Snakeskin Road (36 page)

“Just having fun. We ain’t going nowhere. Now get the light out of my eyes,” and she stood, crossed her arms, not budging.

“Don’t shoot us,” the man pleaded.

“They ain’t going to shoot you,” the woman turned and snickered. “They ain’t shooting me either. They’re cowards.”

“Come on out or we’ll get Ms. Gerald in on this.”

“Not until you get that damn light out of my eyes.” The water had to be freezing, but the woman’s face turned an angry red.

Then someone uttered okay and they lowered the flashlights, the rifles. The two skinny-dippers waded through the shallow water and onto the shore, where they grabbed their clothes, wrapped themselves in towels. The whole time, the flashlights flickered in and out, tunneling up at the sky, unraveling, dissolving into black tangents.

The woman kept telling the guards to move, to give her space. The man, he quivered and lowered himself to the ground, begging the guards not to shoot. They just chuckled and ignored him.

I was at the top of the bank, right before it sharply descended, and had sat down to watch, the water dusky, turning, drifting away from those people. Somewhere on the water were those two runaways.

Calmed me to be here. All this water and nothing on it. Then slowly a light crept up the bank and hit me straight-on so I couldn’t see.

“What’s that?” someone said, whispered it like I might get spooked and run.

“I’m not a
what,”
I said.

“What’re you doing?” This time someone yelled and the rifles came up, aiming.

“Just watching,” I said and put my hands out to show I didn’t have a weapon. “That’s all.”

“Don’t move,” someone else called, and I said, “All right.”

I wished then I were back in bed sleeping, holding on to that woman’s hair, the warmth of her back and shoulders.

The only good thing out here was the music from the piano still working its way down from the balcony, the river soaking the music in deep and carrying.

   Ed and I returned in the morning, and his driving had improved—he no longer skidded toward any ditches as he slowed down to point at the dead hunters on the side of the road. He asked if that’s why I made him stop last night.

“I’ve never seen that done to a body,” I explained.

“Those damn bounty hunters mess up my business,” he said. “They get what they deserve.” He honked at the last one we passed and yelled at it.

I slouched against the passenger door, and the rest of the trip, he talked into the embedded phone in his ear, lining up the farms he was planning to visit. “After lunch.” He winked at me. “I’ve still got four hundred dollars to blow at Instant.”

I nodded and slouched back over. The vibrations lulled me into half dreaming, but kept me awake, too, and that wind, it was flying around us. I don’t know how he could talk on the phone in the wind. I tried to sleep. Before too long we hit a bump, and I stared out at the hood, that beautiful red, kept seeing myself riding down to the post, swinging open the door. I looked over at Ed talking away, holding on to the wheel.

“Why don’t you let me drive?”

At first he didn’t answer, then I asked a second time, and he looked over at me, studied me. He was a little annoyed and told the person on the phone he’d call them back.

“It’s my car,” he said like he said last night. “We done settled this, and we’re close anyway.”

“Just another ten, twenty miles,” I told him and yawned. “Not much. Just let me give it a spin.”

He glanced down at the speedometer, moved that square chin of his into the steering wheel to get a better look. Then he started speeding up, was trying to do it carefully so I wouldn’t notice.

“Where you driving your truck to?” he asked.

“St. Louis,” I said. “Just want to see how it drives, Ed.”

The branches here were turning. It was autumn, and they were just starting to fill out with yellow and orange, and the red maples. They stood out the most along the fence lines.

“Pretty through here,” I said, but Ed wouldn’t look at the trees.

I pointed to the side. “Stop right there,” tapping my finger at the top of the windshield.

“I ain’t stopping,” he announced and sped up more.

“You’re going to get us killed if you don’t slow down. Pull over right there.” I pointed up ahead to the curve, a wide shoulder spreading out in dirt and gravel.

“You have to make me.”

“Make you?” I leaned over halfway. “You think I can’t make you?”

He looked at me and looked at the shoulder.

“Just slow down.”

And he did, stopped the car on the side of the road. There was sweat on that chin, on that Adam’s apple, coming off in small drops. He wiped it away, and the smell of whiskey was getting stronger.

“Now just get out,” I said and grabbed his hand. “Turn it off. Leave the keys.”

That hand was shaking, the skin dry and papery, shaking like that man last night coming out of the river, trying not to. Ed cut the engine, opened the door, and stood up so fast I
thought he might fall. He didn’t. He just walked around to the other side, and I got into the driver seat.

He stood next to the car like he wasn’t sure what to do, like he’d forgotten who he was and where he was, like he wanted to forget this moment, like he wanted to reverse some things. And he kept looking over the car like it was the last time he was going to see it.

“I had this Ford Power—it was rusting in a farmer’s garage. I got it from him and fixed it up. He just gave it to me, and I did all the work myself.” His Adam’s apple kept working up and down, and the sweat on his face had thickened into a white grease.

“You did a good job,” I told him and cranked it, pressed the accelerator all the way in. Next I rubbed over the top of the dash, the smell of antifreeze coming up in the vents.

“I can call a patrol.”

“You should’ve done it already. But there’s none out here.”

“I’ll call the casino.”

I sighed, looked out at the highway. It was curving, but there was no way to tell what was going on beyond that curve, if someone was coming, and what would they do?

“You could call them. You go ahead. You want to do that, go right ahead. And if I show up at Instant, they’ll take your car back, kick me out. Then I’ll be waiting for you.” I shifted the gear.

“But that’s if I show back up. I don’t know where I’m going really,” and I looked at the trees, the fields beyond them that kept going and going. You could tell it, they wouldn’t stop until they had wrapped around the earth; and somewhere there were crows, I could hear them starting out over those fields, that journey, and something picking at the leaves in the underbrush. I looked back up the road we had just come. “Hate for you to waste a call like that.”

The whole time Ed had his hands on the passenger door.

“I fixed up this car. Put a new 426 engine in. You know how hard those are to find? Got it painted, billboard stripes, the seats …” He was shaking his head, and the sweat beaded off.

“You did a good job,” I told him and looked at his hands, counted the nine fingers, and looked up at him, waited. “The day’s coming on,” I said.

He took his hands off.

   I went back to Instant, got the supplies, enough to last a while, and put them in the trunk, headed north.

When I was a carrier, I stopped at the edge-towns around Chicago, but smugglers coming up the Illinois River from St. Louis met their connections at two places: Morris and Starved Rock.

That was some time ago. It had gotten overused, and the government raided the drop-offs, closed them down, but the government was barely here anymore, so maybe the runaways had gone up the Illinois River, were on it right now. Maybe they had already gone through, or traveled some other route, or somewhere else, or maybe they were dead like the girl last night claimed.

I decided to go to Starved Rock because it was south of Ottawa, the confluence of the Illinois and Fox Rivers. They might take Fox up to Sheridan instead of going on to Morris. Had to think that way. The one with black hair, the girl with wide cheekbones, they had managed to stay together and were on the river still.

   Highway 51 was a long drive through the flattest land, an endless ribbon of harvested cornfields, and the sun just sat there at the end of the day touching the earth and nothing else. At dusk, fireflies zagged into the cornstalks and out, streaks of light I passed by, unable to catch up to.

I sped by several fires next to the road, roamers huddled around. Back when the government was still patrolling, you didn’t see gangs this close. The smoke from their fires would appear at the edges of fields, and at night, you could make out beads of red-yellow flame. Now the road was as much theirs as anyone else’s.

After passing a sign for Heyworth my car began to sputter. I had to pull over, rotate the empty propane tank with a new one. It didn’t take long, but up ahead was another fire, and bodies around it, just specks that didn’t move. I kept my eye on them, kept looking behind me, but nothing was coming except those fireflies and the broken cornstalks rattling toward the west when the wind struck. I got back in and drove a little piece more, stopped.

There were only four men, all in long blankets, so I took out my shotgun, stepped to the fire to warm my hands.

“Too cold tonight,” I said, nodded but no one acknowledged me. I kept my grip tight on the shotgun. They might be carrying rifles under those blankets. And what if someone was hiding out across the road? But I doubted it. They just looked worn down, too tired to fight, all mudded up and cold except for the heat on their faces. Still I knew what I was doing was crazy and, still, I couldn’t stop myself.

I sat down, let the fire’s warmth burn into my skin, my whole body, trying to work off the cold and numbness of driving.

“What’s it like in Normal?” I asked. Normal was just five miles away.

“We left there,” one man said. “Had no choice.” He was straight across from me. “Town’s been on fire. Wouldn’t go through it if I was heading north.”

That’s when I noticed the spots on his face. Should’ve noticed it already, and the same on the others, paper scars, pockmarks. Diseased.

I stood up. They were all dying men. Out in the field a little farther two bodies were laid out in wide shadows. I
couldn’t see the full shape of the bodies, what the Martz disease had eaten through. And how many bodies lay between here and Normal? How many had been left in that town to burn?

The dead and the houses, the streets, the air, everything was getting burned to keep the plague from spreading. The same thing had happened in Lawrenceburg over the summer.

“Is there a road I can use to get around it?” I asked. They had closed all the roads off in Lawrenceburg, and I didn’t like the prospect of cutting through fields.

“Highway 43 should get you far enough out of Normal,” the man said. “It was still open when we got out. My family’s from Lincoln. My father worked at Inland Tools before everything closed. We’ve been living between there and Normal.” He coughed and grabbed at his chest inside the blanket—it was a yellow blanket, with old threads roughed up like tangled horsehair.

I knew what was under those blankets, what Martz disease did to the stomach and the ribs, how eventually the ribs cracked and splintered from coughing. I had seen that, seen ditches full of people dead from the disease, seen bodies strewn across fields, left for the birds to pick away. Outside of Lawrenceburg, you could smell that death burning. I could smell it now.

These men had wandered here and stayed close to the road. Someone would be by to shoot them. Or they would starve or the disease would bore into their liver and finish them off.

I held the shotgun out and they didn’t move. It could be me to do it. Maybe they wanted that, expected that.

“Be doing us a favor,” the man said. He was watching me now.

“I’m not here for killing.”

“Why you here?” he asked.

“I’m not doing that.”

Their eyes stared deep into those flames as if the heat and light were all that was keeping them alive. I watched the fire soak up the air and lick at it. With enough branches and enough time it could go up and up, reach beyond the moon and beyond, the whole soul of the earth in one flame, then black and gone. Did they see that, too?

Slowly I stepped back, got in my car, and drove on.

   I circled Normal by 43 like he said, the smoke so dense I was barely able to keep the car from the drainage ditches—but the smoke lifted and for miles the sky and fields were cleared. The clearness, however, didn’t last—someone had set tires blazing across 51—and then shots, they were probably just a warning, the farmers trying to hold the roamers back, but I turned around, gunned the engine, and cut off onto Route 17 to Goose Lake on the Illinois River.

The lake was empty all night, but in the morning two boats crisscrossed each other and weaved around the sloughs heading north. I watched—one boat had six people on board—yet I didn’t see the two deserters. They might be in one of the cabins, and it wasn’t unusual for smugglers to travel in pairs.

The sun was out and the boats kept crossing, going up the lake. I got back in the car, drove ahead until I reached the Route 18 bridge and again set my binoculars on the boats. As they moved under me, I could hear the hum of the engines, but couldn’t feel the hum through the concrete. They headed to a buoy not far up, and one boat, the one in the lead with the six people, honked at the other. The boats made a circle and returned to the bridge and then south of the lake, puttering.

They had been racing, that was all. Not who I was looking for.

I got in and followed 26 past Sawmill Lake and Senachwine.
At Senachwine I came across a marooned houseboat in the marsh and cord grass. I watched it for hours shift in the wind, the water before climbing inside. Empty. There was no food in the cabinets and only the sound of water sloshing against the hull. There was one pot on the stove and something had dried black from the center up the edges. I lifted it, smelled the iron but that was all. I couldn’t get my luck to turn, and I slung that pot against the cabinets and lowered my head, rubbed it. So much time I had wasted.