Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“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.”