped in through a thousand cracks in the wood. The air smelled of dust and mothballs and the wetness of recently disturbed earth. It also smelled of her.

  She was still sleeping, her frame curled into something like a question mark upon a space in the floor where there was no floor—as though the very foundations of the shed had backed away from her quietly in the night. She was snoring and the thumb of her right hand twitched.

  As slow and quiet as possible, I set the plate on the workbench. An old black toolbox had been taken down from the shelves—a dust outline still visible in the place where it had sat unused for years. Its contents were strewn about: a screwdriver, a set of pliers, and a folding knife. The knife had a black aluminum handle engraved with initials I couldn’t decipher. There were a few strands of hair on the blade.

  I was transfixed by the knife. At home, my mother would not let me near anything with a blade, not even the butter knives whose edges were dull as soap. But something about the confines of the old musty shed made me believe that this was a wild, sovereign place, where my mother’s rule had no power. I was so mesmerized by the rust-streaked blade on the workbench, I didn’t notice when the snoring stopped.

  I heard something like a sharp inhale. I dropped the knife and turned to find her on her feet—moving faster than I ever thought possible for someone of such size. Lunging.

  But it was not toward me. Like a frenzied prey she darted away to the furthest corner from where I stood. She backed into the walls with such force that the shed itself shook, and I thought the whole rotting thing would come down on us.

  Fear of her pulled me toward the door, but something kept me where I stood. I saw the rise and fall of her chest. She looked at me as though I had stingers for limbs.

  “Breakfast!” I blurted out. “I brought you breakfast. Look, look!”

  I pointed at the plate on the workbench, but she never took her eyes off me.

  Slowly, she approached. When she was close to me she knelt down. She leaned in until her face was close to mine and I could feel the milky breath of the newly woken on my cheek.

  “I forgot your name,” she said.

  “Benjamin,” I replied. “My name’s Benjamin Chestnut.”

  She took my chin in her hand and inspected my face. “You look like your father did, when he was young,” she said. “You got none of your mother in you.”

  I saw that she had shaved her head, and that there were fresh cuts on her scalp.

  “Why do you want to sleep here?” I asked. “It smells funny. We have lots of nice rooms in the house. My parents say you can stay there as long as you want.”

  She let me go. Her eyes were red and her face stained on one side with soil. She wore the same clothes she had on when she arrived. It occurred to me then that not a single piece of clothing in our home would fit her.

  “Listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you,” she said. I nodded.

  “Don’t ever come in here again.”

  SHE DIDN’T LEAVE the shed until dinnertime. In those days, whenever the weather wasn’t too hot, my mother liked to have dinner in the backyard by the levee. We had a beautiful table on the deck, made of real Cascadia redwood. And although the levee blocked our view of the river, we were able to enjoy its breeze.

  My mother saw her in the yard. “Come have some dinner, Sarat,” she said. “It’s a gorgeous night—don’t get too many of those anymore.”

  She looked at the old plot where my mother once planted her first seeds, back when she was still the help, still an interloper.

  “Look familiar, don’t it?” my mother said. “It’s from before, from the old house. You remember how you used to get me that good foreign soil? That’s all we use now, in all the greenhouses. That very same soil.”

  IN THE WEEKS that followed, we settled into routine. Our guest spent most of her days and nights in the shed. Sometimes she came outside and walked among the greenhouses, but only late in the evening, when my parents were asleep. I lay awake some nights looking for her out my window.

  Whenever I brought her meals to the shed and set them on the ground outside, I peeked in through the doors. I always saw her hunched over a table made of a plywood sheet on stacked paint-can legs. The shed was littered with cheap paper diaries you could only still get from the last dead-tree store in Lincolnton. She was writing in the old way.

  My mother said if she didn’t want to be part of this family, it was best to just ignore her. But I couldn’t. Whenever the old widows came by with toys for me, I made sure to play with them out in the backyard from a spot where I could see through the ajar shed doors. But nothing enticed her to notice me.

  She seemed to exist in her own wild space, unshackled from the rules and decorum of life as my parents had made me know it. It amazed me to think that she slept on soil and ate where she stood and had been on a trip to some secret place for seven whole years. My sheltered world shook with the realization that it was possible to live this way. I’d been raised in the shadow of walls; she was of the river.

  We had fewer guests in the months after she arrived. The politicians who visited from Lincolnton and Atlanta stopped coming. But the old widows still came by every week like clockwork. Some of them wanted to see her, but she would never come to the house.

  Sometimes, playing in the paths between the greenhouses, I’d hear the laborers gossiping about her in their strange far-south drawl. They called her a Bluenose and a Pocketmouth and I had no idea what those things meant. But the words sounded exotic, faraway, primed with the stuff of adventure.

  LATE THAT WINTER a new visitor came. Through my bedroom window I saw his small motorcade—three busted sedans, the old kind that ran on illegal fuel—at the far gate of the driveway. When I came downstairs I heard my mother say we shouldn’t let a man like that anywhere near our home, that we should tell him to turn right around and go back wherever he came from, but my father said that would make us bad ho
sts.

  The cars came up the driveway to the house. The sound of their old gurgling engines drew our guest out of her shed. From the cars emerged a somber-faced entourage of young men and women, all of whom orbited their boss, Adam Bragg Jr.

  With the war coming to an end and reunion finally in sight, this was all that was left of the United Rebels.

  “Simon Chestnut, you living saint,” Bragg said. “The only man in the whole of the goddamn Red who deserves his good fortune.”

  “Hello,” my father said, uncertain.

  “What, don’t you remember me? Remember you came down to see my father that time, got you a nice piece of change from the Martyrs’ Fund?”

  “What do you want, Adam?” my mother said.

  But the man ignored her when he saw the big broad shape approaching from the woodshed.

  “My God, Sarat,” he said. “It does the soul good to see you free.”

  “I got nothing to say to you,” she told him. “Go on, leave.”

  “I don’t begrudge you that,” Bragg replied. “Hell, I don’t begrudge you anything, with what you’ve been through. All I ask is a few minutes of your time. Is there somewhere we can go and speak?”

  “Say what you have to say.”

  Bragg looked at my parents. “Can we speak in private?”

  “Go on inside,” my aunt told my parents. “They’ll be gone in a minute.”

  My father took me into the house, where my mother stood by the window of the grand room, watching.

  Bragg took in the property. It was noon and the sunlight turned the greenhouses radiant. A few laborers toiled on the far edge of our farm; otherwise it was quiet.

  “You know you’re eating the same lettuce and potatoes the governor’s eating?” Bragg said. “Your brother’s done real well, Sarat. You should be proud.”

  “What do you want.”

  “Did they tell you how the great Chestnut Estate came to be, by the way?” Bragg asked. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Turns out all those people who thought your brother was watched over by God, well they wanted God to watch over their money too. So they took it out of the banks and started keeping it here. And then the night the Blues came for you, everybody assumed they’d turn the house inside out and take all the money. But when they didn’t, when they just took you and left, that’s when people really started buying the notion that God watched over the Chestnuts’ place. Pretty soon your sister-in-law over there was running a bank damn near as big as First Southern. And that’s not even counting all those people who just sent money, donated it, didn’t want a single thing in return.”

  He laughed. “You know, you should march right into that big old house and ask them for your cut,” he said. “God knows you’ve earned it.”

  “I asked you what you want.”

  “I wanted, first and foremost, to see you,” Bragg said. “When they told me you were getting out, I didn’t believe it. I guess the war really must be ending, if they’re clearing out Sugarloaf.”

  He pointed to the young men and women standing near the cars. “See that right there? What you’re looking at is all that remains of the great Southern rebellion,” he said. “All those ones who used to fight on the Tennessee line and in East Texas since the war first started have traded their swords for stump speeches—spending their time in Atlanta now, running election campaigns and talking about ‘peace with dignity.’ ”

  “You bitter they don’t hold a table for you in Augusta no more?”

  “Ha! Augusta the way you knew it don’t even exist. Ships come up through the Northern ports now, and the Blues decide what we get to keep. Just one more concession the proud patriots of the Free Southern State agreed to in exchange for peace—the Great Reunification, they call it. Sold their country out for a seat at the kids’ table in Columbus.”

  “The girl you came here to recruit is gone,” Sarat said. “Go, and don’t come back here again.”

  “Honey, you and I both know you’re too broken to recruit,” said Bragg. “I saw you hobble over here from that shed, and we all heard what they did to people in Sugarloaf. Three of the girls they set free with you are already dead, and no Northerner had to come down and kill them, they did the job themselves. Hell, even if I wanted to recruit you, half the rebels still left are dead sure you ratted out the cause in exchange for freedom.”

  He waved over one of the boys standing by the car. “No, Sarat, I didn’t come to recruit you. I came to give you a gift.”

  The boy brought over a photograph. He was strange-looking, his skin too white and his hair buzzed close to the scalp. The rest of Bragg’s entourage made an effort not to stare at Sarat, but this one looked at her dead on, shards of malice in his eyes.

  “You don’t remember him, do you?” said Bragg. She tried to recall why the boy looked familiar, but could not.

  “This here is Trough,” said Bragg, “the last living member of the Salt Lake Boys. Every single one of his brothers is dead or worse than dead. He keeps trying to join them, but I think they’re watching over him from the next life, keeping him here with me against his will. Ain’t that right?”

  Trough said nothing.

  Bragg showed the photograph to Sarat. She saw it and froze. She took it from him and held it close until even her feeble eyes had no doubt who the man was that stared back at her. Even blindfolded and bloodied, his face was more familiar to her than her own. It was the face of the thick-necked guard from Sugarloaf. Bud Baker, the man who’d drowned her.

  “How did you find him?” she said.

  “Damn idiot tried to take his wife and kids on a road trip to Zion and wandered into Mexican Protectorate territory,” said Bragg. “When the Mexicans found out who he was, they shopped him around. I figured you two must have overlapped in that place, and that maybe you’d be interested in saying hello.”

  Her eyes never left the photograph. “Where is he?”

  “We got him in a safe place down south,” said Bragg. “You can tell us what to do with him, or you can come down and do it yourself.”

  OVER MY PARENTS’ OBJECTIONS, she left with Bragg. They drove five hours southwest to a cabin hidden among the stripped and bleached trees near Lake Seminole. The cabin stood at the edge of an algae-covered watering hole. A thin dirt trail led to its door. In the distance to the south, the Georgia coast gave way to the savage Florida Sea.

  She found four people tied and blindfolded inside the cabin—Bud the guard, a woman who must have been his wife, and their two teenage children. All four were shackled to their chairs, their eyes covered with strips of black cloth. All their faces bore the blood and bruises of recent abuse, but none more so than the man she had come to see.

  Bragg and his entourage waited outside; she entered alone. The blindfolded woman, at the sound of the door opening, broke into whimpered pleading, but Sarat ignored her.

  She knelt near Bud. Up close, she could see the outer rings of deep black bruises around his blindfolded eyes. He was drenched in sweat, his heartbeat shook him.

  She put her hands on his knees. He jerked back as though touched with a live wire.

  “Just let my family go,” he said. It was a different voice than the one she remembered—slightly thinner, free of resolve. “Just let them go, they did nothing wrong.”

  Gently she lifted the blindfold from his eyes. For a moment he looked at her as though trying not to recognize her face, as if by burying the memory of her he could bury the reality of her too. He closed his one working eye and when he opened it again and saw that she was still there, he straightened in his chair and tried to steel himself against what he knew was coming.

  From her pocket Sarat retrieved her rusted folding knife. She cupped Bud’s chin in her hand and stroked his cheek.

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m going to make you sing.”

  SOON THE SURROUNDING WORLD evaporated and with it the screaming that filled the room. Only her wrath remained, her unquenchable want. She wanted the b
lood inside him. He looked different now than when she’d last seen him: the early shadows of a beard growing on his face, his hair longer. But the blood inside him was the same.

  She took it all. Rising, she looked at the hollowed remains of the guard and she felt the inverse of fulfillment—the empty undoing of a castaway who, rabid with thirst, resorts to drinking from the ocean.

  When what revenge there was to be had was had, she turned and made to slit the throats of her other captives. She went first to the children. They looked about sixteen or seventeen: redheads, both with curly hair and the same jaws as their father. The shorter of the two had soiled himself and was shaking and sobbing. The other sat still, looking forward at his captor though he could not see.

  When she closed in to kill them, she saw for the first time the mirrored contours of their faces.

  “You’re twins,” she said.

  The shorter boy said nothing. The taller one nodded.

  They must have wondered why she did not kill them—why, with the knife so close to their throats, she stood and knocked the table over and screamed and left them there.

  Outside, Bragg and his group waited. When they saw the color of her hands and the color of her clothes, some of them looked away and others smiled.

  “We’ll burn it down with them in it,” said Bragg. “Nobody will ever know.”

  “No,” she said. “The boys and their mother are still alive. Let them go.”

  “Let them go where?”

  “I don’t care. Smuggle them past the western line out into Blue country. Send them home.”

  “Sarat, they might have seen things. They might have recognized voices, they could tell…”

  “Send them home,” she said.

  ON THE LONG DRIVE BACK she saw Atlanta in the distance. It had grown during her years in Sugarloaf.

  “I heard Albert Gaines killed himself a few years back,” she said. “Where’s he buried?”

  “Oh, he ain’t dead, or at least he’s still breathing,” said Bragg. “After the Blues let him go he went off to that shack of his in the forest, doesn’t speak to nobody or go nowhere, just rotting away with none but his guilt for company. Let the maggots bury him when the time comes, goddamn Pocketmouth rat.”