Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [63]
“Esch, you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“Big Henry told me to come check on you. I told him that I didn’t want to come in the girls’ bathroom, but he said …”
“I’m coming. Hold on.”
At least my face is dry. Maybe everyone will just think that I am high. I want to let Junior go ahead of me back around the building to the gym, so I walk slowly, but then he walks slower so he doesn’t leave me, and it takes us ten minutes to walk around to the front.
“You okay, Esch?” Junior asks.
Desultory claps flit out like small evening bats. Occasional whoops. It sounds empty.
“Yeah.” I am breathing through my mouth. In the bathroom, I cried so hard I felt nauseous. Kids are milling around the gym door like our chickens, and I expect Junior to run off with them, to leave me to duck into the gym alone, but he doesn’t. He loops his arm around my elbow like he is escorting me, and I keep my head down, my eyes half closed so all I see are anonymous legs, tennis shoes, gold-sandaled feet as Junior leads me up the bleachers. We circle Big Henry, sit up and to the side of Skeetah so that Junior and I are farthest away from the crowd and the floor, up here in the dark. It is only after I sit that I realize that Manny and his girl and Rico are sitting a few seats below us and to the right. Manny is leaning forward, away from her, as if he would run down the bleachers and into the game. His shirt pulls across his shoulders, his tense back, and I look away.
“Esch?” Skeetah asks. He is a little less high now, his eyes a little less dull.
“I’m fine.” I try to say it loudly.
“Fuck that nigga.” Skeetah touches my knee lightly, punctuates what he says with a nod. It is as if he is touching the sadness in me with his hand, so I move my knee away, smash my lips together. Already I want to cry. He touches my leg again, with one finger this time: lightly, quickly. “Fuck him.” He spits this at Manny’s back, loud enough for Big Henry to hear.
“What’s up?” Big Henry asks. I shake my head and look down.
Skeetah slaps the bench with both hands. It echoes loudly. Rico, who was elbowing Manny and talking, his hands like birds, turns at the sound, smiling to show his gold. Manny shakes his head, but Rico gets up anyway, ascends the stairs two steps at a time, and stops in front of me and Skeetah. In the gloom, his teeth shine.
“I heard your bitch had our puppies,” Rico says.
“Our puppies?” Skeetah asks.
“Yeah, ours. I thought we was splitting them down the middle.”
“Really.”
“They healthy?”
“Why don’t you ask your cousin if they healthy?”
“I want to see them.”
“Ain’t nothing for you to see.” Skeetah sits up slowly from his recline. He hunches over when he speaks, his shoulders curved, his muscles gathering.
“What you mean?”
“It was China’s first litter. Lot of them born dead, and lot of them done died.”
“Manny say one look just like Kilo. That’s the one I want.”
“It’s dead.” Skeetah stands, and he is barely taller than Rico, who is standing a bleacher below him, and half Rico’s size. But Skeetah tilts his head to the side, squints at Rico, and I know he’s not scared, that he will never be scared. “China killed it,” he says, and there is a lyric in his voice. He almost sings it when he says it, gleeful.
“Well, then I want another one.”
“All they got left for you to have is the runt.”
“What the fuck I want with a runt?” Rico laughs when he says it. It sounds as metallic and hard as his teeth.
“Well, that’s all I got. That one and a black-and-white one. Both small.”
Skeetah is omitting the white one, the one that is a clone of China.
“Manny?”
“Yeah.” Manny walks up the stairs to us, looks at Skeetah and Rico. I ignore his black eyes.
“Thought you said Skeetah got a white one