Salvage the Bones (21 page)

“It's salty. Taste like pecans. And if worse comes to worst, we can eat like China.” Skeetah rubs China from her shoulders to her neck, up along her razor jaw, and holds her face, which goes wrinkly with the skin smashed forward. It looks like he is pulling her to him for a kiss. She squints. I want to kick her. Randall shoulders his box, grabs the ramen box from me, and turns to walk into the house. Junior is tying his cord around an old lawn mower now, pulling at it like he's playing tug-of-war. The sun shines, blazes like fire, funnels down in the gaps between the trees, and lights up Skeetah and China so that they glow, each kneeling before the other, eyes together. Skeetah has already forgotten the conversation, and China never heard it.

“We ain't no dogs,” Randall says. “And you ain't either.” He walks between the thumb and pointer finger of the house, it clenches, and he is gone. The day goes cloudy, and stays.

The Tenth Day: In the Endless Eye

I ate skeet's eggs and bologna. He was out in the shed with China, cleaning her. I ate them all. I cleaned the plate with my tongue, licked the plate clean. I could've eaten the plate. Randall glanced at me once and then went to pulling all the cans out of the cabinets. We sat at the kitchen table and divided and stacked and counted: twenty-four cans of peas, five cans of potted meat, one can of tomato paste, six cans of soup, four cans of sardines, one can of corn, five cans of tuna fish, one box of saltine crackers, some cornflakes we could eat without milk. The rice, sugar, flour, and cornmeal were useless. There were thirty-five Top Ramen noodle packs.

“Shit!” Randall yelled and threw the can of tomato paste he was holding across the room. Outside, the wind pushed between the buildings.

After breakfast, I hear them talking while I'm in the bathroom. The rooster is crowing outside, and China answers him, barking. They are in Daddy's room. When I pee and lean over to grab the toilet paper, my belly pushes into the tops of my thighs, insistent. I ignore it, ease open the door, and creep down the hallway so I can listen to Randall and Daddy through the open door.

“I know,” Randall says. “But we still don't have enough.”

“Y'all eat them dry anyway.”

“Junior eat them dry. Nobody else do.”

Daddy breathes hard so I can hear it catching on mucus in his throat, and then he coughs it out.

“I got enough money in case it's an emergency after the storm. Never know what will happen.”

“But what about—”

“It's just a few hundred, son,” Daddy wheezes. He has only ever called Randall that and has only done so a few times. “I made sure we had enough can goods to last us a few days. No more, no less.”

“I don't think it's enough.”

“FEMA and Red Cross always come through with food. We got that much. If it's not too bad, might still have gas.”

“Everybody still growing, Daddy. Esch, Junior, me. Even Skeet. We all hungry.”

“We make do with what we got.” Daddy coughs. “Always have. And will.” He clears his throat, spits. “Your mama—” he says, and stops. “Y'all found my wedding ring?”

“Yeah. Junior did,” Randall said. “I'll go get it.”

And then there is just the sound of the box fan blowing hard and steady from Daddy's dresser, moving the hot air a few feet before dying in the hot box of his room. I follow him into me and Junior's room, root through my drawer, find the ring, sit it in the middle of his sweaty hand so he can return it to Daddy, who will slip it into his pants pocket, his shirt pocket, on a chain around his neck, anywhere that it will still touch his skin since he has lost the finger for it.

Only Daddy can stand being inside the house, dark and close. All of us, as soon as we can, are outside. There is a blue-gray sheet over the sky, and there is no sun, and the day is only better than the house because there is a pushy wind blowing, the kind that drags at my clothes and shows my body for what it is. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere. The chickens are sitting in a low tree, on some old fence posts, on an old washing machine, on the dump truck and the bonfire wood of their collapsed chicken coop. They huddle, and it is as if they can't bear to be on the ground, in the blowing dirt. I sit on the steps, Junior beside me, his wet skin to mine, Randall on the gas tank with his ball, throwing it up and catching it before the sulky wind can take it away.

Skeetah is building a pile of things outside of the shed. I would say that he is cleaning the shed out, but I cannot, since he is not taking out any of the tools, the oil drums, the broken lawnmowers and bike frames and pots for plants. His pile is all for China: dog food, chains, leashes, blankets, her food bowls. He washes out her bowls with his hands and sits them on the step next to Junior and me, where they sweat small puddles. He carries her blanket to the clothesline and hangs it, and then he bends in two, crouching through the junk in the yard for something.

“What he doing?” Junior asks.

I shrug.

Skeetah straightens up with a large stick in his hand, a branch knocked loose by a rainstorm, and begins beating the blanket. Dirt showers down, fitful as cold rain. Some of it floats a little longer than it should, a slow cloud, and I realize that some of China is in the blanket, that her hair is coming away. It makes me think of cereal in milk, of Rice Krispies in sugar.

“We need more food,” I say.

Randall catches his ball, hugs it to his stomach.

“Any ideas?”

I suck my lips. Feel like chewing something.

“Not yet,” I say.

Randall frowns. Junior lays his head on my shoulder.

“I'm tired,” he says.

I want to say,
It's too hot for you to be hanging on me
, but I look at his baseball knees, his head, which seems too big and heavy for his stringy neck, and instead I say, “Do you want some noodles?”

“Yeah.”

Skeetah is frowning, beating the blanket clean. China starts from her crouch where she has been sitting next to the bucket, running from the first dig of her toes into the dirt. She runs up to the pilings that were the chicken coop and leaps, grinning, barking. She is trying to lick their feathers. The chickens bear down, huddle. China flies past, turns to the fence posts, jumps there, almost meeting them with her head. They squawk and hop, alight again on the wood. She ignores the dozen in the tree and races for the washing machine. She flies and lands on it, and the chickens roosting there scatter.

“Skeet!” I yell.

“China,” Skeet calls and hits the blanket again.

I go into the dark house to cook Junior's noodles, and Daddy sleeps so hard and is so quiet that it feels like I am alone there.

“We should look for eggs,” says Randall. He says this while Junior is sitting on the steps, his face buried in the bowl, slurping at the soupy water left after he has sucked the ramen in long wormy strings over his chin and into his lips. He hates when I break the noodles before I boil them in the pot.

“They need to be in the refrigerator.”

“We can boil them. They'll keep for days.”

Junior is drinking the last of the soup, still hunched over the bowl. I wish I'd made myself some; my tongue turns loose at the idea of the salt. Junior's back is a young turtle's shell, so thin it would snap if stepped on.

Skeetah is piling the folded blanket on top of the food bags along with the leashes and China's practice tires and the syringes and the medicine he stole from the farmer. Junior sticks his finger into the bowl, wipes it along the bottom to get the seasoning, and licks it. He bangs into the kitchen, throws the bowl into the sink, and bangs back out. He runs over to Randall, the soles of his feet flashing yellow, the color of China's eyes.

“You should put some shoes on,” I say.

“You coming, Skeet?” he asks as Randall slides from the gas tank, upright, already squinting into the woods, the dust, the wind.

“I'll catch up. Gotta exercise China. She going to be cooped up, and she ain't going to like it.”

Randall shakes his head and walks around the washing machine, the lawn mower, the old broken RV like he is finding his way through a maze. The chickens cluck at him, ruffle and settle their feathers against the pushing air as he passes. I am hungry.

“We could use more eyes,” I say. “Mama taught you how to do it, too, and you know Junior don't know how to spot them yet.”

“In a minute.” Skeetah shrugs. China, at his knee, lets her head fall to the side, tongue out, as if it is the first time she's ever seen me. Her ears fold over like napkins.

I sigh, don't even know if he can hear it over the wind, and follow Randall into the detritus of the yard to hunt. The wind pushes against me so hard that I imagine it is the wind Medea called up after she slew her brother, to push the boat so quickly that the wake was a bloody froth; I barely have the energy to walk, to push back. On mornings like this when I am hungry, the nausea is always worse. There is the sound of China's scrambling against Skeetah, of the tin shed shaking, of him laughing and China barking, but I leave them to it behind me and keep my eyes on the ground.

The chickens have made their own plans for the storm; they have packed their eggs away, hidden them well. As Randall and Junior and I spread out underneath the oaks and the pines, hunting, Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs.
Look but don't look
, she said.
They'll find you. You gotta wander and they'll come.
She'd leaned over like Randall, her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog.
They're usually brown and have some feathers stuck to them
, she'd say, pointing.
The eggs look that way because of the mama. Whatever color the mama is, that's what color the egg is
. Her lips were pink, and when she leaned over like that I could smell baby powder drifting from the front of her dress, see the mole-marked skin of her chest, the soft fall of her breasts down into her bra.
Like me and you
, she said.
Like me and you
.
See?
She smiled at me, and her eyelashes met her eyelashes like a Venus flytrap. Her thick arm would rub against mine, and I would follow her pointing, and there would be a whole treasure of eggs, nestled one against the other: cream and white and brown and dark brown and speckled so that they almost looked black. The hens would lurk, murmuring.
The cock, he always running off being a bully
, she said
. But the mama, the mama always here. See?

The pines shrug in a sky that covers like a wet T-shirt. Below, Randall fills Junior's shirt with eggs that they gather from the most difficult places, places that only Junior, with his pin fingers, can reach: in the elbows of the dump truck's engine, between the bottom of an old stinking refrigerator and the earth, wedged into the coils of a mattress chewed bare by animals. I search and find nothing.

The eggs in the front of Junior's shirt are warm; they pull the front of the neck down to a V, and where his collarbones meet, it looks like two marbles against the skin. I set the eggs in the black pebbled pot that Mama used to cook gumbo in, count them as they roll and settle. Randall holds the sides of Junior's shirt because Junior seems to be bending to the roll of the eggs. Twenty-four. There are twenty-four eggs to boil, to save, to eat. They are something.

When Manny appears, there is no sun to reach out its hand, to stroke him like a dog, to make him blaze and shine. He does not burn, but still there is something about him that glows, like a fire that is dying and the heat lives in the ashes, plain. I see him first because I am sitting on the steps. Junior's and Randall's backs are to him as they place the eggs in the pot. When Manny sees me looking at him, he catches on the secret mid-walk, like it's a untied shoestring, and his eyes go wide, whiter in his face. But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm.
Where do they go?
I think, and he is looking at Randall's back, not my eyes, and I hate him, and I wonder if I will ever stop loving him.

“Cuz,” he says.

Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.

“Shit,” Randall says and turns.

“Sorry.” Manny's shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”

Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?” They walk outside together, stop at the foot of the back steps.

I stand with the pot. The eggs wobble against one another, sound like rocks at the bottom of a dry creek, rolling from a foot.

“Junior, go play,” Randall calls through the door. Junior shoots away, freed from his chores. He is all bald head and blurred arms and legs. I run water into the pot in the sink until it covers the eggs.

“Skeetah ain't here?”

“Think he somewhere off in the woods running China.”

“She's a beast.”

“Yeah.”

I sprinkle salt into the water, but there is more rice than salt in the shaker.

“Coach called you about the game?”

“Said they was paying for Bodean to go to camp.”

“I didn't know.”

I light the stove with a match and set it to boil. I stand a few feet away from the door in the dark of the kitchen so they can't see me, and I squint through the screen.

“I'm sorry,” Manny says.

“Well.” Randall sighs.

“I don't know what happened.”

“My best friend got into a fight with my brother is what happened.”

“I had other shit on my mind. Wasn't nothing against Skeet.”

“He don't think that. He think you made him poison his dog.”

“I wouldn't do no bullshit like that. You know me.”

Randall has nothing in his hands. Manny fans his face like he's waving away gnats.

“He also think you dogging my sister.”

“Randall, come on, man.”

“What you want?”

“We like family.”

Manny shoves his hands into his pockets and bends in like he's curling for a blow, as if he's ashamed to say what he's said.

“Rico your family. I ain't blood.”

“Like blood.”

“That's the problem.” Randall shakes his head like a horse trying to fling off reins. “I'm the only one.”

“That ain't true.”