by Jesmyn Ward
“Where y’all going?” Junior asks.
“None of your business,” says Skeet. He walks into the shed, and I follow.
“Go on, Junior.” I say. He doesn’t need to know that the puppy is dying. He doesn’t need to know that young things go, too.
“You ain’t the boss of me,” Junior says. I try to block his slide into the curtained doorway, but he crawls under me and sees Skeet handling the sick puppy, which doesn’t swim now. The puppy’s head rolls to the side, and he raises an arm, but I don’t know if that is Skeet’s fingers pulling him like a puppet, or the puppy, fighting.
“Get out of here, Junior! You so bad,” Skeetah says. He pulls down a bucket from one of the high shelves and lays the puppy inside, and then puts it back up so China can’t reach it. She growls, and Skeetah places his fingers in the middle of her forehead, shoves. “Shut up.”
“I’m telling Randall that you fixing to do something bad to the puppy!” Junior runs outside.
“Oh Lord,” I breathe.
China watches, reclining on her side. The puppies feed from her, and she is still, stone. Only her eyes shine like an oil lamp in the light. I should know that’s who she is, know that she’s often still as an animal ready to attack, but I’m not. Her tail does not wag. I can’t help the skin puckering over my stomach, up my arms.
“We’ll leave him up here till later tonight. If it’s the parvo, hopefully he too far away to infect the other ones.” Skeetah wipes his hands on the front of his holey tee. His shirt comes up over his ribs, his thin, muscled stomach. “Shit. The germs. I need to go wash my hands.”
I’m sitting on the steps, waiting on Skeetah, when Randall comes out the trees. He bounces when he walks, and it’s like the darkness under the green gives him his pieces one by one: a chest, a stomach, hips, arms, and legs. Last, a face. Junior is a voice behind him, riding on his back, his feet flopping over Randall’s stomach, leaving white dusty marks like powder with his soles.
“What’s this Junior talking about y’all trying to drown one of the puppies?”
I feel a quick wave of nausea.
“I don’t know where he got that from.”
“He say y’all put it in a bucket.”
“The puppy got parvo.” I say.
“They was going to drown it in the bucket!” Randall hoists Junior up, so when Junior says this, he is the flash of a face over Randall’s shoulder.
“And we wasn’t fixing to drown it in no bucket.” I say.
“Well, what y’all going to do with it?”
“Take it to back to the pit.”
Randall lets Junior go, and Junior hangs on until he can’t anymore, until his legs turn to noodles and he is sliding down Randall like a pole. We three are quiet, looking at each other, frowning.
“Go on, Junior.” Randall says.
“But Randall-”
“Go.”
Junior folds his arms over his chest, his ribs like a small grill burnt black. He needs to put a shirt on.
“Go.”
Junior’s eyes are bright. When he runs away, his feet make little slapping sounds in the dirt, and leave clouds of smoke. Skeetah grabs the bucket and his nest egg of food that he stole from the house.
“You can’t just kill the thing,” Randall says.
“Yes, I can.”
“You can make it better.”
“Nothing can make parvo better. Puppies don’t survive that. And if I don’t get rid of this one, the others will catch it. And then they will all die. You think Junior can handle that?”
“No. But they got to be another way.”
“There ain’t.” Skeetah hauls the bag over his shoulder along with his BB gun, holds the bucket in one trembling hand. “You know basketball, but you don’t know dogs.” He walks away. “Tell him something, I don’t know what-but this one got to go.”
“He too young, Esch.” Randall’s hands look graceless without a basketball in them. He looks like he doesn’t know how to hold them.
“I know,” I say. “But we was young, too.” He knows who I am talking about.
“I keep catching him climbing up on barrels, looking through the cracks, too scared to go inside. Staring at them puppies. China start growling and I pull him away, and I can feel his little heart beating fast. And thirty minutes later I catch him up there again.”
I shrug, lift up my hands like I have something to give him when I know I don’t. I start to trot toward Skeetah, who is walking deeper into the shade under the trees on his way to the Pit.
“Come on!” Skeetah calls. Randall strikes at the air; it looks as if he is passing an invisible ball.
“Shit,” Randall curses. “Shit.”
Skeetah has stolen this: bread, a knife, cups, a half-gallon jug of punch, hot sauce, dishwashing liquid. He sits them next to the bucket, and he dusts off two cinder blocks with a grill laid over it that he and Randall made into a barbecue pit when we were younger. The steel is burnt black, the stones burnt gray. His rifle hangs by a strap from his shoulder, its muzzle digging into the backs of his legs when he walks.
“What do we need that for?” I ask.
In the bucket, the puppy murmurs. It is lonely.
“Come on,” Skeetah says.
In the woods, animals dart between the valleys of shadow. Birds trill up through pathways of sunlight. Skeetah cuts through it all, his shoulders curved. He leans forward when he walks, studies the ground. I am noisy behind him, my feet dragging in the pine needles. I kick up my knees, try to set my feet down easy, but I am off balance. What would be the baby sits like a water balloon in my stomach, makes me feel set to bursting. My secret makes me clumsy. Skeetah stops, kneels in the needles and crackling leaves; underneath, it all rots and turns to dirt. Skeetah shakes his head at me and looks up into the trees. We wait.
Before a hurricane, the animals that can, leave. Birds fly north out of the storm, and everything else roams as far away from the winds and rain as possible. The air has been clear these past couple of days. Bright, every day almost unbearably bright and hot and close, the way that I feel when Manny is sweating over me: golden, burning. Insects root under our feet, squirrels leap from tree to tree, crows glide between the tops of the pines, cawing. The beat of their wings sounds soft as the swish of Mudda Ma’am’s broom when she sweeps pine needles from her sandy front yard. Skeetah watches them the way he watches China: like any second she might speak, and he’s sure when it will happen, she will reveal all the answers to all the things he has ever wondered about. Daddy’s crazy, I think, obsessed with hurricanes this summer. He was convinced last summer after one tornado touched down at a shopping complex in Germaine that the Gulf Coast would be a new tornado alley. He spent the entire summer pointing out the safest places in the house to crouch. Every time he caught Junior in the kitchen, he made him practice the tornado drill we were all taught in school; kneel, fold over your thighs, tuck your head between your knees, cover your neck with your bony fingers to protect the soft throat underneath.
Skeetah takes his gun off his shoulder, cocks it. He holds it loosely at first, his eyes moving back and forth like he is reading something written in the air between the trees.
“Skeet. What you fixing to shoot?”
“Wasn’t enough cans of meat to steal.”
“I ain’t cooking it, Skeet.”
Skeetah shoulders the rifle. He points the gun at the sky. The wind moves a little in the tops of the trees, and then dies away, like a person leaving a room. The trees are silent with longing. The gun begins to scissor back and forth. Skeetah points, following the squirrels scampering through the trees. They are fuzzy and gray, fat with summer food.
“Shhhh,” he says. “We need something to eat.”
A branch creaks. The tops of the pines rub together as the wind comes again, but the oaks do not move. The squirrels like the oaks best, run along their black, hard branches highway overpasses. These are their solid houses; they will withstand a storm, if she c
omes. The smell of baked pine is strong.
“Gotcha,” Skeet says, and he shoots.
The shot rings off a pine, making a solid thunk that sounds like a punch. Skeet winces. The squirrels melt in and out of the dark blotches, round the bends of the trunks, disappear, reappear. When one with a half-missing tail appears at the V of the oak and slides over it to scramble down to the ground, Skeet fires again. The squirrel loses its grip, curls into a ball, and rolls down the trunk, leaving a ribbon of red. Skeetah stands and runs toward it, firing again. Its half tail twitches, and it lays still on the earth. It is big for a Mississippi squirrel.
“I’m not cleaning that.”
The crows fly away, screaming. The insects scream in chorus in the tops of the trees.
Skeetah picks the squirrel up with both hands, tries to hold the body together so it won’t fall apart in pieces. Blood squirts out of it with a pulse. The heart.
“You want him to come tonight, don’t you?”
“Who you talking about?”
“You know who I’m talking about. And it ain’t Big Henry.” He flings a bit of fur away that was dangling wetly like a red earring from the animal’s hide. “Ain’t Marquise, neither.”
“No.” I shake my head. Skeetah grabs the rest of the tail and pulls. What was left of it before he shot the squirrel comes away like bristles from a brush.
“Y’all don’t look right together,” Skeetah says, studying the bloody carcass. He is so hot his nose is sweating. But we are, I want to say. He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts. But I say nothing, and Skeetah shrugs and lifts the squirrel up like an offering and begins walking back to the pit.
When we get back to the campsite, Skeetah lays the squirrel on the plastic bag, and he pulls out the knife and cuts the head off. The blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. He pitches the head into the underbrush like a ball, runs the knife in a jagged line down the squirrel’s chest, and then makes a cross across the animal’s arms. He is ruthless, quiet, focused as China before a fight. Skeetah pulls hard, and the skin balloons away from the flesh underneath, stretching, stretching, until it is a wet limp rag, and Skeetah flings it away. Fur booties remain on the squirrel’s feet, but Skeet cuts those off and tosses them after the head. The animal is no more than meat, now, thick as two pork chops laid together. Skeetah slices at the stomach, and what comes sliding out is blue and purple, like so much wet yarn.
“Shit,” Skeet breathes. The smell of the animal’s insides is everywhere. When Daddy used to keep pigs, they shat and ate and rooted in their own filth, growing pink and fat, but the smell of them and their nest was like this animal’s stomach: raw, full with shit. Skeetah is right.
He tries to pull the innards out, but they hold, so he tries to cut at the strings holding them, and he cuts the intestines by accident.
“Oh, shit,” Skeetah says, and he drops the animal and the innards and the knife on the bloody plastic bag and he steps away, his hands on his knees, his head hanging down. There is sand in my throat, and I cannot breathe.
“Jesus, Skeet.” I run off behind a small gathering of trees, as far as I can make it away from that smell and that slime, and I fall and throw up the eggs, the rice, the water, everything I have inside of me until there is no food left, until my throat feels empty and I cannot stop heaving up air and spit, but still I am not able to throw it all up. Inside, at the bottom, something remains.
By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come. Marquise is slicing at the meat with his own pocket knife, slapping small chunks onto pieces of bread that are turning soggy with hot sauce. Skeetah makes a sandwich, passes it to me, before making his own. The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees. The sun had set while Skeetah and I were looking for wood for the grill; the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a drain and left the sky bleached white to navy to dark. I overloaded on wood for the fire; Skeet had to keep grabbing the squirrel out by its foot, his hand wrapped in his shirt, because he was afraid it would burn. But the fire is large enough that I can see all their faces in the dark.
“It’s good,” Marquise says.
“It tastes burnt,” says Skeetah. Big Henry, beside him, laughs.
“It tastes like shit. I can’t believe y’all eating that.” Big Henry gulps more of his beer, which is so warm the bottle doesn’t even sweat water in the hot night. “Might as well give that little bit of nothing to the puppy.”
I hardly chew the sandwich, just bite it small enough to get on my tongue, wet with spit, and swallow. Skeetah hands me the half-jug of juice, and I swallow a mouthful of warm colored sugar. I am not hungry, but it is better when I eat because I don’t feel so sick. If I throw up again, somebody would ask me what my problem is. And I don’t want to have to speak the lie, to be convincing. To have them looking at me and asking. I pass the jug along to Marquise. This is the closest drink to real fruit juice we’ve ever had in the house. Mama used to put it in the cart while I rode in the basket through the grocery store, wedge the red punch alongside me in the seat so the jug turned my leg cold. But I liked it, because later in the truck that didn’t have any air-conditioning, my leg would stay cold, like a piece of ice melting in my hand.
The puppy in the bucket scratches and Skeetah sits over him, his head hanging low, staring. Every once in a while, he’ll touch the rim of the bucket like he wants to reach in and rub the puppy, comfort it, but he doesn’t.
“You ain’t never gave him a name, huh, Skeet?” I ask.
“No.” He doesn’t look up. “You can give it a name if you want, Esch.” He sits with his chin in his hands. “It’s a girl.”
A name. I knew a girl once in school that was named after the candles you burn to drive the mosquitoes away: Citronella. She always had at least two boyfriends, lip gloss, and all her folders were color-coded to match her books. I used to kneel in the water up to my neck and watch her when we ran into her and her folks swimming at the river. She was golden as those candles, so perfect that I wanted to hate her. And I did, some. But sometimes I would say her name when I was walking along, talking to myself, and I liked the way it sounded, the way it rolled around my tongue like a mouthful of ice cream. Citronella. I want to name the puppy this, but I think Marquise, at least, will laugh at me, because he knows her. Probably was one of her boyfriends, walked down the street to the park with her and held her hand.
“Nella,” I say. “I want to name her Nella.”
Skeet nods. Big Henry tries to pass me his forty, but I shake my head. The hot sauce is still pulling spit from my tongue, but I know I’m probably going to cry when Nella goes, and I don’t want any more salt. Marquise shoves a stick in the fire and stabs at the ashes.
“It’s a good name,” Big Henry says, with a smile half shining and then fading. Skeet looks in the bucket like he didn’t hear. Still, the little bit of happiness that was inside me at coming up with the name flutters and snuffs out. What’s the use of naming her to die?
There’s a breaking sound coming from the woods, the crunch of leaves crumbling underfoot, and Randall and Manny appear. Manny catches all the light from the fire, eats it up, and blazes. He smiles. His scar gleams, and my heart blushes.
“Junior finally fell asleep,” Randall says. “Manny say his cousin Rico lost the dog he had before Kilo to parvo.”
Manny sits next to Randall at the fire, drinks so much of the punch when Marquise hands it to him that there is only scum left at the bottom.
“You should kill it now,” Manny says. “Save it the pain. Rico sliced his dog’s throat soon as he saw it getting sick. Right now, you just torturing it.”
“No,”
Skeet says. “It’s not time yet.”
“You going to shoot it?” Manny eyes the gun. “That’s quick, at least.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, how you going to do it?”
Skeetah looks up, but he is looking at Randall when he talks, not Manny.
“You remember how Mama used to kill the chickens?” Skeetah asks.
The cicadas in the trees are like fitful rain, sounding in waves in the black brush of the trees. When Randall speaks, he stares at Skeetah, who grips the side of the bucket.
“She only killed one when it was something special, like one of our birthdays or her and Daddy’s anniversary. She used to watch them, like she knew every one, knew which one had eggs to hatch, which one hadn’t lain in a while, which one was just getting fat and old. Was almost like the chickens knew it; they’d get nervous. Shuffling around, sticking in groups, staying away from the coop. Next thing you know, she’d grab one, take it behind the house to that big old oak tree stump Daddy’d dragged out of the woods, and stand over it real still while the bird was beating its wings so fast they’d blur. But the chicken wouldn’t ever make no noise. And then she would put her hand over the bird’s face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.” Randall doesn’t take a breath when he speaks, just lets it all run out of him like a steady stream. He swallows. “Chicken don’t taste like that no more.” The crickets in the tree closest to us take up a low rumble, almost drown Randall out. I don’t really remember Mama killing the chickens so clear, but when Randall says it, I see it, and I think I remember it.