Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [45]
“Oh.” Daddy reaches into the truck and pushes the knob to turn off the headlights. He walks toward Skeetah slowly. This is his drunk walk: purposeful, plodding. “What you doing?”
“Nothing.” Skeetah stills, stops pulling at the nail, but stays bent over.
“Nothing?”
“At all.”
“I see you doing something, so you can’t be doing nothing.”
“Ain’t you tired?”
“What?”
“You been busy trying to get parts for that dump truck all day.”
“Damn right,” Daddy says. “The U-Pull-It, the Salvage, all looked at me crazy. No dump truck parts. No help when I was looking through the cars. Look at me like they don’t know when a man’s talking when I tell them a bad storm’s coming.”
Skeetah straightens, balances on the balls of his feet, preparing to outwait Daddy. The hammer is on his knee.
“Them’s boards. You been in my piles?”
“Naw.”
“I got them gathered for the house. You always meddling. You want the windows to shatter?”
“Daddy, I ain’t mess with your wood.”
“Well, where you get it from, then?”
“Found it off up in the woods.” Skeet is running the hammer back and forth on his leg. He is waiting for the step that turns Daddy mean.
“You ain’t found shit in them woods.” Daddy is waving his hand in the air as if he is waving away night beetles startled to flight, wading through the glossy brown bugs with shells as hard as butterscotch candies. He spits. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Skeetah is very quiet. The hammer is still.
“Bullshit!” Daddy yells. “Everything I do for y’all and y’all don’t appreciate shit!” He raises his arms again, as if he has stirred more bugs to motion. He reaches to grab Skeetah’s arm, to pull him to standing and then shove him, probably. This is what he does when he wants to manhandle, humiliate; he pulls one of us toward him, shakes, and then shoves us hard backward so that we fall in the dirt. So that we sprawl like toddlers learning to walk: dirt on our faces and our hands, faces wet with crying or mucus, ashamed. Skeetah is rigid, as straight as the hammer hanging at his side. Daddy tries to shove him but he is slow to let go; it is as if his hands are deaf to what his brain wants them to do, and they grip Skeetah’s shoulders, hard. He shakes Skeetah.
“Let me go, Daddy.” This is so quiet that I can barely hear it.
China is standing in the doorway of the shed. She does not growl. She does not bark. She only stands, head cocked to one side, her forelegs locked wide, her breasts adding more bulk to her, the rest of her lost to the darkness of the shed. She is still.
“Let go!”
“All I do!” Daddy shoves Skeet so hard that Daddy lurches backward with the force of it, but he catches himself before falling.
Skeetah stutters backward but lands crouching, still on his feet. China darts forward. Skeet holds the hammer like a baton.
“Hold,” Skeetah calls. “Hold!” There is wetness to his voice. China stops where she is. She is one of the flaking statues at the graveyard next to the park, an angel streaked by rain, burning bright.
“I wish she would,” Daddy says, his arms straight as his sides. “I wish she would.”
Skeetah edges sideways to China, lays down the hammer, and puts his hand over her muzzle. She is marble under his fingers.
“I’d take her upcountry and shoot her.”
“No.”
“Call the county pound. Make you watch them take her away.”
Skeetah has his arm around China’s back, tucked over and under her stomach, his hand lost somewhere in her breasts. China does not turn and lick him. She watches Daddy still. Skeetah rubs her chest with his other hand, smoothes the fur in broad downward strokes again and again.
“I’m trying to save us,” Daddy says. Skeetah crouches. “Y’all need to learn to appreciate me. You hear me?”
The nightbugs answer back yesssssssss. Skeetah ignores Daddy, rubs China, glances back and forth between them.
“Put them gotdamn boards back where you found them. You hear me?”
China’s tail lowers, but her ears are still laid back down her skull like a crest of feathers. Skeetah is whispering to her,