Salvage the Bones (5 page)

“You welcome.”

My mouth jumps, and I know it's not a smile, but I slide out of the car and away from Big Henry anyway. He's still looking. I got my hands in the pockets of my shorts, and I pinch the test so it won't slide out when I walk.

“You should wash your hands!” I yell over my shoulder on the way to the house. He could have blood on them, that man's blood, breeding things on his hands. The inside of the man's body come out to make Big Henry sick. When I push the door, Big Henry's already at the outside spigot, scrubbing like he wants to peel his skin off.

In the bathroom, the old pink tile that Mama helped Daddy lay feels wet, but I can't see any water on it. The tub is dry. I pull out the test, run the water while I tear the plastic. I've seen movies, know you pee on the stick, which I do. I lay it on the edge of the bathtub, and I climb in, careful not to kick it over on the floor. The tub is some kind of metal, and it is warm. The plastic mat on the bottom of the tub is soft. I watch the stick like Big Henry watched the man. My feet are black against the white, and they leave dirty streaks when I rub them against the tub; it's like I'm rubbing the color off. I sit on my hands; I avoid looking at my stomach, flat in the tub, the way the man refused to look at the woman lying at his feet, sleeping in the long grass.

Color washes across the stick like a curtain of rain. Seconds later, there are two lines, one in each box. They are skinny twins. I look at the stick, remember what it said on the packaging in the store.
Two lines means that you are pregnant
. You are pregnant. I am pregnant. I sit up and curl over my knees, rub my eyes against my kneecaps. The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles. There is something there.

The Third Day: Sickness in the Dirt

Last night, I dozed and woke every few minutes to wish that I could sleep, could close my eyes and fall into the nothing dark of slumber. Every time I dozed, the truth that I was pregnant was there like a bully to kick me awake. I woke at seven with my throat burning, my face wet.

This is what it means to be pregnant so far: throwing up. Sick from the moment I open my eyes, look up at the puckered plaster ceiling, remember who I am, where I am, what I am. I turn the water on so no one can hear me vomit. I turn it off and lock the bathroom. Lay on the floor. Lay my head on my arm, the tile the temperature of water that's been sitting out on a counter all night, and stare at the base of the toilet, the dust caked up around it like Spanish moss. I lay for so long I could be asleep. I lay for so long that when I raise my head from my arm, my hair has marked cursive I can't read into my skin. The floor tilts like the bottom of a dark boat.

“Esch!” Junior screams as he tries the doorknob, slaps the door, and then bangs out of the back door to pee off the steps.

“Esch?” Randall calls.

“I'm shaving my legs!” I told this to the tile, hoarse.

“Shaving? I'm too old to pull a Junior.”

“I'm almost done.” I bend over the sink and drink until I don't feel like throwing up anymore. Even after I turn the water off, I still keep swallowing. My tongue feels rolled in uncooked grits, but I still swallow. Repeat
I will not throw up, I will not throw up, I won't
. When I walk out of the door, I follow the baseboards.

“You okay?” Randall stands in my way.

“I rinsed the hair out the tub,” I say. “Don't worry.”

The sound of Daddy chugging the working tractor through the yard, I ignore. In bed, I pull the thin sheet over my head, mouth my knees, and breathe so hot it feels like two people up under the sheet.

When I wake up for the second time, the air is hot, and the ceiling is so low, the heat can't rise. It doesn't have anyplace to go. I'm surprised Daddy hasn't sent Junior in here to get me up by now, to work around the house and prepare for hurricane. Late last night, he and Junior carried some of the jugs in, lined them up against the wall while I made tuna fish. Daddy kept counting the bottles over and over again as if he couldn't remember, glanced at me and Randall as if we were plotting to steal some. If Randall's told him that I'm sick, he won't care. Maybe they've scattered: Junior under the house, Randall to play ball, Skeet in the shed with China and her puppies. My stomach sizzles sickly, so I pull my book from the corner of my bed where it's smashed between the wall and my mattress. In
Mythology
, I am still reading about Medea and the quest for the Golden Fleece. Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by my throat. I can see her. Medea sneaks Jason things to help him: ointments to make him invincible, secrets in rocks. She has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with all her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind; he makes her double in two. I know her. When I look up, Skeet's standing in the door looking like he's going to cry.

“What's wrong?”

Skeetah shakes his head, and I follow him.

Inside the shed, the puppies are swimming in the dirt. They lay on their bellies, their feet sticking out like small twigs, bobbing on the dusty current. They twitch and roll. They are silent. They are pink yawning tongues. All but one paddles toward China, grabs her abdomen like we do sunken trees at the river. They have trouble grabbing her tits, knead her belly with their paws like we do with our feet when we balance on the slimy trunks. All but one swims and sucks.

He is the white and brown. He is the cartoon swimmer, the puppy who dove like Big Henry when he was being born. He lays face down. His mouth opens and closes like he is eating the shed floor. Skeetah's face is so close to the puppy that when he talks, the brown and white fur flutters, and it almost looks like the puppy's moving.

“He was okay early this morning. Ate once and everything.”

“When you noticed him like this?” I ask. The puppy turns his head to the side, and it looks like his neck is broken. Skeetah rocks back. The swimmer gasps.

“About an hour ago.”

“Maybe it's China. Maybe her milk's bad for him or something.”

“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.”

My morning nap on the tile comes back strong.

“Maybe he just sick, Skeet.”

“What if it's in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?”

The puppy taps the floor with one paw.

“Maybe if you just get him to eat. Maybe he ain't been able to get enough milk.”

Skeet scoops up the puppy, puts him in the dirt inches away from China. She lowers her head, pointed like a snake. When the puppy jerks his neck again, she growls. It is the rumbling of rocks across packed earth. The puppy lays still. His eyes aren't even open yet. She growls again, and he slides to one side.

“Stop it, China.” Skeet breathes. “Feed him.” He pushes the puppy forward inches. The puppy's face plows into the sand.

China's neck snaps out and she barks. She lashes. Her teeth graze the puppy, whose legs twitch outward and draw in tight.

“Skeet!” I yell.

“You bitch!” he hisses, cutting his eyes at her, wounded. He grabs the puppy, wraps it in his shirt, sits back on his folded feet. China ignores him and lays her head along her white, gleaming arms that look like herons' necks. Her eyelids droop, and suddenly she looks tired. Her breasts are all swollen, and the puppies pull at them. She is a weary goddess.

She is a mother so many times over.

“Maybe she just trying to protect the rest of them. You know, if it's serious, she know.”

Skeetah folds the puppy in his hand like a baseball. He nods.

“Fine.” The bugs outside sing because the day is so bright, it is gold. Daddy guns the tractor; he is pulling plywood in stacks across the clearing, gathering wood from all the corners of the Pit for the storm. Big Henry had told us one of his cousins from Germaine had a whole litter die of parvo; the puppies had just opened their eyes, and then the first one died, and then each day after that, every time his cousin walked out back to his doghouse, he would find another puppy dead, so small and hard that it was difficult for him to imagine that they might have once lived. “You going to come out with me and camp tonight?” The puppy is a black ball in Skeetah's black tee: still, round. Skeetah is not looking at his hands, but he is watching China with something like respect and love in his face. “I need to separate him. Make it easy for him til he dies.”

“Yeah.” I breathe. My stomach flutters. I will watch Skeet kill his own. “You know I'm here.”

Eating is different now. I hunch over a bowl of eggs and rice in the kitchen and I eat but feel like I am lying to myself and Skeetah, who is stealing food for our night in the woods. Every bite is another lie. Food is the last thing I want. Skeetah pulls more plastic bags from under the sink and wraps them around the one holding the food so that the bundle is opaque as a spider's egg sac, and I can't see the mix of things that would be our hurricane supplies that Skeetah is filching.

“Look good?” he asks.

I swallow. I nod.

“We should take a jug of that water.”

“You know Daddy done probably counted them.”

“We'll tell Randall to tell him that it was them beers he was drinking yesterday. Made him miscount.”

“Randall ain't coming?”

“Don't know. But you know Randall tell Daddy whatever.”

Skeetah puts the bundle of bags under his shirt. He looks pregnant now.

I skim the belly of my bowl with my spoon, slide the steel along all the curved places. The rice clumps; the eggs are bundled. It all disappears, and I wonder what I am feeding. I imagine the food turning to mush, sliding down my throat, through my body like water through a storm drain to pool in my stomach. To make what is inside me grow to be a baby in the winter. And Skeet smiles at me and holds the door open, waiting for me to walk through, and he is blind.

Junior is pulling planks of plywood across the yard. He yanks them up and hauls, walking backward through the dirt. Daddy has them scattered all around, pulled from other places on the Pit, and has lain them on the ground. Junior is piling them, and every one leaves a trail of crumbling wood behind him since they are eaten through with black, rotting blotches. Junior is leaving a trail of bread crumbs. He is covered in dust, and it makes him look rolled in chalk. His thin gray shorts sag on him, hanging to the middle of his shins. They must be an old pair of Skeet's. He drops a board, and it claps.

“Where y'all going?” Junior asks.

“None of your business,” says Skeet. He walks into the shed, and I follow.

“Go on, Junior.” I say. He doesn't need to know that the puppy is dying. He doesn't need to know that young things go, too.

“You ain't the boss of me,” Junior says. I try to block his slide into the curtained doorway, but he crawls under me and sees Skeet handling the sick puppy, which doesn't swim now. The puppy's head rolls to the side, and he raises an arm, but I don't know if that is Skeet's fingers pulling him like a puppet, or the puppy, fighting.

“Get out of here, Junior! You so bad,” Skeetah says. He pulls down a bucket from one of the high shelves and lays the puppy inside, and then puts it back up so China can't reach it. She growls, and Skeetah places his fingers in the middle of her forehead, shoves. “Shut up.”

“I'm telling Randall that you fixing to do something bad to the puppy!” Junior runs outside.

“Oh Lord,” I breathe.

China watches, reclining on her side. The puppies feed from her, and she is still, stone. Only her eyes shine like an oil lamp in the light. I should know that's who she is, know that she's often still as an animal ready to attack, but I'm not. Her tail does not wag. I can't help the skin puckering over my stomach, up my arms.

“We'll leave him up here till later tonight. If it's the parvo, hopefully he too far away to infect the other ones.” Skeetah wipes his hands on the front of his holey tee. His shirt comes up over his ribs, his thin, muscled stomach. “Shit. The germs. I need to go wash my hands.”

I'm sitting on the steps, waiting on Skeetah, when Randall comes out the trees. He bounces when he walks, and it's like the darkness under the green gives him his pieces one by one: a chest, a stomach, hips, arms, and legs. Last, a face. Junior is a voice behind him, riding on his back, his feet flopping over Randall's stomach, leaving white dusty marks like powder with his soles.

“What's this Junior talking about y'all trying to drown one of the puppies?”

I feel a quick wave of nausea.

“I don't know where he got that from.”

“He say y'all put it in a bucket.”

“The puppy got parvo.” I say.

“They was going to drown it in the bucket!” Randall hoists Junior up, so when Junior says this, he is the flash of a face over Randall's shoulder.

“And we wasn't fixing to drown it in no bucket.” I say.

“Well, what y'all going to do with it?”

“Take it to back to the pit.”

Randall lets Junior go, and Junior hangs on until he can't anymore, until his legs turn to noodles and he is sliding down Randall like a pole. We three are quiet, looking at each other, frowning.

“Go on, Junior.” Randall says.

“But Randall—”

“Go.”

Junior folds his arms over his chest, his ribs like a small grill burnt black. He needs to put a shirt on.

“Go.”

Junior's eyes are bright. When he runs away, his feet make little slapping sounds in the dirt, and leave clouds of smoke. Skeetah grabs the bucket and his nest egg of food that he stole from the house.

“You can't just kill the thing,” Randall says.

“Yes, I can.”

“You can make it better.”

“Nothing can make parvo better. Puppies don't survive that. And if I don't get rid of this one, the others will catch it. And then they will all die. You think Junior can handle that?”

“No. But they got to be another way.”

“There ain't.” Skeetah hauls the bag over his shoulder along with his BB gun, holds the bucket in one trembling hand. “You know basketball, but you don't know dogs.” He walks away. “Tell him something, I don't know what—but this one got to go.”

“He too young, Esch.” Randall's hands look graceless without a basketball in them. He looks like he doesn't know how to hold them.

“I know,” I say. “But we was young, too.” He knows who I am talking about.

“I keep catching him climbing up on barrels, looking through the cracks, too scared to go inside. Staring at them puppies. China start growling and I pull him away, and I can feel his little heart beating fast. And thirty minutes later I catch him up there again.”

I shrug, lift up my hands like I have something to give him when I know I don't. I start to trot toward Skeetah, who is walking deeper into the shade under the trees on his way to the Pit.

“Come on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.

“Shit,” Randall curses. “Shit.”

Skeetah has stolen this: bread, a knife, cups, a half-gallon jug of punch, hot sauce, dishwashing liquid. He sits them next to the bucket, and he dusts off two cinder blocks with a grill laid over it that he and Randall made into a barbecue pit when we were younger. The steel is burnt black, the stones burnt gray. His rifle hangs by a strap from his shoulder, its muzzle digging into the backs of his legs when he walks.

“What do we need that for?” I ask.

In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.