Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [81]
What is wrong with you, Junior? Randall asks.
Get the cheapest you can get, Randall had said, so when Skeetah and Big Henry begin unloading the trunk, I expect cardboard boxes cut in half full of tomato soup. Skeetah pulls out a big bag of dog food, hoists it up over his shoulder, and carries it to the shed. Then he pulls out another fifty-pound bag of dog food and dumps it next to the first, where they sit like lumpy twins. China is barking, high-pitched, from the shed. She is hungry.
“All right!” Skeetah yells, and she stops mid-bark, swallows it. He slides the tin shed door over, and she walks out calmly, brushes him with her head, noses his pants, licks his hand. He squats and rubs her.
Randall and Junior and I have been sitting in the yard for the past hour or so, jobs done; the house is too dark, too hot. It is a closed fist. Junior had been playing with an old extension cord, using it like a rope. He’d kept tying it to trees and twirling the cord like a jump rope. The tree was his partner, but he had no one to jump in the middle. Finally Randall untied the cord and I walked over and grabbed the other end. While the sky was darkening, the sun shining more fitfully through the clouds, we turned the cord for Junior and he jumped in the dust.
Randall walks to the car first. There are two boxes shoved in the corner of the trunk, the tops open and folded apart. In one, there are around fifteen cans of peas, green writing on silver, and a few of potted meat. And in the second box, there are two dozen bags of Top Ramen. Randall grabs the box with the peas and meat in it, and I grab the box with the ramen. Randall holds his box with one arm, his muscles knotting, and shrugs at Skeetah, raises his hand like he is throwing a ball in the air toward a goal raised too high.
“Why did you get all these peas?”
“It’s all they had.”
“And only three potted meats?”
“They was wiped out. Last things on the shelves.”
“I told you not to get nothing that need to be cooked. What we going to do with a box full of Top Ramen?”
“We going to eat it.” Skeetah looks up from China. He is checking her breasts, peeling back the tan wrap to see the scabs that line the red watery wounds. China licks his forearm.
“What we going to cook Ramen with? You know the electricity go out in a thunderstorm; what you think it’s going to do in a hurricane?”
“We got the grill in the woods. We can cook them over a fire.”
“The wood is going to be wet.”
“It ain’t even going to be that big of a deal. Probably turn and miss us.”
“No, Skeet. We been listening to the radio all day. It’s a category three and it’s coming right for us. Got two sacks of dog food! How long you think these peas going to last us?”
“We got other stuff in the house!”
I hate peas. My stomach, which has lately been pulling at me, driving me to eat at all hours of the day to feed the baby, burns.
“Barely enough for five people!” I say, my voice harder than I have ever heard it.
Skeetah unwraps China’s breast, and it hangs free, already bruised and wilted from disuse; it is a dark mark on her, marring what was once so white, so pristine. The scar makes what remains even more beautiful. Skeetah looks at China like he would dive into her if he could and drown.
“You ever tasted dog food?” Skeetah asks.
Randall’s box jerks, and he looks as if he wants to throw it.
Big Henry closes the trunk, holds up his big hands palms out, like he would calm us.
“Man, we got a little extra. Me and Mama got cases of cold drinks and canned goods at the beginning of the summer, and we been eating from her garden