Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [103]
“Is it him?” he whispered.
I nodded, looked down at the ground.
“I knew you had a crush on him, but—” Randall cleared his throat. “I didn’t think he’d do anything about it.”
“I wanted to,” I said.
“I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” Randall said, the words whistling out of him.
A girl separated herself from the crowd, sat down next to Manny on the truck, laid her head on his shoulder. Shaliyah. Manny sat there stiffly beside her, still looking at me, at Randall, waiting for a wave, a nod, anything. I slid my fingers into the crook of Randall’s elbow, and Junior’s leg rubbed the back of my hand. His skin, and Randall’s skin, was warm; I walked so that Randall was my shield, my warm cover, my brother.
“No, Randall,” I said. “You don’t need to. I already did.”
Randall snorted, but he didn’t let Junior go, and he squeezed his forearm to his waist, folding my arm into his, pulling me with him. We walked to Big Henry’s front door together.
Big Henry’s mother, Ms. Bernadine, is half Big Henry’s size, with wide hips and thin shoulders, and now I know where he gets his careful hands. She settled Daddy on the sofa in the dark, hot house, unwrapped and cleaned and rewrapped his hand in the light from the open door and the open windows. Her hands were small and quick as hummingbirds, and just as light. She made potted meat sandwiches, and when one of her brothers brought over a small generator, she hooked the refrigerator up to it from an extension cord along with a small fan, and this she put in the window in the living room, and pointed it at Daddy’s face, which was gray and twisted.
Marquise had run up to the house to find Skeetah and took his dog along: Lala gleamed like melted butter, untouched by the havoc of the hurricane. He said when he got to the house, Skeetah heard his dog barking and came out of the woods. Skeetah was wearing wet, muddy shorts he’d salvaged from the wreckage, but he was still barefoot. When Marquise tried to get him to come down to Big Henry’s house, he’d asked for Marquise’s lighter, said he’d camp out at the house because he was waiting for China to come back. Marquise had argued with him, but Skeetah ignored him, so Marquise left. When Marquise told us the story, he chewed the inside of his cheek, looked ashamed that he hadn’t been able to drag Skeetah down into Bois. “He’s stubborn,” Randall said. “You can’t make him do nothing he don’t want to do.”
That night, when people with working trucks and chains were clearing the streets of trees and burning wet, smoking bonfires, we slept on thin pallets on Big Henry’s living room floor, and his mother whispered to Big Henry in the kitchen: “Ain’t they one more?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s looking for his dog.”
“As long as they need,” she said. “At least they alive.”
“Yeah,” Big Henry said, and I knew he was looking at us, Junior under my armpit, sweating and twitching in his sleep, Daddy still as a stone on the sofa, Randall laying facedown, his head buried in his folded arms, almost diagonal in the small living room. One or two sodden bugs whirred outside, and I wondered where Skeetah was, saw him sitting before a fire, his head cocked to the night, which had turned hot after the cold air left by the storm passed. Waiting.
Big Henry and his uncle Solly, the one who brought the generator and who is tall and skinny and has blurry home-done tattoos up and down his forearms, are talking in the doorway. The sun has burned away the last of the clouds of the storm’s wake. It arcs through the door, slides past Big Henry, and burns