Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones

“Shit, China.” Skeetah breathes. Another puppy is coming. This one slowly slides out headfirst; a lonely, hesitant diver. Big Henry, one of Randall’s friends, dives into the water at the river like that every time we go swimming: heavy and carefully, as if he is afraid his big body, with its whorls of muscle and fat, will hurt the water. And every time Big Henry does so, the other boys laugh at him. Manny is always the loudest of them all: his teeth white knives, his face golden red. The puppy lands in the cup of Skeetah’s palms. She is a patchwork of white and brown. She is moving, her head bobbing in imitation of her mother’s. Skeetah cleans the puppy. He kneels behind China, who growls. Yelps. Splits.

Even though Daddy’s truck was parked right beyond the front door and Junior hit me in my calf with a shine bottle, I looked at Manny first. He was holding the ball like an egg, with his fingertips, the way Randall says a good ball handler does. Manny could dribble on rocks. I had seen him in the rocky sand at the corner of the basketball court down at the park, him and Randall, dribbling and defending, dribbling and defending. The rocks made the ball ricochet between their legs like a rubber paddleball, unpredictable and wild, but they were so good they caught to dribble again nearly every time. They’d fall before they’d let the ball escape, dive to be cut by shells and small gray stones. Manny was holding the ball as tenderly as he would a pit puppy with pedigree papers. I wanted him to touch me that way.

“Hey, Manny.” It was an asthma squeak. My neck felt hot, hotter than the day. Manny nodded at me, spun the ball on his pointer finger.

“What’s up?”

“ ’Bout time,” Daddy said. “Help your brother with them bottles.”

“I can’t fit under the house.” I swallowed the words.

“I don’t want you to get them. I want you to rinse them.” He pulled a saw, brown with disuse, from his truck bed. “I know we got some plywood somewhere around here.”

I grabbed two of the nearest jugs and brought them to the faucet. I turned the knob and the water that burst out of the spigot was hot as boiling water. One of the jugs was caked with mud on the inside, so I let the water run through the top. When the water bubbled up at the rim, I shook the jugs to clear them. Manny and Randall whistled to each other, played ball, and others arrived: Big Henry and Marquise. I was surprised that they all came from other places, that one or two of them hadn’t emerged from the shed with Skeetah, or out of the patchy remains of Mother Lizbeth’s rotting house, which is the only other house in the clearing and which was originally my mama’s mother’s property. The boys always found places to sleep when they were too drunk or high or lazy to go home. The backseats of junk cars, the old RV Daddy bought for cheap from some man at a gas station in Germaine that only ran until he got it into the driveway, the front porch that Mama had made Daddy screen in when we were little. Daddy didn’t care, and after a while the Pit felt strange when they weren’t there, as empty as the fish tank, dry of water and fish, but filled with rocks and fake coral like I saw in Big Henry’s living room once.

“What’s up, cousin?” Marquise asked.

“I was wondering where y’all was. The Pit was feeling empty,” Randall said.

The water in the bottle I held was turning pink. I rocked on my feet with the sloshing, tried not to glance at Manny but did. He wasn’t looking at me; he was shaking Marquise’s hand, his wide, blunt fingers swallowing Marquise’s skinny brown hand almost to nothing. I set the bottle down clean, picked up the next, began again. My hair laid on my neck like the blankets my mother used to crochet, the ones we still piled on in the winter to keep warm and woke up under in the morning, sweating. A bottle of dishwashing liquid landed at my feet, slapping mud on my calves.

“All the way clean,” Daddy said as he stalked off with a hammer in one hand. The soap made my hands slippery. Suds blanketed the mud. Junior quit searching for bottles and sat next to me, playing with bubbles.

“Only reason Manny was up here so early was because he was trying to get away from Shaliyah.” Marquise stole the ball. Although he was smaller than Skeetah, he was almost as quick, and he dribbled to the raggedy hoop. Big Henry winked at Manny and laughed. Manny’s face was smooth and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens. He spread himself over Marquise, guarding him from the goal, and Randall clapped his hands at the edge of the beaten dirt court, waiting for Manny to steal and pass the ball. Big Henry shouldered against him, guarding. He was almost as tall as Randall but much wider, graceful and light as a spinning top. It was a real game now.

The crack of the bottle I was shaking sounded like change clattering in a loose fist. The bottle shattered, and the glass fragmented, slid along my palms. I dropped what I held.

“Move, Junior!” I said. My hands, which moments before had been pink, were red. Especially the left. “I’m bleeding!” I said under my breath. I didn’t yell; I wanted Manny to see me, but not as a weak, sorry girl. Not something to be pitied because I couldn’t take pain like a boy. Randall caught Manny’s rebound and walked over to me as I kneeled, my left hand under the faucet, a ribbon of red making for the mud at my feet. He threw the ball backward. The cut was the size of a quarter, bleeding steadily.

“Let me see.” He pushed around the wound, and it pulsed blood. I felt sick to my stomach. “You got to push on it until it stops bleeding.” He put my thumb, which had been stopping the head of the bottle, over the cut. “You push,” he said. “My hands are too dirty. Until it stops hurting.” It was always what Mama told us to do when we went running to her with a cut or a scrape. She would push and blow at the wound after putting alcohol on it, and when she’d stopped blowing, it wouldn’t hurt anymore. There. See? Like it never happened.

Manny was throwing the ball back and forth with Marquise so quickly it sounded like the fast beat of a drum. He glanced over at Randall kneeling over me; his face was even redder than it usually is, but then he hissed like he always does when he’s playing basketball, and I knew he was excited, not concerned. You got to push… until it stops hurting . My stomach tilted. Randall squeezed once more and stood, and the glimpse I saw of Mama in his mouth when he’d told me to push was gone. Manny looked away.

China’s next puppy is black-and-white. The white circles his neck before curling away from his head and across his shoulder. The rest of him is black. He jerks and mewls as Skeetah lays him on the blanket, clean. His mewl is loud, makes itself heard among the crickets; and he is the loudest Mardi Gras dancing Indian, wearing a white headdress, shouting and dancing through the pitted streets of the sunken city. I want him because he comes out of China chanting and singing like the New Orleans Indians, like the Indians that gave me my hair, but I don’t think Skeetah will give him to me. He is worth too much money. His bloodline is good. China is known among the pit bulls in Bois Sauvage for locking on to dogs and making them cur. She pulls tendons from necks. The daddy dog from Germaine, a few towns over, is equally fierce. Rico, his owner and Manny’s cousin, makes so much money fighting him he only has a part-time job as a mechanic at an oil change shop, and he spends the rest of his time driving his dog in his pickup truck to illegal dogfights set back in the woods.

“I wish he was all black,” Skeetah says.

“I don’t care,” I say in return to Skeetah, to everyone, to the dogs multiplying in the shed, but no one hears me over China. She yelps. She sounds like I do when I let go of the swinging rope that hangs from the tall tree over Wolf River: terrified and elated. Her clipped ears curl forward. The puppy slides from her. It looks yellow, streaked with black, but when Skeetah wipes it off, the black vanishes.