Salvage the Bones (11 page)

“He say again.”

Again I press and turn. This time there isn't even a click. A fly buzzes into the truck, decides to try my arm. I wave it away.

“Shit!” I hear muffled through the machinery.

“Ask him if he want me to do it again.”

Junior doesn't even bother climbing down; he leans out and yells. His little muscles stretch out like shoestrings. When he was a baby, Randall held him the most, and I did the rest of the time. Daddy fed him until he figured out me and Randall could do it. He taught Randall the right ratio for the formula, how to heat the bottle up in a pan of water so that the milk didn't get too hot, and then he went back out in his pickup, trying to find yard work and odd jobs. Afterward, Randall mixed the bottles, kept them filled in the refrigerator so he or I could feed Junior. Whenever Skeetah held him, Junior would cry. When we went to school, Daddy brought Junior to Mudda Ma'am, who had white hair she'd braid into pigtails and loop over her head, and who I never saw wearing anything other than a housedress. She watched kids for money while their parents were at work. She watched Junior until he was old enough for Head Start, which is when her memory started going, so she let the kids go with it. Tilda, her only daughter, moved back in with her to take care of her, but mostly spent her time wearing a dirt path between Javon's house and her own for crack. I wonder if Junior even remembers Mudda Ma'am. He never talks about her, never says her name even when we walk down to the park and see her wandering amongst her azaleas like a child losing at hide-and-seek. Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.

I press, turn, wait.

“Stop!” Daddy is waving the wrench in the air, but the truck is so large that I cannot see his head over the hood, only his black hand, the dirty tool. “Get out. It ain't ready. Go.”

I jump down, Junior already tailing me.

“Go get me another beer, Junior.”

“Y'all always leaving me, Esch. Wait!” Junior says, and he runs to the house, leaving a dust ghost trail behind him.

“She need some time to herself.” Skeetah is saying this. China is beside him. She is snapping at gnats. And with his arms crossed over his chest and a baseball cap high on his head, there is Manny. Every time her mouth shuts, he tries not to, but he flinches. I see it in the balls of his shoulders.

“You should give her a bath or something.” Manny tosses out the comment. Shrugs and justifies the jump when China snaps and shakes her head at what she has missed.

“I will.” Skeetah kneels, runs his hand down China's chest. She looks up and her whole body shimmies like a woman dancing down at the Oaks, a blues club set on six acres of woods and a baseball diamond in the middle of Bois. They host baseball games for black town teams every Sunday during the summer. Once, when the outside bathroom stalls were broken when we were younger, Randall walked me into the blues club during a baseball Sunday to use the bathroom. He and Skeet and I had spent the day begging quarters from our friends to buy pickles and soda at the concession stand, hanging from the chicken wire that backed the dugouts, watching the away team clap and whistle and kick at their bats and throw practice shots while Mama and Daddy were in and out of the blues club.

“I think that's the dirtiest I've ever seen her,” Manny says.

China has a little blood from the other dog, Twist, on her still at the corners of her mouth like lipstick. The red dirt of the Pit has given her a pink gleam, like a barely cooked shrimp still gummy with sea. Manny ignores me and Junior, who is trying to jump at a tree branch and touch it like a basketball goal. The lighter Manny carries in his pockets to smoke his cigarillos dances over and under his knuckles. That is his nervous habit, the thing that he does but does not realize that he does when he is doing some things and thinking of others.

“I'm waiting until right before the fight to clean her. So she be shining on them.”

On the day Randall walked me through the Oaks, all corners and smoke and the bowling of beer bottles hitting tables, he had gripped my shoulders so hard they hurt. Mama had been on the dance floor; I'd never seen her dance before that, and I never would again. She was dancing with a man, not Daddy, while Daddy sat at the edge of the floor and watched. She had shook like China, threw her head back so water glistened down her throat, and her body ran in curves when normally she was all solid. She was beautiful.

“I thought you wasn't going to fight her, her fresh with milk and all.” The lighter stops, and Manny flips it up in the air and catches it. He lights a cigarillo and wedges it in the corner of his mouth and talks around it.

“I ain't. But I'm going to take her. Can't let niggas forget who she is.”

China lays down in the sand indolently. Her breasts, still swollen but maybe a little less now, lay flat before her like a pillow. The skin where her breasts separate from her rib cage is wrinkled—her nipples are a pale pink so colorless they are almost white. I haven't ever touched her chest, but if I did, I would imagine that her teats would be soft and cool against the heat of the day. She does not lay her head in the dirt and huff like other dogs, but stares at Manny and me instead. Like she knows.

“You know Rico going to be there. Fighting Kilo.”

Manny begins flipping the silver and red lighter again when he mentions Rico. The image, which looks like a tattoo, reads
Hearts on Fire
, and pictures two hearts diagonal to one another, going up in flames. His lips kiss the cigarillo and he pulls. China blinks and yawns. There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.

“Well, I hope Kilo ready. Marquise told me some of his cousins from Baton Rouge been talking shit about how they got a boss dog, and they bringing her out to fight, too.” Skeetah rubs China on her side, smoothing her fur over her ribs as he squats over her. Her tail thumps once, raises dust, lies still.

“Kilo always ready.”

Rico is Manny's cousin, the boy from Germaine who bought his dog, Kilo, to mate with China. Rico's big red muscle of a dog with a killing jaw. It was Manny who talked up Kilo to Skeetah. As China grew older, her pulpy puppy muscle hardened like a pearl in the stomach of an oyster, and Skeet's devotion was the living muscle. She grew lean and strong. Manny would talk shit whenever we were all out under the trees as if he could lessen the wonder of Skeetah's prized dog. He thought he could dim her, that he could convince us she wasn't white and beautiful and gorgeous as a magnolia on the trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling.

Manny would sit on a milk crate or a tree stump and say,
My cousin Rico got a fire dog. Probably about the same age as yours, but bigger. More muscle. Got a killing jaw
. Skeetah would ignore Manny, or glance at him while he was dragging China through the sand, around the junk by her teeth locked in a bike tire, and say,
Really
.
Yeah
, Manny would say, and his white teeth would flash in his glass-burned, beautiful face.
Yeah
. China would squeal a dog's squeal and bear down with her haunches, make Skeetah stumble toward her.
We'll see
, Skeetah'd say.

Rico called China small-time until he came to the Pit with Manny one day and finally saw her: knee-high, stout as any boy dog but still sleek with muscle, and her long neck and head like a snake's. Skeetah had her climb a leaning tree and then shred a half of a car tire, pulling it so hard the wire in the rubber made Skeet's hands bleed. When they mated, China had let Kilo lick her from behind, let him mount. Smiled like she liked it. The tendons had stood out in Skeetah's neck, and he squinted so that it looked like his eyes were closed. Kilo had placed his big mouth on her neck like he was kissing her and slobbered on her. She'd snapped at him, figured it for a hold. Hated the submission of it. She nicked him, snapped at him until she threw him off. She'd drawn blood: he hadn't.

“What's the dog name? From Baton Rouge?”

“Boss,” Skeetah laughed. China snorted into the dirt.

“Well, Kilo been fought from Florida to Louisiana. Broke a dog leg once.
They
better be ready.”

“You seen it?”

“What?”

“The break?”

“No, Rico told me.” Manny waves away a gnat, inhales strong on the cigarillo, and blows smoke in a fog in front of his face. “Y'all need to start a fire out here. Why y'all always got so many bugs up here on the Pit? Gnats so bold they out in the middle of the day. Fuck the evening time.” He drops the cigarillo; it smokes a pencil thread and then smothers in the sand.

“We savages up here on the Pit. Even the gnats. Mosquitoes so big they look like bats.” Skeetah nods at me and Junior. “You better watch out. Junior look puny but he'll sucker-punch you in the neck and leave you choking. And Esch—” Skeetah stands when he says it, and China circles him, sniffing in the dirt, “You see how boss China is. You think the other girl on the Pit going to be weak?”

“I ain't saying either of them weak.” Manny still hasn't looked at me. “But you know China ain't as boss as she used to be.”

“What?” Skeetah's tendons are showing.

“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don't think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I'm glass.

Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it's hacking its way out of him.

“You serious? That's when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That's power.”

China is licking Skeetah's hand like she licks the puppies. Skeetah pushes her head away but she keeps at it, and he looks away from Manny. The tendons in his neck smooth. The menace leaves him; if he were a dog, his hair would flatten.

“To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.

“You wormed her yet?” I ask. Does Manny think that of me, that I am weak? That there is a price to this body that swallows him, that pulls at him and takes him until he has nothing left? Is Manny glad because he will never have to pay it?

“Naw. She wouldn't take the Ivomec earlier. Spilled it.”

“You know how to mix it?” Manny slid his lighter into his jean shorts pocket. His muscle shirt was white as his teeth. Shaliyah must have washed. I wonder if he ever told her that about weakness. If he ever called her female, bit it off at the end like underripe sugarcane when he said it?

Skeetah looks up at Manny, his hands dropping, his jaw loose.

“What you mean, mix it?”

“Fuck, you going to kill the dog.” Manny smiles like he wants to laugh. I swallow and realize that I want to push him, to place my hands flat on the muscles of his chest and shove him for looking that way at Skeet, for insulting him. For saying things he doesn't know he is saying about me. I want him to fall over backward, straining his bad arm, and then I want to bear him down in the dirt. Make him touch all of me, for once. “You supposed to mix the Ivomec with cooking oil and then give it to the dog. And don't try doing it with water if you ain't got no cooking oil. Then it won't mix good.”

“She didn't take none of it this morning.” Skeetah is holding China's head still, prying her eyes wide, peering into them.

“You sure?” Manny is still smiling.

“I'm sure.”

“And she only need a little bit. You got a medicine syringe?”

“Yeah, I …” Skeetah pauses. “I got one yesterday.” Looks at me. I figure Randall done told Manny what happened with the farmer and the wormer and the dog, but I know that Skeetah doesn't want everybody to know either. Less people that know, the less people that talk if the farmer ever wanders through the wood our way, asking questions. We live in the black heart of Bois Sauvage, and he lives out away in the pale arteries, so I don't think he will ever come here, swinging his cane like an axe, his dog foaming, probably a rifle in the back window of his gleaming, tinted pickup truck. But I know Skeet would say,
But still
.

“You need half a cc for every twenty pounds. What, China about sixty-five pounds? Give her one and a half.” Manny pulls his arm across his chest, shrugging his shoulder as he does it. Stretching out the wound. This is what he does when he is bored. He looks away from Skeetah and China, beyond Junior, who is peering into the dark shed where the puppies are dozing on their new tile floor, to the woods. Never at me. “Any more than that and she could go blind. And any more than that, she could die.”

Skeetah pulls China to him by her haunches and pries open her jaw, sniffing at her tongue. He has turned from lover to father. She, his doting daughter. I draw a line through the sand with my toe, pull my hands from the pockets of my shorts where they had crept to cup my stomach, trying to expose me so that Manny will look at me like he looks at China. Junior begins whistling into the darkness of the shed, like he would call the puppies to him, lead them into the light, to a new brother, and burrow with them under the house like his lost dogs.

“Get away from the door, Junior,” Skeetah says. China licks his breath, tasting his words. “Esch, we got oil, right?”