by Jesmyn Ward
I’ve crossed the threshold out of the bathroom three times, and each time that I think I am done crying, that I can go back into the game to sit next to my brothers as if nothing has happened, my eyes start leaking and my chest burns, hotter than the bright air with the bees drowsing in the crape myrtle, and I have to go back into the bathroom. I go in the other stall, pull my feet up, squat on the toilet. Smash my face into my salty knees. When I can breathe, I leave the stall to splash cold water on my face, but my eyes still look red, my eyelids swollen in the funhouse mirror. And then I think that Manny saw me, and that he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands, and then I am crying again for what I have been, for what I am, and for what I will be, again.
“Esch, you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“Big Henry told me to come check on you. I told him that I didn’t want to come in the girls’ bathroom, but he said…”
“I’m coming. Hold on.”
At least my face is dry. Maybe everyone will just think that I am high. I want to let Junior go ahead of me back around the building to the gym, so I walk slowly, but then he walks slower so he doesn’t leave me, and it takes us ten minutes to walk around to the front.
“You okay, Esch?” Junior asks.
Desultory claps flit out like small evening bats. Occasional whoops. It sounds empty.
“Yeah.” I am breathing through my mouth. In the bathroom, I cried so hard I felt nauseous. Kids are milling around the gym door like our chickens, and I expect Junior to run off with them, to leave me to duck into the gym alone, but he doesn’t. He loops his arm around my elbow like he is escorting me, and I keep my head down, my eyes half closed so all I see are anonymous legs, tennis shoes, gold-sandaled feet as Junior leads me up the bleachers. We circle Big Henry, sit up and to the side of Skeetah so that Junior and I are farthest away from the crowd and the floor, up here in the dark. It is only after I sit that I realize that Manny and his girl and Rico are sitting a few seats below us and to the right. Manny is leaning forward, away from her, as if he would run down the bleachers and into the game. His shirt pulls across his shoulders, his tense back, and I look away.
“Esch?” Skeetah asks. He is a little less high now, his eyes a little less dull.
“I’m fine.” I try to say it loudly.
“Fuck that nigga.” Skeetah touches my knee lightly, punctuates what he says with a nod. It is as if he is touching the sadness in me with his hand, so I move my knee away, smash my lips together. Already I want to cry. He touches my leg again, with one finger this time: lightly, quickly. “Fuck him.” He spits this at Manny’s back, loud enough for Big Henry to hear.
“What’s up?” Big Henry asks. I shake my head and look down.
Skeetah slaps the bench with both hands. It echoes loudly. Rico, who was elbowing Manny and talking, his hands like birds, turns at the sound, smiling to show his gold. Manny shakes his head, but Rico gets up anyway, ascends the stairs two steps at a time, and stops in front of me and Skeetah. In the gloom, his teeth shine.
“I heard your bitch had our puppies,” Rico says.
“Our puppies?” Skeetah asks.
“Yeah, ours. I thought we was splitting them down the middle.”
“Really.”
“They healthy?”
“Why don’t you ask your cousin if they healthy?”
“I want to see them.”
“Ain’t nothing for you to see.” Skeetah sits up slowly from his recline. He hunches over when he speaks, his shoulders curved, his muscles gathering.
“What you mean?”
“It was China’s first litter. Lot of them born dead, and lot of them done died.”
“Manny say one look just like Kilo. That’s the one I want.”
“It’s dead.” Skeetah stands, and he is barely taller than Rico, who is standing a bleacher below him, and half Rico’s size. But Skeetah tilts his head to the side, squints at Rico, and I know he’s not scared, that he will never be scared. “China killed it,” he says, and there is a lyric in his voice. He almost sings it when he says it, gleeful.
“Well, then I want another one.”
“All they got left for you to have is the runt.”
“What the fuck I want with a runt?” Rico laughs when he says it. It sounds as metallic and hard as his teeth.
“Well, that’s all I got. That one and a black-and-white one. Both small.”
Skeetah is omitting the white one, the one that is a clone of China.
“Manny?”
“Yeah.” Manny walks up the stairs to us, looks at Skeetah and Rico. I ignore his black eyes.
“Thought you said Skeetah got a white one look just like China.”
“He do,” Manny says.
“Ain’t it a little early to be trying to claim one of my bitch’s puppies?” Skeetah says. He is leaning forward, straining at the leash. “They a week old. You know like I know that if they make it through the first six weeks, then they ready to go. So until six weeks go by, you ain’t got no fucking business claiming shit.” Skeet is smiling, and he is rubbing his thumbs with his fingers, his hands clenched loosely as if he can already feel the sting of them on Rico, on Manny. I know that’s who he really wants: Manny. Big Henry and Marquise move with a loping, easy purpose, to flank Skeetah.
“Y’all little Bois Sauvage niggas really think y’all run shit? I will fuck y’all up.”
“Everybody just chill out,” says Manny. “It ain’t even got to be like that.”
“Fuck you!” Skeetah’s voice carries, sliding up in pitch, and it breaks his face in pieces. “You a dirty motherfucker!”
“You going to let that little nigga talk to you like that? If I was you, I’d beat the shit-”
It is what Skeetah has been waiting for Rico to say. Skeetah punches Rico. He does it with his whole body, raining down on Rico’s wide, sweaty face with the steady fury and quick power of the small: fierce as China. The referees on the floor are blowing their whistles, and people are standing up around us, like they are doing a wave. Manny tries to catch his cousin Rico, and Big Henry reaches out to grab Skeetah, but then Manny has pushed his cousin back into Skeetah, volleyed him like a ball, and Manny is punching Skeetah, and Marquise is on Manny, and Big Henry slides his body in between them as a barrier, to stop it all, but then Rico punches him, and they are brawling, falling down the stairs, ripping the crowd like fabric.
Randall is in the middle of the court, wrestling the ball from the huddle that one referee is screeching into his whistle over, when he stops, distracted by the rumble of the crowd, and sees the boys beating one another down the bleachers, Junior and me arm in arm, running down the edge of the stands for the door. Randall looks lost on the court, the ball cradled in his limp hand. The other referee is blowing his whistle at Skeetah and Rico and Manny and Big Henry and Marquise, who are fighting their way along the side of the court now, the crowd carrying them out of the door in the kind of frothing waves we only get before hurricanes.
“Get out of here, Batiste!” Randall’s coach yells at him: the green hand towel he has been using to mop his face snaps like a flag in a bad wind. “That’s your people, ain’t it? That’s you! You’re done! Go on!”
Randall lobs the ball at the wall of the gym, and it ricochets back onto the court. Players that aren’t frozen by the fight try to catch it. I pull at Junior’s arm, and we are the first out of the door; he is fast. Randall jumps in the middle of the fight as it spills out of the door, begins screaming at all of them, calling names, pulling them from their fury one by one until he stands in the middle of them, taller than all of them, black as iron, rigid as a gate.
“What the fuck is wrong with y’all?”
“Who the fuck you think you is?” Rico yells. Manny has him by his shoulder, pulling him backward away from Randall.
“Let me go!” Skeetah says. Small scratches mark his face in beads. Big Henry is holding his arm, and Marquise s
tands next to them, breathing hard, glaring. “I’m going to kill that motherfucker. He ain’t getting nothing from me!”
“I’m going to see your little bitch-ass tomorrow,” Rico sneers; his lips are bleeding. “With your fucking dog.”
“You know you can’t fight no dog just had puppies.” Big Henry steps toward Manny and Rico, stumbling forward with Skeetah. Big Henry’s lips are swollen at one side, puffy and wet.
“I knew I didn’t like this bitch for a reason,” Marquise bites out. His forehead is bruised.
“Fuck that,” Skeetah says. “Fuck that. He ain’t getting none of my puppies.”
“Skeetah”-Randall leans in to Skeetah, his hands still raised-“you fight her tomorrow in that dog fight and Kilo win, them puppies die. You know that.”
“Kilo ain’t going to win,” Skeetah yells, and jerks against Big Henry, who holds him with both arms, hugging him.
“You can’t,” Big Henry says.
“My cousin coming with his dog, Boss. He’ll fight for China. If he win, then fuck you,” Marquise says.
“And if I win?” Rico asks.
“Then fuck you,” Skeetah says.
Randall elbows Skeetah in the chest, points one finger at Rico as if he would shush him.
“Then you get a puppy,” Randall says.
“My choice?” Rico husks.
Randall looks at Skeetah, nods slowly.
“Yeah, your choice.”
Skeetah shakes his head.
“Fuck them,” Skeetah says.
Rico smiles; his name is etched into his golden teeth in blood.
Skeetah spits.
“Yes,” Randall says. “Yes.”
THE EIGHTH DAY: MAKE THEM KNOW
Esch?”
Junior touches me, and I roll away from him.
“Are you going to the fight?”
I woke up this morning and I hurt.
“Skeetah say I can’t go if you don’t go.”
Someone has been beating me.
“He fixing to wash China.”
They have been beating me in my sleep.
“Him and Randall got into a fight because Randall say he shouldn’t be taking her. Say it ain’t her place to go.”
I will not get up for the bathroom. I don’t want to eat.
“Say Skeet always being stupid, and we always ruining things. Like his game. Say the only way he could go to camp now is if Skeetah came up with the money.”
I curl. Under pillow and sheet, I curl around the hurt, around the slipping secret, like a ball.
“Randall dunked the ball so hard this morning he tore the basket down. He made Skeet fix it.” Junior taps my shoulder.
“He broke it. Esch?”
I want it to stop.
I try to read the entire mythology book, but I can’t. I am stuck in the middle. When I put the book down and wipe my wet face and breathe in my morning breath, ripe to the afternoon under the sheet, this is where I have stopped. Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong. The author says that there are a couple of different versions of how it happened. One says she lies to her brother and invites him onto the ship with the Argonauts as they were fleeing, and that Jason ambushes him. That she watched her brother die, her own face on his being sliced open like a chicken: pink skin cut to bloody meat. The other version says that she kills her brother herself, that her brother runs away with her and the Argonauts, assuming that he is safe, and that she chops him into bits: liver, gizzard, breast and thigh, and throws each part overboard so that her father, who is chasing them, slows down to pick up each part of his son.
I read it over and over again. It is like she is under the covers with me, both of us sweating to water. To get away from her, from the smell of Manny still on me a night and morning afterward, I get up.
Junior is sitting on the floor in the hallway outside of the door.
“What you sitting out here for?”
Junior shrugs, looks up at me.
“I was going to go outside, but Skeetah getting ready to wash China, and it be getting muddy under the house. Why you didn’t wake up?”
“I was tired.”
“Daddy asked why you didn’t bring him something to eat this morning. Randall told him you didn’t feel good.”
“Randall made Daddy some eggs?”
“Yeah.”
“What he doing now?”
“Sleep. He was hollering about the hurricane; say it ain’t stopping, that the woman on the news say it’s coming straight for us. Randall told him to calm down. Him and Big Henry went to the store and got some beer and then Daddy went to sleep.”
Junior follows me down the hall to Daddy’s room. Randall has nailed up a blanket over the window, folded it in half over the box fan, which hums and lets in light. Daddy is asleep, sitting up, slumped over like I left him yesterday. The TV is low, a buzzing firecracker. On the screen, there is a map of the Gulf, and Katrina spins like a top, as if the long arm of Florida has just spun it loose. There are two beer cans next to the bed, one open, both of them sweating. I close his door to a crack.
“You going to the fight?”
Junior touches the back of my arm, and I stop outside the bathroom. He pinches me, and I look down at him, his big dark eyes, his missing teeth, his long eyelashes. He opens his eyes wider, looks hopeful.
“Huh, Esch? Please?”
“Who cut your hair?”
“Randall shaved it this morning. Said it’s too hot for hair.”
“He’s right.” I palm his lightbulb head, shake it.
“Esch.” He grins, and he looks like Skeet in the picture in Daddy’s room. The air is close, close as the water in the pit.
“All right,” I say. “We’ll go.”
I sit sideways on the toilet, rest my arms on the windowsill; my body feels stung all over by catfish, my stomach the lead sinker. In front of the shed, Skeetah is testing the water from the hose with one hand: it is so hot that I know the water boils fresh out of the faucet. He will wait until the water runs cold for her. When Skeetah first sprays China, she shakes. She is standing, legs wide, back straight, her head up. She is licking at the water, and it is as if she was never sick. She is coy as a girl with a lollipop, lapping at the hose. She sneezes and closes her eyes, and the dirt starts to run in sheets down her sides. It is the first time that I have seen her off leash in days.
“Come on,” Skeetah says. “We gonna make you shine.”
Skeetah cuts off the water and picks up a mostly empty bottle of dishwashing liquid and empties it on her back. He begins scrubbing, and the soap turns a pink gray. He rubs the soap up the flat, wide length of her head, down her face. He pulls her fur back so that her clenched teeth show, her fangs curving down sharp against her pink gums. Her eyes are slits, half closed in pleasure. She is stretching into Skeet’s hands. He is pulling her limber, massaging her. Her nose is up to the air, and she is long and beautiful as an outstretched wing. He kneels in front of her, swipes his hand down her chest, and she licks him, happy.
“You came back to me,” he says.
“You shouldn’t be taking her.”
Randall rounds the corner of the house. I expect to see a ball in his hands, but there isn’t. It’s like he’s missing his nose.
“Randall, you can kiss my ass.”
“You ain’t got no reason to be mad. I do.”
“She’s my dog. Those are my dogs.”
“You was steady fucking up. I had to do something.”
“Fuck that coach.” China is grinning against the pull of her skin again. Skeetah’s scrubbing hard. China looks striped. “And fuck Rico. Ain’t nothing about China weak.”
“You still ain’t thinking about the puppies.”
Skeetah turns on the hose. China walks in circles in the
water.
“Stay!” Skeetah yells, and she stands frozen. “It wasn’t your dog to give.”
“And it wasn’t your game to fuck up. What am I going to do about camp?”
“If he would’ve said that shit to you, you would’ve jumped him, too.” Skeetah grimaces. “And the way he looked at Esch!”
“Rico fucked with Esch?” Randall, who has been pacing a ditch into the muddy yard as he argues, stops.
Skeetah snorts, glances at the window where I’m sitting, but the sun is too bright outside. He can’t see me. His mouth twists like he has bitten into a peach seed, and he laughs once, a bitter, loud bark.
“You don’t know shit, do you?” Skeetah readjusts his thumb over the hose so that the water shoots out in two hard sparkling streams. Where it hits China’s side, it sounds solid. “You ain’t got to go today. This ain’t got nothing to do with you. Why don’t you go shoot?”
Randall shakes his head, shoves his toe into dry dirt. The dust puffs and drifts in the still air. He looks toward the bathroom, and I sit back so that the tank of the toilet is cool and slippery through my T-shirt.
“I’m going,” I hear him saying. “You made a promise. You said you would pay for camp if they lived,” he says louder.
“All right!” Skeetah yells. “You kicking up dust, Randall!”
“You just like Daddy. Always crazy for something.” I hear the side door off the kitchen scratch open and close as Randall leaves Skeetah to walk into the house.
The water stops. I lean so I can barely see out of the window. Skeetah is on his knees before China again, squirting the last of the soap on her coat, rubbing her whiter than white: she is the cold, cloudy heart in a cube of ice.
“Look at you, shining,” Skeetah breathes into China’s ear. “Cocaine white.” He brushes her, his hand a blade. “Blinding.”
