Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [39]
“He say start it.”
I press and turn. There is a click and then nothing. Junior drops and runs, reappears climbing.
“He say again.”
Again I press and turn. This time there isn’t even a click. A fly buzzes into the truck, decides to try my arm. I wave it away.
“Shit!” I hear muffled through the machinery.
“Ask him if he want me to do it again.”
Junior doesn’t even bother climbing down; he leans out and yells. His little muscles stretch out like shoestrings. When he was a baby, Randall held him the most, and I did the rest of the time. Daddy fed him until he figured out me and Randall could do it. He taught Randall the right ratio for the formula, how to heat the bottle up in a pan of water so that the milk didn’t get too hot, and then he went back out in his pickup, trying to find yard work and odd jobs. Afterward, Randall mixed the bottles, kept them filled in the refrigerator so he or I could feed Junior. Whenever Skeetah held him, Junior would cry. When we went to school, Daddy brought Junior to Mudda Ma’am, who had white hair she’d braid into pigtails and loop over her head, and who I never saw wearing anything other than a housedress. She watched kids for money while their parents were at work. She watched Junior until he was old enough for Head Start, which is when her memory started going, so she let the kids go with it. Tilda, her only daughter, moved back in with her to take care of her, but mostly spent her time wearing a dirt path between Javon’s house and her own for crack. I wonder if Junior even remembers Mudda Ma’am. He never talks about her, never says her name even when we walk down to the park and see her wandering amongst her azaleas like a child losing at hide-and-seek. Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they grow in.
I press, turn, wait.
“Stop!” Daddy is waving the wrench in the air, but the truck is so large that I cannot see his head over the hood, only his black hand, the dirty tool. “Get out. It ain’t ready. Go.”
I jump down, Junior already tailing me.
“Go get me another beer, Junior.”
“Y’all always leaving me, Esch. Wait!” Junior says, and he runs to the house, leaving a dust ghost trail behind him.
“She need some time to herself.” Skeetah is saying this. China is beside him. She is snapping at gnats. And with his arms crossed over his chest and a baseball cap high on his head, there is Manny. Every time her mouth shuts, he tries not to, but he flinches. I see it in the balls of his shoulders.
“You should give her a bath or something.” Manny tosses out the comment. Shrugs and justifies the jump when China snaps and shakes her head at what she has missed.
“I will.” Skeetah kneels, runs his hand down China’s chest. She looks up and her whole body shimmies like a woman dancing down at the Oaks, a blues club set on six acres of woods and a baseball diamond in the middle of Bois. They host baseball games for black town teams every Sunday during the summer. Once, when the outside bathroom stalls were broken when we were younger, Randall walked me into the blues club during a baseball Sunday to use the bathroom. He and Skeet and I had spent the day begging quarters from our friends to buy pickles and soda at the concession stand, hanging from the chicken wire that backed the dugouts, watching the away team clap and whistle and kick at their bats and throw practice shots while Mama and Daddy were in and out of the blues club.
“I think that’s the dirtiest I’ve ever seen her,” Manny says.
China has a little blood from the other dog, Twist, on her still at the corners of her mouth like lipstick. The red dirt of the Pit has given her a pink gleam, like a barely cooked shrimp