Snakeskin Road (18 page)

Supposedly, after two years, Ms. Gerald moved you down to the bottom floors, which had been flooded several times despite the levee. If you didn’t perform well, if you gave her too much trouble, she sold you downriver to the whorehouses there, the shanties where anything could happen to you.

Jennifer’s debt would be paid in three years, but many of the girls had paid their debt and still didn’t leave the St. Charles.

“Nothing to go to,” one girl said. Lisa, from Atlanta. “When I pay off my debt, where am I going to go?” She never talked until she’d gotten halfway through a cigarette. It took the smoke and heat to warm up her vocal cords, Jennifer decided. She only smoked long, thin cigarettes that one of her regular tricks brought with him from Nashville. “There’s no other place for us. Besides, this place is family.”
She inhaled, her body clinging to the tight wrapper, the orange tip, lining her up with its line.

Cawood, who told Jennifer to say her name like a crow cawing for the woods—Cawood was also from Atlanta and big-boned and she said, “That’s crazy talk. Period. Soon as I pay my debt, I’m done, done with it. I’m heading to St. Louis.”

“Where in Atlanta you from?” Lisa always asked Cawood, always after Cawood made an assertion.

“I’ve done told you,” she said, rolling her eyes, rolling them so far back that sometimes Jennifer thought Cawood would fall out of her chair with disgust.

When Lisa wasn’t around, Cawood said to the other girls, “I’ve already told that skinny whore where I live in Atlanta. How many times? How damn many times is she going to ask me that? What drugs are she on today? Enwine Hills off Nance Road, house 123. It probably isn’t there now, but I’ve answered her. You’ve seen me. How many times?”

“Too many,” some of the other girls replied; they were the cheerleaders for any clash, and some laughed, Cawood lowering her head, swinging it low in disbelief.

The bottom two floors were for barge operators, truckers traveling off I-51, and smugglers, and the mille-copter pilots. The train on the levee never stopped, just kept pace with the river.

Jennifer had been downstairs, had seen
those
girls around the first-floor bar, General Grant’s Bar it was called,
those
girls relaxing just like she and Cawood and the other girls on the third-floor parlor did, but only in the daytime when the house was quiet except for women resting, talking in their long T-shirts, in their gowns—that was the only laughter you heard then. Occasionally, someone came off the road and was quickly escorted to a room so everyone else could linger; or a mille-copter would stop, a business executive flying between the cities, between meetings, like her john at the window that afternoon last week.

So the hotel was, during the day, a hotel of women—except for the security guards roaming the fences, and up and back, floor to floor, and except for Professor Jinx, when he came in from St. Louis or one of the casinos, or woke up after an all-night playing. First thing he did was start his melodies, his riffs while the kitchen workers sprayed down dishes, cut peppers and avocados flown in or shipped in, preparing breakfast and lunches and tonight’s meal. And Dr. Syeth would come in a few days a week to make sure no one was pregnant or ruined.

Ruined
was Ms. Gerald’s word for a prostitute who got HIV. “So-and-so has been ruined,” was how Ms. Gerald put it, frowning, refusing to show her teeth. “Got ruined,” the other girls echoed. Some cases were treatable, if still not curable, but some strains were too strong for the drugs. “Don’t let that happen. Don’t let a man do that to you,” Ms. Gerald said.

The news of a ruined girl was always a good occasion for Ms. Gerald to reiterate the five house commandments: 1. Give nothing away for free; 2. Never steal another girl’s john; 3. Never steal from Ms. Gerald; 4. Don’t kiss with your mouth open; and 5. All the money you make goes to the house.

She would turn, as if in a hurry to get away, then “Oh, yes,” she would turn back around. “Take care of your body. No bareback sex. Don’t let a client ruin you.” That was the sixth commandment, and Ms. Gerald was always threatening to add more.

But some tricks paid extra for sex without condoms. The extra went to the girls, and they’d hide it, hoping Ms. Gerald wouldn’t find it in her raids—if a girl hung on to the extra, when a girl was at last free, she could go somewhere “in style,” Cawood promised. And if Ms. Gerald found the extra, then there was the river, the baptism, the cleansing for such betrayals. The girls, all of them, were her investment, and she wanted return on her money.

Ruined
was also Ms. Gerald’s word when something happened to a girl that made her imperfect, imperfect enough that clients wouldn’t use her again—like deep cuts on the face or a bottle “broken in the cunt,” was how Ms. Gerald said it. That had happened twice downstairs and she’d had to hire more security.

“Don’t worry, those johns got their own cutting,” Ms. Gerald promised. But the rich clients, the ones on the top floors, whatever they did, nothing happened to them. Ruined women worked as cleaners to pay off their debt or were sold to farms or sent downriver or over to Instant Casino.

Instant Casino was in Paducah, Kentucky, less than an hour away by car, ten minutes by mille-copter. There were whores at the casino, too—“But not the good ones,” Ms. Gerald said. “I own all the good ones.”

Ms. Gerald refused to let the girls go until their debt had been paid, though many had tried to leave. After talking about last night’s tricks and what they had requested, about the dancing and the Instant Casino musicians that had sat in with Jinx, and all the aches and headaches, and the food that had been served, stuffed pork—was that what the chef called it?—while they lazed around the parlor together on the sofas and cushioned chairs, the girls that had been at the St. Charles the longest told stories of those lost ones.

One girl hadn’t been at the St. Charles a month before she slipped out on a barge—a good swimmer—and she waved and yelled out, “See you in St. Louis,” to the girls onshore. The next day her body came floating down the Mississippi, stiff like a plank of wood, her calico dress wrapped up around her throat.

Another girl snuck out with a client on a mille-copter. “I can’t tell you the number of girls who’ve tried to steal out with some trick,” Cawood said. “But this john wanted to marry, and Ms. Gerald wouldn’t allow it, so he snuck her out. The Nashville police brought the girl back. That’s the kind of reach Ms. Gerald has.” Cawood went around the circle,
nodding her head from one girl to the next, looking through each of their eyes and daring them to doubt the truth. “Ms. Gerald beat that girl and sold her to one of the shanties. Watch out for those men who want to marry.”

There was the story of Roger.

“Oh, no, not this story. This one’s not good,” someone said.

“None of them are good,” Cawood said.

“But Roger,” Naomi continued, “he wanted to marry this girl so bad, he was ready to give away his fortune. He came from old St. Louis money. And she—all I remember of her—she was petite.” Naomi was small, too, the oldest of all the girls. “Her name was Anne and she led him on. She thought he was her ticket, but Ms. Gerald wouldn’t let her go.”

“A tiny thing,” Cawood agreed. Sometimes the girl’s name was Margaret, and sometimes Stella, and Marla, or she had no name; she was just
that
girl who did
that
unfortunate, stupid thing.

“And then,” Naomi pushed all the hair out of her face, knotted it and held it, revealing a washed, bare face, lips full with lipstick, “he came in on a Friday night, the parlor full of card gamblers out of Instant Casino. They had lost all this money, but still had some for us. And Roger went up to her room, cut through all that noise, and shot her, that petite girl, then cried over her body before shooting himself. That noise—we thought security had spotted a roaming gang and was running them off. Next morning, security found the two bodies. They had the bodies wrapped in sheets before I could see them.”

Ms. Gerald refused, no matter the price, to sell her girls into marriage. “Once a man buys you, he’ll do whatever he wants. Treat you like pure dirt. He’ll throw you out when he’s tired of your love. I’ve seen it.” Ms. Gerald nodded her head strong on that one, stronger than Cawood nodded her head. The girls all speculated that something like that
must’ve happened to Ms. Gerald, some man must’ve gotten tired of her love. It was the only time the veneer of her face peeled into a sadness, like that deepness in every river where you go down searching, but lose your way to the surface and lose the bottom and don’t know where you are or what you were hoping to get—that’s what her face became.

Ms. Gerald claimed she just wanted to protect her girls, but Jennifer thought it was about control, who got to own what body—and Ms. Gerald was determined to own as many as she could.

Those mornings when the girls talked about the lost ones, Ms. Gerald came out of her office, came right to the center, and perched on top of a table. She always sat on the tops of tables and never chairs.

“I had this one girl, she was pregnant. This one had somehow slipped past the doctor. Doctor…” Ms. Gerald snapped her fingers as if the doctor’s name was right there to hold in her hand, but not quite, not quite could she take it. Then she scratched her scalp, her hands so pale, as dry-blue as vein—even when she pushed through her white hair, all wiry and brilliant, no red, no blood would rush into those hands. “Oh, whatever his name, I had to fire him because he let this girl slip by. He wasn’t a very good doctor.”

Later, after Ms. Gerald left, the girls said the doctor’s name was Thurman and the father of the baby. The girl’s name was Reseda. She was seventeen.

“So she had gotten herself four months pregnant when I noticed her belly.” Ms. Gerald grabbed her small stomach through the pink jacket and lifted it. “She was dancing on the floor over there, and I grabbed her stomach just like this.” She exhaled. “Beautiful brown skin on her.”

“Not black like me?” Cawood asked.

“No, light brown.” Ms. Gerald nodded.

“Then her skin wasn’t as beautiful as mine.” Cawood opened her arms wide as if there could be no doubt, and the others laughed.

“No one’s as beautiful as you, Cawood, but she was still beautiful. I told her she had to get rid of that baby. I mean, whose was it? Next thing you know, with a baby she’d blackmail a client. And she said she wouldn’t get rid of the baby. So I got the doctor and went up to her room and still she said, ‘No, I’m keeping it.’ Just like that, ‘No, Ms. Gerald, I’m keeping it.’ But she knew I wasn’t going to allow a baby. I told her, ‘You have to do what I ask’ because, now listen up, I’m telling all of you this: babies are where
it
starts.” Ms. Gerald went around the room, making sure every girl was paying attention. “Once a man gets you pregnant, he has you where he wants you. He has your pussy against the wall.”

The girls hollered at that one. “Don’t let him snatch that,” someone said, and the laughing got stronger.

“So we left her, and I got security. I had the doctor, the one I had to let go and some guards—we were going to have to take that baby—and together we went back upstairs, the fifth floor. I knocked. Nothing. There was no sound when I called her out.”

The girls said Reseda had screamed from inside her room. Some of them swore they heard her screaming, Ms. Gerald pounding the door, and the doctor, her boyfriend, he was begging Reseda to open the door, then nothing.

Ms. Gerald got up from the table and walked around to the glass doors, the ones that spread across the east wall, the entire east wall of the parlor, and looked over the sixty-foot levee that surrounded Cairo to protect it, and over that levee into the Ohio River and across the river into Kentucky, where the bank curled up and spread into fields.

“Black, black,” she said. “When we finally got inside, the room was black. Her window had been lifted. Wind was blowing in and the doctor and I went over and looked down and there she was on the pavement below us, shaking. The fall hadn’t quite killed her, hadn’t quite done it to her.” Ms. Gerald shook the cuffs of her pants, rubbed one shoe,
polished it on the back of her left leg. “That’s the thing about being on the fifth floor. It’s far enough up to cause you pain, to hurt you if you fall, but not far enough to finish the job. So there she was, her baby lost, and lost herself. Poor girl.” Then Ms. Gerald walked out onto the balcony, sliding the glass door behind her so no one could follow.

The closest hospital was in Memphis, the girls said. Reseda was still there, living on machines that the doctor paid for. And she did lose the baby. She did lose herself. Poor girl.

Then the girls walked out of the parlor to their rooms as if telling something this horrible was too much to deal with once you said it, once you spoke the truth. Even though the paths of the stories had been different, whether Ms. Gerald told it or the girls told it, the ending was always the same.

Jennifer often looked out her window for Reseda, her mind conjuring the body on the black pavement, the gooey tar that surrounded the hotel and spread to the chain-link fence—red hair some days, blond on others, black, brunette—the hair sprawled out and the shaking body and some dress with blood on it. Sometimes the body on the ground was her own. Jennifer stared and stared—she couldn’t turn away from herself fallen; her baby was dead.

Jennifer looked at the pavement and touched her stomach like Ms. Gerald had touched her stomach when she told that story. Each time a new girl was bought, that story got told. Some morning, Ms. Gerald walked out and said, “I had this one beautiful girl,” and recited it, set them all in the fold, again. It was a dare, of course. The St. Charles locked you up with bodyguards and fences, isolated you from the world. No freedoms, but safety. What was left was the dare—venture out if you think you can make it. You better make it. The world will kill you, snatch you up. Always that talk from Ms. Gerald and her girls.

Jennifer pressed on her stomach, but her skin through the fabric just felt numb. She had lost the ability to feel
where her baby might’ve kicked. By now, Jennifer would’ve been showing.