“You all right, babe?” Michael asks.
I shake my head no. Given-not-Given reaches out again, this time to Michaela, and it looks as if she sees him, as if he can actually touch her, because she goes rigid all at once, and then a golden toss of vomit erupts from Michaela’s mouth and coats the officer’s uniformed chest. Misty drops Michaela and bends and gags. Phantom Given claps silently, and the officer freezes.
“Fuck!” he says.
Michaela crawls to Jojo, and the officer yanks at Jojo’s pocket, pulls out a small bag Jojo had, and looks within it before shoving it back in Jojo’s face like it’s a rotten banana peel. He stalks back to stand in front of us again, and he is opening our cuffs, and he shines. The bile glistens, the blue flashes.
“Go home,” he says. There is no cinnamon and cologne anymore. Just stomach acid.
“Thank you, Officer,” Michael says. He grabs my arm and walks me toward the car, and I cannot hide the shudder of pleasure as the meth licks and his fingers grip and the officer undoes Jojo’s cuffs.
“Boy had a damn rock in his pocket,” the officer says. “Go home, and keep that child in the seat as much as you can.”
Phantom Given frowns at me as I slide into the passenger seat. My body lolls. I can’t blink. My eyes snap open, again and again. Given-not-Given shakes his head as the real Michael slams the passenger door.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Misty breathes in the backseat. Jojo straps Michaela’s legs in her seat and hugs her and the whole contraption: the plastic back, the padding. Michaela sobs and grabs handfuls of his hair. I expect him to tell her it’s okay, but he doesn’t. He just rubs his face against her, his eyes closed. My spine is a rope, tugged north, then south. Michael puts the car in gear.
“You need milk,” Michael says. Phantom Given wipes his hand across his mouth, and it is then I realize that streams of spit are coming from my mouth, thick as mucus. Given-not-Given turns away from the car and disappears: I understand. Phantom Given is the heart of a clock, and his leaving makes the rest of it tick tock tick tock, makes the road unfurl, the trees whip, the rain stream, the wipers swish. I bend in half, my mouth in my elbow and knees, and moan. Wish it was Mama’s lap. My jaw clacks and grinds. I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.
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.”