Ma-mee hadn’t been able to start the collard greens. The most she’d accomplished was washing them in the sink, where she felt the dirt of the garden at the back of the house give underneath her fingers like the silt of a riverbank and wash down the drain. Joshua had done the laundry while she was grocery shopping with Rita, and when she walked in the door, the house smelled of comet and fabric softener; he had cleaned the kitchen, too. She found a bushel of greens in the sink. Joshua had picked them. He said the heat was wilting them. The twins had jumped up from the floor to run outside and get the groceries from Rita’s trunk and when Joshua brushed her on his way to the counter with a bag, her chest hurt. She did not want to tell them about Samuel. The twins snorted laughter at the TV, and she could not bring herself to take out the pot, to cut the seasoning, to begin cooking. She sat down next to Joshua on the sofa. Lying on the floor, Christophe rolled over to face her.
“I got something to tell y’all.” She had made a mistake in not sitting in her chair. A fly was buzzing a slow funeral dirge around the living room. It would die soon. She hesitated.
“We already know,” Christophe said.
“You do?”
“Yes, ma’am. Laila told me and I told Joshua. It’s okay. He had to come back sometime.”
“Who told you?” asked Joshua.
“He came by the house.” Christophe sat up. Joshua scooted closer to her. She laid her hand over his and began making small circles on the back. It was the way she’d rubbed his back as a baby. She made herself stop. “It’s alright. He came by and asked after y’all. He wasn’t bothering me none.”
“He didn’t ask you for no money, did he?” Christophe was on his knees. The fly had stopped buzzing. Perhaps it had died.
“No. I just don’t want y’all to be surprised.”
“I should’ve been here,” Christophe breathed.
“You can’t be here all the time, Chris.”
“Maybe I should say something to him. Make it so he won’t come back over here and bother you.” He paused. “He on that stuff again. I heard.”
“Naw.” Joshua was almost off the sofa. Ma-mee’s hand fell to her side. “Just stay around. He know Uncle Paul be coming home for lunch.” Joshua swallowed, then said it. “He wouldn’t steal from his own blood.”
“Ain’t no blood. He a junkie, Jay. You know how that go.”
Ma-mee made a shushing noise. “Don’t let him bother y’all none. He just a sad man.” She closed her eyes and saw his younger face; that lovely face so like her boys’ own, but sneaky, shifty, as if it lacked the integrity of bones underneath. “Just a sad, lost man.”
“So you don’t want me to say nothing to him, Ma-mee?” said Christophe.
“I’m sure.” She patted Joshua’s arm and sat in her own chair. She let her hands hang over the armrests. “Felt like I done walked some miles.”
“Cille coming.” Joshua said this. He looked folded into the sofa.
“You talked to her?”
“She called the house while you was gone. Say she coming down in around a month—at the end of July or around the beginning of August, I guess. Some music festival or something happening then, too. Or, something like that.” Joshua’s voice dwindled to a slow, piecemeal halt. Christophe was rocking back on his heels. He must have not known.
“Well, that’s good. Been a while. It’ll be good to see her.” The twins were looking at her. The joints of her fingers and her wrist were suffused with pain, and she grabbed her wrist and tried to squeeze it out. She wanted them lying on the floor and lounging on the sofa together. She would cook them a big meal, make them lazy and easy with food. Pain arced through her kneecap. She would make them forget.
She rose and walked slowly, limping to favor her tight knee, and palmed Christophe’s head. “These greens ain’t going to cook theyselves.” She touched his face. “I could use some help though.” He rose, and his cheek slid down and away; the bone was sharp beneath his skin. Joshua rose and she palmed his cheek as well, felt the bone heavy and dense beneath the soft fat of his face. They cooked.
Christophe began waking up before his brother. He’d never been an early riser, but now he found himself suddenly, painfully awake every morning at 5:30, when he’d feel something like a cramp in his stomach. Each day, he heard Ma-mee easing her way down the hall to the bathroom, and he’d realize that the ache in his stomach was his bladder, and he couldn’t go back to sleep because he had to pee. Then Christophe would do something he hadn’t done since he was little. He’d rise and walk carefully out of the room, stepping lightly to ease his bladder, and creep out the back door. The morning would be gray, the air lukewarm, and the grass at his feet always. He’d force it out, quickly; he was ashamed that he was peeing off the back steps like some five-year-old who couldn’t hold it. They used to do it all the time when they were little, when Cille or Ma-mee or Aunt Rita or Uncle Paul or someone else in the family was in the bathroom, hogging it. Back inside, he’d turn off the alarm clock and lie back in his bed and listen to Joshua snore and Ma-mee slide shuffle back to her room to wait for 5:45, when he would rouse his brother. Ma-mee would make them a quick breakfast, and then he’d bring Joshua to work. By the end of Joshua’s second week of work, it was routine.
Christophe never went directly back to the house after he dropped Joshua off. He’d ride back along the beach and nervously eye the fresh-cleaned glass of the storefronts for Help Wanted signs, for bits of neon orange and black that said NOW HIRING. Some he would pass over when the store looked especially dingy or dirty. He’d peer at gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Sometimes, he would pull into the parking lot of the place and circle it. He’d park and leave the engine running and eye the door, always to see some dim shadow moving about on the other side of the glass. They all seemed to be waiting for him. He’d think of the sandwich bag of weed at home, of the old prepaid cell phone Dunny had given him, of the money to be made. He’d think, I’ll wait until I finish selling what I got. Might as well get the money—it’s there. Then I’ll come back for real. He would think of Ma-mee at the house, waiting on him, of Joshua at the dock making honest money. He would run into one of the convenience stores with a sign out on the front, grab an orange juice, snatch an application, and then drive to Bois Sauvage through the bayou and past his home and up deep into the country where the small, tin-roofed shotgun houses were spare, where they squatted in the woods and overgrown fields like nocturnal animals, like wary possums or armadillos; solitary, seeking shelter in the wood, perpetually surprised by the passersby. Few black people lived up here. He had no problem avoiding Felicia’s house. He liked the way the houses disappeared and the road snaked underneath the cover of the trees and laid itself out like a vein along the body of the country. He would ride through the morning until the sun was bright and heavy above him.
Sometimes, he’d stop to put some gas in the tank at the old, shrunken convenience stores hidden in the country. The gas was always ten cents cheaper in these places, and some redneck with a beard was always behind the wooden counter, and when he passed over his money, whatever ceiling fan was blowing in the place would inevitably ruffle the plastic beer ad banners and the tacked-up Confederate emblems like prayer flags. He rode until he began to know his way better. He’d ride until he couldn’t ignore the small red light and the constant chatter of pages through the prepaid cell phone at his hip. He’d reluctantly turn and go back. He rode without music as he eyed the sky to see hawks always somewhere above him. He’d park the car along the ditch at the front of the yard and walk over to the park and sit at one of the wooden picnic tables hidden beneath the short, shivering oaks. They knew where to find him.
They’d amble over at regular intervals, it seemed; alone or in pairs. Once about every hour or half hour or so, he’d see them off in the distance. They seemed to materialize from the heat-drenched air like sudden rain. He’d watch them amble slowly across the dusty red baseball field or pick their way through the pine trees and oak that cloistered the perimeter of the basketball court. He ate potato chips and drank Gatorade while he waited. He folded his arms over the top of the table and laid his head down and stripped off his shirt. He stretched over the top of the table on his back and watched the light etch the veins of the dark green leaves into beautiful relief. He dozed to the pulsing, drowsy cry of the crickets in the long-stemmed grass and the trees around him. He waited for them to come: other drug dealers, or high school students playing hooky, or people on their lunch breaks from driving trucks hauling rocks and sand, or attendants working at convenience stations the next town over, all people he’d grown up with and always known. When they came to him, he’d shake their hands. They would joke with him, and he’d smile. He’d give them what they wanted and they’d lay the bill close to him on the table, where it would flutter and jump with the wind, where it would pulse and twitch like a living thing. One pocket was for dime sacks, the other for dubs; he’d put the money in the pocket with the dime sacks because there was more room. Feeling sick, excited, and ashamed because he was excited, he’d eye the road for dark blue cop cars. Whenever he saw any, which was once every week or so, he’d dart to the ditch and hide in the underbrush, watch them cruise past through the cover of weeds and bushes until they went away, until the vegetation would make him itch and rashes bloom across his legs.
On the police-free days, his clientele would leave him and he would be alone again, staring at the grain of the wood of the table or up through the leaves of the trees, and he would think about what he was doing. He’d realize that he was placing it in their hands, now, that he was hardly thinking about it when he handed it over. He realized that this was something he did, now, like helping Ma-mee with dinner or playing basketball or driving Joshua to work. He sat on that bench in a procession of days, each one longer and hotter than the last, and told himself that this was not what he was. He’d sell until a little after three and then walk home to Ma-mee, the dark cool of the house, and they would wait for Joshua to call. She would ask him if he’d had any luck finding a job. Remembering those signs, his morning dalliance with the asphalt of restaurant and store and hotel parking lots, he would tell her yes, he had looked for a job. He’d think to himself; it wasn’t a lie—he had looked. His weed was beginning to smell like the barn; like rust and earth and oil. After he picked up his brother, after it was dark, after they’d eaten dinner and Ma-mee had fallen asleep, after she’d been quiet in her bed for at least an hour, he’d make sacks. With his brother asleep on the sofa in front of the TV, most times with the phone cradled loosely in his hand from talking to Laila, Christophe would ease out of the house and go to the barn with a flashlight. He’d shine his light on the spastic bats fluttering through the open eaves, the warm, burrowing rodents secreting themselves in the narrow crevices of machines, and like a small, hairy animal himself, he would squeeze between the oil drums, squat sweating in the dark, and do his business. Now he kept his weed in the shed, locked in a small iron toolbox he found, behind the empty coffee cans on a shelf. When he returned to the house, he would wake his brother and bring him to bed. Christophe wondered if Joshua was doing it, waiting up for him on purpose, or if he was simply too exhausted to move and so fell asleep. He read judgment in the way Joshua slept wide legged and square kneed on the couch. Still he woke him to walk to bed and sleep.
Christophe had arrived early at the dock. He’d gotten tired of sitting around at the park. He told Joshua that the clouds had come in fast, that when he saw them rolling in while he was lying on his back on the picnic table bench, they looked like pictures he had seen of mountains. They had rolled across the sky and bulldozed away the blue. While Joshua rubbed his face dry on his shirtsleeve, he strained to hear his brother over the staccato drumming of the rain on the roof and the hood of the car. It slashed sideways against the windows.
When they were seven, they had found an old gray abandoned house deep in a coven of oaks behind the church and had spent an afternoon throwing rocks at the warped planks and yelling to scare away ghosts. Neither the twins nor Skeetah had ventured inside the house, whose roof had sagged under beards of Spanish moss. The rain sounded like the white pebbles had when they had smattered against the wooden face of the house. Through a clear spot, Joshua saw that the rain was coming down so hard the world seemed to have disappeared: it had washed the docks, the concrete parking lot, the men he knew were running to their cars through the downpour, away. He and Christophe had only run away from that house that day when Christophe decided that he had had enough of throwing rocks, since no one was brave enough to run inside, and the sunlight in the woods was fading. He had grabbed Joshua’s hand in a slippery grip, and pulled him away and they had run forever, it seemed, with Skeetah at their back yelling at them to slow down, until they finally crawled out of the woods just as the sun was setting in a red and orange blanket in the sky.
Christophe and Joshua had jumped the ditch dividing the woods from the street as one, and only when their feet had landed on the asphalt did Christophe let go of Joshua’s hand. Joshua looked at his brother now wiping the glass furiously, muttering and cussing about the broken defrost in the car, and wished for it to never stop raining, for the rain to become a biblical flood so that it would wash him not only through space, but through time, away and back to that day in the beginning of his world. Christophe made to start the car, and Joshua stopped him.
“Naw. Let’s just wait it out. It’s too heavy right now to see.”
“Alright.” Christophe cranked the car. Joshua reached over and turned the thermostat knob to cool. The vents expelled air that smelled musty and old; it smelled like weed. Joshua let his bare arm adhere wetly to the windowsill.
“It smell like wet dog in here.” Joshua sniffed and lowered his arm. “Oh. That’s me.” He leaned his head against the window. When he got in the car, he had noticed that Christophe had the radio off. Both of them liked the sound of the rain.
“I want to give you some money. Put it with what you going to give to Ma-mee. Tell her you worked overtime or something,” Christophe said, glaring out the front window.
“Today?” Joshua pinched his forearm to stay awake.
“Every time you get paid, I’ll just give you a hundred. Tell her they paying you more than you thought they was.”
“What if she know I’m lying?” Joshua looked out the passenger window.
“Just tell her you work through lunch and when I don’t pick you up on time, they pay you overtime.”
She would never know that she was receiving money from both of them. She would not want to take the money even from him. She would fuss and say that they got along on her Social Security and Medicaid just fine. He would slip it into her purse.
“Here.” Christophe dug in his pocket and took out a wad of bills folded in half. The bills looked worried over, faded. Joshua didn’t want to give them to her.
“Where’s the wallet Cille gave you?” Cille had sent them matching leather wallets on their fifteenth birthdays. The twins had carried them everywhere even though sometimes the only thing in them were pictures of Ma-mee and Cille and Aunt Rita and their own wallet-sized individual basketball team photos: Joshua had worn the wallet until it curved in the middle and the leather that rubbed against the pocket of his jeans was dull and textured as suede. He still wore it.
“It fell apart.”
Joshua did not let Christophe know that he knew that Christophe had saved it; Christophe had stashed the wallet like some drooping and wilted prom flower in one of his love-note shoe boxes in the top and back of the closet. Christophe counted three twenties, four fives, and twenty ones. He handed the larger bills to Joshua with one hand and apologetically gave the ones to his brother with his other hand and shrugged. “For change.” Joshua grabbed both handfuls and sandwiched them together before shoving them into his wallet.
“Alright then.” Joshua slid the wallet into his back pocket. It felt as if he were sitting on a thick, dirty balled-up sock.
“I smelled it,” Christophe said. “Ma-mee always say we got that blood in us, the kind that know things, that Bois Sauvage blood. I know she can tell the weather, but I swear, before them clouds came and before I even knew they was on the way, I smelled it in the air. It was like a metal kind of smell.” Joshua nodded, and his head slid back and forth against the glass. He knew it left a greasy smudge. “Shit, soon as I jumped up from the bench after I saw them clouds, it started coming down hard. I just stood there for a minute, though. It felt good.” Joshua nodded again. He had been slow walking across the parking lot to the car.
The twins sat like that for the thirty minutes it took for the rain to ease up. Joshua closed his eyes repeatedly and tried to sleep; he couldn’t. He was surprised that he couldn’t. He watched Christophe blearily; he realized that Christophe had taken out his braids and pulled his hair back into a frizzy, short ponytail. Joshua hadn’t realized his brother’s hair was that long; Christophe’s hair had always grown a little faster than Joshua’s own. It had been a couple of days since he had talked to Laila; he’d have to call her and see if she could braid their hair again. He knew his own hair stank like cold wax, and that when Laila combed the braids out, it would come out in ropy knots. He knew he wouldn’t care, and he wouldn’t complain, as long as he could feel the press of her thighs against his shoulders.
After the rain fell away in fits, after it eased up and the worst of it withdrew out over the gulf like a woman gathering her coat and leaving a room, Christophe drove them home. The swish and sway of the windshield wipers echoed through the car. Joshua thought to ask his brother for a blunt, because he wanted the smoke to massage the residue of muscle ache from his arms and legs, but he didn’t. If Christophe didn’t have something rolled when he picked Joshua up, then he didn’t want to smoke. Christophe only handed Joshua a blunt to light and smoke twice since he had been selling. Both times, he set it on the dashboard when Joshua got into the car; Christophe placed it there as if he didn’t want to hand it to his brother. Joshua half shut his eyes and listened to the rain fling itself at the car.
At the house, Christophe opened the screen door to the porch and let it fall without holding it open for his brother. Joshua sighed and licked his lips as he mounted the steps and sucked at the water and salt he found there. When he followed his brother into the gray, humid living room, Christophe had stopped. Laila was sitting on the sofa. Ma-mee wasn’t in her chair.
“Where’s Ma-mee at?” Christophe’s voice was slightly hoarse; he sounded as if he hadn’t spoken in days. Joshua figured that his brother didn’t talk much while he was sitting down at the park waiting for customers. Joshua thought about him often while he was lifting and throwing bags of chickens and crates of bananas. In his mind, Christophe wasn’t sprawling across the bench with his charismatic dark limbs, but instead was round-shouldered and stooped, and his eyes were always studying the road as he waited for clientele and the blue flash of the police. In his head, he saw Christophe’s face through a metal screen, and his worry angered him. Sometimes, jealously, he pictured Javon or Marquise with him, and he wondered if Laila ever walked down to the court, and if she talked to him. “And why you ain’t got the TV on?”
“Miss Rita came and picked her up. She said they was going shopping.” Laila crossed her arms, and then buried her hands into the crevices of the couch cushions. She looked nervous. “I just, uh, I told her I would wait on y’all. Wasn’t nothing good on TV,” she whispered. Christophe turned back to look at his brother.
“I got stuff to do.” Christophe turned away and receded down the hall. Joshua sat on the sofa at the other end from Laila, and placed his cap carefully on the armrest. He smoothed it with his wet, dirty hand, and then began to quickly unlace his boots. Ma-mee would kill him if he got mud on the carpet. He’d forgotten. Shit.
“So, how was work today?”
“It was alright.”
“You usually get off earlier than this, right?”
“Yeah, but the rain …” Joshua pulled off both of his boots and laid them on their sides. He hesitated, and then picked them up and set them outside the front door on the porch. When he sat back down, Laila seemed closer to him on the sofa. From the back room, he heard nothing; it was as if his brother weren’t even there. He wished the rain would fall harder outside; the silence that pervaded the house was unnerving. “So.” He was sure Laila was scooting closer to him. It was like watching a minute hand on a clock move; he could never see it, but he’d blink, and it would be in a different place. “You going to get a summer job?”
“Naw, I don’t think so. Summer’s almost halfway over, now. Fourth of July is like, next week.” She was staring at him like a bird.
“What you do all day then?” Niggas didn’t look at each other when they talked; he’d noticed that. They looked straight ahead and away most of the time; unless you were about to fight or making a joke, you never looked at a man in his face.
“I babysit my little cousins. My auntie pays me fifty dollars a week.” Yes, her knee was touching his, now. All he could feel was a pressure there as he studied her knee, tan and round, lightly touching his leg through the dirty press of his jeans.
“That’s cool.” The long, ripe line of her thigh was beside his. He felt a muscle cramp sullenly in his calf. He ignored it, and looked at her face. It was red.
“Joshua?”
“Hmm?” He could feel her breath on his face as she spoke to him. She smelled like lotion and licorice.
“Are you ever going to kiss me?” It was a whisper. She was staring at his lips and his eyes. She turned redder; she must’ve realized that she was nearly in his lap. She looked at the wall. A knock sounded from deep within the house; it sounded as if Christophe was breaking something. Joshua knew her skin would be soft, that it would give under his fingers like water so that he would not be able to tell whether it was really there. Her blush made him want to smile. She was determined, and shy, and stubborn, and he liked her for it. He knew he stank, but he didn’t care.Joshua leaned forward and placed his hand next to her shoulder on the back of the sofa and kissed her. Her hand came up to the side of his face; her fingers on his cheek felt as light as an insect. She opened her mouth and her lips and tongue were warm; he shivered as slivers of water made their way from his hair down the back of his neck. He pulled away, hesitated, and then kissed the corner of her lips with his mouth closed, and sat back. She wiped her hair back away from her face and smiled. He felt awkward and stupid; what if Ma-mee or Christophe had walked in?
“I need to go take a shower.”
“Alright.” She ducked her head and swallowed, and he wondered if she was still tasting his mouth on her tongue again, if she was remembering it like the flavor of ice cream or juice. He knew he would not be able to forget her taste now that he had it for the first time; he wanted to kiss her again, to coax her onto his lap and run his hands down the warm curve of her back and turn her face to his with his mouth, but he wouldn’t, not in the living room, not with his brother knocking around the house. Dunny had always joked about them sharing girls, but it had never been that way between them.
Joshua showered quickly. By the time he got out, Ma-mee was walking down the hall and Laila wasn’t in the living room anymore. He readjusted the knot holding the towel at his waist.
“Laila told me to tell you she had to go home. She had something to do. She said she was going to call you tonight.” Ma-mee paused. “She sweet on you, huh?”
Her gown was pink and bright and new.
“Got a new gown, huh?”
“Joshua.” Ma-mee pinched his arm. Joshua covered it with his hand and cowered. She laughed and pinched him again.
“Ow. I’m sensitive.” He laughed.
“You like her?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“She like you. Be nice to her.” She rose on her toes and he leaned down into her. She pinched him again. “Men shouldn’t have eyelashes like that.”
Ma-mee turned and touched the wall once and twice with her hand as she walked through the living room and into the kitchen. He heard her get a pot from one of the cabinets, and a second later, turn on the faucet. In their room, Christophe had fallen asleep in the middle of counting his money, and was stretched out with his arms thrown over his head as if he had been surprised, his mouth open, the bills ragged and bunched underneath him. Sometimes he still slept as he did when they were younger: wild, fighting with the walls and wrestling with the sheet. Joshua pulled the pillow so that it rested squarely under his brother’s head; Christophe’s snoring abruptly stopped. Joshua hurried to find clean, dry clothes and pulled them on quickly: he would slip the money into her purse while she was in the kitchen.
Joshua did not sleep well for the rest of the week. His dreams alternated between nightmares about his brother and hazy glimpses of Laila. By the end of his third week of work, Joshua felt as if he’d never done anything else besides work at the dock; the summer rains had begun, and his life was straining against bags and throwing heavy boxes and rain and salt stinging his eyes and the sun parting the clouds like a knife and burning down upon him and steaming the men’s skin and the endless concrete. Everything smelled of metal and stank. Ma-mee packed small lunches of tuna fish and potato salad and apples for him, and he ate his lunches alone, on the pier, or when it rained especially bad, at a corner table in the cafeteria with some other black men around his own age from Germaine; he laughed at their jokes and their conversation sometimes, but was often silent. He woke up each morning drained, and the brutal monotony of work at the pier stunned him. Something about it felt insulting and wrong. He was jealous and would often not speak to his brother on the way to work, disgusted by the fact that Christophe would spend his day chilling at the park. His paychecks made him feel a little better, but still he was glad when the weekend came. He fell asleep early on Friday night, and woke with Christophe near noon. It had rained earlier that morning, but when they woke the sky was barely studded with clouds, a deep, rich blue. The twins dressed and walked to the court, and Joshua waved at people sitting on their porches or cutting grass with rusty push lawn mowers. Christophe punctuated his waves with dribbling their basketball. Otherwise their walk was quiet, their mutual animosity a veil between them.
It seemed that nearly everyone they knew was at the basketball court. A crew of boys from St. Catherine were running a game with some boys from the neighborhood; as they approached the court, Joshua saw Skeetah fly into the air and swat the other team’s ball away from the goal and out of bounds. Marquise retrieved the ball and threw it back into play. Joshua and Christophe walked toward the small bleachers, and were surprised to find them laden with clumps of people: Joshua saw Laila sitting with Felicia on the bottom bleacher. He’d talked to her briefly the night before he’d fallen asleep, had known that she was going to be there, but had not given that as a reason to his brother when he asked him if he wanted to go. He had not talked to his brother about his desire to take her to the movies, to eat at some nice restaurant, to play at the miniature golf place, or the fact that he had asked her to go out with him and she had said yes. Perhaps they could double date with Christophe and Felicia.
Some kids were running along the middle bleacher and jumping off the end, yelling as they hit the ground. Javon sat with Bone on the top bleacher. They were passing a blunt back and forth. Christophe yelled in the general direction of the court, “We got next!” and Joshua caught Laila’s eye and smiled a closemouthed smile at her and settled next to his brother on the bench. Javon nudged Christophe’s shoulder with the hand holding the blunt: Christophe shook his head as he glanced at Felicia and muttered, “No thanks.” Joshua followed his brother’s lead and refused the blunt even though the smell was sweet. Joshua tried not to inhale sharply; he didn’t want to look like some sort of junkie, sitting on the bleachers sniffing the air hard for a whiff of blunt. The little kids, Cece, Dizzy, and Little Man, clambered back up and stopped in front of Christophe. They were glaring at him and Joshua. The little girl was older than the other two; she stood with her hands on her hips and she cocked her head to the side and glared at them. Her hair cloaked her shoulders in fuzzy braids and she was so light skinned that the skin across her nose and cheeks had burned. She opened her mouth, and Joshua saw she was missing her two front teeth. She was probably around six. Joshua coughed and laughed. The two boys behind her looked around two years younger than her; they wore short, tight T-shirts that hugged their potbellies and they stood together close as twins. One was light and one was dark; the dark one stuck out his tongue at Joshua.
“You sat in the middle of our game,” the little girl said.
“We needed a place to sit. Y’all go play somewhere else ’fore I whip one of y’all,” Christophe said.
“You ain’t whipping me!” the girl retorted.
The lighter little boy, Little Man, raised his left hand and flipped the bird at Christophe. Joshua couldn’t help himself; he started to laugh hard. Christophe’s eyes turned to small, dark crescents and he choked out a laugh.
“Y’all better get y’all badasses out of here and go play somewhere. Get!” Christophe yelled.
Little Man had both hands in the air now, both middle fingers extended, and was taking turns jabbing them in the air toward Christophe. His dark clone, Dizzy, followed suit. Cece turned around and back to Christophe; her braids swung out and the plastic barrettes at their ends clicked softly as they shuttered against her face.
“Don’t let me have to tell y’all’s mamas. I know who they is …!” Christophe told her.
She glared at him and then grabbed each of the boys by the arm and yanked.
“Come on!” They screamed and ran after her; they tripped down the bench and Joshua watched them run across the park toward the swings. The girl never let go of their hands. When the trio was halfway across the park, Little Man turned and when Joshua squinted, he could see he was flipping them off again with his free hand as he was running. Laila was shaking her head and laughing while Felicia doubled over as she held her stomach; behind them, Javon snorted.
“Bad little fuckers.”
Joshua watched the trio leap bellyfirst onto the row of swings; they stretched their arms out and kicked with their legs and swung high in the air. Joshua had played that game; he knew they were pretending to fly. He gazed past them to the row of cars parked at the side of the ditch and saw Javon’s car, and Bone’s, and Marquise’s, and a couple of others he couldn’t make out. They weren’t all empty; he saw shadows, and heard the bass from more than one stereo system. He watched the three swinging, saw the girl slow her swing and tumble headfirst from the rubber into the dirt. A figure skirted one of the cars and began walking across the field past the swings toward the court.
The little boys tried to follow her lead but instead squirmed from the seats and landed on their feet. Shrieking, they followed Cece at a run as she led them to the wooden slide. She sandwiched herself behind the two boys at the apex of the slide. They gripped each other between their legs, lined up in a row, and she pushed them down in a train. Joshua had played that game, too. The figure was nearing them; Joshua saw that it was a man, an older man. The man had pants on in the heat, and he had long, curly hair that he had topped with a navy blue baseball cap. Joshua looked at the way he walked and nudged Christophe with his elbow and nodded at the figure as he approached them and surfaced like a swimmer into sharp relief. The man was walking around the court. He was searching the faces of the people playing, and now he was pulling off his cap and peering underneath the trees to pick out the figures on the benches. For the first time in years, Joshua and Christophe saw their father.
Joshua’s face was hot. He wanted to look away from the man, to watch the trio of kids, to watch the game on the court, but he couldn’t. Sandman wasn’t even looking at them; he was looking past them to Javon. Joshua doubted that he even recognized them. Sandman slapped his cap against his thigh and walked underneath the trees to the side of the bleachers to Javon. Joshua glanced past Christophe at Sandman and saw that Christophe was staring straight ahead, and Joshua could see the muscle of his jaw jumping like a darting minnow under his skin. He heard Sandman whisper, “I got something for you, Javon.” Javon jumped from the bleachers and shuffled away further under the trees toward the ditch with Sandman.
“We got next!” Christophe bit out. Laila was not turning to Joshua and smiling anymore. She bounced her feet and shrugged when Felicia leaned in to ask her if she was all right. Joshua swatted a mosquito.
“Somebody need to start a fire,” Joshua said. Christophe was staring at him solemnly. Joshua shook his head no. Christophe sniffed and looked back toward the court.
“Y’all niggas heard me?” Christophe yelled.
Skeetah passed the ball to Big Henry and yelled, “Yeah nigga, we heard you.” His voice quavered; he was breathing hard through his mouth. Javon clambered back on the bench. Joshua let his knee slide and stick wetly to his brother’s, and then jerked it away. Sandman had put his cap back on so that all Joshua could see of him were his strong nose and his mouth. He was standing off to the side of the bleachers. He was looking at the twins.
“Good day for some ball.” He said this as if he were speaking to the air. Javon grunted and pulled on the blunt. Joshua stared at Sandman. Christophe concentrated on the flurry of movement on the court. “Sure is a good day for some ball.” Joshua saw something in Christophe’s face break; the minnow flashed and disappeared.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Sandman walked over to stand in front of them. The navy blue shirt he wore hung like a wet rag on his frame. His knuckles were bony and distended, as large as grapes.
“I was just trying to make conversation.” Sandman was staring at them like a wary dog; Joshua could imagine a stiff, quivering tail on him. Joshua snaked his arm behind his brother’s and squeezed Christophe’s elbow hard. Christophe let out his breath as if he had been holding it. Joshua spoke intently and quietly.
“We don’t want no conversation.” Looking at Sandman’s face was almost like looking at Christophe’s. He had given them his full lips, his prominent nose, the reddish cast to their skin. Something about it was wrong, though; his features seemed confused. It was as if some child had taken pieces of a puzzle and forced them together so that they fit in the wrong way. Sandman opened his mouth wide in disbelief, and Joshua saw that his teeth were yellow and seemed smashed together in his mouth; gray lined them at the seams. He closed his mouth and it made a wet, hollow sound.
“I just wanted to talk to my sons.” Joshua stared at his wide mouth and squeezed Christophe’s arm harder. Christophe shook his elbow from Joshua’s grasp and pulled the ball into his stomach as if it hurt. His fingers were blanched yellow against the orange rubber. He lurched forward and stared intently at Sandman, and when he spoke, his voice was strained.
“You ain’t got no sons here. Ma-mee our mama and our daddy. Leave …us … alone.” He bit the rest of it out. Christophe rocked back and looked away across the baseball diamond to the pines glistening there.
“Joshua …”
“You don’t even know which one you’re talking to.” Christophe spoke without looking back at him, and his voice was small as if he spoke from a great distance. Sandman was staring down at his feet, so Joshua stared at the crown of his head, his thin, bony shoulders, his wet-rag shirt, his dirty jeans, and his black and blue tennis shoes. The pain in Joshua’s chest and at the back of his throat was a panicked flapping.
“You don’t know us.” Joshua spoke softly. “Leave us alone.”
Christophe heard his brother’s quiet statement and through the suffocating anger, he felt that he could breathe. For a minute he had thought he would drown in it. He let out a slow, shaky breath and was surprised; he was so angry it hurt, he was so angry he felt like he was going to cry.
“Go ’head, Sandman,” Joshua said.
Christophe let out another breath he did not know he had been holding. It was all so stupid. All of it. He felt like he was dreaming. He glanced at Sandman and saw him raise a hand as if he was going to say something, then Sandman clenched his hand into a fist and let it fall. He wiped his knuckles along the front of his jeans.
“I got business to take care of,” he said, staring pointedly at the girls, and then walked away from the bleachers. Christophe could not help but turn to watch him. He jerked past the court and past the swings and past the car until he ambled out along the street, walking as if his joints were strung together with string, his gate as jarring as a puppet’s. Christophe let the ball drop to the bleachers. It bounced and stopped in the valley between his feet. Next to him, Joshua sighed. Christophe felt something nudge his shoulder and turned to see Javon passing him the blunt.
“Here you go.”
Christophe took a hit before passing it to Joshua. Christophe closed his eyes and held the smoke in his lungs until he could not hold his breath anymore, until his diaphragm began to shake and convulse in the effort to force his mouth open. He wished he could go swimming. He wished the game would end so he could play. He let the breath whoosh from him, and blinked to find Joshua balancing the ball in one hand and pulling him to his feet with the other toward the vacant court to play. His feet hit the ground, and he could hardly tell he was running.