Snakeskin Road (7 page)

The guardsman turned, went back to talking, left the man standing, one hand on his throat, one holding the thick high cable, until he wilted into sleep. Occasionally a guard looked over at the body lumped on the sidewalk or into the crowd, but it wasn’t until the shift change that he was hauled away.

“I’m tired of cleaning up your messes,” the officer from the new shift called after them, but the departing unit kept their heads down, their shoulders down, and walked.

“Leave him for the Red Crosses. Let them take care of it,” one of the new guards said.

“I don’t want to look at this dead POC my whole shift, do you?”

“No, sir,” the guardsman answered quickly and whistled for help, and “On three” they leaned down, the hard shells of their hats almost touching, then separating as they lifted the body up. The harvest machines sputtered nearby and fizzled, a sound they made all night.

When the man collapsed, Jennifer had wanted to turn away, wanted not to watch, but she did and didn’t help him because what if that made her noticeable. For so long she had stayed unnoticed. A few times, hands had grabbed her, but she pulled loose, kept walking.

In the morning, and then, again, the middle of the day
when the sun broke up the ozone, and at evening when it cooled just a little, enough that you could feel yourself breathe again, the old Cold War sirens launched into their slow whir as if the city were under attack, as if
attack
were an experience about to happen and they should prepare. The church bells and fewer and fewer explosions sounded, as if that part of the city had exhausted itself. The siren was a marker of when the others woke up, when they ate, how much the sun was willing to give. Afterward there were no stars. None to follow.

She had been given rations of food and water, canned beef that tasted of ash, and vegetables that tasted the same. Three people had been killed over rations. And the guardsmen went on missions into the square with the Crosses to bring the dead to the harvesting machines, the sick to the hospitals, and from the hospitals to the machines with their steel mouths open like bullfrog planters—that’s what they looked like. Jennifer had planters like that once. She’d taken them from a house in Alma and kept them and loaded the stone mouths with dirt and zinnia seeds, tulip bulbs that sprouted then withered until in disgust she threw the planters away in a backyard in Montgomery. The following night, they were already covered under sand drifts, and she forgot where she had thrown them.

The guards wouldn’t venture out into the square at night, and once a guardsman said over a loudspeaker,
“No firearms,”
repeated it over and over. But that group inside the fountain with the black shirts, they were still there. And yesterday in the afternoon she had seen a collector after the last Red Cross detail had receded into the crowd. He moved his hand over the new dead as if he might heal them. Something round, half-round in the belly of his palm occasionally glowed a faint red and that’s when he stopped and took out his short knife. She watched him peel a phone from under someone’s ear, making sure to remove the long wiretaproots
undamaged, cut fingers and shake the rings into a bag, clamp down on teeth with pliers and take them, and volt-chips, optic-steel—whatever had been implanted in scars and hips and skin, all of this into his bag, wet at the bottom as if it had been slung through mud. She knew then that she couldn’t fall asleep.

By now she had been in the park for three days. She moved back under the oak where a few leaves still twisted, refusing to splinter in the barrage of heavy gusts, though most of the leaves had been carried away. Under the tree, there were people fixing themselves into the branch-shade. On one side, a family, and on the other, several couples huddled together. The woman selling herself was gone. Beyond them more people in stacked tight bands, and no longer clearings between the haze and the buildings, opening, closing, swirling open.

The dead birds had all been scattered by the children. They played with the bodies, burying them and digging them up. One boy arced them high above the crowd like grenades, footballs, and when they awkwardly dropped, wobbly and spinning, he shouted, “Touchdown! Boom,” then slapped his hands together until the mother said, “Quit. Leave those birds where they are. They might have disease.”

He gravitated toward her slightly, his shoulders and head shifting—the only hair he had was a helmet of peach fuzz—then back, leaning the other way, a more sure foot into the crowd. Too much chaos for rules to hold, the power they had a few days ago, no matter how strong and familiar the voice. There was too much chaos not to be independent if you wanted.

So he set off and Jennifer lost the boy. His mother called after him, went after him as other children pressed in close to the tree. Jennifer held their movements in ribbons of light and dust for only a second as they stroked the dead birds,
drew their feathers open like paper fans then petted the wings back. Sometimes the children held one bird, as many hands as it took until they swallowed it fully inside their grip.

“Where did birdie go? Where did he go?” some of them began to chant.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the others answered back.

“In my hand. In my hand,” the first ones said.

Then “Let him fly, let him fly,” the others said.

Then “One, two, three,” they jerked their hands away and spun.

“There he goes.” They looked up. East, west, north—their bodies forming the points of a compass. “There he goes,” they echoed one another until someone picked the bird out of the dirt and knee-roots.

One girl sat a bird on top of her head and nested it there, balanced, on her stringy hair, and one girl tried to feed a bluebird dirt, and another traced the cracked beak of a bird to its eyes, pinpoints of wooden glass. Then off they went just like the boy with the peach fuzz head who had arced the birds like footballs, legs knifing between refugees, a yell to get back here, that’s too far. This time the voice had enough sway; the legs and feet stomped back to the tree and Jennifer’s eyes drifted, shut down. Time had started to slip around her.

She could no longer depend on its continuity, that the world unfolding would do so in unbroken threads. Time had slipped outside of her fingers where it jerked and fluttered and spiraled beneath her, so deep, she could only breathe silt and loam, choking, her body shaking, her blouse ringed with salt, caked and dry under her chafed breasts and arms. She kept staring at her arms for the purple spots to appear, to bubble up under the skin, her mouth to run dry in a milkish foam. Then she would surely pass like her two fathers. She would follow them out of this world.

There were flickers of Mathew, the trailer in Fatama, the desert, Mama. Something in Jennifer said,
This isn’t the
right world. You’re not in the right world, Sweetie. Sweetie
, like her mama called her on good nights.

She jerked awake. But it didn’t last, and she fell again into time’s misflow, its dark eddies swirling around the children’s legs and crossing up their chants, muddled.

“Come on,” Mathew called, and waved her down to where her breathing plunged. He was already at the foot of the bank, the water turning fast and making her thirsty.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “And I can’t go in that water, not now.”

“What do you mean, you can’t go? It’ll be fun, Jen.” He kept prodding her and knocked the side of his boots against a metal shaft, an old piece of the dam, until clay rolled off like sloughed wood. He kneeled and started to unlace his boot as she sat next to him.

“Because I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” He looked up. “When did this happen?”

She hit him in the shoulder. “I don’t like that question. It happened with
you.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just—I didn’t know.”

“You don’t want children, remember? So I didn’t tell you.” But why hadn’t she told him before leaving? Maybe he would’ve come to Chicago. But she had asked him to come for months, and he never answered, and so she didn’t say the other, and he didn’t.

Jennifer had to get to Chicago. She started to get up, then stopped and asked, “Why didn’t you come with me?”

“The water’s not going to hurt the baby.” He put his hand on her stomach and it was warm. That touch, relaxing. He smiled and leaned in, the thick ridge above his eyes visible like dull plows, familiar, and trapped in his skin, the iron from the clay upturned, allowing Jennifer to breathe.

“Come on. It’s just water.” He went back to unlacing his boot and she grabbed his hand, put it back on her stomach.

“Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do by now?” she said. The river kept rushing, just that sound over their
breathing and would not end, would keep going until someone poked her arm.

“You can’t go to sleep here.” It was Lavina, and behind her, Mazy.

She said their names, reminding herself, placing herself, and Lavina trailed her fingers through Jennifer’s hair. Jennifer grabbed hold of her wrist.

“It’s all right, girl. We found each other a second time. That’s a good omen. We need good omens.” And the river where Jennifer had held Mathew slipped through the heat and shade, down tunnels thirty-five feet, fifty feet. The mining tunnels filled with mud faster than she could count, until she lost that dream of him completely.

“It’s all right,” Lavina whispered.

“Just good to see you. Where’s Gail?”

“They let her out. I suppose they need their contractors.”

“And Darl?”

Lavina shook her head and pulled away, stood up. “Haven’t seen him. You’re the first one we’ve come across. But there are so many people here.” She looked around, her neck just a stalk, too thin to balance that head with its cluttered bush of hair. Dirty-blond is what Tonya who owned the beauty shop would call it. “Even when I get finished washing and cutting and drying—dirty-blond.” She always finished a hair statement with lips pinched shut, raising her scissors—“$200 scissors,” she pointed out, “that will cut into anything”—to the ceiling, to God. Punctuation. There were certain absolutes that Tonya maintained, and all of them had to do with hair—thickness, length, cowlicked, colored, straightened, permed, weaved, and extended. But Jennifer doubted absolutes in her own life, they never seemed to take hold, and so she had none to offer Tonya. She just
listened—dirty-blond. Lavina’s hair was dirty-blond. Beautiful, like Mazy’s chestnut-brown.

Lavina kept staring at the refugees as if trying to find passengers from the bus, like she should’ve kept up with their whereabouts, a duty owed Jennifer simply for inquiring. She didn’t say the other, that they might be dead, swallowed up in the deluge of bodies that kept expanding. Maybe her look was just a way to avoid speaking that truth.

Jennifer had wanted to ask about the driver, but not now. For days, she had looked for him, checked the hospital tent, and even the rows of cocooned bodies, so big he’d be quick to spot, at least two people taken up in his wide skin. His absence pulled through her in flashes without warning, like the moment on the bus he paced over the broken window, crushed the glass into bits, or his face, the bruise growing, swelling, his button-eye swallowed up until gone. She had looked and looked and looked.

Mazy reached across, traced Jennifer’s hair more gingerly than Lavina had done.

“Why are you so far away?” Jennifer said, and pulled the girl in, hugged her, then gasped—the girl’s body was much too light, and Jennifer worried she wasn’t getting enough food. There were tins saved in her pocket, but her baby was growing, needed these.

Too selfish
, she thought. Still she didn’t offer Mazy a thing. Jennifer let go and pressed her hand against a root between them.

Mazy brushed her arm. “Why you so far away?”

Jennifer started to tell her,
I’m right here
, started to say other things, but her arm tensed and Mazy pulled back.

“I’m not feeling too well,” she answered the girl, the lie rehearsed and ready.

“Me either,” Mazy said, and when Jennifer reached over to touch her, Mazy didn’t move and neither did Jennifer’s guilt.

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said, and Mazy nodded, but that didn’t help either, so she asked, “Have you been to your cousins’?”

“No.” It was Lavina who answered. She was still watching the crowds push slowly to the tents. “It’s not really good once you get outside the square, especially for a journey that long.” She marked a direction with her finger. “They’re up north. They’ve set up shelters in the north, too—that’s what I heard. A place close to Lincoln, but we haven’t chanced it,” and she rubbed the back of her neck, rubbed the sweat into her jeans. “I did find a place to sleep. It’s too hot right now and too much daylight. People could follow us. But in evening we’ll go over. Can you make it?”

Jennifer nodded.

“It’s better us three than you by yourself. You still got that glass?”

Jennifer pulled it carefully from her pocket, then slid it back, and as she did, her arm caught on the stationery box wrapped underneath her shirt.

“No one’s taken it,” Mazy said, pointing at the box like Lavina had pointed north, that same response of touching at the air. “What’s inside?”

And Jennifer grabbed the squared edges to hide them deeper and fuller, make the box invisible somehow, as if she could make these things invisible. But she had already turned Mazy away once.

“Letters to my mother in Chicago,” she said. “Would you like to write something?” She got the box out, pulled the top off.

And Mazy bit her lip, gazed down at her hands. The skin had already shriveled along the backs of Mazy’s knuckles like ditches the river channels carved into slumped beds, then left to dry, not at all like Mazy’s face, still full over the knobbed bones, those same bones so pronounced on Lavina.

“No need for letters, her mama’s right here,” Lavina offered. “Besides, she can’t write. I never put her in school.”

“It was a long time before I went to school,” Jennifer said. “In fact, I was older than you are. I bet you can draw.” She took out the small notebook and pencil and handed them to the girl. She closed the lid and gave the box to Mazy to use as a desk.