Sarat observed her new face a long time. In the back of her mind swirled all manner of looming irritations—her mother’s wrath, the ceaseless teasing of the children who’d seen or by now heard what she’d done. But in this moment, alone with her reflection, she felt new and impossibly light.
The pane was of a flimsy plastic and gave slightly when Sarat pushed on it. But in the groove on the other side there was a thick wood block, and it prevented the window from sliding open. She tried to dig her fingers in and lift the pane out entirely. She became so caught up in this task that she didn’t notice the shadow climbing up the wall, a shadow in the shape of a man who now stood behind her.
“Whatever it is you’re looking for,” he said, “I doubt you’ll find it here.”
Sarat jumped and stumbled back, nearly falling off the waste bin. She turned to see a man of about sixty, dressed in a black prewar suit lined with white thin stripes. She’d never seen him before.
He was short, a half-foot shorter than Sarat, even aided by the thick heels of his polished dress shoes. He wore a stiff black homburg. Its brim kept the overhead lights from illuminating his face.
“I’m not stealing,” Sarat said. “Are you gonna tell?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“Sarat.”
“Hello, Sarat. My name is Albert Gaines.” He had a slightly low, even voice with a sliver of Mississippi drawl, one wide vowel cozying up to the next. It reminded Sarat of the announcer on the Peachtree Variety Hour her mother liked to listen to on Friday nights: a soothing, familiar voice.
“How old are you, Sarat?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“And why are you dressed in someone else’s clothes?”
The question caught her off-guard, and for a moment she wondered if the old man had been watching when she went in the creek. But she knew he hadn’t. Every face that watched her was etched in her memory now; she’d remember every single one, every smile, every snicker, forever.
“I jumped into Emerald Creek.”
“And why would you do that?”
“A dare.”
Gaines smiled. Along the skin between the ends of his lips and the dark crescents beneath his eyes Sarat saw small craters, markers of time and damage.
“Come down from there,” he said. “I have a business proposition for you.”
Sarat climbed off the waste bin and approached the man. She imagined him a dignitary—one of the representatives the Free Southerners dispatched from Atlanta every now and then to gauge the mood of the refugees and spread word of recent concessions by and humiliations of the Blues. But those were different beasts; they dressed in cheap, formless shirts and wore pins in the shape of the Southern flag and stammered for hours without saying anything of value. In the eyes of the refugees, those men were little more than dull sparks launched off the gears of some distant machine.
Gaines retrieved a small yellow envelope from his breast pocket. “I have an acquaintance to whom I need this letter delivered,” he said. “His name is Leonard and he lives in row nine, tent nine, in the South Carolina sector.”
“All right,” Sarat said.
“You’re not afraid of going to South Carolina?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to know how much I’m willing to pay?”
Sarat paused. The man chuckled. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a dare, it’s a job. Jobs pay.” He handed her the envelope. “Go on, then, let’s see how you do.”
Sarat took the envelope. On its back the name Leonard was written in impeccable cursive. She walked southeast, past the administrative buildings and in the direction of the camp’s main gate.
Like the rest of the refugees from the other states, she’d never ventured into South Carolina. She had only heard stories of it: of mean, bitter people, the last uninfected remnants of their quarantined state.
Once, years earlier, the South Carolina slice was the largest in the camp. But over the years the sector had shrunk, ceding its northern and western borders to Alabama and Georgia—because from those states there was still a regular flow of refugees, but nobody else was leaving South Carolina. The whole state was walled off, sealed.
Sarat walked past unadorned tents, their tears left for the most part unmended. A few men sat on plastic chairs, reading and playing dominoes. They observed her as she passed.
She reached her destination to find a couple of boys playing cards on a rice sack table. They were perhaps fourteen or fifteen, the one with his back to her a buzz-cut redhead, the other a spindly blond naked but for a pair of Double Star shorts.
Beyond them, and beyond the tent in the distance, the soft white lights of the camp’s main gate burned. And beyond those gates the great Southern world, its cratered cities and salt-eaten coasts and parched, blistered gut, lay waiting. It was a world that for Sarat now existed only in the fiery sermons of radio preachers and the lyrics of war songs and the bucolic pastorals of Free Southern State propaganda. It was an abstraction, an idea, nothing more.
The blond boy, when he saw Sarat approach, sprang from the mandarin-crate box on which he was seated.
“What do you want?” he said, approaching.
“I’m looking for Leonard,” Sarat replied. “Got a letter for him.”
“This ain’t your place. Leave.”
The boy was pale, as though he’d spent no time under the Southern sun. A pink streak ran from the left side of his neck down to near his belly button; Sarat could not tell whether it was a rash or some natural imperfection or the remains of burned skin. He was three or four inches shorter than she was, and at least thirty pounds lighter, his hip bones like the blades of cleavers.
“I’ll leave after I give this to Leonard,” Sarat said, holding out the letter.
“You deaf?” the boy replied. “I said get out, now.”
He came to push her, his hands landing in the space between her shoulders and her breasts. It was then that something deep within her snapped. She felt a searing inflammation, a fire in the cavities behind her eyes.
With a guttural roar she leaped for the boy, palms turned to vises around his throat. He tumbled back onto the ground and she jumped on him, his arms pinned beneath the thick planks of her shins. Her first punch landed square; the boy’s nose cracked. Sarat threw another, and another, until her limbs felt as though they were not her own. With each punch she exhaled and the exhales soon turned to screams. In the wide, blood-splattered eyes of the wiry Carolina boy she caught, for an instant, her own rabid reflection.
A moment later she was lifted, her limbs still moving but her body caught by a pair of handless arms. She was set down on the dirt by a man nearly seven feet tall and wide enough to momentarily eclipse her view of the retreating boy. She tried to scramble around the man’s legs but he held her firm, his stumps hard against her shoulders.
“Enough,” the man said. “Stay.”
Sarat tried to break from the man’s hold but could not. She turned to see his face. It was ruined, the lips gone and in their place thin slivers of brown-crusted skin, the cheeks wrinkled and charred. She saw the cavernous aperture where his right eye once was and she was hypnotized by it.
“What’s this about?” the man said.
Sarat held out the envelope. “I have to give this to Leonard,” she said.
The man took the envelope, pinned it between his wrists. “You’ve done it,” he said. “All right?”
“All right.”
She saw the boy standing behind the man, blood still running from his shifted nose. There was a wild fear in his eyes but it was not the girl he was looking at, it was the man.
“You tell Gaines something for me,” Leonard told Sarat. “Tell him there’s two families that got no one to provide for them no more.” He held up the envelope. “And this alone don’t make that right.”
“Fine,” Sarat said. She turned to leave.
“Hold on,” Leonard said. He turned to the boy.
“Did I raise a coward?” he asked.
“No sir,” the boy replied, his voice hushed and mechanical, his eyes lowered.
“Sure looks like it right now. Apologize.”
The boy stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Sarat said nothing.
“It’s all right,” Leonard said. “You don’t have to accept it—he just has to say it.”