“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,” Martina 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.