Where the Line Bleeds (25 page)

"I rolled another one," Javon intoned. Christophe giggled. The fact
that he could not feel Laila's hands yanking his hair was even funnier, since
he knew from the way his eyes were jerking that she was doing so. Eddie
Murphy guffawed: his laughter sounded like the bray of a donkey. Inhaling
the smoke from the blunt was like breathing: as his chest shuddered he
wondered if he had ever been able to take a breath without it burning, and
if so, why? Something sounded like a shirt ripping, and Christophe saw
that Joshua's mouth had opened wider and he was snoring. Christophe
was so high his eyelids felt swollen shut.

Dunny interrupted Joshua's snoring by shoving him awake and telling
him it was time to go. Skeetah and Marquise had wandered into the living
room and were sitting on the floor, drinking beer, and everyone else was
staring dully at the television, empty bottles in hand. Once in a while,
Javon would make a joke and interrupt Eddie's act, and everyone would
laugh. Christophe guffawed and rocked back and forth. Joshua frowned,
and wearily rose. Christophe noticed belatedly that Felicia had left while
he'd been getting braided up, and that his hand had been cupping Laila's
foot. Laila wiped her hands on her shorts to clean them of hair grease, blushing. Christophe gave Javon a long handshake, and Javon insisted
that he and Joshua stop by the next day: Javon had one hundred pounds
of boiled, spicy shrimp and he was barbecuing, and he didn't want to
have any left over on July the fifth. Christophe said he felt like eating it
all now, and Javon had snorted and said he wouldn't pick them up until
the next day.

Dunny drove to Laila's house first. Christophe watched Joshua walk
her up to her front door. He thought Joshua wasn't going to kiss her
because they stood in the light from the front porch and talked for so
long. They seemed skittish around each other; while Joshua stood straight
and solid as a bull, Laila leaned forward and away from him as gracefully
as an egret. When they kissed, Christophe looked away. He could not
remember the last time he had smoked so much; he knew it was before
he began selling. Dunny pulled into his own driveway and parked;
Christophe's eyes opened a bit more when the car stopped and without
prodding, he got out of the car and walked to the Caprice and sat in the
passenger seat. As Joshua pulled away, Christophe yelled out the window,
slurring, that they'd see Dunny the next day at the picnic at Ma-mee's
house. A fox darted out of the underbrush at the edge of a ditch and then
disappeared again. Christophe looked at the tunnel of light preceding
the car back to his brother and knew that when Joshua had awoken to
see him holding himself and laughing soundlessly with his teeth bared,
Joshua had believed his brother was in pain.

When Joshua drank his first beer on the morning of the fourth,
he was sitting on the picnic bench that he and Dunny and Christophe
had just unloaded off the back of Uncle Paul's truck. Three picnic tables
formed a half-square in the fresh cut lawn around the iron drum grill. It
was ten o'clock: the air reminded Joshua of melting butter. He watched
Uncle Paul spread a red, white, and blue tablecloth over the last picnic
table, and then mumbling something about the goat not being finished,
he drove off. Joshua heard Aunt Rita and Uncle Eze arguing about who
was bringing cold drinks for the kids, and he followed Christophe and
Dunny into the house. Christophe seemed quieter this morning; he woke
and dressed slowly, and when Uncle Paul offered him a beer after they'd
plopped the last table down, he'd refused one. After Joshua and Christophe dressed, they walked out into the yard, the colors of their outfits blinding
and crisp. The twins sat at a table with Dunny and Ma-mee and Aunt
Rita, while Uncle Paul drove into the dirt driveway and slammed the
door with a beer-slurred whoop and proclaimed that the goat was ready.
Julian, Maxwell, and David sat at the other tables with their girlfriends
and wives and children, handing out plates and measuring out portions,
complaining about each other's grilling skills, and accusing each other
of filching shots of moonshine from Paul's bottle. Joshua lugged one of
the roasting pans of goat to the table, and after Christophe ladled some
of the meat onto Ma-mee's plate, they began to eat. Joshua opened three
bottles of beer. Each bottle sprayed small, icy geysers of mist as Joshua
opened them to the heat. He passed one to Dunny on his left, and one
past Ma-mee to Christophe on the right even though neither had asked
him for one, and he took his first sip. He watched Ma-mee scoop a huge,
barbecue-slathered bite of goat into her mouth, close her eyes, and chew.

They ate until they had to shove their pants down over the extended
globes of their bellies. They ate, drank beer, brushed away flies, wiped
sweat from their slick, cologne-scented faces with napkins, and then ate
again. Christophe sucked ribs and shrugged away the platter of goat.
Joshua could not stop himself from scooping more goat on his plate: Paul
had cooked it so long that the meat seemed to melt like hot, syrupy candy
in his mouth. Joshua remembered goat as a stringy dark meat, but the red
spicy mass before him was nothing like he recalled. Joshua opened beer
after beer and passed them: as the sun slid from its zenith to lick the tops
of the pines, the beer and the heat made the day golden and easy for them
all. Christophe seemed more his old self, quick to humor. After he kidded
Dunny about him sneaking one of Aunt Rita's wine coolers, Christophe
said that he wanted to go to Javon's house.

"Javon say he got a whole cooler-full of shrimp at his house: a hundred
pounds. I'ma go get some for you." Christophe told Ma-mee.

"Y'all going to be back to pop the fireworks? I don't want them kids
to be blowing up the big ones by theyself. They'll put somebody's eye
out," Ma-mee said. Her hair was slicked back and shone like a silver cap:
her profile was soft and falling.

"Yeah." Christophe nodded as he rose. "We going to pop the big
ones when we get back." Christophe grabbed a bag of bottle rockets and lighters and pumps that rested by his feet and pulled out a handful and
shoved them into his cavernous shorts pockets. "We going to pop these
on the way."

"Hold on." Dunny rubbed his stomach and put one hand on the
table. "Why don't we wait?"

"By the time we get there, all the shrimp going to be gone."

Dunny tossed his plate into the garbage can. "I feel like going to
sleep." He rose and wove between the tables and islands of chairs and
walked to the street. Joshua trailed Christophe as they skipped heavily
across the lawn to catch up with Dunny. They hopped over the ditch and
landed on the street in a swarm of gnats. As they walked, the gnats drifted
along with them like a cloud of golden dust roused by the sonorous,
beer-suffused sway of their bodies through the sunset. Joshua wished he'd
grabbed another beer. Giggling children hid in the ditches and shot bottle
rockets in front and behind them as they walked past; the sparks shot
through the air like manic, fizzing fireflies. Dogs leapt in and out of the
ditches and woods and barked. The yards they passed were packed with
cars and lawn chairs and tables and people; the air suffused with charcoal
and barbecue and sulfur. A caravan of go-carts swooped past them; preteen boys wearing wave caps and basketball jerseys drove with one hand
while shooting roman candles into the ditches with their other. Joshua
felt as if they were walking with a demented, royal escort.

"One of y'all badasses shoot me and I'm a set y'all on fire." Dunny
yelled at the kids in the ditches.

Joshua wondered if the little girl with the clacking braids and the
dark and light little boys were in the ditches right now, wiping blood from
their legs where the blackberry vines had scratched them and giggling. He
imagined them there in the mellowing dark, whispering. A bottle rocket
shot past inches away from Dunny's belly, and Joshua heard rustling and
laughing from the undergrowth.

"Y'all keep on. I got a bomb at the house!" Dunny shouted. The
bushes were still. Joshua waved his cousin on, and bottle rockets whizzed
past where they had been standing.

"They just playing."

"They going to make me go to war."

"Against some eight year olds?"

"Shut up."

"You need another beer." Christophe broke into the conversation,
and as Bobby Blue Bland crooned from a truck stereo, so loud and
funky Joshua could almost smell the sweat and the cigarette smoke and
see the faded pool tables and the big hair eighties pin-up girls on the
Kool cigarette posters at the local hole in the wall blues club, The Oaks.
Christophe lit the bottle rocket and watched the fuse burn down to the
paper, where it flared.

Christophe threw the rocket above his head into the air at the last
moment, and the rocket hissed and shot into the darkening sky. It flew
in a graceful arc and exploded in a burst of golden, showering sparks.
Christophe handed Dunny an incense pump and a sheaf of red and blue
bottle rockets, and he passed them to Joshua, who began to throw them
into the air. Dunny ambled between them: for all his talk about shooting
at the kids in the ditches, Dunny didn't like to throw firecrackers. When
the twins were eight and he was eleven, he had been teaching them how
to throw bottle rockets in a game of war with Skeetah and Big Henry and
Marquise, and the bottle rocket he threw in the air had shot Big Henry
in the eye instead of harmlessly glancing off his pants or singeing his skin
or even burning a hole in his T-shirt. Big Henry's eye had been blistered
shut for days after the fourth, and now Dunny would only throw bottle
rockets when he was very, very drunk, which would usually result in
him throwing a bottle rocket into a moving car or into a yard full of
sated partiers. Christophe tried to keep them away from him, but Joshua
guessed he was too drunk or reckless to care who he'd passed them to. By
the time they reached Javon's yard, the sun had set. Joshua threw a bottle
rocket back into the street and heard a loud, staticky explosion undercut
by the squeal of go-cart wheels.

"Sorry!" He yelled. He heard laughter, and the go-cart sped away.

Javon had set out several white plastic lawn chairs in the balding yard;
the grass grew tough and stringy, and had given way in several places
to red, sandy earth. The yard was a field of people in crisp jean shorts
and white shirts and short dresses lounging and smoking and eating and
laughing with paper plates and plastic platters of boiled shrimp on their
laps. A hundred gallon cooler of shrimp sat open next to Javon. He flipped
burgers and prodded hotdogs as coals hissed. Bone sat in a seat next to the
cooler, alternately wiping at his face with a paper towel and shooing away
flies circling the cooler of shrimp. Dunny shook hands with Bone and Javon, while Joshua grabbed a dark blue plastic platter. Javon set down his
spatula and gripped Christophe's hand and spoke to him.

"I been betting everybody that I'll give them a hundred dollars if they
can sit here and finish off the cooler, but it's only halfway empty."

"Couldn't nobody eat all that." Bone swigged his beer.

"I hope you got some plastic bags. Ma-mee love shrimp," Christophe
said.

"They somewhere in there." Javon turned back to the burgers. "Want
a hamburger, Dunny?"

"I'm so full. I done ate so much goat I feel like a goat. Mean as shit."

"You got some beer?" Joshua scooped shrimp onto his platter with
his hands. He had torn his skin on the thin area just below his thumb
fingernail; the shrimp were so spicy that the juice burned. The orange and
cream rubbery bodies were a little warmer than the air. Bone handed him
a beer. The bite of the beer inflamed the spice of the shrimp in his mouth,
and he loved it.

"I told them to use two bags of shrimp boil with these.. .it cost extra,
but they good," Javon said.

"Tell me about it." Bone burped and covered his mouth with his
hand, too late.

In the house, Christophe looked out the window over the kitchen sink
and saw Sandman with a rake in his hands: he was raking pine needles in
Javon's backyard. Christophe stood and watched him stab at the ground
with the rake until he paused and picked up a beer half buried in the grass
and drank. He closed his eyes; they popped open and he peered into the
can. After shaking it, he set it down and reached into his pocket, fingering
his pipe before drawing it halfway out. Sandman's lips were moving. He
talked to himself as he walked toward the door. The doorknob squeaked.
Christophe turned hurriedly to the cabinets and began pulling them out
and slamming them shut. The door opened and closed behind Sandman,
and Christophe stopped in mid-pull and gripped the cabinet. What had
he been looking for? Behind him, Sandman opened the refrigerator door,
and Christophe heard the crack of a beer top opening.

"It's hot out there," Sandman said. He reeked of beer.

"What?" Christophe asked Sandman without turning.

"Just making conversation."

Christophe heard Sandman sliding along the counter toward him. He could not take his eyes off the drawer.

"I thought I told you that I didn't have no words for you." Christophe's
hand was shaking.

"I ain't asking you for nothing." Christophe smelled Sandman, ripe
with cut grass and rank, next to him. "I mean, I'm just trying to make a
living-just like you," Sandman said.

"Why don't you go back where you came from?" Christophe asked.

"This my place just as much as it's yourn, boy." Sandman slurred his
derision. "Would be nice to see your mama, though. I bet she still look as
good as she used to."

"Fuck you!" Christophe's arm bunched and contracted and the
drawer was flying from the counter and swinging freely in his hand, and
the contents: empty, ink-stained envelopes and pens and bottle openers
and spoons, were flying through the air. They pelted Sandman's legs and
dropped, or missed him and slid across the floor. Felicia walked into the
kitchen and stopped short of the mess on the floor.