by Jesmyn Ward
Richie ain’t had near that time. It’s hard enough for a man of fifteen, but for a boy? A boy of twelve? Richie got there a month and some weeks after I got there. He walked into that camp crying, but crying with no sound, no sobbing. Just tears leaking down his face, glazing it with water. He had a big head shaped like an onion, the kind of head seemed too big for his body: a body all bones and skin. His ears set straight away from his head like leaves coming off a branch, and his eyes was big in his face. He ain’t blink. He was fast: walked fast, his feet not shuffling, not like most when they first come to camp, but high-stepping, knees in the air, like a horse. They undid his hands and led him to the shack, to his bunk, and he lay down in the dark next to me and I knew he was still crying because his little shoulders had curved in like a bird’s wings when it’s landed but they still fluttering, but he still ain’t make no noise. Them night guards at the doors to the shack go on a break, things can happen to a boy of twelve in the dark if he a crybaby.
When he woke up in the dark morning, his face was dry. He followed me out to the latrines and to breakfast, and sat down next to me in the dirt.
“Mighty young to be in here. How old you is? Eight?” I asked him.
He looked insulted. Frowned and his mouth fell open.
“How biscuits taste nasty?” he asked, and hid his mouth behind his hand. I thought he was going to spit the bread out, but he swallowed and said: “I’m twelve.”
“Still mighty young to be in here.”
“I stole.” He shrugged. “I was good at it. I been stealing since I was eight. I got nine little brothers and sisters always crying for food. And crying sick. Say they backs hurt; say they mouths sore. Got red rashes all over they hands and they feet. So thick on they face you can’t hardly see they skin.”
I knew the sickness he was talking about. We called it “red flame.” Heard tell some doctor had claimed most that had it was poor, eating nothing but meat, meal, and molasses. I could’ve told him those was the lucky ones that ate that way: in the Delta, I’d heard stories of people cooking dirt patties. He was proud of himself when he told me what he’d done, even though he got caught; I could tell in the way he leaned forward, in the way he watched me after he finished talking, like he was waiting for my approval. I knew I couldn’t get rid of him then, especially because he was following me around and sleeping in the bunk next to me. Because he looked at me like I could give him something nobody else could. The sun was coming up through the trees, lighting the sky like a new fire, and I was already feeling it in my shoulders, my back, my arms. I chewed something baked into the bread, something crunchy. I swallowed quick—best not to think about it.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Richard. Everybody call me Richie for short. Like it’s a joke.” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised and a little smile on his face, so small it was only his mouth opening to show his teeth, white and crowding. I didn’t get the joke, so he slumped and explained with his spoon. “ ’Cause I be stealing. So I’m rich?”
I looked down at my hands. Crumb-clean and still felt like I hadn’t eaten.
“It’s a joke,” he said. So I gave Richie what he wanted. He was just a boy. I laughed.
* * *
Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I’ll ever understand Leonie. She’s at the front door, paper grocery bags obscuring her, hitching the screen and kicking it open, and then edging through the door. Kayla scoots toward me when the door bangs shut; she snatches up her juice cup and sucks before kneading my ear. The little pinch and roll of her fingers almost hurts, but it’s her habit, so I swing her up in my arms and let her knead. Mam says she does it for comfort because she never breast-fed. Poor Kayla, Mam sighed every time. Leonie hated when Mam and Pop began calling her Kayla like me. She has a name, Leonie said, and it’s her daddy’s. She look like a Kayla, Mam said, but Leonie never called her that.
“Hey, Michaela baby,” Leonie says.
It’s not until I’m standing in the door of the kitchen and see Leonie pulling a small white box out of one of the bags that I realize this is the first year Mam won’t be making me a cake for my birthday, and then I feel guilty for realizing it so late in the day. Pop would make the meal, but I should have known that Mam couldn’t. She’s too sick with the cancer that came and left and returned, steady as the rising and sinking of the marsh water in the bayou with the moon.
“I got you a cake,” Leonie says, as if I’m too dumb to know what the box contains. She knows I’m not stupid. She said it herself once, when a teacher called her in to school to talk about my behavior, to tell Leonie: He never speaks in class, but he’s still not paying attention. The teacher said it in front of all the children, who were still sitting in their seats waiting to be dismissed for the buses. She assigned me to the frontmost desk in the classroom, the desk nearest the teacher’s, where every five minutes, she’d say, Are you paying attention, which inevitably interrupted whatever work I was doing and made it impossible to focus. I was ten then, and had already begun to see things that other kids didn’t, like the way my teacher bit her fingernails raw, like the way she sometimes wore so much eye makeup to hide bruising from someone hitting her; I knew what that looked like because both Michael’s and Leonie’s faces sometimes looked that way after fights. It made me wonder if my teacher had her own Michael. On the day of the conference, Leonie hissed: He ain’t stupid. Jojo, let’s go. And I winced at the way she used ain’t and the way she leaned in to the teacher without even knowing it, and the teacher blinked and stepped away from the latent violence coiled in Leonie’s arm, running from her shoulder down to her elbow and to her fist.
Mam always made me red velvet birthday cake. She began when I was one. When I was four, I knew it well enough to ask for it: said red cake and pointed at the picture on the box on the shelf in the grocery store. The cake that Leonie brought is small, about the size of both of my fists together. Blue and pink pastel sprinkles litter the top of the cake, and on the side, two little blue shoes. Leonie sniffs, coughs into her bony forearm, and then pulls out a half gallon of the cheapest ice cream, the kind with a texture like cold gum.
“They didn’t have no more birthday cakes. The shoes is blue, so it fits.”
It’s not until she says it that I realize Leonie got her thirteen-year-old son a baby shower cake. I laugh but don’t feel nothing warm, no joy in me when I do it. A laugh that ain’t a laugh, and it’s so hard Kayla looks around and then at me like I’ve betrayed her. She starts crying.
* * *
Usually, the singing is my favorite part of my birthday, because the candles make everything look gold, and they shine in Mam’s and Pop’s faces and make them look young as Leonie and Michael. Whenever they sing to me, they smile. I think it’s Kayla’s favorite part, too, because she sings stutteringly along. Kayla’s making me hold her, because she cried and pushed at Leonie’s collarbone and reached for me until Leonie frowned and held her out to me, said: “Here.” But this year, the song is not my favorite part of my birthday because instead of being in the kitchen, we’re all crowded into Mam’s room, and Leonie’s holding the cake like she held Kayla earlier, out and away from her chest, like she going to drop it. Mam’s awake but doesn’t really look awake, her eyes half open, unfocused, looking past me and Leonie and Kayla and Pop. Even though Mam’s sweating, her skin looks pale and dry, like a muddy puddle dried to nothing after weeks of no rain in the summer. And there’s a mosquito buzzing around my head, dipping into my ear, veering out, teasing to bite.
When the happy birthday song starts, it’s only Leonie. She has a pretty voice, the kind of voice that sounds good singing low but sort of cracks on the high notes. Pop is not singing; he never sings. When I was younger, I didn’t know because I’d have a whole family singing to me: Mam, Leonie, and Michael. But this year, when Mam can’t sing because she’s sick and Kayla makes up words to the melody and Michael’s gone, I know Pop isn’t singing because he’s just moving
his lips, lip-synching, and there’s no noise coming out. Leonie’s voice cracks on dear Joseph, and the light from the thirteen candles is orange. No one but Kayla looks young. Pop is standing too far out of the light. Mam’s eyes have closed to slits in her chalky face, and Leonie’s teeth look black at the seams. There’s no happiness here.
“Happy birthday, Jojo,” Pop says, but he’s not looking at me when he says it. He’s looking at Mam, at her hands loose and open at her sides. Palms up like something dead. I lean forward to blow out my candles, but the phone rings, and Leonie jumps, so the cake jumps with her. The flames waver and feel hotter under my chin. Pearls of wax drip onto the baby shoes. Leonie turns away from me with the cake, looking to the kitchen, to the phone on the counter.
“You going to let the boy blow out his candles, Leonie?” Pop asks.
“Might be Michael,” Leonie says, and then there is no cake because Leonie’s taken it with her to the kitchen, set it on the counter next to the black-corded phone. The flames are eating the wax. Kayla shrieks and throws her head back. So I follow Leonie into the kitchen, to my cake, and Kayla smiles. She’s reaching for the fire. The mosquito that was in Mam’s room has followed us, and he’s buzzing around my head, talking about me like I’m a candle or a cake. So warm and delicious. I swat him away.
“Hello?” Leonie says.
I grab Kayla’s arm and lean in to the flames. She struggles, transfixed.
“Yes.”
I blow.
“Baby.”
Half the candles gutter out.
“This week?”
The other half eating wax to the nub.
“You sure?”
I blow again, and the cake goes dark. The mosquito lands on my head. So scrumptious, he says, and bites. I swat him, and my palm comes away smeared with blood. Kayla reaches.
“We’ll be there.”
Kayla has a handful of frosting, and her nose is running. Her blond afro curls high. She sticks her fingers in her mouth, and I wipe.
“Easy, baby. Easy.”
Michael is an animal on the other end of the telephone behind a fortress of concrete and bars, his voice traveling over miles of wire and listing, sun-bleached power poles. I know what he is saying, like the birds I hear honking and flying south in the winter, like any other animal. I’m coming home.
Chapter 2
Leonie
Last night, after I hung up the phone with Michael, I called Gloria and got another shift. Gloria owns the country bar where I work up in the backwoods. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, slapped together with cinder blocks and plywood, painted green. The first time I saw it, I was riding with Michael upcountry to a river; we’d park under an overpass on the road that crossed the river and then walk until we reached a good swimming spot. What’s that? I asked, and pointed. I figured it wasn’t a house, even though it sat low under the trees. There was too many cars parked in the sandy grass. That’s the Cold Drink, Michael said, and he smelled like hard pears and his eyes were green as the outside. Like Barq’s and Coke? I said. Yep. He said his mama went to school with the owner. I called his mama years later after Michael went to jail, thanked God when it was her that picked up the phone and not Big Joseph. He would have hung up in my face rather than speak to me, the nigger his son had babies with. I told Michael’s mother I needed work, and asked if she could put in a good word with the owner. It was the fourth conversation we’d ever had. We spoke first when Michael and I started dating, second time when Jojo was born, and third when Michaela was born. But still she said yes, and then she told me I should go up there, up to the Kill, upcountry, where Michael and his parents are from, where the bar is, and I should introduce myself to Gloria, so I did. Gloria hired me for a probationary period of three months. You’re a hard worker, she said, laughing, when she told me she was keeping me on. She wore heavy eyeliner, and when she laughed, the skin at the sides of her eyes looked like an elaborate fan. Even harder than Misty, she said, and she damn near lives here. And then waved me back out front to the bar. I grabbed my tray of drinks, and three months turned into three years. After my second day at the Cold Drink, I knew why Misty worked so hard: she was high every night. Lortab, Oxycontin, coke, Ecstasy, meth.
* * *
Before I showed up for work at the Cold Drink last night, Misty must have had a good double, because after we mopped and cleaned and shut everything down, we went to her pink MEMA cottage she’s had since Hurricane Katrina, and she pulled out an eight ball.
“So he’s coming home?” Misty asked.
Misty was opening all the windows. She knows I like to hear outside when I get high. I know she doesn’t like to get high alone, which is why she invited me over, and why she opens the windows even though the wet spring night seeps into the house like a fog.
“Yep.”
“You must be happy.”
The last window snapped up and locked into place, and I stared out of it as Misty sat at the table and began cutting and dividing. I shrugged. I’d felt so happy when I got the phone call, when I heard Michael’s voice saying words I’d imagined him saying for months, for years, so happy that my insides felt like a full ditch ridden with a thousand tadpoles. But then when I left, Jojo looked up from where he sat with Pop in the living room watching some hunting show, and for a flash, the cast of his face, the way his features folded, looked like Michael after one of our worst fights. Disappointed. Grave at my leaving. And I couldn’t shake it. His expression kept coming back to me through my shift, made me pull Bud Light instead of Budweiser, Michelob instead of Coors. And then Jojo’s face stuck with me because I could tell he secretly thought I was going to surprise him with a gift, something else besides that hasty cake, some thing that wouldn’t be gone in three days: a basketball, a book, a pair of high-top Nikes to add to his single pair of shoes.
I bent to the table. Sniffed. A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn’t buy, the melted cake, the phone call. The toddler sleeping in my bed at home while my son slept on the floor, just in case I’d come home and make him get on the floor when I stumbled in. Fuck it.
“Ecstatic.” I said it slow. Sounded the syllables out. And that’s when Given came back.
The kids at school teased Given about his name. One day he got into a fight about it on the bus, tumbling over the seats with a husky redhead boy who wore camo. Frustrated and swollen-lipped, he came home and asked Mama: Why y’all give me this name? Given? It don’t make no sense. And Mama squatted down and rubbed his ears, and said: Given because it rhymes with your papa’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your papa was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us. He was three years older than me, and when him and Camo boy went flipping and swinging over the seat, I swung my book bag at Camo and hit him in the back of the head.
Last night, he smiled at me, this Given-not-Given, this Given that’s been dead fifteen years now, this Given that came to me every time I snorted a line, every time I popped a pill. He sat in one of the two empty chairs at the table with us, and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He was watching me, like always. He had Mama’s face.
“That much, huh?” Misty sucked snot up her nose.
“Yep.”
Given rubbed the dome of his shaved head, and I saw other differences between the living and this chemical figment. Given-not-Given didn’t breathe right. He never breathed at all. He wore a black shirt, and it was a still, mosquito-ridden pool.
“What if Michael’s different?” Misty said.
“He won’t be,” I said.
Misty threw a wadded-up paper towel she’d been using to clean the table.
“What you looking at?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t nobody sit and stare for that long on something this clean without looking at something.” Misty waved her hand at the coke and winked at me. She’d tattooed her boyfriend’s
initials on her ring finger, and for a second it looked like letters and then bugs and then letters again. Her boyfriend was Black, and this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly. She often told me that as far as she was concerned, they were already married. Said she needed him because her mother didn’t give a shit about her. Misty told me once that she got her period in fifth grade, when she was ten years old, and because she didn’t realize what was happening to her, her body betraying her, she walked around half the day with a bloody spot spreading like an oil stain on the back of her pants. Her mother beat her in the parking lot of the school, she was so embarrassed. The principal called the cops. Just one of the many ways I disappointed her, Misty said.
“I was feeling it,” I said.
“You know how I know you lie?”
“How?”
“You get dead still. People is always moving, all the time, when they speak, when they’re quiet, even when they sleep. Looking off, looking at you, smiling, frowning, all of that. When you lie, you get dead still: blank face, arms limp. Like a fucking corpse. I ain’t never seen nothing like it.”
I shrugged. Given-not-Given shrugs. She ain’t lying, he mouths.
“You ever see things?” I say. It’s out my mouth before I have a chance to think it. But at that moment, she’s my best friend. She’s my only friend.
“What you mean?”
“When you on?” I waved my hand like she’d waved hers moments before. At the coke, which was now just a little sorry pile of dust on the table. Enough for two or three lines more.