Where the Line Bleeds (16 page)

"Hey."

"Huh?"

"Can you do me a favor?"

"Yeah."

"Would you mind grabbing me a piece of bread out of that loaf of
bread on the table?"

"Urn, yeah. You sure you don't want nothing else with it?"

"Naw." Christophe slumped into the sofa.

"Okay." Christophe leaned forward and Laila threw her leg over him
and stood. She walked to the table on her toes with her arms out to the
side and her palms flat as if she were walking across a balance beam. He
found himself watching her ass, her shorts pulling tight and smooth with
every mincing step she took. She had such thick hips. Christophe closed
his eyes and only opened them again when he felt Laila softly nudge his
shoulder, and he smelled the doughy bread. He took it from her and
shoved a piece into his mouth. Laila sat behind him. At least she was nice;
he guessed that if Joshua had to be messing with somebody, at least it was
someone who would be considerate enough not to wake Ma-mee from
her nap, and who would do his hair for free.

"I saw your daddy today."

The bread turned dry as sawdust in Christophe's mouth. He looked
at the ragged piece of bread in his hand, and he could not take another
bite.

"Who you talking about?" It came out sharply. It cut through the
drowsing of the crickets filtering in through the windows. He would not
have thought he had it in him, to be that loud and that mean.

"I'm talking about Sandman." She was whispering and he was sorry
that he had yelled at her. Her hands were still. Shit, she'd only done one
braid. God, he was an asshole.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell at you."

"Mmmm-hmmm." She shifted, and he leaned away to give her room
to settle herself, to move her delicately traced knees away from him. When
he leaned back, she resumed braiding.

"You sure it was him?" Christophe began to knead the bread into a
ball with his hand.

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"How you so sure?" There it was again, the rancor. She stopped
braiding again. Except for her hands on his scalp, he would not have
known that she was behind him.

"I remember him from a fewyears back. He look the same, Christophe.
He a little shorter than I remember, but he still the same man."

"What you mean?"

"I saw him out on the corner of Anne and Lapine." What little spit
there was in Christophe's mouth had the gritty, pasty consistency of
cement. He vaguely wondered if he spit right there on the carpet whether
it would be thick and gray, whether it would harden into a stone before
his eyes in the time it would take Laila to complete another braid.

"Over by the church?"

"Yeah." She hesitated. "He was leaning into Javon's car."

"He was buying?"

"That's what it looked like to me." Her voice had sunk so low he
could hardly hear her. The crickets offered a chorus of affirmation.

Christophe raised his hand and waved it in the air as if he was shooing
away a mosquito. He let it fall limply in his lap and sank further into
the carpet. The enthusiastic shouting of the miniscule crowd on the TV
sounded loudly in his ears and overlapped Ma-mee's soft, easy snore. So,
Sandman was done with rehab and he had come back, and according to
Laila, he was doing the same old shit. He waived his hand again, and
Laila grabbed a handful of his hair. Her knees squeezed his shoulders like
football pads. He wondered if Ma-mee had heard anything yet. She liked
him about as much as he and Joshua did. Christophe put his head down;
Laila sighed behind him as she pulled his head up.

He hated it all. He hated the idea of running into the ones that
sold, Javon and Bone, and of having casual conversation with them and
seeing that momentary glance, that sliver of pity in their eyes when they looked at him. The crowd on the TV was clapping and it sounded like
water rushing over stones. The drug would hollow Sandman out again.
He would start out sneakily and then he would not care anymore, and
he would be out there, really out there. Christophe leaned on his elbow
hard, welcoming the arcing pain as he shoved the bone into the floor.
Christophe wondered whether he would come asking for money. Ma-mee
snorted in her sleep and it was loud; he didn't slump back into the sofa
until he heard her exhale in a long, soft whoosh. She blew her breath out
in a way that reminded him of when she blew on his scrapes when he was
younger, when her breath eased the pain when he'd fallen from his bike
and the skin had peeled itself away from the bud of the wound to leave a
bright, red burning flower.

He didn't want to see Sandman. Laila yanked at his hair, struggling to
free a knot, and then pressed his scalp gently, tender and terrible at once.
He was anxious for her to finish, so he could be away from her awful
beauty, so he could go upcountry, away from the heart of Bois Sauvage
where he imagined his father lurking. Involuntarily, he ground his jaw
and bit into his tongue and tasted a salty bitterness. He was sure he was
bleeding.

(HE SKIN ON CHRISTOPHE'S HEAD WAS PULLED SO TIGHTLY HE
felt like he was having trouble blinking. He walked with his
head down, holding it like a newly coiffed offering; it felt as if it
had been scrubbed raw, cleansed for sacrifice. He had waited until Laila
was done with his hair, waited until she had tied it close to his scalp in a
vortex of swirling, precise braids, and then he had sat there, thinking of
Sandman. Perhaps Laila felt awkward waiting for him to acknowledge her,
but Christophe hadn't cared: he ignored her. He wondered if Sandman was
lurking somewhere outside under the pines or in the sunshine. He laid halfpropped against the sofa on the floor and stared at the ceiling, at the way the
water was eating away at the white plaster and had etched expansive brown
sketches of faces. Laila left. Ma-mee had awoken with the slow creak of the
screen door as it closed and had asked after her. Christophe kissed Ma-mee,
reminded her to call him at Dunny's house when Joshua called, and left. He
thought about driving, debated whether he should walk back in the house
and grab the keys once he was outside and the crepe myrtle was nodding
drowsily over his head, but then decided to walk; he had no money for
anything and Joshua wouldn't be paid for another two weeks.

The heat made Christophe feel like a mule dragging a plow through
thick, red chalky clay like the kind he had seen on basketball trips to the
Mississippi Delta. The people had been uniformly dark there; Christophe
had heard his assistant coach say that there was no mixed community
there, and that things had been more savage in the flat, red country. Christophe had stood on the court for his first game in the delta and had
looked out at the wash of faces and noticed that whites sat in one section
while blacks sat in the other. He had ordered a Sprite at the concession
stand after the game and a woman, brunette with thin red lips and a gold
crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck, had not looked him in the
eyes when she took his order, and had placed his change neatly on the
counter out of reach of his outstretched hand. After playing to a tie, the
St. Catherine's boy's varsity team lost in overtime. The trees, the hills, and
the crops rolled past outside the bus window. When they arrived home
at the end of the trip, the team had discovered red dust from the roads
had sifted through the open windows of the bus to drift down on them,
coated their uniforms, and turned them pink.

Christophe watched the gravel as he walked. If he caught a glimpse
of Sandman, he didn't know what he would do. The houses were silent:
the yards were empty. Everyone was at work. A couple of black stray dogs
trotted up to him and sniffed at his pants legs. Their tongues hung like
red wet exclamation marks from their mouths. They followed him along
for a couple houses and then wandered off to sit in the shade. Christophe
wished for that simplicity, wished that he could sit in the shade as a
scavenging mutt resting his jaw on his paws, breathe little clouds in the
dusty grass, and sleep.

When Christophe reached Dunny's yard, the first thing he noticed
was that the spaces where Aunt Rita and Eze usually parked were bare and
worn, like empty nests worn into the earth by sleeping animals. Dunny's
car was parked in the shade of a large, leafy pine tree. Dunny had told
Christophe that Eze had been bitching about cutting the tree down for
five years or so, saying that it would fall on the trailer in a hurricane, and
that it could attract lightning to the house in a thunderstorm and fry
everything, but Aunt Rita had told him that it would stay, and Christophe
was glad he would be alone in the house with Dunny.

Christophe looked up at the sky to see where the sun was; it was
around two. Dunny worked half-day at the plant two Fridays a month,
and Christophe hoped that he wasn't asleep. He knocked once, then
harder, and heard a muffled "I'm coming." Christophe slipped into the
cool, air-conditioned innards of the house. He blinked his eyes, saw only a textured, velvety darkness. He blinked and realized Dunny stood before
him in his boxers, his belly lapping over the edge of his shorts like a fat
tongue. He smelled like sleep and dried sweat. Dunny locked the door
behind Christophe.

"Why didn't you call before you came over?" Dunny said.

"Why, so you could cuss me out as soon as I got here for waking
you up?"

"You still woke me up." Dunny led Christophe back toward his
room. Family pictures cluttered the walls. Aunt Rita had pared her
furniture when Dunny became a teenager: she said there was little need
for decoration when she was living in a house full of men. A skinny
sofa, a worn loveseat, and two deep, velour-covered chairs lined the wall,
all facing a large entertainment center. The coffee table, the end tables
adorned with vases of fake flowers, the china cabinet of crystal glasses
Christophe remembered examining in his youth while wondering if Cille
had one like it in Atlanta: all these were gone. The path to Dunny's room
was a straight one: the line in the carpet looked worn as a forest trail.
Once he was in his room, Dunny sat on the full bed that took up most of
the tiny room, and lounged against the wall.

"At least this way, I only woke you up once, nigga."

"Even once is too much. You know what time I had to get up this
morning and go to work? Six."

"At least you only had to work half a day."

"Yeah, whatever. You should've called-I would've picked you up."
Dunny was grinning.

"Yeah, right nigga. First, you would've cussed me out for calling you,
and then you would've told my ass to walk."

"That's about right." Dunny laughed Christophe sat on the edge of a
chair draped with clothes "Why the fuck is it always so cold up in here?"

"You know I'm about to sleep for another two hours, right? Ain't
nothing going on right now anyway. Why you didn't wait until the sun
set to come over here?"

"I ain't want to change my mind."

Dunny scooted to the edge of the bed. He leaned forward, and
Christophe could smell the sleep on his breath. "You saying what I think
you saying?"

"Yeah."

"Well, alright then."

Dunny pulled on a T-shirt that was a muddy yellow at the armpits
before crouching in front of his chest of drawers and pulling out the
bottom drawer. As Dunny mumbled to himself and rustled unseen
packages, Christophe noticed how the fat at Dunny's sides bulged from
the bottom of the T-shirt; it looked like he had gained weight since the
beginning of the summer. Christophe imagined it was uncomfortable for
him, kneeling there on the floor, crouched like a little kid playing marbles
or jacks. Dunny stopped his mumbling, reinserted the drawer, and tossed
a dark green baggie toward him. Christophe fumbled to catch it. His
fingers were cold.

"That's a quarter pound. You should make $400 from that. When you
done sold it all, I'll give you another one for $200. That's what I'll ask for
them-so basically it's like I'm giving you this one for free."

"Alright."

"And make sure you hide it where Ma-mee can't find it. I done heard
stories from Mama about her stumbling over Aunt Cille's weed stash or
finding bottles of Uncle Paul's moonshine. The last thing you want is for
her to find a quarter pound of weed in your drawers."

"I'm not stupid, nigga. I know how to hide shit."

"Make a smoking sack when you first get it... that way you don't
smoke too much and you don't lose too much profit. Oh shit, I almost
forgot." Dunny pulled the drawer out again, and Christophe heard more
plastic rustling. The QP filled a Ziploc sandwich bag: it was bigger than
Christophe thought. He had no idea how he was going to sneak it home.
"Here some sandwich bags." Dunny tossed a half-empty box at him.
Christophe let them fall to the floor. "You don't want to steal Ma-mee's
because she'll get suspicious."

"I was planning on stealing yours." It was a weak joke.