Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [14]
“What’d they say?” I ask.
“They want us to stay here with them until they come. They going to be a few minutes.”
“I need to get home,” Skeetah says.
Big Henry stares at Skeetah as he pulls to the side of the road to park in the overgrown grass. I am almost afraid he will hit the man, who stands wilted in the ditch again, his toes no longer touching the woman. The man stares off as if he cannot see Big Henry’s car sliding past him, inches away.
“The puppies. She don’t know how to take care of them yet.”
Big Henry turns off the car. I hold myself. The pregnancy test crinkles. Big Henry removes the keys, looks at the man’s phone that he has dropped in his lap. He opens the door, pulls himself out of the seat, closes the door, and begins walking toward the man.
“She’s hungry. And nursing,” Skeetah says.
In every one of the Greeks’ mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in a ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it. Big Henry is kneeling next to the woman. The man has sunk to a squat so that only his head is visible, which he is holding in his hands. I think I hear him moaning. Big Henry hovers over the woman like a grounded buzzard at the side of the road, awkward and cross-footed. I wonder what the woman with the hair the color of a golden condom wrapper is to the man.
“I don’t trust her.” Skeetah waits to say this until Big Henry is too far away to hear, so low I think he’s forgotten I’m sitting in the backseat.
“You think they family or friends?” I shift to ease the scratch of the test, but I don’t move too much because I don’t want it to fall out of the band of my shorts. Skeetah doesn’t answer. I push the front seat.
“Huh?”
“Family or friends?” I look back toward them to see that the man is wandering toward us. Big Henry hollers at him, but it sounds like he is mumbling.
“Lovers,” he says.
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Skeetah says.
I’d always assumed he missed more than half of what went on at the Pit; seemed like all I ever saw around him, once he brought home a pit he told me he stole out of somebody’s yard when he was twelve, were dogs. Striped dogs, bald, whitish-pink dogs, fat dogs, dogs so skinny their bones looked like a school of fish darting around under their skin. His voice was a bark, his step the wagging thump of a meaty tail. We lost each other, a little. And now I wonder what Skeetah’s seen, what he’s been paying attention to when his dogs are sleeping, when he’s between dogs, because every dog before China died before they got a year old. Each time, Skeetah waited a week, then got another one. Before China, he never bothered to buy dog food, and he fed them table scraps mixed with Daddy’s chicken feed. What does he know about lovers? He’s the odd one, the one that always smells like sweaty fur when all the boys are together, the one the girls probably think stinks. But even I know that there’s one, always one, who likes the boy like Skeetah. There’s always one for everybody. But I don’t think he believes that. A hand slaps the door wetly, and the man is there, his fingers trailing red like fishing line. He is squinting at Skeetah, and Skeetah is leaning away from the door.
“Hey, man.” I hear the crank; Skeetah is rolling up the window.
“I think I’ve seen you before.”
Skeetah stops mid-roll.
“Don’t you cut grass?”
“Can you please get away from the car?” I squeak.
“At the graveyard?”
Skeetah rolls up the window so that it seals. Instantly it is five degrees hotter.
“This asshole,” Skeetah mutters. “Why doesn’t he go check on his girlfriend?” He wants to open the door, I know. “How he just going to leave her there like he don’t see her, walk over her like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor?” He wants to hit the man, the bleeding man, with the door. He wants to cuss the man out.
“He’s already bleeding.”
“He don’t