Salvage the Bones

THE TENTH DAY: IN THE ENDLESS EYE

I ate skeet’s eggs and bologna. He was out in the shed with China, cleaning her. I ate them all. I cleaned the plate with my tongue, licked the plate clean. I could’ve eaten the plate. Randall glanced at me once and then went to pulling all the cans out of the cabinets. We sat at the kitchen table and divided and stacked and counted: twenty-four cans of peas, five cans of potted meat, one can of tomato paste, six cans of soup, four cans of sardines, one can of corn, five cans of tuna fish, one box of saltine crackers, some cornflakes we could eat without milk. The rice, sugar, flour, and cornmeal were useless. There were thirty-five Top Ramen noodle packs.

“Shit!” Randall yelled and threw the can of tomato paste he was holding across the room. Outside, the wind pushed between the buildings.

After breakfast, I hear them talking while I’m in the bathroom. The rooster is crowing outside, and China answers him, barking. They are in Daddy’s room. When I pee and lean over to grab the toilet paper, my belly pushes into the tops of my thighs, insistent. I ignore it, ease open the door, and creep down the hallway so I can listen to Randall and Daddy through the open door.

“I know,” Randall says. “But we still don’t have enough.”

“Y’all eat them dry anyway.”

“Junior eat them dry. Nobody else do.”

Daddy breathes hard so I can hear it catching on mucus in his throat, and then he coughs it out.

“I got enough money in case it’s an emergency after the storm. Never know what will happen.”

“But what about-”

“It’s just a few hundred, son,” Daddy wheezes. He has only ever called Randall that and has only done so a few times. “I made sure we had enough can goods to last us a few days. No more, no less.”

“I don’t think it’s enough.”

“FEMA and Red Cross always come through with food. We got that much. If it’s not too bad, might still have gas.”

“Everybody still growing, Daddy. Esch, Junior, me. Even Skeet. We all hungry.”

“We make do with what we got.” Daddy coughs. “Always have. And will.” He clears his throat, spits. “Your mama-” he says, and stops. “Y’all found my wedding ring?”

“Yeah. Junior did,” Randall said. “I’ll go get it.”

And then there is just the sound of the box fan blowing hard and steady from Daddy’s dresser, moving the hot air a few feet before dying in the hot box of his room. I follow him into me and Junior’s room, root through my drawer, find the ring, sit it in the middle of his sweaty hand so he can return it to Daddy, who will slip it into his pants pocket, his shirt pocket, on a chain around his neck, anywhere that it will still touch his skin since he has lost the finger for it.

Only Daddy can stand being inside the house, dark and close. All of us, as soon as we can, are outside. There is a blue-gray sheet over the sky, and there is no sun, and the day is only better than the house because there is a pushy wind blowing, the kind that drags at my clothes and shows my body for what it is. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere. The chickens are sitting in a low tree, on some old fence posts, on an old washing machine, on the dump truck and the bonfire wood of their collapsed chicken coop. They huddle, and it is as if they can’t bear to be on the ground, in the blowing dirt. I sit on the steps, Junior beside me, his wet skin to mine, Randall on the gas tank with his ball, throwing it up and catching it before the sulky wind can take it away.

Skeetah is building a pile of things outside of the shed. I would say that he is cleaning the shed out, but I cannot, since he is not taking out any of the tools, the oil drums, the broken lawnmowers and bike frames and pots for plants. His pile is all for China: dog food, chains, leashes, blankets, her food bowls. He washes out her bowls with his hands and sits them on the step next to Junior and me, where they sweat small puddles. He carries her blanket to the clothesline and hangs it, and then he bends in two, crouching through the junk in the yard for something.

“What he doing?” Junior asks.

I shrug.

Skeetah straightens up with a large stick in his hand, a branch knocked loose by a rainstorm, and begins beating the blanket. Dirt showers down, fitful as cold rain. Some of it floats a little longer than it should, a slow cloud, and I realize that some of China is in the blanket, that her hair is coming away. It makes me think of cereal in milk, of Rice Krispies in sugar.

“We need more food,” I say.

Randall catches his ball, hugs it to his stomach.

“Any ideas?”

I suck my lips. Feel like chewing something.

“Not yet,” I say.

Randall frowns. Junior lays his head on my shoulder.

“I’m tired,” he says.

I want to say, It’s too hot for you to be hanging on me, but I look at his baseball knees, his head, which seems too big and heavy for his stringy neck, and instead I say, “Do you want some noodles?”

“Yeah.”

Skeetah is frowning, beating the blanket clean. China starts from her crouch where she has been sitting next to the bucket, running from the first dig of her toes into the dirt. She runs up to the pilings that were the chicken coop and leaps, grinning, barking. She is trying to lick their feathers. The chickens bear down, huddle. China flies past, turns to the fence posts, jumps there, almost meeting them with her head. They squawk and hop, alight again on the wood. She ignores the dozen in the tree and races for the washing machine. She flies and lands on it, and the chickens roosting there scatter.

“Skeet!” I yell.

“China,” Skeet calls and hits the blanket again.

I go into the dark house to cook Junior’s noodles, and Daddy sleeps so hard and is so quiet that it feels like I am alone there.

“We should look for eggs,” says Randall. He says this while Junior is sitting on the steps, his face buried in the bowl, slurping at the soupy water left after he has sucked the ramen in long wormy strings over his chin and into his lips. He hates when I break the noodles before I boil them in the pot.

“They need to be in the refrigerator.”

“We can boil them. They’ll keep for days.”

Junior is drinking the last of the soup, still hunched over the bowl. I wish I’d made myself some; my tongue turns loose at the idea of the salt. Junior’s back is a young turtle’s shell, so thin it would snap if stepped on.

Skeetah is piling the folded blanket on top of the food bags along with the leashes and China’s practice tires and the syringes and the medicine he stole from the farmer. Junior sticks his finger into the bowl, wipes it along the bottom to get the seasoning, and licks it. He bangs into the kitchen, throws the bowl into the sink, and bangs back out. He runs over to Randall, the soles of his feet flashing yellow, the color of China’s eyes.

“You should put some shoes on,” I say.

“You coming, Skeet?” he asks as Randall slides from the gas tank, upright, already squinting into the woods, the dust, the wind.

“I’ll catch up. Gotta exercise China. She going to be cooped up, and she ain’t going to like it.”

Randall shakes his head and walks around the washing machine, the lawn mower, the old broken RV like he is finding his way through a maze. The chickens cluck at him, ruffle and settle their feathers against the pushing air as he passes. I am hungry.

“We could use more eyes,” I say. “Mama taught you how to do it, too, and you know Junior don’t know how to spot them yet.”

“In a minute.” Skeetah shrugs. China, at his knee, lets her head fall to the side, tongue out, as if it is the first time she’s ever seen me. Her ears fold over like napkins.

I sigh, don’t even know if he can hear it over the wind, and follow Randall into the detritus of the yard to hunt. The wind pushes against me so hard that I imagine it is the wind Medea called up after she slew her brother, to push the boat so quickly that the wake was a bloody froth; I barely have the energy to walk, to push back. On mornings like this when I am hungry, the nausea is always worse. There is the sound of China’s scrambling against Skeetah, of the tin shed shaking, of him laughing and China barking, but I leave them to it behind me and keep my eyes on the ground.

The chickens have made their own plans for the storm; they have packed their eggs away, hidden them well. As Randall and Junior and I spread out underneath the oaks and the pines, hunting, Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs. Look but don’t look, she said. They’ll find you. You gotta wander and they’ll come. She’d leaned over like Randall, her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog. They’re usually brown and have some feathers stuck to them, she’d say, pointing. The eggs look that way because of the mama. Whatever color the mama is, that’s what color the egg is. Her lips were pink, and when she leaned over like that I could smell baby powder drifting from the front of her dress, see the mole-marked skin of her chest, the soft fall of her breasts down into her bra. Like me and you, she said. Like me and you. See? She smiled at me, and her eyelashes met her eyelashes like a Venus flytrap. Her thick arm would rub against mine, and I would follow her pointing, and there would be a whole treasure of eggs, nestled one against the other: cream and white and brown and dark brown and speckled so that they almost looked black. The hens would lurk, murmuring. The cock, he always running off being a bully, she said. But the mama, the mama always here. See?

The pines shrug in a sky that covers like a wet T-shirt. Below, Randall fills Junior’s shirt with eggs that they gather from the most difficult places, places that only Junior, with his pin fingers, can reach: in the elbows of the dump truck’s engine, between the bottom of an old stinking refrigerator and the earth, wedged into the coils of a mattress chewed bare by animals. I search and find nothing.

The eggs in the front of Junior’s shirt are warm; they pull the front of the neck down to a V, and where his collarbones meet, it looks like two marbles against the skin. I set the eggs in the black pebbled pot that Mama used to cook gumbo in, count them as they roll and settle. Randall holds the sides of Junior’s shirt because Junior seems to be bending to the roll of the eggs. Twenty-four. There are twenty-four eggs to boil, to save, to eat. They are something.

When Manny appears, there is no sun to reach out its hand, to stroke him like a dog, to make him blaze and shine. He does not burn, but still there is something about him that glows, like a fire that is dying and the heat lives in the ashes, plain. I see him first because I am sitting on the steps. Junior’s and Randall’s backs are to him as they place the eggs in the pot. When Manny sees me looking at him, he catches on the secret mid-walk, like it’s a untied shoestring, and his eyes go wide, whiter in his face. But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm. Where do they go? I think, and he is looking at Randall’s back, not my eyes, and I hate him, and I wonder if I will ever stop loving him.

“Cuz,” he says.

Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.

“Shit,” Randall says and turns.

“Sorry.” Manny’s shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”

Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?” They walk outside together, stop at the foot of the back steps.

I stand with the pot. The eggs wobble against one another, sound like rocks at the bottom of a dry creek, rolling from a foot.

“Junior, go play,” Randall calls through the door. Junior shoots away, freed from his chores. He is all bald head and blurred arms and legs. I run water into the pot in the sink until it covers the eggs.

“Skeetah ain’t here?”

“Think he somewhere off in the woods running China.”

“She’s a beast.”

“Yeah.”

I sprinkle salt into the water, but there is more rice than salt in the shaker.

“Coach called you about the game?”

“Said they was paying for Bodean to go to camp.”

“I didn’t know.”

I light the stove with a match and set it to boil. I stand a few feet away from the door in the dark of the kitchen so they can’t see me, and I squint through the screen.

“I’m sorry,” Manny says.

“Well.” Randall sighs.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“My best friend got into a fight with my brother is what happened.”

“I had other shit on my mind. Wasn’t nothing against Skeet.”

“He don’t think that. He think you made him poison his dog.”

“I wouldn’t do no bullshit like that. You know me.”

Randall has nothing in his hands. Manny fans his face like he’s waving away gnats.

“He also think you dogging my sister.”

“Randall, come on, man.”

“What you want?”

“We like family.”

Manny shoves his hands into his pockets and bends in like he’s curling for a blow, as if he’s ashamed to say what he’s said.

“Rico your family. I ain’t blood.”

“Like blood.”

“That’s the problem.” Randall shakes his head like a horse trying to fling off reins. “I’m the only one.”

“That ain’t true.”

“Yeah it is.”

“I done watched Junior grow up with all of y’all. That’s real.”

“What about Esch and Skeet?”

“Them, too.”

“No,” Randall says. “It’s not the same.” Bubbles of air, tiny as those that rise up out of the mouths of fish in water, rise from the bottom of the pot, gather in the middle. Vapor mists from the center. “I got shit to do. I’ll see you later.”

Randall walks into the kitchen and I look up from the pot like I haven’t been standing on my tiptoes in the faint blue light of the burner’s fire, like I haven’t been listening.

“It’s going to take forever to boil. Leave it,” Randall says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, tall and straight. He stalks past, closes the door to his room. I hear it shut, and I am out the screen door, running, still on my tiptoes, feet barely touching the ground. There he is, there, receding under the trees, a setting sun. I jump the ditch to the road.

“Wait!” I call. My voice is higher than I have ever heard it.

Manny stops, turning, and his face is a magnolia flower tossing in the wind, his eyes the bright yellow heart. Now I see it, now I don’t.

“What?” he says when I catch up to him. “Randall wanted something?”

Manny’s eyes slide past me to the ditch, to the road, up to the sky the color of a scoured pan.

“No,” I say. “Me.”

“I gotta go.” He turns, shows me the back of his head, his hair, his shoulders. Now I see it, now I don’t.

“I’m pregnant.”

He stops in profile. His nose is like a knife.

“And?”

His hair grows so fast it’s already starting to curl. Sweat beads at his hairline.

“It’s yours.”

“What?”

“Yours.”

Manny shakes his head. The knife cuts. The sweat rolls down his scar, is flung out onto the rotten asphalt.

“I ain’t got nothing here,” he says. Manny blinks at me when he says it. Looks at me head-on, for the second time ever. “Nothing.”

Nothing. For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know.

I am on him like China.

I fought Skeetah and Randall for play when we were younger. Once I punched Skeet in the stomach when we were wrestling and my arms felt like noodles, like he had no muscle to hit and I had no muscle to hit him with. I kicked Randall in the chest when he was picking with me and knocked the wind out of him. Once I fought a girl in the middle school locker room for laughing at my budding breasts; she sneered that I needed to tell my mama that I needed a training bra. My mama was four years dead then. That girl plucked my shirt where a bra strap would be and pushed me, and I turned back on her and swung blind, trying to smash her face in, kicking at her legs, elbowing her, beating with my whole body. She was twice my size, but I surprised her before she was able to push me off. I fell over the bench and the lockers cut a gash in my arm, but I left that girl with a knot rising purple on her head and a lip pink and tender as a pickled pig’s lips in a jar. She always says hello to me when she sees me in the hallway, three years after the fact. I am fast.

I am slapping him, over and over, my hands a flurry, a black blur. His face is hot and stinging as boiling water.

“Hey! Hey!” Manny yells. He blocks what he can with his elbows and forearms, but still I snake through. I slap so hard my hands hurt.

“I love you!”

“Esch!” The skin on his throat is red, his scar white.

“I loved you!”

I hit his Adam’s apple with the V where my thumb and pointer finger cross. He chokes.

“I loved you!” This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood.

“Stupid bitch! What is wrong with you?”

“You!”

Manny grabs me under my armpits, picks me up off the ground, and throws. I fly backward. My toes land first, skimming the road, then my heels thud, but I am moving too fast to stop and I hit the ground with my butt. I try to catch myself with my stinging hands and then they sting more. I’ve scraped the skin off.

“How you come to me saying something’s mines when you fuck everybody who come to the Pit?”

“You the only one I been with!” I rush him again.

“You better go to Big Henry with that bullshit!” Manny twists and shoves me away from him again, but I take the neck of his T-shirt with me when I go.

“I know!” I say. “I know it’s yours!”

“No it ain’t.”

“I’ma tell Randall.”

“You think they don’t know you a slut?” He spits this and it is red; I have drawn blood.

Manny shakes his head and snorts, skipping backward away from me, and then he is running down the narrowing road, being swallowed by the rustling brush, and I am shaking like the leaves, like the green around me, bent in the first fingering rush of the coming winds.

“You are!” I yell.

Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean. What I carry in my stomach is relentless; like each unbearable day, it will dawn. I watch Manny getting smaller and smaller, and my ribs break like dry summer wood, and burn and burn and burn.

“The baby will tell,” I scream. “It’ll tell!” But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.

Randall finds me sitting in the ditch. My legs are over the side, and the blackberry vines are scratching them and there are ants crawling on my toes, but I don’t care. Tears run down my face like water and I cover my face with my shirt but it is too hot and I can’t make it go away. I can never make it stop never nothing. When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons. She shrieked; Jason heard.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I tell him this through the cotton.

“We going to the white people’s house.”

“Who?”

“You and me.”

“For what?”

“We need supplies.” Randall says, and the day quiets for a moment, and I can hear the breath going in and out of him. “Did he say something to you?”

“No.” I wipe my face, let the shirt slide away and down. My eyes feel swollen and warm as ripe grapes. “He ain’t say nothing.”

“I need your help, Esch.” I have never seen one part of Randall soften when he’s awake, not the long line of his arms, his legs like steel posts, his face, always changing and making and saving and shooting things. But now, just for a breath, his face goes soft, and he looks like the baby pictures Mama took of him, pictures of a Randall I’d never seen before. “Please, Esch.”

I bend over and scrub my face dry with my shirt, but the tears still come.

“I can’t,” I sob.

“Please,” Randall whispers.

“Why?” I breathe.

“I need you.”

I scrub, wipe like I could wipe the love of Manny, the hate of Manny, Manny, away. And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.

The start of my run through the woods with Randall is easier; where me and Skeet sprinted, hand in hand, Randall and I jog. I don’t breathe hard at the beginning, and I force myself to ask questions, to speak through the other pain.

“Where’s Junior?”

“Running around somewhere in here.”

“Skeet?”

“Him, too.”

There are no chattering squirrels, no haunted rabbits, no wading turtles in the woods. I don’t know where they have gone, but there are none here. When I look up into the sky, the gray of it shaking as I run, I see birds in great flocks that would darken the sun if we could see it through the thickening clouds. They are all flying away, all flying north. The flocks break and dip and soar, and they are Randall’s hand on a basketball, Skeet’s on a leash, my legs in a chase. I watch them until they vanish past the trees, and then there is only us, the woods, the leaves rattling underfoot. Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the house, and I drop to my knees, and Randall leans back as if he would fall, both of us breathing hard, looking wet and newly born.

There are no cows, no egrets. Randall leaps over the fence without using his hands, jumps high as a deer, but I crawl through on my stomach, my belly feeling like a bowl sloshing with water. I swallow most of it now, and my face is wet with mostly sweat. We pick our way across the field, kicking at cow droppings and mushrooms. The grass seems denser, thicker. There is no blue truck, no white man and woman, no chasing dog. The windows of the house and the barn have been boarded over with thick pieces of plywood, but when I put my ear to the board over the window that Skeetah broke while Randall holds me up, one arm around the soft push of my abdomen and his other arm like a set under my butt, I can hear the cows, big and stupid, shuffling in the barn, letting out little lowing complaints, knocking the walls as if they are looking for escape. I wipe my eyes.

“The house,” Randall says.

Randall lets me down slow. The wood is rough under my hands. When I look at the boards in front of me, I see one dark splash like paint, one maroon tear from where Skeetah fell out of the window; it’s his blood. I wonder if the old limping man smiled when he saw it, felt some kind of joy at the fact that the boy was hurt, or if the limping white man just shook his head as he boarded it over, the anger making the hammer fly bad, bend the nails crooked so that they curve like commas.

The boards of the house are more even, more secure. They are not a patch-up of boards of different sizes like our house; there is no glass left peeking through cracks, only plywood closed smooth and tight as eyelids.

“Here.” Randall tries to slide his finger between the board and the wall, but only his fingernail fits. “You try,” he says, but my fingers will not go in either. I don’t even think Junior’s could. “We should’ve brought a crowbar.”

I shake my head.

“Fuck!” Randall yells. He punches the plywood and it dints, dimples in the middle, and there is the sound of breaking wood and breaking glass. When he pulls his fist back, he’s split the skin, smashed it, and he leaves blood on the board. He holds his hand. His face looks like how I imagine the glass behind the board looks; hard and lined, each piece sliding away from the other where they split, black in the cracks. His eyes look wet. “Shit.” The blood pools in the valleys between his knuckles, rolls to waterfall between his fingers. He looks at me. “I couldn’t do it even if I did have a crowbar.”

“You ain’t Skeet,” I say. The taste of my tears is like raw oysters.

“We have to, Esch.”

“It’s too thick.”

“We have to try.”

Randall knees his chest like he is putting on pants and then he kicks his heel hard into the center of the plywood where he dented it. The glass behind it shatters. He kicks again and the wood splits; it sounds like a shot. Randall stops, and we both look around, scared, but there is no old man swinging a gun like an axe, no pink-dressed woman, just the cows lowing in the barn in the dark, the wind rustling past the trees, the air so wet and hot it could be rain.

“One more time,” Randall says, and then he kicks again, all of his muscle straining against the hot day, the sealed gingerbread house, and the board cracks in two but will not fall because of the nails, and Randall is crouching on the ground, clutching his bad knee.

“The wrong knee,” he says, and blows on his kneecap like he’s scraped it bloody and he is trying to blow away the pain and grit, like Mama did to our scrapes when we were younger. If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles. “Look inside.”

I put my eye to the slit and there is darkness and the gauzy blow of curtains. Under the darkness, there is the empty smell of potpourri and Pine-Sol. Two fingers can fit through the crack, nothing more.

“There’s nothing there. It smells clean. Probably took everything when they evacuated.”

Randall rubs the skin around and below his knee.

“She looked like the type of woman that wouldn’t leave nothing to spoil.”

Randall laughs, but it is dry and scrapes past his throat like brown leaves scratched along the ground by wind.

“Come on,” Randall says.

Randall clutches his hand to his chest when he walks, hopping on his bad knee. I stop at the edge of the clearing and look back at the barn, the cows safe inside it. I can see them brushing against one another in the rank hay dark, their wet noses turned up toward the ceiling, wondering where the blue has gone, the bitter green grass, their bird familiars. How they’d crave the touch of a wing.

On the walk back, it is weird to see Randall walking without swinging his long loose arms. The wood is a sleeping animal: still empty. It is all wrong. I hear the rustling before Randall does, and I have to reach out to stop him, since he has been watching his bad knee.

“Look.”

It is China. She drops something rust-colored and then shoves her nose in it from side to side like a screwdriver. Then she points with her head and dives into what she has dropped, rolling in it; she moves like smoke, the pink pads of her feet waving in the air. Her eyes are squeezed shut and she wears a wide, gum-bearing leer. Her fur is turning red.

“What is that?” Randall asks.

China must hear because she stops her squirming mid-roll and springs up, water frozen to ice, her lips sealed, her tail out. She sees us, looks down at her prize, and then raises her nose to the simmering sky and barks, once. Then she runs away.

It is a dead chicken, opened raw and still warm. I imagine that it looks like the inside of my throat, pink with salt and blood.

“That’s ours,” I say, but Randall is silent as he starts walk-hopping toward the Pit and the house.

“What are you doing?”

Randall says it like he’s been at the park all day, running himself darker and straighter on the court, running himself until all he becomes is muscle and breath. He is tired, and he stands in the doorway of his room, the hall light on overhead, staring. It was a long walk. I shuffle down the hall, alcohol in hand, a wet paper towel for his fist, which he holds close enough to his face to suck. Junior sucked his knuckles until he was two, then he stopped.

Skeet is sitting on his bed, and China has her forelegs on his lap, her nose up; when her neck moves, she is graceful as the spider lilies that grow out on the bayou, bending out over the water. She is licking Skeetah’s chin. There are pink smears from the chicken on her jaw. Skeetah is smiling, the kind of shy smile I haven’t seen on his face since he used to steal packets of Kool-Aid when we were younger and suck the bitter powder, his teeth electric blue or blood red. The puppies sigh and whine in their bucket, which is in the corner of their room along with the fifty-pound bags of dog food, the leashes, the half-shredded tires, China’s blanket.

“I’m bringing her inside for the storm.” Skeetah doesn’t look up.

“Fuck no,” Randall says.

“I ain’t leaving them in the shed.”

“Why not?”

“It ain’t strong enough is why not.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

“It’s too flimsy for them.”

“This is a house, Skeetah. For humans. Not for dogs.”

Skeet looks up. The shy smile, gone. He stops China’s licking by muzzling her with both hands, and she is as still as any of the wrecks in the yard. The scabbed-over wounds on her make her look as rusted as they are.

“I’m not leaving them out there.”

Randall’s face shatters then, and all that’s left is an open window.

“I’m telling Daddy.”

“Fucking tell him then.” Skeetah is all teeth. He lets go of China and stands, and she slides off of him, lands squarely, follows Skeet out of the room. All three of them stand in the door of Daddy’s room as Randall yanks it open and goes in.

“Daddy.” No sound. “Daddy!”

Daddy lays on his side with his back to us like he’s just fallen from something tall, a tree or a fence, and has shattered bone. He rolls over to face us, drags himself up on an elbow.

“What?” This sounds ripped from him, as if he is speaking around the pain. “What do you want?”

“Skeet trying to bring the dogs inside for the storm.”

“Inside?” Daddy’s eyes shine in the dark like an armadillo’s. “Inside what?”

“Inside the house.”

“No,” Daddy says. He lays back on his pillows, rolls toward his hand.

“No,” says Skeetah. He elbows past Randall, stands in front of him. China weaves through at his thigh, sits, her tongue out, looking almost like a normal dog. “I’m not leaving them out there.”

“No?” Daddy faces him, lurches up on an elbow. “What you mean, no? I said they couldn’t stay and they can’t!” He would be shouting if he was better, but he stops for breath between every other word, and what comes out is in wheezes.

“If they go, I go,” Skeetah says.

“What?” Daddy breathes.

“If they go out in the shed, I go in the shed.” Skeetah steps farther into Daddy’s black room, and he is a blankness in the dark, his voice coming from no face, no head. China glows like white sand on a moonlit river beach.

“You ain’t going out in no shed”-Daddy coughs, his throat dry-“with no dog.”

“Yes, I am.” The darkness moves. “And if Randall try to stop me, we going to fight. All of us.”

“Don’t make me get up.” Daddy swings his legs over the side of the bed, pushes up with his good hand, but his feet get tangled up in the sheets, and he tries to untangle them with his bad hand, and then yanks it back up and wobbles, high from the pain medicine. He lists like he’s drunk.

Skeetah moves to leave Daddy’s room and comes into the light from the lighbulb in the hallway like a swimmer surfacing from a dark swimming hole: Manny swimming up from the bottom of the black hole, eating light, splashing out, being born.

“Everything deserve to live,” Skeetah says. “And her and the puppies going to live.”

“Skeet,” Randall says, and Skeet and China stop in their walk, all three of them meeting in the doorway, China’s ears flat on her head, tail up, still and tense as Skeetah.

“What?” Skeetah barks. They are on either side of a crooked mirror, one short, the other tall, both muscle and tendon, tension, wounded knuckles, hands curling.

“I ain’t sleeping in the room with her.” Randall reaches. His good hand grabs.

“Stop!” Daddy’s voice is hard, loud. He slumps like it was all he had in him to breathe it out. “No. No fighting.”

I have to lean to hear him. He sways, punches his good arm in the mattress to hold himself up.

“It’s a category five,” Daddy says. “Woman on the news say it’s a category five.”

“Oh,” I say, but it is more a breath than a word. Daddy has faced a category 5, but we’re too young to remember the last category 5 hurricane that hit the coast: Camille, almost forty years ago. But Mama told us stories about that one.

“She stay in the room, Skeet. If I see her once out, I’m kicking her out in the middle of the storm, you hear? Randall, make do.”

Daddy’s arm buckles.

“I need some soup, Esch.”

Skeetah folds his arms, cocks his head at Randall like a dog. Randall shakes his.

“We usually sleep in the living room anyway, Randall,” I say, whispering, remembering how tender he was when he found me in the ditch.

“Esch,” Daddy breathes. He lays back on his side, facing the door.

“Yeah, Daddy,” Randall says. “I’ll get it.” He brushes by, stiff-armed, and leaves me and Skeetah standing in the hallway. The gas hisses on in the kitchen.

“Everything need a chance, Esch,” Skeet says, and he and China turn into his doorway. China sprawls on the floor, ears pointed to the ceiling again. Her tail thumps, and she smiles. The skin on either side of her scabbed breast pulls tight. Skeetah takes the puppies out one by one, cupping their round bellies, and lays them on the floor, where their noses start twitching and they begin jerking toward China. She looks at them like she looked at the chickens earlier. She licks. “Everything,” Skeetah says and looks through me.