Where the Line Bleeds (35 page)

"Come on, Javon, I know you got it."

"Leave the boards and get the fuck off my property." Javon was
luminous in the light from the bare bulb outside the door. "Yeah, I got
it and I told you I ain't giving it to you!" Javon said. He stepped out into
the patchy, sand-eaten grass next to the door.

Sandman stopped and Javon bumped into him. Christophe could
hear the bugs, big as his thumb, circling and weaving into the bulb, only
to loop away singed to do it again.

"Who the fuck you think you is?" Sandman rasped.

Javon spit. Christophe stood in the doorway. Sandman's head topped
Javon's shoulder, and his eyes glazed over Christophe.

Javon did not reply. He struck. His arm lashed out and he cupped
Sandman's face hard; the noise was hollow and loud. The cuff sounded
as if a watermelon had been dropped, split seedless and red in the dirt.
Christophe surprised himself: a short, jabbing laugh pealed from his
throat, high-pitched and giggly as his brother's. Sandman did not turn
and crumple to the side as Christophe thought he would. Instead, he
folded toward the earth, and then he leapt forward and grabbed Javon
with his thorny arms around the waist. Christophe stepped through the
door and stumbled over an empty forty bottle, which was clinking along
the ground underfoot like a fallen Christmas tree ornament.

Sandman hit Javon in the face. Javon shoved him away and boxed
Sandman's other cheek. Sandman growled and rushed him, and Javon
stepped to the side; he was holding his cheek and laughing. Sandman
flailed against Javon, his fists connecting with Javon's sides so lightly they
sounded like small exhalations of air: pfft, pfft, pfft. Sandman darted to the
right just as Javon reached out to box him again, and his fist lashed out,
blurred, and cracked against the side of Javon's face. Christophe knew
who had given him his own quick reflexes. Javon leaned back and away
from Sandman and Christophe saw his eyes thin to slits and his mouth
spread and his teeth show sharp.

Javon was not laughing any longer. He struck. Sandman reeled to
the side and lurched to the ground. He ran toward Javon again, blindly
swinging. Javon struck again, and Christophe noted the difference in
the sounds: there was bone in this break, something hard about the hit.
Sandman fell to the ground and Christophe heard glass shatter. Javon did not stop. He lumbered over Sandman and punched him deliberately
with wide, artful blows; his arms swung as if he were clearing underbrush
with a machete. Sandman kicked at Javon's legs and pulled himself along
the ground. Javon was not stopping. He palmed a bottle in his hand and
came down hard with it on Sandman's head. The glass shattered like a
gunshot.

"Stop!" Christophe yelled.

Javon's shoulders were sharp and writhing as a pit's under Christophe's
hands, and Christophe shoved him so that they menaced Sandman like a
wave. In Christophe's head, there was a blank wall. The noise of the night
insects ripped through it.

"You going to fucking kill him," Christophe said.

"You going to take up for this nigga?"

"You going to kill him and what's that going to do?"

"What, he your daddy now?"

"Fuck you!" Christophe yelled. His fingers bit into Javon's shoulders,
and he pushed, just as he felt a solid body hit him from behind.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Joshua held him by the neck,
squeezed the base of Christophe's skull, and Christophe struggled against
him. "He's a old man, Chris." Christophe jerked away from Joshua as
Joshua tried to fling him away. Anger buried itself in his chest.

"You don't know!" Christophe turned with the momentum of the
push and punched Joshua. The face under his hand was his own as they
struggled.

"Stop it!" Joshua sobbed, and Christophe landed a blow and felt
Joshua land a blow but felt useless as if he were punching in a dream.
Wet, teary, they wrestled face to face.

"Move!" Javon yelled.

Pain split Christophe's side. It drew a long, deep line over his torso,
flaring from his hip to his stomach and he fell back. He looked down
to find an oblong shard of glass protruding from the tent of his shirt.
Sandman had stabbed him: he crouched to the side of Christophe, one
hand receding from the glass knife. He wore a bloody crown, chunks of
glass still in his hair from Javon's bottle. Sandman grabbed the glass and
pulled, and with a wrench it slid from Christophe's gut. The blood had closed Sandman's eyes like a blindfold. He lunged again and suddenly
Christophe was falling back and back until his rear hit the dirt. Joshua
had pushed him out of the way. The insects fell silent under the beating
rush of blood in his head and Joshua was sitting on top of Sandman,
swinging and hitting him over and over. Christophe blinked and the
world exploded into sound.

"I didn't mean it." Christophe heard Sandman mewl. "I didn't mean it."

Joshua's bandaged hands rose and fell and his back twisted from left
to right and Christophe saw the bandages turn bloody; he saw Javon run
at Joshua and wrestle him away from Sandman who lay limp in the dirt.

"Stop. Stop. Stop."

Christophe blinked again, but did not open his eyes. His front was so
warm, even in the tepid, thick air. He could hear nothing but the beating
again. A bottle rolled into his leg. He lay back in the dirt.

Joshua threw Javon away from him and picked up the red, wet spindle
of arms and legs and head that was his brother and carried him to the car.
When Javon grabbed his hand to stop him from cranking the ignition,
Joshua felt the insane urge to bite him.

"You don't know what happened here," Javon barked.

"Fuck you!" Joshua spat at him. He cranked the engine and shoved
Javon from the window with the other hand. Everything blurred and
jumped back into focus. "I got my brother!"

The tires spit gravel. Joshua smelled burnt rubber. When he realized
he could not see, he turned the headlights on. Behind him, Javon peeled
out of the driveway in his own car. Pines flickered past Joshua and he saw
a deer alighting a ditch in the darkness. He gunned the engine. Wind
rushed through the window to choke him, and he drove over the bayou
so quickly he did not see the black glitter of the water. Christophe curled
small in the seat next to him. Joshua reached into his brother's pockets
gingerly, plucked the few remaining bags of weed from his pockets and
flung them out the window, one by one. The car swerved.

At the hospital, he parked the car on the sidewalk. He crawled across
the seat and scooped his brother up as if he were a sack of chicken and
carried him into the emergency room. He screamed. Short, fat people in
soft green and blue scrubs ran at him and pulled at his arms. They yelled
at him.

"Let him go!"

He ran with the stretcher down the low, gray hallway. They would
not let him go in with his brother. He stood on the wall next to the doors
that had swung shut behind his brother and wiped a red hand over his
eyes. Blood bloomed like flowers across his shirt. He pulled the tattered
wrapping from his hands and dropped it to the linoleum floor. The
stitches oozed red. He was wet everywhere. He smelled the salt from snot
and blood high up in his nostrils and thought he could be at the dock,
in the car in the morning, riding along the sea with Christophe, all of it
salty and blue, as if God's hand had passed over it, parting it, cleansing it,
smoothing it flat. A nurse picked up his rags and escorted him to a room,
made him sit on an examining table, and told him a doctor would see him
soon. She left. He smashed his hands together between his knees and bent
over them, mouthing his kneecaps. He knew that if anyone walked into
the room, they would think he was praying.

-'OSHUA LIED. THE DOCTOR ASKED HIM QUESTIONS AND HE LIED ABOUT
it all. He said they were at the river, drinking, when it had happened.
They were going for a midnight swim. They were planning to camp.
It was a beer bottle. His brother had been running down the beach in the
dark to jump in the water and had tripped over a half-buried log, and had
cut himself on an empty bottle. No, no one else was there: just him and
his brother. No, the doctor didn't need to call anyone else. They had no
one else. Would Christophe be okay? Would he be alright? Was he still
bleeding? Was he still breathing? Joshua wanted to ask his own questions,
but didn't. The doctor touched a finger to Joshua's shoulder, and he looked
up, shocked, away from the image in his mind of his dead, quiet brother.

"He lost a lot of blood," the doctor said, and Joshua nodded. "It's a
good thing you got him here so fast." Joshua looked down at his blood,
his father's blood, his brother's blood on his shirt. "He wouldn't have
made it this far."

Joshua gazed at the doctor then: his bloodless face, his skin as pale
as Javon's. He could see red, tiny veins like cursive around his nose and
his eyes.

"His blood pressure is low, but we stitched him up. Whatever it was
didn't hit any major arteries, but it nicked his liver. All we can do is watch
and wait."

Ma-mee would be at home, feeling the uneven, dark wood of the
house with her fingers, waiting. She would be up, sitting, listening for
signs. Cille.

"My grandmother," he said.

Joshua called Aunt Rita first. Dunny picked up the phone. Joshua
spoke in vague terms: accident, Christophe, hospital, Ma-mee. Dunny
yelled away from the receiver and Joshua heard Aunt Rita in the
background. He knew if he closed his eyes and pulled the receiver away
from his ear a centimeter or so, he could mistake the siren of her concern
for his mother's voice. He didn't. He called Ma-mee, and she picked up
on the third ring. He told her slowly, told her they were coming to pick
her up. He looked down at the blood on his chest and felt sick and asked
her to bring him a shirt. She was quiet and calm, and he wondered if Cille
was even home with her. He went back to the waiting room and sat in
a chair, closed his eyes to the news on the TV screen, and opened them
again and they were there.

When he rose to hug Ma-mee, she put her hand to his throat and
stopped him. Before he could protest, she peeled his shirt away from him,
up and over his head as if he were six. She handed his T-shirt to Cille, and
Cille walked him to the men's bathroom with a pre-emptive, "Shut up,
I'm your mama." Joshua washed the sink pink. In the waiting room, they
sat in a nervous circle. When Cille began to ask Joshua questions, he lied.
He told them the story he had told the doctor. When he got to the part
about picking Christophe up from the ground and running with him to
the car, he could hardly breathe, and the words caught in his mouth and
he swallowed them back down and stopped speaking. After that, Cille did
not ask him any more questions. Cille reached over to him and cupped
his leg, but it was Ma-mee he leaned into, Ma-mee's neck he buried his
face into; her skin was wet. She kneaded the back of his head and shushed
him.

To Ma-mee's bleary eyes, when she walked into that waiting room
on Rita's arm, Joshua had looked as he had the day he and his brother
had been born, as red as he'd been when the doctor had taken him and
Christophe from Cille by C-section. He was the brightest thing in the
room, and he smelled of blood and salt. She could not help but pull the
shirt from him and send him immediately to the bathroom: she needed
to touch him first, and then she needed to see him with the blood washed
from him. She'd brought the brightest, bluest T-shirt for him she could find. It was a shirt Cille had bought for him years ago for Christmas;
Ma-mee was surprised he could still fit into it. When the doctor came for
them and told them they could see Christophe, Joshua would not move.
Cille led her to Christophe's room where she trailed her fingers across his
face: the shadowed lump of his body looked so small under the sheets.
She left Cille sitting next to Christophe's bed, and Joshua met her in the
hallway outside of the room. He still smelled of salt. The white monotone
of the hallways was blinding her.

"I tried to save him," he whispered to her.

"You did, Joshua."

"It don't feel like it, Ma-mee."

"I know."

They wandered through the hallways back to the waiting room. They
sat and waited. Joshua roamed the circuit to Christophe's room and back
again, over and over, until Ma-mee made Dunny fetch him, made him sit
next to her so she could hold him in place. He would not run himself to
sleep this time. Ma-mee held Joshua's wrapped hands in her own, wishing
she could feel the skin through the bandages, wishing he were little again.
She wanted him to be small, for his skull to fit in the curve of her hands;
she wanted to be able to pull him into her lap and enclose him in the
circumference of her arms. She wanted to be able to carry him to his bed
and put him to sleep next to his brother.

Dunny had to drive the car home because Joshua refused to do so.
Joshua watched Dunny from the porch as he cleaned the passenger seat
with a brush and soap and water; he scrubbed away the blood until there
was nothing left, then rolled up the windows and left the car to smolder
in the sun. Joshua spent his days skirting the trees at the rim of the yard
looking toward the road, looking for a silhouette that could have been
Sandman's, remembering the feel of the flesh of his father's face melting
beneath his fists. His hands hung useless and clumsy at his sides, and
when he woke in the morning to his brother's empty bed and his hands,
he could not believe what they had done. Cille drove them to the hospital
in her rental car.