THE LIGHTS ROSE, the crowd dispersed. Usually the young men who came to watch the fight left afterward with adrenaline coursing through their veins, and were apt at the slightest provocation to start brawling with one another in the back alleys south of the boardwalk. But on this night the crowd was muted, and diffused quietly to the Imperial and the other Reynolds Street bars.
Adam Bragg Jr., fully drunk now, invited the sisters back to the Woodrow, where he and his entourage had booked every room for the weekend. But it was clear his interest lay in only one of the twins, and both declined.
Sarat and Dana stood awhile on the boardwalk, watching the docks. In the wake of the big winter storms, the wash often broke over the seawall. Tonight the water moved like black molasses. Even the massive freight ships, the first of which should have started to arrive at port by now, were nowhere to be seen.
“A guy at the fight said one of the gift ships ran aground all the way out at the Mouth,” said Dana.
“They’re here every month,” Sarat replied. “How do they still manage to screw it up?”
“The land shifts under the water. Places that were deep one season turn shallow the next, and unless you’re out there every day you can’t know it.”
Sarat watched the men down in the reef pilots’ house. The lights were on. They were drinking and playing cards and passing time, hoping for the call to head out to the Mouth, the gaping waterway where the ocean met the river near the drowned remains of old Savannah. Others had already joined the tugboats dispatched to rescue the freighter, because it was a day’s work and, even though the reef pilots earned a better living than almost any legal job in Augusta offered, they could still use the money.
“You going to meet that pretty boy of yours tonight?” asked Sarat.
“You know I am,” said Dana. “Don’t go making it a big deal when it ain’t. We’re just seeing each other is all. It’s just fun. I’ll be there when you get up in the morning.”
“He’s not even a real pilot.”
“He’s in training. Everybody’s gotta learn to do a thing before they do it. Gotta get taught.”
“He’s not good enough for you.”
Dana laughed. “You tell me one man you think is.” She took her sister’s hand and kissed it. “I’ll see you soon, beautiful girl.”
Sarat knew where her sister would be spending the night: the Fargo shipping building on 7th Street. It was a block-wide, bureaucratic-looking thing, and amassed within it were the reef pilot trainee dorms, the shipping authority and customs offices, the foreign crews’ hostel, and the north Georgia branch of the Free Southern State.
Sarat despised the place. It spoke to her of all the unnecessary adornments with which her country’s institutions justified their own existence. In truth, the customs officers were crooked, the hostel a thinly disguised brothel, and the temporary storage units in the basement used almost exclusively by smugglers.
It was, all of it, a lie—and the worst kind of lie: a charade of normality at a time of war. The thought of her sister inside that building—lying on one of those soiled bunks with one of those vacant, libidinous boys—made her sick.
Alone, she went to the Belle Rebelle to drink and then to sleep. It was a small bar, built inside one of the old row houses between 10th and 11th Streets. Upstairs, the owner, Layla Denomme, kept three rooms. Some nights she rented them out, but most of the time she let old friends and regulars stay there for free.
Layla’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Layla Jr., had been pouring drinks there for the last two years, standing atop a Yuxi crate to see over the bar top. She knew the regulars by name and Sarat by more.
Of the Belle Rebelle’s die-hard regulars, there were predominantly two groups—the first were stump-limbed war pensioners. They sat at the back tables, growing rust and getting eyes-shut drunk on Atlanta’s dime. The others were river rats: reef pilots, tugboat and towboat captains, and the men who ran skiffs laden with contraband in the dead of night. These patrons sat at a corner of the bar, congregated near a large screen mounted on the back wall.
The screen showed the position and status of the freighters as they approached and navigated the river. Whenever one of the charity ships needed a reef pilot or a batch of dockhands to help with unloading, a notice popped up on the screen.
The simple screen was, for the bar owner, a coup—the result of a years-long relationship with the proprietor of one of the very few working commercial satellites that still covered this slice of the world.
On this night the screen showed that the freighters, which should by now have been working their way upriver to Augusta, were instead log-jammed behind the ship that had run aground. The workers nursed watered-down Joyful and cursed their lousy luck.
“If he’s got any sense, he’ll stay on that goddamned boat and hope they take his ass all the way back to China,” said one of the reef pilots. “He comes back here, they’ll string him up on the boardwalk.”
Sarat sat at the other end of the bar, where Layla the elder leaned on the bar top, eating frickles.
“Baby girl!” she said, hugging Sarat. “Gaines said you’d be coming around soon. It’s so good to see you.”
“How you been, Mama Layla?” said Sarat.
The bar owner shrugged. “The same. Bad night tonight. There’s talk it might be another couple days before they get that ship moving. People are starting to worry about credit, about paying last month’s bills.”
“Is there a storm out there or something?”
“Nah. They had one called Walter, was a Cat Six coming in off the Gulf four days ago, but died real quick over the Florida Sea. Just some rain and wind now, gave the gift ship captains a little trouble out past the borderline, but nothing too bad.”
“Then what’s keeping them?” asked Sarat. “It can’t just be that one stuck ship. Are the Blues tightening up inspections again?”
Layla shook her head. “Just the one stuck ship, can you believe it? They sent this new pilot out, kid named Brunswick—hasn’t been certified no more than a week, and they send him out to guide the first gift ship in. Well don’t you know, he’s running off last season’s map, and he guides them too far south. First damn ship of the month, and he runs them aground into Hutchinson Reef.”
“So they’re just sitting there?”
“Been there since dusk. FSS shipping authority folks being real hardasses about letting other ones go round it. I think they finally saw a chance to flex their muscles. So now everybody’s just waiting on them to pull her out and tow her in.”
“Christ,” said Sarat. “Can’t run a ship up a river. How we supposed to win a war?”
She picked at the bowl of frickles. Layla, who swore up and down that nobody could tell the difference, made them with cricket flour. But Sarat swore she could. There was a stale aftertaste to it, a dishwater echo on the tongue.
Layla called on her daughter to bring over a carafe of Joyful. The girl poured Sarat a cup.
“How are those boys doing?” asked the mother, pointing to the reef rats at the corner of the bar.
“They’re asking if they can start a tab on next month’s ships, if these ones end up turning around.”
“What did you tell them?”
“You know what I told them.”
“Good girl.”
Layla Jr. walked back to the other end of the bar. Sarat watched her. She had her hair in a thick, braided ponytail. Behind it, on the back of her neck, lay a small tattoo of the state of Georgia that her mother had yet to discover.
“How’s your family?” asked Layla Sr.
“They’re all right,” said Sarat. “Gaines’s friend Dr. Heller came by again last month, talking about how they’re working on a program with the Red Crescent where they send injured Southerners up to the good hospitals in Pittsburgh. I told him I’d rather Simon die.”
“What’s the harm in it? It’s not like you’re turning on your people. What if they got something up there in those hospitals can fix him?”
“Unless they got a time machine in those hospitals, they ain’t fixing him.”