Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“That grass going to make you itch.”

“I know,” Randall says. He stretches the waistband of his shorts. “Water.” He walks to the spigot across the grass, and he is fluid and tall and black.

“I know you hot out here.” Big Henry touches the back of my hand with two fingers, presses.

“Yeah.” Manny is rubbing the sweat from his forehead into Shaliyah’s cheek. Her squeal becomes a shriek. Her teeth are so white.

“You want to come sit in my car? It’s parked in the shade. Windows down.” Big Henry glances over at the bleachers and then rolls to his side and stands in one quick motion. Sometimes I forget he was an athlete.

“Okay.” The clouds are slower now, hang off in the distance above the tree line as if they are wary of the sun. “Okay.” I look at the ground when I rise, when I turn away from the court, when I walk. Barely resisting the urge to look back. I don’t even see when Junior barrels up next to me, whooping, swerving at me on his bike. He is laughing. Under the trees in the dirt parking lot, Javon is parked. His car gleams like the approaching sunset. Marquise is leaning on his bumper. Randall runs over behind us, reclines on Big Henry’s hood and the front windshield so that his wet back looks like pudding. Inside the car, Big Henry and I sit with the doors open, one leg out, heads back. Big Henry plays Outkast.

Randall makes jokes and Big Henry laughs. When the sun rests on the rim of the trees, we leave, and Manny is on the court now with his girl. They are playing a game of one-on-one, and he is taunting her, knocking the ball out of her hand so that it ricochets across the court. Her laughter carries on the softening pink wind. Big Henry closes his door. I slam mine, and Randall scoots over to the passenger side of the windshield. Junior holds the top of the door, still standing on his bike, and Big Henry folds his big paw over Junior’s. Big Henry taps the gas and then eases, and this is how we follow Skeetah and China, who are both running now, both sucking dark and blazing bright under the setting sun and the scudding clouds, all the way home.

The puppies are whining for milk. They have been listening to Daddy hammering at the coop, dismantling it nail by board, into the pine-black evening. They writhe against each other. Skeetah lifts them out one by one by their necks, sets them on the floor before China, who is still nosing the ground. He has not taken off her chain yet, so it pools in the dirt next to her, as heavy and sharp as a bike chain. She breathes through her mouth, but something wet seems to catch at the back of her throat with each exhale. She nods with each breath. Her legs are still, but the sweat Skeetah worked up on her catches the red dust on her coat, channels it so that it runs down her back like watercolor paint. Under the bulb, my arms seem blacker, seem dirtier than I’ve ever seen them. I pull my hair back, tie it by taking a tendril of hair from the bottom and knotting it around the rest. I want it out of my face. Mama was wrong: I have no glory. I have nothing.

“Randall!” Daddy yells. It is strange to hear the night without his hammering.

“Yeah,” Randall says from the doorway of the shed. Big Henry is beside him. Junior is clinging to Randall’s back, grasping at his shoulders, his biceps, losing his grip and sliding with the sweat. Skeetah looks toward the door, shakes his head at Daddy’s call, China’s chain slack in his hands. She looks as if she is eating the earth.

“Come here.”

Randall sighs, grabs Junior’s forearms while he bends over and hoists him back up.

“Yeah, yeah.”

I slide into his place in the doorway next to Big Henry so I can see everything. Junior is licking his fingers as Randall walks, swiping them in Randall’s ears.

“Ugh. I told you to stop.” Randall rubs his ears, but I know he can’t get the wet out. “I’m going to put you down.”

“No, Randall. Please.”

“Well, then stop. That shit is so nasty.” Randall stops, links his long arms into a seat under Junior’s butt, and hoists again. “What?”

Daddy has only knocked down one of the chicken coop’s walls. The chickens wander drunken and bewildered around his feet, seemingly mystified that he is dismantling their house, even though they haven’t roosted in it in years. In the half-light from the bulb from the shed and Daddy’s headlights, they look black. Daddy lets his hammer fall, and the chickens scatter, fluttering away like leaves in a wind.

“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.”

“There’s another storm?” Randall asks.

“What you think I been talking about? I knew it was coming,” Daddy says. Like the worst , I repeat. A woman . He shakes his head, frowns at the coop. “We going to try something.”

“What?”

“I want you to get on my tractor and I’m going to direct you to this wall right here.” Daddy points at the longer wall. “And we going to knock this damn thing over.”

Randall hoists again. Junior’s face rests on Randall’s shoulder.

“I can’t drive that thing.”

“All you got to do is put it in gear and press the gas. You know how to steer.”

“We got to do it in the dark?”

Daddy steps to the side and I can see his head, barely coming up to Randall’s shoulder. His face says he is smiling, but his voice says he is not.

“What you mean, ‘We gotta do it at night?’ That depression out in the Gulf done became a hurricane. We ain’t got enough wood to board the windows up and you going to sit here and ask me why we gotta do this at night?”

Randall is silent. Junior is sliding again.

“She headed toward Florida. She come up slantways and who you think she going to hit?’

“Florida,” Randall sighs. “Don’t they usually fade out after they hit?” Randall doesn’t hoist Junior, who is trying to clutch at Randall’s waist with his feet. Junior is losing. Junior’s chin disappears behind Randall’s shoulder, and his head sinks to Randall’s shoulder blades. “All’s I’m saying is that you could drive it better than me.”

“I know I can.” Daddy waves away the compliment. Usually when Randall gives them, they work. “But I can’t see to get it at the right angle. If you do it, I can tell you how to hit it so that the whole thing comes down at once.”

Junior’s feet are at Randall’s knees. Junior comes down in the dirt and barely catches himself. I want to call him back to the shed because I know he’s getting on Daddy’s nerves and will only make Daddy worse, but I don’t. He is the Patroclus to Randall’s Achilles tonight.

“Come on.” Daddy walks into the darkness without waiting to see if Randall follows. Randall rounds the corner with his hands linked behind his neck, shaking his head. Junior shadows him.

Skeetah releases China from her chain, and then loops the metal around and around his forearm and shoulder until it is a solid silver wing. China pads to her corner, flops down all at once, instead of her usual graceful sitting first, the gentle roll onto her flank, her side. She lays her head on the linoleum that Skeetah must have swept clean, because she does not raise dust. Skeetah walks toward the door, lays the chain on the oil drum, arranges it just so, lingers over the links. He cannot bear to look at her.

“You think that did it?” Big Henry asks.

“I don’t know,” Skeetah says.

“Maybe she just tired,” I say to them, because I hope the words will pull Skeetah’s brow smooth, untangle the yarn-knotted furrow of it. Hope that they will make him stop looking at his hands. Big Henry shifts from foot to foot, leans on the door jamb. When he moves, the locusts and cicadas and grasshoppers sound loud, disgruntled.