Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

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 into 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. Kayla is making me so hot and 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 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 Beau 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 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.