Salvage the Bones

THE TWELFTH DAY: ALIVE

We sat in the open attic until the wind quieted from jet fighter planes to coughing puffs. We sat in the open attic until the sky brightened from a sick orange to a clean white gray. We sat in the open attic until the water, which had milled like a boiling soup beneath us, receded inch by inch, back into the woods. We sat in the open attic until the rain eased to drips. We sat in the open attic until we got cold, and the light wind that blew chilled us. We huddled together in Mother Lizbeth’s attic and tried to rub heat from each other, but couldn’t. We were a pile of wet, cold branches, human debris in the middle of all of the rest of it.

I scooted past Daddy, whose eyes were closed as he mumbled against his maimed hand and his good hand, which were folded like he was praying, past Randall, who still held Junior, who still had his hands over his eyes, to Skeetah. He crouched where the attic’s roof was mostly gone, near the front of the long, low half room, and leaned out the gaping absence. He looked like he wanted to jump. I touched him in the middle of his shoulder blades. His skin was warm, hot as if he’d been running, as if the day was blazing bright. He jerked but didn’t look back at me as he scanned the boiling water, the trees popping and flying, the old washing machine spinning like a bumper car around the yard, the wind ripping the land away. The wood under me felt wet and spongy, like it wanted to give. I put my legs to either side of his thighs, scooted up behind him, slid my arms under his armpits, and rested my face on his shoulder.

“I failed her,” he said.

He blinked hard.

“No you didn’t.” I spoke into his neck.

“Yes,” he said. His voice sounded like a rake being dragged over rocks.

“You didn’t fail us,” I said.

He shook his head, and his cheek brushed my forehead. The muscles under his jaw were jumping. He started to shake. I hugged him tighter, held him the way I’d embraced those boys I’d fucked because it was easier to let them get what they wanted instead of denying them, instead of making them see me. My arms had never been so strong.

I squeezed. With my whole body, I squeezed. I could hold him together, but he jerked so hard it felt like he was trying to shake himself apart, separate at the knuckles, pop loose his ribs, dislocate his shoulders, and dislodge his knees: shudder into nothing, a pile of skin and bone and limp muscle. No Skeet.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said.

The hurricane laughed. A tree, plucked from its branches, hopped across the yard and landed against Daddy’s truck with a crunch, stopped short like it had won a game of hopscotch without stepping out of the lines. The sky was so close I felt like I could reach up and bury my arm in it.

Skeetah squinted into the storm, so I looked with him, searching for anything white, anything in the direction that China had whirled away, swimming furiously, barking. Plastic bags, a broken dryer, an old refrigerator. We could see nothing that held heat like China, nothing fighting. The hurricane gusted and peeled back a corner of our house, flung tin with a clatter into the air.

“It ain’t steady now,” I said. “It’s easing up.” I could see the living room, a messy doll’s house. The trees cracked in protest around us. Skeetah hummed.

“China,” he said.

The tractor, which had been buried under the water, peeked its head out, the top of its hood appearing from under the water.

“When it gets to the middle of the tires, I’m going,” Skeetah said.

I said nothing, just hooked my fingers together, like I could’ve kept him there in a living chain.

When the first slice of rubber appeared over the rolling water, Skeetah started. He was a school of fish in my arms. The wind gusted and the trees clattered. There was a whirling sound in the sky, a whistle that was descending and rising, circling. The hurricane groaned, and it was like hearing a million Daddys moan and push back their chairs after eating plates full of fish fried whole, white bread for the bones, beer. The iron at the center of the tire peeked through, and it was an eye opening. Skeetah shrugged out of my embrace all at once: a school of fish exploding around a rock.

“Where you going?” I asked.

Skeetah was already past me, past Randall, in front of Daddy.

“Skeet?” Randall asked. Junior buried his face in Randall’s muddy shirt.

Skeetah was at the hole we’d climbed through. The glass in the window had cut his face, his thighs, his chest, and his skin was running red. Then I looked at my arms, Randall, Junior, Daddy; we were all bleeding, all gashed.

“Boy,” Daddy said.

“I got to find her,” Skeetah said.

“The storm ain’t over.” Daddy rolled to his side, lifted his knees, and settled again as if he was trying to get more comfortable, find purchase to stand up, but none of us could with the bones of the ceiling folding so low.

Skeetah turned in his crouch. All that jumping, stilled. He was one animal again, or at least he thought he would soon be.

“She’s waiting for me,” he said, and jumped down through the ceiling, splashing in the water below.

“Skeet!” Randall yelled.

I looked out of our ragged window, the ripped roof, and saw him wade out into the yard, the water at his waist, his head up, his shoulders back, his arms raised, and his hands extended palms down inches over the water, as if he could calm it.

“Be careful,” Daddy breathed, and I watched my brother walk almost naked out into the departing storm. He headed toward the Pit, the water swirling around him, the broken tops of the trees, the debris rising like a labyrinth up out of the water. He paused, turned his head, and looked back at us. I waved through the ruined window. The air was getting cold. He turned and vanished around a tree growing sideways, into the maw of the maze. He left a thin wake.

When the water left, the front part of Daddy’s truck was sitting on top of the smashed gas tank. The lower half was on the ground. All the water that had been in the car was out, and it left a muddy slime on the windows. The yard was one big puddle that we waded, so icy at our ankles, the first cold water we’d felt since the March rains, to the back door of the house, which was blasted open. The screen door was gone. The inside of the house was wet and muddy as Daddy’s truck. The food we’d gotten had been washed from the shelves, and we hunted for it like we did for eggs, finding some silver cans of peas. We found Top Ramen, still sealed, in the sofa. We put them in our shirts. My hands were pink with Skeetah’s blood from hugging him earlier. I washed them in a puddle in the living room.

“We can’t stay here. We need shelter.” Randall grimaced. “Your hand, and the water…” Randall trailed off. “Who knows what the water had in it.”

Daddy shook his head, his lips weak as a baby’s. He looked dazed. He stared at his truck, the ruined house, the yard invisible under the trees and the storm’s deposits.

“Where,” he said, and it was a statement with no answer.

“By Big Henry,” Randall said.

Junior was on Randall’s back, his eyes finally uncovered and open. He looked drunk.

“What about Skeet?” I asked.

“He’ll find us,” Randall said. “Daddy?” He raised an arm to Daddy, flicked his head toward the road.

“Yeah.” Daddy cleared his throat.

“We can fix it,” Randall said.

Daddy looked down at the ground, shrugged. He glanced at me and shame flittered across his face like a spider, sideways, fast, and then he looked past the house to the road and started walking slowly, uneven, limping. There was a gash in the back of his leg, bleeding through his pants.

We picked our way around the fallen, ripped trees, to the road. We were barefoot, and the asphalt was warm. We hadn’t had time to find our shoes before the hand of the flood pushed into the living room. The storm had plucked the trees like grass and scattered them. We knew where the road was by the feel of the stones wearing through the blacktop under our feet; the trees I had known, the oaks in the bend, the stand of pines on the long stretch, the magnolia at the four-way, were all broken, all crumbled. The sound of water running in the ditches like rapids escorted us down the road, into the heart of Bois Sauvage.

The first house we saw was Javon’s, the shingles of his roof scraped off, the top bald; the house was dark and looked empty until we saw someone who must have been Javon, light as Manny, standing in front of the pile of wood that must have been the carport, lighting a lighter: a flicker of warmth in the cold air left by the storm. At the next nearest house, when the neighborhood started to cluster more closely together, we saw what others had suffered: every house had faced the hurricane, and every house had lost. Franco and his mother and father stood out in the yard looking at each other and the smashed landscape around them, dazed. Half of their roof was gone. Christophe and Joshua’s porch was missing, and part of their roof. A tree had smashed into Mudda Ma’am and Tilda’s house. And just as the houses clustered, there were people in the street, barefoot, half naked, walking around felled trees, crumpled trampolines, talking with each other, shaking their heads, repeating one word over and over again: alive alive alive alive. Big Henry and Marquise were standing in front of Big Henry’s house, which was missing a piece of its roof, like all the others, and was encircled by six of the trees that had stood in the yard but that now fenced the house in like a green gate.

“It’s a miracle,” Big Henry said. “All the trees fell away from the house.”

“We was just about to walk up there and see about y’all,” Marquise said.

Big Henry nodded, swung the machete he had in his hand, the blade dark and sharp.

“In case we had to cut through to get to y’all,” Marquise explained.

“Where’s Skeet?” Big Henry asked.

“Looking,” Randall said, hoisting Junior farther up on his back.

“For what?” Marquise asked.

“The water took China,” I said.

“Water?” Big Henry asked, his voice high at the end, almost cracking.

“From the creek that feeds the pit.” Randall said. “The house flooded through. We had to swim to the old house, wait out the storm in the attic.”

I wanted to say: We almost drowned. We had to bust out of the attic. We lost the puppies and China.

“We need a place to stay,” I said.

“It’s just me and my mama,” Big Henry said. “Plenty of room. Come on.” He flicked the machete blade, threw it to Marquise, who caught the handle and almost dropped it.

“You all right, Mr. Claude?” Big Henry asked Daddy.

Every line of Daddy’s face, his shoulders, his neck, his collarbone, the ends of his arms, seemed to be caught in a net dragging the ground.

“Yeah,” Daddy said. “I just need to sit for a while. My hand.” He stopped short. Big Henry nodded, placed one of those big careful hands on Daddy’s back, and escorted us through the milling crowd, the crumbled trees, the power lines tangled like abandoned fishing line, to his home. He looked at me over his shoulder, and the glance was so soft, so tentative and tender, I wanted to finish my story. I wanted to say, I’m pregnant. But I didn’t.

Amongst the older women in hair curlers and oversized T-shirts and slippers, the girls in sweatpants and tank tops, the boys riding their bikes, the men gathered in clusters pointing at each other and at the sky, I saw Manny. He was sitting in the back of a white and silver pickup truck parked half in, half out of the road, surrounded by the tops of ripped trees. He was staring across the crowd at us, and from that far away, he was all muscled shoulders and golden skin and black, black eyes. There were wide smears of mud all across his legs, his chest. He raised one forearm in a short, stiff wave. Randall hunched over next to me, eyeing Daddy’s and Big Henry’s backs.

“Is it him?” he whispered.

I nodded, looked down at the ground.

“I knew you had a crush on him, but-” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn’t think he’d do anything about it.”

“I wanted to,” I said.

“I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.

A girl separated herself from the crowd, sat down next to Manny on the truck, laid her head on his shoulder. Shaliyah. Manny sat there stiffly beside her, still looking at me, at Randall, waiting for a wave, a nod, anything. I slid my fingers into the crook of Randall’s elbow, and Junior’s leg rubbed the back of my hand. His skin, and Randall’s skin, was warm; I walked so that Randall was my shield, my warm cover, my brother.

“No, Randall,” I said. “You don’t need to. I already did.”

Randall snorted, but he didn’t let Junior go, and he squeezed his forearm to his waist, folding my arm into his, pulling me with him. We walked to Big Henry’s front door together.

Big Henry’s mother, Ms. Bernadine, is half Big Henry’s size, with wide hips and thin shoulders, and now I know where he gets his careful hands. She settled Daddy on the sofa in the dark, hot house, unwrapped and cleaned and rewrapped his hand in the light from the open door and the open windows. Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy’s face, which was gray and twisted.

Marquise had run up to the house to find Skeetah and took his dog along: Lala gleamed like melted butter, untouched by the havoc of the hurricane. He said when he got to the house, Skeetah heard his dog barking and came out of the woods. Skeetah was wearing wet, muddy shorts he’d salvaged from the wreckage, but he was still barefoot. When Marquise tried to get him to come down to Big Henry’s house, he’d asked for Marquise’s lighter, said he’d camp out at the house because he was waiting for China to come back. Marquise had argued with him, but Skeetah ignored him, so Marquise left. When Marquise told us the story, he chewed the inside of his cheek, looked ashamed that he hadn’t been able to drag Skeetah down into Bois. “He’s stubborn,” Randall said. “You can’t make him do nothing he don’t want to do.”

That night, when people with working trucks and chains were clearing the streets of trees and burning wet, smoking bonfires, we slept on thin pallets on Big Henry’s living room floor, and his mother whispered to Big Henry in the kitchen: “Ain’t they one more?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s looking for his dog.”

“As long as they need,” she said. “At least they alive.”

“Yeah,” Big Henry said, and I knew he was looking at us, Junior under my armpit, sweating and twitching in his sleep, Daddy still as a stone on the sofa, Randall laying facedown, his head buried in his folded arms, almost diagonal in the small living room. One or two sodden bugs whirred outside, and I wondered where Skeetah was, saw him sitting before a fire, his head cocked to the night, which had turned hot after the cold air left by the storm passed. Waiting.

Big Henry and his uncle Solly, the one who brought the generator and who is tall and skinny and has blurry home-done tattoos up and down his forearms, are talking in the doorway. The sun has burned away the last of the clouds of the storm’s wake. It arcs through the door, slides past Big Henry, and burns my face.

“That bridge is washed out.”

“The old one over the bayou? The first or second one?”

“The little third.”

“What about the bridge on the east side?”

“That one’s okay. Road’s full of water, they say. But you can drive through it.”

“What it look like?”

Solly clears his throat. Spits.

“It’s bad.” He clears his throat again. “Real bad.” Solly shrugs. “Where your mama say I need to put that tarp again?”

Big Henry leads him outside to show him the bad spot on the roof. He is barefoot, and his feet look white and tender as a baby’s.

“Esch.” Daddy’s voice from the sofa sounds like he has a Brillo pad lodged in his throat. I turn my head just so I can see his face out of the corner of my eye. This is the way you approach a bristling, unfamiliar dog.

Daddy makes a low humming noise. He sits up, folds his useless hand and his good one over his stomach. Looks at the dead TV.

“What Skeetah said. Is it true?”

I look at the carpet, fuzzy and maroon, that grows fluffy at the edge of the sofa he lays on; no one has ever stepped on it there. I nod, an inch’s slide of my head, into the pillow.

Daddy makes a clicking noise in this throat. Clears it and swallows.

“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” he says.

He rubs his good hand over his face like a cat cleaning its jaw and nose. His nose and cheeks are greasy and shine in the dark. I am quiet, feel every inhale and exhale like an explosion.

“It… happened,” Daddy breathes and stops.

I am blinking quickly, a feeling like boiled water splashed over my chest, soaking up my face.

“I’m sorry,” Daddy says.

I want to say, Yes. Or I know. Or I’m sorry, too. But I squeak, small as a mouse in the room. Wonder where the baby will sleep, wonder if it will lay curled up in the bed with me. If I will teach Junior to give it a bottle, the way Daddy taught us. He is old enough now.

“How long has it been?” Daddy asks.

“I don’t know.” My voice is so high it sounds like someone else is talking, like I could turn my face and see another girl there, lying on the floor between her brothers, answering these question.

“When we can, we need to find out.”

“Yes,” I say, facing him, seeing him folding in on himself, soft where he had been hard, the rigid line of him broken. His helpless hand. Junior will feed the baby, sit on the bed with pillows on both sides to support his arms. He will sit still long enough for that.

“Make sure everything’s okay.”

I nod.

“So nothing will go wrong.”

Daddy is rubbing his pocket with his good hand. I hear the crinkle of plastic. For a moment, Mama is there next to him on the sofa, her arm laid across his lap while she palms his knee, which is how she sat with him when they watched TV together. I wonder if that is phantom pain, and if Daddy will feel his missing fingers the way we feel Mama, present in the absence. But it is still terrible when Daddy looks up at me again, past my left shoulder to the opening door, and she isn’t there.

If it is a girl, I will name her after my mother: Rose. Rose Temple Batiste.

“You want to go to St. Catherine?” Big Henry is talking as he walks through the screen door; his pink feet nudge Randall’s head on accident, and Big Henry jumps back and rattles the door frame. Randall looks up sleepily. I palm Junior’s head and rub.

“What?”

“I got gas. We can ride. See what it’s looking like.”

Randall is waking up slowly. He stretches, talks through his yawn.

“We get back, we’ll go up to the house and try to find some more food. We know y’all ain’t got it to spare.”

“We can go get Skeet,” I add.

Daddy is shaking his head. The side of his short afro is smashed flat.

“Skeetah ain’t going to come,” Daddy says. He is gripping the wrist under his bad hand, rubbing at the skin like he could peel it off. The wire that had seemed to line his bones before the accident, before the hurricane, that made him so tall when he stood next to Mama, has softened to string. “I need something for this.”

If it is a boy, I will name it after Skeetah. Jason. Jason Aldon Batiste.

“We’ll find something,” Big Henry says. I shake Junior awake. Outside, the sky is blue, clear of clouds.

The bayou formed by the meeting of the river and the bay is as calm as it would be on any summer day, and it is hard to tell the hurricane has been here except for where the wind dragged the water across the road and left it there. The bayou is where we had thought the water would come from, the reason we thought we were safe, but Katrina surprised everyone with her uncompromising strength, her forcefulness, the way she lingered; she made things happen that had never happened before. Now, all the people from St. Catherine’s that had family in Bois Sauvage and had sheltered there during the storm for fear of what the hurricane would do to the towns on the beach, follow each other in a long line across the drowned bayou to their homes. Big Henry stays close to the car in front of him; the road has disappeared in patches, and it is only the bent bayou grass rimming the sunken asphalt that gives us any idea that we are not driving into the water, that Big Henry won’t set the car spinning like Daddy’s, set us to sink. The water parts and flutters like a fish’s fin away from the tires, and then closes again, muddy. I wonder what the storm has stirred up from the bottom of the bay, and what it has dragged in and left in the warm, mud-dark water.

“Where are the trees?” Junior asks.

In Bois, some stand still: a few young saplings, hardy oak trees low enough to the ground to avoid the worst of the storm, but stripped of all their leaves and half their branches, as naked as if it is the dead of winter. Here in St. Catherine, they have been mown down, and there is too much sky. In Bois, the houses stand, and are ripped and torn in some places, like Skeetah and Rico after the fight, some of them leaning tipsily, like ours, half drowned. Here, there is too much sky. Something turns in my chest, spreads, and drops; it leaves nothing.

The first main road we get to in St. Catherine, the one that runs through the length of the town on the north side so that it is farthest away from the beach, is washed over with mud. The houses that were here are gone, or they have been flipped over on their heads, or they’ve slid sideways to bump into their neighbors, ripped from their foundations. The high school has been flooded, and the elementary school is smashed flat as a pancake; the power lines that still stand across the street have a four-wheeler hanging from the wire. A parking lot where the owners used to keep eighteen-wheeler truck beds is empty: eight of them are now upside down across the street from the lot, looking like Legos, tossed messily, smashing the trees. What used to be a trailer park looks like a stack of fallen dominoes, and there is one trailer on top of another trailer on top of another trailer, stacked like blocks. And everywhere there are people, looking half drowned; an old white man and an old black man camping out under a tarp spread under a lone sapling; a family of Vietnamese with sheets shaped into a tent over the iron towing bar used for mobile homes, plywood set under the draping to make a floor; teenage girls and women foraging in the parking lot and hollow shell of a gas station, hunting the wreckage for something to eat, something to save. People stand in clusters at what used to be intersections, the street signs vanished, all they own in a plastic bag at their feet, waiting for someone to pick them up. No one is coming.

“What?” Big Henry says, as if someone has asked him a question.

An older woman sits at the corner of one of the smaller roads that we turn down to get to the main road that runs closer to the beach. She has a towel draped over her head, and the plastic and metal chair she sits in leans to the left. She waves her hand, and we slow down.

“Can’t pass down there. Can’t pass nowhere near down there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Big Henry says.

“Y’all got any food?” she asks. She is missing her teeth on the side, and she is that in-between color where I can’t tell if she is white or light-skinned black, but I can tell that she is old, the lines of her face rippling outward like her nose, her eyes, and lips were stones dropped in still water.

“Yes,” I say, and I fish out one of the Top Ramen packets we brought with us, pass it to Big Henry in the front seat, who passes it out the window to her. She grabs it, peers at it, and then starts laughing. Her grin is mostly gums. Her T-shirt has a blue and pink teddy bear on it, and it used to be white.

“Well, all right.” She laughs. “All right.”

Big Henry drives as far as he can, which is only around a hundred feet, before he stops the car, pulls it as far to the side of the road as he can without driving into the ditch, and parks. Mud has splattered up the side of the car, patterned it like lace. Junior is scrambling onto Randall’s back again, and Randall loops and knots his arms under Junior’s legs. Junior’s cheek brushes against Randall’s: I haven’t seen him set Junior down since the hurricane. There is a house sitting in the middle of the road, facing us, like it guards the secrets we will find farther in. We pick our way around it.

There are more houses in the street. One house, square and even as a box, two stories, has been knocked off of its foundation and spun to the side. Another house has landed on another house, wood on brick, and settled. The foundations, cinder blocks, rise up out of the earth, stop a few feet in the air, slim and expectant, robbed of their houses. A woman in a baseball cap picks through the rubble of a spun house; her son, who looks around Junior’s age, squats in the dirt near the street and stares, face puckered, as we pass. A man in a yellow T-shirt pokes around his house’s foundation with a stick. We pass what used to be the elementary school, the gym where Randall, a few days ago, played for and lost his chance at going to basketball camp and being recognized by a college scout for his talent, for being Randall, where Manny learned who I was and disowned me, where Skeetah fought for me, and there is nothing but mangled wood and steel in a great pile, and suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.

“Shit,” Randall breathes. He grips Junior’s leg harder, and Junior whimpers but says nothing. “It’s all gone,” he says.

We stand in our small group, staring at the mess, and then I step away, and we leave, but Randall is the last to start walking, and he glances back again and again at the gym that was there but isn’t. Power lines stretch across the mud-clogged road like great lazy snakes; we hop over them. With all the trees gone, it is easy to see that we are approaching the train tracks, the same train tracks that carried the trains we heard blowing raucously when we were younger, swimming in the same oyster-lined bay that came in and swallowed Bois, swallowed the back of St. Catherine, and vomited it out in pieces. A house sits in the middle of the track. It is yellow, and its windows have been blasted open by the storm, but its curtains remain. They flutter weakly. We climb around it, look east and west along the track, and see many houses lining it: it is a steel necklace with wooden beads.

Beyond the track, there are no beads. No houses stand here. There are only great piles of wood. Sometimes they are all the same color, and that’s how we know a house stood here, stood there. There are no foragers here, picking through the rubble. What could be salvaged? What hasn’t been buried or swept back out to sea? The stumps of the trees are raw and ragged, and the plywood from the houses is raw and ragged, and everything has been ripped in half. Closer to the beach, so close I can glimpse it if I squint and look toward the horizon, are oak trees. Some that stood in the park stand still; others have been ripped from the earth, their naked crowns facing the ocean. Those that remain look dead. Narrow streets where dentists’ offices were, where restaurants that served catfish and hush puppies were, where veterinarians’ offices were, where small dim bookstores and the kinds of antiques stores that I would never dream of walking into for fear of breaking something have been savaged; all the storm left are boards and siding stacked like pancakes flung on plates of concrete slabs.

We reach the end of the road. Here the hurricane has ripped even the road that rimmed the beach away in chunks so there are red clay and oyster shell cliffs. The gas station, the yacht club, and all the old white-columned homes that faced the beach, that made us feel small and dirty and poorer than ever when we came here with Daddy, piled in his truck, for gas or chips or bait on our swimming days, are gone. Not ravaged, not rubble, but completely gone. The hurricane has left a few steel beams, which stick up like stray hairs, from concrete foundations. There are rivers running down the highway that lines the beach. Past that, on the beach, there is a sofa. A man with white hair and an open button-down shirt is sitting on the arm of the sofa, and he is holding his head or he is rubbing his eyes or he is smoothing his hair or he is crying, and a dog, orange and large in the sun, is sniffing around him in circles, and then it is running and it is barking excitedly at what it has found. A closed black casket. It sniffs, raises its leg, and pees.

“Ain’t nothing left,” Big Henry says.

It is quieter than I have ever heard it in St. Catherine. There is only wind and the flat blue-gray water, which is so tame there isn’t even the loud swish and draw of waves. Big Henry’s voice carries, and the dog looks up toward us and goes back to sniffing his treasure.

“Come on,” Randall says.

Big Henry and I follow him. Junior bobs up and down on Randall’s back, as gently as if he were sitting in a boat on calm water. We tiptoe on the edge of the ravaged road. I am scared more of it will slide. We climb over half of an oak tree, a car empty as a naked sardine can, what is left of a neon grocery store sign.

“Over here,” Randall says and leads us down one of the side streets, away from the quiet, open expanse of the sea. “Here.”

He jumps up on the concrete slab behind what used to be a bank but is now only the safe, large as an elevator, in the middle of a foundation, and bends to look down in the folds of the concrete.

“Look.”

“The liquor store,” Big Henry says.

“For Daddy,” Randall says, and then we are all on our knees, balancing on the haphazard slabs that rock when we walk, peering under boards, finding glass shards from wine bottles, vodka, gin, gleaming red, dark blue, purple in the shadows. I find a bottle of Mad Dog, lime green, unbroken. Randall finds an orange one. Big Henry finds a red one, and a small bottle of gin. Junior points and Randall unwedges a big gallon jug of vodka. Big Henry slides two bottles of Mad Dog in his shorts pockets, and I slip the bottle of gin and the orange Mad Dog in Randall’s pants, and he hooks his thumb through his belt loops to hold his pants up. Big Henry grabs the vodka jug. I squat down to look in the hot concrete crevasses again, to find another treasure that I can take back for Skeet, something that will help me tell him the story of what we found, but there is nothing here but broken bottles, smashed signs, splintered wood, so much garbage.

Big Henry squats next to me. Randall is pointing down the street, pointing something out to Junior, where the library was that he visited with his school once, maybe.

“I heard what you said. When you was talking to your daddy.”

I will have to tell Skeetah as clearly as I can, and he will have to close his eyes and for one second not think of China and listen as I tell him the story of Katrina and what she did to the coast.

“Who the daddy?” Big Henry asks. There is no blazing fire to his eyes, no cold burning ice like Manny’s. Only warmth, like the sun on the best fall days when the few leaves that will turn are starting and the air is clear and cloudless.

“It don’t have a daddy,” I say. I palm a piece of glass, marbled blue and white, blunt at the edges, grab another that is red and a pink brick stone. I slip all three into my pockets. Like Skeetah told me the story of the last thing that Mama said to us, I will tell him this. This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building.

“You wrong,” Big Henry says. He looks away when he says it, out to the gray Gulf. There is a car out there in the shallows of the water. The top gleams red. “This baby got a daddy, Esch.” He reaches out his big soft hand, soft as the bottom of his feet probably, and helps me stand. “This baby got plenty daddies.”

I smile with a tightening of my cheek. My eyes feel wet. I swallow salt.

“Don’t forget you always got me,” Big Henry says.

I hold the stones so tight in my fist in my pocket that they hurt. I wish I could tell Big Henry this: I wish you were there when the water came, you with your big hands, your legs like tree trunks sunk in the earth. I lead the way over the ruined ground to Randall and Junior, who watch us approaching.

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.

Skeetah’s made a clearing in what used to be the yard but is now a tangle of tree branches and wood and car and wire and garbage. Our house looks like it has been painted in mud, slathered dark. It looks tilted wrong by the water. The night wind feels cool only because it is less hot than the day. Ms. Bernadine gave us a big cup of water each for a bath; a shower was wetting the rag in the water, soaping it, stripping in Big Henry’s warm tiled blue bathroom that smelled faintly like rotten eggs, soaping my whole body, and then rinsing off with the water from the cup. It was heaven. She unwrapped and washed Daddy’s hand, leaned in close, said, It’s a little red. Daddy had replied, already slurring, We’ll deal with it. Dinner was sardines and Vienna sausages, canned corn, dry ramen we ate like crackers, grape and red soda; even after I sucked the last of the sugary hot bite of the soda down, licked the last fish oil from the sardines from my fingernails, I was still hungry. We drove up to the house and had to park the car almost on top of the trees that had been dragged out of the street and left at the side of the road near the ditch.

Skeetah must have found an axe, or maybe he used his bare hands to break the wood; he sits in the middle of the downed trees, his fire big, higher than the fire we barbecued on, so big that the flames leap past the top of his head, burnish him black and gleaming like the glass I found earlier. He sits on an overturned bucket in the circle of mud and dirt that he has made, his elbows on his knees, his eyes intent on the fire. He wears a pair of jean shorts and tennis shoes, and next to him is a rubber tire, a chain that is the same, dark cloudy gray of the hurricane clouds on top of that. China’s things. He has found China’s things.

“We brought you some food,” I say. He looks up, unsurprised, like he has been expecting us. The whites of his eyes are very white, and he seems more still than I have ever seen him before, as still as if there is some hard stone inside of him, at his center: a concrete foundation left still.

“Thank you,” he says. “Your shoes.” Skeetah motions to another, smaller pile I had not noticed. A muddy pile of shoes that looks exactly like the kind of pile the puppy China made. “I found them.”

We sift through the pile. Skeetah peels open the top of one of the Vienna sausage cans, unties the bag of saltines, makes a small sandwich, and begins eating. He chews very slowly. Crumbs gather at the corner of his lips, and he licks them away.

“You should come down with us,” Randall says, jamming his foot into his shoe. Junior slides down Randall’s side, a small black shadow. I throw him his shoes. Randall sits in the dirt, and Junior settles in his lap. Randall lets his chin sit on Junior’s bald, sweating egghead.

“We got plenty of room,” Big Henry says. He inhales his cigarello, and the tip lights red. “You could sleep in my room.”

“We’re worried about you.” I say it because they won’t.

Skeetah smiles around the food, shakes his head. He picks up the cream soda we brought him, his favorite, opens it, and takes a sip.

“I’m not going nowhere,” he says. He eats another cracker sandwich. The meat smells rich in the dark; the crackers smell like nothing. All of it smells like it is burning because of the smoky fire, which is unbearably hot. I sit next to Skeetah but scoot backward to feel leaves still green and fat on the fallen trees tickle my back. “She’s somewhere out there, and she’s coming back.”

“You didn’t see St. Catherine,” Randall says. “Look like somebody dropped a bomb. Like war.”

“Bois ain’t St. Catherine.” Skeetah frowns for a moment, a dark line like a slash between his eyes, his lips and nose like a puzzle with the pieces fit together wrong, and then his face is smooth and polished again. “She can swim.”

“You can come back up here during the day,” Big Henry suggests.

“No.”

“If she come back, Skeet, ain’t like she going to leave again,” I say.

“Ain’t no if.” Skeetah rubs his head from his neck to the crown like his skin is a T-shirt he could pull off and over his skull. Like he could pull who he is off and become something else. Like he could shed his human shape, in the dark, be hatched a great gleaming pit, black to China’s white, and run off into what is left of the woods, follow the line of the creek, and find China sniffing at the bole of an oak tree filled with quivering squirrels, or sniffing at the earth, at the rabbits between the waters. “Not if. When.”

When he looks back up at me, he is still again: sand seared to rock.

“She’s going to come back to me,” he says. “Watch.”

We will sit with him here, in the strange, insect-silent dark. We will sit until we are sleepy, and then we will remain until our legs hurt, until Junior falls asleep in Randall’s arms, his weak neck lolling off Randall’s elbow. Randall will watch Junior and Big Henry will watch me and I will watch Skeetah, and Skeetah will watch none of us. He will watch the dark, the ruined houses, the muddy appliances, the tops of the trees that surround us whose leaves are dying for lack of roots. He will feed the fire so it will blaze bright as a lighthouse. He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud. He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving.

China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence.

She will know that I am a mother.