Where the Line Bleeds

by Jesmyn Ward

  For all the bluster of the air conditioner in the trailer, the living room was hot. Aunt Rita was sitting at the table slicing boiled eggs into slivers. On the stove, a large pot of potatoes was boiling. Christophe smelled cheese; he bet macaroni and cheese was in the oven. Aunt Rita was sweating lightly around her hairline, and as Christophe bent to kiss her, he saw it beading in little droplets on her nose. When his cheek came away from hers, he felt the cool touch of moisture on it. She laughed at him and wiped his face. Joshua walked in behind him.

  “My favorite nephews.”

  “We your only nephews,” Joshua grumbled as he hugged her. She poked him in the stomach with the wooden handle of her knife.

  “Same difference.” Aunt Rita sniffed and brushed her hand underneath her nose and waved them away from her. “Y’all smell like animal. Joshua, you got that money you said you was putting in on the food?”

  Aunt Rita glanced at Christophe, and Joshua studied his feet as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Joshua hadn’t told Christophe that they were contributing money to the family pot. Joshua placed the bills on the table one by one, and he did not look at Christophe as he did so. Aunt Rita’s earrings, red, white, and blue plastic flags, shook as she turned to Christophe. “Dunny in the back. He probably trying on outfits like a girl. He bought around three today.” She covered her mouth and sneezed.

  “Bless you. We went with Uncle Paul to pick out the goat this morning.” Christophe wanted to surreptitiously lower his face to smell his shirt. He balled his fists in his pockets. Everything was dirty about him: his body, his money. In the dim house, even Joshua’s shirt seemed brighter than his.

  “Thank you. Go ahead, now. Y’all making the kitchen stink like hot animal.”

  “You making potato salad and macaroni and cheese?” Christophe called out.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where Uncle Eze at?” Christophe heard Joshua ask this behind him.

  “I don’t know. I think he went down the way by Ozene’s house.”

  “Oh.”

  Christophe waited for Joshua to catch up with him and punched him hard in the arm, joking to release the worm of spite, and ran to Dunny’s door. Why hadn’t he told him? He yanked it open without knocking. Dunny was on his knees on the floor in front of his dresser, and the bottom drawer sat next to him. Dunny’s back was to the twins and two large QP bags of weed lay at his feet. Christophe saw him throw a small sandwich bag into the empty maw of the drawer. It had been white. Dunny turned to face them and Joshua reminded Christophe that he needed to step into the room with a loud “That’s how you want to play, huh?” and a stiff punch to his back. Christophe tripped through the door and caught himself on the bed, and Joshua slammed it shut behind him. Christophe felt Joshua’s arm grabbing him around the waist and lifting him up to body-slam him on the mattress. Christophe’s spine and back stiffened; he wasn’t laughing. Joshua must’ve felt this, because he let him go. Dunny threw one of the QPs back into the slot, and then picked up the other one and held it out toward Christophe.

  “Here you go.” Dunny was still wet from his shower. Christophe didn’t move, so Dunny threw the bag on the bed. It landed between Christophe and Joshua, and Dunny began pulling on his clothes. He pulled his shorts over his boxers so quickly that the fabric at the back ballooned over the waist of his pants like the skin of a frog’s croaking throat. He stubbed his toe on the misplaced drawer. He knelt down and began shoving the drawer into the slot; the rail was misaligned so he banged it with the heel of his hand. It stuck.

  “You should pull it back out. You keep banging on it, it’s going to jam.” Joshua lay back in Dunny’s bed and fanned himself with the front of his shirt. Christophe sat dully, still.

  “What you threw up in there?” Christophe asked.

  Dunny stopped his shoving. The drawer shifted and squeaked in relief. Dunny pulled a pair of socks from his top drawer and pulled one on; he took his time smoothing the cotton fabric up and over his heel and ankle. His hair was freshly braided. Christophe knew perhaps that he should let it go, that he should imagine that he imagined it, but he couldn’t.

  “You hitting the pack?” Christophe asked.

  “Fuck no, I’m not hitting the pack!” Dunny glared.

  “So you selling”—Joshua jackknifed up in the bed—“and now Dunny snorting powder?”

  “You got me fucked up!” Dunny frowned at Joshua and waved toward Christophe. “I don’t know what he saw.”

  “Stop lying, nigga. Either you holding or you selling. Which one?” Christophe said.

  “You didn’t see shit.” Dunny snatched the lotion from the top of his dresser and pumped the head of the bottle.

  “You lying to me like I’m one of these niggas out here that ain’t family. I ain’t crazy, nigga. I know what I saw,” Christophe said. He stood.

  “What the hell?” Joshua said.

  “Come on, Joshua. This motherfucker lying.”

  “I’m lying now?” Dunny threw his towel across the room. It landed on the bed in a sodden heap. Joshua stood. Christophe turned from the door and walked over to point his finger in Dunny’s face.

  “Fuck yeah. You put me on, you take care of me, and then you act like you don’t know me when I ask you a simple-ass question. Fuck you, Dunny. If you ain’t going to be real with me, why should I fuck with you? Why not fuck with any of these shady niggas out here? Blood, remember?” Christophe hit Joshua with his shoulder as he passed him. “Let’s go, Joshua.”

  “Damn, Chris. Calm down.” Dunny sat on the chair next to his dresser. He crossed his arms and rubbed his foot over the carpet as if it itched. Christophe turned back to the room and walked past Joshua again, who watched both of them, his mouth puckered.

  “It’s like being a little kid. Sometimes you just lie cuz it’s the easiest thing to do,” Dunny said as he rolled his eyes at them. “It’s not like I’m proud of the shit.” He knelt and began pulling at the drawer. Between small grunts that sounded like he was hurting himself, he huffed. “Y’all niggas sit the fuck down.” He wrenched the drawer free. Christophe flinched at the noise. Dunny reached into the bottom of the dresser and fumbled; Christophe heard plastic bags sliding and rustling against each other. Dunny had never told Christophe to get the weed for himself even though he knew Christophe knew where the stash was. Christophe had thought Dunny simply had control issues. Could he be snorting? It didn’t look like he’d lost any weight. Dunny threw a small plastic bag to the bed between the brothers. It barely made a sound as it landed next to the QP. It lay on its side on the bed next to the large, green QP like a small, dirty yellow moon. Joshua picked it up. Christophe’s jaw eased. It wasn’t powder. He saw four bits of opaque crack in the corner of the bag; they looked like teeth.

  “I told you I wasn’t snorting powder,” Dunny joked weakly as he sat. Christophe stared at him dryly, and Dunny grimaced.

  “So you ain’t smoking it.” Joshua threw the bag back to Dunny across the room. Dunny snatched it from the air with one hand, and it disappeared in his fat, large fist.

  “Funny, Joshua.”

  “When you start selling that?” Christophe’s voice sliced neatly through the dry banter. He suddenly felt claustrophobic. Discarded clothes lined the floor like wood shavings in a cage. Dunny folded his arms again.

  “I told you I been thinking about leaving the game. I was just trying to stack some more paper . . . I mean, I know this house mine when my mama go, but damn, I’m grown and Eze here and I know they just want to be alone sometime.” Dunny opened his arms to them and the bag of crack glinted in his hand like a ring. “They got a piece of land, a couple of acres, an acre over that way.” Dunny pointed to his left. “My mama hooked it up so I was paying the property taxes on it. It’s going to be mine if the owner don’t come up with the taxes this year. I just need enough to put a down payment on my own trailer . . . my mama said she’d cosign for it.” He threw the bag in the mouth of the dresser with a small tap. “I wasn’t ma
king the money fast enough. Javon put me on for a little bit.” He felt for the drawer’s grooves; the muted muscles in his shoulders jumped as he patiently adjusted it by centimeters, feeling out the mouth. The drawer slid smoothly into the metal tracks this time. “Think about it. I know y’all won’t leave Ma-mee, and y’all shouldn’t, but we could have our own spot. To chill. To get fucked up. All our own. Y’all know what’s mine is y’all’s.”

  “Dunny, you know what’s going to happen.” Christophe let the sentence dissolve in the air between them like smoke.

  “Nigga, I’m the one that put you on. Big Cuz. Of course I know what might happen. But that ain’t going to happen. These assholes ain’t catching me with shit. That’s why I keep it in the bag. If I get pulled over, I’m going to swallow that shit.” He frowned. “ ’Sides, I only been doing this for about a month and a half. I started about when you did. I give this shit another month, tops, and then I’m done. By then I’ll have enough saved up to make up the rest of the money for the down payment and then that’s it. I’m done.”

  “With everything?” Joshua asked. Christophe thought he sounded hopeful.

  “Shit, you can’t expect me to stop cold turkey.” Dunny laughed and the sound of it dropped like stones from his mouth. He rubbed at his sole before he pulled the other sock over his naked foot. “Really though, I’m giving it up. Weed, too, by the end of the summer.” He hesitated. “I’m in the game until my nigga’s out.” Dunny looked at Christophe meaningfully as he picked up his shoe. “I make enough money so that I don’t need this shit. Want, yeah—need, no. I mean, I might still get a couple of QPs to smoke every once in a while, and sell a couple of dime sacks out my smoking sack, but fuck all this moving QPs. I’m tired of riding around shitting on myself whenever I see a cop car in St. Catherine’s. Shit, I can’t get no pussy if I’m always ducking and dodging the police whenever shit getting good.”

  Joshua surprised Christophe with a high-pitched laugh. “You can’t get no pussy noway.” Christophe looked down at his pockets. Dunny had given him a deadline. The weight of Dunny’s words bore down on the curve of his skull, the angled slope of his shoulders, to rest in the dry, veiny skin of his dark hands. It rested in them like something palpable, something material: like the heavy, sawdust-filled medicine ball they’d thrown to each other in basketball practice.

  “Y’all want to go by Javon’s house?” asked Dunny.

  “What for?” Joshua said. Christophe pocketed the QP and flexed his hand over the bag; it crunched and gave in his fist.

  “I ain’t got time to go out to Germaine tonight and wait around on Lean. I need another QP, and Javon got some.” Dunny pocketed a roll of cash bound with a rubber band.

  “Man,” Joshua hesitated, “I told Laila I would stop by and see her tonight before I went home.”

  “Shit, we can pick her up, too.” Dunny shrugged. “We just going by Javon house. He always got a gang of niggas over there anyway.”

  “You drive,” Christophe said.

  “Fine.” Dunny led the way out of the door. Christophe barely resisted the urge to crush the bag of weed in his pocket, to flatten it into a pancake, a disc that he could sling across the room like a Frisbee. He wondered if it would fly far, and if the drawer on Dunny’s dresser was open, if he could sail it into the hiding spot from the bed. After Christophe watched Joshua walk out the door, he rose and felt his way along the wall until his hand hit the light switch. The room went dark, and Christophe pulled the door shut behind him.

  Joshua stood on his toes before Laila’s window and reached up and knocked. The side of the house her room was on was shadowed, and the woods leaned in so close that he felt the touch of underbrush at his back. A leaf caressed his ear. The light clicked on in the room, and he prepared to duck as he saw the curtain flutter: Laila’s face shone at the window and she smiled at him. She disappeared. Dunny had parked on the curve. Joshua waited for her at the ditch. Surreptitiously, he lowered his head to sniff at his shirt, to gauge his funk. Yeah, he stunk like goat and musk. She had called often after the kiss. He had waited until Christophe left the house and called her back because he wanted to see her again, wanted to pull her into his lap and feel her weight, soft and sure, wanted to feel her mouth opening, wet and warm beneath his, wanted to cup the back of her head and pull her to him by her soft, curly hair. He didn’t want to do any of this in front of Christophe, muted and solitary as he was these days. It was why he hadn’t mentioned the money; he hadn’t wanted to shame him. Joshua watched her run to him across the lawn on her toes. She ran like a girl, her legs kicking out to the side, and it made him want to pick her up when she stopped before him.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You want to come with us by Javon house? Or you going to get in trouble?”

  “Naw, my mama don’t care. Y’all ain’t going to be over there all night, is y’all?”

  “Naw.” He wanted to touch her. Joshua crawled in the backseat. Laila followed him. Joshua glanced at Christophe as they pulled away from the ditch. Christophe was slouched down in the seat so far Joshua could only see his hair, blowsy as a jellyfish in a current. He was ignoring them. Dunny tossed a cigar and a small sack to Joshua over the backseat, and Joshua began to cut at the cigar with his fingernail over an empty shoebox top he picked up off the floor. Laila had scooted over so her leg was against his own. The moon was high in the sky: it lit her thigh. He could barely see her face as the stereo boomed and dropped the rhythm, but he could feel her, dense and small next to him. Joshua realized he was leaning into her, pulled by her gravity, so he hunched over the platter of weed on his lap and tried to concentrate. He could smell honeysuckle coming in through the window, and he immediately associated it with her, as if she were blooming.

  He handed her a flashlight he’d picked up from the floor that Dunny kept in his car for just this occasion and told her to hold it as he opened the baggie. The light jiggled and danced in her hand, and for a moment he forgot Dunny and Christophe in the front seat. It seemed that it was only the two of them in the dark, together. He swept the thought away from him with the seeds he brushed from the tray out of the window. This was a sentiment he had only felt for his brother. Laila switched off the flashlight.

  By the time they pulled into the oyster shell driveway at Javon’s house, Joshua had lit the blunt and passed it to Dunny, who had passed it back to him. Laila had taken two hitching hits and expelled the smoke in jagged coughs. Christophe had refused it. The driveway was clogged with cars, and light from what Joshua supposed was the TV threw bright, electric shocks of colors through the filmy curtains along the living room’s front windows. The night was sticky and loud. The two houses Joshua could see from Javon’s yard were silent, their windows dark and closed like lidded eyes. They sat in the car until Joshua and Dunny finished the blunt. Joshua rubbed his hand along the top of Laila’s hair as they exited the car and followed his cousin and his brother into the house, and they all walked up the steeply sloped driveway lined with oyster shells. As he picked his way around the cars, the shells crunched and shifted under his feet and threw him off balance. Laila’s hair had been fine and smooth as running water. He grabbed her hand when they got to the carport, and lifted her arm and ducked his head so that her hand rested on his own fuzzy braids. Dunny knocked perfunctorily and entered the door. Christophe followed him. Joshua and Laila paused on the steps.

  “You going to braid me and Chris’s hair tonight?” Joshua let her go and straightened, and her palm trailed down the side of his face to his shoulder. She pressed into his collarbone briefly.

  “Yeah.” She smoothed the sheaf of her ponytail behind her head. “If Javon got some rubber bands and grease.” Half of Laila’s face was lit by the room, the other side was shadowed and washed black by the night. She was smiling tentatively: her lips were pursed as if she was waiting for a kiss. He closed the door and kissed her lightly and quickly. Joshua pushed her on the small of her back and made her
enter the door before him just so he could touch her. The room was bright, and it was filled with people. Felicia was sitting on the sofa, leaning over the armrest and laughing at the TV set on top of a bigger, broken wooden TV that looked like it was manufactured during the seventies: a comedian in a leather suit was limping across the stage.

  Dunny had hit a possum once, and when they stopped in the middle of the road and shined the headlights on it, it had looked like that as it died. Felicia laughed harder; her smile was so different from Laila’s—her teeth were brighter, sharper, less kind. Big Henry and Remy sat on the faux-velvet upholstered sofa with her. They had forties in paper bags in their laps. They drank at the same time, and Joshua watched the beer bubble and he was thirsty. He pushed the thirst away: he was already fucked up. Joshua sat on the floor in an open space as Laila disappeared to the back of the house where the bedrooms were. By the time he recognized the comedian was Eddie Murphy and began to chuckle, Laila was straddling his shoulders and taking down his braids with a comb in her hand. The carpet was grimy; everyone still had their shoes on. Flaps of plastic hung from the couch like forgotten clothes on a clothesline. The edges were sharp. Joshua saw movement and heard voices, loud and belligerent, in the kitchen where Christophe and Dunny had gone, and then he sank back into the sofa, into Laila’s legs and her probing, steady hands, and he let the high usher him away from his steady worry about the both of them.

  In the kitchen, Christophe leaned against the wall just inside the doorway. Marquise and Skeetah were kneeling on the floor; Skeetah had his hands to his mouth like he was blowing in a conch shell. He whipped his hand back and opened his fist. Dice clattered along the cracked and peeling tile floor and stopped just short of a pile of dirty green money at Javon’s and Bone’s feet. The boys had pushed the kitchen table and chairs to a corner to clear the floor for craps. A bare lightbulb burned in the low ceiling. Marquise was giving a running commentary while he slapped Skeetah on the back.