Snakeskin Road (37 page)

I kept along the Illinois River but there were no other boats, no one else, just the water hiding all that was underneath and the sun gathering at the surface. On the far bank—trees, their branches leaning out, scooping up water and letting go, brushing small pulses into the current.

Finally, I reached Starved Rock, rolled the Ford deep under a stand of birches, and walked down to the line of the river there.

The water shimmied, and out in the middle of the Illinois was the dark and long trees of Plum Island, and to the north Starved Rock, the lock and dam with its caution lights, the sandstone bluffs and canyons. The sky was too thick with a black-grayness to see beyond it. A storm was coming, bullfrogs already calling to one another, anticipating, and the lightning getting close like all the fires the day before around Normal joining into one crooked passage. I ran back to the car, put the top up, and slept with the rain beating down, beating down, washing me in and out of dreams.

   All day I watched the boat ramp, the stone dock there, then back up to Starved Rock, Eagle Rock along the edge of the river, hiking the pathways through the woods.

Route 178 that crossed the Illinois below the ramp had
collapsed years ago, leaving half arches and columns of cement and steel rods that jutted out, sluiced the water downstream. The columns stood like a gateway into a forgotten world. The trail paths had grown over with brush, and scrub oaks, and ferns, and the wooden platforms and signs for the state park overlooks had worn through, broken and empty of people. Only the sound of the woodpeckers marked the emptiness.

In late afternoon, the water shimmied in the flat aim of the sun; it was icy when I put my feet in, burned all the way up my calves, and yellow and red leaves fell in around me, eddying downriver, latching onto my wet cuffs and wrists. Only one barge had come and gone through the lock where the river tumbled out, and I kept my feet in the water until they grew so numb I couldn’t feel them.

After supper, I burned three pictures in the shrinking fire, their faces absorbed into purple and black tailings, let them go, and kept the other two. The woman with black hair, one corner had bled from where I held it, the sweat in my hand smearing her arm and the gap around her into dust, and the one of the girl had crackled along the edges and a crease along her face split her in half as if the mouth and shoulders belonged to another ghost altogether. They were ghost people I kept coming for, like myself, my family. I’d wait for them a few more days, then head back to Adamsville; I’d burn their pictures, too.

The branches formed a jagged opening overhead to the stars, a new moon. Always the stars like the Book of Jude, “The wicked are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.”

Forever. Was it true, our wicked bodies stretched across the ether? Those same stars had fallen into my stomach, grinded against themselves into me. I could not fill my soul like Preacher Spoon had wanted, like I wanted, not even when I held the snake’s belly. I had placed the universe in
my belly, and still I could not escape the nothingness of my own existence.

As I sat there, the sky shifted against me as if heaven was as solid and immovable as the earth and scuttling against the branches. That’s what the wind was doing, its hollow whirring, spilling ghost people back and forth across the ether I could take but never hold.

   I dreamed all night of those men by the fire.

I drove up, got out, and shot them all in the face, cutting away their disease, dropping them to the earth.

But it wasn’t over—the dream looped back—I was in the car again, driving up to the fire, the bodies waiting. I told myself,
Don’t kill them this time. Wait until you’re done at Starved Rock. Once you’re done, you can go to Normal, find these roamers, put them out of their misery
.

I stopped the car, got out, pulled the shotgun waist high, and shot the back of their heads. I couldn’t look at their faces again.

As soon as I killed the roamers a second time, I was back in the convertible driving up to the fire and the black earth around me slowly receding. I got out and came up to those flames to warm my hands.

“It’s getting cold tonight,” I said, and they looked straight into the embers, waited.

Never once did they turn on me. Never once did they do a thing to me. They knew why I was there. And the fire—it never went out. No matter where I was in the dream, I could see the flames on the periphery, shooting off flares, rising.

   One time in Newport, Mam had pneumonia and before it was done with her, she also got pleurisy. Every time she shifted in bed, it hurt. Breathing hurt.

“I don’t want to breathe no more,” she kept saying over and over, half dreaming from the drugs.

Theo said she’d die for sure, and we’d be motherless as well as fatherless, but the nurse who visited our home from the outreach center said it was nothing like that. “Your mother will be okay,” she promised. “If she gets worse, just call me,” and she handed Theo a strip of paper with a number. “I’ll get her back to the hospital.”

Theo waited until the nurse left, then balled up the paper, and threw it in the trash. “That woman can’t save her,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I know,” he said, yelling, daring me not to believe him.

As soon as he slipped upstairs, I dug that strip of paper out of the trash, kept it with me. Memorized the number, which ended in 8934—I still know that part.

At night, I had dream after dream of walking in and finding my mother dead. But all night she kept me awake because the pain made her call out. “Breathe,” she’d say. “I don’t want to breathe.”

Though it was hurting her, at least I knew she was alive, at least she woke me from the nightmares of finding her still body.

Sometimes, I got so worried about it, I felt my way along the dark hall until I was at her bedside making sure her covers were rising, sinking. I listened to that raspy voice and frail cough. Lord, that cough cut into me, into my lungs.

I fell asleep on the floor sometimes, and Theo, if he discovered me there in the morning, would kick me awake.

“Told you to stay in your bed,” he’d say. “Don’t bother her. Is he bothering you, Mam?”

She was trying to move her arm at him, though it hurt her, and kept telling him to stop. Just that one word,
Stop. Stop
. Even after he told her he had stopped, she kept repeating it like the word had gotten stuck on her tongue.

During those nights when she was sick, her voice held a different kind of singing—it was the last of her, what she’d whisper before she died—this voice, slipping out from her room, down the hall to me. She was telling me,
This is what death sounds like, Rosser
.

And the truth was, when Theo kicked me, it didn’t hurt, ’cause I knew Mam’s lungs and sides were in worse pain. I was feeling nothing compared to what she was. It actually made me feel an allegiance to Mam, like I understood a little bit of the pain, what she was going through, and just like death was kicking at her, Theo was kicking me. I understood.

Months later she was better and gone again. “Shacking up,” was how Theo put it, “with a married man on Eighth and Commerce. She’d been better off to die.”

“No,” I told him and raised my hands, but he saw them coming and took them.

“You need to give up on her,” he said and threw my hands back at me and spit on the ground.

All I knew, she was gone, and that coughing that kept waking me was gone, and that silence at night, it would get to be too much in my dreams like someone was pressing a thick heavy glass against me, trying to press my body down into the bed until I was no more.

The only way to break the glass was to jump up, so I’d jump up and suddenly be awake, sweating, sweating so much, and realize there was no glass. And I’d start crying and not know what to do, or where to go.

   I was still sleeping when I heard a laugh like a crow; it hung there circling, pricking me awake. Then I heard voices circling from the dock and I took the rifle, checked the breech—it was loaded—and worked my way along the path.

One car. A boat at the dock with a raised helm, its wooden hull scratched up, needing paint. The Cadillac
trunk was open. One man stood with his hand propped on the roof behind it. A black roof, polished, gathering up specks of sunlight, and his clothes were the same black, and his skin the lightest brown. He was a good bit taller than his car and he kept his other hand on his belt where the gun was holstered; next to him were the two women, the deserters, holding each other like months ago at Pickwick Landing, like they had remained inseparable. The dresses, blue and green—even from this distance they hung worn from the shoulders, draggled, faded.

There was another man loading boxes into the trunk. He was younger than the big man at the car, kept his lips shut tight, long-waisted but short; every step was about keeping his body aligned. The smuggler from St. Louis was unloading his boat. They met halfway, made the transfer, and split back up, the sun blurring the edges of their arms with the same beads of white pressing on the water current and the roof.

The smuggler wore a dark blue cap, wide in the front and as salt-dried as the orange one Granddaddy’d had. He kept his head tucked under it, making his face too dark to know. But he was the loudest. Everyone laughed at what he said, what he did. Even the young man sometimes grinned until he revealed his teeth, and shook his head.

I walked along the tree line until I faced the hood, the driver’s corner—that was as straight with the front as I could get—eighty, ninety yards—and I stayed back of a wide sycamore, its bark peeled onto the ground. I was careful not to step on the peelings.

Then the trunk shut.

The smuggler said, “Hell, that’s it,” clear and ringing. He hugged the two women, slapped the big man on the back and called him partner, and said, “Next time, LT.” They stood there, all five bunched together, and LT handed the smuggler money. He turned to leave, and LT’s helper,
the young man, opened the door for the women. His gun was holstered, too, and his shirt was untucked from carrying the boxes, the wind catching the edges of the white tails and twisting them. I fired, bolted the cartridge out, and everyone scattered to the ground. The young man fell as the women slipped behind the trunk with the other men.

For a long time, forever, they stayed behind that trunk, and the blood of that man pooled on the ground, soaked through his shirt; the rear door was still open.

Then the smuggler ran toward the dock as LT came to the front of his car, shooting at the woods, just firing into the trees hoping to catch something, to scare me long enough. My shot hit the windshield glass, and the two runaways edged along the wheel to the back door. I slipped the bolt into place, shattered the glass there.

The girl fell, but the other woman lifted her, pushed her into the car as it jerked, and I fired, struck LT in the arm, I saw him grab it, and fired again, missed, and the Cadillac sped past me. I couldn’t hear. My ears had popped and were swirling now with a thickness. They ached from the reports, and I knew then, I should’ve stayed on LT.

The boat headed out.

The black-haired woman, the older one, had fallen lifting the girl and couldn’t reach the moving car herself. Now she was running to the opposite woods, away from the dead body that had tripped her up. I fired into the air. She kept running. And as I pushed a shell in, locked it, I knew that was the wrong decision, too. She was gone.

   The boat had already passed the fragile columns of Route 178, splitting the river, and I found her trying to work up the sandstone ledges toward the bridge. Her olive dress, it was that shade of green, kept snagging on the thin boles knuckled into the earth.

I yelled out, “I’m coming. There’s no need to go any higher.” That’s when she saw me. She took a good look and dove into the water, so I jumped in after her.

The boat had already slipped away, and only faintly the motor chopped at the air because of my plugged ears; the water didn’t help. Why she chose the water—why deserters panicked the way they did—I could never figure, but I swam until my lungs burned, until I grabbed her foot, pulled her leg under, and bound her waist. The two of us held in the river, struggling; she kept hitting, yelling in the brackish water.

“You’re going to drown us,” I said, but she wouldn’t let up, no matter how much I threatened, no matter how much I squeezed and hit back. But eventually she tired, and I hauled her to shore and kicked her in the stomach. “Could’ve drowned us.” Kicked her again and again until she coiled up, lay there unmoving in the grass, leaves, and dirt.

When the breath returned to the runaway, she inhaled it in a long sustained draw. It tightened and coiled inside her and came back out a dark, sad moan. Quavering, lost, the moan cut into me like those women crying under Preacher Spoon’s tent. For a long while, I was afraid to touch her, afraid of so much grief.

Jennifer heard a door close, it was a car door, but it
could’ve been that door from when she was twelve, trapped on one side, her mama on the other. She was just as bloodied now, and in her mind she pounded that door. She could do it, break it open. “Mama,” she said, “open up. It’s okay. It’s me.” She pounded though she wasn’t striking anything at all. Her hands had been tied. She couldn’t move, and she could feel her hands, how they dangled there, numb.

She stopped.

She looked up at the sky—the car was moving, reeling—and she knew even though she was here, Mazy had gotten away and would get to Chicago—she had to. Jennifer’s mama was waiting in Chicago, lingering, writing letters Jennifer couldn’t respond to, and that distance sprawled and poured over her.

The wind blew her hair, crossed the blue of the sky into strips of glass, and that hair stuck to the blood on her forehead and mouth; she chewed on her tongue but there was no dust to roll and keep. It took a moment to calm her breathing.

She had lost her baby, Mathew’s baby, and was glad it had already passed because surely the child would be dead now. The engine and the road buzzed in her stomach. At least Mazy had gone on—Jennifer had been able to do that much—the girl would make it.