Snakeskin Road (14 page)

She went to the mirror, took down her mama’s towel, and looked at herself—her hair had gotten all frayed, her skin dulled; her face was shrinking, and soon, maybe, her bones, her whole cranium would shrink into a pea and crush into grains for the wind to blow out of existence.

“You,” she said, pointing at herself in the mirror, “are going crazy.” She nodded just in case some part of her didn’t get it. But she still refused to talk to her mama. Better to die crazy than give in—that was the motto on night fourteen. Then she felt sorry for her mama, all those nights of hers, like this. But Jennifer still wouldn’t leave her room.
Pride cometh before the fall
was one of the few Bible verses she knew, because Terry liked to say it like this:
Baby, now, pride cometh before the fall
.

Then on night sixteen, her mother came to her room and sat on the edge of the bed. She took Jennifer’s hair and started to shake out the dust like she always had, their routine, like they hadn’t missed a night of shaking and braiding. Delia pulled as hard as ever, and Jennifer bit her lip to keep from saying
ouch
. Neither one of them spoke as Delia patiently combed through the tangles, pulled strips of hair aside, then braided. When she finished, she clasped her hands onto Jennifer’s shoulders.

“There now,” she said. “All done.” She lowered her head between Jennifer’s shoulder blades. Jennifer stiffened her back to hold the weight and bowling ball shape of her mama’s head, her mama’s tears warm, turning cool and stinging. Jennifer did not turn around; she did not dare turn around.

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”

“I love you. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know why you did it,” Jennifer said, her shoulders easing, opening the cradled space in the center of her back. She nodded. “I know why.”

Despite the crying, her mother’s voice had a strength to it, a grounding, a certainness. There were times when Delia was doing better and taking care of everyone, keeping Terry and his hothead out of trouble, making sure Jennifer was doing her chores, teaching Jennifer to read. Their world was shifting that way now. Delia hadn’t been holed up in her room for sixteen days. Jennifer knew that these moments, these glimpses never lasted as long as the other ones, the quiet ones, the sad ones. But for now, at least, a good moment.

They could talk again. Not about loneliness, but they could talk.

North. Jennifer knew which direction was north—Nineteenth Street and Mettans would take them. She
found Nineteenth by the library end of the square and marked its direction with her finger, pressing the highway straight across the map’s wrinkles. Then Thirteenth to Court to Weatherly Road. That put you out in Hooper City. And from Hooper City, where could they go?

Whatley was east. Twentieth Street to Fifth Avenue—
Stay off 1st
, the note warned. She kept pausing at the inscription—Fifth to Chesson to Whatley. Somewhere in Whatley—2607—where the pencil lead had circled and circled, etching a small groove.

While Mazy sketched the surrounding refugees—fragmented, shoving, disappearing—Jennifer looked at the map. It was a torn-out square, a grid of the downtown area, a few miles in circumference, and didn’t extend to the desert wall where she and Mazy and the others from the bus had been dropped off five nights ago, where she had found stars for navigating into Birmingham. Since then the stars had darkened, smothered under dirt and smoke. She couldn’t find even one.

Like the afternoon before, and the afternoon before that, they left the square as soon as the last siren ended, creating a routine that had worked against the camp’s attrition—who would Jennifer recognize in the dead tomorrow?

But for now they were safe inside the van. She and Mazy had finished supper, the blue flashlight cranked and set in the middle, and Jennifer pulled out the map, checking the streets and directions, again, careful to follow one route at a time. If she jumbled too many streets, her internal compass spun and spun her vision into a blur.

Focus on one thing
, she told herself.
North
. But then she remembered the church. She had spotted the bishop gang there that morning. So when she and Mazy returned from Linn Park, they circled Kelly Ingram through the bronzed dogs and junked cars, by the apartment building called Freedom Manor, by the statue of MLK posed, ready to address the empty street. They came to the front of the church
the full length of Sixteenth, coming up on it slowly, watching—Jennifer noticed no movement inside, but she had to make sure.

She put down the yellow can of water and took out Lavina’s knife, holding it so it couldn’t be pulled from her, and kept Mazy close as they walked, up the steps, past where the doors and the frame had fallen down the center aisle. But there was nothing inside, except in the first row of pews and bricks where a fire had been, black coals eating out a place in the carpet and loose bones—nothing smoldering, nothing warm. The bishop gang had eaten a dog, then left.

On the altar, burned into wood, the words
This do in remembrance of me
, and Mazy pointed to a stained-glass window in shards of blue, its center ripped out where a glass body had been—only glass arms left to hold the corners of the frame. The ceiling was so high, so cavernous, that Jennifer’s breathing deepened and ached, and she saw Mazy inhale that same fullness.

There had been churches in Montgomery like this, so arched above her, full of the sense of sky, majestic, waiting for someone to sing. The church services in the mining camps had been held in squat buildings or trailers that swatted voices down, and Jennifer only had to attend a few times to know that God was a myth she didn’t believe. But in the old stone churches, the empty ones with rounded ceilings, painted ceilings, majestic—there, in those places, that voice lived, that music she wanted to hear.

Then the blue glass darkened like the specks of blue sky earlier—the sun was being shut out by a new crop of sand, which the wind had carried heavily for miles, looking for the right place to shake free.

Jennifer and Mazy had scrambled out of the church and run back to their shelter. Since that moment, the wind had been striking at the side of the van in a fury as if that first storm in Talladega had finally caught up with Jennifer after meandering and searching.

“Tell me the letters in this word, Jen,” Mazy said. They had finished supper and saved back one tin of rations to add with the other rations—three days’ worth of food, five days if they ate very little, and two plastic bottles they picked off Sixth Street, filling them with water from the can. The yellow can was heavy, and she stretched out the numbness in her arm and shoulder from carrying it all day.

“Jennifer.”

Mazy pushed her shoulder into Jennifer’s back and the throbbing sharpened.

“Stop it,” Jennifer said.

Mazy had the book of poems and was pointing to a word on the page. “This one,” she insisted, and Jennifer folded the map.

“It’s
soft.”
Jennifer whispered
soft
like Lavina would, so strange to hear the echo of someone else’s voice in your own.

“I know it.”

“The first letter is an
s
.” Jennifer drew the
s
on the back of the notebook with her finger. Mazy did the same. Then Jennifer wrote the letter down. “Lots of curves to an
s
,” she said.

The pen wobbled and dipped when Mazy tried, but she abled through it without pausing.

“Almost.” Jennifer drew a second
s
. “Slow through the curves.”

Then Mazy did, repeating
slow
, repeating
curve
.

“That’s it.”

Mazy smiled. She drew another
s
and another until the curves became a natural movement in her hand. They finished the
o, f
the
t
.

“What’s the next word?”

But Mazy shook her head. “Not yet. I want to get this one right.”

As she copied and recopied
soft
, whispering it, Jennifer thought of going north, of the street numbers, Nineteenth,
Thirteenth, how the streets kept shooting north eventually, always a turn to take them where Lavina had gone. Lavina was probably dead.

Jennifer looked down at the blanket and her stationery box, the black lacquer peeled where she had held it, belly sweat and hands, and grit, the blue light, anything not to look at Mazy. She shouldn’t think about Lavina dead with Mazy beside her. Better to think that she was alive, that the money she had taken from Jennifer had helped secure a way out for all of them. But Jennifer still didn’t understand why Lavina had gone north alone. And that kept eating at her: Lavina’s decision to leave them.

There was a scratching at the back doors as if the wind had brought down a branch or unhinged a strip of iron. But it wasn’t a scratching; it was a creaking noise, someone pulling on the door handle.

“Mama?” Mazy said.

Jennifer grabbed Mazy’s hand and flattened the pencil to the notebook, turned off the small flashlight. The blue wilted into black, and Mazy inched closer to Jennifer, said nothing else, like they had talked about—“No one can know we’re here,” Lavina had said. But someone knew.

Jennifer grabbed hold of the knife from where she kept it under her heel, from where the metal burrs caught on the tough of her skin. During the day she kept it tucked in her waist, somewhere touching skin so she could feel it, be aware of it always.

They shouldn’t have come back to the van. Jennifer had vacillated on what to do since they came across the bishop gang that morning.
If we go to the church and it’s empty
, she told herself,
then we’ll be okay
.

Black coals, bones—that’s all they discovered. Lavina had said, “A hideout can only last so long,” but staying in Linn Park at night had become too dangerous. And what if Lavina was outside simply trying to get in? Here, this spot, she would know to find them here. But if it were Lavina,
they would’ve already heard her voice, heard her calling for her daughter.

The wind struck the side of the van, pushed underneath it, then receded. And in that lull Jennifer heard someone walking. Then something butted the doors. The loud whack made them both jump, the pencil and paper were lost, the flashlight rolled to one side—but she held on to the knife.

Something walloped the doors again. The pieces of cardboard slipped to the ground. And though the doors had been unsettled, they didn’t break, the metal settled back. Nothing could be discerned through the small glass windows. Mazy dug her nails into Jennifer’s wrist, and Jennifer didn’t pull away.