Where the Line Bleeds (2 page)

On the bank, Dunny was rolling a blunt from his selling sack,
laughing. He licked the cigar shut, blew on the paper, and lit it. White
smoke drifted from his mouth in tufts. He stood at the edge of the water,
the river lapping at the tips of his basketball shoes. Squinting, Christophe
could see the tips of the crimson leather turning dark red. Dunny hopped
away from the water and held the blunt towards them. Christophe's lungs
burned and his stomach fluttered with nausea.

"Y'all want to smoke?"

Joshua immediately shook his head no, and spit water in a sparkling
brown stream. Christophe thrust himself toward his brother and grabbed
him around his shoulders, trying to shove him below the surface. Joshua
squirmed and kicked, flipping them over. Christophe slid below the
water, the current gripping him, sure as his brother's fingers. He could
hear Joshua laughing above him, muted and deep beyond the bronze
wash of the river. Everything was dim and soft. Christophe exhaled crystal
bubbles of air, grabbed his brother's soft, squirming sides, and pulled him
to the quiet below.

N THE CAR, JOSHUA PLUCKED A WATERLOGGED TWIG, LIMP AS A
shoestring, from Christophe's wet hair. Dunny drove slowly on the
pebbled gray asphalt back roads to Bois Sauvage, encountering a
house, a trailer, another car once every mile in the wilderness of woods,
red dirt ditches, and stretches of swampy undergrowth. Joshua watched
Dunny blow smoke from his mouth and attempt to pass the blunt he'd
rolled on the river beach to Christophe. Christophe shook his head no.
Shrugging and sucking on the blunt, Dunny turned the music up so
Pastor Troy's voice rasped from the speakers, calling God and the Devil,
conjuring angels and demons, and blasting them out. Christophe had
taken off his shirt and lumped it into a wet ball in his lap. His bare feet,
like Joshua's, were caked with sand.

Joshua stretched across the backseat, shirtless also, and tossed the
twig on the carpet. He lay with his cheek on the upholstery of the door,
his head halfway out the window. Joshua loved the country; he loved the
undulating land they moved through, the trees that overhung the back
roads to create green tunnels that fractured sunlight. He and Christophe
had played basketball through junior high and high school, and after
traveling on basketball trips to Jackson, to Hattiesburg, to Greenwood,
and to New Orleans for tournaments, he knew that most of the south
looked like this: pines and dirt interrupted by small towns. He knew
that there shouldn't be anything special about Bois Sauvage, but there
was: he knew every copse of trees, every stray dog, every bend of every half-paved road, every uneven plane of each warped, dilapidated house,
every hidden swimming hole. While the other towns of the coast shared
boundaries and melted into each other so that he could only tell he was
leaving one and arriving in the other by some landmark, like a Circle K
or a Catholic church, Bois Sauvage dug in small on the back of the Bay,
isolated. Natural boundaries surrounded it on three sides. To the south,
east, and west, a bayou bordered it, the same bayou that the Wolf River
emptied into before it pooled into the Bay of Angels and then out to
the Gulf of Mexico. There were only two roads that crossed the bayou
and led out of Bois Sauvage to St. Catherine, the next town over. To the
north, the interstate capped the small town like a ruler, beyond which
a thick bristle of pine forest stretched off and away into the horizon. It
was beautiful.

Joshua could understand why Ma-mee's and Papa's families had
migrated here from New Orleans, had struggled to domesticate the lowlying, sandy earth that reeked of rotten eggs in a dry summer and washed
away easily in a wet one. Land had been cheaper along the Mississippi
gulf, and black Creoles had spread along the coastline. They'd bargained
in broken English and French to buy tens of acres of land. Still, they
and their poor white neighbors were dependent on the rich for their
livelihood, just as they had been in New Orleans: they built weekend
mansions along the beach for wealthy New Orleans expatriates, cleaned
them, did their yardwork, and fished, shrimped, and harvested oysters.
Yet here, they had space and earth.

They developed their own small, self-contained communities: they
intermarried with others like themselves, raised small, uneven houses
from the red mud. They planted and harvested small crops. They kept
horses and chickens and pigs. They built tiny stills in the wood behind
their houses that were renowned for the clarity of the liquor, the strong
oily consistency of it, the way it bore a hole down the throat raw. They
parceled out their acres to their children, to their passels of seven and
twelve. They taught their children to shoot and to drive young, and sent
them to one-room schoolhouses that only advanced to the seventh grade.
Their children built small, uneven houses, married at seventeen and
fourteen, and started families. They called Bois Sauvage God's country.

Their children's children grew, the government desegregated the
schools, and they sent them to the public schools in St. Catherine to
sit for the first time next to white people. Their children's children
could walk along the beaches, could walk through the park in St.
Catherine without the caretakers chasing them away, hollering nigger.
Their children's children graduated from high school and got jobs at
the docks, at convenience stores, at restaurants, as maids and carpenters
and landscapers like their mothers and fathers, and they stayed. Like the
oyster shell foundation upon which the county workers packed sand to
pave the roads, the communities of Bois Sauvage, both black and white,
embedded themselves in the red clay and remained. Every time Joshua
returned from a school trip and the bus crossed the bayou or took the exit
for Bois Sauvage from the highway, he felt that he could breathe again.
Even seeing the small, green metal exit sign made something ease in his
chest. Joshua rubbed his feet together and the sand slid away from his
skin in small, wet clumps that reminded him of lukewarm grits.

When Joshua and Christophe talked about what they wanted to do
with their lives, it never included leaving Bois Sauvage, even though they
could have joined their mother, Cille, who lived in Atlanta. She sent
Ma-mee money by Western Union once a month to help with groceries
and clothing. Cille had still been living with Ma-mee when she had
the twins, and when she decided to go to Atlanta to make something
of herself when the boys were five, she left them. She told Ma-mee she
was tired of accompanying her on jobs, of cleaning messes she didn't
make, of dusting the underside of tabletops, of mopping wooden living
room floors that stretched the entire length of Ma-mee's house, of feeling
invisible when she was in the same room with women who always smelled
of refined roses. She told Ma-mee she'd send for the twins once she found
an apartment and a job, but she didn't. Ma-mee said that one day after
Cille had been gone for eleven months, she stood in the doorway of their
room and watched them sleep in their twin beds. She gazed at their curly,
rough red-brown hair, their small bunched limbs, their skin the color of
amber, and she decided to never ask Cille if she was ready to take them
again. That was the summer their hair had turned deep red, the same
color as Cille's, before it turned to brown, like a flame fading to ash,
Ma-mee said.

Three weeks after that morning, Cille visited. She didn't broach the
subject of them coming back to Atlanta with her. She and Ma-mee had
sat on the porch, and Ma-mee told her to send $200 a month: the boys
would remain in Bois Sauvage, with her. Cille had assented as the sound
of the twins chasing Ma-mee's chickens, whooping and squealing, drifted
onto the screened porch from the yard. Ma-mee said it was common to
apportion the raising of children to different family members in Bois
Sauvage. It was the rule when she was a little girl; in the 1940s, medicine
and food had been scarce, and it was normal for those with eleven or
twelve children to give one or two away to childless couples, and even
more normal for children to be shuffled around within the family, she
said. Joshua knew plenty of people at school that had been raised by
grandparents or an aunt or a cousin. Even so, he wished he hadn't been
torturing the chickens; he wished that he'd been able to see them talking,
to see Cille's face, to see if it hurt her to leave them.

Now Cille was working as a manager at a beauty supply store. She
had green eyes she'd inherited from Papa and long, kinky hair, and Joshua
didn't know how he felt about her. He thought he had the kind of feelings
for her that he had for her sisters, his aunts, but sometimes he thought he
loved her most, and other times not at all. When she visited them twice
a year, she went out to nightclubs and restaurants, and shopped with her
friends. Joshua and Christophe talked about it, and Joshua thought they
shared a distanced affection for her, but he wasn't sure. Christophe never
stayed on the phone with Cille longer than five minutes, while Joshua
would drag the conversation out, ask her questions until she would beg
off the phone.

But once when she'd come home during the summer of their sophomore
year, a kid named Rook from St. Catherine's had said something dirty
about her at the basketball court down at the park while they were playing
a game, something about how fine her ass was. Christophe had told Joshua
later the particulars of what Rook had said, how the words had come
out of Rook's mouth all breathy and hot because he was panting, and to
Christophe, it had sounded so dirty. Joshua hadn't heard it because he was
under the net, digging his elbow into Dunny's ribs, because he was the
bigger man of the two. Christophe was at the edge of the court with the ball, trying to shake Rook, because he was smaller and faster, when Rook
said it. Christophe had turned red in the face, pushed Rook away, brought
the ball up, and with the sudden violence of a piston had fired the ball
straight at Rook's face. It hit him squarely in the nose. There was blood
everywhere and Christophe was yelling and calling Rook a bitch and Rook
had his hand under his eyes and there was blood seeping through the
cracks of his fingers, and Dunny was running to stand between them and
laughing, telling Rook if he wouldn't have said shit about his aunt Cille,
then maybe he wouldn't have gotten fucked up. Joshua was surprised
because he felt his face burn and his hands twitch into fists and he realized
he wanted to whip the shit out of dark little Rook, Rook with the nose that
all the girls liked because it was fine and sharp as a crow's beak but that
now was swollen fat and gorged with blood. Even now Joshua swallowed
at the thought, and realized he was digging his fingers into his sides. Rook,
little bitch.

Joshua felt the wind flatten his eyelids and wondered if Cille would
be at the school. He knew she knew they were graduating: he'd addressed
the graduation invitations himself, and hers was the first he'd done. He
thought of her last visit. She'd come down for a week at Christmas, had
given him and Christophe money and two gold rope chains. He and
Christophe had drunk moonshine and ate fried turkey with the uncles
on Christmas night in Uncle Paul's yard, and he'd listened as his uncles
talked about Cille as she left the house after midnight. She'd sparkled in
the dark when the light caught her jewelry and lit it like a cool, clean
metal chain.

"Where you going, girl?" Uncle Paul had yelled at her outline.

"None of your damn business!" she'd yelled back.

"That's Cille," Paul had said. "Never could stay still."

"That's cause she spoiled." Uncle Julian, short and dark with babyfine black hair, had said over the mouth of his bottle. "She the baby girl:
Papas favorite. Plus, she look just like Mama."

"Stop hogging the bottle, Jule," Uncle Paul had said.

Joshua and Christophe had come in later that night to find Cille back
in the house. She was asleep at the kitchen table with her head on her
arms, breathing softly into the tablecloth. When they carried her to bed, she smelled sweetly, of alcohol and perfume. The last Joshua remembered
seeing of her was on New Year's morning; she'd been bleary and puffy
eyed from driving an hour and a half to New Orleans the night before and
partying on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. He and Christophe
had walked into the kitchen in the same clothes from the previous day,
fresh from the party up on the Hill at Remy's house that had ended when
the sun rose, to see Cille eating greens and cornbread and black-eyed peas
with Ma-mee. Ma-mee had wished them a Happy New Year and told
them they stank and needed to take a bath. They had stopped to kiss and
hug her, and after he embraced Ma-mee, Joshua had moved to hug Cille.
She stopped him with a raised arm, and spoke words he could still hear.

"What a way to start off the New Year."