Snakeskin Road (30 page)

Adamsville, Alabama, was the new post. Had been for
two weeks, but I doubted it’d last long. Used to, I went straight to Birmingham with the deserters—they had a nice setup. Dropped off my bounty and got paid in less than an hour. But the desert had closed in, and the government pulled the border back. They squeezed Birmingham underneath it and left all those people there, dying.

It took me half the night to get paid for two men and a woman. Had to sit with them in a cement cube, and one man, he was the shorter one, I had already kicked him before we came in and cautioned him about it, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I told him to shut up, he was crying like my mam, like his mam, like every fucking mam in the entire fucking world. That did no good. I would’ve hit him but you couldn’t do that on the premises without getting paid less.

Some of the patrollers looked over at me with my head all bottled up in my hands and they chuckled. I knew one of them, had dealt with him all summer—he had a square
head that rolled on his chin-neck every time he looked down to sign papers.

“It ain’t funny,” I yelled. “Hurry up.”

They kept chuckling, and that short man kept crying. Geez.

Turned out they were from Suttons Corner, Georgia, on the Alabama line—got fifteen thousand dollars when I was finished and they were to be shipped to a limestone work camp in Telfair. When I left, I left the crying for the wind crying and blowing sand all through Adamsville like a dust fire. That’s all I could hear, wind and sand making its promise—in Birmingham they were doing a killing—soon enough, the desert would come here, too.

   High Street had three bars, and from what I could tell, it was the only street with anything happening in this town. It had a lighted church, but I wasn’t going near that church, and one bar had been set up in a supply store. The sign hadn’t been changed—
Stel’s Fertilizer
. One bar looked as if it had been in Adamsville forever—called The Halladay. And the other was a converted elementary school. It didn’t have a name, just lights in the glass windows.

That was the one with classrooms full of drunk patrollers and guards and Red Cross volunteers and whores. You didn’t like who you saw in Ms. Krenshaw’s seventh grade English, you could step over to Mr. Flumb’s eighth grade math. Those were teachers I had once, and I kept imagining them stepping into the rooms. Neither one could keep us quiet.

At the end of the hallway stood a pair of double doors and a string of clear lights that opened to the school gym; the bar was all the way across. If I had to name this joint, I’d call it School’s Out, or something catchy, like The End of the World.

“Tomorrow, everyone will get up with headaches and
start the world over.” I told the bartender that, and he just gave me my drink. So I drank and talked with other hunters, patrollers, and guardsmen. I drank and listened the rest of the night as much as I could through the conversations wheeling and circling to the steel rafters and falling back on top of me.

One officer said the government had abandoned Linn Park. He kept trying to rub the sweat off his hands. Never seen someone sweat so much. “That was the last consulate we had. All the other food drops were shut down last week. We’ve left those people to the bombing gangs and roamers.”

“And the storm,” I reminded him.

“Doesn’t sit well with me, but it’s just too many people to deal with.” The whole time he kept looking side to side, yet wouldn’t look across the table, too ashamed of himself, his bald head like a dull pendulum, unhitched and wilting. But he didn’t know me enough to have to bare his shame. “And there’s no money.”

“What do you mean no money?” I was used to the feds not doing something ’cause they didn’t want to. A lack of money, however, had never stopped them in the past. The government had lived in bankruptcy forever.

“They’ve moved all the guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi here, but”—he shook his head—“they’re not returning. No money. The government’s just keeping this section from Birmingham to Atlanta patrolled. They’re worried the desert will take Atlanta next. Most of the mining is south to Florida anyway.”

“They still turning the mines into work camps?”

He nodded. “Accelerating it, building those camps as fast as they can. Someone’s making money. They’ve talked about transporting prisoners from the Carolinas. It shouldn’t affect you any, if you’re worried.” He looked up then, smiled. “You’ll always have a job.”

“I’m not worried,” I said and finished off my rum. But I knew why he said it—if prisoners started coming down, the
government wouldn’t need Alabama deserters. And for years the government had paid good money for those people.

At one time the Southeastern Desert had too many inhabitants, and the government wanted them bottlenecked, didn’t want them fleeing north, just like they didn’t want anyone leaving Birmingham now, so they made it a criminal offense and marked runaways as deserters as if they had belonged to the US Army, as if they had abandoned their country.

If you brought in a deserter, you got paid enough to keep doing it. I’ve done it for nine years. When the government opened the work camps, they started paying real money. None of those people in the camps ever get out—they work until their death. Then someone in the government said, Hell, why not make all mining operations in the Southeastern Desert an extension of the penal system.

Since 2014, residents had worked government-run mines, but there was hardly anyone left in Mississippi and Louisiana, just on the Gulf Coast, and the same attrition was happening in Alabama, in Georgia. Now the government was building work camps to replace the old mining jobs.

“Justice.” I had this argument so many times with other hunters and patrollers. Most everyone claimed it was all about justice. Those residents tried to leave the desert; they should be punished.

“But the desert’s part of the US,” was what I always reminded them. “Those people are citizens.”

“They’re getting justice.”

“They’re getting rooked.” Not that it mattered.

“And you’re getting paid,” I’ve been reminded.

“That’s why I do it,” I always tell them, but that’s not quite right. The money helps—money always helps—but when it gets down to it, once you start a line of work, it’s just easier to stay in that line.

Several black marketers shifted from table to table selling
jewelry that collectors in Birmingham had taken from the dead. They kept repeating the same thing about having more stuff than they could get rid of—lots of necklaces and wedding rings, photographs of families that had become a fetish and traded throughout the post like baseball cards. They had gold and silver fillings, and size elevens and twelves in men’s shoes.

I wear an eleven and a half, but they didn’t have any half sizes. So I bought a pair of twelve loafers that looked like real leather and had scarcely worn through the sole. There was this one jeweled cross I almost bought, with turquoise and diamonds—fake ones, I was sure of it, but I almost took it anyway. Mam used to have one.

“It’s clean,” the seller promised, like all the death had been washed off, like you could wash it all off; and those jewels did shine; he kept rubbing the cross with a towel.

Finally I had to get up and go to another table ’cause he wouldn’t. The bar smelled like beer and vomit and smoke and floor wax. Any second the school basketball team would emerge, and we’d have to clear out, let the ghosts play. That floor wax was getting to me, the whole place was, so I left.

Outside, the storm was still going. It had come from Mississippi, piling a ton of dirt on Birmingham, and we were getting some of it, too, but the ozone was secure here. Tomorrow the dust would end and the sun would click up and up its ladder, no problem. But the truth was, the ozone was more wobbly than secure, that tear over Alabama wasn’t finished tearing, and when I had asked the officer where the border was now, definitively, he chuckled, said, “Definitively, they’re waiting until everything settles. They’ve changed it four times in the last week. So far it’s holding about ten miles south.” I got stuck on that.

Usually when I came in, I took out a room and stayed on post until I spent my money down, but I was anxious—the ozone disintegrating, the winds pushing storm after storm, throwing the earth at us, and everyone in the bar just
annoyed with the weather like always. They had grown static and debauchery gets tiresome after a while. I was getting closer to fifty years of age—that was part of it, too.

I used to tell everyone that change was routine on the Southeastern Desert border, yet I couldn’t stay that night and walked past the church with its lights still on, hoping to catch repentant sinners from the schoolhouse. They were playing a hymn on the organ—“At Calvary.” My mam’s favorite. And I started humming it, ’cause I know it like my mam made me know it, and the dust was blowing around me, but it couldn’t hurt me, not here.

The sky was all black, a fake black, and in the light, the dust made yellow whorls. Fire. So I got in my van and headed up to West Sayre, across Jett Mountain. That was the latest route for
guias
out of Birmingham; they squeezed through on Highway 5, and so many passed, it was like a salmon run. They were heading up to Tennessee and Kentucky on Snakeskin Road. All you had to do was follow.

   Three things I remember about Old New Orleans where I was born and raised until I was six.

Water. All this water around me and dead dogs floating in it, though when I told Mam about it when I was older, she said it wasn’t just dogs, but cats and people’s clothes, debris, water all the way to the roofs, and people, those pale shoulders hunched, and their clothed backs swollen up, and black skins.

“Lots of colored people there,” my granddaddy said. He was Cherokee and black and all mixes of white, but always denied any color in himself.

“Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it, Rosser?” my mother said.

I remembered seeing my yellow dog in the water, floating. Mam never said if that was true or not; she didn’t answer; she looked somewhere else.

The Superdome. We were in this huge warehouse—the Superdome, Mam said it was. I just remember sitting down on this bottom field and these bright lights at the top, so high up, it felt like the whole world had been crammed on top of us, what remained of the world. There was a woman in front of me in a wheelchair, and I watched her and the back of her blue leather chair.

“I’m going to get us some food.” Mam patted my head, pressed me to the ground, but I squirmed out. “Stay put,” she warned.

“Mam,” I said, like, of course, I’d stay put, why would she think otherwise, but really I wanted to go. She said the same thing to my older brother, Theo, but without any head-pressing, then she left.