The smile momentarily left Eli’s lips. He was a scrawny boy—all the rebels seemed to either be scrawny or muscle-bound, never regular-set—and the orange glow of the fire put dark shadows in the hollows beneath his jaw.
“Didn’t steal nothing,” he said. “We fought them for it and we won. You’ve been watching too many of their shows, reading too much of their news. They have you thinking they can’t ever be beat. Well they can. Take away their tanks and their Birds and all those toys they hide behind like cowards, make it so it’s just us and them eye-to-eye, and they can be beat.”
“Calm down,” Sarat said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Eli’s smile returned. “I know you didn’t, girl. Hell, I heard you’re learning from Gaines now.” He laughed. “And he loves you. Says you got more balls than most men out here.”
Eli sliced one of the steaks width-wise. “Here,” he said. “Take half of mine.”
Sarat thanked him. She walked to where her brother sat at the creek-side.
A couple of rebels sat nearby on a felled log, playing guitar and singing an old folk song whose popularity had recently been revived by some firebrand folk star in Atlanta, who set the old music to new lyrics. The boys, drunk on Joyful, slurred the words and cackled at their own musical ineptitude. The one playing guitar stumbled through four open chords with uncoordinated fingers, muting half the strings.
Mama take this flag from me
Ain’t my country anymore…
Sarat sat on the sand beside her brother.
“Hey, lady,” he said. He had a goofy grin on his face, a half-empty jug of Joyful beside him. The drink’s reek hung over the beach: a honeyed perfume of fruits left to rot, old bread, creek water, and whatever else the boys could find to give the dark juice muscle—from antifreeze to turpentine to ground-up painkillers.
“You’re celebrating something, I hear,” Sarat said.
“You could say that,” her brother replied.
“I don’t mean to put a damper on it, but Mama’s mad at you.”
“What’s she mad at me for? Didn’t that stuff we sprayed on her tent work?”
“Yeah, but she thinks you should have sprayed it on everybody’s tent. Thinks her neighbors are all looking at her funny because all their tents collapsed but hers looks good as new.”
Simon chuckled and spat. “What’s she think? We got time to spray everybody’s tent down? Anyway, tell her we’re coming around tomorrow to help all those folks fix the place up. Just couldn’t be there when the Free Southern State soldiers were there, or else we’d have to put those government boys in their place. And then the Blue reporters would have a field day saying, Look how the South’s fighting itself.”
Simon poured a capful of hooch from his jug and offered it to Sarat. When she reached for it he swooped it into his own mouth and smiled.
“Very funny,” said Sarat. “That stuff will make you blind, anyway.”
“If it’s any good, it will,” said Simon.
He dug his heels into the sand and watched the boys singing on the log nearby. He’d grown in the last year; not taller—she still had three inches on him—but bulkier. In the rebel camps out by the banks of the Tennessee, he and some of the Cavaliers passed the time curling milk jugs full of sand; he had biceps on him now like rolling hills.
Sarat envied the malleability of boys’ bodies, the way they could, while still boys, cast their physical shapes forward into adulthood like reconnaissance scouts. All her life she’d had little interest in the working of boys’ minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things. But she longed to have such a malleable, predictable body—one that could grow big and strong and yet not raise a single stranger’s eyebrow.
In the amber glow of firelight the boys sang drunkenly. Simon turned to his sister. “We got one of them yesterday, Sarat,” he said. “We got a big one.”
“Who?” Sarat asked.
“A guy named Pearson,” said Simon. “A general, commander of half the troops along the Tennessee line.”
“Jesus. How?”
“We were out in the forest, all the way out east, past Chattanooga. We’d been there for days, camped out by a path the Blues had been using to run supplies in and out of Big Frog. Eli set a trap, a big mine deep in the ground, a little mine just above it. The big mines don’t go off under the weight of a man, but the little ones do, so you make it so that one sets off the other. Then we lay a tree trunk across the path and we just waited. Waited for three days till finally this convoy comes rolling through. Usually they run in fours but this time it was just two LAVs. We thought it was just grunts rotating through the forward base at Halfway Branch. But when they came out to take a look at the log, well, Eli’s looking through the binoculars and he says, ‘One of them got stars on his shoulders.’ And we’re watching as he walks out ahead of all of them, like he’s making a big show of leading, and he steps right on it. The little mine sets off the big mine and takes all but two of them out right there. We came running down there soon as it went off, and in the back of these LAVs were nothing but crates of supplies. So many, we couldn’t even carry them all.”
Simon pointed to the sky. “I’m telling you, He was watching over us, Sarat. He was watching over us, I know it.”
“Simon, you can’t be out here celebrating,” said Sarat. “You gotta hide. They’ll come after you.”
Simon laughed. “Who are they gonna come after? They don’t know nothing. All they know how to do is build walls and send the Birds to do their dirty work for them.”
“You gonna keep all this stuff in the camp?”
“Most of it is just food,” said Simon. “We’re gonna keep some of it up north in the empty tents, but most of it we’ll just give out. People deserve to eat.”
“They’ll know,” said Sarat. “Word will get out. You can’t have a whole camp eating steak and nobody hears about it.”
“It’ll be all right,” Simon said. He put his arm around his sister and pulled her close to him, her smooth-shaved head resting against his shoulder. “Christ, lady, when did you get so nervous? What happened to the girl who jumped into Shit Lake on a dare?”
“Just be careful.”
“We got one of theirs, Sarat,” said Simon. “Every day they get a hundred of ours, but this time we got one of theirs.”
SARAT RETURNED to the center of the camp. She entered the administrative building through the side door that led to Albert Gaines’s office.
On this night she found him leaning over the table, placing delicate spoonfuls of something black and glistening on a plate. He was dressed as she’d always seen him dressed: his single-breasted suit unblemished by wrinkles. He wore a double-Windsored tie of matte gray decorated with a crest of three stars atop an armored knight’s head and a red-striped shield. His hat lay on the table.
“Come in, come in!” he said, smiling. “I have something special for you.”
Sarat inspected the small flat canister on the table. Its tin lid had been pried open and inside lay a clump of small black balls. The writing on the side of the canister was foreign: letters similar to English but oddly misshapen, as though mutated somehow. The logo on the label was of a fish and a king’s crown.
“In Columbus the Northerners pay more than you would ever believe for pale imitations of this,” Gaines said. “Tonight you get the real thing for free.”
Sarat poked it with her pinky finger. The amount on her plate seemed impossibly small for a meal, and she wondered if it wasn’t some kind of vitamin pill, like the ones that came in the aid shipments.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Try it first. I don’t want you to be disgusted beforehand.”
“I won’t be.”
“It’s caviar,” Gaines said. “Fish eggs.”
“Hmm.”
Sarat tasted the caviar. It whispered to her tongue an awful, briny secret. It spoke of something very far away, fruit of alien trees. Instantly she loved it.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.