by Jesmyn Ward
When he and Christophe lay in bed at night and Joshua attempted to talk about putting in applications at businesses that were four or five towns away, a forty-five-minute or hour commute, he’d reply, “That’s too far away from Ma-mee. We can’t be that far away. What if something happen?” Joshua did notice that he stopped taking the car out riding as much, that he called Dunny more often to pick him up: gas cost money. Christophe went out to visit girls more, played ball at the park, and instead of paying to go inside, hung out in the parking lot at the one black nightclub in Germaine on Saturday nights. They revisited the places on their list, filled out more applications just in case the employees had lost the first ones. Joshua fidgeted around the house, washing clothes or sweeping or vacuuming or attempting to make red beans and rice and corn bread for dinner. While Joshua made the follow-up phone calls, Christophe harassed Uncle Paul and Eze, insisting that they needed to talk to somebody. None of it seemed to be working.
After four weeks of reality rolling over them like an opaque fog, Joshua sat on the front porch steps, his hair a wild brownish-red afro. He was picking it out for Laila, who’d agreed to braid it. Christophe had parked their car in the front yard alongside Dunny’s: they were shirtless, leaning half-in Dunny’s trunk, shifting his speakers around and adjusting the controls on the amplifier. Joshua had just washed his hair, but the water had already evaporated from it. It was tangled and dry and getting harder to comb through. A strong gust of wind cut through the leaves of the lone beech tree that grew in the front yard, and the leaves chattered over the call of the brush of the ubiquitous pines, the tinny rattle of bass from the trunk of Dunny’s car. Were they taking speakers from Dunny’s car and moving them to the Caprice? Inside, the phone rang. Ma-mee picked it up before the end of the first ring.
“Hello?”
Joshua peeled his T-shirt away from his stomach and closed his eyes, straining to hear Ma-mee’s voice.
“What’s up, Laila?” Dunny drawled.
“Hey Dunny. Hey Chris. Where your brother at?”
From inside the house, Joshua heard Ma-mee answer, “Yes.”
“He over there on the porch steps, waiting for you. Why don’t you do my hair after you do his?”
“You gonna have to pay me something for that. Five dollars at least.” Laila laughed.
“Aaaw, that’s messed up. Is he paying you?”
“Hey, if I’m going to be here for three hours doing hair, one of y’all got to pay me something. You asked second, so it’s going to have to be you.”
“You just think Joshua cute—playing favorites and shit.” Joshua could tell Dunny was speaking around the tip of his black, could hear the clench of his lips as he spoke.
Laila giggled, and through the wind, Joshua felt the sun slashing across the skin of his legs, making them burn. Inside the house, Ma-mee asked, “You sure you don’t have another DeLisle on that list?” He opened his eyes to see Laila leaning against Dunny’s car, punching him in the biceps and smiling, and Christophe placing two ten-inch speakers and an amp in the trunk of the Caprice. There was a fine red dust in the air. Joshua followed Ma-mee’s voice into the living room to see her breathe, “Alright then. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and stared in his general direction. Her eyes were trained somewhere in the middle of his chest. Her housedress was a pale yellow, the color of the light shining through the pine needles and cones outside. He stopped just inside the door.
“Who was that?” Joshua asked.
She gripped her forearm so that her arms crossed her lap. She smiled, let it slide away, and looked across the living room in the direction of the porch and the front yard.
“Man from the dockyard. Say he want you to come in Monday at ten for an interview.” Ma-mee pulled at the neck of her dress.
“What about Chris?” The bass thumped through the door behind Joshua.
“They didn’t say nothing about Chris.” She looked away from the door toward the silent TV. “They just want you.” She ran her hands over the lap of her thighs, and then let her palms fall open at her sides, facing upward, facing him. “Somebody else’ll call for Chris. Or maybe they just want you to start first.” She paused. “I don’t know.”
Behind him, Joshua heard the door open and close. Christophe’s face was dark in the shadowed room, his eyebrows a taut line across his forehead.
“Who going to call for Chris?”
Ma-mee opened her mouth as if to reply, but said nothing. Joshua thought that her forehead was wrinkled and her lips drawn up in a way that made her look like she was about to cry. His arms felt heavy and long and apelike at his sides.
“Man from the docks just called.” Here Joshua’s voice thinned, and he had to expel the rest of it like a cough from his throat. “Said he wanted me to come in next Monday for a interview, but—he didn’t say nothing about you.”
“Oh.”
The tips of Christophe’s fingers were pinched and burning from cutting the wires, from twining them one about the other to gather the sound, to harness the music and amplify it in the speakers. Installing the equipment was like guessing at a combination lock, feeling for the correct number of turns and stops, for hidden numbers. He’d spent the last big chunk of his money on that. Underneath his dresser drawer, he had two twenties, a five, and five ones. Fifty dollars. He’d bought the speakers, CD player, and amp from Marquise through Dunny, who was selling his system because he was getting a new one. He’d thought it too good a deal to pass by. He felt duped, standing there, the sun beating at the windows of the shadowed room, all of it dark and quiet, the atmosphere of it seeming to wait on something. Stupid thing to say, oh. He turned toward the door, away from the dim-lit expectant silence of the room, from their searching eyes. He thought of an insect tearing itself from a web with the help of the wind.
“Okay then.” Christophe pushed the screen door that opened to the porch. “I got work to do,” he said. It slammed behind him. The floorboards of the porch, uneven and swollen in the heat, snagged his feet. Dunny was in the trunk again.
“Joshua in the house?” Laila asked.
Christophe loped past her. The brightness of the sun, the sky, the red dirt of the driveway, the flowering fuchsia and green of the azalea bushes were blinding after the inside of the house. He slammed into the side of the trunk of the Caprice and leaned over Dunny, his forearms braced on the warm metal. Why was it parked? It wasn’t enough for him. He needed motion: he needed to move.
“Leave it.”
“What the fuck you talking about leave it? We almost done, young’un.”
“Man, I don’t feel like working on it right now. We can work on it later. You got a cigar?”
Dunny stood straight, his white T-shirt brown across the stomach where he had been leaning on the car, his braids tight and clean over the curve of his skull. Christophe glanced at him and looked away. He realized his leg was kicking by itself at the tire, rousing red dust in clouds across his worn white Reeboks.
“Let’s ride,” Christophe said.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The hurt and love and jealousy in Christophe’s chest coalesced and turned to annoyance that bubbled from his throat.
“Shit, ain’t nothing wrong with me.” Christophe heard this come from him in a hiss. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. Can we just go?”
Dunny closed the trunk. The metal sounded hard and loud, as harsh as the burning sun, when it clattered shut. Dunny pulled a black from behind his ear, a lighter from his pocket.
“You need a smoke.” This trailed behind him as he ambled toward his car. Christophe beat him to it, jumped through the window, and slid into the passenger seat, Dukes of Hazzard style. Sometimes the passenger door jammed and stuck when he tried to open it. He didn’t feel like jiggling the handle for a good three minutes. Dunny leisurely pulled his own door shut.
“Don’t be putting your feet on my seat when you jump in the car.” Dunny lit the black and handed it to Christophe.
“Fuck you.”
Dunny laughed, and the car growled to life. The stereo intoned. The music shook the air; it squeezed Christophe’s throat. Christophe saw Laila, her shirt pulled tight against her chest, her hand on the front porch screen door, watching them leave. He pulled on the black, the tip of the filter hot and malleable between his lips, and felt a cool tingling coat the simmer in his chest and begin to eat away at it in small bites. He blew out the smoke, and inhaled deeply on the second toke. As they turned from the red dirt driveway to the rough gravel of the street, he draped his arm out the window and tapped the ash away. Three small brown children with overlarge heads and bony knees were in the ditch as they passed, picking blackberries and dropping them carefully in large white plastic ice-cream buckets. Cece, Dizzy, and Little Man. They jumped when the bass dropped in quick succession like a trickle of pebbles turned into an avalanche. The smallest and skinniest one, his belly showing through the front of his red jumpsuit with the curve of a kickball, dropped his bucket. When Christophe passed, he could see gnats in small glinting bronze clouds around their heads, illuminating their bulbous skulls like halos. Christophe saluted them with his pointer finger, and leaned back into the seat as Dunny accelerated.
They rode until the sun set, until it slipped between the chattering branches of the trees and painted a broad sweep of the sky in the west pink and red, until the heat wasn’t so oppressive in the car. When Christophe got out at a gas station in Germaine to grab another cigar, he could feel the heat rising from the concrete of the lot. The streetlight over the gas pumps had attracted great swarming gangs of large black flying insects that were intent on racing each other into the bulb and dying. They met their deaths with loud pops. Christophe bought the cigar and was glad to get back in the car, to ride away from the buzzing lights, the streetlamps, the lonely, dusty gas station and the red-faced forlorn attendant, to drive along the highway on the beach, to cruise along the coastline.
Solitary, sparse stands of pine trees dotted the sandy median as they rode along. The moon was full and white in the black, nearly starless sky. As they turned from the beach and rode through St. Catherine to the bayou and neared Bois Sauvage, Dunny seemed to tire of the music. He pushed a button, and the lights on the stereo went off: the music stopped. Dunny hadn’t asked Christophe about his sudden change in mood, his need to run away. Once they’d left Bois Sauvage, he’d simply pulled a sack from his pocket, and told Christophe to look in the glove compartment for a cigar and roll up. The marsh grass was a pale, silvery green as it whipped by outside the window. Here, the night sounds of the insects chattering one to another like an angry congress were loudest. The pine trees were inky black and lined the horizon, and the water was a dark blue, the reflection of the moon shimmering like a white stone path on its surface. Christophe thought it beautiful. He squinted against the salty marsh wind and saw that Dunny was focused on the road, his eyes half-lidded. Christophe took a long pull of the last of the last blunt, and handed the roach to his cousin. He was glad he wouldn’t have to explain himself.
In Bois Sauvage, Dunny rode down the middle of the pockmarked streets, steered away from the edges of the narrow, ancient roads where the asphalt crumbled into pebbles that mixed in with the red dirt, the thick summer grass, and slid down into the ditches. The oaks reached out with tangled arms to form a tunnel over the car. In the yards of the few houses they passed, people, small shadows, sat on their porches or their steps drinking beer from cans, fanning themselves with flyswatters, burning small cans of citronella, and eyeing the patches of piney woods suspiciously, muttering about the descending summer heat, mosquitoes, and West Nile, which they’d heard about on the news.
Christophe watched the tree line, smiling faintly when he realized he could tell where he was going in Bois Sauvage by the tops of the trees, that he recognized the big oak at the corner of Cuevas and Pelage, and that the dense stand of pines on his right indicated that they were in the middle of St. Salvador Street: he and Joshua had played chase under those trees when they were little. Dunny and Javon were always team captains, and they would always pick the same teams: the twins and Marquise, all small and squirrelly, for Dunny, and Big Henry, Bone, and Skeetah for Javon. The smaller team invariably beat the larger team. Christophe and Joshua would always skip past Marquise and Dunny to hide together deep in the woods while the other team was counting loudly on the street. Christophe was the fastest, so he led Joshua in a general direction, but Joshua always had the better eye for hiding spots: he would bury them underneath a hill of dry brown pine needles or in the heart of a full green bush with dark leaves the size of their fingernails or in the top of a small oak tree, silent and perching like crows.
The other team seldom caught them. Dunny would give up and walk out into the open, into the dim light of the forest and give himself away, mostly because he was hungry or tired or had to go to the bathroom. Marquise would follow him, tagging along for food. Joshua and Christophe would stay hidden for hours, giggling breathlessly as Javon or Big Henry crashed through the underbrush beneath them, calling their names loudly and threatening forfeit and talking shit. Their members would drift away, complaining: Big Henry insisting he had chores to do, Bone yelling he had dinner to eat, and Javon spitting that he had TV to watch. Christophe and Joshua would stay where they were until there were no other human sounds around them, sometimes until the sun was setting, and then they’d run out to the empty street, hopping in delirium, drunk with their cleverness, wrestling each other down the length of the road. Christophe let his eyes close and his head loll back onto the headrest, and felt the car stop.
Dunny had taken him to the basketball court. What he could see of the grass in the court lights was long and bunched in tufts, overgrown with weeds. The iron barrels they used as garbage cans were rusting along the rims. Nobody had bothered to line them with black garbage bags since the last time they’d been emptied. The small, warped stand of white wooden bleachers was empty, the swings silent, the small wooden play set the county recreation board had commissioned without playmates. Dunny switched off the ignition, opened his car door, and said, “Get that ball from the backseat.” Christophe willed his arms and torso to move, grabbed the ball and threw it at Dunny, who ran to the court with it and made a sloppy, easy lay-up. He dribbled the ball, half walking and skipping back and forth on the asphalt, shooting jumpers. Christophe watched Dunny on the court. When had he become the one who followed one step behind, the one who eyed and followed the other’s back, the one who was led?
Now, he would have to find his way alone. He lurched toward the court that shone like a snow globe: the pale gray asphalt spray painted with blue gang signs, the halo of the fluorescent lights that cast the scene in a glass sphere, and all those damn bugs circling and falling like black snow. He shuffled through the grass at a slow run and the long, blooming strands bit into his knees, etched fine stinging lines into the skin of his shins. By the time he reached the court, the high was pulsing through his head, his arms, and his legs with the beating call of the night insects: in and out, up and down, over and under and through. Dunny threw the ball at him, and he fumbled to catch it, his hands clumsy. He dribbled the ball through his leg; it glanced against his calf.
“You sure you can handle that?” Dunny asked. He stood with his hands on his waist underneath the goal. Sweat glazed his face.
“Nigga, I know you ain’t asking me if I can handle a damn ball. I’ll show you some ball handling, fat boy.”
Christophe dribbled the ball again, bouncing it with his fingertips. Something about his handling was off. It felt like he was dribbling on rocks; the ball was ricocheting everywhere.
“What the hell are you trying to do to the ball? Dribble it or flatten it?” Dunny loped toward Christophe and raised one arm in defense. His fingers grazed Christophe’s chest.
“Why are you locking your knees? Damn, Dunny, you think I’m that easy?” Christophe bounced the ball through his legs again. It cle
ared his thigh this time, clean and easy. He caught it, wobbled, and smiled. “Just needed to warm up, that’s all.”
“You been hitting the bottle in the car? You got a thirty-two-ounce hid under the passenger seat?”
“I ain’t drank shit and I’m about to school your ass.”
“Chris, I was dunking on niggas when you was still pissing the bed.”
“I ain’t never pissed in the bed, bitch.”
Christophe faked to his right, then jerked to his left, leaned back, and brought his legs together. He crouched and shot a fadeaway. He felt the ball roll from his wrist, across his palm, up the spine of his middle finger and away toward the basket. The release was good, but the shot flew wide. It hit the corner of the backboard, bounced off the edge of the rim, and arced back toward the court. Dunny snatched the rebound. Christophe grimaced.
Dunny hugged the ball to his chest, breathing hard. Christophe eyed his mouth, the pouch of fat and skin quivering under his neck. Dunny’d been good in high school: he’d had a flawless jumper, and he was the go-to man for defense on the inside. Christophe had gone to every one of his home games. Dunny had teased him mercilessly, grilled him, when he’d begun to play seriously in seventh grade. Dunny had sweated with Christophe on the court, had been an indomitable brick wall, and had yelled at him for hours. He was small, so according to Dunny, he should’ve been quicker, handled the ball better, and had a nastier jumper. He’d made Christophe so mad he’d wanted to cry, several times, but instead of crying, Christophe had flared his nostrils, rasped through the pain in his chest, and kept playing. He’d skirted and darted and struck at Dunny like a small, irascible dog. He’d gotten better.