Men We Reaped (8 page)

Demond lived in a seafoam-green house. It had belonged to his grandmother; her husband had probably built it for her, as was the custom in DeLisle in those days. When his girlfriend gave birth to their child when he was in his late twenties, his mother gave him the house for them to live in. It was like most of the older houses in DeLisle: perched up on cinder
blocks, two or three, in case of flood; low ceilings, wood paneling, small corner kitchen. Demond's house was set at the rear of a long, roomy piece of corner property. His yard was mostly grass with a few trees clustered closer near the front of the house: an old spreading oak, pecan, a crape myrtle gone to seed. The house was fronted by a wood-framed, screened-in porch. The living room was always dark, lit only by the neon play of the television across the walls, our faces. The dining room was usually empty except for domino and spades games on the older wooden table, the kitchen brown as the rest of the house. The bathroom was shoved behind the kitchen in a weird, diagonally placed nook off his child's bedroom. The rest of the house, which included two more bedrooms, was designed like a shotgun house, each room opening onto another.

I never went through the door in his child's bedroom wall into the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, through that door to the extra bedroom in the back where sometimes his girlfriend's twin slept. I wondered about those rooms often, wondered if they were as dark as the rooms in the front, if they seemed as sealed, as insular, and I imagined them stretching off into a great distance, room after room, each one more cavelike than its predecessor, each holding what would later become treasure: a picture of Demond grinning and holding his child, his Enyce fits, his Timberland boots, still smelling faintly of the sweat of his feet. I never imagined people in those rooms since all the living seemed to be done in the front.

We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and
the new. I wondered about Demond's grandmother and her kids, and wondered what their lives in Demond's house had been like. Had they lived with the dead as we did? Had they quaffed shine the way we did beer and weed and pills, and then stare at each other in the dim light, glassy-eyed, hoping for a sea change? Even though Demond's parents had remained married and both had good jobs, his family wasn't so different from my family, his reality the same, death stalking us all. If Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?

That same summer, we decided to have a crawfish boil at Nerissa's apartment. Rob borrowed a gas burner and a huge silver pot from a friend in the neighborhood. He set it at the edge of Nerissa's small concrete back patio, pulled out a plastic table, set six chairs around it. It was a bright, warm day; the grass was tough with water because it was summer. It had been raining at least every other day for the past month. Rob set out with two empty coolers and went to a seafood shop that specialized in crawfish during the season, and returned with them full and crawling with mud-green crawfish. He and Nerissa chopped seasonings, dumped them in the heavy silver pot so large an infant could fit inside, and began boiling the sides. Charine and her boyfriend, C. J., cuddled on the sofa, demanded that the rest of us watch the Bruce Lee biopic
Dragon
over and over again. People arrived one by
one, in pairs, in carfuls, Rog and Demond among them. Once there, Demond took a seat at the table where a dominoes game was in mid-slap. A cooler of beer appeared, a few bottles of Crown, some fruity malt beverages for the girls. We spread newspaper over the kitchen table inside the house, dumped the boiled crawfish, now blood red, on the table. We peeled, sucked, and ate. My lips began to burn and I noticed that everyone who was eating crawfish was sniffing, eyes watery, lips red and puffy as pickled pig's lips in a jar. Demond sat at the table with Nerissa and me and Charine, passed us drinks, asked me questions about what I did.

“So what you doing up there?”

“I'm trying to be a writer.”

“What you want to write?”

“Books about home. About the hood.”

“She writing about real shit,” Charine said.

“What you mean?” Demond asked.

“They be selling drugs in the book,” Charine said.

“For real?” Demond asked, took a swig of his beer.

“Yeah,” I said. Laughed, drank a third of my bottle.

“I told you she be writing about the hood,” Charine said.

“You should write about my life,” Demond said.

“I should, huh?” I laughed again. I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about. Then, I laughed it off. Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims.

“It'd be a bestseller,” Demond said.

“I don't write real-life stuff,” I said. It was my stock response for that suggestion, but even as I said it, I experienced
a sort of dissonance. I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren't as raw as they could be, weren't
real
. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn't pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn't figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God. To avoid all of this, I drank.

“I'll think about it,” I said. I smiled. Demond smiled. The vein running down the center of his high forehead pulsed and the skin around his eyes bunched at the corners.

Rob put the last batch of the eighty pounds of crawfish to boil at midnight, cut the burner off, and then went inside and forgot about them, fell asleep. We all slept, drunk, lips tender, on sofas, on floors, in beds. I woke at 2:00 A.M. hungry and drunk and stumbled out onto the slab to find the pot cold, the crawfish bloated with water, soft and ruined, and rain falling, the drops fat and warm. The dominoes, the table, the chairs: all wet. When I stepped out into the grass, searching for some crawfish that had been spared, hidden away on a plate or container, the grass gave and my feet sank. Every step was an exercise in loss. I looked up into the rain, then gave up, slipped
back inside, figured somebody would clean up the mess in the morning, and fell asleep in the bunk bed that my nephew slept in when he visited Nerissa.

Illusions was a club that had been many things before it became what it was for us that summer and the next. It had been a country bar, a teen club, a “Black” club, a pop club, and then finally it became what it would be when Katrina's storm surge bulldozed the beachfront property flat: a Black club we affectionally called “Delusions.” The first floor consisted of a bar and small, crowded dance floor. Upstairs, there were pool tables, another bar, and a small space for a photographer to work, where my cousins and I took pictures in front of a banner spray-painted with a city skyline that was completely alien to the long, low towns of the Coast. God's Gift, the frame around the Polaroid reads. When the club was packed to capacity, the walls sweated and the glass fogged with perspiration.

That night, I drove to Illusions while Nerissa rode in the passenger seat and my brother's last girlfriend, Tasha, laughed in the back. We were perfumed, giddy, glad to be out of Nerissa's apartment, out of Demond's house, where we'd been spending a lot of time:
out
. I wore black. Rob and Demond followed in Demond's car, an older-model Z40 sportscar, sleek and low to the ground. My old boyfriend Brandon met us there. Charine and C. J. had decided to stay at Nerissa's apartment, watching
Forrest Gump
and smoking. Upstairs in Illusions, Rob gave us his shining grin, gold in his dark face, and bought Nerissa, Tasha, and me drinks. They were
walk-me-downs, fluorescent blue and sweet, made of nearly every liquor behind the bar. I couldn't taste the alcohol in it. I gulped mine down, anxious, almost, for the buzz to hit. We stood at the end of the bar with Rob and Brandon, a cigar at the corner of Rob's mouth, watching the women gliding like sleek ducks through the crowd, dressed in gold and pastel denim, hairstyles molded stiff, and the men separated by hood, drinks in hand, stopping girls with a pinched waist, a grasped wrist, a smile,
hey
. I looked at the crowd of people and wondered at their stories, and for a sober moment I knew that their stories were ours, and ours theirs.

“Y'all want another one?” Demond asked. The corner of his mouth made a gesture at a smile.

“Yeah,” Nerissa said. I nodded, as did Tasha. He bought us each another drink, slid them across the bar to us. The clear plastic cups were cold to the touch, perspiring instantly. I drank. When I swallowed, I smiled at Demond in what was supposed to be an unspoken thank-you. Demond laughed and told me that he liked my outfit. His dreadlocks swung. He was handsome, fair, charming. Women approached him, lingered in his field of vision, waiting for him to talk to them, to hit on them, to say hello. He didn't have to flirt. People were attracted to him, and he was charismatic enough to draw them even closer to him with conversation when he wanted to. When he didn't the planes of his face were more severe and he was a closed door, his eyes peepholes viewed from the wrong side, obscuring everything. He had a temper. But that night he was all geniality.

I sucked up the drink: I was thirsty, and it was cold and lemony. I danced at the bar. Nerissa threw her wrist over my
shoulder and danced with me. Tasha, who could dance better than both of us, laughed and drank. Everything turned hazy then: Demond's face blurred, and I told my sister I didn't feel so good. We went to the bathroom together. She took the last available stall, and I heard her vomiting into the toilet. I swayed and my throat burned. Something was wringing my insides out. I was wretched.

“Fuck it,” I said, and leaned over the garbage can, large and full to the brim. I threw up. Everything was hot and sticky: I could feel the bass thudding through the building from the dance floor downstairs through the grimy tile of the bathroom wall. Pretty girls using napkins to wipe sweat from their foreheads: they walked in and out of the bathroom, ignoring me. Some girl in purple and gold stumbled in wearing stilettos and said, “Get it all out, baby.” This was comforting, and I gurgled. Vomit splashed on the top layer of plastic cups. Nerissa came out of her stall, and suddenly I was finished. The world spun. I grabbed her shoulders, followed her out of the bathroom, and blacked out.

When I came to, I was in the backseat of my car, slumped over in the center. Nerissa was on my right, leaning over on my shoulder. Tasha's back was to me because her head rested on the upholstered seat. Brandon and Rob and Demond's voices were loud. I opened my eyes only long enough to see them standing near the two open doors of the car, smiling down at us. The breeze from the Gulf cut cleanly through the car, hot and salty. I couldn't move.

“Walk-me-down, huh? It sure walked them down,” Brandon said.

“Look at them,” Rob said.

We were all sick.

“It's not funny!” Tasha yelled, and in my drunken stupor, I felt like laughing. They did this: despite all, they made us laugh damn near every time we were together. But I couldn't open my mouth. I could only listen as Demond laughed for me, clean and cutting, and the wind carried it away across the parking lot to the Outback steak house, where it sputtered away like a desultory breeze. I curled in on myself. All I wanted in the world was for it to go dark, to not exist. I wanted to black out again. Then I did.

The next time we met at Illusions was New Year's Eve of 2004, over a year later, and there were more of us. This is when we took the picture with the God's Gift background. I left my hair down, curly and big, wore a red one-shoulder shirt and red boots with silver studs and silver stiletto heels shaped skinny and sharp as knives. In the picture, we are all drunk, and everyone smiles. We know that taking this cheap picture is tacky, but we are a neighborhood, a community, a hood, a family, so we grin. Knees bend, hips angle, waists are grabbed. Drunk and sentimental, I loved every one of them for still being alive.

I never drove home when I was drunk. One of my more sober cousins or friends, one of my sisters maybe, drove us back to DeLisle that night, where we ended up in Demond's yard at 4:00 A.M. The sky was deepest black, salted with stars. We were all drunk, all high, all smoking packs of Black & Mild cigars while we perched on car hoods. The music played in the cars where some of us sat having conversations, club-sweaty,
intoxicated and serious. Demond wove his way through the cars with a 22-ounce of beer in his hand, talking and laughing.

“You on a all-night flight, huh?” he asked me as I leaned on the car next to my cousin Blake, passing a cigar back and forth, which I had never smoked before. It was so strong it was making me dizzy and tingly, and I liked the sensation, but not enough to smoke one again, I thought. It was making my throat burn.

The night pulsed with bugs; they gave low, staccato ticks. I smiled at Demond, at all of them. There was no place I wanted to be more than that yard, leaning on that car, interior lights flashing on and off, a lone streetlight a block away leaving us wide-eyed, struggling to see each other in the dark.

Demond ducked his head into the window of a car where two of my cousins were sitting and said, “Hey man, turn the music down.” He didn't wait for them to reply and walked off, his dreads swinging. He liked the party, but he didn't want the county cops to wander by and stop, drawn by the music, and he didn't want the neighbors to complain. Not only did he have responsibilities, but he also had spent the last couple of years dodging the kind of bad luck that afflicts the innocent in drug-plagued neighborhoods, where every other cousin or friend is a drug dealer, every older cousin or friend an addict. Demond had been witness to the aftermath of a shooting and had agreed to testify against the alleged shooter. The shooting had occurred in DeLisle, during a holiday. He'd also agreed to testify against a drug dealer who wasn't from DeLisle but had been operating in the neighborhood. His conscience had made him agree to testify in the
first case, and since he'd been stopped while riding in a car with the drug dealer in the second case, self-preservation had made him agree to testify in the second. These things weighed on him and he felt he had no room for error.