by Jesmyn Ward
“Yeah,” Skeetah says; he is slow to blink. He lifts the puppy. Her stomach rises and falls, and the wind coming out of her sounds like a croaking frog. I reach out to touch her. “Don’t,” Skeet says. “It’ll carry back to the rest.” He glances at me and half smiles, and then looks down at his fingers.
Through the trees, there is a new moon, and Nella is singing to it. I think I see Junior leaping like a squirrel through the shadows, watching and waiting, but when I look closely again, there is only darkness beyond the fire.
When Skeet grabs and twists, his hands are as sure as Mama’s.
When Skeetah comes back from burying the puppy, he is shirtless, his muscles black and ropy as that squirrel’s. Sweat coats him like oil. He stands for a second in the firelight, still, breathing hard. He throws his shirt into the fire.
“What are you doing?” Marquise asks around the squirrel bone he is sucking on. He slurps and almost swallows it, chokes it back up.
“It’s all contaminated,” Skeetah says. “Everything.”
He shucks his pants, throws them into the fire.
“Are you serious?” Marquise laughs.
“As a heart attack,” Skeetah says. His boxers are sagging, the elastic showing at the top. He grabs the dishwashing liquid and walks toward the black water of the pit, bends mid-step to pull his drawers off of one leg and then the other, and then throws them in the fire by looking over his shoulder. But he does not turn back around. All of him is muscle. I haven’t seen him naked since we were little and Mama put us in the tub together.
“I can’t believe you’re going to wash in that,” says Marquise, but even as he is saying it Randall is standing, and even though he didn’t touch the puppy, Randall is taking off all his own clothes, leaving them in a pile. He is taller, and his arms and legs are rubber bands. Big Henry grinds his bottle into the dirt until the earth holds it still. He kicks off his shoes first, and then peels his socks away and folds them in half before shoving them into his shoes. His feet are large and soft-looking with long black hairs curling down the top like baby’s hair.
Where my brothers go, I follow.
I walk into the water with all my clothes on. When I am all wet, I grab the soap from Skeetah and rub suds into my clothes, too. I make them white before I pull them away, one by one, until I am naked in the water, my clothes a dirty, slimy pile on the mud bank.
“Y’all niggas crazy,” Marquise says, but he takes off his clothes anyhow and follows us to the water.
“I was hot anyway,” Manny says, and he throws his white tee near where I was sitting along with his pants and strips to his underwear. He runs and dives in the water and comes up behind Randall and tackles him so that they both sink. They wrestle, giggling, looking like fish yanking against a line. Marquise is swinging from a rope that hangs from a high tree, and Big Henry is moving through the water with a slow stroke, his hands cutting in so straight they don’t make any splash. Randall and Manny keep dunking each other, laughing. I want Manny to touch me, to swim over and grab me by my arms, to pull me up against him, but I know he won’t. Randall slips away from Manny, swims over to Skeetah, who has been treading water off by himself.
“Watch out. You know they got water moccasins under that brush,” says Randall. Skeetah’s scrubbing like he could rub his skin off.
“I’m all right. They ain’t studying me.”
“I ain’t sucking the poison out you,” Randall laughs.
“I ain’t getting bit. They can smell it, you know.”
“Smell what?”
“Death.”
Randall stops his forward glide and treads. I can’t see his face in the dark.
“Shut up, Skeet.” He splashes water that catches firelight and turns red. Drops, like fireworks from the sky, hit Skeet. Under the cicadas, I imagine that I should be able to hear it sizzle. “Now you really talking crazy.”
Big Henry is grabbing at Marquise’s feet, trying to pull him off the rope. Marquise kicks, and Big Henry tugs so hard on the rope, the limb it’s tied to cracks so loud that it sounds like a big bone popping.
“Oh, shit!” Marquise yells, and then he’s letting go of the rope, but it is too late, because it’s all falling on Big Henry’s head. I am laughing so hard my ribs hurt, but when Manny surfaces like a jumping fish next to me, popping up out of the water like the best kind of prize, I stop. The laugh turns to a scratch in my throat.
“What’s up, Esch?” Manny’s looking at Big Henry and Marquise struggling with the branch in the water, Randall swimming over to help. He talks to me out the side of his face. Skeet is still scrubbing his skin off, not watching us. Manny dives under the water and comes up on my right, still staying far enough away from me that I can’t reach out and touch him.
“Nothing.” I swallow the words.
“You was scared to take off your clothes in front of us?” Manny is grinning, but he’s not looking at me, and he’s swimming in slow circles so he’s orbiting me like the moon. Or the sun.
It’s a little noise that comes out of my throat then.
“Scared to let everybody see what you look like?”
I shake my head.
“It ain’t that bad,” he says.
“Not bad?” I breathe, and I am ashamed because I am repeating what he says.
“Something like that.” He jams a finger into his ear and then shakes his head so fast water comes flying off him like a dog. His bottom lip is pink and full, while his top is a shy line. I have dreamed about kissing him. Around three years ago, I saw him having sex with a girl. He and Randall had talked her into coming back to the Pit with them when Daddy was out, and I heard them all laughing when they passed underneath the window. I followed them into the woods. When they got to the pit, Manny grabbed her butt and rubbed her stomach the way a man pets a dog’s side, and then the girl laid down for him. He was on top of her, moving his hand up and down in between her legs, and then he kissed that girl. Twice, three times. He opened his mouth so wide for her, licked her like he was tasting her, like she was cane sugar sweet. He was eating her. I wonder when he stopped kissing girls like that, or if he just doesn’t want to kiss me. Now he circles, half looking at me, half looking at Big Henry and Marquise. He grabs my hand and pulls it toward him, wraps my fingers around his dick.
“Not too bad,” he says. I want to know what it feels like, so I reach out under the water to touch his chest, his nipples the size of red grapes. They are much softer than that. The skin in the seams of his muscles is the color of Sugar Daddy caramel candy. Manny pulls away. “What are you doing?” His dick slides out of my hand, hot in the cool water: then gone.
“I just wanted-”
“Esch.” Manny says it like he’s disappointed, like he doesn’t know who this girl who reached out to touch him is. His profile is sharp, and it shines like a polished penny in the fire. His bottom lip thins when he smiles. “You crazy?”
My hand is still tingling from where he grabbed it and pulled it toward him.
“No.” I meant to say his name; this is what comes out instead.
“Naw, Esch.” He kneads the water, pushing himself up and kicking away from me. “You know it ain’t like that,” he says, and the pain comes all at once, like a sudden deluge.
Manny swims to Randall, who is walking up to the shore, pulling on his clothes. Manny’s back is a shut door. His shoulders are beautiful. I imagine myself on his back now, him swimming me across the deep water, carrying me to solid ground. How the other Manny would turn to kiss me in the water, to eat my air. How he would hold my hand on land instead of wrapping it around his dick underwater. When I tell him about my secret, will he turn to me? I push out all my breath and sink, my head hot. Is this how a baby floats inside its mother? I cup my stomach, hear Daddy say something he only says in his sober moments: What’s done in the dark always comes to the light. I loved Manny ever since I saw him kissing that girl. I loved him before he started seeing Shaliyah, skinny, light-skinned, and craz
y, who is always trying to beat up other girls that she thinks he’s messing with. Once she broke a bottle over Marquise’s cousin’s head down at the Oaks Club on teen night. Shaliyah. She has the kind of eyes that always move fast back and forth like a cat’s. He talks about other girls with Randall, but he always comes back to her: complaining about the way she checks his phone, the way she calls him all the time, the way she only cooks once a week, the way she leaves his clothes in piles around the trailer they share so that he has to do his own laundry so he’ll have something to wear to his job at the gas station. I saw her once at the park, and her crazy cat eyes looked right over me: neither prey nor threat. I loved him before that girl. I imagine that this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love, when she knew him; that she looked at him and felt a fire eating up through her rib cage, turning her blood to boil, evaporating hotly out of every inch of her skin. I feel it so strongly that I cannot imagine how Manny does not feel it, too.
My belly is solid as a squash, because there is this baby inside me, small as Manny’s eyelash in mid-sex on my cheek. And this baby will grow to a fingertip on my hip, a hand on the bowl of my back, an arm over my shoulder, if it survives. I think it is for Manny; he is the only person I have been having sex with for the past five months. Since he surprised me in the woods while I was looking for Junior and grabbed me, knew my girl heart, I have only let him in. Once we had sex for the first time, I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I either shrug and pretend like I don’t hear Marquise or Franco or Bone or any of the other boys when they hint. They ask, and I walk away because it feels like I’m walking toward Manny.
There is a sound above the water; someone is shouting. When I surface and breathe, my lungs pulling for air, Skeetah is the only one left, and he is silent. Bats whirl through the air above us, plucking insects from the sky while they endlessly flutter like black fall leaves. Skeetah watches me swim to him and the dirt, watches me dress in my soapy clothes, and says nothing before turning to lead the way through the dark, naked.
THE FOURTH DAY: WORTH STEALING
Fleas are everywhere. Walking toward Mother Lizbeth and Papa Joseph’s house, I wade through scummy puddles of them. They jump and stick to my legs like burrs, biting, until I stand on what’s left of the porch: a couple of two-by-fours leaning at a slanted angle against the house like an abandoned pier sinking below storm-rising water, the tide of the earth rolling in to cover them. The screen door has long disappeared, and the front door hangs by one hinge. I have to push the wood, which flakes away to dust in my hands, and squeeze sideways through cobwebs tangled with leaves to get into the house.
The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years. Papa Joseph helped Daddy build our house before he died, but once he and Mother Lizbeth were gone, we took couch by chair by picture by dish until there was nothing left. Mama tried to keep the house up, but needing a bed for me and Skeet to sleep in, or needing a pot when hers turned black, was more important than keeping the house a shrine, crocheted blankets across sofas as Mother Lizbeth left them. That’s what Daddy said. So now we pick at the house like mostly eaten leftovers, and Papa Joseph is no more than overalls and gray shirts and snuff and eyes turned blue with age. I remember more of Mother Lizbeth alive. I’d sit on her lap and play with her hair, gray and straight and strong as wire. I would help her take her medicines: two handfuls of pills she had to take every day, by handing them to her one by one. She would feed me sweet figs, still warm as the day, we picked from a tree behind the house. She’d laugh at me, said I ate figs careful as a bird; her smile was black and toothless. And sometimes she was sharp, didn’t want to be hugged, wanted to sit in her chair on the porch and not be bothered. When she died, Mama told me that she had gone away, and then I wondered where she went. Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.
I bend and slap away all the fleas. In the kitchen, Skeetah is panting and pulling in the corner, his whole body straining. Where yesterday he had a short ’fro, today his head is shaved clean, and is a shade lighter than the rest of him. His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.
“Junior told me you was in here. What you doing?”
“Trying to get this linoleum.”
“For what?”
Skeetah was trying to peel it from the corner. A big piece flapped over in front of him like a dog ear.
“It’s in the dirt.” He pulled. I expected he would grunt, but no sound came out. His muscles jumped like popped gum. “The parvo. It’s in the dirt in the shed.”
“So what’s Mother Lizbeth’s floor going to do?”
“It’s going to cover the dirt.” He pulled, a loud pop sounded, and the tile gave. He threw it back and it landed in a pile with four or five others.
“You giving China a floor?” Daddy had started on our house once he and Mama got married. Hearing the stories about him and Papa Joseph when I was growing up, I always thought it was something a man did for a woman when they married: build her something to live in.
“No, Esch.” Skeetah slices at the underside of the next tile with one of Daddy’s rusty box cutters. “I’m saving them puppies. China’s strong and old enough to where the parvo won’t kill her.” He yanked. “They’re money.”
“Why’d you cut your hair?”
“I got tired of it.” Skeetah shrugs, pulls. “What you doing today?”
“Nothing.”
“You want to go somewhere with me?”
“Where?”
“Through the woods.” Skeetah gives another yank, and the next tile comes loose. He throws it wide. “You gotta run.” I’ve always been a fast runner. When the boys and I used to race when we were smaller, I was always in the top three. I beat Randall a few times, and almost beat Skeet once or twice. “I need your help.”
“Okay.” He needs me. Before China had these puppies, I’d go days without seeing him. Days before I’d be walking through the woods looking for eggs or trying to see if I could find Randall and Manny, or walking to the Pit to swim, and I’d stumble on Skeetah, training China to attack and bite and lock on with an old bike tire or a rope. They’d play tug of war, send up clouds of dust and leave dry rivers in the pine needles. Or China’d nap while Skeetah ate razor blades, sliding them between the pink sleeve of his cheek and tongue and back out of his lips so fast I thought I was imagining it. I asked him why he ate them once, and he grinned and said, Why should China be the only one with teeth?
“Yeah.” I say.
The sound of Daddy’s tractor growls in the distance, comes closer. Skeetah picks up the tiles and begins pitching them through a window at the back of the house, where he knows that Daddy won’t come because the back door has been grown over with wisteria and kudzu for years. The front door is the only way in. He pitches the last tile and the box cutter just as Daddy is shoving his way inside, the sound of the wood like a gunshot ricocheting through the room so that I think he’s broken the hinge, but the door stays upright. The cobwebs leave a gray trail and there’s a leaf stuck in his hair. His T-shirt is dark at the pits and neck and down the middle of his back. His boots hit so hard on the floor that he sounds like he’s going to go through the rotted wood. He’s not that much bigger than us. Is this what Medea saw, when she decided to follow Jason, to flee her father with her brother? Did she see through her father’s rich robes to the small-shouldered man beneath? Even though he doesn’t work much anymore, picks up odd jobs working on oyster boats or towing scrap metal, he’s worn the same work clothes every day for as long as I can remember: steel-toe work boots, pants, two T-shirts, two pairs of socks. Mama laid his outfit in clean layers for him on the chair sitting in the corner of their room every night, and Daddy would come up behind her when she was bending over the chair, put his arms arou
nd her waist, whisper in her neck. He’d tell us to go watch TV, to go to our rooms, to get out the door. Now Daddy looks up, surprised.
“What y’all doing in here?”
“Nothing,” Skeetah says, quick and loud, and he begins walking toward Daddy and the door.
“Hold up,” Daddy says. “I need y’all help.”
“I got to see after China.”
“Not yet,” Daddy says. He grabs Skeet’s arm as he tries to pass him. “She’ll hold.”
Skeetah walks into the step he was taking and pulls away from Daddy with his stride. Skeet seems surprised at the way Daddy’s fingers slip from his arm, and Daddy looks at me, just for a minute, like he’s confused. Skeetah stops and turns, and Daddy points up to the attic.
“Gotta new storm in the Gulf. Named José. Supposed to be hitting Mexico.”
Skeetah’s eyes open like he wants to roll them, but he doesn’t.
“You see them pieces of plywood up there? Them two that don’t look too rotten?”
Skeetah nods. I’m surprised that Daddy doesn’t have that sweet bread scent of morning beer on him.
“Yeah.”
“I need you to take this hammer and pry them up off the wall and throw them down. Me and Esch will carry them outside and put them on the tractor.”
The ceiling in the living room fell in years ago, so now it’s easy to see through it to the attic above, where the beams of the roof are showing in snatches. Skeetah tries to jump and hoist himself up, but even though he can jump that high, he can’t grab the beam because the plaster that sticks to it like barnacles makes it difficult for him to grab it.
“Esch, let your brother climb up on you.”
Skeetah looks at him like he’s crazy, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I can do it.”
Daddy could be a ladder for Skeetah if he wanted to, hoist him up with his hands tough as rope, but he won’t. We all know it.
“Come on, Skeet.”
I lunge like I see the cheerleaders do at school when they climb all over each other to make their pyramids, a human jungle gym: my front knee bent, my back leg straight, as solid and steady as I can make them. Daddy’s got his arms folded, looking up into the attic.