Salvage the Bones (15 page)

“Randall!” Daddy yells. It is strange to hear the night without his hammering.

“Yeah,” Randall says from the doorway of the shed. Big Henry is beside him. Junior is clinging to Randall's back, grasping at his shoulders, his biceps, losing his grip and sliding with the sweat. Skeetah looks toward the door, shakes his head at Daddy's call, China's chain slack in his hands. She looks as if she is eating the earth.

“Come here.”

Randall sighs, grabs Junior's forearms while he bends over and hoists him back up.

“Yeah, yeah.”

I slide into his place in the doorway next to Big Henry so I can see everything. Junior is licking his fingers as Randall walks, swiping them in Randall's ears.

“Ugh. I told you to stop.” Randall rubs his ears, but I know he can't get the wet out. “I'm going to put you down.”

“No, Randall. Please.”

“Well, then stop. That shit is so nasty.” Randall stops, links his long arms into a seat under Junior's butt, and hoists again. “What?”

Daddy has only knocked down one of the chicken coop's walls. The chickens wander drunken and bewildered around his feet, seemingly mystified that he is dismantling their house, even though they haven't roosted in it in years. In the half-light from the bulb from the shed and Daddy's headlights, they look black. Daddy lets his hammer fall, and the chickens scatter, fluttering away like leaves in a wind.

“The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she's a woman. Katrina.”

“There's another storm?” Randall asks.

“What you think I been talking about? I knew it was coming,” Daddy says.
Like the worst
, I repeat.
A woman
. He shakes his head, frowns at the coop. “We going to try something.”

“What?”

“I want you to get on my tractor and I'm going to direct you to this wall right here.” Daddy points at the longer wall. “And we going to knock this damn thing over.”

Randall hoists again. Junior's face rests on Randall's shoulder.

“I can't drive that thing.”

“All you got to do is put it in gear and press the gas. You know how to steer.”

“We got to do it in the dark?”

Daddy steps to the side and I can see his head, barely coming up to Randall's shoulder. His face says he is smiling, but his voice says he is not.

“What you mean, ‘We gotta do it at night?' That depression out in the Gulf done became a hurricane. We ain't got enough wood to board the windows up and you going to sit here and ask me why we gotta do this at night?”

Randall is silent. Junior is sliding again.

“She headed toward Florida. She come up slantways and who you think she going to hit?'

“Florida,” Randall sighs. “Don't they usually fade out after they hit?” Randall doesn't hoist Junior, who is trying to clutch at Randall's waist with his feet. Junior is losing. Junior's chin disappears behind Randall's shoulder, and his head sinks to Randall's shoulder blades. “All's I'm saying is that you could drive it better than me.”

“I know I can.” Daddy waves away the compliment. Usually when Randall gives them, they work. “But I can't see to get it at the right angle. If you do it, I can tell you how to hit it so that the whole thing comes down at once.”

Junior's feet are at Randall's knees. Junior comes down in the dirt and barely catches himself. I want to call him back to the shed because I know he's getting on Daddy's nerves and will only make Daddy worse, but I don't. He is the Patroclus to Randall's Achilles tonight.

“Come on.” Daddy walks into the darkness without waiting to see if Randall follows. Randall rounds the corner with his hands linked behind his neck, shaking his head. Junior shadows him.

Skeetah releases China from her chain, and then loops the metal around and around his forearm and shoulder until it is a solid silver wing. China pads to her corner, flops down all at once, instead of her usual graceful sitting first, the gentle roll onto her flank, her side. She lays her head on the linoleum that Skeetah must have swept clean, because she does not raise dust. Skeetah walks toward the door, lays the chain on the oil drum, arranges it just so, lingers over the links. He cannot bear to look at her.

“You think that did it?” Big Henry asks.

“I don't know,” Skeetah says.

“Maybe she just tired,” I say to them, because I hope the words will pull Skeetah's brow smooth, untangle the yarn-knotted furrow of it. Hope that they will make him stop looking at his hands. Big Henry shifts from foot to foot, leans on the door jamb. When he moves, the locusts and cicadas and grasshoppers sound loud, disgruntled.

“You ran her for a while.”

“Yeah.” Skeetah plays with the links the way he used to play with liver, with oatmeal, with beets from the can shaped like tubes of cranberry sauce. This was before he grew older, before his knees gained muscle and his shoulders knotted and he began shoveling his food, lima beans or mushrooms or chitterlings, as if he didn't care what he ate anymore.

“And she still nursing. She probably just tired.”

Daddy's tractor growls from the darkness, bullies the insects. It rolls over branches, discarded plastic garbage cans, detached fenders. They crack and break. Daddy leaves splinters. Randall and Junior follow in its wake, stumbling through the detritus. Skeetah shakes his head.

“He's going to have them out there all gotdamn night.” Skeetah grabs China's bowl from where he has secreted it high on a shelf; it is so high he has to stand on his toes. Randall or Big Henry could have grabbed it without even reaching. Daddy leaves the tractor running and swings one leg over and is down. Skeetah pours China's food, sets it on top of the drum. “Hold on.”

Big Henry moves to let Skeetah walk out of the doorway, and then he smiles at me. The moon shines like a fluorescent bulb behind his head. A piping wind blows, and where my hair escapes and touches my face, it feels like a spider's web unanchored, adrift. Randall climbs up the tractor and sits. Junior hoists himself up and begins scaling the metal.

“What you doing?” Daddy asks Junior.

“Helping Randall.”

“No you're not. Get down.”

“I won't be in the way.”

“Get down.”

“Please.”

“I said no.”

Randall scoots forward on the seat, motions behind him.

“He can sit behind me. He won't be in the way.”

Junior is leaning back to please Daddy, to make him think that he is on the verge of obeying, of jumping off, but still he grips the seat with his hands, and he does not step down.

“Please, Daddy.”

Daddy clears his throat and spits. His T-shirt has a gaping hole at the neck, and it is uneven at the hem, as if someone has been pulling at it.

“Hurry up,” Daddy says.

Daddy waves Junior up to the tractor, and Junior climbs up, slides behind Randall, wraps his arms around Randall's waist with the expectant look of a child on a carousel ride. Skeetah bangs out of the back door of the house with a cup of something in his hand. Moths flit about his head like mussed ash. He walks by and I smell bacon drippings.

“She has to eat,” Skeetah says as he dribbles the drippings, the color of pine sap, over China's dried food. China looks at him, then away. He slides the bowl toward her, but she ignores him. His eyes are a darkness in his face. “Come on.”

China grimaces at him, a showing of tooth and red gum. The puppies are twitching toward her over the linoleum, as if they smell the milk through her breasts, through the pink meat of her. Her nipples look like chewed-up gum.

“Come on.” Daddy waves the tractor forward. “This the corner. Right here.”

“All right,” Skeetah breathes, heedless of the creeping puppies as he pushes China's bowl so close to her that she could lay her head down in it. The lines between Skeet's muscles looked filled in with charcoal.

“All right!” Daddy yells. “Now keep coming straight forward, right there.” Randall guns the tractor and it surges forward. Junior's head snaps back, but he hangs on. There is a crack of wood and then a metal whine as Randall presses the gas again and the tractor jerks forward. “Hold it! You got chicken wire stuck in the grille.”

Daddy tugs at the wire, pulls at the grille and hood. He yanks, leans forward so far he almost puts his face in the grille, detangles, and then he begins pulling at the wire again. Randall is still.

“Do it,” Skeetah commands China.

China's ears are flat as plastic knives laid on her head and her mouth is wet and pink as uncooked chicken, except here the bone shows. She is quivering, her muscles beset by a multitude of tics. She is shaking all over, now eye to eye with Skeetah, seemingly ignoring the dirt-red puppy rounding her bowl, waddling for milk. He is the one that is a model of the father, of Kilo; he is the fattest, the most well fed, the bully. Turgid with the promise of living. When their eyes eventually open, I think that his will be the first.

The tractor idles and the engine turns, sounds as if it going to move.

“Don't do it!” Daddy yells against his tugging, but his grunts eat the
Don't
, and I don't know what Randall hears, but he lets up on the brake and slips it in gear, and the tractor eases forward. “Stop!” Daddy yells. He is pulling back, his hand clenched in the wire, and he twists so hard his arm looks long and ropy.

The red puppy creeps forward, rounds China's bowl, noses her tit. China is rolling, rising. The rumble of the tractor is her growl. Her toes are pointed, her head raised. Skeetah falls back. The red puppy undulates toward her; a fat mite. China snaps forward, closes her jaw around the puppy's neck as she does when she carries him, but there is no gentleness in it. She is all white eyes. She is chewing. She is whipping him though the air like a tire eaten too short for Skeetah to grab.

“Stop!” Skeetah yells. “Stop!”

Randall puts the tractor in gear, switches it to park, but the small hillock the coop is on pulls the tractor back as the engine idles.

“No!” Daddy calls.

Daddy flings his hand free. There is oil on it. He holds to his chest. His shirt is covered in oil. Daddy's jaw is slack. He is walking toward the light of the shed. The oil on his T-shirt turns red. The sound coming out his open mouth is like growling.

“No!” Skeetah calls.

The blood on Daddy's shirt is the same color as the pulpy puppy in China's mouth. China flings it away from her. It thuds on the tin and slides. Randall comes running. Big Henry kneels with Daddy in the dirt, where what was Daddy's middle, ring, and pinkie finger on his left hand are sheared off clean as fallen tree trunks. The meat of his fingers is red and wet as China's lips.

Skeetah kneels in the dirt, feeling for the mutilated puppy; he knocks into metal drums and toolboxes and old chainsaws with his head and his shoulders.

“Why did you?” Skeetah wails.

“Why?” Daddy breathes to Randall and Big Henry standing over him, the blood sluicing down his forearm. They are gripping Daddy's wrist, trying to stop the bleeding. Skeetah is punching the metal he meets. China is bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as Medea. If she could speak, this is what I would ask her:
Is this what motherhood is?

The Seventh Day: Game Dogs and Game Men

There were too many of us in the car on the way to the hospital. Daddy, with his hand wrapped in a red-blooming towel, sat in the front seat. Big Henry drove. Junior and Randall and I sat in the backseat, the smell of blood like the Gulf when the tide's low. That and the smell of dog, like China was in the middle of the driver's seat, licking her whiskers with her bloody tongue, nosing the absent Skeet. Daddy sounded like a larger version of the puppies, his breathing whining in and out. I wondered if he noticed it through the pain. His neck was stringy and long as a cooked turkey's. We took the back way to the hospital, through miles of woods, lonely houses like possums in the dark, half caught and then left behind by the headlights. Junior let me hold his hand. When we arrived at the hospital, Randall and Big Henry half dragged, half carried Daddy through the doors to orderlies who were standing there as if they were waiting for us, and they put him in a wheelchair. We sat in the lobby. The orderlies wheeled Daddy next to us. They left us to whisper with the night admitting nurse, who rose from behind her desk, her scrubs pink with red hearts on them, wearing red Crocs, carrying a clipboard. Daddy bent over in the wheelchair, and the blood ran like a starving stream down his thigh, soaked into the seat, and the nurse began to ask questions and looked at Daddy as he sat up, his head rolling back, and saw his hand. The nurse had a gap between her two front teeth like Mama. She tucked the clipboard under her arm, grabbed the handles, asked Daddy's name. Randall answered as she wheeled Daddy away and followed.

Junior fell asleep sitting upright in his chair and sagged over on Big Henry, who sat slumped over, his elbows on his knees, trying to rub the blood off his hands. It pinked and spread over his skin like a jellyfish. A white couple sat three chairs down from us; the man was bald with wispy hairs like dandelion fluff around his ears, and the woman had red hair that stood up in a curly thin afro the way that older white women's hair often does. Their clothes were clean and faded along the ironed edges. Every few minutes, the woman would rub the gold crucifix at her chest, and the man would take off his silver-framed bifocals and polish them. They studied the receptionist station the whole time we were there and never looked over to Big Henry and his hands, Junior's feet that kicked in his sleep as if he were dreaming of falling, and me. I wondered who they were waiting on, but I never found out because a nurse came for them and they disappeared. The waiting room was scrubbed clean and pale; it smelled of Pine-Sol, coffee, and weariness.

When Randall and Daddy walked out of the long hall, it was three o'clock in the morning. Randall looked older than Daddy under the lights, and Daddy's eyes were glazed as if he was drunk, clear and shiny as the glass water jugs I'd filled, but he was not mean. He shuffled along next to Randall, his hand wrapped up to the wrist in gauze and tape so that it looked like a webworm moth nest wound tight in a pecan tree, a yarn of larvae eating at the ripe green leaves beneath to burst forth in black-winged flurry in the throat-closing heat of fall. Only Daddy's hand would not emerge whole and quivering. Daddy's hand would be not the moths but the bare branches, like bones, left under the husk.

Now Daddy sleeps. He hasn't slept this late since the week after Mama died, when I found him at the table, on the sofa, beside the sink in the bathroom, in the hallway, his torso over the threshold, his legs out. Cans and bottles, mostly beer, lay about him like smaller versions of himself wherever he was. The sun is over the tops of the trees, flooding down into the small clearing around the house. All of the fans are blowing at all of the windows, so the house hums as if it is alive. Big Henry sleeps on the sofa. Randall is snoring in his room. Daddy's door is closed. The chicken coop stands with three walls still, the tractor lightly touching it as if providing a thick, rubber-muscled shoulder to lean on. Junior is watching a rerun of
Reading Rainbow
, the volume so low it is barely louder than the fans. He does not turn it up.

We left Skeetah in the shed last night. He did not run with us to the car. When we came back to the house, he was asleep in his bed in the room he shares with Randall, wrapped up in his sheet, so I only saw the lump of him. He wore his shoes still, and they stuck out of his blanket like bristles on a toothbrush. In place of the curtain he'd dragged a piece of tin he'd salvaged, probably from Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph's roof, and wedged it across the doorway of the shed. China was a lump, as pale as biscuit dough, laying out in the dirt, her chain attached to a car's half-eaten skeleton. He'd separated her from the puppies. When I woke up this morning, he was gone. And so was China.

Daddy is propped up on pillows when I walk into the bedroom, a bowl of chicken noodle soup on a potholder before me, a little of it dribbling around the edges. He is eating crackers one by one, placing them between his lips and then pulling them in. His chewing sounds like crumpled notebook paper. I put down the bowl and the spoon on the night table, cluttered with a glass of water from the tap, a Budweiser can he's been using as an ashtray, and his medicine for pain and infection. His arm is resting on a hill of old blankets and crocheted pillows, which Randall piled last night. Daddy is watching the thirteen-inch black-and-white television sitting on the wide, mirrored dresser across from the bed. He hasn't changed a thing here since Mama died: there are small glass candleholders with tall peach candles wedged into them, and two small bunches of fake flowers in squat vases that look like cups that Mama placed at both ends of the dresser. There are pictures of us, Polaroids, which Mama wedged between the glass and the frame of the mirror. There is one picture of her and Daddy standing chest to chest, in a frame. Her hands are on his shoulders, her hair ironed straight and pulled back smooth, her dress cut open in the front so that it shows her collarbone, as dense and burnished and beautiful as a brass doorknob. She smiles without opening her mouth. Daddy doesn't smile at all, but his hands are around her back, and he has that serious, prideful tilt of his head that Skeetah has when he is standing with China at a dogfight, showing her off before the mad scramble, the cutting barks and teeth.

“Play with the antenna,” Daddy says. His voice sounds dry as the cracker. He leans over and pulls a wicker tray from next to the bed and drags it across his lap. The bowl wobbles in his left hand. He spills some of the soup on the potholder when he sets it down.

There is only static. I grab the right antenna, yank it up.

“Down,” Daddy says.

The box fan in the window is not pushing any air in the room. Every day seems hotter than the last. I grab the left antenna, split them one from the other like a wishbone.

“There.”

“Katrina has made landfall in Florida … miles from Miami.” It is the local news. The weatherwoman is speaking with the anchor, and she is pointing at the interactive screen before her, but the television is so old and the resolution so bad that the map looks like concrete, and the storm, an oil stain.

“Early reports say that there are some dead. Does anyone … idea of where … projection of storm?” Mike's voice is even, smooth, when we catch it through the static.

“… unclear. The storm is currently a category one … could weaken … could change.” The woman's hair is light; she may be blonde.

“So what would you advise our listeners to … Rachel?” The TV gives a static moan, so I split the two parts of the antenna further.

“… prepare as well as they can for the storm. Katrina is on the … if it does not weaken … moving northwest, they should also prepare … government will issue orders for mandatory evacuation.”

“So what does this mean?”

“This means that our viewers may … preparations to remain in their homes for the hurricane, and instead may want to begin … possible evacuation.” Rachel appears to be smiling.

“I can't see, Esch.”

I step aside. Mike turns to the camera.

“… highways will be open for evacuation. It is better to leave earlier … hours … stuck in traffic.”

“You're still in the way,” Daddy says. He blows his soup and stirs it with his spoon, but he does not eat, and instead he lets his good hand drop behind the wicker across his lap.

Mama smiles serenely from the photo. She has no idea that three years later, she will be bleeding to death in the bed that Daddy now lays in with three of his fingers missing. In one of the Polaroids, I am dancing in the kitchen. It is at one of Mama and Daddy's parties where his friends, and one or two of hers, would gather to drink beer and eat oysters and potatoes, fried golden in the same oil and silt and salt. Mama would plug in the cassette deck radio in the kitchen, put in tapes by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Denise LaSalle, and Little Milton, and I would dance while the crowd clapped and laughed at my jerky hand-swinging, all of us sweating in the kitchen. Mama would say,
That's my baby, my dancing girl
, and I would kick extra or wave my arms harder. The music would wring me dry. Now I look at myself and at Mama, at the leaping Randall and the dark-eyed and grinning Skeet, who looks in his picture as if he is worm-ridden, and barely resist snatching the pictures from the mirror, taking them to my room, laying them across my bed to attempt to decode them, to fit them together like a jumbo puzzle.

“Preparation … key,” Rachel says.

I shut Daddy's door.

China is breathe-barking. Every time she inhales, she exhales with a bark, flat and strong as a slap. The sound is carrying through the woods. On the back step, I hear her as if she is drawing closer, but I do not see her appearing with Skeetah at her side. There is only the day, hotter than the one that came before it, dense as water approaching boiling. And then her voice catches. There are other dogs, in the woods near the house, on the other side of the Pit, down the winding, gravel-eaten length of the street, and they bark with her. They ring her like a chorus. Their voices crackle across the sky, all places at once. Somewhere out there, I know, Skeetah is in the middle of these dogs, pulling them to him. He is the hand on the leash. He is the palm. He flexes and they come, he looses his grip and they spread to the red dirt, the pines, the creeks, the oaks. They howl. They hack.

China gives a great shout, and all at once, they are silent.

Randall's game is today. I wipe the bathroom mirror with my palm, and the glass cracks at the edges, the reflective surface flaking away like glitter. I oil my hands, rub them through my hair, which calms into ringlets. I pick two bobby pins that Mama left in a plastic case under the sink, and I slide them into my hair behind my ears, so that it frames my face like a pillow. Junior is singing along with the television, the words indecipherable, his voice higher pitched than a girl's. I smile, turn my head to the right, to the left. This is what I look like, I think. This is the lie. Skeetah is a smell before I see him: the oily sweat of dog, pine needles growing green, and an unwashed stink like milk set too long out in a hot kitchen. He stops in the doorway. I run Vaseline across my lips, rub them together, try to make them glossy.

“What was that noise?”

“What you talking about?”

“China, barking like crazy.”

Outside, Randall is dribbling. I can see him out of the window, shooting, throwing the ball at the house when it rebounds, catching it, throwing it again. The sun is directly overhead, pouring down into the clearing where he practices. He is warming up. The ball is not full with air, so each time that he touches the ball, it is more like a slap.

“Nothing.”

The neck on Skeetah's shirt is stretched as a bib. He looks down at it, shakes his head, grabs it with both hands, and pulls. The shirt rips. The newly sprouted hair on his head is prickly as Velcro.

“It didn't sound like nothing.”

The shirt is black, so what is wet on it is sweat. It could not be blood. I would know. Skeetah drops the tee, and it slaps wetly on the tile. The smell of him moves through the room like smoke from burning wet leaves.

“She forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“Who I was yesterday.”

“Don't you mean she forgot the puppy?”

Randall catches the ball each time it springs from the backboard and throws it back up. He is not letting it touch the earth. He is saving it from making that flat, collapsing sound, again and again. His lips turned down at the corners, smiling.

“No. She forgot me.”

Skeetah bends, turns on the tap in the tub, lifts the hook for the shower. The spray from the water is cold, a fine mist.

“How long you going to keep China on the chain?”

“Long as it takes.” Skeetah kicks his shoes across the floor; once, twice. “As long as it takes.” He peels his socks away like banana peels, and the smell of them is rotten. My stomach shudders.

Big Henry is perched on the hood of his car. Marquise sits next to him, leaned over almost double so that he looks like a crab, all back and arms and legs, as he rolls a blunt on the blue metal. China faces Big Henry, tongue lolling pink and straight as an exclamation mark. She smiles and then grimaces, over and over, so that she has two faces. The pink of the Pit on her coat is overlaid by a brown scum, which etches the lines of her muscles in her shoulder, haunch, and back clean and clear as marker. Big Henry lists sideways, tipping lightly as if he is on the verge of running. I put my hands in my short shorts, look down at the tennis shoes that I have scrubbed until they are as close to white as they can get: off white, a dirty cream the color of egg whites cooked with pepper. Big Henry turns away from China, who is grimacing again. I sit close to Big Henry's windshield on the other side of Marquise, who scoots forward to make room for me.

“You think he ready?”

“Who?” Marquise asks.

“I wasn't talking to you, fool.” Big Henry laughs before biting it off with glances at China and me.