Snakeskin Road (28 page)

“Why won’t you come with me?”

Because I don’t love you
. She could’ve said that to hurt her mama, and even thinking it made Jennifer scold herself—by allowing those words to go through her mind, the sentiment might become real. And what if it was real? It wasn’t. She did love Delia, but she was also scared of her, of what might happen with the two of them alone and no Mat to talk with and console her.

“I’m getting married, Mama,” Jennifer said.

“He’ll follow. He loves you so much,” she insisted.

“Stop, it, Mama.” Jennifer put her hand over Delia’s and squeezed.

They continued on the highway and Jennifer kept her hand on her mother’s so Delia wouldn’t talk, then a sign for Sardis brightened in their headlights, and just ahead of the sign the bus headlights cut slivers into the black sand, heading north.

Jennifer left the truck idling and opened the tailgate, slid the luggage across the bed, and handed it to her mama.

“Jenny, I promise things will be different.”

“I’m getting married. Then we’ll come. I’ll talk him into it.” Her mother was tall. Jennifer always forgot that. Maybe Jennifer was a little taller, but she usually found Delia sitting in a chair, and when she stood it was like being next to someone Jennifer didn’t know as well as she thought she did.

She walked her mother to the bus and the driver came out. He had on a gray suit and blue cap and checked her ticket and visa and put her bag in the compartment underneath the seats efficiently and without grunting like Jennifer had earlier.

“You have no idea how hard it is to leave your girl here, your only girl,” Delia said. She put the tickets back in her purse, closed her eyes.

“I know, Mama.”

“You know nothing of it,” Delia said. “I know what you think of me. I know you don’t like me.”

“Mama,” Jennifer said. “I love you. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Delia stood there, as if she was judging those words, trying to decide if she could believe them. She looked at the ground, then out at that desert, taking the whole desert in. “I carried you in my body for nine months, doesn’t that count for something? Maybe I shouldn’t go. Not like this—”

Terry had told Jennifer the same thing about nine months. It was something the two adults must’ve spoken of between themselves and agreed on—nine months, that should count against all the other.

“I’ll get there, Mama,” Jennifer told her.

“I just want you in Chicago,” she said. “Safe. With me.”

“I know,” Jennifer said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” They hugged, and her mother’s body felt bulky and awkward. Delia got on the bus and the driver stood out by the door trying to light a cigarette, but couldn’t
in the dirt-wind blustering stronger. Finally he put the cigarette back into his pocket and checked his watch and went inside.

Jennifer waved to her mama though all she could make out were darkened windows and the long silver body of the bus, brighter than the driver’s suit. She headed back to the truck. The wind kept whistling the sand by her in huge ribbons, her headlights sputtering down, then flashing brighter.

That damn engine’s not going to hold
, Jennifer thought to herself, and hurried to the cab, but then she slowed down. She was going to be in the desert until Mat decided to go with her. There was no rush to leave. If the truck broke, it broke. She stood there watching the engine rear and putter.

“Go ahead and break,” she said, but it wouldn’t.

   Jennifer came down in her green dress, the material thinned from use, a favorite dress that had been in her closet when she arrived and belonged to a girl before her. Sometimes she’d take the collar, bundle it up in her hand, and smell the sweat that was not hers, as if by smell alone she could know that girl. She was a brunette, her hair lighter than Jennifer’s thick black, but just as thick and straight. The dress was tight on Jennifer’s stomach, so it had to fit the brown-haired girl better; she was smaller, a few inches shorter. There was something about her sway, the way Jennifer moved in the hips of the dress; she could pick up the hips of the other girl—no, not the hips exactly, but that sway, she could pick up the girl’s motion. Sometimes, the material threw her off balance as if the dress was expecting the other girl and how she walked and danced. Jennifer had only worn it a few times. Never washed it. She didn’t want to lose that girl who she liked to imagine had gotten free of the St. Charles, one of the lucky ones.

The stairwell door vibrated when Jennifer put a hand
against it—people already stomping. And Jinx, he was singing, playing loud, just him tonight, no one else, not Dang Red or Benji. She held there. Last time she had been in the stairwell at night, this very spot, she had touched Cawood’s face, and they had talked about Cawood’s sister. She was dead. Something cold went through Jennifer. She wouldn’t bring it up again—not her place, not her right. Another person she had no right to know of or feel for, like Mazy. She wanted to go back to her room, lie down, sleep. But there’d be repercussions. Naomi would come looking for her. If Delia was here, she’d say, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” As if that’s all it took to stop, as if her mother ever stopped.

She opened the door, and the sound came full in the lights, the room whirling, Jinx singing:

She made sure not to make a grand entrance, kept to the wall like those infamous wallflowers she couldn’t be much longer, and looked down at the shoes and bare feet turning, kicking. Already there was the St. Charles football huddle; eight, ten girls laced together, kicking their toes to the middle and heels back out as tricks peeled them out until only five remained, then four, Jinx doing what he called the upper key boogie-woogie special. In that back and forth and fast rhythm, those garish bodies and suits, Jennifer found Mazy. She was dancing with two clients and Cawood nearby. They laughed, and Mazy had on a wig, but you
couldn’t tell it, a blond one Jennifer had seen on Lisa. Mazy was dancing like dancing was her second skin. The girl looked over, then looked away quick, took the hands of one of the clients and pressed them against her sides. He moved his hands up and down and the other one put his hands on her, too.

Jennifer cut across the floor. Someone grabbed at her. “Hold up, baby,” he said, but she kept past him to the lounge—where three girls were taking a break between johns, smoking—and past them into the bathroom. She tried to avoid the full-length mirrors Ms. Gerald had hung for examining your body’s growing contours, and locked herself in a stall, vomited.

There was for a moment euphoria, her strength growing like she could push through the stall door, every door in the St. Charles, but they just led to empty hallways and stairs and more doors, and then a window, then the sky. She shook that sky out of her head and calmed enough to lean back, breathe.
This
—she had forced Mazy to leave Birmingham for
this
.

Someone came into the next stall and retched; all night there’d be retching. Like washing tricks away in the Ohio River, retching was another St. Charles ritual, though this one was unspoken. Ms. Gerald was serious about keeping your figure thin. On Friday mornings, they had to be weighed, and for each pound gained over the week, the girls lost kitchen privileges. One pound equaled no breakfast until the next weighing, two pounds equaled no breakfast or lunch, and anything over five pounds led to mandatory fasting. So the toilets in the bathroom smelled more like soured milk than piss no matter how much they flushed and the servants scrubbed.

Jennifer waited as the girl stepped out, then up to the mirror, cleared her throat, gargled, and washed her hands. She had already seen the red heels and tried to erase them, not wanting to attach those heels to a pair of legs and face.

When Jennifer returned to the lounge, the three girls were gone and Naomi was standing there. It was one of Naomi’s duties to clear out the lounge and stalls, herd the girls back onto the main floor with the clients. She slipped past Jennifer without speaking, like she was tired of talking to people, tired of giving orders.

The music, the mood in the parlor had changed. Jinx had begun a slow song, and except for a few couples, everyone had retreated to the bar or the balcony, the glass doors there open, replaced with screens for the cooler nights, the guards stationed to the sides like potted trees, like every night—still immovable. Jennifer caught the red and white flashes of a mille-copter, then another. They were coming from the east, from Instant Casino.

Then Jinx slipped, snagged right in the center of a center-root, and in that pause, the dancers continued to turn in place, a slow box move, and she heard the shuffle of people below, that other world from the bottom half of the St. Charles, girls turning mille-copter pilots and truckers and barge operators. She always forgot they existed until they made noise. The shuffling sounded like fish hitting their heads inside a bucket. Then Jinx sat on a chord, and the music washed back over that parallel world.

“Why don’t you take a break,” she said when she got to the piano. “Talk with me a while.”

“Got to finish up this song. Stand a minute.” He repeated the chorus,
My sweet baby, I’ll take you dancing tonight
, then swept his hands across the lower notes to the upper ones, a move he called the “escalator,” and stopped—all these things she knew about him—his hands, their habits that had become more recognizable to her than her own.

As he rubbed them together, people clapped, and conversations filled the empty space. His hands looked sore, shaking, and Jennifer sat on the bench, took them.

“No low-down love songs tonight?”

“I’m just getting warmed up. I’m starting them off with
some nice, pretty songs, then I get to the truth, all that sweet love’s going to go bad. Just wait. I got a whole evening to make love go bad. Ow, don’t press so hard,” he said, and Jennifer let his palms sit in hers. She picked up the towel, a few slivers of ice still in it, and laid it over those wooden knuckles, swollen. Above them, the ceiling fans were turning too slowly to do any good.

“If my fingers ever fail me, that’ll be the worse day.” Jinx kept twisting his shoulders and arms through his long white sleeves, trying to ease the pressure on his wrists.

“You’ve still got your lungs.”

“I know, but take my hands, I might as well die,” he said. “They’re attached to my heart, my lungs, my brain. It’s all wired down to the fingers.” He twitched them, but it didn’t help them steady. “I’m worthless if they go. My father had to stop playing the piano in his eighties—I couldn’t practice around him after that, he got too upset. I had to go to my club, The Roll ’Em Pete, and my wife took care of him.”

“How long you been married?” Jennifer had always wanted to know about this woman in St. Louis.

“Thirty years.”

“Thirty years and you’re singing songs about bad love?”

“Before I knew her,” he raised his voice, “I knew bad love. Don’t doubt me. I had my share. She’s my second wife.” He flashed two fingers. “First one I was married to, loved this woman so much I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t care if I played the piano. That’s right,” he nodded, “that serious. My father told me I’d lost my mind, and I had. We lived in Kansas City. I was working at Ophelia’s enough to pay rent and supper, and it wasn’t long before she started telling me she needed more time to herself. Well, I didn’t understand it because I couldn’t stand to be without her. Why would she want to be away from me? Then I found her with someone I knew, we both knew. Never will forget that. Strolling up Wyandotte and there they were on the other side of the street, walking, holding each other, right out in
daylight like they were doing nothing wrong. Never will forget how vulnerable that made me.” Jinx stared off, frowned, and Jennifer could see it—if she wasn’t careful, her questions would make him quiet, cranky, send him into a blue temper.

“I’m sorry, Jinx,” she said, but didn’t know what else to do, how to keep him from sliding. And still she knew nothing about his wife in St. Louis.

“Enough of all that,” he said. “Where you been?”

“Taking care of a girl.”

“The new one?” He nodded toward the bar, and Jennifer looked through the hot, bright, all the colors and bodies, the smoke heavier until she found Mazy with the same two tricks and Cawood.

“Thought Cawood might be taking care of this one.”

“Looks like she is now,” Jennifer said.

“What, you jealous? You’re attached to her, I can tell.”

“I’m not jealous.” Jennifer bit at the inside of her cheek.

“Uh-huh.” Jinx cleared his throat. “What’s her name?”

“Mazy. We met in Birmingham, and I promised her mama I’d take care of her. It’s my fault she’s here.”

“Birmingham’s no place for anybody now.”

“But she’s here, and she’s so angry with me about it. And I don’t blame her. She misses her mama.”

“She’s young,” Jinx said. “You have to give kids time to forgive. She can’t hold that grudge always.”

“You don’t know Mazy. And like I said, I don’t blame her.”

“So let Cawood take care of this one. Move on.”

Sometimes Jinx could say the most hurtful things without even trying, and she wondered why they stayed friends. Maybe they weren’t friends, and it was his blunt way of reminding her. He had said move on. But where could she go? There was no place for her and he knew that. She looked around the parlor, over at the balcony at the tricks standing, looking for someone to approach.

He sighed. “I don’t know what to do for you, Jen.”

“I’m not asking for anything,” she said. “You know I’m married just like you are.”

“I thought you told all the guys you’re married to me?”