Snakeskin Road (35 page)

Maybe those five women weren’t in Cairo. The
guia
had sold one, maybe two at the St. Charles before he headed out. And maybe none were there now, but it was the
maybe
I got stuck on. I knew I should forget them, burn their pictures like the others. They were too many weeks removed, too far gone.

But for over a month I centered the photos in my hand. For over a month I took a room in Adamsville and went to the bars and stayed outside of the church and slept and slept on the bed to make up for all those weeks of not sleeping. I woke every day and there it was in the desk drawer, the Bible. I didn’t want to pick it up, but I knew where the passages were, the ones always calling me. You can avoid the Lord all your life, yet that won’t do any good. So I took the Bible and tried to will myself out of existence like the Lord had done, like my father did, like I did to my mam and brother and grandfather.

I drank strychnine like I had seen Preacher Spoon do because “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” The word abided in me, and I was unharmed.

I burned my wrists, my fingernails black, peeled them off, set fire in a bottle to my feet, under my chin, and I said into that room and beyond its walls, “Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?”

I answered, “It is me, it is me. Damned and protected, both sides of the Lord’s curse. It is me.” But I did not vanish in that smoke or the dreams that followed, the second death where dogs came rising out of the flood, one of the dogs my father.

The next morning in the thin light, I looked out over High Street from the balcony, cleaned the .260 and the shotgun barrels, polished them in bluing. The cars and trucks stayed dusted in sand, unchanged. Later I heard the church choir—

But the Lord had done me no favors. I took the hotel Bible, set it on fire in the sink—the pages held together, too thick to do more than smolder. So I tore the pages out and burned them, and still I knew I’d never be done with the Lord until He was done with me.

I should’ve gone up to West Sayre and followed out a new gang of deserters. That was a smart plan, but I kept bringing out the photos until they took hold—if I couldn’t will myself out of existence, I’d will them into existence. It was decided: they wouldn’t vanish. I wouldn’t let that happen. So I restocked the propane tanks, and the water cistern, and rations, and bought cartridges and new rope and a Tawl knife with a pearled hilt off a marketer. Then I left for the Ohio.

   First, I stopped at Instant Casino in Paducah. The casino was back a ways from the river on Jefferson, a row of wired-off buildings and parking lots built out of the rubble of old houses. You could shift from the hotel to the casino without ever knowing the river was there. All through the Midwestern Free Zones casinos and brothels and churches had popped up, all of it heavily guarded. You weren’t allowed in Instant until you checked your weapons. But down that river was the St. Charles—only an hour’s drive by car or boat—and gamblers were all the time shuttling between the two places. It didn’t take long to find someone going over.

His name was Ed Cochran, and I saw him staggering into the bar, which was a cove. The bar had the fewest lights, and you had to talk over the loud country-swing and bluegrass. I made sure not to sit next to the speakers. It hurt my ears.

They had brought the ceiling down with tiles and air-conditioning vents. The rest of Instant was well lit to catch cheaters at the tables, but they left the bar dark and cold; and it wasn’t summer, it was autumn for Christ sake. Then Ed walked up after playing blackjack, complaining that he’d lost too much money, said he was going to the St. Charles with the rest of what he had.

Two prostitutes tried to talk him out of it, draped their silk sleeves across his back. He shook his head, brushed them off. “I always go to the St. Charles. That place was built out of the wilderness. You know the story?”

“I know it,” I said and came over and bought him a whiskey and told him about Ms. Gerald, what she had done, told him what he already knew, that General Grant had made it his headquarters in the Civil War, that the underground railroad had run through it, that Ms. Gerald had restored it out of a dead town. I talked fast, said I wanted to come along, and if he’d drive, I’d pay for us both.

“All right,” he said, overwhelmed. His eyes kept drifting toward the ceiling, and I followed them, but the ceiling was too black to find a place to fix on and hold. Only then, after we had agreed to go together, did he ask me for my name. That’s how drunk he was.

Ed Cochran was a corn distributor for farms in Indiana and the Illinois valley, and his chin jutted out like the squared head of a diamondback. His nose had widened with age; my nose was doing it, too, though mine had gotten broken once and was more crooked. My face had widened out as much as my brother’s, what I remember of him always, so much bigger than me.

Ed Cochran’s bones kept pushing out through his shirt.
He hardly had any shape to his body except for thin, and his Adam’s apple was a knotted bone stuck in his throat. Every time he talked, that knot forced his words out in a whisper. He only had four fingers on his left hand, and was strangely proud of the way he lost his thumb, pressing it against an irrigation gun. He had four hundred dollars left from the blackjack table and smelled, Lord he smelled—his body, his clothes, all of him soaked through with whiskey, a cloying sugar. I told Ed I was a truck-carrier taking a full load of kaolin from the Southeastern Desert to St. Louis, and it wasn’t long before we were on Highway 50.

He kept swerving through the dark, and I had to grab the wheel.

“Why don’t you let me drive?” I asked.

He said, “It’s my damn car,” and slapped at my hands.

“At least keep your eyes down here on the road and not the treetops,” I said. I made sure he was looking down before I let go. Each time he swerved, we went through the same routine.

He had an old Ford Power, the 2020 model, red with white stripes, and red seats, leather ones, and cat-eye headlights, squared front and rear, a convertible. Any minute, I thought the wind gusts would blow him out into the stars, or at least the branches that hugged the road. But he turned his knobbed shoulders down, clutched the steering wheel, and barreled ahead.

When we got close to the St. Charles, I made him stop. “Just for a second.”

“What for?” he shouted after me as I jogged up the shoulder. “I want to get there. We’re almost there.” His voice wasn’t slurring as bad, even some of the whisper of it had roughened deeper with gravel and anxiousness. He was sobering up, and I told him to wait a second; it wouldn’t be long.

“I’m carsick,” I lied and kept jogging until I came to the tree we had passed where a body—that’s what it looked
like—had been roped to it. I wanted to read the sign hanging off the neck:
No Hunters
.

“That’s longer than any second I’ve ever known,” Ed squeaked out and coughed.

The face and stomach were all eaten up with flies, and when you stepped in close, you could smell it rotting. I felt around his pockets for a wallet or a card, but the overseers had taken everything, even his shoes. It may have been someone from Adamsville. It may have been someone I knew. Several hunters talked of coming this way, but they were as faceless to me now as this one.

“All right. Come on, I’m going to leave your ass,” Ed Cochran shouted.

“I’m paying,” I reminded him and got back in, catching my breath, wiping my hands on my jeans, but I couldn’t get the wet smell of the dead off of me.

“Don’t make any more noise. I ain’t stopping.”

We drove on to the St. Charles, flashing by two more bodies on that road.

   I kept grabbing on to her hair, the separate lengths of it, holding it tight, until finally she pulled away, flicked her neck like a horse, and sat up on the bed. We had been finished for a while, so I knew the touching was over. I just didn’t want it to be. What I felt—the warmth suddenly cold, and the way I thought of it, like the warmth had come from the two of us and lingered between us—that wasn’t the case. It had nothing to do with me, had belonged to her. When she pulled away, she took the warmth, and it was over.

Still I wanted to touch one more time down her body, the full length of it, and measure myself to her skin. She asked if I smoked, and I told her I didn’t but, Lord, I wished I had a cigarette, ’cause if I had one, that would’ve brought her warmth back.

I had already paid, and she started getting dressed, and
so I did, and that’s when I said, “I got one more favor,” and took the photos out, set them in her palm. “Do you know any of these women?”

“I know two,” she told me and nothing else, handed them back until I gave her more money, then she pointed to the youngest girl, she pointed to the one with black hair.

“They worked on the top floors—the rich johns.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling where the piano music had played all night faintly over us, and she retied the loose strands of her blond ponytail.

“Are they here?”

She was still looking down, tightening. “Probably dead. That one,” she touched the girl, “cut a trick all up.”

“Killed him.”

“Just cut him. He’s alive. And that one,” she touched the one with black hair, pressed a little harder, “she left with the crazy girl. They slipped out and that man has a bounty on them—the one got cut—is that what you’re here about? You his bounty hunter?”

I smiled and rubbed the back of my neck. I still had a headache from Ed Cochran’s driving. “I don’t know him. That’s not what I’m here about,” and I looked across the room at the window. “Which way they go?”

“St. Louis. Chicago—everyone thinks they’re up to Chicago—the one with black hair has someone in the city. Hell, they’ve probably already made it or something happened to them. It happened last week. But what I heard, they got on a barge to St. Louis—swam right out to it on the Mississippi.” She walked over to her window, looked out like she wished she had done it, too.

“That’s what a barge operator told one of the girls. Said he dropped them off in St. Louis. But the rivers take you everywhere from here. I like to think they got away,” she said. “There were two girls helped them escape. Got baptized by Ms. Gerald. That’s what Ms. Gerald does, puts you
under water till you almost drown, baptizes you. I’ve had it done to me.

“And one of them, a black girl, she wouldn’t do it, refused to let the guards put her under. I saw the whole thing, all of us did. She got beat, got hurt. Does no good to help someone.” She turned from the window. “Why you want them?”

“They’re deserters.”

“So you’re a bounty hunter for the government?”

“I just need to take them home.”

She smirked and lowered her head at me. “You ain’t just taking them home.” She was daring me to say otherwise, and I didn’t. “You know you can get kicked out of this place? Ms. Gerald doesn’t allow bounty hunters.”

“Only if you say something.”

I stared back at her until she wouldn’t look at me at all.

Her hands, she couldn’t be still with her hands, kept fitting her blouse over her breasts and at her waist, kept tugging on the buttons, up, down. She sighed. “I know a little more.”

So I got up, paid her, sat back on the bed. I watched her put it with the other money and roll it inside a sock.

“They got on a boat in St. Louis. That’s what I heard, going to Chicago. But they probably already there. You too late.”

“Probably,” I said.

“You got all that money, why you want
them?”
I had already answered her once, but I had given the wrong answer, not one to her liking, and I had another chance to give the right one.

Really I didn’t know why—how you got obsessed with people, how they consumed you, and you never even know them.

She was sitting close now, and I placed my finger at the corner of her eye and down her cheek and neck, down the crook of her elbow, her hand until I started to feel warm
again, and she touched my hair, kept brushing through it like my mam had done when she cut it, fluffing it out before scissoring off the ends.

   Couldn’t sleep like she could, but I didn’t wake her, and I snuck outside where it was chilly, the only sound coming from the third-floor balcony—someone on the piano. Whoever was playing was still at it. I’d heard the same man at Instant. He wouldn’t stop playing that night either. Hell, it had to be near six in the morning.

I looked up at the balcony, the few lights there and someone hurried up a side stairwell. It must be the servants’ entrance, and I started that way, got to the bottom of the long ascension of steel rungs, and stopped. I was waiting for something. Maybe permission to go into that world—the rich johns like the blond whore had said, but the guards would throw me out. But that piano player—he must’ve known the two deserters.

Then the door opened and five, six guards came rushing down. I stepped out of their way and did so casually, but I knew I might have to run if they started coming for me.
They don’t know you
, I told myself, and sure enough, they swept on by.

“Where you going?” I shouted. They just kept on until they reached a gate and opened it, kept running and never answered.

Wasn’t long before more guards appeared at the main entrance of the St. Charles and took after the first group. I followed behind them, a path by abandoned houses and brush, all the way down to the long bank of the Ohio River.

They had flashlights pointed, rolling over the water, and rifles drawn on one woman and one man knee-deep in water, walking slow-footed to the shore. The woman was in front, the man a few steps behind. They didn’t have on any clothes.

“We were just swimming,” she said, cursing the guards all huddled up.

“You can’t come out here and you know it,” someone from the huddle said.