Snakeskin Road (21 page)

On the way to the balcony a client lifted her arm and the silver sequins pulled even tighter across her stomach. Jennifer almost shook free, but there’d be repercussions; she looked around for Ms. Gerald and couldn’t find her, but it didn’t matter. Jennifer readjusted herself in the dress, let him tow her onto the dance floor. He was smiling, beaming. “Hey, how you doing? How’s it going? You married?” He popped his curly head back, laughing like of course she wasn’t married, couldn’t be. But Jennifer was. She jerked away from him without thinking, those words—she had been stabbed. There wasn’t a wedding band any longer. Ms. Gerald had taken it. And she rubbed her thumb between her fingers.

“Yeah, that’s my husband over there.” She pointed to Jinx.

The man’s smile soured. He looked over at Jinx, nervous, then back at her, this trick. He smiled again, disbelieving, “That old man?”

“He’s not so old,” she assured him. “And he’s got strong hands.”

His smile soured even more. “What’s wrong, baby? Rather be with him than me? What you think you doing?” He was insulted and there’d be repercussions. So she stepped close, pretended to swoon into his arm so he could catch her, and when he did, she took his hand, righted herself, and whispered, “It’s okay, baby,” smiling. “Nothing’s wrong.” Waited, waited for him to smile back, and he did.

Underneath, she could feel that rumble-beat starting, everyone stomping on the floor. The trick looked past her, and she turned to look, too, everyone saying “Dang Red, Dang,” yelling it and stomping. “You’ve got something.” They raised their arms and clapped.

He had come off the chair, raising the bell of his sax, setting it out, his porcelain cheeks all fired red, and that pork-pie hat tilted up all the way, about to fall off his square head. And she stood there lost to it.

“Dang Red, Dang.” Everyone stomped around her, their noise rising, rising until she was in the river diving down, the thickness of the air, the music blurred, smoke like water. Jennifer closed her eyes, watched her hand stretch down, bend through the water to the mud, grab it and turn, race to the top. She held her breath and kept it, waited until she reached the surface to blow out that air like a whale surfacing, and looked to her other side for Mathew, waited for him to come up from below, to rise out of those dresses and suits and lights, the long wail coming from Dang Red.

   Dust and sand cut at her skin.
Watch that sky
, Jennifer told herself,
watch it
, looking for stars as if by doing that, by focusing on the sky, she could push the sand away, the wind away, make it not exist anymore.

Then she heard the sputter and fizzle of the machine.
Jennifer turned from the sky as hands reached down and crossed to her shoulders, her head, hips, and feet, lifting her.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” But they had gathered all the corners of her body up like a flag, lifted her, and dropped her into the steel mouth of the machine.

At the bottom she started to roll, whooshing, tumbling in plastic against the oiled tines until the sound dulled. The plastic slipped over her skin, over her mouth, tightening, some huge spider cottoning her in a web. When she screamed, all of her breath pressed back into her, and her lungs tightened and burned. She tried to rise up, but her body was angled wrong, she couldn’t get to her arms, her elbows, couldn’t bend or scream.

Then the tines stopped and lifted her body, spit her out of the steel mouth. She lay there on the ground, looking through the plastic sheets crisscrossing her eyes, trying again to find the night stars. The heat in her was going cold, her body sinking in on itself until the plastic and the Birmingham sky tore away, and in that sudden violence, her breath returned, she woke up.

“Hey.” Someone grabbed her arm. It was too black to see except the blue flow of light by the window.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, a deeper voice than the way she remembered it, crackling, groggy. Or was it a second trick, a third. This one had wanted a sleepover. That’s what the girls called a trick who paid to spend the night; they always were the neediest ones.

She kept rubbing the sweat off her arms and stomach, rubbing and crossing herself, but it didn’t make her warm, sitting up in bed. She recognized her bed.

“Just go back to sleep.”

   It was colder, even at lunchtime now, and fewer girls wanted to go out to the river—only those stir-crazy insomniacs
or those who wanted to swim, who liked standing in fish-green water or sitting at its edge. Crazy. Some girls slept until two. Jinx did.

But the St. Charles was just off the Ohio River bank. It was their only excursion off the hotel grounds, and the only exercise they got other than fence walking all six paved acres of the hotel, the generator house, and the parking lot.

“Just like prison,” Lisa said, looking back at the security guard in tow, Douglas. If attacked by roaming gangs, Douglas, in theory, would have to stop them. Maybe not stop them, but at least hold the gang off and radio for help. The gun tower stood on the other end of the St. Charles, facing the city, useless. Some guards had pulled up chairs on the third-floor balcony to monitor and eat lunch. But the levee blocked the view of the river from the third floor except halfway to the Kentucky side. The guards never saw the girls on the Illinois bank, could only hear echoes of their splashing and what sounded like mumbling. If you wanted to see the entire river from the balcony, you had to wait for a flood. And if the river flooded, they wouldn’t be going to it: eight girls, marching single file with one guard in tow, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

Jennifer wondered for a long time why Ms. Gerald didn’t send a full security detail. Two guards trudged along on some outings, but they were never happy about going, and never more than two.

“It’s because nothing ever happens,” Cawood had told her. “In all my walks to the river, not one gang has attacked. Only one girl ever swam the distance to a barge, and she came floating back the next day dead. Lesson learned. For everybody.” But that, Jennifer knew, had happened on the Mississippi. They never went to the Mississippi side of Cairo now.

Lisa pinched her thin cigarette and curled her other fingers around, inhaled. It was such an elaborate, awkward way
to smoke and not much wind blowing, not much reason to hold it that way. But it was her habit, and she managed never to burn her hands. She flicked the cigarette. “I was in prison in Fulton County for three months. Guards watching everything I did. This is exactly what it’s like.”

“I bet the food’s better here,” Bethany, another girl, said. She had stringy red bangs she kept in a headband, her arms, legs, and face dotted with freckles. No matter how little or how long she stayed outside, no matter how well she covered herself, her pale skin always blistered, and she returned to the St. Charles with red patches like the sun had scrubbed her hard with soap. But Bethany had grown up on the Missouri River and liked to be in the water. As she walked, her silver bracelets clattered like dull bells.

“Yeah, what was that last night. Lamb?”

“Good, huh?”

“Yeah, it was. Never had that. Going to have to say something good to the new chef.”

“He’s cute.”

“Cute,” some of the other girls agreed. “What’s his name?”

“Don’t start in with that kind of talk,” Cawood said and came to a stop. She stretched like she couldn’t get her body to shift like she wanted, like she hadn’t woken up right.

“Keep moving, mother duck.” Someone clapped. Cawood was in front and no one could budge around her. She was always in front and had a key to the gate. Like Naomi, she had keys to everywhere in the St. Charles.

Lisa said, “You can get your body in order at the river.”

“Please. It ain’t like the river’s going to disappear if we don’t hurry and get there. And my point about the cute chef is this: if a man ain’t paying, don’t bother with him. I don’t want any fighting in the house, especially over a man. We got enough tricks to deal with at night.”

Some girls nodded and some asked Bethany to tell a little more about the chef, but she whispered to them, “See
me later,” and rolled her eyes at Cawood, who rolled her eyes right back.

They passed under the levee through a cutoff valve that was shut during floods, through the thick reeds, a pathway they had trampled, and then down the steep, sandy bank.

Some girls ran, flying past Cawood to the water like kites falling, shouting. Some girls got undressed; some had walked out in housedresses and took only their panties off; one girl had tried to sneak out in her red satin ballroom dress, but Cawood said, “No, too expensive;” and some had bathing suits on underneath, the bright fabrics gleaming at the sun. Everyone flattened towels to the bank, anchoring the corners with shoes and bracelets.

Jennifer kept her towel over her shoulder and sat on a strip of sand and mud and watched the other girls arc into the river, splashing one another like they were kids still, like that was something you would never lose about yourself if you could just find the right watering hole.

“Aren’t you going in?” Douglas said. She could barely hear him. It was as if all the resonance had been pulled out of his voice a long time ago and left him with a hollow pitch.

“In a minute,” she said. She didn’t want to be reminded of his presence, the rifle and all the equipment on his hips and vest—he had a bullet-proof vest. Instead of feeling safe, she felt betrayed, remembering all those guards in Birmingham leaving on mille-copters, leaving them behind. And she didn’t want him imposing on the openness of the beach and the river, where one surface overtook the other, the bodies vanishing in water.

She tried to focus on the bodies, but he kept swaying back and forth, his shadow drifting on the sand in front of her, so she stood up and walked to the edge.

“Take off your clothes and come in,” Cawood yelled.

“Take it all off,” the girls hooted, echoing the cries in the parlor.

Jennifer twisted her hair behind her ears and crossed her arms. She had on jeans and a shirt she had thrown on for breakfast, and she didn’t plan on taking anything off.

“What you trying to hide?” Cawood splashed water at her, but Jennifer was too close to the shore. “Remember our talk? Remember what I said to you?”

“I’m leaving my clothes on,” Lisa said from where she was standing waist-deep in the river.

“Well, of course you are. You’re
Lisa,”
Cawood emphasized the
Lisa
. “And Lisa doesn’t take off her clothes.”

“Unless she gets paid,” Bethany said, and everyone laughed.

“A lot. You got to pay that girl a lot to get those clothes off,” Cawood said.

“It’s worth it,” Lisa fired back, and sent a flare of water at Cawood. “Just leave me alone. I don’t care if we’re both from Atlanta.”

“What difference does that make? Like we should be friends because we’re from the same city. And I was never in prison in Atlanta.”

“Leave her alone, Cawood,” another girl said, and another one: “We have to take our clothes off enough as it is.”

“But not like this.” Cawood pulled her shirt up and tossed it, tossed her arms and hands up to the sky. “Just us and the sun and the river and no one else.” She laughed, but her laughing died back quick, the wind sweeping across, picking up the coolness from the surface. She pushed out in the water to grab her shirt before it sank or slipped away, and kept out in the deeper channel.

A barge was coming from the bluffs at the highest point of the city, way up east, already honking to let them know he was coming. Some of the girls waved, but he was too far away to notice, not much more than a speck, and they had to be the tiniest specks to him.

Jennifer stepped into the water—it was too cold, and she
had to press into the mud to keep her feet from cramping. But as Cawood swam into the deeper channel, Jennifer stepped further away from the shore, letting the water soak up to her waist, the cold dissipating. She turned from the barge, looked at the river where it hooked toward the Mississippi.

One time she swam the Alabama River bank to bank, but the Ohio was much wider—and if she started out for the middle, Douglas would have what her mama called a “hissy-fit.” He couldn’t use the rifle because she was property. No way he could come after her, not with all the stuff he was lugging. She thought about that, swimming out there, no one but the sun and the river, like Cawood said, taking long backstrokes, and holding her breath, releasing it, and looking up at the guards on the third-floor balcony eating their lunch.

“She’s calling you,” Lisa said. “Ms. Gerald’s girl Naomi. Hear me? She’s calling for you. Wake up.”

It was the
Wake up
that got Jennifer’s attention. Then she heard the other—Naomi repeating Jennifer’s name. She was trying to descend the bank gracefully, but there was no coming down that slope gracefully.

“She’s calling you.” Lisa drew her lips in tight, all the anxiousness in her voice and long cheeks ready to burst, and Jennifer wanted to say,
Relax. She’s calling me, not you
. But instead she smiled, lay back, let her hair catch and pull into the water. She looked straight into the sun.

Since leaving the desert, she could see the sun, its blurred white mass like a nickel at times, like a melting quarter, though she had always been told not to look directly or it would burn holes in your eyes. So be it. In the desert they said the warning as a joke because the sun was never without its curtain of ozone. Look straight into the sun if you can find it hovering.

But here the sun warmed her face, and she could
breathe without coughing. She looked straight into the white center. “Burn,” she whispered. It could burn straight through her for all she cared.

“Ms. Gerald needs to see you. Come on.” It was Naomi. She had finally made it to the river and was trying to keep her shoes from slipping into the brackish water. Douglas moved up behind Naomi.

“Come on in,” Jennifer said to her. “Take it all off.” She liked parroting Cawood’s lines. When Cawood pointed those words at Jennifer, she felt a tickle but didn’t laugh. Cawood’s scoldings and motherings and insistences caught her off guard, so she hesitated, not quite sure what to do with them. The words had to sit for a while. Then later, she repeated the lines as a way of saying,
That was a good one, Cawood; don’t worry about me, I was listening, I’m still here
.