Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [33]
“Thank God,” I whisper to the egret, who will not leave me, and pecks in a suspicious circle near my foot.
What I can see of the road is empty. The trees are moving so it seems like they are a green, shimmering curtain in the distance, the road fading to a dark green velvet line in the middle. I stare at it, try hard to see something, run my tongue over my lips again and again, twist it into a wave to ready it. My arm feels like it is going dead, so I roll to the side, glance at the road. Is that blue, a flash of metal like a dying star? But there is nothing. I hiss at the bird again, wonder why Manny didn’t come by, wonder when he will come again, if he will want more from me next time. If I can get him to look at me in the eye again. To not walk away from me.
The pain is sudden, sharp. It shoots through my hips and I squeeze my legs together and wonder why my bladder feels like a soaked sponge. I can’t help it. I have to pee. Again.
“Shit, Skeet,” I say to the side of the barn, the empty shimmering road. I will hold it. It shoots again, and I rock my hips side to side in the grass, squeezing my legs. Sometimes when I move like this, squeeze like this, it helps. The pressure eases. It lasts for a shake of my head, a nod at the still empty road, and then it is back. Unbearable, a tadpole grown to the confines of its egg. Pressure. I can hold it. I can’t.
I stand up, look back toward where I know Randall is crouching in the green. Maybe I can pull my panties and shorts to the side and pee that way. I pull the elastic at the crotch, but they are too tight. I cannot face the road and pee. It is impossible. Randall and Big Henry, and farther back, Junior, will see me. I can deal with them seeing a flash of shoulder, of leg, even a nipple, but I cannot bare myself in this field, my butt facing them, and pee. It will only take a moment, I tell myself. Jumping into a squat and facing Junior and Randall and Big Henry in the woods, I put my butt as low to the ground as I can and yank my shorts down in wedges until I feel the air on my skin. I force the pee out, and it hits the grass as strongly as a rush of water out of a water hose. It beats the grass low. The baby and the pee are one, there when I forget they are there, when I forget so well I think they might be gone. I start to inch up my pants, but they are stuck, and I’m trying to miss the wet-pee grass when I hear it, and I wish I hadn’t. Randall’s whistle, high-pitched and sharp, short. I yank my shorts all the way up, fall forward on my hands, and turn my head to see a silver grille, a dark blue blur, growing to fill the driveway.
They’re here spasms through my head like a bat, but I put my fingers in my mouth, and I blow and blow and blow until I hear Randall scream, “Esch!”
Skeetah’s arm is the first thing to break the surface of the window. The truck is pulling up the driveway and rounding the side of the house, and I am crawling backward on my hands and knees, the cows nervously shuffling away from me, the birds waving them on, my egret familiar making squeaking sounds at my side as it abandons me, when the door to the truck opens and I rise up on my legs, still bending low, still backward. There is a dog in the bed of the truck, and it is leaping like a doe, barking to call attention to itself, again and again and again, its fur long and shaggy, the color of the cloud dark sky above me, its dark head pointed toward me in the field, its nose intent on our line.
The white man is the first to get out of the truck. He slams the door behind him, waves his hands at the dog as if he is casting out a fishing net for perch in the shallow tides on the beach at night. Someone has bound my feet with barbed wire: I cannot run. Skeetah’s upper body is hanging out the window