yesnothankyou

“I’m out of my fuckin’ mind,” he sighs, and it’s true, he is. In my memories his hair is always long, too golden from the sun, but that’s not what it looks like anymore, not what it looks like here. He rolls his own cigarettes still, pinches it between his lips and smoke floods from just the corner. I think his hands are interesting. Tattooed and textured, weathered from years of farm work. He passes the brown bag to his brother, both their faces red already. A paper bag crinkling between rough fingers is one of those odd things engraved in the soft shore of my soul. Kalem takes a sip, smiling, ignoring him—says: “Billie-Jo, what did daddy do when Quickboy took off with him?” and when he says her name, he shoots it out his mouth, melts it together, some single slurring word. Both of them do that. She suppresses an eyeroll, but I think she’s having fun. “He said, call Johnny, tell him to get in the truck. We’ll try to cut ‘em off.” Joe barks a laugh, head tossed back, cigarette all ash. “How were they gonna stop a horse with their trucks? I thought that son of a bitch meant to kill me.” They did finally catch him though. None of them remember how. By the time they found him, he was on the other side of the bridge in Des Allemands, across the bayou. All Joe remembers is flying down highway 90 on an angry horse that his father forced him to ride, the trucks closing in, his uncle screaming cusswords. Then his mind blanks out. He wasn't even ten years old.

Later, Joe’s crying because he lost a bet over a Saints game. It was too much money, it always is. He’s already gone, and it’s a little fascinating how that can still happen since he’s been drinking as far back as he can remember. They all started drinking early; at every fish fry, their dad, grandfather, and great uncle Junkhead would let them take sips if they fetched their beers for them. The men would get drunk enough that pretty soon the sips turned into gulps, turned into whole cans filched. Joe calls this the only thing those men ever gave me. I’ve seen pictures of him as a kid and he’s almost never smiling. For a long time it doesn’t make sense to me, that’s not how I know him. Usually he’s performing, turning his horrors into legends, sentences melding, erratic. He talks like his mother from the marsh, only he speaks faster. Every other word is unintelligble and brackish like the water he comes from. There's a glittering intensity to it, still. Draws people in and it’s captivating, can't look away.

When he finally stops crying, he drinks more from his paper bag and tells another legend. His eyes are glass, faded blue. He looks like the man he was named after, but no one's ever called him that. Squinting through his haze, he talks about when him and my parrain, his best friend Kanupe, ran from the cops when they were fifteen. They booked it through all of Paradis, didn't even get caught. “We might have been the two dumbest motherfuckers, but we knew exactly where to go.” His voice surges with satisfaction. “Back then, we roamed.” They hid in a patch of swamp, down in the muck. He smiles that lopsided grin when he makes the memory a fable. Years later, my parrain recites this story too, but it goes differently. He says Joe cried when they got back to the house, heaving and dripping on the stoop. His dad wasn't home and the relief unhinged him. My mom watched them hug from the window, because they were the brothers they didn't get to have. That was the same year he had a seizure outside the church. Some CYO dance on Halloween, and Joe took something with his beer. Next thing she knew he was out on the lawn, convulsing. Her and Kanupe were dressed as wisemen, staring silently as they waited for the ambulance. Two kids in costumes, wearing fake beards, watching their hero come undone.

Kalem’s getting there, but it takes longer, he’s eighteen years behind. He starts another story. Billie-Jo, who's never called that except by her brothers, smirks just like they do. She doesn't drink anymore. Not after she left the bayou and all those ghosts. The rest of them don't know how to stop, it's the only thing they've got, and now when they smile it looks deranged, all that devotion and cruelty twisted together. That crushes her but she understands. She pulls a drag from her red—Cowboy killers they always scold her—and holds it in her lungs good and long before letting it go. The freckles that gather at her sharp cheekbones are faint and perfect. They're talking about their mom now, the time when Melinda was interrogating her, saying mama, you and nanny are never gonna die right? am I right? What she doesn’t say is that later, Joe told her if their daddy couldn’t kill her, nothing could. Instead, she talks about how nanny pined for Father Bane, that she had a framed photo of him on her nightstand. They both howl with laughter, loud and thick with a corrupted love that's only theirs to know. “Ain’t that a trip?”

My nanny’s house scared me, all that iron and red velvet. I liked the porch, though. She had a can crusher and I liked watching those pepsi cans crunch into disks. By the time I came around, Father Bane was long gone and so was the picture on her night stand. When she says my name, her voice warbles. There’s a dollhouse in the living room but she won’t let me play with it even though I didn’t ask. I walk the property instead, running my fingers along the chain link fence. The land stretches out for miles and I feel like the tiniest thing anyone could ever be. Kalem finds me and when I tell him about the dollhouse I start to cry, but I don’t know why, I didn’t want to play with it anyway. He hugs me, tells me he’ll buy me a thousand doll houses, and then we go spit in her garden.

Kalem lives with us for a summer when I’m in the fifth grade. He becomes friends with all the neighborhood boys. They play manhunt every evening and I beg them to let me play but they never do. They complain that Kalem would help me win, and he says they’re right. I watch from a rooftop instead, furious and jealous. I decide to forgive him at a crawfish boil, when all my cousins say I'm his favorite and Kalem doesn't disagree, just keeps peeling crawfish for me. He buys an old pickup, sky blue, and sometimes lets me ride in the bed, which I think is a gut-punch kind of joy, unparalleled. He has this Johnny Cash album and doesn't play anything besides Wayfaring stranger. I get so sick of it, the same song over and over, but it's the only song his daddy still sings sometimes. I've never heard my grandfather sing. I know that it's beautiful, though. I know, because they all get somber when they talk about it. The single part of him not too sharp to hold. One day, Kalem comes home with a black eye and scratches on his face. I sneak into his room that night and ask him what happened. “Aw, Ash. Sometimes I want to tell you everything, but you’re so little.” I don’t know what he means. He tries to explain, just can't figure out how. What I've learned is that when you're born into something ugly it's hard to leave it behind. I watch him play video games until I fall asleep. He moves back in with his dad when the summer’s over, and he’s never the same.

When I graduate high school, Joe and my parrain call me, but not Kalem because he’s in prison again. I sit on the back porch just listening to them both fighting to get a word in. Kuh, Kanupe says. I don’t know anyone besides my family who uses that word. “BJ’s gonna knock us out when she finds out the shit we tell her.” My uncle Joe says she punches real hard. That’s because she used to be the maddest person in the whole world. She’s not mad anymore, though. She smokes her same marlboros like she has forever, and her smile lines are the best thing I know. Her stories are sad and sometimes accidentally beautiful and she tells them easy, unafraid. She says some people can’t make it out of darkness, but some people can claw through. Out of spite, at first, and then out of love.