by Jesmyn Ward
Christophe remembered that Joshua had mimicked Dunny, had wrestled with his cousin chest to chest under the goal. He had learned to be the big man on the inside to Christophe’s squirrelly point guard. By the twins’ senior year, they were unstoppable. They spoke in a secret language on the court, communicated with their shoulders, their eyes, smirks and smiles. Christophe could tell whether Joshua wanted him to pass the ball to him into the inside for an easy lay-up by the set of his mouth. It was effortless, invigorating. They never smoked after a game: there was no reason to; they were already high.
Now Christophe looked at his cousin and felt something like hands behind his sternum constricting. Dunny had softened and spread like a watercolor since he’d graduated five years ago. Beer and weed had blunted his edges. The old Dunny would’ve shook him, spun, made the shot, and taunted him. This Dunny clutched the ball to his middle as if he were injured, as if the ball were stanching a flow of blood from his stomach. Even the blink of his eyes was slurred. Christophe lunged at his cousin and swatted the ball with the flat of his palm so hard it echoed through his fingers with the stinging burn of slapped water. The ball slipped away from Dunny, and his hands met in prayer before his chest. Christophe began to dribble back and forth between his legs. He meant it to be hard and sure. He wanted the impact of the ball on the court to sound like gunshots, for the ball to slice its way through the air into his hand, but it didn’t. It meandered; it strayed. There was a line of tension pulled taut in his shoulders, and no matter how carefully he followed the old lessons of Dunny’s phantom, he could not loosen it.
“You’re palming the ball.”
“Shut up, Dunny.”
“You’re supposed to finger it,” Dunny said.
Christophe lurched to his right and snapped the ball, faking at Dunny with it. Dunny cringed. Christophe felt something in his knee stab at him with a quick, piercing pain.
“Who said I needed lessons from you?” Christophe crouched and shot. The ball rang the rim like a bell and fell away. Dunny caught it.
“Your sloppy playing did, that’s who.” Dunny grinned and shoved one large, meaty shoulder into Christophe’s chest. He shot a fadeaway. It grazed the rim and escaped the capsule of light surrounding the court.
“You lost it. . . now go get it.”
“It’s your ball, Chris.”
“No it ain’t, Dunny. If I go get this mothafucka, you’re not getting it back. I’m going to make you eat it.”
Dunny breathed wetly. He shuffled into the darkness and reappeared with the ball. The night and the insects and the foliage flickered in and out of being like a fractured film. Christophe knew he’d smoked too much.
“I think you forgot who your Daddy was.”
Dunny shoved Christophe hard with his shoulder as he dribbled. Christophe stole the ball and pulled away to shoot. He felt the skin of his face, his ears, and his neck burn hot. He narrowed his eye at Dunny’s flaccid throat, his profuse sweating, his labored breathing, and spat his reply.
“I don’t have a daddy!”
The ball sailed through the air and dropped neatly into the basket, caressing the line of the net as it fell. Christophe snorted, blew his breath from his chest in one quick huff, and barely resisted adding a curt “Bitch” to his declaration. His anger buoyed him, burned him clean and left his mind and body unfettered by the high. He was a simple working equation of mind and muscle blessed with a clean shot. For a second, he felt right. He let Dunny get the rebound.
“So, what was wrong with you today?” Dunny’s dribbling echoed in Christophe’s ears like a ponderous heartbeat.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Christophe dug his fingers into his hipbones.
“It’s about a job, ain’t it? Joshua got called back for something and you didn’t. You had to know there was a chance that would happen.”
“Whatever.” Christophe watched the ball shoot from Dunny’s grip, meet the asphalt, and rush back to his grip once, twice. Dunny’s fingertips seemed to suction the ball back, to kiss it. Dunny’d been right about that at least: his ball-handling skills were almost perfect.
“Let it go, Chris.”
“What you know about it, Dunny? You got a job. You got a hustle. You got a mama and a stepdaddy to help you out.”
Dunny stopped dribbling. He gripped the ball casually in one hand and rested it in the cradle of his hip.
“And you should know, asshole, that you got support, too.” Dunny rolled the ball against his belly, and then stopped. “You got your brother, you got Ma-mee, you got all our aunts and uncles, and most important, you got me.”
Christophe swiped a bug away from his ear with his hand; it stung his palm. He eyed his cousin’s puffy face, his half-lidded eyes.
“What the fuck that’s supposed to mean?”
“You actually think I’m going to let you starve out here?”
Christophe watched Dunny’s stillness and knew it for what it was: a gathering of energy and anger. He was pissed. Christophe had watched him fight several people, knock them to their hands and knees, force them to eat dirt with long, sure punches that had the force of machinery in them. Dunny’d fought often in his teenage years over money, perceived slights, subtle insults. His was a deceptive calm. Christophe stared blankly through his anger, his unsettled bewilderment, and watched Dunny’s mouth move.
“You really think I’m going to let your dumb, ungrateful ass struggle out here when I can put you onto my hustle? When I can front you a quarter pound of weed and have you out here doubling your money?” Dunny stepped closer to Christophe. His eyes were slits, fringed dashes in the set canvas of his face. Dunny barely opened his mouth. The whites of his eyes and the pearl of his teeth were invisible in the dark. “What kind of a cousin do you think I am?”
Dunny wouldn’t hit him. The only time he’d ever hit him was when they wrestled, and then they were always playing. Suddenly Christophe remembered the muscle beneath the meat: fat people were really strong. He guessed it was because they had more to move around. Christophe waved about in his hazy brain for an answer; he hadn’t considered this. He’d always been somewhat single-minded. He’d grown up picturing his life in his head, plotting it as he went along: he’d made the basketball team in ninth grade, lost his virginity in tenth grade, led the team to all-conference his junior year, successfully juggled several girls at one time throughout his high school career and never had any of them fight one another or discover his manipulations, and he’d finally graduated. There was a pattern, an order to his life. He dreamed things, worked for them, and they happened. He’d assumed this would continue after he graduated, that there existed steps to his life: a job at the dockyard or the shipyard where he could learn a trade, pay raises, stacking money, refurbishing Ma-mee’s house, a girlfriend, a kid, and possibly a wife one day. The idea of a legitimate job had existed as an absolute in his head. It was the fulcrum upon which the bar of his dreams balanced.
Christophe had dismissed dealing because he saw where it led: a brief, brilliant blaze of glory where most drug dealers bought cars, the bar at the club, women, paid bills for their mamas, and if they were really lucky, houses. That lasted around two years. Then the inevitable occurred. The coast was too small for anyone to remain anonymous for long. The county police hounded the local dealers, who depended on bigger dealers in Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans for their cocaine. The cops saw the local dealers at the park, in the neighborhood, making runs for dope, put two and two together, and that was it. The dealers fell, then. They were running, hiding, haunted. They scraped together large sums of money and tried to put them away to support their families and their girlfriends and their kids and instead found themselves using the money to post bail, because the police picked most boys up three times a year, if not more. For most drug dealers, jail and hustling became a job and going home became a vacation. One or two weeks out, and they were back in again for violating probation for smoking a little weed, like Fresh.
He’d forgotten how several drug dealers Dunny’s age looked. When Christophe saw their faces on their brief respite from jail, half the time he didn’t recognize them, and the rest of the time, he was always amazed at how old they appeared. Those were the lucky ones. Others became addicts themselves, or died. He thought of Cookie from St. Catherine, who earned his nickname because as a dealer he had moved big weight, and never had less than a few cookies on him at a time. He had earned his name twice. Now, as a junkie, he begged dealers, his former comrades, for crumbs. He stood on the same corner in St. Catherine, every day in the same worn blue jeans and denim shirt, which he called his suit, and stared at the cars that passed, never waving, in the evenings. An image of Sandman as he’d last seen him, drunk, his eyes blanched wide from his high, almost falling from the pickup truck. Christophe waved his hand. Dunny was small-time: Dunny had done the smart thing. He held a steady job and only dabbled in selling weed—no crack or coke, and especially no meth or X to the white people living further out and upcountry.
“I ain’t never really wanted to do that, Dunny.”
“What you mean you ain’t never wanted to do that?” Dunny ducked his head to catch Christophe’s gaze.
“I wanted to get a job . . . work up . . . make some good money.”
“Where did you think you was going to work, Chris? Doing what?”
“I don’t know . . . the pier or the shipyard or something. . . .”
“Nigga, it ain’t never that easy. Everybody and they mama want a job at the pier and the shipyard. Everybody want a job down there can’t get one.”
“I could work somewhere else.”
“Wal-Mart? Do you know what niggas start out making at Wal-Mart? Six-fifty an hour, Chris. Six dollars and fifty fucking cents. Gas is almost two dollars a gallon. Even working forty-hour weeks and without rent to pay, how far you think that’s going to get you?”
“Uncle Paul and Eze did it.” Christophe looked away from his cousin, studied the sandy asphalt court. He shook his head no. He didn’t know what he was saying no to, but he did it anyway.
“I ain’t saying you can’t do it. I’m just saying it’s hard.”
The fluorescent lights blinked. Once, twice. Christophe knew from experience what would happen next. The lights flashed bright and died. Their incessant neon buzzing sizzled away. The ringing chorus of the night bugs displaced it, smoothed it over, and submerged it as if it had never been. A droning filled Christophe’s head, and the park was suffused with a calm, stately darkness. There were no streetlights in the country. Dunny’s face disappeared. His white shirt glowed blue, and Christophe was suddenly aware of the stars, sparkling full to bursting in the sky above his head.
“I got to try,” Christophe said.
Dunny’s voice snaked its way into his ear, wound its way around him with possibility.
“Well, think about it, Chris. If you decide that this is something you want to do, let me know. I can front you a QP. You can pay me back after you get on your feet.”
Dunny’s voice dropped. “If you buy more from me with your profit, and then sell all that, you’ll double your money. Easy.”
Christophe rubbed his hair, laced his fingers together, and locked them behind his neck before dropping them.
“I don’t know, Dunny.”
“Just think about it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do in the end. You could find a way to make it. A broke way, but a way.” Dunny’s voice in the dark was suddenly soft, clean of anger and tinged with a wistfulness that surprised Christophe. “You could be lucky.”
Dunny brushed past Christophe and walked with a tired gait to the car. The faint white glow of Dunny’s shirt was like a beacon. Christophe felt his way along the hood. His fingers traced the grille as he rounded his side and climbed in, careful to hold his body upright with his arms braced so that he eased his torso into the seat; his sneakers brushed it.
“I hate when you do that.”
Dunny lit a black and put the car in reverse. In the sudden flare of light from the lighter, Christophe saw Dunny’s fatigue again: his eyelids looked swollen, and his mouth around the pale plastic tip of the cigarillo was slack. Christophe could hear the tires spew dirt and pebbles from the dirt parking space into the street. Dunny gunned the engine. The motor roared and they shot forward, passing through the weak, pale light of the wide-set yellow streetlamps some people had erected in their yards along the road. Christophe broke the textured, cricket-laden, tree-rustled silence with a timid request.
“Man, take me to your house.”
Dunny nodded in reply and accelerated, passing the turn to Ma-mee’s house. The weed had hit Christophe with a lethargic fist. He didn’t want to face Joshua yet, and he knew his brother would be awake, lying with his eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, poised to talk, to conjecture, to confess.
Dunny led them to the back door of the trailer. Christophe followed Dunny to the living room, where Dunny turned and offered him a short handshake. Christophe knew he would fall asleep on the sofa within minutes, but being away from his twin and Ma-mee, away from the familiar walls of his bedroom, would wake early in the morning with the first tentative infusion of sunlight into the living room, and would probably walk home. Christophe sat down, slumped sideways as his cousin disappeared to his room, and stared absentmindedly at the blinking red light of the VCR. It was the only moving thing in the room. He cradled his face with his palm and fell asleep.
Christophe snapped awake suddenly and could not remember the sound that woke him, but knew that some noise had. He pushed himself up and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes so that he could see the small digital clock on the VCR. It read 3:46. Christophe’s skin slid back and forth and stretched pleasantly and eased the itch: his eyes burned. The bathroom light shone out into the hallway. The rest of the house lapsed into darkness. He looked toward his cousin’s room, eyed his aunt’s: nothing stirred. Christophe tiptoed toward the back door. On his way past the refrigerator, he saw a small note: Joshua called. He twisted the lock on the knob, stepped out onto the back deck, tried to ease the squeaking of the hinges by pushing the door shut in centimeters, and closed the door behind him.
From the wood next to the house, Dunny’s dog barked loud, warning, staccato barks. Christophe felt buffeted by the incessant cry of the cicadas in the trees around him. He followed the road in the dark by feeling his way with his feet: one foot in the grass, another on the asphalt. Small animals rustled in the thick grass and blackberry briars that choked the ditch. It was hot enough for snakes. The landscape was drowned in black ink: he tried to peer into the darkness, to catch irregular sounds. He’d forgotten to pick up a stick. Few people kept their dogs on leashes or had fences, and every time he broke into the light after passing a stand of woods and saw a small sunken house or a rusting trailer, he’d tense up and listen for barks and growling, for sudden rushes of angry animal and fur. He could not find a stick in the dark.
Perhaps tomorrow someone would call. He’d go to the shipyard anyway and drop off an application during Joshua’s interview. He repeated this to himself over and over, as he walked along. Fireflies burst into light and left neon-green trails behind them as they flitted along in the dense, dark air. They were like the ideas in his head, flaring and failing. Could he sell? Did he want to? How could he do that out of Ma-mee’s house? What the hell would he say to Joshua? A quick anger, a violent flash of hurt burned in his throat, and then dissipated. He glanced briefly up at the sky and saw that it was scudded with clouds. He was too tired to be angry. He’d deal with the sore jealousy he felt toward his brother, the sticky love, and the sense of shame and protective responsibility he felt when he thought of Ma-mee, tomorrow. He wanted her to be proud of him, not stumble across his weed one day while she was putting clean socks in his underwear drawer. He didn’t know if he could face her if it came to that.
Something large rustled in the ditch to his right. He surprised himself by h
opping to the left. Fear showered in sparks through his chest. In the dark, he stopped abruptly, his hands flexing into tight fists, his palms seeming suddenly empty. The fear surprised him. It was the kind of fear he hadn’t felt since he’d been younger, since he’d stayed out playing in the woods with his brother after the sun set, after the streetlights came on, and the black tree limbs suddenly seemed like fingers and he’d panicked at the irrational, instinctual feeling that something was closing in on him. After that first time in the woods, he’d sometimes get the same feeling when he was walking home, or when he was taking a shower by himself and his eyes were closed and he was washing his hair. Vaguely, a part of him associated the advent of this feeling with his own conscious comprehension of the power of the dark, of what it could hold and hide: possums, armadillos, snakes, spiders, dogs, and men.
Christophe hadn’t felt this panic in years. The urge to run on and on down the asphalt and not stop running until he reached his house made it impossible for him to think. The thought was like a siren, a light circling and flashing over and over again in his head. He listened for the rustle again and heard nothing. He struggled to walk, but he broke into a trot anyway, and ran until he reached the next circle of light emitted from a small, wooden porch on a sagging house. He searched the lip of the yard and found a small stick that was only as long as his forearm and light. The sides of it were marked with small, velvety spots of fungus. It was hollow. Christophe gripped it hard and made himself stand still in the small bud of light that shone on the street. He made himself remain until he remembered where he was and what he was doing. He was eighteen and he was walking home in the dark and his house was only about a half a mile down and he’d lived here all his life and there was nothing in those woods that could hurt him—nothing. He just needed to breathe and calm down. He stood there until the fear ebbed. Then he set out into the darkness, dove into it like it was water.