Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones

Most times when we go to the grocery store in St. Catherine, cars fill half the parking lot. Now the whole lot is full, and we have to ride around for ten minutes waiting on a spot. The heat beats at the car like Mardi Gras parade-goers looking for a ride. It slinks in the seams of the windows like beads. Big Henry’s air-conditioning brushes across my face and chest, light as cotton candy, and melts like the heat is a tongue. The walk across the parking lot is slow and long, even though we have a decent spot that’s almost in the middle; Skeetah walks so quickly, he leaves me dragging through the heat, but Big Henry lingers, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

Inside, I follow Big Henry, who follows Skeetah, who bumps past carts pushed by ladies with feathery-light hair and freckled forearms pulling tall men wearing wraparound sunglasses. The rich ones wear khakis and yacht club shirts, the others wear camouflage and deer prints.

“We need water and batteries and…,” one woman lists as she swerves her buggy away down an aisle, a teenage boy with a mop of big curls loping along in her wake. He is not listening; he looks over Skeetah and Big Henry, and away.

Skeetah ignores everyone like they’re pits of inferior breeding. Big Henry dances past, mumbles “Sorry” and “ ’Scuse me.” I am small, dark: invisible. I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen.

There are only a dozen or so different kinds of dog food, and I know that Skeetah already knows what kind he wants. He always gets the same kind: the most expensive. Daddy once bought Skeet a big fifty-pound bag of generic dog food at the feed store. Skeetah fed China the food and she ate it in gulps, swallowed it down like it was water, and shat it out in runny lumps, like sunny-side-up eggs, all over the Pit. After that, she ate table scraps Skeet sneaked out the house for a month. He spent that month in the shed, banging at one of Daddy’s junk lawn mowers until one day he started it screaming to life, and then he went down to the Catholic church and convinced them to pay him to cut the grass and pull weeds at the graveyard. Mostly because they knew about Mama, I think, they let him do it. He mows three times a week during the summer, and in the winter, he weeds. That’s how he gets his dog food money. On a few of Daddy’s drunk nights when he’s down at the Oaks nodding off to the blues, I’ve seen Skeet walking out of Daddy’s room with his hands balled into stealing fists in his pockets. I keep expecting Daddy to wake up one morning to find some of his money missing. He’d be out in the hallway, yelling for Skeetah, throwing off anger and alcohol like steam, but we’ve been lucky. That hasn’t happened yet.

“My dog do good on that one.” When I walk up, Big Henry is pointing to a big green bag; it’s not the cheapest dog food, but it’s not the most expensive either. Skeetah ignores him; he’s already pulling at a fifty-pound sack.

“China like what she like.” He mumbles this. The bag hangs like a limp child over his shoulder, and it crunches.

“Next thing you know, you going to be buying her allergy medicine. Marquise said there’s a white girl at y’all school that got a dog that’s allergic to grass. Grass ,” Big Henry whispers.

“That’s ’cause some people understand that between man and dog is a relationship.” Skeet jumps and shifts the bag. It hangs even, covers half his chest. “Equal.”

“My dog would just be sneezing.” Big Henry says. He shrugs and laughs. He has eyes the color of bleached-out asphalt, and when he smiles, they shrink to fingernails in his face.

“Your dog wouldn’t be able to breathe. And he’d hate you,” Skeet says.

All the checkout lines are long. All the steel baskets are full. Skeetah rocks from side to side on his feet, and me and Big Henry bump into each other and don’t know what to do. He ricochets back and rocks the candy and magazine rack, and I cross my arms and pinch my elbows. I feel like I should have a basket, wonder if when these people look at us, they wonder where our supplies are. The cabinets at home have enough food to get us through a few days until the stores are back up and running, and if the cabinets don’t, Daddy will make sure to stock them if a storm hits. But the way the cashier’s apron hangs off one shoulder, like she hasn’t had the time to pull it up with all the groceries she’s been scanning, makes me nervous. She’s made up of all the reds: red hair in a ponytail, red cheeks, red hands. I put my hands in my pockets, and the pregnancy test I ripped out of the box and tucked into the waistband of my shorts when I wandered away from Skeetah on a trip to the bathroom scratches my side.

Maybe it’s China that made me get it. I know something’s wrong; for weeks I’ve been throwing up every other day, always walking around feeling like someone’s massaging my stomach, trying to push the food up and out of me. Some months when I eat a little less because I’m tired of ramen or potatoes, I’m irregular. But the sickness and the vomiting make me think I should get a test, that and me being two months irregular, and the way I wake up every morning with my abdomen feeling full, fleshy and achy and wet, like the blood’s going to come running down any minute-only it doesn’t. I think back to all the times I’ve had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up, once we pull apart. This is what I’m thinking when I see the woman laying half in the road, half in the grass.

“That’s a woman,” I say.

“That’s a car,” Skeetah says. And there, caught in the pines like a cat ascending a trunk, is a car. It looks as if it jumped there, as if it wanted to see what bark felt like, and flipped over to grip the tree.

“Didn’t they know to slow down coming through here?” Skeetah asks. “Got signs everywhere.”

“Maybe they not from here,” I say, because there is a man pacing in the ditch, and he is holding his head. Blood slides in a curve down the side of his face, between his fingers and down his forearms. He could not have known the road would curl like his streaming blood in this, the trickiest part of the bayou to drive. He could not have known that the road clung to whatever dry land it could find, and that it was no place to drive over the speed limit. Daddy had wrecked his truck here once, when he was drunk. When he came home after the police let him out, he cursed for a good two hours about Dead Man’s Curve.

“Y’all need help?” Big Henry asks out the window as we slow to a stop. Skeetah looks straight ahead, ignores the scene out his window, the pacing man.

The man looks up, climbs from the ditch. It is as if he doesn’t see the woman as he steps so close to her, he could kick her. He has a cell phone in one hand, smashed up against his ear, his thin brown hair in his other. He is wearing a white shirt with white buttons, and the blood has made a beauty contestant sash across his chest.

“Can you tell me where I’m at?” he says. His voice is loud, as if he is shouting at an old person who is hard of hearing. “I’m on the phone with 911, and they need to know where I’m at.”

“Tell them you in between Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine’s, on the bayou. Tell them the closest road is Pelage, and you right before the Dedeaux Bridge.”

The man nods, opens his mouth to speak.

“I’m…” He closes it. “Can you? I’m…” He reaches into the passenger-side window, holds the phone in a red grip in front of Skeetah’s face. Skeetah doesn’t shrink away, doesn’t move. Instead, he stares through the man’s hand. Big Henry, in his way, takes the phone with just two of his fingers. It is polka-dotted with blood.