Snakeskin Road (27 page)

“Not the yelling. That’s all Cawood,” Bethany told her, and the other girls chuckled and some hissed “trouble” under their breath. “Have you turned tricks before?”

Mazy didn’t answer.

“Have you had sex? You’re young,” Lisa said.

Mazy looked behind her at the bank; it had gotten further away from them; and she glanced around at the different faces, not sure where to pin her gaze.

“Were you raped?” Cawood asked.

“Cawood,” Jennifer said.

“Don’t start on me. You’ve had your time, Jen. You’ve been holding on to her for too long. Now we get to talk.”

“Raped,” Mazy managed, and with that she started to leave, but the girls closed in. “Hold on,” they said, “wait up.”

“Don’t be ashamed just because someone raped you. Most of us been through that,” Cawood said, and many of the girls nodded, said, “uh-huh,” and Mazy stopped.

“Let her be, Cawood. She isn’t ready,” Jennifer said.

“Oh, you’re ready. Kind of work we do, you’re always
ready for. Trust me.” Cawood went past Jennifer and came up to the girl. “Someone rape you?” She nodded until Mazy nodded.

“Hurt you?” She picked up Mazy’s wrists and rubbed over the cuts. “No trick’s worth cutting.”

“That’s not why I did it,” Mazy said.

“Then why?”

“I was angry—” Mazy stopped, looked down at her wrists, the hands holding her, and started to say something else, gasped.

“Cawood,” Jennifer said; she was behind them still, and Cawood shifted her back so Jennifer wasn’t able to see Mazy and Mazy wasn’t able to see her.

“Doesn’t matter, whatever happened,” Cawood said. “Let it go. No more cutting.” She lifted the blue and gold bandana. “What you hiding under here?” and Mazy reached up to her skull as Cawood tossed the bandana between two girls, Mazy spreading her palms over that nakedness.

“Pretty. Your face is much prettier without that hair. You need to stop hiding.” Cawood took Mazy’s hands down.

“You just throw him away, right here in this river, toss him. That man, it was one man?” Mazy nodded. “It’s happened to all of us, a trick doing something we didn’t want. But you throw him away, and all that cutting, you throw it away, too, until it’s nothing, until it doesn’t exist, and only you, that’s what’s left.

“Next time a trick tries something you don’t want, you scream at him like you heard me scream—it’ll scare the hell out of him, I promise. He’ll think you’re some devil. Tricks don’t want to mess with the devil.” Cawood broadened her shoulders and everyone laughed. “It’s all a performance—what you have to do to survive,” she whispered. “You’ve got to learn how to perform.” Then she raised her voice. “Johns don’t want to be shamed either. Up and down this river are shanties where tricks can do what they want to a girl. But
you’re protected here.” She looked past Mazy at Douglas and the other guard, Oliver. Mazy turned to look. “Some trick starts to hurt you, just scream, and the guards will take him out. Won’t let him back in the St. Charles.

“And remember this, when you’re in bed turning a trick, it’s your bed, take control of it. Most times, that’ll be enough. You can come down here, wash tricks away easy. But if you don’t work, Ms. Gerald will sell you to one of the shanties, and you’ll still have to fuck. Or you’ll be in a field working your back against the sun instead of a bed. It takes all of us to keep this place going.”

“That’s right,” the other girls said, “all of us.”

“You need to start working,” Bethany said, her freckles patched into red blisters.

“Get it over with tonight,” Lisa said. “I’ve got a wig, a brown one you can borrow—wavy, long. I bet your hair was dark brown.”

“She’s not ready for working,” Jennifer told them and stepped around Cawood.

“She just needs to get it over with,” Lisa snapped back. “Before I got sold here, I worked at Instant Casino and the casino in Natchez. Saw girls cut and beaten by tricks, saw them die. No one did a thing.”

“You’re scaring her.” Jennifer moved closer, but Mazy pushed her hands out.

“I don’t want you around me.”

“Mazy—”

The girl shook her head and Cawood grabbed Jennifer’s shoulder.

“Don’t.” Jennifer shook loose, wheeled. “You’re bullying her.” She was right up on Cawood, and Cawood breathed in, exhaled long and slow.

“Why you picking a fight with me?”

“’Cause you don’t know what’s happened. I’m worried about her.”

“She’s got to take care of herself,” Cawood said. Mazy
was walking back to shore, and Jennifer wanted to follow, but hesitated.

Some of the girls swam out to the drop-off, where the channel turned deep, and dove under, laughing; others leaned out over the water, let the surface hold them, cool them, the wind picking them along like driftwood. They faced the sun, where it was burning away the fog.

“She won’t make it on her own,” Jennifer said. “She’s not all right; she’s told me.”

“I’ll look after her like I’ve looked after you.”

“All your caring hasn’t made me any better.”

“Yet here you are, still alive as far as I can tell.”

“But you’re leaving in a month. We’ve got three years.”

“You’ll get through it like I did, Jen, and she will.”

“I’m not happy, Cawood.”

Cawood busted a laugh so loud Jennifer thought the river would crack open. “Is that what you’re after, happiness? Who ever said living had a thing to do with being happy?”

“Then what’s the point, Cawood? What can I hold on to?”

“Nothing. There’s no point to it, just like there’s no point to death. You think you’ll be happy then?”

“I bet your sister had a hard time with you,” Jennifer said and stomped off through the water as much as the water and the bottom mud would give.

“It was the other way around,” Cawood called out. “She gave me all the fits in the world, but I did love her.”

“Did? You
did
love her? You still don’t?”

“No, I
still
do, but she passed. She didn’t get out of Atlanta.”

Jennifer stopped and the river sloshed up against her legs; she turned. “Cawood—”

Cawood just shook her head. “Bringing up my sister. That’s none of your damn business. None of your right. Don’t do that again. I don’t want to think on it, and I’ve told
you that.” She swam for the deeper pool of water with the other girls and wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t look at Jennifer.

“Cawood,” she called after, and from the other direction, Douglas yelled, “Hey.”

He and the other guard, Oliver, were yelling for Mazy to come back—she was walking along the shore—and Oliver said he would shoot. But Mazy was property. Ms. Gerald didn’t want her property damaged or gunned down. Still, in Birmingham, guns went off by mistake all the time, people shot when no one should be. He pulled his gun. Mazy kept walking, moving a little faster.

Jennifer hurried onto the beach and told them, “I’ve got her. Don’t shoot. Hold on, Mazy.” She looked up. You couldn’t see the St. Charles, not the third-floor balcony where the other guards had stretched out in chairs, resting after eating, and she felt dizzy like the current and mud were still pulling her feet and ankles in, her shoulders pulling the other way.

Then Mazy ran and Oliver fired. But that was all, one blast into the air, the three of them running after her now. He radioed the other guards, and the ducks along the bank jumped into the river or sliced the water a small distance, then raised up and flew across.

It was at the point where the beach curved, where Mazy could’ve gone out of sight if she turned up the bank into the empty houses and buildings of Cairo; it was at that point she stopped, and they caught up to her quick. The men grabbed her, bound her, Jennifer asking if she was okay, and pleading, “Don’t harm her.”

Two huge black birds clapped from the shore and sailed heavily toward the sky. Where the birds had been, where Mazy kept staring, was a body tied to a tree. It was an old white oak, bent and heavy-trunked leaning out at the water. And where the trunk leaned, the body had been tied, a rope
across the forehead, one across the neck, stomach, and calves like a ship’s figurehead, a sign hanging from its neck, the wind picking at it, knocking.

Douglas walked up, swiped at the sign, missed, and reached for it again more slowly. He kept looking over the face—eyeless, noseless, earless, the mouth eaten back into a wide gullet. He kept looking as if it was someone he knew. And Mat, for a second Jennifer thought it was Mat—she had dreamed of him. He had walked up the river; but she had dreamed him, it wasn’t him now, and yet she said his name.

“No hunters,” Douglas shouted, turning the sign so they could see the spray-painted words. “Another poacher from Qillen’s farm. Should we leave him?”

“Why does Qillen tie those bodies up so close to us?” Oliver spit at the ground, scraped his foot over the spit and buckled a collar over Mazy’s neck, pulled, wrapped the leash around his hand. Mazy kept staring at the body; she hadn’t moved.

“He’s always tying poachers up by the roads. Have you seen the one on 50 between here and Instant?”

Oliver shook his head.

“Should I cut him down?”

“We’re not dealing with that.” Oliver radioed the other guards, many of them already on the beach.

He waved. “You can stop your running.” They slowed, and one guard put his hands to his knees.

“Ronnie, are you that out of shape?” Oliver snapped. The other guards chuckled.

“He used to be a sprinter,” someone said, and the heckling grew louder. Ronnie managed to raise one hand and swat at the closest body.

Behind them, the girls were still in the water. If any had been panicked when the gun fired, Jennifer couldn’t tell. Their voices boomed upriver, joking, singing, the huge black birds circling.

• • •

There was a scratch at the door. It was Naomi, and Jennifer told her to come inside, but she stood against the frame, her hair drawn severely at the corners with bobby pins before it fell straight to her jacket like three sides of a square so her face could be fully seen. Nothing was hidden in those eyes; her distrust was never hidden. Jennifer always felt she was facing her mama, a piece that kept shifting before Jennifer could catch up to it and name it, know it exactly.

She said, “Mazy’s already in the parlor. You need to come to work like everyone else.”

“What did Ms. Gerald do to her?”

“Nothing,” and she shifted into the hallway, into its weaker light with the odor of stale cigarettes and plates of barely-eaten food. “Worse things have happened than a girl running away and failing. Like when you got here and lost your baby.” She looked at Jennifer’s stomach, then back to the stairwell. “It takes a while.” And there it was—that knot where her baby had tried to take root and was now gone.

“Besides, Mazy said she was ready to work.”

“I need to get dressed,” Jennifer said, and Naomi tapped her watch as Jennifer shut the door.

“Just know you’re expected.”

After they came back from the river, Mazy had been taken to her new room, and Jennifer was left with the girl’s clothes and the notebook. A servant came for the clothes, but the notebook stayed; and Jennifer looked at the drawings Mazy had recently done and kept hidden. They were all of the room, different angles of the furniture and windows, how the curtains pulled against the walls, and the Kentucky shore and the river, that long bank on the other side.

Jennifer wanted to go to the windows, but couldn’t now; she didn’t want to see those birds circling, didn’t want to think about that tied body stretched above the water. Qillen was a name she had heard of. He owned the land north of
the St. Charles, a tobacco and corn farmer. And what Douglas said, that other bodies were tied to trees along highways—Jennifer kept pacing the room, looking at her walls, imagining bodies just beyond them, every direction, all those bodies had her boxed in. So she retreated to the bed, opened the notebook back up.

Mazy had drawn a picture of Delia’s legs, just the legs kicking, and Jennifer took out the flicker-photograph to set it beside Mazy’s drawing. She stared one to the other, the one in motion, the other still, and at first the motion of the photograph kept her attention, but then it was what Mazy had done, how the one leg dipped down, the lines around the anklebones out to the toes.

She put a hand over her mama’s face in the photograph and gazed at the legs, tried to imagine what Mazy saw. Then she put a finger on Mazy’s lines, felt along them, ingrained so deeply. She traced it and traced it. Her mama was in these lines, and herself, and Mazy, crossing, twining, breathing, while the other legs fluttered on the periphery.

   Jennifer took her mother on one more drive, a short one from Delia’s house on Ted Lane in Richmond to the bus waiting in the town square of Sardis. At 3:00 a.m. the bus departed for Birmingham, and from there another bus to Chicago. It was only thirteen miles from Richmond to Sardis and her mother was already on the front porch with her one piece of luggage when Jennifer arrived.

She tossed it on the truck bed, and they started out.

“Where’s your luggage?” her mama said. It should’ve sounded like a joke. Jennifer had said for weeks she wasn’t going. But Delia said it straight, a mother’s order, and Jennifer felt the pull to oblige. The truth was, Jennifer had thought of going, even now with so little time, with Mathew refusing and at the clay mine, a part of her, no, every bit of her wanted to leave for the Saved World.

“I’ll get there,” Jennifer promised. “Mat just needs a little more convincing. His father’s here.” Jennifer had been telling herself this for days.

“Chris wants his son to go as much as you and me.”

“He won’t go, Mama. We’ve already talked about this. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Delia sighed, and for a few miles they stayed quiet, but she kept looking out the window, fidgeting. She had on perfume, but Delia never wore perfume, and where did she get it? Maybe that’s why she couldn’t be still.

“Why don’t you come anyway. He’ll come after, he loves you so much.”

“You wouldn’t have left Terry here.”

“But I want you to go.” Her mama slapped her hands on the dashboard. Like a child, Jennifer thought. It was something Jennifer would’ve done once.