Salvage the Bones

THE THIRD DAY: SICKNESS IN THE DIRT

Last night, I dozed and woke every few minutes to wish that I could sleep, could close my eyes and fall into the nothing dark of slumber. Every time I dozed, the truth that I was pregnant was there like a bully to kick me awake. I woke at seven with my throat burning, my face wet.

This is what it means to be pregnant so far: throwing up. Sick from the moment I open my eyes, look up at the puckered plaster ceiling, remember who I am, where I am, what I am. I turn the water on so no one can hear me vomit. I turn it off and lock the bathroom. Lay on the floor. Lay my head on my arm, the tile the temperature of water that’s been sitting out on a counter all night, and stare at the base of the toilet, the dust caked up around it like Spanish moss. I lay for so long I could be asleep. I lay for so long that when I raise my head from my arm, my hair has marked cursive I can’t read into my skin. The floor tilts like the bottom of a dark boat.

“Esch!” Junior screams as he tries the doorknob, slaps the door, and then bangs out of the back door to pee off the steps.

“Esch?” Randall calls.

“I’m shaving my legs!” I told this to the tile, hoarse.

“Shaving? I’m too old to pull a Junior.”

“I’m almost done.” I bend over the sink and drink until I don’t feel like throwing up anymore. Even after I turn the water off, I still keep swallowing. My tongue feels rolled in uncooked grits, but I still swallow. Repeat I will not throw up, I will not throw up, I won’t. When I walk out of the door, I follow the baseboards.

“You okay?” Randall stands in my way.

“I rinsed the hair out the tub,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

The sound of Daddy chugging the working tractor through the yard, I ignore. In bed, I pull the thin sheet over my head, mouth my knees, and breathe so hot it feels like two people up under the sheet.

When I wake up for the second time, the air is hot, and the ceiling is so low, the heat can’t rise. It doesn’t have anyplace to go. I’m surprised Daddy hasn’t sent Junior in here to get me up by now, to work around the house and prepare for hurricane. Late last night, he and Junior carried some of the jugs in, lined them up against the wall while I made tuna fish. Daddy kept counting the bottles over and over again as if he couldn’t remember, glanced at me and Randall as if we were plotting to steal some. If Randall’s told him that I’m sick, he won’t care. Maybe they’ve scattered: Junior under the house, Randall to play ball, Skeet in the shed with China and her puppies. My stomach sizzles sickly, so I pull my book from the corner of my bed where it’s smashed between the wall and my mattress. In Mythology, I am still reading about Medea and the quest for the Golden Fleece. Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by my throat. I can see her. Medea sneaks Jason things to help him: ointments to make him invincible, secrets in rocks. She has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with all her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind; he makes her double in two. I know her. When I look up, Skeet’s standing in the door looking like he’s going to cry.

“What’s wrong?”

Skeetah shakes his head, and I follow him.

Inside the shed, the puppies are swimming in the dirt. They lay on their bellies, their feet sticking out like small twigs, bobbing on the dusty current. They twitch and roll. They are silent. They are pink yawning tongues. All but one paddles toward China, grabs her abdomen like we do sunken trees at the river. They have trouble grabbing her tits, knead her belly with their paws like we do with our feet when we balance on the slimy trunks. All but one swims and sucks.

He is the white and brown. He is the cartoon swimmer, the puppy who dove like Big Henry when he was being born. He lays face down. His mouth opens and closes like he is eating the shed floor. Skeetah’s face is so close to the puppy that when he talks, the brown and white fur flutters, and it almost looks like the puppy’s moving.

“He was okay early this morning. Ate once and everything.”

“When you noticed him like this?” I ask. The puppy turns his head to the side, and it looks like his neck is broken. Skeetah rocks back. The swimmer gasps.

“About an hour ago.”

“Maybe it’s China. Maybe her milk’s bad for him or something.”

“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.”

My morning nap on the tile comes back strong.

“Maybe he just sick, Skeet.”

“What if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?”

The puppy taps the floor with one paw.

“Maybe if you just get him to eat. Maybe he ain’t been able to get enough milk.”

Skeet scoops up the puppy, puts him in the dirt inches away from China. She lowers her head, pointed like a snake. When the puppy jerks his neck again, she growls. It is the rumbling of rocks across packed earth. The puppy lays still. His eyes aren’t even open yet. She growls again, and he slides to one side.

“Stop it, China.” Skeet breathes. “Feed him.” He pushes the puppy forward inches. The puppy’s face plows into the sand.

China’s neck snaps out and she barks. She lashes. Her teeth graze the puppy, whose legs twitch outward and draw in tight.

“Skeet!” I yell.

“You bitch!” he hisses, cutting his eyes at her, wounded. He grabs the puppy, wraps it in his shirt, sits back on his folded feet. China ignores him and lays her head along her white, gleaming arms that look like herons’ necks. Her eyelids droop, and suddenly she looks tired. Her breasts are all swollen, and the puppies pull at them. She is a weary goddess.

She is a mother so many times over.

“Maybe she just trying to protect the rest of them. You know, if it’s serious, she know.”

Skeetah folds the puppy in his hand like a baseball. He nods.

“Fine.” The bugs outside sing because the day is so bright, it is gold. Daddy guns the tractor; he is pulling plywood in stacks across the clearing, gathering wood from all the corners of the Pit for the storm. Big Henry had told us one of his cousins from Germaine had a whole litter die of parvo; the puppies had just opened their eyes, and then the first one died, and then each day after that, every time his cousin walked out back to his doghouse, he would find another puppy dead, so small and hard that it was difficult for him to imagine that they might have once lived. “You going to come out with me and camp tonight?” The puppy is a black ball in Skeetah’s black tee: still, round. Skeetah is not looking at his hands, but he is watching China with something like respect and love in his face. “I need to separate him. Make it easy for him til he dies.”

“Yeah.” I breathe. My stomach flutters. I will watch Skeet kill his own. “You know I’m here.”

Eating is different now. I hunch over a bowl of eggs and rice in the kitchen and I eat but feel like I am lying to myself and Skeetah, who is stealing food for our night in the woods. Every bite is another lie. Food is the last thing I want. Skeetah pulls more plastic bags from under the sink and wraps them around the one holding the food so that the bundle is opaque as a spider’s egg sac, and I can’t see the mix of things that would be our hurricane supplies that Skeetah is filching.

“Look good?” he asks.

I swallow. I nod.

“We should take a jug of that water.”

“You know Daddy done probably counted them.”

“We’ll tell Randall to tell him that it was them beers he was drinking yesterday. Made him miscount.”

“Randall ain’t coming?”

“Don’t know. But you know Randall tell Daddy whatever.”

Skeetah puts the bundle of bags under his shirt. He looks pregnant now.

I skim the belly of my bowl with my spoon, slide the steel along all the curved places. The rice clumps; the eggs are bundled. It all disappears, and I wonder what I am feeding. I imagine the food turning to mush, sliding down my throat, through my body like water through a storm drain to pool in my stomach. To make what is inside me grow to be a baby in the winter. And Skeet smiles at me and holds the door open, waiting for me to walk through, and he is blind.

Junior is pulling planks of plywood across the yard. He yanks them up and hauls, walking backward through the dirt. Daddy has them scattered all around, pulled from other places on the Pit, and has lain them on the ground. Junior is piling them, and every one leaves a trail of crumbling wood behind him since they are eaten through with black, rotting blotches. Junior is leaving a trail of bread crumbs. He is covered in dust, and it makes him look rolled in chalk. His thin gray shorts sag on him, hanging to the middle of his shins. They must be an old pair of Skeet’s. He drops a board, and it claps.

“Where y’all going?” Junior asks.

“None of your business,” says Skeet. He walks into the shed, and I follow.

“Go on, Junior.” I say. He doesn’t need to know that the puppy is dying. He doesn’t need to know that young things go, too.

“You ain’t the boss of me,” Junior says. I try to block his slide into the curtained doorway, but he crawls under me and sees Skeet handling the sick puppy, which doesn’t swim now. The puppy’s head rolls to the side, and he raises an arm, but I don’t know if that is Skeet’s fingers pulling him like a puppet, or the puppy, fighting.

“Get out of here, Junior! You so bad,” Skeetah says. He pulls down a bucket from one of the high shelves and lays the puppy inside, and then puts it back up so China can’t reach it. She growls, and Skeetah places his fingers in the middle of her forehead, shoves. “Shut up.”

“I’m telling Randall that you fixing to do something bad to the puppy!” Junior runs outside.

“Oh Lord,” I breathe.

China watches, reclining on her side. The puppies feed from her, and she is still, stone. Only her eyes shine like an oil lamp in the light. I should know that’s who she is, know that she’s often still as an animal ready to attack, but I’m not. Her tail does not wag. I can’t help the skin puckering over my stomach, up my arms.

“We’ll leave him up here till later tonight. If it’s the parvo, hopefully he too far away to infect the other ones.” Skeetah wipes his hands on the front of his holey tee. His shirt comes up over his ribs, his thin, muscled stomach. “Shit. The germs. I need to go wash my hands.”

I’m sitting on the steps, waiting on Skeetah, when Randall comes out the trees. He bounces when he walks, and it’s like the darkness under the green gives him his pieces one by one: a chest, a stomach, hips, arms, and legs. Last, a face. Junior is a voice behind him, riding on his back, his feet flopping over Randall’s stomach, leaving white dusty marks like powder with his soles.

“What’s this Junior talking about y’all trying to drown one of the puppies?”

I feel a quick wave of nausea.

“I don’t know where he got that from.”

“He say y’all put it in a bucket.”

“The puppy got parvo.” I say.

“They was going to drown it in the bucket!” Randall hoists Junior up, so when Junior says this, he is the flash of a face over Randall’s shoulder.

“And we wasn’t fixing to drown it in no bucket.” I say.

“Well, what y’all going to do with it?”

“Take it to back to the pit.”

Randall lets Junior go, and Junior hangs on until he can’t anymore, until his legs turn to noodles and he is sliding down Randall like a pole. We three are quiet, looking at each other, frowning.

“Go on, Junior.” Randall says.

“But Randall-”

“Go.”

Junior folds his arms over his chest, his ribs like a small grill burnt black. He needs to put a shirt on.

“Go.”

Junior’s eyes are bright. When he runs away, his feet make little slapping sounds in the dirt, and leave clouds of smoke. Skeetah grabs the bucket and his nest egg of food that he stole from the house.

“You can’t just kill the thing,” Randall says.

“Yes, I can.”

“You can make it better.”

“Nothing can make parvo better. Puppies don’t survive that. And if I don’t get rid of this one, the others will catch it. And then they will all die. You think Junior can handle that?”

“No. But they got to be another way.”

“There ain’t.” Skeetah hauls the bag over his shoulder along with his BB gun, holds the bucket in one trembling hand. “You know basketball, but you don’t know dogs.” He walks away. “Tell him something, I don’t know what-but this one got to go.”

“He too young, Esch.” Randall’s hands look graceless without a basketball in them. He looks like he doesn’t know how to hold them.

“I know,” I say. “But we was young, too.” He knows who I am talking about.

“I keep catching him climbing up on barrels, looking through the cracks, too scared to go inside. Staring at them puppies. China start growling and I pull him away, and I can feel his little heart beating fast. And thirty minutes later I catch him up there again.”

I shrug, lift up my hands like I have something to give him when I know I don’t. I start to trot toward Skeetah, who is walking deeper into the shade under the trees on his way to the Pit.

“Come on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.

“Shit,” Randall curses. “Shit.”

Skeetah has stolen this: bread, a knife, cups, a half-gallon jug of punch, hot sauce, dishwashing liquid. He sits them next to the bucket, and he dusts off two cinder blocks with a grill laid over it that he and Randall made into a barbecue pit when we were younger. The steel is burnt black, the stones burnt gray. His rifle hangs by a strap from his shoulder, its muzzle digging into the backs of his legs when he walks.

“What do we need that for?” I ask.

In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.

“Come on,” Skeetah says.

In the woods, animals dart between the valleys of shadow. Birds trill up through pathways of sunlight. Skeetah cuts through it all, his shoulders curved. He leans forward when he walks, studies the ground. I am noisy behind him, my feet dragging in the pine needles. I kick up my knees, try to set my feet down easy, but I am off balance. What would be the baby sits like a water balloon in my stomach, makes me feel set to bursting. My secret makes me clumsy. Skeetah stops, kneels in the needles and crackling leaves; underneath, it all rots and turns to dirt. Skeetah shakes his head at me and looks up into the trees. We wait.

Before a hurricane, the animals that can, leave. Birds fly north out of the storm, and everything else roams as far away from the winds and rain as possible. The air has been clear these past couple of days. Bright, every day almost unbearably bright and hot and close, the way that I feel when Manny is sweating over me: golden, burning. Insects root under our feet, squirrels leap from tree to tree, crows glide between the tops of the pines, cawing. The beat of their wings sounds soft as the swish of Mudda Ma’am’s broom when she sweeps pine needles from her sandy front yard. Skeetah watches them the way he watches China: like any second she might speak, and he’s sure when it will happen, she will reveal all the answers to all the things he has ever wondered about. Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer. He was convinced last summer after one tornado touched down at a shopping complex in Germaine that the Gulf Coast would be a new tornado alley. He spent the entire summer pointing out the safest places in the house to crouch. Every time he caught Junior in the kitchen, he made him practice the tornado drill we were all taught in school; kneel, fold over your thighs, tuck your head between your knees, cover your neck with your bony fingers to protect the soft throat underneath.

Skeetah takes his gun off his shoulder, cocks it. He holds it loosely at first, his eyes moving back and forth like he is reading something written in the air between the trees.

“Skeet. What you fixing to shoot?”

“Wasn’t enough cans of meat to steal.”

“I ain’t cooking it, Skeet.”

Skeetah shoulders the rifle. He points the gun at the sky. The wind moves a little in the tops of the trees, and then dies away, like a person leaving a room. The trees are silent with longing. The gun begins to scissor back and forth. Skeetah points, following the squirrels scampering through the trees. They are fuzzy and gray, fat with summer food.

“Shhhh,” he says. “We need something to eat.”

A branch creaks. The tops of the pines rub together as the wind comes again, but the oaks do not move. The squirrels like the oaks best, run along their black, hard branches highway overpasses. These are their solid houses; they will withstand a storm, if she comes. The smell of baked pine is strong.

“Gotcha,” Skeet says, and he shoots.

The shot rings off a pine, making a solid thunk that sounds like a punch. Skeet winces. The squirrels melt in and out of the dark blotches, round the bends of the trunks, disappear, reappear. When one with a half-missing tail appears at the V of the oak and slides over it to scramble down to the ground, Skeet fires again. The squirrel loses its grip, curls into a ball, and rolls down the trunk, leaving a ribbon of red. Skeetah stands and runs toward it, firing again. Its half tail twitches, and it lays still on the earth. It is big for a Mississippi squirrel.

“I’m not cleaning that.”

The crows fly away, screaming. The insects scream in chorus in the tops of the trees.

Skeetah picks the squirrel up with both hands, tries to hold the body together so it won’t fall apart in pieces. Blood squirts out of it with a pulse. The heart.

“You want him to come tonight, don’t you?”

“Who you talking about?”

“You know who I’m talking about. And it ain’t Big Henry.” He flings a bit of fur away that was dangling wetly like a red earring from the animal’s hide. “Ain’t Marquise, neither.”

“No.” I shake my head. Skeetah grabs the rest of the tail and pulls. What was left of it before he shot the squirrel comes away like bristles from a brush.

“Y’all don’t look right together,” Skeetah says, studying the bloody carcass. He is so hot his nose is sweating. But we are, I want to say. He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts. But I say nothing, and Skeetah shrugs and lifts the squirrel up like an offering and begins walking back to the pit.

When we get back to the campsite, Skeetah lays the squirrel on the plastic bag, and he pulls out the knife and cuts the head off. The blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. He pitches the head into the underbrush like a ball, runs the knife in a jagged line down the squirrel’s chest, and then makes a cross across the animal’s arms. He is ruthless, quiet, focused as China before a fight. Skeetah pulls hard, and the skin balloons away from the flesh underneath, stretching, stretching, until it is a wet limp rag, and Skeetah flings it away. Fur booties remain on the squirrel’s feet, but Skeet cuts those off and tosses them after the head. The animal is no more than meat, now, thick as two pork chops laid together. Skeetah slices at the stomach, and what comes sliding out is blue and purple, like so much wet yarn.

“Shit,” Skeet breathes. The smell of the animal’s insides is everywhere. When Daddy used to keep pigs, they shat and ate and rooted in their own filth, growing pink and fat, but the smell of them and their nest was like this animal’s stomach: raw, full with shit. Skeetah is right.

He tries to pull the innards out, but they hold, so he tries to cut at the strings holding them, and he cuts the intestines by accident.

“Oh, shit,” Skeetah says, and he drops the animal and the innards and the knife on the bloody plastic bag and he steps away, his hands on his knees, his head hanging down. There is sand in my throat, and I cannot breathe.

“Jesus, Skeet.” I run off behind a small gathering of trees, as far as I can make it away from that smell and that slime, and I fall and throw up the eggs, the rice, the water, everything I have inside of me until there is no food left, until my throat feels empty and I cannot stop heaving up air and spit, but still I am not able to throw it all up. Inside, at the bottom, something remains.

By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come. Marquise is slicing at the meat with his own pocket knife, slapping small chunks onto pieces of bread that are turning soggy with hot sauce. Skeetah makes a sandwich, passes it to me, before making his own. The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees. The sun had set while Skeetah and I were looking for wood for the grill; the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a drain and left the sky bleached white to navy to dark. I overloaded on wood for the fire; Skeet had to keep grabbing the squirrel out by its foot, his hand wrapped in his shirt, because he was afraid it would burn. But the fire is large enough that I can see all their faces in the dark.

“It’s good,” Marquise says.

“It tastes burnt,” says Skeetah. Big Henry, beside him, laughs.

“It tastes like shit. I can’t believe y’all eating that.” Big Henry gulps more of his beer, which is so warm the bottle doesn’t even sweat water in the hot night. “Might as well give that little bit of nothing to the puppy.”

I hardly chew the sandwich, just bite it small enough to get on my tongue, wet with spit, and swallow. Skeetah hands me the half-jug of juice, and I swallow a mouthful of warm colored sugar. I am not hungry, but it is better when I eat because I don’t feel so sick. If I throw up again, somebody would ask me what my problem is. And I don’t want to have to speak the lie, to be convincing. To have them looking at me and asking. I pass the jug along to Marquise. This is the closest drink to real fruit juice we’ve ever had in the house. Mama used to put it in the cart while I rode in the basket through the grocery store, wedge the red punch alongside me in the seat so the jug turned my leg cold. But I liked it, because later in the truck that didn’t have any air-conditioning, my leg would stay cold, like a piece of ice melting in my hand.

The puppy in the bucket scratches and Skeetah sits over him, his head hanging low, staring. Every once in a while, he’ll touch the rim of the bucket like he wants to reach in and rub the puppy, comfort it, but he doesn’t.

“You ain’t never gave him a name, huh, Skeet?” I ask.

“No.” He doesn’t look up. “You can give it a name if you want, Esch.” He sits with his chin in his hands. “It’s a girl.”

A name. I knew a girl once in school that was named after the candles you burn to drive the mosquitoes away: Citronella. She always had at least two boyfriends, lip gloss, and all her folders were color-coded to match her books. I used to kneel in the water up to my neck and watch her when we ran into her and her folks swimming at the river. She was golden as those candles, so perfect that I wanted to hate her. And I did, some. But sometimes I would say her name when I was walking along, talking to myself, and I liked the way it sounded, the way it rolled around my tongue like a mouthful of ice cream. Citronella. I want to name the puppy this, but I think Marquise, at least, will laugh at me, because he knows her. Probably was one of her boyfriends, walked down the street to the park with her and held her hand.

“Nella,” I say. “I want to name her Nella.”

Skeet nods. Big Henry tries to pass me his forty, but I shake my head. The hot sauce is still pulling spit from my tongue, but I know I’m probably going to cry when Nella goes, and I don’t want any more salt. Marquise shoves a stick in the fire and stabs at the ashes.

“It’s a good name,” Big Henry says, with a smile half shining and then fading. Skeet looks in the bucket like he didn’t hear. Still, the little bit of happiness that was inside me at coming up with the name flutters and snuffs out. What’s the use of naming her to die?

There’s a breaking sound coming from the woods, the crunch of leaves crumbling underfoot, and Randall and Manny appear. Manny catches all the light from the fire, eats it up, and blazes. He smiles. His scar gleams, and my heart blushes.

“Junior finally fell asleep,” Randall says. “Manny say his cousin Rico lost the dog he had before Kilo to parvo.”

Manny sits next to Randall at the fire, drinks so much of the punch when Marquise hands it to him that there is only scum left at the bottom.

“You should kill it now,” Manny says. “Save it the pain. Rico sliced his dog’s throat soon as he saw it getting sick. Right now, you just torturing it.”

“No,” Skeet says. “It’s not time yet.”

“You going to shoot it?” Manny eyes the gun. “That’s quick, at least.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, how you going to do it?”

Skeetah looks up, but he is looking at Randall when he talks, not Manny.

“You remember how Mama used to kill the chickens?” Skeetah asks.

The cicadas in the trees are like fitful rain, sounding in waves in the black brush of the trees. When Randall speaks, he stares at Skeetah, who grips the side of the bucket.

“She only killed one when it was something special, like one of our birthdays or her and Daddy’s anniversary. She used to watch them, like she knew every one, knew which one had eggs to hatch, which one hadn’t lain in a while, which one was just getting fat and old. Was almost like the chickens knew it; they’d get nervous. Shuffling around, sticking in groups, staying away from the coop. Next thing you know, she’d grab one, take it behind the house to that big old oak tree stump Daddy’d dragged out of the woods, and stand over it real still while the bird was beating its wings so fast they’d blur. But the chicken wouldn’t ever make no noise. And then she would put her hand over the bird’s face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.” Randall doesn’t take a breath when he speaks, just lets it all run out of him like a steady stream. He swallows. “Chicken don’t taste like that no more.” The crickets in the tree closest to us take up a low rumble, almost drown Randall out. I don’t really remember Mama killing the chickens so clear, but when Randall says it, I see it, and I think I remember it.

“Yeah,” Skeetah says; he is slow to blink. He lifts the puppy. Her stomach rises and falls, and the wind coming out of her sounds like a croaking frog. I reach out to touch her. “Don’t,” Skeet says. “It’ll carry back to the rest.” He glances at me and half smiles, and then looks down at his fingers.

Through the trees, there is a new moon, and Nella is singing to it. I think I see Junior leaping like a squirrel through the shadows, watching and waiting, but when I look closely again, there is only darkness beyond the fire.

When Skeet grabs and twists, his hands are as sure as Mama’s.

When Skeetah comes back from burying the puppy, he is shirtless, his muscles black and ropy as that squirrel’s. Sweat coats him like oil. He stands for a second in the firelight, still, breathing hard. He throws his shirt into the fire.

“What are you doing?” Marquise asks around the squirrel bone he is sucking on. He slurps and almost swallows it, chokes it back up.

“It’s all contaminated,” Skeetah says. “Everything.”

He shucks his pants, throws them into the fire.

“Are you serious?” Marquise laughs.

“As a heart attack,” Skeetah says. His boxers are sagging, the elastic showing at the top. He grabs the dishwashing liquid and walks toward the black water of the pit, bends mid-step to pull his drawers off of one leg and then the other, and then throws them in the fire by looking over his shoulder. But he does not turn back around. All of him is muscle. I haven’t seen him naked since we were little and Mama put us in the tub together.

“I can’t believe you’re going to wash in that,” says Marquise, but even as he is saying it Randall is standing, and even though he didn’t touch the puppy, Randall is taking off all his own clothes, leaving them in a pile. He is taller, and his arms and legs are rubber bands. Big Henry grinds his bottle into the dirt until the earth holds it still. He kicks off his shoes first, and then peels his socks away and folds them in half before shoving them into his shoes. His feet are large and soft-looking with long black hairs curling down the top like baby’s hair.

Where my brothers go, I follow.

I walk into the water with all my clothes on. When I am all wet, I grab the soap from Skeetah and rub suds into my clothes, too. I make them white before I pull them away, one by one, until I am naked in the water, my clothes a dirty, slimy pile on the mud bank.

“Y’all niggas crazy,” Marquise says, but he takes off his clothes anyhow and follows us to the water.

“I was hot anyway,” Manny says, and he throws his white tee near where I was sitting along with his pants and strips to his underwear. He runs and dives in the water and comes up behind Randall and tackles him so that they both sink. They wrestle, giggling, looking like fish yanking against a line. Marquise is swinging from a rope that hangs from a high tree, and Big Henry is moving through the water with a slow stroke, his hands cutting in so straight they don’t make any splash. Randall and Manny keep dunking each other, laughing. I want Manny to touch me, to swim over and grab me by my arms, to pull me up against him, but I know he won’t. Randall slips away from Manny, swims over to Skeetah, who has been treading water off by himself.

“Watch out. You know they got water moccasins under that brush,” says Randall. Skeetah’s scrubbing like he could rub his skin off.

“I’m all right. They ain’t studying me.”

“I ain’t sucking the poison out you,” Randall laughs.

“I ain’t getting bit. They can smell it, you know.”

“Smell what?”

“Death.”

Randall stops his forward glide and treads. I can’t see his face in the dark.

“Shut up, Skeet.” He splashes water that catches firelight and turns red. Drops, like fireworks from the sky, hit Skeet. Under the cicadas, I imagine that I should be able to hear it sizzle. “Now you really talking crazy.”

Big Henry is grabbing at Marquise’s feet, trying to pull him off the rope. Marquise kicks, and Big Henry tugs so hard on the rope, the limb it’s tied to cracks so loud that it sounds like a big bone popping.

“Oh, shit!” Marquise yells, and then he’s letting go of the rope, but it is too late, because it’s all falling on Big Henry’s head. I am laughing so hard my ribs hurt, but when Manny surfaces like a jumping fish next to me, popping up out of the water like the best kind of prize, I stop. The laugh turns to a scratch in my throat.

“What’s up, Esch?” Manny’s looking at Big Henry and Marquise struggling with the branch in the water, Randall swimming over to help. He talks to me out the side of his face. Skeet is still scrubbing his skin off, not watching us. Manny dives under the water and comes up on my right, still staying far enough away from me that I can’t reach out and touch him.

“Nothing.” I swallow the words.

“You was scared to take off your clothes in front of us?” Manny is grinning, but he’s not looking at me, and he’s swimming in slow circles so he’s orbiting me like the moon. Or the sun.

It’s a little noise that comes out of my throat then.

“Scared to let everybody see what you look like?”

I shake my head.

“It ain’t that bad,” he says.

“Not bad?” I breathe, and I am ashamed because I am repeating what he says.

“Something like that.” He jams a finger into his ear and then shakes his head so fast water comes flying off him like a dog. His bottom lip is pink and full, while his top is a shy line. I have dreamed about kissing him. Around three years ago, I saw him having sex with a girl. He and Randall had talked her into coming back to the Pit with them when Daddy was out, and I heard them all laughing when they passed underneath the window. I followed them into the woods. When they got to the pit, Manny grabbed her butt and rubbed her stomach the way a man pets a dog’s side, and then the girl laid down for him. He was on top of her, moving his hand up and down in between her legs, and then he kissed that girl. Twice, three times. He opened his mouth so wide for her, licked her like he was tasting her, like she was cane sugar sweet. He was eating her. I wonder when he stopped kissing girls like that, or if he just doesn’t want to kiss me. Now he circles, half looking at me, half looking at Big Henry and Marquise. He grabs my hand and pulls it toward him, wraps my fingers around his dick.

“Not too bad,” he says. I want to know what it feels like, so I reach out under the water to touch his chest, his nipples the size of red grapes. They are much softer than that. The skin in the seams of his muscles is the color of Sugar Daddy caramel candy. Manny pulls away. “What are you doing?” His dick slides out of my hand, hot in the cool water: then gone.

“I just wanted-”

“Esch.” Manny says it like he’s disappointed, like he doesn’t know who this girl who reached out to touch him is. His profile is sharp, and it shines like a polished penny in the fire. His bottom lip thins when he smiles. “You crazy?”

My hand is still tingling from where he grabbed it and pulled it toward him.

“No.” I meant to say his name; this is what comes out instead.

“Naw, Esch.” He kneads the water, pushing himself up and kicking away from me. “You know it ain’t like that,” he says, and the pain comes all at once, like a sudden deluge.

Manny swims to Randall, who is walking up to the shore, pulling on his clothes. Manny’s back is a shut door. His shoulders are beautiful. I imagine myself on his back now, him swimming me across the deep water, carrying me to solid ground. How the other Manny would turn to kiss me in the water, to eat my air. How he would hold my hand on land instead of wrapping it around his dick underwater. When I tell him about my secret, will he turn to me? I push out all my breath and sink, my head hot. Is this how a baby floats inside its mother? I cup my stomach, hear Daddy say something he only says in his sober moments: What’s done in the dark always comes to the light. I loved Manny ever since I saw him kissing that girl. I loved him before he started seeing Shaliyah, skinny, light-skinned, and crazy, who is always trying to beat up other girls that she thinks he’s messing with. Once she broke a bottle over Marquise’s cousin’s head down at the Oaks Club on teen night. Shaliyah. She has the kind of eyes that always move fast back and forth like a cat’s. He talks about other girls with Randall, but he always comes back to her: complaining about the way she checks his phone, the way she calls him all the time, the way she only cooks once a week, the way she leaves his clothes in piles around the trailer they share so that he has to do his own laundry so he’ll have something to wear to his job at the gas station. I saw her once at the park, and her crazy cat eyes looked right over me: neither prey nor threat. I loved him before that girl. I imagine that this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love, when she knew him; that she looked at him and felt a fire eating up through her rib cage, turning her blood to boil, evaporating hotly out of every inch of her skin. I feel it so strongly that I cannot imagine how Manny does not feel it, too.

My belly is solid as a squash, because there is this baby inside me, small as Manny’s eyelash in mid-sex on my cheek. And this baby will grow to a fingertip on my hip, a hand on the bowl of my back, an arm over my shoulder, if it survives. I think it is for Manny; he is the only person I have been having sex with for the past five months. Since he surprised me in the woods while I was looking for Junior and grabbed me, knew my girl heart, I have only let him in. Once we had sex for the first time, I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I either shrug and pretend like I don’t hear Marquise or Franco or Bone or any of the other boys when they hint. They ask, and I walk away because it feels like I’m walking toward Manny.

There is a sound above the water; someone is shouting. When I surface and breathe, my lungs pulling for air, Skeetah is the only one left, and he is silent. Bats whirl through the air above us, plucking insects from the sky while they endlessly flutter like black fall leaves. Skeetah watches me swim to him and the dirt, watches me dress in my soapy clothes, and says nothing before turning to lead the way through the dark, naked.