Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

Junior touches the back of my arm, and I stop outside the bathroom. He pinches me, and I look down at him, his big dark eyes, his missing teeth, his long eyelashes. He opens his eyes wider, looks hopeful.

“Huh, Esch? Please?”

“Who cut your hair?”

“Randall shaved it this morning. Said it’s too hot for hair.”

“He’s right.” I palm his lightbulb head, shake it.

“Esch.” He grins, and he looks like Skeet in the picture in Daddy’s room. The air is close, close as the water in the pit.

“All right,” I say. “We’ll go.”

I sit sideways on the toilet, rest my arms on the windowsill; my body feels stung all over by catfish, my stomach the lead sinker. In front of the shed, Skeetah is testing the water from the hose with one hand: it is so hot that I know the water boils fresh out of the faucet. He will wait until the water runs cold for her. When Skeetah first sprays China, she shakes. She is standing, legs wide, back straight, her head up. She is licking at the water, and it is as if she was never sick. She is coy as a girl with a lollipop, lapping at the hose. She sneezes and closes her eyes, and the dirt starts to run in sheets down her sides. It is the first time that I have seen her off leash in days.

“Come on,” Skeetah says. “We gonna make you shine.”

Skeetah cuts off the water and picks up a mostly empty bottle of dishwashing liquid and empties it on her back. He begins scrubbing, and the soap turns a pink gray. He rubs the soap up the flat, wide length of her head, down her face. He pulls her fur back so that her clenched teeth show, her fangs curving down sharp against her pink gums. Her eyes are slits, half closed in pleasure. She is stretching into Skeet’s hands. He is pulling her limber, massaging her. Her nose is up to the air, and she is long and beautiful as an outstretched wing. He kneels in front of her, swipes his hand down her chest, and she licks him, happy.

“You came back to me,” he says.

“You shouldn’t be taking her.”

Randall rounds the corner of the house. I expect to see a ball in his hands, but there isn’t. It’s like he’s missing his nose.

“Randall, you can kiss my ass.”

“You ain’t got no reason to be mad. I do.”

“She’s my dog. Those are my dogs.”

“You was steady fucking up. I had to do something.”

“Fuck that coach.” China is grinning against the pull of her skin again. Skeetah’s scrubbing hard. China looks striped. “And fuck Rico. Ain’t nothing about China weak.”

“You still ain’t thinking about the puppies.”

Skeetah turns on the hose. China walks in circles in the water.

“Stay!” Skeetah yells, and she stands frozen. “It wasn’t your dog to give.”

“And it wasn’t your game to fuck up. What am I going to do about camp?”

“If he would’ve said that shit to you, you would’ve jumped him, too.” Skeetah grimaces. “And the way he looked at Esch!”

“Rico fucked with Esch?” Randall, who has been pacing a ditch into the muddy yard as he argues, stops.

Skeetah snorts, glances at the window where I’m sitting, but the sun is too bright outside. He can’t see me. His mouth twists like he has bitten into a peach seed, and he laughs once, a bitter, loud bark.

“You don’t know shit, do you?” Skeetah readjusts his thumb over the hose so that the water shoots out in two hard sparkling streams. Where it hits China’s side, it sounds solid. “You ain’t got to go today. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. Why don’t you go shoot?”

Randall shakes his head, shoves his toe into dry dirt. The dust puffs and drifts in the still air. He looks toward the bathroom, and I sit back so that the tank of the toilet is cool and slippery through my T-shirt.

“I’m going,” I hear him saying. “You made a promise. You said you would pay for camp if they lived,” he says louder.

“All right!” Skeetah yells. “You kicking up dust, Randall!”

“You just like Daddy. Always crazy for something.” I hear the side door off the kitchen scratch open and close as Randall leaves Skeetah to walk into the house.

The water stops. I lean so I can barely see out of the window. Skeetah is on his knees before China again, squirting the last of the soap on her coat, rubbing her whiter than white: she is the cold, cloudy heart in a cube of ice.

“Look at you, shining,” Skeetah breathes into China’s ear. “Cocaine white.” He brushes her, his hand a blade. “Blinding.”

The few dirt-scratched yards and thin-siding houses and trailers of Bois Sauvage seem a sorry match to the woods, like pitting a puppy against a full grown dog. Here, there are swimming holes that are fat puddles and some the size of swimming pools fed by skinny clear creeks, but the earth makes the holes black, and the trees make them as filthy with leaves as a dog is with fleas. There are clusters of magnolias that are so tall and green and glossy, they are impossible to climb, and the air around them always smells like peaches. There are oaks so big and old that their arms grow out black and thick as trunks, which rest on the ground. There are ponds that are filled with slime and tall yellow grasses, and at night, frogs turn them teeming, singing a burping chorus. There are clearings where deer feed, startle white, and kick away. There are turtles plowing through pine straw, mud, trying to avoid the pot. Marquise told us once that he went out into those woods with Bone and Javon after a hard rain to find some mushrooms they could take, and they came across a wolf, lean as a fox, dirty gray, who looked at them like they’d shot at him, and then disappeared.

The trail that leads into one of the deeper parts of the woods is up the road away from the house. China leads us, relaxed at the end of her chain; the leash is dull steel, the collar chrome. Skeetah stole it. He has reshaved his head, and he wears a hand towel around his neck like a scarf. Big Henry carries Junior on his shoulders, and Randall trails, a big stick in his hand, which Skeetah laughed at him for picking up when we were jumping the ditch, saying, That ain’t going to do nothing against these dogs . Then he pointed at China and said, But she will . Randall carries the stick anyway. Marquise is probably already there with his cousin. Crows caw. I listen for the boys and the dogs somewhere out in these woods, but all I can hear is the pine trees shushing each other, the oak bristling, the magnolia leaves hard and wide so that they sound like paper plates clattering when the wind hits them, this wind snapping before Katrina somewhere out there in the Gulf, coming like the quiet voice of someone talking before they walk through the doorway of a room.

A cloud passes over the sun, and it is dark under the trees. It passes, and the gold melts through the leaves, falls on bark and floor: foil coins. Soon we reach a curtain of vines, which hang from the lowest branches to the needle-carpeted earth, and we crawl. Skeetah dusts China’s breasts off, waves us on. We have been walking for a long time when I hear the first tiny bark.

“You tired?” Randall asks.

“No,” I say. My stomach feels full of water, hurts with it, but I will not tell him that. I push aside a branch, let it go, but it still scratches my arm. Medea’s journey took her to the water, which was the highway of the ancient world, where death was as close as the waves, the sun, the wind. Where death was as many as the fish waiting in the water, fanning fins, watching the surface, shadowing the bottom dark. China barks as if she is answering the dog.

The clearing is a wide oval bowl, which must be a dried-up pond that grows wide and deep when it rains; the bottom is matted with dry yellow reeds, and the trees grow in a circle around it. The boys and their dogs talk and smoke in clumps, pass blunts and cigarettes from one to another, ask How old is yours or Where you got that collar or How many she done had ? There are around ten dogs here, around fifteen boys. I am the only girl. Marquise’s little brother Agee is here, and he and Junior begin competing to see who can climb the fastest up a gray, low-limbed tree outside the circle of game dogs and game men. The dogs are brown and tan, black and white, striped brindle, red earth. None of them is white as China. She glows in the sun of the clearing, her ears up, her tail cocked. The dogs nap, pace, bark, strain against the leash, and lean out into the clearing where they will fight, trying to get into the sun, to feel it on their black wet noses. They will all match today, one dog against another. The boys have been drawn by gossip of the fight between Kilo and Boss to the clearing like the Argonauts were to Jason at the start of his adventure. They will throw their own dogs into the ring, each hoping for a good fight, a savage heart, a win, to return home from the woods, their own dangerous Aegean Sea, to be able to say, My bitch did it or My nigga got him . Some of the boys are nervous; they put their hands in their pockets, take them out, swing their sweat rags in the air and swat at gnats. Some of the boys are confident: shoulders round and grinning. Big Henry wipes at his face with a sweat rag he’s pulled out of his pocket, and Randall leans on his stick, frowning at the frolicking dogs. A hawk circles in the air above us, turns, vanishes.