“For sure,” he said.
As Hilton rolled the blunt, I watched cars pass by, and tried to persuade C. J. to light a fire in the rusty steel barrel used as a garbage can, to drive away the gnats.
“Come on, C. J. You know you want to light a fire.”
“I think you want to do it, Pocahontas,” he said to me.
“No, I don’t. I protect nature.” I laughed.
“Come on, Mimi. You can do it,” C. J. said.
Hilton laughed at me; his face dimpled and his wide shoulders shook. I was depressed and hungover. I was dreading the drive back to Michigan the next day, its endless winter. I scanned the ground and assessed what I could use to set a fire: overgrown, dry winter grass, shorn oak branches, brown leaves, acorns, bits of napkins and potato chip bags and empty soda bottles littering the park. Through gaps in the pines, I saw two crackheads, our older cousins, former friends, walking up and down out on the main, pebbly street, waiting for dealers.
“I’m a junkie for this shit.” C. J. laughed and held up the blunt. “Really, though.”
I waved it away when Hilton offered it to me. They smoked for three hours until the sun set and a heavy fog rolled in with the night. Once every few years, a whiteout fog blanketed the entire Gulf Coast for days, reducing visibility to nothing. During winter fogs like this, we cursed and fiddled with our headlights, which did little to reveal the Mississippi landscape: our lights solitary seekers in the country dark.
We didn’t end up going to the movies. I had to pack. I folded clothes and burned CDs for my sisters and my cousins and loaded my car and stood in my yard and listened to the cacophony, even in winter, of insects in the woods surrounding my house. It was a blessed noise to hear the sounds of home even if I couldn’t see much of it in the thick fog. While I worked, Charine sat in my car in the driveway with C. J. and smoked for an hour or so. He didn’t want to go to whatever his temporary home for the night was, to walk to Duck’s house or Rob’s house or Pot’s house and sleep on the couch. He wanted to stay in my car with Charine, to talk into the night and through the morning. She was his home. But Charine told him: I hate the cold. She came inside around midnight, and he left. He walked down the street to Duck’s house, disappearing into the fog. I imagine him standing beneath the big oak tree, waiting for his cousins to appear out of the fog and pick him up. If he couldn’t be with Charine, he would avoid sleeping altogether and find other things to do with his night. They were planning to ride upcountry to bring his cousin’s infant son home.
Charine had fallen asleep but I was still busy packing when the phone rang at two o’clock in the morning. It was C. J.’s mother. Why is she calling the house? I thought.
“Hello?”
“C. J.’s been in an accident—”
I thought: No.
“—and he didn’t make it. Please tell Charine.”
I thought: I cannot do this.
“Okay,” I said.
C. J.’s mother sobbed and hung up the phone. I stared at the living room wall. I slumped over the sofa and tried to breath. The air felt wrong rushing down my throat. I called Hilton.
“Hello?”
I told him what C. J.’s mother had told me. I wiped my nose and said it all in a whisper.
“I cannot do this to her,” I cried. “I cannot tell her this. I cannot wake her up and do this to her.”
“I’m coming,” he said.
Thirty minutes later I let Hilton in the front door. He walked past me through the living room into the kitchen into the den and into Charine’s room. He switched on the light and shook her awake. He told her. She walked outside in the fog, and I put on my shoes. We three rode down to the park where I had seen him twelve hours earlier. We parked in the dark and people materialized out of the fog and woods and gathered with us until the sun rose, brought together again by a third tragedy, by another death and more loss and grief. They passed around blunts like napkins. My sister smoked until her eyes closed from the tears.
C. J. had ridden upcountry with his cousins: after they dropped the baby off, they hit a train. There was no reflective gate arm at the railroad crossing. There were flashing lights and bells that should have warned of the passing train, but they didn’t consistently work, and because it was located at a crossing out in the county in a mainly Black area, no one really cared about fixing them or installing a reflective gate arm. On that night, even if the warning system had been working, that errant mechanical sentry at that lonely Mississippi county crossing, it was no match for that blinding winter fog. C. J. was in the passenger’s seat. Our cousin swerved and slammed into the train with the right side of the car, which was crushed by the impact of the train car. C. J. was stuck in the automobile. The cousins tried to pull him out but he was sandwiched there. The car caught on fire and he burned while they stood by helpless, hollering for help into the cold white night, their cries swallowed by the Mississippi fog.
I cannot ask Charine about the facts of C. J.’s death. There are things that I don’t want her to think about, so I don’t ask her if he was still alive after the car hit the train. I don’t ask her if he spoke to his cousins when they tried to pull him from the car. I don’t ask her if he was still conscious when the fire sparked. I cannot ask if that’s what killed him, the fire. But I have heard stories from others, and they say he was alive. Some stories even say that he told them to leave him in the car while they were trying to pull him out; when I hear this, I think that he must have been in so much pain, his legs crushed by the metal, that he saw how futile their effort was. Some stories even say that the car burned and he was alive, and what is unspoken is that C. J. added his cries to his cousins’ hollering for help and they all screamed there besides those faulty lights and the train track that cut through the woods. But I do not tell Charine these stories; I would not add to her burden of loss, especially when she already carries blame. Often she says that if she had sat a while longer in my car, if only, he would have stayed at our house with her instead of leaving and riding with his cousins upcountry. If I would have stayed in the car, she says, he’d still be alive. The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.
The day after C. J. died, we drove to our friend’s house down the street, where we found him and four other boys from the hood sitting in a running car parked in his dirt driveway, beers in hand. They stared forward as if any minute they might hit the gas, drive north straight through the house, and leave this place. They cried with set faces. Charine climbed into the car, sandwiched in, and hugged one of them. I turned my back to the humming vehicle and covered my face. I saw everything. I understood nothing.
The night after C. J.’s death, I drove my sister around DeLisle while she smoked the rest of that batch of weed she had given C. J. We drove my tank dry into the morning as she rolled blunts, and I wondered if we were courting death: If we weren’t, why did he keep following us, insistently, persistently, pulling us to him one by one? She smoked that bag, and after she finished it, she smoked through other bags. She told me they calmed her like cigarettes. She smoked every day, and for years after that night, she wept abruptly in the car without warning. When she did I turned the music up, and I let her cry, able only to say: “I know, I know.”
I pride myself on knowing words, on figuring out how to use them so they work for me. But years later, my sister digs up C. J.’s funeral announcements, a pamphlet and a bookmark, after I ask her to do so. She begins crying, talks of regret and loss, grief constant as a twin, of how she dreams of C. J., and in every dream she is always chasing him. In those dreams, he is agile and golden as he flips and flies and leaps, and he will not allow himself to be caught.