Where the Line Bleeds

by Jesmyn Ward

  “But Javon—”

  Javon was so quick; one minute he was reclining on the sofa, the next he was upright, his open hand sounding like the snap of a leather belt against Blackjack’s face. Blackjack stumbled into the white man, who fell backward into the wall and barely caught himself. He looked as if he were trying to sink into the woodwork. Javon’s long nails had etched red, bleeding lines in the dark mask of Blackjack’s face. “Get out my house,” Javon said. “And Blackjack, don’t come here no more.”

  “Just a bump, Javon,” Blackjack said as he slid along the wall.

  “I’m about to go get my mothafucking gun,” Javon yelled. “Y’all trespassing.”

  Javon disappeared. Blackjack and the white man slammed the door and scuttled out into the yard. Christophe thought about leaving while Javon was rustling around in his room. Javon reappeared at his side in the dim hallway.

  “You think he was the police?” Christophe asked.

  “I don’t know him, and I ain’t taking no chances. They probably got Blackjack on something, so he trying to sell somebody else out.” Javon was lax and limber where seconds before he had been taut. “I forgot I moved my gun—couldn’t even find the gotdamn thing until they was already out the door.”

  Christophe wondered if they were watching the house, if they had noted his car here every day, if they had run the tag. Dunny had told him it was about chance in the beginning, about luck, about being smart and collected. Had he been stupid in coming here? Javon noticed him standing. He blushed, and it was as if the stain of the blush bled from his ears to pool in his face; it was like a wound inking water red.

  “My house too far back in the woods for them to come running up in here and me not know about it,” Javon said. Christophe was angry. He didn’t want to sit, to nervously glance at the door every thirty minutes or so, waiting for a flurry of knocks and policemen with red faces and hard forearms to kick down the door.

  “I don’t feel like doing no business today. I’ma go.”

  “Alright then.”

  Christophe fingered the sacks in his pocket, thought about the money, Ma-mee, Cille, Joshua, the money. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” Javon sat and ignored him.

  Christophe spent the rest of the day at the river, floating in the shallows, with a six-pack he’d bought at one of the up-country stores where they never checked for ID. He let the beers bake in the sand in the sun, and then balanced them on his chest and sucked them down hot.

  By the middle of the week, Christophe’s morning smoke was anticipated. He halfheartedly waited for a call from the dock during dinner with Cille, Ma-mee, and Joshua. He concentrated hard on eating quickly and ignoring the sting of their newly born family dinner discussion. He left walking as soon as possible after he’d washed the dinner dishes. On Thursday, he hurried past Cille and Ma-mee talking in the living room on his way out the door while Joshua was in the shower.

  “I’m going down the street, Ma-mee.”

  “You want me to tell your brother where you going?” Ma-mee asked.

  Her voice stopped him in the doorway, and he brushed one foot back and across the warped doorjamb. She was waiting for him, Cille suddenly alert as a terrier at her side.

  “I don’t know where I’ll end up.”

  Christophe released the door so that it tapped softly against the frame; he leapt from the steps. He felt badly about lying to her: he knew where he was going. He could not stand seeing her by the phone, waiting like the first time: he could not wait as he had the first time. He could not stand Cille’s constant questions about where he had applied. The food-laden refrigerator shamed him; Joshua drank and ate the food their money bought and every time Christophe sat down to a meal, he felt like choking. Javon had taken to making Sandman leave out of the back door off the kitchen. Christophe knew that Javon was doing him a favor, one in turn for another, and that they were accomplices. He’d only been selling at Javon’s house for a week and already he was worrying about the money bulging in green, rubber-banded balls in the toolbox in the shed. He hid it carefully from his brother. He decided to walk to Javon’s house. He smoked and stripped off his shirt and thought of how the night made it feel as if he hadn’t even taken it off. The haphazard streetlights were too bright: he wanted the insect-ridden dark all around him. He threw rocks at the bulbs as he passed them; they bounced off the wooden posts. The weed skewed his aim.

  Christophe was surprised to see Dunny’s car in Javon’s driveway. He knocked and let himself in the house without waiting for Javon’s voice, to find Dunny, Javon, Bone, and Marquise around the domino-littered kitchen table. Dunny was scribbling on the back of a shoe-box top they were using as a score sheet.

  “Lock the door,” Javon called.

  Christophe turned the lock behind him and pulled a chair from the hallway and sat with his back to the front door.

  “What’s up, cuz?” asked Dunny.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why you ain’t come get a QP from me? I know it’s that time.”

  “Business been a little slow.” Christophe tried not to glance at Javon, but he did. Javon was studying the dominos in his hand. He had not told Dunny, then. “I’ll be to see you in a couple of days.”

  “How’s having Aunt Cille back?”

  “Temporary and fine.”

  Dunny laughed in response. Christophe had not spent any real time with Dunny since the Fourth of July. He assumed his cousin was here because he had come to get powder from Javon, so he was not shocked when Javon pulled a packet of white powder from his pocket and placed it on the table. Dunny did not grab the pack, and Christophe wondered why Javon was letting the pack sit there, grimy and small, next to him at the table. Were they using it as a wager? Dunny wiped a shoe-box top clean and handed it to Javon. The inside of the top was a smooth, dull black. Javon untied the plastic bag and dumped half the contents of the bag out on the inside of the top, and then pulled a razor from his pocket and began chopping at the clumpy powder. Christophe felt the pull of the door at his back, but his eyes were riveted on Javon, to his careful dividing of the cocaine into thin, delicate lines on the cardboard. He noticed the way everyone’s faces at the table hadn’t changed, as if they had been expecting this. Christophe had not known. Javon laid the razor down and bent to the table with the rolled-up dollar bill in his hand. He sniffed. He pushed the top across the table to Bone. Dunny began washing the dominoes, swishing them back and forth with his large, thick hands. The air-conditioning was cold on Christophe’s neck: he felt as if someone were running a cube of ice back and forth across it. Bone passed the dollar and board to Marquise. Dunny was looking at his hands. Christophe watched Marquise straighten and make as if to shove the top across the table to Dunny. Dunny’s hands stilled.

  “You know I don’t fuck with that shit.”

  “What about you, Chris?” Javon spoke, and his voice was raspy. Christophe looked at him and his eyes were wide and white. Javon smiled.

  “You ever did it?”

  “Naw.”

  “This some good shit. Clean.” Javon’s pupils seemed to spread like the gulping hole of a drain. “Here.”

  He held out the razor that he’d used to cut the cocaine. Christophe saw a faint sheen of powder on it; it dulled the blade.

  “Taste,” he said.

  The weed had calmed Christophe: the jittery unease that he woke to every morning before dawn, that prevented him from sleeping, had receded with the smoke. Javon smiled at him wider and the black seemed to eclipse the white and he thought, I’ve seen the movies, it will only numb my tongue a little, and he took the razor in his hand and placed it like a communion wafer on his tongue. It was bitter. The razor slipped and his mouth was wetter than it had been and when he plucked it from his mouth, it was red.

  “You cut yourself,” Javon said.

  Javon picked up his dominoes and began slapping them down on the table. He was talking very fast. Bone and Marquise were laughing and blinking quickly and Christophe
thought perhaps he should rinse his mouth, perhaps there was too much blood. He was leaning over the sink spitting pink water onto the ceramic bowl when he saw Dunny behind him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “There wasn’t even hardly nothing on there.”

  “Your tongue numb, ain’t it?”

  “That’s from the cut.”

  “Right, stupid.”

  “Look, nigga, don’t act like you ain’t done this shit before. For all I know, he probably do that shit to everybody.”

  Dunny slumped in the doorway.

  “What the fuck is going on, cuz?” He braced himself on the frame. “Time for both of us to jump out of the game.”

  The bathroom smelled like stale, standing piss. The air-conditioned air from the living room failed to penetrate the back rooms. Christophe ignored Dunny.

  “I feel sick,” Christophe said.

  “You do that shit again, and me and Joshua going to beat the shit out of you.”

  “Fuck you, Dunny.” Christophe squeezed out of the bathroom. “I’m not the fucking crackhead in the family.”

  Christophe played dominoes with the others until the buzzing in his brain abated, and the dregs of the weed lapped at him and made him tired. Dunny sipped on a forty. By the time Javon won, it was drizzling outside. Christophe did not want to walk home in it, so he accepted Dunny’s offer of a ride. He did not speak around his throbbing tongue. Back at Ma-mee’s, he heard Dunny drive away after he turned off the kitchen light over the sink. The door to Cille’s empty room was closed. Christophe fell asleep on the sofa with his shoes on.

  Joshua woke to Christophe’s empty pristine bed, and to the sound of the television. The sky was a dull gray. He walked to the living room, expecting Ma-mee, and found Christophe. He was crouched on the floor in front of the television, flipping through the channels manually by jabbing at the controls at the bottom of the screen.

  “What time is it?”

  “Got a storm out in the gulf. On the other side of Cuba. They say it’s coming right for us.” A storm pinwheeled across the TV in a neat arc through the blue of the ocean, blue as air, to land solidly in the gulf. The weatherman was yellow and wore a bad gray suit.

  “You slept out here?”

  “Should be here in two weeks or something.” Christophe squinted as if he could feel the winds. He couldn’t stop tapping the television stand. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before. Joshua couldn’t compete with the television, wouldn’t beg an answer from his brother’s back, so he walked past Cille’s room to get ready for work. Her door was open, left slightly ajar, and she’d left her fan on. He cut it off. She hadn’t come home the night before. Her perfume swirled and settled in the room.

  In their room, Joshua pulled on his boots. He kissed Ma-mee and would have walked away quickly if she hadn’t tugged at his arm. Her eyes were a dark blue in the rust-laced light.

  “He smells like yesterday,” Ma-mee said. Joshua looked down at her hand on his arm. He did not want to confirm that he knew his brother had hardly slept, that he was fidgeting, and that he hadn’t taken a bath. Joshua chewed the soft pink inside of his mouth; he couldn’t lie to Ma-mee. “I’m worried about him,” she added.

  Outside, the horn pealed loudly.

  “He looking like his daddy,” she said. Ma-mee’s grip on Joshua’s arm loosened, but still her fingers caressed him at his elbow. He bent to kiss her. Her skin was wrinkled and wet against his lips. It slid with his mouth. She smelled of vinegar.

  “Take care of your brother.”

  He nodded and pulled away from her.

  For once, Joshua did not fall asleep on the way to work, even though he wanted to. He had waited for Ma-mee to go to bed the night before, and then he had let Laila slide over him on the sofa, had let her sit heavy and soft as ripe fruit in his lap, and kissed her. She had run her fingers across the downy stubble of his face, over the soft hair of his sideburns, and he had wondered at the wetness of her mouth. He had imagined her insides, pink and breathing, the blood and bones and flesh that made her, and wanted to be inside her. Yet Christophe had not made it home, and Ma-mee slept the light sleep of the old in her room, and he knew he could not do it like that. He had kissed and touched her in the hot flickering dark and had driven her home at midnight. On his way back, the headlights had flashed over Sandman, stooped over the handlebars of his bike, pedaling his way slowly down the road: he had no hat on, and his neck was bare and burned red, even in the dark. His palm had flashed pale in the air, but Joshua had not slowed: he did not know if Sandman recognized the car. He supposed Sandman wanted a ride to the store, and once there, to borrow money. That is what crackheads did. Yet, still, his back was thin and narrow as Christophe’s, and when the lights dissolved over his face and left him in the black, for a moment he thought he saw his brother.

  He watched Christophe tap the steering wheel as he drove, jumping lightly in his seat, and wondered when his brother had become so manic. It had to be Javon. Why else was he twitching and gripping the steering wheel with both hands? He should say something. He could see the dockyard ahead of them on the horizon, stretching out like a finger along the smooth blue water.

  “When you think we should start putting boards up?” The words were clumsy. Christophe turned to him, his forehead wrinkled, and turned down the stereo. Still, Joshua shouted as if the music were still playing. “It’s the third one we done had this summer—ain’t no reason for you to be so nervous.”

  “It ain’t the storm,” Christophe said.

  “Well, then what is it?”

  Christophe put the car in park and Joshua felt the frame jerk. Christophe pushed one hand against the dashboard, where his fingers slid wetly through the dust, creating winding trails like writing, and the other hand on the headrest of the passenger seat. He looked squarely at Joshua, his chin down. He opened his eyes wider, purposefully.

  “It ain’t nothing.”

  Joshua stared at his brother’s mouth, and then out at the parking lot, the low seawall, the swooping seagulls dropping from the sky like rain. Christophe switched the gear into drive and pressed on the brake. He reached into his pocket with his right hand and pulled out a wad of bills.

  “For Ma-mee.”

  “This early.”

  “I know. I got lucky these past two weeks.”

  As Joshua slipped the money into his pants, he eyed the clock and lost his patience.

  “You fucking up,” Joshua whispered.

  Christophe slapped the steering wheel and turned on Joshua. “I’m making money, nigga! I make more in one week than you do in two. I’m trying, alright!”

  “No, you ain’t,” Joshua said. He left the car with a slam.

  Joshua could not stop thinking of Christophe under the leaden sky and the sun that he felt was melting his brother, evaporating bits and pieces of him to the clouds. He heard him again and again in his head, repeating: nothing, nothing, nothing. He saw Christophe turn, bracing himself to stillness on the wheel and the headrest, and saw his open mouth. He had seen a thin red line there, bisecting his brother’s tongue, dividing it in two. Joshua balanced two boxes on his shoulders, felt his back strain. The line. At first he had thought he imagined it, but it did not disappear. It looked like a cut. He shifted the boxes to his hand and slid them down to the pallet. He slid his palms over the sides to smooth them, to correct the pile, and he felt the pallet lurch under his feet. A board must have broken.

  How could Christophe cut his mouth that way? What food sliced the mouth in straight lines? Joshua forgot the seagulls hovering like vultures, the parking lot smelling of hot tar, the boxes and sacks growing in a column from his feet and saw Christophe’s mouth but could not hear the words he spoke. Joshua’s hands felt squeezed, smashed, and he lurched away from the boxes and fell to the pavement. Blood was on his hands and wrists. He bent over, and pressed his palms together and held them open like a book and saw that the skin had been slashe
d; it hung in petal-pink strips from the root of his pinkies to his wrists. A man standing next to him called out and he saw Leo running toward him. Leo pulled him into the office, and Joshua let himself be led.

  “I was checking the box,” Joshua said. His hands were stinging. A catfish had stabbed him with its dorsal fin once: it had throbbed like this. They had been swimming on the beach with little nets Uncle Paul had made for them. They had been eight then.

  “One of them slats probably broke. They get rotted out by the salt water and the wind. Your hand got caught in the ties on the boxes. I done seen it cut before. Sharp as a razor.”

  Leo led him past piles of file cabinets, the receptionist, and a short row of computers to a small room, narrow as a closet, off the main office. The blood ran down the seam of his fingers. Leo dabbed at his palms with alcohol pads, and then flattened a towel between his hands and sandwiched Joshua’s big palms with his own. The pressure slowed the blood. When Leo peeled away the towel, Joshua saw that the cuts were roughly identical, and the meat beneath his skin was angry red.

  “You might need stitches.”

  Leo drove him to the hospital in his own dark blue pickup truck. The cab had leather seats.

  “It’s new,” Leo said.

  Joshua elevated his hands to drain them and kept the towel pressed tight against the pain: he did not want to leak blood on Leo’s seats. At the hospital, the doctor sewed twelve perfect black stitches diagonally across both of Joshua’s palms. They were dark and tough as new tattoos. His hands throbbed and swelled. The doctor told him to take ibuprofen for pain, and wrapped his hands in gauze and tan wrappings that were light against his perpetually sunburned skin. Back at the dockyard, he called Ma-mee, even though he suspected that Christophe would not be there. He wasn’t. When Ma-mee asked if anything was wrong, he denied it. He would tell her when he got home; he did not want her to worry. He thought of the park. He hated his brother for being there. He thought of calling Laila, and then Cille’s cell. He thumbed through the phone book clumsily with the tips of his fingernails, until he found the number. Javon answered the phone. He sounded slow and high.