Snakeskin Road (4 page)

Jennifer folded the stationery—
pine sky
the label read—“hardly green” is what she called it—there wasn’t a hint of
pine at all, just glue and paper and now heat, difficult to feel because her fingers kept shaking numb, had been doing that all morning. She dropped the letter and quickly snatched it up before the wind had a chance to take it into the exhausted crowd of Linn Park. They churned around her, heading to the refugee tents, slowly exiting back into the square, then back to the tents, where huge fans had been set up for cooling. Jennifer pushed the letter into its envelope yet couldn’t feel the edges; the paper slipped, cutting, just the smallest lines of blood and cracked skin. Despite this, despite her dry tongue, she managed to seal it, and leaned against the flat bark of the oak—
This Oak Tree Planted in Memory of George Washington
is what the plaque said. She gazed as she had all day at the leaves.

It was the first time Jennifer had seen oak leaves beyond a photograph or a movie; the first time she had listened to the dulled edges cut against one another in stirs of wind dying, coming back. Each time, the leaves restarted like the wheel of some engine ever-turning. On the underbellies were green and white splotches, but mostly the leaves had shriveled brown through the veins, frozen from when the storm hit.

The trunks needed to be uprooted, she had already decided, the dirt shaken out of their wrinkled skin, like shaking out a rug, what her mama told her to do when they lived in Mississippi—shake out the rugs to rejuvenate the color. They had carried five rugs from home to abandoned home, occasionally replacing a worn-out rug or an unraveling one with a new one. Used to, she’d lay them across the chair backs and close them around her into a hiding place, a cloak. And when she stared out from between the legs, it was like being in a rocket or a smaller house—“my apartment,” she called it. If she touched the walls of her fortress, dust separated from the bright weaves, floating down and at the same time up to the ceiling, fine particles wrapped and strung through light. In the same way, the people here
moved about her, as if the rugs couldn’t be still now, the sky sifting its dust.

As a child, the taste of dust had calmed her, and she would roll its familiar chalkiness back and forth on her tongue, refusing to spit like her stepfather, Terry. “It’s mud sucking,” he explained often, spitting into the sink or the toilet or sometimes into his hands, wiping the brown liquid onto his coveralls. In Louisiana and Mississippi, the dust was always brown.

“That’s gross,” she’d tell him, and examine the folds in her dress, the one ribbon, the sleeves, to make sure the fabric remained untarnished. Her thick hair had always trapped dust, and every night her mother grabbed up long pulls and shook them before tying them into braids. Jennifer touched the ends to make sure they weren’t dipped in his brown goo.

One night when they lived in Picayune, he laughed and said, “Better on my coveralls than in my
lungs
. Why you keep all that dirt inside?” She closed her mouth, just stared at his hands.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t touch you with these.” He spread the palms forward, lumbered into the room, then followed with another clumsy stride and another until Jennifer ran out to get something, anything to hit him with. She hated it when he tried to frighten her.

Steel flat cars worked best for throwing—Barbies had a tendency to veer at the hinged legs and shoulders. But by the time she made it back to the kitchen, the laughing had switched to coughing and there he stood over the sink, gripping the metal rim, unable to spit. That coughing, it sounded like he’d never stop, like he had no more air in his lungs to help.

Terry was tall, bowed through the center like a warped strip of metal, his spine never fixing right—sometimes, she thought, like the sun skimming the edges of the moon into slivers and quarters. If he collapsed, what to do with him?

How would she possibly stretch him and raise him back up? He possessed too many ungainly bones, too much coughing that made her feel tiny, just a girl, and not older like she imagined to be. So she yelled for her mama, heavier and stronger, but in the bedroom with the door shut and locked, all the lights out.

Terry doubled over the sink, and Jennifer yelled, again.

“Don’t bother Delia,” he managed to say, the words coming out breathy with no force to them at all. “I’m all right. She needs to readjust. You know that, Jenny. I’m okay.” The coughing wasn’t as hard, that’s true, but it might be a trick. He stood clamped onto the sink and swaying.

“What if you die?” His face was soaked in red as if all the blood in him was trying to get out and couldn’t. Any moment he’d get even worse. But there was one good thing—he couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t scare her with his gross hands.

“Lord, girl, I’m not going to pass.” He chuckled. “All it is is a cough.” And the coughing eased up some. He breathed good and full.

Jennifer lifted the torpedo, an Indy 500 race car shaped like a skinny arrowhead, and flung it. Usually, she aimed for the stomach because it didn’t hurt awful to be hit there, yet enough of a hit that he felt it, that he knew what she’d done. But this time, she flung it right for his head and hit him under the ear. He had coughed for five minutes.

“Damn it, girl. That one hurt.” He rubbed the place. There was even a speck of blood.

“You can’t cough that long.”

“I can’t help my coughing.”

“Not that long,” she told him.

He reached down, grabbed the torpedo, and flung it back. The car cracked into the wall.

“You put a dent in it,” she said. “You’re going to wake her.”

“Delia needs to be.”

“I thought she needed to readjust.”

“Not now. She needs to see what kind of mess her daughter’s up to.” The red in his face had changed, was pinker and cool, like he was controlling the blood, how it flowed, how it moved through the skin and under his short, short brown hair. “She won’t be happy.”

Jennifer spotted the car. She looked at Terry, then back at the torpedo.

“Don’t—”

But she did and flung it and Terry ducked and this time the car sailed through the thin glass of the kitchen window.

“Shit,” he said. “Now we’re both in trouble, Jenny. Why—” But he stopped himself a second time. A shuffling noise was coming from her mama’s bedroom. “You woke her.” He raised a finger.

“You did it coughing. And yelling.”

“Just get me something to fix this,” he said.

“Like what?”

“A shirt, cardboard, something. I got to cover this hole unless she finds it.” He leaned in on the broken frame, then swiveled around. “Come on, come on.”

So she went to her room and rattled open the drawer, scooped up her shirts, and carried the whole bundle to the kitchen.

“I just need one.” Terry wrapped it around his hand and punched out the remaining glass; the wind swirled, blowing in debris and light.

“Why don’t you use your own shirt?” she suggested.

He grabbed up another one of hers, a pink one that she wore a lot, and another, stuffing them in the window like bricks until they fit tight in the square and the wind couldn’t whistle through. It looked as if the window had grown a colorful fungus, her clothes bulging and ugly.

“You think Delia will notice?”

“That’s stupid. Of course she’ll notice.” There was a flushing noise—her mother still behind a door. “When do I
get my shirts back?” She only had three clean ones left and needed them.

“As soon as I get this fixed. You’re all right today.” He glanced down. “We’ve got to measure it,” and he quickly traced his finger along the frame. “I’ll talk with Neil about cutting glass, or maybe plywood. But that’s it. One square, you think?”

They looked at the fungus blob, and Jennifer nodded. “One square,” she said.

Then, “I can’t help the coughing, Jenny. Don’t be so hard on me.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either.” He sighed. “Don’t be so hard on me, okay?”

She wasn’t about to utter
okay
or even give him a nod. Then he started to rub her head, and she jerked back.

“I washed my hands,” he promised, and put his hand back on her head and she let him. But she didn’t feel calm, couldn’t bring herself down from all his noise, such a thin body, he wouldn’t hold up. He’d pass like Everett, and she’d lose another father. So she rolled the dust around with her tongue and kept at it, focused, so she never had to spit, never had to cough. Eventually, it wasn’t his rubbing, it was the dirt her tongue clicked back and forth that made her relax and allowed her to readjust.

The calmness she felt now leaning against the oak in Linn Park was from that same place—the dust had simply moved from Louisiana to Alabama, had followed, that dust sifting now from the light to her, like the rugs in her apartment of chairs. Jennifer trapped those tiny particles, breathed them in, held them, and her lungs refused to let go.

Every tree in Linn Park was covered, too, not quite dead, still in shock. Water no longer ran in the fountain that the
trees encircled, and the lower reflecting pools were also empty, overrun with people stepping in, out as if their movement were the only way to stay alive.

On the envelope, she wrote her mother’s Chicago address,
355 Turner Avenue, Apt. 2118
, and started to put her own Fatama address in the left corner—Mathew was in Fatama, and maybe the letter had a chance of winding up at one of those places—but instead she wrote the date,
June 26, 2044
, and her name,
Jennifer Philips Harrison
. She didn’t have any liberty stamps and no way to get any—every store she had passed on Highway 11, every building was broken and blacked out. As soon as she left Birmingham, she’d mail the letters.

She’ll worry if I don’t
, Jennifer reminded herself.

Delia often said, “I just can’t stop thinking about things. Wish I could.”

“I’d like to know about it, Mama, those things.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” she’d say. “Don’t make me answer that.”

Jennifer used to find her mother in the dining room, sitting with hands spread wide on the table, examining every crease, bend, and knot—when she checked her own palms, that’s all she found. Then her mama would wipe something from her face, lay her hands back on the table, open, close them, open them more, and wiggle her hips firmly into the wooden seat. Her mother had long hair, thick with streaks of gray that never trapped much dust, and she sat through the early morning, repeating the same ritual until Jennifer asked, “What’s wrong?” What else could her mama’s hands possibly carry?

“Nothing, nothing, nothing.” That meant something was definitely wrong, those three words given so quickly, leaving Jennifer breathless, anxious. Somehow Delia Philips knew it, too. She scuffed the chair over the tile and walked into the kitchen. If Jennifer followed, her mama
would walk out of the kitchen to her bedroom, close and lock the door.

All of Jennifer’s attempts to reverse the lock’s click with bobby pins and clothes hangers failed—they merely scratched at the hole in the doorknob. Sometimes Delia said, “Stop it.” Then the light inside the room would click off and all around the door blackness would seep into Jennifer’s toes and up through her body to her black hair. That’s when she felt the most empty and weak—as if she were being filled with cold black water, nothing to do until Terry got done at the mine.

Louisiana and Mississippi were like that, whatever house they moved into on the Pearl River, the schools barely open for weeks, always closing. Like that.

When Jennifer turned sixteen they kept the schools open for good, and she was in a classroom every night. She sat at her desk, and thought if only her mother had stayed at the table, had talked, then the loneliness they both felt could’ve been erased, or at least uprooted. But grief was something to endure alone—Delia insisted on it. First Everett’s passing—a flash flood at the Pearl River mine in Bogalusa, and Jennifer so young she could recall him only in fragments—the way he pitted the sofa cushions, his arms slumped and resting next to her, no jawline, eye line, hair, only his laugh—so loud and rumbling, it couldn’t be turned off.

In her dreams, even the ones now, his laugh curled up like smoke and wheeled through, vanishing as naturally as sky, skin, words—whatever the dreams put forth. Mama had pictures—the woman loved to take pictures and flicker-photographs—but they remained static against the memories of Everett plopping down and standing, his voice rolling inside her bones, unwilling to be quiet. Mama’s pictures were no one she knew really.

Four years after Everett’s death, Terry had moved in, and as soon as he left for the mine in New Hebron, Mama
pulled and braided Jennifer’s hair and said, “He’s coming back at six.” Then after a pause, “Isn’t he?”

Jennifer swung around to face her mama’s doubt—always that doubt, something hard in her eyes. Not toward Jennifer, she didn’t mean it that way, but something hard and scattered that Jennifer connected to the desert, the sand undercutting her mother’s gravity, in both of them, the possibility of any axis.

“He’ll be home. He’s always home at six, Mama,” she said, and wanted sometimes to snatch her mama’s hair, make her say ow, make her step out of the unending sadness.

Yet Jennifer had done the same worrying when she married at twenty-one, spent nights examining her palms for cuts and breaks while Mathew dug deeper holes in the clay loam. She counted figures in the wallpaper and the rough ceilings while he went thirty-seven feet, sixty feet down—a parallel counting of his life and hers. She measured him deep in the earth, his body growing smaller and smaller, the numbers filling up the space above him and between them, but never enough numbers to fill the distance completely.

When she started to talk to herself like Delia, she paid for Internet classes from Syracuse, went driving through the desert towns until her propane rations gave out. Back and forth she went, looking at the empty houses everyone fled in 2014. But what was she hoping to find in them? She stopped at places with the front doors missing as if the ghost people had finally returned, and left open the black space as invitation and warning.