Where the Line Bleeds (10 page)

He'd forgotten how several drug dealers Dunny's age looked. When
Christophe saw their faces on their brief respite from jail, half the time
he didn't recognize them, and the rest of the time, he was always amazed
at how old they appeared. Those were the lucky ones. Others became
addicts themselves, or died. He thought of Cookie from St. Catherine,
who earned his nickname because as a dealer he had moved big weight,
and never had less than a few cookies on him at a time. He had earned
his name twice. Now, as a junkie, he begged dealers, his former comrades,
for crumbs. He stood on the same corner in St. Catherine, everyday in
the same worn blue jeans and denim shirt, which he called his suit, and
stared at the cars that passed, never waving, in the evenings. An image of
Sandman as he'd last seen him, drunk, his eyes blanched wide from his
high, almost falling from the pickup truck. Christophe waved his hand. Dunny was small-time: Dunny had done the smart thing. He held a steady
job and only dabbled in selling weed-no crack or coke, and especially no
meth or X to the white people living further out and upcountry.

"I ain't never really wanted to do that, Dunny."

"What you mean you ain't never wanted to do that?" Dunny ducked
his head to catch Christophe's gaze.

"I wanted to get a job.. .work up...make some good money."

"Where did you think you was going to work, Chris? Doing what?"

"I don't know... the pier or the shipyard or something...."

"Nigga, it ain't never that easy. Everybody and they mama want a job
at the pier and the shipyard. Everybody want a job down there can't get
one."

"I could work somewhere else."

"Wal-Mart? Do you know what niggas start out making at Wal-Mart?
Six-fifty an hour, Chris. Six dollars and fifty fucking cents. Gas is almost
two dollars a gallon. Even working forty hour weeks and without rent to
pay, how far you think that's going to get you?"

"Uncle Paul and Eze did it." Christophe looked away from his cousin,
studied the sandy asphalt court. He shook his head no. He didn't know
what he was saying no to, but he did it anyway.

"It ain't saying you can't do it. I'm just saying it's hard."

The fluorescent lights blinked. Once, twice. Christophe knew from
experience what would happen next. The lights flashed bright and died.
Their incessant neon buzzing sizzled away. The ringing chorus of the
night bugs displaced it, smoothed it over, and submerged it as if it had
never been. A droning filled Christophe's head, and the park was suffused
with a calm, stately darkness. There were no streetlights in the country.
Dunny's face disappeared. His white shirt glowed blue, and Christophe
was suddenly aware of the stars, sparkling full to bursting in the sky above
his head.

"I got to try," Christophe said.

Dunny's voiced snaked its way into his ear, wound its way around
him with possibility.

"Well, think about it, Chris. If you decide that this is something you
want to do, let me know. I can front you a QP. You can pay me back after
you get on your feet."

Dunny's voice dropped. "If you buy more from me with your profit,
and then sell all that, you'll double your money. Easy."

Christophe rubbed his hair, laced his fingers together, and locked
them behind his neck before dropping them.

"I don't know, Dunny."

"Just think about it. You don't have to do anything you don't want to
do in the end. You could find a way to make it. A broke way, but a way."
Dunny's voice in the dark was suddenly soft, clean of anger and tinged
with a wistfulness that surprised Christophe. "You could be lucky."

Dunny brushed past Christophe and walked with a tired gait to the
car. The faint white glow of Dunny's shirt was like a beacon. Christophe
felt his way along the hood. His fingers traced the grill as he rounded his
side and climbed in, careful to hold his body upright with his arms braced
so that he eased his torso into the seat; his sneakers brushed it.

"I hate when you do that."

Dunny lit a black and put the car in reverse. In the sudden flare of
light from the lighter, Christophe saw Dunny's fatigue again: his eyelids
looked swollen, and his mouth around the pale plastic tip of the cigarillo
was slack. Christophe could hear the tires spew dirt and pebbles from the
dirt parking space into the street. Dunny gunned the engine. The motor
roared and they shot forward, passing through the weak, pale light of
the wide-set yellow streetlamps some people had erected in their yards
along the road. Christophe broke the textured, cricket-laden, tree-rustled
silence with a timid request.

"Man, take me to your house."

Dunny nodded in reply and accelerated, passing the turn to Ma-mee's
house. The weed had hit Christophe with a lethargic fist. He didn't want
to face Joshua yet, and he knew his brother would be awake, lying with
his eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, poised to talk,
to conjecture, to confess.

Dunny led them in to the back door of the trailer. Christophe
followed Dunny to the living room, where Dunny turned and offered
him a short handshake. Christophe knew he would fall asleep on the
sofa within minutes, but being away from his twin and Ma-mee, away
from the familiar walls of his bedroom, would wake early in the morning with the first tentative infusion of sunlight into the living room, and
would probably walk home. Christophe sat down, slumped sideways as
his cousin disappeared to his room, and stared absentmindedly at the
blinking red light of the VCR. It was the only moving thing in the room.
He cradled his face with his palm and fell asleep.

Christophe snapped awake suddenly and could not remember the
sound that woke him, but knew that some noise had. He pushed himself
up and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes so that he could see the
small digital clock on the VCR. It read 3:46. Christophe's skin slid back
and forth and stretched pleasantly and eased the itch: his eyes burned.
The bathroom light shone out into the hallway. The rest of the house
lapsed into darkness. He looked toward his cousin's room, eyed his aunt's:
nothing stirred. Christophe tiptoed toward the back door. On his way past
the refrigerator, he saw a small note: Joshua called. He twisted the lock on
the knob, stepped out onto the back deck, tried to ease the squeaking of
the hinges by pushing the door shut in centimeters, and closed the door
behind him.

From the wood next to the house, Dunny's dog barked loud, warning,
staccato barks. Christophe felt buffeted by the incessant cry of the cicadas
in the trees around him. He followed the road in the dark by feeling his
way with his feet: one foot in the grass, another on the asphalt. Small
animals rustled in the thick grass and blackberry briars that choked the
ditch. It was hot enough for snakes. The landscape was drowned in black
ink: he tried to peer into the darkness, to catch irregular sounds. He'd
forgotten to pick up a stick. Few people kept their dogs on leashes or
had fences, and every time he broke into the light after passing a stand of
woods and saw a small sunken house or a rusting trailer, he'd tense up and
listen for barks and growling, for sudden rushes of angry animal and fur.
He could not find a stick in the dark.

Perhaps tomorrow someone would call. He'd go to the shipyard
anyway and drop off an application during Joshua's interview. He repeated
this to himself over and over, as he walked along. Fireflies burst into light
and left neon-green trails behind them as they flitted along in the dense,
dark air. They were like the ideas in his head, flaring and failing. Could
he sell? Did he want to? How could he do that out of Ma-mee's house? What the hell would he say to Joshua? A quick anger, a violent flash of
hurt burned in his throat, and then dissipated. He glanced briefly up at
the sky and saw that it was scudded with clouds. He was too tired to be
angry. He'd deal with the sore jealousy he felt toward his brother, the
sticky love, and the sense of shame and protective responsibility he felt
when he thought of Ma-mee, tomorrow. He wanted her to be proud of
him, not stumble across his weed one day while she was putting clean
socks in his underwear drawer. He didn't know if he could face her if it
came to that.

Something large rustled in the ditch to his right. He surprised himself
by hopping to the left. Fear showered in sparks through his chest. In the
dark, he stopped abruptly, his hands flexing into tight fists, his palms
seeming suddenly empty. The fear surprised him. It was the kind of
fear he hadn't felt since he'd been younger, since he'd stayed out playing
in the woods with his brother after the sun set, after the street lights
came on, and the black tree limbs suddenly seemed like fingers and he'd
panicked at the irrational, instinctual feeling that something was closing
in on him. After that first time in the woods, he'd sometimes get the same
feeling when he was walking home, or when he was taking a shower by
himself and his eyes were closed and he was washing his hair. Vaguely, a
part of him associated the advent of this feeling with his own conscious
comprehension of the power of the dark, of what it could hold and hide:
possums, armadillos, snakes, spiders, dogs, and men.

Christophe hadn't felt this panic in years. The urge to run on and on
down the asphalt and not stop running until he reached his house made it
impossible for him to think. The thought was like a siren, a light circling
and flashing over and over again in his head. He listened for the rustle
again and heard nothing. He struggled to walk, but he broke into a trot
anyway, and ran until he reached the next circle of light emitted from a
small, wooden porch on a sagging house. He searched the lip of the yard
and found a small stick that was only as long as his forearm and light.
The sides of it were marked with small, velvety spots of fungus. It was
hollow. Christophe gripped it hard and made himself stand still in the
small bud of light that shone on the street. He made himself remain until
he remembered where he was and what he was doing. He was eighteen
and he was walking home in the dark and his house was only about a half a mile down and he'd lived here all his life and there was nothing in those
woods that could hurt him-nothing. He just needed to breathe and
calm down. He stood there until the fear ebbed. Then he set out into the
darkness, dove into it like it was water.

Christophe walked quickly. The fear kept surging back for him.
Someone was on the verge of grabbing him. His shoulders itched. He
swung the stick back and forth with his hand as he walked. He surprised
himself with a high-pitched laugh. What the hell was he going to do with
this stick? He was clutching the thing like a machete. He shook his head,
tried to batten the fear down in his chest, and waved the stick like a wand.
He flicked his wrist as if to throw it, but he didn't. His fingers wouldn't let
it go. He thought to laugh again, but he didn't. He quickened his pace.
Vale's house. The woods. Uncle Paul's house. The woods. The field where
Johnny kept his old, broke down horse. It grazed, snorting softly, and
pulled up bunches of grass. Christophe was surprised that he could hear
the grass rip. The woods. Ma-mee's house. He leapt over the ditch and ran
to the porch. By the time he reached the screen door, he was sprinting.
He threw the stick down next to the steps and pulled open the door and
rushed inside. The fear had slammed into him, had choked him the most
at the moment his hand closed over the door handle. He locked the door
shut behind him and hopped across the kitchen floor and through the
living room on his toes. He tried not to hit the worst of the boards that
creaked.

Their room door was open. He eased into the room, breathing hard.
He shucked his pants and squinted into the darkness. His brother was
asleep: his back was turned to Christophe's bed, his face to the wall.
Christophe heard him breathing deeply and slowly. The alarm clock read
4:10. He cracked open a drawer and pulled out a pair of basketball shorts
and put them on. He lay down in his bed on his back and stared at the
ceiling as he pulled the sheet up to his chest. Only when the flat sheet slid
coolly over his shins did the fear fully dissipate in his chest. It dissolved so
quickly that he felt foolish lying there in his bed. Still he could not help
himself from staring at the room, from laying on his side so that he faced
the door. The light from the bathroom shone in the hallway and draped
the doorway with a little weak half-moon. He blinked at it, half expecting
a shadow to move across it and snuff it out, and fell asleep.

' A-MEE WOKE AROUND FIVE MINUTES BEFORE SHE FELT THE FIRST
heated touch of sunlight on her bed. When Lucien had built
the house, she had insisted he put their room on the side of
the house facing east, alongside the kitchen. Back then, he had bought the
land from the county government for a little bit of nothing. He'd saved up
working carpentry and yard jobs for vacationing white families who owned
beach homes, mansions really, on the shore. It was what Paul did now.
Lucien had been a hard worker: he was frugal, so he'd saved from the time he
was twelve. After he'd married Ma-mee, then known as Lillian, at eighteen,
he'd bought eight acres of property up the road from his father in Bois
Sauvage. It was enough to build a house on, to raise a couple of small feed
and food crops for the family, and to keep a horse or two. His brothers and
his father had helped him lay the foundation, raise the frame, piece by piece
in slow, painful spurts: Ma-mee remembered eating beans and portioning
out biscuits for months to save money as they bought the house board by
board. She remembered craving green things, craving watermelons swollen
red with water, and after the house was completed, she was almost pleased
enough with the produce to not resent the hours of work: of weeding and
watering, her back a shield against the sun.