Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [86]
“I ain’t got nothing here,” he says. Manny blinks at me when he says it. Looks at me head-on, for the second time ever. “Nothing.”
Nothing. For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know.
I am on him like China.
I fought Skeetah and Randall for play when we were younger. Once I punched Skeet in the stomach when we were wrestling and my arms felt like noodles, like he had no muscle to hit and I had no muscle to hit him with. I kicked Randall in the chest when he was picking with me and knocked the wind out of him. Once I fought a girl in the middle school locker room for laughing at my budding breasts; she sneered that I needed to tell my mama that I needed a training bra. My mama was four years dead then. That girl plucked my shirt where a bra strap would be and pushed me, and I turned back on her and swung blind, trying to smash her face in, kicking at her legs, elbowing her, beating with my whole body. She was twice my size, but I surprised her before she was able to push me off. I fell over the bench and the lockers cut a gash in my arm, but I left that girl with a knot rising purple on her head and a lip pink and tender as a pickled pig’s lips in a jar. She always says hello to me when she sees me in the hallway, three years after the fact. I am fast.
I am slapping him, over and over, my hands a flurry, a black blur. His face is hot and stinging as boiling water.
“Hey! Hey!” Manny yells. He blocks what he can with his elbows and forearms, but still I snake through. I slap so hard my hands hurt.
“I love you!”
“Esch!” The skin on his throat is red, his scar white.
“I loved you!”
I hit his Adam’s apple with the V where my thumb and pointer finger cross. He chokes.
“I loved you!” This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood.
“Stupid bitch! What is wrong with you?”
“You!”
Manny grabs me under my armpits, picks me up off the ground, and throws. I fly backward. My toes land first, skimming the road, then my heels thud, but I am moving too fast to stop and I hit the ground with my butt. I try to catch myself with my stinging hands and then they sting more. I’ve scraped the skin off.
“How you come to me saying something’s mines when you fuck everybody who come to the Pit?”
“You the only one I been with!” I rush him again.
“You better go to Big Henry with that bullshit!” Manny twists and shoves me away from him again, but I take the neck of his T-shirt with me when I go.
“I know!” I say. “I know it’s yours!”
“No it ain’t.”
“I’ma tell Randall.”
“You think they don’t know you a slut?” He spits this and it is red; I have drawn blood.
Manny shakes his head and snorts, skipping backward away from me, and then he is running down the narrowing road, being swallowed by the rustling brush, and I am shaking like the leaves, like the green around me, bent in the first fingering rush of the coming winds.
“You are!” I yell.
Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean. What I carry in my stomach is relentless; like each unbearable day, it will dawn. I watch Manny getting smaller and smaller, and my ribs break like dry summer wood, and burn and burn and burn.
“The baby will tell,” I scream. “It’ll tell!” But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.
Randall finds me sitting in the ditch. My legs are over the side, and the blackberry vines are scratching them and there are ants crawling on my toes, but I don’t care. Tears run down my face like water and I cover my face with my shirt but it is too hot and I can’t make it go away. I can never make it stop never nothing. When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons. She shrieked;