During the next four weeks, Ma-mee orbited the phone like a moon. It was a rotary dial plastic blue phone; what she could see of it was a vague blur the pale color of boy’s baby clothes. The boys went off to play basketball or lounged in their room listening to the stereo and reading old, faded issues of Sports Illustrated and Low Rider magazine or cut the grass or dozed on the couch or on the carpet before the box fan. Ma-mee sat in the easy chair next to the side table with the telephone on it and listened to the TV with the volume on low. The twins called places to follow up, and every manager or employee told them that they would call them back. Ma-mee took to picking up the receiver surreptitiously throughout the day, listening for the dial tone to assure herself that the damn thing was still working, that it hadn’t short-circuited or malfunctioned during the night.
Joshua slipped money into Ma-mee’s purse when they went shopping with Uncle Paul for groceries, and splurged on forties of King Cobra at $1.50 a bottle once a weekend. He tried not to spend much, but the money still disappeared from the small stash he kept hidden in a shoe box in the top of their closet. Cille called once when the twins weren’t home and talked to Ma-mee for only a minute because there were customers in the store. Cille had told Ma-mee to tell the twins she said hello, and that she was planning on taking a trip down to Mississippi to see them toward the end of the summer when she got a little vacation time. Joshua had hated to admit that something in his chest eased when he heard Ma-mee tell him that. Something had opened behind his ribs and he’d felt wistful, sitting at the kitchen table with the lightbulb burning, the radio playing old R&B, Luther Vandross crooning from the windowsill of the open window, greens on the table and the sun setting outside. He hadn’t said anything in return, had kept the surge of emotion in his chest quiet, but Christophe had grunted and shrugged out, “That’s cool,” before shoveling another forkful of seasoned, steaming greens and rice from his plate into his mouth.
Bills were due. He knew Aunt Rita collected all the bills and paid them with money from Ma-mee’s Social Security and disability checks and Cille’s Western Union money orders that she deposited in Ma-mee’s account every month. Without Cille’s help, they would come up short this month, or barely scrape by. He figured that Uncle Paul or Aunt Rita would give them more money if they needed it—but something in him balked at the idea. He watched Ma-mee hover over the phone and check it when she thought he wasn’t looking, and every day that it didn’t ring with a call about a job, worry tightened his head like a vise. He knew Christophe had more money than he did saved up in his own secret stash (on the floor under his bottom dresser drawer), but he also knew that while he grew quiet and tight with dread and frustration over their unemployment, Christophe reacted by getting angry, by refusing to limit his spending. It was almost as if he believed that if he spent like he had money, if he acted like he didn’t have to worry about money, then he’d have it: a job would inevitably make itself available. He refused to live like he was poor.
When he and Christophe lay in bed at night and Joshua attempted to talk about putting in applications at businesses that were four or five towns away, a forty-five-minute or hour commute, he’d reply, “That’s too far away from Ma-mee. We can’t be that far away. What if something happen?” Joshua did notice that he stopped taking the car out riding as much, that he called Dunny more often to pick him up: gas cost money. Christophe went out to visit girls more, played ball at the park, and instead of paying to go inside, hung out in the parking lot at the one black nightclub in Germaine on Saturday nights. They revisited the places on their list, filled out more applications just in case the employees had lost the first ones. Joshua fidgeted around the house, washing clothes or sweeping or vacuuming or attempting to make red beans and rice and corn bread for dinner. While Joshua made the follow-up phone calls, Christophe harassed Uncle Paul and Eze, insisting that they needed to talk to somebody. None of it seemed to be working.
After four weeks of reality rolling over them like an opaque fog, Joshua sat on the front porch steps, his hair a wild brownish-red afro. He was picking it out for Laila, who’d agreed to braid it. Christophe had parked their car in the front yard alongside Dunny’s: they were shirtless, leaning half-in Dunny’s trunk, shifting his speakers around and adjusting the controls on the amplifier. Joshua had just washed his hair, but the water had already evaporated from it. It was tangled and dry and getting harder to comb through. A strong gust of wind cut through the leaves of the lone beech tree that grew in the front yard, and the leaves chattered over the call of the brush of the ubiquitous pines, the tinny rattle of bass from the trunk of Dunny’s car. Were they taking speakers from Dunny’s car and moving them to the Caprice? Inside, the phone rang. Ma-mee picked it up before the end of the first ring.
“Hello?”
Joshua peeled his T-shirt away from his stomach and closed his eyes, straining to hear Ma-mee’s voice.
“What’s up, Laila?” Dunny drawled.
“Hey Dunny. Hey Chris. Where your brother at?”
From inside the house, Joshua heard Ma-mee answer, “Yes.”
“He over there on the porch steps, waiting for you. Why don’t you do my hair after you do his?”
“You gonna have to pay me something for that. Five dollars at least.” Laila laughed.
“Aaaw, that’s messed up. Is he paying you?”
“Hey, if I’m going to be here for three hours doing hair, one of y’all got to pay me something. You asked second, so it’s going to have to be you.”
“You just think Joshua cute—playing favorites and shit.” Joshua could tell Dunny was speaking around the tip of his black, could hear the clench of his lips as he spoke.
Laila giggled, and through the wind, Joshua felt the sun slashing across the skin of his legs, making them burn. Inside the house, Ma-mee asked, “You sure you don’t have another DeLisle on that list?” He opened his eyes to see Laila leaning against Dunny’s car, punching him in the biceps and smiling, and Christophe placing two ten-inch speakers and an amp in the trunk of the Caprice. There was a fine red dust in the air. Joshua followed Ma-mee’s voice into the living room to see her breathe, “Alright then. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and stared in his general direction. Her eyes were trained somewhere in the middle of his chest. Her housedress was a pale yellow, the color of the light shining through the pine needles and cones outside. He stopped just inside the door.
“Who was that?” Joshua asked.
She gripped her forearm so that her arms crossed her lap. She smiled, let it slide away, and looked across the living room in the direction of the porch and the front yard.
“Man from the dockyard. Say he want you to come in Monday at ten for an interview.” Ma-mee pulled at the neck of her dress.
“What about Chris?” The bass thumped through the door behind Joshua.
“They didn’t say nothing about Chris.” She looked away from the door toward the silent TV. “They just want you.” She ran her hands over the lap of her thighs, and then let her palms fall open at her sides, facing upward, facing him. “Somebody else’ll call for Chris. Or maybe they just want you to start first.” She paused. “I don’t know.”
Behind him, Joshua heard the door open and close. Christophe’s face was dark in the shadowed room, his eyebrows a taut line across his forehead.
“Who going to call for Chris?”
Ma-mee opened her mouth as if to reply, but said nothing. Joshua thought that her forehead was wrinkled and her lips drawn up in a way that made her look like she was about to cry. His arms felt heavy and long and apelike at his sides.
“Man from the docks just called.” Here Joshua’s voice thinned, and he had to expel the rest of it like a cough from his throat. “Said he wanted me to come in next Monday for a interview, but—he didn’t say nothing about you.”
“Oh.”
The tips of Christophe’s fingers were pinched and burning from cutting the wires, from twining them one about the other to gather the sound, to harness the music and amplify it in the speakers. Installing the equipment was like guessing at a combination lock, feeling for the correct number of turns and stops, for hidden numbers. He’d spent the last big chunk of his money on that. Underneath his dresser drawer, he had two twenties, a five, and five ones. Fifty dollars. He’d bought the speakers, CD player, and amp from Marquise through Dunny, who was selling his system because he was getting a new one. He’d thought it too good a deal to pass by. He felt duped, standing there, the sun beating at the windows of the shadowed room, all of it dark and quiet, the atmosphere of it seeming to wait on something. Stupid thing to say, oh. He turned toward the door, away from the dim-lit expectant silence of the room, from their searching eyes. He thought of an insect tearing itself from a web with the help of the wind.
“Okay then.” Christophe pushed the screen door that opened to the porch. “I got work to do,” he said. It slammed behind him. The floorboards of the porch, uneven and swollen in the heat, snagged his feet. Dunny was in the trunk again.
“Joshua in the house?” Laila asked.
Christophe loped past her. The brightness of the sun, the sky, the red dirt of the driveway, the flowering fuchsia and green of the azalea bushes were blinding after the inside of the house. He slammed into the side of the trunk of the Caprice and leaned over Dunny, his forearms braced on the warm metal. Why was it parked? It wasn’t enough for him. He needed motion: he needed to move.
“Leave it.”
“What the fuck you talking about leave it? We almost done, young’un.”
“Man, I don’t feel like working on it right now. We can work on it later. You got a cigar?”
Dunny stood straight, his white T-shirt brown across the stomach where he had been leaning on the car, his braids tight and clean over the curve of his skull. Christophe glanced at him and looked away. He realized his leg was kicking by itself at the tire, rousing red dust in clouds across his worn white Reeboks.
“Let’s ride,” Christophe said.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The hurt and love and jealousy in Christophe’s chest coalesced and turned to annoyance that bubbled from his throat.
“Shit, ain’t nothing wrong with me.” Christophe heard this come from him in a hiss. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. Can we just go?”
Dunny closed the trunk. The metal sounded hard and loud, as harsh as the burning sun, when it clattered shut. Dunny pulled a black from behind his ear, a lighter from his pocket.
“You need a smoke.” This trailed behind him as he ambled toward his car. Christophe beat him to it, jumped through the window, and slid into the passenger seat, Dukes of Hazzard style. Sometimes the passenger door jammed and stuck when he tried to open it. He didn’t feel like jiggling the handle for a good three minutes. Dunny leisurely pulled his own door shut.
“Don’t be putting your feet on my seat when you jump in the car.” Dunny lit the black and handed it to Christophe.
“Fuck you.”
Dunny laughed, and the car growled to life. The stereo intoned. The music shook the air; it squeezed Christophe’s throat. Christophe saw Laila, her shirt pulled tight against her chest, her hand on the front porch screen door, watching them leave. He pulled on the black, the tip of the filter hot and malleable between his lips, and felt a cool tingling coat the simmer in his chest and begin to eat away at it in small bites. He blew out the smoke, and inhaled deeply on the second toke. As they turned from the red dirt driveway to the rough gravel of the street, he draped his arm out the window and tapped the ash away. Three small brown children with overlarge heads and bony knees were in the ditch as they passed, picking blackberries and dropping them carefully in large white plastic ice-cream buckets. Cece, Dizzy, and Little Man. They jumped when the bass dropped in quick succession like a trickle of pebbles turned into an avalanche. The smallest and skinniest one, his belly showing through the front of his red jumpsuit with the curve of a kickball, dropped his bucket. When Christophe passed, he could see gnats in small glinting bronze clouds around their heads, illuminating their bulbous skulls like halos. Christophe saluted them with his pointer finger, and leaned back into the seat as Dunny accelerated.
They rode until the sun set, until it slipped between the chattering branches of the trees and painted a broad sweep of the sky in the west pink and red, until the heat wasn’t so oppressive in the car. When Christophe got out at a gas station in Germaine to grab another cigar, he could feel the heat rising from the concrete of the lot. The streetlight over the gas pumps had attracted great swarming gangs of large black flying insects that were intent on racing each other into the bulb and dying. They met their deaths with loud pops. Christophe bought the cigar and was glad to get back in the car, to ride away from the buzzing lights, the streetlamps, the lonely, dusty gas station and the red-faced forlorn attendant, to drive along the highway on the beach, to cruise along the coastline.
Solitary, sparse stands of pine trees dotted the sandy median as they rode along. The moon was full and white in the black, nearly starless sky. As they turned from the beach and rode through St. Catherine to the bayou and neared Bois Sauvage, Dunny seemed to tire of the music. He pushed a button, and the lights on the stereo went off: the music stopped. Dunny hadn’t asked Christophe about his sudden change in mood, his need to run away. Once they’d left Bois Sauvage, he’d simply pulled a sack from his pocket, and told Christophe to look in the glove compartment for a cigar and roll up. The marsh grass was a pale, silvery green as it whipped by outside the window. Here, the night sounds of the insects chattering one to another like an angry congress were loudest. The pine trees were inky black and lined the horizon, and the water was a dark blue, the reflection of the moon shimmering like a white stone path on its surface. Christophe thought it beautiful. He squinted against the salty marsh wind and saw that Dunny was focused on the road, his eyes half-lidded. Christophe took a long pull of the last of the last blunt, and handed the roach to his cousin. He was glad he wouldn’t have to explain himself.
In Bois Sauvage, Dunny rode down the middle of the pockmarked streets, steered away from the edges of the narrow, ancient roads where the asphalt crumbled into pebbles that mixed in with the red dirt, the thick summer grass, and slid down into the ditches. The oaks reached out with tangled arms to form a tunnel over the car. In the yards of the few houses they passed, people, small shadows, sat on their porches or their steps drinking beer from cans, fanning themselves with flyswatters, burning small cans of citronella, and eyeing the patches of piney woods suspiciously, muttering about the descending summer heat, mosquitoes, and West Nile, which they’d heard about on the news.
Christophe watched the tree line, smiling faintly when he realized he could tell where he was going in Bois Sauvage by the tops of the trees, that he recognized the big oak at the corner of Cuevas and Pelage, and that the dense stand of pines on his right indicated that they were in the middle of St. Salvador Street: he and Joshua had played chase under those trees when they were little. Dunny and Javon were always team captains, and they would always pick the same teams: the twins and Marquise, all small and squirrelly, for Dunny, and Big Henry, Bone, and Skeetah for Javon. The smaller team invariably beat the larger team. Christophe and Joshua would always skip past Marquise and Dunny to hide together deep in the woods while the other team was counting loudly on the street. Christophe was the fastest, so he led Joshua in a general direction, but Joshua always had the better eye for hiding spots: he would bury them underneath a hill of dry brown pine needles or in the heart of a full green bush with dark leaves the size of their fingernails or in the top of a small oak tree, silent and perching like crows.
The other team seldom caught them. Dunny would give up and walk out into the open, into the dim light of the forest and give himself away, mostly because he was hungry or tired or had to go to the bathroom. Marquise would follow him, tagging along for food. Joshua and Christophe would stay hidden for hours, giggling breathlessly as Javon or Big Henry crashed through the underbrush beneath them, calling their names loudly and threatening forfeit and talking shit. Their members would drift away, complaining: Big Henry insisting he had chores to do, Bone yelling he had dinner to eat, and Javon spitting that he had TV to watch. Christophe and Joshua would stay where they were until there were no other human sounds around them, sometimes until the sun was setting, and then they’d run out to the empty street, hopping in delirium, drunk with their cleverness, wrestling each other down the length of the road. Christophe let his eyes close and his head loll back onto the headrest, and felt the car stop.
Dunny had taken him to the basketball court. What he could see of the grass in the court lights was long and bunched in tufts, overgrown with weeds. The iron barrels they used as garbage cans were rusting along the rims. Nobody had bothered to line them with black garbage bags since the last time they’d been emptied. The small, warped stand of white wooden bleachers was empty, the swings silent, the small wooden play set the county recreation board had commissioned without playmates. Dunny switched off the ignition, opened his car door, and said, “Get that ball from the backseat.” Christophe willed his arms and torso to move, grabbed the ball and threw it at Dunny, who ran to the court with it and made a sloppy, easy lay-up. He dribbled the ball, half walking and skipping back and forth on the asphalt, shooting jumpers. Christophe watched Dunny on the court. When had he become the one who followed one step behind, the one who eyed and followed the other’s back, the one who was led?
Now, he would have to find his way alone. He lurched toward the court that shone like a snow globe: the pale gray asphalt spray painted with blue gang signs, the halo of the fluorescent lights that cast the scene in a glass sphere, and all those damn bugs circling and falling like black snow. He shuffled through the grass at a slow run and the long, blooming strands bit into his knees, etched fine stinging lines into the skin of his shins. By the time he reached the court, the high was pulsing through his head, his arms, and his legs with the beating call of the night insects: in and out, up and down, over and under and through. Dunny threw the ball at him, and he fumbled to catch it, his hands clumsy. He dribbled the ball through his leg; it glanced against his calf.
“You sure you can handle that?” Dunny asked. He stood with his hands on his waist underneath the goal. Sweat glazed his face.
“Nigga, I know you ain’t asking me if I can handle a damn ball. I’ll show you some ball handling, fat boy.”
Christophe dribbled the ball again, bouncing it with his fingertips. Something about his handling was off. It felt like he was dribbling on rocks; the ball was ricocheting everywhere.
“What the hell are you trying to do to the ball? Dribble it or flatten it?” Dunny loped toward Christophe and raised one arm in defense. His fingers grazed Christophe’s chest.
“Why are you locking your knees? Damn, Dunny, you think I’m that easy?” Christophe bounced the ball through his legs again. It cleared his thigh this time, clean and easy. He caught it, wobbled, and smiled. “Just needed to warm up, that’s all.”
“You been hitting the bottle in the car? You got a thirty-two-ounce hid under the passenger seat?”
“I ain’t drank shit and I’m about to school your ass.”
“Chris, I was dunking on niggas when you was still pissing the bed.”
“I ain’t never pissed in the bed, bitch.”
Christophe faked to his right, then jerked to his left, leaned back, and brought his legs together. He crouched and shot a fadeaway. He felt the ball roll from his wrist, across his palm, up the spine of his middle finger and away toward the basket. The release was good, but the shot flew wide. It hit the corner of the backboard, bounced off the edge of the rim, and arced back toward the court. Dunny snatched the rebound. Christophe grimaced.
Dunny hugged the ball to his chest, breathing hard. Christophe eyed his mouth, the pouch of fat and skin quivering under his neck. Dunny’d been good in high school: he’d had a flawless jumper, and he was the go-to man for defense on the inside. Christophe had gone to every one of his home games. Dunny had teased him mercilessly, grilled him, when he’d begun to play seriously in seventh grade. Dunny had sweated with Christophe on the court, had been an indomitable brick wall, and had yelled at him for hours. He was small, so according to Dunny, he should’ve been quicker, handled the ball better, and had a nastier jumper. He’d made Christophe so mad he’d wanted to cry, several times, but instead of crying, Christophe had flared his nostrils, rasped through the pain in his chest, and kept playing. He’d skirted and darted and struck at Dunny like a small, irascible dog. He’d gotten better.
Christophe remembered that Joshua had mimicked Dunny, had wrestled with his cousin chest to chest under the goal. He had learned to be the big man on the inside to Christophe’s squirrelly point guard. By the twins’ senior year, they were unstoppable. They spoke in a secret language on the court, communicated with their shoulders, their eyes, smirks and smiles. Christophe could tell whether Joshua wanted him to pass the ball to him into the inside for an easy lay-up by the set of his mouth. It was effortless, invigorating. They never smoked after a game: there was no reason to; they were already high.
Now Christophe looked at his cousin and felt something like hands behind his sternum constricting. Dunny had softened and spread like a watercolor since he’d graduated five years ago. Beer and weed had blunted his edges. The old Dunny would’ve shook him, spun, made the shot, and taunted him. This Dunny clutched the ball to his middle as if he were injured, as if the ball were stanching a flow of blood from his stomach. Even the blink of his eyes was slurred. Christophe lunged at his cousin and swatted the ball with the flat of his palm so hard it echoed through his fingers with the stinging burn of slapped water. The ball slipped away from Dunny, and his hands met in prayer before his chest. Christophe began to dribble back and forth between his legs. He meant it to be hard and sure. He wanted the impact of the ball on the court to sound like gunshots, for the ball to slice its way through the air into his hand, but it didn’t. It meandered; it strayed. There was a line of tension pulled taut in his shoulders, and no matter how carefully he followed the old lessons of Dunny’s phantom, he could not loosen it.
“You’re palming the ball.”
“Shut up, Dunny.”
“You’re supposed to finger it,” Dunny said.
Christophe lurched to his right and snapped the ball, faking at Dunny with it. Dunny cringed. Christophe felt something in his knee stab at him with a quick, piercing pain.
“Who said I needed lessons from you?” Christophe crouched and shot. The ball rang the rim like a bell and fell away. Dunny caught it.
“Your sloppy playing did, that’s who.” Dunny grinned and shoved one large, meaty shoulder into Christophe’s chest. He shot a fadeaway. It grazed the rim and escaped the capsule of light surrounding the court.
“You lost it… now go get it.”
“It’s your ball, Chris.”
“No it ain’t, Dunny. If I go get this mothafucka, you’re not getting it back. I’m going to make you eat it.”
Dunny breathed wetly. He shuffled into the darkness and reappeared with the ball. The night and the insects and the foliage flickered in and out of being like a fractured film. Christophe knew he’d smoked too much.
“I think you forgot who your Daddy was.”
Dunny shoved Christophe hard with his shoulder as he dribbled. Christophe stole the ball and pulled away to shoot. He felt the skin of his face, his ears, and his neck burn hot. He narrowed his eye at Dunny’s flaccid throat, his profuse sweating, his labored breathing, and spat his reply.
“I don’t have a daddy!”
The ball sailed through the air and dropped neatly into the basket, caressing the line of the net as it fell. Christophe snorted, blew his breath from his chest in one quick huff, and barely resisted adding a curt “Bitch” to his declaration. His anger buoyed him, burned him clean and left his mind and body unfettered by the high. He was a simple working equation of mind and muscle blessed with a clean shot. For a second, he felt right. He let Dunny get the rebound.
“So, what was wrong with you today?” Dunny’s dribbling echoed in Christophe’s ears like a ponderous heartbeat.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Christophe dug his fingers into his hipbones.
“It’s about a job, ain’t it? Joshua got called back for something and you didn’t. You had to know there was a chance that would happen.”
“Whatever.” Christophe watched the ball shoot from Dunny’s grip, meet the asphalt, and rush back to his grip once, twice. Dunny’s fingertips seemed to suction the ball back, to kiss it. Dunny’d been right about that at least: his ball-handling skills were almost perfect.
“Let it go, Chris.”
“What you know about it, Dunny? You got a job. You got a hustle. You got a mama and a stepdaddy to help you out.”
Dunny stopped dribbling. He gripped the ball casually in one hand and rested it in the cradle of his hip.
“And you should know, asshole, that you got support, too.” Dunny rolled the ball against his belly, and then stopped. “You got your brother, you got Ma-mee, you got all our aunts and uncles, and most important, you got me.”
Christophe swiped a bug away from his ear with his hand; it stung his palm. He eyed his cousin’s puffy face, his half-lidded eyes.
“What the fuck that’s supposed to mean?”
“You actually think I’m going to let you starve out here?”
Christophe watched Dunny’s stillness and knew it for what it was: a gathering of energy and anger. He was pissed. Christophe had watched him fight several people, knock them to their hands and knees, force them to eat dirt with long, sure punches that had the force of machinery in them. Dunny’d fought often in his teenage years over money, perceived slights, subtle insults. His was a deceptive calm. Christophe stared blankly through his anger, his unsettled bewilderment, and watched Dunny’s mouth move.
“You really think I’m going to let your dumb, ungrateful ass struggle out here when I can put you onto my hustle? When I can front you a quarter pound of weed and have you out here doubling your money?” Dunny stepped closer to Christophe. His eyes were slits, fringed dashes in the set canvas of his face. Dunny barely opened his mouth. The whites of his eyes and the pearl of his teeth were invisible in the dark. “What kind of a cousin do you think I am?”
Dunny wouldn’t hit him. The only time he’d ever hit him was when they wrestled, and then they were always playing. Suddenly Christophe remembered the muscle beneath the meat: fat people were really strong. He guessed it was because they had more to move around. Christophe waved about in his hazy brain for an answer; he hadn’t considered this. He’d always been somewhat single-minded. He’d grown up picturing his life in his head, plotting it as he went along: he’d made the basketball team in ninth grade, lost his virginity in tenth grade, led the team to all-conference his junior year, successfully juggled several girls at one time throughout his high school career and never had any of them fight one another or discover his manipulations, and he’d finally graduated. There was a pattern, an order to his life. He dreamed things, worked for them, and they happened. He’d assumed this would continue after he graduated, that there existed steps to his life: a job at the dockyard or the shipyard where he could learn a trade, pay raises, stacking money, refurbishing Ma-mee’s house, a girlfriend, a kid, and possibly a wife one day. The idea of a legitimate job had existed as an absolute in his head. It was the fulcrum upon which the bar of his dreams balanced.
Christophe had dismissed dealing because he saw where it led: a brief, brilliant blaze of glory where most drug dealers bought cars, the bar at the club, women, paid bills for their mamas, and if they were really lucky, houses. That lasted around two years. Then the inevitable occurred. The coast was too small for anyone to remain anonymous for long. The county police hounded the local dealers, who depended on bigger dealers in Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans for their cocaine. The cops saw the local dealers at the park, in the neighborhood, making runs for dope, put two and two together, and that was it. The dealers fell, then. They were running, hiding, haunted. They scraped together large sums of money and tried to put them away to support their families and their girlfriends and their kids and instead found themselves using the money to post bail, because the police picked most boys up three times a year, if not more. For most drug dealers, jail and hustling became a job and going home became a vacation. One or two weeks out, and they were back in again for violating probation for smoking a little weed, like Fresh.
He’d forgotten how several drug dealers Dunny’s age looked. When Christophe saw their faces on their brief respite from jail, half the time he didn’t recognize them, and the rest of the time, he was always amazed at how old they appeared. Those were the lucky ones. Others became addicts themselves, or died. He thought of Cookie from St. Catherine, who earned his nickname because as a dealer he had moved big weight, and never had less than a few cookies on him at a time. He had earned his name twice. Now, as a junkie, he begged dealers, his former comrades, for crumbs. He stood on the same corner in St. Catherine, every day in the same worn blue jeans and denim shirt, which he called his suit, and stared at the cars that passed, never waving, in the evenings. An image of Sandman as he’d last seen him, drunk, his eyes blanched wide from his high, almost falling from the pickup truck. Christophe waved his hand. Dunny was small-time: Dunny had done the smart thing. He held a steady job and only dabbled in selling weed—no crack or coke, and especially no meth or X to the white people living further out and upcountry.
“I ain’t never really wanted to do that, Dunny.”
“What you mean you ain’t never wanted to do that?” Dunny ducked his head to catch Christophe’s gaze.
“I wanted to get a job … work up … make some good money.”
“Where did you think you was going to work, Chris? Doing what?”
“I don’t know … the pier or the shipyard or something.…”
“Nigga, it ain’t never that easy. Everybody and they mama want a job at the pier and the shipyard. Everybody want a job down there can’t get one.”
“I could work somewhere else.”
“Wal-Mart? Do you know what niggas start out making at Wal-Mart? Six-fifty an hour, Chris. Six dollars and fifty fucking cents. Gas is almost two dollars a gallon. Even working forty-hour weeks and without rent to pay, how far you think that’s going to get you?”
“Uncle Paul and Eze did it.” Christophe looked away from his cousin, studied the sandy asphalt court. He shook his head no. He didn’t know what he was saying no to, but he did it anyway.
“I ain’t saying you can’t do it. I’m just saying it’s hard.”
The fluorescent lights blinked. Once, twice. Christophe knew from experience what would happen next. The lights flashed bright and died. Their incessant neon buzzing sizzled away. The ringing chorus of the night bugs displaced it, smoothed it over, and submerged it as if it had never been. A droning filled Christophe’s head, and the park was suffused with a calm, stately darkness. There were no streetlights in the country. Dunny’s face disappeared. His white shirt glowed blue, and Christophe was suddenly aware of the stars, sparkling full to bursting in the sky above his head.
“I got to try,” Christophe said.
Dunny’s voice snaked its way into his ear, wound its way around him with possibility.
“Well, think about it, Chris. If you decide that this is something you want to do, let me know. I can front you a QP. You can pay me back after you get on your feet.”
Dunny’s voice dropped. “If you buy more from me with your profit, and then sell all that, you’ll double your money. Easy.”
Christophe rubbed his hair, laced his fingers together, and locked them behind his neck before dropping them.
“I don’t know, Dunny.”
“Just think about it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do in the end. You could find a way to make it. A broke way, but a way.” Dunny’s voice in the dark was suddenly soft, clean of anger and tinged with a wistfulness that surprised Christophe. “You could be lucky.”
Dunny brushed past Christophe and walked with a tired gait to the car. The faint white glow of Dunny’s shirt was like a beacon. Christophe felt his way along the hood. His fingers traced the grille as he rounded his side and climbed in, careful to hold his body upright with his arms braced so that he eased his torso into the seat; his sneakers brushed it.
“I hate when you do that.”
Dunny lit a black and put the car in reverse. In the sudden flare of light from the lighter, Christophe saw Dunny’s fatigue again: his eyelids looked swollen, and his mouth around the pale plastic tip of the cigarillo was slack. Christophe could hear the tires spew dirt and pebbles from the dirt parking space into the street. Dunny gunned the engine. The motor roared and they shot forward, passing through the weak, pale light of the wide-set yellow streetlamps some people had erected in their yards along the road. Christophe broke the textured, cricket-laden, tree-rustled silence with a timid request.
“Man, take me to your house.”
Dunny nodded in reply and accelerated, passing the turn to Ma-mee’s house. The weed had hit Christophe with a lethargic fist. He didn’t want to face Joshua yet, and he knew his brother would be awake, lying with his eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, poised to talk, to conjecture, to confess.
Dunny led them to the back door of the trailer. Christophe followed Dunny to the living room, where Dunny turned and offered him a short handshake. Christophe knew he would fall asleep on the sofa within minutes, but being away from his twin and Ma-mee, away from the familiar walls of his bedroom, would wake early in the morning with the first tentative infusion of sunlight into the living room, and would probably walk home. Christophe sat down, slumped sideways as his cousin disappeared to his room, and stared absentmindedly at the blinking red light of the VCR. It was the only moving thing in the room. He cradled his face with his palm and fell asleep.
Christophe snapped awake suddenly and could not remember the sound that woke him, but knew that some noise had. He pushed himself up and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes so that he could see the small digital clock on the VCR. It read 3:46. Christophe’s skin slid back and forth and stretched pleasantly and eased the itch: his eyes burned. The bathroom light shone out into the hallway. The rest of the house lapsed into darkness. He looked toward his cousin’s room, eyed his aunt’s: nothing stirred. Christophe tiptoed toward the back door. On his way past the refrigerator, he saw a small note: Joshua called. He twisted the lock on the knob, stepped out onto the back deck, tried to ease the squeaking of the hinges by pushing the door shut in centimeters, and closed the door behind him.
From the wood next to the house, Dunny’s dog barked loud, warning, staccato barks. Christophe felt buffeted by the incessant cry of the cicadas in the trees around him. He followed the road in the dark by feeling his way with his feet: one foot in the grass, another on the asphalt. Small animals rustled in the thick grass and blackberry briars that choked the ditch. It was hot enough for snakes. The landscape was drowned in black ink: he tried to peer into the darkness, to catch irregular sounds. He’d forgotten to pick up a stick. Few people kept their dogs on leashes or had fences, and every time he broke into the light after passing a stand of woods and saw a small sunken house or a rusting trailer, he’d tense up and listen for barks and growling, for sudden rushes of angry animal and fur. He could not find a stick in the dark.
Perhaps tomorrow someone would call. He’d go to the shipyard anyway and drop off an application during Joshua’s interview. He repeated this to himself over and over, as he walked along. Fireflies burst into light and left neon-green trails behind them as they flitted along in the dense, dark air. They were like the ideas in his head, flaring and failing. Could he sell? Did he want to? How could he do that out of Ma-mee’s house? What the hell would he say to Joshua? A quick anger, a violent flash of hurt burned in his throat, and then dissipated. He glanced briefly up at the sky and saw that it was scudded with clouds. He was too tired to be angry. He’d deal with the sore jealousy he felt toward his brother, the sticky love, and the sense of shame and protective responsibility he felt when he thought of Ma-mee, tomorrow. He wanted her to be proud of him, not stumble across his weed one day while she was putting clean socks in his underwear drawer. He didn’t know if he could face her if it came to that.
Something large rustled in the ditch to his right. He surprised himself by hopping to the left. Fear showered in sparks through his chest. In the dark, he stopped abruptly, his hands flexing into tight fists, his palms seeming suddenly empty. The fear surprised him. It was the kind of fear he hadn’t felt since he’d been younger, since he’d stayed out playing in the woods with his brother after the sun set, after the streetlights came on, and the black tree limbs suddenly seemed like fingers and he’d panicked at the irrational, instinctual feeling that something was closing in on him. After that first time in the woods, he’d sometimes get the same feeling when he was walking home, or when he was taking a shower by himself and his eyes were closed and he was washing his hair. Vaguely, a part of him associated the advent of this feeling with his own conscious comprehension of the power of the dark, of what it could hold and hide: possums, armadillos, snakes, spiders, dogs, and men.
Christophe hadn’t felt this panic in years. The urge to run on and on down the asphalt and not stop running until he reached his house made it impossible for him to think. The thought was like a siren, a light circling and flashing over and over again in his head. He listened for the rustle again and heard nothing. He struggled to walk, but he broke into a trot anyway, and ran until he reached the next circle of light emitted from a small, wooden porch on a sagging house. He searched the lip of the yard and found a small stick that was only as long as his forearm and light. The sides of it were marked with small, velvety spots of fungus. It was hollow. Christophe gripped it hard and made himself stand still in the small bud of light that shone on the street. He made himself remain until he remembered where he was and what he was doing. He was eighteen and he was walking home in the dark and his house was only about a half a mile down and he’d lived here all his life and there was nothing in those woods that could hurt him—nothing. He just needed to breathe and calm down. He stood there until the fear ebbed. Then he set out into the darkness, dove into it like it was water.
Christophe walked quickly. The fear kept surging back for him. Someone was on the verge of grabbing him. His shoulders itched. He swung the stick back and forth with his hand as he walked. He surprised himself with a high-pitched laugh. What the hell was he going to do with this stick? He was clutching the thing like a machete. He shook his head, tried to batten the fear down in his chest, and waved the stick like a wand. He flicked his wrist as if to throw it, but he didn’t. His fingers wouldn’t let it go. He thought to laugh again, but he didn’t. He quickened his pace. Vale’s house. The woods. Uncle Paul’s house. The woods. The field where Johnny kept his old, broke-down horse. It grazed, snorting softly, and pulled up bunches of grass. Christophe was surprised that he could hear the grass rip. The woods. Ma-mee’s house. He leapt over the ditch and ran to the porch. By the time he reached the screen door, he was sprinting. He threw the stick down next to the steps and pulled open the door and rushed inside. The fear had slammed into him, had choked him the most at the moment his hand closed over the door handle. He locked the door shut behind him and hopped across the kitchen floor and through the living room on his toes. He tried not to hit the worst of the boards that creaked.
Their room door was open. He eased into the room, breathing hard. He shucked his pants and squinted into the darkness. His brother was asleep: his back was turned to Christophe’s bed, his face to the wall. Christophe heard him breathing deeply and slowly. The alarm clock read 4:10. He cracked open a drawer and pulled out a pair of basketball shorts and put them on. He lay down in his bed on his back and stared at the ceiling as he pulled the sheet up to his chest. Only when the flat sheet slid coolly over his shins did the fear fully dissipate in his chest. It dissolved so quickly that he felt foolish lying there in his bed. Still he could not help himself from staring at the room, from lying on his side so that he faced the door. The light from the bathroom shone in the hallway and draped the doorway with a little weak half-moon. He blinked at it, half expecting a shadow to move across it and snuff it out, and fell asleep.