Salvage the Bones

THE FOURTH DAY: WORTH STEALING

Fleas are everywhere. Walking toward Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s house, I wade through scummy puddles of them. They jump and stick to my legs like burrs, biting, until I stand on what’s left of the porch: a couple of two-by-fours leaning at a slanted angle against the house like an abandoned pier sinking below storm-rising water, the tide of the earth rolling in to cover them. The screen door has long disappeared, and the front door hangs by one hinge. I have to push the wood, which flakes away to dust in my hands, and squeeze sideways through cobwebs tangled with leaves to get into the house.

The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years. Papa Joseph helped Daddy build our house before he died, but once he and Mother Lizbeth were gone, we took couch by chair by picture by dish until there was nothing left. Mama tried to keep the house up, but needing a bed for me and Skeet to sleep in, or needing a pot when hers turned black, was more important than keeping the house a shrine, crocheted blankets across sofas as Mother Lizbeth left them. That’s what Daddy said. So now we pick at the house like mostly eaten leftovers, and Papa Joseph is no more than overalls and gray shirts and snuff and eyes turned blue with age. I remember more of Mother Lizbeth alive. I’d sit on her lap and play with her hair, gray and straight and strong as wire. I would help her take her medicines: two handfuls of pills she had to take every day, by handing them to her one by one. She would feed me sweet figs, still warm as the day, we picked from a tree behind the house. She’d laugh at me, said I ate figs careful as a bird; her smile was black and toothless. And sometimes she was sharp, didn’t want to be hugged, wanted to sit in her chair on the porch and not be bothered. When she died, Mama told me that she had gone away, and then I wondered where she went. Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.

I bend and slap away all the fleas. In the kitchen, Skeetah is panting and pulling in the corner, his whole body straining. Where yesterday he had a short ’fro, today his head is shaved clean, and is a shade lighter than the rest of him. His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.

“Junior told me you was in here. What you doing?”

“Trying to get this linoleum.”

“For what?”

Skeetah was trying to peel it from the corner. A big piece flapped over in front of him like a dog ear.

“It’s in the dirt.” He pulled. I expected he would grunt, but no sound came out. His muscles jumped like popped gum. “The parvo. It’s in the dirt in the shed.”

“So what’s Mother Lizbeth’s floor going to do?”

“It’s going to cover the dirt.” He pulled, a loud pop sounded, and the tile gave. He threw it back and it landed in a pile with four or five others.

“You giving China a floor?” Daddy had started on our house once he and Mama got married. Hearing the stories about him and Papa Joseph when I was growing up, I always thought it was something a man did for a woman when they married: build her something to live in.

“No, Esch.” Skeetah slices at the underside of the next tile with one of Daddy’s rusty box cutters. “I’m saving them puppies. China’s strong and old enough to where the parvo won’t kill her.” He yanked. “They’re money.”

“Why’d you cut your hair?”

“I got tired of it.” Skeetah shrugs, pulls. “What you doing today?”

“Nothing.”

“You want to go somewhere with me?”

“Where?”

“Through the woods.” Skeetah gives another yank, and the next tile comes loose. He throws it wide. “You gotta run.” I’ve always been a fast runner. When the boys and I used to race when we were smaller, I was always in the top three. I beat Randall a few times, and almost beat Skeet once or twice. “I need your help.”

“Okay.” He needs me. Before China had these puppies, I’d go days without seeing him. Days before I’d be walking through the woods looking for eggs or trying to see if I could find Randall and Manny, or walking to the Pit to swim, and I’d stumble on Skeetah, training China to attack and bite and lock on with an old bike tire or a rope. They’d play tug of war, send up clouds of dust and leave dry rivers in the pine needles. Or China’d nap while Skeetah ate razor blades, sliding them between the pink sleeve of his cheek and tongue and back out of his lips so fast I thought I was imagining it. I asked him why he ate them once, and he grinned and said, Why should China be the only one with teeth?

“Yeah.” I say.

The sound of Daddy’s tractor growls in the distance, comes closer. Skeetah picks up the tiles and begins pitching them through a window at the back of the house, where he knows that Daddy won’t come because the back door has been grown over with wisteria and kudzu for years. The front door is the only way in. He pitches the last tile and the box cutter just as Daddy is shoving his way inside, the sound of the wood like a gunshot ricocheting through the room so that I think he’s broken the hinge, but the door stays upright. The cobwebs leave a gray trail and there’s a leaf stuck in his hair. His T-shirt is dark at the pits and neck and down the middle of his back. His boots hit so hard on the floor that he sounds like he’s going to go through the rotted wood. He’s not that much bigger than us. Is this what Medea saw, when she decided to follow Jason, to flee her father with her brother? Did she see through her father’s rich robes to the small-shouldered man beneath? Even though he doesn’t work much anymore, picks up odd jobs working on oyster boats or towing scrap metal, he’s worn the same work clothes every day for as long as I can remember: steel-toe work boots, pants, two T-shirts, two pairs of socks. Mama laid his outfit in clean layers for him on the chair sitting in the corner of their room every night, and Daddy would come up behind her when she was bending over the chair, put his arms around her waist, whisper in her neck. He’d tell us to go watch TV, to go to our rooms, to get out the door. Now Daddy looks up, surprised.

“What y’all doing in here?”

“Nothing,” Skeetah says, quick and loud, and he begins walking toward Daddy and the door.

“Hold up,” Daddy says. “I need y’all help.”

“I got to see after China.”

“Not yet,” Daddy says. He grabs Skeet’s arm as he tries to pass him. “She’ll hold.”

Skeetah walks into the step he was taking and pulls away from Daddy with his stride. Skeet seems surprised at the way Daddy’s fingers slip from his arm, and Daddy looks at me, just for a minute, like he’s confused. Skeetah stops and turns, and Daddy points up to the attic.

“Gotta new storm in the Gulf. Named José. Supposed to be hitting Mexico.”

Skeetah’s eyes open like he wants to roll them, but he doesn’t.

“You see them pieces of plywood up there? Them two that don’t look too rotten?”

Skeetah nods. I’m surprised that Daddy doesn’t have that sweet bread scent of morning beer on him.

“Yeah.”

“I need you to take this hammer and pry them up off the wall and throw them down. Me and Esch will carry them outside and put them on the tractor.”

The ceiling in the living room fell in years ago, so now it’s easy to see through it to the attic above, where the beams of the roof are showing in snatches. Skeetah tries to jump and hoist himself up, but even though he can jump that high, he can’t grab the beam because the plaster that sticks to it like barnacles makes it difficult for him to grab it.

“Esch, let your brother climb up on you.”

Skeetah looks at him like he’s crazy, but he doesn’t say anything.

“I can do it.”

Daddy could be a ladder for Skeetah if he wanted to, hoist him up with his hands tough as rope, but he won’t. We all know it.

“Come on, Skeet.”

I lunge like I see the cheerleaders do at school when they climb all over each other to make their pyramids, a human jungle gym: my front knee bent, my back leg straight, as solid and steady as I can make them. Daddy’s got his arms folded, looking up into the attic.

“Naw, Esch. I can jump.”

“No you can’t,” Daddy says. “Go on.”

Skeet puts one hand on my shoulder. I’m surprised by how hard his skin is; his calluses are like pebbles embedded in the soft sandy skin of his hand, where Daddy’s whole hands are like gravel. When Skeetah isn’t smiling, the corners of his lips turn down. Now that he’s mad, his chin looks hard, and his mouth is a straight line.

“I’m going to step and grab, okay? Quick as I can.”

I nod. Skeetah looks at me for a moment more, and says it again.

“Quick as I can.”

When Skeetah steps, his sneaker bears down on my thigh and the rubber grooves feel like cleats. It hurts. I can’t help but let a little sound come out of my throat, but then I close it off so that I can’t even breathe. He stands and grabs a ceiling beam behind the plaster. My leg is shaking.

“Right there,” Daddy says.

When Skeetah pushes off my leg and pulls with his arms, it feels like his foot is grinding into my skin. Another noise surprises its way out of my throat, and I breathe hard, ashamed. When we were little and we would fall and skin a knee and cry, Daddy would roll his eyes, tell us to stop. Stop. I straighten up and rub my leg.

“All right,” Daddy says. Daddy throws up the hammer and Skeetah moves over to the side of the attic where I can’t see and starts wrenching. I huddle over my leg, rubbing at the marks Skeetah’s left in my skin. The first board comes away fast. I look up to see Skeetah flinging it through the hole in the ceiling, and it lands too near Daddy’s feet. I jump out of the way. “Watch out, boy.”

Daddy hands me the plywood and motions toward the door. The other piece of plywood cracks and comes away, and I look back to see Skeetah sending it sailing through the ceiling like a paper airplane, directly for Daddy, who ducks.

“Shit!”

“Sorry,” Skeetah says as he jumps down, landing like a cat. The board has clipped Daddy, bounced off the wall to clatter to the floor. Skeetah is smiling.

“Gotdamnit, boy.”

“I said I was sorry.” Skeetah’s not smiling anymore, but when I push my board through the door, I smile into my shirt, because he has that same look on his face as he did the day he mastered the razor eating, and I know it’s for me.

Into the woods to the east of us, about a mile through pine and oaks so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt, there is a pasture full of grazing cows. A wooden and barbed-wire fence rims the pasture. In the middle sits a big brown barn, and next to it, a small white house with a high sloped tin roof and small windows. White people live there.

Skeetah found the place one day by accident while we were playing an all-day game of chase in the woods, running in circles, hiding and seeking for hours in teams. He stumbled into a clearing where the pines had been cut brutally away so that stumps dotted the field beyond the fence like chairs that no one would ever sit on. Egrets picked their way through the grass, attentive and showy as fussy girlfriends at the cows’ sides. When I came crashing out of the woods, I forgot to touch Skeetah, startled at the way the sky opened up at the field, the way the land looked wrong. There was too much blue. A pickup truck slid soundlessly out of a shadow in a gap in the woods, which I figured must’ve been their driveway, and a cow lowed. An older white man and woman got out of the truck when it parked, waving away the cloud of dust they’d kicked up. Off in the distance, we heard a dog bark.

“Come on, Skeet,” I said.

He stood a moment longer, squinting at the house, his head to one side.

“I’ma leave you,” I said, and I turned to trot off back into the soft underside of the woods, the green reach of the trees. It wasn’t until I was deep in the gloom of the forest that I heard him running so quickly to catch up with me that I looked back scared, thinking the white people who lived in that house on the edge of the black heart of Bois Sauvage had come after us, but saw only Skeet jogging, his face so calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

This is where Skeetah says we are going when he comes into my room, changed out of the jeans he was wearing in Mother Lizbeth’s house into a T-shirt the color of pine needles and dark brown Dickies that have holes in both of the knees. He doesn’t have any socks on under his tennis shoes.

“You got to change,” he says. “Wear something green or brown or black. Don’t wear nothing white or tan.”

“Why not?”

“You got to blend in.” Skeetah leaves to wait in the hallway, and I dig through my drawers until I find a black T-shirt and a pair of black basketball shorts that Randall gave me because they were too small for him. They originally had the St. Catherine high school logo on them, which means he stole them and that they were practice shorts, but they’re so old that the dragonfly blue writing at the bottom that would have made them unacceptable to Skeetah has flaked off and left a faded gray shadow where it was. I pull my hair back into a ponytail, put on some black socks and my tennis shoes, smooth my big T-shirt over my puffy stomach. Skeetah knocks on the wall twice, and I know this is his way of telling me to hurry up.

“Let’s go.”

We run out the door, scatter the chickens before us, and they whirl about like crape myrtle petals blown loose by summer rain. Brown and rust red and white, the only sound the swish of their wings. China interrupts, barks.

Away from the Pit, the pine trees reach skyward, their green-needled tops stand perfectly still. Once in a while, they shiver in the breeze that moves across their tops. They seem to nod to something that I cannot hear, and I wonder if it is the hum of José out in the Gulf, singing to himself. The breeze doesn’t touch us down here. Down here, the air is thick and hot. The trees are so dense that there’s only a little undergrowth, and the bushes fight for their bright spots on the hard-packed, shadowy earth. There are birds, like yesterday, but these are small and brown, so small that they could fit in the middle of my hand or in the maw of China’s mouth. They are following us. As we walk through the wood on an unseen trail, the tiny birds fly from tree to tree, chattering sharply with each other, keeping pace with us. In the dense air, the oaks stand apart from the piney clusters: solemn, immovable. Spanish moss hangs from their arms, gray as an old king’s beard. Skeetah grabs my hand, and I almost jump away from him, surprised at the feel of it around mine, his fingers hard, the small calluses on his palm from China’s leash now dry and scratchy as old bread. He pulls and we run through a corridor of pines, oaks, birch, birds. I can’t help it. I lean back against his pull, and I laugh.

We fall into a pace. My face feels tight and hot, and the air coming into my nose feels like water. I am swimming through the air. My body does what it was made to do: it moves. Skeetah cannot leave me. I am his equal. Skeetah sprints a little faster, and when the slack in my arm is still there because I am still at his side, he looks back at me quickly and smiles widely. There, silver. He has a razor in his cheek. Is this how Medea ran with her brother, hand in hand, away from their father’s hold to join the Argonauts? Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight? When we come to the edge of the clearing, he lets my hand go. I sink to my knees, lean forward, and bury my face in the pine straw, breathing in the baked sap of the fallen leaves, feeling the sweat dripping off of me everywhere. I need to pee; there is a wet weight that makes me think of the baby. I find a bush. When I come back, Skeetah is flipping the razor over his scarred knuckles, his shirt in his hand. He wipes his pale head, drying stinging sweat. I don’t want to bare my stomach, so I don’t wipe my face with the hem of my heavy shirt. Beyond the barbed wire and the lolling cows, the barn and house sit, small in the distance. The house must have been added on to over the years because it is uneven: on one end of the house there is a lean-to shed, and with the roof of the sloping front porch, it looks like a ship manned by rowers on each side. We are here.

“You got to keep watch.”

“Where you going?”

“I’m going to see if I can get into the barn. See that little window on the side? The one right above that trailer?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet you they don’t even lock them.”

“Why do you want to go in a barn?”

“They got cow wormer in there. I know it.”

“You can’t give your dogs cow wormer.”

“Yes, I can. Rico was talking about it when his dog and China was mating. Say that’s the best kind of wormer to give a dog. Make them a little sick, but it knock all of them worms out. Everybody does it.”

“So you going to steal it?”

“I can’t lose no more.”

“Well, how I’m going to let you know if somebody’s coming?”

“You see that group of stumps right there? Them three all huddled up next to each other close to the middle of the field?”

“Yeah.”

“You going to lay there, and if the white people come, you going to whistle. And then you going to keep low and start running to the woods.”

“What if they get you?”

“Don’t stop,” he says, looking me in the face, his head forward and down like a dog standing across from another at the end of his leash, straining, ready to fight. “You hear me? Don’t stop.”

We pick our way around the edges of the field, circle the eye of the house and barn, fight through the wooden lash. Skeetah is still holding his shirt in one hand, but he’s eaten the razor. He moves through the wood carefully, folding branches in his hands like dog chains, holding them lightly so he doesn’t break them, and letting them go with two fingers. He holds them for me, but even then he still catches me with several of them, and the branches feel like popped rubber bands when they hit me on my arms, or in my forehead. I make a noise.

“Sorry,” he says, glancing back.

I shrug even though he can’t see it as he peers toward the house. We are working our way toward the house side of the pasture, Skeetah looking for cars, for movement. In the shadow of the house away from the barn, a puppy lolls. A mutt. Skeetah pauses, drops to his knees. He puts on his T-shirt and wets one fingertip, holds it up to the air. His head is to the side with one ear up as if he is listening to the trees, the insects droning in waves. I shrug at him again, this time with my hands up.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“Seeing if we upwind or downwind.”

“Okay, Crocodile Hunter.” I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t even grin. He wets two more fingers, holds them up. “You know he’s dead, right?”

“Shut up, Esch.” Skeetah’s quiet, wipes his hands off on his pants. “That must have been the dog we heard that first time.” He licks his finger and holds it up again, but soon drops it. “I can’t tell.”

We are standing in the middle of a patch of blackberry vines. Their barbed-wire twine catches on my ankles, fingers a shin, draws blood in short, deep lines like a child’s scratch. I knee the air, trying to pull away, only to get caught up in more on my calf, around my toe.

“Hold still.” Skeetah grabs them as he’d grabbed the branches and pulls. “They can smell blood, you know.”

“Not from this far, Skeet.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.” The vines peel away. Skeetah wets his fingers again, but this time he wipes away the droplets of blood that have gathered on my legs like summer gnats. He wipes them away in dabs, licks his fingers again, wipes. He has the same patient look Mama had on her face when she used to find us crusty in public, smears of Kool-Aid along our mouths, crumbs on our cheeks. She cleaned us like kittens. He bends to wipe the seams of my socks, and his bald head gleams with sweat. He picks up my leg and I balance with one hand on his head. His shaved skin reminds me of scales when I rub against it, and it is cool like a puddle of water that has been turning dark and dry at the edges in a tree’s shade.

We worm our way through the woods as we watch the house for movement. We slide on our stomachs under bushes so tangled and overgrown that we cannot crouch or crawl through them. We slither like snakes, grab dirt and pine straw with our elbows, and pull. Skeetah stops often, straw and twigs sliding off his slick head to catch on his shoulders like holiday tinsel, and he listens. I stop, too, try my hardest to be so still, to hear the threat, but the blood beats through my ears so strongly I cannot hear anything over that and the whooshing of my breath. Skeetah crawls through a stand, and we start again. Dust turns to mud on our arms, leaves us striped. Bits of sunlight bite through the tops of the pines, that murmur once and twice and are quiet. There is nothing but us creeping through the underbrush. A rabbit sits, watching us, as we make the halfway mark around the circle of the field and its quiet house. It twitches its ears, stares at us in profile, one large black eye like a wet marble in its face, wide and glazed as if it is seeing something supernatural. We keep walking, and it stays put, even after we leave it sitting in the little clearing we’d broken through, even after we leave it for the road.

The path to the road is less thick. Here the trees are mostly the kind that lose their leaves in the winter, but they are green and full with summer. The wind makes them clap as we pass. The road is narrow, and from what I can see of the house, we only have around three-fourths of the field between us and where we started. A vein of oyster shells runs down the middle of the road, but the rest is paved with small rocks that look like they come from the river. Sand rises up in little hills at the road’s edges, and Skeetah and I kneel next to them as he squints down the drive, his right hand up to me. Wait, his lacy knuckles say.

Insects sizzle and answer us. Heat. A little further down the drive, a snake sleeps. Skeetah waves me forward, and we run across the road. Our feet over the stones are light as skipped rocks.

The drive is endless, winks out in the distance where the trees on either side meet in the middle. For a year, we were very unlucky, and St. Catherine schools changed our bus route so that we were picked up at 6:30 A.M. and for the next hour we rode up and out of the black Bois that we knew and into the white Bois that we didn’t that spread out and upcountry, past churches and one-room stores selling cigarettes and hot fries, chips and cold drinks in glass bottles and penny candy, the kind of stores that have one gas tank out front with the writing scratched off. Randall would sleep with his head on the glass, Skeetah would do homework, and I would study all the other houses in other lonely fields; the trailers, the long low brick homes, small wood shacks that looked slapped together, that couldn’t be bigger than two rooms. And all the kids we picked up were white: broad-shouldered, thick boys with wiry hair on their lips and little girls with red cheeks and eyes watery blue, their faces scrubbed rough. I wonder if they have their own Skeetahs and Esches crawling around the edges of their fields, like ants under the floorboards marching in line toward sugar left open in the cabinet.

The house is plain from all angles: its white is faded to tan by the sun, and all the windows are shut with white curtains drawn over them. It’s a blind house with closed eyes. There’s a raised concrete porch running across the front of the house, and some rocking chairs, painted bright blue, the kind of bright blue I’ve seen on the lizards that live in the seams of our walls, that crouch still on the front porch. The barn is unpainted and tall, and the doors are shut. The wood is old and dark, like the kind of wood Papa Joseph used to build Mother Lizbeth’s house. It looks similiar, as if all the walls are so old they’re about to peel away from each other at the edges.

“Shhhh,” Skeetah breathes, and I don’t know if he’s telling me to be quiet or calling my name. But he is standing still, so I stop behind him. He points. There, in the cove of trees where we first viewed the house and barn, in the cove of trees that leads to the Pit-someone is there.

Skeetah moves with his back curved, his fingers touching the ground as we scoot forward from shadow to shadow. We hug the trees. It’s not until we’re laying on our sides, peeping over a red dirt hill, that I see things I think I know, like the rubber band swing of an arm, a careful sway and settle of limbs. Randall and Big Henry. And then a piping. Junior.

“Who house is that?”

“Some white people’s, Junior,” Randall answers.

“You sure you saw them heading this way?” Big Henry asks.

“Soon as me and Junior jumped the ditch to the yard, we saw them running off back in here. Fast.”

“How you know they came here?”

“I don’t,” Randall breathed. “But this all they got back here, and they ain’t got enough people for chase. If we find them, I bet they’re going to want to play.”

“I want to go see the cows,” Junior says, jumping up again and again, trying to bounce level with Randall’s face. He gets as far as his chest. “Please.”

“No,” Randall says. “You can see them from here.”

I push up from the hill, ready to walk over. Skeetah grabs my arm, stops me mid-rise, and it hurts almost, the way he pulls at the shoulder. He is shaking his head, and I cannot understand what is in his face. He points to the ground, tries to pull me down next to him so I won’t let them know where we are, what we’re about to do.

“They can help,” I whisper. “More eyes.”

He still has my wrist, pulling it tight to him like a rope to his side, as if he can make me heel. I snatch my hand from him, and it slides through his grip like a wet fish.

“Yes,” I say, and I start walking. He doesn’t have any choice but to follow, so I don’t even look back. There is a rustling and a wet crunch of pine needles, and I know that he is following.

Randall, who is all edges and honed sharp to see what others can’t, hear what others can’t, is the first to hear us.

“I thought I saw y’all coming back here.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Why y’all was running so fast?” Randall asks. Big Henry is resting on a tree, bent over so that he is sitting on air, the trunk his chair back.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Behind me, Skeetah speaks.

“You need to take Junior home.”

“What’s wrong with him being out here?”

“I got to get something.” Skeetah folds his arms.

“From where?” Randall asks. And then he looks at Skeetah, and his head nods and his mouth opens so that he looks like a gulping fish. “Oh,” he says, and he is quiet.

“What?” Big Henry asks.

Skeetah breathes hard, once, and then pulls his arms tighter across his chest.

“For the dogs,” I say, because Skeetah will not speak.

“No,” Randall says.

Skeetah just looks at him, his muscles ropes in his crossed arms.

“You don’t know what them white people got up in that house. They could have a gun,” Big Henry says.

“We ain’t going in the house,” I say. “We going in the barn.”

“We ain’t going in no barn.” Skeetah speaks up, his lips tight. “I’m going in the barn and you keeping watch like I said.”

“Neither of ya’ll going nowhere.” Randall spreads his fingers, long and skinny, shakes his head, snatches at Junior’s arm, who is watching beside him. “Y’all coming home with me.”

“Aw shit,” Big Henry breathes.

“We ain’t going nowhere.” Skeetah unlashes his arms and they come whipping out from his sides, and his voice is loud, and he’s like those little firecrackers we get on the Fourth of July that throw out sparks from all sides and jump in bright acid leaps across the hard dirt yard. “First of all, me and Esch done walked all around this field and watched the house for damn near an hour. Ain’t nobody home, and all they got is a puppy on the other side of the house, over by that driveway. And I know what I need and I know where it’s at. And it ain’t like you won’t get nothing out of this. If my dogs live, I can make eight hundred dollars off them. Eight hundred dollars. Do you know what we can do with eight hundred dollars? You won’t need to beg Daddy for the rest of the money for basketball camp week after next, and you won’t have to stress over playing good enough in the summer league to get one of those scholarships for it either. I know you want to go, just like you know Daddy don’t have it.” Skeetah fizzles, his hands down by his side. Now he’s just trailing bitter, sulfurous smoke. “You ain’t the parent,” he mutters.

“This is stupid,” Big Henry says.

“I’m the fastest,” Junior says as he yanks on Randall’s arm.

“Shut up, Junior,” I say.

Randall pulls Junior to him and puts his hand on his head the same way I put mine on Skeet’s when he was wiping off the blood. Junior quiets, turns to face us, and Randall’s arm is around his neck like a scarf. Junior’s still smiling; he still thinks he’s about to run with us.

“You ain’t running nowhere, Junior.” Junior’s face pulls. Randall’s arms cradle him by the chest. Randall looks down at Junior’s head, wipes away moss caught in his hair. “You’d do that for me?” Randall speaks to Junior’s head, so at first I don’t know who he’s talking to, and then I remember Skeet, who is nodding next to me now. With each dip of Skeetah’s head, sweat drips unimpeded from his crown, past his strong nose, his downy upper lip, to fall from his chin like a weak summer sprinkle.

“Yes,” Skeetah says, still nodding. “Yes.”

Skeetah sketches the plan. It is what makes him so good with dogs, with China, I think, the way he can take rotten boards and make them a kennel, make a squirrel barbecue, make ripped tile a floor.

“You too big to be out there in that field.”

“Wasn’t going to go anyway,” says Big Henry. Skeetah shrugs.

“So you stay here in the woods with Junior. Shut up, Junior. This is serious. You ever heard of Hansel and Gretel? Well, that’s who own that house, and they want to fatten you up like a little pig and eat you. So shut up and stay in the woods with Big Henry. And if you sneak out like you did last night-shut up, Junior, I saw you-I’m going to catch you and whip you. That’s if the white people don’t eat you first.”

“You want me to help you get in the barn?” Randall asks.

“No, I don’t need no help. Besides, you too tall. You going to be at the edge of the field, right by the fence, and keep watch on the whole field. You see anything, you whistle.”

“What about Esch?” Randall says.

“Esch going to be in the middle of the field, laying down by them stumps right there: she got a better shot of the driveway than you ’cause she going to be closer. If she see something, she going to whistle. And loud, Esch. No baby whistles.”

“I knew how to whistle with my fingers in my mouth before you did, Skeet,” I say.

“I know,” he says. He glances at me when he says it, and he and I both know that he is telling the truth. “Well, all right. Is everybody ready.” He says it like that, like a statement rather than a question. Skeetah is not giving us any room to not be ready. “All right, then. Once you see me come out that window, I want everybody to start running. Don’t look back. Run.”

There is a line through us all, stringing from one to another across the field; Skeetah with his knees bent, his back a black ball, running toward the barn window. Me on a low rise, grass tufted up unevenly around me in bunches, lying like a snake in wait behind the tree stumps. Randall hidden in the woods behind me, crouching behind a large, low bush with leaves the size of my fingernails. And Big Henry and Junior, even farther back behind Randall. When I left them, Big Henry was bouncing back and forth on his feet, and Junior was squatting on the ground away from him, his feet splayed out in a Y, digging with a stick to raise the pine needles into peaked roofs.

The cows rip bunches of grass away, feed steadily, chewing and swallowing and yanking. The egrets flap, walk in small couples. One leaves its mate to wander over to me, pecking between each step so that his beak is another leg. It walks him closer. I hiss at it so it stops. It is whiter than the other egrets. Its feathers are soft, downy, as if it is younger, recently born; a fluffy, warm body beats under the down. I hiss again, and it is a flailing pillow, beating away. The cows ignore Skeetah as he runs by unless he brushes too close to their salad plate, and then they skitter away a few feet to settle. Skeetah crawls under the other edge of the fence and sprints to the window he showed me, a leaping shadow. His hand moves to his face and away again, and I know that he must be taking out the razor. He jumps and pulls himself up onto the window’s ledge, balancing with his feet braced against the wall, and he begins to fiddle with the window. My underarms feel flushed and swampy.

“What is he doing?” I talk myself into hurrying him. “Now, Skeet, do it.”

He wrenches it, but the window will not open. He slides down the wall and puts his hand to his face again. Grabbing the hem of his shirt, he yanks it over his head, wraps it around his arm, and jumps back up on the ledge. With one arm holding him up, he elbows the window with the T-shirt. It breaks. He elbows it again, and it shatters. Skeetah is all forearms and knees, truncated thighs and twisting shoulders, and then he is black as the shadowy interior of the barn, and then he is gone.

“Thank God,” I whisper to the egret, who will not leave me, and pecks in a suspicious circle near my foot.

What I can see of the road is empty. The trees are moving so it seems like they are a green, shimmering curtain in the distance, the road fading to a dark green velvet line in the middle. I stare at it, try hard to see something, run my tongue over my lips again and again, twist it into a wave to ready it. My arm feels like it is going dead, so I roll to the side, glance at the road. Is that blue, a flash of metal like a dying star? But there is nothing. I hiss at the bird again, wonder why Manny didn’t come by, wonder when he will come again, if he will want more from me next time. If I can get him to look at me in the eye again. To not walk away from me.

The pain is sudden, sharp. It shoots through my hips and I squeeze my legs together and wonder why my bladder feels like a soaked sponge. I can’t help it. I have to pee. Again.

“Shit, Skeet,” I say to the side of the barn, the empty shimmering road. I will hold it. It shoots again, and I rock my hips side to side in the grass, squeezing my legs. Sometimes when I move like this, squeeze like this, it helps. The pressure eases. It lasts for a shake of my head, a nod at the still empty road, and then it is back. Unbearable, a tadpole grown to the confines of its egg. Pressure. I can hold it. I can’t.

I stand up, look back toward where I know Randall is crouching in the green. Maybe I can pull my panties and shorts to the side and pee that way. I pull the elastic at the crotch, but they are too tight. I cannot face the road and pee. It is impossible. Randall and Big Henry, and farther back, Junior, will see me. I can deal with them seeing a flash of shoulder, of leg, even a nipple, but I cannot bare myself in this field, my butt facing them, and pee. It will only take a moment, I tell myself. Jumping into a squat and facing Junior and Randall and Big Henry in the woods, I put my butt as low to the ground as I can and yank my shorts down in wedges until I feel the air on my skin. I force the pee out, and it hits the grass as strongly as a rush of water out of a water hose. It beats the grass low. The baby and the pee are one, there when I forget they are there, when I forget so well I think they might be gone. I start to inch up my pants, but they are stuck, and I’m trying to miss the wet-pee grass when I hear it, and I wish I hadn’t. Randall’s whistle, high-pitched and sharp, short. I yank my shorts all the way up, fall forward on my hands, and turn my head to see a silver grille, a dark blue blur, growing to fill the driveway.

They’re here spasms through my head like a bat, but I put my fingers in my mouth, and I blow and blow and blow until I hear Randall scream, “Esch!”

Skeetah’s arm is the first thing to break the surface of the window. The truck is pulling up the driveway and rounding the side of the house, and I am crawling backward on my hands and knees, the cows nervously shuffling away from me, the birds waving them on, my egret familiar making squeaking sounds at my side as it abandons me, when the door to the truck opens and I rise up on my legs, still bending low, still backward. There is a dog in the bed of the truck, and it is leaping like a doe, barking to call attention to itself, again and again and again, its fur long and shaggy, the color of the cloud dark sky above me, its dark head pointed toward me in the field, its nose intent on our line.

The white man is the first to get out of the truck. He slams the door behind him, waves his hands at the dog as if he is casting out a fishing net for perch in the shallow tides on the beach at night. Someone has bound my feet with barbed wire: I cannot run. Skeetah’s upper body is hanging out the window when the dog leaps from the truck, growling to a bark like a shovel dragged along asphalt wearing away to stones. Skeetah falls face forward, lands on his forearms and his head, crumples to a roll and then rises. His feet kick backward behind him and he is running as the man looks toward the other side of the barn that he cannot see, follows the dog, who is bounding around the barn, the color of a storm wrapped in rain. Skeetah is running with one arm above his head, back and forth as if he is beating the air with his palm, and I realize that he is telling me to run, and I turn to sprint while the man behind us is yelling, “Hey! Hey! What are y’all doing in my field? Hey!” And while he is too old, hair the color of his dog’s, has arms that are too short and a belly, and his face is already red from trying to sprint so that he has given up on running in the middle of the field, his dog is all fire, combustion and spring. Skeetah catches me, wheezes, “Run,” so I stop looking at the man, the woman who’s out of the truck now, her hands on her pink-clad hips, her hair bright red, and the man walking toward us through the field, swinging his right hand as if there is a cane there, limping. I run. The dog yelps excitedly, yards from us.

“Hey!” the man yells to the dog. The last I see of him he is turning, still gesturing with no cane, toward the house. The wood opens and swallows us. Big Henry and Junior are gone, as well as Randall, who is all bounding grace ahead of us, his head low, his legs flying out back behind him like black ribbons. The dog’s bark catches in the back of its throat, rips on its teeth on the way out. My heart is gushing, and my arms and legs are stinging. I feel the pee weight at my center. I would run it away.

“Hey!” We hear the man yell again, his voice muffled in the blanket of the woods. Then rifle shots. “Twist!” he calls. “Twist!” The voice dwindles to nothing in the threads. My feet catch, hold, and kick the earth. Skeetah runs next to me in the funny way he’s always had, his hands like blades. Every time the dog barks, it’s as if his teeth are grazing my neck. My skin is tight with fear.

“Come on,” Skeet says, and he is moving in front of me, leaving me. I stretch my legs, reach with my heels, to gain ground. The dog rumbles behind me. Slipping through a clutch of pine trees ahead is Big Henry: Junior clings to the bulk of him, his head turned backward to watch us. His face is immobile except for the jarring of Big Henry’s run, which shakes his mouth open with each running step. I expect him to be crying or screaming, but he isn’t. He knows this frantic run before this ruinous dog. Big Henry pounds the earth now, footsteps heavy for once as he tears through low bushes like a startled bear. Randall dodges the trees like a point guard. The dog snaps and I swear I can feel his saliva on my legs, and then I see that Skeetah has scooped a branch in his hand, holds it like a bat but then swings it backward like a golf club.

“Faster than this,” Skeet stutters all at once. I know I am, the secret in my stomach be damned. I stretch through my toes, my arches, my heels, my tendons, my calves, unlock the hinges of my knees, the fulcrum where my thighs meet my hips. This is that other thing that I can do. Run.

“Halfway!” Skeetah yells as we pass a cathedral of oaks, leaving clouds in the dusty chapel at their middle. The dog yips with each bound. Still there. I expected it to lose interest, to bound off, but it will not, inexorable as hovering thunder.

“Get!” Skeetah yells, and swings the branch again at the dog. I am even with him now, but still we cannot lose it. We come to a hill, barren of pines but slick with needles; at the bottom, Big Henry is picking himself up, one arm grabbing at the ground and one hand in a white grip on Junior, who has not let go through the fall.

“Go!” I yell. Randall is prying Junior from Big Henry, who is still soundless, and now we are a pack, Randall our lead, signaling us through the widest gaps through pines, over the smallest bushes, around the staunchest oaks. The saw palmetto cracks like whips at our shins. The dog’s barks turned high-pitched: Success, it says. The pit is below us, and we hug its edge, sprinting ever faster to the house, to a slammed back door, to a car’s roof, to escape. The woods between the pit and our house and the shed pass with a sigh, and then we are in the backyard, and Skeetah flings away the branch. The dog skids to a stop. He barks loudly in pleasure, calls the florid man excitedly. Here, they are here! he says.

China is the shushing sound, the finger laid against the lips in admonition. She is on him, a white blur against gray, snow on cloud, the biting cold. Unforgiving. She is one great tooth. Twist’s growl meets with hers but already he is turning, rolling to a ball, screaming. Randall runs to the top of the steps with Junior, who is still staring, his mouth still open, and I have stopped at the foot of the steps, Big Henry on the roof of his car, to watch Skeetah lurch out of his run, his arm still outstretched, and pivot to watch. Twist screams again, and there is a frantic lick to it. China grips him and arches her back, digs in as her whole body jerks toward the other dog. It looks like she is giving birth again. Twist’s scream turns to a squeal. She has him by the neck. Skeetah is smiling.

“Skeet!” I yell. I slap him on the back, his muscle like dinner plates between the flat plane of his shoulder blades. He looks at me, surprised, the smile startled from him.

“What?”

“She’s going to kill him.”

He looks back to China, who is curved in two, a fang, and is jerking moans out of the other dog, who is in fits against her, bleeding.

“Stop it,” I say.

Skeetah puts his hands in his pockets, fingers what I now see are shapes there, big as curled fists. The cow wormer.

“He’s going to hear it hollering, and he’s going to follow it here,” I say over the grunting and the squealing. Twist is rolling like a tornado.

“Stop!” Skeetah barks and lunges toward China. “China!” He yells, “Hold!” and he grabs the thighs on her two back legs and pulls. She jerks her head once, viciously, and then lets go, flinging her head backward so that blood rises and glitters through the air before falling to droplets in the sand, a light shower of red. Twist jumps and runs, limping like his master, away to the pit and past, his panicked yelp like a siren receding in the distance, off to some other emergency. Behind him, he leaves red rain.