“Better that than you getting killed and me having to explain what happened. I ain’t leaving.”
With Marcus peering from around her shoulder and her heart pounding, she carefully set the land mine back in the crate. A few inches from the bottom of the crate, it slipped out of her hand and dropped. Sarat watched it, waiting for the inevitable explosion, and then in an instant she turned around, grabbed her friend by the hand and sprinted toward the island’s interior.
They ran blind and mute through the thicket for five minutes without pause, until their exhaustion and the dawning realization that there had been no explosion brought them to rest.
“What…” said Marcus, gasping. But he couldn’t form an end to the question, and finally he just said, “What the hell? What the hell?”
Sarat couldn’t help but laugh, and quickly they were both in hysterics over their brush with death. Since their arrival they’d been careful not to make too much noise, but now they cackled.
They found themselves near the middle of the island, where the tree cover was thickest and the ground cool under the shade of the branches. About twenty feet up one of the tallest trees, Sarat saw a wooden observation platform, a lookout of sorts. Without a second thought she started to climb the thick hemp rope that dangled from the tower.
“What’s up there?” Marcus asked.
“Don’t know, but I bet you can see the whole camp,” Sarat replied. “Bet you can even see the Blues.”
She climbed to the platform and Marcus followed. Their view was obstructed a little by some of the nearby trees, but otherwise they were above most of the canopy. The world, Blue to the north, Red to the south, spread out before them.
They unzipped the backpack and ate their sandwiches and watched the vast horizon. In the distance to the north Sarat saw more acreage of browning forestland and a few dilapidated marinas and even the skeleton of a creek-side condominium near where the Tennessee River flowed.
From Albert Gaines’s many maps she had learned that there were natural borders and political borders. To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.
They sat silent for a while, letting the sugar from the apricot gel slowly revive them.
“You mad at me?” Marcus asked.
“Why would you think that?” Sarat replied.
“Haven’t seen you lately. Came by your tent a few times, but you weren’t there.”
“Been busy, I guess.”
“Doing what?”
“Learning. Got a new teacher, comes by a few times a week.”
“I thought you said they don’t teach you anything worth knowing in Patience.”
“They don’t,” Sarat said. “But he ain’t one of them useless teachers the Red Crescent folks bring in. He’s teaching me all kinds of stuff they won’t. Stuff they’re too scared to teach.”
“Like what?” Marcus asked.
Sarat pointed northward. “Like about them. About all the things they’ve done to us over the years. All the times they’ve put what’s good for them ahead of what’s good for us. You can go to school a million years down here and they won’t have the guts to tell you a single thing about Northerners. But now I’m learning what they’re really like.”
Marcus observed the land to the north with indifference. “My dad told me the other day that my grandfather was a Northerner,” he said.
“Like, he fought for them?” asked Sarat.
Marcus shook his head. “Nah, just worked up there, on the oil trains up in some place called Williston. Died in that big explosion in ’69. My dad said the North didn’t care about prohibition too much before that, said if the same thing had happened in Texas they wouldn’t have done anything about it, even if it had killed a thousand. He said the thing about Northerners is, when it’s good it’s their good alone, but when it’s bad it’s everybody’s bad to share.”
“If your dad hates them so much, how come he’s always talking about sneaking out of here and going up to join them?” Sarat asked.
“Just because he wants to go there don’t mean he likes them,” Marcus said. “Just means it’s safe. If you had a chance to go where it’s safe, wouldn’t you?”
Sarat thought about the question. It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester—perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?
“I don’t know,” she said.
The sun began to set over the far side of Camp Patience. Sarat and Marcus descended from the lookout and walked back along the path to the edge of the island. Their underwear had dried on their bodies but it felt good to slip into the water once again. With nothing inside the bag, there was no point in holding it above the water; Sarat slipped it on her back. Her hands free, she swam with ease, gliding.
She’d learned recently that solid land was not the natural skin of the world, only a kind of parasitic condition that surfaced and receded in million-year cycles. The natural skin of the world was water, and all water on earth was connected. In this way she was able to make believe she was swimming not in some offshoot of the Tennessee River, but in that muddy place by the banks of the Mississippi. For a brief moment she was home.
AFTER NIGHT FELL she ate dinner alone in her tent and then she went to see Gaines. They’d settled into a thrice-weekly ritual: every night he visited the camp she would come to see him in his office. Sometimes he’d give her errands to run, envelopes stuffed with cash to hand out in the South Carolina slice. Eventually the Carolinians got used to the sight of the tall, bald-headed girl crossing into their neighborhood. In time the boys in South Carolina gave her the nickname Payday. But although anytime she walked through the hermit sector she had on her person more money than most of Camp Patience’s refugees would see in a lifetime, not once did she worry about theft or harassment. They all knew who she worked for.
After she ran the errands she would return to Gaines’s office and listen to him teach. Every night was different: sometimes they discussed the natural world, a textbook spread open on the table before them full of pictures of all the plants and animals that didn’t survive the planet’s warming. Most often, they talked about the way things used to be.
He fed her the old mythology of her people—the South of Spanish moss and palmetto fronds; of magnolia trees dressed up in leaves of History and History’s step-sister Apocrypha; of unmatched generosity and jubilant excess; of whole pigs smoked whole days and of peaches and pecans and key lime pie. She gorged on it all, delighted not only that such a world existed but that she held to it some ancestral claim. How much of it was real and how much pleasant fantasy didn’t matter. She believed every word.
He said that her country once occupied the most fertile land in all of the world; mother of sugar and mother of cotton and mother of corn. He taught her about the first time the North had torn her country to shreds. He said people think of that war now the way they think about most wars: just a bunch of young men killing young men on the orders of old men. But he said it was women who were left to clean it all up in the end, women who rebuilt the scorched Southern country and nursed what was left of those young men. He said there were even some women who fought and killed, disguised themselves in the clothing of men if they had to. Women who defied.
Sometimes he gave her what he called lyrics—a script of sorts, relating to something they’d discussed that day. Then she’d go home and read it over, until she learned her part of the conversation. And the next time he returned to the camp, they’d talk through it, as naturally as though they’d had the same conversation a thousand times.
What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?