Where the Line Bleeds (6 page)

Across the table, Joshua squinted inches above the application and
printed his name, their telephone number, and their address in careful,
even cursive. Christophe always told him he wrote like a girl. As for work
history, he placed a terse line through each open space. They had pooled
the money their mother sent Ma-mee every month with what they earned
doing yard-work with Uncle Paul and it had satisfied them; they grew
up tailoring their needs to fit the amount of expendable cash they had available. They'd coped in different ways: while Joshua would forego
Nikes and buy Reebok so he could have shoes and a new shirt, Christophe
would wait and hoard his money so he could spend his portion on the
latest Jordans-damn clothes.

The night before, they'd lain on their beds in their rooms and discussed
their options. Both twins lay on their backs, clothed only in boxer shorts,
and stared at the ceiling fan slowly revolving in circles above their heads.
The night insects had poured their insistent calling and wailing into the
open screen of the window, but still the boys pitched their voices low.
Their list was a dull litany of choices: McDonald's, Burger King, Sonic,
Dairy Queen, Piggly Wiggly, Circle K, Chevron, Wal-Mart, K-Mart,
the Dockyard and the Shipyard. None of their options were in Bois
Sauvage. There wasn't much in Bois Sauvage: three convenience stores
(none of which offered gas for sale), an elementary school, three Catholic
churches, a park that consisted of a baseball field, a concrete basketball
court, rusty slides, swings, monkey bars and park benches, and a couple of
hole-in-the-wall nightclubs that their Uncle Paul frequented that served
moonshine under the counter and specialized in playing dirty modern
delta blues. (The twins' personal favorite was a song called "It's Cheaper
to Keep Her.") They needed a car to get to all of the places they were
putting in applications, because they were all at least two towns over in
each direction along the coast, in Germaine or Ocean Point or Lausianne,
beyond the reach of Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine. In the hot air of the
room, Christophe had breathed out, "Thank God Cille got us a fucking
car," then threw his arm over his head so that his armpit would cool and
the sweat would dry along the elongated rigid expanse of his chest, his
ribs, the hollow of his stomach and belly button. He'd started breathing
hard within seconds: he was asleep.

Joshua was envious of Christophe's ability to fall asleep like that,
instantly dead to the world, free from the weight of waking life, anywhere,
anytime. Once he'd fallen asleep during the eye of a hurricane Andrew
that hit the year they were eight, and he hadn't woken up until after the
storm had passed. While he had slept, Joshua had stayed awake, transfixed,
staring out the window at the hundred-mile-per-hour winds uprooting
pecan trees from the field next to the house. Joshua stared at the ceiling, felt the fine puffs of heat from the sluggish fan, and wondered about the
days to come. He didn't really want to work at any of those places, yet he
didn't know where he did want to work. Would every night of the rest of
his life be like this one: dreading the morning, the endless monotony of
the repetition of days, of work that he hated, spiraling off into old age?
He'd sighed and wiped a slick hand across his chest. He didn't know,
but he was tired, and the dread of these new thoughts seemed as heavy
and oppressive as the heat. He had lain staring at the circling fan until
he glanced at the alarm clock and saw it read three, and had blinked, all
the while listening to his brother's breath stutter into snoring in the next
bed. He only realized he'd fallen asleep when he opened his eyes and
saw Ma-mee standing over him. He heard the cock crowing from the
chicken coop in the backyard, and felt Ma-mee's touching his scalp as she
muttered, "Wake up."

Joshua leaned closer into the form, marked the boxes indicating he
hadn't been convicted of a felony, provided three references (Uncle Paul,
Ma-mee, and his auto mechanic teacher from Vo-tech) and signed his
signature. He looked over at Christophe's paper and found it wrecked.
Christophe's sprawling, furious scribble spilled across the page in wide
arcs, and his words tumbled down the margin of the application at the
end of each line. Joshua smiled. Christophe never could color entirely
within a line. Christophe pocketed the pen and looked up and grimaced
at his brother. His fingertips were stained with ink. Joshua followed
Christophe to the counter where they both slid the applications as a
pair to the assistant manager, some kid with thick-lensed glasses and a
large nose and broad, bony black shoulders that had graduated from St.
Catherine's High School a year before them. He palmed them and nodded
at the twins. Christophe rolled his eyes. Joshua knew he had absolutely no
patience for people he considered "lames."

"We got to work at the same time because we got to share a ride.
That's why we put down the same hours for availability."

The boy bit his lower lip and nodded. He bent to slide the completed
applications in a small bin beside the cash register before speaking in
a deep, gravelly voice. It surprised Joshua: he sounded like a croaking
frog, like a ditch frog that called loudest after a summer storm, bloated
with rain.

"I understand. I don't know if we going to be hiring anytime soon.
Most of the people we just hired on full time been working here since
before graduation."

Joshua turned to the door and saw Christophe pursing his lips as he
followed. Joshua walked to the car and leaned his forearms against it. The
sun had not yet seeped in enough to make the metal burn; for that he was
grateful. He kicked the door. He was anxious, and this was the first place
they had visited.

Christophe narrowed his eyes as he walked to the driver's side door
of the car and fumbled in his pocket for the keys. Here it was seven in
the morning and he already felt like a smoke: he was nervous. He felt like
he'd fumbled and dropped his usual charm and sense of humor as soon as
he stepped into the building. The metal bar of the door handle was cool
in his grip: his fingers faltered on it and slipped away as he heard a high
pierced whistle. At the side of the building, a dark, slim figure lounged
against the brick wall, pulled hard on a cigarette, and waved. Christophe
recognized him: Charles, who'd graduated with their class on Friday, was
taking a break at the side of the dumpsters. He'd twisted his visor to the
side and flipped it upside down so that his afro swelled out of the top like
a small balloon. Christophe walked over to him, and Charles handed him
the cigarette. Christophe took a quick puff and passed it back to Charles,
holding the smoke in his lungs until he could feel the nicotine lap at his
chest like a small wave and settle like foam over his skin. Joshua ambled
over slowly, crouched on his haunches at their side, and shook his head
no at the proffered smoke.

"Y'all come up here looking for a job, huh?"

Christophe nodded.

"Man, they ain't hiring for shit. They upped me to full time. We been
having people come by here all day. They don't want to hire no more
staff-they working the shit out of us." The tip of the cigarette sparkled
red.

"We got all day to go." Christophe held out his hand. "It's probably
the same at all the fast food places. Might have some luck at the dock `cause
Dunny stepdaddy said they was hiring. They don't accept applications
until Wednesday, though."

The heat of the day was slithering across the half-empty parking
lot with the ascending sun, and the smell of the warming asphalt filled
Christophe's nose along with the smoke. Joshua watched a blue station
wagon and an old beaten-up red pickup truck swerve past them into the
drive-through lane. Christophe passed the cigarette back to Charles and
nodded at the cars.

"Breakfast crowd. It ain't really going to let up until after lunch."
Charles' nose widened as he smiled and laughed so that the smoke drifted
out over his teeth grayish white. He had an overbite. "By that time, I
done probably smoked at least two blunts." He tossed the cigarette to the
sidewalk and crushed it beneath the toe of his sneaker. "Otherwise I'd kill
somebody."

Joshua shook his head and pressed his forehead into his forearms,
which were crossed over his knees.

"I hear you on that one," Christophe said.

At Charles' side, the door opened. The gangly assistant manager poked
his head out, then a shoulder. He blinked at the three boys standing and
crouching silently in the shade of the wall. He looked down at the ground
and spoke.

"Charles?"

Charles crossed one leg over the other and made a point not to look
at the boy when he replied.

"What, Larry?"

"We need you to finish break. Breakfast crowd coming in." He
mumbled his last bit before the door clicked shut. "It's getting busy."

Charles rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. Next to him on the
sidewalk, Christophe heard Charles whisper beneath his breath, "Tired
of this shit."

"You know that if I had a blunt already rolled up I'd smoke with you.
But I ain't got nothing today," Christophe said.

"It's alright. I'm going to roll up one when I take a bathroom break
in about an hour." He swung the door open. "If y'all really want to work
here, y'all should call and ask to speak to Gary in about a week. He
the manager that do all the hiring. Something might open up. See y'all
later."

From inside the restaurant, Christophe heard the boy with the frog's
voice intoning orders in an endless procession. Charles flipped his hat
over, jammed it down on his head so that his afro parted and fell in wilted
tufts like dehydrated vegetation. The door closed and Joshua raised his
head.

"That's what we got to look forward to," he said.

"If we get hired here and Kermit the Frog's our boss, I just might have
to hit him," Christophe said.

"Yeah, so we can get fired... cause you know I'm going to have to
jump in and save your no-fighting ass," Joshua laughed.

Christophe pulled Joshua to his feet, and Joshua walked to the car
while Christophe began patting his pockets for the keys again. Joshua was
staring at the pavement. Christophe spoke to the taut skin at the back of
his brother's head, his meaty, sloping shoulders.

"We'll find something."

"I know."

The air was already difficult to breathe. The sun had boiled it dense
so that it smelled strongly of salt and tar, and had burned the water of
the gulf a dirty brownish blue. Unlocking the door and looking over the
car and past his brother, Christophe studied the beach. He could see
the barrier islands floating on the horizon of the water, appearing like
bristling shadows of elongated reeds as they siphoned the current and
blocked the clean blue-green wash of the Gulf of Mexico, blocked the
water that swept up from the Caribbean, and impacted the beach that
he saw with silt, with mud, with runty, dirty waves. He was calm; he was
ready. As Joshua slumped and played with the stereo, Christophe turned
the ignition. He hated those islands.

Theyvisited four more places that morning: Burger King, Dairy Queen,
Circle K, and Sonic. Burger King smelled like McDonald's. The orange
of the decor made the interior of the restaurant darker than McDonald's.
The boys didn't know anyone who worked there. After they left Burger
King, they rode around and ate Whoppers, shoving the napkins they
hadn't used in the glove compartment. Joshua said with a smirk, "Well, I
guess the car is really ours now." They submitted applications at Sonic and
Dairy Queen. They filled half the tank at Circle K, and completed their forms on the dashboard of the car, hunched over, itching wetly against
the crushed cloth of the seats. Christophe had signed his name with a
flourish, tossed the pen on the seat between them, and insisted that it
was too hot to ride around in the car with no air conditioning on the
job search. They'd gone home then, hiding from the hottest part of the
afternoon in the living room with Ma-mee, catching the tail end of her
daytime soaps and watching jeopardy. They'd asked her to wake them
up early the next morning and gone to bed after watching reruns of The
Cosby Show at nine because Ma-mee loved Clair Huxtable. The twins had
fallen asleep without talking.

The next morning, they'd driven to Chevron first. Piggly Wiggly
and Wal-Mart and K-Mart were next on the list. The managers were all
clones of each other: a short, plump feather-haired white woman for
the grocery stores, and a shrunken curly-haired white man for the gas
stations. They spent the morning waiting in lines, writing against walls.
Christophe wondered why all the places they put in applications smelled
like antiseptic. Under the gas smells and the new cheap clothes smells and
the smells of plastic wrapping and the greasy, stale food, the weeks-old
hot dogs, there was always the smell of Lysol, of ammonia, of some sort
of stringent cleaner. Sometime after noon, Christophe called off the job
search for the day after the second time Joshua fell asleep in the passenger
seat, and Christophe saw the sweat beading and running down Joshua's
face as if he'd been doused with water. He'd sweat like that since they
were kids. Christophe had opened a napkin at a stoplight and laid it over
Joshua's face like a caul and then took the next right and drove them
home. When he'd awoken Joshua and told him to go inside, Joshua hadn't
moved, but instead grunted at his brother and spent the afternoon asleep
in the car.

Now they were in the parking lot of the dockyard. The main office,
set in a little cluster of boxy, tin buildings, only accepted applications
from noon to three. It was eleven. Joshua slouched in the passenger seat,
his face resting on his fist, his other hand cupping a lukewarm Coke.
They hadn't heard from any of the other places where they'd applied:
they were waiting until after the weekend to follow up. The toast and
scrambled eggs he'd eaten for breakfast had seemingly evaporated from his belly. He'd been nursing the Coke since they'd made it from Bois
Sauvage into Germaine and stopped at a corner store before posting up in
the parking lot. He took another sip and was so hungry he could feel the
Coke trickle down past the center of his breastbone. The hunger dulled
his nervousness: he found he was hesitantly hopeful. Finally, here was a
place where they had more of a chance to get a position, a place where,
if they kept at it for a while, they could make pretty good money-at
least more than they could make working at Wal-Mart or McDonald's or
Circle K. He didn't like it, but he could do it, and he could do it without
some kid with horsy shoulders and a weasely neck monitoring his every
move. He switched the radio on and when he heard the midday blues
program, he turned it off.