Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [12]
Most times when we go to the grocery store in St. Catherine, cars fill half the parking lot. Now the whole lot is full, and we have to ride around for ten minutes waiting on a spot. The heat beats at the car like Mardi Gras parade-goers looking for a ride. It slinks in the seams of the windows like beads. Big Henry’s air-conditioning brushes across my face and chest, light as cotton candy, and melts like the heat is a tongue. The walk across the parking lot is slow and long, even though we have a decent spot that’s almost in the middle; Skeetah walks so quickly, he leaves me dragging through the heat, but Big Henry lingers, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
Inside, I follow Big Henry, who follows Skeetah, who bumps past carts pushed by ladies with feathery-light hair and freckled forearms pulling tall men wearing wraparound sunglasses. The rich ones wear khakis and yacht club shirts, the others wear camouflage and deer prints.
“We need water and batteries and …,” one woman lists as she swerves her buggy away down an aisle, a teenage boy with a mop of big curls loping along in her wake. He is not listening; he looks over Skeetah and Big Henry, and away.
Skeetah ignores everyone like they’re pits of inferior breeding. Big Henry dances past, mumbles “Sorry” and “ ’Scuse me.” I am small, dark: invisible. I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen.
There are only a dozen or so different kinds of dog food, and I know that Skeetah already knows what kind he wants. He always gets the same kind: the most expensive. Daddy once bought Skeet a big fifty-pound bag of generic dog food at the feed store. Skeetah fed China the food and she ate it in gulps, swallowed it down like it was water, and shat it out in runny lumps, like sunny-side-up eggs, all over the Pit. After that, she ate table scraps Skeet sneaked out the house for a month. He spent that month in the shed, banging at one of Daddy’s junk lawn mowers until one day he started it screaming to life, and then he went down to the Catholic church and convinced them to pay him to cut the grass and pull weeds at the graveyard. Mostly because they knew about Mama, I think, they let him do it. He mows three times a week during the summer, and in the winter, he weeds. That’s how he gets his dog food money. On a few of Daddy’s drunk nights when he’s down at the Oaks nodding off to the blues, I’ve seen Skeet walking out of Daddy’s room with his hands balled into stealing fists in his pockets. I keep expecting Daddy to wake up one morning to find some of his money missing. He’d be out in the hallway, yelling for Skeetah, throwing off anger and alcohol like steam, but we’ve been lucky. That hasn’t happened yet.
“My dog do good on that one.” When I walk up, Big Henry is pointing to a big green bag; it’s not the cheapest dog food, but it’s not the most expensive either. Skeetah ignores him; he’s already pulling at a fifty-pound sack.
“China like what she like.” He mumbles this. The bag hangs like a limp child over his shoulder, and it crunches.
“Next thing you know, you going to be buying her allergy medicine. Marquise said there’s a white girl at y’all school that got a dog that’s allergic to grass. Grass,” Big Henry whispers.
“That’s ’cause some people understand that between man and dog is a relationship.” Skeet jumps and shifts the bag. It hangs even, covers half his chest. “Equal.”
“My dog would just be sneezing.” Big Henry says. He shrugs and laughs. He has eyes the color of bleached-out asphalt, and when he smiles, they shrink to fingernails in his face.
“Your dog wouldn’t be able to breathe. And he’d hate you,” Skeet says.
All the checkout lines are long. All the steel baskets are full. Skeetah rocks from side to side on his feet, and me and Big Henry bump into each other and don’t know what to do. He ricochets back and rocks the candy and magazine rack, and