Where the Line Bleeds (13 page)

Joshua stuck one finger in the mouth of the bottle. He was thirsty
again. Maybe he'd just have to take one more sip, regardless of Laila. She
seemed so innocent. He knew she drank once in a while, but the beer in
his hand suddenly seemed as loaded with potential menace as that snake in
the street, and he wanted to drop it. He wondered if he could cough and
drop it at the same time, if he could cover up the soft thud of the bottle
hitting the dirt. The breeze blew again, a bit more forceful this time, and
he could smell her: sweat and salt and underneath it all, cocoa butter.

"I heard you got called back to the pier," Uncle Paul said.

Uncle Paul probably thought he was doing Joshua a favor by
mentioning his future job in front of a girl, but his declaration made the
beer smack Joshua with a biting nausea. It made him think of Christophe.
Joshua grimaced and let the warm glass slip from his sweaty fingers and
drop to the ground without a care for the sound or the sudden lukewarm
spill he felt coat his leg. He had drunk all but a sip of it. Where was his
brother? Laila had heard the bottle; she stared at Joshua and the black,
greased machinery glistening underneath the hood.

"Yeah," Joshua said.

That back that was his own yet was something else, that back that he
knew better than his own had walked away from him and become an alien
thing: it made him feel like he was perpetually on the verge of crying.

"They make pretty good money down there." Uncle Paul winked at
him and turned up his beer.

"I guess so." Joshua felt an obstinate quiet, bidding Uncle Paul to
shut up. Laila wiped her bangs away from her forehead: she was sweating
tendrils of sweat down her forehead like fine lines of cursive at her temple.
He wanted to touch her, to wipe all the sweat away.

"It'll be good to be working. I know how you boys is: you like to
spend money, go places, do things."

"What you talking about `you boys'?" Joshua kicked and hit the bottle
by accident and was ashamed: it ricocheted under the truck and clanged as
the glass hit the metal underbelly of the machine. Joshua pushed himself
away from the metal grill and slung his T-shirt over his shoulder. "I got
called back. Chris didn't. I gotta go."

"Alright, nephew."

Uncle Paul's farewell was lost in the swish of the grass against Joshua's
legs. It itched when it slid, almost sensuously, against the slick layer of
the beer on his skin. He was walking fast; he was leaning forward, cutting
against the sun with his head down. He had to get away from Laila. They
were all making him crazy.

"Joshua."

Laila was shuffling along next to him. He kept walking.

"What's up, Laila?" Joshua said it in a way that he knew would make
her go away: he said it quickly, curtly, dismissively. He was already on the
street: the shock of the asphalt through the bottom of his soles surprised
him. He walked faster.

"I know I may look tall, but I'm not. My legs is around three times
shorter than yours."

She was almost running to keep up with him. He didn't slow down.
She was still there, trotting along next to him. As shitty as he felt inside,
he couldn't bring himself to tell her to go home, to leave him alone. He
sighed and slowed down.

When he banged through the door, he grunted to Ma-mee and
walked straight to his room and sat on the floor. Laila stopped to talk to
Ma-mee in the living room. He stared at Christophe's neat coverlet. The
ceiling fan clicked and whirred above him like some irate bird. He felt
himself growing sleepy, even though his stomach whirled with beer, with
Laila and those slick tan legs in his living room. A sudden weight on the
bed startled him.

"One of your braids came out in the back."

Her hands cupped the crown of his head and lifted, and he felt the
warm familiar enclosure of her thighs on his shoulders. He let her hands
guide his head so that his ear rested on her thigh. Her fingers teased
a braid from his head, combed his hair out. As Laila braided his hair, Joshua felt the muscles in his neck melt from strained cords to wide,
lax threads. His head rested smoothly in the cup of her leg. He kicked
absently at his brother's bed. Laila wasn't moving: she was done with the
braid, but she was still and quiet beneath and behind him. He wanted to
turn his head and mouth her thigh. The day was a prescient, dozing thing
outside the window: the insects breathed a droning snore. Laila slumped
against the wall behind him as patient and present as the bright outside.
Joshua absently wondered if Laila had fallen asleep as he felt his own
eyelids grow heavy. He wanted to rest his eyes.

Joshua had known her since he was little, had protected her, carried
her over the deepest ditches, and made sure that when they played hideand-go-seek, she was hidden in a good spot. Christophe and Dunny and
the others would tease him about wanting to be her boyfriend. The first
time he really noticed she'd grown up was one fall afternoon in his senior
year. She'd had softball practice, and the boys had basketball practice. All
of her teammates had left, and Joshua walked from the gym to get some
water and saw her waiting for her mother to pick her up. He'd sat with
her, ignoring Christophe and Dunny's teasing, their threats to leave him.
Christophe and Dunny had peeled off their practice jerseys and sat in the
car next to the bleachers, rolling and smoking blunts. Joshua had fanned
himself with his practice basketball jersey and rolled his eyes at them and
sat next to her, quiet, cracking a joke once every five minutes or so. He
liked to see her smile. Her breath was a lullaby.

Outside the window, Christophe stopped. He'd had Dunny turn the
radio low when he dropped him off. After he'd talked to Ma-mee earlier
that morning, he'd called McDonald's, and asked to speak to the manager
that Charles had told them about. Steve had answered the phone with a
quick Southern accent.

"Hello?"

"Hello, my name is Christophe DeLisle and I dropped off an
application about three weeks ago and then another one around a week
ago and Charles-he works the day shift-told me to call back and ask to
speak to you because you handle all the applications and..."

"Charles doesn't work here any more."

The manager had hung up then. Christophe had only pressed the
button to hang up the phone and call Dunny to bring him to the shipyard, to Oreck for applications. He'd even stopped at one of the convenience
stores in Bois Sauvage and told them he was interested in a job when he
saw a handmade Help Wanted sign in the window. He wanted to apologize
to Joshua. He wanted to get his opinion about Dunny's proposition.
He needed Joshua's reasoning, his slow deliberation; Joshua would help
him find his way. He'd walked around the house because he wanted to
enter the back door and go straight to his room. He wanted a chance to
gather himself. . He stood on his tiptoes at the window and peered inside,
balancing himself by laying the flat of his palms against the worn board
siding. The boards beneath his hands splintered like toothpicks, and a
sliver stung him. In the room, he could see Joshua sitting on the floor
with his head lolled back on the bed. It was resting on Laila's thigh. She
was slumped over. Both of them breathed deeply and evenly: he guessed
that they were asleep. Christophe frowned past the sudden feeling that
he wanted to punch through the screen of the window and startle them
awake. It didn't look like Joshua needed his apology, or his company. He
pressed his hand hard into the house, hard enough to feel the splinter
drive its way further into his skin, hard enough so that it felt like a blade
instead of wood, and then pushed himself away and out into the day.

The sun would not leave them: even after it set, it left a residue of heat
in the evening. Christophe, stone-drunk under the barebulb lights strung
between the trees at Felicias party later that night, thought the blanketing
heat was a vestigial presence, something made even more present by its
absence. The bulbs burned like dying stars on the wire draped over the
arms of the old, twisted oaks in Felicia's parents' front yard. It was her
eighteenth birthday party. She was flitting from one group of people
to another, along the tables laden with barbecue and potato salad and
hamburgers, flirting. She was one of the girls he'd fucked with in high
school. He liked a few things about her: her brownish-blonde hair, her
hips, her fierce sense of determination-she usually got what she wanted.
She was silly, though. Talking to her was a chore. Now, the most he
appreciated about her was the party: it was good to see everybody he
hadn't seen since graduation, and to have a place to get drunk and high
and not have to worry about the police.

Dunny passed him a blunt. Christophe expected to feel the burst,
the sudden pleasurable explosion of THC in chest, but he felt nothing but relief at breathing again when he exhaled. He was numb. Evidently,
he'd drunk and smoked himself sober. He spit into the grass. Dunny
was laughing at Javon, who was attracting girls like mosquitoes in the
passenger seat. Skinny Skeetah and short Marquise were passing a bottle
of Crown back and forth in the backseat. Christophe hadn't said much of
anything to any of them. After Christophe had left his house, he'd walked
back to Dunny's and wandered from the sofa to the car until the sun set.
He'd rolled up blunt after blunt on the way to the party. The smooth
cigar paper on his tongue made him think of Joshua's face against Laila's
leg. He'd only uttered something else beside yes or no when Dunny had
stopped at the liquor store and asked him what he wanted to drink: Mad
Dog. Dunny had rolled his eyes.

He came out the store fifteen minutes later and handed Javon a bottle
of Remy and his change, tossed the bottle of Crown in the backseat at
Marquise and Skeetah, and dropped a brown-wrapped bottle of Hennessy
in Christophe's lap. Christophe had made to pass it back, ashamed through
the haze of his high at his lack of money, at the $3.50 in change he'd given
Dunny to buy the Mad Dog that surely must've been as leaden as a fishing
sinker in Dunny's shorts pocket. Dunny wouldn't accept it. Christophe
had decided that he would wash away the lump of pride in his throat.
He'd popped the bottle and drained the neck in one gulp.

After five or so swallows, it had started tasting like sugar water, and
Christophe relaxed as the drunkenness swept him up and buoyed him
along. It felt good. He hated to think it, but it seemed like what he
needed-until he drained the bottle so that only a lick of brown liquor
was left at the bottom and they were parked in Felicias yard in a cluster
of cars and people, and he felt terribly sober. The darkness hadn't softened
anything: the glint of gold teeth, the bright tint of jerseys, the hard, clean
casts of car bodies, and the bottles emerging from the dirt as durable as
seashells-they were all around him, all distinct and singular. He wanted
it all to recede, but it wouldn't. The liquor and the weed had failed him.
The only thing that would ease it all would be if he passed out, and he
knew he had to wait for that to happen, so he stood at the front left tire
of the car and held the Hennessey absently in his hand and leaned against
the hood and hoped that he'd be unconscious in Dunny's backseat by the time Joshua showed up. He felt his eyelids flutter close, and then snap
open. Oh yes, it was coming.

Joshua jumped over the ditch and landed in the yard and pulled his
cap low to hide his face. He hadn't seen his brother all day, and he'd felt
particularly naked and awkward and aroused when he woke up and found
Laila there in his bed with a patient, kind look on her face. He'd told her
he'd see her at the party; it was the most polite way he could ask her to
leave, and it was still a lie. The only person he wanted to see was the only
person that didn't want to see him, it seemed. He didn't bother calling
Dunny to ask for a ride; he didn't want to hear Dunny lying to him on the
phone at Christophe's behest, telling him for some reason or another that
he didn't have room in his car. He'd walked over to Franco's house and
gotten a ride with him. They'd parked down the street from Felicia's, close
enough to see the lights and hear distinct voices. They'd smoked a blunt.
Franco was ambling over toward a group of younger girls with his arms
out, his new outfit crisp and starched to a cardboard stiffness, so Joshua
loped his own way, looking for his brother.

Christophe raised his chin from where it had eased down to his chest
and saw a shadow weaving its way across the lawn between the cars and
he knew that walk because it was his own twin and goddamn it, he cussed
to himself, he hadn't passed out in time. Joshua stood, his hands in his
pockets, next to Christophe. Christophe realized he had missed him.

"Hey, Chris."

It seemed so unnecessary to Joshua that he had to greet his brother.

"Joshua."

Christophe upended the bottle and poured it in a weak stream down
his throat. It stung a trickle down his esophagus. Christophe closed his
eyes and was grateful for it while it lasted. When he opened them, his
twin was still there.

"Fuck it."

"What you mean, fuck it? I didn't even say anything yet."

"You didn't have to...I already know what you want to talk about.
And I just ...I don't want to talk about it right now."

Joshua leaned nearer to his brother and sniffed.

"What all did you drink?"

Christophe shook his head, and saw the world blur and tilt. Okay, so
he hadn't drunk himself sober. Just when that thought seemed consoling
to him and guaranteed to help him get through the conversation he was
trying to have with his brother, his stomach settled and the world lurched
aright, and he felt dreadfully, seriously present.

"You avoiding me." Joshua said. He looked at his brother's profile.
Christophe was staring off into the yard. He looked like he was on the
verge of passing out.