Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward Read Free Book Online Page B

like dehydrated vegetation. The door closed and Joshua raised his
head.
    "That's what we got to look forward to," he said.
    "If we get hired here and Kermit the Frog's our boss, I just might have
to hit him," Christophe said.
    "Yeah, so we can get fired... cause you know I'm going to have to
jump in and save your no-fighting ass," Joshua laughed.
    Christophe pulled Joshua to his feet, and Joshua walked to the car
while Christophe began patting his pockets for the keys again. Joshua was
staring at the pavement. Christophe spoke to the taut skin at the back of
his brother's head, his meaty, sloping shoulders.
    "We'll find something."
    "I know."
    The air was already difficult to breathe. The sun had boiled it dense
so that it smelled strongly of salt and tar, and had burned the water of
the gulf a dirty brownish blue. Unlocking the door and looking over the
car and past his brother, Christophe studied the beach. He could see
the barrier islands floating on the horizon of the water, appearing like
bristling shadows of elongated reeds as they siphoned the current and
blocked the clean blue-green wash of the Gulf of Mexico, blocked the
water that swept up from the Caribbean, and impacted the beach that
he saw with silt, with mud, with runty, dirty waves. He was calm; he was
ready. As Joshua slumped and played with the stereo, Christophe turned
the ignition. He hated those islands.
    Theyvisited four more places that morning: Burger King, Dairy Queen,
Circle K, and Sonic. Burger King smelled like McDonald's. The orange
of the decor made the interior of the restaurant darker than McDonald's.
The boys didn't know anyone who worked there. After they left Burger
King, they rode around and ate Whoppers, shoving the napkins they
hadn't used in the glove compartment. Joshua said with a smirk, "Well, I
guess the car is really ours now." They submitted applications at Sonic and
Dairy Queen. They filled half the tank at Circle K, and completed their forms on the dashboard of the car, hunched over, itching wetly against
the crushed cloth of the seats. Christophe had signed his name with a
flourish, tossed the pen on the seat between them, and insisted that it
was too hot to ride around in the car with no air conditioning on the
job search. They'd gone home then, hiding from the hottest part of the
afternoon in the living room with Ma-mee, catching the tail end of her
daytime soaps and watching jeopardy. They'd asked her to wake them
up early the next morning and gone to bed after watching reruns of The
Cosby Show at nine because Ma-mee loved Clair Huxtable. The twins had
fallen asleep without talking.

    The next morning, they'd driven to Chevron first. Piggly Wiggly
and Wal-Mart and K-Mart were next on the list. The managers were all
clones of each other: a short, plump feather-haired white woman for
the grocery stores, and a shrunken curly-haired white man for the gas
stations. They spent the morning waiting in lines, writing against walls.
Christophe wondered why all the places they put in applications smelled
like antiseptic. Under the gas smells and the new cheap clothes smells and
the smells of plastic wrapping and the greasy, stale food, the weeks-old
hot dogs, there was always the smell of Lysol, of ammonia, of some sort
of stringent cleaner. Sometime after noon, Christophe called off the job
search for the day after the second time Joshua fell asleep in the passenger
seat, and Christophe saw the sweat beading and running down Joshua's
face as if he'd been doused with water. He'd sweat like that since they
were kids. Christophe had opened a napkin at a stoplight and laid it over
Joshua's face like a caul and then took the next right and drove them
home. When he'd awoken Joshua and told him to go inside, Joshua hadn't
moved, but instead grunted at his brother and spent the afternoon asleep
in the car.
    Now they were in the parking lot of the dockyard. The main office,
set in a little