Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [83]
Skeetah is building a pile of things outside of the shed. I would say that he is cleaning the shed out, but I cannot, since he is not taking out any of the tools, the oil drums, the broken lawnmowers and bike frames and pots for plants. His pile is all for China: dog food, chains, leashes, blankets, her food bowls. He washes out her bowls with his hands and sits them on the step next to Junior and me, where they sweat small puddles. He carries her blanket to the clothesline and hangs it, and then he bends in two, crouching through the junk in the yard for something.
“What he doing?” Junior asks.
I shrug.
Skeetah straightens up with a large stick in his hand, a branch knocked loose by a rainstorm, and begins beating the blanket. Dirt showers down, fitful as cold rain. Some of it floats a little longer than it should, a slow cloud, and I realize that some of China is in the blanket, that her hair is coming away. It makes me think of cereal in milk, of Rice Krispies in sugar.
“We need more food,” I say.
Randall catches his ball, hugs it to his stomach.
“Any ideas?”
I suck my lips. Feel like chewing something.
“Not yet,” I say.
Randall frowns. Junior lays his head on my shoulder.
“I’m tired,” he says.
I want to say, It’s too hot for you to be hanging on me, but I look at his baseball knees, his head, which seems too big and heavy for his stringy neck, and instead I say, “Do you want some noodles?”
“Yeah.”
Skeetah is frowning, beating the blanket clean. China starts from her crouch where she has been sitting next to the bucket, running from the first dig of her toes into the dirt. She runs up to the pilings that were the chicken coop and leaps, grinning, barking. She is trying to lick their feathers. The chickens bear down, huddle. China flies past, turns to the fence posts, jumps there, almost meeting them with her head. They squawk and hop, alight again on the wood. She ignores the dozen in the tree and races for the washing machine. She flies and lands on it, and the chickens roosting there scatter.
“Skeet!” I yell.
“China,” Skeet calls and hits the blanket again.
I go into the dark house to cook Junior’s noodles, and Daddy sleeps so hard and is so quiet that it feels like I am alone there.
“We should look for eggs,” says Randall. He says this while Junior is sitting on the steps, his face buried in the bowl, slurping at the soupy water left after he has sucked the ramen in long wormy strings over his chin and into his lips. He hates when I break the noodles before I boil them in the pot.
“They need to be in the refrigerator.”
“We can boil them. They’ll keep for days.”
Junior is drinking the last of the soup, still hunched over the bowl. I wish I’d made myself some; my tongue turns loose at the idea of the salt. Junior’s back is a young turtle’s shell, so thin it would snap if stepped on.
Skeetah is piling the folded blanket on top of the food bags along with the leashes and China’s practice tires and the syringes and the medicine he stole from the farmer. Junior sticks his finger into the bowl, wipes it along the bottom to get the seasoning, and licks it. He bangs into the kitchen, throws the bowl into the sink, and bangs back out. He runs over to Randall, the soles of his feet flashing yellow, the color of China’s eyes.
“You should put some shoes on,” I say.
“You coming, Skeet?” he asks as Randall slides from the gas tank, upright, already squinting into the woods, the dust, the wind.
“I’ll catch up. Gotta exercise China. She going to be cooped up, and she ain’t going to like