Snakeskin Road by James Braziel Page A

leaving?”
    “I’ll be outside. Not far.” She pointed to the opening in the canvas. “I promise.” Jennifer started to put Mazy’s hand on her stomach and explain but stopped. She didn’t want Mazy to know about the baby—she shouldn’t reveal that to anyone. So Jennifer exited by the large fans as a guardsman and the agent trudged back to Lavina.
    Outside, the fans’ humming stayed with her; the sun’s heat began to swell; and she bent over, vomited on the ground.
    Don’t pass out
, she said to herself quickly and repeated quickly.
Whatever you do, don’t pass out
, trying to push through the drowning heat and breathe.
    Someone reached over to help. But when she saw the Red Cross patch, she jerked away. The Crosses lifted the dead and the dying, took them to the harvesting machines, and she was neither.
    “You all right?”
    She nodded, stepped away, slipped inside the wall of refugees. That pull from the earth had so much strength—well fed, rested, cool, and she had none of the man’s reserves. She had to sit on the ground to keep from falling and watched the legs cross and open in front of her. In betweenthose arches, before the legs closed up, she fixed on the exit where Lavina and Mazy would eventually show.
    “You need a way out?” a man said to her.
    “What?” she asked.
    “A way out,” he said. “Don’t you want a passage out of Birmingham? Consulate’s no help.” He stood pearled and blue like the desert at times. In his shades, certain tinges of light filtered against what she remembered—the sandbanks, washing color into the river. On him now, the same dusting of sunlight, and underneath, what he really was: curly hair, bland shirt, pants, scrubbed clean and faceless. Not even the doctors were this clean.
    “What’re you doing?” she asked.
    “You’re too close to the consulate,” he said, and started into the thick mess of bodies. She got up and followed. When he stopped, another man was there, identical clean shirt and skin and shades. They nodded to each other like partners, brothers, and faced Jennifer.
    “Do you want out?” the man repeated. He was younger than the other man, but something in the straight of their bodies like a tree split down the center, both halves pulled open to reveal the same burls and longness in their faces, the same deep hinge attaching their necks to their jaws, something marked them as brothers in the odd filtered light.
    “Yes.”
    “Then we can get you out,” the older one said. “You have money?”
    “Yes,” she said, again, but shouldn’t have said that, why did she reveal that? and wished to undo the word. Jennifer had left the money in her box, and left the box under the blanket with the rations in the van. Lavina had said not to bring it. “It’ll be safer here.” But all morning in the cramped line Jennifer felt for the lacquered edges, her hands twitching, hesitating, and at nothing, just restless twitching.
    “Not a lot of money,” she added.
    They kept quiet, and she withdrew a step—“I don’t havethe money on me—” brushing against the refugees. If needed, she could push into the swirl of bodies and escape.
    “You look healthy. Do you have any diseases?”
    “Diseases?” Jennifer laughed. “Not that I’m aware of. You?”
    They didn’t answer. Of course they didn’t, and she laughed more, unable to stop. When she was younger, she did this often: laughed in the middle of conversations, in bleak moments or the silence right before a joke’s punch line, always at the wrong time. It was something Terry and she did together, cutting each other off with snickering until they had forgotten the logic of their thoughts. Her mother would scowl and slap at them, her hands like blind flyswatters, missing badly. “Stop it. You’re too giddy.” She slapped at the air and never hit, never caught them.
    “You’re missing on purpose,” Jennifer had accused her mama eventually, all that laughter a contagion her mama