Snakeskin Road (19 page)

Go back to sleep
, she told herself and pressed up against the glass instead, thought how easy it would be to tumble, to fall and break apart. Yet the baby, the baby—she couldn’t do that to her baby.

The baby’s dead
.

Someone rapped on the door. Ms. Gerald had sent one of the security to her room. The girls would’ve called her out, but the guards just knocked and left. They’d be back if she didn’t come down, and this time instead of knocking, they’d simply come in and escort her to the parlor.

When she first got here, Ms. Gerald sat her in the office—the only time Jennifer had been allowed inside the office with its huge planters of lavender and artifacts from the Cairo Custom House and, most prominently, an engraved pistol and sword and Union soldier uniform pressed into a glass case—and said to Jennifer, “I own you now.”

At the time, Jennifer was thinking of Mazy, the van back on the road, each second further and further away, a distance she’d never catch up to, and what would happen to Mazy now. Then she couldn’t stop crying. She wanted to get up, wanted to run, but there was a guard at the door, so she sat there listening, tapping her feet, and digging at her eyes.
If I blind myself
, she thought,
blind myself to what’s happening, then I’ll erase it
.

Ms. Gerald walked to her desk, sat on top, and lifted the contract, the wax mold of Jennifer’s teeth as proof of ownership. Carefully, she set them down. “You’re in a brothel, and you need to get used to that. It takes some girls a while to get used to that. The good news is this: the St. Charles is an oasis, not a shanty. I found this place out of the wilderness.”

Ms. Gerald told this to everyone: “I came to Cairo after the people left, came here with nothing and built a brothel out of the wilderness.”

Cairo had been a city once. What happened to those
people, their lives here, where did they end up? But Ms. Gerald announced her
wilderness
line so often, so confidently, that the girls repeated it, and the regular johns said it to the new johns when they got drunk: “an oasis in the desolate Midwest, a brothel out of the wilderness.” Then they laughed at the spectacular, improbable truth. How could this be? Yet here it was, the St. Charles thriving and nothing else.

Ms. Gerald had managed to supplant the other truths, all of the other histories of this place except for the Civil War, as if that were the only other time Cairo had existed. The other histories, no one cared to know. And where Cairo had ended, Ms. Gerald began. No one knew, not even Naomi, who Ms. Gerald was before the St. Charles, where she came from, why she came here.

“You’re fresh, so I’m keeping you for the rich clients,” Ms. Gerald said and explained the boundaries of the St. Charles Hotel, the squared fence and gun tower, the landing area for mille-copters, the generator and pump house, the security detail and guards, and the dangers beyond those boundaries. As she talked, she kept her arms stiff, her hands pressed to the desk edge as if it would fly away without her insistence. The white hair she kept pinned back, and she had on a gray suit that swallowed her up from ankle to throat. Ms. Gerald always wore suits—pink, blue, green, black. The stiffness in the fabric seemed to hamper her movements.

Finally, she repeated that any extra money a man offered, Jennifer had to give to the house.

“Number five of the commandments, all the money comes to me. I take care of my girls. Do what I ask, and a man won’t be allowed to hurt your body.”

“I’m not going to,” Jennifer said.

Ms. Gerald sighed. “Don’t think a client won’t take a drugged up girl. They like that, some prefer it. I won’t protect you unless you do what I say.”

Jennifer was taken to her room, told to shower, dress,
come downstairs to the parlor at seven. But she didn’t, and they knocked on the door. She didn’t come down and they came back—Dr. Syeth, that straight black hair of his shagged over his forehead left to right, his face always sweating in that same pattern, left to right, as if his face naturally sloped that way, shiny. He always looked as if he’d rather be somewhere else, like he had to be careful—he knew the story about the other doctor, and he brought two guards to hold her down.

They drugged her and left the room, leaving Jennifer with a sense of the world splitting and moving at different speeds. She called out for Mathew, the baby, Mazy, Terry, Delia—like the flicker-photographs in her mother’s letters, how the images started up, then got stuck halfway, these people slipped in and out, half real, unreal.

The second rhythm was of her room, the dimness of it, how the corners flashed and then fell into darkness, the piano playing downstairs, a client talking to her, splashes of laughter, talking, as he moved her body around. She couldn’t move her body at all. And there she was split between the two worlds, simultaneously existing in both, slipping from one to the other like water, like the river draining in and back on itself, and she couldn’t completely divorce what was being done to her from what her mind wanted to hold on to, but she couldn’t hold on to anything. As if all of the world had become an impossible slippery air.

The next day, she had awful cramps, and then the blood, the fetus, all of it washed out of her. They all knew. The girls brought in towels and soaked up the blood and wrung the towels in the shower. Dr. Syeth told them to throw them in the river or burn them. “You should’ve told me you were pregnant,” he said, wiping the sweat from his face. Her fault, all her fault—anything that happened to them, the responsibility was always with the girl. And they changed her sheets and left her alone for a while, left her with that emptiness.

“Pull yourself together,” Cawood had whispered to her one day. The girls made visits to check on her, and Cawood sat on the bed and hummed whatever Jinx was playing downstairs. She kept picking at her nails, a stubborn yellow polish that wouldn’t come off. “We’ve all got our losses just like you,” she said. She smelled like lemons, like she had been cutting lemons. “I’m sorry, honey. But don’t let this damn place and that damn woman pull you apart. That’s what she wants.”

It was Naomi who came the most. She had worked at the St. Charles for five years, and in the hierarchy, only Ms. Gerald was over her. Cawood was third in line.

She sat on the bed, smelling of lavender from Ms. Gerald’s office, and looked through Jennifer’s stationery box. She looked over Mazy’s drawings, and read from the book of poems, the letters Jennifer’s mother had written, looked at the flicker-photographs.

“I like this one of the Chicago River,” she told Jennifer. “I’m from a town near Chicago. Braidwood. We used to drive there when the city was open. Our favorite thing to do was follow the river block by block.” But she gave the readings in the wrong voice, the wrong pitch, not her mother’s voice, not how Jennifer had imagined the poet with her name, the other Naomi, Naomi Shihab Nye.

Eventually she discovered Jennifer’s money that Teal Dennis hadn’t and took it. Jennifer had closed her eyes half in and out, but she saw what Naomi had done.

Ms. Gerald came in after a week. “Your baby is dead. You have to start working.” She stood in the doorway, but Jennifer never answered, and when she woke up, Ms. Gerald had gone.

The baby was gone. Jennifer wondered, if she had given in, had done what Ms. Gerald had wanted that first day, would the baby still be alive? There was no baby. It was her fault. She had betrayed Mathew. That’s how she saw it. And she had betrayed herself.

The thing that healed her the most was the music, not at night, the fast riffs, but during the day, Professor Jinx slowly building his chords, repeating them, getting his hands and keys in synch like he wanted. She could feel her body rebuilding and wanted to step out of bed to that music she had known in the desert—Billie Holiday, Ella, Peggy Lee—step toward that music, its sound rooted in her own breathing, and when Cawood hummed, the humming became flashes of—

“Don’t stop singing,” Jennifer said to her once.

“Oh, I don’t sing,” she promised. “My voice wasn’t made for that. Just helps me pass the time, but thank you.”

Sometimes Jennifer would get up and look out at the river, watching it drift and drift, holding her hands to her stomach, that hollow core of herself. She couldn’t undo it.

Jennifer hadn’t written a letter to her mother since arriving in Cairo and still couldn’t write one. The baby was gone. She should jump, end herself, but somehow, she couldn’t, not with that girl down there. Reseda. She kept seeing that girl down there. But what could she tell Mat or her mama now?

“You tell your mother, Here I am. Alive. And I’m okay. And I know you’re going to say you’re not okay, but you are. You’re alive, you have to stay alive, honey. That’s all you got. All anyone here has.” That’s what Naomi said. But Naomi had taken Jennifer’s money, stolen a piece of her freedom for herself—her words couldn’t be trusted.

Now, standing by the window, Jennifer could smell the wet wood and mildew of the room—it rained here so much. And she needed to go down.

Jennifer had hoped to get to Chicago, have her baby. She would’ve raised it with her mother until Mat came. She would’ve made him leave the desert. But she knew that was a lie—she couldn’t make anyone do what she wanted.

A trick told her once that the St. Charles had slipped between worlds. “Kansas City, St. Louis are protected, civilized. All the city-states,” he said, “most zones in Kansas City are protected. Everything between those two cities, everything around the St. Charles is a vast frontier. You must feel unsafe, don’t you?” he asked her. “The frontier could easily swallow you up.”

She had never answered him.

There was a scratch on the door—one of the girls. The girls scratched at the door like her mama’s cat, Pearl.

“I’m going down,” came Cawood’s voice. “I know you’re inside. Come down with me, Jen.”

Jennifer looked out at the maple turning red, then at the river, the wash of trees just beyond, cypress and willow trees reaching over the river still green, the sway, the turn of green in the current, green turning black in the fading sun. The sway seemed to drink from that river water, seemed to cradle the river in that late sun. She wanted to hold and twist those branches with her hand and felt another spark. How to place it, she didn’t know. How to use it for something that would keep her alive.

   The first thing she noticed coming down the stairs was the sound, how it quickly magnified. She’d have a good foot on the stairs from the fifth floor, when there’d be that slight tremble at her toes, and the further down she walked, the tremble spread up her calf, around her hips, the full length of her shoulders, radiating down her arms.

“Feel that?” Cawood said. Cawood was already swaying in her dress, a raspberry silk wrapped close to her body, especially the small rolls on her stomach. “Hot love rolls,” she
called them, though she had gotten into a few arguments with Ms. Gerald about her shape, and its multi-faceted contours.

“I’m in fine shape. You see any man doesn’t want to hold on to me? Dance with me? I bring the most money to this house.” It was true, and always that talk about money quieted Ms. Gerald down.

“You just need to be careful,” Ms. Gerald said, expanding her fingers outward, “with your figure.”

“This figure?” Cawood straightened up tall and wide in her bones, locking her hips. “Nothing wrong with this figure.” It was Cawood who could talk loud and get away with it. Only Cawood. In a month, she would be a free woman. “Not a girl,” Cawood noted. “Woman.” Like Jinx would say.

Jennifer was wearing a silver dress as tight as Cawood’s, so that moving in it made her feel mummified. It was a dress that had been picked out for her, sequined, a size smaller than she needed. Some nights, most nights, the girls got to choose their clothes unless everyone came down wearing similar things.

“Black, too much black in this room,” Ms. Gerald would announce and make them go upstairs, change. “We offer variety.” The St. Charles offered every shade of girl from pearl to latte to ebony, short, tall, and big-boned, every pitch of voice, every shade of color in their clothes and their polish—that was Ms. Gerald’s promise to her clients.

A couple of outfits got circulated depending on size. One was a cheerleading outfit with a bright yellow W branded across the blue front. A vendor out of Chicago brought in racks of dresses and tops and lingerie and pants for Ms. Gerald and the girls to pick through each month, and that’s where the cheerleading outfit had been found. There had actually been five or six to choose from with different letters, mascots, and one with a megaphone over the heart, the fabric pressed inside a plastic casing.

“Couldn’t she have picked the megaphone?” Cawood
asked a few weeks after the cheerleading outfit had been circulated through the house. “We all know what we are, whores, but damn, sometimes I just want to snatch that W off the front.”

“That’ll get you baptized,” Jennifer said.

Cawood shook her head. “I’ve been through that. Burned my throat up. I’ve been beaten by that woman.” When she said the last thing, she didn’t smile, she looked angry. A lot of the girls looked skittish.

After Ms. Gerald had told them to go back upstairs and change out of all that drab black, one girl, Odette, returned in black pants, the same ones she had worn, with silver buttons down the sides. Ms. Gerald picked up a glass tumbler from the bar and came up behind Odette and hit her between the shoulders.

“Are you deaf? What’re you doing?” Ms. Gerald struck her again, but the glass was too thick to break. Odette was tiny, tinier than Lisa, and Ms. Gerald knocked Odette to the ground. For a slight woman, Ms. Gerald generated a lot of power.

Odette had yelled, “Stop, God, stop,” crying, and hurried out of the parlor with her body halfway upright like an ostrich. Ms. Gerald put the glass down, stared at the deep red ring the lip had formed in her palm. If the glass had broken, it would’ve done so into her. She shook her hand, walked off. No one looked surprised at what had happened. It was just an interruption, a pause before the clients flew in, and they went on doing what they were doing before.