LATE AT NIGHT, when the weather cooled and the camp’s ragged bustle gave way to the hard, graceless sleep of the dispossessed, Martina visited her friend Erica Yarber’s tent for a game of cards. For the better part of five years, this had been a ritual, practiced three or four times a week by Martina, Erica, their friend Lara, and whichever women from the neighboring tents decided to join them on any given night.
It was a large tent, near the border between Alabama and South Carolina, once occupied by Erica, her husband, and her teenage son. But the son had moved west to join the fighting and the husband’s heart gave out one morning and now she lived alone.
Martina arrived with a jar of pickles, red in their Kool-Aid brine. Their taste repulsed Martina, conjuring cherries marinated in sweat, but the other women enjoyed them. The women almost always brought with them something to eat or drink: boiled and dry peanuts, day-old cafeteria bread massaged with oil or bacon grease, sweet ears, kettle chips, a mason jar of corrosive, tent-made Joyful, in addition to whatever else the women managed to acquire that day through serendipity or altruism.
The game was Fight the Landlord. Ten bucks a point, first to a hundred. They used three decks, and in this way the game moved more quickly and opportunities for bombs and rockets were increased. They played by the light of rainbow candles made from melted crayons and shoelace wicks. On a nearby tablet, a Dixie Radio broadcast trickled from the speakers. It was a big-lunged, brass-backed man singing. Young love has made me old, tired, restless, and blue.
“Mag on Mag, nines on eights,” Martina said, laying six cards on the shaky plywood table.
“Nope,” Lara said.
“Nothing,” Erica followed.
Martina swept the hand and set it facedown in a neat pile in front of her. Lara’s Joyful was starting to do its work.
It had become, over the years, the South’s wartime drink. Joyful, a Frankenstein hooch, made from whatever was on hand, no two jugs ever the same. Martina took another swig. She tasted the ingredients of this particular batch: a festering, months-old orange juice, and beneath that an aftertaste of corn and mouthwash. She felt the onset of drunkenness; every once in a while the candle flames stood still and it was the room that flickered.
Soon the game was called and Martina collected her winnings and the ladies retreated to Erica’s small, makeshift living room. Here there were arranged a set of cushions made of stitched charity blankets and foam. With no couch to use as a base, the cushions were arranged flat on the ground in the style of a Bouazizi majlis. The arrangement was sectioned with low tables made of the discarded cardboard boxes in which the camp’s water bottles came.
The women sat on the cushions and left the door of the tent ajar to let in a little breeze. Soon Erica was fast asleep where she sat.
It was quiet, Erica’s snoring their only accompaniment. Between the Joyful and the good tobacco, a warming balm washed over Martina’s body, and the pains of the day began to recede.
“You know I had a sister once,” she said.
“You never told me that before,” Lara replied.
“Never told no one. Never told my husband, even. She died when I was five. I don’t remember nothing about her anymore, except she had thumbs that could bend both ways. She used to show that off all the time, soon as she figured out nobody else could do it.”
Lara sat upright against the cushions. She blinked a few times to shake off the weight that had been building on her eyelids.
“How’d she die?” she asked.
“Got a cold one day playing in a creek that ran by our house. By nighttime she was shaking and coughing up blood. She was dead by morning. Didn’t even take a whole day. I remember my parents wouldn’t let me in the bedroom, didn’t want me seeing her the way she was. But I was out in the hallway and I could hear it, the sound she made when she was fighting so hard to breathe. I wish they would have let me see her. I think just the sound of it alone is worse than if they’d let me see her.”
“I’m sorry,” Lara said. “That must have been hard.”
“Ahh, it’s all long gone now. Time buries time, my mother used to say. It broke my father, though. For months afterward he just went round talking about how there used to be drugs that could have fixed her right up, but everybody used them too much and they didn’t work anymore. And what did work, we couldn’t afford. He kept saying it over and over, like saying it would change things.”
Martina stamped out her cigarette butt in her empty measuring cup. “I remember the day we buried her. We brought this preacher out to the farm to say a few words. Man must have been a hundred years old, half-blind and pretty well senile. He walks up to the grave—my parents dug a plot for her right there on the farm, made a cross out of fence posts—he walks up to the grave and we stand behind him, all dressed up in the finest clothes we own. And we think he’s just going to read a passage or just say a couple nice things about heaven or the Lord calling her home or whatever. But he doesn’t do any of that—you know what he does? He starts singing. He had this song like, We’re all children in the kingdom of Jesus. He sings that line a couple times—I think he just made it up in his head, none of us ever heard this song before, we’re just standing there like idiots behind him, none of us saying a word—and then he starts with: the boys and the girls are children in the kingdom of Jesus, the cats and the dogs are children in the kingdom of Jesus, the mules and the antelopes…just keeps going and going, like he’s taking attendance on the Ark. Finally I can’t help it anymore, I start giggling. My mother smacks me on the back to shut me up, but I can’t help it. I’m trying, damn near wetting myself trying, but I can’t. And then suddenly it hits me that I’m laughing at my own sister’s funeral, and I get this guilt right in my gut—hits me like a train. And I start crying harder than I ever cried. But that old man doesn’t care, he just keeps on going—the frogs and the horses and the squirrels and…”
Martina chuckled and shook her head. “I’ll never forget that goddamn senile old preacher. How’s he gonna go and make a little girl hate herself at her own sister’s funeral?”
“Jesus,” Lara said. “Maybe ya’ll really are Catholics.”
Soon the first blue of dawn began to leak into the charred sky. After the Joyful buzz wore off, Martina excused herself and walked back to her tent. In these hours the camp was at its calmest, and the tents running afield in all directions were beautiful in a rugged, delicate way—strange desert fauna reticent and frozen, a harvest of life.
When she reached her tent she opened the door slowly so as not to wake the children. She stepped inside and saw her son knelt down, pushing something under his mattress. At the foot of his bed his boots were caked in fresh mud.
“May as well show me whatever it is you got under there,” Martina said.
The boy jumped at the sound of his mother’s voice. He started to say something, then thought better of it. He reached under the bed and dragged out a black hard-shell guitar case. The strap showed signs of wear but the case itself was immaculate for its age, and appeared to Martina to have been at one time used prolifically but also with great care.
“They give you that?” Martina asked. “Some kind of gift or something?”
“No,” Simon replied. “Found it in an abandoned studio.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I swear it.”
“Sit.”
Simon sat on his bed. His mother sat beside him. She saw he’d cut himself across the left side of the forehead. She inspected the cut with her thumb. Simon pulled back.
“You know what they want in return when they start giving the kids round here gifts, right?”