by Jesmyn Ward
“Laila told me to tell you she had to go home. She had something to do. She said she was going to call you tonight.” Ma-mee paused. “She sweet on you, huh?”
Her gown was pink and bright and new.
“Got a new gown, huh?”
“Joshua.” Ma-mee pinched his arm. Joshua covered it with his hand and cowered. She laughed and pinched him again.
“Ow. I’m sensitive.” He laughed.
“You like her?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“She like you. Be nice to her.” She rose on her toes and he leaned down into her. She pinched him again. “Men shouldn’t have eyelashes like that.”
Ma-mee turned and touched the wall once and twice with her hand as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. He heard her get a pot from one of the cabinets, and a second later, turn on the faucet. In their room, Christophe had fallen asleep in the middle of counting his money, and was stretched out with his arms thrown over his head as if he had been surprised, his mouth open, the bills ragged and bunched underneath him. Sometimes he still slept as he did when they were younger: wild, fighting with the walls and wrestling with the sheet. Joshua pulled the pillow so that it rested squarely under his brother’s head; Christophe’s snoring abruptly stopped. Joshua hurried to find clean, dry clothes and pulled them on quickly: he would slip the money into her purse while she was in the kitchen.
Joshua did not sleep well for the rest of the week. His dreams alternated between nightmares about his brother and hazy glimpses of Laila. By the end of his third week of work, Joshua felt as if he’d never done anything else besides work at the dock; the summer rains had begun, and his life was straining against bags and throwing heavy boxes and rain and salt stinging his eyes and the sun parting the clouds like a knife and burning down upon him and steaming the men’s skin and the endless concrete. Everything smelled of metal and stank. Ma-mee packed small lunches of tuna fish and potato salad and apples for him, and he ate his lunches alone, on the pier, or when it rained especially bad, at a corner table in the cafeteria with some other black men around his own age from Germaine; he laughed at their jokes and their conversation sometimes, but was often silent. He woke up each morning drained, and the brutal monotony of work at the pier stunned him. Something about it felt insulting and wrong. He was jealous and would often not speak to his brother on the way to work, disgusted by the fact that Christophe would spend his day chilling at the park. His paychecks made him feel a little better, but still he was glad when the weekend came. He fell asleep early on Friday night, and woke with Christophe near noon. It had rained earlier that morning, but when they woke the sky was barely studded with clouds, a deep, rich blue. The twins dressed and walked to the court, and Joshua waved at people sitting on their porches or cutting grass with rusty push lawn mowers. Christophe punctuated his waves with dribbling their basketball. Otherwise their walk was quiet, their mutual animosity a veil between them.
It seemed that nearly everyone they knew was at the basketball court. A crew of boys from St. Catherine were running a game with some boys from the neighborhood; as they approached the court, Joshua saw Skeetah fly into the air and swat the other team’s ball away from the goal and out of bounds. Marquise retrieved the ball and threw it back into play. Joshua and Christophe walked toward the small bleachers, and were surprised to find them laden with clumps of people: Joshua saw Laila sitting with Felicia on the bottom bleacher. He’d talked to her briefly the night before he’d fallen asleep, had known that she was going to be there, but had not given that as a reason to his brother when he asked him if he wanted to go. He had not talked to his brother about his desire to take her to the movies, to eat at some nice restaurant, to play at the miniature golf place, or the fact that he had asked her to go out with him and she had said yes. Perhaps they could double date with Christophe and Felicia.
Some kids were running along the middle bleacher and jumping off the end, yelling as they hit the ground. Javon sat with Bone on the top bleacher. They were passing a blunt back and forth. Christophe yelled in the general direction of the court, “We got next!” and Joshua caught Laila’s eye and smiled a closemouthed smile at her and settled next to his brother on the bench. Javon nudged Christophe’s shoulder with the hand holding the blunt: Christophe shook his head as he glanced at Felicia and muttered, “No thanks.” Joshua followed his brother’s lead and refused the blunt even though the smell was sweet. Joshua tried not to inhale sharply; he didn’t want to look like some sort of junkie, sitting on the bleachers sniffing the air hard for a whiff of blunt. The little kids, Cece, Dizzy, and Little Man, clambered back up and stopped in front of Christophe. They were glaring at him and Joshua. The little girl was older than the other two; she stood with her hands on her hips and she cocked her head to the side and glared at them. Her hair cloaked her shoulders in fuzzy braids and she was so light skinned that the skin across her nose and cheeks had burned. She opened her mouth, and Joshua saw she was missing her two front teeth. She was probably around six. Joshua coughed and laughed. The two boys behind her looked around two years younger than her; they wore short, tight T-shirts that hugged their potbellies and they stood together close as twins. One was light and one was dark; the dark one stuck out his tongue at Joshua.
“You sat in the middle of our game,” the little girl said.
“We needed a place to sit. Y’all go play somewhere else ’fore I whip one of y’all,” Christophe said.
“You ain’t whipping me!” the girl retorted.
The lighter little boy, Little Man, raised his left hand and flipped the bird at Christophe. Joshua couldn’t help himself; he started to laugh hard. Christophe’s eyes turned to small, dark crescents and he choked out a laugh.
“Y’all better get y’all badasses out of here and go play somewhere. Get!” Christophe yelled.
Little Man had both hands in the air now, both middle fingers extended, and was taking turns jabbing them in the air toward Christophe. His dark clone, Dizzy, followed suit. Cece turned around and back to Christophe; her braids swung out and the plastic barrettes at their ends clicked softly as they shuttered against her face.
“Don’t let me have to tell y’all’s mamas. I know who they is . . . !” Christophe told her.
She glared at him and then grabbed each of the boys by the arm and yanked.
“Come on!” They screamed and ran after her; they tripped down the bench and Joshua watched them run across the park toward the swings. The girl never let go of their hands. When the trio was halfway across the park, Little Man turned and when Joshua squinted, he could see he was flipping them off again with his free hand as he was running. Laila was shaking her head and laughing while Felicia doubled over as she held her stomach; behind them, Javon snorted.
“Bad little fuckers.”
Joshua watched the trio leap bellyfirst onto the row of swings; they stretched their arms out and kicked with their legs and swung high in the air. Joshua had played that game; he knew they were pretending to fly. He gazed past them to the row of cars parked at the side of the ditch and saw Javon’s car, and Bone’s, and Marquise’s, and a couple of others he couldn’t make out. They weren’t all empty; he saw shadows, and heard the bass from more than one stereo system. He watched the three swinging, saw the girl slow her swing and tumble headfirst from the rubber into the dirt. A figure skirted one of the cars and began walking across the field past the swings toward the court.
The little boys tried to follow her lead but instead squirmed from the seats and landed on their feet. Shrieking, they followed Cece at a run as she led them to the wooden slide. She sandwiched herself behind the two boys at the apex of the slide. They gripped each other between their legs, lined up in a row, and she pushed them down in a train. Joshua had played that game, too. The figure was nearing them; Joshua saw that it was a man, an older man. The man had pants on in the heat, and he had long, curly hair that he had topped with a navy blue baseball cap. Joshua lo
oked at the way he walked and nudged Christophe with his elbow and nodded at the figure as he approached them and surfaced like a swimmer into sharp relief. The man was walking around the court. He was searching the faces of the people playing, and now he was pulling off his cap and peering underneath the trees to pick out the figures on the benches. For the first time in years, Joshua and Christophe saw their father.
Joshua’s face was hot. He wanted to look away from the man, to watch the trio of kids, to watch the game on the court, but he couldn’t. Sandman wasn’t even looking at them; he was looking past them to Javon. Joshua doubted that he even recognized them. Sandman slapped his cap against his thigh and walked underneath the trees to the side of the bleachers to Javon. Joshua glanced past Christophe at Sandman and saw that Christophe was staring straight ahead, and Joshua could see the muscle of his jaw jumping like a darting minnow under his skin. He heard Sandman whisper, “I got something for you, Javon.” Javon jumped from the bleachers and shuffled away further under the trees toward the ditch with Sandman.
“We got next!” Christophe bit out. Laila was not turning to Joshua and smiling anymore. She bounced her feet and shrugged when Felicia leaned in to ask her if she was all right. Joshua swatted a mosquito.
“Somebody need to start a fire,” Joshua said. Christophe was staring at him solemnly. Joshua shook his head no. Christophe sniffed and looked back toward the court.
“Y’all niggas heard me?” Christophe yelled.
Skeetah passed the ball to Big Henry and yelled, “Yeah nigga, we heard you.” His voice quavered; he was breathing hard through his mouth. Javon clambered back on the bench. Joshua let his knee slide and stick wetly to his brother’s, and then jerked it away. Sandman had put his cap back on so that all Joshua could see of him were his strong nose and his mouth. He was standing off to the side of the bleachers. He was looking at the twins.
“Good day for some ball.” He said this as if he were speaking to the air. Javon grunted and pulled on the blunt. Joshua stared at Sandman. Christophe concentrated on the flurry of movement on the court. “Sure is a good day for some ball.” Joshua saw something in Christophe’s face break; the minnow flashed and disappeared.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Sandman walked over to stand in front of them. The navy blue shirt he wore hung like a wet rag on his frame. His knuckles were bony and distended, as large as grapes.
“I was just trying to make conversation.” Sandman was staring at them like a wary dog; Joshua could imagine a stiff, quivering tail on him. Joshua snaked his arm behind his brother’s and squeezed Christophe’s elbow hard. Christophe let out his breath as if he had been holding it. Joshua spoke intently and quietly.
“We don’t want no conversation.” Looking at Sandman’s face was almost like looking at Christophe’s. He had given them his full lips, his prominent nose, the reddish cast to their skin. Something about it was wrong, though; his features seemed confused. It was as if some child had taken pieces of a puzzle and forced them together so that they fit in the wrong way. Sandman opened his mouth wide in disbelief, and Joshua saw that his teeth were yellow and seemed smashed together in his mouth; gray lined them at the seams. He closed his mouth and it made a wet, hollow sound.
“I just wanted to talk to my sons.” Joshua stared at his wide mouth and squeezed Christophe’s arm harder. Christophe shook his elbow from Joshua’s grasp and pulled the ball into his stomach as if it hurt. His fingers were blanched yellow against the orange rubber. He lurched forward and stared intently at Sandman, and when he spoke, his voice was strained.
“You ain’t got no sons here. Ma-mee our mama and our daddy. Leave . . . us . . . alone.” He bit the rest of it out. Christophe rocked back and looked away across the baseball diamond to the pines glistening there.
“Joshua . . .”
“You don’t even know which one you’re talking to.” Christophe spoke without looking back at him, and his voice was small as if he spoke from a great distance. Sandman was staring down at his feet, so Joshua stared at the crown of his head, his thin, bony shoulders, his wet-rag shirt, his dirty jeans, and his black and blue tennis shoes. The pain in Joshua’s chest and at the back of his throat was a panicked flapping.
“You don’t know us.” Joshua spoke softly. “Leave us alone.”
Christophe heard his brother’s quiet statement and through the suffocating anger, he felt that he could breathe. For a minute he had thought he would drown in it. He let out a slow, shaky breath and was surprised; he was so angry it hurt, he was so angry he felt like he was going to cry.
“Go ’head, Sandman,” Joshua said.
Christophe let out another breath he did not know he had been holding. It was all so stupid. All of it. He felt like he was dreaming. He glanced at Sandman and saw him raise a hand as if he was going to say something, then Sandman clenched his hand into a fist and let it fall. He wiped his knuckles along the front of his jeans.
“I got business to take care of,” he said, staring pointedly at the girls, and then walked away from the bleachers. Christophe could not help but turn to watch him. He jerked past the court and past the swings and past the car until he ambled out along the street, walking as if his joints were strung together with string, his gate as jarring as a puppet’s. Christophe let the ball drop to the bleachers. It bounced and stopped in the valley between his feet. Next to him, Joshua sighed. Christophe felt something nudge his shoulder and turned to see Javon passing him the blunt.
“Here you go.”
Christophe took a hit before passing it to Joshua. Christophe closed his eyes and held the smoke in his lungs until he could not hold his breath anymore, until his diaphragm began to shake and convulse in the effort to force his mouth open. He wished he could go swimming. He wished the game would end so he could play. He let the breath whoosh from him, and blinked to find Joshua balancing the ball in one hand and pulling him to his feet with the other toward the vacant court to play. His feet hit the ground, and he could hardly tell he was running.
9
THEY DID NOT TALK ABOUT it until the day before the fourth of July, three days later; Joshua had been dismissed early from work, and they were at the fireworks tent next to the interstate perusing the all-in-one prewrapped kits. They had been debating whether to get a bunch of individual bottle rockets and Roman candles and rocket bombs; Joshua thought they’d save money if they picked and chose what they wanted, and Christophe wanted one of the kits because it contained a special super-bomb. In the picture pasted to the front, the bomb looked as if it burst into a rose: a glittering, deep blue rose. Christophe had never seen anything like that, and part of him wanted to buy it because he just wanted to see if it was possible. He wanted to know if someone could make something explode into such a beautiful shape, or if the small, inky drawing on the advertisement was a sham. At the end of their small argument over fireworks, he told Joshua this, and Joshua bent over the case silently and squinted at the base of the bomb. He was trying to read the small print.
“I wasn’t going to hit him.”
Joshua nodded. “I know.”
“I thought I could, but once I saw him . . .”
“Yeah.”
“I know he ain’t nothing—but it was like looking at you. His face.”
Joshua had lost the tiny print. He skimmed it like a crossword puzzle for a word, and found the small script. Christophe squatted next to him and leaned in to peer at the writing. His shoulders brushed his brother’s. Joshua sniffed. They had gone with Paul to a farm further up in the country to pick out a goat to barbecue for the fourth. The goat had small, intelligent black eyes, white and black spotted fur, and four marbled horns. Christophe had been freaked out by it; he had said it looked like the devil and Uncle Paul had laughed. They had watched the man slaughter it; he had done it the old way and brought a sharp knife quickly across the bottom of the throat, thrusting upward. Joshua thought he could have done it a better way, because he saw the goa
t toss his head and jerk after the blood started to cascade from his neck to splatter the muddy ground. Its mouth had moved soundlessly as if it was trying to breathe and it had kicked as if it was wiping at a tuft of grass in the earth with its foot, and then it had stilled. Christophe had asked the man why he hadn’t shot the thing in the head. The man, who was thin and red-skinned at the neck and forearms and had a head full of thick, bushy white hair, had laughed. He said something about fried brains. Christophe said he was going to throw up. Joshua could smell the musty odor of goat hair and he remembered the rich, heavy, offal scent of the blood now. Uncle Paul was at his house; he was smoking and basting the goat. He would tend it all night. The print was too small to read.
“I think we should get it.”
Christophe needed to get a QP from Dunny, and he needed to dump Joshua. The Fourth would be a good day for making money—everybody wanted to get high on a holiday. Christophe told Joshua he needed to see Dunny after they left the fireworks stand, and asked Joshua if he wanted him to drop him off at the house or at Laila’s or by Uncle Paul’s. He paused a long time. Joshua spoke against the fist on his cheek and asserted that he was all right, he wanted to ride. Christophe resigned himself to Joshua’s company. They watched the headlights cut through the darkness before them and Joshua began to search through the CD for a song he wanted to hear. For the first time in a long time, the thought of waking up the next morning to the summer didn’t depress him. When he was younger, Christmas had been his favorite holiday, but as he’d gotten older, he’d developed a new appreciation for the Fourth. Everything about the day was an indulgence: the new outfit he’d treated himself to, the barbecue, crawfish, and shrimp, the largesse of his extended family, the liquor, the weed, the fireworks, the girls in short skirts and halter tops. On that day, the heat was more than bearable; it was welcome. As Christophe turned into Dunny’s driveway and switched off the lights and the car, he prayed it would not rain the next day.