Where the Line Bleeds (36 page)

"My job expect me back on Monday," she said. Joshua had watched
her from the hallway when they were first preparing to leave the hospital the night before; he went to fetch her because the sun had been rising,
and Ma-mee had needed to go home and take her medicine. Cille had
been sitting at the side of Christophe's bed, one hand on the sheet next to
his head, staring at his face. She would not touch him.

"Yeah," Joshua replied, and he heard the go home in his voice, and he
hoped Ma-mee did not hear it, but he knew she did. None of them spoke.
At the hospital, while Cille was escorting Ma-mee to the bathroom, he
crouched next to the bed and whispered in his brother's ear, telling him:
wake up, come back, it was an accident. Rita came and went with food.
Christophe slept through one day, then another, his blood pressure low,
his chest rising and falling slowly. When he awoke a day later, Joshua
was slumped by the window in a chair, staring at Cille, wondering when
she would begin packing up her bags to go home; it was the end of the
week. Ma-mee was at Christophe's bedside, stroking his scarred, serrated
knuckles. Christophe opened his eyes and Joshua jerked upright in his
chair. Christophe blinked, stared at the ceiling, and turned his head to
look at Ma-mee and Cille, and then at Joshua. Ma-mee stopped rubbing
his hand.

"Christophe?"

"Yes, Ma-mee," he croaked.

"You alright?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She covered her face with the same hand that had been stroking him,
and breathed hard. Her mouth opened in a thin, pink line and she inhaled
as if she was going to say something, but closed her mouth instead. She
did not remove her hand from her eyes.

"What happened, Chris?" Cille asked as she stood behind Ma-mee,
her hand on her shoulder.

Christophe's eyes shifted to catch Joshua's face. Joshua did not move.
Christophe looked as if he swallowed to wet his throat, but when he
spoke, his voice was still a hoarse, shallow croak.

"It was an accident."

Joshua exhaled. He felt as if he were buoyed on water, floating on his
back in the river with his hands dug into the cold, white sand. For the
first time in days, he felt weightless. Christophe croaked again.

"It was an accident."

Ma-mee dropped her hand. Joshua could see the glaze of tears in the
bags under her eyes. She wiped them away.

"Don't let it happen again, not any of it." Ma-mee paused. "I think
you trying to kill me."

Christophe's leg twitched. Joshua walked to the other side of the bed.
His brother was grimacing.

"Can I have some water?"

Cille clumsily poured Christophe a small, plastic glass and helped
him slide forward into a slight hunch to drink. She held the back of
his head. She tilted the cup and succored Christophe like a baby. Water
dribbled from the cup down his chin, and Cille wiped it away.

The doctor sent them home later that day with the admonition that
Christophe should rest, after he sent a social worker to the room to process
paperwork to have the hospital bills waived. Cille drove them home, and
once there, she piecemeal packed every bit of colored lace and silk she'd
festooned the room with, and loaded it all into her rental car. She did not
ask for Joshua's help, and he did not offer it.

"I'm returning the rental to the airport in New Orleans." She listed
in the middle of the living room and looked at all of them as she spoke,
and yet Joshua thought she looked at none of them; they were a window.
"Work." This sound erupted from her like a hiccup. Joshua thought she
would say something else, but she didn't.

"It was good having you so long, Cille." Ma-mee was looking in the
direction of Cille's voice, but her gaze was off, uncentered.

"Yes, Mama." Cille gripped her purse strap like a backpacker would.
In the room's half light, her usually light eyes were glassy and black like
the water of the bayou at night shattering cold light from houses along its
surface. "Maybe the next visit we can work on getting the yard together,
and everything will be quieter."

"You need help, Cille?" Christophe asked this from his makeshift bed
on the couch. At first Joshua thought Christophe would correct himself
for not calling her Mama, at least in parting, and he thought Cille would
correct him, but she only twisted the strap around her finger until it
turned the tip white, and neither corrected the other.

"Like you can move," Cille smiled a little, "and no, I don't."

"Goodbye." Joshua was staring at the soft skin of Ma-mee's chest, the
way it fell like a curtain from the rod of her collarbone. How underneath
was solid and hard as oyster shells, sure as the bottom of the bay. He just
wanted Cille to leave.

"Goodbye." Cille didn't look at him either. "Y'all take care of each
other."

"Be safe on that road, Cille," Ma-mee said, her voice falling to a
wheezing whisper.

"I will, Mama." And with a shivering of gold and magenta and silky
black, she shimmered like a mirage in the room, turned, and was gone.

That evening, Rita cooked for the family while Dunny sat on the
floor next to Christophe's head and told him he deserved to hurt a little
more for being such a dumbass-what the hell had he been drinking to
stumble over a log at the river and cut himself wide open on a piece of
glass? Christophe had turned his head into his pillow.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Christophe said.

Laila joined them. Joshua led her back to the room and she told him
that she had heard that Sandman was missing.

"What you mean?"

Joshua spoke this into her shoulder. He tasted sweat and smelled cocoa
butter. He breathed in the roasting grass and dense pine from outside.

"Ain't nobody seen him. I was by Javon's yesterday and Marquise and
Big Henry was talking about how they ain't seen him riding around or
on his bike or nothing. They thought he might've went back to rehab or
something. Javon say he ain't seen him either. Then Tilda jump in and
say she thought she saw him back up in that old house in the woods that
you say you and Christophe used to throw rocks at, but when she called
him, he disappeared. You know how the country is. Everybody think they
know but nobody do. Skeetah say he saw somebody with a cast look like
Sandman over in St. Catherine."

He stroked her with the skin of his wrists, and she picked at the
wrapping on his hands.

"You want to tell me what happened?" she asked him.

He kissed her shoulder, openmouthed. His breath was hot.

"Not yet," he breathed.

Christophe woke quickly when Joshua sat next to him; he peered at
the clock and it cleared and he saw that it was five-thirty in the morning.
Christophe pushed the sheet away from his torso: it was hot, even for the
morning: it was hurricane-heralding weather. Joshua was rewrapping his
hands.

"Ma-mee up yet?" Christophe asked.

"She still sleep." Joshua yanked at the yellowed, tangled gauze.

Joshua's head was so close to Christophe that he could see that his
brother hadn't shaved; red-brown, wiry hair sprouted from the side of his
face and under his chin.

"You told them I tripped and fell at the river?"

"Yeah."

"What'd you do with all the weed that was in my pockets?"

"Threw it out the car on our way to the hospital.. .it was only about
three or four dub sacks, though."

"What about him?"

Joshua recounted the stories about Sandman Laila had told him.

"I figured he wasn't dead.. .but still. Javon..."

"All he was worried about was hisself."

Christophe kicked the sheet so that it shivered from his legs and
bunched against the cushions. The floor fan hummed, and bits of dust
set sail like dandelion seeds from its plastic frame to drift through the
air. The skin around Joshua's stitches was a light, pale pink. Christophe
thought of the way only Javon's head and hands had flushed red when
he was toying with Sandman, of how the rest of him had seemed starkly
white, of how he'd acted like he wanted to swing at Christophe, and how
Sandman had disappeared. He would have never gone to Javon's on that
first day if he had known: he should have driven to the bayou, to one of
the hidden boat launches and sat all day, regardless of the money and the
weed and the way Javon had seen him in that kitchen. Javon had looked
at him once: he was no killer. Still, where was Sandman? Rehab, jail, a
hospital, with his people in Germaine or St. Catherine? Joshua opened
and closed his hands, slowly, testing the skin. He rubbed his fingertips
over the matching scars.

"I didn't know I was going to hurt him that bad. I just did it." He
prodded his cuts. "All I could think about was saving you."

"You think he knew it was me?"

"I don't know. I was just.. .hitting him. Like I couldn't hear nothing-I
thought you was dying.."

"I couldn't hear nothing either." Christophe laid his hand flat across
the bandage on his stomach.

"I think I almost killed him, Chris," Joshua whispered. "If he's even
still alive."

Christophe looked closely at his brother, noticed the way the muscle
shrank into the hollows of his collarbone, the way the skin under his eyes
seemed permanently smudged black. His teeth glistened.

"You was trying to save me, not kill him. It's a difference," Christophe
replied.

"Is there?" Joshua asked him, his voice barely registering.

"Yeah, it is."

"You didn't do nothing wrong. Javon ain't no killer. Sandman probably
just decided to leave, go back to rehab. Or maybe he in jail. The cops
could've come picked him up. You know he ain't never stayed no place
long-at least, no place close to us."

Outside, a loud car rumbled by. Christophe grabbed his brother's
wrist and held it, felt the blood beating beneath his fingertips, sat so still
he heard his own blood pounding in his ears. Joshua's pulse matched
his own. Christophe's arm began to ache, but he sat that way, holding
his brother, and Joshua remained still. Christophe cleared his throat and
broke the silence.

"Wasn't nothing here for him anyway."

"I'm sorry about hitting you. I didn't know."

Christophe closed his eyes, but did not remove his hand from his
brother. He shrugged. His brother, their wounds, Ma-mee dimming like
a bulb, his parents' places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons:
it was enough.

"Me too. When the sun start going down, let's go fishing."

Joshua gave his brother his pain pills, and Christophe fell asleep.
Joshua lay down on the floor, folded his arms into a pillow, and nodded
off on the scratchy carpet. Minutes later, Ma-mee found them like that,
and turned the fan higher. The bright sun tried to ease its way around the edges of the curtains, to suffuse the room with heat and insect chatter and
the babble of pines, mimosas, pecan, and oak. Ma-mee shut the screen
door against the drowsy gossip of the bees on the fuchsia flower clusters
of the crepe myrtle, cleaned, and listened to her boys sleep.

Dunny drove them to the bayou. They'd decided to go to one of the
smaller bridges, one that was only as long as two cars, to fish. There was
no traffic. The sun perched on the tip of the marsh grasses in the distance,
framed by egrets and still pine trees. The water was dark brown and deep
and muddy and smelled of eggs, and the twins sat on the grass at the edge
of the bayou and dangled their poles out over the water. The rusted steel
rigging of a sunken fishing boat protruded from the feathered lap of the
small bay in which they fished. Joshua balanced his pole with his fingertips
as he clenched it between his knees; he had to ask Christophe to thread
the bait onto the hook. Christophe wasn't even holding his own pole;
Dunny had balanced it for him between two buckets. Dunny lounged
in the sandy, stubby grass and smoked a black and mild cigar. Sweat ran
across Christophe's belly and leaked into his wound and itched.

"People talking," said Dunny.

"About what?" said Joshua.

"About Sandman. Wondering where he at and why he disappeared,"
Dunny replied.

Joshua cranked in his reel and shook his pole.

"I went over by Javon's house the other day," Dunny continued. "He
had some old fucked-up band aids hanging off his hand. Said he cut
himself by accident last week."

The wind puffed disconsolately at Christophe's face and he let his
head loll back on the hard, dirty plastic of the bait cooler.

"Bad luck everywhere," Christophe spoke to the pink striated sky.

Dunny sat up and hugged his knees and then rolled back. He eyed
the twins.

"Y'all telling me y'all ain't have nothing to do with none of this?"
Christophe reached for Dunny's black, but Dunny stopped him. "It's bad
for you."

"Come on, Dunny."

"Y'all going to answer my question or what?" Dunny said.

Joshua yanked hard on his line, pulled it upward, and unclenched his
knees. He reeled the line in with his fingertips. Christophe saw a hawk
gliding on updrafts in the distance.

"No," Joshua said.

"I ain't stupid."

"Neither is we," Christophe breathed to the clouds.

The pain medicine made him feel that he was floating. He could see
faint wisps of white moving with infinitesimal patience north. The winds
were moving; the storm was coming. He watched Joshua reel his line
in; a small, silver brown fish gasped and flopped at the end of the line.
It twisted piteously and sprayed Joshua and Christophe with warm
bayou water.

"Here." Dunny grabbed the line and enclosed the small fish in his
hand. Christophe could not see it anymore. He heard it there, flapping
wetly against Dunny's skin. Dunny began to pull the hook from the fish's
mouth, and Christophe could see a faint line of blood on the metal.

"I don't know why y'all niggas wanted to go fishing anyway. Chris can
hardly move, and if you get fish juice in your hand it'll probably rot off
and die. Y'all some goddamn geniuses."