Joshua lied. The doctor asked him questions and he lied about it all. He said they were at the river, drinking, when it had happened. They were going for a midnight swim. They were planning to camp. It was a beer bottle. His brother had been running down the beach in the dark to jump in the water and had tripped over a half-buried log, and had cut himself on an empty bottle. No, no one else was there: just him and his brother. No, the doctor didn’t need to call anyone else. They had no one else. Would Christophe be okay? Would he be alright? Was he still bleeding? Was he still breathing? Joshua wanted to ask his own questions, but didn’t. The doctor touched a finger to Joshua’s shoulder, and he looked up, shocked, away from the image in his mind of his dead, quiet brother.
“He lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said, and Joshua nodded. “It’s a good thing you got him here so fast.” Joshua looked down at his blood, his father’s blood, his brother’s blood on his shirt. “He wouldn’t have made it this far.”
Joshua gazed at the doctor then: his bloodless face, his skin as pale as Javon’s. He could see red, tiny veins like cursive around his nose and his eyes.
“His blood pressure is low, but we stitched him up. Whatever it was didn’t hit any major arteries, but it nicked his liver. All we can do is watch and wait.”
Ma-mee would be at home, feeling the uneven, dark wood of the house with her fingers, waiting. She would be up, sitting, listening for signs. Cille.
“My grandmother,” he said.
Joshua called Aunt Rita first. Dunny picked up the phone. Joshua spoke in vague terms: accident, Christophe, hospital, Ma-mee. Dunny yelled away from the receiver and Joshua heard Aunt Rita in the background. He knew if he closed his eyes and pulled the receiver away from his ear a centimeter or so, he could mistake the siren of her concern for his mother’s voice. He didn’t. He called Ma-mee, and she picked up on the third ring. He told her slowly, told her they were coming to pick her up. He looked down at the blood on his chest and felt sick and asked her to bring him a shirt. She was quiet and calm, and he wondered if Cille was even home with her. He went back to the waiting room and sat in a chair, closed his eyes to the news on the TV screen, and opened them again and they were there.
When he rose to hug Ma-mee, she put her hand to his throat and stopped him. Before he could protest, she peeled his shirt away from him, up and over his head as if he were six. She handed his T-shirt to Cille, and Cille walked him to the men’s bathroom with a preemptive “Shut up, I’m your mama.” Joshua washed the sink pink. In the waiting room, they sat in a nervous circle. When Cille began to ask Joshua questions, he lied. He told them the story he had told the doctor. When he got to the part about picking Christophe up from the ground and running with him to the car, he could hardly breathe, and the words caught in his mouth and he swallowed them back down and stopped speaking. After that, Cille did not ask him any more questions. Cille reached over to him and cupped his leg, but it was Ma-mee he leaned into, Ma-mee’s neck he buried his face into; her skin was wet. She kneaded the back of his head and shushed him.
To Ma-mee’s bleary eyes, when she walked into that waiting room on Rita’s arm, Joshua had looked as he had the day he and his brother had been born, as red as he’d been when the doctor had taken him and Christophe from Cille by C-section. He was the brightest thing in the room, and he smelled of blood and salt. She could not help but pull the shirt from him and send him immediately to the bathroom: she needed to touch him first, and then she needed to see him with the blood washed from him. She’d brought the brightest, bluest T-shirt for him she could find. It was a shirt Cille had bought for him years ago for Christmas; Ma-mee was surprised he could still fit into it. When the doctor came for them and told them they could see Christophe, Joshua would not move. Cille led her to Christophe’s room, where she trailed her fingers across his face: the shadowed lump of his body looked so small under the sheets. She left Cille sitting next to Christophe’s bed, and Joshua met her in the hallway outside of the room. He still smelled of salt. The white monotone of the hallways was blinding her.
“I tried to save him,” he whispered to her.
“You did, Joshua.”
“It don’t feel like it, Ma-mee.”
“I know.”
They wandered through the hallways back to the waiting room. They sat and waited. Joshua roamed the circuit to Christophe’s room and back again, over and over, until Ma-mee made Dunny fetch him, made him sit next to her so she could hold him in place. He would not run himself to sleep this time. Ma-mee held Joshua’s wrapped hands in her own, wishing she could feel the skin through the bandages, wishing he were little again. She wanted him to be small, for his skull to fit in the curve of her hands; she wanted to be able to pull him into her lap and enclose him in the circumference of her arms. She wanted to be able to carry him to his bed and put him to sleep next to his brother.
Dunny had to drive the car home because Joshua refused to do so. Joshua watched Dunny from the porch as he cleaned the passenger seat with a brush and soap and water; he scrubbed away the blood until there was nothing left, then rolled up the windows and left the car to smolder in the sun. Joshua spent his days skirting the trees at the rim of the yard looking toward the road, looking for a silhouette that could have been Sandman’s, remembering the feel of the flesh of his father’s face melting beneath his fists. His hands hung useless and clumsy at his sides, and when he woke in the morning to his brother’s empty bed and his hands, he could not believe what they had done. Cille drove them to the hospital in her rental car.
“My job expect me back on Monday,” she said. Joshua had watched her from the hallway when they were first preparing to leave the hospital the night before; he went to fetch her because the sun had been rising, and Ma-mee had needed to go home and take her medicine. Cille had been sitting at the side of Christophe’s bed, one hand on the sheet next to his head, staring at his face. She would not touch him.
“Yeah,” Joshua replied, and he heard the go home in his voice, and he hoped Ma-mee did not hear it, but he knew she did. None of them spoke. At the hospital, while Cille was escorting Ma-mee to the bathroom, he crouched next to the bed and whispered in his brother’s ear, telling him: wake up, come back, it was an accident. Rita came and went with food. Christophe slept through one day, then another, his blood pressure low, his chest rising and falling slowly. When he awoke a day later, Joshua was slumped by the window in a chair, staring at Cille, wondering when she would begin packing up her bags to go home; it was the end of the week. Ma-mee was at Christophe’s bedside, stroking his scarred, serrated knuckles. Christophe opened his eyes and Joshua jerked upright in his chair. Christophe blinked, stared at the ceiling, and turned his head to look at Ma-mee and Cille, and then at Joshua. Ma-mee stopped rubbing his hand.
“Christophe?”
“Yes, Ma-mee,” he croaked.
“You alright?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She covered her face with the same hand that had been stroking him, and breathed hard. Her mouth opened in a thin, pink line and she inhaled as if she was going to say something, but closed her mouth instead. She did not remove her hand from her eyes.
“What happened, Chris?” Cille asked as she stood behind Ma-mee, her hand on her shoulder.
Christophe’s eyes shifted to catch Joshua’s face. Joshua did not move. Christophe looked as if he swallowed to wet his throat, but when he spoke, his voice was still a hoarse, shallow croak.
“It was an accident.”
Joshua exhaled. He felt as if he were buoyed on water, floating on his back in the river with his hands dug into the cold, white sand. For the first time in days, he felt weightless. Christophe croaked again.
“It was an accident.”
Ma-mee dropped her hand. Joshua could see the glaze of tears in the bags under her eyes. She wiped them away.
“Don’t let it happen again, not any of it.” Ma-mee paused. “I think you trying to kill me.”
Christophe’s leg twitched. Joshua walked to the other side of the bed. His brother was grimacing.
“Can I have some water?”
Cille clumsily poured Christophe a small, plastic glass and helped him slide forward into a slight hunch to drink. She held the back of his head. She tilted the cup and succored Christophe like a baby. Water dribbled from the cup down his chin, and Cille wiped it away.
The doctor sent them home later that day with the admonition that Christophe should rest, after he sent a social worker to the room to process paperwork to have the hospital bills waived. Cille drove them home, and once there, she piecemeal packed every bit of colored lace and silk she’d festooned the room with, and loaded it all into her rental car. She did not ask for Joshua’s help, and he did not offer it.
“I’m returning the rental to the airport in New Orleans.” She listed in the middle of the living room and looked at all of them as she spoke, and yet Joshua thought she looked at none of them; they were a window. “Work.” This sound erupted from her like a hiccup. Joshua thought she would say something else, but she didn’t.
“It was good having you so long, Cille.” Ma-mee was looking in the direction of Cille’s voice, but her gaze was off, uncentered.
“Yes, Mama.” Cille gripped her purse strap like a backpacker would. In the room’s half-light, her usually light eyes were glassy and black like the water of the bayou at night shattering cold light from houses along its surface. “Maybe the next visit we can work on getting the yard together, and everything will be quieter.”
“You need help, Cille?” Christophe asked this from his makeshift bed on the couch. At first Joshua thought Christophe would correct himself for not calling her Mama, at least in parting, and he thought Cille would correct him, but she only twisted the strap around her finger until it turned the tip white, and neither corrected the other.
“Like you can move”—Cille smiled a little—“and no, I don’t.”
“Goodbye.” Joshua was staring at the soft skin of Ma-mee’s chest, the way it fell like a curtain from the rod of her collarbone. How underneath was solid and hard as oyster shells, sure as the bottom of the bay. He just wanted Cille to leave.
“Goodbye.” Cille didn’t look at him either. “Y’all take care of each other.”
“Be safe on that road, Cille,” Ma-mee said, her voice falling to a wheezing whisper.
“I will, Mama.” And with a shivering of gold and magenta and silky black, she shimmered like a mirage in the room, turned, and was gone.
That evening, Rita cooked for the family while Dunny sat on the floor next to Christophe’s head and told him he deserved to hurt a little more for being such a dumbass—what the hell had he been drinking to stumble over a log at the river and cut himself wide open on a piece of glass? Christophe had turned his head into his pillow.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Christophe said.
Laila joined them. Joshua led her back to the room and she told him that she had heard that Sandman was missing.
“What you mean?”
Joshua spoke this into her shoulder. He tasted sweat and smelled cocoa butter. He breathed in the roasting grass and dense pine from outside.
“Ain’t nobody seen him. I was by Javon’s yesterday and Marquise and Big Henry was talking about how they ain’t seen him riding around or on his bike or nothing. They thought he might’ve went back to rehab or something. Javon say he ain’t seen him either. Then Tilda jump in and say she thought she saw him back up in that old house in the woods that you say you and Christophe used to throw rocks at, but when she called him, he disappeared. You know how the country is. Everybody think they know but nobody do. Skeetah say he saw somebody with a cast look like Sandman over in St. Catherine.”
He stroked her with the skin of his wrists, and she picked at the wrapping on his hands.
“You want to tell me what happened?” she asked him.
He kissed her shoulder, openmouthed. His breath was hot.
“Not yet,” he breathed.
Christophe woke quickly when Joshua sat next to him; he peered at the clock and it cleared and he saw that it was five-thirty in the morning. Christophe pushed the sheet away from his torso: it was hot, even for the morning: it was hurricane-heralding weather. Joshua was rewrapping his hands.
“Ma-mee up yet?” Christophe asked.
“She still sleep.” Joshua yanked at the yellowed, tangled gauze.
Joshua’s head was so close to Christophe that he could see that his brother hadn’t shaved; red-brown wiry hair sprouted from the side of his face and under his chin.
“You told them I tripped and fell at the river?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do with all the weed that was in my pockets?”
“Threw it out the car on our way to the hospital … it was only about three or four dub sacks, though.”
“What about him?”
Joshua recounted the stories about Sandman Laila had told him.
“I figured he wasn’t dead … but still. Javon …”
“All he was worried about was hisself.”
Christophe kicked the sheet so that it shivered from his legs and bunched against the cushions. The floor fan hummed, and bits of dust set sail like dandelion seeds from its plastic frame to drift through the air. The skin around Joshua’s stitches was a light, pale pink. Christophe thought of the way only Javon’s head and hands had flushed red when he was toying with Sandman, of how the rest of him had seemed starkly white, of how he’d acted like he wanted to swing at Christophe, and how Sandman had disappeared. He would have never gone to Javon’s on that first day if he had known: he should have driven to the bayou, to one of the hidden boat launches and sat all day, regardless of the money and the weed and the way Javon had seen him in that kitchen. Javon had looked at him once: he was no killer. Still, where was Sandman? Rehab, jail, a hospital, with his people in Germaine or St. Catherine? Joshua opened and closed his hands, slowly, testing the skin. He rubbed his fingertips over the matching scars.
“I didn’t know I was going to hurt him that bad. I just did it.” He prodded his cuts. “All I could think about was saving you.”
“You think he knew it was me?”
“I don’t know. I was just … hitting him. Like I couldn’t hear nothing—I thought you was dying.”
“I couldn’t hear nothing either.” Christophe laid his hand flat across the bandage on his stomach.
“I think I almost killed him, Chris,” Joshua whispered. “If he’s even still alive.”
Christophe looked closely at his brother, noticed the way the muscle shrank into the hollows of his collarbone, the way the skin under his eyes seemed permanently smudged black. His teeth glistened.
“You was trying to save me, not kill him. It’s a difference,” Christophe replied.
“Is there?” Joshua asked him, his voice barely registering.
“Yeah, it is.
“You didn’t do nothing wrong. Javon ain’t no killer. Sandman probably just decided to leave, go back to rehab. Or maybe he in jail. The cops could’ve come picked him up. You know he ain’t never stayed no place long—at least, no place close to us.”
Outside, a loud car rumbled by. Christophe grabbed his brother’s wrist and held it, felt the blood beating beneath his fingertips, sat so still he heard his own blood pounding in his ears. Joshua’s pulse matched his own. Christophe’s arm began to ache, but he sat that way, holding his brother, and Joshua remained still. Christophe cleared his throat and broke the silence.
“Wasn’t nothing here for him anyway.”
“I’m sorry about hitting you. I didn’t know.”
Christophe closed his eyes, but did not remove his hand from his brother. He shrugged. His brother, their wounds, Ma-mee dimming like a bulb, his parents’ places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons: it was enough.
“Me too. When the sun start going down, let’s go fishing.”
Joshua gave his brother his pain pills, and Christophe fell asleep. Joshua lay down on the floor, folded his arms into a pillow, and nodded off on the scratchy carpet. Minutes later, Ma-mee found them like that, and turned the fan higher. The bright sun tried to ease its way around the edges of the curtains, to suffuse the room with heat and insect chatter and the babble of pines, mimosas, pecan, and oak. Ma-mee shut the screen door against the drowsy gossip of the bees on the fuchsia flower clusters of the crepe myrtle, cleaned, and listened to her boys sleep.
Dunny drove them to the bayou. They’d decided to go to one of the smaller bridges, one that was only as long as two cars, to fish. There was no traffic. The sun perched on the tip of the marsh grasses in the distance, framed by egrets and still pine trees. The water was dark brown and deep and muddy and smelled of eggs, and the twins sat on the grass at the edge of the bayou and dangled their poles out over the water. The rusted steel rigging of a sunken fishing boat protruded from the feathered lap of the small bay in which they fished. Joshua balanced his pole with his fingertips as he clenched it between his knees; he had to ask Christophe to thread the bait onto the hook. Christophe wasn’t even holding his own pole; Dunny had balanced it for him between two buckets. Dunny lounged in the sandy, stubby grass and smoked a black and mild cigar. Sweat ran across Christophe’s belly and leaked into his wound and itched.
“People talking,” said Dunny.
“About what?” said Joshua.
“About Sandman. Wondering where he at and why he disappeared,” Dunny replied.
Joshua cranked in his reel and shook his pole.
“I went over by Javon’s house the other day,” Dunny continued. “He had some old fucked-up Band-Aids hanging off his hand. Said he cut himself by accident last week.”
The wind puffed disconsolately at Christophe’s face and he let his head loll back on the hard, dirty plastic of the bait cooler.
“Bad luck everywhere,” Christophe spoke to the pink striated sky.
Dunny sat up and hugged his knees and then rolled back. He eyed the twins.
“Y’all telling me y’all ain’t have nothing to do with none of this?” Christophe reached for Dunny’s black, but Dunny stopped him. “It’s bad for you.”
“Come on, Dunny.”
“Y’all going to answer my question or what?” Dunny said.
Joshua yanked hard on his line, pulled it upward, and unclenched his knees. He reeled the line in with his fingertips. Christophe saw a hawk gliding on updrafts in the distance.
“No,” Joshua said.
“I ain’t stupid.”
“Neither is we,” Christophe breathed to the clouds.
The pain medicine made him feel that he was floating. He could see faint wisps of white moving with infinitesimal patience north. The winds were moving; the storm was coming. He watched Joshua reel his line in; a small, silver brown fish gasped and flopped at the end of the line. It twisted piteously and sprayed Joshua and Christophe with warm bayou water.
“Here.” Dunny grabbed the line and enclosed the small fish in his hand. Christophe could not see it anymore. He heard it there, flapping wetly against Dunny’s skin. Dunny began to pull the hook from the fish’s mouth, and Christophe could see a faint line of blood on the metal.
“I don’t know why y’all niggas wanted to go fishing anyway. Chris can hardly move, and if you get fish juice in your hand it’ll probably rot off and die. Y’all some goddamn geniuses.”
Dunny pulled the hook from the fish’s mouth cleanly and let the fish fly. The sun caught it and turned it pure silver, and then it dropped to the water with a crystal plop. Joshua threaded a piece of raw meat on the hook and threw the line out again.
“I was drunk at the river,” Christophe said.
“Yeah?” replied Dunny.
“Yeah.”
“We got into a fight,” said Joshua.
“Over what?”
“Over me getting a job,” said Christophe.
“He acted like he didn’t want to work,” said Joshua.
“I was going to talk to you about that shit,” said Dunny.
“Well, ain’t no need now,” said Christophe.
“Joshua let go with his temper, huh?” asked Dunny.
“We was drunk and that nigga would not shut up,” said Christophe.
“I should’ve known to leave him alone, but he said some shit about Laila always being over at the house,” Joshua said.
“I didn’t really care about that shit. The way he kept rubbing his job in my face was what really pissed me off.”
“I got drunk and didn’t know when to stop.”
“He would not shut up. So I told him he could kiss my ass and took off running toward the car and that log jumped up and next thing I knew I was bleeding.”
“I thought he was playing for a minute, but when he didn’t get up …”
“He must’ve carried me to the car. I don’t remember nothing after that except waking up in the hospital feeling like I just got over the flu or something.”
“Y’all niggas is wild,” Dunny replied. “And I don’t believe a word y’all just said.” He passed the black to Christophe.
“Thank you.” Christophe inhaled and passed it back.
“I heard they got openings down at the shipyard again—working on government contracts and shit,” Dunny said, as he shook out his ash into the grass. A whistling bird flew off into the distance, trilling along until it disappeared into a line of moss-covered Spanish oaks arching over the water. “I could take you down there on my half-day Friday.”
“Who knows?” Christophe pulled up a bunch of grass and let it fall from his fingers. “I could get lucky, right?” Joshua reeled in yet another small, brownish fish. Dunny snatched the line away from him again.
“What the fuck is it with all these fucking small-ass mullets you pulling out the water, Joshua?” Dunny carefully pulled the thread of the hook away from the fish’s mouth. It thrashed a little slower than the last one, with less effort. “What was this one trying to do, commit suicide?”
“With the water smelling like that, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Christophe said.
“We need some rain,” Joshua spoke. Dunny wound his arm back like a baseball pitcher and threw the fish farther out into the water. The fish was so small, it created no waves when it disappeared with a throaty plop. “And it’s coming.”
“Why don’t you go jump in?” Christophe asked Dunny. “It’s hot enough.”
“You crazy? You know they got alligators and snakes and shit in this water.”
“I don’t see none,” said Joshua.
“That’s ’cause both you and Christophe ain’t all there.”
“You think it do any good to throw them back?” Christophe asked.
“What you mean?” asked Joshua, his eyes dark.
“I mean, do you think either of them will survive?”
Dunny wiped his hands on his pants and began rooting in his pockets. Dunny pulled out a lighter and threw it on the ground next to him as he rummaged. The cattails quivered. The sky was turning purple in strokes, and the sun was setting the pines in the distance ablaze. Dunny twirled a found black between his fingers and lit it; he spoke around it with the corner of his mouth.
“Eze told me he done seen mullet that’s seventeen pounds. Don’t think just ’cause they little now, they ain’t about shit. Them some little savages.”
Joshua resettled his pole between his knees and slowly brushed sand from his wrappings. Christophe eyed the sun burning orange as molten metal on the horizon through slitted eyes. Somewhere along the shoreline, Christophe heard a heavier plop, as if a turtle or a baby alligator had catapulted itself into the cool, dark, still water. The Spanish moss in the oaks hung thick and limp as a woman’s hair, and Christophe could imagine the mullet sliding into the obscure, mulch-ridden water. He could see them angled at forty-five degrees, sucking mud and muck from the bottom, growing long and striped.
They would float along with the smooth, halting current that was slow and steady as a heartbeat. He could imagine them sliding along other slimy, striped fish and laying eggs that looked like black marbles as the sun set again and again over the bayou and hurricanes passed through, churning them to dance. He could imagine them running their large tongues over the insides of their mouths and feeling the scars where the hooks had bit them, remembering their sojourn into the water-thin air, and mouthing to their children the smell of the metal in the water, the danger of it. They would survive, battered and cunning. He imagined schools of mullet dying old and fat, engorged with marsh and water to bloated proportions until the river waters that fed into the brackish wetlands swept them along with the current. Out and out through the spread of the bay until their carcasses, still dense with the memory of the closed, rich bayou in the marrow of the bones, settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and turned to black silt on the ancient floor of the sea.