by Jesmyn Ward
The handcuffs are on me before the n is silent.
“Sit down.”
I sit. The ball in my throat is wet cotton, growing denser and denser as it descends. The officer walks back to the car, makes Michael get out, puts him in handcuffs, and marches him back to sit next to me.
“Baby?” Michael says. I shake my head no, the air another kind of cotton, humid with spring rain, all of it making me feel as if I am suffocating. Jojo climbs out of the car, Michaela hanging on to him, squeezing him with her legs: she has her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Misty climbs out the backseat, her hands palms forward and her mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything she’s saying. The officer looks between the two and makes his decision and walks toward Jojo, his third pair of handcuffs out. Michaela wails. The officer gestures for Misty to take Michaela, and Michaela buries her face in Jojo’s neck and kicks when Misty pulls her from Jojo. She’s never liked Misty: I brought her with me to Misty’s one day after a run to the convenience store by the interstate for cigarettes, and when Misty leaned into the car to say hello to Michaela, Michaela turned her face, ignored Misty, and asked a question: “Jojo?”
“Just breathe,” Michael says.
It’s easy to forget how young Jojo is until I see him standing next to the police officer. It’s easy to look at him, his weedy height, the thick spread of his belly, and think he’s grown. But he’s just a baby. And when he starts reaching in his pocket and the officer draws his gun on him, points it at his face, Jojo ain’t nothing but a fat-kneed, bowlegged toddler. I should scream, but I can’t.
“Shit,” Michael breathes.
Jojo raises his arms to a cross. The officer barks at him, the sound raw and carrying in the air, and Jojo shakes his head without pausing and staggers when the officer kicks his legs apart, the gun a little lower now, but still pointing to the middle of his back. I blink and I see the bullet cleaving the soft butter of him. I shake. When I open my eyes again, Jojo’s still whole. Now on his knees, the gun pointing at his head. Michaela thrashes against Misty.
“Sonofabitch!” Misty screams, and drops Michaela, who runs to Jojo, throws herself on his back, and wraps herself, arms and legs, around him. Her little bones: crayons and marbles. A shield. I’m on my knees.
“No,” Michael says. “Don’t, Leonie. Baby, don’t.”
I snap. Imagine my teeth on the officer’s neck. I could rip his throat. I don’t need hands. I could kick his skull soft. Jojo slumps forward into the grass, and the cop is shaking his head, reaching under Michaela, who kicks at him, to cuff Jojo with one hand. He motions to Misty, who runs forward and grips Michaela under her armpits, wrestles her like an alligator.
“Jojo!” Michaela screams. “Have Jojo!”
The officer stands in front of me again.
“I need your permission to search the car, ma’am.”
“Take me out of these cuffs.” If he would come close enough, I could head-butt him blind.
“Is that a yes, ma’am?”
I swallow, breathe. Air shallow as a muddy puddle.
“Yes.”
Jojo only has eyes for Michaela. He twists his neck to look at her, speaks to her, his voice another murmuring, like the trees as they sway in the wind. The clouds, like great gray waves, are sliding across the sky. The air already feels wet. Michaela is beating Misty around the neck, and I am sure Misty is cussing, her words indecipherable, but her syllables split the air as cleanly as railroad spikes riven into wood.
“He put up the gun, baby?” Michael asks.
I nod and groan.
The officer is picking his way through the trunk, which is all junk. I see that now, handcuffed, suffocating. Plastic bags filled with faded, misshapen clothes. Al’s bag of sandwiches. A tire iron. Jumper cables. An old cooler littered with empty potato chip bags and cold drink bottles, mold eating at the seams. The baggie down my throat, disappeared to my stomach; my breath coming in a great whoosh, and I can breathe but the high from the meth comes fast. It squeezes me, a great hand, and shakes. It is a different kind of suffocation. I shudder, close my eyes, open them, and Phantom Given is sitting next to Jojo on the ground, reaching out as if he could touch him. Given-not-Given drops his hand. Half of Jojo’s face is in the dirt, but I can still see his frowning mouth, quivering at the corners: it is the face he made when he was a baby, when he was fighting the urge to cry.
“Have Jojo!” Michaela shrieks. The officer straightens from the car and walks over to Misty, who hoists Michaela up in the air to wrangle her. Phantom Given rises, walks to the officer, Michaela, and Misty.
“You all right, babe?” Michael asks.
I shake my head no. Given-not-Given reaches out again, this time to Michaela, and it looks as if she sees him, as if he can actually touch her, because she goes rigid all at once, and then a golden toss of vomit erupts from Michaela’s mouth and coats the officer’s uniformed chest. Misty drops Michaela and bends and gags. Phantom Given claps silently, and the officer freezes.
“Fuck!” he says.
Michaela crawls to Jojo, and the officer yanks at Jojo’s pocket, pulls out a small bag Jojo had, and looks within it before shoving it back in Jojo’s face like it’s a rotten banana peel. He stalks back to stand in front of us again, and he is opening our cuffs, and he shines. The bile glistens, the blue flashes.
“Go home,” he says. There is no cinnamon and cologne anymore. Just stomach acid.
“Thank you, Officer,” Michael says. He grabs my arm and walks me toward the car, and I cannot hide the shudder of pleasure as the meth licks and his fingers grip and the officer undoes Jojo’s cuffs.
“Boy had a damn rock in his pocket,” the officer says. “Go home, and keep that child in the seat as much as you can.”
Phantom Given frowns at me as I slide into the passenger seat. My body lolls. I can’t blink. My eyes snap open, again and again. Given-not-Given shakes his head as the real Michael slams the passenger door.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Misty breathes in the backseat. Jojo straps Michaela’s legs in her seat and hugs her and the whole contraption: the plastic back, the padding. Michaela sobs and grabs handfuls of his hair. I expect him to tell her it’s okay, but he doesn’t. He just rubs his face against her, his eyes closed. My spine is a rope, tugged north, then south. Michael puts the car in gear.
“You need milk,” Michael says. Phantom Given wipes his hand across his mouth, and it is then I realize that streams of spit are coming from my mouth, thick as mucus. Given-not-Given turns away from the car and disappears: I understand. Phantom Given is the heart of a clock, and his leaving makes the rest of it tick tock tick tock, makes the road unfurl, the trees whip, the rain stream, the wipers swish. I bend in half, my mouth in my elbow and knees, and moan. Wish it was Mama’s lap. My jaw clacks and grinds. I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.
Chapter 8
Jojo
I can’t look at him straight. Not with him sitting on the floor of the car, squeezed between Kayla’s car seat and the front, facing me. He don’t say nothing, just got his arms over his knees, his mouth on his wrists. One hand balled into a fist. I ain’t never seen knees like his: big dusty beat-up tennis balls. Even though he’s skinny, arms and legs racket-thin, he should be too big to fit in the space he done folded himself into. He’s sharp at the edges, but there’s too much of him, so all I can think when I look at him is Something’s wrong. The phrase keeps flying around in my head like a bat, fluttering and flapping and slapping at the corners of an attic. I don’t know I’ve fallen asleep until I wake up to the car stopping, to the lights flashing, to the policeman in the window telling Leonie to step out of the car and the boy on the floor sinking farther down, covering his ears with his hands.
“They going to chain you,” he says.
When the officer comes around to the back door and says, “Step out of the car, young man,” the boy curls up smaller into himself, like a roly-poly, and he grimaces.
“I to
ld you,” he says.
It’s my first time being questioned by the police. Kayla is screaming and reaching for me, and Misty is complaining, her shirt sliding farther down her shoulder, showing the tops of her breasts. I don’t have eyes for that. All I have eyes for is Kayla, fighting. The man telling me sit, like I’m a dog. “Sit.” So I do, but then I feel guilty for not fighting, for not doing what Kayla is, but then I think about Richie and then I feel Pop’s bag in my shorts, and I reach for it. Figure if I could feel the tooth, the feather, the note, maybe I could feel those things running through me. Maybe I wouldn’t cry. Maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it was a bird, ricocheted off a car midflight, stunned and reeling. But then the cop has his gun out, pointing at me. Kicking me. Yelling at me to get down in the grass. Cuffing me. Asking me, “What you got in your pocket, boy?” as he reaches for Pop’s bag. But Kayla moves so fast, small and fierce, to jump on my back. I should soothe Kayla, should tell her to run back to Misty, to get down and let me go, but I can’t speak. The bird crawling up into my throat, wings spasming. What if he shoot her? I think. What if he shoot both of us? And then I notice Richie looking out of the car window, even though the cuffs are grinding into my wrists. He distracts me from the warm close day, from Misty pulling Kayla away, but only for a second because I can’t help but return to this: Kayla’s brown arms and that gun, black as rot, as pregnant with dread.
The image of the gun stays with me. Even after Kayla throws up, after the police officer checks my pants and lets me out of them biting handcuffs, even after we are all in the car and riding down the road with Leonie bent over sick in the front seat, that black gun is there. It is a tingle at the back of my skull, an itching on my shoulder. Kayla snuggles in to me, quickly asleep, and everything is hot and wet in the car: Misty’s sweating about the hairline, wet beads appear on Kayla’s snoring nose, and I can feel water running down my ribs, my back. I rub the indents in my wrists where the handcuffs squeezed and see the gun, and the boy starts talking.
“You call him Pop,” Richie says. I think it should be a question, but he says it like it’s a statement. I look up at Misty, who’s biting her fingers and looking out the window, and I nod.
“Your grandpa,” the boy says, his eyes looking up to his forehead, the roof of the car, like he’s reading the words he says in the sky. Michael ain’t paying attention to anything going on in the backseat, either; he’s driving and rubbing Leonie’s back. She’s doubled over, moaning. I nod again.
“My name?” he says.
Richie, I mouth.
He looks like he wants to smile but he doesn’t.
“He told you about me?”
I nod.
“He tell you how he knew me? That we was in Parchman together?”
I huff and nod again.
“They don’t send them there as young as you no more.”
My wrists won’t stop hurting.
“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”
It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone.
“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”
Like my marrow could carry a bruise.
“You look like Riv,” Richie says. He puts his chin on his forearms and breathes hard, like he just finished running a long way. I move Kayla onto my lap, and she is making me so hot. I have to look away from the wrong of the boy folded onto the floor of the car, so I stare out the window at the tall trees flashing past and think about the gun. Even though it reminded me of so much cold, I think it would have been hot to touch. So hot it would have burned my fingerprints off.
* * *
It’s after one of them long stretches, after at least two hours seeing nothing but trees, we finally run up on a gas station, and Michael pulls off the road. The boy’s been sitting quiet, I been singing to Kayla, and Misty been playing with her cell phone, so we all look up when we pull into the parking lot. The sun burns with a steady midafternoon bore. Leonie’s still bent over in the front seat, but she ain’t moaning no more. She quiet as the boy, but she ain’t still like him. She got her arms crossed over her chest and she rubbing her stomach and her sides and her back like she’s miming kissing, her fingers digging into the thin shallows between her ribs. And every five seconds or so, her head smacks back like someone hit her in the face with a basketball, like I got hit when I was seven in a game down at the park. My cousin Rhett threw the ball to me and yelled catch too late. I wasn’t paying attention to him or the game: I was looking to the bleachers, where Leonie was sitting with Michael, thigh to thigh in the cold winter air, puffed up in jackets, huddled together like nesting hens. I turned around to the ball slamming into my nose and mouth, so hard I saw white and left spit on the ball. They all laughed, and I thought it was funny and horrible at the same time.
Michael’s digging through Leonie’s purse, and he pulls out ten one-dollar bills and waves them.
“I need you to get two things. Milk and charcoal.”
“Kayla’s asleep.”
“Your mama’s sick. She need this for her stomach.”
I remember the gray water, the black stew from the leaves she boiled for Kayla.
“She gave Kayla something she made. So she wouldn’t be sick no more. She ain’t got no more of that?”
I wonder if whatever medicine she cooked would help Leonie now. If it would make her so sick that whatever poison is inside her would come out.
“She gave it all to Kayla,” Misty says.
“What you need charcoal for?”
“Jojo, you always talk this much when somebody asks you to do something?”
He could hit me right now. Leonie did most of the hitting, but I know Michael could hit, too. Never with a closed fist, though. Always with his palm open, but his hand felt like a small shovel every time he hit me on the thin plate of my shoulder, the knobby middle of my chest, my arm where the muscle ain’t enough to take the pain out of the blow.
“Kayla’s asleep,” I say again, meaning it to be firm, but it comes out soft as a mumble, and it don’t sound like what I want it to sound like. Michael don’t hear We don’t need you. He hear I’m weak.
“Put her in her seat.”
“She going to wake up,” I say. She’s a heavy sleeper. Plus she don’t feel good, which means she’ll probably stay sleep. But I don’t want to put her down. I don’t want to leave her in her seat with Richie sitting at her feet, her toes by his head, her little feet dangling by his mouth. What if she sees him?
“Goddamnit, I’ll go get it,” Misty says, and opens the car door.
“No,” Michael says. “Jojo, get your goddamn ass up out this car and go inside and get what I told you. Right now.”
“He going to hit you. In the face,” Richie says, but he doesn’t look up, doesn’t raise his head. Just says it and keeps his head down. “I ain’t going to touch her.”
“Kayla,” I say.
Michael throws the money at me and sharpens his hand to a blade. The other one he got on Leonie’s shoulder, keeping her still.
“She too young to help me,” Richie says. “I need you.”
“I’ll go,” I say.
Michael doesn’t turn back around. He watches me lay Kayla in her seat, watches me try to fix her head so it doesn’t flop forward, so her little chin doesn’t dig into her chest, watches me glance at Richie on the floor, who waves his fingers but doesn’t raise his head.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” Richie says.
The inside of the store is so cool and the outside air so hot and wet that the windows are fogged up. I can’t see Leonie’s car from inside, only the smeared gray on the glass. The man at the counter got a big brown bushy beard, every hair going every which way on his face, but the rest of him is thin and yellow, even his hair, which he’s combed over his head to hide the baldness underneath. It works, too, because his scalp is yellow as the r
est of him, so it’s hard for me to tell where his skin ends and the hair sprouts.
“That’s all?” he says when I put the quart of milk and the small briquettes of charcoal on the counter. He stretches out his words so they seem to loop between us, and I have to translate to understand what he says through the accent. I lean forward. He moves back just a step: small as a slivered fingernail. A twitch. I remember I’m brown, and I move back, too.
“Yeah,” I say, and slide the money over the counter.
When I bring the bag to the car, Michael is disappointed.
“Go back inside,” he says, “and get a hammer or a screwdriver or something. Go look where they got all the home stuff and the car stuff at. They got to have something. How you expect me to break the charcoal up?”
“Guess that wasn’t all?” the man asks when I slide the tire-pressure gauge across the counter.
“Nope,” I say. He smiles at me, and each tooth is gray. His gums red. His mouth the only thing about him that’s vivid, a red surprise coming out of his beard. I take a Tootsie Pop out the display bin.
“How much is it?”
“Seventy-five cents,” the man says. His eyes say different: I would give it to you if I could, but I can’t. Got cameras in here.
“I got it,” I say, “and I don’t need no receipt.”
The change is cold in my pocket when I stop at Michael’s side of the car and hand him the gauge.
“You got my change?”
I was hoping he’d forget, that at the next place we stopped, I could sneak inside with Kayla, buy a beef jerky and a drink for myself. My insides feel like a balloon again, full with nothing but air. I pick the change out around the bag Pop gave me, and when I slide into the back of the car, Michael’s handing me a dirty saucer Leonie had slid under the driver’s seat, and a brick of charcoal, and the gauge.
“Fucking charcoal was expensive,” he says. “Crush it.”
“Candy,” Kayla says, and reaches for me.
“Michaela, leave your brother alone,” Michael says. He’s rubbing Leonie’s hair, bending over to whisper in her ear, and I catch little bits of it. “Just breathe, baby, breathe,” he says.