Sarat smiled. She wanted Layla to stand her ground, and Layla knew Sarat wanted it. Because it made what came next sweeter, made the roughness sweeter. And it was the roughness Sarat craved. She wanted not love itself but the taking and giving of it; the parched hardness of her tongue scraping along Layla’s skin, a harvest of goose bumps in its wake. She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.
The sound of them seeped through the brittle bedroom window and was drowned by the bustle of the docks. Outside, the river rats worked the cranes and the trucks, readying to relieve the gift ships of their contents. Soon the freight ships would arrive and their cargo of rations and tent materials and charity blankets would be moved throughout the Red. Then in the days that followed the ships would be loaded with their reward in the great barter: crate upon crate of clothing from the Southern shirt factories; cheap electronics from the sweatshops along the Alabama coast; fruits and vegetables from Atlanta’s vertical farms. Then the ships would depart, and Augusta would grow quiet once more, the giving and taking complete.
Layla’s heartbeat echoed in the springs. Sarat rolled away. The fan turned slow, easy circles overhead.
She felt Layla’s finger on her back, tracing a wound. The cut was thin and long, running from the top of her left shoulder to the middle of her back.
“How did you get this?” asked Layla.
“Don’t know,” said Sarat.
“Yeah you do. You just don’t want to tell me.”
“That’s right.”
Layla sat up in bed. She leaned over and picked her shirt off the floor and put it on. It was stretched out a little around the collar from when Sarat had pulled it off her. Outside on the boardwalk, there shone a great blinking lantern. A sliver of its light came in through the bedroom window. It cast Layla momentarily in a wash of white, and in this moment the places where her skin was red and flush were made porcelain and clean, the newness of her restored.
“This is my last year in this place,” she said. “Come January, I’m gone.”
“And where exactly you gonna go to?” asked Sarat, her back still turned.
“South to Valdosta, where my mother grew up. All her people are still there.”
Sarat chuckled. “Everybody trying to get the hell out the south coast, and you’re going back?”
“Better there than here,” said the girl. “I’m not gonna wait on drunk river rats and clean up puke for the rest of my life. Wake up one day find out now I’m the Old Layla. At least down there I don’t have to worry every day about whether this’ll be the night the Blues finally come down from Tennessee, burn the whole place to the ground.”
“Only reason Blues won’t come all the way down to Valdosta is because there’s nothing down there worth burning,” said Sarat. “What are you gonna do, work in one of the farm slums? The shirt mills?”
“Maybe I will.”
Sarat shook her head. “Christ,” she said. “You still so young.”
“Like you ain’t?”
Sarat faced her. “Turn around,” she said.
Layla complied. Sarat brushed aside her ponytail and kissed the place where Georgia’s outline lay inked upon her neck. “Run off wherever you like,” she said. “You mine tonight, though.”
“I ain’t nobody’s,” Layla replied. But she lay a while longer under the slow-turning fan.
Then she was gone, and Sarat slept. She dreamed of Patience, and of the knife coming loose from her hand too soon. In the dream the Blues bound her and took her north, to a place in the forest. They dug for her a prison well deep into the ground, a dark earthen hollow from which she could not climb. It was always the same. Every night she closed her eyes and was confined to the empty well, powerless and blind and alone.
She woke with the residue of the nightmare in her pores. For a moment she scratched at the mattress, but a warm hand patted her head, and a voice said: It’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right.
She let her sister’s breathing calm her, and smelled the skin of her thigh. She let the lullaby wash over her—it’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right, beautiful girl. But she held her own eyes closed because she knew that the voice and smell and touch of her sister were not real. They were only imagined things, concocted by her mind to cleanse the aftertaste of the nightmare. When she finally opened her eyes, her sister would not be there.
OUTSIDE, the docks rattled with the movement of commerce. All morning, the crews unloaded the boxes. By noon, when Sarat could no longer keep her eyes closed, the opposite process was under way.
Sarat walked to the window. The room was dank, despite the fan’s slow circling. Still naked, she lifted the window open and leaned out to catch a little of the Savannah breeze. The boardwalk looked old and weathered in the clear light of day. A couple of drunks lay asleep in their vomit. A freight ship blocked the view of the river but Sarat could still see, on the other bank, the great martyrs’ mural.
It was painted onto a stretch of the Carolina quarantine wall, about ten blocks long. Here the wall was covered with a collage of the South’s unjustly killed. Not an inch of concrete was visible behind a mass of drawings and photographs. Almost daily, the survivors of Northern assaults were ferried on skiffs across the river and given a chance to paste or draw their loved ones’ images on the wall.
Only the dead were allowed to grace the wall. In time, the ritual became so popular that the kids who ran the skiffs started mounting ladders to their boats to reach the topmost edges. The Red soldiers looked on from their guard towers, and no matter how close the mourners came to falling over into the Slow country of South Carolina, they did not intervene. Eventually, the center of the quarantine wall in Augusta was saturated entirely, and the mural began to spread up and downriver.
Only very special circumstances, such as the massacre at Camp Patience, allowed for the pasting of new martyrs on the old part of the mural in Augusta. But the very center of the mural, it was understood by all, was never to be touched. In that sacred place was painted a large portrait of Julia Templestowe.
A tipsy, whistling dockhand stumbled down the boardwalk, shirtless. He was a rookie, fresh off celebrating his first shift on the docks. He wore a child’s toy Viking’s hat, its plastic horns bright green. As he passed the Belle Rebelle he looked up and saw Sarat standing naked at the window. He stopped and stared, uncertain. Finally Sarat snapped forward as though to lunge at him. He flinched and fell back, nearly tumbling off the boardwalk and onto the wharf below. Sarat winked at the jolted dockhand. She closed the window.
She dressed and went downstairs. The bar was empty. She fixed herself a drink and ate the stale leftover frickles, and then she left.
The waterfront was as busy now as it was the night before, but it was a different kind of traffic. This was the busyness of work. By nightfall, when the month’s business was done and the gift ships were moving back to the Atlantic, Augusta would once again be consumed in revelry, the temporarily flush dockworkers burning through their cash. Then it would grow quieter and quieter, until by the third week of the month half the bars wouldn’t bother opening their doors at all.
She hitched a ride east to the coast on one of the trucks that ran back and forth along the Savannah highway, shuttling dockhands, foreign crew members, and packages to and from Augusta.
She arrived at Garden Sound in the late afternoon. The mouth of the river where it met the ocean was a desolate place, but beautiful in its own way. Great looming wharfs lined the edge of the land. It was here where many of the freight companies kept offices, and where the last remaining salvage divers set sail to search for bounty in the undersea heart of sunken Savannah.
In the distance, six miles outland, a line of glowing buoys marked the boundary beyond which the Blues controlled the water. Their coastal vessels circled, and whenever a gift ship arrived, they escorted it to a large floating customs platform, where the soldiers searched it.