Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [38]
“Hand me that wrench, boy.”
Junior doesn’t hear or he doesn’t want to move. He palms the sand gently, the way he used to pat the stray dogs that lived on the Pit before Skeetah bought China home. They were always mottled the color of dried sticks, of leaves sinking into earth and darkening, and they followed Junior around the Pit, licked his face when he had it out with Randall over not wanting to take a bath, or because he’d failed another test. They boiled around him like a rain-swollen creek when he’d run out into the bare yard, the trees, and cry. They nested with him under the house. But China had been settled in for two years now, and the dogs had disappeared. I do not remember if she killed them, or if they slunk off one by one in the night once she took on weight and could rip rubber tires in two. Junior’s forever the puppy weaned too soon.
“Junior!” Daddy yells. I’m walking through the ripped net of the shade, trying to edge past them unseen. I want to find Skeetah. He has medicine to give.
“Junior!” Daddy beats the rim of the dump truck with whatever tool he has, and it clangs like a bell. Junior startles, drawn from his holes. “The wrench!”
Junior picks up the wrench. He is strong for a little boy. When he grabs it and curls, I can see his muscles bunch. He is skinny in the way of picky-eating little boys before they reach puberty, when they either turn lean or get fat, and then grow into their man bodies. He lets it rest on Daddy’s leg.
“Here,” Junior breathes. I move too quickly, and he sees me. I shake my head, but he’s already saying it. “Esch. Where you going?”
“Esch! Where your brothers at? I need they help.” Daddy is a voice billowing from the bottom of the car like smoke.
“I don’t know.”
“What?” he bellows.
“I said I don’t know.” Junior is rising to follow me. I walk faster.
“Where Skeetah at? Randall here?” Junior asks.
“Hold up!” Daddy yells. “Come here.”
Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck. It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines, a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and looks like a handheld cake mixer.
“I want you to get up in the driver’s seat. When Junior come tell you, I want you to try to start it.”
“I can go find Skeetah if you want.”
“No.” Daddy’s already putting one shoulder back underneath the truck. “I got to get this fixed today. Now. They going to be money to be made after this storm come through by a man with a dump truck. José hit them folks in Mexico yesterday, but they already got another storm out in the Gulf. Tropical depression number ten. And it’s so far out and the water so hot …” Daddy trails off, his voice dissolving under the metal. The truck broke right after Mama died, and Daddy got disability checks from it since it was an accident. I don’t ask him how he’s supposed to be able to drive a big dump truck after the storm without somebody asking him about it. Junior crouches next to Daddy. In the dirt next to him, a beer bottle, half full, is screwed into the sand.
There are multiple levers, and I don’t know how to work any of them.
“Tell Daddy I don’t know how to start the truck,” I yell to Junior. The seat is peeling away at the seams like plastic Kraft wrappers, and the foam padding underneath is damp. The dash and the steering wheel and the glass are coated in dust turned candy shell hard.
Up close Daddy smells like vinegar, like salt. That is his fresh alcohol smell.
“You see that there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the clutch. That’s the brake. Put this here in neutral. You don’t need to do nothing to this. But when you turn the key, press the clutch and the brake at the same time.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t touch nothing else.” His hands are like mine, like Skeet’s. That’s where we get these flat wide fingers from. But I look at his face and his collarbone punching up through the neck of his shirt like knuckles, and I can’t see anything else he ever gave me. He walks around the side of the