BEFORE THEY LEFT THE CAMP, DEX OUTFITTED THEM WITH TUPPERWARE containers of leftovers and gave them a hundred dollars for their help. Hardly an unnecessary word passed between Dex and Jonah while they packed, and Dex watched them back out of the driveway but never raised a hand in farewell. They drove west through the Atchafalaya Basin, one great primordial sweep of water and earth and flora. By midmorning they had crossed the Sabine and entered Texas. They passed through Beaumont, and then Houston reared up, serpentine tangles of overpass and exit ramp. They crept along in the six-lane gridlock.
“This as far as I been from home,” Colby said. “After this, it’s all new.”
“Y’all evacuated to Houston, too?”
“Yeah. Me and Mom and Jamal.” Heat danced over the cars. Colby spoke to his window. “He’s been gone to jail since before I met you.”
“What he do?”
“What he had to, I guess.”
“Huh. I got an uncle in Angola.”
“So you know what I mean, then.”
Jonah shrugged. “The second time in there for him. Dumb-ass.”
“What he do?”
“Busted parole. They found him in a Biloxi casino with a bunch of money wasn’t his.”
“Ha. What about the first time?”
“Know the difference between manslaughter and murder?”
“Yeah.”
“Manslaughter.” Jonah punched the horn and immediately felt stupid for doing so. He looked at Colby. “Like you said. What he had to do.”
They lurched forward before taillights flared through the column of cars.
“That’s how Pop explained it, at least,” Jonah said. “When my uncle got out he was gonna come live with us, so my dad tried to explain it to me. I was a kid. I asked if he was a murderer. I didn’t know the fucking difference, you know? I still don’t, not really. But Pop smacked me across the mouth and I ran out to the backyard.”
Colby listened, face placid.
“Jamal ever tell you that crying was for pussies or anything like that? I got that shit all the time. So I just stand there, holding my breath. Don’t fuckin’ cry, I say to myself. And Pop comes out and stands behind me. He says sorry. He always said sorry. I dunno. He grabs my shoulders and turns me around and looks me in the face and goes, Jonah, listen to me. I’m telling you this because I love you. What your uncle did was an accident, yeah, but he had to protect himself. He wouldn’t be here at all—alive, I mean—if not for this.”
Jonah paused, cleared his throat.
“Pop brings his face real close and tells me: If you’re ever in a fight, you beat him until he’s fucking retarded. Or else as soon as you turn around, he’ll get up and kick you in the back of the head.” Jonah snorted, a kind of laugh. “I was, like, nine.” Jonah glanced at Colby. “Then Pop picked up Uncle Dexter and he lived with us for a while and then he got caught in Biloxi. What you think about that?”
Colby shrugged. “It makes sense.”
Jonah recalled the fight that had gotten him kicked out of his second high school, the expulsion that had brought him to Luz and to Colby. This second high school was full of second-chance white kids—teenagers who’d been booted from previous private schools for drugs or cheating or fighting or, as in Jonah’s case, breaking zero-tolerance policies. It was the last stop on the private side of education, and it was a school full of bullies and wannabe tough guys. The kid had been picking on Jonah and wouldn’t stop when asked. Jonah broke the kid’s nose there in the hallway. He knew it when he hit him. The kid never imagined what it would look like, his own blood speckled across the lockers. That had been his problem. There was blood on Jonah’s fist, too. Even before the kid fell to the ground, a hush coursed through the boys looking on, all the private-school boys wearing their shirts and ties. None of them had foreseen such an outcome, either, not from a fight they urged on and did indeed wish to happen. The reality of the redness. And when the teacher arrived, he saw Jonah’s knuckles and regarded him as one might regard an animal. Jonah remembered that look.
“I used to cruise with Jamal.” Colby said it softly.
Jonah looked at his friend.
“Not all the time, you know. But he asked me to come along sometimes. Me, I was just a boy. He had this red Grand Prix, and he’d play the music real low, just a quiet little pulse. If I went to jack up the volume, Jamal would say, Naw, naw. That was how he liked it, real easy like. I loved cruising with him. Never told him that, though. You leave those feelings alone.”
“Right,” Jonah said.
“We’d roll past this house or that house where some boys were chilling on the steps. They’d be just staring at us, all hard like. And Jamal, he say, Don’t you smile now. Give ’em that look right back, ya heard? Finally we’d stop at this pink shotgun, his boss’s house. He’d run inside, leave me in the car. Afterward, he’d drive through the daiquiri shop. Always had these crisp new twenties. I remember that. Jamal was a tough dude—still, he loved him some strawberry daiquiris.” Colby chuckled.
Jonah smiled. The traffic started and stopped. The sun glared against the Houston skyline. He thought about the month he spent here with his father after Katrina. They stayed at the camp in the months after that, until they could return to New Orleans. It would have been during that time that Luz had arrived with her father, when all the work was just beginning. Almost five years ago. Jonah and Luz, they’d been hardly more than children. “I never need to spend any more time in Houston,” Jonah said, believing Colby would take his meaning.
“Me, I liked it here.” Colby watched the tall buildings glint.
“Come on.”
“We stayed with some cousins for almost a year.” Colby grinned. “It was the first time I ever seen black kids and white kids playing together. Here, in Houston.”
“Really?”
Colby told him about an outdoor basketball court ringed with chain-link. Jamal and Colby would go down there with their cousins. It was mostly black guys playing pickup, sure, but there were white boys, too. Colby stood on the sideline more often than not, watched everyone play. It was good pickup—some shit-talking and you better have some grit, but it was honorable, no cheap fouls, no whining. Sometimes Colby got in and ran around the unpainted arc, hoping someone would dish him the ball so he could chuck one up. “Right after the storm,” he said, “I saw my brother smile more than ever before.”
Back home, the water still hadn’t receded. Once it was clear they weren’t returning to the city anytime soon—and maybe never, according to the news—Jamal’s people, the crew from the pink house, turned up in Houston. “After that,” Colby said, “Jamal didn’t have time to play no more. It was back to business.” Colby, though, kept playing ball at the court. He found himself thinking about their New Orleans neighborhood, and the strange white family on their street, the only white family he knew of on their side of St. Charles Avenue. “It was y’all, Mickey-Bee,” Colby chuckled. He told Jonah how when he was young and sitting with Jamal and his friends on the porch, they used to see one of the older white kids walking along the street, under the cemetery wall. “It was your brother Dex,” Colby said. “We just thought he was weird.”
Jonah laughed. “No shit.”
“Yeah. So you know, that’s why I said hi to you when you showed up in school last year. I recognized you from around the way.”
“Huh,” Jonah said, gripping the wheel. Traffic picked up and he kept his eyes on the highway.
“I think about it,” Colby went on, “ . . . maybe I never woulda said hey if I didn’t play with all kinds of kids in Houston.”
An uncomfortable feeling took root in Jonah’s gut. He’d never considered that their friendship began with something akin to an act of pity on Colby’s part. He pushed the conversation in a new direction: “You talk to Jamal ever?”
“Me and Mom write him letters.” Colby bumped his shoulders. “See, what happened was we came back to New Orleans in August, a year after the storm. Jamal got a second possession charge, right off the bat, and they tacked something about an illegal gun to it, too. The city was fucking crazy that fall. Everybody coming home and carving out territory all over again. Judges weren’t playing.”
“Yeah.”
“I figure they probably wanted him to flip on his crew, but that ain’t Jamal. After a while, somebody come looking for me, wanting me to help out to pay Jamal back. But you know, Mickey-Bee, I ain’t never hustled like Jamal. I never been in that pink house. I never wanted to climb like he did.” Colby sighed. “I ain’t cut out for it the way my brother was.”
Jonah glanced at his friend, but Colby was looking elsewhere. “I get it, bud.”