Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

“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.”

Esch?”

Junior touches me, and I roll away from him.

“Are you going to the fight?”

I woke up this morning and I hurt.

“Skeetah say I can’t go if you don’t go.”

Someone has been beating me.

“He fixing to wash China.”

They have been beating me in my sleep.

“Him and Randall got into a fight because Randall say he shouldn’t be taking her. Say it ain’t her place to go.”

I will not get up for the bathroom. I don’t want to eat.

“Say Skeet always being stupid, and we always ruining things. Like his game. Say the only way he could go to camp now is if Skeetah came up with the money.”

I curl. Under pillow and sheet, I curl around the hurt, around the slipping secret, like a ball.

“Randall dunked the ball so hard this morning he tore the basket down. He made Skeet fix it.” Junior taps my shoulder.

“He broke it. Esch?”

I want it to stop.

I try to read the entire mythology book, but I can’t. I am stuck in the middle. When I put the book down and wipe my wet face and breathe in my morning breath, ripe to the afternoon under the sheet, this is where I have stopped. Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong. The author says that there are a couple of different versions of how it happened. One says she lies to her brother and invites him onto the ship with the Argonauts as they were fleeing, and that Jason ambushes him. That she watched her brother die, her own face on his being sliced open like a chicken: pink skin cut to bloody meat. The other version says that she kills her brother herself, that her brother runs away with her and the Argonauts, assuming that he is safe, and that she chops him into bits: liver, gizzard, breast and thigh, and throws each part overboard so that her father, who is chasing them, slows down to pick up each part of his son.

I read it over and over again. It is like she is under the covers with me, both of us sweating to water. To get away from her, from the smell of Manny still on me a night and morning afterward, I get up.

Junior is sitting on the floor in the hallway outside of the door.

“What you sitting out here for?”

Junior shrugs, looks up at me.

“I was going to go outside, but Skeetah getting ready to wash China, and it be getting muddy under the house. Why you didn’t wake up?”

“I was tired.”

“Daddy asked why you didn’t bring him something to eat this morning. Randall told him you didn’t feel good.”

“Randall made Daddy some eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“What he doing now?”

“Sleep. He was hollering about the hurricane; say it ain’t stopping, that the woman on the news say it’s coming straight for us. Randall told him to calm down. Him and Big Henry went to the store and got some beer and then Daddy went to sleep.”

Junior follows me down the hall to Daddy’s room. Randall has nailed up a blanket over the window, folded it in half over the box fan, which hums and lets in light. Daddy is asleep, sitting up, slumped over like I left him yesterday. The TV is low, a buzzing firecracker. On the screen, there is a map of the Gulf, and Katrina spins like a top, as if the long arm of Florida has just spun it loose. There are two beer cans next to the bed, one open, both of them sweating. I close his door to a crack.

“You going to the fight?”