Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [44]
“His bitch must’ve gave it to him.” Skeetah breathes this into China’s coat; from the doorway, she is the dusty lightbulb in the room. Junior is creeping along the wall, trying to get closer to the puppies. In the yard, the dust from Manny’s searching feet billows up and obscures him, turning his white shirt, his golden skin, dark as a bruised peach.
I’ve heard girls at my school talk. These are conversations I snatch from the air like we take down clothes that have crusted dry on a clothesline. The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage. Say that this is what you do when you can’t afford an abortion, when you can’t have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you.
In the bathroom, I bend over standing and knead my stomach, knead the melon to pulp, but it just keeps springing back: ripe. Intent on bearing seed. I could find something big enough and hard enough to jump on: Daddy’s dump truck hood, Daddy’s tractor, one of the old washing machines out in the yard. We have bleach in the laundry room. Only thing I wouldn’t be able to find is the birth control pills; I’ve never had a prescription, wouldn’t have money to get them if I did, don’t have any girlfriends to ask for some, and have never been to the Health Department. Who would bring me? Daddy, who sometimes I think forgets that I am a girl? Big Henry, one of the few of our friends who has a car? Manny? Teeth-in-the-dark Manny? If I took care of it, he would never know, I think, never know, and then maybe it would give him time. Time to what? I push. Be different. Love me.
These are my options, and they narrow to none.
The sun set hours ago, and I am sitting on the toilet seat, pulling the towel that Randall tacked up for a curtain to look out in the yard. I see Skeetah dragging wood to the door of the shed. The bare bulb burns outward, shining on the dirt he kneels in. He is prying nails from wood. Insects swarm at the edges of the light. The frame for the kennel that sat for days, wedged into the dirt like a fallen scarecrow, is upright again. He is building her a house. He is watching over her, gauging her for sickness. He knows love.
“Gotdamnit.”
Daddy’s pickup eases into the yard so slowly that I can hear him curse above the gurgle of the engine. This is how he drives when he is bombed-out drunk. Very slowly, and with his brights on. His headlights break the golden bubble that encases Skeet and flood the yard with light. Skeetah raises the arm with the hammer and shades his eyes. Daddy parks parallel to his dump truck, which has sat rust-barnacled and silent since I attempted to crank it this morning. Daddy leaves his headlights on and gets out of the truck.
“I said, gotdamnit!”
Daddy tries to punctuate this by slamming the door of his truck, but he fails. His hand slips from the metal, and it closes so quietly I can’t even hear it from my seat on the toilet next to the window.
“Gotdamn Van’s Salvage,” Daddy mutters, “didn’t even have the part I needed.” He leans against the side of his truck like it’s a human being, speaks this almost as low as he used to on the nights he came home dazed drunk when Mama was alive. Mama would walk out to meet him, gather him to her like a child. She was only a few inches shorter than him and could bear all of his weight. He would whisper to her as they walked up the concrete slabs that made up the steps to the front porch. We never heard what he said to her. I imagine that he told her that he loved her, soaked tender with moonshine.
“You left your lights on,” Skeetah says.
“Now how I’m going to make money after the storm?” Daddy slaps his truck, but it is awkward, at odds. It slides into a caress. “What you say?”
“I said you left your lights on.” Skeetah is prying