American War(6)
Sarat inspected the soggy pages of a waterlogged book caught in the net. The book’s title was The Changing Earth. Its cover featured a picture of a huge blue mountain of floating ice. She leafed gingerly through the pages, peeling them from one another. The book was filled with maps of the world, old and new. The new maps looked like the old ones, but with the edges of the land shaved off—whole islands gone, coastlines retreating into their continents. In the old maps America looked bigger.
She saw the shadow of her brother, Simon, standing behind her. “What is it?” he said, snatching at the book.
“None of your business,” Sarat replied. “I found it first.” She pulled the book away and hopped to her feet, ready to fight him for it if she had to.
“Whatever,” Simon said. “I don’t even want it, it’s just a dumb book.” But she could see him inspecting the open page.
“Do you even know what that is?” he asked.
“It’s maps,” Sarat said. “I know what maps are.”
Simon pointed to a corner of the page where the blue of water seemed to overwhelm a few thin shreds of land on the southern edge of the continent.
“That’s us, stupid,” he said. “That’s where we live.”
Sarat looked at the place on the map where Simon pointed. It looked wholly abstract, in no way reminiscent of her home.
“You see all that water?” Simon said. “That all used to be land, and now it’s gone.” He pointed back in the direction of their house. “And one day this’ll all be water too. We’ll have to get out of here or else we’ll drown.”
Sarat saw the faint smirk on her brother’s face and knew instantly he was trying to scare her. She wondered why he seemed so obsessed with such tricks, why he so often tried to say things in the hopes of making her react in some fearful or foolish way. He was three years older than she was, and a boy—a different species altogether. But still she sensed in her brother a kind of insecurity, as though trying to scare her was not some cruel way to pass the time, but a vital means of proving something to himself. She wondered if all boys were like this, their meanness a self-defense.
And anyway, she knew he was a liar. The water would never eat their home. Maybe the rest of Louisiana, maybe the rest of the world, but never their home. Their home would remain on dry land, because that was the way it had always been.
LATE IN THE MORNING, Benjamin’s acquaintance, Alder Smith, arrived. He was four hours late. His plywood fishing skiff bobbed softly on the parting water, its outboard motor gurgling and coughing fumes. It was an archaic thing, but still faster and nimbler than the Sea-Toks, whose feeble, solar-fed motors barely beat the current.
It said something to own a vehicle that still ran on prohibition fuel; it spoke not only of accumulated wealth, but of connections, of status.
“Mornin’,?” Smith said as he ushered the boat to the foot of the Chestnuts’ landing, throwing a loop of nylon around the docking pole. Like Benjamin, he was tall, but boasted broader shoulders and a full head of brown hair made copper by too much time in the sun. Before the war his father owned a dozen fossil car dealerships between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Those businesses were now long gone but the wealth they bore still lingered, and Smith lived a comfortable life on the other side of the river. Among the families that still dotted the flooded south of Louisiana and Mississippi, he was known as a facilitator, a man who had plenty of friends. He knew Free Southern State government men in Atlanta and the smugglers who ran the tunnels across the Mississippi-Arkansas line; he knew consuls in the federal offices that dotted the tamed and broken parts of the Union-aligned South. He even claimed to know the right-hand men of senators and congressmen in the federal capital in Columbus.
“Mornin’,?” Martina replied. “Come on up, we got some sandwiches left, coffee too.”
“Thank you kindly, but we’re already late. Come on, Ben. Blues don’t like waiting.”
Benjamin kissed his wife and children goodbye and stepped inside to kiss the feet of the ceramic Virgin. He descended to the river with great care so as to keep from slipping in the clay and dirtying his good pants. He carried with him his old leather briefcase and the half-ladder. His wife watched from the edge of the flat land.
“Dock south and walk into the city,” she told the men. “Don’t let any government people see that boat.”
Smith laughed and started the motor. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “This time next week you’ll be halfway to Chicago.”
“Just be good,” Martina said. “Be careful, I mean.”
The men pushed the skiff from the mud and pointed the hull north in the direction of Baton Rouge. The boat rumbled into the narrowing heart of the great brown river, twin spines of water rising and spreading in its wake.
Excerpted from:
FEDERAL SYLLABUS GUIDELINES—HISTORY, MODULE EIGHT: THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
MODULE SUMMARY:
The Second American Civil War took place between the years of 2074 and 2095. The war was fought between the Union and the secessionist states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina (as well as Texas, prior to the Mexican annexation). The primary cause of the war was Southern resistance to the Sustainable Future Act, a bill prohibiting the use of fossil fuels anywhere in the United States. The bill, championed by President Daniel Ki, was in part a response to decades of adverse climate effects, the waning economic importance of fossil fuels, and a deadly oil train derailment in Williston, North Dakota, in 2069.