Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [36]
“I whistled once I saw them.”
“I know.” Skeetah is holding the wrap with one hand, trying to wind it around his torso with the other. The wounds are angry; there are four of them gouged into his stomach and side. He is failing.
“Let me,” I say, and I grab one end. Skeetah lets it fall. His head is closer to the color of the rest of his body now. When I fell asleep last night, he was in the shed with China, laying her floor, resettling them in. The kennel is still three pieces of wood hammered together at bad right angles, rooting into the dirt. “You put something on it?”
“Just took a shower.” Skeetah mumbles this into his underarm. “Then I poured some peroxide on it. From China’s bottle.” That’s the other thing he does with her after fights, wipes at her cuts with a towel he’s washed, bleached, and dipped in hydrogen peroxide. She smiles lazily like a woman in a new Fourth of July outfit being complimented.
“This clean?” The wrap looks dirty, worn thin.
“I washed and bleached it last night,” Skeetah sighs. I wrap the bandage once, and I expect him to flinch from the cloth, but he doesn’t. For once he doesn’t smell like dog. He smells like the constant wind that pushes the tide in over the Gulf of Mexico, but not the tide at the beach. The tide at the Bay of Angels, which smells of the oysters fresh dug from the mud. Daddy used to take us swimming there when we were younger, in a little cove. The water was murkier than the river, and colder, and the bottom was a landscape of oyster shells. We dug up oysters, threw them out farther away from the cove. Marsh grass waved at the edges, and pines leaned out over the water. Pelicans floated in rows. Daddy would fish off a sinking pier, and sometimes on a ledge on one of the support pilings under the bridge with some of his friends, and most of the time, at the end of the day, he’d be left with an empty cooler of beer and one or two croakers bleating in the icy water. His friends caught fifteen-pound redfish they’d have to wrestle from the water. Daddy’d call us out at the end of the day, more drunk than mad, the sunset turning through the sky behind us like a top. Our feet were always a snarl of cuts.
“Tighter,” Skeetah says.
Mama went with us swimming in the bay sometime. She circled Daddy and his friends, sat in a sagging plastic and aluminum yard chair Daddy’d found on the Pit. She laughed at their jokes sometime, but she didn’t drink any beer. Mostly she just sat with a fishing pole braced between her legs. She was the one that caught a baby shark; it was the same color as the water, as long as her arm, and strong. Daddy tried to take the pole from her and she wouldn’t let him. His friends laughed, tried to get her to give it to them, but she held it in both hands and walked the shark up and down the oyster-shelled sand, in the biting marsh grass, under and out from the bridge. She walked it tired, her arms big and round, strong under the woman fat. She coaxed it to death. And when it gave up, she hauled it in and let out a laugh that swooped up into the sky with the pelicans and flew away, wind-ready and wide as their wings. She cooked it in butter that night, soaked it in buttermilk to take the wild out of it. When we ate it, it was tender, sea salty, and had no bones.
“Almost done?” Skeetah is watching my hands. I wonder if he sees the wounds underneath the bandage already, if he imagines what they will look like once healed. His own fight scars.
“Yeah,” I say.
The last time Mama went with us to the bay, Daddy flipped his line backward to cast it out over the water and caught her palm with his hook. The barbed needle sank in deep. She pulled it out and rinsed it off in the water we were swimming in. Her stomach was big with Junior. It healed crooked and purple, puffy, and she had to go to the clinic to get an ointment for it when it started to leak pus. Whenever she would walk me through the store or through a crowd when we were out in public, holding the back of my neck with her hand, I’d feel the scar