Snakeskin Road (23 page)

“Tears will do no good,” she whispered, something her mama often said, adding, “The desert won’t hold them.”

That’s when she noticed the girl’s wrist, the left one, turned, marked in cuts back and across, the blood sticky, and she went to the dresser, pulled out a shirt, bit it, an old shirt tasting of cedar, and tore it, gingerly wrapping the raw skin—she didn’t want to wake the girl—and wrapped the other arm the same.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should’ve kept you with me. I should’ve come looking for you,” as if these words could heal Mazy, could change her body back. She dried her tears as they came and told herself,
No good; nothing’s good
.

There were small bruises, purple splotches above the elbow, along the calves where the dress lay, covering everything else. At least Mazy’s body had let go of its shaking; she was resting, still wearing her shoes, and Jennifer unbuckled one, peeled it from her foot.

Below them, the piano—it was two, Jinx playing. He had barely started when he came to a halt.

She could see his hands trying to bend out of the night’s
sleep. It was too early for them to shake. He was staring at the piano like he did, his jaw hinged loose, staring at the piano like it was some new, amazing thing he had to figure out. He’d spend all day figuring it out.

Then he struck the keys, the same notes. He’d do this over and over, build the song “From the center-root,” Jinx liked to call it. “I start right in the middle, work both directions—build a little toward the start, then come back to the center-root, build toward the finale.” Eventually that melody, that root circled through the whole piece until it was done, and he’d work on the next song. All night he inserted those roots into his solos, and she’d stop wherever she was in the St. Charles, expecting them, fragments of music that had purled through her head all afternoon, unfolding in the space around her.

   “Are you all bad luck when it comes to women? Is that really how you got your name?” Jennifer had asked the first time she met Jinx. She’d heard him through the floor in her room for weeks and knew of him from the other girls, and walked by and said nothing. But on this night, she sat at the bar listening until she got restless, then got up halfway through a song about a woman named Lucille—

and walked over to him. It was the third song in a row about women treating him bad.

He didn’t answer, just kept on playing. When she didn’t move away from the piano, he said, “I guess I’m not all bad luck; you’re here. I’m married—my second wife. She’s stuck
to me so far—that’s two women, so I’m not totally jinxed, though I’ve had my share of low-down love, the wrong kinds of love.” He shook his head.

“The truth is, some people look at me suspiciously. They think my name sounds like I’m getting into trouble or causing it, like I’m a bad omen. But the truth is—since you asked—it was my father’s nickname when he played in New Orleans, played the piano morning and night: the Swanson Club, Tipawa. He had the fastest hands. You couldn’t catch those fingers with your eyes, no way; he’d be on to the next key. So the others in the trio started calling him Jink with a
k
. For a long time that was his name. Everywhere he took me with him, people called him Jink.

“But my father had a second side—jokester, trickster. One time when I was in high school, I picked my hair out as far as I could. When I walked, it floated.” Jinx laughed. “I had my own private cloud of hair, that’s how I saw it. My father kept his hair all slicked back, straightened, and cut short, so it was my rebellion—hair. That’s all I possessed.” He put his hands out like there was nothing to his body to own, not now, not when he was in high school, not ever. Then he dusted one hand down the front pearl buttons of his shirt. He was thin like Terry but had muscular fingers, arms. Terry carried his muscles in his shoulders.

“My father, he was a big man. He told me to cut my ’fro or birds were going to nest in it.” Jinx crooked his neck so Jennifer could get a better look at the whole slab of his head. “See what time has done to my beautiful hair?” He rubbed his fingers through the tiny, flat curls. “Scruff is all I grow now,” and he shook his head, disgusted.

“My father did that to me constantly. Came by and picked at my ’fro with his hands, yelled, ‘Watch out. A bird’s getting in that hair, nesting down.’ And I jumped. Always, I jumped. He got me so many times.” Jinx laughed and this time his voice departed. He had to clear the gravel out of his throat before he could go on. “See, he got it in my mind—
birds in my hair—got me thinking about birds, red, blue, hawks, wrens, worried me with it constantly. I woke up in the middle of the night shooing birds away from the bedposts. Wasn’t a bird there. Man was a trickster.

“His friends got the same treatment. As my father put it—‘I’m just helping people let go of their blues.’ Then he’d dig at my side, smile, and I’d tell him to stop. And he’d tell me I was being too serious. Always told me I was too serious. His job, he said, was to try to ease me up some.

“So he did enough of this fooling at church, and at Jack’s Grocery where we shopped, and just walking, my father loved to go walking in the French Quarter, and strolling to his clubs until after a while people started saying, ‘Look out. Here comes Jink. He’s going to play some trick on you. Those fast hands, watch out. He’s going to jinx you,’ and they all moved out of his way. Smart thing they did.

“Wasn’t long before his name got changed. Everyone started calling him Jinx. His real name was Edward Smith, but Jinx, well, that’s a hell of a lot more interesting. My mother called him ‘Edward’—she was the only one, insisted on proper names at her table. When he passed, I took up
Jinx
out of respect.”

“What’s your real name?”

“It’s Jinx,” he said. “That’s my real name. Fits with all the troubles come on top of me. Especially from women.” He squared himself with the piano, straightened his neck—

Jinx always wore white long-sleeved shirts, tuxedo shirts with silver buttons, pearled buttons, like his father; always had a story to tell about the things his father did. His voice was frail and dry and sweet. There was a sweetness to his
sound that flowed through the words and yet was so fragile like it might crumble and contradicted the way Jennifer had always heard the songs, especially Billie Holiday and her sad tones that wouldn’t let up. Jinx’s voice always let up, always wanting a drink of water.

“Why you like this old music?” he said one afternoon after she had dragged a chair over to listen. Jennifer had slouched forward, elbows on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands, making requests for “Miss Otis,” “Strange Fruit,” and “Traveling Light,” reeling off the names without thinking. “Now, someone you know had to love this music or you had to love it. Which is it?”

“Don’t ask me that, Jinx,” she said.

He stopped playing, looked straight at her. “What happened to you?”

Jennifer sat up. Without the music the earth slipped, just enough that she had to make sure her bare feet were on the cold floor, and her body was indeed her body sitting up in a chair.

He was always demanding in that way, wanting to know the history of things, how people were connected. But it was too much to reveal her parents, Mathew, her baby. Everyone at the St. Charles knew about the baby and that was enough. Just the thought of telling more weakened the threads of those people inside her, and she wondered how much longer she’d be able to hold on to them. She couldn’t lose them.

Jinx sighed, started back on the lower keys. “I ain’t trying to scare you,” he said. “It’s just, I’m always telling you stories. I’d like to hear some.”

He said nothing else and after a while, she refound those center-roots and submerged, wedging her chin back into her hands.

Through the evening Jinx played what the clients wanted and when no one wanted anything, he played piano solos. Later when everyone was upstairs finishing business
or, if lucky, an early night and resting, well, you heard Jinx working through his center-roots again, but faster—what he had started slow at 2:00 in the afternoon and wouldn’t finish until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. He struck the keys, paused, then let the keys tumble, quick tempo like his father, one rhythm into another—like tumblers inside a lock—then the lock clicked and he paused to call the sun back from the other half of the world. The pauses grew and grew as the hours slipped, as if the distance between river currents had grown too great, all the magnetic pulls of the world stretched to their end, and leaving just a pool of black water, unmoving, silent.

   Mathew loved that kind of music—big band, swing, blues. It was the music of his father, Mr. Chris, who loved it and danced to it. That year before his death, Jennifer got Mr. Chris to dance with her in the boxed kitchens of the houses they lived in. A few times, she got Mat to dance. But he was in too much awe of the steps his father made and never tried to emulate them.

When they first started dating, no matter what they did—make love, eat, kiss, sleep, drive—they listened to Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington. It was so much a part of Mat, how he moved through the world, and she wanted to get close to anything, everything that was a part of him. They planned to get married, but a few months before the wedding, Terry passed. He came up from a mining hole coughing; his lungs shut and air gave way to blood.

That’s when the desert and all its vastness swirled against her and knocked her down. There was nothing to grab on to but wind and blowing sand, nothing to steady her falling. Every day, Mathew held her in bed and told her, “I’m sorry, Jen. What can I do? Just tell me. Anything.”

She wouldn’t answer; she couldn’t. Those words were like a wool she couldn’t tear or reach around to throw away.
All she heard was the wind sweeping the sand; his voice, the touch of his fingers were just another sweep of that same grit. Mathew smelled like clay, like the deepest core of the earth—he’d never get that out of his skin, just like Terry. All day, he held her and she suffocated under the smell of red iron. When she had the strength, she picked up his arm, moved it off without explaining.

When she went to her mother’s house, Delia leaned up from the table and without any acknowledgment said, “Terry,” just kept repeating his name for Jennifer to answer to and “Why did he?” Then long silences. Jennifer sat at the table across from her or on the sofa, cooked supper in the kitchen, and wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t dare give anything except for those plates of food and tea. She waited for her mama.

One night, a couple of weeks after Terry’s death, Jennifer drove over and found her mother at the table with an envelope.

“How are you?” she asked. Delia had looked especially worn the last few evenings, wearing that old ghost again. Jennifer worried that Terry’s death might send Delia so far down, she’d never climb out.

As much as Terry had meant to Jennifer, he meant even more to her mama. She had depended on him to get through her days, to survive the desert. They had only been in Alabama for seven months. Jennifer had latched onto Mathew, but Delia still had no friends. And Jennifer didn’t have the strength to replace Terry, nor the desire. She was old enough now not to hate herself for that selfishness.

Delia was at the table, head crooked in her hands, where they gripped the thick black-gray hair that would be Jennifer’s one day; those hands held her up, suspended. She was looking at the far wall, and Jennifer thought the two of them might sit awkwardly in that small room as usual. But then her mother said, “I want to get out.” She let her hands drop, they knocked the table, and she turned to Jennifer.
The skin around her eyes was burned and swollen, so her eyes looked even smaller than usual, painful to look at. But it was the first time since Terry’s death she had acknowledged her daughter.

“Mama, you should do something about your eyes.”

“Let’s go for a jaunt,” Delia said, saying
jaunt
like Terry would, and she showed enough of her teeth that it could be mistaken for a smile.

Jennifer quickly said, “I’ve got my truck,” surprised her mother wanted to go anywhere. Delia never made suggestions, never wanted to do anything, as if by sitting alone, she could wait out her depression, wait out her life until one or the other ended.

“Just let me get something on.” Her mama put the envelope in her pocket, tied her robe, and went to the back.

Jennifer looked around the room—so spare, the desert trawling a gust of wind across the north side of the house. Then it fell back to catch its breath. They were in Richmond, not far out of Montgomery, and she thought they might drive up the river to the capitol ruins there.