Where the Line Bleeds (20 page)

"I got something to tell y'all." She had made a mistake in not sitting
in her chair. A fly was buzzing a slow funeral dirge around the living
room. It would die soon. She hesitated.

"We already know," Christophe said.

"You do?"

"Yes, ma'am. Laila told me and I told Joshua. It's okay. He had to
come back sometime."

"Who told you?" asked Joshua.

"He came by the house." Christophe sat up. Joshua scooted closer
to her. She laid her hand over his and began making small circles on the
back. It was the way she'd rubbed his back as a baby. She made herself
stop. "It's alright. He came by and asked after y'all. He wasn't bothering
me none."

"He didn't ask you for no money, did he?" Christophe was on his
knees. The fly had stopped buzzing. Perhaps it had died.

"No. I just don't want y'all to be surprised."

"I should've been here." Christophe breathed.

"You can't be here all the time, Chris."

"Maybe I should say something to him. Make it so he won't come
back over here and bother you." He paused. "He on that stuff again. I
heard."

"Naw." Joshua was almost off the sofa. Ma-mee's hand fell to her
side. "Just stay around. He know Uncle Paul be coming home for lunch."
Joshua swallowed, then said it. "He wouldn't steal from his own blood.

"Ain't no blood. He a junkie, Jay. You know how that go."

Ma-mee made a shushing noise. "Don't let him bother y'all none. He
just a sad man." She closed her eyes and saw his younger face; that lovely
face so like her boys' own, but sneaky, shifty, as if it lacked the integrity
of bones underneath. "Just a sad, lost man."

"So you don't want me to say nothing to him, Ma-mee?" said
Christophe.

"I'm sure." She patted Joshua's arm and sat in her own chair. She let
her hands hang over the armrests. "Felt like I done walked some miles."

"Cille coming." Joshua said this. He looked folded into the sofa.

"You talked to her?"

"She called the house while you was gone. Say she coming down in
around a month-at the end of July or around the beginning of August,
I guess. Some music festival or something happening then, too. Or,
something like that." Joshua's voice dwindled to a slow, piecemeal halt.
Christophe was rocking back on his heels. He must have not known.

"Well, that's good. Been a while. It'll be good to see her." The twins
were looking at her. The joints of her fingers and her wrist were suffused
with pain, and she grabbed her wrist and tried to squeeze it out. She wanted them laying on the floor and lounging on the sofa together. She
would cook them a big meal, make them lazy and easy with food. Pain
arced through her kneecap. She would make them forget.

She rose and walked slowly, limping to favor her tight knee, and
palmed Christophe's head. "These greens ain't going to cook theyselves."
She touched his face. "I could use some help though." He rose, and his
cheek slid down and away; the bone was sharp beneath his skin. Joshua
rose and she palmed his cheek as well, felt the bone heavy and dense
beneath the soft fat of his face. They cooked.

Christophe began waking up before his brother. He'd never been
an early riser, but now he found himself suddenly, painfully awake
every morning at 5:30, when he'd feel something like a cramp in his
stomach. Each day, he heard Ma-mee easing her way down the hall to the
bathroom, and he'd realize that the ache in his stomach was his bladder,
and he couldn't go back to sleep because he had to pee. Then Christophe
would do something he hadn't done since he was little. He'd rise and walk
carefully out of the room, stepping lightly to ease his bladder, and creep
out the back door. The morning would be gray, the air lukewarm, and the
grass at his feet always. He'd force it out, quickly; he was ashamed that he
was peeing off the back steps like some five-year old who couldn't hold it.
They used to do it all the time when they were little, when Cille or Mamee or Aunt Rita or Uncle Paul or someone else in the family was in the
bathroom, hogging it. Back inside, he'd turn off the alarm clock and lie
back in his bed and listen to Joshua snore and Ma-mee slide shuffle back
to her room to wait for 5:45, when he would rouse his brother. Ma-mee
would make them a quick breakfast, and then he'd bring Joshua to work.
By the end of Joshua's second week of work, it was routine.

Christophe never went directly back to the house after he dropped
Joshua off. He'd ride back along the beach and nervously eye the freshcleaned glass of the storefronts for Help Wanted signs, for bits of neon
orange and black that said NOW HIRING. Some he would pass over
when the store looked especially dingy or dirty. He'd peer at gas stations
and fast food restaurants. Sometimes, he would pull into the parking lot
of the place and circle it. He'd park and leave the engine running and
eye the door, always to see some dim shadow moving about on the other side of the glass. They all seemed to be waiting for him. He'd think of the
sandwich bag of weed at home, of the old pre-paid cell phone Dunny had
given him, of the money to be made. He'd think, I'll wait until I finish
selling what I got. Might as well get the money-it's there. Then I'll come
back for real. He would think of Ma-mee at the house, waiting on him,
of Joshua at the dock making honest money. He would run into one of
the convenience stores with a sign out on the front, grab an orange juice,
snatch an application, and then drive to Bois Sauvage through the bayou
and past his home and up deep into the country where the small, tinroofed shotgun houses were spare, where they squatted in the woods and
overgrown fields like nocturnal animals, like wary possums or armadillos;
solitary, seeking shelter in the wood, perpetually surprised by the passersby. Few black people lived up here. He had no problem avoiding Felicia's
house. He liked the way the houses disappeared and the road snaked
underneath the cover of the trees and laid itself out like a vein along the
body of the country. He would ride through the morning until the sun
was bright and heavy above him.

Sometimes, he'd stop to put some gas in the tank at the old, shrunken
convenience stores hidden in the country. The gas was always ten cents
cheaper in these places, and some redneck with a beard was always behind
the wooden counter, and when he passed over his money, whatever ceiling
fan was blowing in the place would inevitably ruffle the plastic beer ad
banners and the tacked up confederate emblems like prayer flags. He rode
until he began to know his way better. He'd ride until he couldn't ignore
the small red light and the constant chatter of pages through the pre-paid
cell phone at his hip. He'd reluctantly turn and go back. He rode without
music as he eyed the sky to see hawks always somewhere above him. He'd
park the car along the ditch at the front of the yard and walk over to the
park and sit at one of the wooden picnic tables hidden beneath the short,
shivering oaks. They knew where to find him.

They'd amble over at regular intervals, it seemed; alone or in pairs.
Once about every hour or half-hour or so, he'd see them off in the distance.
They seemed to materialize from the heat-drenched air like sudden rain.
He'd watch them amble slowly across the dusty red baseball field or pick
their way through the pine trees and oak that cloistered the perimeter of the basketball court. He ate potato chips and drank Gatorade while he
waited. He folded his arms over the top of the table and laid his head
down and stripped off his shirt. He stretched over the top of the table
on his back and watched the light etch the veins of the dark green leaves
into beautiful relief. He dozed to the pulsing, drowsy cry of the crickets
in the long-stemmed grass and the trees around him. He waited for them
to come: other drug dealers, or high school students playing hooky, or
people on their lunch breaks from driving trucks hauling rocks and sand,
or attendants working at convenience stations the next town over, all
people he'd grown up with and always known. When they came to him,
he'd shake their hands. They would joke with him, and he'd smile. He'd
give them what they wanted and they'd lay the bill close to him on the
table, where it would flutter and jump with the wind, where it would
pulse and twitch like a living thing. One pocket was for dime sacks, the
other for dubs; he'd put the money in the pocket with the dime sacks
because there was more room. Feeling sick, excited, and ashamed because
he was excited, he'd eye the road for dark blue cop cars. Whenever he saw
any, which was once every week or so, he'd dart to the ditch and hide in
the underbrush, watch them cruise past through the cover of weeds and
bushes until they went away, until the vegetation would make him itch
and rashes bloom across his legs.

On the police-free days, his clientele would leave him and he would
be alone again, staring at the grain of the wood of the table or up
through the leaves of the trees, and he would think about what he was
doing. He'd realize that he was placing it in their hands, now, that he
was hardly thinking about it when he handed it over. He realized that
this was something he did, now, like helping Ma-mee with dinner or
playing basketball or driving Joshua to work. He sat on that bench in
a procession of days, each one longer and hotter than the last, and told
himself that this was not what he was. He'd sell until a little after three
and then walk home to Ma-mee, the dark cool of the house, and they
would wait for Joshua to call. She would ask him if he'd had any luck
finding a job. Remembering those signs, his morning dalliance with the
asphalt of restaurant and store and hotel parking lots, he would tell her
yes, he had looked for a job. He'd think to himself; it wasn't a lie-he had looked. His weed was beginning to smell like the barn; like rust and
earth and oil. After he picked up his brother, after it was dark, after they'd
eaten dinner and Ma-mee had fallen asleep, after she'd been quiet in her
bed for at least an hour, he'd make sacks. With his brother asleep on the
sofa in front of the TV, most times with the phone cradled loosely in his
hand from talking to Laila, Christophe would ease out of the house and
go to the barn with a flashlight. He'd shine his light on the spastic bats
fluttering through the open eaves, the warm, burrowing rodents secreting
themselves in the narrow crevices of machines, and like a small, hairy
animal himself, he would squeeze between the oil drums, squat sweating
in the dark, and do his business. Now he kept his weed in the shed, locked
in a small iron toolbox he found, behind the empty coffee cans on a shelf.
When he returned to the house, he would wake his brother and bring him
to bed. Christophe wondered if Joshua was doing it, waiting up for him
on purpose, or if he was simply too exhausted to move and so fell asleep.
He read judgment in the way Joshua slept wide legged and square kneed
on the couch. Still he woke him to walk to bed and sleep.

Christophe had arrived early at the dock. He'd gotten tired of sitting
around at the park. He told Joshua that the clouds had come in fast, that
when he saw them rolling in while he was lying on his back on the picnic
table bench, they looked like pictures he had seen of mountains. They had
rolled across the sky and bulldozed away the blue. While Joshua rubbed
his face dry on his shirt sleeve, he strained to hear his brother over the
staccato drumming of the rain on the roof and the hood of the car. It
slashed sideways against the windows.

When they were seven, they had found an old gray abandoned house
deep in a coven of oaks behind the church and had spent an afternoon
throwing rocks at the warped planks and yelling to scare away ghosts.
Neither the twins nor Skeetah had ventured inside the house, whose
roof had sagged under beards of Spanish moss. The rain sounded like
the white pebbles had when they had smattered against the wooden face
of the house. Through a clear spot, Joshua saw that the rain was coming
down so hard the world seemed to have disappeared: it had washed the
docks, the concrete parking lot, the men he knew were running to their
cars through the downpour, away. He and Christophe had only run away from that house that day when Christophe decided that he had
had enough of throwing rocks, since no one was brave enough to run
inside, and the sunlight in the woods was fading. He had grabbed Joshua's
hand in a slippery grip, and pulled him away and they had run forever,
it seemed, with Skeetah at their back yelling at them to slow down, until
they finally crawled out of the woods just as the sun was setting in a red
and orange blanket in the sky.

Christophe and Joshua had jumped the ditch dividing the woods
from the street as one, and only when their feet had landed on the asphalt
did Christophe let go of Joshua's hand. Joshua looked at his brother now
wiping the glass furiously, muttering and cussing about the broken defrost
in the car, and wished for it to never stop raining, for the rain to become
a biblical flood so that it would not only wash him through space, but
through time, away and back to that day in the beginning of his world.
Christophe made to start the car, and Joshua stopped him.

"Naw. Let's just wait it out. It's too heavy right now to see."

"Alright." Christophe cranked the car. Joshua reached over and
turned the thermostat knob to cool. The vents expelled air that smelled
musty and old; it smelled like weed. Joshua let his bare arm adhere wetly
to the windowsill.

"It smell like wet dog in here." Joshua sniffed and lowered his arm.
"Oh. That's me." He leaned his head against the window. When he got in
the car, he had noticed that Christophe had the radio off. Both of them
liked the sound of the rain.

"I want to give you some money. Put it with what you going to give
to Ma-mee. Tell her you worked overtime or something," Christophe
said, glaring out the front window.

"Today?" Joshua pinched his forearm to stay awake.