by Jesmyn Ward
“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 hot dogs 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 midpull 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.
“What’s wrong?”
“Where the sandwich bags at?” Christophe yelled.
“In here,” she said, and opened a cabinet over the sink. Christophe grabbed a handful of spoons and pens and dumped them into the drawer and handed it to her as she passed him the box of bags. Sandman had backed away to the refrigerator again: he looked especially small and dirty next to the cream front of the refrigerator door. Felicia was wearing something tight and red: she glittered in the small room like a ruby, shaming Sandman’s grimy clothing and face and the hungry beating of Christophe’s heart. He ran.
Christophe walked up to the group and stood with a gallon-size plastic Ziploc bag in his hand. Bone asked, “You want a beer?” His buzz, gone: his brother, drunk as his father and keeping things from him; and Felicia, hard and cold as a jewel as she resumed her seat, not even looking at him.
Javon handed Christophe a beer. When Christophe took it from him, Javon’s fingers were as cold as the beer bottle. Christophe peeled away the gold Michelob paper, dipped into the shrimp cooler, and dumped a spattering of shrimp onto his plate. He began to peel the shells away from the bodies and eat, and let the beer grow warm, untouched. At the nearest house, beyond a stand of woods, partiers were shooting firework cannons into the air. They shrieked into the navy sky and exploded in shapes: a red flower, a yellow sun. Javon was breaking down a cluster of purple-green weed for a blunt. Christophe pulled the tail away from the meat. He wondered if Sandman was still raking back there in the elongating shadows, and he imagined himself sneaking around the house, hitting him hard enough with a beer bottle to make him collapse. If Javon offered, Christophe planned to smoke. Another firework hurtled through the air, and Christophe watched it ascend and dropped the shrimp from his fingers when he saw it burst into a brilliant, sparkling blue flower. He watched the flower flare and fade like rain down the pane of a window. Another flower bloomed in the sky.
“Did you see that?” Christophe turned to Joshua to see him sucking the last foamy residue from a bottle of beer, his head tilted back. He was smiling around the bottle. Christophe wanted his attention. He kicked him.
“What!” The bottle shaded Joshua’s mouth so that all Christophe could see of his brother in the dark was his eyes, which were curved like machete blades at the corners. Joshua wiped at his shoe with his free hand. “I know you ain’t scuffed my shit.” Joshua lost his balance and the bottle moved with him as he slumped momentarily over. “I ain’t got it to burn,” he mumbled. Christophe could see his mouth now; he was serious, he wasn’t grinning.
“The flower,” Christophe said drunkenly, and looked up as another blue rose erupted there.
“Oh,” said Joshua. “I missed it.” Christophe looked down and knew his brother hadn’t even bothered to look because he was doubled over trying to peer at his foot in the dark. None of the others were looking at the sky: it was as if only Christophe could see the miracle of those blue flowers in that yard.
10
JOSHUA WONDERED WHY CILLE HADN’T scheduled her vacation a week and a half earlier so she could have spent the Fourth with them, but he remembered her jazz festival, and he told himself that was why she hadn’t come to see them on the holiday. At least she chose to fly in on a Wednesday evening: he had asked Leo to let him off a little early so he could ride to the New Orleans airport with Christophe to pick her up. When Leo told him the supervisor had assented on Tuesday afternoon, Joshua had only nodded. He was tired all the time, now. It colored his hours with another longing besides wanting to be with Ma-mee, with Laila, to understand his brother, and tangentially, his mother: a longing for rest, a longing for the cessation of movement and worry about movement in the guise of gyrating cranes and flying sacks and shifting crates and ascending lifts and sliding pallets and diving gulls. When he went back to work two days after the Fourth, he’d remained alert enough to get his job done, and passed the hours by daydreaming of swimming at the river with Laila. He’d imagined her on his back while he stood in the amber, silvery water: her body soft against him, her arms around his shoulders.
They too
k the back way to New Orleans. They forsook the fastest route, deviating from the long, dreary, straight line of I-10 that ran from the pines of Mississippi across the gray flat expanse of Lake Pontchartrain into the low swamps of Louisiana to the bright steel and warped, garish color of New Orleans; instead, they took I-90. When Ma-mee was younger, it was the route she took to the city. They headed west, and the two-lane highway shrank to a two-lane road, and then they were cruising along the skirt of Lake Pontchartrain. Uncle Paul called it Duke country, and Joshua figured Uncle Paul probably got his presentiment from a sign outside one of the camps; even though David Duke had been defeated as governor for Louisiana years ago, some fishing camp proprietor had kept a huge homemade billboard on the edge of his camp facing the road that read “Duke” in big white letters on a background so dark blue it almost looked black.
The road wound before them through marsh grass and sparse pines, and fishing camps dotted the asphalt’s sides at regular intervals in tiny, half-acre lots. The camps squatted on the edge of the bay at the water; beyond them, Joshua saw the water of the lake on his right, and the water of the Gulf of Mexico on his left. The fishing camps had names like Bayou Fishing and Sauvage Critters and Rebel Rendezvous, and even though Joshua had often ridden to New Orleans with his brother or with Dunny or Ma-mee or Paul to the airport or to Bourbon Street or to visit one of Ma-mee’s brothers, he had never seen anyone, any living and walking human beings, white or black, in any of those fishing camps. If it weren’t for the bright paint and the neatly shelled driveways and the cut grass, he would’ve sworn that no one worked or lived there, that the place existed as a mirage, as an idea, as a foreboding relic to black people to remind them that outside their own communities, there existed enmity and history and dread hidden in the pines and the marsh that was based on the color of their skin.
In the summer of 1984, before Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park closed, Ma-mee and Uncle Paul had taken them to visit the park. They’d just turned three, and all Joshua remembered of that day was the roaring battery of the colossal white Zephyr roller coaster that he was too afraid to ride, and the eerie emptiness of the fishing camps and the road leading to the park. With his arm out the window and the salty air whistling cleanly up his nostrils, Joshua remembered the way Ma-mee had held his hand while he watched Christophe walk off with Uncle Paul to ride the roller coaster. When Joshua had asked his brother what it was like after he’d gotten off, Christophe had only said that it was fast, and it jerked a lot. Christophe hadn’t asked to ride again, and had instead been content to sit at one of the benches along the boardwalk next to his brother and eat the sandwiches that Ma-mee had packed for them. On their ride back to Mississippi, as Christophe nodded off next to him with his head resting on Joshua’s shoulder, Joshua had sucked the remains of cotton candy from the seam of his fingernails, and watched Ma-mee dangle her hand out the window of the car and wave at the streaming night and rustling of marsh grasses.
Joshua understood why Ma-mee loved the drive: in the setting sun’s light, the marsh grasses quivered and lashed violently in the wind, turning one way and another to catch the light and turn from green to gold to rose to wheat. The marsh greenery shuddered and bent into the caress of the air crossing from the gulf to the lake over the narrow inlet of sand and pine and grass; all of it shimmered and shone like Laila’s face or Ma-mee’s eyes or a broad, short, bowlegged pit in midleap through the air—something made beautiful for its own sake, something inviting adoration simply because it exists. Christophe turned the stereo down one notch so they could hear the music and the sounds from outside the car at the same time: the silky grass, the leaning and cracking pines, the insistent singing of the insects. Both Joshua and Christophe had showered and dressed to meet their mother in their new Fourth of July outfits that Christophe had recently washed. After Christophe picked him up from work earlier that Wednesday afternoon, Joshua had starched both of their jean shorts into cardboard stiff lines; the creases in the legs were like box edges. They crossed a narrow bridge: Joshua was sure if he reached his arm out of the window of the car as Ma-mee had done that evening, he could touch the black rusted bars of the steel tunnel. The sun shone from the water in golden, glassy waves.
It was always a surprise when 90 emptied out into the city. Suddenly, they were in an old neighborhood east of New Orleans, and they followed the signs to meet up with I-10: once they were in the city, it was the only way they knew to get to the airport. The signs that led them to the interstate were small, green, and innocuous: they perched on skinny, nearly invisible iron poles and hid themselves in clusters of oak leaves and branches. The two hadn’t really talked while they were getting ready, and now there was something perfunctory about the way Christophe drove. He hadn’t seemed excited when they left, and he’d tied a rag over his hair instead of oiling it for Cille. Joshua lay his head tentatively on the windowsill of the door and stared out at the projects. The red, faded two-story brick buildings squatted in obscure, unexpected places: they waited with patient tenacity in the sudden corners of the city. They sat perched at regular intervals in the maze of New Orleans streets; they spread over sandy, oak-studded lots and menaced the warped, salmon-pink or turquoise-blue old mansions that cringed away from them across the wide, grassy, oak-lined avenues. The trolley cut like a razor blade on its tracks to separate the two. Everyone he saw in the streets seemed cut from the trunks of the ancient, bowing oaks. Joshua watched small dark children play inscrutable games on the sidewalks.
The balconies on the buildings looked as if they were going to sag and collapse into one another like cards. Women in stretched-out, oversized T-shirts and short skirts braided hair on their stoops. The boys who sat between the women’s legs were shirtless or wore wide-necked, off-white T-shirts and wifebeaters. Those who were already braided or wore hats seemed always on the verge of crossing the streets at corners. They played dice games against pockmarked deli storefronts that sold beer, food, crawfish and shrimp poboys. They spoke to one another and gold shone when their mouths opened. Older, gray-haired women in long, shapeless skirts entered the dark mouths of the delis and surfaced with small brown paper bags. Men who reminded Joshua of Sandman walked along the sidewalks and crossed the streets heedless of the slow flow of traffic; they danced between the cars and stared wide-eyed at the windshields. Their hair stood in knotted, luxuriant half-afro half-dreaded shocks.
The whole city seemed on the verge of collapsing, of coming apart and spewing into the streets to slide and submerge in the river. Joshua imagined it all gone: the levees, the sea of white aboveground tombs, the French Quarter, the flickering sparkle of the knot of shiny skyscrapers called downtown, and the huddling rows of high-windowed, wooden-sided houses warped soft by the salty, sulfurous air and the rain. Christophe stopped at an intersection, and Joshua looked out the window to see a knot of people clustered at a bus stop: they were mostly black. A boy who Joshua estimated was around his own age stood slumped into the glass side of the bus shelter. He wore a white bandana pulled so low over his forehead it rimmed his eyebrows. His skin contrasted so darkly with his bandana and his white T-shirt he seemed cut from a black-and-white photograph, and Joshua noticed the smooth skin of the boy’s forearm was interrupted by a rough round scar of keloid skin. The mark shone shiny and round and blush colored, like pink lips half-open to a dark mouth. Joshua saw another scar on the boy’s biceps; the scars were raised and angry and perfect and reminded Joshua of brandings he had seen on animals. Joshua knew what caused those scars: bullets. The boy sneered and raised the corner of his lip to show one perfect, gold-plated tooth. It looked like a dagger in his mouth. Joshua looked away. The light turned green, and they sped to Canal Street, the I-10 West on-ramp, and the airport. The highway rose and dipped and curved on a complex system of bridges the city had built over the city streets and houses below: Joshua closed his eyes against the nausea rousing itself in his stomach.
“You think you could slow down on them curves?” Joshua ask
ed.
“Naw.” The car accelerated. “She probably already there, and I don’t want to hear her mouth.” Christophe cleared his throat, and an airplane whined low overhead.
Through the waving cattails and the short, new trees lining the approach to the airport, Joshua saw that Mayor Ray Nagin welcomed him to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Joshua’s stomach clenched again. He looked at the clock. She would be waiting for them.
Christophe turned into the arrival lane and slowed to a crawl: this was the first time they’d ridden to the airport and picked up Cille without Uncle Paul or Ma-mee. They had no money to park in the garage. Joshua got out of the car and slammed the door shut. A pale cop in a dark blue uniform nodded at him coolly.
“I’ll go get her,” Joshua said.
“I’ll make the circle,” Christophe replied as he turned the volume on the stereo higher and saluted the cop with his pointer finger: Joshua knew he was only doing it to annoy the officer. The trunk vibrated with beat. The cop’s neck was glazed, and meaty. The policeman stepped to the edge of the sidewalk toward the car as Christophe drove off. He wanted to yell at Christophe about getting a ticket: he didn’t have the money to pay for it.
