Salvage the Bones

THE SEVENTH DAY: GAME DOGS AND GAME MEN

There were too many of us in the car on the way to the hospital. Daddy, with his hand wrapped in a red-blooming towel, sat in the front seat. Big Henry drove. Junior and Randall and I sat in the backseat, the smell of blood like the Gulf when the tide’s low. That and the smell of dog, like China was in the middle of the driver’s seat, licking her whiskers with her bloody tongue, nosing the absent Skeet. Daddy sounded like a larger version of the puppies, his breathing whining in and out. I wondered if he noticed it through the pain. His neck was stringy and long as a cooked turkey’s. We took the back way to the hospital, through miles of woods, lonely houses like possums in the dark, half caught and then left behind by the headlights. Junior let me hold his hand. When we arrived at the hospital, Randall and Big Henry half dragged, half carried Daddy through the doors to orderlies who were standing there as if they were waiting for us, and they put him in a wheelchair. We sat in the lobby. The orderlies wheeled Daddy next to us. They left us to whisper with the night admitting nurse, who rose from behind her desk, her scrubs pink with red hearts on them, wearing red Crocs, carrying a clipboard. Daddy bent over in the wheelchair, and the blood ran like a starving stream down his thigh, soaked into the seat, and the nurse began to ask questions and looked at Daddy as he sat up, his head rolling back, and saw his hand. The nurse had a gap between her two front teeth like Mama. She tucked the clipboard under her arm, grabbed the handles, asked Daddy’s name. Randall answered as she wheeled Daddy away and followed.

Junior fell asleep sitting upright in his chair and sagged over on Big Henry, who sat slumped over, his elbows on his knees, trying to rub the blood off his hands. It pinked and spread over his skin like a jellyfish. A white couple sat three chairs down from us; the man was bald with wispy hairs like dandelion fluff around his ears, and the woman had red hair that stood up in a curly thin afro the way that older white women’s hair often does. Their clothes were clean and faded along the ironed edges. Every few minutes, the woman would rub the gold crucifix at her chest, and the man would take off his silver-framed bifocals and polish them. They studied the receptionist station the whole time we were there and never looked over to Big Henry and his hands, Junior’s feet that kicked in his sleep as if he were dreaming of falling, and me. I wondered who they were waiting on, but I never found out because a nurse came for them and they disappeared. The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness.

When Randall and Daddy walked out of the long hall, it was three o’clock in the morning. Randall looked older than Daddy under the lights, and Daddy’s eyes were glazed as if he was drunk, clear and shiny as the glass water jugs I’d filled, but he was not mean. He shuffled along next to Randall, his hand wrapped up to the wrist in gauze and tape so that it looked like a webworm moth nest wound tight in a pecan tree, a yarn of larvae eating at the ripe green leaves beneath to burst forth in black-winged flurry in the throat-closing heat of fall. Only Daddy’s hand would not emerge whole and quivering. Daddy’s hand would be not the moths but the bare branches, like bones, left under the husk.

Now Daddy sleeps. He hasn’t slept this late since the week after Mama died, when I found him at the table, on the sofa, beside the sink in the bathroom, in the hallway, his torso over the threshold, his legs out. Cans and bottles, mostly beer, lay about him like smaller versions of himself wherever he was. The sun is over the tops of the trees, flooding down into the small clearing around the house. All of the fans are blowing at all of the windows, so the house hums as if it is alive. Big Henry sleeps on the sofa. Randall is snoring in his room. Daddy’s door is closed. The chicken coop stands with three walls still, the tractor lightly touching it as if providing a thick, rubber-muscled shoulder to lean on. Junior is watching a rerun of Reading Rainbow, the volume so low it is barely louder than the fans. He does not turn it up.

We left Skeetah in the shed last night. He did not run with us to the car. When we came back to the house, he was asleep in his bed in the room he shares with Randall, wrapped up in his sheet, so I only saw the lump of him. He wore his shoes still, and they stuck out of his blanket like bristles on a toothbrush. In place of the curtain he’d dragged a piece of tin he’d salvaged, probably from Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s roof, and wedged it across the doorway of the shed. China was a lump, as pale as biscuit dough, laying out in the dirt, her chain attached to a car’s half-eaten skeleton. He’d separated her from the puppies. When I woke up this morning, he was gone. And so was China.

Daddy is propped up on pillows when I walk into the bedroom, a bowl of chicken noodle soup on a potholder before me, a little of it dribbling around the edges. He is eating crackers one by one, placing them between his lips and then pulling them in. His chewing sounds like crumpled notebook paper. I put down the bowl and the spoon on the night table, cluttered with a glass of water from the tap, a Budweiser can he’s been using as an ashtray, and his medicine for pain and infection. His arm is resting on a hill of old blankets and crocheted pillows, which Randall piled last night. Daddy is watching the thirteen-inch black-and-white television sitting on the wide, mirrored dresser across from the bed. He hasn’t changed a thing here since Mama died: there are small glass candleholders with tall peach candles wedged into them, and two small bunches of fake flowers in squat vases that look like cups that Mama placed at both ends of the dresser. There are pictures of us, Polaroids, which Mama wedged between the glass and the frame of the mirror. There is one picture of her and Daddy standing chest to chest, in a frame. Her hands are on his shoulders, her hair ironed straight and pulled back smooth, her dress cut open in the front so that it shows her collarbone, as dense and burnished and beautiful as a brass doorknob. She smiles without opening her mouth. Daddy doesn’t smile at all, but his hands are around her back, and he has that serious, prideful tilt of his head that Skeetah has when he is standing with China at a dogfight, showing her off before the mad scramble, the cutting barks and teeth.

“Play with the antenna,” Daddy says. His voice sounds dry as the cracker. He leans over and pulls a wicker tray from next to the bed and drags it across his lap. The bowl wobbles in his left hand. He spills some of the soup on the potholder when he sets it down.

There is only static. I grab the right antenna, yank it up.

“Down,” Daddy says.

The box fan in the window is not pushing any air in the room. Every day seems hotter than the last. I grab the left antenna, split them one from the other like a wishbone.

“There.”

“Katrina has made landfall in Florida… miles from Miami.” It is the local news. The weatherwoman is speaking with the anchor, and she is pointing at the interactive screen before her, but the television is so old and the resolution so bad that the map looks like concrete, and the storm, an oil stain.

“Early reports say that there are some dead. Does anyone… idea of where… projection of storm?” Mike’s voice is even, smooth, when we catch it through the static.

“… unclear. The storm is currently a category one… could weaken… could change.” The woman’s hair is light; she may be blonde.

“So what would you advise our listeners to… Rachel?” The TV gives a static moan, so I split the two parts of the antenna further.

“… prepare as well as they can for the storm. Katrina is on the… if it does not weaken… moving northwest, they should also prepare… government will issue orders for mandatory evacuation.”

“So what does this mean?”

“This means that our viewers may… preparations to remain in their homes for the hurricane, and instead may want to begin… possible evacuation.” Rachel appears to be smiling.

“I can’t see, Esch.”

I step aside. Mike turns to the camera.

“… highways will be open for evacuation. It is better to leave earlier… hours… stuck in traffic.”

“You’re still in the way,” Daddy says. He blows his soup and stirs it with his spoon, but he does not eat, and instead he lets his good hand drop behind the wicker across his lap.

Mama smiles serenely from the photo. She has no idea that three years later, she will be bleeding to death in the bed that Daddy now lays in with three of his fingers missing. In one of the Polaroids, I am dancing in the kitchen. It is at one of Mama and Daddy’s parties where his friends, and one or two of hers, would gather to drink beer and eat oysters and potatoes, fried golden in the same oil and silt and salt. Mama would plug in the cassette deck radio in the kitchen, put in tapes by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Denise LaSalle, and Little Milton, and I would dance while the crowd clapped and laughed at my jerky hand-swinging, all of us sweating in the kitchen. Mama would say, That’s my baby, my dancing girl, and I would kick extra or wave my arms harder. The music would wring me dry. Now I look at myself and at Mama, at the leaping Randall and the dark-eyed and grinning Skeet, who looks in his picture as if he is worm-ridden, and barely resist snatching the pictures from the mirror, taking them to my room, laying them across my bed to attempt to decode them, to fit them together like a jumbo puzzle.

“Preparation… key,” Rachel says.

I shut Daddy’s door.

China is breathe-barking. Every time she inhales, she exhales with a bark, flat and strong as a slap. The sound is carrying through the woods. On the back step, I hear her as if she is drawing closer, but I do not see her appearing with Skeetah at her side. There is only the day, hotter than the one that came before it, dense as water approaching boiling. And then her voice catches. There are other dogs, in the woods near the house, on the other side of the Pit, down the winding, gravel-eaten length of the street, and they bark with her. They ring her like a chorus. Their voices crackle across the sky, all places at once. Somewhere out there, I know, Skeetah is in the middle of these dogs, pulling them to him. He is the hand on the leash. He is the palm. He flexes and they come, he looses his grip and they spread to the red dirt, the pines, the creeks, the oaks. They howl. They hack.

China gives a great shout, and all at once, they are silent.

Randall’s game is today. I wipe the bathroom mirror with my palm, and the glass cracks at the edges, the reflective surface flaking away like glitter. I oil my hands, rub them through my hair, which calms into ringlets. I pick two bobby pins that Mama left in a plastic case under the sink, and I slide them into my hair behind my ears, so that it frames my face like a pillow. Junior is singing along with the television, the words indecipherable, his voice higher pitched than a girl’s. I smile, turn my head to the right, to the left. This is what I look like, I think. This is the lie. Skeetah is a smell before I see him: the oily sweat of dog, pine needles growing green, and an unwashed stink like milk set too long out in a hot kitchen. He stops in the doorway. I run Vaseline across my lips, rub them together, try to make them glossy.

“What was that noise?”

“What you talking about?”

“China, barking like crazy.”

Outside, Randall is dribbling. I can see him out of the window, shooting, throwing the ball at the house when it rebounds, catching it, throwing it again. The sun is directly overhead, pouring down into the clearing where he practices. He is warming up. The ball is not full with air, so each time that he touches the ball, it is more like a slap.

“Nothing.”

The neck on Skeetah’s shirt is stretched as a bib. He looks down at it, shakes his head, grabs it with both hands, and pulls. The shirt rips. The newly sprouted hair on his head is prickly as Velcro.

“It didn’t sound like nothing.”

The shirt is black, so what is wet on it is sweat. It could not be blood. I would know. Skeetah drops the tee, and it slaps wetly on the tile. The smell of him moves through the room like smoke from burning wet leaves.

“She forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“Who I was yesterday.”

“Don’t you mean she forgot the puppy?”

Randall catches the ball each time it springs from the backboard and throws it back up. He is not letting it touch the earth. He is saving it from making that flat, collapsing sound, again and again. His lips turned down at the corners, smiling.

“No. She forgot me.”

Skeetah bends, turns on the tap in the tub, lifts the hook for the shower. The spray from the water is cold, a fine mist.

“How long you going to keep China on the chain?”

“Long as it takes.” Skeetah kicks his shoes across the floor; once, twice. “As long as it takes.” He peels his socks away like banana peels, and the smell of them is rotten. My stomach shudders.

Big Henry is perched on the hood of his car. Marquise sits next to him, leaned over almost double so that he looks like a crab, all back and arms and legs, as he rolls a blunt on the blue metal. China faces Big Henry, tongue lolling pink and straight as an exclamation mark. She smiles and then grimaces, over and over, so that she has two faces. The pink of the Pit on her coat is overlaid by a brown scum, which etches the lines of her muscles in her shoulder, haunch, and back clean and clear as marker. Big Henry lists sideways, tipping lightly as if he is on the verge of running. I put my hands in my short shorts, look down at the tennis shoes that I have scrubbed until they are as close to white as they can get: off white, a dirty cream the color of egg whites cooked with pepper. Big Henry turns away from China, who is grimacing again. I sit close to Big Henry’s windshield on the other side of Marquise, who scoots forward to make room for me.

“You think he ready?”

“Who?” Marquise asks.

“I wasn’t talking to you, fool.” Big Henry laughs before biting it off with glances at China and me.

“Skeetah?” I ask. Big Henry shakes his head across the careful shifting and picking and measuring that Marquise is signaling with the hitch of his back.

“Randall.”

Right now Randall would probably be squeezed into the bathroom with Skeet, either hissing at him to hurry up and get out of the shower, or washing off with a rag and soap over the sink, dripping suds all over the counter, the floor, the toilet, taken to ignoring Skeet, probably thinking about the game. He has been too tall to wash in the sink for years.

“He fast. He’ll be ready soon.”

“I mean the game.” Big Henry smiles a little then, just a dimpling at the corner of his lips.

“Oh.” I nod, my face hot. “He been practicing all day. He ready.” My sweat is making the backs of my thighs slick; I am sliding along the metal like mud gone downhill in a bad rain, coming to a slow, sticky stop on Marquise’s back.

“Well, damn, Esch, I didn’t know you wanted me like that.” Marquise turns and smirks around the blunt he is licking shut. He winks at me, his tongue white at the edges, bits of the cigar paper flaking off and sticking like food. I know that wink, that grin. He smiled like that when he was done when we had sex for the last time about a year ago, when he was wiping himself, turned away from me; he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder. I grip the seam where the windshield joins the hood, and I pull myself away from him so that we are no longer touching. I do not like his smile.

“Leave her alone, Marquise.”

“I’m just fucking with her.”

“Too hot out here for you to be fucking with anybody.”

I slide down the side of the car, stand, look down so I can pull my shorts so they are not bunching in my crotch, showing me. When I finally look up, Big Henry is looking at me with the same dazed half intensity he showed China, as if he is staring but thinking of something else. I shrug, and then when I realize there was no question asked, I shrug again.

“I’ma get Randall.” I break into a walk and stutter to a run. Feel them watching.

When we leave for the game, Daddy is asleep. I leave a full cup of water and a packet of crackers on the bedside table and push his bottles of medicine closer together so they are easier for him to reach. He sleeps with his mouth open, his face slack with medicine, and drools. Where Junior’s or Randall’s sleep faces are babyish, fat and smooth, Daddy’s sleeping face is Skeetah’s: puckered, the skin pulling: the face frozen in fight. From the dresser, Mama beams at me, hands caressing Daddy, smiling.

I am glad to be sitting in the backseat by the window in the car, Junior’s bony rump squirming on my lap, Skeetah in the middle pulling at the blunt, Marquise next to him at the other window, opaque through a cloud of smoke. Big Henry’s head could be any other boy’s head under his baseball cap, and Randall leans on the headrest, his eyes closed, everything still but his eyelids jumping like dragonflies. I do not think that he is dreaming. Junior shifts, and I hold him tight; he is my shield.

The summer league game is in the gym at St. Catherine’s elementary school. Ms. Dedeaux told us once that the elementary school used to actually be the black school for the district before the schools were desegregated in 1969, after the last big hurricane, when people were too tired finding their relatives’ uprooted bodies, reburying them, sleeping on platforms that used to be the foundations of their houses, under tents, biking or walking miles for freshwater, for food, to still fight the law outlawing segregation. Daddy went to this school when it was all black, and Mama, too. On one of their blues nights after I had danced myself to shaking, Mama told the story of how they met, that Daddy would not stop pulling her hair in the hallway, making fun of her little-girl pigtails since the rest of her was so grown, and of how she turned around one day and hit him in the chest so hard he lost his breath. Then he stopped pulling her hair, but started leaving her presents in her desk, instead: pieces of pecan candy he’d stolen from his grandma, whole pecans wrapped in newspaper, blackberries dusted with ditch dirt, hot from the sun, leaking black juice. That was their beginning.

Now there’s construction paper taped in makeshift galleries along the wall by the door. They flutter in the wind driven by the industrial fan, and at the concession stand a woman with finger waves, a gold tooth, and lips the color of azaleas rolls her eyes at Junior, who drags his feet when we pass her. Moles fade to freckles in a messy paint splatter across her face. Bags of potato chips are laid out on her folding table in rows, one against the other, orderly and even. I grab Junior’s bony shoulders and push him to the top of the stands where we sit.

The inside of the gym is dark, the steel ceiling beams lost in a humid haze like cloud cover; it is hotter here at the top of the bleachers. Big Henry sits next to Marquise, who sprawls on one elbow and tries to wheedle a sports drink out of him. Randall is already on the court doing drills, tossing the ball to his teammates as they weave in and out of each other in knots and make lay-ups, palm rebounds in lazy arcs. Skeetah sinks into the bleachers until his butt is resting on the floor, his legs kicked out so that his soles are to the court, his arms spread wide across the seat behind him. The corded gather of him eases. He wipes his forehead with the hem of his shirt and it beads again. He nods languidly. He is smiling, his teeth white and even: glistening bone. He is high.

“You’re surprised I came.” Skeetah speaks to the court, his smile grown slack. He blinks solemnly.

“Yeah.”

“What’s been done been done.” Skeet shrugs, his shoulders rise and settle like sleek feathers. “China going to come back to me. To herself. Soon.”

“You bring them back by her to feed yet?”

“Yeah. I held her muzzle shut. Every time she move her head toward them, I pop her on her nose.”

“You think the other three puppies going to make it?”

“Fucking right they going to make it.” Skeetah lays his head back on the bleacher behind his shoulders. He swallows and his Adam’s apple slides like a mouse down the gullet of a snake. “This ain’t beating me.”

Junior is tapping me on my leg, beating out Morse code.

“Esch?”

“Go ’head. Stay away from the concession stand.”

Junior smiles, teeth missing in the front, and then swallows it and tries to look trustworthy enough to stay away from the snack table.

“And don’t try to steal nothing, neither.”

Junior squeals, his mouth turned down at the corners to plead.

“No.”

“Here.” Big Henry is reaching into his pocket, cupping loose change like marbles. He drops the coins in Junior’s hand, which Junior cups and holds before him. He leaps down the stands. His T-shirt billows behind him like a limp flag.

“Not even a thank-you.” Marquise rubs his braids.

“Thank you!” Junior screams.

Big Henry rests his elbows on his knees, shakes his head. Huddled over, his face a surprise emerging from the broad bowl of back. He glances over at me, and it is as if he passed the money to me, as if he dropped it in my hand like chalky pecan candy, like mealy pecans, sun-blackened blackberries. Skeetah is blinking half-lidded at the game, where Randall and his teammates are already glazed with sweat, shining darkly in the dim light like the rain-drenched stone that lines the muddy beach of the pit. Big Henry asks the air in front of him, but everyone knows who he is speaking to.

“You want something?”

His hands are so different from Manny’s, so large, and they are slow-moving as the sheaves of the stunted palm trees planted at odd places along the beach, alien to the Mississippi Gulf, as they bear the dragging wind made slow by the barrier islands.

“No,” I say. I have to go to the bathroom.

I maneuver around clumps of boys and girls, some I go to school with, some from Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine, until I reach the bottom of the bleachers. Still, the gym is more than half empty. All of the parents, six or seven of them, and their toddlers sit on the first row only. Girls slap and slide along the benches while still sitting; boys wear white tees, sleeveless shirts, caps, basketball shorts. There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.

On the court, Randall is already blinking hard at the sweat blinding him. His shirt sticks to him on the sides, close as a bud. He goes up for a rebound, rises up out of the cluster of players, but they buzz angrily, and he falls. The referee whistles, and Randall walks to the foul line, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Nothing about him seems to touch anything else: the court, the ball, his shirt that he picks at so that his skin can breathe. He is a bayou crane, alighting so he doesn’t even sink into the black marsh before taking off in flight.

“Excuse you.”

Bumping into him is a shock. He is solid, stocky, with the kind of chest men get when their bulky muscles start softening to seed. His fresh fade has a tinge of red in the brown, which lights up when he tilts his head at me as it catches the light coming in through the door. He has a gold grill in, the same grill that he had in on the day that he and Skeetah mated China and Kilo. He opens his mouth further, and the letters are stamped in spit-shined jewels, one on each tooth, into the gold: R-I-C-O.

“Sorry.”

Manny stands to one side behind him. He is wearing blue, and he and Shaliyah and Rico must be fresh from the barbershop, for his curls have been cut close so that they are only black waves, but his face stands out without the hair framing it, beautiful: the strong nose, the jaw leading to a hollow where there is a fresh purple mark, the shiny scar on his face making the rest of the skin even more vivid. He jerks his head up, raises his eyebrow in the easy whatsup way boys acknowledge each other. To me. Shaliyah is in sandals and a miniskirt next to him, all dips and swells like a badly rutted road worn smooth by the rain. She wears gold earrings, bracelet, and a necklace even here, where we don’t have to pay for admission.

“What’s up?” Rico says, and I am veering over the edge of the court as he barrels past me. Manny pulls at Shaliyah’s hand, and they follow Rico. I wade through a tide of kids at the door, all Junior’s age or younger, trading small candies they are sucking from wax paper and salty cheesy chips and neon cold drinks they’ve scraped the labels off of with their small, bony fingers. The bathroom is around the back of the gym in a separate, smaller building, and I run to it.

The bathroom is dark, darker even than the gym, and it is small, with only one sink and two dark green stalls. The walls are gray cinder block. I go in the stall farthest from the door, lock it behind me, pee while squatting and then flush, wipe down the seat, and sit on the bowl, which is narrow enough to feel like a seat. I wedge my nose between my thighs and breathe. My stomach and my shirt, bunched together, feel like a pillow wedged in my lap. I wish I could pull it out. My eyes burn. Inside my chest, a machete swings, back and forth, up and down, breaking the living, clearing a pulpy path behind it where green things lie, leaking. My face is wet against my leg. I stay like that until it stops, until the toilet stops ticking, the door creaks open, and the machete pauses, smelling of sap and metal.

I wipe my face with my shirt, open the stall, and he is standing there, pulling the outside door shut behind him, sealing the darkness.

“This is the girls’,” I say weakly.

“Been thinking about you,” says Manny, and then he has pushed me back into the stall, closed it behind us, grabbed my arms and turned us so that he is sitting on the toilet. He unzips his pants, and I grab his dick hard enough to hurt. I want it to hurt. He doesn’t wince, intent on my loose shorts. He pulls me down on him so I am straddling him, and then he is inside. It is easy and wet. He grips my shoulders, pulls me down hard, rolls back away from me, pulls me down again, his face in my chest. It is the first time he has grabbed me over my waist, kept his hands on me closer to my face. Touched me.

“Wait,” he says, and then he is making me stand up, pulling off my shorts and underwear, bearing me back down on him. My clothes catch on one ankle, hang like they’re half-pinned from a clothesline. We have never done it like this. His hands are on my ass, and he tries to look down, to see, but it brings us face-to-face. Sweat gathers at his hairline, catches on the red grooves left by the clippers, like ant trails, across the top of his forehead. He grimaces, looking down, away, over my shoulder, up to the ceiling.

I grab his face.

Under my hands, his jaw, freshly shaved, feels like a cat’s tongue. My fingers are black as bark against his paler skin.

He will look at me.

He shrugs, twists his head to the side. Flipping like a caught fish. I roll my hips. It is too sweet.

He will look at me.

He snorts, puts his head down into my shoulder. I pull hard, and my hands slide along his face. I grab again.

He will look at me.

He grunts, grabbing at my sweaty sides, his eyes closed. His lashes are longer than those of any girls I know. Beautiful. The thumbs of his long hands press into my stomach, so he can pull again, but then they stutter. He presses hard again: my belly pushes back. He looks down and back up, eye to eye: all I have ever wanted, here. He is looking. He is seeing me, and his hands are coming around to feel the honeydew curve, the swell that is more than swell, the fat that is not fat, the budding baby, and his eyes are so black they are all black, and they are a night without stars. All I have ever wanted. He knows.

“Fuck!” Manny yells, and he is throwing me up and off of him. I hit the door behind me, the rough cat tongue of his face gone, and I grip steel, air, nothing. The bathroom smells like the salt of marsh mud, like tadpoles dying in their shrinking shallows, and he is zipping his pants, folding me into the corner of the stall when he opens it, leaving me standing in the dark bathroom, runny at the legs, breasts aching with bloom, one of Mama’s hair clips hanging from one string of hair before it falls into the toilet, lost in the scummy bowl. I wipe myself, flush the toilet, watch the water spin in a spiral, a baby storm, as it sucks the clip down and down and away.

I’ve crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time that I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowsing in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees. When I can breathe, I leave the stall to splash cold water on my face, but my eyes still look red, my eyelids swollen in the funhouse mirror. And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying again for what I have been, for what I am, and for what I will be, again.

“Esch, you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“Big Henry told me to come check on you. I told him that I didn’t want to come in the girls’ bathroom, but he said…”

“I’m coming. Hold on.”

At least my face is dry. Maybe everyone will just think that I am high. I want to let Junior go ahead of me back around the building to the gym, so I walk slowly, but then he walks slower so he doesn’t leave me, and it takes us ten minutes to walk around to the front.

“You okay, Esch?” Junior asks.

Desultory claps flit out like small evening bats. Occasional whoops. It sounds empty.

“Yeah.” I am breathing through my mouth. In the bathroom, I cried so hard I felt nauseous. Kids are milling around the gym door like our chickens, and I expect Junior to run off with them, to leave me to duck into the gym alone, but he doesn’t. He loops his arm around my elbow like he is escorting me, and I keep my head down, my eyes half closed so all I see are anonymous legs, tennis shoes, gold-sandaled feet as Junior leads me up the bleachers. We circle Big Henry, sit up and to the side of Skeetah so that Junior and I are farthest away from the crowd and the floor, up here in the dark. It is only after I sit that I realize that Manny and his girl and Rico are sitting a few seats below us and to the right. Manny is leaning forward, away from her, as if he would run down the bleachers and into the game. His shirt pulls across his shoulders, his tense back, and I look away.

“Esch?” Skeetah asks. He is a little less high now, his eyes a little less dull.

“I’m fine.” I try to say it loudly.

“Fuck that nigga.” Skeetah touches my knee lightly, punctuates what he says with a nod. It is as if he is touching the sadness in me with his hand, so I move my knee away, smash my lips together. Already I want to cry. He touches my leg again, with one finger this time: lightly, quickly. “Fuck him.” He spits this at Manny’s back, loud enough for Big Henry to hear.

“What’s up?” Big Henry asks. I shake my head and look down.

Skeetah slaps the bench with both hands. It echoes loudly. Rico, who was elbowing Manny and talking, his hands like birds, turns at the sound, smiling to show his gold. Manny shakes his head, but Rico gets up anyway, ascends the stairs two steps at a time, and stops in front of me and Skeetah. In the gloom, his teeth shine.

“I heard your bitch had our puppies,” Rico says.

“Our puppies?” Skeetah asks.

“Yeah, ours. I thought we was splitting them down the middle.”

“Really.”

“They healthy?”

“Why don’t you ask your cousin if they healthy?”

“I want to see them.”

“Ain’t nothing for you to see.” Skeetah sits up slowly from his recline. He hunches over when he speaks, his shoulders curved, his muscles gathering.

“What you mean?”

“It was China’s first litter. Lot of them born dead, and lot of them done died.”

“Manny say one look just like Kilo. That’s the one I want.”

“It’s dead.” Skeetah stands, and he is barely taller than Rico, who is standing a bleacher below him, and half Rico’s size. But Skeetah tilts his head to the side, squints at Rico, and I know he’s not scared, that he will never be scared. “China killed it,” he says, and there is a lyric in his voice. He almost sings it when he says it, gleeful.

“Well, then I want another one.”

“All they got left for you to have is the runt.”

“What the fuck I want with a runt?” Rico laughs when he says it. It sounds as metallic and hard as his teeth.

“Well, that’s all I got. That one and a black-and-white one. Both small.”

Skeetah is omitting the white one, the one that is a clone of China.

“Manny?”

“Yeah.” Manny walks up the stairs to us, looks at Skeetah and Rico. I ignore his black eyes.

“Thought you said Skeetah got a white one look just like China.”

“He do,” Manny says.

“Ain’t it a little early to be trying to claim one of my bitch’s puppies?” Skeetah says. He is leaning forward, straining at the leash. “They a week old. You know like I know that if they make it through the first six weeks, then they ready to go. So until six weeks go by, you ain’t got no fucking business claiming shit.” Skeet is smiling, and he is rubbing his thumbs with his fingers, his hands clenched loosely as if he can already feel the sting of them on Rico, on Manny. I know that’s who he really wants: Manny. Big Henry and Marquise move with a loping, easy purpose, to flank Skeetah.

“Y’all little Bois Sauvage niggas really think y’all run shit? I will fuck y’all up.”

“Everybody just chill out,” says Manny. “It ain’t even got to be like that.”

“Fuck you!” Skeetah’s voice carries, sliding up in pitch, and it breaks his face in pieces. “You a dirty motherfucker!”

“You going to let that little nigga talk to you like that? If I was you, I’d beat the shit-”

It is what Skeetah has been waiting for Rico to say. Skeetah punches Rico. He does it with his whole body, raining down on Rico’s wide, sweaty face with the steady fury and quick power of the small: fierce as China. The referees on the floor are blowing their whistles, and people are standing up around us, like they are doing a wave. Manny tries to catch his cousin Rico, and Big Henry reaches out to grab Skeetah, but then Manny has pushed his cousin back into Skeetah, volleyed him like a ball, and Manny is punching Skeetah, and Marquise is on Manny, and Big Henry slides his body in between them as a barrier, to stop it all, but then Rico punches him, and they are brawling, falling down the stairs, ripping the crowd like fabric.

Randall is in the middle of the court, wrestling the ball from the huddle that one referee is screeching into his whistle over, when he stops, distracted by the rumble of the crowd, and sees the boys beating one another down the bleachers, Junior and me arm in arm, running down the edge of the stands for the door. Randall looks lost on the court, the ball cradled in his limp hand. The other referee is blowing his whistle at Skeetah and Rico and Manny and Big Henry and Marquise, who are fighting their way along the side of the court now, the crowd carrying them out of the door in the kind of frothing waves we only get before hurricanes.

“Get out of here, Batiste!” Randall’s coach yells at him: the green hand towel he has been using to mop his face snaps like a flag in a bad wind. “That’s your people, ain’t it? That’s you! You’re done! Go on!”

Randall lobs the ball at the wall of the gym, and it ricochets back onto the court. Players that aren’t frozen by the fight try to catch it. I pull at Junior’s arm, and we are the first out of the door; he is fast. Randall jumps in the middle of the fight as it spills out of the door, begins screaming at all of them, calling names, pulling them from their fury one by one until he stands in the middle of them, taller than all of them, black as iron, rigid as a gate.

“What the fuck is wrong with y’all?”

“Who the fuck you think you is?” Rico yells. Manny has him by his shoulder, pulling him backward away from Randall.

“Let me go!” Skeetah says. Small scratches mark his face in beads. Big Henry is holding his arm, and Marquise stands next to them, breathing hard, glaring. “I’m going to kill that motherfucker. He ain’t getting nothing from me!”

“I’m going to see your little bitch-ass tomorrow,” Rico sneers; his lips are bleeding. “With your fucking dog.”

“You know you can’t fight no dog just had puppies.” Big Henry steps toward Manny and Rico, stumbling forward with Skeetah. Big Henry’s lips are swollen at one side, puffy and wet.

“I knew I didn’t like this bitch for a reason,” Marquise bites out. His forehead is bruised.

“Fuck that,” Skeetah says. “Fuck that. He ain’t getting none of my puppies.”

“Skeetah”-Randall leans in to Skeetah, his hands still raised-“you fight her tomorrow in that dog fight and Kilo win, them puppies die. You know that.”

“Kilo ain’t going to win,” Skeetah yells, and jerks against Big Henry, who holds him with both arms, hugging him.

“You can’t,” Big Henry says.

“My cousin coming with his dog, Boss. He’ll fight for China. If he win, then fuck you,” Marquise says.

“And if I win?” Rico asks.

“Then fuck you,” Skeetah says.

Randall elbows Skeetah in the chest, points one finger at Rico as if he would shush him.

“Then you get a puppy,” Randall says.

“My choice?” Rico husks.

Randall looks at Skeetah, nods slowly.

“Yeah, your choice.”

Skeetah shakes his head.

“Fuck them,” Skeetah says.

Rico smiles; his name is etched into his golden teeth in blood.

Skeetah spits.

“Yes,” Randall says. “Yes.”