Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I had to pee.”

  He picks up an Ace Bandage so old it’s faded white and pulls the hem of his shirt over and behind his neck so it hugs his shoulders like a shrug. He’s so skinny it’s loose on him.

  “It’s all right,” he says.

  The wrap is one of Randall’s, probably used on his knee, which he’s troubled so much his coach told him he needed surgery. The school will pay for it, but Randall keeps putting it off because he doesn’t want to lose any playing time. After games, his knee swells up like a water balloon.

  “I whistled once I saw them.”

  “I know.” Skeetah is holding the wrap with one hand, trying to wind it around his torso with the other. The wounds are angry; there are four of them gouged into his stomach and side. He is failing.

  “Let me,” I say, and I grab one end. Skeetah lets it fall. His head is closer to the color of the rest of his body now. When I fell asleep last night, he was in the shed with China, laying her floor, resettling them in. The kennel is still three pieces of wood hammered together at bad right angles, rooting into the dirt. “You put something on it?”

  “Just took a shower.” Skeetah mumbles this into his underarm. “Then I poured some peroxide on it. From China’s bottle.” That’s the other thing he does with her after fights, wipes at her cuts with a towel he’s washed, bleached, and dipped in hydrogen peroxide. She smiles lazily like a woman in a new Fourth of July outfit being complimented.

  “This clean?” The wrap looks dirty, worn thin.

  “I washed and bleached it last night,” Skeetah sighs. I wrap the bandage once, and I expect him to flinch from the cloth, but he doesn’t. For once he doesn’t smell like dog. He smells like the constant wind that pushes the tide in over the Gulf of Mexico, but not the tide at the beach. The tide at the Bay of Angels, which smells of the oysters fresh dug from the mud. Daddy used to take us swimming there when we were younger, in a little cove. The water was murkier than the river, and colder, and the bottom was a landscape of oyster shells. We dug up oysters, threw them out farther away from the cove. Marsh grass waved at the edges, and pines leaned out over the water. Pelicans floated in rows. Daddy would fish off a sinking pier, and sometimes on a ledge on one of the support pilings under the bridge with some of his friends, and most of the time, at the end of the day, he’d be left with an empty cooler of beer and one or two croakers bleating in the icy water. His friends caught fifteen-pound redfish they’d have to wrestle from the water. Daddy’d call us out at the end of the day, more drunk than mad, the sunset turning through the sky behind us like a top. Our feet were always a snarl of cuts.

  “Tighter,” Skeetah says.

  Mama went with us swimming in the bay sometime. She circled Daddy and his friends, sat in a sagging plastic and aluminum yard chair Daddy’d found on the Pit. She laughed at their jokes sometime, but she didn’t drink any beer. Mostly she just sat with a fishing pole braced between her legs. She was the one that caught a baby shark; it was the same color as the water, as long as her arm, and strong. Daddy tried to take the pole from her and she wouldn’t let him. His friends laughed, tried to get her to give it to them, but she held it in both hands and walked the shark up and down the oyster-shelled sand, in the biting marsh grass, under and out from the bridge. She walked it tired, her arms big and round, strong under the woman fat. She coaxed it to death. And when it gave up, she hauled it in and let out a laugh that swooped up into the sky with the pelicans and flew away, wind-ready and wide as their wings. She cooked it in butter that night, soaked it in buttermilk to take the wild out of it. When we ate it, it was tender, sea salty, and had no bones.

  “Almost done?” Skeetah is watching my hands. I wonder if he sees the wounds underneath the bandage already, if he imagines what they will look like once healed. His own fight scars.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The last time Mama went with us to the bay, Daddy flipped his line backward to cast it out over the water and caught her palm with his hook. The barbed needle sank in deep. She pulled it out and rinsed it off in the water we were swimming in. Her stomach was big with Junior. It healed crooked and purple, puffy, and she had to go to the clinic to get an ointment for it when it started to leak pus. Whenever she would walk me through the store or through a crowd when we were out in public, holding the back of my neck with her hand, I’d feel the scar and see those pelicans. Up close, their beaks were etched with dark like the barnacles on a ship’s hull, the same color as Mama’s hand, and they were sharp as knives. They didn’t like us swimming close to them. Her hand was special, her own, one. Mama.

  “You ran slow yesterday.”

  I hold the bandage close. Skeetah grabs a rusty safety pin from off the sink and pins it shut.

  “Only in the beginning,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” The light is creeping into the bathroom like fog.

  Skeetah pulls his shirt back over his head, looks down at my body to my chest, my stomach, my feet. What does he know? I shift, barely help myself from folding my arms.

  “Maybe you’re gaining weight.”

  “You’re saying I’m fat?” I am trying not to cry. I don’t want him to know, but I can’t tell him, because I can’t say it. I haven’t said it to myself yet, out loud. Just chased it around in my head since I saw the lines.

  “No,” Skeet says. “Just growing up, maybe.” The light is thick in the bathroom; it suffuses everything after he walks out, the smell of the bay going with him, leaving me and a smell like fried food that makes me turn on the water in the sink and vomit as quietly as I can, my face in the bowl.

  I am kneeling on the sink. The bowl is hard metal, and where it meets the plastic of the counter, there is a ridge. It is cutting into my knees. I want to see how big I am, to see if you can tell. This is the only private mirror in the house. A big mirror with a fake gold-worked frame hangs in the living room, but I cannot do it there. I have to see myself as Skeetah, Randall, Junior, Daddy, and Manny do, have to see beyond my hands for eyes, hands that cup my stomach in my sleep so that I wake with them in the top of my shorts.

  I tuck the hem of my shirt up through my bra. My breasts are full, turgid and tender the way they get before my period comes on. But I can still keep them smashed down in my bra. There’s the flat Y of my torso leading into my waist. Dark marks over my stomach like small black beans, old chicken-pox scars from when I was little and lay on the sofa, delirious with pain, for three days. Me, Randall, and Skeetah had it at once, and Mama must’ve rubbed us down with chamomile lotion every hour, but it felt like an endless dark day, like the kind they have in Alaska midwinter, between each time she’d lay my head in her lap, lift my shirt, and rub ease and sleep into my skin. I even had small burning bumps on my tongue.

  Before I became pregnant, my stomach had been almost flat, the belly button an outie: an eye squeezed shut. The skin dark and spotted darker. I don’t look fat so much, now, just a little past full. The eye is open to a slit. There is a layer of meat around the belly button. I turn to the side, my feet braced on the sink bowl, my toes on the bottom, my butt on my heels, my knees down, and I sit up as straight as I can. There it is. It is not a watermelon curve. It is not that large. It is not a cantaloupe curve; it is not that insistent. The closest I can get to it is a honeydew curve; it is long and slight. I push with my hands, and it will not sink to dense pearls like fat. It pushes back, water flush and warm. I unpin my shirt. We all share clothes, so it’s mostly men’s T-shirts for me, loose jeans and cotton shorts. They cannot tell, but it is there. Perhaps Skeetah saw when I walked from the water and put on my clothes. I do not know, but I will not give him the chance to see again now. I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.

  The piles that Daddy has been building like birds’ nests all over the yard for the hurricane are not growing today. Daddy is secreted like
a snake in the dirt under his dump truck, his legs in dark blue pants, the hems tucked into his work boots that used to be brown when Mama bought them for him years ago for Christmas and are now black. Junior is sitting next to Daddy’s feet, digging a cluster of holes in the dirt. He smoothes the dirt away so that there is no evidence of digging, only holes.

  “Hand me that wrench, boy.”

  Junior doesn’t hear or he doesn’t want to move. He palms the sand gently, the way he used to pat the stray dogs that lived on the Pit before Skeetah bought China home. They were always mottled the color of dried sticks, of leaves sinking into earth and darkening, and they followed Junior around the Pit, licked his face when he had it out with Randall over not wanting to take a bath, or because he’d failed another test. They boiled around him like a rain-swollen creek when he’d run out into the bare yard, the trees, and cry. They nested with him under the house. But China had been settled in for two years now, and the dogs had disappeared. I do not remember if she killed them, or if they slunk off one by one in the night once she took on weight and could rip rubber tires in two. Junior’s forever the puppy weaned too soon.

  “Junior!” Daddy yells. I’m walking through the ripped net of the shade, trying to edge past them unseen. I want to find Skeetah. He has medicine to give.

  “Junior!” Daddy beats the rim of the dump truck with whatever tool he has, and it clangs like a bell. Junior startles, drawn from his holes. “The wrench!”

  Junior picks up the wrench. He is strong for a little boy. When he grabs it and curls, I can see his muscles bunch. He is skinny in the way of picky-eating little boys before they reach puberty, when they either turn lean or get fat, and then grow into their man bodies. He lets it rest on Daddy’s leg.

  “Here,” Junior breathes. I move too quickly, and he sees me. I shake my head, but he’s already saying it. “Esch. Where you going?”

  “Esch! Where your brothers at? I need they help.” Daddy is a voice billowing from the bottom of the car like smoke.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?” he bellows.

  “I said I don’t know.” Junior is rising to follow me. I walk faster.

  “Where Skeetah at? Randall here?” Junior asks.

  “Hold up!” Daddy yells. “Come here.”

  Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck. It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer.

  “I want you to get up in the driver’s seat. When Junior come tell you, I want you to try to start it.”

  “I can go find Skeetah if you want.”

  “No.” Daddy’s already putting one shoulder back underneath the truck. “I got to get this fixed today. Now. They going to be money to be made after this storm come through by a man with a dump truck. José hit them folks in Mexico yesterday, but they already got another storm out in the Gulf. Tropical depression number ten. And it’s so far out and the water so hot…” Daddy trails off, his voice dissolving under the metal. The truck broke right after Mama died, and Daddy got disability checks from it since it was an accident. I don’t ask him how he’s supposed to be able to drive a big dump truck after the storm without somebody asking him about it. Junior crouches next to Daddy. In the dirt next to him, a beer bottle, half full, is screwed into the sand.

  There are multiple levers, and I don’t know how to work any of them.

  “Tell Daddy I don’t know how to start the truck,” I yell to Junior. The seat is peeling away at the seams like plastic Kraft wrappers, and the foam padding underneath is damp. The dash and the steering wheel and the glass are coated in dust turned candy shell hard.

  Up close Daddy smells like vinegar, like salt. That is his fresh alcohol smell.

  “You see that there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the clutch. That’s the brake. Put this here in neutral. You don’t need to do nothing to this. But when you turn the key, press the clutch and the brake at the same time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t touch nothing else.” His hands are like mine, like Skeet’s. That’s where we get these flat wide fingers from. But I look at his face and his collarbone punching up through the neck of his shirt like knuckles, and I can’t see anything else he ever gave me. He walks around the side of the truck. Minutes later, Junior clambers up the side of the truck.

  “He say start it.”

  I press and turn. There is a click and then nothing. Junior drops and runs, reappears climbing.

  “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, hang
ing 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.