Where the Line Bleeds (37 page)

Dunny pulled the hook from the fish's mouth cleanly and let the fish
fly. The sun caught it and turned it pure silver, and then it dropped to
the water with a crystal plop. Joshua threaded a piece of raw meat on the
hook and threw the line out again.

"I was drunk at the river," Christophe said.

"Yeah?" replied Dunny.

"Yeah."

"We got into a fight," said Joshua.

"Over what?"

"Over me getting a job," said Christophe.

"He acted like he didn't want to work," said Joshua.

"I was going to talk to you about that shit," said Dunny.

"Well, ain't no need now," said Christophe.

"Joshua let go with his temper, huh?" asked Dunny.

"We was drunk and that nigga would not shut up," said Christophe.

"I should've known to leave him alone, but he said some shit about
Laila always being over at the house," Joshua said.

"I didn't really care about that shit. The way he kept rubbing his job
in my face was what really pissed me off."

"I got drunk and didn't know when to stop."

"He would not shut up. So I told him he could kiss my ass and took
off running toward the car and that log jumped up and next thing I knew
I was bleeding."

"I thought he was playing for a minute, but when he didn't get
up....

"He must've carried me to the car. I don't remember nothing after
that except waking up in the hospital feeling like I just got over the flu
or something."

"Y'all niggas is wild," Dunny replied. "And I don't believe a word y'all
just said." He passed the black to Christophe.

"Thank you." Christophe inhaled and passed it back.

"I heard they got openings down at the shipyard again-working on
government contracts and shit," Dunny said, as he shook out his ash into
the grass. A whistling bird flew off into the distance, trilling along until
it disappeared into a line of moss covered Spanish oaks arching over the
water. "I could take you down there on my half-day Friday."

"Who knows?" Christophe pulled up a bunch of grass and let it fall
from his fingers. "I could get lucky, right?" Joshua reeled in yet another
small, brownish fish. Dunny snatched the line away from him again.

"What the fuck is it with all these fucking small-ass mullets you
pulling out the water, Joshua?" Dunny carefully pulled the thread of the
hook away from the fishs mouth. It thrashed a little slower than the last
one, with less effort. "What was this one trying to do, commit suicide?"

"With the water smelling like that, I wouldn't be surprised,"
Christophe said.

"We need some rain," Joshua spoke. Dunny wound his arm back like
a baseball pitcher and threw the fish farther out into the water. The fish
was so small, it created no waves when it disappeared with a throaty plop.
"And it's coming."

"Why don't you go jump in?" Christophe asked Dunny. "It's hot
enough."

"You crazy? You know they got alligators and snakes and shit in
this water."

"I don't see none," said Joshua.

"That's cause both you and Christophe ain't all there."

"You think it do any good to throw them back?" Christophe asked.

"What you mean?" asked Joshua, his eyes dark.

"I mean, do you think either of them will survive?"

Dunny wiped his hands on his pants and began rooting in his pockets.
Dunny pulled out a lighter and threw it on the ground next to him as he
rummaged. The cattails quivered. The sky was turning purple in strokes,
and the sun was setting the pines in the distance ablaze. Dunny twirled
a found black between his fingers and lit it; he spoke around it with the
corner of his mouth.

"Eze told me he done seen mullet that's seventeen pounds. Don't
think just cause they little now, they ain't about shit. Them some little
savages."

Joshua resettled his pole between his knees and slowly brushed
sand from his wrappings. Christophe eyed the sun burning orange as
molten metal on the horizon through slitted eyes. Somewhere along the
shoreline, Christophe heard a heavier plop, as if a turtle or a baby alligator
had catapulted itself into the cool, dark, still water. The Spanish moss in
the oaks hung thick and limp as a woman's hair, and Christophe could
imagine the mullet sliding into the obscure, mulch-ridden water. He
could see them angled at forty-five degree angles, sucking mud and muck
from the bottom, growing long and striped.

They would float along with the smooth, halting current that was
slow and steady as a heartbeat. He could imagine them sliding along
other slimy, striped fish and laying eggs that looked like black marbles as
the sun set again and again over the bayou and hurricanes passed through,
churning them to dance. He could imagine them running their large
tongues over the insides of their mouths and feeling the scars where the
hooks had bit them, remembering their sojourn into the water-thin air,
and mouthing to their children the smell of the metal in the water, the
danger of it. They would survive, battered and cunning. He imagined
schools of mullet dying old and fat, engorged with marsh and water
to bloated proportions until the river waters that fed into the brackish
wetlands swept them along with the current. Out and out through the spread of the bay until their carcasses, still dense with the memory of the
closed, rich bayou in the marrow of the bones, settled to the bottom of
the Gulf of Mexico and turned to black silt on the ancient floor of the
sea.

THE END

My agent, Jennifer Lyons, believed in me from the first line. She, along
with Doug Seibold and everyone at Agate Publishing, gave me invaluable
feedback and incredible opportunities. I never could have written this
book and become the writer that I am without the University of Michigan,
and the great writers that I worked with and met while I was there: Peter
Ho Davies, Nicholas Delbanco, Laura Kasischke, Eileen Pollack, and the
members of the cohorts above, in, and below mine. I would especially like
to thank Elizabeth Ames, Natalie Bakopoulos, Joel Mowdy, and Raymond
McDaniel. Thanks are also in order for those who nurtured my beginnings:
Nancy Wrightsman, Kristin Townsend, the Crounse family, and Dr. Robert
J. C. Young.

Many of my friends gave me fortitude along the way, especially Mark
Dedeaux, Maurice Graham, Jillian Dedeaux, Clinton Starghill, Brenna
Powell, Mariha Herrin, and Julie Hwang. Finally, I would like to thank
my mother, Norine Dedeaux, for always providing, and my father, Jerry
Ward, for always listening. I would also like to thank my sisters, Nerissa and
Charine, for being and believing, my grandmother Dorothy for inspiring,
my cousin Aldon for holding my hand, and all of the members of my
extended family for giving me a place where I belong.