Snakeskin Road (26 page)

“It’s Chicago. When we leave here, we’ll go there.”

“I’m too tired to go anywhere,” Mazy said and leaned against the pillows she had propped against the headboard. “It’s just too much trying. I don’t believe in it.”

“You have to keep trying. Promise me, Mazy.” It was the same argument they had after Naomi brought them supper a few hours ago.

Naomi set the dinner plates on the table, the glasses of sweet tea, and told Jennifer, “The girl’s progressing fast” as she took up the dirty plates and forks and knives from lunch.

Jennifer said Mazy needed more time and could one of the servants bring the food tomorrow?

“You need to show her the kitchen,” Naomi answered. “She needs to start getting her own meals. Her room is almost finished.” Before leaving, she went over and talked with Mazy about makeup for the cut on her face.

“You’re doing so well, she’s going to tell Ms. Gerald you’re ready for work,” Jennifer said.

“You act like you don’t want me to get better.”

“I want you to stay with me as long as they’ll let you.”

Then Jennifer explained Ms. Gerald’s five commandments, the story about the St. Charles being found
out of the wilderness
. She didn’t tell Mazy about the girls who died.

Mazy said she had already figured out what the St. Charles was, but didn’t want to be touched anymore. “I told Mr. Hammond that. Gave him a black eye once. It didn’t stop him. And Ms. Hammond knew and never stopped him—” and how could Jennifer do this, wasn’t she married?

“There are worse options here,” Jennifer said. She looked at Mazy’s wrists, the purple marks on her arms, and felt that emptiness where her baby had been, where the unborn child bled out of her. How could emptiness form such a thick knot?

“But you’ll get through it. We’ll get out. You have to believe that, Mazy. You have to keep trying.” She repeated everything that Cawood had said and everything that Naomi had said, a string of words that disintegrated as soon as they were spoken. “Listen to me, Mazy.”

“Stop it,” Mazy said. “You don’t even believe what you’re saying.” She went to the bathroom, turned on the water.

For the last few days Mazy had walked back and forth to the windows, Jennifer pointing out the girls at the river swimming, their names, and do you want to swim? The girls from the first two floors swam in the late afternoon, the sun blurring them into shadows on the water.

Mazy stepped up to the glass and watched, then traced back through the room until she had covered every inch of it, and washed the cuts and found a yellow sundress that worked and a white pullover sweater that she took off and put back on, complained that it was scratchy, complained that she was cold, and wrapped her sheared head in the bandana.

Jennifer had picked up the notebook. Its spine was now broken, but the pages were still intact, and Mazy drew on the empty sheets that remained. Each time Jennifer came near, Mazy closed the book. Jennifer heard her crying in the bathroom, in her sleep—and that was the only time, in her sleep, that Jennifer could touch her, try to soothe her.

But the girl had been in a good mood since their argument and her long bath, humming along with Jinx’s voice like Cawood would do and was probably doing right now somewhere in the St. Charles, only Mazy’s voice was smaller, quieter. Both Dang Red and Benji Red were playing with Professor Jinx tonight. Mazy stomped the floor to the stomping going on downstairs, her feet swinging from the bed. Jennifer wanted to take her and dance.

“Does he ever stop playing?” she asked, smiling. Jennifer hadn’t seen the girl show such a full row of teeth since they were on the bus in the Talladega Forest.

“Thank goodness, no,” Jennifer said, and told the story of how Jinx got his name.

Then she had taken out the flicker-photographs—Mazy had never seen any before.

They sat on the edge of the bed, watched them under the lamp and talked about Jennifer’s mother until Mazy said she was tired of trying. Jennifer promised they’d get to Chicago.

“Then you’ll have your mama. My mama’s dead.” Mazy dug her shoulder at the pillows.

“You don’t know that.”

“She’s dead and she ain’t coming for me. And if she isn’t dead, she still ain’t coming for me. She left us in Birmingham, Jen.” Jennifer couldn’t see Mazy’s face. “I don’t trust you.” She let go of the letter, just let it fall to the covers. “You’ll let me go again.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. I know it. You won’t take me to Chicago. It’s better for me to believe you won’t take care of me. And how can you? Ms. Gerald’s the one owns me.”

Jennifer picked up Mazy’s hand and rubbed the inside like scooping flesh out of a melon.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I want you to be okay.”

“I told you, I’m numb, I’m dead. I don’t want to live.”

“Mazy, please.”

“I don’t trust it.” Mazy pulled, but Jennifer wouldn’t give her hand away. “You let me go once. And my mama’s gone.”

“But you’re alive.”

“I want to believe it,” she said. “And I want to trust it.”

“Then do,” Jennifer said.

Below them the stomping had picked up and Jinx was flying through a solo. Jennifer caught the center-root, what Jinx had been playing all day and breathed it in, held it, and held on to the girl’s hand, and tried to steady Mazy’s shaking but couldn’t. She felt her own blood twist and shift through her body, so hot, and all she could think of, holding her
mama that night in Montgomery, the hollowness. How her mama had asked for a chance and how Jennifer decided against it.

“This water will never go dry,” Mat said. He nodded and kicked at the bank, pushing sand and mud into the rivers. They had gone to where the Ohio and Mississippi converged at a shoal. The sky, it was full of stars like that night on Snakeskin Road, so full that it seemed the universe would break apart, and those black paths in the sky would be
the black paths of the rivers twisting and going, washing the stars away.

“We get so much rain here,” Jennifer said. “Every few days.”

“Nothing gets washed out?” he asked. Always when she dreamed of Mat now, he showed up curious, full of questions about the Saved World, his boots still on. He wasn’t taking them off, rolling his pants up, cajoling her,
Let’s go, Jen. Come on in with me, Jen
.

“It floods a lot. That’s what I hear. But when the water shrinks back to the rivers, everything returns—all this green.” Jennifer was on the edge of the water, too, a few steps away from him, but she didn’t come any closer. “Mathew, I have to tell you something.” The darkness kept cutting out, black, blacker, so at times she could glimpse the bones in his head and hands like familiar outcroppings, and then the shape of him would fall into the black, impossible to find. She couldn’t find him now.

“The baby’s dead. I know,” he said.

“Mat—”

“What could you do?” he said. “What could you do, Jen?”

She wanted him to put his hand on her stomach, at least turn and look at her. She could see him now, had found him, again, a fixed point like the river, the sky, nodding, looking out at the water.

“No use having a baby in the desert anyway.”

“We’re not in the desert. We’re in the Saved World. You’ve come this far to me, and I need you.”

“I can’t stay, Jen. I’ve got to go back,” he said.

“To what? There’s nothing in that desert, and I need you.”

“There was nothing you could do,” he said. “I don’t blame you, Jen.” And he started along the bank.

“You shouldn’t leave me,” she said. “Can’t you see that? You shouldn’t keep leaving me.”

But he kept going. Above them that field of stars was so much more than she could hold, and at any moment, she knew they would fall and the earth would fall away, and the only thing left would be her echo still circling, calling for him to come back.

   “They’re swimming again,” Mazy said.

There was still a piece of a dream, Mathew at the river, and Jennifer yawned, swatted her hand at the flattened sheets and coverlet.

“Do you want to swim?” she asked, stretching, looking, and found Mazy at the window. Jennifer kicked the covers down with her feet.

“Well, it’s a little chilly,” Mazy said. She had the pullover sweater on, and pants, and who knew how many layers of shirts underneath the sweater—yet still her body was like a twig.

“We don’t have to swim. We can just watch from the bank or dip our feet in.”

“Is the water cold?”

“Not bad,” Jennifer promised. “You’ll warm up to it.”

“All right, I want to go.”

They found Douglas on the balcony and he agreed to walk them down. A few minutes before, they had come through the parlor and Mazy sat on the piano bench, flattened her hands over the closed lid, slowly opened it back.

“He doesn’t want anyone touching the keys,” Jennifer said, and checked behind her for Jinx, but he didn’t appear. She wondered if he had left for the casinos or gone back to St. Louis. Mazy touched the piano lightly, soundlessly as she worked her fingers from the middle out to the ends and back over each white and black note, her fingers levering up and down. She had to perch on the edge of the bench to get to the floor pedals.

“You think he’d teach me?” she asked.

Jennifer had never seen him teach anyone or offer to do so. But maybe he would, and she told the girl just that,
maybe
, and they went to the kitchen, grabbed leftovers from the fridge, piled them into sandwiches while the cooks cleaned squash and onions and crowder peas in the deep sinks. The knife handles and spoons smelled of garlic, and the back kitchen door swung open, someone on the stoop wringing the neck of a chicken, those white feathers flying against the cook’s fist. He roped the bird down on top of the other dead ones.

   It was chilly like Mazy had said, a little foggy after the storms last night, and they both ran down the bank in front of Douglas, didn’t stop until they got knee-deep in the water.

“I’m mad at you,” Cawood yelled at Jennifer.

“What for?”

“You wait until now—a whole week—before you let the rest of us see her, like she’s
your
private property. I’m Cawood,” she said to Mazy and smiled.

That graciousness irked Jennifer so. “I’d like some of that kindness, too,” she said, and Cawood frowned at her while the others introduced themselves.

Shivering, Mazy brushed at the water her jeans kept soaking up. She walked backward to the shore.

“Where you going?” Cawood asked. “Don’t be afraid of us.”

“You see the girl shaking. She’s cold, that’s all,” Lisa said. Her blond hair was wet to the scalp and neck, no longer blond, and the rest of her was hidden under the black water. “Cawood can be a little bit of trouble,” she warned Mazy.

“I’m not trouble.” Cawood splashed Lisa and Lisa splashed her back and that set everyone splashing. The ritual.

Now Mazy was really shivering, but laughing about it.
She pulled down the edges of her bandana tighter and balled up her soaked towel and sweater, threw them on the shore.

Jennifer took Mazy’s hand and pulled her out to the other girls. “You’ll get warmer the deeper in you get.”

On the Kentucky bank the hardwood leaves had started to turn yellow, some orange, almost a peach color, all of them tinged like the red maple. The girls came in, formed a loose circle around Mazy and Jennifer.

“Welcome, Mazy,” Cawood said—she was the closest—her voice low, whispery. “This river is the best thing about the St. Charles.” She opened her arms at the foggy sky and shouted, which all at once made Jennifer nervous and elated, as if something of her had slipped out in that shouting, ricocheted off the water and up to the sky along with everyone else. Then Cawood said, “We do this every day until winter gets us.”