Snakeskin Road (33 page)

They didn’t even cry once we got inside the cement block at the post; they were too jolted, too much had happened in a short time and they had grown unsure of everything, of themselves. Only one of the deserters begged, “Don’t make me go back into that,” when she realized we were in Alabama. “I can’t go back into that.” The words soured in her mouth. But we were already in the cement block, and she was getting processed. I sold them for fifty thousand. Right there, the whole crew, fifty thousand.

“That’s the most money we’ve given out,” the cash officer said, smiling big like I had made her day, but she hadn’t been here long. I’d seen hunters pull in more.

The only glitch was that the patrollers couldn’t verify one of the women. She kept looking around, scared just like the others, trying to figure out the sudden walls and steel cages. She had a small face and barely any chin and hair cut straight across the back as if my mam had done it—rough, uneven. She told the officers a name, it wasn’t real, and fingerprinting, DNA, signatures, nothing came back. Still they took her. She was probably someone Pearson bought from the old Mexican
guias
. Who knew how she got to Mexico, where she came from before she was smuggled north.

I was cautioned not to bring any more unidentifieds
because what if it was a citizen; patrollers don’t like you turning over US citizens, even if they had been enslaved. I knew several bounty hunters turned back for offering too many unidentifieds at once and forced to sell their cargo cheap to organ dealers. If you kept doing it, you got blacklisted. And if you want to know it, right there, that’s just how screwed up and illogical the rules were, the whole process outlined in a manual issued back in 2014.

The first haul was always the largest because the deserters hadn’t adjusted—all the shifting from Alabama to the farm, and then rescued—some deserters actually believed that’s what I was doing—it kept them from finding their center. By the time they realized what was going on, I’d resold them to the government. But it was early; maybe my luck would hold. There was that chance, so I didn’t stay in Adamsville, didn’t even head over to The End of the World Bar. The weather had calmed; the sun slipped down red and the crickets reemerged from their hiding places during the storm. What was left on High Street, a layering of sand like snow flurries.

Teal Dennis sold nine women to Bixon in Kentucky—I had recognized the name from fence posts but that’s all I knew of them. They just didn’t look to be a huge operation with the secondhand truck and trailer. I wouldn’t get all nine runaways—more than my share, too many to coordinate. And to be honest, I was still in disbelief at Pearson Whaike’s seven, how easy it was. Still don’t know how I got seven.

“One more haul,” I said, whispered it to myself and stretched. Fifty thousand. I doubted I’d get that much money in one trade again. Suddenly all that money was a burden. I had to do something with it, had to spend it, and the thought of it exhausted me.

I’ll spend it later
, I decided, and restocked the propane tanks and water tank and drove right back up through the
Natchez Trace on 43, 195, 16, came right up through the dead zone; the Herefords split open to vultures gathering the last bit of dusk. I wondered how long it’d take before any green returned to that track of land, and when I’d rest. I hadn’t slept for days.

Night came on as I crossed 33. Then I took County 291 winding into the Sanctified Mountains, then 86 that struck out through Jals Valley; the sun was long out of it, and that’s when I heard the train.

It was coming right next to me on 86, the tracks just to the left under a string of old telephone poles and wires stretched out in loops that touched the earth where some had rusted through and broken. It was catching up—power trains moved quick and reached two hundred in straight-aways, but Jals Valley was too curvy for that. Still it was going. I said, “Hell with it,” gunned the accelerator, and there we were side by side racing, the road going and going, but there was no end except all that remained undefined and unknown. We would cross there and keep crossing to the next and the next.

I was right alongside the engine blowing hard smoke. That was the important thing, I told myself—I was right there. But all I noticed was its one light in front, a miniature sun, and the smaller backlights streaming down the long body. My feet and ankles started burning—if the road turned too fast, I wouldn’t be able to angle out of it. I opened my window to hear better, the train and my van going, when suddenly there was an explosion, and I thought I’d been shot, but I hadn’t, it was the train.

Maybe it was the light, the small sun had burst out, or the engine had gone out in a steel flare, but then I saw truck lights come on and zag, a whole swarm zagging over to the train, some people running with long sticks, rifles firing—roamers. I kept going, lucky as hell to get out.

• • •

   
I had a snake in the yard, small, black. I was watching it not move, and I wasn’t moving either, the two of us waiting on whoever moved first, when Theo came out the door.

“What’s going on?” he asked and did it in such a way like whatever my answer was it wouldn’t satisfy him.

“Quiet,” I said. “I’m aiming to pick up that snake.” I pointed.

“Where?” he asked. He looked over at Granddaddy, then back across the sweep of the yard. The grass had died brown it was so dry, windless, and his big head was full of snot. He kept rubbing his fingers under his nose—summer colds were the hardest to get rid of, Mam said. And he stood there with all that snot and heft I could never undo.

I pointed harder. “There,” I said and felt him pass on my left. I started into a lunge for the snake, but he clubbed me in the arm and I fell over. From the grass I saw the heel of his boot strike at the head. He did it again and again, the snake’s body vaulting up, then falling, twitching at the grass blades.

“It’s just a garden snake. What you want to pick it up for?” he said and looked across the yard at Granddaddy like his question was a joke and the two of them were in on it. Granddaddy put a cigarette to his mouth, puffed out some smoke, set his arm back on the rest. Theo walked out onto Twelfth.

I watched the heels and cuffs of his jeans, the snake turning the dead grass because there was no wind to do it. I pulled up on my knees like that man praying in the tabernacle, and the sun eyeing the back of my head. My arm was sore. I put my hand up close to the smear of blood in the raw skin, but still I couldn’t grab hold of that snake.

   It was Friday night, the last of the Holiness Signs Revival and Mam promised she’d go with me. She got dressed up in the same white blouse and black skirt—it was more a brown-black
color than I remembered—and it pulled out the brown in her tight curls and the flat moles on her skin. I had those same moles, red and brown patches.

We were on the porch and I said, “Let’s go.” She looked me over.

“I’ve already washed up,” I promised, and she smiled. Then she nodded out beyond the yard, a man walking up, that man from the first night.

I was about to ask her who it was but didn’t bother—she’d been seeing him all week. He was stooped like Grand-daddy, but a little wider, still spindly, elongated like a pancake, and his face was all bearded, gentle, too gentle, so all you could notice was him smiling back, a ridge of teeth, and Mam said, “Harold, let’s go, it’s starting soon.”

We walked up Grandview. Mam and Harold, they laughed and joked and I just kept looking up the blacktop, looking up to the curves peeling off like apple skins, round and round leading to more blacktop and more curves, switchbacks that kept going until, if you weren’t careful, you’d lose your balance and fall.

Preacher Spoon came over as soon as we arrived and took our place. He was happy to see Mam, I could tell, but not as much to see Harold—his smile waned. It was good to have someone on my side, and he made his offer to sit in front. Mam batted her hand, started to say we were good here, but I stood up.

“Let’s go down there.”

“Rosser, I don’t want to. This is good,” she said and contorted like she was aching at a joint in her body that shouldn’t be provoked.

“Well, I’m going,” I said and marched up to the front left pew. It was empty, just me, and that long slab of wood. You could pile that bench up with snakes like I had dreamed it and lose the boundaries of your own skin inside their squirming. I had to close my eyes and tell myself
Stop, don’t let the world get away from you
.

Wasn’t long before Mam sat next to me; Harold next to her.

She sighed. “You’ve embarrassed me, Rosser. When we get home …” She pinched my arm, the same place Theo had slugged me, and I said, “Ow,” but she never finished the threat; she didn’t have to. When I got home, Granddaddy would be at the table eating soup or one of those bread sandwiches he made without peanut butter or jelly or anything, and later Theo would open the door at 2:00 a.m. as loud as he could, and Mam, she wouldn’t be home. Empty. All her threats were empty.

We didn’t talk after that, and she didn’t talk much to Harold either except in curt replies. Meanwhile the tent got so full, it couldn’t hold all the congregants. They had showed up every night, more and more people, and tonight was the largest—standing by the ropes and stakes, their bodies swollen out into the clearing. Biehl Street dead-ended on a hill that overlooked Newport. You could see rooftops and the tops of condominiums over the Fifth Street wall and the ones in Cincinnati with blue and yellow warning lights, but you couldn’t see the river, that’s all there was. That canopy had been staked right up to that precipice where the road ended.

Right in the heart, right up front was Preacher Spoon with his hair slicked into wings and those closed gray eyes, and that Bible he kept pressing with his hand, opening and pressing down on the pages, like he could stamp those words into his skin, into his blood, into his soul and ours.

He had already taken a bottle of fire and held it under his chin. I glanced over at Harold’s fat beard and wanted to put the fire under it until I smelled burning hair. There were three lamps of light on the floor throwing the shadows up at sharp angles against one another, so you were never sure which path to follow, which shadow was the most real, the most true to the contours of Preacher Spoon’s face and the words coming out. Tonight, he had four boxes—some of
the congregants had brought in snakes. As the sermon closed down, people were getting in fits, praying to the Holy Ghost as loud as they could, praying into the arcs of those shadows. And it hadn’t cooled any, the night was betrayed; all the bodies and the sweat and mustiness of the green canvas.

Mam had grabbed my hand during the fire under the chin part—Mam was a big old scaredy-cat.

Then Preacher Spoon felt around the mesh gate. “Have you ever looked inside someone’s soul? Found it hollowed out?” Preacher Spoon stopped and looked through us all. “My soul has been that kind of soul. Until I let the Lord in, allowed the Lord to fill me, and wash me with His blood.”

He took up a snake. “I ask you to come down with your shames and disgraces and your empty souls. Let the spirit fill you tonight.”

I didn’t know where my soul was, what it held or lacked, just like I don’t now—nothing, inside me is nothing. And that must’ve been why all those people came to the front, ’cause inside them was nothing, too. When the women started walking to the front, I said to Mam, “Why don’t you go up there?”

“What do you mean?” She was already clutching on to Harold and had turned her body to the side, away from the commotion.

I nudged her. “Take up a snake, Mam.”

“Rosser,” she said my name with as much gravel as she could and rolled her eyes. “I think we should go, that’s what I think.” She looked for Harold to say something in agreement or nod, but he just looked straight ahead, mesmerized like I had been that first night, like he had lost where he was, stuck to the wooden back.

“You the one who brought me on Sunday,” I said and crossed my arms. I wasn’t budging.

But then it was like the spirit took over, or at least what I thought that would be like, what the spirit had done to all
the other people. I got out of my chair aiming to walk right toward Preacher Spoon and take up one of those snakes. Mam’s hand reached for me, but I wiggled out before she could—the spirit did that, helped me wiggle out.

I walked forward, stepped around the dancing ones, the ones with fire, the ones with snakes, ready to fill my soul with whatever it took, and Preacher Spoon said, “Come on, little lamb; are you ready, little lamb?”

I nodded and opened my hands out and he placed that snake down, a bright diamondback on my wrists, and after he did, I knew that thing was not of me. I had hoped the spirit would fuse us, me and the snake, and I’d be washed through with the blood of Jesus, a blood other than my own, but we remained separated by our skins, our cold blood. I was cut off, having betrayed myself for wanting.

I heard Mam. She was right there yanking my hands away, saying, “Put it down, Rosser, let go.” I opened my eyes and she was still shouting and other people were, too, but they were lost inside their own shouts and didn’t hear my mother. Preacher Spoon pushed them back, made a circle around her, and Harold came forth, and Mam, you could see the puncture on her arm. That snake, it was somewhere, everywhere.

Harold said call a doctor, yelled it to the congregation, and Preacher Spoon said, “No, the Lord will heal her.”

Mam looked at me, aching, clutching her arm above that purple lump, the two small holes.

“What you bring me here for?” she asked.

What was left of the spirit that had filled me, left me.

“Mam,” I said, and she shook her head, and kept her eyes pinched closed and wouldn’t look up.

I ran from there.

   There’s one thing about running and what I know the Lord must’ve known when he put this world in motion—it
never ends. You think it will, you’ll want it to, but it never ends. Don’t believe me, just place your hands against the earth, try to stop it.

   They had a lot of overseers at Bixon Farms and echolocation gates around the compound and dogs. The nine deserters were split up, and I could only find six of them that matched up with the photos I had taken at Pickwick Landing. They may have already sold the others or were using them in the house. And the land, it was sprawling, well over a thousand acres of corn, peas, tobacco, pine groves, hardwoods, and pasture.