Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [20]
“I’m not cleaning that.”
The crows fly away, screaming. The insects scream in chorus in the tops of the trees.
Skeetah picks the squirrel up with both hands, tries to hold the body together so it won’t fall apart in pieces. Blood squirts out of it with a pulse. The heart.
“You want him to come tonight, don’t you?”
“Who you talking about?”
“You know who I’m talking about. And it ain’t Big Henry.” He flings a bit of fur away that was dangling wetly like a red earring from the animal’s hide. “Ain’t Marquise, neither.”
“No.” I shake my head. Skeetah grabs the rest of the tail and pulls. What was left of it before he shot the squirrel comes away like bristles from a brush.
“Y’all don’t look right together,” Skeetah says, studying the bloody carcass. He is so hot his nose is sweating. But we are, I want to say. He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts. But I say nothing, and Skeetah shrugs and lifts the squirrel up like an offering and begins walking back to the pit.
When we get back to the campsite, Skeetah lays the squirrel on the plastic bag, and he pulls out the knife and cuts the head off. The blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. He pitches the head into the underbrush like a ball, runs the knife in a jagged line down the squirrel’s chest, and then makes a cross across the animal’s arms. He is ruthless, quiet, focused as China before a fight. Skeetah pulls hard, and the skin balloons away from the flesh underneath, stretching, stretching, until it is a wet limp rag, and Skeetah flings it away. Fur booties remain on the squirrel’s feet, but Skeet cuts those off and tosses them after the head. The animal is no more than meat, now, thick as two pork chops laid together. Skeetah slices at the stomach, and what comes sliding out is blue and purple, like so much wet yarn.
“Shit,” Skeet breathes. The smell of the animal’s insides is everywhere. When Daddy used to keep pigs, they shat and ate and rooted in their own filth, growing pink and fat, but the smell of them and their nest was like this animal’s stomach: raw, full with shit. Skeetah is right.
He tries to pull the innards out, but they hold, so he tries to cut at the strings holding them, and he cuts the intestines by accident.
“Oh, shit,” Skeetah says, and he drops the animal and the innards and the knife on the bloody plastic bag and he steps away, his hands on his knees, his head hanging down. There is sand in my throat, and I cannot breathe.
“Jesus, Skeet.” I run off behind a small gathering of trees, as far as I can make it away from that smell and that slime, and I fall and throw up the eggs, the rice, the water, everything I have inside of me until there is no food left, until my throat feels empty and I cannot stop heaving up air and spit, but still I am not able to throw it all up. Inside, at the bottom, something remains.
By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come. Marquise is slicing at the meat with his own pocket knife, slapping small chunks onto pieces of bread that are turning soggy with hot sauce. Skeetah makes a sandwich, passes it to me, before making his own. The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees. The sun had set while Skeetah and I were looking for wood for the grill; the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a