Snakeskin Road (5 page)

Walk inside there, she knew, and vanish.

Maybe I’ll open a business—
she said that at least once a week for a year, but over half the encampment was at the mine. What was the point? Her friend Tonya had a hair place, The Great Look Beauty Shop, only the
e
and
t
kept ungluing and falling off, so it read
The Gr a Look
and sometimes
The Gr at Look
. Whenever Jennifer drove by, Tonya
was sitting in the fat beauty shop chair watching TV, alone. It was like that at all of the businesses, everyone slumped in their seats, watching the one station, WAZD, the government transmitted to the camps, waiting for the dust to quiet, for the miners to be done so they could lift the town’s grogginess with their mud and exhaustion.

You can only drive so far—Terry had said that. He took them on a weekend drive once a month, saving up his propane rations until he had extra, and if he had extra money, he bought propane from the black marketers. Jaunts, he called them—Let’s go for a jaunt—along the full length of creek beds and upriver until he got weary. I’ve had enough now, he’d say when he was ready, Jennifer half-asleep against the passenger door, Mama against his shoulder. He slued the truck and always so fast, something in her got pulled through the window and left in the desert. But Jennifer didn’t open her eyes to find it, that piece of herself, whatever it was.

And he was right. She grew weary of drifting over the state and county roads, was drawn back to the houses she and Mathew lived in: a two bedroom trailer in Fatama, a one floor ranch in Tensaw, the old Georgian in Selma on Abbott Street made of brick. Every August for nine years the mining camp stopped in Selma for a month; every August she made that place her home on Church and Abbott. But the ones in Fatama and Tensaw would more than likely be damaged next year, unlivable—sand and wind searing off a roof, or joists and rafters snapped from dry rot she’d seen happen so many times.

As she got older, and Mat talked less, she gave up on driving altogether and stayed in the kitchens and bedrooms, the crooked, empty hallways that had belonged to others, all of them dead now, ghost people. Where she slept, they had slept, and lived with the same insomnia, counted figures in the same walls, waiting for the desert to tire. Her only relief came from writing her mother letters and watching television.
“At least I don’t stare at my hands,” she said to herself. At least there were other voices when the television was on.

Jennifer did this until Mat’s father, Mr. Chris, moved in the year before his death, stacking his stolen library books on the kitchen floor. She began to read like she had in high school, was surprised to learn that Mathew had read a lot when he was younger.

“I’ve never seen him pick up a book. And he sees me doing it.” Another piece of his history that Mathew kept from her.

Mr. Chris nodded. “He won’t now. Can’t get him to do anything now,” he said, pulling clay from his beard.

Jennifer read to avoid sinking into a solitude like her mother’s, those nights and early mornings, watching her stare at her hands. It was as if Mama had plunged herself into the center of a fig, and no way for anyone to get close—except for Terry, when he was home and held her.

After Delia left the Southeastern Desert for good to live with her sister, Bobbie, in Chicago, after Terry’s death when Jennifer was twenty-one and chose to stay in Alabama and marry Mathew, she wrote her daughter every week, sometimes twice a week. “Forgive me,” her mother had said, but for what? Escaping the desert? Giving Jennifer her loneliness? Jennifer never asked. She wanted her mama to bring the quiet existence between them all those years to the surface. What an explosion—an explosion that would never happen, would never be said. And what to do with this new woman Delia Philips had become, this attention to her daughter from a long distance? Before she left, they could barely stay in the same room—too much grief, and when Jennifer reached Chicago, she hoped the years and letters between them had altered that distance, had softened her mama toward her presence.

She’ll worry about me
, Jennifer told herself—the bus overturning, the dead in Birmingham.
Maybe I shouldn’t send the letters. Or I should change what I wrote
. But for
years the government had censored the letters Delia Philips sent. She wasn’t about to censor her own. She shook her head.
Got to let her know I’m coming. That’s the important thing
. As soon as she was outside Birmingham, she’d mail them.

Jennifer twisted her hair, stuck it behind her ear. She was sure it looked funny, her ear poking out on one side, but there wasn’t any other way to keep the bangs from her face, to cool off. The wind that blew through Linn Park was all heat and gritted-soot.

Then she took the letter and placed it in the black box, pulled the box under her blouse and wrapped her arms around it—so much sand on her arms. When the box touched her sweaty stomach, a chill there, and she wondered if her baby felt it, too.

She had managed to keep the stationery, the accompanying envelopes, some of her mother’s letters with their flicker-photographs, her visa, but no brush—her hair desperately needed one—and a picture of Mat, a high school picture he had given her before the wedding so she wouldn’t forget him while he mined for clay rocks.

“Please. I’m not going to forget
you,”
she always teased Mat before he left, and he smiled. In the picture, the bones in his face had not yet spread and stretched his mouth and skin into an older bloom—there was something hopeful about that face, so she kept it in the box, along with seven hundred US dollars she had saved, and a small notebook if she ran out of stationery, and the one poetry book by Naomi Shihab Nye. She went over the items again and again, thumbed through them, so she wouldn’t forget.

She hadn’t opened the Shihab book since leaving Fatama. But Jennifer had written so much in the last few days, at least the poems gave her a voice other than her own, someone else talking, and in that way permitted her voice to rest.

I want, I need immediate bloom—
that was the line that had given her the strength to leave Fatama and Mathew. Immediate bloom. She needed that now.

Instead, here she was in the center of Birmingham leaning against an oak, the leaves cutting, dying, the box sealed under her shirt and arms so no one could know it, the baby sealed deeper inside. Yet somehow she and the baby were safe as if in a tornado’s eye, as if inside her old rug fortress. All of these people churning, milling over the dead and one another—she was in the center of their misery. They were too trapped to see her, to know she existed as they swirled toward the refugee tents, the huge fans, and away from the sun to the trees and the buildings outlining the square.

The white haze—it infused the roofs with a flatness, as if nothing existed beyond the park, the roped-open tents, the Tutwiler Hotel, and across the square, the Jefferson County Courthouse, which had been the capitol building since they moved the state offices from Montgomery in 2014, the courthouse with its stone panels. She could see those panels barely—a woman sending a man away and another panel with the same woman allowing a man in—
With Justice
the first one read and
With Mercy
the other. The rest of the city had been swallowed up in white and flakes of soot. Still people kept moving until someone dropped to the ground like Iona had done, like the driver had done on the way in from the Birmingham gates. They had traveled maybe five miles at that point.

“Get up,” Darl and Lavina had told him. Jennifer said, “Just a little more. We’re close now.”

She had put her hands again on his shoulders, but he shook them off, wiped at the pucker on his face, where his eye had been, the blistered bruise swollen, flowering, draining. “Just bring me some water when you get there,” he had said. “It’ll be enough to carry me.” He was on the curb and there was no way to lift him.

Darl said, “I don’t know how long.”

“Doesn’t matter.” The driver lay flat. “Just bring me water.”

“I could lance it. We could hold you; I could try to get some of the infection out. Then you could go on.”

“You’re not touching me.” The driver tried to slow his shallow breath and catch it deeper. He set one finger to his face, moved it off. “Bring the water. I’m too dizzy. The doctors can fix the knot.”

He said “will carry me” several more times and “water,” a large framed man like Bossey, and no way to lift him. Bossey, the mining crew chief, was in Fatama with Mathew, and the driver was lying down and softly crying and then, “I’m going to lose my eye, I can tell. They won’t let me drive a bus anymore.”

Darl crouched lower. “Be quiet,” he whispered as if the dead were listening. “I’ll get water for you.”

Once they reached the tents, Darl looked for a doctor, and Jennifer lost sight of him and the others.

Around her now, refugees buckled, dropped. Some grabbed hold of the closest arms and fingers and belt loops and lifted. Someone managed, “Help me, baby, I’m so tired.” The others didn’t get up. Two men talked about a car they had on L Street with a full tank. “If we go north.” “No, they’ve closed it off, too.” After he spoke, the second man turned and looked at the tree. He followed the trunk down to Jennifer and paused. She looked away. When she turned back, the two men had walked on. Church bells—she couldn’t place where they came from. One man kept yelling to God, “These are the end times, the end times, the Lord shall make the rain powder and dirt.” He was close by and the crowd pushed around the preacher. No one waited. When someone fell, the crowd swirled around them, like a rock fallen in a river, just like her; she had become a rock against the tree with its low-gnarled limbs, splitting the flow of bodies and wire and trash. They swirled around her,
around the end-times man lifting up on his toes, “I will tread them with my anger,” and swirled around the fallen until a group with red crosses on their sleeves and backs jagged through and took the dead away.

From another part of the city, a low sound rose and fell—“The early warning system,” some of the refugees said, and a woman chuckled, “Remains of the Cold War.” She had tied white bags over her arms’ burnt skin. “We never got nuclear explosions, just this terrible weather.” The woman laughed and stepped through the dust. The Red Crosses cut against her.

Another stray dog wove through the crowded legs. Earlier, a dog had been shot, its hind legs taken out, and the refugees peeled open a circle for the shooter to flip the animal, cut and pull through its stomach, still trembling, and skin it.

Jennifer had seen the national guard gun down a man who said he was hungry. And she realized afterward, it had not made her jump or turn away. “Can you help me with some food?” he said, walking up, then jerked in the rifle flash. She watched him slip, and she did nothing and felt nothing. The shot for a moment made her deaf, the same as the dog’s whine had made her deaf earlier when he lost his legs. The Red Crosses took the man away, and her mouth so dry; she kept trying to swallow but there was nothing to swallow.

These bodies made the heat worse—the shuffling of feet and mumbling for food, the hard breathing—refugees with shirts over their heads, pillows, anything against the sun, and everyone carrying the yellow cans of water handed out at the shelter each morning.

Someone whispered, “Hey,” from behind her. “Hey,” he said louder. He was getting close, and Jennifer took a piece of glass she had found on the walk to Linn Park, moved it into the open so the man could see it. She kept the point of the glass ready, but when she turned, no one was there.

In one corner of the empty fountain, three refugees had torn limbs from the brittle oaks to build a fire. They cooked meat and coffee and kept their rifles upright like the guardsmen, and a black shirt knotted to a pole marked them against the others, their blue smoke too awful and delicious to avoid.

Again, the church bells denoted the time of day she no longer knew. Mille-copters appeared out of the flattened sky and whipped up dust and landed with rations and guards and took off. She was safe, she reminded herself, until the human tornado shook her out. She was safe under the oak branches that curled down like the long brim of a hat. Near her toes and the knuckled roots lay not acorns, but birds, wings pulled tight to their blackened bodies, the wind pushing, hoping to turn them like spun balls of thread. If she moved, she’d touch their feathers. She didn’t, remained as still as the tree. Behind her, on the other side, she heard a woman selling sex for rations and water. Someone else, a black marketer, was selling bags of ice, changing his pitch when he traded ice for sex.

Everyone from the bus had disappeared. Two days ago as they walked deeper into Birmingham, some went into the buildings along Highway 11, the doorless entranceways, and some, like the driver, couldn’t make it. As they walked, the dark gave over to the sun and ozone, and they realized just how many bodies they were stepping over. Bodies littered the highway, their blood dried in pools of fleck-dust and along thin grass barriers still green, and cars that had jammed into one another, the bodies inside them coated with powder and smoke. Some cars had struck the long corridor wall that followed Old 11, the driver called it. Heavier trucks had broken through the concrete before stalling and burning into soot.

There was one girl, she couldn’t write to Mama about that girl, lumped on the black pavement, her face swollen and purpled as if she had been stuffed with sand. Something
of her had slipped into Jennifer as if the girl had withered down into a baby. Jennifer reached under the box and touched her stomach, wished she was far enough along to feel a kick. She waited for the girl to change back and breathe.

“Don’t stop walking.” Lavina lifted Jennifer’s elbow. “Stop looking at that girl. And if you see someone coming at you, run.” She, Jennifer, Mazy, and the contractor, Gail, had walked from the gate together, a little behind the rest of the group.

“We don’t have much to steal,” Jennifer said.

“They don’t know that. You’re carrying a box. What’s in your black box?”