by Jesmyn Ward
“I thought you was using our car.”
“That’s too much trouble. ’Sides, I don’t feel like getting up at dawn to go bring Joshua to work. I already made a reservation for a rental.”
Christophe laid his spoon delicately in the crater of his bowl. It clinked lightly against the porcelain like the initial note of a wind chime.
“Yeah,” Christophe said, short. Joshua yawned.
“Go ahead and go to bed,” Ma-mee said.
“I’ll do the dishes, Ma-mee.” Christophe rose from his chair and cleared Ma-mee’s place.
After all that cooking, she had not been hungry. The summer was nearing its zenith, and for once, the heat boiling against the windows bothered her. The fans had sluggishly stirred the heat thrown by the oven and the heat from outside the house. Ma-mee had felt as if she were sinking in a pot of simmering soup. For once, she wished for the end of the summer, for the short dark days, for the late dawns and early sunsets of winter. Joshua left Cille her plate, but picked up his own cup and plate and followed his brother to the sink. After the boys cleaned the kitchen, Joshua stood silently next to Cille, waiting a step behind her chair until she turned and saw him. Ma-mee noticed the straight dark bulk of him, the way he stood almost painfully at attention.
“You want me to get that for you?” Joshua asked Cille, reaching for her plate.
“No, thank you. I got it.” Cille grabbed Joshua to stop him. She left her hand on him, and for a second Ma-mee thought he would fall over her onto the table: his silhouette looked unbalanced. Christophe kissed Ma-mee softly on the cheek, and she decided she wouldn’t begin nagging him again about a job until Cille left, and that she was glad for the summer, glad for her full stomach, glad to have Christophe’s lips on her skin.
“Good night,” Christophe said.
Joshua pulled away from Cille.
“Night, Cille.” Christophe threw this over his shoulder.
“Night, Christophe,” Cille replied.
Joshua slid his hand over Ma-mee’s shoulder: his hand felt rougher and heavier than it usually did.
“Night, Ma-mee.” Joshua kissed her and drew away. “Night, Cille,” he added, and then he was gone.
“I’m surprised they still wash the dishes.”
Ma-mee watched Cille play with her bowl. She was tired, like the boys. She would follow them to bed.
“They good boys.” Ma-mee stood. “I’m going to bed, too.”
“You need some help?”
“Naw. Your bedroom ready.”
Cille stood and lightly hugged Ma-mee; Ma-mee felt it as no more than a slight, extended flutter against her back. She hugged Cille solidly, and let her palms slide from the spine of Cille’s back and out over her shoulder blades to her underarms. Yes, she had gained weight. Ma-mee’s eyes stung and they blurred to an incoherent opacity, so she blinked and nodded at Cille and pulled away from her.
“Night, Mama.”
“See you in the morning.”
Ma-mee felt her way to her room. In the living room, the TV rumbled to life. Cille would stay up late, and Ma-mee knew if Cille didn’t have to ride with Christophe to pick up her rental car, she would have found Cille asleep in front of the TV in the morning. Ma-mee pulled her housedress over her head, and noticed by the shadow mimicking her that she was undressing in front of the mirror, as was her old habit. She heard her child laugh at something in the living room, and the muted stumbling of one of her boys in the bathroom. As she leaned toward the switch on the wall, she wondered what Cille’s face looked like now, if she was sprouting fine lines at the corners of her eyes that looked like bunches of spider lilies. Her father had gathered them at that age. She switched off the light.
11
CILLE WAS MAKING CHRISTOPHE NERVOUS. He had dropped Joshua off in the heavy gray dawn and made his way back to the country to pick her up. The rental car was in Germaine, and Christophe only had time to brush his teeth and wash his underarms before he left the house. He thought longingly of the privacy of his park bench, the matted grass that the county officials had overlooked cutting, and the wind through the closest branches of the pines: the closest thing he could get to his own place. He was ready to be done with his family’s errands and on with his work.
“Got any new prospects today?” Cille asked him. She sipped her gas station issue coffee.
“Couple places,” he mumbled. He had seen a few new signs on his first trip to Germaine that morning, but he had not had time to stop and grab any applications and add them to the stash, thick as a nest of napkins, in the glove compartment. He watched the cup anxiously and hoped she didn’t spill it. The first place she’d look for something to wipe with was the glove compartment.
“Mmm, hmmm.” She breathed and nodded.
There would be no riding, no sleeping at the park today. Cille might see him. He would ride to Javon’s house and park it around the back and sit there for the day: he knew Javon would be doing a little business, most likely from the living room, and he knew he could still make the money he needed to make there. The plastic on Javon’s sofa would be cool. Christophe couldn’t think of anything else to say to her. She had showered and dressed and put on makeup, and she smelled clean and sweet. Christophe saw the Enterprise Rent-a-Car sign and hit his signal.
“What you doing today?” he asked.
“I’m going to see some friends. Might take Rita with me to do some shopping later.” Cille patted him on the shoulder as he parked the car. The rentals gleamed like wet candy. The Caprice growled and suddenly it seemed too loud, too old.
“That’s alright.” She stopped him from turning off the car. Her perfume was strong, as heavy and layered as her pinkish-red lipstick.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Like I said, I made reservations. I’ll see you at the house tonight.”
“Alright then.” She left the car. He watched her walk into the building with her head down against the sun, which lanced in bright waves through the muffling clouds, and he did not reach over to pull the door more firmly shut until she entered the tinted door of the building. The green sign quivered and rang as a gust of wind blew, and he wondered at how small she was, how petite she looked as she reached for the door, how she had to lean back with her weight to pull it open. She was soft, underneath. Even though he didn’t want to, he knew that. When he pulled into Javon’s driveway, he muted the stereo and veered off the oyster shells and parked in the backyard beneath the sheltering branches of two oak trees, near to where he had first seen Sandman on the Fourth. When Christophe knocked on the front door, hot paint cracked away beneath his knuckles and fell like confetti. A muffled voice answered.
“Come in!”
Javon had pulled all the curtains shut, and he sat on the sofa with a forty sandwiched between his legs and a remote control in his hand. He was the brightest thing in the room, glowing a pale white in the gloom.
“What’s up?” Javon asked.
Christophe wiped sweat from his palms on his jeans. He felt nervous.
“Uh—sorry about parking in your backyard. It’s just, Cille’s—well, my mama’s here from Atlanta and I was wondering if I could come over here and chill for a while.” Christophe gripped Javon’s hard, bony, pale fingers in a handshake. He wasn’t making any sense. “She think I be looking for a job, and I don’t want her to see me down at the park, and everybody else at work, so I . . .”
“Sit down.”
Christophe sank into the icy plastic cushions of the sofa.
“It’s cold up in here.”
“I can’t stand to sweat.” Javon changed the channel desultorily. “You can chill here long as you want. I understand you don’t want your mama to know what you do.” He switched the channel again. A woman in white sneakers flew through the air on a yellow vacuum in a commercial. “Far as my family know, I’m always about to get called back for a job or going on a interview.” He fingered the remote control and a video popped on-screen: rappers wearing leathe
r jackets mugged in front of cars that gleamed with the dull silver sheen of bullets, as wide-thighed women writhed in bikinis. Javon tossed the remote toward Christophe.
“You want to watch something?”
“I’m cool.”
Christophe’s eyes hurt: he let his head roll back and it hit the wall. A knock sounded, and he thought it was his head until he realized someone was tentatively tapping at the door. Javon set his beer on the floor, so hard foam rose to the top and spilled from the mouth of the bottle like lava. He ushered in a short, dark figure.
“Come on,” he said, and the woman followed him into the kitchen.
Christophe knew her, but then, the entire hood knew her. Her name was Tilda, and she was around his mother’s age. She lived in a square, sagging house with her mother, who everyone on the block called Mudda Ma’am. Tilda had struck an uneasy balance: she took care of Mudda Ma’am for most of the day, making sure she didn’t wander outside and into the overgrown woods in a spell of senility. Every few hours, Christophe would see Tilda hurrying down the street toward Javon’s: her hair pulled back into a tight bun, her shirt tucked into her pants, her hands in her pockets: Christophe knew she was fighting to appear nonchalant, unhurried, straightforward.
In his time selling from his park bench, Christophe had only seen Mudda Ma’am appear once: she wore a nightdress the color of wisteria and her gray hair was laid thick to her scalp. She walked with her head down and her hips pushed forward, curving in toward her soft, paunchy belly as if she were pregnant. She had tottered around the azaleas grown riotous, the grass grown in angry long bunches to the lip of the ditch: it had taken her twenty minutes. By then, Tilda was back, and she had ushered Mudda Ma’am back into the sad mouth of the house, away from the ditch where she had stood swinging her head blankly back and forth, up and down the tree-shrouded street.
Christophe tried to keep his eye on the new video that looked to have the same women as the last video, and he tried not to look at Tilda but could not help it. She moved jerkily into the kitchen and disappeared around the corner. The screen jumped into sharp focus, but then Christophe could hear her soft voice and Javon’s low rough one over the scissoring, thudding music of the video.
“What you need?” Javon said.
“A dub.”
Christophe willed himself to watch the women, gliding sleek and oiled like seals in and out of the fluorescent blue water of a pool, lying on their sides on white lawn chairs. The rapper wore a suit and fedora, and he held a cigar between his fingers as he gestured.
Tilda followed Javon from the kitchen, and Javon sank down into the sofa cushions next to Christophe. Tilda hesitated, then ducked her head at Christophe and skipped past the television.
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright, Tilda.” Christophe shrugged.
Tilda smiled; her teeth were brighter than they would be out in the light of the day. Christophe knew the edges of the bottom and top front pairs were brown from the heat of the glass pipe. He had seen her picture in Cille’s yearbook that she’d left behind when she’d gone to Atlanta. Tilda’s smile had been wide and all white.
“Don’t let all my air out, Tilda,” Javon said.
The door shut with a whoosh and a muffled thump. Javon’s phone rang. He took it into the kitchen. More glistening women jumped in and out of watery focus. Javon returned to the sofa and pulled a sandwich bag from his pocket. The bag was shredded and dirty. He tore one end of the greasy plastic and untied the knot, shook one small chip out of the cluster, and twisted it up in the shredded corner.
“Marquise fixing to come over here. Say he want a dub to sell and a dime sack. You got him?”
“Yeah.” Christophe made his own small sack with one of a wad of sandwich bags he kept secreted in his pockets like plugs of chew. When he was done twisting the ten-dollar sack, he was surprised when Javon dropped the crack into his palm. He gripped it, and it dug into his flesh like a small pebble.
“What’s this for?”
“For that.”
A knock sounded at the door and Marquise opened it wide enough to slip in sideways. A rapper slid over the hood of a lime-green car and wove around streetlamps as he ran from the police.
“What’s up, y’all. Good money today.” Marquise didn’t sit. “Thirty?”
“Yeah.” Javon pulled at his beer. “Christophe got it.”
Marquise pulled out thirty dollars, the bills faded and folded, and dropped them in Christophe’s lap. Christophe offered the crack and the weed to Marquise palm up, feeling like his skin was shrinking away from them. Marquise plucked the bags from his hand. His fingernails were sharp and jagged.
“Alright, nigga.” Marquise slid back out the door. Christophe felt a tongue of heat lick through the open door, and then dissipate in the chill air. He shifted and the money slid down the crevasse of his lap. He handed it to Javon.
“Keep it. I don’t usually charge Marquise, so it’s all yours.”
Christophe thought about leaving, about dropping the extra ten to sit on the sofa in his place. What if an undercover came in and Javon handed to him to sell? Christophe would be guilty. But didn’t Javon only sell to established clientele? Then Christophe thought of Cille somewhere out there in her bright, unfamiliar rental car.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. ’Sides, you helping me out.” Javon rolled his eyes. “I done seen every one of these videos ten times. Want to play something?” He knelt before the television, and Christophe slipped the money into his pocket. He barely caught the controller Javon threw at him, and as he and Javon chose football teams and played, he lost. When the next knock echoed softly at the door, he was almost not surprised when Javon paused the game and dropped another soapy crumb in his lap. Christophe sold. When the door closed and he resumed the game, he played until his fingers hurt. He knew that Javon was giving him business by letting him hang out there, but he was also manipulating him into taking a risk; he was handling the crack—if something happened, he would take the charge. He did not realize it was time for him to leave until Bone pulled the door open and stepped inside, and Christophe saw the sun was skimming the tops of the pine trees. He had sold all of his weed for the day, and his money pocket was stuffed with bills.
Joshua was waiting for him in the parking lot.
“You want to drive?” Christophe asked him. Joshua paused in closing the passenger-side door. Christophe shook his head when he saw the sweat dried to salt on his brother’s face so that his skin looked lined with small, white crevices. It made him look old. “Never mind, I got it,” Christophe said.
“You did anything with Cille today?” Joshua asked.
“Naw. I brought her to get the car and then I sat by Javon’s house.”
“What she say she was going to do?”
“Visit some friends. Shop with Aunt Rita.”
“So she supposed to be at the house tonight?”
“I guess so.” Christophe hesitated. “Laila supposed to be coming over?”
“Naw. I told her not to come over till Saturday.” Joshua grinned tiredly. “So, what’d you do all day?”
“Played some games.” Christophe could not help it: he felt his voice tighten with the lie. He tried to follow it with a truth. “Sold all my weed today, though.”
Joshua looked out the window, and when he spoke, it was into the wind.
“They got a opening at the dock. Somebody quit.” He fingered the windowsill. “If you come in and drop off another application, you could say I was your reference. It might help.”
Christophe nodded imperceptibly. He should be excited. Christophe saw a figure in the distance half pedaling a bike. He was inching along next to the afternoon traffic. His arms were skinny and he wore pants in the heat, and he had a plastic grocery bag slung over the handlebars of the bike.
“I’ll come in next week,” Christophe said.
As Christophe neared the man, he saw the bag hung slack: a few bright aluminum cans s
himmered through the opaque plastic. Something sank in his chest, and he felt sick.
“Look.”
Sandman. Pedaling weakly along the concrete and wood boardwalk of the beach. He stopped and scanned the sand and grass at the side of the road, and then looked back against the stream of traffic. His hair was long and bushy.
“All the way out here in Germaine? On a fucking bike?” Joshua breathed this against the palm of his hand. “No.”
Christophe watched the speedometer. As they neared Sandman, he tried to keep pace with the normal flow of traffic, but found himself speeding up. He didn’t want Sandman to see them. How long had it taken him to ride his bike from Bois Sauvage to Germaine? Two hours? Three?
“We on the other side of the median, Chris.”
They neared Sandman and passed him. They saw him stoop in the sand with his mouth open, and dig. When he pulled out a can, sand sprayed from the dirt-logged aluminum. Christophe jerked his head back around to the road, and put both hands on the wheel.
“Fuck,” Christophe said.
Joshua wiped his face.
“Cille’s probably home,” Joshua said, and laid his head back.
Christophe pulled over into the right lane; other cars began to pass him. He did not care. When he looked back over at his brother, he saw that Joshua had closed his eyes with his mouth open to the wind.
At the house, Christophe awoke Joshua by giving his shoulder a shake, then exited the car with a slam. Joshua followed, his feet dragging in the long grass. They’d have to cut the yard this weekend. He walked up the porch stairs and through the screen door to find a cluster of hot-pink flowered plants lining the walls; they were smaller than azaleas, and their stems were knottier and woodier. Bougainvillea.
Christophe was already through the front door, already kissing Ma-mee on the cheek and falling into the couch before Joshua had even crossed the threshold. Cille was standing in the middle of the living room, smoothing a pale yellow pleated sundress over her legs. A tag hung from the strap at her shoulder.
“What do you think?” she said.
