Where the Line Bleeds (26 page)

"What's wrong?"

"Where the sandwich bags at?" Christophe yelled.

"In here," she said, and opened a cabinet over the sink. Christophe
grabbed a handful of spoons and pens and dumped them into the drawer
and handed it to her as she passed him the box of bags. Sandman had
backed away to the refrigerator again: he looked especially small and
dirty next to the cream front of the refrigerator door. Felicia was wearing
something tight and red: she glittered in the small room like a ruby,
shaming Sandman's grimy clothing and face and the hungry beating of
Christophe's heart. He ran.

Christophe walked up to the group and stood with a gallon size
plastic Ziploc bag in his hand. Bone asked "You want a beer?" His buzz,
gone: his brother, drunk as his father and keeping things from him; and
Felicia, hard and cold as a jewel as she resumed her seat, not even looking
at him.

Javon handed Christophe a beer. When Christophe took it from him,
Javon's fingers were as cold as the beer bottle. Christophe peeled away
the gold Michelob paper, dipped into the shrimp cooler, and dumped
a spattering of shrimp onto his plate. He began to peel the shells away
from the bodies and eat, and let the beer grow warm, untouched. At the
nearest house, beyond a stand of woods, partiers were shooting firework cannons into the air. They shrieked into the navy sky and exploded in
shapes: a red flower, a yellow sun. Javon was breaking down a cluster
of purple-green weed for a blunt. Christophe pulled the tail away from
the meat. He wondered if Sandman was still raking back there in the
elongating shadows, and he imagined himself sneaking around the house,
hitting him hard enough with a beer bottle to make him collapse. If Javon
offered, Christophe planned to smoke. Another firework hurtled through
the air, and Christophe watched it ascend and dropped the shrimp from
his fingers when he saw it burst into a brilliant, sparkling blue flower. He
watched the flower flare and fade like rain down the pane of a window.
Another flower bloomed in the sky.

"Did you see that?" Christophe turned to Joshua to see him sucking
the last foamy residue from a bottle of beer, his head tilted back. He was
smiling around the bottle. Christophe wanted his attention. He kicked
him.

"What!" The bottle shaded Joshua's mouth so that all Christophe
could see of his brother in the dark was his eyes, which were curved like
machete blades at the corners. Joshua wiped at his shoe with his free
hand. "I know you ain't scuffed my shit." Joshua lost his balance and the
bottle moved with him as he slumped momentarily over. "I ain't got it to
burn," he mumbled. Christophe could see his mouth now; he was serious,
he wasn't grinning.

"The flower," Christophe said drunkenly, and looked up as another
blue rose erupted there.

"Oh," said Joshua. "I missed it." Christophe looked down and knew
his brother hadn't even bothered to look because he was doubled over
trying to peer at his foot in the dark. None of the others were looking at
the sky: it was as if only Christophe could see the miracle of those blue
flowers in that yard.

' OSHUA WONDERED WHY CILLE HADN'T SCHEDULED HER VACATION A
week and a half earlier so she could have spent the fourth with them,
but he remembered her jazz festival, and he told himself that was why
she hadn't come to see them on the holiday. At least she chose to fly in on a
Wednesday evening: he had asked Leo to let him off a little early so he could
ride to the New Orleans airport with Christophe to pick her up. When Leo
told him the supervisor had assented on Tuesday afternoon, Joshua had only
nodded. He was tired all the time, now. It colored his hours with another
longing besides wanting to be with Ma-mee, with Laila, to understand his
brother, and tangentially, his mother: a longing for rest, a longing for the
cessation of movement and worry about movement in the guise of gyrating
cranes and flying sacks and shifting crates and ascending lifts and sliding
pallets and diving gulls. When he went back to work two days after the
fourth, he'd remained alert enough to get his job done, and passed the hours
by daydreaming of swimming at the river with Laila. He'd imagined her on
his back while he stood in the amber, silvery water: her body soft against
him, her arms around his shoulders.

They took the back way to New Orleans. They forsook the fastest
route, deviating from the long, dreary, straight line of I-10 that ran from
the pines of Mississippi across the gray flat expanse of Lake Pontchartrain
into the low swamps of Louisiana to the bright steel and warped, garish
color of New Orleans; instead, they took 1-90. When Ma-mee was
younger, it was the route she took to the city. They headed west, and the two-lane highway shrank to a two-lane road, and then they were cruising
along the skirt of Lake Pontchartrain. Uncle Paul called it Duke country,
and Joshua figured Uncle Paul probably got his presentiment from a sign
outside one of the camps; even though David Duke had been defeated as
governor for Louisiana years ago, some fishing camp proprietor had kept
a huge homemade billboard on the edge of his camp facing the road that
read "Duke" in big white letters on a background so dark blue it almost
looked black.

The road wound before them through marsh grass and sparse pines,
and fishing camps dotted the asphalt's sides at regular intervals in tiny,
half-acre lots. The camps squatted on the edge of the bay at the water;
beyond them, Joshua saw the water of the lake on his right, and the
water of the Gulf of Mexico on his left. The fishing camps had names
like Bayou Fishing and Sauvage Critters and Rebel Rendezvous, and even
though Joshua had often ridden to New Orleans with his brother or with
Dunny or Ma-mee or Paul to the airport or to Bourbon Street or to
visit one of Ma-mee's brothers, he had never seen anyone, any living and
walking human beings, white or black, in any of those fishing camps. If
it weren't for the bright paint and the neatly shelled driveways and the
cut grass, he would've sworn that no one worked or lived there, that the
place existed as a mirage, as an idea, as a foreboding relic to black people
to remind them that outside their own communities, there existed enmity
and history and dread hidden in the pines and the marsh that was based
on the color of their skin.

In the summer of 1984, before Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park
closed, Ma-mee and Uncle Paul had taken them to visit the park. They'd
just turned three, and all Joshua remembered of that day was the roaring
battery of the colossal white Zephyr roller coaster that he was too afraid
to ride, and the eerie emptiness of the fishing camps and the road leading
to the park. With his arm out the window and the salty air whistling
cleanly up his nostrils, Joshua remembered the way Ma-mee had held his
hand while he watched Christophe walk off with Uncle Paul to ride the
roller coaster. When Joshua had asked his brother what it was like after
he'd gotten off, Christophe had only said that it was fast, and it jerked a
lot. Christophe hadn't asked to ride again, and had instead been content to sit at one of the benches along the boardwalk next to his brother and
eat the sandwiches that Ma-mee had packed for them. On their ride back
to Mississippi, as Christophe nodded off next to him with his head resting
on Joshua's shoulder, Joshua had sucked the remains of cotton candy from
the seam of his fingernails, and watched Ma-mee dangle her hand out the
window of the car and wave at the streaming night and rustling of marsh
grasses.

Joshua understood why Ma-mee loved the drive: in the setting sun's
light, the marsh grasses quivered and lashed violently in the wind, turning
one way and another to catch the light and turn from green to gold to
rose to wheat. The marsh greenery shuddered and bent into the caress of
the air crossing from the gulf to the lake over the narrow inlet of sand
and pine and grass; all of it shimmered and shone like Laila's face or Mamee's eyes or a broad, short, bow-legged pit in mid-leap through the airsomething made beautiful for its own sake, something inviting adoration
simply because it exists. Christophe turned the stereo down one notch so
they could hear the music and the sounds from outside the car at the same
time: the silky grass, the leaning and cracking pines, the insistent singing
of the insects. Both Joshua and Christophe had showered and dressed
to meet their mother in their new fourth of July outfits that Christophe
had recently washed. After Christophe picked him up from work earlier
that Wednesday afternoon, Joshua had starched both of their jean shorts
into cardboard stiff lines; the creases in the legs were like box edges. They
crossed a narrow bridge: Joshua was sure if he reached his arm out of the
window of the car as Ma-mee had done that evening, he could touch the
black rusted bars of the steel tunnel. The sun shone from the water in
golden, glassy waves.

It was always a surprise when 90 emptied out into the city. Suddenly,
they were in an old neighborhood east of New Orleans, and they followed
the signs to meet up with 1-10: once they were in the city, it was the
only way they knew to get to the airport. The signs that led them to
the interstate were small, green, and innocuous: they perched on skinny,
nearly invisible iron poles and hid themselves in clusters of oak leaves and
branches. The two hadn't really talked while they were getting ready, and
now there was something perfunctory about the way Christophe drove. He hadn't seemed excited when they left, and he'd tied a rag over his
hair instead of oiling it for Cille. Joshua lay his head tentatively on the
windowsill of the door and stared out at the projects. The red, faded
two-story brick buildings squatted in obscure, unexpected places: they
waited with patient tenacity in the sudden corners of the city. They sat
perched at regular intervals in the maze of New Orleans streets; they
spread over sandy, oak-studded lots and menaced the warped, salmon
pink or turquoise blue old mansions that cringed away from them across
the wide, grassy, oak lined avenues. The trolley cut like a razor blade on
its tracks to separate the two. Everyone he saw in the streets seemed cut
from the trunks of the ancient, bowing oaks. Joshua watched small dark
children play inscrutable games on the sidewalks.

The balconies on the buildings looked as if they were going to sag and
collapse into one another like cards. Women in stretched-out, oversized
T-shirts and short skirts braided hair on their stoops. The boys who sat
between the women's legs were shirtless or wore wide-necked, off-white
T-shirts and wifebeaters. Those who were already braided or wore hats
seemed always on the verge of crossing the streets at corners. They played
dice games against pockmarked deli storefronts that sold beer, food,
crawfish and shrimp poboys. They spoke to one another and gold shone
when their mouths opened. Older, gray-haired women in long, shapeless
skirts entered the dark mouths of the delis and surfaced with small brown
paper bags. Men that reminded Joshua of Sandman walked along the
sidewalks and crossed the streets heedless of the slow flow of traffic; they
danced between the cars and stared wide-eyed at the windshields. Their
hair stood in knotted, luxuriant half-afro-half-dreaded shocks.

The whole city seemed on the verge of collapsing, of coming apart
and spewing into the streets to slide and submerge in the river. Joshua
imagined it all gone: the levees, the sea of white aboveground tombs, the
French Quarter, the flickering sparkle of the knot of shiny skyscrapers
called downtown, and the huddling rows of high-windowed, woodensided houses warped soft by the salty, sulfurous air and the rain. Christophe
stopped at an intersection, and Joshua looked out the window to see a
knot of people clustered at a bus stop: they were mostly black. A boy
who Joshua estimated was around his own age stood slumped into the glass side of the bus shelter. He wore a white bandana pulled so low over
his forehead it rimmed his eyebrows. His skin contrasted so darkly with
his bandana and his white T-shirt he seemed cut from a black and white
photograph, and Joshua noticed the smooth skin of the boy's forearm
was interrupted by a rough round scar of keloid skin. The mark shone
shiny and round and blush colored, like pink lips half-open to a dark
mouth. Joshua saw another scar on the boy's bicep; the scars were raised
and angry and perfect and reminded Joshua of brandings he had seen on
animals. Joshua knew what caused those scars: bullets. The boy sneered
and raised the corner of his lip to show one perfect, gold-plated tooth. It
looked like a dagger in his mouth. Joshua looked away. The light turned
green, and they sped to Canal Street, the I-10 West on-ramp, and the
airport. The highway rose and dipped and curved on a complex system of
bridges the city had built over the city streets and houses below: Joshua
closed his eyes against the nausea rousing itself in his stomach.