Snakeskin Road (16 page)
Authors: James Braziel
Tags: #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #General
“Somewhere between here and St. Louis. That’s my route on Snakeskin Road. But it could be anywhere in the Free Zones really where she winds up. Depends on the customer, where the customer lives.”
“We need to get to the Saved World. Chicago.”
“The Midwest
is
the Saved World, honey. But it ain’t called the Saved World up there. It’s still the United States, more like city-states now. That’s what Birmingham was before all this mess, and that’s what Chicago is—but I ain’t going that far. I’m not a taxi service.”
She wanted to demand that he take them, but he would just take the money like Lavina did.
“What does she have to do?”
“Farmwork—that’s all the Free Zones are—mostly corporate farms. She might work in a factory or a house for someone. The customers choose, though I try to nudge them toward certain refugees.”
“I want her to be in a house with a good family.”
“A good family?” he howled. It turned quick into a cough and he had to rub his throat to soothe it. “Of course they’re good families. Each and every one. But you’re not Mazy’s mother? Seems like I met her. Can’t quite remember.”
“No, she’s not my mother.”
“Her mother’s gone. She left me in charge of Mazy.”
“She’s not gone.” Mazy pulled herself loose and stared at the floor.
“Well, she’s not here,” Teal Dennis said. “You look healthy, both of you do, like I was told outside.” He set the light over Jennifer’s face, down her body. She had to work hard to keep her eyes from closing.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Jennifer said.
“How old?”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty.” He groaned like other people’s age was something that ached him, and he stretched his back. The man couldn’t get comfortable. “Your name?”
“Jennifer.”
“I’ve got two contracts, Jennifer. If you want to join Mazy—you’re bonded for three years until your debt’s paid, then you’re free. That’s how it works.” He unfolded two long sheets of paper, pushed them across the floor.
“Will you keep us together?”
Mazy looked up when Jennifer said this.
“I’ll try, but I can’t promise—”
“I need to know you’ll keep us together.”
He bent down and put the light between the contracts, so they could see his eyes, the deep shadows, how the light pulled the sharp corners of his large face toward the ceiling, broadening.
“I can make all the promises in the world, but it don’t matter. You’ve got to get out of here. The government’s pulled out—there’s no more food, nothing, just a desert. You don’t want to be here for the last of it. You don’t want to be here when there’s nothing left. Now, I need to know if you’re going to sign these contracts. Storm’s coming to a lull.”
“She can’t write,” Jennifer said.
“Then you sign her name.” He dropped a pen on the sheets and before Jennifer could take it, Mazy grabbed her.
“You’re not signing for me.” She said the words straight-out.
“I don’t know where else we can go.”
“My mama,” she said.
“You have to trust me. I’m trying to get you out of here. It’s what Lavina wanted. We’ll die here.”
“My mother is here.”
“I don’t know where she is and neither do you, Mazy.”
“She’s with my cousins.”
“But she may not have made it.”
Mazy sighed, and dipped her head, shifted her body closer.
“If we leave, will Mama be able to find us?”
Jennifer wanted to tell her yes, but, “No,” she answered. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Mazy hooked her fingers tight into Jennifer’s fingers. “Then I can’t leave her. We should try to find her, Jen. Why won’t you help me find her?”
“Because I’m not sure where to look. This is the only way out. Lavina talked to him. She trusted him.” Jennifer looked over at Teal Dennis and Mazy did the same. “She doesn’t want us to come looking for her.”
“But I need to—”
“She’s gone.” Jennifer shook her head.
Mazy yanked her fingers loose. “You don’t know that; you don’t know where she is.”
“But we’ll be together.”
“You can’t promise that either. You heard him.” Mazy turned, stared at the opposite wall, the painting with the tree, maybe her attention was there, the swirls and colors, what Jennifer had already found.
“Remember those bodies when we came here tonight,” Jennifer said. “Laid out on the road, cut up and bleeding. I don’t want that to be you. And all the ones you’ve drawn. Remember them. All those people lost.”
Jennifer took the pen, signed under Teal Dennis’ name, above the Delta Insurance representative, and still underneath
there was a place open for
Buyer
. She signed both contracts, sent them back across the wooden floor, not even looking at what they said.
Teal Dennis took two small containers out of his pocket, opened one, and eased out a tiny object shaped like a
U
, like a horseshoe for a small pony.
“Open your mouth,” he said to Jennifer, then gestured with it. When she kept still, he sighed. “I already explained how this damn storm’s messed up my schedule, and you’re lucky I’m still here. All this is—I need dental records for the insurance. My customers want their property insured.”
“I’m not keeping that in my mouth.”
“You don’t keep it in. It just takes an impression. A few seconds and it pops out.” He scratched at his beard, and she didn’t say anything, so he strode over, and she opened her mouth.
“Bite down,” he said. He held her chin in place, her teeth squishing into the wax frame. She could smell dirt and coal, but also chicken cooked fresh in his hands, not out of a tin. Then he told her to open up and wedged the small horseshoe out, the suction so tight, she thought it would pull down her entire row of teeth.
He set it back into the container and wrapped it inside the contract.
Then he handed the other horseshoe to Jennifer and leaned back on his legs. Something was hollow about his body, how it moved and jostled, like the dead wood trees that got washed up in the river, like his thick skin and clothes had been wrapped around a big whistling, nothing frame.
“She’s got to do it, too,” he said. “I ain’t dealing with someone so angry.”
“Mazy?” But Mazy hadn’t stopped staring at the wall, the painting. “We’ve got to do this last thing.”
Jennifer came around and hooked her finger into the
girl’s mouth, opened it. She expected Mazy to bite at any minute. But the girl let Jennifer open it enough, let her place the horseshoe in, push it into her teeth, and take it out.
“There’s just one more thing,” Teal Dennis said. “That box of yours. I need to see it.” He gestured.
“Someone’s already looked at it once.”
“I know. Just put it over here.”
“They’re my letters.”
He tapped his finger on the ground, and she opened the lock like she had done in the foyer.
Teal Dennis shuffled his hands through the letters and down to the bottom and opened a few letters from her mother. He thumbed through Mazy’s notebook and the book of poems.
“These sealed envelopes—what’s inside?” He squinted at the address.
“Letters to my mother,” she said.
“Mathew Harrison?”
“He’s my husband.”
Teal Dennis opened one of the letters to Mathew, started reading.
Those are my words
, Jennifer thought to herself and wanted to snatch it from him.
Slowly, he put it back, pushed the box to her.
Then he went to the door. “Come on.” Mazy held on a little longer, but she got up, too, and they went down the hallway, still dark, but with other people with flashlights, and outside to where three vans sat, waiting. He put them in the last van, which was also dark, but when they got in, there were other bodies, so many, ten or fifteen or more, all of them, it seemed, women or girls Mazy’s age, and one looked even younger, but it was only a flash—the doors shut.
For a second it was as if the breath in all of them had been sucked out, and then they all exhaled. Someone was crying, somewhere, more than one. Someone was praying, “Oh Jesus, Lord, please,” always someone praying.
Mazy dug her nails into Jennifer’s arm and Jennifer let her. The wind and dust hit the walls of the van, shifted it up a little, polished it, and fell back. Jennifer hoped to find windows, but there was nothing. All she could taste was the wax in her mouth.
July 2, 2044
Dear Mama
,
So it’s true. The Saved World, your flicker-photographs from Chicago, the sky there when it breaks free of clouds into patches of blue, no haze, just blue to breathe easy. The first time we stopped this morning, I looked south, the clouds gray and brown there, still full of dust. But those clouds lingered back, and above, white clouds stacked tall, stretching the sky’s ceiling higher. Such depth to the sky, Mama, and between all that white collapsing on itself and rising? Blue, as if we had outrun the desert at last
.
Mazy and I have made it out of Birmingham, smuggled out by a guia, Teal Dennis. We’re in a convoy of three
vans, and it’s so dark in this cargo hull, lit only by splinters of light along the rear doors, when they shake open enough light for me to continue writing
.
Each time we stop, I’ve counted—there are fifty-one women and girls. The only men are the drivers and the guards who travel shotgun. We stop to eat and “go piss,” they tell us. Then they dig through the brush for propane gas tanks, full ones to replace the empties they leave in the same spot, under the same cover for the fuel runners. The men circle us with their hands over their rifles, talking about the next pickup at mile markers up the road
.
Teal Dennis told them in Double Springs, the fuel runner put it at marker 57 near the Natchez Trace
.
And that’s where we stopped next—the drivers trying to get us to Pickwick Landing in Tennessee for tomorrow’s auction
.
In Double Springs, I heard a lonely hollowed-out sound that swelled, died. The woman squatting next to me noticed that I noticed
.
She said she’d always liked the loon, but I didn’t know what a loon was
.
Just a bird, she said and stood up, pushing her skirt down into place. There’s no time for modesty here
.
You don’t know it? She asked like she didn’t quite believe me, and kept patting her skirt in the back, a spot that had buckled and wouldn’t smooth
.
I’m from the desert, I said
.
She put her hand to her mouth, cocked her neck, and
made the call that the loon made. Then she blew at a long wavy strand of blond hair that kept landing on her nose, itching
.
I learned to do that as a kid, she said. I taught it to my kids
.
And the smile that had crept up, pulling at the corners of her lips—I don’t even think she knew the smile was there—suddenly dimmed and she left. I stayed with Mazy and the other women until the loon answered back
.
At marker 57 with evening coming on, that same woman said to me it was crickets just getting started around us, rubbing their wings, and cicadas working their wings—that’s what we were listening to coming from the thick undergrowth
.
Where you from? I asked
.
She said Birmingham, and knobbed her hands around her hips, exhaling and stretching from the van’s ungiving metal, the crooked shape it had forced on all our backs
.
She told me that she had lost her house in Hill Valley, a protected zone until the storm, and asked if Mazy was my girl
.
Mazy and I looked at each other
.
Yes, I said, and Mazy didn’t disagree, let me hold her hand. I wished I had told that to Teal Dennis
.
It felt cool, a cool July evening and humid, the ground wet from rain that had come before us, and the plants and trees at the Trace—just like the blue stretching overhead, the white clouds all scattered into small bits turned pinkish
blue-gray by the sun. At the Trace, the earth stretched out from us in green. Birds darted from the branches, sailed. This was what the dead birds in Birmingham had been before the storm, I could see that, before the children tossed them away
.
Must have had her when you were young, the woman said. Hold on to her
.
She uncrossed her arms to touch Mazy’s shoulder, but Mazy pulled back, and the woman looked down like that was expected, her touch an offense. Of the two of us, she was the younger one with that crazy wave of hair flopping on her tiny nose, just floating there. Her children had to be young, too. Maybe they were dead or still in Birmingham. Maybe she left them behind
.
Teal Dennis and the other men called out, raised their guns and whistled, rounded us up. That woman’s in a different van than Mazy and me
.
Riding in this hull is a lot of shimmying and jerks of what the road gives. The hard metal floor just hums through your bones, my baby’s bones. I still can’t get over that someone is inside me growing. It’s a girl, Mama—I’m sure it’s a girl. The van is always filled with a chorus of coughs—one person starts it and then everyone else joins, louder and louder, trying to outdo one another with their echoes, trying to get out that last dirt in their lungs. The guias have opened up vents in the back to keep us
cool, and with it, a little more light, slatted like blinds over windows. A few women whisper. I wish I could make out what they’re saying against the hum of the van, the vents’ whistle, the coughs and highway
.
July 3, 2044
Mama
,
The auction has ended, and we’re heading to Pilot Oak, Kentucky, trying to get there by night for another auction tomorrow, a small showing for a group of buyers
.
One of the buyers at Pickwick warned Teal Dennis that a feud between two farmers had shut down Highway 22 at a section called Parker’s Crossroads
.
Are the government agents going to mediate? Teal asked
.
Not anymore. Not around here, the buyer said, swatting at flies
.
Not even regional? No one out of Memphis? Or Nashville?
They don’t come around here either, the man said. He said everyone had their own property to protect. And the city-states had to take care of themselves with the feds pulled back east and all the problems there. Then he told Teal Dennis, What’s waiting for you on 22, if you keep that way, two farmers claiming the same acres and neither budging
.
Teal Dennis asked if it was anyone he knew and the man answered that it was Floyd Stentson
.
Teal Dennis nodded and rubbed at his beard. He said Stentson could be a little crazy and asked if Stentson still drove an army tank around his farm
.
The buyer nodded—He still uses it to blow up trees—and slapped a fly on his calf
.
He said, The other party in the feud is a corporate outfit—Tyler Foods. They’re just as crazy
.
The buyer hadn’t seen a government agent in months. He claimed they had all gone back east. Last one he saw was in a mille-copter crash. Someone took it down near Lutts
.
Teal Dennis told him about Birmingham, that the national guard was swarming the city
.
Or they were, he said. They’ve pulled back, created a new border in Adamsville
.
The man shook his head—It’s their wreck and they’ll never fix it. Never
.
Teal Dennis smiled—Guess I’m going to have to shed a piece of skin off Snakeskin Road
.
That’s what everyone calls this length of highways we’re on, Mama, Snakeskin Road. When one piece of the road gets shut down, the guias shed it like the skin of a snake, and find a new path to travel
.
Teal Dennis told the man thanks, handed him the papers and teeth casts for two women. Then he told his drivers to start on 22, cut off on 412, and work toward
Weakley County. They could get into Kentucky that way. He knew a fuel runner there
.
And at the auction, Teal Dennis had lined up less than half of us; said he could get a better price in Kentucky. Mazy and I were some of the ones he saved back
.
The other women were lined up and checked over by the buyers. Twelve were sold. Some as wives, some as field laborers. One was sold as a nanny. As the rest of us were corralled into the vans, other guias arrived at the landing, the wide lake behind them trapping the sun, and they trailed out their wares—men, women, I saw two babies
.
The woman who had made the loon call, the woman from Hill Valley, I didn’t know her name—she was one of the twelve, gone
.
