The river was young and small. At its start it seeped from the red clay earth in the piney woods of southern Mississippi, and then wound its way, brown and slow, over a bed of tiny gray and ochre pebbles through the pines, shallow as a hand, deep as three men standing, to the sandy, green lowlands of the gulf of Mexico. It slithered along, wide and narrow, crossed by small wood and concrete bridges, lined by thin slivers of white beach, in and out of the trees, before it divided itself into the bayou and emptied itself into the bay. Near the river’s end, at one such bridge, two teenage boys, twins, stood at the apex. Legs over the side, they gripped the warm, sweaty steel at their backs. Underneath them, the water of the Wolf River lay dark and deep, feathered by the current. They were preparing to jump.
The sun had only risen a few hours ago, but it was hot even for late May. Christophe, the thinner of the two, let his arms loosen and leaned out, testing the height. His muscles showed ropy and long over his shoulders and down his back. Christophe wondered how cold the water would be. Joshua, taller, and softer on account of the thin layer of fat across his stomach and chest and bigger in the arms, rested his rear lightly on the steel of the railing, shying from its heat. Christophe looked at his brother, and thought the air around him seemed to waver. Joshua kicked, spewing sand and gravel from the edge. He laughed. Christophe felt his hands slip and grabbed at the rail. He looked over at his brother and smiled, the side of his mouth curving into a fishhook. Christophe knew he was sweating more than normal in the heat, and it was making his hands slippery. He and his twin were still drunk from the night before. They were graduating from high school in three hours.
“What the hell y’all doing?”
Dunny, their cousin, stood below them on the sand at the edge of the water with a beer in his hand. He’d parked the car and walked to the bank while they’d taken off their shirts and shoes. His T-shirt hung long and loose on him except where it pulled tight over his beer belly, and his jean shorts sagged low. This was one of the tallest bridges on the coast. When they were younger, all the kids from Bois Sauvage would ride their bikes there and spend all day in a circuit: plummeting from the bridge, swimming to the shore, and then running on their toes over the scalding concrete to fall to the water again. Now, the twins were almost too old to jump. Christophe thought he and Joshua had jumped once the previous summer, but he was not sure. While Dunny had egged Christophe on when he thought of the bridge at 4 a.m. after he and Joshua finished off a case, Dunny had refused to jump. He was twenty-five, he had said, and while the twins could still balance on the iron railing like squirrels on a power line, he couldn’t.
“Y’all niggas gonna jump or what?” Dunny asked.
Christophe squinted at Joshua, at the face that was his own, but not, full lips, a jutting round nose, and skin the color of the shallows of the water below that named them twins. If he leaned in closer, he could see that which was different: freckles over Joshua’s cheeks and ears where Christophe’s skin was clear, Joshua’s eyes that turned hazel when the sun hit them while Christophe’s eyes remained so dark brown they looked black, and Joshua’s hair that was so fine at the neck, it was hard to braid. Christophe moved closer to his brother, and when his arm slid along the length of Joshua’s forearm, for a second it was as if Christophe had touched himself, crossed his own forearms, toucher and touched. Christophe was ready to leap. His stomach roiled with a combination of beer and anxiety, but he’d wait. Christophe knew Joshua. Christophe knew that while he liked to do things quickly, Joshua was slower about some things. His brother was looking across the water, eyeing the river winding away into the distance, the houses like small toys along the shoreline that were half hidden by the oak, pine, and underbrush rustling at the water’s edge.
“That one up there on the right—that white one. Looks like the one Ma-mee used to work at, huh?”
What Christophe could see of the house through the trees was large and white and glazed with windows. He nodded, feeling his balance.
“Yeah,” Christophe said.
“I always wanted to have a house like that one day. Big like that. Nice.”
Christophe loved to look at those houses, but hated it, too. They made him feel poor. They made him think of Ma-mee, his grandmother, back when she was healthy and could still see, scrubbing the dirt out of white people’s floors for forty years. He knew she was waiting for them now at the house, regardless of her blindness and her diabetes, with their gowns laid out on the sofa, pressed. He swallowed, tasting warm beer. Those stupid houses were ruining the jump.
“Well, the house going to rot into the ground before we can buy it, Jay.” Christophe laughed and spit a white glob out over the river. It arced and fell quickly. “Can we jump so we can graduate and make some money?”
Sweat stung Christophe’s eyes. Joshua was staring at the water, blinking hard. Christophe saw Joshua swallow; his brother was nervous about the drop. His own throat was clenching with the idea of the fall. It was so early in the summer that Christophe knew the water would be cold.
“Come on then, Chris.”
Joshua grabbed Christophe by the arm and pulled. He threw his other arm into the air, and leaned out into space. Christophe let go and leaped into Joshua, hugging him around his chest, and felt him burning and sweaty in his arms, squirming like a caught fish. They seemed to hang in the air for a moment, held in place by the heavy, humid blue sky, the surrounding green, the brown water below. In the distance, a car sounded as it approached on the road. Christophe heard Joshua exhale deeply, and he clenched his fingers around Joshua’s arms. Then the moment passed, and they began to fall. They dropped and hit the water and an eruption of tepid water burned up their noses. Their mouths opening by instinct; the water was silty on their tongues and tasted like unsweetened tea. In the middle of the surging murky river, both brothers felt for the bottom with their feet even as they let go of each other and struggled to swim upward. They surfaced. The day exploded in color and light and sound around them. They blew snot and water out their nostrils; Christophe tossed his head and grinned while Joshua screwed a pinky finger into one ear.
On the bank, Dunny was rolling a blunt from his selling sack, laughing. He licked the cigar shut, blew on the paper, and lit it. White smoke drifted from his mouth in tufts. He stood at the edge of the water, the river lapping at the tips of his basketball shoes. Squinting, Christophe could see the tips of the crimson leather turning dark red. Dunny hopped away from the water and held the blunt toward them. Christophe’s lungs burned and his stomach fluttered with nausea.
“Y’all want to smoke?”
Joshua immediately shook his head no, and spit water in a sparkling brown stream. Christophe thrust himself toward his brother and grabbed him around his shoulders, trying to shove him below the surface. Joshua squirmed and kicked, flipping them over. Christophe slid below the water, the current gripping him, sure as his brother’s fingers. He could hear Joshua laughing above him, muted and deep beyond the bronze wash of the river. Everything was dim and soft. Christophe exhaled crystal bubbles of air, grabbed his brother’s soft, squirming sides, and pulled him to the quiet below.