Where the Line Bleeds

by Jesmyn Ward

  Christophe never went directly back to the house after he dropped Joshua off. He’d ride back along the beach and nervously eye the fresh-cleaned 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 prepaid 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, tin-roofed 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 prepaid 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 shirtsleeve, 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 woul
d wash him not only 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.

  “Every time you get paid, I’ll just give you a hundred. Tell her they paying you more than you thought they was.”

  “What if she know I’m lying?” Joshua looked out the passenger window.

  “Just tell her you work through lunch and when I don’t pick you up on time, they pay you overtime.”

  She would never know that she was receiving money from both of them. She would not want to take the money even from him. She would fuss and say that they got along on her Social Security and Medicaid just fine. He would slip it into her purse.

  “Here.” Christophe dug in his pocket and took out a wad of bills folded in half. The bills looked worried over, faded. Joshua didn’t want to give them to her.

  “Where’s the wallet Cille gave you?” Cille had sent them matching leather wallets on their fifteenth birthdays. The twins had carried them everywhere even though sometimes the only thing in them were pictures of Ma-mee and Cille and Aunt Rita and their own wallet-sized individual basketball team photos: Joshua had worn the wallet until it curved in the middle and the leather that rubbed against the pocket of his jeans was dull and textured as suede. He still wore it.

  “It fell apart.”

  Joshua did not let Christophe know that he knew that Christophe had saved it; Christophe had stashed the wallet like some drooping and wilted prom flower in one of his love-note shoe boxes in the top and back of the closet. Christophe counted three twenties, four fives, and twenty ones. He handed the larger bills to Joshua with one hand and apologetically gave the ones to his brother with his other hand and shrugged. “For change.” Joshua grabbed both handfuls and sandwiched them together before shoving them into his wallet.

  “Alright then.” Joshua slid the wallet into his back pocket. It felt as if he were sitting on a thick, dirty balled-up sock.

  “I smelled it,” Christophe said. “Ma-mee always say we got that blood in us, the kind that know things, that Bois Sauvage blood. I know she can tell the weather, but I swear, before them clouds came and before I even knew they was on the way, I smelled it in the air. It was like a metal kind of smell.” Joshua nodded, and his head slid back and forth against the glass. He knew it left a greasy smudge. “Shit, soon as I jumped up from the bench after I saw them clouds, it started coming down hard. I just stood there for a minute, though. It felt good.” Joshua nodded again. He had been slow walking across the parking lot to the car.

  The twins sat like that for the thirty minutes it took for the rain to ease up. Joshua closed his eyes repeatedly and tried to sleep; he couldn’t. He was surprised that he couldn’t. He watched Christophe blearily; he realized that Christophe had taken out his braids and pulled his hair back into a frizzy, short ponytail. Joshua hadn’t realized his brother’s hair was that long; Christophe’s hair had always grown a little faster than Joshua’s own. It had been a couple of days since he had talked to Laila; he’d have to call her and see if she could braid their hair again. He knew his own hair stank like cold wax, and that when Laila combed the braids out, it would come out in ropy knots. He knew he wouldn’t care, and he wouldn’t complain, as long as he could feel the press of her thighs against his shoulders.

  After the rain fell away in fits, after it eased up and the worst of it withdrew out over the gulf like a woman gathering her coat and leaving a room, Christophe drove them home. The swish and sway of the windshield wipers echoed through the car. Joshua thought to ask his brother for a blunt, because he wanted the smoke to massage the residue of muscle ache from his arms and legs, but he didn’t. If Christophe didn’t have something rolled when he picked Joshua up, then he didn’t want to smoke. Christophe only handed Joshua a blunt to light and smoke twice since he had been selling. Both times, he set it on the dashboard when Joshua got into the car; Christophe placed it there as if he didn’t want to hand it to his brother. Joshua half shut his eyes and listened to the rain fling itself at the car.

  At the house, Christophe opened the screen door to the porch and let it fall without holding it open for his brother. Joshua sighed and licked his lips as he mounted the steps and sucked at the water and salt he found there. When he followed his brother into the gray, humid living room, Christophe had stopped. Laila was sitting on the sofa. Ma-mee wasn’t in her chair.

  “Where’s Ma-mee at?” Christophe’s voice was slightly hoarse; he sounded as if he hadn’t spoken in days. Joshua figured that his brother didn’t talk much while he was sitting down at the park waiting for customers. Joshua thought about him often while he was lifting and throwing bags of chickens and crates of bananas. In his mind, Christophe wasn’t sprawling across the bench with his charismatic dark limbs, but instead was round-shouldered and stooped, and his eyes were always studying the road as he waited for clientele and the blue flash of the police. In his head, he saw Christophe’s face through a metal screen, and his worry angered him. Sometimes, jealously, he pictured Javon or Marquise with him, and he wondered if Laila ever walked down to the court, and if she talked to him. “And why you ain’t got the TV on?”

  “Miss Rita came and picked her up. She said they was going shopping.” Laila crossed her arms, and then buried her hands into the crevices of the couch cushions. She looked nervous. “I just, uh, I told her I would wait on y’all. Wasn’t nothing good on TV,” she whispered. Christophe turned back to look at his brother.

  “I got stuff to do.” Christophe turned away and receded down the hall. Joshua sat on the sofa at the other end from Laila, and placed his cap carefully on the armrest. He smoothed it with his wet, dirty hand, and then began to quickly unlace his boots. Ma-mee would kill him if he got mud on the carpet. He’d forgotten. Shit.

  “So, how was work today?”

  “It was alright.”

  “You usually get off earlier than this, right?”

  “Yeah, but the rain . . .” Joshua pulled off both of his boots and laid them on their sides. He hesitated, and then picked them up and set them outside the front door on the porch. When he sat back down, Laila seemed closer to him on the sofa. From the back room, he heard nothing; it was as if his brother weren’t even there. He wished the rain would fall harder outside; the silence that pervaded the house was unnerving. “So.” He was sure Laila was scooting closer to him. It was like watching a minute hand on a clock move; he could never see it, but he’d blink, and it would be in a different place. “You going to get a summer job?”

  “Naw, I don’t think so. Summer’s almost halfway over, now. Fourth of July is like, next week.” She was staring at him like a bird.

  “What you do all day then?” Niggas didn’t look at each other when they talked; he’d noticed that. They looked straight ahead and away most of the time; unless you were about to fight or making a joke, you never looked at a man in his face.

  “I babysit my little cousins. My auntie pays me fifty dollars a week.” Yes, her knee was touching his, now. All he could feel was a pressure there as he studied her knee, tan and round, lightly touching his leg through the dirty press of his jeans.

  “That’s cool.” The long, ripe line
of her thigh was beside his. He felt a muscle cramp sullenly in his calf. He ignored it, and looked at her face. It was red.

  “Joshua?”

  “Hmm?” He could feel her breath on his face as she spoke to him. She smelled like lotion and licorice.

  “Are you ever going to kiss me?” It was a whisper. She was staring at his lips and his eyes. She turned redder; she must’ve realized that she was nearly in his lap. She looked at the wall. A knock sounded from deep within the house; it sounded as if Christophe was breaking something. Joshua knew her skin would be soft, that it would give under his fingers like water so that he would not be able to tell whether it was really there. Her blush made him want to smile. She was determined, and shy, and stubborn, and he liked her for it. He knew he stank, but he didn’t care. Joshua leaned forward and placed his hand next to her shoulder on the back of the sofa and kissed her. Her hand came up to the side of his face; her fingers on his cheek felt as light as an insect. She opened her mouth and her lips and tongue were warm; he shivered as slivers of water made their way from his hair down the back of his neck. He pulled away, hesitated, and then kissed the corner of her lips with his mouth closed, and sat back. She wiped her hair back away from her face and smiled. He felt awkward and stupid; what if Ma-mee or Christophe had walked in?

  “I need to go take a shower.”

  “Alright.” She ducked her head and swallowed, and he wondered if she was still tasting his mouth on her tongue again, if she was remembering it like the flavor of ice cream or juice. He knew he would not be able to forget her taste now that he had it for the first time; he wanted to kiss her again, to coax her onto his lap and run his hands down the warm curve of her back and turn her face to his with his mouth, but he wouldn’t, not in the living room, not with his brother knocking around the house. Dunny had always joked about them sharing girls, but it had never been that way between them.

  Joshua showered quickly. By the time he got out, Ma-mee was walking down the hall and Laila wasn’t in the living room anymore. He readjusted the knot holding the towel at his waist.