by Jesmyn Ward
“Who the fuck you think you is?” Sandman rasped.
Javon spit. Christophe stood in the doorway. Sandman’s head topped Javon’s shoulder, and his eyes glazed over Christophe.
Javon did not reply. He struck. His arm lashed out and he cupped Sandman’s face hard; the noise was hollow and loud. The cuff sounded as if a watermelon had been dropped, split seedless and red in the dirt. Christophe surprised himself: a short, jabbing laugh pealed from his throat, high-pitched and giggly as his brother’s. Sandman did not turn and crumple to the side as Christophe thought he would. Instead, he folded toward the earth, and then he leapt forward and grabbed Javon with his thorny arms around the waist. Christophe stepped through the door and stumbled over an empty forty bottle, which was clinking along the ground underfoot like a fallen Christmas tree ornament.
Sandman hit Javon in the face. Javon shoved him away and boxed Sandman’s other cheek. Sandman growled and rushed him, and Javon stepped to the side; he was holding his cheek and laughing. Sandman flailed against Javon, his fists connecting with Javon’s sides so lightly they sounded like small exhalations of air: pfft, pfft, pfft. Sandman darted to the right just as Javon reached out to box him again, and his fist lashed out, blurred, and cracked against the side of Javon’s face. Christophe knew who had given him his own quick reflexes. Javon leaned back and away from Sandman and Christophe saw his eyes thin to slits and his mouth spread and his teeth show sharp.
Javon was not laughing any longer. He struck. Sandman reeled to the side and lurched to the ground. He ran toward Javon again, blindly swinging. Javon struck again, and Christophe noted the difference in the sounds: there was bone in this break, something hard about the hit. Sandman fell to the ground and Christophe heard glass shatter. Javon did not stop. He lumbered over Sandman and punched him deliberately with wide, artful blows; his arms swung as if he were clearing underbrush with a machete. Sandman kicked at Javon’s legs and pulled himself along the ground. Javon was not stopping. He palmed a bottle in his hand and came down hard with it on Sandman’s head. The glass shattered like a gunshot.
“Stop!” Christophe yelled.
Javon’s shoulders were sharp and writhing as a pit’s under Christophe’s hands, and Christophe shoved him so that they menaced Sandman like a wave. In Christophe’s head, there was a blank wall. The noise of the night insects ripped through it.
“You going to fucking kill him,” Christophe said.
“You going to take up for this nigga?”
“You going to kill him and what’s that going to do?”
“What, he your daddy now?”
“Fuck you!” Christophe yelled. His fingers bit into Javon’s shoulders, and he pushed, just as he felt a solid body hit him from behind.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Joshua held him by the neck, squeezed the base of Christophe’s skull, and Christophe struggled against him. “He’s a old man, Chris.” Christophe jerked away from Joshua as Joshua tried to fling him away. Anger buried itself in his chest.
“You don’t know!” Christophe turned with the momentum of the push and punched Joshua. The face under his hand was his own as they struggled.
“Stop it!” Joshua sobbed, and Christophe landed a blow and felt Joshua land a blow but felt useless as if he were punching in a dream. Wet, teary, they wrestled face-to-face.
“Move!” Javon yelled.
Pain split Christophe’s side. It drew a long, deep line over his torso, flaring from his hip to his stomach, and he fell back. He looked down to find an oblong shard of glass protruding from the tent of his shirt. Sandman had stabbed him: he crouched to the side of Christophe, one hand receding from the glass knife. He wore a bloody crown, chunks of glass still in his hair from Javon’s bottle. Sandman grabbed the glass and pulled, and with a wrench it slid from Christophe’s gut. The blood had closed Sandman’s eyes like a blindfold. He lunged again and suddenly Christophe was falling back and back until his rear hit the dirt. Joshua had pushed him out of the way. The insects fell silent under the beating rush of blood in his head and Joshua was sitting on top of Sandman, swinging and hitting him over and over. Christophe blinked and the world exploded into sound.
“I didn’t mean it.” Christophe heard Sandman mewl. “I didn’t mean it.”
Joshua’s bandaged hands rose and fell and his back twisted from left to right and Christophe saw the bandages turn bloody; he saw Javon run at Joshua and wrestle him away from Sandman, who lay limp in the dirt.
“Stop. Stop. Stop.”
Christophe blinked again, but did not open his eyes. His front was so warm, even in the tepid, thick air. He could hear nothing but the beating again. A bottle rolled into his leg. He lay back in the dirt.
Joshua threw Javon away from him and picked up the red, wet spindle of arms and legs and head that was his brother and carried him to the car. When Javon grabbed his hand to stop him from cranking the ignition, Joshua felt the insane urge to bite him.
“You don’t know what happened here,” Javon barked.
“Fuck you!” Joshua spat at him. He cranked the engine and shoved Javon from the window with the other hand. Everything blurred and jumped back into focus. “I got my brother!”
The tires spit gravel. Joshua smelled burnt rubber. When he realized he could not see, he turned the headlights on. Behind him, Javon peeled out of the driveway in his own car. Pines flickered past Joshua and he saw a deer alighting a ditch in the darkness. He gunned the engine. Wind rushed through the window to choke him, and he drove over the bayou so quickly he did not see the black glitter of the water. Christophe curled small in the seat next to him. Joshua reached into his brother’s pockets gingerly, plucked the few remaining bags of weed from his pockets, and flung them out the window, one by one. The car swerved.
At the hospital, he parked the car on the sidewalk. He crawled across the seat and scooped his brother up as if he were a sack of chicken and carried him into the emergency room. He screamed. Short, fat people in soft green and blue scrubs ran at him and pulled at his arms. They yelled at him.
“Let him go!”
He ran with the stretcher down the low, gray hallway. They would not let him go in with his brother. He stood on the wall next to the doors that had swung shut behind his brother and wiped a red hand over his eyes. Blood bloomed like flowers across his shirt. He pulled the tattered wrapping from his hands and dropped it to the linoleum floor. The stitches oozed red. He was wet everywhere. He smelled the salt from snot and blood high up in his nostrils and thought he could be at the dock, in the car in the morning, riding along the sea with Christophe, all of it salty and blue, as if God’s hand had passed over it, parting it, cleansing it, smoothing it flat. A nurse picked up his rags and escorted him to a room, made him sit on an examining table, and told him a doctor would see him soon. She left. He smashed his hands together between his knees and bent over them, mouthing his kneecaps. He knew that if anyone walked into the room, they would think he was praying.
14
JOSHUA LIED. THE DOCTOR ASKED him questions and he lied about it all. He said they were at the river, drinking, when it had happened. They were going for a midnight swim. They were planning to camp. It was a beer bottle. His brother had been running down the beach in the dark to jump in the water and had tripped over a half-buried log, and had cut himself on an empty bottle. No, no one else was there: just him and his brother. No, the doctor didn’t need to call anyone else. They had no one else. Would Christophe be okay? Would he be alright? Was he still bleeding? Was he still breathing? Joshua wanted to ask his own questions, but didn’t. The doctor touched a finger to Joshua’s shoulder, and he looked up, shocked, away from the image in his mind of his dead, quiet brother.
“He lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said, and Joshua nodded. “It’s a good thing you got him here so fast.” Joshua looked down at his blood, his father’s blood, his brother’s blood on his shirt. “He wouldn’t have made it this far.”
Joshua gazed at the d
octor then: his bloodless face, his skin as pale as Javon’s. He could see red, tiny veins like cursive around his nose and his eyes.
“His blood pressure is low, but we stitched him up. Whatever it was didn’t hit any major arteries, but it nicked his liver. All we can do is watch and wait.”
Ma-mee would be at home, feeling the uneven, dark wood of the house with her fingers, waiting. She would be up, sitting, listening for signs. Cille.
“My grandmother,” he said.
Joshua called Aunt Rita first. Dunny picked up the phone. Joshua spoke in vague terms: accident, Christophe, hospital, Ma-mee. Dunny yelled away from the receiver and Joshua heard Aunt Rita in the background. He knew if he closed his eyes and pulled the receiver away from his ear a centimeter or so, he could mistake the siren of her concern for his mother’s voice. He didn’t. He called Ma-mee, and she picked up on the third ring. He told her slowly, told her they were coming to pick her up. He looked down at the blood on his chest and felt sick and asked her to bring him a shirt. She was quiet and calm, and he wondered if Cille was even home with her. He went back to the waiting room and sat in a chair, closed his eyes to the news on the TV screen, and opened them again and they were there.
When he rose to hug Ma-mee, she put her hand to his throat and stopped him. Before he could protest, she peeled his shirt away from him, up and over his head as if he were six. She handed his T-shirt to Cille, and Cille walked him to the men’s bathroom with a preemptive “Shut up, I’m your mama.” Joshua washed the sink pink. In the waiting room, they sat in a nervous circle. When Cille began to ask Joshua questions, he lied. He told them the story he had told the doctor. When he got to the part about picking Christophe up from the ground and running with him to the car, he could hardly breathe, and the words caught in his mouth and he swallowed them back down and stopped speaking. After that, Cille did not ask him any more questions. Cille reached over to him and cupped his leg, but it was Ma-mee he leaned into, Ma-mee’s neck he buried his face into; her skin was wet. She kneaded the back of his head and shushed him.
To Ma-mee’s bleary eyes, when she walked into that waiting room on Rita’s arm, Joshua had looked as he had the day he and his brother had been born, as red as he’d been when the doctor had taken him and Christophe from Cille by C-section. He was the brightest thing in the room, and he smelled of blood and salt. She could not help but pull the shirt from him and send him immediately to the bathroom: she needed to touch him first, and then she needed to see him with the blood washed from him. She’d brought the brightest, bluest T-shirt for him she could find. It was a shirt Cille had bought for him years ago for Christmas; Ma-mee was surprised he could still fit into it. When the doctor came for them and told them they could see Christophe, Joshua would not move. Cille led her to Christophe’s room, where she trailed her fingers across his face: the shadowed lump of his body looked so small under the sheets. She left Cille sitting next to Christophe’s bed, and Joshua met her in the hallway outside of the room. He still smelled of salt. The white monotone of the hallways was blinding her.
“I tried to save him,” he whispered to her.
“You did, Joshua.”
“It don’t feel like it, Ma-mee.”
“I know.”
They wandered through the hallways back to the waiting room. They sat and waited. Joshua roamed the circuit to Christophe’s room and back again, over and over, until Ma-mee made Dunny fetch him, made him sit next to her so she could hold him in place. He would not run himself to sleep this time. Ma-mee held Joshua’s wrapped hands in her own, wishing she could feel the skin through the bandages, wishing he were little again. She wanted him to be small, for his skull to fit in the curve of her hands; she wanted to be able to pull him into her lap and enclose him in the circumference of her arms. She wanted to be able to carry him to his bed and put him to sleep next to his brother.
Dunny had to drive the car home because Joshua refused to do so. Joshua watched Dunny from the porch as he cleaned the passenger seat with a brush and soap and water; he scrubbed away the blood until there was nothing left, then rolled up the windows and left the car to smolder in the sun. Joshua spent his days skirting the trees at the rim of the yard looking toward the road, looking for a silhouette that could have been Sandman’s, remembering the feel of the flesh of his father’s face melting beneath his fists. His hands hung useless and clumsy at his sides, and when he woke in the morning to his brother’s empty bed and his hands, he could not believe what they had done. Cille drove them to the hospital in her rental car.
“My job expect me back on Monday,” she said. Joshua had watched her from the hallway when they were first preparing to leave the hospital the night before; he went to fetch her because the sun had been rising, and Ma-mee had needed to go home and take her medicine. Cille had been sitting at the side of Christophe’s bed, one hand on the sheet next to his head, staring at his face. She would not touch him.
“Yeah,” Joshua replied, and he heard the go home in his voice, and he hoped Ma-mee did not hear it, but he knew she did. None of them spoke. At the hospital, while Cille was escorting Ma-mee to the bathroom, he crouched next to the bed and whispered in his brother’s ear, telling him: wake up, come back, it was an accident. Rita came and went with food. Christophe slept through one day, then another, his blood pressure low, his chest rising and falling slowly. When he awoke a day later, Joshua was slumped by the window in a chair, staring at Cille, wondering when she would begin packing up her bags to go home; it was the end of the week. Ma-mee was at Christophe’s bedside, stroking his scarred, serrated knuckles. Christophe opened his eyes and Joshua jerked upright in his chair. Christophe blinked, stared at the ceiling, and turned his head to look at Ma-mee and Cille, and then at Joshua. Ma-mee stopped rubbing his hand.
“Christophe?”
“Yes, Ma-mee,” he croaked.
“You alright?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She covered her face with the same hand that had been stroking him, and breathed hard. Her mouth opened in a thin, pink line and she inhaled as if she was going to say something, but closed her mouth instead. She did not remove her hand from her eyes.
“What happened, Chris?” Cille asked as she stood behind Ma-mee, her hand on her shoulder.
Christophe’s eyes shifted to catch Joshua’s face. Joshua did not move. Christophe looked as if he swallowed to wet his throat, but when he spoke, his voice was still a hoarse, shallow croak.
“It was an accident.”
Joshua exhaled. He felt as if he were buoyed on water, floating on his back in the river with his hands dug into the cold, white sand. For the first time in days, he felt weightless. Christophe croaked again.
“It was an accident.”
Ma-mee dropped her hand. Joshua could see the glaze of tears in the bags under her eyes. She wiped them away.
“Don’t let it happen again, not any of it.” Ma-mee paused. “I think you trying to kill me.”
Christophe’s leg twitched. Joshua walked to the other side of the bed. His brother was grimacing.
“Can I have some water?”
Cille clumsily poured Christophe a small, plastic glass and helped him slide forward into a slight hunch to drink. She held the back of his head. She tilted the cup and succored Christophe like a baby. Water dribbled from the cup down his chin, and Cille wiped it away.
The doctor sent them home later that day with the admonition that Christophe should rest, after he sent a social worker to the room to process paperwork to have the hospital bills waived. Cille drove them home, and once there, she piecemeal packed every bit of colored lace and silk she’d festooned the room with, and loaded it all into her rental car. She did not ask for Joshua’s help, and he did not offer it.
“I’m returning the rental to the airport in New Orleans.” She listed in the middle of the living room and looked at all of them as she spoke, and yet Joshua thought she looked at none of them; they were a window. “Work.” This sound
erupted from her like a hiccup. Joshua thought she would say something else, but she didn’t.
“It was good having you so long, Cille.” Ma-mee was looking in the direction of Cille’s voice, but her gaze was off, uncentered.
“Yes, Mama.” Cille gripped her purse strap like a backpacker would. In the room’s half-light, her usually light eyes were glassy and black like the water of the bayou at night shattering cold light from houses along its surface. “Maybe the next visit we can work on getting the yard together, and everything will be quieter.”
“You need help, Cille?” Christophe asked this from his makeshift bed on the couch. At first Joshua thought Christophe would correct himself for not calling her Mama, at least in parting, and he thought Cille would correct him, but she only twisted the strap around her finger until it turned the tip white, and neither corrected the other.
“Like you can move”—Cille smiled a little—“and no, I don’t.”
“Goodbye.” Joshua was staring at the soft skin of Ma-mee’s chest, the way it fell like a curtain from the rod of her collarbone. How underneath was solid and hard as oyster shells, sure as the bottom of the bay. He just wanted Cille to leave.
“Goodbye.” Cille didn’t look at him either. “Y’all take care of each other.”
“Be safe on that road, Cille,” Ma-mee said, her voice falling to a wheezing whisper.
“I will, Mama.” And with a shivering of gold and magenta and silky black, she shimmered like a mirage in the room, turned, and was gone.
That evening, Rita cooked for the family while Dunny sat on the floor next to Christophe’s head and told him he deserved to hurt a little more for being such a dumbass—what the hell had he been drinking to stumble over a log at the river and cut himself wide open on a piece of glass? Christophe had turned his head into his pillow.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Christophe said.
Laila joined them. Joshua led her back to the room and she told him that she had heard that Sandman was missing.
