Where the Line Bleeds (17 page)

"Ha, ha, nigga. And this," Dunny threw a small black cloth bag at
him, "is a scale. You'll need it. This way if niggas want to complain and
say you gave them too little, you can show them the scale and shut them
up. You don't want to get a reputation for peeling niggas. That's the way
you lose clientele." Dunny loosened the drawstring and pulled the scale from the inside. He inserted his finger into a small keychain ring at the
top of the scale, and then rummaged under the mattress with his other
hand and pulled out a small clear baggie of weed. "My smoking sack,"
he grinned. He clipped the sack onto the other end of the scale and
Christophe watched the needle on the small scale slide to five grams. "It's
a dub sack. Twenty dollars. A dime sack is 2.5 grams. Half of a dime sack
is a blunt. If you can help it, don't sell blunts. It's hard to make money
on blunts because you got so much loose change in your pocket and you
end up spending it."

"What is this, Pine Selling 101?" Christophe couldn't understand
where the jokes were coming from. Something about it felt manic,
panicked, and he had a flashback to his run home after his basketball
game with Dunny, of pine trees shuffling into a fence around him while
the cicadas sounded like an alarm and something breathed and followed
at his back. He opened his mouth and a high, giggly laugh came out; he
hadn't heard that laugh since his voice changed. For some reason, this was
even funnier, and he doubled over the sack he was holding in his hands
and crushed it to his chest, and it cushioned him like one of Ma-mee's
old needle-pinned sewing pillows. The smell of it was strong; it was good
stuff. When he sat up, Dunny was staring at him. His hand was still in the
air, and the smoking sack dangled like a Christmas tree ornament from
the branch of his finger.

Dunny unhooked the sack and balled it into his fist. He cupped it
in the hollow of his hand like a raw egg: careful of the delicate shell, and
sat down.

"You sure you want to do this?"

Christophe held the QP so that it sat on his flat palms like an offering
on a plate. Part of him wanted Dunny to take it. He looked at his cousin,
and then down at the bag. Or not.

"I got to." The weed was dense and packed with buds. Dunny scooted
forward.

"Maybe you ain't cut out for this. You got to know how to stay calm,
how to get everything you can out of this and make the shit worth it. You
think you can do that, Chris?"

"Yeah, Dunny."

"You sure? Really though."

Christophe looked at the baggie and noticed there were small, opaque
pockmarks where the stems had pushed against the baggie. Christophe
smoothed them over with his hand as if he could wipe them away. The
plastic stretched clear and then dimpled again.

"I'm sure. I'll do it til I get on my feet and find something else."

Dunny dropped the bagged scale on top of the QP of weed. The black
bag punctuated the baggie like the pupil of a dull green eye. It was staring
at Christophe.

"Alright, cuz. I'm going to hold you to that," said Dunny.

"You do that."

They talked for a while longer; Dunny lounging in his bed while
Christophe squirmed on the chair, the sack and the scale balanced
smoothly in his hands. Christophe was still talking when he noticed
Dunny had fallen asleep with his mouth open. Christophe walked to the
living room. He carried the sack and scale away from him, handled it the
way he would handle something poisonous and biting, handled it like
a snake. Ma-mee hadn't called yet, but he knew that Aunt Rita and Eze
should be getting home sometime soon. The last thing he wanted was for
them to walk in to him sleeping on the sofa with a quarter pound of weed
in his lap, so he stuffed it down the front of his shorts. They were baggy
enough so that the weed nested in the bulge of his crotch. He was careful
not to lean over into the sofa or to lean back; the skin of his head was still
tight, his braids were still fresh, and he didn't want to ruin them.

He tried to watch TV but instead dozed fitfully, jarred awake every
few minutes or so by his body tilting forward or sliding backward, when
he'd jerk upright to preserve his head. His lurching nap on the sofa made
him feel like a boat sliding into a slip, wary of the sea and the dock.
When he woke thirty minutes later, Dunny was still asleep, so Christophe
walked home. The baggie irritated him. It chafed at his side like a burr
grown to monstrous proportions: a prickly sticker bent on making the
carrier spread its seed. He murmured hello to Ma-mee, and in his room,
he closed the door, locked it, and sat on his bed. He pulled the bag and
scale out, stood, and grabbed a chair from the foot of his bed and slid it
over to his closet, where he climbed up and reached to the back of his shelf and pulled out a shoebox. He opened it and saw the familiar letters
and pictures, scribbled on in pink and purple ink, embroidered with small
drawings of people and lower case I's with hearts for dots. They were all
the letters and pictures he'd received from girls over the years. Felicia's
name shone like a neon sign. He scooped the paper to one side, deposited
the bags, and covered them over with letters. He shoved the box to the
back of the closet and propped an old pair of his basketball shoes on the
top of it to disguise the smell, and stepped away and down off the chair.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his head down, staring at the floor and
his hands until Joshua called for a ride home from work.

Joshua didn't expect the silence after he fell into the car, shining with
sweat and stinking. His T-shirt gathered under his arms and rolled into
the fold in the middle of his stomach. He thought of pulling it clear, of
fighting it into some semblance of smoothness, but he didn't have the
strength to wrestle with it as his brother started the car and pulled out of
the parking lot. Instead, he sank back into the cloth cushion, laid his head
on the headrest, and fell asleep.

Joshua expected jibes when he awoke; he had been jarred awake by
his own snoring, and as he opened his eyes to blink at the pines and the
slumbering, reclining oaks shading the car on its way to Bois Sauvage, he
noticed drool running in a slimy line down his chin and wiped it away.
He expected a laugh, but received nothing. Joshua looked over at his
twin to see his face filmy with sweat, his mouth set in a falling line. The
radio was silent. Joshua saw that Christophe's hair had been braided into
neat, looping rows; the hairstyle mirrored his own and curled along his
brother's head like a handful of glass beads. Joshua recognized that style;
it was Laila's.

"Did Laila come by and do your hair? I asked her to yesterday."

"Yeah."

"Oh." Joshua rubbed his eyes; the sweat seeped into them and burned
them shut again. Christophe cleared his throat to speak. It sounded as if
his brother was about to vomit.

"He back."

Joshua stared at his brother dumbly. He was too tired to think. Who
was back?

Him.

The answer unfolded in Joshua's head as neatly as an elementary
pupil's letter: easy along the edges and crisp until it lay revealed before
him, a little creased but otherwise clear, and written in a bold, clumsy
hand.

Him.

So that was why his brother was so quiet. Joshua turned and threw
his arm over his seat.

"Who told you?" Joshua asked.

"Laila."

"She saw him?"

"Yeah."

"Where?"

"In Bois Sauvage. On side of the church."

One of Joshua's earliest memories was of him and Christophe in the
yard with their grandfather, and of his grandfather coaching them to
drive a sow and her two piglets back into the sty. The pigs had been fat
and short and obstinate, and stank of sour corn. His small, chubby hands
had slid away from their muddied skin uselessly, and Pa-Pa had laughed
at the two of them. Joshua thought that had to have been easier than this
conversation.

"Doing what?"

"You know what he was doing."

Christophe, who never drove with both hands on the wheel, had one
at seven and one at two. Joshua pulled his shirt over his head; it rasped
against his skin wetly. It was like skinning a squirrel, and his naked back
felt good as the wind buffeted him through the window.

"She was sure?"

"He was leaning into Javon's car."

The sweat chilled him and as the wind flashed across his skin.
Christophe hit a bad, marsh-eaten patch of road, and a dull throbbing
bloomed in the small of Joshua's back. Christophe was frowning and
ignoring him. Joshua had heard stories about boys who never really knew
their fathers who met them when they got older and didn't recognize
them. The twins had been at least thirteen or fourteen the last time they
saw Sandman: what would he look like now?

When Joshua followed Christophe into the house, the living room was
dark and empty; Ma-mee was in her room. He could hear her humming
and shuffling, faintly. In the bathroom, he turned the cold tap on until he
couldn't turn it anymore.

Under the spray of the water, a loop of Sandman twelve years younger
on one of the last occasions he had spent time with them kept playing
in his head: Sandman, in a dirty T-shirt and navy pants with a spindly
fishing pole in one hand, handing him and his twin two overlarge, taped
fishing poles with string tied to the end with ragged, dirty bits of orange
feathers and sinkers attached. He had taken them fishing out at one of the
boat launches on the bayou. Joshua had dropped his stick, and the water
had closed around it like a fist, had sucked at the small leaden sinker, and
it had sunk.

Christophe had offered to let him take turns holding his own stick
but Joshua had refused and spent the rest of the time seated on the edge
of the launch, a shadow of his twin, and watched Sandman. He stared at
Sandman's mouth, which never seemed to close, and counted the teeth
he could see and his moles. Sandman had not noticed until it was time
for them to leave that Joshua did not have his fishing pole, and then he
scolded him because he said the sinkers cost money. He had seemed big,
absent, and mean. Joshua walked into his room, wanting to recall that
day to his brother so he could grasp the situation, could think it out, so
they could remember again who Sandman had been and who they were
now, and found his twin gone, and the room empty. The curtains at the
windowsill fluttered a weak hello.

Christophe needed to move his stash from the house, so he left before
his brother finished showering. Ma-mee was shaking out the pillows of
her bed, and when he left she was beating one of the cushions from her
chair in her room against her dresser, and muttering something about
dust. After shoving both bags in his underwear, Christophe went around
the back of the house to the shed; his grandfather had used it as a barn
and later, as a workplace for his carpentry, and when they were young
men, his uncles had kept their car there after his grandfather had gotten
rid of the cow and his horses. Ma-mee and the twins never used it for
anything; the tin roof sagged, and random car parts, feeding chutes, and stalls crumbled into one another in a stuffy, sweltering maze. Christophe
faltered at the door; the barn seemed to gather heat inside, to pull it
lovingly into its mouth.

Christophe crouched to the right of the opening, clutching at the
bags. His fingers hurt. He picked his way past a hulking car engine and
an empty oil barrel drum laced with cobwebs and rust, and cleared a
space on the sawdust and dirt floor. He took out the weed and set it on
his lap and began to measure it out carefully. Christophe peered at the
silver scale in the dim light of the barn and counted under his breath,
culling the stems, filling and weighing and adjusting the bags; too little
here, and too much there. He pulled sandwich bag after sandwich bag
from his pockets like a magician; he had forgotten to take them out after
Dunny gave them to him. Sweat ran down his forehead and pooled in the
creases of his eyelids; when he blinked, they rolled in fat teardrops away
from his eyes and down his cheeks, and stung. He bagged it all, and the
sacks lay on the earth in front of him in a small semicircle. He squinted at
them. In the dark, they looked like small spiders' egg sacks. He put three
dimebags and one dubsack into his pocket. He bagged the rest together
in one sandwich bag along with the scale, stashed it in an old Community
coffee can, scanned the yard, and ran out the door.

HRISTOPHE HEARD DUNNY BEFORE HE SAW HIM CRUISING TOWARD
the park. Dunny drove to the basketball court, dodging Skeetah
and Marquise who were walking their pit bulls, and parked his car
in the dirt parking lot. Javon, Bone, and Remy had parked their cars under
the shade of the pine trees at the edge of the park: Christophe watched
them pass paper bags he knew held thirty-two ounces of beer back and
forth across the gleaming hard tops of their cars in the distance. Crackheads
circled them warily, like mosquitoes. Dunny walked over to them and spoke.
Christophe slumped, almost curled in half over the picnic table bench. He
watched Dunny approach, and did not move when his cousin sat next to
him. He had not been able to approach the boys: he had not known how.