by Jesmyn Ward
“Come on, Laila. You look cold as Ma-mee.”
Joshua pulled her up and past the swing. Ma-mee was staring in Christophe’s direction, at the bougainvilleas alighting in the yard graceful as herons, blooming hot pink. Cille followed Joshua and Laila with a curious look. Her eyes were as bright and patient as a pit’s. She was so beautiful it hurt Joshua to look at her. Instead, he kneaded Laila’s small, hot hand in his own, and urged her back to his room faster. He rustled a T-shirt from his drawer and handed it to her.
“Put this on.”
“I ain’t cold.”
Joshua shoved the shirt into her arm insistently. She tugged it over her head, and it fell to the middle of her thighs. He grabbed the sleeves and pulled, and she came to him and stood, small and hard against his chest. He hugged her.
“Don’t pay no attention to her. I don’t know why she being so mean.”
Joshua let his hand fall along the curve of her spine down her back, and he stooped so that his face slid along hers, so that his lips stopped at her ear.
“I’m sorry.”
He averted the thought of Cille, then. He shrugged away his brother and his bent, resentful shoulders, his lunging digging in the front yard, and let himself fall into Laila’s open mouth. The insides of it were so soft, her body was small and sweating under the tent of his shirt. He would walk her home, away from Cille. He walked into the living room and heard arguing on the porch.
“I’m ashamed of you, Cille. Treating that child like that? I didn’t raise you to be so rude.”
“I been raised, Mama. I don’t need no more raising. I ain’t said nothing to that girl that ain’t been said to her before.”
“I won’t have you talking like that to that girl in my house.”
“I was leaving anyway,” Cille said. Before Joshua could tug Laila forward so it wouldn’t look as if they were eavesdropping, Cille entered the living room and brushed by him and Laila without looking at them. By the time Joshua and Laila walked to the porch, Cille was swooping past them again with her keys clattering like small chimes and her purse clutched in her hand, her face set so hard everything about her seemed smooth and impenetrable as rock. She walked away with her arms folded tightly into her sides as she gripped her purse, which made them appear less like arms and more like wings.
“Mama,” Joshua called.
Cille stopped next to Christophe, and Christophe looked up at Joshua. Christophe was trailing a thin line of fire across the pile of wet foliage with a lighter set on high. The flame shot out and licked impotently at the wet plants. Cille waved her hand and spoke without facing them.
“I’m late for a show,” she said. She walked to her car, slammed her door, and Joshua let Laila’s hand fall and started after her.
“Let her go.” Christophe blinked once and looked back down: Joshua saw bags that looked like purple bruises beneath his eyes.
“What do you know? You ain’t in this,” Joshua blurted. Cille started her car.
“Oh yeah, I forgot.” Christophe stood and his voice rose with him. Joshua made as if to run to her car as she began to back out the driveway, ignoring Christophe. Christophe grabbed his arm. “I ain’t the one she talks to. I ain’t the one with the job and the girlfriend. What I say don’t matter because I ain’t shit to the house.”
“You chose,” Joshua bit out. He wrenched his brother’s arm from his own, and stepped toward the retreating car. Cille peeled away. “Every day, you choose.”
“Fuck you,” Christophe said.
“Boys!” Ma-mee yelled thinly.
Joshua pulled Laila, who had stepped beside him, away from Ma-mee standing with her hands flat against the screen of the porch door, away from his brother with the arched, fight-ready neck, the stillness of the harnessing swing, away from the house. When they reached the road, Joshua looked back and saw that Christophe had managed to light the pile: it smoked wetly in thick, white puffs, and drifted outward to obscure his brother.
Joshua didn’t talk on the way to Laila’s house, and once there, he did not want to let her walk inside, did not want to walk back to his own house, to his manic brother and Ma-mee finding her way in the rain-drizzled dark. He sat with Laila on her slimy, wet wooden steps, silent. He left her with the admonition that he’d be back and walked back to his house to find both his brother and Ma-mee gone: Ma-mee with Aunt Rita and his brother vanished, the earth showing in bald, wounded patches where Christophe had been. His brother had left the car, so Joshua took Laila to a poboy place in St. Catherine’s to apologize. Joshua paid for the meal, and was defiantly glad to have a job. He sat across from her at a small, plastic table with a sticky checkered plastic tablecloth and watched the condiments from her shrimp poboy slide down the crevices of her fingers, between her knuckles, to the wax paper. He vacillated between teasing her about her messiness and wanting to lick her fingers for her, to suck the vinegary ripeness of the pickle, the mayonnaise, the salt of the shrimp and the pepper. They sat in the nearly empty, cool, small-windowed restaurant until the clouds eased their pressure and gave into rain, and the sun reemerged, dim and orange, on the horizon.
After they crossed the bayou to Bois Sauvage and entered the country, the tops of the trees turned black and swallowed the sun, and Joshua slowed the car. They were nearing the Oaks. The small, squat, thin-walled nightclub was set to the side of a baseball field: the proprietor specialized in blues and baseball games, and on Saturday nights, the dirt field that comprised the parking lot was usually packed with rusty pickup trucks and late-model Mustangs. Joshua saw lights burning between the cars where small fires made of pine leaves and twigs had been set to smoking, to drive away the gnats, and he could hear the heavy thumping bass line of a blues song emanating from the club, even though it had no windows.
“Hold on a minute. My mama had wanted me to stop by here on our way back and grab her a plate.” Laila grabbed his shoulder. Joshua turned into the parking lot, and eased the car to the edge of the field. “I’ll be right back,” Laila said.
“Here, get Ma-mee a plate, too. Catfish,” Joshua added. He pulled out a twenty. He ignored the blood urge that flashed Christophe’s and Cille’s faces into his mind, too; he would not get them food. When he and Christophe were younger, Ma-mee would sometimes send them on their bikes to the Oaks on a Saturday with enough money in their pockets for a fish plate, which Christophe would carry back because he was the first to learn how to ride his bike without steering with his hands. Laila closed the door behind her, and the lock barely clicked. Joshua leaned over to shut the door fully and before the light dimmed, he saw a black and mild cigar on the floor, still in the plastic. He would smoke it, get a buzz, and it would help him sleep after he dropped Laila off, help him relax so he would not think about Cille in the other room or Christophe with his busy, busy hands. He searched for a lighter, but could not find one in the glove compartment, in his pockets, or underneath the seats. After cussing and dimming the light, he saw the glow of one of the fires in the dirt lot glimmering at him through the window. A woman laughed drunkenly in the dark, and another man shouted “brother-in-law” across the field. Small gnats pinched his skin with bites. Joshua wove in and out of the cars and stopped by the closest fire and waved the thick, heady smoke toward his face and his clothing to shoo the gnats away. He knelt to light the black.
“What the hell you follow me over here for? You trying to impress your drunk friends?” Cille spoke sharply, and Joshua looked up expecting to see her standing over him, her hands cupping her hips, narrowing her eyes at him, waiting for an answer. By the light of the fire, he saw her standing almost fifteen feet away from him in the dark, her back to him, the flames etching her back and her yellow silk dress in gold. Even in the dark, she shone. Joshua scooted away from the fire and waved the smoke from his eyes so he could watch her, immediately protective. The person she was talking to bobbed darkly a few feet away from her, and he shifted. His face blazed over her shoulder, the fire illuminating him. Sandman
.
“You walk by me acting like you don’t even know me,” Sandman said. There was authority and force in his voice that Joshua hadn’t heard since he was small.
“I don’t,” Cille said. In the shadows, Sandman was all lurching movement, while Cille was still. Suddenly, Joshua knew where Dunny got it from.
“Oh, you know me all right.” Sandman’s voice slid from taunting to hushed sincerity, deep and gentle. “You can’t not know your babies’ daddy.”
“Samuel, what you want from me? That was finished a long time ago. You left me with them kids after my daddy died. You never cared.”
“That ain’t true. I was young and dumb. . . .”
“Well, I wasn’t. I dealt with it, and you didn’t, Samuel.” Her voice rose.
“Love don’t just go away like that, Cille,” Sandman said.
“It do.”
The arc of the smoke turned, and he heard Sandman turn nasty in the haze.
“You couldn’t live without me then.”
“This ain’t then.” Cille stepped away from Sandman toward her car and through the curling smoke. Joshua saw his father drawn tight, one fist closing over the air where Cille had been.
“Cille!” Sandman shouted at her back as she slammed her car door shut. Under the sound of the bass thumping in the club and the nighttime insects, Cille’s car prowled away from the fire and the weak lights under the eaves of the Oaks.
Sandman lurched upright, took one tottering step, and stood staring off into the night after Cille. Joshua looked down at his feet and wondered if he looked like that, always staring, always waiting for her to return. The smoke scratched his throat, the black faded to unlit in his hands as he felt his way to his car to wait for Laila. He kissed her in the car in front of her house. At home, someone was watching television: Joshua peeked through the window and saw a flash of a young Pam Grier pointing a gun toward the audience, quivering furiously. Joshua snuck through the back door. He placed the fish plate on his dresser and sat in bed, drunk with smoke. Christophe slept with his back to the room. The television stopped, and he heard a light tread: Cille. Her room door closed, and still he waited until he could hear nothing but the meeting of the bugs outside before he tiptoed to the kitchen, dumped the plate into the refrigerator, and fell smoke-tinged and dizzy into bed.
When Joshua woke in the morning, he was surprised to find that the sun had barely risen, and Christophe was still asleep. On his walk to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, he heard Cille and Ma-mee, already awake. He paused in the hall.
“I saw they daddy last night. I came back early from the city and stopped at the Oaks and he was out front with some of his old buddies—looked like shit. He used to be so—but I guess that was the problem, though. People that fine and know it, and then get things so easy, with his mama and his daddy babying him, never come to good anyway.”
“He came by here. Christophe hate him.” Ma-mee lowered her voice, and Joshua could smell biscuits. “You can’t come in here treating them boys like that, Cille. One minute on and the next gone when they not who you want them to be.”
“I still say Joshua could do better.”
“You upset Christophe, too. I know he need a kick in the ass: busy for no good reason, still ain’t got a job yet. But you can’t be hard on him all the time, Cille. You got to show him something.”
“I know them boys,” Cille said. Her voice was tight.
“You got to give them more, Cille. Same way I gave you.”
“You raised them, I know.” Joshua heard Ma-mee stutter to stroke the argument, and Cille spoke over her again. “But they still got more of me in they blood, and I know my blood.” Cille’s chair scraped back. “I’ll be back later. I got an extra week in my schedule.” She paused. “Regional office called and told me they having some electrical problems with the store, so they going to shut it down for a few days.” Ma-mee coughed. “I figured I’d stay if that’s okay with you.”
“Yes, Cille.” Cille’s footsteps sounded and she was gone. In the kitchen, he heard Ma-mee’s stillness spread and make thick the room.
12
BEFORE MA-MEE WOKE ON MONDAY, before dawn, Christophe crept out to the shed to make up his sacks for the day. He had greeted Cille’s announcement at their stilted Sunday dinner that she would stay for an extra few days with nothing but a silent surmise that he would go to Javon’s. He remembered the mornings when they were still in school: Dunny’s car leaden with smoke, the sun searing the sky a bright yellow, the marsh grass snapping in the wind. In those days, it always seemed as if it were spring, and everything was a new, tough green. Then, he had known things. Now, he parsed weed into sacks and the heat in the shack hovered and billowed with the rising sun, and he watched his hands clenching and pinching and pulling and tying, and he did not know anything. He did not know who he was. He rolled up a blunt there in the shed, plucking a cigarillo from the stash he kept for distributing to his loyal customers, and he succumbed to his weakness for a morning smoke. He did not want to go to Javon’s house again, did not want to see him or hand out nuggets of crack, but he knew he would. After only four or five days of selling, he had made so much he could slip all of the help-money into Ma-mee’s purse himself.
Christophe drove his brother to work that morning with his left hand at the apex of the wheel. He fondled the blunt in his pocket until he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. At the next red light, he pulled the blunt out and lit it.
“What are you doing?” Joshua said.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You never smoke in the morning. You don’t never smoke at all no more.”
Christophe pulled deeply on the blunt and let the smoke out in little puffs from his nose. Already the driving was easier. Christophe tried to blow the smoke in his brother’s direction, maliciously. It was the first jollity he’d felt toward his brother since their fight on Sunday. He parked the car.
“They accepting applications today. Same time,” Joshua said.
Christophe didn’t bother to nod, and Joshua slammed the door. Joshua slogged his way through the ascending heat from the sun glittering out over the gulf. Christophe drove in slow arcs through Germaine while he considered skipping the application hour. He knew his eyes were red, but he turned around at the edge of Germaine and drove back toward the dock. He watched the men moving about, jerking against the weight of the salt and heat, and smoked another blunt. He fell asleep, then woke hungry and disoriented in time to see Joshua at the car door, who slid into the passenger seat and unwrapped his sandwich without speaking and began to chew. His hair was fraying from the weave of his braids, and he let his hands fall heavily to his lap after taking a bite. He was tired.
Christophe left the car before Joshua finished eating. The same woman was sitting at the desk. This time, her hair was redder than he remembered, and she did not smell so strongly of perfume. Men with salt dried to powder on their faces ambled about the hallways of the building, and Christophe sat in the waiting area and filled out his application on a copy of A Hunter’s Guide: there were no clipboards available, the woman told him. He shrugged at her, smiled a closemouthed smile when he handed it back to her, and thought of the weed in the glove compartment as he walked to the car. Christophe rolled another blunt. Joshua sat with him until the hour was over, and then let his head fall back on the seat, and breathed out a long, loud sigh. He blinked hard, and directed his comment at no one.
“I can’t wait to get paid.”
He pulled at the latch of the door and was gone. Christophe drove back toward the country, parked in his usual spot behind Javon’s house, and opened the door after knocking once. Javon ushered Tilda from the house.
“You missed some money this morning.”
“I had some shit I had to do.”
“Won’t be nothing you can’t make back tonight. If you want—I told them to come back by.”
Christophe tossed a joystick up with his left hand a
nd caught it with his right. He waited for the next knock on the door. He measured his words.
“Way I’m going, I’m going to sell all that Dunny done gave me soon. I go back too early, and he might wonder why.”
“I got you.”
Javon plucked the black cigar he’d been smoking from his mouth and appraised the twisted, desiccated tip. He threw it across the room in a perfect arc and it plopped like a drop of heavy rain in the garbage can. He pulled another from his pocket.
“Come back tonight, I’ll have a QP for you. Whatever you pay Dunny for it.”
Christophe sat on his hands. He wanted to roll another blunt. The weight kept them still.
“Why?”
Javon hesitated in lighting the black. Javon eyed him and opened his mouth, his gold front reflecting against all the pink like a candy wrapper.
“Because I feel like it.”
Someone knocked at the door and two figures entered the living room: one he knew, but the other he didn’t—and the other he didn’t know was white. Blackjack, the junkie he knew, was so dark his skin looked like newly poured asphalt. He walked with his hands in his pant pockets, his arms lost in the loose folds of his T-shirt. His chest curved inward like a bowl. The white had a day’s growth of beard on his face, all brown, his hair and his beard blending into each other. He was too clean. Christophe stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
“Who you bringing in my house, Blackjack?”
“He from upcountry,” Blackjack said. He smiled and nodded at the man. “Called—”
“What makes you think I got what you or white boy want?” Javon said, his voice shrinking. Christophe stepped back further into the kitchen. “Get out of here.”
