Snakeskin Road (17 page)
Authors: James Braziel
Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #General
July 3—Night
It’s night, Mama, and we made it just outside of Pilot Oak. Everywhere we stop is outside of town. The drivers rarely go through them because of roaming gangs. The farmers stay away from the towns, too, unless they know exactly where the roamers are and they can exterminate them without losing workers
.
There are thousands of crickets rubbing, chirping. The sound overwhelms everything else. The campfires have died back to embers and the mosquitoes are biting us more without the smoke to confuse them
.
I know soon we’ll be put back in the vans, but for
now, there are stars, so many that Mazy has taken the notebook and is drawing them as negatives—her stars are black marks against the white page; she’s trying to map the sky, the universe
.
She said she didn’t want to forget what they were like
.
You’ll see them again, I promised her
.
I wish Mama could see this place, she said
.
Earlier, when we were driving, the day was much hotter than these dying fires. They opened vents in the back of the van after the first stop. I could feel Mazy’s sweaty arm next to me and her hair blowing in my face. She’s calmer now
.
I wish your mother could see this, too, I told her and I wished Mathew could see it
.
I don’t know what Chicago is like, if you have seen these same skies. Mat’s father used to swear that these places existed
.
About as close to heaven as any of us will get, he promised
.
It was the one time I remember him smiling. I’m the one seeing what he wanted Mathew to see—everything is so vast. I’ve never thought of the world as endless, as beautiful, as possible. I wish my baby was born right now, here
.
I’ve taken my shoes off, Mama, and guess what? I’m digging my feet into the soil, wet and cool, heat still coming off those embers
.
July 4
Dear Mama
,
Saw thistles this morning, a whole open field. The wind hit them, beat the stalks down, tried to, and then they stood, black and brown at the base, dried out above thick tufts of grass, some of the white fluff swirled, arced, and settled. Just for a moment. Each time the sun split the clouds out, there were mountains
.
Hills. Not really mountains, some of the other women said
.
We were in a valley surrounded by mountains, as far as I was concerned, swaths of green and something blooming red, yellow, the sun, its light at the tips of the cloud, like the fingers on a hand reaching around this gray-purple and tearing it down the center like so much bread. And warmth. Not blistering heat. Just warmth. Then the clouds closed up again and the hand of the sun was pulled away
.
Teal Dennis’ men gave us three buckets of water and sponges and said to rinse the dirt off. So I washed Mazy and she coughed on the water, said stop it, and so I put more water on her face like Terry would do, or I would do to him. She snatched that sponge and threw it at me and hit someone else, and well, Mama, we were all throwing water, scooping it out of those three buckets onto one another, laughing and hitting one another with sponges until the guards stepped in and said that we were clean enough
.
That’s when the trucks pulled in. The buyers. We all looked at one another, looked around at our soaking wet selves, our nervousness getting even more nervous
.
So I just closed my eyes, then opened them to that circle of mountains, at that sun, a cloud rolling over the top, a swath of orange, something blooming red and yellow. The wind picked up and blew the thistles everywhere, and the guards said, “Line up,” the barrels of their rifles pushing at our loose hands
.
This is what I’ve seen since leaving Birmingham: a deerfly tried to bite me, tiny yellow wings, striped in black; a bird flew over, a hawk. It dove and swung in the wind, then kited higher. One of the men tried to shoot it
.
Moths, fluttering from one grass blade to stalks to bushes, passing in the fire smoke. Oaks and pines with large vines crawling up. The wind here has a different sound than in the desert—there’s more rush to the wind when it strikes leaves, abruptly dropping away. Black grass seeds collect on my leg, and sometimes the sky is as gray as dust cloud gray, but there’s nothing dry about it
.
My skin is filled with sweat, moisture. Mille-copters come overhead. When I hear them, the vans pull off onto smaller roads and stop and dust comes in through the vents. But like the buyer explained, there are no federal agents here now. The mille-copters vanish
.
A tree with red berries that shiver, and the rain, so
much rain that doesn’t evaporate by noon; loons and frogs; one frog cranks up, then another, and another as if they’re calling on one another to see who’s loudest
.
The bark of huge oaks, gray and disjointed like rivers, not at all blackened and burnt as I’ve known them; brown branches, white berries, split from the trunk; and on one ground, flattened out pears, the limbs still bent full with pears with green lopsided sides. They taste cold and sweet here. Birds like to whistle here. The wind forces rain from the trees
.
Sometimes we’re let out in long-rowed crops
.
That’s cotton, one girl told me, and someone got stickers from pigweed. One woman saw me get sick in the morning. I had tried to walk behind a wide trunk, and she saw me bend over, said she wouldn’t tell the guias. Sometimes the ground is covered in pine straw—swaths of earth
.
One tree, its bark had peeled off, and between the branches sat the web of a huge spider, the ground below covered in a mat of brown pointed large leaves. And sometimes pine straws pierce the green leaves and dangle down or catch in the branches of other trees, then the wind brushes through
.
Parched thistles lift and fall and lift, for how far? The quality of the light is different here. Always there is something living—bugs at my toes, around my mouth, looking for water, too
.
A blue morning glory winding up a tree
.
Huge white birds scuttering up from the ground
.
The sound of trucks driving past on wet roads. None of them have turned back for us
.
The wind curls around my entire body. Some branches knot up and curl into themselves. My stomach barely shows. Flattened pinecones; pears squished on the ground; and orange butterflies, black roots that shoot up from the sand and trip you; brown nests in trees, if you look up high enough and stay with your watching, the wind shifting it all, Mazy’s hand swinging in mine. She lets me do that
.
The barbed-wire fences are rusted, the wires tangled in streams and rivulets; and the sound of trucks on wet roads coring out the distance; leaves spread out like huge fans
.
It is the fourth of July, Mama. Happy Fourth. At least I know you’re in a safe place from what the guards and the buyers said today about Chicago, that it’s well protected, and one man said the city had as much influence as the whole federal government, that the US government no longer has control over the Midwestern city-states: St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis
.
Mazy and I weren’t sold in Kentucky. We’re heading to Cairo, Illinois, now. Cairo, like all these small towns, has been abandoned for the large cities. But you must know this, must know what the world is becoming. There are only five women left, all of them in our van, so there’s a lot more space for lying down. The vents are near the
truck bed, and when you lie down, the wind rushes over your whole body.
Jen
Those letters to her mother had been almost three months ago, three months since Jennifer was bought in Cairo and Mazy was taken from her, taken on to St. Louis, or sold somewhere between.
She could barely remember that girl. No—the memory was there. Jennifer had put Mazy out of her mind, that was it, wouldn’t think on her, except reading these letters now—the two of them holding hands, their hands latticed, the smoothness of Mazy’s skin and the sweat between their fingers. Or sometimes Mazy leaned into her. That was the important thing—the touch, the closeness. If you touched someone, you couldn’t lose them.
But Mazy wasn’t in Cairo. And Mazy’s mother, Lavina—her face marked up with dust and black holes, her voice scratched out—Jennifer couldn’t piece her back into someone recognizable. Lavina had abandoned them in Birmingham.
It was out of boredom that Jennifer opened the letters. That’s what she told herself, but she didn’t really know why. She dropped them into the black box, let them fall into it with the ripped-open envelopes like making a fire of twigs and leaves and brush. That would be a good thing, to burn the box and everything inside it—a history she didn’t want to cross anymore. She would never get the momentum of herself back, and by tomorrow Mazy’s hands, the touch of her skin, would toughen and wizen, become impossible to hold on to. Jennifer would shoo the girl away, a straw broom to the floor, and the letters would evaporate like smoke without burning any trace into her mind.
She put the box under her bed, gave it a shove to the center, far enough that it dimmed smaller. Maybe one day
she could walk into her room and forget the box was there. If she pushed it far enough under.
Two floors below, Professor Jinx was flying over the piano, “Catching every key in sight and sending it straight to heaven,” he would say when he wasn’t in one of his blue tempers, the kind Mat had.
Professor Jinx had driven down from his club in St. Louis and been playing all afternoon—quiet, healing solos. But he was revving it up now—“Straighten Up and Fly Right”—that’s what chords he struck, “hot, fast, and loose.” She could hear his voice, that dry, sweet sound.
“I’ve had this parched scratching in the back of my throat all my life,” he told her as if he was an old man, an old soul. He wasn’t much over fifty.
That voice, it was rising up now, and she could almost hear the heels of the other girls stomping with the tricks from St. Louis, from Memphis, though it was too early in the evening for stomping, dancing. The mille-copters were just starting to buzz. She’d be expected to come downstairs and join the other girls soon.
Jennifer went back to the window and looked across the Ohio, the straight of it where it turned down and out of her reach. This is what she always did before going to the parlor, glance out over the river from her room five stories up in the St. Charles Hotel in Cairo, Illinois. The hotel had been built before the Civil War, and it was where, she’d been told, Ulysses S. Grant had kept his headquarters, and, before that, where runaway slaves had stopped on their journey north. Though she hadn’t gone to the basement to see it, supposedly the underground holding cells still existed.
Jen’s room sat in the southeast corner, and from there she could see the Mississippi River, too, just a catch of it from the south window, the rest of the Mississippi hidden under mimosa trees, the levee, the other buildings. But the east window displayed the full stretch of the Ohio, the hills of Kentucky banked on the other side. A little further south
the two rivers conjoined and barges slipped slowly around one another with Cairo, this small leveed jewel, right between them.
Because it offered a better view of the Ohio, it was this window she stayed at most, watching the drifting water, and farther north along the Cairo bank, its houses there burned up and broken. In one house a skinny tree had coiled through a large hole in the saltbox roof. A maple that a john pointed out to her a week ago. He had flown in on a mille-copter from Memphis to St. Louis, said he needed a pick-me-up before seeing his wife, and Jennifer was just the girl for it.
Girl
—no one called them women here, except for Jinx. All of his songs were about women and mothers, and as he put it, “low down, wrong kind of loves.”
“That kind of love,” he promised, “puts everyone else’s love to shame.
“And that kind of love is the kind I’ve endured. It’s in my singing, my playing. Come closer if you want to know the depth of that lowliness.” Jennifer always got as close as she could, as much as he’d allow.
It was still light out when the john from Memphis was done with her; he stood by the window swishing his tie in a knot, pointing at the maple. “Someone needs to fix that roof,” he said. He smiled, sure of himself. Jennifer wondered what it was like to be so damn sure of yourself and wanted him to get away from her window, from her view of the world.
“Autumn’s already started.” He pointed again, and that’s when she came over, saw the red edges at the top green crown of branches.
Every day since he left, she had come to look at the maple more than the river. The red had spread from the edges to the center vein, the green now in splotches. She looked and waited for the wind to catch the red, carry it; at times when that happened, something in her sparked. That’s why she opened the letters. She remembered now:
she wanted to see if reading those words about Snakeskin Road could knife through the numbness even more. But it just made her hands ache for Mazy.
The rivers here didn’t dry up, not like the Coosa. Barges came up and down, east and south to Cincinnati, to Memphis, and north to Minneapolis. She knew these names from her desert schools, from the tricks that flew in. The other girls talked about the barges and their destinations, too, that they might escape on one. The barges moved so slowly, and all day and night, surely they could swim out and sneak on board. Sometimes the barges did stop in Cairo. The St. Charles was here after all, the only thing left in town.
The hotel had been split into two halves, the upper half for clients coming in from city-states on mille-copters, clients with the most money, and where she was because she had never been a prostitute before.
“You’re fresh,” Ms. Gerald, the St. Charles Madame informed Jennifer on the first day when she was sold here, smiling deep and inviting, like this was a good thing to be.