My cousins rolled their eyes, said “Fuck that nigga,” and kept the volume where it was. The sun came up, washed the yard a milky gray, then white, and we departed one by one to our houses, where we eased open doors, tiptoed inside, and fell into dead sleeps while the sun burned its way higher into the sky and the community rose to face the day. Everything about the night seemed stolen, lived in those murky hours while others slept or worked. We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.
On February 26, 2004, Demond was working third shift, at night. He called Rob before he left work, told him he would call him when he made it home, that maybe Rob could ride with him to a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in Gulfport, to Walmart, to get diapers for his daughter.
On another night, Demond would have driven to DeLisle, turned into Rob’s mother’s driveway, which dipped down from St. Stephen’s, and stopped to the side of Rob’s mother’s house. Rob would have loped out, slid into the passenger seat of the maroon two-door car, eased into conversation with Demond, and they would’ve driven up Lobouy Road, pine-cloaked under the night sky, thick with animal secrets, to the interstate. At that hour, Gulfport would have been desolate: a stretch of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, two-story hotels, neon lights, black and yellow oil-spotted parking lots, and beyond them, pines and ranch-style houses divided into subdivisions. Demond’s car would have been one of a few idling at stoplights, filling up in gas stations, parked near the doors at Walmart. They would have flicked the ashes from their cigars out the window to turn to dust on the asphalt. It would have been a night like any other, where the company of a friend eased Demond out of a shift spent standing, repetitively doing one thing or another. But this was not a night like any other night because Demond never showed up at Rob’s house.
Later, talk around the factory where Demond worked, from the guard shack, would be that there was a truck lurking near the gates, that someone was watching the cars leave after second shift, arrive for third. Instead of going to Rob’s after he left work, Demond went home. Rob waited for him and fell asleep. In Rob’s blue room, the light from the television pulled him into his dreams: Rob slept, and the light shone over him with an aluminum crackle, flashing, but he didn’t wake. Neither did anyone in the houses next to Demond’s, or in the house across the street. Neither did Demond’s fiancée or his daughter when someone stepped out of the bushes in front of Demond’s house and shot him as he walked up to his door, tired and grimy with dried sweat, wanting a shower, maybe a beer. Hours later, Demond’s absence in that cavernous room, in a cold bed, woke his fiancée. She looked outside and saw his car. She walked out on the porch, her small feet making the wood creak, and saw someone asleep on the lawn. Who was asleep in the yard? Demond lay there, his dreads splayed away from his head, his face still, his eyes open, his chest red; but for that, he would have been asleep. She fell on him and screamed.
Charine got the call at around seven o’clock the next morning. We had a de facto phone tree: the first person to hear would call the second person, who would call the third, who would call the fourth, and somewhere in that line someone would call Rob, who would call Nerissa, who would call Charine, who would tell me, no matter the time. I was home for my spring break, asleep, dreaming of nothing, when she came into my room in my mother’s house, switched on the light, and without preamble said, “Mimi, Demond’s been shot.” I heard her, covered my eyes, breathed. Death rushed me like water does the first summer jumper into a still-chill spring river.
“What the fuck!” I said.
Charine hopped from one foot to another.
“What happened?” I said.
“I don’t know. It might be drug-related. You know he was supposed to testify against that dude from New Orleans.”
Charine climbed into the bed with me, turned toward the wall. If she cried, she was silent, and I could not feel it in her back or her stomach. I spooned her, threw my arm over her ribs, held her like I had when she was a baby, when she was growing out of her chubby precociousness to walk, and I was an eight-year-old growing faster from the legs than anywhere else. She fell asleep, and every time my arm rose and fell with her breath, I thanked something that she still breathed, even as I was sick about it, whatever it was, that killed us one after the other. Senseless, I thought. This is never going to end, I thought. Never.
I woke up four hours later. My eyes were puffy and red, matted at the seams from crying, from sleeping. I threw on a sweatshirt and drove with Charine to meet Nerissa at Demond’s house. I played one song over and over in my car, parked on the street, felt the acute sense that life had promised me something when I was younger, that it wouldn’t be this hard, perhaps, that my people wouldn’t keep dying without end. I’m only twenty-six, I thought. I’m tired of this shit.
We sat with Demond’s fiancée, a widow at my age, her face swollen, red-tinged underneath the black. She smoked cigarette after cigarette.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “Nothing.”
She said it as if the fact that she hadn’t heard the gunshot meant it couldn’t have happened. We did not know then that the police would conduct an investigation for a few months, post signs at the local gas stations near the interstate asking for any information about Demond’s murder. We did not know the murderer would remain faceless, like the great wolf trackless in the swamp, and the police’s search would be fruitless.
On the day after Demond died, I sat on his concrete porch steps. When the sun set, the coven of bats that lived in Demond’s roof burst from the vents and out into the night in a black, squeaking mass. Where we had parked and drank and gotten high on Demond’s lawn, now there was yellow police tape draped from pine to pine, circumventing the mimosa. It read: CAUTION. Nerissa smoked, exhaling clouds into the cold air, the skin dry at the sides of her mouth, and I wondered who had come out of the dark and killed Demond. Even as I knew the figure that had waited hidden for him in the shivering pockets of the trees was human, I wanted to turn to Nerissa and ask her: What do you think it is? What?
We Are Wounded, 1984–1987
My mother, my father, Josh, Nerissa, and I moved from the small house in the big field to a cream and yellow single-wide trailer in DeLisle on a dead-end red-dirt road. The road was mostly wooded, but there was a cluster of houses near the dead end, and each of those houses contained boys whom I would be friends with for the rest of my life. I was seven then. Joshua and I and the boys spent our days swinging from my father’s punching bag, which he’d hung from a pecan tree in the front yard, having mud fights, running races down the middle of the road, picking unripe pears by the wagonful from my aunt’s house farther down the street and eating so many we grew sick. I thought my parents were mostly happy then, but now I know my own happiness blinded me.