Snakeskin Road (22 page)

Jennifer heard Cawood chuckling in the back, her way of saying,
Glad you did, I hear you
. A lapse of time existed between what each of them said directly or not—they talked around each other all day and still there were these moments of connection like sisters, friends since forever, one listening out for the other.

Naomi stood there with hands on hips, balancing, afraid of the water, like it was some deadly pit of lava. She had on a linen suit that Jennifer liked, similar to the tan one Ms. Gerald wore. Maybe it had been Ms. Gerald’s once, and she’d given it to Naomi. Naomi who had stolen Jennifer’s money, who had read her mama’s letters and the poems in a scratchy, thin voice, the wrong voice. Her lips full of red lipstick; her tiny body. Naomi with her hair in bobby pins and wiry strands of gray in her straight black hair, wiry wrinkles burned into her face. Naomi was afraid of those wrinkles just like Jennifer’s mama had been and hoped everyone would notice her lips instead.

“You don’t have to be so damn afraid,” Jennifer told her. “You’re like my mama. I feel sorry for you.”

Naomi turned at Jennifer like Lisa had done, making the coat buckle at her waist, like Jennifer was crazy, that crazy desert girl. Why you asking me to come in that river? I’m not coming in there. Telling me not to be scared. You feel sorry for me?

“Ms. Gerald needs to see you,” Naomi repeated.

“What about?” Cawood asked. “What you want with her?”

Naomi cupped her hand over her eyes and stared at Cawood’s head above the brown water.

“It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I’m asking for her.”

“Cawood, it has nothing to do with you,” she snapped. Cawood sluiced a gusher of water at Naomi that didn’t reach, and then Cawood turned the other way to face the Kentucky side.

Jennifer stepped out, but she didn’t pick up the towel she had brought. Instead she just stood there, dripping onto the sand. Naomi had already started back to the St. Charles, her body angling up the bank in that linen suit.

   “Now tell me, what does she want?” It took Jennifer a while to catch up with Naomi, but she did at the hotel entrance and grabbed her shoulder.

Naomi pulled away. “You were rude to me down there. Why?”

“You took my money,” Jennifer said. “I know Ms. Gerald could’ve found it and taken it, but she does that to everyone. Why did you take the money?” For months, Jennifer had wanted to bring this up, but the two of them had kept their distance after that week when Naomi helped Jennifer recover. Naomi was Ms. Gerald’s girl, like Lisa said, and Jennifer had felt there was no point in asking. But Naomi wanted something from her now, and Jennifer decided she wanted something, too.

“It’s not your money,” Naomi said. “Belongs to the house.”

“You’re not the house, Ms. Gerald is.”

“How do you know I didn’t give it to her?”

“Did you?”

Naomi wouldn’t look at Jennifer straight on and shook her head, shook it to mean no or shook it to mean I’m not telling. Either way she was done talking and went into the hotel lobby, up to the parlor.

Jennifer looked at Jinx’s piano all empty by the glass doors, saw the guards outside still eating their lunch, leaning back in their chairs, and she wondered how close it was until two when Jinx would appear, one of those rare moments you’d see him walking, long through the legs like a curved rail, and cranky, ready to play. They went up one more flight of stairs into the office, and Naomi shut the door behind them.

The room hadn’t changed since that first meeting, the big planters of lavender, the navy Union uniform pressed in the glass case, except the glass was dustier, the sunlight striking it, the designs in the pistol handle. There was a guard by the door and Naomi went over to him. Ms. Gerald was sitting on top of her desk, a contract and a small case beside her holding a wax impression of someone’s teeth. It was as if that first meeting, that first day, had reset itself into motion, only this time, Jennifer knew what would happen.

She heard a noise, someone breathing hard, sitting in the chair Jennifer had sat in, should be sitting in now. An elbow came into focus, the sleeve of a pale blue dress worn, a few tears, but not dirty, clean enough for visiting an aunt and cousins in Hooper City.

“Mazy,” she said. It was Mazy, but her hair had been razored off, and there was a cut across her cheek, that knobbed cheek she carried swollen and red now where the scab had been pulled. But it was her, and Jennifer reached for her.

Mazy looked up, turned her eyes down.

“Where’ve you been? What happened to you?” She grabbed the girl, and for the second time since she had known Mazy, all of the girl’s weight—there was so little of it—gave way easily in her hands. She didn’t answer, didn’t put her arms around Jennifer. Instead she brought them to the center of her body and shouted and pushed with all her strength, pushed Jennifer back.

She was shaking and crossed her arms.

“It’s
me
, Mazy.”

Mazy shook her head, kept shaking it.

“I was hoping you knew her,” Ms. Gerald said. “She was sold to one of my regular clients in St. Louis by the same
guia
who sold you to me. Who is she? Mazy. Tell me about her. I just bought her.”

“I knew Mazy in Birmingham,” Jennifer said, and started to say her mother was Lavina, started to talk about the city, what had happened, how they had gotten out. But Ms. Gerald didn’t want this kind of information. For three months, no one had asked about Birmingham. Everything around the St. Charles was empty, a forgotten land from here to the city-states. A few girls acknowledged, “Oh, it’s a mess down there in Alabama,” and sometimes a client would ask, Where you from? And Jennifer would say, Birmingham, and they’d echo the sentiment, What a mess, or go on to the next question, the next thing they wanted her to do. She finally stopped replying.

But one trick said—and he worked for the Nashville city-state—that the federal government couldn’t maintain the border, the US government was bankrupt. They had already closed checkpoints in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“Pretty soon,” he said, “the border will be a map line. That’s all.”

“What about the people in the Southeastern Desert?” she asked him.

“Still people in that desert?” he asked.

“My husband,” she said, and he said, “Huh,” just
huh
, like he didn’t believe her. “I thought you were from Birmingham.”

Then she forgot about that trick and what he’d told her until now.

But Ms. Gerald didn’t want to hear about the desert, and Jennifer tried to think of the best way to answer. She looked down, pulled at her jeans, pulled the wet fabric from her skin. Ms. Gerald kept her office cold and the damp denim was making Jennifer shiver.

“How did you find Mazy?” she asked.

“I didn’t. The client brought her to me. It was a favor for him since I depend on him for business,” Ms. Gerald said. “He was tired of her. She was his servant.” Jennifer looked back at the cut on Mazy’s face.

“The girl did that to herself. The hair, too. Look at her wrists.” But Mazy turned her wrists so Jennifer couldn’t see them, no one could. “If she wasn’t so beautiful, I would’ve turned him down.”

Ms. Gerald leaned in. “Tell me about Mazy. Her temperament. What do you know? She has a different name than you—she’s not your sister or cousin. But they can give you any name on these sheets.” She tapped the contract, and picked up the small case, rattled the impression inside, stowed it in her pocket.

“She’s a friend,” Jennifer said. “I knew her mother. I was supposed to take care of her, but we got separated.

“Mazy,” Jennifer whispered, pleaded. She wanted to hold the girl, but Mazy shook her head, inhaled and exhaled quicker and wildly.

“I can’t calm her down.” Ms. Gerald crossed one ankle behind the other and began to rock slowly. “She’s no good to me. And no good to herself if she keeps working at those wrists. I can sell her to one of the shanties, but it’ll be a loss. I don’t want a loss.” Ms. Gerald yawned. She always seemed bored when she talked, as if everything she said had been
repeated and repeated, and she no longer had interest in her words, in anyone in the room, even herself. “Will you help me?”

“She’s angry with me because we separated. I allowed it,” Jennifer said.

“She’s not just angry at you. The client told me she destroyed their kitchen in St. Louis. His wife had had enough, so here she is. What I need to know is, was she like this in Birmingham?”

“No,” Jennifer said. “Not at all.”

“I mean, can you reach her? Get her ready to work? Dr. Syeth’s given her a shot, and she’ll get drowsy. I’ll have her taken up to your room.”

“She’s fifteen.”

Ms. Gerald turned her hands over. “What can I do about her age? Nothing. I’ve had girls twelve work here. In the shanties, they start them out at ten.” She gripped the edge of the desk, swung her legs stronger. “Fifteen is a good age to start. She’s not ruined yet.”

“Let her do something else. Mazy’s been a servant.”

“I’ll never get my money out of her that way. And she’s already used to being fucked. I know the client. You just need to get her ready like Naomi had to get you ready. She’s in a brothel. It takes some girls a while to get used to that.”

Jennifer stepped toward Mazy, but the cold denim pulled at her skin and Mazy bundled tighter into a ball.

“She’ll calm down,” Ms. Gerald insisted, and kept rocking her feet slower and slower like the gears of a clock dictating time, its fluctuations and pacing, when it should finally end.

   That last day on Snakeskin Road, they lay back on the full stretch of the metal floor of the van, just Jennifer and Mazy and one other girl. The vents were turned wide open, turning hot air over them, that smell from the gas tank and
tar; it rained once, and the air got damp, cooler, but they drove through it, and the air thinned out, again, took the sweat from their bodies. At least the air was moving, and it was dark, difficult to see Mazy, so they held one another’s hands, taking turns rubbing the inside of their palms, touching, some game they invented, like scooping the fruit out of a melon.

Jennifer was thinking about the next stop, Cairo, Illinois. Chicago was in Illinois, and though she tried to recreate that state map in her mind, the crossing roads and bulleted cities, she couldn’t locate Cairo. She knew it wasn’t near Chicago, but it was in Illinois; she was moving, getting closer. And when they got there, she wondered how they might escape. The
guias
had kept everyone circled and had threatened to put them in chains after one woman ran off. They found her and beat her, kicked her, and because of her bruises, sold her cheap. No one else had run since.

There were almost as many
guias
as women now. It didn’t seem possible to escape. But she kept thinking, they’d step out, and while the
guias
talked about the next marker where the fuel runners had left tanks, she’d grab Mazy and run. But the map just crumbled around her then into brush and groves that rubbed against her legs until they caught fire, the entire landscape she knew nothing of, lost.

When the van did stop, it wasn’t a field. They were at the St. Charles, and the
guias
corralled them toward the entrance, told them to go inside to the bathrooms there. It was the first time all trip they had gone in a building, first time they had come to a town.

Though the town appeared broken, empty, the lobby of the hotel did not. A white wainscoting held up the bottom half of the walls, a relief of roses encircled in branches, and the upper half was painted in crimson with a gold gilding of leaves just above the chair railing. The stem of each leaf angled forward and directed you through the lobby further in.
The ceiling was tin, high up, the kind she had discovered ripped and curling onto the floor and countertops in Alabama homes with debris and rafters pressing down on them. But here the ceiling spread out in perfect squares, fans sticking down, slowly turning the cold firmament and the ovate medallions of the chandeliers.

As they walked through, Ms. Gerald watched them, said nothing. Then on their way to the van, Teal Dennis told Jennifer he needed to speak to her. “Hold up a second,” he said, pulling her aside, and Mazy paused, but one of the other
guias
pushed on Mazy’s back and said, “Let’s go.” She was trying to get a look at Jennifer, and fell forward, caught herself, looked back. The guard pushed on her, pushed until she moved, and it was at that moment—there was too much space between them. They had managed to stay close until now, and Jennifer started walking toward her, but Teal Dennis said, “Hold up, I need to talk to you, that’s all. Just hold up.” He wrenched her arm, wouldn’t let go.

The sun glared through the open door and there was nothing but the black shapes of the women and
guias
and then just the white of the sun, the door swinging shut, the St. Charles security guards coming over.

Teal Dennis turned, walked out of the lobby where Mazy had gone, and Jennifer started after him, screaming, but the guards stopped her and took her to Ms. Gerald’s office.

“I have to get back to the van,” she said, catching her breath, her wrists sore, burning.

Ms. Gerald just looked at her and began to swing her legs.

   Jennifer watched Mazy sleep where the guards had set her on the brown covers, and remembered the van, how the metal got on the back of your arms and clothes and the tar
coming up in the vents, and Mazy getting pushed in the lobby, all that space between them impossible to gather.

She looked out her window, but the girls had come in already, the Ohio River slowly working its way south, the sun pulled off its axis somewhere going west. So Jennifer went over to Mazy, rubbed her hair, where the long strands used to unfurl, where she used to comb out strips for braiding, the scalp over the hard bone. Then Jennifer lifted the hand to her face, took her other hand and pressed both into her chin and mouth and breathed dirt, salt, citrus—orange or lemons, a bitterness to Mazy’s skin, so familiar, but she couldn’t find comfort. The tears plashed on the worn dress, on Mazy’s face, and Jennifer rubbed them off, rubbed them back into the line of hair.