Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [41]
“What’s the dog name? From Baton Rouge?”
“Boss,” Skeetah laughed. China snorted into the dirt.
“Well, Kilo been fought from Florida to Louisiana. Broke a dog leg once. They better be ready.”
“You seen it?”
“What?”
“The break?”
“No, Rico told me.” Manny waves away a gnat, inhales strong on the cigarillo, and blows smoke in a fog in front of his face. “Y’all need to start a fire out here. Why y’all always got so many bugs up here on the Pit? Gnats so bold they out in the middle of the day. Fuck the evening time.” He drops the cigarillo; it smokes a pencil thread and then smothers in the sand.
“We savages up here on the Pit. Even the gnats. Mosquitoes so big they look like bats.” Skeetah nods at me and Junior. “You better watch out. Junior look puny but he’ll sucker-punch you in the neck and leave you choking. And Esch—” Skeetah stands when he says it, and China circles him, sniffing in the dirt, “You see how boss China is. You think the other girl on the Pit going to be weak?”
“I ain’t saying either of them weak.” Manny still hasn’t looked at me. “But you know China ain’t as boss as she used to be.”
“What?” Skeetah’s tendons are showing.
“Any dog give birth like that is less strong after. Even if you don’t think it. Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.” Finally Manny glances at me. It slides over me like I’m glass.
Skeetah laughs. It sounds as if it’s hacking its way out of him.
“You serious? That’s when they come into they strength. They got something to protect.” He glances at me, too, but I feel it even after he looks away. “That’s power.”
China is licking Skeetah’s hand like she licks the puppies. Skeetah pushes her head away but she keeps at it, and he looks away from Manny. The tendons in his neck smooth. The menace leaves him; if he were a dog, his hair would flatten.
“To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.
“You wormed her yet?” I ask. Does Manny think that of me, that I am weak? That there is a price to this body that swallows him, that pulls at him and takes him until he has nothing left? Is Manny glad because he will never have to pay it?
“Naw. She wouldn’t take the Ivomec earlier. Spilled it.”
“You know how to mix it?” Manny slid his lighter into his jean shorts pocket. His muscle shirt was white as his teeth. Shaliyah must have washed. I wonder if he ever told her that about weakness. If he ever called her female, bit it off at the end like underripe sugarcane when he said it?
Skeetah looks up at Manny, his hands dropping, his jaw loose.
“What you mean, mix it?”
“Fuck, you going to kill the dog.” Manny smiles like he wants to laugh. I swallow and realize that I want to push him, to place my hands flat on the muscles of his chest and shove him for looking that way at Skeet, for insulting him. For saying things he doesn’t know he is saying about me. I want him to fall over backward, straining his bad arm, and then I want to bear him down in the dirt. Make him touch all of me, for once. “You supposed to mix the Ivomec with cooking oil and then give it to the dog. And don’t try doing it with water if you ain’t got no cooking oil. Then it won’t mix good.”
“She didn’t take none of it this morning.” Skeetah is holding China’s head still, prying her eyes wide, peering into