Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [35]
China is the shushing sound, the finger laid against the lips in admonition. She is on him, a white blur against gray, snow on cloud, the biting cold. Unforgiving. She is one great tooth. Twist’s growl meets with hers but already he is turning, rolling to a ball, screaming. Randall runs to the top of the steps with Junior, who is still staring, his mouth still open, and I have stopped at the foot of the steps, Big Henry on the roof of his car, to watch Skeetah lurch out of his run, his arm still outstretched, and pivot to watch. Twist screams again, and there is a frantic lick to it. China grips him and arches her back, digs in as her whole body jerks toward the other dog. It looks like she is giving birth again. Twist’s scream turns to a squeal. She has him by the neck. Skeetah is smiling.
“Skeet!” I yell. I slap him on the back, his muscle like dinner plates between the flat plane of his shoulder blades. He looks at me, surprised, the smile startled from him.
“What?”
“She’s going to kill him.”
He looks back to China, who is curved in two, a fang, and is jerking moans out of the other dog, who is in fits against her, bleeding.
“Stop it,” I say.
Skeetah puts his hands in his pockets, fingers what I now see are shapes there, big as curled fists. The cow wormer.
“He’s going to hear it hollering, and he’s going to follow it here,” I say over the grunting and the squealing. Twist is rolling like a tornado.
“Stop!” Skeetah barks and lunges toward China. “China!” He yells, “Hold!” and he grabs the thighs on her two back legs and pulls. She jerks her head once, viciously, and then lets go, flinging her head backward so that blood rises and glitters through the air before falling to droplets in the sand, a light shower of red. Twist jumps and runs, limping like his master, away to the pit and past, his panicked yelp like a siren receding in the distance, off to some other emergency. Behind him, he leaves red rain.
THE FIFTH DAY: SALVAGE THE BONES
Bodies tell stories. This is what I realize when I burst in on Skeetah in the bathroom in the morning, bladder full with early morning pregnant pee, and see him standing in front of the mirror. Skeetah is shirtless. He is tracing cuts across his stomach with two fingers, the way he checks China’s mouth after a fight for tears, missing teeth: lightly, sensitively. The way other people put their fingers in cupcakes to lick the icing.
“Come on,” he whispers, pulling on a shirt. The light in the bathroom is gray because the sun is not yet up. We slide past each other and he stands outside the doorway, which I leave cracked, as I pee. I flush, put the toilet seat down, and sit, pushing down on my stomach, feeling it push back against my hand. Hoping but knowing all at once that it was not a dream. Skeetah shuffles in the hall, and when he realizes I’m not leaving, he comes back into the bathroom. I’d seen his shirt ripped after Twist ran away, but I didn’t know how badly he’d been cut.
“When did that happen?”
“When I came out the window. I was in a hurry.”
I push my stomach in, and nausea moves through me. What should I tell him?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I had to pee.”
He picks up an Ace Bandage so old it’s faded white and pulls the hem of his shirt over and behind his neck so it hugs his shoulders like a shrug. He’s so skinny it’s loose on him.
“It’s all right,” he says.
The wrap is one of Randall’s, probably used on his knee, which he’s troubled so much his coach told him he needed surgery. The school will pay for it, but Randall keeps putting it off because he doesn’t want to lose any playing