Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [106]
“Yes,” I say, and I fish out one of the Top Ramen packets we brought with us, pass it to Big Henry in the front seat, who passes it out the window to her. She grabs it, peers at it, and then starts laughing. Her grin is mostly gums. Her T-shirt has a blue and pink teddy bear on it, and it used to be white.
“Well, all right.” She laughs. “All right.”
Big Henry drives as far as he can, which is only around a hundred feet, before he stops the car, pulls it as far to the side of the road as he can without driving into the ditch, and parks. Mud has splattered up the side of the car, patterned it like lace. Junior is scrambling onto Randall’s back again, and Randall loops and knots his arms under Junior’s legs. Junior’s cheek brushes against Randall’s: I haven’t seen him set Junior down since the hurricane. There is a house sitting in the middle of the road, facing us, like it guards the secrets we will find farther in. We pick our way around it.
There are more houses in the street. One house, square and even as a box, two stories, has been knocked off of its foundation and spun to the side. Another house has landed on another house, wood on brick, and settled. The foundations, cinder blocks, rise up out of the earth, stop a few feet in the air, slim and expectant, robbed of their houses. A woman in a baseball cap picks through the rubble of a spun house; her son, who looks around Junior’s age, squats in the dirt near the street and stares, face puckered, as we pass. A man in a yellow T-shirt pokes around his house’s foundation with a stick. We pass what used to be the elementary school, the gym where Randall, a few days ago, played for and lost his chance at going to basketball camp and being recognized by a college scout for his talent, for being Randall, where Manny learned who I was and disowned me, where Skeetah fought for me, and there is nothing but mangled wood and steel in a great pile, and suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.
“Shit,” Randall breathes. He grips Junior’s leg harder, and Junior whimpers but says nothing. “It’s all gone,” he says.
We stand in our small group, staring at the mess, and then I step away, and we leave, but Randall is the last to start walking, and he glances back again and again at the gym that was there but isn’t. Power lines stretch across the mud-clogged road like great lazy snakes; we hop over them. With all the trees gone, it is easy to see that we are approaching the train tracks, the same train tracks that carried the trains we heard blowing raucously when we were younger, swimming in the same oyster-lined bay that came in and swallowed Bois, swallowed the back of St. Catherine, and vomited it out in pieces. A house sits in the middle of the track. It is yellow, and its windows have been blasted open by the storm, but its curtains remain. They flutter weakly. We climb around it, look east and west along the track, and see many houses lining it: it is a steel necklace with wooden beads.
Beyond the track, there are no beads. No houses stand here. There are only great piles of wood. Sometimes they are all the same color, and that’s how we know a house stood here, stood there. There are no foragers here, picking through the rubble. What could be salvaged? What hasn’t been buried or swept back out to sea? The stumps of the trees are raw and ragged, and the plywood from the houses is raw and ragged, and everything has been ripped in half. Closer to the beach, so close I can glimpse it if I squint and look toward the horizon, are oak trees. Some that stood in the park stand still; others have been ripped from the earth, their naked crowns facing the ocean. Those that remain look dead. Narrow streets where dentists’ offices were, where restaurants that served catfish and hush puppies were, where veterinarians’ offices were, where small dim bookstores and the kinds of antiques stores that I would never dream of walking