Men We Reaped Read Online Free PDF Page B

we’d done the previous summer. That drinking had been insane, ecstatic. We’d taken shots of Everclear that summer, felt that liquor running through us, thrumming: for this moment, you are young and alive. Live, more. The summer of 2004, we were no longer rebel drinkers, imbibing to break rules, to shit on mores. Now, we were subdued drinkers, drinking to forget. By the summer of 2004, we knew we were old: by the end of the summer, we’d know we had one foot in the grave.
    On that night at Rog’s house, we’d gotten cases of Budweiser, Rog’s favorite beer, and we were playing dominoes, smoking, and talking. Charine, who never drank, decided that she was going to drink instead of smoke that night. I stood in the back room, which felt like a screened-in porch, and talked to my younger cousin Dez, who like most of my younger cousins stood taller than me, so he had to bend over when I spoke. He asked me about my writing, what I was working on, and I told him: a book about twin boys, young men, from a place like DeLisle. He made me feel embarrassed when he praised me in the dark room, under the music, for writing about “real shit,” he said. I sipped my beer: I hated the taste of it, but I loved the buzz of it. Charine downed her liquor, drink after drink, until she staggered past me.
    â€œI need to go to the bathroom,” she said.
    Rog led us down the hallway as I walked Charine through his mother’s room to her private bathroom. I turned on the light, and Charine sank to her knees, let her head fall in my lap, and passed out. Unconscious, she threw up. Rog disappeared, then reappeared.
    â€œShe all right? She need to drink some water.”
    â€œYeah, she a lightweight,” I said, stroking her hair, staring blearily at the yellow rug.
    For the two hours we sat on the floor of his mother’s bathroom, Charine asleep in my lap, me drinking the last of my warm beer, nursing my dark buzz, Rog came with offerings: one glass of water, two glasses of water, potato chips, bread for Charine’s stomach. Charine drank the water but refused the bread and chips, so I ate them. When I’d sobered up enough to drive, Rog helped me bring her out to the car and saw us off into the bayou, the night.
    The next day Charine and I visited Rog. The day was hot and bright, cumulus clouds like mountains loomed in the sky, but it did not rain. Rog was sitting in a hard plastic chair, and when Charine and I walked up the driveway to the carport, he dragged over two other chairs, metal with plastic weave. We sat. I was hungover. The woven straps dug into my legs, but it felt good to sit, to find a little ease in the shade as Rog and Charine smoked, as the cicadas trilled and ticked. Rog and Charine talked about how things in the hood had changed, how we felt like death was stalking us, driving us from one another, the community falling apart. They talked about how messed up they’d been the night before. They talked about California. They talked about change.
    Rog talked about change, about returning to California,with others, too. It was all he could think of then, and I imagined the pines and the thick air felt like the walls of an invisible room to him, closed on all sides. Perhaps this made him use more, because like many people, Rog medicated with drugs and alcohol. His habit became more evident. He lost weight, became even more wiry, even more lean, his smile, slight when it shone, dimmer in his face. His cousin Bebe said that leaving was all he talked about one summer day, leaving Mississippi to return to California. He missed his job; he missed the freedom of the different, the new. He told her, “Cuz, you know, it’s a better place for me out there. I can make a better way.” He turned his bottle up. “I’m ready to change, ready to go,” he said. “I’ll be straight out there, but here …” And as he spoke, a boy from the neighborhood who was