Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [60]
The summer league game is in the gym at St. Catherine’s elementary school. Ms. Dedeaux told us once that the elementary school used to actually be the black school for the district before the schools were desegregated in 1969, after the last big hurricane, when people were too tired finding their relatives’ uprooted bodies, reburying them, sleeping on platforms that used to be the foundations of their houses, under tents, biking or walking miles for freshwater, for food, to still fight the law outlawing segregation. Daddy went to this school when it was all black, and Mama, too. On one of their blues nights after I had danced myself to shaking, Mama told the story of how they met, that Daddy would not stop pulling her hair in the hallway, making fun of her little-girl pigtails since the rest of her was so grown, and of how she turned around one day and hit him in the chest so hard he lost his breath. Then he stopped pulling her hair, but started leaving her presents in her desk, instead: pieces of pecan candy he’d stolen from his grandma, whole pecans wrapped in newspaper, blackberries dusted with ditch dirt, hot from the sun, leaking black juice. That was their beginning.
Now there’s construction paper taped in makeshift galleries along the wall by the door. They flutter in the wind driven by the industrial fan, and at the concession stand a woman with finger waves, a gold tooth, and lips the color of azaleas rolls her eyes at Junior, who drags his feet when we pass her. Moles fade to freckles in a messy paint splatter across her face. Bags of potato chips are laid out on her folding table in rows, one against the other, orderly and even. I grab Junior’s bony shoulders and push him to the top of the stands where we sit.
The inside of the gym is dark, the steel ceiling beams lost in a humid haze like cloud cover; it is hotter here at the top of the bleachers. Big Henry sits next to Marquise, who sprawls on one elbow and tries to wheedle a sports drink out of him. Randall is already on the court doing drills, tossing the ball to his teammates as they weave in and out of each other in knots and make lay-ups, palm rebounds in lazy arcs. Skeetah sinks into the bleachers until his butt is resting on the floor, his legs kicked out so that his soles are to the court, his arms spread wide across the seat behind him. The corded gather of him eases. He wipes his forehead with the hem of his shirt and it beads again. He nods languidly. He is smiling, his teeth white and even: glistening bone. He is high.
“You’re surprised I came.” Skeetah speaks to the court, his smile grown slack. He blinks solemnly.
“Yeah.”
“What’s been done been done.” Skeet shrugs, his shoulders rise and settle like sleek feathers. “China going to come back to me. To herself. Soon.”
“You bring them back by her to feed yet?”
“Yeah. I held her muzzle shut. Every time she move her head toward them, I pop her on her nose.”
“You think the other three puppies going to make it?”
“Fucking right they going to make it.” Skeetah lays his head back on the bleacher behind his shoulders. He swallows and his Adam’s apple slides like a mouse down the gullet of a snake. “This ain’t beating me.”
Junior is tapping me on my leg, beating out Morse code.
“Esch?”
“Go ’head. Stay away from the concession stand.”
Junior smiles, teeth missing in the front, and then swallows it and tries to look trustworthy enough to stay away from the snack table.
“And don’t try to steal nothing, neither.”
Junior squeals, his mouth turned down at the corners to plead.
“No.”
“Here.” Big Henry is reaching into his pocket, cupping loose change like marbles. He drops the coins in Junior’s hand, which Junior cups and