Snakeskin Road (12 page)

2607 Chesson Street, Whatley
Teal Dennis
Mazy—Bonded—5:00
Wednesday
.

June 29

Dear Mama
,

We had to abandon the consulate line. All morning, we’ve stood outside, first for rations and water, then the consulate. We couldn’t get under the tent before the sun became too much, so we’re under my oak tree, the one I found when I first came here, planted in memory of George Washington. That’s what the plaque says
.

The limbs give us a thin shade now, leafless, crossing out lines of the sun, and by us, I mean I’m here with Mazy Elis. She’s the girl I wrote you about from Talladega. Usually she draws pictures through the heat, but her mother, Lavina, has gone to find a way out, and I’m taking care of Mazy now. She’s fifteen and won’t talk. I don’t blame her for that. She’s worried about her mama. A little bit of her, I think, blames me for her mother leaving. That’s probably true. If her mama hadn’t found me, she wouldn’t have left her daughter behind
.

Already noon, and we’re inside the dust and smoke, something perpetually burning the city, sooty and gritty. Something here is always burning. So the earth’s white haze gets confused with our own fires. I can’t separate them, and my breathing is shallow, difficult like something
heavy is down in my lungs—a crowbar or hammer twisting. The workers at the shelter all have respirators for when the air is heavy like this. The rest of us pull up our shirts to our face or take a rag. A wet rag is better than a dry one—that’s what you always told me, and it’s true. I’ve seen some people tearing shirts from dead people. Forget the smell, they just need something to filter the air, to use against the sun
.

Across from the shelters, a memorial points at the sky, an obelisk trying to find a cloud to pierce, to open. But it can’t cut through the smoke. There’s one statue on a roof, a gold woman clutching arrows. I can’t see her today. The park is full of stone obelisks, bronzed soldiers turning blue-green, memorials to the dead. When you first come into the city, there’s a statue of Vulcan, Birmingham’s symbol, but I’ve never seen it because of the haze. It’s gone, the residents say, pointing at where it should be. But it’ll show up when the weather clears. It’ll be back once the weather clears
.

   
The evening siren has started, and still the sun is trying to break through the dust and smoke; shards of light come, then quickly get covered over. At least the heat is finally letting up; at least Mazy has drawn a picture. She hasn’t started talking to me yet, but she drew a picture of a woman who plopped down a few yards in front of us, her dress rising as she fell. For a while she raised her hands, lowered them, and stretched one higher and held
herself up with the other until her arms became too wobbly. She lay down and went to sleep. I thought she might be dead, or easing into death, but someone kicked at her and helped her up
.

Elaine, keep moving, the man who kicked her said, and she walked toward the tents with him, disappeared. Never saw her face, only the back of her clothes charcoaled in dirt
.

Mazy drew the hands holding on to the air as if Elaine had found an invisible clothesline, or as if the air itself, every length of it had been compressed into a single line for hanging on to before Elaine had to let go, and then Mazy drew the sleep, and then the legs and arms of the crowd like a thick grove of trees. I’ve got to get us out of here, Mama. There’s no electricity except for the generators the national guard have set up and the ones that sputter in pockets through Birmingham. Lavina, Mazy’s mother, was good at pointing them out and the different explosions. She could tell by the sound what was detonated and the total weight of plastics used. Mostly plastics, she said, some launchers. She was a coal blaster from Georgia. Today, so many blasts. Then smoke. Birmingham is caving in around us, and we can’t see it
.

The Red Crosses are coming through for the dead—their last pickup of the day. They don’t load the dead at night. It used to be ten or twelve on foot, but now the Crosses travel in armed groups alongside a small truck and a trailer for tossing up bodies. They stack them into
pyramids until the bodies start rolling off. Then the Crosses drive to harvesting machines where the dead are cocooned in plastic so they don’t stink
.

But Mama, the dead aren’t being hauled out of the park anymore. Seven gravel trucks are lined up, full of plastic dead bodies and the cabs empty of drivers, the trucks just sitting. The roads have gotten bombed is what a guardsman told us. So, the rest of the bodies have been taken to a courtyard behind the tents. The harvest machines wrap them, and the forklifts dump them into the courtyard. On some bodies, the plastic has already started to melt to the skin—you can see it, how the plastic changes hue, less shiny, more opaque and greasy. The courtyard bodies are as high as the withered boxwoods, starting to form into a pyramid
.

Mazy is sleeping now. For supper we had canned beef stew and green beans—even more tasteless than our desert food, the out-of-date MREs we used to get. But Mazy and I are safe, locked inside the van. Tomorrow morning, the walls will start to heat up and we’ll unlock the doors, return to the food drop site. We’ll have our breakfast, lock the van doors, head to Linn Park—the world has become static. I’ve been here four days but our lives are set into this routine, so exhausting, it’s getting harder to call up what the world was like, what existed before this one
.

Mazy and I talked about her camp in Georgia over supper. They didn’t have school like we didn’t for so long in Mississippi, though friends of her mother had read to her and taught her a few words. So I showed her the one book I had, read her a poem, “Sparrow Bones,” then tried to get her to read the first line—He told the secrets of his life directly into your ear—I had her sound out letters
.

Remember when you did that with me? It’s the only time she looked happy all day. I guess I wouldn’t call it happiness. That’s not right. She seemed interested. Engaged. She keeps asking, Where’s north? How do you get to Hooper City? That’s where her mama went
.

I don’t know, I keep telling her. I sit on my hands, so I won’t point in any direction. I’m afraid she’ll try to leave. This morning, a group of refugees opened a manhole cover and people jumped in; other refugees said they led to the protected communities that hadn’t been overrun, and eventually led out beyond the desert city wall. But it depended on where you surfaced. The labyrinth opened into the broken parts, too, overrun with collectors, bishop gangs
.

It wasn’t long before some of the people started coming back up, said they got turned around, couldn’t figure which way to go. One woman said she could get to the end of the city—a short woman, bald, her scalp black as if her hair had been burned off. She had worked for the city in the sewer tunnels, but no one joined her, no one believed anymore. She’ll be back, someone said. She’ll
just go in circles, too, make herself crazy. Or bake to death down there
.

Even the inside of the earth is baking, Mama. The dust is the same as yesterday—I see it now in this blue light floating through the van—the heat, the smoke, and the sun, finally the sun has given up for the day. And when the Red Cross detail came through, they put the manhole cover back on top
.

I saw Darl today. He was the one who tried to help those people on the bus in Talladega. He was leaning against the tallest memorial, the obelisk, all sides of it burned black like the woman’s scalp. I saw him after the last warning siren, and Mazy and I had begun our journey from George Washington’s tree to the van
.

He was leaning against the stone slab, his eyes closed. He could’ve still been alive like that woman, Elaine, earlier. And Mazy, she saw him, too, knew who he was. But we just walked around him, watched how the last of the sun cut over his face and body, lines of sunlight shifting as the haze shifted, the smoke sinking to the earth as if it were coming from his body, as if the last of him was sinking
.

Then the Red Crosses came over and took him because he was close to the tents and their painted red line you’re not allowed to pass. When they lifted him, the line of his shoulders raised as if the shoulders had been pinched up, clipped to the air I remembered how it was when he was alive, those shoulders planting him or
setting him into a strong walk. But the Crosses just slung him onto the truck bed already too full. His body rolled down, and they pushed at the other bodies with sticks
.

Make a little room for the POC, someone said, then they slung him again, and this time he caught on the curved bones of the others. I know I shouldn’t let Mazy see these things. You’ll think bad of me here—and maybe it’s a mark that I won’t be a good mother, but all day we watch people die, Mama. And yes he was someone we knew, and deserved more respect than that from me
.

The harvest machine was close by, ready to spin and sew him in plastic, like some huge spider cottoning him in a web until his face was entirely sealed. I know that’s what happened
.

Mama, I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of Darl, keep seeing his face all closed up and stiffening. If I don’t keep my mind busy with writing, the walls of the van start to shrink down, and I can’t breathe. If only I could open the door a little, see a glimpse of the lighter darkness outside—I must get my mind off of it—I’m tempted to get up and go out just to breathe, but I’m afraid that if I do, Mazy will wake, and I might expose her, both of us. I can’t let anyone find us here. Lavina said Mazy snores like a bullhorn, and she does. I have to push her. Is it mean of me, you think? But I don’t want anyone to find us
.

I’ve had some morning sickness. I keep putting my
hand on my stomach, but there’s no lump there, nothing to show. Sometimes I press down, not hard, I press to see what will happen. My stomach doesn’t pop up any bigger. And I breathe and watch my stomach. Mazy caught me once and asked, Is your stomach hurt?

I got a bellyache, I told her. My stomach’s full of air
.

I smiled, wanted to laugh, wanted to get her to laugh
.

I’m hungry all the time, was all she said and went back to drawing. She did talk to me before we got back to the van. I had forgotten that, her talking to me, and so many other things I wish I could forget
.

Mama, when did you start showing with me? What’s it like to carry a baby for all those months, someone growing inside you? Nine months. How do you take care of something you can’t hold properly? And I can’t make the smoke in Birmingham disappear. And I remember the women’s babies in the mining camps. I felt Charlene’s baby swing a foot against her round stomach, her skin so tight at any minute it would burst. My skin has never been that tight, but it will be. Tell me when I see you, all these things. Promise, you’ll tell me
.

The mille-copters are coming over again. It’s the food drop for tomorrow, or maybe another train of people in the protected zones leaving. The explosions have died down some—they remind me of thunderstorms at night sweeping through the desert, leaving the morning ground so hot and wet that it sticks to your hands, all over your skin. By lunch all of it dry, too hot to keep
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