Where the Line Bleeds (27 page)

"You think you could slow down on them curves?" Joshua asked.

"Naw." The car accelerated. "She probably already there, and I don't
want to hear her mouth." Christophe cleared his throat, and an airplane
whined low overhead.

Through the waiving cattails and the short, new trees lining the approach
to the airport, Joshua saw that Mayor Ray Nagin welcomed him to the Louis
Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Joshua's stomach clenched
again. He looked at the clock. She would be waiting for them.

Christophe turned into the arrival lane and slowed to a crawl: this
was the first time they'd ridden to the airport and picked up Cille without
Uncle Paul or Ma-mee. They had no money to park in the garage. Joshua
got out of the car and slammed the door shut. A pale cop in dark blue
uniform nodded at him coolly.

"I'll go get her," Joshua said.

"I'll make the circle," Christophe replied as he turned the volume
on the stereo higher and saluted the cop with his pointer finger: Joshua
knew he was only doing it to annoy the officer. The trunk vibrated with
beat. The cop's neck was glazed, and meaty. The policeman stepped to the
edge of the sidewalk towards the car as Christophe drove off. He wanted
to yell at Christophe about getting a ticket: he didn't have the money to
pay for it.

The automatic doors to the airport entrance slid shut behind Joshua
and a blast of cold air hit him in the face and the chest. Luggage carousels
sat embedded at regular intervals along the corridor to his right and his
left. Crowds of people surrounded the few carousels that moved; the
people shuffled wearily, yawned with pasty mouths. Once in a while
someone would dart forward and pull a taut, fat piece of luggage from
the belt and drag it out of the way of the crowd. The family had gone to
pick up Cille from the airport for the first time when Joshua was fifteen,
and from that one trip, he knew that the carousels were usually slow, and
that Cille's luggage always seemed to be last on the belt.

He passed a mother and a small girl sitting in the waiting area: the
woman held the child in her lap and rested her chin on the girl's braided
brown hair. The little girl wore shorts and her legs hung bare and slack
next to her mother's long skirt. They were both dozing. Joshua looked
for Cille and wondered if he would be able to recognize her immediately
when he saw her. He pictured her as he last saw her: eating cornbread at
the table, magenta lipstick that came off in smudged kisses on the golden
top of the bread. He walked past the woman and the little girl again, and
stood on the wall in the middle of the corridor. He felt as if he could
not swallow, and every time he saw a short, pecan-colored woman with
smooth skin and shoulder-length hair, he was startled. Joshua scanned the
hallway and wished that he had a hat to pull over his face.

Cille stood on the outer rim of the baggage carousel nearest Joshua.
She was wearing a tank top and long white pants, and she had a black carryon bag slung over her shoulder. She was thicker than he remembered: the
round plump circle of her upper arm was fleshier than when he had last
seen her, and so was her face. Her hair had been curled into stiff ringlets;
she must have fallen asleep on the plane because several curls in the back
were smashed flat. She looked tired. In the profile of her body, her soft,
falling chin, and the slight pouch at her stomach, Joshua saw Ma-mee. A
man wearing a pink polo shirt and moccasins squeezed past her to elbow
his way to the front of the crowd to pull a suitcase away from the pulley.
Cille looked at him, her mouth slightly open, and rolled her eyes. Joshua
was surprised at the sudden shock of electricity through his chest and
up out of his throat that urged him away from the wall, that urged him to grab the man, to push him so that he lost his fat-fingered grip on his
luggage and fell. Before he knew what he was doing, Joshua was walking
toward her. Part of him would have liked to remain on the wall, unseen
and watching her.

"Hey, Cille."

She turned to him and her hair moved like a dark cloud and obscured
part of her face. Her eye shadow was smudged. Her face froze slack and
soft, and then her eyes wrinkled and creased at the corners, and she was
smiling, and she knew him.

"Joshua."

Cille held her arms out, bent at the elbow, to him. Joshua embraced
her. He placed his fingers delicately on her back; he touched her with
the pads of his fingertips as if he were balancing a basketball. Cille was
patting his back lightly, repeatedly, as if she were burping an infant. He
inhaled her. When he was younger, he remembered her wearing perfume
that came in small, golden bottles that were shaped like shells, bottles
that he could almost close in his childish fist. There were five of them.
He wondered if she still had them. She smelled the same, she smelled to
him like the day she left and they'd taken that picture that neither he nor
Christophe wanted to take. He was so nervous. She drew back from him
before he straightened and stood.

"You got another bag?"

Cille nodded, and Joshua saw a spray of fine lines at the corner of
her eyes, light as chicken scratchings in sand, as she smiled another small,
closemouthed smile.

"The gray one with all the flowers on it."

The man who had brushed past Cille was gone. Joshua wove through
several people who stood still as pillars on the rim of the carousel with
muttered, breathy "excuse mes," and before her suitcase disappeared
behind the black plastic curtain leading beyond the wall to where the
baggage handlers were throwing luggage, he pulled it from the line. The
belt clanked and whined as it shuffled past, and behind its spinning
protestations, he heard the baggage handlers crying to each other in broad,
black New Orleans accents. The vowels sounded from their mouths long
and sliding; he imagined their tongues to be pink shovels.

"Hey, now! Watch, there! You missing one, yeah!"

Joshua walked back to Cille. He was tempted to throw the suitcase
over his shoulder like a case of chicken. He stopped abruptly in front of
Cille. He wondered if she could smell his cologne. He wondered if she
liked his outfit.

"Christophe waiting outside with the car," he mumbled. She nodded
and hitched the carry-on further up on her shoulder. Her rings glittered
gold. He expected her to walk ahead of him towards the door. "You want
me to get that?" Cille shook her head, and her hair swung across her face
again as she turned and began walking for the door.

"Let's go."

Joshua followed her. She walked listing to her side to balance the bag
on her hip. He fell in line next to her and slipped his fingers under the
strap on her shoulder and pulled it. He settled it on his own collarbone; he
was unbalanced, but he didn't care. She had looked like she was limping.

"I got it," she said from behind him, her arms now weightless. Her
hard-soled sandals clicked on the tile.

"It's alright," he offered.

Joshua walked through the heat lurking like a fog before the automatic
sliding doors. The doors hissed open and he heard Cille stop next to him,
and he looked down at her. Sweat was beading in a mustache over her
top lip.

"It always seem hotter down here than in Atlanta," she said.

Joshua grunted. The Caprice's engine was loud and hoarse, and as
Christophe pulled up to the curb, Joshua felt as if he was seeing the car for
the first time. The gray-blue paint had an old, solid sheen to it. The trunk
was silent, and Joshua looked back and saw that the cop was harassing a
man in a black Lexus who was parked at the corner with his yellow hazard
lights blinking. The man was arguing with his hands as a woman in heels
made her way to him. All they needed were some new tires; rims, perhaps,
around New Year's if he could save up enough money. Christophe bent
quickly to unlock the trunk, and Joshua was careful to position her bags
on the top and the sides of the speakers: he didn't want them to shift and
pop anything. Christophe would kill him, and they couldn't afford new
speakers. Christophe opened the front passenger seat door for her.

"Hey, Cille."

"Hey, Christophe." She held her arms out to him as she had to Joshua,
and he moved in to hug her. Joshua saw he patted her on the back as she
had patted him, and that Christophe was the first to move away.

"You sit in the front," Joshua said to her, as he opened the back door
and climbed in the seat. He began rolling up the window. She hated
riding with the windows down. Christophe and Cille slid in the car at
the same time on opposite sides of the Caprice, and Cille rolled up her
own window slowly. Christophe turned on the air conditioner and in
the backseat, Joshua grimaced. He swore he could smell a hint of weed
in the air blowing from the vents even though he had sprayed them with
Febreze before they'd left; it smelled like stale hay. Christophe blew on a
CD, wiped it on his shirt, peered at the back, and then slipped it into the
CD player.

Horns sizzled and Al Green wailed. Normally, Christophe would turn
up the volume until it sounded like Al was sitting in the backseat, until
Joshua could almost imagine him as a young, wiry man, his teeth white
and sharp in his dark face, looking as if he'd jumped from the album
cover, sweating and screaming his song in their ears. Dunny would laugh
at them when they listened to Al Green like that, but Christophe would
tell him that Al Green could bump. Joshua would just close his eyes and
listen to the music. It was like the jumping into the river for the first time
after a long, cold winter, immersing himself in the warm embrace of the
water after surfacing from the kind of winter where frost froze the grass to
knife blades overnight and the pipes under the house burst if they didn't
wrap them with blankets. Now, Al sounded timid.

"Thank God the air conditioner work in here. I felt like I was going
to melt out there." Cille paused. "How y'all like the car? Eze sent me
pictures."

"It's real nice. Thank you," Christophe said. He turned off the airport
drive and onto the entrance ramp for I-10. Traffic was light; Christophe
passed an old pickup truck with moldy lumber on the back going forty,
and then a small black sports car sped past him so quickly he almost
missed it. Cille laughed.

"Traffic in New Orleans still the same." The air conditioner was
blowing hard and Joshua could feel the sweat drying on his skin until it felt grainy, as it had when he and Christophe were younger when they'd
play in the ditches and in the red dirt roads and let clouds of dust settle
over them. Joshua saw the Canal Street exit and wondered if Christophe
would take it, if they would go back to Mississippi the way they came.
He knew Cille hated taking 90; she thought the route was too long and
too circuitous, and she said she didn't want to risk a flat out there in the
middle of Klan country. Joshua hoped Christophe would take the exit
anyway, would feign ignorance; Joshua could imagine the way the light
would shatter across the windows in prisms as the sun set behind them. It
would be a shame to ride with the windows closed. Joshua felt Christophe
press on the brakes as the car slowed. Cille put her hand on the back of
Christophe's headrest and spoke.

"I'm glad you decided to take I-10. I'm ready to get home."

Christophe accelerated and passed the exit. They were streaming past
the suburbs of the city and entering a corridor of green low, swampy
trees interrupted by strip malls and small cities of apartment complexes.
They were made of brown brick and board and always had For Rent
banners hanging from their sides: it was all ugly. Cille fell silent in the
front seat, and he saw her head angle to the side, her shoulders slump: she
was sleeping. He wanted to ask Christophe what he thought about her,
whether he noticed anything different, but her lightly dozing presence
stopped him. Christophe had been mostly quiet since the fourth, had
answered most of his questions with silences. The trees waved soundlessly
and cars cruised past them, and he could see her shoulder at the airport,
see where the strap bit into her shoulder and left the flesh there red and
tender like a hickey, when he pulled it from her. He and Christophe did
not talk until he pulled into the yard in a steady rain, and Christophe
asked Joshua if he wanted to wake her up. Christophe left the car to pull
the suitcases from the trunk, and Joshua woke their mother.

Ma-mee had made red beans and rice. The day before, Christophe
had come home directly from dropping Joshua off and had helped glean
the small hard pale beans from the pot that were gray or dense as stones,
to find those that could not be cooked. She could only tell so much by
feeling them with her hands. She had asked Christophe if he'd had any luck
with putting in applications, and after he'd told her no, he hadn't spoken as he helped. He'd left soon after they were done. She'd felt concurrently
guilty and justified about her nagging while she'd ladled spices into the
pot along with the beans: garlic, Vidalia onion, bell pepper, green onion,
bay leaf, and thyme. When she heard the boys pull into the yard, the
beans were bubbling and simmering spicy hot, the biscuits were right to
the touch, giving like cotton under her hand, the skin on the chicken was
crusted and cooling in a container on the table, and she was sitting in her
chair before the television.

When Cille was a toddler, Ma-mee had left her in the yard with the
boys and the scratching chickens to bring a load of clothes in from the
clothesline, and when she walked out the back door, she found Cille
squatting on the side of the house, grabbing fistfuls of tender green grass
shoots with clumps of red clay adhering to them with her small hands
and shoving it all in her mouth and chewing. Something about seeing her
child like that had made Ma-mee want to laugh: the wide, long-fringed
eyes, the direct stare, and the earnest chewing. Something else about it
made her want to cry: the snotty nose, the dirt stained like vomit down the
front of Cille's chest, her knotted curly hair. Ma-mee had brought Cille
in the house, and attempted to feed her things that would make her lose
her craving for grass and dirt. It wasn't until Ma-mee began feeding Cille
biscuits every morning for breakfast-dense, floury, chalky biscuits-that
she had stopped eating from the yard. Ma-mee automatically cooked them
whenever Cille visited: perhaps her child no longer had a taste for them.
The twins did. Weeks earlier, Christophe had even begun making biscuits
for the family; he followed her recipe but still his biscuits were uneven,
spongy soft but riddled with hard rocks of silty flour that startled the
mouth. Ma-mee had changed the sheets on the bed in the extra bedroom
even though no one had slept on them for over six months, and as she
switched the television off, she could smell the lingering, close sweetness
of the fabric softener. Underneath that was the aroma of wet wood; the
rain had come suddenly, and after Ma-mee heard a slap of thunder, the
quick drum of rain rolled over the roof. Below the knocking of the rain
on the house like hundreds of hands, she heard a light step followed by
heavier steps on the porch. The screen door creaked, and Cille was the
first to walk into the living room.