Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [13]
Maybe it’s China that made me get it. I know something’s wrong; for weeks I’ve been throwing up every other day, always walking around feeling like someone’s massaging my stomach, trying to push the food up and out of me. Some months when I eat a little less because I’m tired of ramen or potatoes, I’m irregular. But the sickness and the vomiting make me think I should get a test, that and me being two months irregular, and the way I wake up every morning with my abdomen feeling full, fleshy and achy and wet, like the blood’s going to come running down any minute—only it doesn’t. I think back to all the times I’ve had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up, once we pull apart. This is what I’m thinking when I see the woman laying half in the road, half in the grass.
“That’s a woman,” I say.
“That’s a car,” Skeetah says. And there, caught in the pines like a cat ascending a trunk, is a car. It looks as if it jumped there, as if it wanted to see what bark felt like, and flipped over to grip the tree.
“Didn’t they know to slow down coming through here?” Skeetah asks. “Got signs everywhere.”
“Maybe they not from here,” I say, because there is a man pacing in the ditch, and he is holding his head. Blood slides in a curve down the side of his face, between his fingers and down his forearms. He could not have known the road would curl like his streaming blood in this, the trickiest part of the bayou to drive. He could not have known that the road clung to whatever dry land it could find, and that it was no place to drive over the speed limit. Daddy had wrecked his truck here once, when he was drunk. When he came home after the police let him out, he cursed for a good two hours about Dead Man’s Curve.
“Y’all need help?” Big Henry asks out the window as we slow to a stop. Skeetah looks straight ahead, ignores the scene out his window, the pacing man.
The man looks up, climbs from the ditch. It is as if he doesn’t see the woman as he steps so close to her, he could kick her. He has a cell phone in one hand, smashed up against his ear, his thin brown hair in his other. He is wearing a white shirt with white buttons, and the blood has made a beauty contestant sash across his chest.
“Can you tell me where I’m at?” he says. His voice is loud, as if he is shouting at an old person who is hard of hearing. “I’m on the phone with 911, and they need to know where I’m at.”
“Tell them you in between Bois Sauvage and St. Catherine’s, on the bayou. Tell them the closest road is Pelage, and you right before the Dedeaux Bridge.”
The man nods, opens his mouth to speak.
“I’m …” He closes it. “Can you? I’m …” He reaches into the passenger-side window, holds the phone in a red grip in front of Skeetah’s face. Skeetah doesn’t shrink away, doesn’t move. Instead, he stares through the man’s hand. Big Henry, in his way, takes the phone with just two of his fingers. It is polka-dotted with blood.
“Yeah, it’s been an accident. Two people, and they car flipped over in a tree.” Big Henry repeats the location. “This the man’s phone, but the woman, she just laying there.” He pauses. “Okay. All right. I will.” He looks down in his lap, mumbles, “Thank you.