Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

Rico flashes a hand, quiets Manny. Manny stands, Rico with him. The boys have moved. They cluster behind Rico and behind Skeetah so that I have to move to the edge to see the dry pond bed, the red dashes where blood has fallen. The circle of boys that the dogs fought in all day has dissipated like fog.

“Fucking right,” Rico says. He slaps Kilo’s side. Kilo grunts to a stand, staggers to a run to the middle of the bowl. He is a creek becoming a river.

“Go!” Skeetah says. China raises her head to the sun and barks once, twice. It is a laugh. She digs her feet into the straw and jumps to a sprint.

“Grab her!” Rico yells.

Kilo eddies around China’s shoulder. Swirls and bites. China bites back, returns the kiss, savagely.

“Grab her, son!” Rico yells.

They rise and clench each other with their arms, stand on their back legs. China kicks with her front feet, pushes away from Kilo’s chest to unfurl like a whip to lash back around with her head, to bite and rip again, but when she leans back it is as if Kilo has just seen her breasts, white and full and heavy and warm, and he bows his head like a puppy to drink. But he doesn’t drink. He bites. He swallows her breast.

“No,” Skeetah says.

“Shake her,” Rico calls.

Kilo is a whirlpool, spinning China, shaking her. She claws at him with her paws, her jaw wide, and tries to eat his eyes. But Kilo will not let go.

“Jump!” Skeetah yells. “Jump, China!”

It is what he tells her to do when he wants her to jump from trees. To leap. To fly. China bows into Kilo. She gathers herself, flexes like a muscle. She tongues Kilo’s ear and bites and then leans back and pushes hard with her feet all at once. She rips. Her breast is bloody, torn. The nipple, missing.

“China!” Skeetah calls, and China lands on her front feet, already running toward him.

Kilo howls and falls backward away from China, his ear ragged.

“Come, Kilo!” Rico calls, and Kilo runs to Rico, dragging his ragged ear along the ground, butting Rico’s leg and leaving a bloody print.

“I told you, Skeet,” Randall says.

“Shut up,” Skeetah says.

The gash is a red flame swallowing her breast.

“She can’t fight,” Randall says.

Skeetah is squeezing China’s neck, murmuring in her ear. This time I cannot hear what he says. Skeetah is whispering so closely to China’s ear I only catch half of his lips behind the red-veined white of her ear. Her breast drips blood. China licks Skeetah’s cheek.

Rico stands, already smiling.

“Maybe I don’t want the white one,” Rico says. “Maybe I want the colored one that got more Kilo in it.” He laughs.

Skeetah stands, and China, stout and white, looks up at him.

“She fights,” Skeetah says.

Randall pulls the stick from his shoulders, swings it around to his front.

“She’s already fucked up enough,” Randall says.

“Cuz, if she lost, she lost,” Big Henry says, slowly, as if he is tasting the words.

“She didn’t lose,” Skeetah breathes.

Rico laughs.

Skeetah shrugs and touches the tip of China’s nose with his finger.

“She’s mine, and she fights.”

Kilo grimaces.

“Let’s give this nigga what he want,” Rico says to Kilo.

There is sweat and blood running red and gray down China’s ribs.

“Go ahead, Kilo.”

Kilo runs.

“Go, China! Go!” Skeetah screams, and China hurtles forward, her bloody breast streaming fluid, leaving a trail in the brush.

They meet. They rise. They embrace. They bite, neck to neck. They rip growls from each other, and the wind punches into the clearing and carries the growls away.

Kilo grabs China’s shoulder again, jerks his neck to make her shake.

Skeetah’s fists are curled tight, and his whole body seems to bristle.

“Make ’em know!” Skeetah calls, barely louder than speaking.

China hears.

“Make them know.”

She is fire. China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks. She flips over and is on top of him, even though he still has her shoulder. He roils beneath her. She chews. Fire evaporates water.

Make them know make them know make them know they can’t live without you , Skeetah says. China hears.

Hello, father , she says, tonguing Kilo. I don’t have milk for you. China blazes. Kilo snaps at her breast again, but she shoulders him away. But I do have this . Her jaw is a mousetrap snapped shut around the mouse of Kilo’s neck.

When Kilo screams, it is loud and high, as if the wind whistles when it slides past China’s teeth.

Skeetah smiles.

Skeetah calls, “Come, China!”

China spins, takes away part of Kilo’s throat.

China comes.

“Hold! Hold!” Rico screams, sweaty, his face twisted sour. He drags Kilo across the dusty bottom of the pond. Manny kneels, takes in me, Skeetah, and China in one glance, and looks like he hates us all. I wish it wouldn’t hurt, but it does.

Kilo keens.

There are pink mimosa flowers drifting and falling on the breeze. Marquise’s brother has left Junior; he has scampered out of the tree to hide his face in Jerome’s leg while his pink-dusted shoulders shudder. Junior squats in the mimosa still, his hands white on the branches, jerking as if he would break the wood. His eyes are wide, glued to the screaming Kilo. Junior shakes a beat to Kilo’s keening, and it is a song.

The sound of someone throwing up in the bathroom wakes me. In my half sleep, I see myself in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, one hand on the back of the bowl, vomiting. But then the retching becomes louder, sounds like my tongue is curling up and out of my throat, and I realize I am not throwing up. I have never been so loud; have never made that sound. The bathroom disappears and I wake to the half-light of dawn, the ceiling, Junior asleep in his twin bed with his sheets and pillow kicked to the floor, and our door cracked.

It’s Daddy on the floor of the bathroom. Daddy with one hand on the back of the bowl, one knee on the floor. Daddy looking like he’s about to dive into the toilet, lose his tongue.

“Daddy?”

“Get Randall,” he breathes, and then his back curves and he sounds like he’s being ripped.

The hallway is still dark. Randall is in his bed, Skeetah isn’t. After the match yesterday, he washed China under the lightbulb outside the back door. He rubbed her down and then sat on the back steps and dabbed antibiotic ointment from a dirty crumpled tube into her where Kilo had torn her and made the flesh show. Her leg and shoulder and her ripped breast looked like meat, and Skeetah took the same worn-out Ace bandage he’d wrapped his side with and cut it in thirds. He wrapped her leg, her neck and shoulder, her stomach, and pinned. She stood, eyes slits, panting easily, letting him patch her up. Every few minutes, she would wag her tail, and he would rub her somewhere it wasn’t red: her feet, her back, her tail. He must have slept in the shed with her. I have to shove Randall twice before he wakes up, his eyes rolling white, his arms up to guard his face.

“What?” he says. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Daddy. He in the bathroom throwing up.”

Randall looks at me like he can’t see me.

“What?”

“Daddy. In the bathroom. He’s sick.”

Randall nods at me, blinks. He’s waking.

“Said he needed you.”

By the time we get to the end of the hallway, Randall is bouncing, shaking the sleep off his arms and legs. Daddy has laid his head on the toilet, his face turned to us, his eyes closed, his arms hanging knuckle down on the peeling tile so that they look like sapling pine trees.