Snakeskin Road (25 page)

“I won’t take it anymore,” Mazy said. “That’s why Ms. Hammond got rid of me. That numbness started to burn.” Mazy drew a line down her breastbone and clenched her fist at her stomach. “I’d wake up at night on fire, sweating.” She moved to the window.

“Every day, Ms. Hammond sent me to the store for groceries. ‘Need some bread, child,’ like I was her child. Told me to walk. It was good exercise for me. So I was always going along the walls. Everything was clean in Blue Ridge, not dusty or dirty. All the people so clean. When I got back with the bread, she’d say, ‘Where’s the eggs? The chicken? I need a fresh chicken, child.’ And she’d walk through the kitchen and ask the cook if there was anything else he needed. Then I would be off, again, along that wall. Every day like that.

“Of course, I knew what was on the other side—Birmingham, that world, those people wanting to get through the concrete. Their hands were on the other side pushing. And I didn’t want to run away and get caught by them. I knew what they would do. I did run away once. She beat me for it. Got me on the floor and started kicking. Whatever you do, don’t let them get you on the floor. I had to see a doctor. For a while, I wasn’t allowed to walk by myself. Hell, for a while I
couldn’t
walk.” She drew a line down her breastbone
again, sat down on the broad windowsill, put her back against the glass.

“One day, there was a man stealing bread—happened when I was in the store. I had a whole list of things for Ms. Hammond, and I was just getting to them, and somehow the man had gotten into Blue Ridge—he hid under a car. That’s how he got through the checkpoint, the police think. He was obviously not from Blue Ridge. He was dirty. He wasn’t dressed properly.” Mazy glanced at the shoulder of her dress, picked it up to look at the bruise, and looked down her arm at the bandages, then crossed her arms, shivering. “He wasn’t proper. Ms. Hammond was all about proper. And the police came in and shot him. That’s the law. You get caught stealing, you get shot. Eye for an eye.

“Everyone there said he deserved it, and everyone who talked about it later said he deserved it, and the police hauled him off quick and the store was mopped blood-clean. But before they shot him, I remember the man saying, I’m hungry’ like all the people in Birmingham used to say in Linn Park. Those people.” She pointed to where the notebook was. “And he said, ‘There’s no food in the rest of the city.’ He was angry. They shot him.

“Everyone said
thank you
. The officers couldn’t finish their work for all the congratulations. I just stared at his body. Some people started laughing because the bread he had stolen had gone poof, up in the air. That’s how the checkout woman put it, ‘They shot him and the bread went poof She raised her arms’, ‘Poof, up in the air.’

“The bread slices fell all over the ground, all over his body. He was covered in slices of white bread and some people were laughing, how ridiculous he looked. But when you’re hungry like we were in Birmingham, saving those rations, when you’re hungry like that, you’re always hungry like that. I started picking up the bread.

“‘No,’ the checkout woman told me. ‘Don’t do that.’ She came out from behind the counter and took my arms,
held them. ‘You get some fresh bread for your mother.’ But I had already stuffed a good bit in my pockets and I kept picking it up. Then one of the officers came over and looked at me and asked if I was all right, and where did I live. I didn’t want to get shot, so I got up. As soon as I got out the front door, I ran home and put all of that bread under my bed just in case,” Mazy said. “Just in case.

“But Ms. Hammond found the food, made me clean it out. I’d hide food, and they’d find it. Finally, I got so hungry, I went into the kitchen and took everything, all that food hiding in the cabinets and fridge, set it on the counters and tile.” Mazy twisted her hand, emptied it into the whole space of the room, then held her arms tight again, shivered. She kept looking past Jennifer as if nothing was recognizable, not even the shapes of walls, the line joining the ceiling and the floor, as if the corners didn’t exist, as if Mazy and Jennifer weren’t here or anywhere.

   Jennifer and Mazy stayed quiet with each other just like Jennifer and her mama had stayed quiet that night driving out of Richmond to Montgomery. She hadn’t traveled along the railroad tracks that followed the Alabama like Terry used to do, the gaps in the ties smoothed over with sand, getting as close to the edge of the bank as possible until her mama would say, “This isn’t some daredevil show.” And Terry, embarrassed, would relent.

Instead, Jennifer stayed on Highways 40 and 54, which mostly stayed off the river, dipped close enough a few times to glimpse the wide snakish water, then veered into the wheeling dust that started on the ground before stirring toward the sky. Throughout the day, you could see the dust devils rise until they exploded back into air having lost the force of the hot-cold helix inside them. In the darkness, the headlights only captured that beginning spiral, the dust slipping over the cab, then away.

Her mama had slouched against the passenger door from the beginning, content on not talking, just like all their drives together. The truck shook Delia’s face and neck until she was lulled into sleep, shook the wrinkles loose, and Jennifer tried to follow the lines, where they betrayed her mother’s age—just like her mama’s hair, this face would be hers when she was older. At least with her mama resting, there was a softness, a flexibility opposed to the rigid frame her body woke with, setting against the spare houses, her time alone, the grit, and chores.

In Montgomery the buildings were half-covered and imploding, the weight of the sand too much. Jennifer drove up Dexter to the stone steps of the capitol, its domed roof missing—it had been lifted and carried to Birmingham by sky-cranes in 2014, the year Jennifer was born, leaving a huge, cratered ceiling for gathering up whorls of sand.

“You stopping?” her mama asked, and peeked, yawned.

“Just for a minute,” Jennifer explained. It wouldn’t be a good idea to leave the truck idle. The engine had been doing weird things, sputtering when it sat too long, getting cold or clogged, especially with dust blowing. The dust always worried Jennifer.

“I keep expecting people to come out of those buildings,” Delia said. “All these years, and still every time we come to a town, I look for people.” She had brought a shawl—even now in the hottest part of summer Delia wore shawls or something long-sleeved as if she could never get warm—and she sat up more, hooked the shawl around her, its spiral of red, yellow, brown, the wind whipping against the hood of the truck. “When Everett passed, it was like someone slapped me hard in the face. For a long time I looked for him walking back in the house. But it was just you, Jenny, in the house. And now Terry.”

Jennifer’s cheek stung, and she wanted to say
I’m sorry, Mama, it was just me in the house
. She had failed—a daughter instead of a husband, a girl instead of a man, and a
woman now, still not the right companion. Her confidence, her existence washed out of her, exhausted with the burden of what she was not.

“I know how much he meant to you,” she said. “Both of them.” Jennifer put her elbow into the crook of the door frame and leaned that way. “I wish Terry was here.”

“Some people, they should never pass. They’re too good for death. He was. But Jenny, I have some news. We don’t have to stay in the desert.” Her mother pulled out the envelope, the one from the table. “Your Aunt Bobbie, she’s been able to get visas and money for us to come and live with her in Chicago.” Delia placed the envelope on the seat beside Jennifer. “Mathew has a visa, is that right?”

She nodded. “He’s had it since he was born. He’s had it all this time and just hasn’t used it.”

“Then we can all leave, Jenny. You and Mat can marry in Chicago. I know you got your plans set here. If you want the ceremony—”

“Hold on, Mama. You’re talking too much,” Jennifer said, and pulled up the sheets of folded paper. She glanced at the letter, the words
Dear Sister
, and
persuaded
, and
visa
, and
I can’t wait to see you and Jen, Love, Bobbie
. Aunt Bobbie. Jennifer had only seen flicker-photographs. Much taller than Delia, but she had that same lope and roundness in her shoulders, carried herself like Mama—slow, purposeful. She wore glasses, the kind that came to a point at the top end, making her eyes into cat eyes. And she had curly red hair—Where all that red comes from is a mystery, Delia had said—neither she nor Jennifer had a trace—and Bobbie’s hair was the curliest of the three. She left Louisiana before it turned into a dust bowl, and now she wanted them to come live with her. They had no other living relatives. Paper-clipped to the letter were two permissions to transfer, one for Jennifer, one for her mama.

Jennifer smiled, the visas heavy like mining scrip, the kind of paper that wouldn’t easily tear or dissolve. “Why is
she helping us?” The answer seemed obvious, but every bit of good news in the desert had a catch.

“Because of Terry’s passing. My sister works for the government. Did you read what she said?”

“No,” Jennifer said. “No.” She reached across, grabbed her mama, digging into the holes of the shawl.

“Now, don’t worry,” Delia whispered. “We’re going to be close. We’ll have our chance in Chicago.”

If anything Jennifer squeezed tighter, but all the strength washed out of her; she didn’t believe they would ever be close. For her mother to actually say it, say it was possible, just made it worse. But Mat—they could leave the desert together and have a life in the Saved World—this was possible; this is what Jennifer held on to.

“I’m glad we’ll be out and finally have that chance. I’ve just been no good here to you, to myself.”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Jennifer said, and tried to take hold of that word
chance
. If she just pulled tight enough, maybe she could wring out all their disappointments, their reservations, and the distance between them would dry up, collapse. Her mama wanted it to be so. She said she did. Jennifer pulled and pulled and waited to experience something beyond hollowness.

“Let’s get on back,” Delia said. “You talk to Mathew. I just wanted to drive out one more time like Terry loved.”

It was true. Terry did love the jaunts, and they loved the long monotonous drives because of him. Yet he never kept track of the miles they traveled. Jennifer knew it had taken seventy-four miles from Richmond to Montgomery, yet with him, it didn’t matter. The trips went like this: she asked Terry the miles on the odometer, and he rattled off some number, yawning, uninterested. A little while later, she asked him again. Sometimes he just said two or six million, something so wrong she knew he was lying, and she craned her neck at the odometer.

“Stop bothering me with that,” he finally said. “It
doesn’t matter how far we’ve gone. Just look outside. Look.” He waved his hand through the cab like his arm was broken, flopping it goofily around like a broken-winged bird. So she sighed and leaned on the passenger door, and looked, anything not to look at that recalcitrant man and his stupid, stupid arm.

It was always outside so dark and black, you could barely make out the bank, where it dipped down to the blacker river. The headlights just glared into the pitch, blinding, revealing the edges of some other world, immense. They were going into it fast.

“Look,” he was still whispering to her.

   When Delia had left for the Saved World, she sent Chicago to Jennifer piece by piece, in letters and in flicker-photographs. There was one of Pearl, her mama’s tabby, splayed on the bed, pawing at her mother’s hand until she rubbed its white belly. The paws froze, the picture came to a stop. And the streets of the city, her mother walking the sidewalks to share it with her.

On the nights Mat worked, Jennifer had mulled over the people in those ten-second clips. What did they do? Where were they going? The number of bodies always shocked her, how quickly they walked by, their faces blank and focused, then gone out of the frame.

But Jennifer’s favorite was of Mama kicking her feet in the Chicago River. It became Mazy’s favorite, too. Whenever the legs stopped kicking, Mazy set the letter under the bed lamp, and the light started the silent movie over, Delia’s legs paddling, her shoulders lifting, then curling over her arms straight as pegs, and the whole time her lips were opened wide, happy. Aunt Bobbie must’ve taken it, or perhaps someone her mama met, someone plucked out of that large, engrossed Chicago crowd. The note at the top had been short—

All of her mother’s letters had been censored by the government office in Birmingham, when the office was there and Birmingham was the entry city into the Saved World. They controlled the desert mining, food shipments, the schools, even television. But just like the flicker-photographs, the incomplete lines, the absences drew Jennifer to Chicago even more.

It had been nine years since her mother left the Southeastern Desert, nine years since Jennifer tried to convince Mat to use their visas. But he wouldn’t leave his father and so she stayed while her mother sent photos and letters, the absences building and building.

“I think your mama’s pretty,” Mazy said.

“She wouldn’t think so.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She just can’t see any beauty in herself; she never has.” Mazy had just taken another bath—she had had five over the last two days, and this was the longest one so far. She smelled of soap, vanilla covering up the orange-metallic of her skin, sweating out the water, her head wrapped in a blue and gold bandana.

“Did you ever tell her?”

“What?” Jennifer asked.

“That she didn’t see herself the right way. That she was beautiful.”

“No. I never tried to talk her out of it.”

Mazy put the letter back up to the light and the legs kicked again. “She seems happiest in this one.”