Where the Line Bleeds (33 page)

Joshua woke to Christophe's empty pristine bed, and to the sound
of the television. The sky was a dull gray. He walked to the living room,
expecting Ma-mee, and found Christophe. He was crouched on the floor
in front of the television, flipping through the channels manually by
jabbing at the controls at the bottom of the screen.

"What time is it?"

"Got a storm out in the gulf. On the other side of Cuba. They say
it's coming right for us." A storm pinwheeled across the TV in a neat arc
through the blue of the ocean, blue as air, to land solidly in the gulf. The
weatherman was yellow and wore a bad gray suit.

"You slept out here?"

"Should be here in two weeks or something." Christophe squinted as
if he could feel the winds. He couldn't stop tapping the television stand. He was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing the day before. Joshua
couldn't compete with the television, wouldn't beg an answer from his
brother's back, so he walked past Cille's room to get ready for work. Her
door was open, left slightly ajar, and she'd left her fan on. He cut it off.
She hadn't come home the night before. Her perfume swirled and settled
in the room.

In their room, Joshua pulled on his boots. He kissed Ma-mee and
would have walked away quickly if she hadn't tugged at his arm. Her eyes
were a dark blue in the rust-laced light.

"He smells like yesterday," Ma-mee said. Joshua looked down at her
hand on his arm. He did not want to confirm that he knew his brother
had hardly slept, that he was fidgeting, and that he hadn't taken a bath.
Joshua chewed the soft pink inside of his mouth; he couldn't lie to Mamee. "I'm worried about him," she added.

Outside, the horn pealed loudly.

"He looking like his daddy," she said. Ma-mee's grip on Joshua's arm
loosened, but still her fingers caressed him at his elbow. He bent to kiss
her. Her skin was wrinkled and wet against his lips. It slid with his mouth.
She smelled of vinegar.

"Take care of your brother."

He nodded and pulled away from her.

For once, Joshua did not fall asleep on the way to work, even though
he wanted to. He had waited for Ma-mee to go to bed the night before,
and then he had let Laila slide over him on the sofa, had let her sit heavy
and soft as ripe fruit in his lap, and kissed her. She had run her fingers
across the downy stubble of his face, over the soft hair of his sideburns,
and he had wondered at the wetness of her mouth. He had imagined her
insides, pink and breathing, the blood and bones and flesh that made
her, and wanted to be inside her. Yet Christophe had not made it home,
and Ma-mee slept the light sleep of the old in her room, and he knew
he could not do it like that. He had kissed and touched her in the hot
flickering dark and had driven her home at midnight. On his way back,
the headlights had flashed over Sandman, stooped over the handlebars of
his bike, pedaling his way slowly down the road: he had no hat on, and
his neck was bare and burned red, even in the dark. His palm had flashed pale in the air, but Joshua had not slowed: he did not know if Sandman
recognized the car. He supposed Sandman wanted a ride to the store, and
once there, to borrow money. That is what crackheads did. Yet, still, his
back was thin and narrow as Christophe's, and when the lights dissolved
over his face and left him in the black, for a moment he thought he saw
his brother.

He watched Christophe tap the steering wheel as he drove, jumping
lightly in his seat, and wondered when his brother had become so manic.
It had to be Javon. Why else was he twitching and gripping the steering
wheel with both hands? He should say something. He could see the
dockyard ahead of them on the horizon, stretching out like a finger along
the smooth blue water.

"When you think we should start putting boards up?" The words were
clumsy. Christophe turned to him, his forehead wrinkled, and turned
down the stereo. Still, Joshua shouted as if the music were still playing.
"It's the third one we done had this summer-ain't no reason for you to
be so nervous."

"It ain't the storm," Christophe said.

"Well, then what is it?"

Christophe put the car in park and Joshua felt the frame jerk.
Christophe pushed one hand against the dashboard, where his fingers slid
wetly through the dust, creating winding trails like writing, and the other
hand on the headrest of the passenger seat. He looked squarely at Joshua,
his chin down. He opened his eyes wider, purposefully.

"It ain't nothing."

Joshua stared at his brother's mouth, and then out at the parking
lot, the low seawall, the swooping seagulls dropping from the sky like
rain. Christophe switched the gear into drive and pressed on the brake.
He reached into his pocket with his right hand and pulled out a wad
of bills.

"For Ma-mee."

"This early."

"I know. I got lucky these past two weeks."

As Joshua slipped the money into his pants, he eyed the clock and
lost his patience.

"You fucking up," Joshua whispered.

Christophe slapped the steering wheel and turned on Joshua. "I'm
making money, nigga! I make more in one week than you do in two. I'm
trying, alright!"

"No, you ain't," Joshua said. He left the car with a slam.

Joshua could not stop thinking of Christophe under the leaden sky
and the sun that he felt was melting his brother, evaporating bits and
pieces of him to the clouds. He heard him again and again in his head,
repeating: nothing, nothing, nothing. He saw Christophe turn, bracing
himself to stillness on the wheel and the headrest, and saw his open
mouth. He had seen a thin red line there, bisecting his brother's tongue,
dividing it in two. Joshua balanced two boxes on his shoulders, felt his
back strain. The line. At first he had thought he imagined it, but it did
not disappear. It looked like a cut. He shifted the boxes to his hand and
slid them down to the pallet. He slid his palms over the sides to smooth
them, to correct the pile, and he felt the pallet lurch under his feet. A
board must have broken.

How could Christophe cut his mouth that way? What food sliced the
mouth in straight lines? Joshua forgot the seagulls hovering like vultures,
the parking lot smelling of hot tar, the boxes and sacks growing in a
column from his feet and saw Christophe's mouth but could not hear the
words he spoke. Joshua's hands felt squeezed, smashed, and he lurched
away from the boxes and fell to the pavement. Blood was on his hands
and wrists. He bent over, and pressed his palms together and held them
open like a book and saw that the skin had been slashed; it hung in petalpink strips from the root of his pinkies to his wrists. A man standing next
to him called out and he saw Leo running toward him. Leo pulled him
into the office, and Joshua let himself be led.

"I was checking the box," Joshua said. His hands were stinging. A
catfish had stabbed him with its dorsal fin once: it had throbbed like this.
They had been swimming on the beach with little nets Uncle Paul had
made for them. They had been eight then.

"One of them slats probably broke. They get rotted out by the salt
water and the wind. Your hand got caught in the ties on the boxes. I done
seen it cut before. Sharp as a razor."

Leo led him past piles of file cabinets, the receptionist, and a short
row of computers to a small room, narrow as a closet, off the main office. The blood ran down the seam of his fingers. Leo dabbed at his palms
with alcohol pads, and then flattened a towel between his hands and
sandwiched Joshua's big palms with his own. The pressure slowed the
blood. When Leo peeled away the towel, Joshua saw that the cuts were
roughly identical, and the meat beneath his skin was angry red.

"You might need stitches."

Leo drove him to the hospital in his own dark blue pickup truck. The
cab had leather seats.

"It's new," Leo said.

Joshua elevated his hands to drain them and kept the towel pressed
tight against the pain: he did not want to leak blood on Leo's seats. At the
hospital, the doctor sewed twelve perfect black stitches diagonally across
both of Joshua's palms. They were dark and tough as new tattoos. His
hands throbbed and swelled. The doctor told him to take ibuprofen for
pain, and wrapped his hands in gauze and tan wrappings that were light
against his perpetually sunburned skin. Back at the dockyard, he called
Ma-mee, even though he suspected that Christophe would not be there.
He wasn't. When Ma-mee asked if anything was wrong, he denied it.
He would tell her when he got home; he did not want her to worry. He
thought of the park. He hated his brother for being there. He thought of
calling Laila, and then Cille's cell. He thumbed through the phone book
clumsily with the tips of his fingernails, until he found the number. Javon
answered the phone. He sounded slow and high.

"Chris there?"

"Who this?"

"Joshua."

Suddenly Christophe was on the line, exhaling hard into the receiver.
His voice was thick with weed.

"I need you to come pick me up."

Joshua heard a click, and then a dial tone. Instead of his usual thirty
minutes, Christophe arrived at the edge of the dockyard in twenty. Joshua
held his arms folded across his chest, and eased into his seat.

"What happened?"

"Cut my palms open on a tie on a box. Had to get some stitches."

"You alright?"

"It ain't that bad. They gave me a week off." Joshua heard clattering
in the backseat, and looked around to find a sheaf of freshly scented
plywood marked hurricane.

"Where you get that from?"

"Stole it."

Christophe stopped at a burger place, ordered for Joshua without
asking what he wanted, and set the meal on the seat between them without
speaking. Staring at his hands on the steering wheel, Joshua imagined his
brother's palms, smaller than his own, pale and unmarked, and thought
of the black scribbling on his own, of the added difference between them.
He hated the immediacy of the wound: he wondered when he would
be able to touch something again without the wrappings, feel warmth
against his skin, and be rid of the throbbing pain. Joshua's soda was bitter,
and the fries left a waxy coating in his mouth. At the house, he left his
drink on the seat. Christophe picked it up, walked it into the house, and
threw it away.

HE FISSURES ACROSS JOSHUA'S HANDS FELT LIKE FISH GILLS TO
Ma-mee: the threads were tough, yet the thin slit of the wound
was leaking a yellow fluid that made the flesh hot and soft. She
had known something was wrong when Joshua had called. She had left
Cille talking midsentence and immediately walked from the kitchen
where she was chopping onions for butter beans and rice to the porch,
when she heard their car: Joshua walked in before Christophe. He held
his hands in the air. Even with her fuzzy eyes, Ma-mee could tell that
the color of the flesh was wrong, that the curve of his fingers was too
stiff, that something was over them, that something must have happened.
Christophe walked in behind him with his arms drawn into his sides and
his hands in his pockets.

Behind her, Cille hissed and reached around her to grab Joshua, to pull
him to her, to ask what happened. Ma-mee had sat as Joshua told them what
happened: the stacked boxes, the old crate, the rotting slats, the ripping
pain. The blood. She asked him to unwrap his hands, to hold them out
so she could touch them and reassure herself there were no broken bones,
no fingers ripped from his hand at the root by the thick twine. Cille had
laughed as if Ma-mee were foolish, and it was Christophe who bent over
Joshua's hands to unwrap the bandages. He smelled as if he hadn't taken a
bath. Joshua smelled of sea salt and sweaty, sun-baked skin. His palms were
swollen, and she could see black etching where there should be a wash of
pink and pale peach. The lifelines that bisected his palms like small ditches
were replaced by gashes, the perfect punctuation of the stitches. Ma-mee
pinched the knobby spines of his knuckles.

"Oh...Joshua." Ma-mee breathed. Cille brushed Ma-mee's shoulder
in the huddle as she made to touch Joshua's open hands, and Ma-mee
felt him startle. Cille paused, stone-heavy and still as she had been in the
womb, skin to skin, and then moved away: Ma-mee felt cold air between
them.

"They just cuts," Joshua said.

"Could've been worse," Cille said, and Ma-mee heard the concern
evaporate from her voice like rain from a horse's hot flank. She backed
away and sat across the room from them all on the sofa, watching. "Chris,
why you just picking him up now?"

"I got to do some work in the shed. Find some boards for the windows.
Storm coming." Christophe replied. His hands in his pockets, he was
already shouldering his way towards the door. Ma-mee felt her family
spinning away from her.

"No, you don't need to do nothing in the shed." Ma-mee piped.
"Hurricane ain't even coming this way for sure."