CHAPTER SIX
By the banks of Chalk Hollow, Sarat hunted for pet food. She moved in graceful rampage over the broken branches and dried-up leaves, the dead things emitting a satisfying crunch beneath her bare feet. The branches were sharp and the leaves dusted with nettles but the girl felt none of it, her soles tough as leather.
She knelt and dug into the soil near where it met the water. On the surface the soil was warm from the sun but below it was cooler. She dug an elbow-length hole, looking for the little burrowing worms she recalled from her childhood. But there were none. Soon the bottom of the hole began to fill with river water, and she abandoned it.
Nearby, Marcus Exum picked at the fungi growing on the bark of stunted sweetgum trees. He slashed with a penknife at the roots of the wide, white-fleshed mushrooms and placed the bounty in his stitched blanket knapsack. One tree, collapsed completely, was barely visible beneath a second skin of mushrooms. Marcus picked at the parasitic growth until his bag was full, and a small segment of the tree’s coal-black bark was bare.
“He’ll eat that for sure,” Sarat said, climbing over the dead tree. “Heck, I’d eat that.”
“I don’t know,” Marcus replied, bending the edges of the mushroom back and forth. “Maybe it’s poisonous. My dad says a lot of the stuff growing out here is. Says anything growing out here people can eat, they already ate.”
“We’re feeding it to a turtle,” Sarat said. “A turtle ain’t people.”
“Yeah, but poison’s poison. It don’t know who’s eating it.”
“Well, she’s gotta eat something around here. Keep looking.”
Sarat wiped the soil from her hands on the sides of her COSCO Shipping T-shirt and scrambled back down the ravine in the direction of the creek.
She was confined to boys’ clothes now, there being no girls and hardly any women in the camp as tall as she was. And although it limited her to the worn-through jeans and scuffed shirts that once belonged to Simon and his friends, she found it liberating to no longer be measured against the unbearable standard of her sister, who counted in her sprawling wardrobe not a single piece of clothing fit for adventures like these.
She picked the green leaves and tiny flowers of an Alabama supplejack perched low against the water, its branches limp and thirsty. On the ground she discovered a small tangle of sweetgum seeds and black peppervine fruit. All these she deposited in her knapsack.
A few feet away, a clearing led down to the water’s edge. Sarat scrambled down until she was ankle-deep in the warm, muddy creek. A fine sheet of blue-green scum covered the surface of the water. She brushed it away and dipped a thermos into the river and filled it. The water below was tinted brown and, lifted to the light of the sun, glistened with fine particulate.
A hundred feet beyond, the sheltered estuary of Chalk Hollow fed into Sandy Creek, and a mile further to the east, Sandy Creek met the Tennessee River. Sarat could see the rebel skiffs in the far distance, docked near the ruined wharf of an abandoned marina. When the daylight began to fade, they would cross.
Many times the children had seen the rebels, and the rebels had seen the children. Often they crossed paths at Chalk Hollow, where the camp’s feeble fencing was bent and torn to shreds. Over the years, the camp’s residents had learned not to venture this far east, where the rebel boats docked, nor to the north, where clashes between the rebels and the Northern militias had grown more and more frequent.
But to Sarat this place was a small paradise—a land teeming with life, away from the human pollution and unmagical monotony of the camp itself. Soon the rebels became used to the site of the broad, fuzzy-haired girl and her runty friend. They ignored the children, saw in them neither threat nor enticement; the boy was too small, the girl too big.
Marcus clambered down the embankment to where Sarat stood. “We should go,” he said.
“Relax. Have some fruit.” Sarat picked two black peppervine pebbles and offered one to Marcus, who declined. She shrugged and popped both into her mouth. The skin was mushy and broke open with little resistance.
The children marched back inland. For a while they followed the broken, sand-covered remains of Highway 25. Not a mile to the north lay the severed bridge to the Blue country.
They walked west, toward the now abandoned tents that marked the northern end of the camp. From experience they knew which tents to avoid—the ones that, though unoccupied, contained the rebels’ illicit cargo ferried nightly across Sandy Creek.
Officially, these tents near the fence were assigned to refugees long since dead or relocated. And newly arrived refugees, when given assignments here, were quickly warned by more senior residents; inevitably they found some way to relocate further south, closer to the camp’s interior.
The children arrived at a tent near the border between the Mississippi and Alabama slices. It was indistinguishable from all others in the area but for a rectangular gash on the east-facing canvas, cut there by Sarat so as to let more sunlight in.
Using the Phillips head on his knife, Marcus had learned to turn the door’s metal bolt from the outside, and in this way the children believed they could keep the tent’s contents secret from prying eyes. He wrestled with the bolt’s screw head for a moment, and the bolt unlocked. The children stepped inside.
In the center of the tent, four cots were stationed on their sides in the shape of a rectangle, forming a makeshift pen. The inside of the pen was lined with charity blankets.
A yellow-and-black-shelled turtle shuffled glumly in one corner of the pen. It was a small, rotund animal, about six inches in length. The yellow markings on its back were split with black lines in patterns that resembled the fractal aesthetics of butterfly wings. It moved on ancient, leathery feet, at the ends of which grew sharp pointed claws that tore softly into the blanket.
The animal watched the children approach with a muted consternation. Gently it retreated into its shell.
“Is he ever going to like us?” Marcus asked.
“She’s a girl,” Sarat said.
“How do you know she’s a girl?”
“I found her, so she’s a girl.”
“Is she ever going to like us, then?”
“She’s gonna like us when she sees all the food we got her,” Sarat replied.
“Maybe we should just take her back to the creek,” Marcus said, but Sarat brushed him off. She reached into her sack and began laying out the leaves and berries in small mounds on the far end of the pen from where the turtle had backed itself into a corner. Reluctantly, Marcus followed, setting the mushroom heads on the blanket.
“Not like that,” Sarat said. “They’re bigger than she is. Break them first.”
The children lay the food in the pen and then backed away a few feet. Eventually the turtle reemerged from its shell. It observed the spread on the other side of the pen, but did not move.
“Maybe she’s lonely,” Marcus said.
“Can’t do anything about that,” Sarat replied. “When’s the last time you saw another turtle anywhere around here? Or a lizard, or crickets even.”
“Well she must have come from somewhere. She was born, so she must have had parents, maybe brothers and sisters too.”
“Just because she had them doesn’t mean they’re still there.”
The children waited a while longer but the turtle refused to move. Soon Sarat could no longer stand the sight of nothing happening.
She marched to the far side of the pen. As she approached, the turtle once more ducked into its shell. Sarat picked the animal up and carried it to the other end of the pen and set it next to the food. Then she stepped back.
The turtle reemerged. It observed the children again with its orange-backed eyes, and then turned and shuffled away.
“Dammit,” Sarat said.
“Maybe we should try my idea,” Marcus offered.
“I’m telling you, it won’t work,” Sarat replied. “That rat is almost as big as she is. She’s just gonna get more scared.”
“What have we got to lose by trying?”
Sarat acquiesced, and quickly Marcus left and sprinted to his own tent further south. In a few minutes he returned with a galvanized steel bucket. He held the bucket over the pen and tilted it. A small brown field mouse skittered down the side.
All four of the tent’s occupants stood frozen, eying one another. Then the mouse scurried to the pen’s bountiful corner and began eating the berries.
“Well, least she won’t be lonely anymore,” Sarat said.
The children left the tent. They parted in southern Alabama; Marcus returned home. Sarat said she’d come by later in the evening so they could check again on the welfare of their pets.
“You know we’re not supposed to go up near the fence at night,” Marcus said.
“We’re not supposed to go up near the fence in the day, either,” Sarat replied. “You scared?”
“No.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
Sarat said goodbye and left. She walked south through the western part of Alabama and then into Mississippi. Before she reached home, a couple of boys cut across her path, high with excitement.
“I’m telling you, he lost it in the shit,” said one of the boys. “Came off his arm when he was swinging at a fastball, and landed right there in the shit.”
Curious, Sarat followed the boys.
They led her to the banks of Emerald Creek. A crowd of perhaps a dozen boys and girls from the nearby tents were assembled near the foul-smelling sewage ditch.
In the center of the commotion was a boy named Ethan. The forlorn boy, who was a year Sarat’s senior, was pointing to something in the ditch and arguing with a handful of other boys, all of whom seemed to be talking at once.
One of the girls, holding her nose against the stench, caught sight of Sarat approaching.
“Hey, maybe Sarat can get it,” she said. “She’s bigger than all y’all.”
“Get what?” Sarat asked. The boys looked her over in a way she’d gotten used to: a cautious curiosity at the girl who was not like the other girls. She ignored them and pushed her way to the banks.
In the ditch the wastewater flowed brown and thick as gravy. It was the pungent soup of the camp’s excrement and filth. Small crescents of the blue disinfectant that the cleaning staff flushed twice daily down the bowls swirled along the surface. Cigarette butts and empty cans and ration wrappers littered the banks and floated in the effluent.
An ancient heirloom wristwatch lay upon a rock in the middle of the creek. Like so many of the functionally deceased things the refugees carried with them—the washed-out photos and the obsolete or corrupted stores of memory and the keys to homes long since bombed or otherwise demolished—it bore a vital link to some distant, happier past.
“Used to be my grandfather’s,” Ethan said. “My mom’s gonna kill me if I don’t get it back.”
“So go in there and get it,” Sarat said.
“Don’t be gross. I’m not gonna step in shit.”
Another boy whispered something in Ethan’s ear. He listened and nodded.
“Why don’ you get it, Sarat?” he said. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you do.”
Sarat shrugged. “All right.”
Once more she pushed the boys aside and walked away from the creek, toward the nearest tents. A few of the children followed, among them Ethan, who held Sarat by the wrist and warned her against telling any grown-ups.
“I’m not telling anybody,” Sarat said, shaking the boy’s hand loose. “Stop being so scared of everything.”
She walked between two tents, where an unused clothesline hung. She unhooked the metal holders on either tent and rolled the line around her fist. Then she returned to the creek. The children followed.
At the banks she uncoiled the line and tossed it into the ditch. On her first try she fired too far left and then overcompensated. But on the third throw the hook landed just past the rock on which the watch was stranded. Slowly she pulled on the line.
“Careful, careful!” Ethan cried from behind her. “You’re gonna knock it in.”
“Be quiet,” Sarat said.
She tugged gently on the line until the metal hook rested on the rock just beside the watch. With surgeon’s hands she edged the hook closer until it dislodged the watch from its place. The watch began to slide down the polished side of the rock toward the stream, but caught on the edge of the hook. A couple of the children yelped in triumph.
“You got it!” Ethan yelled. “Pull it in, pull it in.”
“Hold on,” Sarat said. “Give me that bat of yours.”
One of the boys picked up a baseball bat nearby and handed it to Sarat. With the line still in her left hand, she lifted the bat with her right. She held it as far out in front of her as she could without losing her balance. Slowly she began lifting it up underneath the line to create a pivot point. Then she reeled in the catch. The hook lifted, the watch rising with it. As it came off the rock the watch swung and skimmed across the surface of the creek. Coiling the line around her wrist, Sarat pulled the watch in and set it on the ground.
She turned to Ethan. “Pay up,” she said.
The boys stared at the watch on the ground as though it had landed from outer space. Finally Ethan pulled a wad of Redbacks from his pocket and paid Sarat what he owed her.
The children began to disperse. Some of the boys revived their baseball game, a little further away from the creek this time. One of the younger girls, whom Sarat did not know, offered to return the clothesline for her.
As she made to leave, Sarat was approached by another of the boys, a fourteen-year-old from Georgia named Michael. She knew him only tangentially. He was the older brother of a boy named Thomas, who as a toddler had suffered a shrapnel injury that had frozen his mind at the age of two. The older brother had been sleeping in the same bed the night the Birds came, but through blind chance had escaped uninjured.
“Hey, Sarat—wait, girl, where are you going so fast?” Michael said. He pointed at the creek. “I’ll give you another fifty if you go in.”
The departing children halted. Sarat eyed them, and then Michael. He was wiry and lanky, swimming inside his too-big Sinopec Solar T-shirt, a hand-me-down from the Augusta docks.
Sarat said nothing.
“C’mon now,” Michael said. “You ain’t scared, are you?”
He had pasted on his face a smirk with which Sarat was well acquainted. She’d seen the same look on so many of the other boys’ faces over the years. A self-satisfied grin. It was the smirk of knowing he’d left her with an impossible choice—step into the river of filth or be labeled a coward.
Even then, at such a young age, she understood that smile for what it was: a mask atop fear, a balm for the crippling insecurity of childhoods deeply damaged. They were fragile boys who wore it, and their fragility demanded menace. Sarat knew the boys better than they knew themselves. And she knew there was no winning this dare. That was the point—for there to be no winning, only different magnitudes of losing.
“How do I know you’re not lying?” she said.
Michael pulled a wrinkled Redback from his pocket. He held it up to Sarat. She inspected the gray pastoral of McCoy Auditorium—the place where Julia Templestowe spit in the Northerners’ eyes all those years ago—drawn on its back.
“She’s not really gonna do it, is she?” said one of the boys in the crowd. Another boy elbowed him and told him to shut up.
Sarat turned away from Michael and took a step down the embankment, easing down with her backside braced against the slope. She descended slowly, the dirt gradually becoming cooler against her feet as she neared the fetid pool. In all her years at Camp Patience, the smell of Emerald Creek had never bothered her, but as she came closer now there was a thickness to the stench she’d never known before; it overwhelmed the borders between the senses and soon she could almost taste the acrid sweetness on her tongue.
Her throat tightened and she felt the urge to gag, but fought it. Everywhere in the camp the bustle of daily life continued unhindered but here the children stood watching, silent and entranced.
Where the embankment met the creek, Sarat’s foot disappeared into the brown sludge. She felt the liquid stick to the short hairs of her shin, syrupy and warm. A sharp sigh broke out among the children behind her as her feet went through the surface. She heard a young girl say, Gross.
She realized then that she hadn’t agreed beforehand with Michael what stepping into the creek really meant. However deep she went, he’d argue she should have gone deeper.
Her feet found solid footing on a polished rock when she was knee-deep in the waste. It was shallower than she’d expected. Gently she eased her backside off the bank and stood upright. She turned to face the boy who’d dared her. Michael stood at the edge of the creek. He had the same smug smile plastered on his face but behind it she could see a tightly reined astonishment, a disbelief that she’d actually gone and done it.
Satisfied she’d met the terms of the wager, Sarat eased herself back against the embankment, this time facing forward, her hands braced against the dirt. As she pushed herself up, she heard a muted crack beneath the surface. The rock on which she stood came loose. Suddenly she was sinking.
In an instant the brown water swallowed her. Instinctively she closed her eyes and in the darkness felt the warmth of it in her hair and on her face. For a moment she believed she was drowning. A panic reflex unlike anything she’d ever felt before took hold of her muscles.
Before her eyes were open she was clawing at the bank, her nails scraping against the rocks and dirt. Like a cornered animal she thrashed wildly, the fear alive inside her.
She climbed back out of the creek, her arms and legs slick with brown muck. It was on her now, the stink. She could smell nothing else. She saw the children laughing at her, the boys most of all. Michael made a big show of it, keeling over, pretending he couldn’t breathe from laughing so hard. It was his way of showing he’d won; the smart-ass girl who’d shown all of them up with her little fishing line was now covered in shit.
Sarat climbed up on hands and knees until she was back on the flat ground.
“I did it,” she said. “Give me my money.”
Michael backed away as she approached. He tossed the bill in her direction. It landed in the dirt at Sarat’s feet.
“Jesus Christ,” Michael said, still laughing. “You stink.”
Sarat picked up the money. She walked past the children, who parted to let her through. A few of them hovered in her periphery as she walked back to her tent. Others, like forward scouts, ran ahead of her to tell their parents and siblings what had happened.
The filth stuck to her legs, drops of it trailing behind her in the dirt. She felt something in her hair, moving like tiny insects.
When she reached her tent she found that the news beat her there. Her mother stood outside, waiting.
“What did you do to yourself?” Martina said.
“Nothing,” Sarat replied. It was an instinctual reply—the word came out of her mouth before she knew she’d said it. And as soon as she’d said it her mother stepped forward and slapped her across the face.
“You think we don’t have enough problems?” she said. “You think it’s not enough that we’re stuck here in this hell, killers all around us? You think I don’t have enough to deal with, you gotta go make an embarrassment of your family, make them all laugh at us too?”
Sarat shook her head. Tears welled in her eyes. Most of the children who’d followed her home had left, and now the remaining few were also leaving. Whatever novelty there was to be had in the spectacle of her had suddenly dried up.
“You’re not coming in here covered in shit,” Martina said. “You did this to yourself, you go get yourself cleaned up. Nobody fixing your messes from here on in but you.”
“Fine,” Sarat said. “I didn’t ask you to fix anything.”
She turned and walked away. She walked east. Dusk settled over the camp. Some of the men who’d slept through the hot middle of the day were now emerging from their tents to sit on their box-crates and drink and play cards. Sarat walked past them and although the breeze carried her smell ahead of her, the men did not notice or seem to care.
Near the northern edge of Alabama, she saw a group of about half a dozen men seated around an old folding table. Upon the table sat a tablet connected to a small speaker.
The men were watching a recording of the previous week’s Yuffsy. It was a title fight at the Citadel in Augusta, one of the better ones in recent memory. All twelve fighters had managed to stay on their feet for the first seven and a half minutes before one was finally knocked out.
One of the men watching said there had been a boy from Patience who came close to making the undercard, but lost a fight two nights earlier in the qualifiers.
“It was one of the Carolina boys, a kid named Taylor,” the man said. “Mean as hell, they say.”
“Yeah, but I bet you the whole time he was busy being mean, the other guys were busy fighting,” another replied. “Mean don’t mean nothing.”
Marcus Exum stood on the periphery of the men’s viewing circle. He was perched on an upturned laundry basket, craning for a look at the screen. When he saw Sarat he jumped down and ran to her.
“Hey, hey,” he said, tapping her on the elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t touch me,” Sarat said. Marcus recoiled. She saw in his eyes a sudden burst of confusion and hurt.
“I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “I’m covered in shit. I stink.”
“So what?” Marcus said. “Take a shower, then.”
“Got no clothes to change into. My mom won’t let me in the tent. Says I embarrassed her.”
“I bet if you go say you’re sorry she’ll—”
“I’m not sorry,” Sarat said, loud enough that a couple of the men watching the fight looked up. “I’m not sorry and none of them can make me sorry. They’re liars and cowards, all of them. They pretend like this is normal, like it’s normal to live this way. But it’s not normal. Your dad’s right. We’re just waiting to die, waiting for the Blues to come up over that fence one day and kill every last one of us. I’m not sorry. I’m not the one who’s wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re wrong,” Marcus said. “I’ve never thought you were wrong. Go to the shower trailer. I’ll get you some clothes from our tent. My dad’s not that much bigger than you anyway.”
Sarat walked up the dirt path to the northernmost shower trailer in the Alabama slice. It was a rusted metal and vinyl shack on blocks. Inside, it smelled of mildew and the candy-cardamom scent of the cleansing lotion packets that arrived by the boxload every month from the Augusta docks. They were small clear packets like the kind condiments come in. They littered the ground, caught in the drains, and stuck to the undersides of feet. All but the most well-connected of Camp Patience’s residents used the packets to wash their hair and skin, and yet none of the residents ever smelled like the slimy amber liquid, only the shower trailers did.
Sarat entered the trailer and stripped down. She piled her clothes on the ground under the showerhead in one of the three stalls and turned the hot water tap. In a minute, steam began to churn about the room. The water melted the crust of filth from the clothes, and a briny, sulfuric smell filled the trailer.
Sarat stepped into the adjacent stall. She turned the tap. The water was cold; her skin erupted in goose bumps and the fine hairs on her forearms rose.
She stood with her head bowed, watching the milky-brown water swirl around the drain. On the back of the stall door there was all manner of graffiti: symbols of the Southern militias, genitals drawn cartoonish and grotesque, addresses of tents in which lived the whores and thieves and traitors. Soon the water ran clear.
Sarat heard the trailer door open. She heard Marcus walk inside, his footsteps almost indecipherable under the rush of water and squealing pipes. She heard him set the clothes on the bench by the wash basin, and then she heard the squeak of the trailer door once again opening and closing.
But when the sound was gone she knew Marcus had not left. She knew he was still standing inside the room, and through the tiny sliver where the door hinges met the stall, she could feel his eyes on her.
With her head still lowered she saw what he saw. The topography of her body: the shoulders wide and thick; the breasts that on any other girl her age would have stood as mounds but on her frame were modest; the hips in line with the shoulders, in line with the thighs, the body big and uncurved. A brick of a girl. And to his eyes she knew the strangest prize was the place between the lines, the place that had in this last year turned against her in a way so sudden she thought at first she was dying. The place that in an instant made her a stranger to herself.
And she knew that if she were simply to look up and catch his stare, the boy would flee, would not even beg forgiveness later but instead would die right there of shame. For the first time in her life she owned a pair of eyes other than her own, and with her head bowed she kept them locked upon her. In the thick sweat of steam both boy and girl for a moment were entranced by the same skin.
The flow of water began to weaken and the pipes let out a rumbling whistle. Sarat shut the tap. As the water died she heard Marcus scurry from the trailer.
Outside the stall she found an Alibaba shirt and a pair of slouch jeans worn white at the knees. The shirt fit her well enough but the pants were loose around her hips. She picked her old shirt from the soaked pile on the floor and tore it apart. She took one half of the ruined fabric and braided it; wringing the water out as she did. Then she ran it through the belt loops and tied it tight.
When she stepped out of the shower trailer she found Marcus seated on the bottom step, his arms hugging his shins. She sat beside him.
In the early nighttime hours the camp was alive with chatter and wandering flashlights and the fungal sweat of cooking. The sounds of the Free Southern Radio came high and tinny through portable speakers.
She looked at Marcus but he looked at his feet. She sensed that between her and her friend one wall had come crumbling down but another, different one had taken its place. And although she couldn’t define it, she knew what it was. She knew it to be a cousin of that low-lit language her sister spoke so well. It lived in that strange fevered place between curiosity and desire.
And it thrilled her—not the sex of it but the newness, the realization that she could not only manipulate these feelings within herself but also without; that she could turn the gears inside another so forcefully.
Finally he spoke: “My dad, when he falls asleep, nothing can wake him.”
“I’m not staying in your tent,” Sarat said.
“Then where are you gonna stay?”
“I’ll go bunk in the pen with Cherylene and that rat of yours, if she hasn’t eaten him already. Plenty of room there.”
Marcus turned and held Sarat by the forearm. “Please don’t stay up there. You know it’s not safe. My dad says the Blue militias are going to tear through that fence any night now.”
“And I believe him, but what are the odds it’ll be tonight?”
“What if it is tonight?”
“Then we’ll all be dead anyway. Where you want me to stay, then?”
“Go down to the sick building,” Marcus said. “Tell them you got the flu or something—they’ll let you stay the night there.”
“The sick building hasn’t been open since last Christmas,” said Sarat.
“They still got a couple of bunks in there. Nobody’s using them for anything.”
They were jolted from their conversation by a crack of gunfire, a single shot ringing in the air somewhere to their north. It was a sound they’d heard a million times before, a sound unanchored and without destination.
“Please don’t stay up there tonight,” Marcus said.
“All right,” Sarat replied.
The two friends sat together at the foot of the stairs and watched an old woman patch a square hole in her tent with some thread and a piece of blanket. Sarat squirmed.
“What’s the matter?” Marcus asked.
“My hair’s itchy,” Sarat said.
“Didn’t you wash it?”
“Yeah.” She scraped her nails against her scalp until she worried it would bleed. Still, trails of invisible ants marched through the fuzzy corkscrews of her hair.
“Your dad have clippers?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Go get them.”
Marcus sprung up and ran back to his tent. Soon he returned with an old electric clipper and three attachments.
Sarat fit one of the attachments and turned on the clipper. It buzzed and vibrated in her hand. Cautiously she set it just above her forehead and for a moment she felt nothing. Then came a slight tug at the roots and soon she saw the rough strands float gently past her to the ground.
She moved the clipper slowly, in part out of caution but also to prolong the act; the shearing felt good against her skin. Soon the clipper glided along smoothly, and no more hair fell.
“Did I miss anywhere?” she asked. Marcus shook his head.
Sarat set the clipper on the stairs, its teeth still clogged. She rubbed her hand against the felt of her scalp. She stood.
“You’re a good friend,” she told Marcus, and then she left.
