The captain turned. “Well now, if it isn’t the only real goddamn men in Augusta. Make way, for Christ’s sake!” he said, kicking at two Atlanta college boys slumped on garden recliners near the grill. “It’s a zoo around this time of the month—you know how it gets when there’s money to be had.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go inside and clean you out anyway. Haven’t had a decent meal in a week.”
The captain nodded. “Go on in. I’ll send some steak your way.”
Sarat laughed. “Ain’t nothing like that flying steak you got here. You shoot them down yourself?”
“I’ll shoot you down, you keep running your mouth. Flying steak’s better than none.”
The captain pointed to the grand bullethead windows of the church’s street-side facade. The original windows had been smashed long ago in one of the riots following the massacre at Fort Jackson, the insides stripped and looted down to the pews and the floorboards.
“Your friend Bragg is in there, by the way,” he said.
“The old one or the young one?” asked Sarat.
“Ha! The old one can’t get up to take a piss nowadays. It’s the kid. Got his whole entourage with him too.”
“Christ,” said Sarat. “Well that’s no fun.”
The captain wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand on the side of his jeans. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know. I’ll go in there and kick his ass—don’t care how united his daddy’s little rebels are.”
They thanked the old captain and went inside. Beyond the redbrick exterior, there was little left of the original church—only the words AND THEY WENT DOWN BOTH INTO THE WATER, painted in an arch along the wall, and below it a pale hollowness where once there hung a shining cross.
The captain was a collector of long-dead things, species that had once existed but could not adapt to the planet’s unbreaking fever. Taxidermied heads of caribou and muskoxen and sea lions and white-faced foxes stared down from the walls with marbles in their eyes.
The dinner hall was full. The air was heavy with the smell of fryer oil and sawdust on spilled beer. The tables were arranged haphazardly throughout what was once a grand nave. In the rear of the room a frenzied herd of line cooks moved in chaotic ritual around stoves and bubbling pots.
The twins searched the room for a place to sit. Instantly, Sarat saw the men turn to watch her sister. Dana shifted the room’s orbit, took charge of the air. The boys turned toward her like filings to a magnet’s pole. Sarat waited for one of them to do more than look; secretly she hoped for it.
They found a table in the back by the kitchen. But before they sat, one of Adam Bragg Jr.’s bodyguards came over and asked them to join his party.
“We’re good where we are,” said Sarat.
“We’ll be over in a minute,” said Dana. When the bodyguard was gone she turned to her sister. “Just a couple of minutes,” she said. “Just to make nice.”
“You know it won’t be a couple of minutes,” said Sarat. “Why we gotta go make nice? We don’t work for him, we haven’t pledged allegiance to no United Rebels or anybody else.”
“I don’t give a shit ’bout the United Rebels or anybody else. But people like him won’t suddenly stop being important because we ignore them. Better to have him on our side in case we need him or his daddy’s help one day.”
“Goddammit,” Sarat said, rising. “Can’t even eat proper around them. Let’s get it over with.”
They found the young man, who on this night was celebrating his twenty-first birthday, seated at a large circular table in a corner of the room. It was the only table in the place covered with cloth, and around it hovered a flock of bodyguards, rebel grunts, well-wishers, and hangers-on.
Seated at the table were a couple of faces Sarat recognized: a well-known smuggler named Henson; Augusta’s deputy mayor; the head of the reef pilots’ union; and three other men who, by the stiff pull of their ill-fitting suits, were probably government men from Atlanta. The fractured politics of the wartime South dictated that high-ranking members of the United Rebels and the Free Southern State should not be seen socializing, given the diverging tenors of each on the subject of peace. But in Augusta such rules were often temporarily set aside.
“?’Evening, ladies,” said Bragg. “A true pleasure to see you. Sit, sit.”
The sisters sat near their host. He introduced them to the table, loud enough so that the orbiting entourage could also hear.
“These are Dana and Sarat Chestnut,” he said, “survivors of the Camp Patience massacre and proud patriots of the Southern nation. I’m honored to call them friends.”
“It’s great to see you two girls,” one of the suits from Atlanta said. Bragg introduced him as the director of the Free Southern State’s media operations for northern Georgia.
“Aren’t you two the sisters of that boy Simon, the Miracle Boy?”
“Yeah,” said Sarat, “and whose sister is you?”
The man looked at his host, the smile fading from his lips.
“Enough small talk,” said Bragg. “Let’s eat.”
From the kitchen came a parade of bowls and silver trays: chicken liver; cracklings; rice smothered in redeye gravy; corn chips and Mississippi caviar; beef that was not really beef but pigeon, charred black on the outside and pink within. The table descended into a glutton’s silence, the only sound that of jaws and silverware. In the lull, Bragg leaned over to his guests.
“I heard you were out in Halfway,” he said. “That true?”
Sarat said nothing.
“Well, at least you made it out alive. Not many my father sends out there can say the same.”
When the guests were done, the plates were cleared and in their place came others: trays of sliced peaches and watermelons and cantaloupes; jugs of ice water and lemonade and artillery punch. Until finally those seated around the table could eat and drink no more.
Tipsy and slurring his words, one of the Atlanta men rose to make a toast. He started with something about the Southern spirit and the great and noble cause of freedom, but soon he talked himself into a pretzel, until finally Bragg interrupted him: “Let’s just say: To the South, victorious.”
“To the South, victorious!” echoed the man. The table raised their glasses.
The men from Atlanta soon left. A few of Bragg’s people took their place at the table. Among them were two of the Salt Lake Boys, Trough and Cornhill.
There had been six when the rebels first found them: orphans in the battle of Spanish Fork, where the Blues, Mexican troops, and even a few misguided Texas outcasts fought to a standstill near what became the very northwestern edge of the Mexican Protectorate.
They were rumored to be the brood of Mormons. In the aftermath of the battle, the rebels found them hiding in a piggery on the outskirts of town, and named them after the places they found them. Eventually they were taken back south and drafted into the Bragg family’s bustling orbit.
The staff cleaned the tables and then brought out cigars and brandy. The cigars were from the old Caribbean islands, expensive and among the last of their kind. The haze that filled the air was sweet and earthy.
“You know my father sends me out here because he doesn’t trust me,” said Bragg, leaning close to the twins, high on the easy camaraderie of the freshly drunk. “He says it’s to make sure the supplies get past the Blues out on the coast and into the right hands—to keep an eye on things. But I think he just wants me out of Atlanta as much as possible. Afraid I’ll kill him in his sleep, all that palace coup shit old men worry ’bout.”
Bragg laughed. He was looking at Dana but watching her sister. He carried an effortless charm wielded almost exclusively by those born into comfort or those who rose from nothing to achieve it. He smiled by default, teeth sheathed, eyes like pistol barrels, as though a camera lens stalked constantly on his periphery. He was gifted with a very rare and advantageous talent for seeming to speak intimately, every word a precious secret between old friends.