Where the Line Bleeds (12 page)

"Just because Joshua got called back for a job and you didn't don't
mean nothing, Chris." Ma-mee watched his hands still their tugging on
the shrimp, watched him let the shrimp roll into the palm of his hand,
watched it disappear in the blur of his fist. "Christophe, I wouldn't lie to
you. I never lied to you," she said.

He opened his palm and grabbed at the tail: she saw a bit of gray come
off easily. He had warmed it with the palm of his hand; he had coaxed it
with the heat of his skin. He was resourceful. She reached across the table
and cupped his now empty hand with her own, ran her fingers over the
hard, serrated skin of his knuckles. He had fought with them numerous
times, and scraped them on river rocks and tree bark and asphalt. He
would find something for himself.

"This just means you have a little bit more time to look. This way
you'll find something that suits you real good," she said.

Christophe circled her hand with his. His calluses felt as hard and
tough as an oyster shell.

"I know, Ma-mee." His voice dwindled to a whisper. "I'll find
something to do."

The shrimp were beginning to stink like a stagnant, landlocked,
shallow beach pool. Reluctantly, she removed her hand from the tent of
his own, and grabbed another shrimp.

"The heat coming," she said.

She realized she was squinting at him as if she could sharpen him
with her stare so she could read his face. The pile of shrimp between them
shrank. The sun slid across the window of the room and sent planks of
light across the floor, and Ma-mee closed her eyes as she picked and peeled,
picked and peeled, as the light crept under the table and submerged her
feet. It moved upward and lent a halo of light to Christophe's head: a
phosphorescent glow. Christophe peeled, working away at the pile, and
felt the heat brush the back of his calves. The shrimp ripened and seemed
to melt into the paper, to blur the words gray.

As the sun rose in the sky, Joshua slept in the twins' room. He wrapped
himself in a sheet, fought it as sweat wet his face and dampened the cotton
fabric, and dreamt vivid, colorful dreams. He smelled the sea salt of those
small ripening bodies protesting the loss of their water to the dry air and dreamt that he was on the pier pulling at woven sacks pregnant with
frozen chicken that, regardless of how hard he pulled, would not move.

Joshua's walk down St. Alphonse Street was a crawl. It was ten and
the heat and humidity of the air pulled at him like a net: it reminded
him of his dreams, of the salt and sea. He wondered if shrimp felt like
this, if they struggled against the thick fingers of the current created by
the encroaching net in hope of escaping, of moving forward. When he'd
awoken that morning, his brother was gone. The crooked, taut sheet was
the only indicator that his brother had been there. Christophe had made
the bed sloppily. When he walked into the kitchen feeling as if his eyelids
were glued together and rubbing his face against the light, Ma-mee had
been wiping down the table. The air smelled of seafood. She answered
his question about Christophe's whereabouts, told him that he had been
there, but had woken up early in the morning and left. When he asked
her if Christophe had said anything to her about the call and the previous
day, she'd paused midswipe, and then shook her head no. Joshua had sat
on the sofa and watched The Price of Right with her, gulped down a bowl
of cold cereal, and left after shrugging into a discolored tank and a pair of
baggy jean shorts. He decided to go walking in search of Christophe, who
he guessed was probably somewhere with Dunny.

By the time he was a house and a stand of woods away from Mamee's house, he'd peeled off his shirt and slung it over his shoulder where
it hung drenched and limp as a dishrag. Insects seethed in the woods and
called loudly to one another; they seemed to cheer the heat. The asphalt
shimmered like a handheld fan down the length of the road, and his
feet dragged along the pebbles embedded in the asphalt. The sun glinted
sharply as a knife off the wet gold of his arm. The heat made him want to
stop, to be still, to sit and breathe. He paused under a patch of shivering
shade thrown by the reach of a pine tree. The sunlight glittered around
him at the edges of the bristles' fluttering shadow The dark reminded
him of being submerged to his neck in the river in water so tepid, when
compared with the loaded tropical day, it verged on being cool. He
wondered if that was where his brother was. He wanted to feel weightless
and buoyed.

Five feet away from Joshua, a snake blacker than the asphalt lay
sunning itself. It writhed lazily, flicking its tail as it soaked up the baking heat of the concrete. When he was younger, he had been terrified of
snakes, but now, he wasn't. Either it didn't notice him, or the temperature
of the day had made it loathe to move. It seemed to be made of the same
stuff as the asphalt: its skin like the polished grain of the pitted, ancient
street. The snake eased its way to the side of the road. He thought about
the stories Ma-mee told them, about how they were so hungry when they
were children. She told them her brothers had caught snakes by their
tails on hot summer days like this, had ran with them to the closest tree
and bashed their small, oblong skulls against the trunks, of how they had
bought them home and skinned and deboned them, of how they had
eaten them in a gravy stew with rice. Ma-mee said that often they found
whole mice in their stomachs. Joshua imagined that the meat would be
flaky and chewy, and taste faintly like brown leaves and dirt. The snake
raised its head and flicked its tongue as if it could taste Joshua's sweat, his
exhaustion, the steady hunger clenched in his stomach. He had heard that
some animals could smell these things, could smell fear.

Joshua walked around the snake; he gave it a wide berth. It seemed
to nod at him, and he frowned at it until he was out of the shade. The
sun seemed to beat the sense out of him. Its burn echoed the revolving,
sucking burn in his stomach. He was glad he'd gotten the job. It would be
good to be able to buy food for the house and not have to ration soda, to
abstain from eating too much shrimp because he was trying to save some
for Ma-mee, for his brother, for later; it would be good to not have to eat
oatmeal in the morning. He was so damned tired of eating oatmeal and
sugar, of parsing out the teaspoon of condensed milk on top.

He hated condensed milk. It would be good to have a little money in
his pocket so he could go out to eat sometime, pick up a basket of fried
catfish and hush puppies for dinner for the family. Take a girl somewhere,
maybe. He closed his eyes and stumbled, sure he could almost smell the
food. Ma-mee maintained that she had kept them fed and fat when they
were little: she was proud of the fact, and she would brag about it to
her friends, to her daughters, that the twins had never wanted for food.
Joshua remembered otherwise. He remembered eating handfuls of corn
flakes and watery powdered milk, of eating tuna for weeks at a time, of
dreaming of pizza as an eight year old. He remembered being perpetually hungry, regardless of how much he ate. Even now Joshua associated his
infrequent brushes with satiety with bliss: the full weight of good food in
the stomach, a mouth wet with juice, and the sated, languorous feeling
that massaged his chest and back when he had eaten well. Down the
street, someone was standing in Laila's driveway, and he could hear music
blasting from a truck parked in Uncle Paul's yard. He doubted it was true,
but perhaps Christophe was at Uncle Paul's house, or perhaps Uncle Paul
had seen him. Regardless, the shade in Uncle Paul's yard was too good to
pass up. He jumped across the ditch and jogged to the truck.

It was Uncle Paul's Ford. He was under the hood with a wrench in
his hand. Rust laced its way along the seams of the gray truck, and Joshua
had no idea how Uncle Paul had kept the thing running for this long. It
was his work truck, and he was forever alternately cussing it and cajoling
it. At the least, Uncle Paul would have some water in his refrigerator: if
he didn't know anything about Christophe, Joshua could get a drink and
head back down the street to Ma-mee's house to lie on the relative cool of
the living room floor and wait for dusk to look. Joshua leaned against the
truck and Uncle Paul jackknifed in surprise and almost banged his head
on the hood.

"What you doing sneaking up on folks, boy?"

"Looking for Chris. You seen him?"

"Naw, I ain't seen him." Uncle Paul set the wrench on the edge of the
grill and rested his forearms against the iron grate. "I'm surprised you out
here looking for him in this heat."

"I'm alright. I think I'm going to head back after I leave here."

"How ya'll like them shrimp I brought by? I figured since I was down
there at the docks checking on some fish for Rita, I might as well grab
some shrimp for Ma-mee. They was some good-sized shrimp, too, for
only three dollars a pound. She fry them up this morning?"

"Yeah..."

"I bought me a couple of pounds, too. I might bring 'em to Mama's
tonight. Not like I got somebody to cook them up for me over here
anyway."

"Stop trying to be a player and then maybe you could keep a
girlfriend."

Uncle Paul was at least a head shorter, and when he took off his
mesh cap to wipe his forearm across his forehead, Joshua saw that he was
prematurely balding.

"Can't help what's in the blood, son. No, you sure can't help it."
Uncle Paul replaced his cap and kicked something at his feet, something
that was shoved underneath the hood of the car, and Joshua heard a dull
clunk. "Have a beer."

Joshua normally didn't drink in the daytime. It was sort of an
unspoken rule he played by: smoking, yes, he'd smoke a blunt or two
while there was daylight, but he didn't like to drink. It made him think
of drunks. It made him think of Rollo, who rode up and down the main
street in St. Catherine and lurked around the Vietnamese corner store
buying 97-cent King Cobras all day, whose eyes were perpetually watery
and bloodshot, and who always had the sickly sweet smell of alcohol
sweat on him, even in the winter. It made him think of his father in those
yards, of him leaning against trucks like these with those goddamn blue
blocker shades on, drinking beer after beer, laughing and smiling at jokes
Joshua and Christophe couldn't hear as they walked past. Joshua shrugged
his shoulders and hesitated. He was so hot, though. He could imagine
the cool, salty fizz of it on his tongue. Fuck it. He would have just one,
and then he would walk home. He pulled out a Michelob longneck,
unscrewed the top, and took a deep swallow.

"I hid them because I know if niggas saw them they'd come asking
for some. Hold it low, boy. I don't want to be supplying the whole
neighborhood."

"Ain't nobody out in this heat, Uncle Paul, except you and me."
Joshua tilted the bottle back again. He was so hungry he already felt a
little dizzy buzz behind his temples.

"That's what you think, Joshua. Look like we ain't the only ones out
here, and look like I ain't the only pimp in the family." Uncle Paul nodded
towards the street and started laughing.

"What the hell you talking about?"

"Ain't that Laila?"

Joshua squinted out past the yard and saw a brilliant white shirt and
short red shorts, a pair of thick tan thighs and slender, swinging arms, and coal black, curly hair. Yes, Laila. He was surprised at the way the
beer caught in the back of his throat at seeing her. He swallowed. He
hadn't seen her since he let her braid his hair after Christophe left: he'd
been in a stupor, and hadn't complained when she led him to the couch
and plucked the comb from his head and began braiding. She was so
fine he couldn't take his eyes off her legs, from the taper of her waist,
but the sudden thump in his chest when he realized it was her walking
up in the yard surprised him. He looked past her breasts and stopped at
the crooked, flashing grin on her face, and wanted to stay there. There
was feeling. Sometimes, when she smiled at him like that at school or
in the street, so shy and brave all at once, it reminded him of Cille. He
shifted on his feet and let the bottle rest between his chest and the truck;
it clinked once, twice against the grill. He didn't want her to think he was
like some old drunk with nothing better to do with his time than drink.
He tried to look casual as a small wind stirred listlessly in the branches of
the pecan tree overhead and disturbed the shade, rippling it momentarily
so that the light stabbed his vision.

"Hey, Paul."

"What's a little sweet thing like you doing out here in this heat? You
going to melt."

Laila rolled her eyes and stared at Joshua.

"I heard it all before, Uncle Paul."

Paul broke out into a loud bray of laughter.

"Hey, Joshua."

"What's up, Laila?"

Joshua nervously swung the bottle back and forth. Laila leaned
against the door of the truck and propped one forearm on the side mirror.
Her move made one breast rise higher than the other. Her hair brushed
against the contours of her cheeks with the wispy languor of cattails, and
Joshua found himself glad that there was another small coughing breeze
for a reason that had nothing to do with the heat. He tried to still his
hands. "I thought that was you down the road."

"I was looking at a snake. Big black one. I guess it was a king snake."

"Where was it at?"

"Right in front of Uncle Paul's yard."

"You should've told me," Uncle Paul interjected.

"I didn't even see it." Laila rested her head on her forearm, and
watched Joshua steadily. "I hate snakes."

"I used to, but I wasn't scared of that one," Joshua said.

"It's good to have snakes around. They eat up all the rodents. Keep
the mice in check." Uncle Paul seemed determined to break into the
conversation.