Other than the eulogies, most of what she wrote proved useless; perhaps one out of every twenty achieved what it was intended to achieve. These successful letters, the demonstrable fruits of her work, she printed out and stored in a small filing cabinet by her bed. It was those letters that marked her place in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the camp—alongside the likes of the man in the Alabama sector who could move any sum of money anywhere in the country in four days or less, or the grandmother in Georgia whose fortuitous real estate allowed her to leach a wireless connection from the administrative offices. Work provided purpose, a sense of place, a sense of agency.
In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact.
She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully.
It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.
LIKE THEIR OLD HOME by the banks of the Mississippi Sea, the Chestnuts’ tent was sectioned into thirds. Martina’s room occupied the back third, anchored by a steel hospital cot and an old chest of drawers.
In the middle third of the tent the twins lived in opposing beds. On Dana’s side there were the salvaged trappings of teenage girlhood—a straightening iron; a makeup kit composed of various brands and shades of concealer and blush and lipstick and eye shadow. Near these things lay a stack of dog-eared, yellowing copies of Belle Magazine, a publication out of print for decades.
On Sarat’s side of the tent there were no posters and few possessions. In a large plastic bowl she kept a potpourri of war seeds—bullet casings and wild-toothed slivers of shrapnel. They were given to her as presents by the sullen grunts charged with scouring the Northern boundary of the camp for land mines. She liked watching the soldiers work, their frames hunchbacked, their ancient metal detectors helplessly beeping.
In a small space ahead of the girls’ room Martina kept a kitchen. The area between the kitchen and the tent’s front door was Simon’s room. It was a chaotic space, thick with the dank smell of unwashed clothing that sat in a heap at the foot of the boy’s bed. A blanket lay tucked under the bottom of the bed’s mattress, creating a makeshift curtain that hid whatever was stored beneath the bed. On the wall there hung an old poster of pristine Texas desert, unspoiled and unmarked. It was a form of protest. The desert poster became popular among the teenage boys at the camp after the administrators banned posters featuring a particular brand of long-discontinued, fossil-run muscle car. Before that, it was snakes of any kind; and before that, the rebel rattlesnake; and before that—in the beginning—posters bearing the names of any of the rebel groups. Soon the administrators would get around to banning Texas pastorals, and the boys would move on to something else.
Everywhere in the tent there were piles of accumulated things—hot plates, standing fans, two mini-fridges, half-empty bottles of rubbing alcohol; moisturizer; paperwork from the camp and from the Free Southern State; can openers; first-aid kits; and, more than all of these things, blankets.
Blankets saturated every aid shipment to Camp Patience, boxes upon boxes of burly fabric that scraped the skin like sandpaper. Even in the deadest of winter there was no need for blankets, so instead the refugees fashioned from them room dividers and tablecloths, foot mats and drawer-lining. Still, there were more blankets than anyone knew what to do with. Folded piles of blankets lay beneath the twins’ beds and above the filing cabinet. They were useless as bartering currency, subject to an inflation even worse than that of the Southern dollar. And yet the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China and the Bouazizi Empire kept sending more. For the life of her, Martina could not imagine what the foreigners thought the weather was like in the Red, but then she couldn’t even imagine the benefactors as people. They existed in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in some vast, indecipherable machine, its only visible output these hulking aid ships full of blankets.
MARTINA RESTED on her cot. She closed her eyes but could not sleep. The midday heat was building. She sat up and went outside.
She walked south, away from her tent, into Georgia. She followed the paths between the tents until she reached the place where the woman with the cleft-lipped baby lived. It was one of the newer tents, near the southwestern edge of the camp. The woman was alone, changing her child on the bed.
He was a pristine baby boy, his skin smooth as alabaster. Even the malformation that split his upper lip looked flawless, as though it were everyone else that was built the wrong way.
“Mornin’,?” Martina said. “You got a minute?”
The woman said nothing. She was in her early twenties. She wore an FSS shirt and a plain gray skirt that ran to her ankles.
“Lara told me you’re not interested in a letter for the camp director anymore,” Martina said.
“That’s right,” the woman replied.
“You got some other plan?”
“We’ll make do.”
“Look, I don’t know your story, and I don’t care,” Martina said. “But in this place we don’t have the luxury of inventing enemies. Let me write that letter for you. I don’t need any payment.”
“No. Thank you. We’ll make do,” the woman said. She lay her baby on a small scrap of aid blanket. The child grasped at the air with chubby little limbs.
“For Christ’s sake,” Martina said. “We’re not even Catholic. That statue belongs to my husband.”
“So your husband’s Catholic.”
“My husband’s dead.”
The woman did not respond. Her baby gurgled and spat and stared transfixed at the ceiling.
“Fine,” Martina said. “Do what suits you. Just remember that it’s that baby boy who’s paying for your made-up grudges.”
“Thank you for your concern,” the woman said.
Martina left the tent. Her anger at the young woman’s stubbornness quickly prompted recollections of all the times she’d found herself on one side or another of these meaningless, bigoted demarcations; all the times she’d been made to feel alien to some stranger’s expectation of what constituted the right and normal world—the color of her skin, the ethnicity of the man she’d chosen to marry, even her tomboy daughter. And no matter how much she tried to fight it, every now and then it still made her venomous. Stay mean if you want to, you stupid little girl, she thought. Cling to that tiny piece of power you think you have. But I hope every time you see your baby’s ruined lips you think of me.
She walked back to her own neighborhood in Mississippi. On her way she caught sight of Sarat playing tag with a gaggle of boys a few years younger than she was. They dodged around the tents and under the weighted clotheslines, giggling and screaming. Martina called her daughter over.
“Stop rolling around in the dirt,” she said. “You look filthy.”
“We’re just playing,” the girl replied, catching her breath as the rest of the children sprinted onward.
“Where’s your sister?”
“I don’t know,” Sarat said. “Out with the older kids in Missy’s tent, probably.”
“I thought I told you to keep an eye on her.”
“They’re not gonna eat her.”
“How ’bout your brother? I haven’t seen him all morning.”
“I heard he and Mark and them all snuck out to Muscle Shoals. Don’t tell him I told you, he’ll get mad.”
“Muscle Shoals? How’d they get out of the camp?”
“Same way smugglers get in,” Sarat said, pointing east. “Through Sandy Creek on the Alabama side.”