Salvage the Bones

THE NINTH DAY: HURRICANE ECLIPSE

The sound of someone throwing up in the bathroom wakes me. In my half sleep, I see myself in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, one hand on the back of the bowl, vomiting. But then the retching becomes louder, sounds like my tongue is curling up and out of my throat, and I realize I am not throwing up. I have never been so loud; have never made that sound. The bathroom disappears and I wake to the half-light of dawn, the ceiling, Junior asleep in his twin bed with his sheets and pillow kicked to the floor, and our door cracked.

It’s Daddy on the floor of the bathroom. Daddy with one hand on the back of the bowl, one knee on the floor. Daddy looking like he’s about to dive into the toilet, lose his tongue.

“Daddy?”

“Get Randall,” he breathes, and then his back curves and he sounds like he’s being ripped.

The hallway is still dark. Randall is in his bed, Skeetah isn’t. After the match yesterday, he washed China under the lightbulb outside the back door. He rubbed her down and then sat on the back steps and dabbed antibiotic ointment from a dirty crumpled tube into her where Kilo had torn her and made the flesh show. Her leg and shoulder and her ripped breast looked like meat, and Skeetah took the same worn-out Ace bandage he’d wrapped his side with and cut it in thirds. He wrapped her leg, her neck and shoulder, her stomach, and pinned. She stood, eyes slits, panting easily, letting him patch her up. Every few minutes, she would wag her tail, and he would rub her somewhere it wasn’t red: her feet, her back, her tail. He must have slept in the shed with her. I have to shove Randall twice before he wakes up, his eyes rolling white, his arms up to guard his face.

“What?” he says. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Daddy. He in the bathroom throwing up.”

Randall looks at me like he can’t see me.

“What?”

“Daddy. In the bathroom. He’s sick.”

Randall nods at me, blinks. He’s waking.

“Said he needed you.”

By the time we get to the end of the hallway, Randall is bouncing, shaking the sleep off his arms and legs. Daddy has laid his head on the toilet, his face turned to us, his eyes closed, his arms hanging knuckle down on the peeling tile so that they look like sapling pine trees.

“I’m sick,” Daddy moans. “Can’t stop.”

“Come on, Daddy.”

“No.” Daddy tries to push Randall away from him as Randall bends over, grabbing Daddy under his arms, but Daddy is weak, and his hands fall away like dry branches. “Got to stay by the toilet.”

“I’ma put a garbage can next to your bed.” Randall tugs Daddy up, gets his chest in the air, but Daddy’s legs drag, and Daddy hangs there limp as sheets on a clothesline before they’ve been stretched and pinned. When the grandparents were still living, Mama washed all the sheets for both houses at once, and there was so much bedding that Daddy had to hang extra lines. Mama would walk through and hang them bunched first before spreading them. The sheets were so thin we could almost see through them. They made cloudy rooms, and we played hide-and-seek in them. In the winter, they made our faces wet and achingly cold, but in the summer, it was so hot the sheets didn’t stay wet long, but we smashed our faces into them anyway, trying to find the hidden cool. Mama yelled at us for dirtying them once when we left muddy prints on them; afterward, we let our hands hover over them, shoved our noses into them to see if we could see the other person running down the next billowing hallway. Now, washing and hanging clothes is me and Randall’s job: I don’t even think Skeetah knows how to work the washing machine.

“Grab his legs,” Randall says, so I bend and lift. Daddy is heavier than he looks. His eyes are closed and he is wheezing into his bicep; his breath gargles in his throat. “Come on.”

I have to back down the dark hallway, so we shuffle slowly. After Mama died, Daddy taught Randall and me how to use the washing machine. It was our job to wash the sheets, to hang them up. At first we only washed them when Daddy told us to, and later we washed them when they’d get so dirty we’d wake up often in the middle of the night, itching, scratching a shin, an ankle. This is how we hung the sheets in the beginning, when we were both too short to put them over the line: the wet sheet sagging in the middle, us counting and lifting and flinging the damp cotton at the same time hoping it would catch. Daddy’s ankles feel smooth as oranges. I don’t expect them to be so smooth.

“One, two, three,” Randall says, and we are lifting and rolling Daddy onto the bed like our sheets. For one moment, Randall is half his size, thin as a stretched belt, his knees big as softballs, all bone and skin, and we are children again, and Mama has just died and we are hanging her sheets. My eyes sting. Daddy leaves a wet trail across the pillowcase. He moans and holds his bad hand.

There are more beer cans on the nightstand, half empty. They shake when Randall kneels next to the bed, looking for Daddy’s medicine, which is on the floor.

“Your hand hurt?” Randall asks. Daddy rolls on his side, facing us, and I go to the bathroom and come back with the garbage can and put it under his nose next to the bed. There are candy wrappers and wadded-up toilet paper at the bottom of the can, but it is mostly empty. Randall turns on Daddy’s bedside lamp, reads the bottles to see which is his pain medicine. He is big and dark and every inch of him is pebbled with muscle, and sometimes I wonder if Daddy is amazed at how this tall machine of a boy came out of him and Mama. Sometimes I wonder if he’s amazed at Randall. And then I see Manny, almost as bright as China in the clearing, and wonder what will come from him and me: something gold and broad like him, black and small like me, or something more than either of us. Daddy came to one of Randall’s games, once, and stood by the gym doors the entire time, nodding to himself with his baseball cap in his hand, frowning at the court and half watching the game. He left before halftime.

“Daddy, it say here you wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol with these antibiotics. Or with these pain pills.”

Daddy shakes his head and lays still.

“Beer ain’t nothing,” he croaks into the pillow. “Just like a cold drink.”

“It’s probably why you throwing up.”

“I can’t lay here.” Daddy’s good hand is shaking. “Got to get the house ready.”

“Esch, get some water.” Randall grabs a can, crushes it in one hand with his long fingers, which closes like a spider. “And take these with you.”

I load the beer cans into my shirt. Daddy mumbles. When I come back with the water, Randall is handing Daddy his pills, and Daddy is at least up on an elbow, even if the side of his head is smashed into the headboard. He gulps down all the water and the pills as if taking it down fast will stop it from coming back up later.

“The hurricane,” Daddy says.

“You tell us what to do,” Randall says, and then asks me to get Daddy two pieces of bread for his stomach and put them on the table.

The breeze has become a wind today, its gusts stronger, harder than yesterday in the woods and clearing. With my fingers I find a flashlight in the metal storage box on the back of Daddy’s pickup truck along with a hammer and a drill. The nails are are all along the bottom of the box, like feathers and hay in a chicken coop. The windows first, Daddy had said. You have to cover all the windows. Picking the nails out is slow; I prick my finger on one, suck it, but there isn’t any blood, just the pain. I wonder if China’s ruined nipple will feel like this in her puppy’s mouth when it heals: hard, healed over hurt.

Skeetah walks out of the door of the shed and slides the tin slab he has been using as a door back in place. He turns on the water at the faucet, bends and drinks, lets it run over his head. When he comes over to me, the water is streaming in beads down his neck, down and over his collarbone like Kilo’s red shawl.

“What y’all in Daddy’s truck for?”

“He sick,” I say.

Randall is leaning half in and half out of the truck, tuning the radio to the black radio station. His legs are so long that they rest flat-footed on the hard packed dirt below the passenger door. He yells into the windshield so Skeetah can hear him. “He wants us to get the house ready for the hurricane.”

“He say to do the boards first,” I tell Skeet. He is shirtless, and his belt is looped so tight around his shorts that the waistband hangs from it like a shower curtain, and the leather cuts into his skin. They are the shorts from the day before. I was right; he slept in the shed with China.

“I can’t,” Skeetah says. “I need to wash China again, treat her cuts. Make sure they don’t start looking ugly.”

“That’s going to take what? Fifteen, thirty minutes?” Randall is leaning out of the truck now, the music curling back up behind him, tiny and metal-sounding because Daddy’s truck doesn’t have any bass. The song tinkles to an end, and the DJ, a woman, speaks smoothly, her voice calm and almost as deep as a man’s.

“Hurricane Katrina is now a category three hurricane. It is scheduled to make landfall in Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, sometime Monday morning. The NHC has issued a hurricane watch for southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. We at JZ94.5 will keep you updated about the status of the storm throughout-” Randall switches off the radio. Skeetah works his mouth, looks down at the ground. His eyebrows, so dark and even they look drawn on, meet and form a hook. Daddy’s do that. Mine are so light you can barely see them.

“I need to go to the store for some supplies. Wraps and stuff,” Skeetah says.

“You can pick up some more canned goods when you go.” Randall rolls his eyes.

“I ain’t got no money for that.”

“Well, then how you was going to get-” Randall stops mid-sentence. “Shit. I’ll get some money from Daddy’s wallet. Get the cheapest. Anything in a can. We ain’t going to be able to cook nothing.”

“I know that,” Skeetah says.

“I shouldn’t even have asked.” Randall rubs his head. “Don’t get caught.”

“I don’t.”

“How are you going?”

“I already called Big Henry.”

“Hurry up and get back.” Randall turns on the radio station again. The rapper sounds like a squirrel. Randall starts fidgeting with the knob, but leans out again. “We need your help!”

“Yeah,” Skeetah says. He wipes the water shawl away, and it smears to a tie running down the middle of his ribs. The air is so hot and close that even with the wind, the water will not evaporate. “Keep an eye on China,” he says, and the sudden wind takes him into the house.

“Junior?”

I need him to pick the nails out of the bin. His small spider fingers can do it better than mine. He is not in his bed, but his sheets and pillow are still on the floor. I pick them up, put them on the mattress. The curtain at our window flutters. I turn the fan off.

“Junior.”

He isn’t in the bathroom. Whoever used it last left the toilet seat up, as usual. The door to Skeetah and Randall’s room is closed; I can hear Skeetah shuffling around inside. There is a hole in the bottom middle of their door from where Skeetah got mad once and kicked in a dent; Daddy came up behind him and kicked him hard for that one, and then tried to slap him in the face.

“Junior in there?”

“Naw.” The walls are so thin it sounds like Skeetah is standing next to me. It was because of China that Skeet had kicked the wall: once China got fat enough and her breasts big enough for Daddy to notice that she was pregnant, Daddy told Skeet he didn’t want the Pit overrun by dogs. He was drunk when he said it, and he didn’t say it again after that night, after Skeet had blocked his hand when Daddy tried to slap him and said, Don’t hit me in the face, like he would take it anywhere else but there.

“Junior?”

He is standing next to Daddy’s bed, his small, narrow back to me, his bald head bent. One arm hangs at his side, and the other he holds in front of him like he’s in an Easter egg race, balancing a boiled egg on a spoon. But there is no spoon here, only his pointer finger, which he holds steady in front of Daddy’s sleeping nose, nearly brushing Daddy’s scraggly mustache, the naked chicken skin above Daddy’s lip. I have never seen Junior so still.

“What are you doing?”

Junior jumps. He turns and whips his finger behind his back. There are bruises under his eyes, so he looks like a little brown nervous man. I grab the finger and pull him out of the room, shut the door.

“Esch,” Junior whispers. He looks at the floor like he is looking through it, down to his hollows in the dirt under the house.

“What was that?” I ask. I squeeze, and there is only skin over bone. His finger is still pointed. He moans and tries to pull away, but I hold.

“He wasn’t breathing.”

“What do you mean, he wasn’t breathing?”

I drag him down the hallway, and he curls and drops and digs in with his feet, but I get him to our room. I kneel in front of him.

“What were you doing?”

Junior is looking at my throat, my hand, anywhere but my face. I yank, and he looks at my face.

“He looked like he was asleep but then he looked like he wasn’t breathing so I wanted to feel him breathe. Let me go!”

“Don’t go in there when he’s sleep no more.” I shake Junior’s arm again. “He’s sick.”

“I know,” Junior mewls. “I know he sick.” Junior closes his hand and pulls suddenly, and his hand slides between mine like wet rope and is out. “I know about his hand and the beer and his medicine.” He bounces. “I saw it when he smashed it. I found it!” Gets louder. “I see things!”

“Found what?”

“His ring!”

“Junior!”

“Here!” Junior yells. I can’t see his baby teeth, small and yellow like candy, only his throat, wet and pink, and he is an infant again, his mouth always open, always trying to find the nipple so that he’d grab our fingers, the blanket, his bib, the paws of his lost dogs, and suck them. He is the baby Junior and then he isn’t; he is a miniature Skeetah, and the hand he hadn’t been using to check Daddy’s breathing digs into his pockets and whips something out, something small and maroon, the size of a quarter, and throws it across the room. “It wasn’t no good to him noway!” He is breathing like he’s been running, and then he is skittering down the hallway like a spider. I almost catch him at the steps.

“Randall!” I yell, “get Junior!”

Randall jackknifes out of the truck, and he is a long black line streaking around the corner of the house where Junior has gone, and then I hear him banging underneath the house. Junior is laid so flat I cannot see him.

“Junior,” Randall yells, “get from under there!”

Junior is silent.

“You going to make me come under there and get you!” Randall says from between clenched teeth, and he must be crawling because Junior has popped up on my side of the house and is trying to run, his eyes white and rolling like a rabbit’s, but I have him, and he is kicking, kicking, and I’m surprised he doesn’t have fur.

“What did he do?” Randall walks around the corner, the front of him red with dirt.

“He had Daddy’s wedding ring.”

“He what?” Randall is frowning.

“He had Daddy’s wedding ring. He found it on the finger and took it off. It was in his pocket.” Each word makes Randall’s face slide and break until it looks like a broken glass with all the lines in it, and I know it’s because he can’t believe what I’m saying.

“Boy, what the hell is wrong with you?” Randall yells. He yanks Junior from me, and his other hand comes down hard on Junior’s skinny bottom. “What is wrong with you?” Randall yells, and his voice is higher. He hits again. “Junior!”

Junior runs in circles from Randall’s hand, so they spin, but Randall is faster and stronger, and his hand comes down again and again.

“That’s so. Nasty. You. Could’ve. Got. A disease!” Randall slaps twice, and his hand is as stiff as a board. “Why did you do it?”

“She gave it to him!” Junior wails. His voice is a siren. “And it wasn’t no good for him no more!” He sobs. “I wanted it!” He wails. “Her!”

Skeetah laughs when we tell him what Junior did.

“He’s dead wild.”

“He’s bad.”

“Did y’all at least find it? He going to be up in there trying to stash it somewhere.”

“I did,” I say. It was on my bed, and I’d picked it up with a handful of toilet paper and washed it off in the sink. The gold was dull and old, an almost silvery pale, and nothing about it looked like it had ever touched Mama’s skin. “It was covered in blood.” I’d thrown up after I cleaned it.

Junior is hiccupping, bent over double into the top of the toolbox on the back of Daddy’s truck, picking out nails. His sobbing hiccups echo up and out of the metal, loudly. He drops the nails he finds on the truck bed, and they ping.

“What’d you do with it?” asks Skeetah.

“I put it in my top drawer,” I say.

Skeetah laughs. His teeth are milky, his smile wide.

“We should look for the fingers. That’s free protein.” He laughs. “We could feed them to China.”

“Shut up. That is so nasty,” I say.

“Don’t know what’s wrong with him.” Randall shakes his head.

Skeetah laughs as he walks into the shed, pulling the wood behind him, but we can still hear him chuckling and talking to himself minutes later. When Big Henry drives up to pick Skeetah up, Skeetah is tugging the tin back over the doorway of the shed, smiling into his shirt. Big Henry parks and walks up slowly, a cold drink in his hand, and I’m surprised it’s not a beer. I nod at Big Henry but stand with my arms folded in the truck bed behind Junior, who is still hiccupping and dripping snot into the toolbox.

“What’s wrong with him?” Big Henry asks, and I glance over to see that he is looking at me, asking me. He’s shaved the stray hair and goatee off his face, so it is smooth and lighter than the rest of him, and looks soft with the sweat making it shine. I look at Junior’s narrow, bony back; he drops another nail. Ping.

“Come on,” Skeetah laughs, and they leave.

Cover the windows.

I make Junior hold the nails in his shirt and stand next to Randall and me as we try to match board size up to windows, drag them around the house, set them down where they will be nailed. Randall has the one hammer with a full handle we could find. It is my job to hold the wood in place at the bottom, at least as far as I can reach, while Randall drives the nails in. Junior is breathing in shudders. He is trying to swallow his lip each time. There is always glass showing after we nail the boards, an eye’s worth or a hand’s worth, no matter how we switch the wooden pieces and shuffle. Randall concentrates, but he still smashes two of his fingers, skipping around in tight circles like he is running a drill, cussing under his breath. Junior breaks his hiccup breathing to giggle then. So do I. The clay has turned to dust for want of rain, and when Randall nails, the board shivers and drizzles red down on my head from where the dirt is caked.

Bring the jugs of water in.

The glass jugs me and Junior fished from under the house are sitting in the kitchen in clusters. They look like tadpole sacs, huddled together, sticking to each other for company: cloudy at the heart. When Junior and I brought them in, they were dusty, opaque. I rinse a dishrag for Junior and one for me, and we sit on the floor in the kitchen and we scrub. This is a hurricane eclipse, the wood over the windows, the inside of the house so dark that the white of Junior’s shirt is the brightest thing. We sit in the square of light left by the open door, and we wipe the rags pink. This is what we will drink. This is what we will use to cook. Randall is trying to fill the holes in the wood, but he can’t. There isn’t enough wood. Light cuts through the house, slinky and thin as electricity lines from the chinks of exposed glass. Daddy gets up out of bed, cussing and banging into things, and stumbles to the bathroom. He throws up. He yells for water, and I make Junior bring it. When I pee, I take the flashlight I found in Daddy’s toolbox to see that Daddy’s missed the toilet, and that there is throw-up on the bathroom floor. I clean it up with the rags we wiped the jugs with; when we take the rags outside to rinse them under the hose instead of in the sink full of dishes, they run yellow and red.

Fill my gas tank.

Junior sits in the middle, his legs dangling, black and skinny. Randall drives. I let my hand fall out of the passenger window, let the wind pick it up, bear down on it, take it as if it is holding it. Both windows are down because Daddy has no air-conditioning, and my legs stick to the rugs that Mama laid over the seat when we were small and the upholstery would get so hot in the summer it would feel like it was melting our skin. It’s too hot for them kids, she’d said, and she’d beaten the rugs until they were clean, and then she’d washed them, and then she’d tucked them over the seats. Before Randall sat in the driver’s seat, I could see that Daddy had worn his side thin. The rest of the fabric feels almost as thick as when Mama put it in. I remember it had itched the first time I rode in the truck cab with them, but I hadn’t complained. Back then we’d all fit in the cab, and there was no seat belt law. Now we ride up and through the country toward the interstate, where the closest gas station is. The pines whistle and whip at the side of the road, the fitful wind making them dance. The strip of sky ahead and over the pines is overcast, gray, and then the sun will shine through it in fits, burn through like fire through wax paper. At the gas station, Randall doesn’t even let Junior get out so he can go in the store and find something to beg for; I go inside and pay with cash, and Randall pumps. The AC is so cold and the fluorescent lights so bright that it makes it hard for me to breathe; I feel hot, my body sodden as a dripping sponge, my breasts and stomach full of boiling water, my limbs burning. Randall fills the tank, and on the way back he opens up the truck on the back road, presses the gas. We tear down the asphalt, past the trees, and the engine howls; we beat the sky and the wind. Junior bares his teeth and grins.

Cook whatever’s in the ’frigerator.

There are six eggs in the refrigerator. A few cups of cold rice. Three pieces of bologna. An empty cardboard box from the gas station that holds chicken bones sucked dry. A half gallon of milk. Ketchup and mayonnaise. The stove is gas, so when Randall lights the burners, the kitchen glows orange and shadows climb the walls. The day tries to light the open doorway and fails. Junior sits in that dim light of the door, his chin on his knees, hugging his legs. He draws designs in the dirt on the floor. He is mad because Randall told him that no, he couldn’t watch TV. That he was still in trouble. Randall fries the eggs with the bacon grease Daddy keeps in the old Community Coffee tin on the counter; he dumps in the rice and creole seasoning. I fry the bologna slices, and China must smell them because she starts barking, loud, begging barks. On four plates, we divide the eggs and rice, the bologna sliced in half, saving a little for Skeetah. Junior and Randall drink the milk. I bring Daddy his plate, but he is asleep, so I set it on his dresser and leave him there, dozing in the cave of his room. It is dark, but still he sleeps with his bad arm over his eyes.

Park my truck in the clearing by the pit.

The only real clearing on the Pit is by the pit. They had to cut trees so they’d have room to maneuver the dump trucks, to open the earth. Randall drives Daddy’s truck around the house, skirts the trees, the mirrors barely clearing on each side. The chickens scatter before the truck, clucking in complaint, the wind picking them up so they fly in clumsy leaps. Randall parks next to the makeshift grill we cooked the squirrel on; there are tiny lumps of black char stuck to the metal, and red ants stream over it, a living line. While we are rolling up the windows of the truck and locking the toolbox, Junior kneels next to the grill. By the time we are done, Randall shakes his head at Junior, tells him come on; Junior’s finger is in the middle of the ants, and they have diffused to a puddle over his hand. They are all curving, all stinging, all burying their bites in his skin. Junior has a prideful look on his face, says, Look how long I can do it. When Randall grabs him by his arm and I brush the ants away, Junior’s skin is puffy, white and red, bumps swelling under the skin.

What is wrong with you, Junior? Randall asks.

Get the cheapest you can get, Randall had said, so when Skeetah and Big Henry begin unloading the trunk, I expect cardboard boxes cut in half full of tomato soup. Skeetah pulls out a big bag of dog food, hoists it up over his shoulder, and carries it to the shed. Then he pulls out another fifty-pound bag of dog food and dumps it next to the first, where they sit like lumpy twins. China is barking, high-pitched, from the shed. She is hungry.

“All right!” Skeetah yells, and she stops mid-bark, swallows it. He slides the tin shed door over, and she walks out calmly, brushes him with her head, noses his pants, licks his hand. He squats and rubs her.

Randall and Junior and I have been sitting in the yard for the past hour or so, jobs done; the house is too dark, too hot. It is a closed fist. Junior had been playing with an old extension cord, using it like a rope. He’d kept tying it to trees and twirling the cord like a jump rope. The tree was his partner, but he had no one to jump in the middle. Finally Randall untied the cord and I walked over and grabbed the other end. While the sky was darkening, the sun shining more fitfully through the clouds, we turned the cord for Junior and he jumped in the dust.

Randall walks to the car first. There are two boxes shoved in the corner of the trunk, the tops open and folded apart. In one, there are around fifteen cans of peas, green writing on silver, and a few of potted meat. And in the second box, there are two dozen bags of Top Ramen. Randall grabs the box with the peas and meat in it, and I grab the box with the ramen. Randall holds his box with one arm, his muscles knotting, and shrugs at Skeetah, raises his hand like he is throwing a ball in the air toward a goal raised too high.

“Why did you get all these peas?”

“It’s all they had.”

“And only three potted meats?”

“They was wiped out. Last things on the shelves.”

“I told you not to get nothing that need to be cooked. What we going to do with a box full of Top Ramen?”

“We going to eat it.” Skeetah looks up from China. He is checking her breasts, peeling back the tan wrap to see the scabs that line the red watery wounds. China licks his forearm.

“What we going to cook Ramen with? You know the electricity go out in a thunderstorm; what you think it’s going to do in a hurricane?”

“We got the grill in the woods. We can cook them over a fire.”

“The wood is going to be wet.”

“It ain’t even going to be that big of a deal. Probably turn and miss us.”

“No, Skeet. We been listening to the radio all day. It’s a category three and it’s coming right for us. Got two sacks of dog food! How long you think these peas going to last us?”

“We got other stuff in the house!”

I hate peas. My stomach, which has lately been pulling at me, driving me to eat at all hours of the day to feed the baby, burns.

“Barely enough for five people!” I say, my voice harder than I have ever heard it.

Skeetah unwraps China’s breast, and it hangs free, already bruised and wilted from disuse; it is a dark mark on her, marring what was once so white, so pristine. The scar makes what remains even more beautiful. Skeetah looks at China like he would dive into her if he could and drown.

“You ever tasted dog food?” Skeetah asks.

Randall’s box jerks, and he looks as if he wants to throw it.

Big Henry closes the trunk, holds up his big hands palms out, like he would calm us.

“Man, we got a little extra. Me and Mama got cases of cold drinks and canned goods at the beginning of the summer, and we been eating from her garden since, trying to save them. Sure Marquise got some extra, since his mama been hollering about him eating too much since they trying to make sure they got enough to eat just in case, too. Skeetah, you ain’t got to eat dog food.”

“It’s salty. Taste like pecans. And if worse comes to worst, we can eat like China.” Skeetah rubs China from her shoulders to her neck, up along her razor jaw, and holds her face, which goes wrinkly with the skin smashed forward. It looks like he is pulling her to him for a kiss. She squints. I want to kick her. Randall shoulders his box, grabs the ramen box from me, and turns to walk into the house. Junior is tying his cord around an old lawn mower now, pulling at it like he’s playing tug-of-war. The sun shines, blazes like fire, funnels down in the gaps between the trees, and lights up Skeetah and China so that they glow, each kneeling before the other, eyes together. Skeetah has already forgotten the conversation, and China never heard it.

“We ain’t no dogs,” Randall says. “And you ain’t either.” He walks between the thumb and pointer finger of the house, it clenches, and he is gone. The day goes cloudy, and stays.