Snakeskin Road (11 page)

Directly above her, one of the cardboard pieces slipped, and Jennifer pushed it more tightly into the window. She waited to see if it would fall again, breathing in the diesel and heat—it was much hotter at the top of the van—but just standing there became as awkward as not answering Lavina, so she sat down and flipped her arm over, revealing the bruise.

“There were two men—coyotes,
guias
—who said they would take me to Chicago. Kept looking at me, examining, said they would take me with whatever money I had. Then I told them I didn’t have any money, and they said that didn’t matter, they’d still take me to Chicago. But I didn’t know what they would do.”

She looked up and Lavina was staring like the men had done, that same suffocation of her body inside her clothes. Jennifer wanted out of the van.

“You’re healthy,” Lavina finally said.

“That’s what they told me.”

“The same for Mazy. All us desert people. We’re used to this weather. I’ve been told by
guias
since we got to Linn Park that Mazy and I are healthy. All of them saying they’ll take us out of Birmingham with no problems. Now, one
guia
, he just said he’d take Mazy. Trusted him,” she said.

“I didn’t trust those men I saw.”

“His name was Teal Dennis, told me to get Mazy out, she’d have to work her debt off in Kentucky, the tobacco fields there. He knew farmers and kept them supplied. Said he might be able to sell her as a servant to some of his people in Louisville or Memphis—those who live behind the walls, rich people. She’d be taken care of. He had connections, customers he dealt with on a regular basis, a route that
stretched up through the Midwestern Free Zones to St. Louis, Missouri, and that he’d take Mazy, and she’d have to work until she paid off her debt—three years’ labor.”

“My God, three years?” Jennifer shook her head. “You can’t do that. Mazy’ll be eighteen. What about you? What did he promise you?”

“He did what you’re doing—shook his head at me. Told me I was too old to bring a good price, even if I was healthy. That’s the one word they all like to use—
healthy
. Like we’re chickens or dogs. He said he couldn’t get a buyer for me because I wasn’t young enough, pretty enough. Too many sun wrinkles, don’t you see?” She pushed her head forward and smiled so her wrinkles fanned out in deeper ravines.
The desert has ravaged me
.

“I told him I was a coal blaster—that didn’t help. That’s what I get for having Mazy at forty-five.” Lavina pulled up her shirt, rubbed a finger along the worm-scar. “Still itches,” she said, as if the scar were new or by rubbing it she could make it new, keep her daughter’s memory attached. Then she lowered her shirt. “But he can get Mazy out. That was his promise.”

“I don’t know why you’d trust him.”

“It’s a choice among bad choices here. At least what he’s offering is temporary.”

“If it’s real,” Jennifer said.

“He showed me a contract. Said all the workers are insured.”

“What good is that paper? It’s no good.”

Lavina crossed her arms over her knees, stretched her body down and back up, slow, painful like she was trying to work the pain out of her bones and muscles and couldn’t. Jennifer felt that same ache working its way through her body, making her shift a little, and still the ache.

“I’ve always known about
guias
, but I never thought I’d be dealing with one.”

Jennifer had known about them, too. They hung out
around the desert border and drove in when the miners got close to Birmingham, what the miners called “sweeping”—“the
guias
are sweeping”—and some of the miners and their families paid to get swept up and out of the desert and none of those people came back to say what happened.

Lavina flung her hands at the air as if slinging off water. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I can’t send Mazy out like that, so I told this man no, I wouldn’t do it,” and she crossed her arms again over her knees. “The other
guias
said they’d take us, no problem. That’s another one you hear,
No problem
, as if trusting them should be easy. Some of them are organ dealers. Kill you as soon as they get you outside the city limits. Gut you like an animal, take your organs and sell them up north. At least the collectors wait until you’re dead before they start cutting. But this man, Teal Dennis, has been sweeping the Southeastern border for years.” Lavina sighed and Jennifer leaned over the blue light that separated them.

“What if we tried to leave on our own, tried to make it to the end of the city over the walls?”

“The bishop gangs will find us, or the national guard, the patrollers. Even if we got out, where will we go? It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s better than trusting
that guia.”

“I told him I wouldn’t do it. But Jen, you have to trust somebody. You have to choose,” she said. “At least he had a history, the names of places, an explanation. That’s something you can’t find in other people.”

“I don’t have that much faith.”

“If you were desperate enough you would. If you had a daughter—” And she lay down. “My aunt would help us, but she’s up in the north. I worry she’s dead, and my cousins. I don’t like to think like that, but…”

“They’re not dead,” Jennifer assured her, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could give assurance of, and she shouldn’t have said it, another thing she shouldn’t have said.

“I don’t think the government’s going to let us out of here to know. Just going to keep us corralled until we all die in the sun. Like what happened to the bus driver. He’s still on that sidewalk.”

“You seen him dead?”

“No,” Lavina answered.

“You don’t know, then. Maybe Darl got back with some help. Maybe the visas will work tomorrow. We can go back to the consulate.”

“Sick of that place.” Lavina kicked her feet, shifting them so the bottom of the blanket curled around her toes like loose paper, and the van rocked, settled back.

“What’s in the black box?”

“Letters to my mama,” Jennifer said like she had said yesterday. Her mouth was dry, and there was sand she couldn’t get out from behind her teeth. She kept rolling it around with her tongue to calm herself. “That’s all.”

“So your mother’s in Chicago?”

“Yeah,” Jennifer said, and Lavina didn’t say another thing except, “That’s good. I hope you get there.”

She sealed the letter in an envelope, addressed it, set it in her box, closed the lid down, and watched the blue light fade in clips and clips, dimming the belly of the van blue into black.
Why didn’t he come with me?
Always that question circling, pushing forward in the space around her.

The blackness spread out beyond the van, beyond Kelly Ingram Park and into Thirteenth and Ninth and Eighth Streets, filling the pews of the open church on Sixteenth
with long black space, and into Linn Park, overwhelming the refugees, the guards, and Red Crosses, and to the first set of concrete walls in Birmingham, and over them into the neighborhoods, each peel of Gail’s onion engulfed, layer after layer, until the blackness pooled outside the city and began flooding the desert, too much space to gather up and hold.

   The night she left Fatama, she and Mathew sat on the bed holding each other, the air conditioner making its low-hummed growl, circulating the cold over the blankets she stayed wrapped in, Mathew already dressed for work. His thick rubber trousers squeaked whenever he shifted on the mattress, and underneath, his boots scuffed and scuffed at the floor like dying fish. He pulled away.

Don’t
, she thought, and said, “Come with me to Chicago.” He just looked down at the blankets and she wondered where he was in his head. Thinking of his father who died in March. Or his uncle who died looking for blue diamonds when Mathew was twelve. But it wasn’t her.

“What’re you thinking? Talk to me.”

“I’ve got to leave for Miller’s Ferry,” was all he said, and he showed Jennifer his watch. “It’s almost 11:00. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“I won’t be here,” she reminded, and he nodded, kept looking at the blanket, where it gave way to her gown and arms.

She grabbed his chin and lifted, flaked off the mica and old clay along the ridge in his forehead, sweaty, smooth, a river rock jutting, anchoring his eyes deep under his eyebrows—“So much of your father is in you.”

“Don’t say that.” He jerked away so she couldn’t reach his face.

“It’s true,” she said. There had always been the similarity. But Mat had become uneasy since his father’s death, so
quiet, a ghost that, when she touched, nothing warm or familiar returned.

“I have to go to work.” He brought his arm up again, the watch flashing in the lamp, and she pushed it down.

“The bus leaves at 2:30. Why won’t you come with me?” And the baby, if she mentioned the baby, said,
I’m pregnant
, this would do it, this would get him to leave with her for Chicago.

He looked at the blanket seams, where they crossed her beige gown, the wrinkles there. She pulled the blanket further up her arms. The AC flickered, the generator slowing for a second, then it surged, fell back, and stayed in a growling lull until Mat stretched up from the bed, headed through the hallway without answering.

Jennifer listened as the front door, then the truck door opened, closed, and said to herself,
Open the door back up. Come here
. When the engine cranked, she said,
Turn the key back. Open the door back up
. She closed her eyes.
Come here
.

He pulled out of the driveway and the ghost she had known since March was replaced by the wind, the AC humming, gone.

   The heat in the van started to build in the morning, and it felt as if the whole cavern had swelled up like the belly of an animal, sleep giving way to flesh and ribs bowing and bending. Usually Lavina was waking them, getting them up so they could open a few rations before the heat turned unbearable, then out to Linn Park for more food and water and maybe the consulate, trying to figure out what the government would and wouldn’t do.

But this morning, it was just the heat, the smell of rubber and diesel tangled in the scratchy blankets. The black river Jennifer had dreamed of, having consumed the city and desert all night, now flowed back into the van, sunlight
breaking around the cardboard edges, trying to saw open the last color of the dream. Jennifer looked at the clump of blankets where Lavina and Mazy slept and thought about going back to sleep and would have, but the note was so close that when she turned her head, the paper shifted, rattled.

Jennifer grabbed it and sat up, moved the note under the pins of light.

It was signed
Thanks
and
Lavina
and a p.s. at the bottom said,
I will pay you back
.

Pay me back?
Jennifer opened her black box and dug into the bottom. The money was still there. But when she lifted the envelope, it sprung too lightly in her hands. She counted the twenties, the tens—only three hundred. She recounted. Still three hundred. Lavina had taken the other four.

She dropped the money and snapped the box lid, wrapped her body around it.

You have to choose who to trust
, Lavina had said, and Jennifer had trusted Lavina, but shouldn’t have. Three hundred dollars wouldn’t get Jennifer and her baby to Chicago. And yet Lavina was trusting her with Mazy—or was she leaving Mazy?

All her pressing didn’t make the box any tighter, any more secure, didn’t bring the money back. She’d been too careless, should’ve kept the box hidden under her shirt like she had those first days in Linn Park, should’ve kept it with her no matter what until the box was invisible.
Keep your secrets in
, she told herself, pressed harder, and started working at the dust on her tongue.

Her mama was probably still in her room in Chicago.
Delia had sent flicker-photographs of the room, its walnut vanity with two oval side mirrors that opened out from the long center mirror, all three flashing up briefly in the camera light; a bed had been placed on the opposite wall, with blue covers, navy, with light yellow sheets, and sometimes the sheets were a dull taupe, but the covers remained blue, and a bedside table without books, and sometimes her mama’s cat, Pearl, crossing the bed for the ten-second length of the flicker, carefully unsnagging its nails. One light in the ceiling, a square room, plain walls—her mother had kept them that way—no paintings, no framed photographs, no windows.