Snakeskin Road (31 page)

Then he left. I remember grabbing hold of his shirt and Theo jerking away and giving me that look—“Don’t.” So I didn’t. It was just me watching this woman in the blue wheelchair. I existed behind her what seemed like forever in this new world, and she was constant, she didn’t vanish. I wanted to touch her arm and say something.

“She was sleeping, just sleeping.” That’s what Mam told me for years afterward.

I snapped back, “She was dead. I know it. I keep having the dream and she was dead.”

Then Mam would shut up as usual, not wanting to fight with my memories any longer.

My father was from Orleans. Never saw him, not one time. He probably died in that hurricane. Mam said he wasn’t even in the city then probably. Already gone. “He was always getting out of things before something bad could happen.”

But I’m fairly certain he died in that hurricane, was one of those dog bodies. I’m just not sure which one.

They never did put the city back together. And there was another hurricane, then the dust storms. But we weren’t there for any of it. We left to Newport, Kentucky, where
Mam’s father was, where her people was. That’s about all I remember.

   I’d been holed up in West Sayre, fallen asleep I don’t know how long, when some vans came by, whizzing. There may have been more to come by earlier, but it was just that small convoy that got me stirred. Everyone drives the same white vans so you can’t tell what’s in back. There were three in a row, and I figured
guias
—they liked sweeping out fifty or more deserters at once and that took about three vans. I waited a bit, then headed out.

For cargo, I had food and water and all the propane tanks I needed to get to California or Canada, not that I was going that far. You just never know how long you’ll be on a run. The tanks knocked against one another, especially when I hit potholes on the highway. I kept trying to find a steady rhythm in them, but couldn’t. It didn’t take long to realize the
guias
were heading up to the Natchez Trace. I knew a fuel runner there. And nothing, nothing had happened.

But you don’t get trouble as long as you drive on federal or state roads. Get off on these narrow county blacktops and dirt strips—and eventually you’ll have no choice—then you might run into farmers. They’ll want to know who the hell you are and where you come from. Once they figure out you’re a bounty hunter, they’ll take everything of value out of your pockets—money, knives, pictures—so it doesn’t get bloody before they kill you. Roaming gangs kill you like they do cattle and dogs for supper, but there’s not many left. They’re the people from these ghost towns that didn’t make it to Louisville or Memphis, didn’t get enslaved. Roaming gangs have to constantly move. The farmers have almost eradicated them.

Just last summer, patrollers were on the federal and state
roads and mille-copters, helping out truck-carriers between the city-states. Hell, ten years ago, Union Chapel and Jasper, all these towns still had people. All of it gone. Supposedly, the city-states are protected, but I want nothing to do with them. That’s what Birmingham was. Now it’s under the border, suffocating.

   Newport has one part of itself that faces Cincinnati from across the Ohio River, one part with a shopping mall, high-rise condos, and an aquarium. You go back from there to Fifth Street—some banks and businesses—still pretty nice. Keep coming down Monmouth to Sixth to where the Brass Ass Lounge is, and
Girls, Girls, Girls
flashing in pink neon on the marquee. Keep coming back, and the roads haven’t had much work done. Dixie Chili and Beach’s Sewing Center are still boarded up, until you get to Twelfth and Anne.

That’s where Mam’s daddy lived, and where we lived after we left New Orleans. Theo was always going to the shopping mall on the river, strolling up there. That’s before they built the wall on Fifth and closed it off from us.

“At least,” my brother said, “we can still get into the Brass Ass.”

They let him in though he was only sixteen, ’cause they were starving for customers. Plus, he looked older and thicker than boys his age. We had the same brown hair, but his lay down flat and serious on his head and mine was always cut too short by my mother and spiking.

“Have at it,” I told him. There was
no we
—I couldn’t get in. “Looking is all you’re going to get.” Then I shifted a few steps out of his way in case he wanted to give me a slug. His favorite target was my left upper arm, and once he slugged me so many times in a row, the whole side of it turned black. Still I said things, daring him to. Crazy.

But before the wall, Theo was able to go to the shops,
and he lived all day trying on clothes, watching movies, and the river—he said he especially liked watching the cars shoot across the bridges, as if he were part of that world. Our mam, she was somewhere else. She’d come home for a few days, then be gone. I was left with my granddaddy.

Granddaddy wore an orange cap and a jacket, a light brown one, dirty, all of it, and faded around the shoulders. Even in the humidity of Newport, in hot July, he had on those heavy clothes. Most days, he never talked, just came outside and sat in his chair—a peeling blue aluminum thing, not very comfortable—allowing the steel back to straighten up his back as he smoked cigarettes, one leg crossed long and dangling over the other.

“He’s cooling off,” Theo would say and shrug. But Granddaddy was always out in the sun.

Sometimes he pointed at things. A bird maybe. Mosquitoes. I couldn’t tell. I was on the porch, on the far side looking down.

“Hey, old man,” I’d say when the mosquitoes started to get me too many times, “let me have a drag on that cigarette.” And I’d come off that porch, jumping on the boards so they quaked and scared him. I did this in the summers when I was eleven and twelve, finally big enough to think myself a bully. “Hey, old man, I got a lighter right here.”

He had one, too, though sometimes he turned and let me light his cigarette. I’d be up on him. If I wanted, I could push his body down with my body. I always waited until he pulled out a new cigarette and wanted it lit before I stepped off the shaded overhang and approached.

He gave it to me to light, and I did, took the first puff or two, gave it back. Sometimes I ran off with it.

“You’re stupid,” I’d tell him. “Stupid.”

Every time I stole a cigarette, I’d wait a few days, try it again. He still turned to me to light it. His memory was so rattled.

One day after watching him from the other side of the
porch, I came over and took his pack of cigarettes straight out of his pocket.

“What you going to do about that, old man? What you going to do?”

“Boy,” he said, and he curled his fingers at me, gesturing, “boy.” I went and put my head next to his. “Those are my cigarettes,” he said. That’s all.

I stood up.

“I know whose they are,” I said. “Take them from me.” I dangled the pack out in front of his nose.

He just breathed, like he could breathe those cigarettes in if he did it hard enough.

“Boy,” he said. “I’m going to whip your father’s color out of you.”

“He’s whiter than you are,” I said. But by that time, I was already across that yard, and as soon as I got out of sight, I slung those cigarettes out and tore them up—good cigarettes—just tore them and stomped on them. I started to head out on Monmouth to find Theo. But to stand there with my brother and have him pretend that he couldn’t hear, no matter what I said, no matter how much I talked, to have Theo look at everyone and everywhere but not look at me—the thought of it was too deflating.

I exhaled and looked down one end of Twelfth Street to the other, this house, that house. Someone had a fake eagle in the yard with all the brown paint coming off the wings, and a girl who was younger than me stood up on her toes from behind a fence; her nose was on the wooden top, her small dog barking. I didn’t like dogs, was scared of their sudden movements and noise, kept dreaming of dogs in that New Orleans floodwater.

Underneath my shoe that cigarette pack with that stupid camel was looking happy with itself, like the painted sand dunes behind it was a better place than where I was. It didn’t seem fair, so I snatched the camel up, marched back into the yard.

I was going to give it to Granddaddy, I swear, give it back to him, empty as it was, but I got halfway and I spotted him crying. Crying over stupid cigarettes. So, I hurled the pack on the ground and pointed. “Come here if you want one,” I said and went inside the house, making sure to slam the door.

Next day, he walked out into the yard, facing the sun in his jacket and orange cap, even though it was hot, crossed one leg over the other and pulled out a cigarette. After he finished smoking, he put his hands on the armrests and kept them still. Then I came outside and sat on the porch. The mosquitoes found me quick.

I guess those sand dunes and that camel was a sign of the kind of work I’m doing now. I never think about that unless I come across those kind of cigarettes. I was twelve then and left him alone after that.

   Above Natchez Trace, I drove through a dead zone, a swath cutting over Highway 20; I couldn’t see no end to it. It had peeled the land away east and west, trying to touch the sun coming and going, gashing through a field of millet and pines. There were some dead Herefords with bleached faces and tongues, their stomachs bloated and splitting, their necks and legs stiff. All of it probably from a carbon cloud.

Some carbon clouds drifted from the cities and dissipated—everything grew back fine. But some, the mercury was too strong and killed the land off, especially if it settled in a valley until the wind got deep enough to blow it back out.

There were fissures in the ozone, too, ruptures that could last for months, burning stretches of land until they healed, but everything not rooted to the earth could avoid them. The carbon clouds were so thick, you couldn’t see where you were going, where it stopped; everything got
trapped inside. The whole state of Kansas was a dead zone for years after carbon clouds settled there. This one on 20 carried three miles by the road.

The
guias
had been at the Trace. I found their empty propane tanks and hung on for the fuel runner. It was the one I knew, Bo Wasson. He said they were taking women to an auction at Pickwick Landing. All from Birmingham. And not just this group.

“They’re keeping you busy today.”

“Yeah.” He nodded and took a swipe at his forehead, the sweat and loose hair. “I’ve got to refill these tanks and get them to another mile marker.”

I’d been paying Bo for years, and there were several fuel runners in Kentucky and Tennessee that I also knew, but that was it.

After the dead zone, I passed a few truck-carriers and more white vans returning south and one guy in an Impala. A 1960s Impala; 1960s. Baby blue with fins and rounded taillights and the frameless glass. Now that was it. I thought about circling, asking him to trade that Impala for my van, but I wouldn’t trade if I owned that car. No one in his right mind would trade. I wondered what he was doing up here.

Next I hid the van several miles out of Pickwick and cut through the woods to the landing.

It was cool there under the oaks and a scattering of cottonwoods, pines, wind off the lake, and I lay flat on the pine straw and leaves the rest of the night, staring up at those branches sweeping back and forth against the moon, a full moon. Sometimes I looked down at all the shadows over me, cutting, crossing, but they never sewed my body up fully into a shadow. They did the same to the moon, revealing faces—there were always faces in the branches, but none I recognized or could make into someone I wanted. I couldn’t sleep.

In the early morning the
guias
and the farmers showed up.

Pearson Whaike was with them. I had stolen two deserters from him some years back. His farm was up on Hohenwald, about four hundred acres of tobacco, and he didn’t have many guards, not much of an operation. I thought he’d be forced out by now.

Someone had built a fire and was turning meat on wooden spits. The fat sizzled, burned, and the smoke drifted up for the trees to absorb. My stomach wanted me to go down there and reach into that fire, take it. And the women and girls and men stood one at a time on the block while the auctioneer reeled off numbers. The farmers raised their hands until “Sold,” the auctioneer said, and that deserter was removed, a slave now, the next one hauled up.

I took photos of those blanked faces, washed out, some of them streaked red from crying. I took pictures of the
guias
. Teal Dennis was the main one. He’d been doing this longer than me. More vans and trailers showed up and they brought more meat and wood to the fire—the smoke had spread all through the branches. I stayed a while, but it was too much to take in, too many people I’d never be able to find. Always best to leave the hunting simple—Teal Dennis was the one I started with. I cut back across the woods to those vans heading into Kentucky, wanted to see how far west he was going.

   On Twelfth and Anne, the days spun lazily like time had stopped in Newport. Theo and I went to school or didn’t, came home or didn’t, then one time when I was fourteen, I came home and it wasn’t just Granddaddy in the yard—Mam was on the porch, dressed up. I mean dressed up in a black skirt and white blouse. She was always pretty, with those small eyes, and curls she stuck in place with hairspray. But Mam never bought white ’cause she said the minute you put it on, it got dirty. Someone must’ve given it to her. She was going to revival.

“What’s getting revived?” I asked her like I always did, being smart-alecky, and she dusted her hand on the railing, exhaled deep like she was cleaning out the air in her lungs and the air around her; she didn’t say a thing.

At other times, she would look down or tighten her lip, and that’s when I knew I had gotten to her. Don’t know why Mam was nice to me, I didn’t deserve it.

I said to her I wanted to go.

“You don’t even know what it is,” she said.

“I don’t care. I want to get revived.”

“It’s a church service,” she said. “You’ll think it’s boring.”