Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [19]
I shrug, lift up my hands like I have something to give him when I know I don’t. I start to trot toward Skeetah, who is walking deeper into the shade under the trees on his way to the Pit.
“Come on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.
“Shit,” Randall curses. “Shit.”
Skeetah has stolen this: bread, a knife, cups, a half-gallon jug of punch, hot sauce, dishwashing liquid. He sits them next to the bucket, and he dusts off two cinder blocks with a grill laid over it that he and Randall made into a barbecue pit when we were younger. The steel is burnt black, the stones burnt gray. His rifle hangs by a strap from his shoulder, its muzzle digging into the backs of his legs when he walks.
“What do we need that for?” I ask.
In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.
“Come on,” Skeetah says.
In the woods, animals dart between the valleys of shadow. Birds trill up through pathways of sunlight. Skeetah cuts through it all, his shoulders curved. He leans forward when he walks, studies the ground. I am noisy behind him, my feet dragging in the pine needles. I kick up my knees, try to set my feet down easy, but I am off balance. What would be the baby sits like a water balloon in my stomach, makes me feel set to bursting. My secret makes me clumsy. Skeetah stops, kneels in the needles and crackling leaves; underneath, it all rots and turns to dirt. Skeetah shakes his head at me and looks up into the trees. We wait.
Before a hurricane, the animals that can, leave. Birds fly north out of the storm, and everything else roams as far away from the winds and rain as possible. The air has been clear these past couple of days. Bright, every day almost unbearably bright and hot and close, the way that I feel when Manny is sweating over me: golden, burning. Insects root under our feet, squirrels leap from tree to tree, crows glide between the tops of the pines, cawing. The beat of their wings sounds soft as the swish of Mudda Ma’am’s broom when she sweeps pine needles from her sandy front yard. Skeetah watches them the way he watches China: like any second she might speak, and he’s sure when it will happen, she will reveal all the answers to all the things he has ever wondered about. Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer. He was convinced last summer after one tornado touched down at a shopping complex in Germaine that the Gulf Coast would be a new tornado alley. He spent the entire summer pointing out the safest places in the house to crouch. Every time he caught Junior in the kitchen, he made him practice the tornado drill we were all taught in school; kneel, fold over your thighs, tuck your head between your knees, cover your neck with your bony fingers to protect the soft throat underneath.
Skeetah takes his gun off his shoulder, cocks it. He holds it loosely at first, his eyes moving back and forth like he is reading something written in the air between the trees.
“Skeet. What you fixing to shoot?”
“Wasn’t enough cans of meat to steal.”
“I ain’t cooking it, Skeet.”
Skeetah shoulders the rifle. He points the gun at the sky. The wind moves a little in the tops of the trees, and then dies away, like a person leaving a room. The trees are silent with longing. The gun begins to scissor back and forth. Skeetah points, following the squirrels scampering through the trees. They are fuzzy and gray, fat with summer food.
“Shhhh,” he says. “We need something to eat.”
A branch creaks. The tops of the pines rub together as the wind comes again, but the oaks do not move. The squirrels like the oaks best, run along their black, hard branches highway overpasses. These are their solid houses; they will withstand a storm, if she comes. The smell of baked pine is strong.
“Gotcha,” Skeet says, and he shoots.
The shot rings off a pine, making a solid thunk that sounds like a punch. Skeet winces. The squirrels melt in and out of the dark blotches, round the