Snakeskin Road (24 page)

Jennifer sat on the edge of the bed going through Mazy’s notebook. It was lunchtime and Naomi had brought up plates of food and a wardrobe of clothes. “I’m guessing she’s a two, but I also have some size fours. I don’t have any junior sizes.” Naomi laid the plates on the table, then transferred the clothes from the crook of her arm to the dresser. “One of the bras should fit,” she said and asked if there had been any progress.

“She’s exhausted,” Jennifer explained. “I don’t know when she’ll wake up. Those cuts are going to need time to heal.”

“One guard’s in the hallway in case she gets violent again.” Naomi walked to the bed, looked the girl over. “She’s sleeping so hard.”

“Did you hear what I said about time?”

Naomi nodded. “I’ll talk with Ms. Gerald.”

That had been an hour ago, and none of their murmurings, none of that noise or the smell of cooked chicken had gotten Mazy to wake up.

Jennifer sat on the edge of the bed and flipped through the drawings, kept going back to the people she recognized: a woman with puffy cheeks, her hair trailing off into the light and her hands clenched onto the can of water, bony fingers clutching that can like it was her last possession in the world. Light sluiced down her throat, one of those rare times when the sun had made it through the haze.

A man with fattened jowls and a mustache pulled over his lips, sores on his arms, and a thick wrinkle across the top of his nose where someone had pounded at the center of him and brought his eyes down like a bull, serious and tired.

One woman had on a plain shirt—Jennifer remembered its color, blue. The woman’s hair had been pulled up and over her forehead to wave back at her ears, blond, and it hung loosely to her shoulders. Jennifer had watched the woman skim her hand down the middle, put in a barrette, clamp the left side out of the way. She tried to do the same to the right, but the barrette she was holding split apart. She placed a hand to her cheek; Mazy had drawn out the point of her nose in gray pencil, and her eyebrows pinched to the center. In her other hand she kept rubbing the barrette.

And one woman with a shawl—it was actually green like the skin of a lime and cleaner or at least brighter than the other shawls Jennifer had noticed in Linn Park, so striking. It was as if the color wrapped around the woman protected her somehow.

Clothes blew around, shirts without bodies the children tried to catch. When they hit the back of someone’s calf like leeches, they had to be scraped off.

And dead birds everywhere, their beaks half-open, and cats and dogs stretched out with their mouths open wide as if they were just tired and panting, trying to catch their breath. Only they wouldn’t move, would never move.

Another drawing, of a boy, a scar over his eyes and a wide blunt nose like the blunt end of a hammer, half his
bottom teeth missing, that collarbone raised on the left side more than the right. Jennifer remembered that the boy never wore a shirt.

The other children—boys with fat faces, lips too tiny to hold much, making sure they stayed close to an adult. Just the arms of the adults had been drawn onto the page like broken-off tree limbs.

A bicycle tire.

A woman with a lazy eye that drifted far to the left corner as if trying to catch something behind her and a wild tuft of hair like a gray crow’s nest; her shirt, collared, a man’s collar, wide on her, leaving a wide ring on her neck, sunburnt. Mazy had penciled the neck in black.

A cross with fake flowers that someone had staked into one plot of the square. It said
Go Now, Papa
—for days no one touched it.

A different man, his nose curved where it had broken, and the long curve of a scar that stretched across his face and nose, and another scar that pulled up one corner of his lip—so many wrinkles, like rivers and creeks for tears to cut the paths deeper, drop from his jaw, catch in his hand.

A plank of wood with
Steep
written on the side.

Mazy had sketched pages of buckets and bucket lids and tin cans, a door that had been pounded, the latch pounded back sideways, the tin piece in the frame coming unnailed, falling out.

There was an entire page devoted to a woman Jennifer had not seen, a deep hollow in her neck where the Adam’s apple should’ve been, that’s where her chin sunk into black, where the wrinkles first started, where she might collapse into the pages, disappear. Her hair was thick, long, straight, full for a woman in her fifties, sixties; but maybe she was younger like all of them, the desert having scored her face hard, maybe it was the thick-wire eyebrows that kept her eyes dark and focused out to somewhere in the smoke and wrinkled elbows that kept her in place.

Mazy drew arms and legs straight as witch brooms and hands that curled back like the feet of birds. Even the dogs, mottled white with coal faces and ears and noses, carried a solemn, hungry look. The haze stirred their shadows into one thick circle, one long knot unknotting on the ground, stripped from each dog, each person, a corner indiscernible.

Always in the center, the reverend stood on his box, hands toward heaven, wrinkled elbows, dark-circled eyes, coil on top of coil-vein, a belt of broken leather, his mouth open. The scar above his lip set his mouth separate from the rest of his face, deep lines to a wide sandbar chin. In Mazy’s drawing, it looked as if he was waiting for rain to drink.

She remembered pieces of stone, beard, chipped paint, wood, faces stretched wide, dark overalls, thumbs missing on hands, bald heads, worn-through jeans.

Not just people but pieces of wire rolled up, the wind blowing across, one tree where birds had made a nest out of wire. And paper that would whip up, hit you in the face, a smokestack rolling around having fallen from somewhere, and pieces of rock from a building that people kicked, plain dresses that stretched all the way down to the women’s ankles, dirt-white and some cornflower pattern, cracked bowls, and piecemeal plywood, electric wire lines that dipped into the streets, abandoned chairs upside down—all of this, Mazy had drawn, had spent each hour watching, sketching.

Jennifer was sweating, breathing hard like she did after the nightmares of the harvesting machines, but she couldn’t shut the notebook, couldn’t stop remembering. On the last page, Mazy had drawn a picture of Jennifer.

She had marked the thick black hair, and a fierceness in her eyes; those eyes stared hard into things, wild into things, searching. The planes of her face were cut by toughened long cheekbones, scattered with freckles, her lips drawn up in a silent pull as if she had taken the words from someone for herself and would not let them go. Mazy had discovered the wrinkle at her chin, where it frayed into two paths, and
the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes trailing down like her hair. But that fierceness, it was something Jennifer wanted to recognize in herself, but couldn’t. She put the notebook down and walked to the window. The faint reflection in the glass was too bland, her wrinkles smoothed away, ghostlike. She looked back for the picture Mazy had drawn, for herself.

   It was when Jinx started playing that Mazy rolled and stretched in bed and sat up.

“It’s okay,” Jennifer told her. “It’s me. No one else.” She picked up the notebook, brought it closer, but the girl shifted to the other side.

So Jennifer left the notebook on the covers and went back to the chair and table, flipped on the lamp. The only other light came from the window, the sun coming through in streaks of gray; all morning the clouds had been gray and that waiting for rain set a heaviness into each movement, the lifting of things, even sitting down.

“There’s no one else here, I promise. You’re in my room. One of the girls brought chicken up to eat, but that was a while ago. I don’t think you’ll want it now.”

Mazy looked at Jennifer, watched her, and Jennifer kept searching for the missing long hair, the way Mazy’s face used to be—thinner, her eyes smaller. Then Mazy reached for the notebook.

“I can get you something else from the kitchen. Are you thirsty?”

Mazy didn’t answer, just flipped through the pages until she got to the final drawing.

She looked up, then back at the portrait, and Jennifer straightened her shoulders. She felt as if Mazy was looking to see how
she
had changed, what
she
had lost in her face, judging, measuring, calculating something as well.

“You do this?” Mazy asked, lifting one of her wrapped arms.

Jennifer nodded and pointed to the bathroom. “The sink’s in there. You should take them off and wash the cuts.”

Mazy went back to the picture, traced a finger over the page.

“I can get you something to eat.” The lines on the page had been etched like braille, its own language for decoding. At least the girl was calmer.

“You left me,” Mazy said. “They took me to St. Louis. Chained me inside the van because I refused to leave without you.”

“I tried to get outside.”

“You promised we would stay together.”

Jennifer marked her feet against the wooden floor. “I had to get you out of Birmingham. I didn’t know what would happen after that.”

“Then you should’ve left me to find my mama.”

“She wanted you out, too.”

“She was looking for my cousins and my aunt. She asked you to take care of me until she found them.” Mazy set the book down, then picked it up and slung it at the bathroom door. “I don’t even know what happened to her.”

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said.

“Not good enough.” Slowly the girl stepped out of bed. “I don’t trust you.”

Jennifer watched Mazy’s toes dig at the wood, the bedposts holding the frame; the book was somewhere in the corner, she couldn’t see it. “I’m not asking for that.”

“What are you asking?”

Jennifer wanted Mazy to be okay, and here she was alive like Naomi had said—this is the miracle, this is what you hold on to. But there was also what Ms. Gerald wanted.

Mazy peered around the room. The green walls had faded in the gray light; they needed painting. Nothing had been hung, not even a full-length mirror like Jennifer had found in some of the other girls’ rooms. She set her eyes on the rosewood dresser and the long green, black rug going
from the bed to the center. To the right—the table, chairs, and lamp, their legs and cords entangled. The bathroom, the south and east windows.

There wasn’t a television—the only one in the St. Charles belonged to Ms. Gerald, though Jennifer had never seen it, never heard it. No phones or radios were allowed either. It was always strange to be with a trick in the middle of a conversation or in the middle of sex, and have him blurt something out as if suddenly talking to himself. But it was the phone embedded just under the ear; he was in conversation with his father, a wife, a lover, his boss, his children, someone else. And Jennifer covered her mouth, laughing, though she didn’t mean it, was afraid to, but it happened.

Sometimes the client laughed, made a joke about coitus interruptus. “I know this is ridiculous,” he’d say, or “I’m ridiculous,” roll his eyes, and continue talking. Sometimes he just walked out or turned over in bed, and she was left to stare out the windows of her room or the parlor—a reprieve until the trick wanted her again.

It was never what was said, the lies or truth of the words that sent her spiraling the other direction into that blue lowdownness that Jinx always sang about, or the intense, angry conversations. It was the artless talkers, the soft-spoken easy ones, how they gave their words away, how those words, she could tell, were being received.

Sometimes, while a client slept, Jennifer touched the knot underneath his ear, felt the plastic and metal underneath the skin, and remembered the collectors, how they cut and pried open the phones like digging oysters out of shells, then chiseled and pulled the wire-roots to keep them intact. She always wondered how far into the neck and ear the wires had been sewn. In the desert camps nothing like this existed.

“Where am I now? Who do I belong to now?” Mazy asked.

“Ms. Gerald, the woman you met, owns us. You’re in the St. Charles. It’s an old hotel.”

“But where am I? This isn’t a city-state.”

Jennifer shook her head. “You’re in Cairo, Illinois. We’re squeezed between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. You can see them from the windows.”

“I flew along the Mississippi yesterday,” Mazy said and walked over to a window, the Mississippi side, that slip of river curling under the trees. “First time I’d been in a mille-copter. The pilot kept dipping close to the water, zigzagging because of the winds.”

“The St. Charles is the only thing left in Cairo. All those houses out there are abandoned.”

“Like Birmingham,” Mazy said.

“What was St. Louis like?”

“I lived in a protected zone called Blue Ridge,” and as she stretched, Jennifer saw small lines of blood, where they had dried in the fabric. The cut on her face had scabbed all the way across and it pulled her cheek taut. She kept looking out the window and back at Jennifer, the gray changing her face light, then dark as if the full length of the day, from its first beginning to dusk was happening all at once in Mazy’s expression.

“Those broken walls in Birmingham. It was just like that in St. Louis, only they weren’t broken. So high, you couldn’t see over them. Used to walk along those walls. All the time running errands for my family. Kept waiting for someone to break through. I’d hear explosions and jump and people wondering what was wrong with me.”

“You had a family?”

Mazy shook her head. “They didn’t have any children. They wanted me to call them mother and father, but I refused. She beat me for that, Ms. Hammond. That was her name. With a mop handle, anything with a handle—I remember when she lifted a chair to me.

“When she beat me, she got all upset, and my body turned numb. I thought, This is what it’s like to be dead, this numbness. Do they beat you here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you ever wish you were dead when they beat you?”

“No,” Jennifer said. She didn’t tell Mazy it was because she felt she had already died. Since her baby’s death, she lingered. That was the mystery to her, the lingering, how she was able—she had only been whipped twice for not fucking enough clients, not bringing in enough money. Ms. Gerald used a horse whip across the shoulders that she kept in the glass case. “I haven’t seen anyone beat that bad.”