Chapter 8
Jojo
I can’t look at him straight. Not with him sitting on the floor of the car, squeezed between Kayla’s car seat and the front, facing me. He don’t say nothing, just got his arms over his knees, his mouth on his wrists. One hand balled into a fist. I ain’t never seen knees like his: big dusty beat-up tennis balls. Even though he’s skinny, arms and legs racket-thin, he should be too big to fit in the space he done folded himself into. He’s sharp at the edges, but there’s too much of him, so all I can think when I look at him is Something’s wrong. The phrase keeps flying around in my head like a bat, fluttering and flapping and slapping at the corners of an attic. I don’t know I’ve fallen asleep until I wake up to the car stopping, to the lights flashing, to the policeman in the window telling Leonie to step out of the car and the boy on the floor sinking farther down, covering his ears with his hands.
“They going to chain you,” he says.
When the officer comes around to the back door and says, “Step out of the car, young man,” the boy curls up smaller into himself, like a roly-poly, and he grimaces.
“I told you,” he says.
It’s my first time being questioned by the police. Kayla is screaming and reaching for me, and Misty is complaining, her shirt sliding farther down her shoulder, showing the tops of her breasts. I don’t have eyes for that. All I have eyes for is Kayla, fighting. The man telling me sit, like I’m a dog. “Sit.” So I do, but then I feel guilty for not fighting, for not doing what Kayla is, but then I think about Richie and then I feel Pop’s bag in my shorts, and I reach for it. Figure if I could feel the tooth, the feather, the note, maybe I could feel those things running through me. Maybe I wouldn’t cry. Maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it was a bird, ricocheted off a car midflight, stunned and reeling. But then the cop has his gun out, pointing at me. Kicking me. Yelling at me to get down in the grass. Cuffing me. Asking me, “What you got in your pocket, boy?” as he reaches for Pop’s bag. But Kayla moves so fast, small and fierce, to jump on my back. I should soothe Kayla, should tell her to run back to Misty, to get down and let me go, but I can’t speak. The bird crawling up into my throat, wings spasming. What if he shoot her? I think. What if he shoot both of us? And then I notice Richie looking out of the car window, even though the cuffs are grinding into my wrists. He distracts me from the warm close day, from Misty pulling Kayla away, but only for a second because I can’t help but return to this: Kayla’s brown arms and that gun, black as rot, as pregnant with dread.
The image of the gun stays with me. Even after Kayla throws up, after the police officer checks my pants and lets me out of them biting handcuffs, even after we are all in the car and riding down the road with Leonie bent over sick in the front seat, that black gun is there. It is a tingle at the back of my skull, an itching on my shoulder. Kayla snuggles in to me, quickly asleep, and everything is hot and wet in the car: Misty’s sweating about the hairline, wet beads appear on Kayla’s snoring nose, and I can feel water running down my ribs, my back. I rub the indents in my wrists where the handcuffs squeezed and see the gun, and the boy starts talking.
“You call him Pop,” Richie says. I think it should be a question, but he says it like it’s a statement. I look up at Misty, who’s biting her fingers and looking out the window, and I nod.
“Your grandpa,” the boy says, his eyes looking up to his forehead, the roof of the car, like he’s reading the words he says in the sky. Michael ain’t paying attention to anything going on in the backseat, either; he’s driving and rubbing Leonie’s back. She’s doubled over, moaning. I nod again.
“My name?” he says.
Richie, I mouth.
He looks like he wants to smile but he doesn’t.
“He told you about me?”
I nod.
“He tell you how he knew me? That we was in Parchman together?”
I huff and nod again.
“They don’t send them there as young as you no more.”
My wrists won’t stop hurting.
“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”
It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone.
“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”
Like my marrow could carry a bruise.
“You look like Riv,” Richie says. He puts his chin on his forearms and breathes hard, like he just finished running a long way. I move Kayla onto my lap, and she is making me so hot. I have to look away from the wrong of the boy folded onto the floor of the car, so I stare out the window at the tall trees flashing past and think about the gun. Even though it reminded me of so much cold, I think it would have been hot to touch. So hot it would have burned my fingerprints off.
* * *
It’s after one of them long stretches, after at least two hours seeing nothing but trees, we finally run up on a gas station, and Michael pulls off the road. The boy’s been sitting quiet, I been singing to Kayla, and Misty been playing with her cell phone, so we all look up when we pull into the parking lot. The sun burns with a steady midafternoon bore. Leonie’s still bent over in the front seat, but she ain’t moaning no more. She quiet as the boy, but she ain’t still like him. She got her arms crossed over her chest and she rubbing her stomach and her sides and her back like she’s miming kissing, her fingers digging into the thin shallows between her ribs. And every five seconds or so, her head smacks back like someone hit her in the face with a basketball, like I got hit when I was seven in a game down at the park. My cousin Rhett threw the ball to me and yelled catch too late. I wasn’t paying attention to him or the game: I was looking to the bleachers, where Leonie was sitting with Michael, thigh to thigh in the cold winter air, puffed up in jackets, huddled together like nesting hens. I turned around to the ball slamming into my nose and mouth, so hard I saw white and left spit on the ball. They all laughed, and I thought it was funny and horrible at the same time.
Michael’s digging through Leonie’s purse, and he pulls out ten one-dollar bills and waves them.
“I need you to get two things. Milk and charcoal.”
“Kayla’s asleep.”
“Your mama’s sick. She need this for her stomach.”
I remember the gray water, the black stew from the leaves she boiled for Kayla.
“She gave Kayla something she made. So she wouldn’t be sick no more. She ain’t got no more of that?”
I wonder if whatever medicine she cooked would help Leonie now. If it would make her so sick that whatever poison is inside her would come out.
“She gave it all to Kayla,” Misty says.
“What you need charcoal for?”
“Jojo, you always talk this much when somebody asks you to do something?”
He could hit me right now. Leonie did most of the hitting, but I know Michael could hit, too. Never with a closed fist, though. Always with his palm open, but his hand felt like a small shovel every time he hit me on the thin plate of my shoulder, the knobby middle of my chest, my arm where the muscle ain’t enough to take the pain out of the blow.
“Kayla’s asleep,” I say again, meaning it to be firm, but it comes out soft as a mumble, and it don’t sound like what I want it to sound like. Michael don’t hear We don’t need you. He hear I’m weak.
“Put her in her seat.”
“She going to wake up,” I say. She’s a heavy sleeper. Plus she don’t feel good, which means she’ll probably stay sleep. But I don’t want to put her down. I don’t want to leave her in her seat with Richie sitting at her feet, her toes by his head, her little feet dangling by his mouth. What if she sees him?
“Goddamnit, I’ll go get it,” Misty says, and opens the car door.
“No,” Michael says. “Jojo, get your goddamn ass up out this car and go inside and get what I told you. Right now.”
“He going to hit you. In the face,” Richie says, but he doesn’t look up, doesn’t raise his head. Just says it and keeps his head down. “I ain’t going to touch her.”
“Kayla,” I say.
Michael throws the money at me and sharpens his hand to a blade. The other one he got on Leonie’s shoulder, keeping her still.
“She too young to help me,” Richie says. “I need you.”
“I’ll go,” I say.
Michael doesn’t turn back around. He watches me lay Kayla in her seat, watches me try to fix her head so it doesn’t flop forward, so her little chin doesn’t dig into her chest, watches me glance at Richie on the floor, who waves his fingers but doesn’t raise his head.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” Richie says.
The inside of the store is so cool and the outside air so hot and wet that the windows are fogged up. I can’t see Leonie’s car from inside, only the smeared gray on the glass. The man at the counter got a big brown bushy beard, every hair going every which way on his face, but the rest of him is thin and yellow, even his hair, which he’s combed over his head to hide the baldness underneath. It works, too, because his scalp is yellow as the rest of him, so it’s hard for me to tell where his skin ends and the hair sprouts.
“That’s all?” he says when I put the quart of milk and the small briquettes of charcoal on the counter. He stretches out his words so they seem to loop between us, and I have to translate to understand what he says through the accent. I lean forward. He moves back just a step: small as a slivered fingernail. A twitch. I remember I’m brown, and I move back, too.
“Yeah,” I say, and slide the money over the counter.
When I bring the bag to the car, Michael is disappointed.
“Go back inside,” he says, “and get a hammer or a screwdriver or something. Go look where they got all the home stuff and the car stuff at. They got to have something. How you expect me to break the charcoal up?”
“Guess that wasn’t all?” the man asks when I slide the tire-pressure gauge across the counter.
“Nope,” I say. He smiles at me, and each tooth is gray. His gums red. His mouth the only thing about him that’s vivid, a red surprise coming out of his beard. I take a Tootsie Pop out the display bin.
“How much is it?”
“Seventy-five cents,” the man says. His eyes say different: I would give it to you if I could, but I can’t. Got cameras in here.
“I got it,” I say, “and I don’t need no receipt.”
The change is cold in my pocket when I stop at Michael’s side of the car and hand him the gauge.
“You got my change?”
I was hoping he’d forget, that at the next place we stopped, I could sneak inside with Kayla, buy a beef jerky and a drink for myself. My insides feel like a balloon again, full with nothing but air. I pick the change out around the bag Pop gave me, and when I slide into the back of the car, Michael’s handing me a dirty saucer Leonie had slid under the driver’s seat, and a brick of charcoal, and the gauge.
“Fucking charcoal was expensive,” he says. “Crush it.”
“Candy,” Kayla says, and reaches for me.
“Michaela, leave your brother alone,” Michael says. He’s rubbing Leonie’s hair, bending over to whisper in her ear, and I catch little bits of it. “Just breathe, baby, breathe,” he says.
“Shhh,” I tell Kayla, put my knees to the door, and hunch down over the plate and the charcoal. I hit the charcoal light because I don’t want the gauge to break the plate. Kayla whines and the whine rises. I think she’s going to start screaming candy, candy, but I look back at Kayla and she has her two middle fingers in her mouth, and I know then by the way she’s studying me, her little eyes round as marbles, calm in her seat, rubbing her seat belt clasp with her other hand, that she has it. Like me. That she can understand like I can, but even better, because she know how to do it now. Because she can look at me and know what I’m thinking, know I got it, Kayla, got you a sucker but you got to wait for me to finish doing this and you can get it, I promise, because you been a good girl, and she smiles around her wet fingers, her little teeth perfect and even as uncooked rice, and I know she hears me.
“Mike, you sure about this?” Misty asks.
“It’s what they give you in the hospital,” Michael says.
“I ain’t never heard of nobody using the kind you cook with.”
“Well,” Michael says.
“What if it make her worse?”
“You know what she did?”
“Yes,” Misty says, almost swallows the words, her voice quiet.
“Well, then you know she need something.”
“I know.”
“This what I got,” Michael says, something about his voice set, like concrete firming, like he answered a question: final.
“It’s done,” I say.
“The whole piece?”
I raise the saucer up so he can see it, see the tiny pile of black-gray powder, smelling strong of sulfur. Some kind of bad earth. Like the bayou when the water’s low, when the water runs out after the moon or it ain’t rained and the muddy bottom, where the crawfish burrow, turns black and gummy under the blue sky and stinks. Michael takes the powder. He peels the plastic off the milk top, pops it, and drinks two big gulps. I am so hungry I can smell it on his breath, smell it in the car when he takes the charcoal and dumps it into the milk, puts the top on, and shakes. The milk shades gray. He flicks the top off again, and there is a new smell in the car, the kind of smell that makes the back of my throat get thick, the kind of smell that makes me want to swallow, so I do.
“Jesus Christ, that stinks!” Misty says. She pulls her shirt over the bottom half of her face like a veil.
“It ain’t supposed to smell good, Misty,” Michael says. He hoists Leonie up and her head falls back. I expect her eyes to be closed but they aren’t: they are wide open, and her lashes are fluttering fast as a hummingbird’s wings. A white open shock. “Come on, baby. You got to drink this.”
Leonie twists and turns like she has no bones, her body winding as a worm’s.
“Candy?” Kayla asks.
Michael’s nostrils flare and his lips are spread like he wants to smile, but there is no curve here. His teeth gleam yellow and wet as a dog’s. He won’t know. All his attention is on Leonie, on her winding neck and her hands trying to bat him away.
I unwrap the sucker. It is red and glossy and I hide it in the curve of my hand as I pass it to Kayla. If Michael ask where she got it, I’m going to say I found it on the floor of the car.
“What’s that?” Richie asks.
“Come help me, Misty,” Michael says. The milk drips down his forearm. Leonie is fighting him. “Hold her nose!”
“Shit!” Misty says, and she’s out the backseat and in the front seat and they are both wrestling Leonie back and Michael’s pouring what he can down Leonie’s throat, and she’s swallowing and breathing and choking and there’s gray milk everywhere.
“Hold me!” Kayla says, and she’s climbing into my lap. Her hair is soft on my face, and I can smell the sucker on her breath, sugary and tart, and she turns her head and it’s like having a faceful of cotton candy, rough and sweet.
“It’s a sucker,” I whisper. Richie nods and stretches his hands over his head.
“That’s your mama?” he ask.
“No,” I say, and I don’t explain, even when Michael pull her from the car and they both on they knees in the grass on the side of the station, and she’s vomiting so hard her back curves like an angry cat’s.
* * *
I am singing nursery rhymes with Kayla while Leonie throws up because I want Kayla to pay attention to me. Don’t want her to see Leonie hunched over and sick, don’t want her to see Michael with that pinched look on his face like he’s going to cry, don’t want her to see Misty running from the station to where they are on the grass with cups of water and her voice high-pitched and her face red. But I sing the nursery songs all wrong; Leonie sang them to me so long ago I remember them only in snatches, light shining on a moment here or there when I was on her lap, both of us singing in the kitchen, steamy with onions and bell pepper and garlic and celery, the smell so delicious I wanted to eat the air. Mam would laugh at my pronunciation, the way I called cows tows, the way I called cats tats. I must have been Kayla’s age, but I could smell Leonie, too, smell her breath, the red cinnamon gum she chewed as she sang past my ear. Even when I grew older and she stopped giving me kisses, every time somebody chewed that gum, I thought of Leonie, of her soft, dry lips on my cheek. Kayla doesn’t care, even if the songs are patched together from my memory, pieces of a puzzle that almost fit: Old MacDonald has a llama, and there’s a cow on the bus, mooing as the wheels go around and around, and the itsy bitsy spider is crawling with a pout. I make up pantomimes for all of it, but Kayla’s favorite is a spider crawling upward, because I cross my thumbs and my fingers splay and segment and move, and there is a spider in the car, inches from Kayla’s face, crawling upward against the rain. Foolishly. When the boy begins speaking, I sing in a whisper, and Kayla sings in a whisper because she thinks it’s fun, and I listen. Then Kayla stops singing and she listens, too, but she waves her arms in the air and whines when I stop, so I sing.
“Is Riv old?” Richie asks.
I nod and warble.
“He was skinnier than you. Taller. Always had a way about him. He stood out. Not just because he was young. But because he was Riv.”
The sun is creeping across the sky. The sun beams past the boy’s face to land on Kayla, to make her eyes shine.
“Got a lot of men in there ain’t so friendly. Then and now. It’s full of wrong men. The kind of men that feel better if they do something bad to you. Like it eases something in them.”
Where the sun should hit the boy’s face and make it glow, it only seems to make it turn a deeper brown.
“They beat you in there. Some people look at boys our age and see somebody they can violate. See somebody who got soft pink insides. Riv tried to keep that from me. But he couldn’t keep it all, and I was too small. I couldn’t bear it. Kept thinking about my brothers and sisters, wondering if they was eating. Wanted to know what it would feel like to wake up and not feel like a thicket of thorns was up inside of me.”
This is a brown that skims black.
“I couldn’t live with it. So I decided to run. Did Riv tell you that?”
I nod.
“I guess I didn’t make it.” Richie laughs, and it’s a dragging, limping chuckle. Then he turns serious, his face night in the bright sunlight. “But I don’t know how. I need to know how.” He looks up at the roof of the car. “Riv will know.”
I don’t want to hear no more of the story. I shake my head. I don’t want him talking to Pop, asking him about that time. Pop has never told me the story of what happened to Richie when he ran. Every time I ask about it, he changes the subject or asks me to help him with something in the yard. And I understand the sentiment when he looks away or walks off, expecting me to follow. I know what Pop’s saying: I don’t want to talk about this. It wounds me.
“What’s wrong?” Richie asks. He looks confused.
“Shut up,” I say softly. And then I nod at Kayla, who wiggles her fingers in the air and says, “Spider, spider.”
“I got to see him again,” he says. “I got to know.”
Michael done picked Leonie up like a baby, one arm under the crook of her knees, the other under her shoulders. Her head flops back. He’s talking into her throat, carrying her to the car. She’s shaking her head. Misty’s wiping her forehead with paper towels. Richie raises up a little, like he has a body, has skin and bones and muscle, needs to stretch before he settles back down into his too-small spot on the floor.
“It’s how I get home.”
It’s afternoon. The clouds are gone, the sky a great wash of blue, soft white light everywhere, turning Kayla gold, turning me red. Everything else eating light while Richie shrugs it off. The trees clatter.
“You ain’t even from Bois.” I say it like it’s a fact, when I know it’s a question.
Richie leans forward, leans so close that if he had breath, it would be hitting me in the face, stinking up my nose. I done seen pictures of toothbrushes from the ’40s. Big as hair brushes, bristles look metal. I wonder if they even had them up there, in Parchman, or if they gnawed a twig to a brushy softness and rubbed their teeth with that, the way Pop said he had to do when he was growing up.
“There’s things you think you know that you don’t.”
“Like what?” I spit it out fast because Misty’s opening the front door, and Michael’s laying Leonie in the front seat, and I know the rest of my words have to be quiet.
“Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone. Ain’t nothing but a field and some woods, but even if the house was still there, it ain’t about that.” Richie rubs his knuckles together. “I don’t know.”
I raise my right eyebrow at him. Mam can do it, and I can do it. Pop and Leonie can’t.
“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived . . . it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”
“So what?” I whisper.
Michael starts the car and pulls out of the narrow gravel parking lot beside the gas station. Wind kneads my scalp.
“This my way to find that.”
“Find what?”
“A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song.”
“That don’t make no sense.”
Misty glances over at me. I look out the window.
“It will,” Richie says. “It’s why you can hear animals, see things that ain’t there. It’s a piece of you. It’s everything inside of you and outside of you.”
“What else?” I lower my hand and mouth.
“What?”
“What else I don’t know?”
Richie laughs. It’s an old man’s laugh: a wheeze and a croak.
“Too much.”
“The biggest ones,” my lips form.
“Home.”
I roll my eyes.
“Love.”
I point at Kayla. Richie shrugs.
“There’s more,” he says. He wiggles like the floor is too hard, like he doesn’t like talking about love. The way he looks at me then, like the secretary at the school did when I was seven and I had an accident and peed myself and Leonie never showed up with clean clothes, so I sat on a hard orange plastic chair in the office and shivered for an hour until they got in touch with Mam, and she came and walked me out of the AC into the hot day. Like he’s sorry for me, for what I got to learn.
“And time,” he says. “You don’t know shit about time.”