Salvage the Bones

THE FIFTH DAY: SALVAGE THE BONES

Bodies tell stories. This is what I realize when I burst in on Skeetah in the bathroom in the morning, bladder full with early morning pregnant pee, and see him standing in front of the mirror. Skeetah is shirtless. He is tracing cuts across his stomach with two fingers, the way he checks China’s mouth after a fight for tears, missing teeth: lightly, sensitively. The way other people put their fingers in cupcakes to lick the icing.

“Come on,” he whispers, pulling on a shirt. The light in the bathroom is gray because the sun is not yet up. We slide past each other and he stands outside the doorway, which I leave cracked, as I pee. I flush, put the toilet seat down, and sit, pushing down on my stomach, feeling it push back against my hand. Hoping but knowing all at once that it was not a dream. Skeetah shuffles in the hall, and when he realizes I’m not leaving, he comes back into the bathroom. I’d seen his shirt ripped after Twist ran away, but I didn’t know how badly he’d been cut.

“When did that happen?”

“When I came out the window. I was in a hurry.”

I push my stomach in, and nausea moves through me. What should I tell him?

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I had to pee.”

He picks up an Ace Bandage so old it’s faded white and pulls the hem of his shirt over and behind his neck so it hugs his shoulders like a shrug. He’s so skinny it’s loose on him.

“It’s all right,” he says.

The wrap is one of Randall’s, probably used on his knee, which he’s troubled so much his coach told him he needed surgery. The school will pay for it, but Randall keeps putting it off because he doesn’t want to lose any playing time. After games, his knee swells up like a water balloon.

“I whistled once I saw them.”

“I know.” Skeetah is holding the wrap with one hand, trying to wind it around his torso with the other. The wounds are angry; there are four of them gouged into his stomach and side. He is failing.

“Let me,” I say, and I grab one end. Skeetah lets it fall. His head is closer to the color of the rest of his body now. When I fell asleep last night, he was in the shed with China, laying her floor, resettling them in. The kennel is still three pieces of wood hammered together at bad right angles, rooting into the dirt. “You put something on it?”

“Just took a shower.” Skeetah mumbles this into his underarm. “Then I poured some peroxide on it. From China’s bottle.” That’s the other thing he does with her after fights, wipes at her cuts with a towel he’s washed, bleached, and dipped in hydrogen peroxide. She smiles lazily like a woman in a new Fourth of July outfit being complimented.

“This clean?” The wrap looks dirty, worn thin.

“I washed and bleached it last night,” Skeetah sighs. I wrap the bandage once, and I expect him to flinch from the cloth, but he doesn’t. For once he doesn’t smell like dog. He smells like the constant wind that pushes the tide in over the Gulf of Mexico, but not the tide at the beach. The tide at the Bay of Angels, which smells of the oysters fresh dug from the mud. Daddy used to take us swimming there when we were younger, in a little cove. The water was murkier than the river, and colder, and the bottom was a landscape of oyster shells. We dug up oysters, threw them out farther away from the cove. Marsh grass waved at the edges, and pines leaned out over the water. Pelicans floated in rows. Daddy would fish off a sinking pier, and sometimes on a ledge on one of the support pilings under the bridge with some of his friends, and most of the time, at the end of the day, he’d be left with an empty cooler of beer and one or two croakers bleating in the icy water. His friends caught fifteen-pound redfish they’d have to wrestle from the water. Daddy’d call us out at the end of the day, more drunk than mad, the sunset turning through the sky behind us like a top. Our feet were always a snarl of cuts.

“Tighter,” Skeetah says.

Mama went with us swimming in the bay sometime. She circled Daddy and his friends, sat in a sagging plastic and aluminum yard chair Daddy’d found on the Pit. She laughed at their jokes sometime, but she didn’t drink any beer. Mostly she just sat with a fishing pole braced between her legs. She was the one that caught a baby shark; it was the same color as the water, as long as her arm, and strong. Daddy tried to take the pole from her and she wouldn’t let him. His friends laughed, tried to get her to give it to them, but she held it in both hands and walked the shark up and down the oyster-shelled sand, in the biting marsh grass, under and out from the bridge. She walked it tired, her arms big and round, strong under the woman fat. She coaxed it to death. And when it gave up, she hauled it in and let out a laugh that swooped up into the sky with the pelicans and flew away, wind-ready and wide as their wings. She cooked it in butter that night, soaked it in buttermilk to take the wild out of it. When we ate it, it was tender, sea salty, and had no bones.

“Almost done?” Skeetah is watching my hands. I wonder if he sees the wounds underneath the bandage already, if he imagines what they will look like once healed. His own fight scars.

“Yeah,” I say.

The last time Mama went with us to the bay, Daddy flipped his line backward to cast it out over the water and caught her palm with his hook. The barbed needle sank in deep. She pulled it out and rinsed it off in the water we were swimming in. Her stomach was big with Junior. It healed crooked and purple, puffy, and she had to go to the clinic to get an ointment for it when it started to leak pus. Whenever she would walk me through the store or through a crowd when we were out in public, holding the back of my neck with her hand, I’d feel the scar and see those pelicans. Up close, their beaks were etched with dark like the barnacles on a ship’s hull, the same color as Mama’s hand, and they were sharp as knives. They didn’t like us swimming close to them. Her hand was special, her own, one. Mama.

“You ran slow yesterday.”

I hold the bandage close. Skeetah grabs a rusty safety pin from off the sink and pins it shut.

“Only in the beginning,” I say.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” The light is creeping into the bathroom like fog.

Skeetah pulls his shirt back over his head, looks down at my body to my chest, my stomach, my feet. What does he know? I shift, barely help myself from folding my arms.

“Maybe you’re gaining weight.”

“You’re saying I’m fat?” I am trying not to cry. I don’t want him to know, but I can’t tell him, because I can’t say it. I haven’t said it to myself yet, out loud. Just chased it around in my head since I saw the lines.

“No,” Skeet says. “Just growing up, maybe.” The light is thick in the bathroom; it suffuses everything after he walks out, the smell of the bay going with him, leaving me and a smell like fried food that makes me turn on the water in the sink and vomit as quietly as I can, my face in the bowl.

I am kneeling on the sink. The bowl is hard metal, and where it meets the plastic of the counter, there is a ridge. It is cutting into my knees. I want to see how big I am, to see if you can tell. This is the only private mirror in the house. A big mirror with a fake gold-worked frame hangs in the living room, but I cannot do it there. I have to see myself as Skeetah, Randall, Junior, Daddy, and Manny do, have to see beyond my hands for eyes, hands that cup my stomach in my sleep so that I wake with them in the top of my shorts.

I tuck the hem of my shirt up through my bra. My breasts are full, turgid and tender the way they get before my period comes on. But I can still keep them smashed down in my bra. There’s the flat Y of my torso leading into my waist. Dark marks over my stomach like small black beans, old chicken-pox scars from when I was little and lay on the sofa, delirious with pain, for three days. Me, Randall, and Skeetah had it at once, and Mama must’ve rubbed us down with chamomile lotion every hour, but it felt like an endless dark day, like the kind they have in Alaska midwinter, between each time she’d lay my head in her lap, lift my shirt, and rub ease and sleep into my skin. I even had small burning bumps on my tongue.

Before I became pregnant, my stomach had been almost flat, the belly button an outie: an eye squeezed shut. The skin dark and spotted darker. I don’t look fat so much, now, just a little past full. The eye is open to a slit. There is a layer of meat around the belly button. I turn to the side, my feet braced on the sink bowl, my toes on the bottom, my butt on my heels, my knees down, and I sit up as straight as I can. There it is. It is not a watermelon curve. It is not that large. It is not a cantaloupe curve; it is not that insistent. The closest I can get to it is a honeydew curve; it is long and slight. I push with my hands, and it will not sink to dense pearls like fat. It pushes back, water flush and warm. I unpin my shirt. We all share clothes, so it’s mostly men’s T-shirts for me, loose jeans and cotton shorts. They cannot tell, but it is there. Perhaps Skeetah saw when I walked from the water and put on my clothes. I do not know, but I will not give him the chance to see again now. I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.

The piles that Daddy has been building like birds’ nests all over the yard for the hurricane are not growing today. Daddy is secreted like a snake in the dirt under his dump truck, his legs in dark blue pants, the hems tucked into his work boots that used to be brown when Mama bought them for him years ago for Christmas and are now black. Junior is sitting next to Daddy’s feet, digging a cluster of holes in the dirt. He smoothes the dirt away so that there is no evidence of digging, only holes.

“Hand me that wrench, boy.”

Junior doesn’t hear or he doesn’t want to move. He palms the sand gently, the way he used to pat the stray dogs that lived on the Pit before Skeetah bought China home. They were always mottled the color of dried sticks, of leaves sinking into earth and darkening, and they followed Junior around the Pit, licked his face when he had it out with Randall over not wanting to take a bath, or because he’d failed another test. They boiled around him like a rain-swollen creek when he’d run out into the bare yard, the trees, and cry. They nested with him under the house. But China had been settled in for two years now, and the dogs had disappeared. I do not remember if she killed them, or if they slunk off one by one in the night once she took on weight and could rip rubber tires in two. Junior’s forever the puppy weaned too soon.

“Junior!” Daddy yells. I’m walking through the ripped net of the shade, trying to edge past them unseen. I want to find Skeetah. He has medicine to give.

“Junior!” Daddy beats the rim of the dump truck with whatever tool he has, and it clangs like a bell. Junior startles, drawn from his holes. “The wrench!”

Junior picks up the wrench. He is strong for a little boy. When he grabs it and curls, I can see his muscles bunch. He is skinny in the way of picky-eating little boys before they reach puberty, when they either turn lean or get fat, and then grow into their man bodies. He lets it rest on Daddy’s leg.

“Here,” Junior breathes. I move too quickly, and he sees me. I shake my head, but he’s already saying it. “Esch. Where you going?”

“Esch! Where your brothers at? I need they help.” Daddy is a voice billowing from the bottom of the car like smoke.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” he bellows.

“I said I don’t know.” Junior is rising to follow me. I walk faster.

“Where Skeetah at? Randall here?” Junior asks.

“Hold up!” Daddy yells. “Come here.”

Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck. It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer.

“I want you to get up in the driver’s seat. When Junior come tell you, I want you to try to start it.”

“I can go find Skeetah if you want.”

“No.” Daddy’s already putting one shoulder back underneath the truck. “I got to get this fixed today. Now. They going to be money to be made after this storm come through by a man with a dump truck. José hit them folks in Mexico yesterday, but they already got another storm out in the Gulf. Tropical depression number ten. And it’s so far out and the water so hot…” Daddy trails off, his voice dissolving under the metal. The truck broke right after Mama died, and Daddy got disability checks from it since it was an accident. I don’t ask him how he’s supposed to be able to drive a big dump truck after the storm without somebody asking him about it. Junior crouches next to Daddy. In the dirt next to him, a beer bottle, half full, is screwed into the sand.

There are multiple levers, and I don’t know how to work any of them.

“Tell Daddy I don’t know how to start the truck,” I yell to Junior. The seat is peeling away at the seams like plastic Kraft wrappers, and the foam padding underneath is damp. The dash and the steering wheel and the glass are coated in dust turned candy shell hard.

Up close Daddy smells like vinegar, like salt. That is his fresh alcohol smell.

“You see that there?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the clutch. That’s the brake. Put this here in neutral. You don’t need to do nothing to this. But when you turn the key, press the clutch and the brake at the same time.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t touch nothing else.” His hands are like mine, like Skeet’s. That’s where we get these flat wide fingers from. But I look at his face and his collarbone punching up through the neck of his shirt like knuckles, and I can’t see anything else he ever gave me. He walks around the side of the truck. Minutes later, Junior clambers up the side of the truck.

“He say start it.”

I press and turn. There is a click and then nothing. Junior drops and runs, reappears climbing.

“He say again.”

Again I press and turn. This time there isn’t even a click. A fly buzzes into the truck, decides to try my arm. I wave it away.

“Shit!” I hear muffled through the machinery.

“Ask him if he want me to do it again.”

Junior doesn’t even bother climbing down; he leans out and yells. His little muscles stretch out like shoestrings. When he was a baby, Randall held him the most, and I did the rest of the time. Daddy fed him until he figured out me and Randall could do it. He taught Randall the right ratio for the formula, how to heat the bottle up in a pan of water so that the milk didn’t get too hot, and then he went back out in his pickup, trying to find yard work and odd jobs. Afterward, Randall mixed the bottles, kept them filled in the refrigerator so he or I could feed Junior. Whenever Skeetah held him, Junior would cry. When we went to school, Daddy brought Junior to Mudda Ma’am, who had white hair she’d braid into pigtails and loop over her head, and who I never saw wearing anything other than a housedress. She watched kids for money while their parents were at work. She watched Junior until he was old enough for Head Start, which is when her memory started going, so she let the kids go with it. Tilda, her only daughter, moved back in with her to take care of her, but mostly spent her time wearing a dirt path between Javon’s house and her own for crack. I wonder if Junior even remembers Mudda Ma’am. He never talks about her, never says her name even when we walk down to the park and see her wandering amongst her azaleas like a child losing at hide-and-seek. Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.

I press, turn, wait.

“Stop!” Daddy is waving the wrench in the air, but the truck is so large that I cannot see his head over the hood, only his black hand, the dirty tool. “Get out. It ain’t ready. Go.”

I jump down, Junior already tailing me.

“Go get me another beer, Junior.”

“Y’all always leaving me, Esch. Wait!” Junior says, and he runs to the house, leaving a dust ghost trail behind him.

“She need some time to herself.” Skeetah is saying this. China is beside him. She is snapping at gnats. And with his arms crossed over his chest and a baseball cap high on his head, there is Manny. Every time her mouth shuts, he tries not to, but he flinches. I see it in the balls of his shoulders.

“You should give her a bath or something.” Manny tosses out the comment. Shrugs and justifies the jump when China snaps and shakes her head at what she has missed.

“I will.” Skeetah kneels, runs his hand down China’s chest. She looks up and her whole body shimmies like a woman dancing down at the Oaks, a blues club set on six acres of woods and a baseball diamond in the middle of Bois. They host baseball games for black town teams every Sunday during the summer. Once, when the outside bathroom stalls were broken when we were younger, Randall walked me into the blues club during a baseball Sunday to use the bathroom. He and Skeet and I had spent the day begging quarters from our friends to buy pickles and soda at the concession stand, hanging from the chicken wire that backed the dugouts, watching the away team clap and whistle and kick at their bats and throw practice shots while Mama and Daddy were in and out of the blues club.

“I think that’s the dirtiest I’ve ever seen her,” Manny says.

China has a little blood from the other dog, Twist, on her still at the corners of her mouth like lipstick. The red dirt of the Pit has given her a pink gleam, like a barely cooked shrimp still gummy with sea. Manny ignores me and Junior, who is trying to jump at a tree branch and touch it like a basketball goal. The lighter Manny carries in his pockets to smoke his cigarillos dances over and under his knuckles. That is his nervous habit, the thing that he does but does not realize that he does when he is doing some things and thinking of others.

“I’m waiting until right before the fight to clean her. So she be shining on them.”

On the day Randall walked me through the Oaks, all corners and smoke and the bowling of beer bottles hitting tables, he had gripped my shoulders so hard they hurt. Mama had been on the dance floor; I’d never seen her dance before that, and I never would again. She was dancing with a man, not Daddy, while Daddy sat at the edge of the floor and watched. She had shook like China, threw her head back so water glistened down her throat, and her body ran in curves when normally she was all solid. She was beautiful.

“I thought you wasn’t going to fight her, her fresh with milk and all.” The lighter stops, and Manny flips it up in the air and catches it. He lights a cigarillo and wedges it in the corner of his mouth and talks around it.

“I ain’t. But I’m going to take her. Can’t let niggas forget who she is.”

China lays down in the sand indolently. Her breasts, still swollen but maybe a little less now, lay flat before her like a pillow. The skin where her breasts separate from her rib cage is wrinkled-her nipples are a pale pink so colorless they are almost white. I haven’t ever touched her chest, but if I did, I would imagine that her teats would be soft and cool against the heat of the day. She does not lay her head in the dirt and huff like other dogs, but stares at Manny and me instead. Like she knows.

“You know Rico going to be there. Fighting Kilo.”

Manny begins flipping the silver and red lighter again when he mentions Rico. The image, which looks like a tattoo, reads Hearts on Fire, and pictures two hearts diagonal to one another, going up in flames. His lips kiss the cigarillo and he pulls. China blinks and yawns. There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.

“Well, I hope Kilo ready. Marquise told me some of his cousins from Baton Rouge been talking shit about how they got a boss dog, and they bringing her out to fight, too.” Skeetah rubs China on her side, smoothing her fur over her ribs as he squats over her. Her tail thumps once, raises dust, lies still.

“Kilo always ready.”

Rico is Manny’s cousin, the boy from Germaine who bought his dog, Kilo, to mate with China. Rico’s big red muscle of a dog with a killing jaw. It was Manny who talked up Kilo to Skeetah. As China grew older, her pulpy puppy muscle hardened like a pearl in the stomach of an oyster, and Skeet’s devotion was the living muscle. She grew lean and strong. Manny would talk shit whenever we were all out under the trees as if he could lessen the wonder of Skeetah’s prized dog. He thought he could dim her, that he could convince us she wasn’t white and beautiful and gorgeous as a magnolia on the trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling.

Manny would sit on a milk crate or a tree stump and say, My cousin Rico got a fire dog. Probably about the same age as yours, but bigger. More muscle. Got a killing jaw. Skeetah would ignore Manny, or glance at him while he was dragging China through the sand, around the junk by her teeth locked in a bike tire, and say, Really. Yeah, Manny would say, and his white teeth would flash in his glass-burned, beautiful face. Yeah. China would squeal a dog’s squeal and bear down with her haunches, make Skeetah stumble toward her. We’ll see, Skeetah’d say.

Rico called China small-time until he came to the Pit with Manny one day and finally saw her: knee-high, stout as any boy dog but still sleek with muscle, and her long neck and head like a snake’s. Skeetah had her climb a leaning tree and then shred a half of a car tire, pulling it so hard the wire in the rubber made Skeet’s hands bleed. When they mated, China had let Kilo lick her from behind, let him mount. Smiled like she liked it. The tendons had stood out in Skeetah’s neck, and he squinted so that it looked like his eyes were closed. Kilo had placed his big mouth on her neck like he was kissing her and slobbered on her. She’d snapped at him, figured it for a hold. Hated the submission of it. She nicked him, snapped at him until she threw him off. She’d drawn blood: he hadn’t.

“What’s the dog name? From Baton Rouge?”

“Boss,” Skeetah laughed. China snorted into the dirt.

“Well, Kilo been fought from Florida to Louisiana. Broke a dog leg once. They better be ready.”

“You seen it?”

“What?”

“The break?”

“No, Rico told me.” Manny waves away a gnat, inhales strong on the cigarillo, and blows smoke in a fog in front of his face. “Y’all need to start a fire out here. Why y’all always got so many bugs up here on the Pit? Gnats so bold they out in the middle of the day. Fuck the evening time.” He drops the cigarillo; it smokes a pencil thread and then smothers in the sand.

“We savages up here on the Pit. Even the gnats. Mosquitoes so big they look like bats.” Skeetah nods at me and Junior. “You better watch out. Junior look puny but he’ll sucker-punch you in the neck and leave you choking. And Esch-” Skeetah stands when he says it, and China circles him, sniffing in the dirt, “You see how boss China is. You think the other girl on the Pit going to be weak?”

“I ain’t saying either of them weak.” Manny still hasn’t looked at me. “But you know China ain’t as boss as she used to be.”

“What?” Skeetah’s tendons are showing.

“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I’m glass.

Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it’s hacking its way out of him.

“You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That’s power.”

China is licking Skeetah’s hand like she licks the puppies. Skeetah pushes her head away but she keeps at it, and he looks away from Manny. The tendons in his neck smooth. The menace leaves him; if he were a dog, his hair would flatten.

“To give life”-Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue-“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.

“You wormed her yet?” I ask. Does Manny think that of me, that I am weak? That there is a price to this body that swallows him, that pulls at him and takes him until he has nothing left? Is Manny glad because he will never have to pay it?

“Naw. She wouldn’t take the Ivomec earlier. Spilled it.”

“You know how to mix it?” Manny slid his lighter into his jean shorts pocket. His muscle shirt was white as his teeth. Shaliyah must have washed. I wonder if he ever told her that about weakness. If he ever called her female, bit it off at the end like underripe sugarcane when he said it?

Skeetah looks up at Manny, his hands dropping, his jaw loose.

“What you mean, mix it?”

“Fuck, you going to kill the dog.” Manny smiles like he wants to laugh. I swallow and realize that I want to push him, to place my hands flat on the muscles of his chest and shove him for looking that way at Skeet, for insulting him. For saying things he doesn’t know he is saying about me. I want him to fall over backward, straining his bad arm, and then I want to bear him down in the dirt. Make him touch all of me, for once. “You supposed to mix the Ivomec with cooking oil and then give it to the dog. And don’t try doing it with water if you ain’t got no cooking oil. Then it won’t mix good.”

“She didn’t take none of it this morning.” Skeetah is holding China’s head still, prying her eyes wide, peering into them.

“You sure?” Manny is still smiling.

“I’m sure.”

“And she only need a little bit. You got a medicine syringe?”

“Yeah, I…” Skeetah pauses. “I got one yesterday.” Looks at me. I figure Randall done told Manny what happened with the farmer and the wormer and the dog, but I know that Skeetah doesn’t want everybody to know either. Less people that know, the less people that talk if the farmer ever wanders through the wood our way, asking questions. We live in the black heart of Bois Sauvage, and he lives out away in the pale arteries, so I don’t think he will ever come here, swinging his cane like an axe, his dog foaming, probably a rifle in the back window of his gleaming, tinted pickup truck. But I know Skeet would say, But still.

“You need half a cc for every twenty pounds. What, China about sixty-five pounds? Give her one and a half.” Manny pulls his arm across his chest, shrugging his shoulder as he does it. Stretching out the wound. This is what he does when he is bored. He looks away from Skeetah and China, beyond Junior, who is peering into the dark shed where the puppies are dozing on their new tile floor, to the woods. Never at me. “Any more than that and she could go blind. And any more than that, she could die.”

Skeetah pulls China to him by her haunches and pries open her jaw, sniffing at her tongue. He has turned from lover to father. She, his doting daughter. I draw a line through the sand with my toe, pull my hands from the pockets of my shorts where they had crept to cup my stomach, trying to expose me so that Manny will look at me like he looks at China. Junior begins whistling into the darkness of the shed, like he would call the puppies to him, lead them into the light, to a new brother, and burrow with them under the house like his lost dogs.

“Get away from the door, Junior,” Skeetah says. China licks his breath, tasting his words. “Esch, we got oil, right?”

Daddy keeps a two-gallon jug of vegetable oil in the cabinet for frying oysters or fish when he can catch them or his friends give them to him, but I don’t think China will like the taste of it. I stick a finger into the oil and rub it across my teeth. Too metallic, too bland. But the bacon grease Daddy keeps on the counter in an old coffee can, the metal waxy with residue: that tastes like drippings. That tastes like the next bite is going to be salty crunchy bacon, tender in the middle, burnt at the edges, stiff as a twig. This she will like.

Skeetah has found a big cardboard box, cut it in half, and lined it with material, and I can’t tell whether the material is old clothes or old sheets or old towels, because under the dogs they are just dark gray rags. The bottom of the box reads Westinghouse.

“I took it from behind the hall at the church,” Skeetah says. He is sucking the Ivomec into the medicine syringe. It is colorless as water. He is sitting on a toolbox rusted and kicked to bad angles, the Ivomec bottle between his knees. When he shifts, the toolbox crunches against the metal inside like a mouth grinding its teeth. He recaps the bottle, slides it into his pants pocket. Manny is gone, but Junior is standing in the corner, his hands folded behind him, leaning against the shed wall.

“Where’s Manny?”

“Said he had something to go do.” Skeetah holds the syringe in one hand, the coffee container of bacon grease in another. He wobbles.

“He said he’d be back,” Junior pipes up. He rocks on his feet and slams against the shed, shaking the tin.

“Junior. Stop it. Shit, I need a bowl.” Skeetah turns to me. “Can you get me a bowl, please?”

“Junior, go get him a bowl.” Even though I have to pee, the melon under my shirt ripe, I still don’t want to leave the shed.

“He asked you,” Junior says quietly, intent on the puppies. They are blindly pitching themselves out the door of the box, headlong.

“Junior, go ’head.”

“No.”

“Esch, please.”

In the house, I hardly sit on the toilet. I lean over and mouth my knees, feel the tender skin above my kneecaps with my lips. Outside, the rooster crows at the middle of the day, his call cutting through the hazy buzz of the insects. Nausea digs at me. Manny has left; I don’t want to think of him, to know he is somewhere out there eating up all the sunlight, smoking a cigarillo, passing purchases to customers at the gas station, his hands brushing Shaliyah soft as marsh grass, but I do. I walk in shadow on the way to the shed. Where I can’t avoid the sun, where it touches me through the branches, it burns.

Skeetah pours a palmful of the bacon grease into the bowl and then squirts in the Ivomec. He mixes it with his finger. Even though we are in the shade, the heat is worse in the shed, like the inside of a hot fist. Junior and Skeetah are both glazed with sweat, and Skeetah blinks like he’s about to cry because the sweat runs like water from his scalp to his forehead into his eyes. I am trying to see whether the Ivomec is mixing well in the bowl when there is an eclipse of light in the doorway and Skeetah looks up and past me, pissed.

“Move out the way of the door. You blocking all the light.”

It’s Manny. Both of his hands are on the top of the doorsill, and he leans into the door, stretching his body like taffy. All I can see is the shadow of him and the white of his smile. It feels wrong to not be able to see his face, seems wrong that he is as dark as me now, that he would be washed dark by the sun behind him like ink set to bleeding over waterlogged paper.

“Anybody seen my lighter?” Manny’s voice is as distinct and sharp as the corners of the toolbox Skeet sits on.

“No.” Skeetah is stirring the medicine with his finger. “Move.”

“You, Esch?”

I shake my head.

“You put it in your pocket,” Junior says, and Manny leans on the doorjamb, fishes in his pockets. Light diffuses through the room. I see Manny’s profile, his glass-burned side, and then he stops fumbling and turns to us and his face is dark again. I want him to grip my hand like he grips the dark beams over his head, to walk with me out of the shed and away from the Pit. To help me bear the sun. To hold me once he learns my secret. To be different.

“I didn’t see you over there, Junior,” Manny says.

“Thank you,” Skeet says. The oil has absorbed all of the Ivomec. The mix is off-white, creamy. Skeetah tastes it.

“You shouldn’t do that,” shadow Manny says.

“Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

“I’m just trying to help you out.”

“You could help me out by moving out of my light-in or out.”

“I’m out.” Manny shrugs. “I’m going to look up under the trees. Ain’t no way I’m coming in; China don’t like me.” China is sitting before Skeetah, ignoring how close I am to him, intent on the bowl with the bacon grease in it. She is panting, her tongue dripping water.

“China likes everybody.” Skeet is sucking the mixture back up into the syringe.

“Okay.” Manny laughs. His smile again. Each time I see his teeth, nausea elbows me. Manny steps away and the light floods in and I want him to leave, to come back, to never have been. China is dancing on her hind legs because Skeetah is standing, the syringe in his hand.

“Here.”

I press the bowl to my stomach.

China is hopping on her hind legs. What tore through the gray dog yesterday is now a woman approaching her partner on the floor of the Oaks, the first lick of the blues guitar sounding from the jukebox, a drink in her hand. China lands on her front paws and pushes back up. Skeet crouches, places one arm around the back of her neck, twining his hand around her jaw, tilting her head up.

“That’s my girl,” he says.

China grins. Her tongue flashes out like a wet, whipped rag.

“I know my girl,” Skeetah breathes. With his other hand, he tilts the syringe to her lips.

China barks, nods. Her front legs rest on his chest like a lover’s. She flings her head back in submission, supplication.

“Good bitch,” Skeetah says.

China nuzzles the syringe, licks.

“That’s my bitch.” Skeetah closes his fingers, the medicine disappears, and he withdraws. The puppies twitch and nuzzle at their feet. China accidentally steps on the orange one, and it yelps.

“Always my bitch,” Skeetah says.

Outside, Manny is pacing the yard, running his feet through the sand.

“His bitch must’ve gave it to him.” Skeetah breathes this into China’s coat; from the doorway, she is the dusty lightbulb in the room. Junior is creeping along the wall, trying to get closer to the puppies. In the yard, the dust from Manny’s searching feet billows up and obscures him, turning his white shirt, his golden skin, dark as a bruised peach.

I’ve heard girls at my school talk. These are conversations I snatch from the air like we take down clothes that have crusted dry on a clothesline. The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage. Say that this is what you do when you can’t afford an abortion, when you can’t have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you.

In the bathroom, I bend over standing and knead my stomach, knead the melon to pulp, but it just keeps springing back: ripe. Intent on bearing seed. I could find something big enough and hard enough to jump on: Daddy’s dump truck hood, Daddy’s tractor, one of the old washing machines out in the yard. We have bleach in the laundry room. Only thing I wouldn’t be able to find is the birth control pills; I’ve never had a prescription, wouldn’t have money to get them if I did, don’t have any girlfriends to ask for some, and have never been to the Health Department. Who would bring me? Daddy, who sometimes I think forgets that I am a girl? Big Henry, one of the few of our friends who has a car? Manny? Teeth-in-the-dark Manny? If I took care of it, he would never know, I think, never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what? I push. Be different. Love me.

These are my options, and they narrow to none.

The sun set hours ago, and I am sitting on the toilet seat, pulling the towel that Randall tacked up for a curtain to look out in the yard. I see Skeetah dragging wood to the door of the shed. The bare bulb burns outward, shining on the dirt he kneels in. He is prying nails from wood. Insects swarm at the edges of the light. The frame for the kennel that sat for days, wedged into the dirt like a fallen scarecrow, is upright again. He is building her a house. He is watching over her, gauging her for sickness. He knows love.

“Gotdamnit.”

Daddy’s pickup eases into the yard so slowly that I can hear him curse above the gurgle of the engine. This is how he drives when he is bombed-out drunk. Very slowly, and with his brights on. His headlights break the golden bubble that encases Skeet and flood the yard with light. Skeetah raises the arm with the hammer and shades his eyes. Daddy parks parallel to his dump truck, which has sat rust-barnacled and silent since I attempted to crank it this morning. Daddy leaves his headlights on and gets out of the truck.

“I said, gotdamnit!”

Daddy tries to punctuate this by slamming the door of his truck, but he fails. His hand slips from the metal, and it closes so quietly I can’t even hear it from my seat on the toilet next to the window.

“Gotdamn Van’s Salvage,” Daddy mutters, “didn’t even have the part I needed.” He leans against the side of his truck like it’s a human being, speaks this almost as low as he used to on the nights he came home dazed drunk when Mama was alive. Mama would walk out to meet him, gather him to her like a child. She was only a few inches shorter than him and could bear all of his weight. He would whisper to her as they walked up the concrete slabs that made up the steps to the front porch. We never heard what he said to her. I imagine that he told her that he loved her, soaked tender with moonshine.

“You left your lights on,” Skeetah says.

“Now how I’m going to make money after the storm?” Daddy slaps his truck, but it is awkward, at odds. It slides into a caress. “What you say?”

“I said you left your lights on.” Skeetah is prying at a reluctant nail, his head down, concentrating. He watches Daddy out of the corner of his eyes.

“Oh.” Daddy reaches into the truck and pushes the knob to turn off the headlights. He walks toward Skeetah slowly. This is his drunk walk: purposeful, plodding. “What you doing?”

“Nothing.” Skeetah stills, stops pulling at the nail, but stays bent over.

“Nothing?”

“At all.”

“I see you doing something, so you can’t be doing nothing.”

“Ain’t you tired?”

“What?”

“You been busy trying to get parts for that dump truck all day.”

“Damn right,” Daddy says. “The U-Pull-It, the Salvage, all looked at me crazy. No dump truck parts. No help when I was looking through the cars. Look at me like they don’t know when a man’s talking when I tell them a bad storm’s coming.”

Skeetah straightens, balances on the balls of his feet, preparing to outwait Daddy. The hammer is on his knee.

“Them’s boards. You been in my piles?”

“Naw.”

“I got them gathered for the house. You always meddling. You want the windows to shatter?”

“Daddy, I ain’t mess with your wood.”

“Well, where you get it from, then?”

“Found it off up in the woods.” Skeet is running the hammer back and forth on his leg. He is waiting for the step that turns Daddy mean.

“You ain’t found shit in them woods.” Daddy is waving his hand in the air as if he is waving away night beetles startled to flight, wading through the glossy brown bugs with shells as hard as butterscotch candies. He spits. “Did you?”

“Yes.” Skeetah is very quiet. The hammer is still.

“Bullshit!” Daddy yells. “Everything I do for y’all and y’all don’t appreciate shit!” He raises his arms again, as if he has stirred more bugs to motion. He reaches to grab Skeetah’s arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. Skeetah is rigid, as straight as the hammer hanging at his side. Daddy tries to shove him but he is slow to let go; it is as if his hands are deaf to what his brain wants them to do, and they grip Skeetah’s shoulders, hard. He shakes Skeetah.

“Let me go, Daddy.” This is so quiet that I can barely hear it.

China is standing in the doorway of the shed. She does not growl. She does not bark. She only stands, head cocked to one side, her forelegs locked wide, her breasts adding more bulk to her, the rest of her lost to the darkness of the shed. She is still.

“Let go!”

“All I do!” Daddy shoves Skeet so hard that Daddy lurches backward with the force of it, but he catches himself before falling.

Skeetah stutters backward but lands crouching, still on his feet. China darts forward. Skeet holds the hammer like a baton.

“Hold,” Skeetah calls. “Hold!” There is wetness to his voice. China stops where she is. She is one of the flaking statues at the graveyard next to the park, an angel streaked by rain, burning bright.

“I wish she would,” Daddy says, his arms straight as his sides. “I wish she would.”

Skeetah edges sideways to China, lays down the hammer, and puts his hand over her muzzle. She is marble under his fingers.

“I’d take her upcountry and shoot her.”

“No.”

“Call the county pound. Make you watch them take her away.”

Skeetah has his arm around China’s back, tucked over and under her stomach, his hand lost somewhere in her breasts. China does not turn and lick him. She watches Daddy still. Skeetah rubs her chest with his other hand, smoothes the fur in broad downward strokes again and again.

“I’m trying to save us,” Daddy says. Skeetah crouches. “Y’all need to learn to appreciate me. You hear me?”

The nightbugs answer back yesssssssss. Skeetah ignores Daddy, rubs China, glances back and forth between them.

“Put them gotdamn boards back where you found them. You hear me?”

China’s tail lowers, but her ears are still laid back down her skull like a crest of feathers. Skeetah is whispering to her, murmuring.

“You hear me?” Daddy yells, takes a halting step toward Skeet. China’s tail rises.

“Yes,” Skeetah says. He is facing Daddy, staring at him plainly, his face smooth and open, only his mouth barely moving when he speaks. “Yes.”

“Good.” Daddy steps back. Skeet leans on China to stop her from moving. Daddy turns to walk into the house. He shuffles sideways, slow and deliberate, watching Skeet and China watch him leave them to the abandoned hammer, the fallen frame, the dark expanse sounding of bug and wood and wind spreading out and away from the two of them like a bride’s train.