Free Snakeskin Road by James Braziel Page A

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 theirbreathing 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 justlistened—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