by Jesmyn Ward
“You sure it was him?” Christophe began to knead the bread into a ball with his hand.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“How you so sure?” There it was again, the rancor. She stopped braiding again. Except for her hands on his scalp, he would not have known that she was behind him.
“I remember him from a few years back. He look the same, Christophe. He a little shorter than I remember, but he still the same man.”
“What you mean?”
“I saw him out on the corner of Anne and Lapine.” What little spit there was in Christophe’s mouth had the gritty, pasty consistency of cement. He vaguely wondered if he spit right there on the carpet whether it would be thick and gray, whether it would harden into a stone before his eyes in the time it would take Laila to complete another braid.
“Over by the church?”
“Yeah.” She hesitated. “He was leaning into Javon’s car.”
“He was buying?”
“That’s what it looked like to me.” Her voice had sunk so low he could hardly hear her. The crickets offered a chorus of affirmation.
Christophe raised his hand and waved it in the air as if he were shooing away a mosquito. He let it fall limply in his lap and sank further into the carpet. The enthusiastic shouting of the minuscule crowd on the TV sounded loudly in his ears and overlapped Ma-mee’s soft, easy snore. So, Sandman was done with rehab and he had come back, and according to Laila, he was doing the same old shit. He waved his hand again, and Laila grabbed a handful of his hair. Her knees squeezed his shoulders like football pads. He wondered if Ma-mee had heard anything yet. She liked him about as much as he and Joshua did. Christophe put his head down; Laila sighed behind him as she pulled his head up.
He hated it all. He hated the idea of running into the ones who sold, Javon and Bone, and of having casual conversation with them and seeing that momentary glance, that sliver of pity in their eyes when they looked at him. The crowd on the TV was clapping and it sounded like water rushing over stones. The drug would hollow Sandman out again. He would start out sneakily and then he would not care anymore, and he would be out there, really out there. Christophe leaned on his elbow hard, welcoming the arcing pain as he shoved the bone into the floor. Christophe wondered whether he would come asking for money. Ma-mee snorted in her sleep and it was loud; he didn’t slump back into the sofa until he heard her exhale in a long, soft whoosh. She blew her breath out in a way that reminded him of when she blew on his scrapes when he was younger, when her breath eased the pain when he’d fallen from his bike and the skin had peeled itself away from the bud of the wound to leave a bright, red burning flower.
He didn’t want to see Sandman. Laila yanked at his hair, struggling to free a knot, and then pressed his scalp gently, tender and terrible at once. He was anxious for her to finish, so he could be away from her awful beauty, so he could go upcountry, away from the heart of Bois Sauvage where he imagined his father lurking. Involuntarily, he ground his jaw and bit into his tongue and tasted a salty bitterness. He was sure he was bleeding.
6
THE SKIN ON CHRISTOPHE’S HEAD was pulled so tightly he felt like he was having trouble blinking. He walked with his head down, holding it like a newly coiffed offering; it felt as if it had been scrubbed raw, cleansed for sacrifice. He had waited until Laila was done with his hair, waited until she had tied it close to his scalp in a vortex of swirling, precise braids, and then he had sat there, thinking of Sandman. Perhaps Laila felt awkward waiting for him to acknowledge her, but Christophe hadn’t cared: he ignored her. He wondered if Sandman was lurking somewhere outside under the pines or in the sunshine. He lay half-propped against the sofa on the floor and stared at the ceiling, at the way the water was eating away at the white plaster and had etched expansive brown sketches of faces. Laila left. Ma-mee had awoken with the slow creak of the screen door as it closed and had asked after her. Christophe kissed Ma-mee, reminded her to call him at Dunny’s house when Joshua called, and left. He thought about driving, debated whether he should walk back in the house and grab the keys once he was outside and the crepe myrtle was nodding drowsily over his head, but then decided to walk; he had no money for anything and Joshua wouldn’t be paid for another two weeks.
The heat made Christophe feel like a mule dragging a plow through thick, red chalky clay like the kind he had seen on basketball trips to the Mississippi Delta. The people had been uniformly dark there; Christophe had heard his assistant coach say that there was no mixed community there, and that things had been more savage in the flat, red country. Christophe had stood on the court for his first game in the delta and had looked out at the wash of faces and noticed that whites sat in one section while blacks sat in the other. He had ordered a Sprite at the concession stand after the game and a woman, brunette with thin red lips and a gold crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck, had not looked him in the eyes when she took his order, and had placed his change neatly on the counter out of reach of his outstretched hand. After playing to a tie, the St. Catherine’s boys’ varsity team lost in overtime. The trees, the hills, and the crops rolled past outside the bus window. When they arrived home at the end of the trip, the team had discovered red dust from the roads had sifted through the open windows of the bus to drift down on them, coated their uniforms, and turned them pink.
Christophe watched the gravel as he walked. If he caught a glimpse of Sandman, he didn’t know what he would do. The houses were silent: the yards were empty. Everyone was at work. A couple of black stray dogs trotted up to him and sniffed at his pants legs. Their tongues hung like red wet exclamation marks from their mouths. They followed him along for a couple of houses and then wandered off to sit in the shade. Christophe wished for that simplicity, wished that he could sit in the shade as a scavenging mutt resting his jaw on his paws, breathe little clouds in the dusty grass, and sleep.
When Christophe reached Dunny’s yard, the first thing he noticed was that the spaces where Aunt Rita and Eze usually parked were bare and worn, like empty nests worn into the earth by sleeping animals. Dunny’s car was parked in the shade of a large, leafy pine tree. Dunny had told Christophe that Eze had been bitching about cutting the tree down for five years or so, saying that it would fall on the trailer in a hurricane, and that it could attract lightning to the house in a thunderstorm and fry everything, but Aunt Rita had told him that it would stay, and Christophe was glad he would be alone in the house with Dunny.
Christophe looked up at the sky to see where the sun was; it was around two. Dunny worked half-day at the plant two Fridays a month, and Christophe hoped that he wasn’t asleep. He knocked once, then harder, and heard a muffled “I’m coming.” Christophe slipped into the cool, air-conditioned innards of the house. He blinked his eyes, saw only a textured, velvety darkness. He blinked and realized Dunny stood before him in his boxers, his belly lapping over the edge of his shorts like a fat tongue. He smelled like sleep and dried sweat. Dunny locked the door behind Christophe.
“Why didn’t you call before you came over?” Dunny said.
“Why, so you could cuss me out as soon as I got here for waking you up?”
“You still woke me up.” Dunny led Christophe back toward his room. Family pictures cluttered the walls. Aunt Rita had pared her furniture when Dunny became a teenager: she said there was little need for decoration when she was living in a house full of men. A skinny sofa, a worn love seat, and two deep, velour-covered chairs lined the wall, all facing a large entertainment center. The coffee table, the end tables adorned with vases of fake flowers, the china cabinet of crystal glasses Christophe remembered examining in his youth while wondering if Cille had one like it in Atlanta: all these were gone. The path to Dunny’s room was a straight one: the line in the carpet looked worn as a forest trail. Once he was in his room, Dunny sat on the full bed that took up most of the tiny room, and lounged against the wall.
“At least this way, I only woke you up once, nigga.”
; “Even once is too much. You know what time I had to get up this morning and go to work? Six.”
“At least you only had to work half a day.”
“Yeah, whatever. You should’ve called—I would’ve picked you up.” Dunny was grinning.
“Yeah, right nigga. First, you would’ve cussed me out for calling you, and then you would’ve told my ass to walk.”
“That’s about right.” Dunny laughed. Christophe sat on the edge of a chair draped with clothes. “Why the fuck is it always so cold up in here?”
“You know I’m about to sleep for another two hours, right? Ain’t nothing going on right now anyway. Why you didn’t wait until the sun set to come over here?”
“I ain’t want to change my mind.”
Dunny scooted to the edge of the bed. He leaned forward, and Christophe could smell the sleep on his breath. “You saying what I think you saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, alright then.”
Dunny pulled on a T-shirt that was a muddy yellow at the armpits before crouching in front of his chest of drawers and pulling out the bottom drawer. As Dunny mumbled to himself and rustled unseen packages, Christophe noticed how the fat at Dunny’s sides bulged from the bottom of the T-shirt; it looked like he had gained weight since the beginning of the summer. Christophe imagined it was uncomfortable for him, kneeling there on the floor, crouched like a little kid playing marbles or jacks. Dunny stopped his mumbling, reinserted the drawer, and tossed a dark green baggie toward him. Christophe fumbled to catch it. His fingers were cold.
“That’s a quarter pound. You should make $400 from that. When you done sold it all, I’ll give you another one for $200. That’s what I’ll ask for them—so basically it’s like I’m giving you this one for free.”
“Alright.”
“And make sure you hide it where Ma-mee can’t find it. I done heard stories from Mama about her stumbling over Aunt Cille’s weed stash or finding bottles of Uncle Paul’s moonshine. The last thing you want is for her to find a quarter pound of weed in your drawers.”
“I’m not stupid, nigga. I know how to hide shit.”
“Make a smoking sack when you first get it . . . that way you don’t smoke too much and you don’t lose too much profit. Oh shit, I almost forgot.” Dunny pulled the drawer out again, and Christophe heard more plastic rustling. The QP filled a Ziploc sandwich bag: it was bigger than Christophe thought. He had no idea how he was going to sneak it home. “Here some sandwich bags.” Dunny tossed a half-empty box at him. Christophe let them fall to the floor. “You don’t want to steal Ma-mee’s because she’ll get suspicious.”
“I was planning on stealing yours.” It was a weak joke.
“Ha, ha, nigga. And this,” Dunny threw a small black cloth bag at him, “is a scale. You’ll need it. This way if niggas want to complain and say you gave them too little, you can show them the scale and shut them up. You don’t want to get a reputation for peeling niggas. That’s the way you lose clientele.” Dunny loosened the drawstring and pulled the scale from the inside. He inserted his finger into a small keychain ring at the top of the scale, and then rummaged under the mattress with his other hand and pulled out a small clear baggie of weed. “My smoking sack.” He grinned. He clipped the sack onto the other end of the scale and Christophe watched the needle on the small scale slide to five grams. “It’s a dub sack. Twenty dollars. A dime sack is 2.5 grams. Half of a dime sack is a blunt. If you can help it, don’t sell blunts. It’s hard to make money on blunts because you got so much loose change in your pocket and you end up spending it.”
“What is this, Pine Selling 101?” Christophe couldn’t understand where the jokes were coming from. Something about it felt manic, panicked, and he had a flashback to his run home after his basketball game with Dunny, of pine trees shuffling into a fence around him while the cicadas sounded like an alarm and something breathed and followed at his back. He opened his mouth and a high, giggly laugh came out; he hadn’t heard that laugh since his voice changed. For some reason, this was even funnier, and he doubled over the sack he was holding in his hands and crushed it to his chest, and it cushioned him like one of Ma-mee’s old needle-pinned sewing pillows. The smell of it was strong; it was good stuff. When he sat up, Dunny was staring at him. His hand was still in the air, and the smoking sack dangled like a Christmas tree ornament from the branch of his finger.
Dunny unhooked the sack and balled it into his fist. He cupped it in the hollow of his hand like a raw egg, careful of the delicate shell, and sat down.
“You sure you want to do this?”
Christophe held the QP so that it sat on his flat palms like an offering on a plate. Part of him wanted Dunny to take it. He looked at his cousin, and then down at the bag. Or not.
“I got to.” The weed was dense and packed with buds. Dunny scooted forward.
“Maybe you ain’t cut out for this. You got to know how to stay calm, how to get everything you can out of this and make the shit worth it. You think you can do that, Chris?”
“Yeah, Dunny.”
“You sure? Really though.”
Christophe looked at the baggie and noticed there were small, opaque pockmarks where the stems had pushed against the baggie. Christophe smoothed them over with his hand as if he could wipe them away. The plastic stretched clear and then dimpled again.
“I’m sure. I’ll do it till I get on my feet and find something else.”
Dunny dropped the bagged scale on top of the QP of weed. The black bag punctuated the baggie like the pupil of a dull green eye. It was staring at Christophe.
“Alright, cuz. I’m going to hold you to that,” said Dunny.
“You do that.”
They talked for a while longer; Dunny lounging in his bed while Christophe squirmed on the chair, the sack and the scale balanced smoothly in his hands. Christophe was still talking when he noticed Dunny had fallen asleep with his mouth open. Christophe walked to the living room. He carried the sack and scale away from him, handled it the way he would handle something poisonous and biting, handled it like a snake. Ma-mee hadn’t called yet, but he knew that Aunt Rita and Eze should be getting home sometime soon. The last thing he wanted was for them to walk into him sleeping on the sofa with a quarter pound of weed in his lap, so he stuffed it down the front of his shorts. They were baggy enough so that the weed nested in the bulge of his crotch. He was careful not to lean over into the sofa or to lean back; the skin of his head was still tight, his braids were still fresh, and he didn’t want to ruin them.
He tried to watch TV but instead dozed fitfully, jarred awake every few minutes or so by his body tilting forward or sliding backward, when he’d jerk upright to preserve his head. His lurching nap on the sofa made him feel like a boat sliding into a slip, wary of the sea and the dock. When he woke thirty minutes later, Dunny was still asleep, so Christophe walked home. The baggie irritated him. It chafed at his side like a burr grown to monstrous proportions: a prickly sticker bent on making the carrier spread its seed. He murmured hello to Ma-mee, and in his room, he closed the door, locked it, and sat on his bed. He pulled the bag and scale out, stood, and grabbed a chair from the foot of his bed and slid it over to his closet, where he climbed up and reached to the back of his shelf and pulled out a shoebox. He opened it and saw the familiar letters and pictures, scribbled on in pink and purple ink, embroidered with small drawings of people and lowercase i’s with hearts for dots. They were all the letters and pictures he’d received from girls over the years. Felicia’s name shone like a neon sign. He scooped the paper to one side, deposited the bags, and covered them over with letters. He shoved the box to the back of the closet and propped an old pair of his basketball shoes on the top of it to disguise the smell, and stepped away and down off the chair. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head down, staring at the floor and his hands until Joshua called for a ride home from work.
Joshua didn’t expect the silence after he fell into the car, shini
ng with sweat and stinking. His T-shirt gathered under his arms and rolled into the fold in the middle of his stomach. He thought of pulling it clear, of fighting it into some semblance of smoothness, but he didn’t have the strength to wrestle with it as his brother started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. Instead, he sank back into the cloth cushion, laid his head on the headrest, and fell asleep.
Joshua expected jibes when he awoke; he had been jarred awake by his own snoring, and as he opened his eyes to blink at the pines and the slumbering, reclining oaks shading the car on its way to Bois Sauvage, he noticed drool running in a slimy line down his chin and wiped it away. He expected a laugh, but received nothing. Joshua looked over at his twin to see his face filmy with sweat, his mouth set in a falling line. The radio was silent. Joshua saw that Christophe’s hair had been braided into neat, looping rows; the hairstyle mirrored his own and curled along his brother’s head like a handful of glass beads. Joshua recognized that style; it was Laila’s.
“Did Laila come by and do your hair? I asked her to yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Joshua rubbed his eyes; the sweat seeped into them and burned them shut again. Christophe cleared his throat to speak. It sounded as if his brother was about to vomit.
“He back.”
Joshua stared at his brother dumbly. He was too tired to think. Who was back?
“Him.”
The answer unfolded in Joshua’s head as neatly as an elementary pupil’s letter: easy along the edges and crisp until it lay revealed before him, a little creased but otherwise clear, and written in a bold, clumsy hand.
“Him.”
So that was why his brother was so quiet. Joshua turned and threw his arm over his seat.
“Who told you?” Joshua asked.
“Laila.”
“She saw him?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“In Bois Sauvage. On side of the church.”