Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [52]
“Well, shit.” Randall folds himself in half and wipes his face on his basketball shorts. “Shit.”
“You ready for the summer league game tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” Randall’s voice is muffled in his shorts; the cloth makes it quaver.
“They going to pay for basketball camp this year?”
“Don’t know. Coach say it’s between me and Bodean.”
“Nervous?”
“They only choose one, and I score two to Bodean’s one every game. I work harder than him.”
“You already imagining all them scouts at the camp, ain’t you?” Big Henry laughs.
“Figure I look best in a black jersey.” Randall leans back and cradles his skull in his hands. “Or baby blue.” Randall smiles, but I know that a part of him is serious, that he already knows what college he wants to go to.
Big Henry pushes himself up off his elbows. Manny sits down next to Shaliyah on the bleachers, leans over to her, rubs his sweaty shoulder into hers. She squeals and tries to jump up, but he clutches her to him. She squirms and squeals again, laughing. The sun is bearing down on me, burning, evaporating the sweat, water, and blood from me to leave my skin, my desiccated organs, my brittle bones: my raisin of a body. If I could, I would reach inside of me and pull out my heart and that tiny wet seed that will become the baby. Let them go first so the rest won’t hurt so much.
“That grass going to make you itch.”
“I know,” Randall says. He stretches the waistband of his shorts. “Water.” He walks to the spigot across the grass, and he is fluid and tall and black.
“I know you hot out here.” Big Henry touches the back of my hand with two fingers, presses.
“Yeah.” Manny is rubbing the sweat from his forehead into Shaliyah’s cheek. Her squeal becomes a shriek. Her teeth are so white.
“You want to come sit in my car? It’s parked in the shade. Windows down.” Big Henry glances over at the bleachers and then rolls to his side and stands in one quick motion. Sometimes I forget he was an athlete.
“Okay.” The clouds are slower now, hang off in the distance above the tree line as if they are wary of the sun. “Okay.” I look at the ground when I rise, when I turn away from the court, when I walk. Barely resisting the urge to look back. I don’t even see when Junior barrels up next to me, whooping, swerving at me on his bike. He is laughing. Under the trees in the dirt parking lot, Javon is parked. His car gleams like the approaching sunset. Marquise is leaning on his bumper. Randall runs over behind us, reclines on Big Henry’s hood and the front windshield so that his wet back looks like pudding. Inside the car, Big Henry and I sit with the doors open, one leg out, heads back. Big Henry plays Outkast.
Randall makes jokes and Big Henry laughs. When the sun rests on the rim of the trees, we leave, and Manny is on the court now with his girl. They are playing a game of one-on-one, and he is taunting her, knocking the ball out of her hand so that it ricochets across the court. Her laughter carries on the softening pink wind. Big Henry closes his door. I slam mine, and Randall scoots over to the passenger side of the windshield. Junior holds the top of the door, still standing on his bike, and Big Henry folds his big paw over Junior’s. Big Henry taps the gas and then eases, and this is how we follow Skeetah and China, who are both running now, both sucking dark and blazing bright under the setting sun and the scudding clouds, all the way home.
The puppies are whining for milk. They have been listening to Daddy hammering at the coop, dismantling it nail by board, into the pine-black evening. They writhe against each other. Skeetah lifts them out one by one by their necks, sets them on the floor before China,