Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [40]
“I’m waiting until right before the fight to clean her. So she be shining on them.”
On the day Randall walked me through the Oaks, all corners and smoke and the bowling of beer bottles hitting tables, he had gripped my shoulders so hard they hurt. Mama had been on the dance floor; I’d never seen her dance before that, and I never would again. She was dancing with a man, not Daddy, while Daddy sat at the edge of the floor and watched. She had shook like China, threw her head back so water glistened down her throat, and her body ran in curves when normally she was all solid. She was beautiful.
“I thought you wasn’t going to fight her, her fresh with milk and all.” The lighter stops, and Manny flips it up in the air and catches it. He lights a cigarillo and wedges it in the corner of his mouth and talks around it.
“I ain’t. But I’m going to take her. Can’t let niggas forget who she is.”
China lays down in the sand indolently. Her breasts, still swollen but maybe a little less now, lay flat before her like a pillow. The skin where her breasts separate from her rib cage is wrinkled—her nipples are a pale pink so colorless they are almost white. I haven’t ever touched her chest, but if I did, I would imagine that her teats would be soft and cool against the heat of the day. She does not lay her head in the dirt and huff like other dogs, but stares at Manny and me instead. Like she knows.
“You know Rico going to be there. Fighting Kilo.”
Manny begins flipping the silver and red lighter again when he mentions Rico. The image, which looks like a tattoo, reads Hearts on Fire, and pictures two hearts diagonal to one another, going up in flames. His lips kiss the cigarillo and he pulls. China blinks and yawns. There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts. Manny never looks at me.
“Well, I hope Kilo ready. Marquise told me some of his cousins from Baton Rouge been talking shit about how they got a boss dog, and they bringing her out to fight, too.” Skeetah rubs China on her side, smoothing her fur over her ribs as he squats over her. Her tail thumps once, raises dust, lies still.
“Kilo always ready.”
Rico is Manny’s cousin, the boy from Germaine who bought his dog, Kilo, to mate with China. Rico’s big red muscle of a dog with a killing jaw. It was Manny who talked up Kilo to Skeetah. As China grew older, her pulpy puppy muscle hardened like a pearl in the stomach of an oyster, and Skeet’s devotion was the living muscle. She grew lean and strong. Manny would talk shit whenever we were all out under the trees as if he could lessen the wonder of Skeetah’s prized dog. He thought he could dim her, that he could convince us she wasn’t white and beautiful and gorgeous as a magnolia on the trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling.
Manny would sit on a milk crate or a tree stump and say, My cousin Rico got a fire dog. Probably about the same age as yours, but bigger. More muscle. Got a killing jaw. Skeetah would ignore Manny, or glance at him while he was dragging China through the sand, around the junk by her teeth locked in a bike tire, and say, Really. Yeah, Manny would say, and his white teeth would flash in his glass-burned, beautiful face. Yeah. China would squeal a dog’s squeal and bear down with her haunches, make Skeetah stumble toward her. We’ll see, Skeetah’d say.
Rico called China small-time until he came to the Pit with Manny one day and finally saw her: knee-high, stout as any boy dog but still sleek with muscle, and her long neck and head like a snake