Salvage the Bones (12 page)

Daddy keeps a two-gallon jug of vegetable oil in the cabinet for frying oysters or fish when he can catch them or his friends give them to him, but I don't think China will like the taste of it. I stick a finger into the oil and rub it across my teeth. Too metallic, too bland. But the bacon grease Daddy keeps on the counter in an old coffee can, the metal waxy with residue: that tastes like drippings. That tastes like the next bite is going to be salty crunchy bacon, tender in the middle, burnt at the edges, stiff as a twig. This she will like.

Skeetah has found a big cardboard box, cut it in half, and lined it with material, and I can't tell whether the material is old clothes or old sheets or old towels, because under the dogs they are just dark gray rags. The bottom of the box reads
Westinghouse
.

“I took it from behind the hall at the church,” Skeetah says. He is sucking the Ivomec into the medicine syringe. It is colorless as water. He is sitting on a toolbox rusted and kicked to bad angles, the Ivomec bottle between his knees. When he shifts, the toolbox crunches against the metal inside like a mouth grinding its teeth. He recaps the bottle, slides it into his pants pocket. Manny is gone, but Junior is standing in the corner, his hands folded behind him, leaning against the shed wall.

“Where's Manny?”

“Said he had something to go do.” Skeetah holds the syringe in one hand, the coffee container of bacon grease in another. He wobbles.

“He said he'd be back,” Junior pipes up. He rocks on his feet and slams against the shed, shaking the tin.

“Junior. Stop it. Shit, I need a bowl.” Skeetah turns to me. “Can you get me a bowl, please?”

“Junior, go get him a bowl.” Even though I have to pee, the melon under my shirt ripe, I still don't want to leave the shed.

“He asked you,” Junior says quietly, intent on the puppies. They are blindly pitching themselves out the door of the box, headlong.

“Junior, go 'head.”

“No.”

“Esch, please.”

In the house, I hardly sit on the toilet. I lean over and mouth my knees, feel the tender skin above my kneecaps with my lips. Outside, the rooster crows at the middle of the day, his call cutting through the hazy buzz of the insects. Nausea digs at me. Manny has left; I don't want to think of him, to know he is somewhere out there eating up all the sunlight, smoking a cigarillo, passing purchases to customers at the gas station, his hands brushing Shaliyah soft as marsh grass, but I do. I walk in shadow on the way to the shed. Where I can't avoid the sun, where it touches me through the branches, it burns.

Skeetah pours a palmful of the bacon grease into the bowl and then squirts in the Ivomec. He mixes it with his finger. Even though we are in the shade, the heat is worse in the shed, like the inside of a hot fist. Junior and Skeetah are both glazed with sweat, and Skeetah blinks like he's about to cry because the sweat runs like water from his scalp to his forehead into his eyes. I am trying to see whether the Ivomec is mixing well in the bowl when there is an eclipse of light in the doorway and Skeetah looks up and past me, pissed.

“Move out the way of the door. You blocking all the light.”

It's Manny. Both of his hands are on the top of the doorsill, and he leans into the door, stretching his body like taffy. All I can see is the shadow of him and the white of his smile. It feels wrong to not be able to see his face, seems wrong that he is as dark as me now, that he would be washed dark by the sun behind him like ink set to bleeding over waterlogged paper.

“Anybody seen my lighter?” Manny's voice is as distinct and sharp as the corners of the toolbox Skeet sits on.

“No.” Skeetah is stirring the medicine with his finger. “Move.”

“You, Esch?”

I shake my head.

“You put it in your pocket,” Junior says, and Manny leans on the doorjamb, fishes in his pockets. Light diffuses through the room. I see Manny's profile, his glass-burned side, and then he stops fumbling and turns to us and his face is dark again. I want him to grip my hand like he grips the dark beams over his head, to walk with me out of the shed and away from the Pit. To help me bear the sun. To hold me once he learns my secret. To be different.

“I didn't see you over there, Junior,” Manny says.

“Thank you,” Skeet says. The oil has absorbed all of the Ivomec. The mix is off-white, creamy. Skeetah tastes it.

“You shouldn't do that,” shadow Manny says.

“Don't you have somewhere to go?”

“I'm just trying to help you out.”

“You could help me out by moving out of my light—in or out.”

“I'm out.” Manny shrugs. “I'm going to look up under the trees. Ain't no way I'm coming in; China don't like me.” China is sitting before Skeetah, ignoring how close I am to him, intent on the bowl with the bacon grease in it. She is panting, her tongue dripping water.

“China likes everybody.” Skeet is sucking the mixture back up into the syringe.

“Okay.” Manny laughs. His smile again. Each time I see his teeth, nausea elbows me. Manny steps away and the light floods in and I want him to leave, to come back, to never have been. China is dancing on her hind legs because Skeetah is standing, the syringe in his hand.

“Here.”

I press the bowl to my stomach.

China is hopping on her hind legs. What tore through the gray dog yesterday is now a woman approaching her partner on the floor of the Oaks, the first lick of the blues guitar sounding from the jukebox, a drink in her hand. China lands on her front paws and pushes back up. Skeet crouches, places one arm around the back of her neck, twining his hand around her jaw, tilting her head up.

“That's my girl,” he says.

China grins. Her tongue flashes out like a wet, whipped rag.

“I know my girl,” Skeetah breathes. With his other hand, he tilts the syringe to her lips.

China barks, nods. Her front legs rest on his chest like a lover's. She flings her head back in submission, supplication.

“Good bitch,” Skeetah says.

China nuzzles the syringe, licks.

“That's my bitch.” Skeetah closes his fingers, the medicine disappears, and he withdraws. The puppies twitch and nuzzle at their feet. China accidentally steps on the orange one, and it yelps.

“Always my bitch,” Skeetah says.

Outside, Manny is pacing the yard, running his feet through the sand.

“
His
bitch must've gave it to him.” Skeetah breathes this into China's coat; from the doorway, she is the dusty lightbulb in the room. Junior is creeping along the wall, trying to get closer to the puppies. In the yard, the dust from Manny's searching feet billows up and obscures him, turning his white shirt, his golden skin, dark as a bruised peach.

I've heard girls at my school talk. These are conversations I snatch from the air like we take down clothes that have crusted dry on a clothesline. The girls say that if you're pregnant and you take a month's worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage. Say that this is what you do when you can't afford an abortion, when you can't have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you.

In the bathroom, I bend over standing and knead my stomach, knead the melon to pulp, but it just keeps springing back: ripe. Intent on bearing seed. I could find something big enough and hard enough to jump on: Daddy's dump truck hood, Daddy's tractor, one of the old washing machines out in the yard. We have bleach in the laundry room. Only thing I wouldn't be able to find is the birth control pills; I've never had a prescription, wouldn't have money to get them if I did, don't have any girlfriends to ask for some, and have never been to the Health Department. Who would bring me? Daddy, who sometimes I think forgets that I am a girl? Big Henry, one of the few of our friends who has a car? Manny? Teeth-in-the-dark Manny?
If I took care of it, he would never know,
I think,
never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what?
I push.
Be different. Love me
.

These are my options, and they narrow to none.

The sun set hours ago, and I am sitting on the toilet seat, pulling the towel that Randall tacked up for a curtain to look out in the yard. I see Skeetah dragging wood to the door of the shed. The bare bulb burns outward, shining on the dirt he kneels in. He is prying nails from wood. Insects swarm at the edges of the light. The frame for the kennel that sat for days, wedged into the dirt like a fallen scarecrow, is upright again. He is building her a house. He is watching over her, gauging her for sickness. He knows love.

“Gotdamnit.”

Daddy's pickup eases into the yard so slowly that I can hear him curse above the gurgle of the engine. This is how he drives when he is bombed-out drunk. Very slowly, and with his brights on. His headlights break the golden bubble that encases Skeet and flood the yard with light. Skeetah raises the arm with the hammer and shades his eyes. Daddy parks parallel to his dump truck, which has sat rust-barnacled and silent since I attempted to crank it this morning. Daddy leaves his headlights on and gets out of the truck.

“I said, gotdamnit!”

Daddy tries to punctuate this by slamming the door of his truck, but he fails. His hand slips from the metal, and it closes so quietly I can't even hear it from my seat on the toilet next to the window.

“Gotdamn Van's Salvage,” Daddy mutters, “didn't even have the part I needed.” He leans against the side of his truck like it's a human being, speaks this almost as low as he used to on the nights he came home dazed drunk when Mama was alive. Mama would walk out to meet him, gather him to her like a child. She was only a few inches shorter than him and could bear all of his weight. He would whisper to her as they walked up the concrete slabs that made up the steps to the front porch. We never heard what he said to her. I imagine that he told her that he loved her, soaked tender with moonshine.

“You left your lights on,” Skeetah says.

“Now how I'm going to make money after the storm?” Daddy slaps his truck, but it is awkward, at odds. It slides into a caress. “What you say?”

“I said you left your lights on.” Skeetah is prying at a reluctant nail, his head down, concentrating. He watches Daddy out of the corner of his eyes.

“Oh.” Daddy reaches into the truck and pushes the knob to turn off the headlights. He walks toward Skeetah slowly. This is his drunk walk: purposeful, plodding. “What you doing?”

“Nothing.” Skeetah stills, stops pulling at the nail, but stays bent over.

“Nothing?”

“At all.”

“I see you doing something, so you can't be doing nothing.”

“Ain't you tired?”

“What?”

“You been busy trying to get parts for that dump truck all day.”

“Damn right,” Daddy says. “The U-Pull-It, the Salvage, all looked at me crazy. No dump truck parts. No help when I was looking through the cars. Look at me like they don't know when a man's talking when I tell them a bad storm's coming.”

Skeetah straightens, balances on the balls of his feet, preparing to outwait Daddy. The hammer is on his knee.

“Them's boards. You been in my piles?”

“Naw.”

“I got them gathered for the house. You always meddling. You want the windows to shatter?”

“Daddy, I ain't mess with your wood.”

“Well, where you get it from, then?”

“Found it off up in the woods.” Skeet is running the hammer back and forth on his leg. He is waiting for the step that turns Daddy mean.

“You ain't found shit in them woods.” Daddy is waving his hand in the air as if he is waving away night beetles startled to flight, wading through the glossy brown bugs with shells as hard as butterscotch candies. He spits. “Did you?”

“Yes.” Skeetah is very quiet. The hammer is still.

“Bullshit!” Daddy yells. “Everything I do for y'all and y'all don't appreciate shit!” He raises his arms again, as if he has stirred more bugs to motion. He reaches to grab Skeetah's arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. Skeetah is rigid, as straight as the hammer hanging at his side. Daddy tries to shove him but he is slow to let go; it is as if his hands are deaf to what his brain wants them to do, and they grip Skeetah's shoulders, hard. He shakes Skeetah.

“Let me go, Daddy.” This is so quiet that I can barely hear it.

China is standing in the doorway of the shed. She does not growl. She does not bark. She only stands, head cocked to one side, her forelegs locked wide, her breasts adding more bulk to her, the rest of her lost to the darkness of the shed. She is still.

“Let go!”

“All I do!” Daddy shoves Skeet so hard that Daddy lurches backward with the force of it, but he catches himself before falling.

Skeetah stutters backward but lands crouching, still on his feet. China darts forward. Skeet holds the hammer like a baton.

“Hold,” Skeetah calls. “Hold!” There is wetness to his voice. China stops where she is. She is one of the flaking statues at the graveyard next to the park, an angel streaked by rain, burning bright.

“I wish she would,” Daddy says, his arms straight as his sides. “I wish she would.”

Skeetah edges sideways to China, lays down the hammer, and puts his hand over her muzzle. She is marble under his fingers.

“I'd take her upcountry and shoot her.”