Where the Line Bleeds

by Jesmyn Ward

  “Ah, shit, Skeetah. Craps, nigga. You can’t roll dice for shit. You sorry. You should just go ahead and hand your money to me because the way you playing you just giving it away. Really though.”

  “Shut up, Marquise.”

  Christophe realized Franco was standing on the wall next to him, looking as if he was already wearing his Fourth of July outfit: he wore a velour short set, the baby blue of it was as deep as the summer sky after a hard rain. His mother worked as a nurse and his father worked at the power plant, so he was always clean, had always been pretty and well dressed ever since they were kids. He always had the newest shoes, the best baseball caps, the flyest fits. The lineup of Franco’s hair that was so sharp it looked as if it had been cut with a razor, and Christophe looked away as Dunny crossed the room to shake Javon’s hand. He remembered his own days of being fresh, of being clean, of smelling good—he sniffed the goat on his shirt and wanted to laugh at himself, but the urge died in the glare of the yellow fluorescent lights over the sink. He had ignored Felicia when he walked in the door; it was his way of imagining she couldn’t see him like this. Bone rolled the dice.

  “Seven.” Bone called out, and knelt to scoop the dice. He gathered the pile of money from the floor and shoved it in his pocket. Skeetah stood. A hole the size of a quarter stretched at the neck of his navy T-shirt, and Christophe could see smudges of dirt smeared across his chest against the dark cloth.

  “What you picked up the money for?” Skeetah asked.

  “I won,” Bone said.

  “You ain’t even going to roll again and give me a chance to win my money back?”

  “Naw.” Bone grinned and pulled on the black and mild cigar in his mouth.

  “That’s fucked up, Bone.” Marquise pointed at Bone. “You know tomorrow the Fourth and you know we just up in here playing for fun and you going to take the man money, anyway?”

  Skeetah held his white palms out toward Bone; Christophe marveled at the fact that while the rest of Skeetah was so dark, his palms were pale and chalky. Calluses from his pit bull’s leash sprouted across his palms like a constellation. “Man, c’mon, Bone. At least give me a chance to win my money back.”

  Bone stepped toward Skeetah. He had a rag tied low over his head so that it sheathed his scalp; Christophe knew he was trying to pack his waves down for the next day. Bone narrowed his eyes: they reminded Christophe of a snake’s.

  “Naw, nigga.” Bone had a small grin on his face as he said this, but by the set of his eyes and the way he advanced slowly toward Skeetah until his tall bulk towered over him, Christophe knew he wasn’t playing. “This what you two little niggas don’t understand. I won the game. I take the money. Game over.”

  Dunny was shaking his head as he leaned on the counter next to Javon. He shrugged and whispered into Javon’s ear.

  “That is sort of fucked up, Bone,” Franco said.

  “You shut up, Franco. Ain’t nobody asked you.”

  Marquise half sat against the wall and looked away back toward the living room. Skeetah stared at Bone’s chest with his eyes half-lidded as if he was sleepy, his arms on his waist. He was dangerously still. Christophe could tell Skeetah wanted to hit Bone, and suddenly, he hated Bone’s clean-cut goatee, his expensive cologne, the gold loop gleaming in his ear. Christophe stepped in the middle of the two.

  “Why you got to be such a asshole, Bone?” He heard rather than saw Dunny move from the counter. “That’s some bullshit and you know it. You got a whole pocket full of money and you can’t let that nigga have a chance to get his money back?” Christophe stabbed his finger up toward Bone’s eye and saw him flinch as he spit the words out. “You just being a bitch, that’s all. Can’t never let no other nigga get ahead.”

  “You better get your finger out my face,” Bone bit out, but Christophe didn’t care if he was the key that had turned in the lock to open the door to a confrontation. Joshua’s face flashed in his brain, and he wanted it, suddenly.

  “I ain’t got to do shit. What you going to do if I don’t?”

  “I’m going to whip your ass.”

  Bone brought his hands up to shove Christophe and start the fight when Christophe saw a freckled arm whip out like a striking animal and push Bone backward, and suddenly Javon was standing before him. Christophe had forgotten he was in Javon’s house, that he was jabbing his finger into Javon’s best friend’s face, and that Javon had broken a white boy’s jaw. He could not understand why he was not afraid. He wondered if Javon’s face would turn another color if he hit him hard in the nose, if the cartilage and the bone would break under his knuckles, and if the blood would bloom red like a rose across his face.

  “Chris. Chill out, nigga,” Javon said, and Christophe saw that the pores of his face were large and defined and blended in with the freckles. “Ain’t no need for all that.” Christophe saw Javon’s black eyes moving back and forth, saw that he was trying to gauge the play of emotions that confused even Christophe. Javon was looking at him. For some reason, this made Christophe rock back on his heels. He felt solid, tall. He nodded at Javon and stepped back and Dunny let him go. Javon turned to Bone.

  “Pull the money out. Stop acting like you afraid to play,” Javon said.

  “I ain’t afraid of shit.”

  Javon stepped so close to Bone his nose almost touched Bone’s own.

  “Well then play,” Javon said.

  Javon stood like a statue before Bone. Bone’s nostrils flared. Javon let his head list to the side, and then he stepped past Bone to lean against the counter and pick up his pencil-thin cigar from where he had left it. He inhaled and let the smoke trail from his mouth so he could reinhale it in through his nose; the yellow smoke ran out of him and into him, and it was the same color as his face. Bone threw the bills from his pocket to the floor, where they scraped along the battered tile like crumbling brown leaves.

  “I’m just going to win it back anyway,” he grumbled. Bone dropped the dice to the floor. “I’m going to ride to the store and get some more blacks. Anybody want to ride?” No one answered him.

  Christophe heard the door open and shut. He leaned around the corner to check on his brother, to see why his twin hadn’t rushed into the kitchen when he heard them yelling, to find Joshua asleep on the floor between Laila’s legs. She was pulling and threading his hair into an intricate weave of braids. The others were laughing at the television. A shelf in the corner twinkled with dust-cloaked porcelain figures: Christophe saw that they were small porcelain clowns invoking multiple poses of hilarity. A few lay cracked or tumbled on their sides; they looked as if they had fallen stricken in a field of ash. Laila looked up from her work to catch him studying her and murmured, “He fell asleep.” Long, snakelike bangs had pulled free of her ponytail: the hair fell over her eyes. She was small and light next to Felicia, and as her hair waved before her eyes, he wondered if her hair would be as thick and slick as Felicia’s in his hands. Laila looked pointedly at Christophe and raised her eyebrows at him. “You next.”

  Christophe suppressed the urge he had to walk over to his brother, to wake him, to pull him up and away from Laila and back two months into their world. His brother trusted her; his eyes were half-open in sleep, and he lay against her as if he were wounded. Christophe returned to the kitchen to find Javon standing before him with a blunt in his hand, and Dunny shaking the dice so quickly his fist began to blur like a hummingbird’s wings. Dunny was watching him. The smoke wafted in an amorous tendril up Christophe’s nose: he was so tired of that smell, of the harsh, biting burn of it. He hesitated in the act of shaking his head no, of refusing the blunt, and sniffed again. There was something sweet about the smell, something unfamiliar and dense; something that crystallized like sugar in his nose. Javon smiled at him and dangled the blunt closer to Christophe’s face.

  “California. Some of my cousins brought it down.”

  Christophe grabbed the blunt. Still smiling, Javon leaned on the wall next to Christophe. Dunny swept the
dice from the floor and yelled out “point,” and then threw them back out. They rapped over the floor. Christophe held the smoke in his lungs and heard the dice like a knocking hand on a door: he inhaled again and a door opened inside him. He passed the blunt to Javon. Shaking his hand, Dunny pistoned his arm back and forth like he was trying to start an errant, rusted-over lawn mower. Christophe laughed, and Javon passed him the blunt.

  Laila startled Christophe: she gripped his arm, and told him that she had been saying his name for a few moments but he must have not heard her. He followed her to the sofa; Joshua’s hair was done, and he had scooted over to make room for Christophe and had fallen back asleep. Laila pulled the elastic band out of Christophe’s hair and his head lolled back and he peered at her. She was as pretty as Felicia; her nose was smaller, but her lips weren’t as big. His eyes felt veiled by cotton. He was floating. She giggled and said, “You high,” and began braiding his hair. Someone got off the sofa and passed in front of the television like an eclipse of the moon. Christophe was not surprised when a red-dotted hand descended in front of his face.

  “I rolled another one,” Javon intoned. Christophe giggled. The fact that he could not feel Laila’s hands yanking his hair was even funnier, since he knew from the way his eyes were jerking that she was doing so. Eddie Murphy guffawed: his laughter sounded like the bray of a donkey. Inhaling the smoke from the blunt was like breathing: as his chest shuddered he wondered if he had ever been able to take a breath without it burning, and if so, why? Something sounded like a shirt ripping, and Christophe saw that Joshua’s mouth had opened wider and he was snoring. Christophe was so high his eyelids felt swollen shut.

  Dunny interrupted Joshua’s snoring by shoving him awake and telling him it was time to go. Skeetah and Marquise had wandered into the living room and were sitting on the floor, drinking beer, and everyone else was staring dully at the television, empty bottles in hand. Once in a while, Javon would make a joke and interrupt Eddie’s act, and everyone would laugh. Christophe guffawed and rocked back and forth. Joshua frowned, and wearily rose. Christophe noticed belatedly that Felicia had left while he’d been getting braided up, and that his hand had been cupping Laila’s foot. Laila wiped her hands on her shorts to clean them of hair grease, blushing. Christophe gave Javon a long handshake, and Javon insisted that he and Joshua stop by the next day: Javon had one hundred pounds of boiled, spicy shrimp and he was barbecuing, and he didn’t want to have any left over on July the fifth. Christophe said he felt like eating it all now, and Javon had snorted and said he wouldn’t pick them up until the next day.

  Dunny drove to Laila’s house first. Christophe watched Joshua walk her up to her front door. He thought Joshua wasn’t going to kiss her because they stood in the light from the front porch and talked for so long. They seemed skittish around each other; while Joshua stood straight and solid as a bull, Laila leaned forward and away from him as gracefully as an egret. When they kissed, Christophe looked away. He could not remember the last time he had smoked so much; he knew it was before he began selling. Dunny pulled into his own driveway and parked; Christophe’s eyes opened a bit more when the car stopped and without prodding, he got out of the car and walked to the Caprice and sat in the passenger seat. As Joshua pulled away, Christophe yelled out the window, slurring, that they’d see Dunny the next day at the picnic at Ma-mee’s house. A fox darted out of the underbrush at the edge of a ditch and then disappeared again. Christophe looked at the tunnel of light preceding the car back to his brother and knew that when Joshua had awoken to see him holding himself and laughing soundlessly with his teeth bared, Joshua had believed his brother was in pain.

  When Joshua drank his first beer on the morning of the Fourth, he was sitting on the picnic bench that he and Dunny and Christophe had just unloaded off the back of Uncle Paul’s truck. Three picnic tables formed a half-square in the fresh-cut lawn around the iron drum grill. It was ten o’clock: the air reminded Joshua of melting butter. He watched Uncle Paul spread a red, white, and blue tablecloth over the last picnic table, and then mumbling something about the goat not being finished, he drove off. Joshua heard Aunt Rita and Uncle Eze arguing about who was bringing cold drinks for the kids, and he followed Christophe and Dunny into the house. Christophe seemed quieter this morning; he woke and dressed slowly, and when Uncle Paul offered him a beer after they’d plopped the last table down, he’d refused one. After Joshua and Christophe dressed, they walked out into the yard, the colors of their outfits blinding and crisp. The twins sat at a table with Dunny and Ma-mee and Aunt Rita, while Uncle Paul drove into the dirt driveway and slammed the door with a beer-slurred whoop and proclaimed that the goat was ready. Julian, Maxwell, and David sat at the other tables with their girlfriends and wives and children, handing out plates and measuring out portions, complaining about each other’s grilling skills, and accusing each other of filching shots of moonshine from Paul’s bottle. Joshua lugged one of the roasting pans of goat to the table, and after Christophe ladled some of the meat onto Ma-mee’s plate, they began to eat. Joshua opened three bottles of beer. Each bottle sprayed small, icy geysers of mist as Joshua opened them to the heat. He passed one to Dunny on his left, and one past Ma-mee to Christophe on the right even though neither had asked him for one, and he took his first sip. He watched Ma-mee scoop a huge, barbecue-slathered bite of goat into her mouth, close her eyes, and chew.

  They ate until they had to shove their pants down over the extended globes of their bellies. They ate, drank beer, brushed away flies, wiped sweat from their slick, cologne-scented faces with napkins, and then ate again. Christophe sucked ribs and shrugged away the platter of goat. Joshua could not stop himself from scooping more goat on his plate: Paul had cooked it so long that the meat seemed to melt like hot, syrupy candy in his mouth. Joshua remembered goat as a stringy dark meat, but the red spicy mass before him was nothing like he recalled. Joshua opened beer after beer and passed them: as the sun slid from its zenith to lick the tops of the pines, the beer and the heat made the day golden and easy for them all. Christophe seemed more his old self, quick to humor. After he kidded Dunny about him sneaking one of Aunt Rita’s wine coolers, Christophe said that he wanted to go to Javon’s house.

  “Javon say he got a whole cooler full of shrimp at his house: a hundred pounds. I’ma go get some for you,” Christophe told Ma-mee.

  “Y’all going to be back to pop the fireworks? I don’t want them kids to be blowing up the big ones by theyself. They’ll put somebody’s eye out,” Ma-mee said. Her hair was slicked back and shone like a silver cap; her profile was soft and falling.

  “Yeah.” Christophe nodded as he rose. “We going to pop the big ones when we get back.” Christophe grabbed a bag of bottle rockets and lighters and pumps that rested by his feet and pulled out a handful and shoved them into his cavernous shorts pockets. “We going to pop these on the way.”

  “Hold on.” Dunny rubbed his stomach and put one hand on the table. “Why don’t we wait?”

  “By the time we get there, all the shrimp going to be gone.”

  Dunny tossed his plate into the garbage can. “I feel like going to sleep.” He rose and wove between the tables and islands of chairs and walked to the street. Joshua trailed Christophe as they skipped heavily across the lawn to catch up with Dunny. They hopped over the ditch and landed on the street in a swarm of gnats. As they walked, the gnats drifted along with them like a cloud of golden dust roused by the sonorous, beer-suffused sway of their bodies through the sunset. Joshua wished he’d grabbed another beer. Giggling children hid in the ditches and shot bottle rockets in front and behind them as they walked past; the sparks shot through the air like manic, fizzing fireflies. Dogs leapt in and out of the ditches and woods and barked. The yards they passed were packed with cars and lawn chairs and tables and people; the air suffused with charcoal and barbecue and sulfur. A caravan of go-carts swooped past them; pre-teen boys wearing wave caps and basketball jerseys drove with one hand while sh
ooting Roman candles into the ditches with their other. Joshua felt as if they were walking with a demented, royal escort.

  “One of y’all badasses shoot me and I’m a set y’all on fire,” Dunny yelled at the kids in the ditches.

  Joshua wondered if the little girl with the clacking braids and the dark and light little boys were in the ditches right now, wiping blood from their legs where the blackberry vines had scratched them and giggling. He imagined them there in the mellowing dark, whispering. A bottle rocket shot past inches away from Dunny’s belly, and Joshua heard rustling and laughing from the undergrowth.

  “Y’all keep on. I got a bomb at the house!” Dunny shouted. The bushes were still. Joshua waved his cousin on, and bottle rockets whizzed past where they had been standing.

  “They just playing.”

  “They going to make me go to war.”

  “Against some eight-year-olds?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You need another beer.” Christophe broke into the conversation, and as Bobby Blue Bland crooned from a truck stereo, so loud and funky Joshua could almost smell the sweat and the cigarette smoke and see the faded pool tables and the big-hair eighties pinup girls on the Kool cigarette posters at the local hole-in-the-wall blues club, the Oaks. Christophe lit the bottle rocket and watched the fuse burn down to the paper, where it flared.

  Christophe threw the rocket above his head into the air at the last moment, and the rocket hissed and shot into the darkening sky. It flew in a graceful arc and exploded in a burst of golden, showering sparks. Christophe handed Dunny an incense pump and a sheaf of red-and-blue bottle rockets, and he passed them to Joshua, who began to throw them into the air. Dunny ambled between them: for all his talk about shooting at the kids in the ditches, Dunny didn’t like to throw firecrackers. When the twins were eight and he was eleven, he had been teaching them how to throw bottle rockets in a game of war with Skeetah and Big Henry and Marquise, and the bottle rocket he threw in the air had shot Big Henry in the eye instead of harmlessly glancing off his pants or singeing his skin or even burning a hole in his T-shirt. Big Henry’s eye had been blistered shut for days after the Fourth, and now Dunny would only throw bottle rockets when he was very, very drunk, which would usually result in him throwing a bottle rocket into a moving car or into a yard full of sated partiers. Christophe tried to keep them away from him, but Joshua guessed he was too drunk or reckless to care who he’d passed them to. By the time they reached Javon’s yard, the sun had set. Joshua threw a bottle rocket back into the street and heard a loud, staticky explosion undercut by the squeal of go-cart wheels.