Snakeskin Road (8 page)

“Ma’am?” Mazy looked up at her mother, pencil flat to the paper.

“Of course, you can draw. Go ahead. She can,” Lavina said to Jennifer. “Loves to. I keep notepads just for Mazy, but they’re in our suitcase on the bus. No good now.”

“I’m not trying to upset you,” Jennifer said.

“You’re not upsetting
me.”
Lavina crossed her arms and hooked her thin neck back, indignant at what Jennifer had said, or had she been caught off guard? Jennifer wasn’t sure.

Mazy stopped drawing and looked at her mother again.

“Go ahead, Mazy. Show Jennifer a picture.” She waved her hand at her daughter. “She’s good with faces. Besides, you might be doing that all day, which is more than we’ll be doing. I’m not mad,” Lavina chuffed. “There’s too much else to be mad at. The government, for one. And all these people—it’s damn making me claustrophobic. I wish they’d just move out.” She shooed a hand at the crowd, rubbed the back of her thin neck.

“Just in case someone decides to mess with us …” She pulled up her shirt to reveal the butt of a knife, her stomach drawn and the bottom of her ribs showing. Jennifer noticed a scar across her stomach like a long worm.

“You see that?” She turned in closer to Jennifer. “That’s where they pulled Mazy out of me, and Lord,” she grimaced, “I know what it’s like to be sliced into. And holler? Lord did I holler. ‘Won’t feel a thing,’ the doctor said. ‘Okay, Doctor. Okay.’” She nodded. “Let me tell you, didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. The anesthesia didn’t
last, and I just lay there, couldn’t even twitch.” She drew her body in. Her eyes closed down. Then opened. “Mazy, you owe me for that one. Always going to owe me.”

But Mazy was busy sketching, watching the boy with the peach fuzz head. He had come back and sent another bird sailing, diving. He whistled like the dropping of a bomb, and Mazy glanced at him, sketched, didn’t look up at her mother.

“Too many people,” Lavina whispered; the Cold War sirens started, middle of the day. The sun was sitting over them, and it would only get hotter. Jennifer tried not to think of the heat, how it swelled her tongue, left her mouth chalky, and the taste of metal—
middle of the day, middle of the day
, she kept telling herself, a piece of time to hold on to.

Jennifer had drawn pictures when she was younger but never liked what she drew. Nothing looked like it was supposed to be. Houses looked like blobs with diagonal windows, cars looked like flat houses ready to swoon, and her faces? They were gnarled like thrown-away paper and blurry, boring. When she got bored enough, she cleaned: windows, ovens, cabinets—especially the hinges on cabinets—the sand was always trying to get in, grit everything up. Or she slept against the passenger door while Terry drove the riverbanks, the truck’s engine humming in her stomach.

Her mother had taught her to write, and the lessons carried over during those few weeks a year the mining schools opened until she was sixteen. Delia taught her when she wasn’t having a spell, and sometimes after her mother locked herself in her room, Jennifer wrote small notes and slipped them under:
Come out
, or
Please, come out
. She stood completely still, listening, waiting for Delia to pick them up. But those requests never worked. So she tried
another strategy: yelling, which worked on two occasions, and got her spankings for it.

Since her mama kept the television in her bedroom, Jennifer had the rest of the house and its loneliness to carry. Sometimes Jennifer stood by the door listening to the voices, imagining actors, creating their lips and white teeth, tilts of head and how confidently they strode across floors and fields, and the audience, that matchbox of people dark in front of the stage. But most of the time the TV wasn’t on. It was quiet, and Jennifer had the whole house. She cleaned until her arms got heavy and became a dull silence she wanted to cut off—arms, legs, all of her had become boring. And no cleaning, no drawing, no rugs wrapped around chairs could reverse it.

In their home in Picayune she had busted a window. It marked the beginning of one of her mama’s longest spells. For twenty-seven nights the wind shook the frame, Terry promising to get it fixed and not doing it; twenty-seven nights her mama locked herself in the bedroom. The quietness and the shaking window built up a feverish pressure all the way to the ceiling that would eventually get to her mama, had to, and she’d come out. But Jennifer had told herself the same thing last night and the week prior, and the one before that.

Twenty-seven. Jennifer was twelve. Twelve plus twelve was twenty-four, and this spell had lasted twice her age—too long. She couldn’t breathe, and walked up to the window, unplugged the shirts stuffed in the gap, let the wind blow the sand in. She stuck her hand out and felt around, all gritty and dirty hot that didn’t make her feel better. But once she pulled her hand inside, she noticed the cut. A scrape on her lower left arm just above her wrist, a bleeding, just a little.
Stupid, stupid
. She wrapped her arm tight with one of the shirts, but the dirt inside it was too rough, and she unwrapped it, washed her arm in the sink, beat the dust out of another shirt, wrapped it again.

Then she went to her mother’s door and started to knock.

   All afternoon, Mazy sketched and Jennifer and Lavina watched the crowds. More and more people fell, and they didn’t help them, not a single one, and even the Red Cross details gave up and left the bodies where they lay.

After the evening siren washed through, the collectors started in like oversized locusts, how Jennifer had always pictured locusts swooping down, covering a field, landing on blades and leaves with twitching legs and wings, eating. The collectors started in like that, had become so aggressive, and Jennifer followed Lavina and Mazy to another park: Kelly Ingram.

It wasn’t long before they came across two men and a woman turning down a street.

“They might’ve seen us,” Lavina whispered and led Jennifer and Mazy the other way, across Bestoe to Eleventh, then back up Seventeenth. The small group might be a group of roamers, a bishop gang, or a bombing gang—that’s what Lavina called them, what the guardsmen called them.

Lavina had seen the bishop gangs in action—they holed up in churches and took people as soon as they walked inside to “Have a word with God.” Repent. Sanctuary. The explosions were from bombing gangs shelling into wealthy neighborhoods. “They’re destroying Gail’s onion.” Lavina had laughed when she said this because that’s what Gail called the labyrinth of Birmingham walls. “It’s getting sliced up now, those rich places. Everything’s getting looted. And the people there still trying to leave.” She had pointed to a string of mille-copters slipping up into the sky beyond the food drop; all day the mille-copter trains slipped in and out. “City’s about empty, except here.”

So when they saw the two men and the woman, they went the other way across Bestoe to Eleventh, and down to
Kelly Ingram. The sign in the brick said:
In Honor of Osmond Kelly Ingram, First American Killed in Action in World War I. Medal of Honor. War Cross—Italy
.

Cars had been piled into the square, and a long transit bus and the bricks from one building, the entire façade had collapsed into the park, leaving a dark cave, an open hull of pews and stained glass and beams like a rended ship. In the park was a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, and nothing else except the last of the sun where the ozone had disappeared for the moment, giving a new depth to the world—shadows left behind from coiled metal, wires, the high tops of buildings, and car hoods. They walked between two sheets of bronze—dogs growling out from bronze walls frozen and sharp. What had happened here? Jennifer wondered. She couldn’t move away from thinking the dogs might be real. If they had been, they would’ve cut into her and Mazy and Lavina. Mazy stroked a muzzle, felt along the sharp bottom row of teeth.

“Don’t do that,” Lavina told her.

At the end of the dogs sat a van, pale blue, but it was hard to tell the color in the grayness, the way dust had settled over the body, the hood crushed beneath the underbelly of a truck. Lavina jingled out a set of keys and opened the rear doors.

“Don’t get in yet,” she whispered and walked to the front, opened those doors, too. She did it slowly, carefully, so the hinges creaked only slightly against the lull.

“I don’t think the roamers followed us,” Lavina said.

“There were two dead bodies inside,” Mazy said, staring at the van. “We dragged them out.”

“To Ninth Street,” Lavina added. “Heavy as washing machines.”

“Then we took the keys,” Mazy said.

“Don’t talk so much,” Lavina told her. “We don’t want any roamers to find us.”

Jennifer held on, tried to keep herself, her balance, but
there was a flutter in her mind she couldn’t get hold of, ravel. She needed sleep, and the flutter spiraled down her body, down her spine and hit her legs with a numbness—she couldn’t feel her feet, and she couldn’t judge her distance to the open van, the buildings, the sun.

“Got to let it cool off,” Lavina said. “I haven’t seen any people here, and none have seen us, but we got to be quiet.”

“Mama, stop talking,” Mazy said.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Mama.”

Lavina crossed her arms. “Just a few more minutes till it’s cool enough.”

The shadows kept growing wider and wider as if they were being poured into the square like some cool, thin liquid, trying to hide them. There were lights in the distance, but not like the lights that had come before. A fire—that’s what it was. Something else burning farther away and smoke.

Lavina stepped into the van, scuffed around, then poked her head out to say it was cool enough, come on, so they joined her and hid themselves inside, locked the doors. The van was black inside except for a swath of tiny rust holes near the front, and the windows had been shut up with cardboard and plastic, the air kept still with heat and dust and the thinnest traces of grease and metal. Lavina turned the crank on the flashlight and set the base down. The blue light curved through the van’s belly, revealing blankets and a tire and that was it.

In one corner, Lavina lifted out a stack of provisions, added two more. “We’ve saved nine,” she said. “That should do for a while.” Mazy plopped down with a moan. She had given the notebook back to Jennifer in Linn Park, and was stretching her hand out now, her arm. And she hadn’t said a word about the faces she had drawn and decided to keep, the ones she scratched over.

“People do a lot of walking at night,” Lavina explained.
“I’ve seen them. Roaming. One group I saw shoot a collector. Took everything that he’d lifted from the dead. Then they started in on his body. We couldn’t get away from where we were hiding. They would’ve shot us. Would’ve done the same with us. I’ve seen bodies blown up, you know. When we’re blowing a shaft, before we light any chesa-sticks or fill any boreholes, we try to clear everyone, but sometimes people are there you don’t notice, or they step into the wrong place. I’ve seen what explosions can do. But nothing like what they did to that collector. I covered Mazy’s eyes. Wrapped her up in me so she wouldn’t fidget. Saw all of that.”

“Be quiet, Mama,” Mazy said.

“Stop it now. Just go to sleep, and let me tell it.” Lavina wouldn’t look at Mazy or Jennifer, not straight-on. Instead she sighed, kept scanning the walls.

“Sleep.”

She said it in such a way that at first Jennifer thought it was a question, as if “sleep” were apples, cold water, and did Jennifer want some? But no, Lavina was
telling
her to go to sleep, if she could do it, wind down, slow the flutter of her exhaustion.

Jennifer stretched out on one of the blankets—it was rough and the steel beneath made her back go numb and sweaty. She shifted, kept shifting on the floor. It was a huge cage they were in. Lavina flipped off the blue light. Soon all Jennifer felt was a tumbling of dreams—those seconds of Mat and her mama, stretched out now, longer and longer reels of those worlds, their skin—Mathew’s clay hand on her stomach holding the baby in place, her mama’s wrinkles crosshatched and closing over her pinhole eyes, drawing her face, her chin into the V center of her neck.

Last week through the early mornings, Mat had held Jennifer in Fatama, and later they slipped out to the Alabama River—two weeks ago he had held her before work, and they listened to the old record of Billie Holiday that had
belonged to Mathew’s father, Mathew’s grandfather. It was warped now, but they still set it on the turntable, taking in the scratched rhythms.

Billie’s voice swelled against the steel of the van now, echoing the final trace of blue light and the cardboard Mazy and Lavina had pushed into the windows. One window remained cracked and wouldn’t close all the way, so they worried, but it was pitch, the world was pitch—and just beyond were those fires as if stars had fallen into Birmingham, and would smolder here, burn everything, sink the city into the earth before their intensity washed out.

The sleep grew darker, fell away from Billie’s voice, her song—

—the stars so deep, she would never wake from it, didn’t want to, afraid at times she’d never find the way back from sleep to waking because there was no staircase, no rope out of its tunnel, just a deep, deep falling until she landed on top of a door and she knocked, kept knocking.

Jennifer was twelve, again, and she beat the door until it was upright like a door should be and she was standing in the house in Picayune, a coolness gliding along the carpet and across her toes, it was February, she was twelve, her arm wrapped tight.

“Mama,” she started yelling. “Mama. I’m wounded.”

She looked at her arm where the shirt was wrapped—no blood—and pressed into the fabric, first her thumb, then her nail, until a drop leaked through and a small line of blood began to smear.

“Mama,” she said. “Please come out.” She banged on the door, pounded as if she could knock it down. “I’m hurt bad, Mama.”