Where the Line Bleeds (21 page)

"Every time you get paid, I'll just give you a hundred. Tell her they
paying you more than you thought they was."

"What if she know I'm lying?" Joshua looked out the passenger
window.

"Just tell her you work through lunch and when I don't pick you up
on time, they pay you overtime."

She would never know that she was receiving money from both of
them. She would not want to take the money even from him. She would fuss and say that they got along on her Social Security and Medicaid just
fine. He would slip it into her purse.

"Here." Christophe dug in his pocket and took out a wad of bills
folded in half. The bills looked worried over, faded. Joshua didn't want to
give them to her.

"Where's the wallet Cille gave you?" Cille had sent them matching
leather wallets on their fifteenth birthdays. The twins had carried them
everywhere even though sometimes the only thing in them were pictures
of Ma-mee and Cille and Aunt Rita and their own wallet-sized individual
basketball team photos: Joshua had worn the wallet until it curved in the
middle and the leather that rubbed against pocket of his jeans was dull
and textured as suede. He still wore it.

"It fell apart."

Joshua did not let Christophe know that he knew that Christophe had
saved it; Christophe had stashed the wallet like some drooping and wilted
prom flower in one of his love-note shoeboxes in the top and back of the
closet. Christophe counted three twenties, four fives, and twenty ones.
He handed the larger bills to Joshua with one hand and apologetically
gave the ones to his brother with his other hand and shrugged, "For
change." Joshua grabbed both handfuls and sandwiched them together
before shoving them into his wallet.

"Alright then." Joshua slid the wallet into his back pocket. It felt as if
he was sitting on a thick, dirty balled-up sock.

"I smelled it." Christophe said. "Ma-mee always say we got that blood
in us, the kind that know things, that Bois Sauvage blood. I know she can
tell the weather, but I swear, before them clouds came and before I even
knew they was on the way, I smelled it in the air. It was like a metal kind
of smell." Joshua nodded, and his head slid back and forth against the
glass. He knew it left a greasy smudge. "Shit, soon as I jumped up from
the bench after I saw them clouds, it started coming down hard. I just
stood there for a minute, though. It felt good." Joshua nodded again. He
had been slow walking across the parking lot to the car.

The twins sat like that for the thirty minutes it took for the rain to
ease up. Joshua closed his eyes repeatedly and tried to sleep; he couldn't.
He was surprised that he couldn't. He watched Christophe blearily; he realized that Christophe had taken out his braids and pulled his hair back
into a frizzy, short, ponytail. Joshua hadn't realized his brother's hair was
that long; Christophe's hair had always grown a little faster than Joshua's
own. It had been a couple of days since he had talked to Laila; he'd have
to call her and see if she could braid their hair again. He knew his own
hair stank like cold wax, and that when Laila combed the braids out,
it would come out in ropy knots. He knew he wouldn't care, and he
wouldn't complain, as long as he could feel the press of her thighs against
his shoulders.

After the rain fell away in fits, after it eased up and the worst of
it withdrew out over the gulf like a woman gathering her coat and
leaving a room, Christophe drove them home. The swish and sway of
the windshield wipers echoed through the car. Joshua thought to ask his
brother for a blunt, because he wanted the smoke to massage the residue
of muscle ache from his arms and legs, but he didn't. If Christophe didn't
have something rolled when he picked Joshua up, then he didn't want to
smoke. Christophe only handed Joshua a blunt to light and smoke twice
since he had been selling. Both times, he set it on the dashboard when
Joshua got into the car; Christophe placed it there as if he didn't wanted
to hand it to his brother. Joshua half-shut his eyes and listened to the rain
fling itself at the car.

At the house, Christophe opened the screen door to the porch and let
if fall without holding it open for his brother. Joshua sighed and licked
his lips as he mounted the steps and sucked at the water and salt he found
there. When he followed his brother into the gray, humid living room,
Christophe had stopped. Laila was sitting on the sofa. Ma-mee wasn't in
her chair.

"Where's Ma-mee at?" Christophe's voice was slightly hoarse; he
sounded as if he hadn't spoken in days. Joshua figured that his brother didn't
talk much while he was sitting down at the park waiting for customers.
Joshua thought about him often while he was lifting and throwing bags of
chickens and crates of bananas. In his mind, Christophe wasn't sprawling
across the bench with his charismatic dark limbs, but instead was roundshouldered and stooped, and his eyes were always studying the road as he
waited for clientele and the blue flash of the police. In his head, he saw Christophe's face through a metal screen, and his worry angered him.
Sometimes, jealously, he pictured Javon or Marquise with him, and he
wondered if Laila ever walked down to the court, and if she talked to him.
"And why you ain't got the TV on?"

"Miss Rita came and picked her up. She said they was going shopping."
Laila crossed her arms, and then buried her hands into the crevices of the
couch cushions. She looked nervous. "I just, uh, I told her I would wait
on y'all. Wasn't nothing good on TV," she whispered. Christophe turned
back to look at his brother.

"I got stuff to do." Christophe turned away and receded down the
hall. Joshua sat on the sofa at the other end from Laila, and placed his cap
carefully on the armrest. He smoothed it with his wet, dirty hand, and
then began to quickly unlace his boots. Ma-mee would kill him if he got
mud on the carpet. He'd forgotten. Shit.

"So, how was work today?"

"It was alright."

"You usually get off earlier than this, right?"

"Yeah, but the rain...." Joshua pulled off both of his boots and laid
them on their sides. He hesitated, and then picked them up and set them
outside the front door on the porch. When he sat back down, Laila seemed
closer to him on the sofa. From the back room, he heard nothing; it was
as if his brother wasn't even there. He wished the rain would fall harder
outside; the silence that pervaded the house was unnerving. "So." He was
sure Laila was scooting closer to him. It was like watching a minute hand
on a clock move; he could never see it, but he'd blink, and it would be in
a different place. "You going to get a summer job?"

"Naw, I don't think so. Summer's almost halfway over, now. Fourth of
July is like, next week." She was staring at him like a bird.

"What you do all day then?" Niggas didn't look at each other when
they talked; he'd noticed that. They looked straight ahead and away most
of the time; unless you were about to fight or making a joke, you never
looked at a man in his face.

"I baby-sit my little cousins. My auntie pays me fifty dollars a week."
Yes, her knee was touching his, now. All he could feel was a pressure there
as he studied her knee, tan and round, lightly touching his leg through
the dirty press of his jeans.

"That's cool." The long, ripe line of her thigh was beside his. He felt
a muscle cramp sullenly in his calf. He ignored it, and looked at her face.
It was red.

"Joshua?"

"Hmm?" He could feel her breath on his face as she spoke to him.
She smelled like lotion and licorice.

"Are you ever going to kiss me?" It was a whisper. She was staring at
his lips and his eyes. She turned redder; she must've realized that she was
nearly in his lap. She looked at the wall. A knock sounded from deep
within the house; it sounded as if Christophe was breaking something.
Joshua knew her skin would be soft, that it would give under his fingers
like water so that he would not be able to tell whether it was really there.
Her blush made him want to smile. She was determined, and shy, and
stubborn, and he liked her for it. He knew he stank, but he didn't care.
Joshua leaned forward and placed his hand next to her shoulder on the
back of the sofa and kissed her. Her hand came up to the side of his
face; her fingers on his cheek felt as light as an insect. She opened her
mouth and her lips and tongue were warm; he shivered as slivers of water
made their way from his hair down the back of his neck. He pulled away,
hesitated, and then kissed the corner of her lips with his mouth closed,
and sat back. She wiped her hair back away from her face and smiled. He
felt awkward and stupid; what if Ma-mee or Christophe had walked in?

"I need to go take a shower."

"Alright." She ducked her head and swallowed, and he wondered if she
was still tasting his mouth on her tongue again, if she was remembering
it like the flavor of ice cream or juice. He knew he would not be able to
forget her taste now that he had it for the first time; he wanted to kiss her
again, to coax her onto his lap and run his hands down the warm curve of
her back and turn her face to his with his mouth, but he wouldn't, not in
the living room, not with his brother knocking around the house. Dunny
had always joked about them sharing girls, but it had never been that way
between them.

Joshua showered quickly. By the time he got out, Ma-mee was walking
down the hall and Laila wasn't in the living room anymore. He readjusted
the knot holding the towel at his waist.

"Laila told me to tell you she had to go home. She had something
to do. She said she was going to call you tonight." Ma-mee paused. "She
sweet on you, huh?"

Her gown was pink and bright and new.

"Got a new gown, huh?"

"Joshua," Ma-mee pinched his arm. Joshua covered it with his hand
and cowered. She laughed and pinched him again.

"Ow. I'm sensitive." He laughed.

"You like her?"

He didn't know what to say.

"She like you. Be nice to her." She rose on her toes and he leaned
down into her. She pinched him again. "Men shouldn't have eyelashes
like that."

Ma-mee turned and touched the wall once and twice with her hand
as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. He heard
her get a pot from one of the cabinets, and a second later, turn on the
faucet. In their room, Christophe had fallen asleep in the middle of
counting his money, and was stretched out with his arms thrown over his
head as if he had been surprised, his mouth open, the bills ragged and
bunched underneath him. Sometimes he still slept as he did when they
were younger: wild, fighting with the walls and wrestling with the sheet.
Joshua pulled the pillow so that it rested squarely under his brother's head;
Christophe's snoring abruptly stopped. Joshua hurried to find clean, dry
clothes and pulled them on quickly: he would slip the money into her
purse while she was in the kitchen.

Joshua did not sleep well for the rest of the week. His dreams
alternated between nightmares about his brother and hazy glimpses of
Laila. By the end of his third week of work, Joshua felt as if he'd never
done anything else besides work at the dock; the summer rains had
begun, and his life was straining against bags and throwing heavy boxes
and rain and salt stinging his eyes and the sun parting the clouds like a
knife and burning down upon him and steaming the men's skin and the
endless concrete. Everything smelled of metal and stank. Ma-mee packed
small lunches of tuna fish and potato salad and apples for him, and he
ate his lunches alone, on the pier, or when it rained especially bad, at a corner table in the cafeteria with some other black men around his
own age from Germaine; he laughed at their jokes and their conversation
sometimes, but was often silent. He woke up each morning drained, and
the brutal monotony of work at the pier stunned him. Something about
it felt insulting and wrong. He was jealous and would often not speak
to his brother on the way to work, disgusted by the fact that Christophe
would spend his day chilling at the park. His paychecks made him feel a
little better, but still he was glad when the weekend came. He fell asleep
early on Friday night, and woke with Christophe near noon. It had rained
earlier that morning, but when they woke the sky was barely studded with
clouds, a deep, rich blue. The twins dressed and walked to the court, and
Joshua waved at people sitting on their porches or cutting grass with rusty
push lawnmowers. Christophe punctuated his waves with dribbling their
basketball. Otherwise their walk was quiet, their mutual animosity a veil
between them.

It seemed that nearly everyone they knew was at the basketball court.
A crew of boys from St. Catherine were running a game with some boys
from the neighborhood; as they approached the court, Joshua saw Skeetah
fly into the air and swat the other team's ball away from the goal and out
of bounds. Marquise retrieved the ball and threw it back into play. Joshua
and Christophe walked toward the small bleachers, and were surprised
to find them laden with clumps of people: Joshua saw Laila sitting with
Felicia on the bottom bleacher. He'd talked to her briefly the night before
he'd fallen asleep, had known that she was going to be there, but had not
given that as a reason to his brother when he asked him if he wanted to
go. He had not talked to his brother about his desire to take her to the
movies, to eat at some nice restaurant, to play at the miniature golf place,
or the fact that he had asked her to go out with him and she had said yes.
Perhaps they could double date with Christophe and Felicia.

Some kids were running along the middle bleacher and jumping off
the end, yelling as they hit the ground. Javon sat with Bone on the top
bleacher. They were passing a blunt back and forth. Christophe yelled
in the general direction of the court, "We got next!" and Joshua caught
Laila's eye and smiled a close-mouthed smile at her and settled next to his
brother on the bench. Javon nudged Christophe's shoulder with the hand holding the blunt: Christophe shook his head as he glanced at Felicia and
muttered, "No thanks." Joshua followed his brother's lead and refused the
blunt even though the smell was sweet. Joshua tried not to inhale sharply;
he didn't want to look like some sort of junkie, sitting on the bleachers
sniffing the air hard for a whiff of blunt. The little kids, Cece, Dizzy, and
Little Man clambered back up and stopped in front of Christophe. They
were glaring at him and Joshua. The little girl was older than the other
two; she stood with her hands on her hips and she cocked her head to the
side and glared at them. Her hair cloaked her shoulders in fuzzy braids
and she was so light skinned that the skin across her nose and cheeks had
burned. She opened her mouth, and Joshua saw she was missing her two
front teeth. She was probably around six. Joshua coughed and laughed.
The two boys behind her looked around two years younger than her;
they wore short, tight T-shirts that hugged their potbellies and they stood
together close as twins. One was light and one was dark; the dark one
stuck out his tongue at Joshua.