by Jesmyn Ward
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 astringent 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 horsey shoulders and a weaselly neck monitoring his every move. He switched the radio on and when he heard the midday blues program, he turned it off.
Christophe was rolling a blunt. He’d spread a napkin across his lap. On his left knee, he’d placed the weed, rolled up in a small corner of a Ziploc bag. On his right knee, he balanced the cigarillo: a strawberry Swisher Sweet. He sliced the cigar down the middle with his pointer fingernail: he kept his fingernails long for a reason. The strawberry smell of the cigar’s skin sifted through the car. Christophe opened the plastic bag and began to break it down in smaller pieces that would fit in the wrapper, and to cull the buds from the stems. He sprinkled the leaves evenly down the center of the skin. He licked the Swisher, and then folded the edges together, sealing it. The weed was strong; the smell of it had been thick and musky, and the buds had been damp and hard to break down. It would be good to smoke.
He lit the blunt by inhaling sharply on the end of it while he fired up the other end with his most recent lighter, which was a dull purple color. Joshua was surprised Christophe hadn’t lost it yet: he’d had it for a few weeks now. He’d bought it the day after graduation. The day was overcast; the clouds clustered in a dense blanket in the sky, low and light gray, for as far as Joshua could see, out over the gulf and into the distance. It made the docks seem even more forlorn. The men moved slowly in their blue-and-black overalls, their T-shirts rolled up over their biceps to show their pining muscles as they bent and lifted and threw sack after sack of what looked like feed onto platforms that the forklift operator loaded onto a crane. They were unloading a trucker’s trailer, and transferring the cargo to the hold of the ship sitting in the harbor. Joshua winced at the seeming endless line of workers, the endless quantity of pallets and bags. It was more than tedium: it was hard, backbreaking work. But he knew they could take care of Ma-mee with this money, fix up the house a bit, fix some leaks in the roof; they wouldn’t have to decide between planting buckets and buying shoes. They could finally save and spend and earn and have something of their own, something that hadn’t been given to them by their mother.
“I feel like we fixing to go play a game or something,” Christophe said. He inhaled again, pulling the sweet, sticky smoke into his lungs. Joshua noticed he wasn’t fidgeting anymore: the weed was calming him. He began to speak, and Joshua listened. Christophe could see it in his head: he’d pass this car to Joshua and buy his own car. A Cutlass. He’d paint it navy blue with a silver pearl, and put it on some dubs, some twenty-inch six-stars. He’d put a system in it. He would take the corners slow by the church and the convenience station and into the driveway so he wouldn’t dent the dubs, and he’d play Pastor Troy so loud his trunk would rattle. Dunny would be jealous. He waved the blunt vaguely toward Joshua, his eyes half-lidded, concentrating on relaying the vision of him riding up to the house, parking the car, of him and Joshua and Uncle Paul redoing the porch on the house, replacing the small sagging one with a larger, deluxe version that had room for a swing, and plants, and two ceiling fans. Ma-mee would like that.
Joshua didn’t smoke too often; he hoped the blunt would stop his legs from shaking. He knew Christophe had some Febreze spray stashed underneath the seat, so they could mask the smell. As for the eventual job piss tests, he was sure they could sneak in one of their little cousins’ urine when the time came for those interviews. Dunny had done it when he’d gone to interview for his job at the local Wal-Mart, and he’d passed. He’d taped a small plastic vial of it to the inside of his thigh: he said the worst part was ripping the tape off. Joshua puffed and held the smoke in his lungs before letting it out and breathing through his nose so that the smoke seemed to flow like water over a stone over his upper lip and into his nostrils. He loved that trick. Christophe could never manage it. Christophe grinned. Joshua took another quick puff, and then handed the blunt back to his brother.
“How long you think we’ll have to work here before we can start doing big shit? Like fixing the porch? Before we get some benefits?” Christophe choked out around the smoke he was holding in his chest.
“Probably around six months. I think that’s how long they usually make you wait.”
Joshua felt his sternum tingle and leaned his head somnolently on the backseat. The back of his skull felt weighted by something leaden: in his mind, he pictured a ton anchor like the one he imagined anchored the ships in the dock dragging at the back of his brain. “This some good green.”
“Dunny sold it to me. It was the last of that good batch he got from Big Lean. Had to bug him to do that. He didn’t want to sell it because he wanted to smoke it all. Made me promise to save some so we could smoke with him. Maybe tonight to celebrate putting all these applications in.”
“How long you think it’s going to be before people start calling us back?” asked Joshua.
“Uncle Paul said by the end of next week. Dunny said two. He say Wal-Mart always needing people—we know the boat need people—so even if the grocery stores or Burger King’n’em don’t call us back, at least we know we have two pretty good chances, right? Uncle Paul say to wait to go down to the shipyard where they build the barges . . . say we probably got better chances here and the other places first, ’cause most people they hire down there know a trade like welding or something.” Christophe passed the blunt.
Joshua hit it twice, and stared out the window. His tongue felt rough, serrated: his taste buds slid against the roof of his palate as sharp and crusty as barnacles. His mouth was dry with the taste of the weed. It was the one thing he didn’t like about smoking—weedmouth. He wanted more to drink than that Coke; he wanted more than the trickle in the bottom of the can. Then he remembered where they were, and why they were here, and why he’d have to swallow more spit. He attempted to work some up in the back of his throat. It had the texture o
f cobwebs.
“We need to start working soon. I got the feeling from Ma-mee that Cille’s done with sending us money,” Joshua said. His tongue seemed twice its normal size. “When you was in the shower, Ma-mee said something like Cille figure we grown and she must not feel responsible for us no more.” Joshua didn’t add that Ma-mee had snorted when she said it, that there had been an unspoken “as if she was ever responsible for you” tacked on the end that had floated in the air between them and landed in front of Joshua in his half-eaten plate of eggs.
Christophe sucked at the blunt and then ground it out in the ashtray.
Christophe patted his pockets and muttered. “Where the hell is my Clear Eyes?” He found it, and tipped his head back, easing it into the corners of his lids. “Shit, I could’ve told you that.” He threw the small opaque plastic bottle into Joshua’s lap. “Even though she said it, you had to know it anyway.”
Joshua didn’t answer. He was glad he didn’t smoke that often: while he felt buoyed by water, streams of feeling licking his limbs, for Christophe, who had smoked longer and more than he had, smoking a blunt was almost like smoking a cigarette. Joshua applied the Visine and dropped it on the seat between them, and if possible, sank further down into the upholstery. He didn’t want to think about Cille like that, think that she could just pass them off like a job she’d completed. Even though she hadn’t come to their graduation, she had given them the car: surely she’d still be in their lives some sort of way. The skin of his throat pulled as he leaned his head on the door and glanced at the time on the dashboard. It was 11:45. Christophe pulled out the bottle of Febreze from under his seat and began spraying himself and Joshua with it. Joshua closed his eyes and let him spray; he turned into the door, baring his back to his brother so that he sprayed that as well. Joshua settled back and closed his eyes. He felt as if he were floating, and by concentrating on the sensation, he was able to let Cille slip from his mind. There was a river of static behind his eyeballs. He sighed, and felt her visage and her voice peeling and falling away from his brain like a loose flower petal.
Christophe led the way across the pier to the office as Joshua followed. He danced across the concrete, weaving through the working men, who were faceless in the sun’s glare. Under the hot, salty wind, Joshua smelled Febreze. He blew out his breath and smelled weed. In the office, the floor was lined with faded dirty white and gray tile, and fluorescent lights shone in long, bright rows from the ceiling and cast everything in glassy yellow. As he stepped up behind Christophe at the counter and flanked his brother, Joshua thought about holding his breath. Christophe was leaning into the counter. The clerk wore wide, red plastic-rimmed glasses that covered half her face, and lipstick that matched her frames. Her short hair had been hairs-prayed into a gray-blond mane. Joshua saw that the lipstick had bled into the tiny creases at the corner of her mouth; her pale face seemed to be leaching away the color from her lips. Joshua knew she could smell the weed on Christophe, who had one elbow on the counter in a nonchalant assertion.
“May I help you.” It was not a question; it was a statement. Her mouth cracked and Joshua thought he saw a flash of teeth. It almost seemed dirty.
“We came to fill out applications. Two, please.”
Christophe smiled at Joshua, seemingly pleased with himself for the confidence in the declaration. Joshua let out a breath and immediately regretted it. The woman slid two blurry sheets of white paper across the counter. Christophe grabbed an application and pulled it across the table toward him as the woman dropped two pencils on the counter and pointed them to a row of chairs across the room against the wall. Christophe smiled at the woman and walked away. Joshua slid the paper across the cold countertop. The woman was watching him. He smiled at her through his haze, grabbed the pen, turned away, and exhaled. He was moving too slowly: every step took hours. Sweat ran from his hairline, and he shivered; he felt cold. When he sat on the chair next to his brother, he realized he had almost forgotten what he was here for.
Christophe was writing purposefully, quickly; his usually messy scrawl scrawled across the paper in tightly wound lines. Christophe looked up from his work and elbowed Joshua: Christophe jabbed the pencil toward his brother and made a motion Joshua assumed Christophe thought mimicked writing. To Joshua, it looked like his brother was carving something in the air; he held the pencil like a knife. Joshua began writing. The weed was churning him up inside; it was twisting him like a wet rag, wringing sweat from him. He filled out the answers he’d memorized. He plucked them formed whole from his head, and placed them slowly and succinctly on the paper. Christophe lounged next to him with his paper in his hand, and Joshua saw that he was kneading the corner between his thumb and forefinger as he leaned back in his seat and grinned to himself.
Joshua stared at his paper, determined that it was done, and grabbed his brother’s from his hand and rose quickly. They walked back to the counter side by side. The woman was at her desk, staring at a black-and-green computer screen. She didn’t move from her seat. Joshua placed the applications on the table as he blinked against the fuzziness in his eyes: his eyeballs seemed to have grown hair. Christophe set the pencil down beside him and called out “Thank you” to the woman. The blonde head nodded at the screen. Christophe stopped in the blinding noise and sunlight of the dock and waited for his brother. Joshua was silent; he felt as if Christophe were pulling him along in a fine green fishing net through the throngs of men, the leaning machines, and the crates.
“I’m hungry,” Christophe said at the car. “I wish we had a whole ’nother blunt,” he mumbled as he backed the car out of the parking space.
Joshua waved his fingers in front of his brother’s face; he was trying to draw patterns from the air. Christophe stared, and pressed the brakes. His eyelids fluttered open wide as Joshua grinned. Christophe laughed and slapped Joshua’s hand away.
“Stop it,” said Christophe as he put the car in drive.
Joshua turned on the radio. A blues singer’s voice limped through the air between them. Christophe shrugged and said, “Leave it on.” Joshua laid his head back against the headrest and stared at the gray-blue water, at the shrimp boats buoyed like pelicans, their nets flared like wings. The car sailed across the barren, black sea of the parking lot away from the commotion of the pier. Christophe pointed with one finger toward the windshield, toward the west: homeward.
3
DURING THE NEXT FOUR WEEKS, Ma-Mee orbited the phone like a moon. It was a rotary dial plastic blue phone; what she could see of it was a vague blur the pale color of boy’s baby clothes. The boys went off to play basketball or lounged in their room listening to the stereo and reading old, faded issues of Sports Illustrated and Low Rider magazine or cut the grass or dozed on the couch or on the carpet before the box fan. Ma-mee sat in the easy chair next to the side table with the telephone on it and listened to the TV with the volume on low. The twins called places to follow up, and every manager or employee told them that they would call them back. Ma-mee took to picking up the receiver surreptitiously throughout the day, listening for the dial tone to assure herself that the damn thing was still working, that it hadn’t short-circuited or malfunctioned during the night.
Joshua slipped money into Ma-mee’s purse when they went shopping with Uncle Paul for groceries, and splurged on forties of King Cobra at $1.50 a bottle once a weekend. He tried not to spend much, but the money still disappeared from the small stash he kept hidden in a shoe box in the top of their closet. Cille called once when the twins weren’t home and talked to Ma-mee for only a minute because there were customers in the store. Cille had told Ma-mee to tell the twins she said hello, and that she was planning on taking a trip down to Mississippi to see them toward the end of the summer when she got a little vacation time. Joshua had hated to admit that something in his chest eased when he heard Ma-mee tell him that. Something had opened behind his ribs and he’d felt wistful, sitting at the kitchen table with the lightbulb burning, the radio playin
g old R&B, Luther Vandross crooning from the windowsill of the open window, greens on the table and the sun setting outside. He hadn’t said anything in return, had kept the surge of emotion in his chest quiet, but Christophe had grunted and shrugged out, “That’s cool,” before shoveling another forkful of seasoned, steaming greens and rice from his plate into his mouth.
Bills were due. He knew Aunt Rita collected all the bills and paid them with money from Ma-mee’s Social Security and disability checks and Cille’s Western Union money orders that she deposited in Ma-mee’s account every month. Without Cille’s help, they would come up short this month, or barely scrape by. He figured that Uncle Paul or Aunt Rita would give them more money if they needed it—but something in him balked at the idea. He watched Ma-mee hover over the phone and check it when she thought he wasn’t looking, and every day that it didn’t ring with a call about a job, worry tightened his head like a vise. He knew Christophe had more money than he did saved up in his own secret stash (on the floor under his bottom dresser drawer), but he also knew that while he grew quiet and tight with dread and frustration over their unemployment, Christophe reacted by getting angry, by refusing to limit his spending. It was almost as if he believed that if he spent like he had money, if he acted like he didn’t have to worry about money, then he’d have it: a job would inevitably make itself available. He refused to live like he was poor.