Salvage the Bones (9 page)

“Shut up, Junior,” I say.

Randall pulls Junior to him and puts his hand on his head the same way I put mine on Skeet's when he was wiping off the blood. Junior quiets, turns to face us, and Randall's arm is around his neck like a scarf. Junior's still smiling; he still thinks he's about to run with us.

“You ain't running nowhere, Junior.” Junior's face pulls. Randall's arms cradle him by the chest. Randall looks down at Junior's head, wipes away moss caught in his hair. “You'd do that for me?” Randall speaks to Junior's head, so at first I don't know who he's talking to, and then I remember Skeet, who is nodding next to me now. With each dip of Skeetah's head, sweat drips unimpeded from his crown, past his strong nose, his downy upper lip, to fall from his chin like a weak summer sprinkle.

“Yes,” Skeetah says, still nodding. “Yes.”

Skeetah sketches the plan. It is what makes him so good with dogs, with China, I think, the way he can take rotten boards and make them a kennel, make a squirrel barbecue, make ripped tile a floor.

“You too big to be out there in that field.”

“Wasn't going to go anyway,” says Big Henry. Skeetah shrugs.

“So you stay here in the woods with Junior. Shut up, Junior. This is serious. You ever heard of Hansel and Gretel? Well, that's who own that house, and they want to fatten you up like a little pig and eat you. So shut up and stay in the woods with Big Henry. And if you sneak out like you did last night—shut up, Junior, I saw you—I'm going to catch you and whip you. That's if the white people don't eat you first.”

“You want me to help you get in the barn?” Randall asks.

“No, I don't need no help. Besides, you too tall. You going to be at the edge of the field, right by the fence, and keep watch on the whole field. You see anything, you whistle.”

“What about Esch?” Randall says.

“Esch going to be in the middle of the field, laying down by them stumps right there: she got a better shot of the driveway than you 'cause she going to be closer. If she see something, she going to whistle. And loud, Esch. No baby whistles.”

“I knew how to whistle with my fingers in my mouth before you did, Skeet,” I say.

“I know,” he says. He glances at me when he says it, and he and I both know that he is telling the truth. “Well, all right. Is everybody ready.” He says it like that, like a statement rather than a question. Skeetah is not giving us any room to not be ready. “All right, then. Once you see me come out that window, I want everybody to start running. Don't look back. Run.”

There is a line through us all, stringing from one to another across the field; Skeetah with his knees bent, his back a black ball, running toward the barn window. Me on a low rise, grass tufted up unevenly around me in bunches, lying like a snake in wait behind the tree stumps. Randall hidden in the woods behind me, crouching behind a large, low bush with leaves the size of my fingernails. And Big Henry and Junior, even farther back behind Randall. When I left them, Big Henry was bouncing back and forth on his feet, and Junior was squatting on the ground away from him, his feet splayed out in a Y, digging with a stick to raise the pine needles into peaked roofs.

The cows rip bunches of grass away, feed steadily, chewing and swallowing and yanking. The egrets flap, walk in small couples. One leaves its mate to wander over to me, pecking between each step so that his beak is another leg. It walks him closer. I hiss at it so it stops. It is whiter than the other egrets. Its feathers are soft, downy, as if it is younger, recently born; a fluffy, warm body beats under the down. I hiss again, and it is a flailing pillow, beating away. The cows ignore Skeetah as he runs by unless he brushes too close to their salad plate, and then they skitter away a few feet to settle. Skeetah crawls under the other edge of the fence and sprints to the window he showed me, a leaping shadow. His hand moves to his face and away again, and I know that he must be taking out the razor. He jumps and pulls himself up onto the window's ledge, balancing with his feet braced against the wall, and he begins to fiddle with the window. My underarms feel flushed and swampy.

“What is he doing?” I talk myself into hurrying him. “Now, Skeet, do it.”

He wrenches it, but the window will not open. He slides down the wall and puts his hand to his face again. Grabbing the hem of his shirt, he yanks it over his head, wraps it around his arm, and jumps back up on the ledge. With one arm holding him up, he elbows the window with the T-shirt. It breaks. He elbows it again, and it shatters. Skeetah is all forearms and knees, truncated thighs and twisting shoulders, and then he is black as the shadowy interior of the barn, and then he is gone.

“Thank God,” I whisper to the egret, who will not leave me, and pecks in a suspicious circle near my foot.

What I can see of the road is empty. The trees are moving so it seems like they are a green, shimmering curtain in the distance, the road fading to a dark green velvet line in the middle. I stare at it, try hard to see something, run my tongue over my lips again and again, twist it into a wave to ready it. My arm feels like it is going dead, so I roll to the side, glance at the road. Is that blue, a flash of metal like a dying star? But there is nothing. I hiss at the bird again, wonder why Manny didn't come by, wonder when he will come again, if he will want more from me next time. If I can get him to look at me in the eye again. To not walk away from me.

The pain is sudden, sharp. It shoots through my hips and I squeeze my legs together and wonder why my bladder feels like a soaked sponge. I can't help it. I have to pee. Again.

“Shit, Skeet,” I say to the side of the barn, the empty shimmering road. I will hold it. It shoots again, and I rock my hips side to side in the grass, squeezing my legs. Sometimes when I move like this, squeeze like this, it helps. The pressure eases. It lasts for a shake of my head, a nod at the still empty road, and then it is back. Unbearable, a tadpole grown to the confines of its egg. Pressure. I can hold it. I can't.

I stand up, look back toward where I know Randall is crouching in the green. Maybe I can pull my panties and shorts to the side and pee that way. I pull the elastic at the crotch, but they are too tight. I cannot face the road and pee. It is impossible. Randall and Big Henry, and farther back, Junior, will see me. I can deal with them seeing a flash of shoulder, of leg, even a nipple, but I cannot bare myself in this field, my butt facing them, and pee. It will only take a moment, I tell myself. Jumping into a squat and facing Junior and Randall and Big Henry in the woods, I put my butt as low to the ground as I can and yank my shorts down in wedges until I feel the air on my skin. I force the pee out, and it hits the grass as strongly as a rush of water out of a water hose. It beats the grass low. The baby and the pee are one, there when I forget they are there, when I forget so well I think they might be gone. I start to inch up my pants, but they are stuck, and I'm trying to miss the wet-pee grass when I hear it, and I wish I hadn't. Randall's whistle, high-pitched and sharp, short. I yank my shorts all the way up, fall forward on my hands, and turn my head to see a silver grille, a dark blue blur, growing to fill the driveway.

They're here
spasms through my head like a bat, but I put my fingers in my mouth, and I blow and blow and blow until I hear Randall scream, “Esch!”

Skeetah's arm is the first thing to break the surface of the window. The truck is pulling up the driveway and rounding the side of the house, and I am crawling backward on my hands and knees, the cows nervously shuffling away from me, the birds waving them on, my egret familiar making squeaking sounds at my side as it abandons me, when the door to the truck opens and I rise up on my legs, still bending low, still backward. There is a dog in the bed of the truck, and it is leaping like a doe, barking to call attention to itself, again and again and again, its fur long and shaggy, the color of the cloud dark sky above me, its dark head pointed toward me in the field, its nose intent on our line.

The white man is the first to get out of the truck. He slams the door behind him, waves his hands at the dog as if he is casting out a fishing net for perch in the shallow tides on the beach at night. Someone has bound my feet with barbed wire: I cannot run. Skeetah's upper body is hanging out the window when the dog leaps from the truck, growling to a bark like a shovel dragged along asphalt wearing away to stones. Skeetah falls face forward, lands on his forearms and his head, crumples to a roll and then rises. His feet kick backward behind him and he is running as the man looks toward the other side of the barn that he cannot see, follows the dog, who is bounding around the barn, the color of a storm wrapped in rain. Skeetah is running with one arm above his head, back and forth as if he is beating the air with his palm, and I realize that he is telling me to run, and I turn to sprint while the man behind us is yelling, “Hey! Hey! What are y'all doing in my field? Hey!” And while he is too old, hair the color of his dog's, has arms that are too short and a belly, and his face is already red from trying to sprint so that he has given up on running in the middle of the field, his dog is all fire, combustion and spring. Skeetah catches me, wheezes, “Run,” so I stop looking at the man, the woman who's out of the truck now, her hands on her pink-clad hips, her hair bright red, and the man walking toward us through the field, swinging his right hand as if there is a cane there, limping. I run. The dog yelps excitedly, yards from us.

“Hey!” the man yells to the dog. The last I see of him he is turning, still gesturing with no cane, toward the house. The wood opens and swallows us. Big Henry and Junior are gone, as well as Randall, who is all bounding grace ahead of us, his head low, his legs flying out back behind him like black ribbons. The dog's bark catches in the back of its throat, rips on its teeth on the way out. My heart is gushing, and my arms and legs are stinging. I feel the pee weight at my center. I would run it away.

“Hey!” We hear the man yell again, his voice muffled in the blanket of the woods. Then rifle shots. “Twist!” he calls. “Twist!” The voice dwindles to nothing in the threads. My feet catch, hold, and kick the earth. Skeetah runs next to me in the funny way he's always had, his hands like blades. Every time the dog barks, it's as if his teeth are grazing my neck. My skin is tight with fear.

“Come on,” Skeet says, and he is moving in front of me, leaving me. I stretch my legs, reach with my heels, to gain ground. The dog rumbles behind me. Slipping through a clutch of pine trees ahead is Big Henry: Junior clings to the bulk of him, his head turned backward to watch us. His face is immobile except for the jarring of Big Henry's run, which shakes his mouth open with each running step. I expect him to be crying or screaming, but he isn't. He knows this frantic run before this ruinous dog. Big Henry pounds the earth now, footsteps heavy for once as he tears through low bushes like a startled bear. Randall dodges the trees like a point guard. The dog snaps and I swear I can feel his saliva on my legs, and then I see that Skeetah has scooped a branch in his hand, holds it like a bat but then swings it backward like a golf club.

“Faster than this,” Skeet stutters all at once. I know I am, the secret in my stomach be damned. I stretch through my toes, my arches, my heels, my tendons, my calves, unlock the hinges of my knees, the fulcrum where my thighs meet my hips. This is that other thing that I can do.
Run
.

“Halfway!” Skeetah yells as we pass a cathedral of oaks, leaving clouds in the dusty chapel at their middle. The dog yips with each bound. Still there. I expected it to lose interest, to bound off, but it will not, inexorable as hovering thunder.

“Get!” Skeetah yells, and swings the branch again at the dog. I am even with him now, but still we cannot lose it. We come to a hill, barren of pines but slick with needles; at the bottom, Big Henry is picking himself up, one arm grabbing at the ground and one hand in a white grip on Junior, who has not let go through the fall.

“Go!” I yell. Randall is prying Junior from Big Henry, who is still soundless, and now we are a pack, Randall our lead, signaling us through the widest gaps through pines, over the smallest bushes, around the staunchest oaks. The saw palmetto cracks like whips at our shins. The dog's barks turned high-pitched:
Success
, it says. The pit is below us, and we hug its edge, sprinting ever faster to the house, to a slammed back door, to a car's roof, to escape. The woods between the pit and our house and the shed pass with a sigh, and then we are in the backyard, and Skeetah flings away the branch. The dog skids to a stop. He barks loudly in pleasure, calls the florid man excitedly.
Here, they are here!
he says.

China is the shushing sound, the finger laid against the lips in admonition. She is on him, a white blur against gray, snow on cloud, the biting cold. Unforgiving. She is one great tooth. Twist's growl meets with hers but already he is turning, rolling to a ball, screaming. Randall runs to the top of the steps with Junior, who is still staring, his mouth still open, and I have stopped at the foot of the steps, Big Henry on the roof of his car, to watch Skeetah lurch out of his run, his arm still outstretched, and pivot to watch. Twist screams again, and there is a frantic lick to it. China grips him and arches her back, digs in as her whole body jerks toward the other dog. It looks like she is giving birth again. Twist's scream turns to a squeal. She has him by the neck. Skeetah is smiling.

“Skeet!” I yell. I slap him on the back, his muscle like dinner plates between the flat plane of his shoulder blades. He looks at me, surprised, the smile startled from him.

“What?”

“She's going to kill him.”

He looks back to China, who is curved in two, a fang, and is jerking moans out of the other dog, who is in fits against her, bleeding.