“I got my papers ready.”
Martina shook her head and cast an eye out for signs of an incoming boat. “Probably there won’t even be any permits,” she said. “Probably they’ll do what they always do and turn us back. That’s their way, don’t give a damn about nobody south of the Mag line. It’s like we aren’t human, aren’t animal even, like we’re something else entirely. They’ll just turn you back, I know it.”
Benjamin shrugged. “Do you want me to go or not?”
“You know I do.”
When she was done wiping the lipstick, Martina set to braiding Dana’s hair. It came down in long, smooth strands of the deepest black, unlike Sarat’s, which although the same color, was unruly and revolted to fuzz in the humidity.
“You girls know what the best thing about the North is?” she asked.
“What?” Sarat replied.
“Well, you know how at night here it gets so hot you just can’t take it, and you wake up with your sheets all damp with sweat?”
“I hate that,” Dana said.
“Well when you get far enough north, it never gets hot that way. And in the winter, if you go really far north, they don’t even have rain—they have little balls of ice that drop from the sky, and the ground gets all thick with it till you can’t see the roads anymore, and the rivers get so cold they turn to solid rock you can walk on.”
“That’s silly,” Dana said. In her mind, these were more of her parents’ elaborate fairy tales, the hardening rivers and falling ice no different than the fish with whiskers that her father said once swam in great schools through the lifeless Mississippi back when it was just a river, or the ancient lizards buried in the deserts to the west, whose remains once powered the world. Dana didn’t believe any of it.
But Sarat did. Sarat believed every word.
“It’s true,” Martina said. “Cool in the summer, cool in the winter. Temperate, they call it. And safe too. Kids out in the streets playing till late at night; you’ll make friends your first day there.”
Simon shook his head quietly. He knew that even as she talked to the twins, his mother was really addressing him. With everyone else she spoke directly, with no sentimentality or euphemism. But to her only son, whose inner mental workings she feared she would never learn to decipher, she passed messages through intermediaries in weak, obvious code. Simon hated it. Why couldn’t she be like his father? he wondered. Why couldn’t she simply say what she meant?
BY MID-MORNING, Benjamin’s ride had yet to appear. Soon Martina began to believe her husband had been forgotten. Or perhaps Benjamin’s acquaintance had finally been caught in that old fossil-powered boat of his and had been arrested. It was true that the states surrounding the rebel Red—a cocoon formed by Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—were deeply sympathetic to the cause of the Free Southern State. And even though residents of these states still required a permit to move north to the real heart of the Blue country, the states were officially members of the Union nonetheless, and a man caught using fossil fuel in these parts was still an outlaw.
She thought about how much easier it would be for everyone if all these would-be statelets were simply allowed to break free from the Union, to form their own miniature nations along the fault lines of region or creed or race or ideology. Everyone knew there had always been fissures: in the Northwest they were constantly threatening to declare the independence of the proud, pacifist Cascadia; south of Cascadia so much of California, Nevada, Arizona, and West Texas was already under the informal control of the Mexican forces, the map of that corner of the continent slowly reverting to what it was hundreds of years ago. In the Midwest the old-stock nativists harbored a barely restrained animosity toward the millions of coastal refugees who descended onto the middle of the country to escape rising seas and severe storms. And here, in the South, an entire region decided to wage war again, to sever itself from the Union rather than stop using that illicit fuel responsible for so much of the country’s misfortune.
Sometimes it seemed to Martina that there had never been a Union at all, that long ago some disinterested or opportunistic party had drawn lines on a map where previously there were none, and in the process created a single country fashioned from many different countries. How bad would it really be, she wondered, if the federal government in Columbus simply stopped wasting so much money and blood trying to hold the fractured continent together? Let the Southerners keep their outdated fuel, she thought, until they’ve pulled every last drop of it from the beaten ground.
Martina watched the river and waited for the boat to come. She saw Sarat near the water, inspecting a discarded shrimp net that had washed up onshore a few months earlier; the children had made from it a makeshift trap for river debris. The net collected all manner of strange treasure: an iron cross, a neck-rest from a barber’s chair, a laminated picture of a long-shuttered leper colony, a small sign that read, “Please No Profanity In The Canteen.”
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.