Snakeskin Road (20 page)

“Shouldn’t have worn black,” someone admonished.

“I’m not wearing it for the rest of the week,” someone else said, and a few girls giggled. Jinx started in slowly on a new song, and that’s when the interruption, its last imprint disappeared completely, the world had circled back into its musical place again.

No one liked wearing the cheerleading outfit or the cowgirl outfit with its heavy leather chaps except for Lisa,
though she had never been a cheerleader or a cowgirl. “It’s just something different,” she explained. Always at the St. Charles you had to explain yourself. An unclarified motive made you suspicious.

Tonight, however, was a dress night because a firm from Nashville had requested “ballroom girls,” as Ms. Gerald put it.

As they walked down the stairs, Cawood was already lilting to Jinx’s piano. Someone was playing a saxophone. Probably Dane Red. Everyone called him Dang Red when he got deep into a solo—“Dang Red, Dang,” the tricks and girls would holler, “you’ve got something,” and stomp. He’d go and go until his cheeks fired red and breathless, and he could go no more. He played the sax, and his younger brother, Benji Red, played drums. Benji always showed up after his floor shift at Instant Casino. Then he and his brother and Jinx would go until two, three in the morning.

“Come on, Jennifer, you got to feel it a little bit,” Cawood said.

She did feel it, just not in the way Cawood did. The music tried to soothe, but something inside her ultimately wouldn’t accept it, and though the music filled her, she had shut the music out. Whether it was Jinx’s music, or some man she didn’t want holding her holding her, or Ms. Gerald’s commandments—all of these things filled her now and left her empty of herself.

At the bottom, with the trembling changed to shaking, the floor shaking strong, people dancing just on the other side, Cawood set her body in front of the exit.

“All the way down this stair and you haven’t talked to me. Not once.” Cawood asked questions this way—assertions to be denied or confirmed, then apologized for.

“Still that baby. Going to have to let go of that baby.” Cawood nodded. She took Jennifer’s chin and made her nod, too.

And that touch … how was it, Jennifer wondered, the
touch of someone’s hand to your face could almost make you cry? This was something she couldn’t shut out.

“Three months you’ve been carrying this burden, and I ain’t saying you haven’t done your work, but you’re starting to depress me.”

“It’s not just the baby.”

“I don’t want to know—we’ve had this talk before. Whatever it is, I don’t want to know about your family, who you loved before you got here, and neither does anyone else, none of these tricks. You’ve got to forget that world or you won’t make it. Ms. Gerald’s watching you. I’ve seen her. She’ll put you down on those bottom floors. And those girls, you don’t want to be one of those girls.” She held Jennifer’s chin straight with her own. “Now, you’ve got to do something that seems impossible, and I know, ’cause when I had to leave Atlanta, I felt the same way. You have to embrace this world, this small little speck, the St. Charles in Cairo, Illinois. If you’re like me, whatever there was in Atlanta, whatever there was in Alabama for you, ain’t there now. And this, too, the St. Charles, it’ll be a speck to brush off your skin one day, just flick it off like it was never a part of you. As soon as you leave. I’m leaving in one month. But you’ve got to make it to the end. I’m not going to be around. I’m almost a free woman.”

Jennifer took her hand and pressed it against Cawood’s cheek, her hand so cool against Cawood’s warm face. She took the back of her hand and pressed it as well, pressed out the coolness, front to back, and Cawood let go of Jennifer and let her arms fall by her sides.

“Now you got me thinking. My younger sister, two years younger, she did this to me at night when we had the same room. She could never keep her hands warm, even in the dead of summer, and she’d roll her hand, one then the other, on the side of my face, like my skin was biscuits for patting, and tell me, ‘You so warm, Caw’—she called me Caw—‘and I’m so cool. We even each other out.’ She’d do
that, and I’d let her until she fell asleep. All night I felt her hand on my face, even in my dreams. We were just girls.” Cawood closed her eyes and nodded. Then she opened her eyes, those circles of white, the dark center, her black skin.

“I ain’t going to keep having this talk with you, Jenny. I’m tired of having this talk with you.”

“But you’re so warm, Caw,” Jennifer teased. Then “All right” when Cawood smiled.

“All right,” Cawood said. She opened the door and Jinx’s music poured into the stairway.

A trick walked up, took Cawood’s hand like they had known each other forever, good friends, and Cawood said, “Where you been so long?” “Waiting on you,” he answered so sweet.

Jennifer navigated into the noise before someone approached her. “Floating” was what the girls called it—she floated through the talking, switching bodies, long drinks in hand, the east doors open and screened, the first night of this, because it was cool, had cooled now, autumn as promised, autumn she never knew in the desert was definitely here. Some girls were already dancing in a huddle, the “St. Charles football huddle” they called it, with arms spread over shoulders, feet kicking to the center. The tricks broke in, peeled them out one by one onto the tiled floor, black and white squares that spread from the east end to the kitchen that shuttered the west end, the bar against the north, everyone talking, laughing. To her it was like being submerged in water, these conversations, the smoke, Professor Jinx, all of it just as heavy as water.

During the days, the girls went down to the river to swim—the Ohio because it wasn’t as muddy as the Mississippi. If a barge came along, they waved and called to it until the barge operator honked back, Jennifer’s stomach felt wet and cold, washed by the small tide of the boat’s wake, the river for the moment like the ocean. And she’d dive in, swim hard to reach the bottom like she did at seven, twelve, and
older—she used to race Mathew to the bottom to grab a handful of mud and bring it to the surface.

She went down and down until that river became as dark and muddy as the others she’d known—the Pearl, the Tensaw, the Coosa—before she rose to the surface, blowing the air out of her lungs like a whale. And waited, waited for Mathew to come up beside her.

But the Ohio just slipped past, barely rippling, moving quietly on to join the Mississippi. The barge had already gone by. Sometimes the other girls caught her looking for Mathew, and they stared at her like she was crazy—
What’re you looking for? What crazy thing are you doing now?
They were all unnerved by how quiet she was, and no one would talk to her except Cawood and Jinx.

But the air in the parlor was thicker than the Ohio, harder to breathe. She stepped across the tiles, focusing on shoulders and belts and shoes, letting them blur together, and didn’t look at the johns’ faces.
Don’t look above the neck or they’ll approach
. Some girls did, tried to figure out the nicest or richest, the easiest johns to deal with, and tried to avoid the regulars who liked to bruise. Ms. Gerald said a little bruising was acceptable, but made those clients pay extra and sign an agreement for collection of property damage. “A binding agreement,” Ms. Gerald explained to Jennifer that first day, “is still honored by city-state and federal law.” The girls called it the “whore prenup.”

“Which means,” Lisa said, putting out a cigarette, “if you have the money, you can do whatever you want to your whore.”

Jennifer slipped around the huddled girls still kicking their feet, to Professor Jinx playing quick, his cracking voice like Mat’s father’s records:

That voice of his was dry and sweet, like burning the driest wood and watching it turn and pop, blue and orange. Jinx was a small man, lanky, his brown fingers too big for him, shooting out the cuffs of his white shirt—always a white shirt—with fat knuckles and thick wrist joints, all those strong bones pegged into the back of his hands.

She didn’t want to disturb him, but she stood by the piano anyway and waited for his solo to end. He had stopped singing, was counting off the notes
tet, tat
, that thing he did where he scatted with the keys up and up the scale, while Dang Red waited, plopped on a chair, one leg hooked back, ready to anchor him into a solo.

Dang Red was young, but so overweight he had to sit on a box or a chair every time he sat in, and the sweat on his arms and large face bathed his pale skin in a milky whiteness; he always wore what Jinx called a porkpie hat and his lips and nose were as squat as the hat, as if he had been squished in the front, smushed down from the top of his head and along those square cheeks, all of him into a square porcelain box. With one hit, he’d crack right open.

He clicked his fingers on the reed until Jinx eased up and swept his hands over the keyboard, graceful, slow, letting the piano catch its breath, and in the applause, Dang Red hooked his leg and sharpened out his first note. He was so crouched and pigeoned, his head under that straw hat so low, that Jennifer was afraid the sax would bump the floor and shatter. It was the way Dang Red held things and moved—everything about him fragile.

“Good to see you,” Jinx said, his voice still dry, always in need of water. He nodded.

She nodded back. “You sound good tonight, Jinx.”

“Every night.”

“Of course, every night.” And that’s how it started, how he pulled her into his joking and teasing like she used to do with Terry, something familiar she needed.

“What do you want to hear? Anything?”

“I didn’t know you were already taking requests.”

“I just started. What you want?”

“How about ‘Miss Otis’ or ‘Cotton Field’?”

He shook his head. “Not upbeat enough. You’re just trying to bring us all down. The people won’t have it, not this evening.”

“I heard you playing Nat King Cole earlier.”

“There you go.” He smiled. “‘Straighten Up and Fly Right.’ Want to hear it again? Now that Red’s here, I can do it even better.” But Jinx’s hands slipped at the keys; he fell forward, tried to catch himself, and did, pulling himself up on the bench, rolling his shoulders and setting the tempo back.

Dang Red had kept his eyes closed this far, but when Jinx slipped he peered over to see what was happening.

Jinx waved Dang on with his big left hand. “I’ve got it,” he called, and Dang closed his eyes, turned to the small crowd of dancers.

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said.

“Don’t be. I shouldn’t let you distract me. It’s my own doing, not yours.” Everything for Jinx was about perfection, no matter how easy he talked about playing hot, fast, and loose. There was nothing he hated worse than a loss of concentration. And when he got tired, his hands started to slip, couldn’t feel the keys right. She’d seen him at those moments pick up a cup of tea and drink, grabbing the cup all along its sides. Those strong hands shook that tea like an old engine.

Jennifer had told him to rest more often, but Jinx wouldn’t give up his all day rehearsing.

“This piano gets too lonely without my touch,” he had
said, and this wasn’t the only piano he kept company. He worked all the local casinos, had his own club in St. Louis—The Roll ’Em Pete—and he was married, though he seldom talked about his wife.

Jinx came to the St. Charles for a few days at a time, sometimes he stayed a whole week. Ms. Gerald kept a room open for him. Then he was gone, leaving everyone with a silence that made them less hungry for breakfast, less eager to get out of bed or wanting to do a single thing.

“As I see it,” he told her often, “I don’t have a choice in the matter. I’ve got to play.” He kept wet, cool towels beside him on the bench to rest his hands on, and sometimes he’d ask Jennifer to get him a new towel wrung in water and crushed ice. The coldness kept his hands numb and going.

She was staring at his hands now, sweat dappled along the sleeves of his shirt. “What’s your age again, Jinx?”

“You should never ask a young man his age. Why you doing that? You think ’cause I’m slipping on this piano I’m old? I’m fifty-six. My father didn’t pass until he was ninety-one.” He slipped a second time; just his left fingering.

“I’m causing you problems,” she said.

Jinx waved to Dang Red. “I got it,” he called out. “Keep going,” another sweep of his hand cutting the light, those swollen knuckles crossed in hard skin.

“I wish you could stay.” Jinx cleared his throat and looked up. She looked back, waiting, not ready to leave. She hoped he’d reconsider and tell her
I want you to stay
. But he wouldn’t. Sometimes when she came over, he didn’t say a word, just kept his focus on the piano. He had grumbled to her before that she was bothering him and to stop it. Once in a blue temper, he abruptly said, “I can’t talk with you now.”

The glass doors, on the east wall had been opened and the wind carried through the whole parlor, autumn as promised. There were two guards, one on either end of the wide sweep of doors, but not carrying rifles—rifles weren’t allowed
on the floor at night, so mostly the guards kept their arms crossed and stood like potted trees, watching, watching.

“Okay, I’m going,” she said. “But when I come back tell me more about your father and play ‘Miss Otis Regrets.’”

“We’ll talk about him, I promise.” Jinx liked talking about his father. “But ‘Miss Otis’ will have to wait until tomorrow. Just come down.”

She would do that—come down and sit with him—and should’ve done it earlier instead of staying by that window, but she just didn’t think of it. She forgot to do these things that were good for her. Like eating, she didn’t do much of that either. Instead she thought about the girl who jumped from the fifth floor and didn’t quite die; instead she thought about her baby, her missing baby. Talking with Jinx was like a thin piece of paper catching fire while they talked and joked, until he had had enough of talking. Later as she tried to remember it, grab it, the paper was ash, gone.