Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [49]
“She needs to get up,” Skeet says. When we tell him that we are walking to the park, he is resolved. “She needs to work it out.”
Skeetah puts her on a leash and then picks her up, slinging her over one shoulder. Her hind legs tangle in his thighs and make it hard for him to walk. He hasn’t done this since she was a puppy. Then she would smile over his shoulder, licking the salt from his ear and neck. Now she frowns, her eyes half closed, nodding to sleep. A thin line of spit stretches to his back. Skeetah hoists her up again and again, and it is only when we have rounded the house, circled an old tub, the husk of a car I never remember seeing run, and jumped the ditch to the ragged asphalt road does he set her down. Pines sway on both sides with a sudden wind, and China lists with them. She is shaking. Her white hair dusts Skeetah’s shoulders, which look hard. He is frowning. He yanks at her leash.
“Come on.”
Junior bumps me in the side.
“I’ll be right back.” Junior says, and then he is running away toward the house.
China looks desultorily after him. Skeetah yanks her leash, again, and begins walking. She drags herself into motion, pads after him. The chain pulls at her ears, circles her head like a garrote. Skeetah walks leaning forward and doesn’t look back. A hawk circles over our heads, riding a draft. It glides down in a spiral and then flaps off and vanishes in the feathery tops of the trees. Our house is the color of rust, nearly invisible under the oaks and behind the rubbish, lopsided. The cement bricks it sits on are the color of the sand. I follow Skeetah, who is walking so quickly, his figure dwindles in the high, hot day. I expect Junior to come back with a ball, but then I hear the grab and grind of bike tires, and he is peeling down the road, standing up. The dull black bike wobbles from side to side with each pedal. It is too small even for Junior to ride. When he swerves next to me, I realize it has no seat. This is why he is standing. I laugh.
“Where did you get that from?”
“Found it,” Junior huffs. His smile is more like an exhale, and then he is huffing again, wheeling away from me to ride circles around Skeetah. Where China would have usually chased anyone on a bike, she saunters, head down, and ignores Junior. Skeetah ignores her in turn, walking straight ahead, his back curved, his silhouette one tense, worried line. The leash remains taut. I run to catch up with them.
As we walk into the center of Bois Sauvage, away from our Pit, the houses appear gradually, hidden behind trees, closer to one another until there are only ragged lots of woods separating them. We walk past Big Henry’s incongruously narrow shotgun house. Marquise’s small pink house, which has only three windows and sits in a yard so clustered with azalea, seems like one more faded flower. Rich boy Franco’s house is green, and for some reason, someone in his family has painted the bottom two feet of the tree’s trunks in his yard white. Some older boys named Joshua and Christophe have a blue-gray house with a screened-in porch along the side with bougainvillea grown to riot under the oaks in the yard, and then there is Mudda Ma’am’s yellow house faded to tan, choked with wisteria. Manny’s trailer is on the other side of Bois Sauvage, away from this side of the neighborhood: the small Catholic church, the haphazard cemetery Skeetah mowed, the county park with the dirt parking lot, which strives to impose some order, some civility to Bois.