Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

  “If you take it out, it won’t lose your spot. It’ll save it,” I say.

  I know this not because I have a game system but because I played Michael’s when he lived with us, so I know how they work. He took it with him when he left. The boy ignores me. He makes a sound halfway between a cry and a growl in his throat, something gurgling and whiny, and when he comes up in front of the shelf of game systems, he doesn’t stand or turn around and begin playing with Kayla again. He doesn’t grab another ball off the floor, a black one or a green one or a red one, all that I can see, and roll one toward us. He stands up and punches the TV. He hits it with his right hand first, then his left, and then his right, windmilling his arms so that his small fists connect with the plastic so hard it sounds like it’s cracking. It is cracking. His fist hits again and there is a firework on the car that bursts and stays, one shot through with white and yellow and red. He hits with his left and it does nothing, but then he hits with his right again and there is another firework burst on the car. It stays.

  “What are you doing?” the woman yells from the kitchen. She’s half risen from the table. “You better not be messing with them boxes again!”

  The boy hits again with his left. Nothing.

  “What I say!” the woman yells, and she’s all the way standing now. The boy bends to the floor, grabs a T-ball bat, and swings. There’s a loud crunch, the sound of glass and plastic cracking, and for one moment, the entire car is one brilliant burst of fireworks, and then the TV winks black, and there is nothing on the screen, but before the screen there are the woman and the boy. She stalks past Kayla, who runs and launches herself into my lap and grabs my shirt with both hands, and corners the boy in front of the TV. He turns with the bat and whacks her on the left leg with it.

  “MotherFUCK!” she half coughs and screams, and then she grabs the bat from him. She picks up the boy by one arm and holds the bat with another and yells, “What did you do?” Each word is a swing. Each swing makes the boy run. He shrieks. “What did you do!”

  The boy’s legs are red wherever she hits him with the bat. He laps the woman like a horse on a merry-go-round, his face like that: open mouth, grimace, rictus. She hits him so many times, his cry goes silent, but that mouth is still open. I know what he is saying: Pain, please, no more pain, please. The woman drops the bat and the boy’s arm all at once, the bat dropping in a straight line to the floor, the boy sagging into a heap.

  “Wait till your daddy come out the shed. He’s going to kill you.”

  Leonie walks across the living room and takes Kayla from me. When she talks, she looks at Misty, who still stands in the doorway of the kitchen, holding back the sheet.

  “We really got to get back on the road soon.”

  “He’ll be in soon,” the woman pants.

  “Y’all got a bathroom?” I ask.

  “It’s broke,” the woman says. She’s sweating and wiping her hair back away from her face. “We use the toilet in the shed, but if you got to pee, it’s best you just go do it out in the yard.”

  When I walk out, the boy has crawled back into his recliner, and he has curled himself into a ball and is crying noisy tears. Kayla reaches for me when I open the door, but Leonie holds her in a tight hug and walks back into the kitchen with her, away from the crying boy and the shattered television, as if that is what she needs to protect Kayla from. The woman is already there, drinking a cold drink, shaking her head. “This the second one he done did that to,” she says. “It’s called birth control,” says Misty. The woman coughs.

  * * *

  The front yard is still cloaked in mist, still empty. The dog has disappeared, but my hands still burn when I run to the car, the sweat coming in spikes with the fear of teeth. Nothing chases me to the car, where I open the doors on the driver’s side to make a shield and pee by the driver’s seat. I half hope Leonie will step in it. I zip and ease the doors shut, wonder where all the people that live in this small circle of houses are. Nothing comes for me when I glance at the house, study the closed front door, or when I creep around the back. There is a shed there, brown with a dark tin roof, papered like the house with weatherproofing liner, but no siding. There is a light coming through slits in one of the windows, which have been blacked out with aluminum foil. Someone is listening to country music inside, and when I put my eye to the slit, I see a shirtless man with a beard. He is tattooed, like Michael, but has shaved his head. There are tables with glass beakers and tubes and five-gallon buckets on the ground and empty cold-drink liter bottles, and I know I’ve seen this before, know that smell because when Michael built his lean-to in the woods behind Mam and Pop’s house, it looked and smelled like this. The reason he and Leonie fought, the reason he left, the reason he’s in jail. The man is cooking, moves as easy and sure as a chef, but there is nothing to eat here. My stomach burns. I sneak back around to the front of the house, fingering Pop’s bag in my pocket, wondering if that tooth is a raccoon’s, if it makes me so quiet and quick that even the dog won’t hear me when I circle around to the front of the house and ease inside.

  When we leave fifteen minutes later, I’m not nervous and I don’t sweat. Misty’s trying to act like she’s not holding a paper bag tucked into a plastic bag, her arm straight as a yardstick at her side, the bag crinkling and hissing when she walks. Leonie looks everywhere but at Misty. She doesn’t hand Kayla off, but instead buckles Kayla in herself. When we pull away from that sad circle of houses with all that plenty inside, Misty is bent down fiddling with Leonie’s floor mats, and the bag disappears. I slide a pack of saltines and two bottles of juice I stole out of that house into my own plastic bag. After we leave the half-burnt room of pine trees, and we’re back on pavement and the highway, Leonie turns on the radio and lets it play louder than she ever has. I open my stolen bottle and drink the juice down, then pour half the other bottle into Kayla’s sippy cup. I hand one cracker to Kayla and slide one into my mouth. We eat like that: one for me and one for her. I let the saltines turn mealy and soggy on my tongue before chewing and swallowing so I don’t crunch. I am silent and stealthy in another way. Neither of the women in the front seat pay us any attention. When I eat and drink, I have never tasted anything so good.

  Chapter 4

  Leonie

  The night of Jojo’s birthday, Misty said: If we do this, the trip’s paid for. And then: You and Michael could have enough for a deposit. Y’all could get your own place. You always say the problem is y’all parents. Yours ’cause you live with them; his because they’re assholes. Given was even more still when she said that, like stone. Through Misty’s narrow kitchen window, I could see the tops of the trees turning from a dark velvet gray to orange, from palest orange to a pink the color of the inside of my mouth. How you think I paid for all my trips up to Bishop? From tips? She shook her head and snorted. You better take advantage.

  I hear them four words over and over again when we get in the car and I watch Misty put the package in the pocket under the floorboards. You better take advantage. She said them words as though decisions have no consequences, when, of course, it’s been easier for her. The way she said it, take advantage, made me want to slap her. Her freckles, her thin pink lips, her blond hair, the stubborn milkiness of her skin; how easy had it been for her, her whole life, to make the world a friend to her?

  Before Michael went to jail, he installed the envelope in the bottom of my car. He elevated the car on a jack and crawled underneath with his welding tools, and he cut what looked to be a perfect square in the floor of the car, then inserted another piece of metal with a hinge, fixed the hinge, and then welded the bottom of the car back together. Two doors, he’d said, and then kissed me twice. One to hold, and the other to let it go. If I need to. He’d been home from the oil rig for six months by then, and we’d had to move back in with Mama and Pop. We’d run through the money he saved, plus his severance. He’d worked on the Deepwater Horizon as a rig welder. After it blew up, he came home with his severance money
and nightmares. At the time, I’d talked him into buying a full-size bed for us to share in our new apartment, so no matter how we moved, I said, we’d sleep close, so every time he kicked in his sleep, every time he twitched or mumbled and threw up his arms, drawing back from something, I woke. I’d spent the days after the accident with Jojo in the house watching CNN, watching the oil gush into the ocean, and feeling guilty because that’s not what I wanted to see, guilty because I didn’t give a shit about those fucking pelicans, guilty because I just wanted to see Michael’s face, his shoulders, his fingers, guilty because all I cared about was him. He’d called me not long after the story broke on the news, told me he was safe, but his voice was tiny, corroded by static, unreal. I knew those men—all eleven of them. Lived with them, he said. When he came home, I was happy. He wasn’t. What we supposed to do? he asked, taking two bites of his grits before leaving them to jelly on his plate. We’ll figure it out, I said. When he started getting skinny, I thought it was because of his nightmares. When his cheekbones started standing out on his face like rocks under water, I thought it was because he was stressed out over money. When his spine rose under his skin, a line of knuckles punching up his back, I thought it was because of his grief and the fact he couldn’t find another welding job anywhere in Mississippi or Alabama or Florida or Louisiana or the Gulf of Mexico. But later I found out the truth. Later, I learned he’d figured everything out without me.

  “You don’t have to be so nervous,” Misty says.

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “This ain’t the first time I done this.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m talking about with Bishop.”

  Misty’s sipping on one of the cold drinks she took from her friends’ house. The woman’s name was Carlotta, and her husband, the one who cooked and gave us the bag, was Fred.

  “First time I did this was when I was visiting Sonny, my ex.”

  “That’s how you know them?”

  “Yeah. First time I did it, I was scared to death. Like you. But then after that, each time was easier.”

  I glance in the rearview mirror. Michaela’s shoving a blue ball in her mouth and babbling around the ball at her brother, who is trying to coax it away from her, his face very close to hers, his voice low and serious: “No, don’t put that in your mouth, Kayla; it’s nasty and done been on the floor.” Michaela grins and spits the ball in his hand and begins clapping and saying: “Nasty, that’s nasty.” Jojo looks like he’s paying all his attention to Michaela, but I know he’s not. There’s something about the way he leans, about how he says the same thing to Michaela, again, “That floor was nasty,” that makes me realize he’s listening to what we’re saying, even as he’s trying to look like he’s not. Me and Misty already talked about it when I picked her up: we’re not going to refer to it by name, not going to use any words that hint to what’s in the bag, what we’re sneaking north with us: meth, crystal, crank. We’d talk around it, avoid it like a bad customer in the bar who’s too drunk for more, who smells like sweet alcohol fermenting and diesel, yet keeps grabbing my hand when I walk by, saying something fucked up to me like: One more, you sweet Black bitch. And when we have to call it some other name, we’re going to call it the most embarrassing thing we can so Jojo will lose all interest.

  “If we get pulled over and they find those goddamn tampons, Misty, I’m going to kill you.”

  I figure that will make Jojo stop listening. Never mind the fact that the statement doesn’t make any sense. He’s a boy, and periods are one of those things about the human body he most likes to ignore: kidney stones, pimples, boils. Cancer.

  “Jojo, I need the atlas.”

  I’m right. He jerks when I say this before rooting around for the book and handing it over the seat to me, trying to find my eyes in the rearview mirror. When his brown don’t find my black, Misty takes it from him. He shrinks back into the backseat, still looking at the floor. Michaela calls him, “Jojo,” and he leans toward her again.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “I’m looking,” Misty mumbles.

  I look for mile markers. We stopped at Carlotta and Fred’s just north of Hattiesburg, in north Forrest County.

  “Mendenhall. We’re in Mendenhall,” Misty says. There’s a stoplight ahead of us, so I slow. She’s not looking at the atlas.

  “How you know that?”

  Misty points up, and there’s a billboard. Mendenhall, it reads, Home of Mississippi’s Most Beautiful Courthouse.

  “I want to see it.”

  The light turns green. I step on the gas.

  “I don’t.”

  “Why not? What if it’s really pretty?”

  In the backseat, Jojo is moving his mouth around like he’s chewing something. He looks away from Michaela and up to me, and his eyes dark as mine. I was smaller when I was his age, weedier, more delicate at my joints and bones. He looks like Given, but he never jokes. Sometimes, when Jojo’s playing with Michaela or sitting in Mama’s room rubbing her hands or helping her turn over in the bed, I look at him and see a hungry girl.

  “I bet it has big columns and everything. Probably even bigger than Beauvoir,” Misty says.

  “No,” I say, and leave it at that.

  Michael never used to write me anything about the violence in jail, those things that happened in the dead of night in dark corners and locked rooms: the stabbings and the hangings and the overdoses and the beatings. But I told him he had to tell me. In a letter, I said: If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I imagine the worst. So in the next letter, he told me about somebody getting jumped in the showers, beaten purple and black. In the one after, he told me how his cellmate started messing with one of the female guards, how they snuck around and have sex in the jail, hunching like rodents. Bent on procreating. And in the next letter, he told me about the guards beating an eighteen-year-old boy who had been convicted of kidnapping and strangling a five-year-old girl in a trailer park. They heard him screaming and then nothing, and then got word he bled to death like a pig in his cell. That, I want to say to Misty, is your pretty courthouse. But I don’t say anything. I watch the road roll out before me like a big black ribbon and I think about Michael’s last letter before he told me he was coming home: This ain’t no place for no man. Black or White. Don’t make no difference. This a place for the dead.

  * * *

  Michaela’s sick. She was quiet for the first hour after we left the house, but then she started coughing, and the tail end of the cough caught in her throat and she gagged. For the past thirty minutes, she’s been crying and fighting with her seat belt, trying to get out. I hand a palmful of napkins to Jojo, and every other time I look in the rearview mirror, I see him bending over her, frowning, wiping at her drooling mouth. The napkins soak in seconds. We were supposed to drive the rest of the way today and stay with Michael and Bishop’s lawyer in the next town over from the jail, but all her crying is making me feel like someone is squeezing my brain, tighter and tighter. I can’t breathe. Then she coughs and gags again, and I look back and the front of her is orange and mauve. She’s thrown up all her puffy Cheetos, digested soggy, all her little careful bites of her ham sandwich. The meat has turned what isn’t yellow pink. Jojo is holding napkins in both hands, frozen. He looks scared. Michaela cries harder.

  “We gotta stop,” I say as I pull over on the shoulder of the road.

  “Oh shit,” Misty says, and waves her hand in front of her mouth like she’s shooing away gnats. “That smell is going to make me throw up.”

  I want to slap her, even though the smell of the stomach acid, harsh and intense in the small car, makes me feel queasy, too. Want to yell at her: Bitch, how you work around all them drunks and can’t stand a little throw-up? But I don’t. Once we’re on the side of the road, and I’m swiping globs of the vomit away with the napkins I snatched from Jojo, the queasiness turns flips and somersaults in my stomach like a kid on a trampoline. Jojo doesn’t look scared anymore. He p
uts both hands in the vomit cascading down Michaela’s front and unbuckles her chest harness. She pauses in her frantic straining, her little chest pushed out against the belt again to give a thank-you cry before she starts pulling at the lap buckle, anxious for him to undo that, too, to free her. He’s frowning. He unbuckles the last buckle and pulls her out, and before I even have a moment to admonish him, to say his name sharply, say “Jojo,” Michaela is smashed to his chest and her little arms are around his neck again, the length of her laid along him, shaking, mewling, him breathing: “It’s all right, Kayla, it’s all right, Kayla, Jojo got you, Jojo got you, I got you, shhh.”

  “You almost done?” Misty asks, tossing it over her shoulder to the backseat like a piece of gummy burger wax paper.

  “I’m tired of this shit,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because I’m tired of driving, tired of the road stretching before me endlessly, Michael always at the opposite end of it, no matter how far I go, how far I drive. Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he’s trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.

  I mop up the rest of the slimy residue in her seat, throw the napkins on the asphalt, take a few baby wipes, and swipe them across the seat so that it smells like stomach acid and flowery soap.

  “It smells better,” Misty says. She’s half leaning out the window of the car, her formerly fluttering hand now cupped over her nose like a mask.

  * * *

  The drive to the next gas station seems miles, and the sun breaks through the clouds and beams directly overhead.