Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [75]
Kilo keens.
There are pink mimosa flowers drifting and falling on the breeze. Marquise’s brother has left Junior; he has scampered out of the tree to hide his face in Jerome’s leg while his pink-dusted shoulders shudder. Junior squats in the mimosa still, his hands white on the branches, jerking as if he would break the wood. His eyes are wide, glued to the screaming Kilo. Junior shakes a beat to Kilo’s keening, and it is a song.
THE NINTH DAY: HURRICANE ECLIPSE
The sound of someone throwing up in the bathroom wakes me. In my half sleep, I see myself in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, one hand on the back of the bowl, vomiting. But then the retching becomes louder, sounds like my tongue is curling up and out of my throat, and I realize I am not throwing up. I have never been so loud; have never made that sound. The bathroom disappears and I wake to the half-light of dawn, the ceiling, Junior asleep in his twin bed with his sheets and pillow kicked to the floor, and our door cracked.
It’s Daddy on the floor of the bathroom. Daddy with one hand on the back of the bowl, one knee on the floor. Daddy looking like he’s about to dive into the toilet, lose his tongue.
“Daddy?”
“Get Randall,” he breathes, and then his back curves and he sounds like he’s being ripped.
The hallway is still dark. Randall is in his bed, Skeetah isn’t. After the match yesterday, he washed China under the lightbulb outside the back door. He rubbed her down and then sat on the back steps and dabbed antibiotic ointment from a dirty crumpled tube into her where Kilo had torn her and made the flesh show. Her leg and shoulder and her ripped breast looked like meat, and Skeetah took the same worn-out Ace bandage he’d wrapped his side with and cut it in thirds. He wrapped her leg, her neck and shoulder, her stomach, and pinned. She stood, eyes slits, panting easily, letting him patch her up. Every few minutes, she would wag her tail, and he would rub her somewhere it wasn’t red: her feet, her back, her tail. He must have slept in the shed with her. I have to shove Randall twice before he wakes up, his eyes rolling white, his arms up to guard his face.
“What?” he says. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Daddy. He in the bathroom throwing up.”
Randall looks at me like he can’t see me.
“What?”
“Daddy. In the bathroom. He’s sick.”
Randall nods at me, blinks. He’s waking.
“Said he needed you.”
By the time we get to the end of the hallway, Randall is bouncing, shaking the sleep off his arms and legs. Daddy has laid his head on the toilet, his face turned to us, his eyes closed, his arms hanging knuckle down on the peeling tile so that they look like sapling pine trees.
“I’m sick,” Daddy moans. “Can’t stop.”
“Come on, Daddy.”
“No.” Daddy tries to push Randall away from him as Randall bends over, grabbing Daddy under his arms, but Daddy is weak, and his hands fall away like dry branches. “Got to stay by the toilet.”
“I’ma put a garbage can next to your bed.” Randall tugs Daddy up, gets his chest in the air, but Daddy’s legs drag, and Daddy hangs there limp as sheets on a clothesline before they’ve been stretched and pinned. When the grandparents were still living, Mama washed all the sheets for both houses at once, and there was so much bedding that Daddy had to hang extra lines. Mama would walk through and hang them bunched first before spreading them. The sheets were so thin we could almost see through them. They made cloudy rooms, and we played hide-and-seek in them. In the winter, they made our faces wet and achingly cold, but in the summer, it was so hot the sheets didn’t stay wet long, but we smashed our faces into them anyway, trying to find the hidden cool. Mama yelled at us for dirtying them once when we left muddy prints on them; afterward, we let our hands hover over them, shoved our noses into them to see if we could see the other person running down the next billowing