Ets here Martina said It s all right relax her husband replied When s he ever been on time Where s your good tie It s not a job interview just a work permit I m only going to a government office no different than the post office When was the last time people killed one another to get something from a post office Benjamin sat at the table in the yard He was a lean man with a lean face his near touching brows anchoring a smooth large forehead made larger by setting baldness at the temples He was at all times clean shaven save for a thin black mustache his wife worried made him look unseemly He kissed Sarat on the forehead and when he saw his other daughter her face smeared with red kissed her too Your girls been at it again Martina said Won t learn manners won t do what they re told Benjamin shook his head at Dana with mock disapproval then he leaned close to her ear I think it looks good on you he whispered Thanks Daddy Dana whispered back The family assembled around the table Martina called out for Simon and soon he came around the front porch carrying in his hands the recently sawed bottom half of the family s ten rung ladder Seeing the look on his mother s face the eight year old blurted Dad asked me to do it Martina turned to her husband who bit happily into the bacon and drank the sour grainy coffee It was rancid stuff from the ration packs designed to keep soldiers awake Don t look at me like that Smith needs a ladder Benjamin said Got new shingles to put up old ones have all gone to mush So you re going to give him half of ours It s a fair enough deal considering he s the one who knows the man at the permit office Without him we may as well try to shoot our way across the border He s got enough money to buy himself a million ladders said Martina I thought you said he was doing us a favor Benjamin chuckled A Northern work permit for half a ladder is still a favor Martina poured the last of her coffee in the dirt We need to get up and fix our roof just the same as the Smiths she said We don t need anythan a five rung ladder to do it Benjamin replied especially now that our own boy s grown tall and strong enough to get himself up there It was a point with which Simon vehemently agreed promising his mother he d climb up regularly to add chlorine to the tank and clean the bird dung from the solar panels just like his father didThe family ate together Benjamin rail thin his whole life inhaled the bacon and eggs with shameless appetite His son looked on cataloging his father s every minute ritual into an ironclad manual of what it means to be a man Soon the boy too had wiped his plate clean The twins sipped orange juice from plastic cups and picked at their biscuits until their mother softened them with a smear of butter and apricot jam and then they ate uietly deep in guarded thought Martina watched her husband her eyes still and silent a look her children mistook for hardness but her husband knew to be just how she was Finally she said Don t tell them nothing about doing any work for the Free Southerners It s no secret Benjamin replied They know full well every man around these parts has done some work for the Free Southerners Doesn t mean I picked up a rifle for them But you don t have to say it If you say it then they have to check one of the boxes on the form and take you into another room and ask you all kinds of other uestions And then in the end they won t give you a permit on account of security reasons or whatever they call it Just say you work in the shirt factory that s not a lie uit worrying so much Benjamin said leaning back in his seat and picking the stray meat from between his teeth They ll give us a permit The North needs workers we need work Simon interjected Why do we need to go to the North We don t know anybody up there They got jobs there his mother replied They got schools there You re always complaining about not having enough toys enough friends enough everything Well up there they have plenty Tyler says going to the North is for traitors Says they should hang Sarat listened intently to the conversation filing the strange new word in her mind Traitors It sounded exotic A foreign tribe perhaps Don t talk like that Martina said You going to listen to your mother or a ten year old boy Simon looked down at his plate and mumbled Tyler s dad told him They finished eating and retreated to the porch Martina sat on the steps and cleaned the lipstick from her daughter s face with a wet dishrag the girl suirming and whining Simon smoothed the ends of the half ladder with a sandpaper block putting his whole weight into the job until his father told him he didn t have to work it so hard Sarat returned to the scene of her morning experiment poking at the congealed honey thick in the knots of the wood enthralled by the amber liuid s viscosity It fascinated her how the thing so readily took the shape of its vessel With her pinky she cracked the crust and tasted a dollop She expected the honey to taste like wood but it still tasted like itself Benjamin sat on a hickory chair the weaves of its backrest frayed and peeling He looked out at the brown barren river and waited on his patron to arrive Do you know what you re going to say to them at the permit place Martina asked Have you thought it through I ll answer what they ask You got your papers ready 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 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 Danas 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 rainthey 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 anyand the rivers get so cold they turn to solid rock you can walk on That s silly Dana said In her mind these wereof 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 uietly 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 afternoon Benjamin s ride had yet to appear Soon Martina began to believe her husband had been forgotten Or perhaps Benjamin s acuaintance 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 Reda cocoon formed by Louisiana Arkansas Tennessee and North Carolinawere deeply sympathetic to the cause of the Free Southern State And even though residents of these states still reuired 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 below them so much of California Nevada Arizona and west Texas were 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 on shore a few months earlier the children had made from it a makeshift trap for river debri.
american epub war free novel ebok American War book American War A Novel PDFEts here Martina said It s all right relax her husband replied When s he ever been on time Where s your good tie It s not a job interview just a work permit I m only going to a government office no different than the post office When was the last time people killed one another to get something from a post office Benjamin sat at the table in the yard He was a lean man with a lean face his near touching brows anchoring a smooth large forehead made larger by setting baldness at the temples He was at all times clean shaven save for a thin black mustache his wife worried made him look unseemly He kissed Sarat on the forehead and when he saw his other daughter her face smeared with red kissed her too Your girls been at it again Martina said Won t learn manners won t do what they re told Benjamin shook his head at Dana with mock disapproval then he leaned close to her ear I think it looks good on you he whispered Thanks Daddy Dana whispered back The family assembled around the table Martina called out for Simon and soon he came around the front porch carrying in his hands the recently sawed bottom half of the family s ten rung ladder Seeing the look on his mother s face the eight year old blurted Dad asked me to do it Martina turned to her husband who bit happily into the bacon and drank the sour grainy coffee It was rancid stuff from the ration packs designed to keep soldiers awake Don t look at me like that Smith needs a ladder Benjamin said Got new shingles to put up old ones have all gone to mush So you re going to give him half of ours It s a fair enough deal considering he s the one who knows the man at the permit office Without him we may as well try to shoot our way across the border He s got enough money to buy himself a million ladders said Martina I thought you said he was doing us a favor Benjamin chuckled A Northern work permit for half a ladder is still a favor Martina poured the last of her coffee in the dirt We need to get up and fix our roof just the same as the Smiths she said We don t need anythan a five rung ladder to do it Benjamin replied especially now that our own boy s grown tall and strong enough to get himself up there It was a point with which Simon vehemently agreed promising his mother he d climb up regularly to add chlorine to the tank and clean the bird dung from the solar panels just like his father didThe family ate together Benjamin rail thin his whole life inhaled the bacon and eggs with shameless appetite His son looked on cataloging his father s every minute ritual into an ironclad manual of what it means to be a man Soon the boy too had wiped his plate clean The twins sipped orange juice from plastic cups and picked at their biscuits until their mother softened them with a smear of butter and apricot jam and then they ate uietly deep in guarded thought Martina watched her husband her eyes still and silent a look her children mistook for hardness but her husband knew to be just how she was Finally she said Don t tell them nothing about doing any work for the Free Southerners It s no secret Benjamin replied They know full well every man around these parts has done some work for the Free Southerners Doesn t mean I picked up a rifle for them But you don t have to say it If you say it then they have to check one of the boxes on the form and take you into another room and ask you all kinds of other uestions And then in the end they won t give you a permit on account of security reasons or whatever they call it Just say you work in the shirt factory that s not a lie uit worrying so much Benjamin said leaning back in his seat and picking the stray meat from between his teeth They ll give us a permit The North needs workers we need work Simon interjected Why do we need to go to the North We don t know anybody up there They got jobs there his mother replied They got schools there You re always complaining about not having enough toys enough friends enough everything Well up there they have plenty Tyler says going to the North is for traitors Says they should hang Sarat listened intently to the conversation filing the strange new word in her mind Traitors It sounded exotic A foreign tribe perhaps Don t talk like that Martina said You going to listen to your mother or a ten year old boy Simon looked down at his plate and mumbled Tyler s dad told him They finished eating and retreated to the porch Martina sat on the steps and cleaned the lipstick from her daughter s face with a wet dishrag the girl suirming and whining Simon smoothed the ends of the half ladder with a sandpaper block putting his whole weight into the job until his father told him he didn t have to work it so hard Sarat returned to the scene of her morning experiment poking at the congealed honey thick in the knots of the wood enthralled by the amber liuid s viscosity It fascinated her how the thing so readily took the shape of its vessel With her pinky she cracked the crust and tasted a dollop She expected the honey to taste like wood but it still tasted like itself Benjamin sat on a hickory chair the weaves of its backrest frayed and peeling He looked out at the brown barren river and waited on his patron to arrive Do you know what you re going to say to them at the permit place Martina asked Have you thought it through I ll answer what they ask You got your papers ready 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 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 Danas 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 rainthey 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 anyand the rivers get so cold they turn to solid rock you can walk on That s silly Dana said In her mind these wereof 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 uietly 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 afternoon Benjamin s ride had yet to appear Soon Martina began to believe her husband had been forgotten Or perhaps Benjamin s acuaintance 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 Reda cocoon formed by Louisiana Arkansas Tennessee and North Carolinawere deeply sympathetic to the cause of the Free Southern State And even though residents of these states still reuired 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 below them so much of California Nevada Arizona and west Texas were 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 on shore a few months earlier the children had made from it a makeshift trap for river debri.