Salvage the Bones (20 page)

“Randall!” I yell, “get Junior!”

Randall jackknifes out of the truck, and he is a long black line streaking around the corner of the house where Junior has gone, and then I hear him banging underneath the house. Junior is laid so flat I cannot see him.

“Junior,” Randall yells, “get from under there!”

Junior is silent.

“You going to make me come under there and get you!” Randall says from between clenched teeth, and he must be crawling because Junior has popped up on my side of the house and is trying to run, his eyes white and rolling like a rabbit's, but I have him, and he is kicking, kicking, and I'm surprised he doesn't have fur.

“What did he do?” Randall walks around the corner, the front of him red with dirt.

“He had Daddy's wedding ring.”

“He what?” Randall is frowning.

“He had Daddy's wedding ring. He found it on the finger and took it off. It was in his pocket.” Each word makes Randall's face slide and break until it looks like a broken glass with all the lines in it, and I know it's because he can't believe what I'm saying.

“Boy, what the hell is wrong with you?” Randall yells. He yanks Junior from me, and his other hand comes down hard on Junior's skinny bottom. “What is wrong with you?” Randall yells, and his voice is higher. He hits again. “Junior!”

Junior runs in circles from Randall's hand, so they spin, but Randall is faster and stronger, and his hand comes down again and again.

“That's so. Nasty. You. Could've. Got. A disease!” Randall slaps twice, and his hand is as stiff as a board. “Why did you do it?”

“She gave it to him!” Junior wails. His voice is a siren. “And it wasn't no good for him no more!” He sobs. “I wanted it!” He wails. “Her!”

Skeetah laughs when we tell him what Junior did.

“He's dead wild.”

“He's bad.”

“Did y'all at least find it? He going to be up in there trying to stash it somewhere.”

“I did,” I say. It was on my bed, and I'd picked it up with a handful of toilet paper and washed it off in the sink. The gold was dull and old, an almost silvery pale, and nothing about it looked like it had ever touched Mama's skin. “It was covered in blood.” I'd thrown up after I cleaned it.

Junior is hiccupping, bent over double into the top of the toolbox on the back of Daddy's truck, picking out nails. His sobbing hiccups echo up and out of the metal, loudly. He drops the nails he finds on the truck bed, and they ping.

“What'd you do with it?” asks Skeetah.

“I put it in my top drawer,” I say.

Skeetah laughs. His teeth are milky, his smile wide.

“We should look for the fingers. That's free protein.” He laughs. “We could feed them to China.”

“Shut up. That is so nasty,” I say.

“Don't know what's wrong with him.” Randall shakes his head.

Skeetah laughs as he walks into the shed, pulling the wood behind him, but we can still hear him chuckling and talking to himself minutes later. When Big Henry drives up to pick Skeetah up, Skeetah is tugging the tin back over the doorway of the shed, smiling into his shirt. Big Henry parks and walks up slowly, a cold drink in his hand, and I'm surprised it's not a beer. I nod at Big Henry but stand with my arms folded in the truck bed behind Junior, who is still hiccupping and dripping snot into the toolbox.

“What's wrong with him?” Big Henry asks, and I glance over to see that he is looking at me, asking me. He's shaved the stray hair and goatee off his face, so it is smooth and lighter than the rest of him, and looks soft with the sweat making it shine. I look at Junior's narrow, bony back; he drops another nail.
Ping
.

“Come on,” Skeetah laughs, and they leave.

Cover the windows.

I make Junior hold the nails in his shirt and stand next to Randall and me as we try to match board size up to windows, drag them around the house, set them down where they will be nailed. Randall has the one hammer with a full handle we could find. It is my job to hold the wood in place at the bottom, at least as far as I can reach, while Randall drives the nails in. Junior is breathing in shudders. He is trying to swallow his lip each time. There is always glass showing after we nail the boards, an eye's worth or a hand's worth, no matter how we switch the wooden pieces and shuffle. Randall concentrates, but he still smashes two of his fingers, skipping around in tight circles like he is running a drill, cussing under his breath. Junior breaks his hiccup breathing to giggle then. So do I. The clay has turned to dust for want of rain, and when Randall nails, the board shivers and drizzles red down on my head from where the dirt is caked.

Bring the jugs of water in.

The glass jugs me and Junior fished from under the house are sitting in the kitchen in clusters. They look like tadpole sacs, huddled together, sticking to each other for company: cloudy at the heart. When Junior and I brought them in, they were dusty, opaque. I rinse a dishrag for Junior and one for me, and we sit on the floor in the kitchen and we scrub. This is a hurricane eclipse, the wood over the windows, the inside of the house so dark that the white of Junior's shirt is the brightest thing. We sit in the square of light left by the open door, and we wipe the rags pink. This is what we will drink. This is what we will use to cook. Randall is trying to fill the holes in the wood, but he can't. There isn't enough wood. Light cuts through the house, slinky and thin as electricity lines from the chinks of exposed glass. Daddy gets up out of bed, cussing and banging into things, and stumbles to the bathroom. He throws up. He yells for water, and I make Junior bring it. When I pee, I take the flashlight I found in Daddy's toolbox to see that Daddy's missed the toilet, and that there is throw-up on the bathroom floor. I clean it up with the rags we wiped the jugs with; when we take the rags outside to rinse them under the hose instead of in the sink full of dishes, they run yellow and red.

Fill my gas tank.

Junior sits in the middle, his legs dangling, black and skinny. Randall drives. I let my hand fall out of the passenger window, let the wind pick it up, bear down on it, take it as if it is holding it. Both windows are down because Daddy has no air-conditioning, and my legs stick to the rugs that Mama laid over the seat when we were small and the upholstery would get so hot in the summer it would feel like it was melting our skin.
It's too hot for them kids
, she'd said, and she'd beaten the rugs until they were clean, and then she'd washed them, and then she'd tucked them over the seats. Before Randall sat in the driver's seat, I could see that Daddy had worn his side thin. The rest of the fabric feels almost as thick as when Mama put it in. I remember it had itched the first time I rode in the truck cab with them, but I hadn't complained. Back then we'd all fit in the cab, and there was no seat belt law. Now we ride up and through the country toward the interstate, where the closest gas station is. The pines whistle and whip at the side of the road, the fitful wind making them dance. The strip of sky ahead and over the pines is overcast, gray, and then the sun will shine through it in fits, burn through like fire through wax paper. At the gas station, Randall doesn't even let Junior get out so he can go in the store and find something to beg for; I go inside and pay with cash, and Randall pumps. The AC is so cold and the fluorescent lights so bright that it makes it hard for me to breathe; I feel hot, my body sodden as a dripping sponge, my breasts and stomach full of boiling water, my limbs burning. Randall fills the tank, and on the way back he opens up the truck on the back road, presses the gas. We tear down the asphalt, past the trees, and the engine howls; we beat the sky and the wind. Junior bares his teeth and grins.

Cook whatever's in the 'frigerator.

There are six eggs in the refrigerator. A few cups of cold rice. Three pieces of bologna. An empty cardboard box from the gas station that holds chicken bones sucked dry. A half gallon of milk. Ketchup and mayonnaise. The stove is gas, so when Randall lights the burners, the kitchen glows orange and shadows climb the walls. The day tries to light the open doorway and fails. Junior sits in that dim light of the door, his chin on his knees, hugging his legs. He draws designs in the dirt on the floor. He is mad because Randall told him that no, he couldn't watch TV. That he was still in trouble. Randall fries the eggs with the bacon grease Daddy keeps in the old Community Coffee tin on the counter; he dumps in the rice and creole seasoning. I fry the bologna slices, and China must smell them because she starts barking, loud, begging barks. On four plates, we divide the eggs and rice, the bologna sliced in half, saving a little for Skeetah. Junior and Randall drink the milk. I bring Daddy his plate, but he is asleep, so I set it on his dresser and leave him there, dozing in the cave of his room. It is dark, but still he sleeps with his bad arm over his eyes.

Park my truck in the clearing by the pit.

The only real clearing on the Pit is by the pit. They had to cut trees so they'd have room to maneuver the dump trucks, to open the earth. Randall drives Daddy's truck around the house, skirts the trees, the mirrors barely clearing on each side. The chickens scatter before the truck, clucking in complaint, the wind picking them up so they fly in clumsy leaps. Randall parks next to the makeshift grill we cooked the squirrel on; there are tiny lumps of black char stuck to the metal, and red ants stream over it, a living line. While we are rolling up the windows of the truck and locking the toolbox, Junior kneels next to the grill. By the time we are done, Randall shakes his head at Junior, tells him
come on
; Junior's finger is in the middle of the ants, and they have diffused to a puddle over his hand. They are all curving, all stinging, all burying their bites in his skin. Junior has a prideful look on his face, says,
Look how long I can do it
. When Randall grabs him by his arm and I brush the ants away, Junior's skin is puffy, white and red, bumps swelling under the skin.

What is wrong with you, Junior?
Randall asks.

Get the cheapest you can get
, Randall had said, so when Skeetah and Big Henry begin unloading the trunk, I expect cardboard boxes cut in half full of tomato soup. Skeetah pulls out a big bag of dog food, hoists it up over his shoulder, and carries it to the shed. Then he pulls out another fifty-pound bag of dog food and dumps it next to the first, where they sit like lumpy twins. China is barking, high-pitched, from the shed. She is hungry.

“All right!” Skeetah yells, and she stops mid-bark, swallows it. He slides the tin shed door over, and she walks out calmly, brushes him with her head, noses his pants, licks his hand. He squats and rubs her.

Randall and Junior and I have been sitting in the yard for the past hour or so, jobs done; the house is too dark, too hot. It is a closed fist. Junior had been playing with an old extension cord, using it like a rope. He'd kept tying it to trees and twirling the cord like a jump rope. The tree was his partner, but he had no one to jump in the middle. Finally Randall untied the cord and I walked over and grabbed the other end. While the sky was darkening, the sun shining more fitfully through the clouds, we turned the cord for Junior and he jumped in the dust.

Randall walks to the car first. There are two boxes shoved in the corner of the trunk, the tops open and folded apart. In one, there are around fifteen cans of peas, green writing on silver, and a few of potted meat. And in the second box, there are two dozen bags of Top Ramen. Randall grabs the box with the peas and meat in it, and I grab the box with the ramen. Randall holds his box with one arm, his muscles knotting, and shrugs at Skeetah, raises his hand like he is throwing a ball in the air toward a goal raised too high.

“Why did you get all these peas?”

“It's all they had.”

“And only three potted meats?”

“They was wiped out. Last things on the shelves.”

“I told you not to get nothing that need to be cooked. What we going to do with a box full of Top Ramen?”

“We going to eat it.” Skeetah looks up from China. He is checking her breasts, peeling back the tan wrap to see the scabs that line the red watery wounds. China licks his forearm.

“What we going to cook Ramen with? You know the electricity go out in a thunderstorm; what you think it's going to do in a hurricane?”

“We got the grill in the woods. We can cook them over a fire.”

“The wood is going to be
wet
.”

“It ain't even going to be that big of a deal. Probably turn and miss us.”

“No, Skeet. We been listening to the radio all day. It's a category three and it's coming right for us. Got two sacks of dog food! How long you think these peas going to last us?”

“We got other stuff in the house!”

I hate peas. My stomach, which has lately been pulling at me, driving me to eat at all hours of the day to feed the baby, burns.

“Barely enough for five people!” I say, my voice harder than I have ever heard it.

Skeetah unwraps China's breast, and it hangs free, already bruised and wilted from disuse; it is a dark mark on her, marring what was once so white, so pristine. The scar makes what remains even more beautiful. Skeetah looks at China like he would dive into her if he could and drown.

“You ever tasted dog food?” Skeetah asks.

Randall's box jerks, and he looks as if he wants to throw it.

Big Henry closes the trunk, holds up his big hands palms out, like he would calm us.

“Man, we got a little extra. Me and Mama got cases of cold drinks and canned goods at the beginning of the summer, and we been eating from her garden since, trying to save them. Sure Marquise got some extra, since his mama been hollering about him eating too much since they trying to make sure they got enough to eat just in case, too. Skeetah, you ain't got to eat dog food.”